by Alan Furst
Thus Goldman.
An attitude sharply confirmed when Szara offered warm news of Tscherova. “She is for the cause,” Szara said. “I know she was coerced, originally-induced and threatened and paid and what you like. Things have changed, however. An emigre from Russia she may be, but she is no emigre from human decency. And the Nazis themselves, by being as they are, have made us a gift of her soul.”
“What did she look like, exactly?” Goldman asked.
But Szara wasn’t falling for that. “Tall and thin. Plain-for an actress. I suppose the greasepaint and the stage lighting might make her attractive to an audience, but up close it’s another story.”
“Does she play the romantic lead? “
“No. Maids.”
“Aside from the work, do you suppose she’s promiscuous?”
“I don’t believe so, she’s not really the type. She claims to have had a lover or two in Berlin, but I believe most of that has actually been done by her associates. She is constantly around it, and she is no saint, but neither is she the devil she pretends to be. If I were you, I’d direct Schau-Wehrli to handle her carefully and to make sure nothing happens to her. She’s valuable, and certainly worth protection, whatever it takes.”
Goldman nodded appreciatively. He seemed, Szara thought, more and more like Stefan Leib as time went by: hair a little too long, corduroy jacket shapeless and faded, the introverted cartographer, absentminded, surrounded by his tattered old maps. “And Germany? ” he asked.
“In a word?”
“If you like.”
“An abomination.”
Goldman’s mask slipped briefly and Szara had a momentary view of the man beneath it. “We shall settle with them this time, and in a way they will not forget,” he said softly. “The world will yet thank God for Joseph Stalin.”
With Kristallnacht, a kind of shiver passed through Paris. The French had their own problems: communists and the Comintern, the fascist Croix de Feu, conspiracy and political actions among the various emigre groups, strikes and riots, bank failures and scandals- all against a deafening drumbeat from the Senate and the ministries. Stripped of all the rhetoric, it came out trouble in Germany and Russia, now what? They’d not really gotten over the Great War- there was a political sophism afoot that the French did not die well, that they loved life a little more than they should. But in the 1914 war they had died anyhow, and in great numbers. And for what? Because now, twenty years later, the trouble was back, three hundred miles east of Paris.
Troubles from the east were nothing new. Napoleon’s experiment in Russia hadn’t gone at all well, and with the defeat at Waterloo in 1815, Russian squadrons, among them the Preobajansky Guard, had occupied Paris. But the French were never quite as defeated as you thought they were; the Russians had, in time, gone home, bearing with them various French maladies of which two proved ultimately to be chronic: unquenchable appetites for champagne and liberty, the latter eventually leading to the Decembrist uprising of 1825-the first in a series of revolutions ending in 1917.
But the present trouble from the east was German trouble, and the French could think of nothing worse. Burned in 1870 and scorched in 1914, they prayed it would go away. Hitler was such a cul, with his little mustache and his little strut; nobody wanted to take him seriously. But Kristallnacht was serious, broken glass and broken heads, and Frenchmen knew in their stomachs what that meant no matter what the politicians said. They tried to maneuver diplomatically with Stalin, figuring that with an alliance on either side of Hitler they could crush the shitty little weasel between them. But, maneuvering with Stalin … You thought you had it all agreed and then something always just seemed to go wrong.
The days grew shorter and darker but the bistros did not grow brighter-not this year they didn’t. The fog swirled along the rue du Cherche-Midi and Szara sometimes went home with the carefree girls from the cafes, but it never made him all that happy. He thought it would, each time-oh, that strawberry blond hair and those freckles-but only the usual things happened. He missed being in love-definitely he missed that-but winter 1938 didn’t seem to be the season for it. So he told himself.
Life ground on.
Baumann reported obediently, milling more swage wire every month as the bombers rolled out of the Reich factories.
Or maybe didn’t.
Or maybe did even more than Moscow knew.
