Dark Star ns-2

by Alan Furst

  “Andouillette,” Szara said.

  “What is it? A sausage? What’s in it?”

  “You won’t want it if I tell you,” Szara said.

  “Probably the chef’s mistress,” Maltsaev said with a laugh. “Order me a steak. Cooked. No blood or back it goes.” His eyes were animated behind the tinted lenses, flicking around the room, staring at the other customers. Then he leaned confidentially toward Szara. “Who is this Abramov you’re going to see?” He looked triumphant and pleased with himself-surprised I know that?

  “Boss. One of them, anyhow.”

  “A big shot? “

  “He sits on one Directorate, certainly. Perhaps others, I don’t know.”

  “Old friend, I’ll bet. The way things go these days, you don’t last long without a protector, right?”

  Szara shrugged. “Everybody’s got their own story-mine’s not like that. It’s all business with Abramov.”

  “Is it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Hey!” Maltsaev called as a waiter went past and ignored him.

  It snowed on the night of the sixth, and by the time Szara and Maltsaev left the Gare de Lyon on the seventh of February the fields and villages of France were still and white. The nineteenth century, Szara thought with longing: a pair of frost-coated dray horses pulling a cart along a road, a girl in a stocking cap skating on a pond near Melun. The sky was dense and swollen; sometimes a flight of crows circled over the snow-covered fields. But for the presence of Maltsaev, it would have been a time for dreaming. The frozen world outside the train window was unmoving, cold and peaceful, smoke from farmhouse chimneys the only sign of human life.

  Following the rules, they had booked the compartment for themselves, so they were alone. Szara kept a hand or a foot in permanent contact with the small traveling case that held the sixty thousand francs, each packet of hundred-franc notes bound by a strip of paper with Cyrillic initials on it. But even though they were alone, Maltsaev spoke obliquely: your friend in Sion, the man in Brussels. A glutton’s appetite for gossip, Szara thought. Who do you know? How do the loyalties work? What’s the real story? Maltsaev was the classic opportunist, probing for whatever you might have that he could use. Szara parried him on every point, but felt that eventually the sheer weight of the attack might wear him down. To escape, he feigned drowsiness. Maltsaev sneered with delight: “Going to dreamland with our dear gold on your lap?”

  They’d left at dawn, and it was again dark when they reached Geneva. They walked three blocks from the railroad station and found the Opel Olympia that had been left in front of a commercial travelers’ hotel, the ignition key taped to the bottom of the gas pedal. Szara drove. Maltsaev sat beside him, smoking his cardboard-tipped Belomor cigarettes, a road map spread across his lap. They circled the north shore of Lake Leman on good roads in intermittent light snow, then, after Villeneuve, began to climb over the mountain passes.

  Here the weather cleared and there was a bright, sharp moon, its light sparkling on the ice crystal in the banked snow at the sides of the road. Sometimes, on the curves, they could see down into the valleys spread out below: clusters of stone villages, ice rivers, empty roads. The sense of deep silence and distance at last reached Maltsaev, who ceased talking and stared out the window. By ten o’clock they had descended to Martigny and turned north on the narrow plain by the Rhone, here an overgrown mountain stream. There was hardpack snow on the roads and Szara drove carefully but steadily, encountering only one or two cars along the way.

  Sion was dark, no lights anywhere, and they had to hunt for a time until they found the gravel road that went up the mountainside. Five minutes later the grade flattened out and they rolled to a stop in front of an old hotel, tires crunching on newly fallen snow. The hotel-a carved sign above the arched doorway said Hotel du Vaz-was timber and stucco capped by a steep slate roof hung with icicles. It stood high above the road, at the edge of a shimmering white meadow that sloped gently toward the edge of an evergreen forest. The ground-floor shutters were closed; behind them was a faint glow, perhaps a single lamp in what Szara presumed to be a reception area in the lobby. When he turned off the ignition and climbed out of the Opel, he could hear the sound of the wind at the corner of the building. There were no other cars to be seen; perhaps it was a summer hotel, he thought, where people came in order to walk in the mountains.

  Maltsaev got out of the car and closed the door carefully. From an upper window, Szara heard Abramov’s voice. “Andre Aronovich? “

  “Yes,” Szara called. “Come down and let us in. It’s freezing.”

