Dark Star

intellectuals. These men and women were often brilliant, knew science, languages, poetry, philosophy. DUBOK, for them, was a kind of symbol, a beloved creature from the lower depths, an enlightened thug, and their comradeship with him confirmed them as members of a newly reordered society. A political scientist, a philosopher, an economist, a poet, could only make revolution if they shared their destiny with a criminal. He was the official representative of the real world. Thus they advanced his standing at every opportunity. And DUBOK knew it. And DUBOK loathed them for it. Understanding condescension with every bone in his body, taking revenge at his leisure, proving that equality was in their minds, not his, as he obliterated them.

Now Szara had known from the beginning he had in his hands a Georgian and, when his perfectly capable mind finally bothered to do arithmetic, a Georgian at least fifty-five years old with a history of revolutionary work in Tbilisi and Baku. It could have been any one of a number of candidates, including the leaders of the Georgian khvost, but, as Szara worked laboriously through the dossier, these were eliminated by DUBOK himself. For the benefit of the Okhrana, DUBOK had written out a description of his friend Ordjonikidze. Eighteen months later he mentioned the Armenian terrorist Ter Petrossian, seen taking part in a bank “expropriation” in Baku; referred, a few pages later, to the good-natured Abel Yenukidze; and spoke harshly against his hated enemy, Mdivani. In May of 1913, he was pressed to organize a situation in which the revolutionary Beria might be compromised, but DUBOK never quite managed to do more than talk about that.

After a day and a half, Andre Szara could no longer avoid the truth: this was Koba himself, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, son of a savage, drunken cobbler from Gori, the sublime leader Stalin. For eleven years, from 1906 to 1917, he had been the Okhrana’s pet pig, snouting up the most rare and delicious truffles that the underground so thoughtlessly hid from its enemies.

This room, Szara thought, staring out at the gray sky over Berlin, too much happens in it. He rose from the desk, stretched to ease his back, lit a cigarette, walked to the window. The lady in silks was rustling about downstairs, doing whatever mysterious things she did all day. Below, on the sidewalk, an old man was holding the leash of a grizzled Alsatian dog while it sprayed the base of a street lamp.

Szara spent part of Sunday morning removing a soiled sheet of cotton cloth that sealed the back of Huldigung der Naxos, then distributing the sheets of the Okhrana dossier across the back of the painting itself, securing them with brown cord tied off to the heads of tiny nails he pounded in with a tack hammer. The cotton cloth he refitted with great care, the bent nails installed by the original framer repositioned in the dents and rust tracks they’d formed over the years. The weight of the heavy gilded frame concealed the presence of the paper, he thought, and a hundred years from now, some art restorer …

On Monday he was, for the first time, onstage as a German, speaking with slow deliberation, purging the Yiddish lilt from his accent, hoping to pass for a mildly unusual individual born somewhere far away from Berlin. He found that if he combed his hair straight back off his forehead, tied his tie very tight, and carried his chin in a position that, to him, felt particularly high, the disguise was credible. He took the name Grawenske, suggesting distant Slavic or Wendish origins, not at all uncommon in Germany.

He telephoned the office of an auctioneer and was given the name of a warehouse that specialized in the storage of fine art (“Humidity is your enemy!” the man told him). Herr Grawenske appeared there at eleven promptly, explained that he was joining the accounting staff of a small Austrian chemical company in Chile, muttered about his wife’s sister who would be occupying his residence, and left Professor Ebendorfer’s masterpiece in their care, to be crated, then stored. He paid for two years, a surprisingly reasonable amount of money, gave a fictitious address in Berlin, and was handed a receipt. The remainder of the officer’s effects, and the fine satchel, were distributed to shops that supported charity missions.

Marta Haecht had given him the phone number at the little magazine where she “helped out the art director.” Szara tried to call several times, chilled to the bone as the flat Berlin dusk settled down on the city. The first time, she’d gone on an errand to the printers’. The second time, somebody giggled and said they didn’t know where she’d gotten to. On the third try, close to quitting time, she came to the phone.

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” he said. “May I see you tonight?”

“There is a dinner. My parents’ wedding anniversary.”

“Then late.”

She hesitated. “I’ll be returning home …”

What? Then he understood there were people near the telephone. “Home from a restaurant?”

“No, it isn’t that.”

“Home to sleep.”

“It would be better.”

“What time is the dinner over?”

“One can’t rush away, I hope you’ll understand. It is a, it is an occasion, festive …”

“Oh.”

“Do you have to go away tomorrow?”

“It can’t be helped.”

“Then I don’t see how …”

“I’ll wait for you. Maybe there’s a way.”

“I’ll try.”

Just after eleven the doorbell rang. Szara raced downstairs, hurried past the landlady’s door-opened the width of an eye-and let her in. In the little room, she took off her coat. An aura of the cold night clung to her skin, he could feel it. She was wearing a midnight blue party dress, taffeta, with ruffles. The back was all tiny hooks and eyes. “Be careful,” she said as he fumbled. “I mustn’t stay too long. Here it is not done to leave a party.”

“What did you tell them?”

“That a friend was going away.”

It was not a magic night. They made love, but the tension in her did not break. Afterward she was sad. “Maybe I shouldn’t have come. Sweeter to have a memory of the snow.” With the tips of his fingers he pushed the hair back off her forehead. “I’ll never see you again,” she said. She bit her lip to keep from crying.

He walked her home, almost to the door. They kissed good-bye, dry and cold, and there was nothing to say.

In the late November of 1937, the Soviet merchant vessel Kolstroi shipped anchor in the port of Rostock, moved slowly up the Warnemunde inlet into Lubeck bay and, swinging north into the Baltic and setting a north-by-easterly course to skirt the Sasenitz peninsula and pass south of the Danish isle of Bornholm, made for Leningrad harbor, some eight hundred and forty nautical miles away.

The Kolstroi, heavily laden with machine tools, truck tires, and bar aluminum loaded at the French port of Boulogne, docked at Rostock only to complete its complement of eleven passengers bound for Leningrad. Moving up the Warnemunde in gathering darkness, the Kolstroi sounded its foghorn continually, joining a chorus of in-and outbound freighters as it reached Lubeck bay, where the Baltic fogbanks rolled in toward shore in the stiff northerly winds. Andre Szara and the other passengers were not allowed the freedom of the deck until the ship was beyond the German territorial limit. When Szara did seek the air, after the close quarters of the ship’s lounge where they were fed supper, there was little visibility, nothing of the lights on the German coast, only black water heaving in November swells and a building gale that drove iced salt spray onto the metal plates of the deck, where it froze into a lead-colored glaze. He bore it as long as he could, staring into the fog whipping past the ship’s lights, unable to see land.

The Kolstroi was Soviet territory; he’d bowed under the vast weight of it before they ever sailed, his possessions spread out on a table under the cold eyes of a security officer. The journalist Szara meant nothing to this one, Homo Stalinus, human as clock. He was thankful he had disposed of the Okhrana dossier before he left Berlin-memory itself was frightening in the atmosphere aboard the freighter.

The passengers were a mixed group. There were three English university students, with creamy skins and bright eyes, terribly earnest young men on a dream voyage to what they believed to be their spiritual homeland. There was one middle-age trade representative, suffering from an illness-attempted escape, Szara thought-who was dragged on board by NKVD operatives. The tips of his shoes scraped the wooden gangplank as they carried him