by Alan Furst
Szara read with pure astonishment. After the tense aridity of Dr. Baumann and the lawyer’s precision of Valais, it was like a night at the theater. What an eye she had! Penetrating, malicious, ironic, as though Balzac were reborn as a Russian emigre in 1939 Berlin. Read serially, RAVEN’S reports worked as a novel of social commentary. Her life was made up of small roles in bad plays, intimate dinners, lively parties, and country house weekends in the Bavarian forest, with boar hunting by day and bed hopping by night.
Szara had tender feelings for this woman, even though he suspected she was a specialist in the provocation of tender feelings, and he would have expected himself to read of her never-quite-consummated liaisons intimes with a leaden heart. But it just wasn’t so. She’d told him the truth that night in her dressing room: she protected herself from the worst of it and was unmoved by what went on around her. This casual invulnerability was everywhere in her reports, and Szara found himself, above all else, amused. She had something of a man’s mind in such matters, and she characterized her fumbling, half-drunken, would-be lovers and their complicated requests with a delicate brutality that made him laugh out loud. By God, he thought, she was no better than he was.
Nor did she spare her subagents. Lara Brozina she described as writing “a kind of ghastly, melancholy verse that Germans of a certain level adore.” Brozina’s brother, Viktor Brozin, an actor in radio plays, was said to have “the head of a lion, the heart of a parakeet.” And of the balletmaster Anton Krafic she wrote that he was “sentenced every morning to live another day.” Szara could positively see them-the languid Krafic, the leonine Brozin, the terribly sensitive Brozina-amusing frauds making steady progress along the shady underside of Nazi society.
And Tscherova did not spare the details. During a weekend in a castle near the town of Traunstein, she entered a bathroom after midnight “to discover B. [that meant BREWER, Krafic] drinking champagne in the bathtub with SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Bruckmann, who was wearing a cloche hat with a veil and carmine lipstick.” What in heaven’s name, Szara wondered, had the Directorate made of this?
Referring to the file of outgoing reports he discovered the answer: Schau-Wehrli had reprocessed the material to make it palatable. Thus her dispatch covering RAVEN’S description of the jolly bath said only that “BREWER reports that SS Hauptsturmfuhrer BRUCKMANN has recently been with his regiment on divisional maneuvers in marshy, swamplike terrain near the Masurian Lakes in East Prussia.” Another pointer, Szara noted, toward the invasion of Poland, where such conditions might be encountered.
A rich, rewarding file.
He worked his way through the last of it on the afternoon of the summer solstice, the day the sun is said to pause, he thought. Pleasing, that idea. Something Russian about it. As though the universe stopped for a moment to reflect, took a day off from work. One could sense it, time slowing down: the weather light and sunny, rather aimless, a bird twittering away on a neighboring balcony, Kranov coding at his desk, humming a Russian melody, the little bell on the door of the ground-floor tabac tinkling as a customer entered.
Then the warning buzzer went off beside Kranov’s table-a danger signal operated from beneath the counter in the tabac. This was followed, a moment later, by a knock on the door at the bottom of the stairs, a door shielded by a curtain on the back wall of the shop.
Szara had absolutely no idea what to do, neither did Kranov. They both froze, sat dead still like two hares caught in a winter field. They were literally surrounded by incrimination-files, flimsies, stolen documents, and the wireless telegraph itself, with its aerial run cleverly up the unused chimney by way of the attic. There was no getting rid of anything. They could have run down the stairs and rushed out the back door, or jumped the three stories and broken their ankles, but they did neither. It was three-thirty on a bright summer afternoon and not a wisp of darkness to cover their escape.
