by Alan Furst
“Were you stabbed?” Lady Angela asked quietly, evidently amused.
“A little. It’s nothing.” “What a very, very nice man you are.” “Hah.”
“It’s true. Next week, you’re to have supper with me, tete-a-tete. Can you?”
“I shall be honored, dear lady.”
“Mysterious things may happen.”
“The very thing I live for.”
“I expect you do.”
“You’re right. Will there be a violinist?”
“Good God no!”
“Then I’ll come.”
The dinner was at Fouquet’s, in a private room with dark green curtains. Gold-painted cherubs grinned from the corners of the ceiling. There were two wines, and langoustines with artichokes and turbot. Lady Angela Hope was in red, a long, shimmering silk sheath, and her upswept hair, a color something like highly polished brass, was held in place by two diamond butterflies. He thought her presentation ingenious: glamorous, seductive, and absolutely untouchable-the culmination of the private dinner was … that one would have dined privately.
“What am I to do with my little place in Scotland? You must advise me,” she said.
“Could anything be wrong?”
“Could anything be wrong-could anything be right! This dreadful man, a Mr. MacConnachie if you will, writes that the northwest cornice has entirely deteriorated, and …”
Szara was, in a way, disappointed. He was curious, and the street imp from Odessa in him would have liked the conquest of a titled English lady in a private room at Fouquet’s. But he’d understood from the beginning that the evening was for business and not for love. While they dawdled over coffee, there was a discreet knock on the doorframe to one side of the curtain. Lady Angela playfully splayed her fingers at the center of her chest. “Why whoever can that be?”
“Your husband,” Szara said acidly.
She suppressed a giggle. “Bastard,” she said in English. Her upper-class tone made a poem of the word and he noted that it was absolutely the most honestly affectionate thing she had ever said, or likely ever would say, to him. Underneath it all, he thought her splendid.
Roger Fitzware slipped between the curtains. Something in the way he moved meant he was no longer the slightly effeminate and terribly amusing Roddy that the Brasserie Heininger crowd so adored. Short and quite handsome, with thick reddish-brown hair swept across a noble forehead, he was wearing a tuxedo and smoking a little cigar. “Am I de trop?” he said.
Szara stood and they shook hands. “Pleased to see you,” he said in English.
“Mm,” Fitzware said.
“Do join us, dear boy,” Lady Angela said.
“Shall I have them bring a chair?” Fitzware said, just to be polite.
“I think not,” said Lady Angela. She came around the table and kissed Szara on the cheek. “A very, very nice man,” she said. “You must ring me up-very soon,” she called as she vanished through the curtain.
Fitzware ordered Biscuit cognac and for a time they chatted about nothing in particular. Szara, a student of technique, found considerable professional satisfaction in watching Fitzware work; intelligence people, no matter their national origin, always had a great deal in common, like people who collected stamps or worked in banks. But the approach, when it came, was no surprise, since it turned out to be the same one favored by the Russian services, one that created an acceptable motive and solicited betrayal in the same breath.
Fitzware conducted the conversation like a maestro: The concierge situation in Paris- and here he was quite amusing: his apartment house groaned beneath the heel of a ferocious tyrant, un vrai dragon in her eighties with a will of iron-led gracefully to the political situation in Paris-here Fitzware implicitly acknowledged the concerns of his guest by citing, with a grim expression, the slogan chalked on walls and bridges, Vaut mieux Hitler que Blum, a fascist preference for the Nazis over Leon Blum, the Jewish socialist who’d led the government a year earlier. Then it was time for the political situation in France, followed closely by the political situation in Europe. Now the table was set and it only remained for dinner to be served.
“Do you think there can be peace?” Fitzware asked. He lit a small cigar and offered Szara one. Szara declined and lit a Gitane.
“Of course,” Szara said. “If people of good will are determined to work together.”
And that was that.
