Dark Star

Szara to find some sort of honey to make him swallow that pill.

Of course they wanted more than that-Dershani in particular thought Baumann ought to be pumped dry, the quicker the better. He must know other subcontractors-who were they? Could they be approached? If so, how? What were their vulnerabilities? Then too-Mezhin now took his turn, you didn’t want to be a wilting flower in this crowd-what of his association with senior officers of Rheinmetall? Might there not be something for them in that? Boris Grund thought this line productive. And what was Baumann paying for austenitic steel? Grund said his pals downstairs in the Economic Section were starving for such information, maybe we should toss them a bone.

Kurova didn’t like the dead-drop. They’d gotten the Baumanns to buy a dog, a year-old schnauzer they named Ludwig, so that Baumann could be out on the street at night and use a stone wall near his house as a mailbox. This brought Odile, in a maid’s uniform, into the neighborhood two or three times a month to drop off mail and collect a response. A bent nail in a telephone pole was used as a signal: head turned up told Baumann to collect, head turned down confirmed that his deposit had been picked up. All according to standard form and practice, Kurova acknowledged. But Germans were naturally curious, they stared out their windows, and they had an insatiable appetite for detail. Why does Dr. Baumann reach behind the stone in Herr Bleiwert’s wall? Look how poor little Ludwig wants only to play. Kurova just didn’t like it. Both operatives were too much in the open.

Dershani agreed. What about a restaurant, something in the industrial neighborhood where the wire mill was located?

Abramov thought not. As a Jew, Baumann’s activities were limited-he couldn’t just go to a restaurant. This would be noticed.

The factory, then, Mezhin offered. Best of all, could they reach the engineer Haecht, who would, according to Szara, be nominally in control of the business as new anti-Jewish statutes were promulgated. They looked in their dossiers. They had a blurry photograph of Haecht, taken by an officer from the Berlin embassy. University records. Exemplar of handwriting. Inventory of family: wife Ilse, son Albert a pharmaceutical salesman, daughter Hedwig married to an engineer in Dortmund, daughter Marta an assistant art editor at a literary magazine.

Literary magazine? Perhaps a friend of ours, Dershani wondered idly.

Perhaps, Kurova admitted, but nice German girls don’t go to factories.

Slow and easy, Abramov counseled, we don’t want to create a panic.

This is no time for caution, Dershani said.

That was true.

Baumann’s product was crucial. They had other sources of information on the German aircraft industry, but none that determined the numbers quite so exactly. The Directorate that handled the product coming in from Burgess and Philby and others in Great Britain confirmed the OPAL Directorate’s hypotheses, as did sources in the French services. The German industrial machine was building a nightmare.

Baumann had shipped 14,842 feet of swage wire in October; this meant a monthly bomber production rate of 31 planes. From there they could project, using range and load factors already in their possession. The German bomber force as constituted in a theoretical month-May of 1939, for instance-would be able to fly 720 sorties in a single day against European targets and deliver 945 tons of bombs, causing a projected 50 casualties per ton-a total of almost 50,000 casualties in a twenty-four-hour period. A million casualties every three weeks.

And the USSR, Great Britain, and France were in absolute harmony on one basic assumption: the bomber would always get through. Yes, antiaircraft fire and fighter planes would take their toll, but simply could not cause sufficient damage to bring the numbers down.

The Russians, using their British spies, had followed with interest developments in British strategic thinking in the last month of 1937. The RAF experts had urged building up the British aircraft industry to deliver heavy bombers to match the German numbers, ultimately to create a counterweight of terror: you destroy our cities, we’ll destroy yours. But the cabinet had overruled them. Said Sir Thomas Inskip: “The role of our air force is not an early knockout blow … but to prevent the Germans from knocking us out.” This was not the usual thinking, but the cabinet, in the end, had determined the defensive system a better option, and British industry began to build fighters instead of bombers.

