by Alan Furst
And what a good time they had.
Much later, when they simply hadn’t the strength to go on any longer, they fell sound asleep, still pressed together, the sheets tangled around their legs, drifting away in the midst of the most charming and vile conversation.
It was not yet dawn when they woke up. He touched her, she flexed with pleasure and sighed, a pale shape in the darkness, eyes closed, mouth open, breasts rising and falling. Suddenly he understood that sometimes there was no reaching the end of desire, no satisfying it. They simply would not, he realized, ever quite get enough of each other. Nonetheless, he thought, they could hope for the best. They could try. They could make a beginning.
He could have crawled out of bed at dawn and set out into the cold world, but he didn’t. They stole another day, and this time they didn’t wait for nightfall. They disappeared in the middle of the afternoon. At eight in the evening a servant set out a tureen of soup at the long table in the dining room with the ticking grandfather clock. But nobody showed up. And at eight-thirty she took it away.
He left in the middle of the following day. A taxi was called. They stood in the vestibule together until it came. “Please don’t cry,” he said.
“I won’t,” she promised, tears running everywhere.
The taxi honked twice and he left.
The Gestapo had him an hour later. He never even got out of Berlin. To his credit, he sensed it. He did not enter the Lehrter Bahnhof immediately but walked the streets for a while, trying to calm himself down-simply another traveler, a little bored, a little harassed, a man who had to take the train up to Hamburg on some prosaic and vastly uninteresting errand.
But the passport control people at the staircase that led down to the platform didn’t care what he looked like. A Berlin policeman took the Kringen identity papers and compared them to a typewritten list, looked over Szara’s shoulder, made a gesture of the eyes and a motion of the head, and two men in suits closed in on either side of him. Very correct they were: “Can you come with us for a moment, please? ” Only will power and raw pride kept him from collapsing to his knees, and he felt the sweat break out at the roots of his hair. One of the men relieved him of his valise, the other frisked him, then they marched him, to the great interest of the passing crowd, toward the station police post. He wobbled once and one of the detectives caught him by the arm. They took him down a long corridor and through an unmarked door where a uniformed SS officer was sitting behind a desk, a file open in front of him. Reading upside down, Szara could see a long list of names and descriptive paragraphs on a yellow sheet of teletype paper. “Stand at attention,” the man said coldly.
Szara did as he was told. The officer concentrated on the Kringen identity documents and left him to stew, the standard procedure. “Herr Kringen?” he said at last.
“Yes.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What did you use to obliterate the birthdate? Lemon? Oxalic acid? Not urine-I hope for your sake I haven’t touched your piss.”
“Lemon, sir,” Szara said.
The officer nodded. He tapped the Kringen name with the eraser at the end of a pencil. “The actual Herr Kringen went into the Lutheran hospital to have a bunion removed from his foot. And while this poor man lay in a hospital bed, some little sneak made off with his papers. Was that you?”
“No, sir. It wasn’t me. I bought the passport from an orderly at the hospital.”
The officer nodded. “And you are?”
“My name is Bonotte, Jean Bonotte. I am of French nationality. My passport is hidden in the flap of my jacket.”
“Give it to me.”
Szara got his jacket off and with shaking hands tried to rip the seam open. It took a long time but the heavy thread finally gave. He placed the passport on the desk and put his jacket back on, the torn flap of lining hanging ludicrously down the back of his leg. Behind him, one of the detectives snickered. The officer picked up the telephone and requested a number. He turned the pages of the Bonotte passport with the pencil eraser. While he waited for his call to go through he said, “What reason have you for your visit to Germany? A mad impulse?” The detective laughed.
“I fled Poland, but could not find a way out of Lithuania.”
“So you obtained Kringen’s passport and came out with the Volksdeutsch from Riga?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well aren’t you clever,” said the officer, looking at Szara carefully for the first time and meaning what he said.
They drove him to Columbia House, Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, and locked him in an isolation cell. Small but clean, a cot and a bucket, a heavily grilled window nine feet up and a light bulb in the ceiling. They weren’t entirely sure what they had, he guessed, not the sort of poor fish at whom they screamed, Spy! You will be executed! but, just maybe, the real thing, and that had to be handled at length and in a very different way. Perhaps with delicacy, perhaps not. If the decision was “not,” the next step was no secret. Szara could hear the screaming from distant parts of the building, and it sickened him and weakened his will to resist, as it was intended to.
Abramov, with evident distaste, had covered this possibility during the time of his training: nobody resists torture, don’t try. Tell them what you have to, it’s our job to keep you from knowing too much. There are two goals you must try to accomplish: one, the less you say in the first forty-eight hours the better-that gives us time-but in any event, feed them the least important material you can. You are just a low-level opportunist forced to work for the government-contemptible, but not important. And two, try to signal us that you’ve been caught. That’s crucial. We can protect a network from damage, close down everything you touched, and rescue your associates while we work through channels to get you free or at least to keep you from harm. The signals will change based on circumstance: a technical variation in wireless/telegraphy or simply vanishing from our sight while working in hostile territory. But there will certainly be a signal established and an appropriate way to deliver it. Remember, in this organization there is always a chance, we can do almost anything. “If you are taken,” Abramov had said, “you must cling to hope as a sailor cast into the sea clings to a spar.”