Fitzware had hoisted a signal flag of inquiry, and Szara had responded. Fitzware took a moment to swirl his cognac and exhale a long, satisfied plume of cigar smoke. Szara let him exult a little in his victory; for somebody in their line of work, recruitment was the great, perhaps the only, victory. Now it was settled, they would work together for peace. As who wouldn’t? They both knew, as surely as the sun rose in the morning, that there would be war, but that was entirely beside the point.
“We’re terribly at sea, you know, we British,” said Fitzware, following the script. “I fear we haven’t a clue to the Soviet Union’s intentions regarding Poland-or the Baltics, or Turkey. The situation is complex, a powder keg ready to go up. Wouldn’t it be dreadful if the armies of Europe marched over a simple misunderstanding?”
“It must be avoided,” Szara agreed. “At all cost. You’d think we would have come to understand, in 1914, the price of ignorance.”
“Sorrowfully, the world doesn’t learn.”
“No, you’re right. It seems we are destined to repeat our mistakes.”
“Unless, of course, we have the knowledge, the information, that permits us to work these things out between diplomats-in the League of Nations, for instance.”
“Ideally, it is the answer.”
“Well,” said Fitzware, brightening, “I believe there’s still a chance, don’t you? “
“I do,” Szara said. “To me personally, the critical information at this time would concern developments in Germany. Would you agree with that?”
Fitzware did not respond immediately; simply stared as though hypnotized. He’d led himself some way down a false trail, assuming that Szara’s information concerned Soviet operations-intelligence; political or otherwise. Now he had to shift to a completely different area. Quickly, it dawned on him that what he was being offered was, on balance, even better than he’d realized. Offers of Soviet secrets were, in many cases, provocations or dangles-attempts to involve a rival service in deluding itself or revealing its own resources. One had to wear fireproof gloves in such cases. Offers of German secrets, on the other hand, coming from a Russian, would very likely be hard currency. Fitzware cleared his throat. “Emphatically,” he said.
“To me, the key to a peaceful solution of the current difficulties would be a mutual knowledge of armaments, particularly combat aircraft. What would be your view on that?”
In Fitzware’s eyes Szara glimpsed the momentary light of elation, as though an inner voice cried out, I’d dance naked on me fookin’ birthday cake! In fact, Fitzware permitted himself a civilized grunt. “Hm, well, yes, of course I agree.”
“With discretion, Mr. Fitzware, it’s entirely possible.”
An unspoken question answered: Fitzware was not in communication with the USSR, was not being drawn into the occluded maze of diplomatic initiatives achieved by intelligence means. He was in communication with Andre Szara, a Soviet journalist operating on his own. That was the meaning of the word discretion. Fitzware considered carefully; matters had reached a delicate point. “Your terms,” he said.
“I have great anxiety on the question of Palestine, particularly with the St. James’s Conference in session.”
At this, Fitzware’s triumphant mood slightly deflated. Szara could not have raised a more difficult issue. “There are easier areas in which we might work,” he said.
Szara nodded, leaving Fitzware to tread water.
“Can you be specific?” Fitzware said at last.
“Certificates of Emigration.”
“Real ones?”
“Yes.”<
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“Above the legal limit, of course.”
“Of course.”
“And in return?”
“Determination of the Reich’s monthly bomber production. Based on the total manufacture of the cold-process swage wire that operates certain nonelectronic aircraft controls.”
“My board of directors will want to know the reason you say ‘total.’ “
“My board of directors believes this to be the case. It is, whatever else one might say, Mr. Fitzware, a very good, a very effective, board of directors.”
Fitzware sighed in agreement. “Don’t suppose, dear boy, you’d consider taking something simple, like money.”
“No.”
“Another Cognac, then.”
“With pleasure.”
“We have a good deal of work yet to do, and I can’t promise anything. All the usual, you understand,” Fitzware said, pressing the button on the wall that summoned a waiter.
“I understand perfectly,” Szara said. He paused to finish his Cognac. “But you must understand that time is very important to us. People are dying, Great Britain needs friends, we must make it all work out somehow. If you will save lives for us, we will save lives for you. Surely that’s world peace, or damn close to it.”