  “Who is with you? “

  Looking up, Szara saw one shutter partly opened. Before he could respond, Maltsaev whispered, “Don’t say my name.”

  Szara stared at him, not understanding. “Answer him,” Maltsaev said urgently, gripping him hard at the elbow. Abramov must have seen the gesture, Szara thought. Because a moment later they heard the sound, eerily loud in the still, cold air, of a heavy man descending an exterior staircase, perhaps at the back of the hotel. A man in a hurry.

  Maltsaev, coat flapping, started to run, and Szara, not knowing what else to do, followed. They were immediately slowed when they moved around the side of the hotel because here the snow was deeper, up to their knees, which made running almost impossible. Maltsaev swore as he stumbled forward. They heard a shout from the trees and to their left. Then it was repeated, urgently. A threat, Szara realized, spoken in Russian.

  They came around the corner at the back of the hotel and stopped. Abramov, in a dark suit and homburg hat, was trying to run across the snow-covered meadow. It was absurd, almost comic. He struggled and floundered and slipped, went down on one hand, rose, lifted his knees high for a few steps, fell again, then lurched forward as he tried to reach the edge of the forest, leaving behind him a broken, white path. The homburg suddenly tilted to one side and Abramov grabbed it frantically, instinctively, and held the brim tightly as he ran, as though, late for work, he were running to catch a tram in a city street.

  The marksmen in the forest almost let him reach the trees. The first shot staggered him but he kept on a little, only slower, then the second shot brought him down. The reports echoed off the side of the mountain, then faded into silence. Maltsaev walked into the meadow, Szara followed, moving along the broken path. It was slippery and difficult, and soon they were breathing hard. Just before they reached him, Abramov managed to turn on his side. His hat had rolled away and there was snow caught in his beard. Maltsaev stood silently and tried to catch his breath. Szara knelt down. He could see that Abramov had bled into the snow. His eyes were closed, then they flickered open for a moment, perhaps he saw Szara. He made a single sound, a guttural sigh, “Ach,” of exhaustion and irritation, of dismissal, and then he was gone.

  The Renaissance Club

  At the Brasserie Heininger, at the far corner table where you could see everyone and everyone could see you, seated below the scrupulously preserved bullet hole in the vast and golden mirror, Andre Szara worked hard at being charming and tried to quiet a certain interior voice that told him to shut up and go home. A newcomer to the crowd of regulars at the corner table, and so the center of attention, he proposed a toast: “I would like us to drink to the love … to the hopeless loves … of our childhood days.” Was there a split second of hesitation-my God, is he going to weep? — before the chorus of approval? But then he didn’t weep; his fingers combed a longish strand of black hair off his forehead and he smiled a vulnerable smile. Then everyone realized how very right the toast was, how very right he was, the emotional Russian long after midnight, in his steel gray tie and soft maroon shirt, not exactly drunk, just intimate and daring.

  That he was. Beneath the tablecloth, his hand rested warmly on the thigh of Lady Angela Hope, a pillar of the Paris night and a woman he’d been specifically told to avoid. With his other hand, he drank Roederer Cristal from a gold-rimmed champagne flute which, thanks to the attentions of a clairvoyant wai
ter, turned out to be perfectly full every time he went to pick it up. He smiled, he laughed, he said amusing things, and everyone thought he was wonderful, everyone: Voyschinkowsky, “the Lion of the Bourse;” Ginger Pudakis, the English wife of the Chicago meat-packing king; the Polish Countess K-, who, when properly intrigued, made ingenious gardens for her friends; the terrible Roddy Fitzware, mad, bad, and dangerous to know. In fact the whole pack of them, ten at last count, hung on his every word. Was his manner perhaps just a shade more Slavic than it really needed to be? Perhaps. But he did not care. He smoked and drank like an affable demon, said, “For a drunkard the sea is only knee deep!” and other proverbial Russianisms as they came to him, and generally made a grand and endearing fool of himself.

  Yet-he was more Slavic than they knew-the interior voice refused to be still. Stop, it said. This is not in your best interest; you will suffer, you will regret it, they will catch you. He ignored it. Not that it was wrong, in fact he knew it was right, but still he ignored it.