Szara closed his eyes and rested his head against the cold cement wall. No, Sergei Jakobovich-he addressed Abramov’s departed soul-not this time. Hope, despair-all such fancies were now entirely beside the point. He’d at last made the error that could not be overcome. Had not sufficiently understood the capability, the magnitude, of the German security machine-not until he’d seen the long sheet of yellow teletype paper with the name KRINGEN in the left-hand column. The identity that had been purchased in Paris would not hold up, not once they went to work on it, it wouldn’t. When he worked his way back through the last two years of his life-Khelidze, Renate Braun, Bloch, Abramov, the OPAL network, then de Montfried and the British, finally the assignment in eastern Poland-he saw himself as a man willing to do almost anything in order to stay alive. He’d not done badly, had lasted a long time compared to the others-the intellectuals, Old Bolsheviks, Jews, foreign communists. Had outlived almost all of them, twisted and turned, lied and schemed, survived.
But it was not meant to be, and this he faced.
He suspected that what he’d almost done to himself in the Pripet marsh, the day he’d crossed into Lithuania, had been a shadow of the future-somehow he’d sensed that he was living out his last few days. But he had slightly misread the omen; he wasn’t done with life, that wasn’t it. Life was done with him. And in his deepest heart, he wondered if he hadn’t come to Berlin knowing that he would find a way to Tscherova, an unconscious appeal to fate to let him passionately love a woman once more before he left the earth. If so, his wish had been granted, and now it was time to accept the inevitable cost of the bargain. He marveled at the coldness of his heart. The time of dreams and delusions was ended; he saw the world, and himself, in perfect clarity. Certain obligations
remained-to protect Tscherova, principally-but there were others, and he would now plan how to sacrifice himself in the most effective way. How late, he thought, strength comes to some people.
The interrogator was called Hartmann. An SS Obersturmbannfuhrer, a major, a well-fed man with a placid face and small, carefully groomed hands, who addressed him politely. Hartmann was nothing more, Szara realized, than the intake valve of an information machine. He existed to acquire facts-perhaps a lawyer, or some functionary in a judicial system, before being called to his present duty by the Nazi party. He did not process the information. That happened elsewhere, far above him in the hierarchy, where an administrative panel, a directorate, made decisions.
To begin with, Hartmann pointed out that if they were straightforward with each other, all would turn out for the best. He implied, without actually saying it, that his job was best done if Szara did not have to be taken to the cellars; they were, together, men who could proceed with their obligations-Szara’s to confess, Hartmann’s to certify the quality of that confession-while remaining innocent of such measures. That sort of thing was for another sort of person.
Szara did not resist. He cooperated. By the afternoon of the first day he had to admit he was not Jean Bonotte. Hartmann had provided paper and pencil and asked him to write a biography, beginning with his childhood in Marseille-names and places, schools and teachers. “I cannot write such a biography because I did not grow up there,” Szara said. “And I am not named Jean Bonotte.”
“This passport is a forgery, then,” Hartmann said.
“Yes, Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer, it is.”
“Then will you tell me your true name? And your nationality, if it is not French?”
“I will,” Szara said. “My real name is Andre Aronovich Szara. As for my nationality, I was born a Polish Jew when Poland was a province of Russia. By 1918 I was living in Odessa, and so remained a citizen of the Soviet Union, eventually becoming a journalist for the newspaper Prcwda.”
Hartmann was puzzled. “Is it a newspaper that sent you to Berlin? With false identity? I wonder if you could clarify this.”
“I can. I obtained the false identity myself, and the newspaper has known nothing of me since I left Poland.”
Hartmann paused. Szara sensed discomfort. The interrogator took refuge in the notes he’d made to himself to guide him in the interview, but they were all wrong now. His Frenchman, trapped on the wrong side of the lines, had disappeared. In his place stood a Russian, a rather prominent one he suspected, captured while in flight from the USSR, Germany’s nominal ally. Hartmann cleared his throat, for him a gesture of irritation. He had to question his competence to work in such areas. All sorts of intimidating issues suddenly made themselves felt; the prisoner’s culpability under German law, possible extradition, others he could not even imagine. All of them grave, difficult, complex, and ultimately to be resolved in a political, not a legal, context. This was obviously not going to be a case he would be allowed to pursue; he could put himself in a good light only by presenting to his superiors the most precise information. Hartmann took up his pen and turned to a fresh page in his writing tablet. “Slowly and clearly,” he said, “and beginning with your surname, you will please spell.”
It rained hard that night, for Szara a blessing. It reminded him that there was a world outside his cell, and the steady splash on the high, grilled window muted, if it could not quite obliterate, the sounds of a Gestapo prison. His plan was successfully launched; Hartmann had ended the interview with the utmost correctness. Szara suspected they would not see each other again, and in the event this turned out to be the case.
Szara’s strategy of revelation without defiance had proceeded from one basic assumption: he could not be sure he would withstand what was euphemistically known as intensive interrogation. He feared he would first give up the existence of the OPAL network, and that would lead inexorably to the exposure of Nadia Tscherova. He had to avoid the cellars in Berlin and then, if it came to that, the cellars in Moscow.