So they sat there and presently heard a second knock, perhaps a bit more insistent than the first. Szara, not knowing what else to do, walked down the stairs and answered it. To find two Frenchmen waiting politely at the door. They were Frenchmen of a certain class, wore tan summerweight suits of a conservative cut, crisp shirts, silk ties not terribly in fashion but not terribly out. The brims of their hats were turned down at precisely the same angle. Szara found himself thinking in Russian, My God, the hats are here. The two men had a particular coloration that a Frenchman of the better sort will assume after lunch, a faint, rose-tinted blush on the cheeks which informs the knowledgeable that the beef was good and the wine not too bad. They introduced themselves and presented cards.
They were, they said, fire inspectors. They would just have a brief look around, if it wasn’t terribly inconvenient.
Fire inspectors they were not.
But Szara had to go along with the game, so he invited them in. By the time they’d climbed to the third floor, Kranov had pulled the blanket off the window and flung it over the wireless, turning it into a curious dark hump on an old table from which a wire ran up the corner of the wall and disappeared into the attic through a ragged hole in the ceiling. Kranov himself was either in a closet or under the bed in Odile’s apartment on the second floor-one of those truly inspired hiding places found amid panic-but in the event he was unseen. The Frenchmen didn’t look, they didn’t strip the blanket off the wireless, and they didn’t even bother to enter Odile’s apartment. One of them said, “So much paper in a room like this. You must be careful with your cigarettes. Perhaps a bucket of sand ought to be placed in the corner.”
They touched the brims of their hats with their forefingers and departed. Szara, his shirt soaked at the armpits, collapsed in a chair. Somewhere on the floor below he heard a bump and a curse as Kranov extricated himself from whatever cranny he’d jammed himself into. A comedy, Szara said to himself, a comedy. He pressed his palms against his temples.
Kranov, swearing under his breath, threw the blanket into a corner and flashed Goldman a disaster signal. For the next two hours messages flew back and forth, Kranov’s pencil scratching out columns of figures as he encoded responses to Goldman’s precise questions. Somewhere, Szara was certain, the French had a receiver and were taking note of all the numbers crackling through the summer air.
By the end of the exchange Szara realized that the game was not actually over, the network was not blown. Not quite. They had, evidently, been warned, probably by the Deuxieme Bureau- diplomatic and military intelligence-using agents of the Paris Prefecture of police or the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, the DST, the French equivalent of the American FBI. The warning came in two parts:
We know what you’re doing, went the first.
This was no great surprise, when Szara had a moment to think about it. The French police had always insisted, since Fouche served Napoleon, on knowing exactly what went on in their country, and most particularly in their capital. Whether they actually did anything about what they knew was treated as a very different matter-here political decisions might be involved-but they were scrupulously careful in keeping track of what went on, neighborhood by neighborhood, village by village. So their knowledge of the existence of OPAL was, finally, no great surprise.
From their point of view it did not hurt them that the Russians spied on Germany, the traditional enemy of France. They may have received, at a very high level, compensation for allowing OPAL a free hand, compensation in the form of refined intelligence product. Always, there were arrangements that did not meet the eye.
But the second part of the warning was quite serious: if you truly mean to become an ally of Germany, we may decide that your days here are numbered, since such an alliance might damage French interests, and that will not be permitted to happen. So here, gentlemen, are a pair of fire inspectors, and we send them to you in a most courteous and considerate fashion, which is to say before anything actually starts burning.
We’re sure you’ll understand.
In July, the OTTER operation ended. They
would hear from Dr. Baumann no more. So that month’s exchange of information for emigration certificates was the last. Szara signaled de Montfried for a meeting, he responded immediately.
De Montfried was driven in from his country house, a chateau near Tours. He was wearing a cream-colored suit, a pale blue shirt, and a little bow tie. He carefully placed his straw hat on the marquetry table in the library, folded his hands, and looked expectantly at Szara. When told the operation was over, he covered his face with his hands, as though in great fatigue. They sat for some time without speaking. Outside it was oppressively quiet; a long, empty, summer afternoon.