In Germany, also, a strategic decision was made, though this one rested on Hitler’s power. When the Reich marched into the Rhineland in 1936 and opposition did not materialize, the German General Staff lost credibility. Hitler was right. It was proven. Soon thereafter, he turned his attention to Hermann Goring’s Luftwaffe. Where, Hitler wanted to know, are my airplanes? Goring felt the pressure, and took steps to protect himself. Germany stopped production of four-engine bombers, the Dornier Do-19 and the Junkers Su-89. Those planes could operate at greater distances, in England or the USSR, and stay longer over target, as well as extend the air cover provided to U-boat packs beset by sub chasers or destroyers, but they were not going to be built. Driven by Hitler’s impatience, Goring directed the aircraft industry to build twin-engine bombers. “The Fuhrer,” Goring said, “does not ask me what kind of bombers I have. He simply wants to know how many.” The comment was believed to be private.

It wasn’t.

And that was the point. The Moscow Directorate had to know what Goring said, and what the British cabinet thought, and had to do whatever, whatever, had to be done in order to know. In the same complex of buildings where the OPAL Directorate met, other groups labored to keep Germany and Great Britain from finding out what Stalin said, or what the Politburo thought. That work, though, was none of their business. Their business was a million casualties every three weeks. With a threat of that dimension, how carefully could Dr. Julius Baumann be treated? They had to, as Dershani counseled, take their chances, and if the man went slack with terror or rigid with fury it was Szara’s job to handle him. If Szara couldn’t do it, they’d find somebody who could. They were not in a position to be gentle with spies, even less with case officers.

“Then we are agreed,” Kurova said. There were stern nods of assent around the table.

That night, the W/T operator in Dzerzhinsky Square settled in on his frequency at 1:33 A.M., Moscow time, as scheduled for that date. He discovered a neighbor, some plodding fool out there somewhere, sending five-digit groups as though he had all eternity to get the job done. The operator swore softly with irritation, caressed his dial until he found a private little band of silent air, then began a long signal to his nameless, faceless, yet very familiar colleague in Paris. Paris, he thought, a city I’ll never see. But that was fate. So, instead, he put a bit of his soul into the telegraphy, flying ghostlike across the sleeping continent along with his secret numbers.

Goldman had said, “Be a journalist!” so Szara did what he asked, but he didn’t like it. He found a large, gloomy room on the rue du Cherche-Midi (literally, the street that looked for the sun, which it rarely found), midway between brawling Montparnasse and fashionably arty Saint-Germain; coming out of his doorway he turned right to buy a chicken, left to buy a shirt. He drank wine and ate oysters at the Dome, a noisy barnyard of artists and artistes, the people who came to look at them, predators scenting the money of the people who came to look at them, petits bourgeois celebrating their anniversaries and saying “Ah!” when the food came to the table, and-he only grew aware of them with time-a surprisingly large number of reasonably appealing and attractively dressed people of whom one couldn’t say more than that they ate at the Dome. Simply Parisians.

Szara attended the occasional session of the Senat, dropped in at the trial of this week’s murderer, browsed the women in bookstores, and showed up at certain salons. Where journalists were, there was Andre Szara. He passed through the Pravda office from time to time, collected a phone message or two, and if with some frequency he disappeared completely from sight for a day or two, well, so did many people in Paris. Szara was running an espionage network, God only knew what the rest of them were doing.

On the days when Ilya Ehrenburg wasn’t in town, Andre Szara was the preeminent Soviet journalist in Paris. The city’s hostesses made this clear to him-“It’s terribly late, I know, but could you come? We’d so love to have you!” He went, and Ehrenburg was never there. Szara had been called in as a last-minute substitute, the Soviet Journalist in the room, along with the Tragic Ballerina, the Rich American Clod, the Knave of Attorneys, the Sexually Peculiar Aristocrat, the Cynical Politician, and all the rest-like a pack of tarot cards, Szara thought. He much preferred relaxed social evenings at friends’ apartments, spontaneous gatherings rich with combative exchanges on politics, art, and life, at the Malrauxs’ on the rue du Bac, sometimes at Andre