By the sick humanity of an age to come.
Before comely Europe
Into our thickets and forests we’ll disperse,
And then we shall turn upon you
Our ugly Asiatic face.
But we ourselves henceforth shall be no shield of yours,
We ourselves henceforth will enter no battle.
We shall look on with our narrow eyes
When your deadly battles rage.
Nor shall we stir when the ferocious Hun
Rifles the pockets of the dead,
Burns down cities, drives herds into churches,
And roasts the flesh of the white brothers.
This is the last time-bethink thee, old world! —
To the fraternal feast of toil and peace,
The last time-to the bright, fraternal feast
The barbarian lyre now summons thee.
There were several very long seconds of silence; only Poziny’s graceful inclination of the head summoned applause that resolved the tension in the room. Everyone there knew what the poem meant, in the early days of the revolution and in March of 1938. Or thought they knew.
The Austrian chemical engineer H. J. Brandt arrived in Copenhagen on the Baltic ferry Kren Lindblad from Tallinn, Estonia, on 4 April 1938.
The grammar school teacher E. Roberts, from Edinburgh, took the Copenhagen-Amsterdam train, arriving at Amsterdam’s Central Station in the early evening of 6 April.
The naturalized Belgian citizen Stefan Leib, of Czechoslovakian origin, got off the Amsterdam train at Brussels toward noon on 7 April, going immediately to the shop called Cartes de la Monde- maps of the world; antique, old, and new-he owned in the rue de Juyssens, in the winding back streets of the old business district.
A serious man, Monsieur Leib, in his early thirties, quiet, somewhat scholarly in his tweed jacket and flannels, and notably industrious. He could be found, most nights, in the small office at the rear of the store at a large oak desk piled high with old maps- perhaps the Netherlands of the seventeenth century, decorated with curly-haired cherubs puffing clouds of wind from the cardinal points of the compass-as well as utilitarian road maps of the Low Countries, France, and Germany; tidal charts, Michelin and Baedeker guides, or the latest rendering of Abyssinia (important if you had followed the fortunes of Italian expeditionary forces), Tanganyika, or French Equatorial Africa. Whatever you might want in cartography, Monsieur Leib’s shop was almost sure to have it.
On the evening of 12 April, those with an eye for moderately prominent journalists might have spotted Monsieur Leib out for dinner with A. A. Szara, recently assigned to the Paris bureau of Pravda. Spotted, that is, if one happened to visit a very dark and out-of-the-way Chinese restaurant, of dubious reputation, in the Asian district of Brussels.
In the end, Abramov and his associates had not made a choice of cities or networks for Dr. Baumann’s case officer. Life and circumstance intervened and chose for them. Even the multiple European networks of the Rote Kapelle-the Red Orchestra, as the German security services had nicknamed them-were not immune to the daily vicissitudes and tragedies that the rest of the world had to confront. In this instance, a deputy officer of the Paris- based OPAL network, work name Guillaume, was late for a clandestine meeting established in Lyon-one of his group leaders from Berlin was coming in by train under a cover identity-and drove recklessly to avoid having to wait for a fallback meeting three days later. His Renault sedan failed to make a curve on the N6 just outside Macon and spun sideways into a roadside plane tree. Guillaume was thrown clear and died the next day in the hospital in Macon.
Captain I. J. Goldman, rezident of OPAL under the painstakingly crafted cover of Stefan Leib, was brought back to Moscow by a circuitous route-“using passports like straw,” grumbled one of the “cobblers” who manufactured or altered identity papers at the NKVD Foreign Department-for lengthy consultations. Goldman, son of a Marxist lawyer from Bucharest, had volunteered for recruitment in 1934 and was, following productive service in Spain, something of a rising star.
Like all rezidents, he hated personnel problems. He accepted the complicated burdens of secrecy, a religion whose rituals demanded vast expenditures of time, money, and ingenuity, and the occasional defeat managed by the police and counterespionage forces that opposed him, but natural disasters, like road accidents or wireless/ telegraph breakdowns, seemed especially cruel punishments from heaven. When a clandestine operator like Guillaume met an accidental death, the first thing the police did was to inform, or try to, a notional family that didn’t exist. Had Goldman himself not contacted hospitals, police, and mortuaries in the region, Guillaume might have been determined a defector or runaway, thereby causing immense dislocation as the entire system was hurriedly restructured to protect itself.
Next, Goldman had to assure himself, and his directorate in Moscow, that the accident was an accident, an investigation complicated by the need to operate secretly and from a distance. Goldman, burning a cover identity that had cost thousands of roubles to construct, hired a lawyer in Macon to make that determination. Finally, by the time he arrived in Moscow, he was able to defend himself against all accusations save one: his supervision had been lax to the degree that one of his staff drove in an undisciplined manner. On this point he criticized himself before his superiors, then described countermeasures-lectures, display of the autopsy report obtained by the Maconnais lawyer-that would be undertaken to eliminate such events in the future. Behind their stone faces, the men and women who directed OPAL laughed at his discomfort: they knew life, love affairs, bizarre sexual aberrations, lost keys, gambling, petty jealousies; all the absurd human horseshit that network rezidents had to deal with. They’d learned to improvise, now it was his turn.
When they were done scowling, they gave him a choice: elevate the Paris group leader to Guillaume’s position or accept a new deputy. This was no choice at all, group leaders were infamously difficult to replace. On their ability to stroke and soothe, wheedle, nag, or threaten, everything depended. He could, on the other hand, accept a new deputy, the journalist Szara, an amateur “who had done a few things with fair success.”
Goldman would have preferred experienced help, perhaps transferred from what he believed to be less crucial networks, for OPAL ran some fourteen agents in France and Germany and would now service a fifteenth (Baumann, officially designated OTTER), but the purges had eaten down into the apparai from the top and operationally sophisticated staff simply wasn’t available. It was arranged for him to meet with Szara, who would work with a co-deputy in OPAL but would essentially be on his own in Paris while Goldman, as “illegal” rezident, worked in protective isolation in Brussels. In the end he put a good face on it and indicated he was pleased with the arrangement. Somewhere, operating deep within the committee underbrush, there was a big, important rat who wanted Szara in Paris-Goldman could smell him.
Then too, for Goldman, it was best to be cooperative; his rising star was lately a little obscured, through no fault of his own, by a dark cloud on the horizon. His training class, the Brotherhood Front of 1934-in fact a fractious crowd recruited from every lost corner of the Balkans-was not turning out as senior apparat people thought it would. A distressing number of the “brothers” had left home; some defected, harboring far less fraternal affection than their Russian family had supposed. The undisputed leader of the class, a Bulgarian, had vanished from Barcelona and resurfaced in Paris, where he’d become entangled in emigre politics and gotten himself arrested by French internal security officers in July of ‘37. A Serbian had disappeared back into the mountains of his homeland after a very complex exfiltration from a Spanish prison-a dreadful instance of ingratitude, though it was the NKVD that had shopped him to Franco’s military intelligence in the first place, expedient neutralization after he resisted an order to purge POUM members in his guerrilla unit. And a Hungarian from Esztergom, worthless to the apparat from day one, had also fled to Paris where, hiding out in a Montmartre hotel, he’d apparently been murdered by a merchant seaman. What had he been involved in? Nobody knew.
Given that chamber of horrors, Goldman would be saying yes sir to senior officers for the foreseeable future. Privately, he had grave misgivings about Andre Szara. The journalist seemed both arrogant and insecure-a normal enough combination but potentially lethal under the stresses of clandestine work.