The lawyer Valais, HECTOR, picked up a new agent, a mercenary Bavarian corporal called Gettig who assisted one of the German military attaches. Odile’s husband ran off with a little Irish girl who worked in a milliner’s sewing room. Kranov now wore a thick sweater in the cold upstairs room on the rue Delesseux and stolidly punched away at the W/T key: the eternal Russian peasant in the technological age. To Szara he became a symbol, as the journalist for the first time saw OPAL clearly for what it was: a bureaucratic institution in the business of stealing and transmitting information. It was Kranov who handed Szara the decoded flimsy announcing the accession of Lavrenti Beria to the chairmanship of the NKVD. The official triumph of the Georgian khvost meant little to Szara at the time; it was simply one more manifestation of a bloody darkness that had settled on the world. When Beria cleaned the last of the Old Bolsheviks out of high positions in the intelligence apparat, the purge ended.
In the middle of December they came at him again-this time from a different angle, and this time they meant it.
A stiff, creamy envelope addressed to him, by hand, at the Pravda bureau, the sort of thing journalists sometimes got. Le Cercle Renaissance invites you … A square of clear cellophane slipped from within the card and floated to the floor at his feet. He didn’t bite the first time so they tried him again-just before Christmas when nobody in Paris has enough invitations-and this time somebody took a Mont Blanc pen and wrote Won’t you please come? below the incised lettering.
It meant the barber and it meant the dry cleaner and it meant a white shirt laundered to the consistency of teak-expensive indignities to which he submitted in the vain, vain hope that the invitation was precisely what it said it was. He checked the organization, the Renaissance Club; it did exist, and it was extremely exclusive. One of the excluded, a guest at a gallery opening, shot an eyebrow when he heard the name and said, “You are very fortunate to be asked there,” with sincere and visible loathing in his expression.
The address was in Neuilly, home to some of the oldest and quietest money in France. The street, once the frantic taxi driver managed to find it, was a single row of elegant three-story houses protected by wrought-iron palings, discreetly obscured by massed garden foliage-even in December-and bathed in a satin light by Victorian street lamps. The other side of the street was occupied by a private park, to which residents received a key, and beyond that lay the Seine.
A steward collected Szara’s dripping umbrella and showed him up three flights of stairs to a small library. A waiter appeared and set down an ivory tray bearing a Cinzano aperitif and a dish of nuts. Abandoned to a great hush broken only by an occasional mysterious creak, Szara wandered along the shelves, sampling here and there. The collection was exclusively concerned with railroads, and it was beautifully kept; almost all the books had been rebound. Some were privately printed, many were illustrated, with captioned sepia prints and daguerreotypes:
On the platform at Ebenfurth, Stationmaster Hofmann waits to flag through the Vienna-Budapest mail. Flatcars loaded with timber cross a high trestle in the mountains of Bosnia.
The 7:03 from Geneva passes beneath the rue Lamartine overpass.
“So pleased you’ve come,” said a voice from the doorway. He was rather ageless, perhaps in the last years of his fifties, with faded steel-colored hair brushed very flat against the sides of his head. Tall and politely stooped, he was wearing a formal dinner jacket and a bow tie that had gone slightly askew. He’d evidently walked a short distance through the rain without coat or umbrella and was patting his face with a folded handkerchief. “I’m Joseph de Montfried,”
he said. He articulated the name carefully, sounding the hard t and separating the two syllables, the latter lightly emphasized, as though it were a difficult name and often mispronounced. Szara was amused-a cultured Frenchman would as likely have gotten the Baron de Rothschild’s name wrong. This family too had a baron, Szara knew, but he believed that was the father, or the uncle.
“Do you like the collection? ” Said with sincerity, as though it mattered whether Szara liked it or not.
“It’s yours?”
“Part of mine. Most of it’s at home, up the street, and I keep some in the country. But the club has been indulgent with me, and I’ve spared them walls of leatherbound Racine that nobody’s ever read.” He laughed self-consciously. “What’ve you got there?” Szara turned the book’s spine toward him. “Karl Borns, yes. A perfect madman, Borns, had his funeral cortege on the Zurich local. The local!” He laughed again. “Please,” he said, indicating that Szara should sit down at one end of a couch. De Montfried took a club chair.