“Close enough,” Fitzware said.
In the violent, changeable weather of early March, Szara and Fitzware got down to serious negotiation. “Call it what you like,” Szara was later to tell de Montfried, “but what it was was pushcart haggling.” Fitzware played all the traditional melodies: it was his board of directors that wanted something for nothing; the mandarins in Whitehall were a pack of blind fools; he, Fitzware, was entirely on Szara’s side, but making headway through the bureaucratic underbrush was unspeakably frustrating.
Much of the negotiating was done at the Brasserie Heininger. Fitzware sat with Lady Angela Hope and Voyschinkowsky and the whole crowd. Sometimes Szara joined them, other times he took one of his cafe girls out for dinner. He would meet Fitzware in the men’s WC, where they would whisper urgently back and forth, or they would go out on the sidewalk for a breath of fresh air. Once or twice they talked in a corner at the social evenings held in various apartments. Over the course of it, Szara realized that being a Jew made bargaining difficult. Fitzware was eternally proper, but there were moments when Szara thought he caught a whiff of the classical attitude: why are you people so difficult, so greedy, so stubborn?
And of course Fitzware’s board of directors tried to do to him what his own Directorate had done to Dr. Julius Baumann. Who are we really dealing with? they wanted to know. We need to have a sense of the process; where is the information coming from? More, give us more! (And why are you people so greedy?)
But Szara was like a rock. He smiled at Fitzware tolerantly, knowingly, as the Englishman went fishing for deeper information, a smile that said, We’re in the same business, my friend. Finally, Szara made a telling point: this negotiation is nothing, he admitted ruefully to Fitzware, compared to dealings with the French, who had their own Jewish communities in Beirut and Damascus. That seemed to work. Nothing, in love and business, quite like a rival to stimulate desire.
They struck a deal and shook hands.
Baumann’s figures, from 1 January 1937 through February 1939, brought an initial payment of five hundred Certificates of Emigration-up from Fitzware’s offer of two hundred, down from Szara’s demand for seven hundred. One hundred and seventy-five certificates a month would be provided as the information was exchanged thereafter. The White Paper would produce seventy-five thousand legal entries through 1944, fifteen thousand a year, one thousand two hundred and fifty a month. Szara’s delivery of intelligence from Germany would increase that number by a factor of fourteen percent. Thus the mathematics of Jewish lives, he thought.
He told himself again and again that the operation had to be run with a cold heart, told himself to accept a small victory, told himself whatever he could think of, yet he could not avoid the knowledge that his visits to the corner tabac seemed much more frequent, his ashtrays overflowed, he took more empty bottles to the garbage can in the courtyard, his bistro bills rose sharply, and he ate aspirin and splashed gallons of cold water on his eyes in the morning.
There was too much to think about: for one, unseen Soviet counterintelligence work that was meant to keep people like him from doing exactly what he was doing; for another, the potential for blackmail come the day when Fitzware wanted a view of Soviet operations in Paris and threatened to denounce him if he refused to cooperate; for a third, the strong possibility that Baumann’s information was in fact supplied by the Reich Foreign Office intelligence unit and would in time poison the British estimate of German armaments. What, he wondered, were they hearing on the subject from other sources? He was to find that out, sooner than he thought.
During this period, Szara found consolation in the most unlikely places. March, he discovered, was good spying weather. Something about the fierce skies full of racing clouds or the spring rains blowing slantwise past his window gave him courage-in a climate of turbulence one could put aside thoughts of consequences. The political parties of the left and the right were to be seen daily on the boulevards, bellowing their slogans, waving their banners, and the newspapers were frantic, with thick black headlines every morning. The Parisians had a certain facial expression: lips compressed, head canted a little to one side, eyebrows raised: It meant where does all this lead? and implied no place very good. In Paris that spring of 1939, one saw it hourly.