  Voyschinkowsky, inspired by the toast, was telling a story: “It was my father who took me to the Gypsy camp. Imagine, to go out so late at night, and to such a place! I could not have been more than twelve years old, but when she began to dance …” Lady Angela’s leg pressed closer under the table, a hand appeared through the smoky air, and a stream of pale Cristal fizzed into his glass. What other wine, someone had said of champagne, can you hear?

  Like Lady Angela Hope, the Brasserie Heininger was notorious. In the spring of ‘37 it had been the site of, as the Parisians put it, “une affaire bizarre”: the main dining room had been sprayed with tommy guns, the Bulgarian maitre d’ had been assassinated in the ladies’ WC, and a mysterious waiter called Nick had disappeared soon after. Such violently Balkan goings-on had made the place madly popular; the most desirable table directly beneath the golden mirror with a single bullet hole; in fact the only mirror that survived the incident. Otherwise, it was just one more brasserie, where mustached waiters hurried among the red plush banquettes with platters of crayfish and grilled sausage, a taste of fin de siecle deviltry while outside the February snow drifted down into the streets of Paris and cabmen tried to keep warm.

  As for Lady Angela Hope, she was notorious among two very different sets: the late-night crowd of aristocrats and parvenus, of every nationality and none at all, that haunted certain brasseries and nightclubs, as well as another, more obscure perhaps, which followed her career with equal, or possibly keener, interest. Her name had been raised in one of Goldman’s earliest briefings, taken from a file folder kept in a safe in the Stefan Leib shop in Brussels. Both Szara’s predecessor and Annique Schau-Wehrli had been “probed” by Lady Angela, who was “known to have informal connections with British intelligence stations in Paris.” She was, as promised, fortyish, sexy, rich, foul-mouthed, promiscuous, and, in general, thoroughly accessible; an indefatigable guest and hostess who knew “everybody.” “You will meet her certainly,” said Goldman primly, “but she has entirely the wrong friends. Stay away.”

  But then, Goldman.

  Szara smiled to himself. Too bad Goldman couldn’t see him now, the forbidden Lady Angela snugly by his side. Well, he thought, this is fate. This had to happen, and so now it is happening. Yes, there may have been some kind of alternative, but the one person in his life who really understood alternatives, knew where they hid and how to find them, was gone.

  That was Abramov, of course. And on 7 February, in a meadow behind the Hotel du Vaz in Sion, Abramov had resigned from the service. Exactly how that came to happen Szara didn’t know, but he’d managed to unwind events to a point where he had a pretty good idea of what had gone on.

  Abramov, he suspected, had attempted to influence Dershani by use of the photographs taken in the garden of the house at Puteaux. It hadn’t worked. Realizing his days were numbered, he’d at last taken Szara’s advice offered on the beach at Aarhus and planned one final operation: his own disappearance. He’d arranged the meeting at the Hotel du Vaz in Sion (owned, Szara was told that night, by a front corporation operated by the NKVD Foreign Department), which gave him a legitimate reason to leave Moscow. He’d then created a notional agent in Lausanne who needed sixty thousand French francs. This made Goldman in Brussels a logical source and Szara’s scheduled trip to Sion a convenient method of delivery. The money was meant to give Abramov a running start in a new life; the operation was dovetailed and simple, but it hadn’t worked.

  Why? Szara could see two possibilities: Kranov, already thought to spy on the OPAL network for the Directorate, might have alerted security units when an untrained and uncertain hand operated the wireless key in Moscow. Every operator had a characteristic signature, and Kranov, trained to be sensitive to change of any kind, had probably reacted to Abramov’s rather awkward keying of his own message.

  To Szara, however, Goldman was the more interesting possibility. Network gossip suggested the rezident had previously had a hand in a rogue operation, something well outside the usual scope of OPAL‘s activities, in which a young woman was kidnapped from a rooming house in Paris. And when Szara described to Schau-Wehrli the operatives he’d met later that night at the Hotel du Vaz-especially the one who used the work name Dodin, a huge man, short and thick, with the red hands and face of a butcher-she had reacted. In the next instant she was all unknowing, but he’d felt a shadow touch her, he was sure of it.