“We’ll have supper right here, if you don’t mind. Do you?”
“Of course not.”
“Good. Sandwiches and something to drink. I’ve got to meet my wife for some beastly charity thing at ten-my days of eating two dinners are long over, I’m afraid.”
Szara did mind. Going upstairs, he’d caught a glimpse of a silk-walled dining room and a glittering array of china and crystal. All that money invested at the barber and the dry cleaner and now sandwiches. He tried to smile like a man who gets all the elaborate dinners he cares to have.
“Shall we stay in French? ” de Montfried asked. “I can try to get along in Russian, but I’m afraid I’ll say awful things.”
“You speak Russian?”
“Grew up speaking French en famille and Russian to the servants. My father and uncle built much of the Russian railroad system, then came the revolution and the civil war and most of it was destroyed. Very entrepreneurial place-at one time anyhow. How’s it go? ‘Sugar by Brodsky, Tea by Vysotsky, Revolution by Trotsky.’ I suppose it’s aimed at Jews, but it’s reasonably faithful to what happened. Oh well.” He pressed a button on the wall and a waiter appeared almost instantly. De Montfried ordered sandwiches and wine, mentioning only the year, ‘27. The waiter nodded and closed the door behind him.
They chatted for a time. De Montfried found out quite a bit about him, the way a certain kind of aristocrat seemed able to do without appearing to pry. The trick of it, Szara thought, lay in the sincerity of the voice and the eyes-I am so very interested in you. The man seemed to find everything he said fascinating or amusing or cleverly put. Soon enough he found himself trying to make it so.
There was no need for Szara to find out who de Montfried was. He knew the basic outline: a titled Jewish family, with branches in London, Paris, and Switzerland. Enormously wealthy, appropriately charitable, exceptionally private, and virtually without scandal. Old enough so that the money, like game, was well cured. Szara caught himself seeking something Jewish in the man, but there was nothing, in the features or the voice, that he could identify; the only notable characteristics were the narrow head and small ears that aristocrats had come to share with their hunting dogs.
The sandwiches were, Szara had to admit, extremely good. Open-faced, sliced duck and salmon, with little pots of flavored mayonnaise and cornichons to make them interesting. The wine, according to its white and gold label, was a premier cru Beaune called Chateau de Montfried-it was easily the best thing Szara had ever tasted.
“We’ve my father to thank for this,” de Montfried said of the wine, holding it up against the light. “After we were tossed out of Russia he took an interest in the vineyards, more or less retired down there. For him, there was something rather biblical in it: work thy vines. I don’t know if it actually says that anywhere, but he seemed to think it did.” De Montfried was hesitantly sorrowful; the world would not, he understood, be much moved by small tragedies in his sort of family.
“It is extraordinary,” Szara said.
De Montfried leaned toward him slightly, signaling a shift in the conversation. “You are recommended to me, Monsieur Szara, by an acquaintance who is called Bloch.”
“Yes?”
De Montfried paused, but Szara had no further comment. He reached into the inside pocket of his dinner jacket, withdrew an official-looking document with stamps and signatures at the bottom, and handed it to Szara. “Do you know what this is?”
The paper was in English, Szara started to puzzle through it.
“It’s an emigration certificate for British Palestine,” de Montfried said. “Or Eretz Israel-a name I prefer. It’s valuable, it’s rare, hard to come by, and it’s what I want to talk to you about.” He hesitated, then continued. “Please be good enough to stop this discussion, now, if you feel I’m exceeding a boundary of any kind. Once we go further, I’m going to have to ask you to be discreet.”
“I understand,” Szara said.
“No hesitation? It would be understandable, certainly, if you felt there were just too many complications in listening to what I have to say.”
Szara waited.
“According to Monsieur Bloch, you were witness to the events in Berlin last month. He seems to feel that you might, on that basis, be willing to provide assistance for a project in which I take a great interest.”
“What project is that?”
“May I pour you a little more wine? “
Szara extended his glass.