De Montfried, meanwhile, had appointed himself official agent runner. He was no Abramov and no Bloch, but he had long experience as a commercial trader and believed he understood intuitively how any business agent should be handled. This assumption produced, in the hushed railroad library of the Renaissance Club, some extraordinary moments. De Montfried offering money-“Please don’t be eccentric about this, it is only the means to an end”-which Szara did not care to take. De Montfried in the guise of a Jewish mother, pressing smoked fish sandwiches on a man who could barely stand to look at a cup of coffee. De Montfried handed a stack of five hundred Certificates of Emigration, clearing his throat, playing the stoic with tears of pleasure in his eyes. None of this mattered. The days of Abramov and Bloch were over; Szara had been running OPAL operations for too long not to run his own when the time came. That included making sure he didn’t know too much about details that did not directly concern him.
But de Montfried said just enough so that Szara’s imagination managed the rest. He could see them, perhaps an eye surgeon from Leipzig with his family or a tottering, old rabbi from Berlin’s Hasid community, could see them boarding a steamer, watching the coastline of Germany disappear over the horizon. Life for them would be difficult, more than difficult, in Palestine. What the Nazi Brown Shirts had started the Arab raiding bands might yet finish, but it was at least a chance, and that was better than despair.
The British operatives provided all the usual paraphernalia: a code name, CURATE, an emergency meeting signal-the same “wrong number” telephone call the Russians sometimes used-and a contact to be known by the work name Evans. This was a rail-thin gentleman in his sixties, from his bearing almost certainly a former military officer, quite possibly of colonial service, who dressed in chalk-stripe blue suits, carried a furled umbrella, cultivated a natty little white mustache, and stood straight as a stick. Contacts were made in the afternoon, in the grand cinemas of the Champs-Elysees neighborhood: silent exchanges of two folded copies of Le Temps placed on an empty seat between Szara and the British contact.
Silent but for, on one occasion, a single sentence, spoken by Evans across the empty seat and suitably muffled by the clatter of a crowd of Busby Berkeley tap dancers on the screen: “Our friend wants you to know that your numbers have been confirmed, and that he is grateful.” He was not to hear Evans speak again.
Confirmed?
That meant Baumann was telling the truth; his information had been aut
henticated by other sources reporting to the British services. And that meant, what? That Dr. Baumann was betraying a German Funkspiele operation, all by himself and just because? That Marta Haecht’s boss had been mistaken: it wasn’t Von Polanyi having lunch with Baumann at the Kaiserhof? Szara could have gone on and on; there were whole operas of possibilities to be drawn from Fitzware’s message. But there was no time for it.
Szara had to hurry back to his apartment, hide a hundred and seventy-five certificates under the carpet until they could be delivered to de Montfried that evening, make a five P.M. meeting in the third arrondissement, the Marais, then head out to the place d’Italie for a treff with Valais, the new group leader of the SILO network, a little after seven.
The meeting in the Marais took place in a tiny hotel, at an oilcloth-covered table in a darkened room. A week earlier, Szara had been offered his very own emigration certificate to Palestine. “It’s a back door out of Europe,” de Montfried had said. “The time may come when you’ll have no other choice.” Szara had politely but firmly declined. There was no doubt a reason he did this, but it wasn’t one he wanted to name. What he did ask of de Montfried was a second identity, a good one, with a valid passport that would take him over any border he cared to cross. His intention was not flight. Rather, like any efficient predator, he simply sought to extend his range. De Montfried, his favors refused again and again, was eager to oblige. “Our cobbler,” he’d said, using the slang expression for forger, “is the best in Europe. And I’ll arrange to have him paid, you’re not even to discuss it.”
The cobbler was nameless; a fat, oily man with thinning curls brushed back from a receding hairline. In a soiled white shirt buttoned at the sleeves, he moved slowly around the room, speaking French in an accent Szara could place only generally, somewhere in Central Europe. “You’ve brought a photograph?” he said. Szara handed over four passport pictures taken in a photo studio. The cobbler chuckled, chose one, and handed the rest back. “Myself, I don’t keep records-for that you’ll have to see the cops.”