  Through Kranov or Goldman-or both-the special section of the Foreign Department had become involved, dispatched Maltsaev to Paris to keep watch on Szara as he went to meet Abramov and to find out if he was an accomplice, or even a fellow fugitive. Szara realized that his instinctive distaste for Maltsaev’s personality had provoked him into a blank and businesslike response to the man’s offensive needling, and that in turn had quite probably saved his life.

  They’d buried Abramov at the edge of the meadow, under the snow-laden boughs of a fir tree, chipping at the frozen ground with shovels and sweating in the cold moonlight. There were four of them besides Maltsaev; they took off their overcoats and worked in baggy, woolen suits, swearing as they dug, their Swiss hunting rifles propped against a tree. They spread snow over the dirt and returned to the empty hotel, building a fire in the fireplace downstairs, sitting in handmade pine chairs and smoking Maltsaev’s Belomors, talking among themselves. Szara was part of every activity, taking his turn with the shovel, struggling with Abramov’s weight as they put him in the ground. He had no choice; he became a temporary member of the unit. They talked about what they could buy in Geneva before they went back to Kiev, they talked about other operations; something in Lithuania, something in Sweden, though they were oblique with a stranger in their midst. The only ceremony for Abramov was Szara’s silent prayer, and he made very sure his lips did not move as he said it. Yet, even at that moment, in the dark meadow, he planned further memorials.

  Early in the morning, standing on the platform of the railroad station in Geneva and waiting for the Paris train, Maltsaev was blunt: “The usual way in these affairs is to send the accomplice along on the same journey, innocent or not doesn’t matter. But, for the moment, somebody considers you worth keeping alive. Personally I don’t agree-you are a traitor in your heart-but I just do what they tell me. That’s a good lesson for you, Szara, come to think of it. Being smart maybe isn’t so smart as you think-you see where it got Abramov. I blame it on the parents, they should have made him study the violin like all the rest of them.” The train pulled in. Maltsaev, after a contemptuous bow and a sweep of the hand toward the compartment door, turned and walked away.

  Staring at Voyschinkowsky across the table, pretending to listen as the man told a story about his childhood, Szara for the first time understood the chain of events that had led to the night of 7 February. It had started with Lotte Huber’s romance with Seneschal and from there moved, seemingly driven by fate, to its conclusion. Inevitable, he thought. The champagne was cunning; the opposite of vodka in that it didn’t numb, it revea
led. One could say, he realized, that a Nazi official’s appetite for red berry sauce had two years later led to the death of a Russian intelligence officer in a Swiss meadow. He shook his head to make such thoughts go away. Remember, he told himself silently, this must be done with a cold heart.

  Voyschinkowsky paused to take a long sip of champagne. “The Lion of the Bourse” was in his early sixties, with a long, mournful face marked by the chronically red-rimmed eyes and dark pouches of the lifelong insomniac. He was reputed to be one of the richest men in Paris. “I wonder whatever became of her? ” he said. He had a thick Hungarian accent and a heavy, hoarse voice that seemed to come from the bottom of a well.

  “But Bibi,” Ginger Pudakis said, “did you make love?”

  “I was twelve years old, my dear.”

  “Then what?”

  One side of Voyschinkowsky’s mouth twisted briefly into a tart grin. “I looked at her breasts.”

  “Finis?”

  “Let me tell you, from one who has lived a, a rich and varied cosmopolitan life, there was never again a moment like it.”

  “Oh Bibi,” she breathed. “Too sad!”

  Lady Angela whispered in Szara’s ear, “Say something clever, can you?”

  “Not sad. Bittersweet,” he said. “Not at all the same thing. I think it is a perfect story.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Roddy Fitzware.

  They went on to a nightclub to watch Apache dancing. A young dancer, her skirt bunched up around her waist, slid across the polished floor into the audience and accidentally drove a spike heel into Szara’s ankle. He winced, saw a momentary horror on her face amid the black and violet makeup, then her partner, in the traditional sailor’s shirt, whisked her away. Now I am wounded in the line of duty, he thought, and should receive a medal, but there is no nation to award it. He was very drunk and laughed out loud at the thought.