“I hope you’ll forgive me if I work up to a substantive description in my own way. I don’t want to bore you, and I don’t want you to think me a hopeless naif-it’s just that I’ve had experience of conversations about the Jewish return to Palestine and, well, it can be difficult, even unpleasant, as any political discussion is likely to be. Polite people avoid certain topics, experience shows the wisdom in that. Like one’s dreams or medical condition-it’s just better to find something else to talk about. Unfortunately, the world is now acting in such a way as to eliminate that courtesy, among many others, so I can only ask your forbearance.”
Szara’s smile was sad and knowing, with the sort of compassion that has been earned from daily life. He was that listener who can be told anything without fear of criticism because he has heard and seen worse than whatever you might contrive to say. He withdrew a packet of Gitanes, lit one, and exhaled. I cannot be offended, said the gesture.
“At the beginning of the Great War, in 1914, Great Britain found itself fighting in the Middle East against Turkey. The Jews in Palestine were caught up in the Turkish war effort-taxed into poverty, drafted into the Turkish armies. A certain group of Jews, in the town of Zichron Yaakov, not far from Haifa, believed that Great Britain ought to win the war in the Middle East, but what could they do? Well, for a small, determined group of people arrayed against a major power there is only one traditional answer, other than prayer, and that is espionage. Thus a botanist named Aaron Aaronson, his sister Sarah, an assistant called Avshalom Feinberg, and several others formed a network they called NILI-it’s taken from a phrase in the Book of Samuel, an acronym of the Hebrew initials for The Eternal One of Israel will not prove false. The conspiracy was based at the Atlit Experimental Station and was facilitated by Aaron Aaronson’s position as chief of the locust control unit-he could show up anywhere, for instance at Turkish military positions, without provoking suspicion. Meanwhile Sarah Aaronson, who was ravishing, became a fixture at parties attended by high-ranking Turkish officers. The British at first were suspicious-the Aaronsons did not ask for money-but eventually, in 1917, NILI product was accepted by British officers stationed on ships anchored off Palestine. There were-it’s a typical problem, I understand-communications difficulties, and Avshalom Feinberg set out across the Sinai desert to make contact with the British. He was ambushed by Arab raiders and murdered near Rafah, in the Gaza strip. Local legend has it that he was buried in the sand at the edge of the town and a palm tree grew up from his bones, seeded by
dates he carried in his pockets. Then the spy ring was uncovered-too many people knew about it-and Sarah Aaronson was arrested by the Turks and tortured for four days. At that point she tricked her captors into letting her use the washroom, un-supervised, where she had secreted a revolver, and took her own life. All the other members of the network were captured by the Turks, tortured and executed, except for Aaron Aaronson, who survived the war only to die in a plane crash in the English Channel in 1919.
“Of course the Arabs fought on the side of the British as well- they too wished an end to Turkish occupation-and their revolt was led by skilled British military intelligence officers, such as T E. Lawrence and Richard Meinertzhagen. The Arabs believed they were fighting for independence, but it did not quite turn out that way. When the smoke cleared, when Allenby took Jerusalem, the British ruled Mandate Palestine and the French held Syria and the Lebanon.
“But the NILI network was not the only effort made on Britain’s behalf by the Jews. Far more important, in its ultimate effect, was the contribution of Dr. Chaim Weizmann. Weizmann is well known as a Zionist, he is an articulate and persuasive man, but he is also known, by people who have an interest in the area, as a biochemist. While teaching and doing research at the University of Manchester, he discovered a method of producing synthetic acetone by a process of natural fermentation. As Great Britain’s war against Germany intensified, they discovered themselves running out of acetone, which is the solvent that must be used in the manufacture of cordite, a crucial explosive in artillery shells and bullets. In 1916 Weizmann was summoned before Winston Churchill, at that time first lord of the Admiralty. Churchill said, ‘Well, Dr. Weizmann, we need thirty thousand tons of acetone. Can you make it?’ Weizmann did not rest until he’d done it, ultimately taking over many of Britain’s large whiskey distilleries until production plants could be built.