The conventions of the German character first specified efficiency-thus they’d arrested him. A crucial component of that efficiency, however, was thoroughness, and this he perceived to be his possible ally. Now that they knew who he was, he expected they would want from him all they could get, essentially political intelligence. Who did he know? What were they like? How, precisely, was the political line of Pravda determined? What personalities were at play? For his part, he meant to make use of what he called the Scheherazade defense: as long as he intrigued them with stories, they would not execute him or send him back to Russia. In the normal interrogation process, where every statement raised questions, a cooperative subject might continue the discussion for a period of months. Szara’s hope lay in the fact that Germany was at war, and in war it was a given that unpredictable things happened, including catastrophes of all sorts-invasions, raids, bombings, mass escapes, even negotiations and peace. Any or all of it might be to his advantage. And if they should reach the end of the line with him and determine to ship him back to Russia, he then had one last move to make: he could contrive to take his life by attempted escape, from the Germans or the Russians, whoever gave him the barest edge of an opportunity.
It wasn’t much of a plan, he knew, but in his circumstances it was all he had. It might have worked. He was never to find out, because there was one convention of the German character he’d neglected to include in the equation.
They came for him after midnight, when the sounds of the Gestapo interrogations were impossible not to hear and sleep was out of the question. First there was the clang of a gate, then approaching footsteps in the corridor. Szara gripped the frame of the cot with all the strength in his hands, but the footsteps halted outside his cell and the door burst open. Two SS troopers stood in the spill of strong light, recruiting poster SS, tall and fair and sallow in their black uniforms. Then it was “Raus!” and all that, toothy grins, the silent sharing of the great joke that only they understood. Holding his beltless pants up with his hands, he hurried along the corridor as best he could, shuffling because they’d taken his shoelaces as well. His mind had gone numb, yet his senses seemed to operate independently: the troopers smelled like a gymnasium, a man in an isolation cell moaned as though in a dream. They went down several flights of stairs, at last arriving in a brightly lit office filled with desks, the walls covered with beautifully drawn charts and lists.
A little gnome of a man waited for him at a railing; in his hands a wet hat dripped onto the linoleum. Eyes down, Szara thought he saw an edge of pajama bottom peeking out from one leg of the man’s trousers. “Ah,” said the man in a soft voice. “It’s Herr Szara.”
“You’ll have to sign for him,” said the taller of the two SS.
“It’s what I do,” said the man, almost to himself.
Papers were produced and laid on a desk. The gnome carefully unscrewed the cap of a silver fountain pen. He began to scratch a well-flourished signature at the bottom of each page. “Have we all his things?” he asked as he wrote.
The SS man pointed to the door, where Szara’s valise stood to one side with several envelopes stacked on top of it. When the last signature was executed, the gnome said, “Come along, then.” Szara held the envelopes under one arm, picked up the valise, and used his free hand to hold his pants up. “Do you have an umbrella we can use?” the gnome asked the SS trooper.
“A thousand apologies, mein Herr, it’s something we don’t have.”
The gnome sighed with resignation. “Good night, then. Heil Hitler. Thank you for your kind assistance.”
In the floodlit courtyard stood a small green Opel, its hood steaming in the rain. The man opened the door and Szara climbed in and leaned back against the leather seat. Water sluiced down the windshield and blurred the floodlights to golden rivers. The little man slid behind the wheel, turned on the ignition, said, “Excuse me,” and, leaning across Szara, retrieved a Luger automatic pistol from the glove compar
tment. “Your forbearance,” he said formally, “in not punching me will be appreciated. And please don’t jump out of the car-I haven’t run since childhood. Well, to tell you the truth, I didn’t run then either.”
“May I ask where we’re going? ” Szara opened the envelopes, put his belt on and laced up his shoes.
“You certainly may,” said the gnome, peering through the rain, “but it wouldn’t mean anything even if I told you.” Uncertainly, he steered the Opel across the broad courtyard, flipped a leather card case open and showed it to a guard, then drove ahead when the iron gate swung open. There was a sudden shout behind them.
“What are they yelling about?”
“To turn on the windshield wipers.”
“Yes, well,” the gnome grumbled, turning on the wipers, “wake a man up at midnight and what do you expect.” The Opel turned the corner from Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse to Saarlandstrasse. “So,” he said. “You’re the man who worked in Paris. You know what we Germans say, don’t you. ‘God lives in France.’ Someday I would like to go.”
“I’m sure you will,” Szara said. “I really must insist on asking you where we are going.” He didn’t care if the man shot him. His fingers rested lightly on the door handle.
“We’re going to a place near Altenburg. There. Now the secret’s out.”
“What’s there?”
“You ask entirely too many questions, if you’ll permit me. Perhaps it’s done in France-it isn’t here. I can only say that I’m sure everything will be explained. It always is. After all, you’re not handcuffed, and you’ve just left the worst place you could possibly be- now doesn’t that tell you something? You’re being rescued, so be a gentleman, sit quietly, and think up some entertaining stories about Paris. We’ll be driving for a few hours.”