Szara felt sorry for de Montfried but could find no words of consolation. What was there to say? The man had discovered himself to be rather less powerful than he’d thought. Yet, Szara realized, how little would change for him. He would present the same image to the world, would live beautifully, move easily in the upper realms of French society; the haughty Cercle Renaissance would still be the place where a library of railroad books was maintained for his pleasure. Certainly he was to be envied. He had simply found, and rather late in life, the limits of his power. Perceiving himself to be a wealthy and important man, de Montfried had attempted to exert influence on political events and, based on Szara’s understanding of this world, had succeeded. He simply did not understand how well they’d done. He simply did not understand that he’d imposed himself on a world where the word victory was hardly to be heard.
Together, he and Szara had been responsible for the distribution of one thousand three hundred and seventy-five Certificates of Emigration to Mandate Palestine. As these covered individuals and their families, and were so precious that marriages and adoptions were arranged, sometimes overnight, the number of salvaged lives was perhaps three thousand. What, Szara wondered, could he say? You bloody fool, you want to save the world-now you know what it takes to save three thousand lives! No, he could not say that. And had he said it he would have been wrong. The true price of those lives was yet to be paid and would turn out to be higher, for Szara and others, than either of them could have realized at that moment.
De Montfried dropped his hands heavily to the arms of his chair and sat back, his face collapsed with failure. “Then it’s finished,” he said.
“Yes,” Szara said.
“Can anything be done? Anything at all?”
“No.”
Szara had certainly thought about it-thought wasn’t really the word; his mind had spun endless scenarios, reached desperately for a solution, any solution at all. But to no avail.
It was Szara’s opinion that Evans had told him the truth that afternoon in the movie theater: the British services were able to confirm the figures from other sources. That meant he could not simply lie, offer numbers that would appear to be logical. They would know. Not at first-for a month or two it might be managed, and a month or two meant another three hundred and fifty certificates, at least seven hundred lives. Seven hundred lives were worth a lie-in Szara’s calculus they certainly were. But it was worse than that.
When he’d first gone to the British, he’d believed his figures to be false, part of a German counterintelligence attack. It had not mattered, then. But the world had shifted beneath his feet; Germany would take Poland, and Russia would agree to a treaty that left Britain and France isolated. False figures delivered now might deform the British armament effort in unforeseen ways, false figures could well help the Nazis, false figures could cost thousands of lives, tens of thousands, once the Luftwaffe bombers flew. So those seven hundred lives were lost.
“Have you told them? ” de Montfried asked.
“Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“On the possibility that you and I, sitting here, might invent something, discover something, find another way. On the possibility that you have not been forthcoming with me and that you have resources I don’t know about, perhaps information of some kind that can be substituted.”
De Montfried shook his head.
They sat in silence.
“What will you tell them?” de Montfried said at last.
“That there has been an interruption at the source, that we wish to continue until a new method can be worked out.”
“And will they accept that?”
“They will not.”
“Not even for one month?”
“Not even that.” He paused for a moment. “I know it’s difficult to understand, but it’s like not having money. Lenin said that grain was ‘the currency of currencies.’ That was in 1917. For us, it might now be said that information is the currency of currencies.”
“But surely you know other things, things of interest.”
“For the people I deal with directly, that might very well work. But we are asking for something I’m certain they-MI6-had to fight for, and only the magnitude of what we were offering made it possible for them to win that battle. I don’t think they’ll go back to war for other material I might offer. I’m sure they won’t. Otherwise, believe me, I would try it.”
Slowly, de Montfried gathered himself to face the inevitable. “It is very hard for me to admit to failure, but that is what’s happened, we’ve failed.”
“We’ve stopped, yes.”
De Montfried withdrew a leather case and a fountain pen from the inside pocket of his jacket, unscrewed the top of the pen, and began to write a series of telephone numbers on the back of a business card. “One of these will find me,” he said. “I am almost never out of touch with my office-that’s the number you’ve been using- but I’ve included several other numbers, places where I’m to be found. Otherwise we’ll leave it as it’s been, simply say Monsieur B. is calling. I’ll leave instructions for the call to be put through to me directly. Day or night, any time. Whatever I have is at your disposal should you need it.”
