Goldman was familiar with Szara’s writing, he thought it sometimes powerful, almost always informative. But Goldman had been in the business just long enough to fear the creative personality. He’d developed a taste for blunt, stolid types, unemotional, who worked day and night without coming down with fevers, men and women who didn’t nurse grudges, who preferred verification to intuition, were endlessly dependable and there when you needed them, could think on their feet in a crisis,
Over the ghastly chop suey in Brussels, Goldman told him,
“Well, you are one, of course, very good, yes, but you must now make a special effort to live the life, and to be seen to live the life, one would expect of such a person. Go about, seek out your colleagues, haunt the right cafes. No slinking around, is what I mean. Of course you’ll see the necessity of it, yes?”
Goldman made him mad, pointing this out. It was true that he’d habitually avoided journalists’ haunts and parties and gone off on his own. For one thing, it didn’t pay to be too friendly with Western Europeans-the lead diva of the Moscow Opera had been sent to the camps for dancing at a party with the Japanese ambassador. For another, he forever had to accomplish some special little task for the
Szara never really did respond to Goldman’s direction. He looked at the gray noodles on his plate for a moment, then went on with the conversation. Inside he was broiling. Wasn’t he unhappy enough about mortgaging his soul to Abramov and secretly abandoning his profession? Apparently not. They now laid upon his heart a heaping tablespoon of Russian irony, directing him to act more like what he no longer was. All this from some snotty little Romanian who thought he spoke idiomatic Russian, was very much his junior in age, and looked like (and probably acted like) some kind of rodent. Small eyes that glittered, ears a little too big, features set close together. Like a smart mouse. Maybe too smart. Who the hell did he think he was?
Back in Paris the following day, however, he kept his opinions to himself. “You’ve met Yves,” said his fellow deputy, using Goldman’s work name. “What do you think?”
Szara pretended to ponder the question. He did not want to commit himself, but neither did he want to seem like a spineless idiot-he was going to have to work closely with this woman. She was the sort of individual who, in the setting of a business office, might well be known as
She was an ardent, blistering Marxist, a former pillar of the Swiss Communist party from a wealthy bourgeois (and long ago rejected) family in Lucerne. She had a tongue like a sword, spoke six languages, and feared absolutely nothing. In Paris, she worked as office manager and resident saint for a League of Nations satellite office, the International Law Institute, which issued oceans of studies attempting to encourage the countries of the world to normalize and standardize their legal codes. Wasn’t the theft of a female ancestor’s soul in Nyasaland much the same, when all was said and done, as a stock swindle in Sweden?
“Well? ” she repeated. “Don’t tell me you have no opinion of the man. I won’t believe you.”
They were in her living room, a typical Parisian concoction of rich red draperies, silk pillows, naked gold women holding ebony-shaded lamps above their heads, and little things-ashtrays, onyx inkwells, ivory boxes, Galle bottles, and porcelain bull terriers-on every shelf and table. Szara kept his elbows jammed well against his sides.
“Young,” he said.
“Younger than you.”
“Yes.”
“Brilliant, my dear comrade.”
“Glib.”
“Boof!” she said, a Gallic explosion of incredulous air. “But how can you be like this? Measured any way you like, brilliant. Against the norm? Genius. Recall the Russian operative who went to London last year, pockets just stuffed with British pounds. He is there two days, ventures from his hotel for the first time. Persuaded by Soviet propaganda, he actually believes that the English working classes are so poor they wear paper shoes. He suddenly spies a shop window full of leather shoes, not at all expensive.
Szara pretended to be slightly abashed. He was the new boy in the office, he had to make a decent impression, but he’d known Goldman’s type before: a genius all right, a genius for self-advancement. “I suppose you’re right,” he said amiably.
Friday, the last week in April, in a warm, gentle rain that shone on the spring leaves of the boulevard trees, Szara booked a telephone call to Marta Haecht’s magazine office in Berlin.
Twenty minutes later he canceled it.
The gospel according to Abramov: “Look, you can never be sure what they know about you, just as they can never be sure what we know about them. In times of peace, the services do two things in particular, they watch and they wait. This is a war of invisibility, fought with invisible weapons: information, numbers, wireless/telegraph transmissions, social acquaintance, political influence, entree to certain circles, knowledge of industrial production or infantry morale. So, show me an infantry morale. You can’t. It’s intangible.
“Counterintelligence operations are the most invisible of all. The people who run them don’t want to neutralize their opponents- not right away. Some boss is screaming
The seed Abramov planted in Moscow grew a frightful garden in Paris. It grew in Szara’s imagination, where it took the form of a voice: a quiet, resourceful voice, cultured, sure of itself, German-speaking. It was the voice of presumed surveillance, and when Szara contemplated something foolish, like a telephone call to Germany, it spoke to him.
Aesopian language suggested reality with symbolism or implication. Are you still studying French? I sent you a card from Paris- did you receive it? I’m writing a story about the workers who built the Gare du Nord. I don’t know where the time goes, I have to finish the piece by noon on the fourth of May.
It fooled nobody.
Even if
Of course he considered using the network for communication. This would either evade all suspicion or end in absolute tragedy. A lover’s choice,
He worked.