Szara put the card in his pocket. “One can never be sure what might happen. One has to hope for the best.”
De Montfried nodded sadly.
Szara stood and offered his hand. “Good-bye,” he said.
“Yes,” de Montfried said, rising to shake hands. “Good luck.”
“Thank you,” Szara said.
The card joined the money and the Jean Bonotte passport that afternoon.
The OTTER operation had ended suddenly and badly.
Odile must have activated an emergency signal available in Berlin, because Goldman called a special meeting, to take place just after she got off the train. Szara and Schau-Wehrli were summoned to a place called Arion, in Belgium, an iron mining town just over the Luxembourg border a few kilometers north of the French city of Longwy. It was hot and dirty in Arion. Coal smoke from the mills drifted through the soot-blackened streets, the sunset was a dark, sullen orange, and the night air was dead still. The meeting was held in a worker’s tenement near the center of town, the home of a party operative, a miner asked to spend the night with relatives. They sat in the cramped parlor with the shutters closed amid the smells of sweaty clothes and boiled food.
Odile was shaken-her face an unnatural white-but determined. She had gotten off a local train from the German border only a few minutes before they arrived. Goldman was there with another man Szara did not know, a short, heavy Russian in middle age, with wavy fair hair and extremely thick glasses that distorted his eyes. At first Szara thought he might be asthmatic: his breath rasped audibly in the little room. After they’d settled down, Szara noticed that the man was staring at him. Szara met his glance but the man did not look away. He put an oval cigarette between his lips, creased the head of a wooden match with his thumbnail, and lit the cigarette from the flare. Only then did he turn to face Odile. As he shook the match out, Szara saw that he wore a large gold watch on his wrist.
By the time Szara and Schau-Wehrli arrived, Odile had told her story to Goldman and the other man and produced Baumann’s message. Goldman handed it to Szara. “Have a look,” he said.
Szara took the slip of paper, read quickly over the
production numbers, then discovered a terse sentence scrawled along the bottom of the sheet: You should be aware that rumors of a rapprochement between Germany and the USSR have angered members of the diplomatic and military class.
“What is your opinion?” Goldman asked.
“My opinion,” Szara said. “It seems he’s trying to supply additional information. We’ve been after him for months to do that. Do such rumors exist? “
“Perhaps. In the class of people he refers to, they could easily be more than rumors,” Goldman said. “But how would Baumann know such things? Who is he talking to? “
Szara said he didn’t know.
Goldman turned to Odile. “Please tell us again what happened.”
“I always clear the drop early in the morning,” Odile said, “when the maids go to work in the neighborhood. I went to the wall by the little wood, made certain I was not observed, reached over the wall and felt around until I found the loose rock, then withdrew the paper and put it in the pocket of my raincoat. There was no message from the network, so I was next going to the telephone pole to acknowledge reception by turning the bent nail. I went about ten steps when a woman came out of the woods. She was approximately fifty years old, wearing a housedress, and extremely agitated and nervous. ‘He has been taken,’ she said to me in German. I pretended not to understand what it was all about. ‘He is in a camp, in Sachsenhausen,’ she said, ‘and his friends can’t help him.’ I stared at her and started to hurry away. ‘Tell them they must help him,’ she called after me. I walked very fast. She came a few steps after me, then stopped and went back into the woods. I did not see her do this, but I looked over my shoulder a few seconds later and she was gone. I heard a dog barking, a little dog, from the woods somewhere. I made my way to the Ringbahn station at Hohenzollern-Damm, went into the public toilet, and hid the message in my shoulder pad. I was out of Berlin on a local train about one hour later. I saw nobody unusual on the train, had no other experience out of the ordinary.”