Dark Star

Szara reached into an inside pocket and handed a wad of fifty-franc notes across the gearshift. “Go to a nice restaurant,” he said.

Seneschal took the packet. “I thank you,” he said lightly.

“We want you to know you’re appreciated.” Szara paused. “I don’t suppose you actually have much feeling for her.”

“It’s curieux, if you want the truth. The fat little Nazi maiden squirming away … one closes one’s eyes with passion.”

Szara smiled. Seneschal clearly didn’t mind all that much, yet there was a melancholy note of martyrdom in his voice, that the world should come to this. “The broad masses stand and applaud as you build socialism.”

Seneschal laughed and Szara was gratified that the joke worked. Being funny was easily the most difficult trick of all in a foreign language, sometimes the French just stared at him in palpable confusion-what did this man mean?

Lotte Huber was a chubby German woman employed as a clerk at the German Trade Mission. Working with his lawyer friend Valais, who helped various German enterprises with residence permits and the infinite complexities of French bureaucracy, Seneschal had “met” Huber by sitting next to her and a girlfriend at the theater. During the intermission the four of them got to talking, then went out for drinks after the play. Seneschal had presented himself as a young man of wealthy and aristocratic family, seduced the clerk, eventually proposed marriage. To his fury, his unseen “parents” categorically rejected the match. He then estranged himself from his family, abandoning the vast inheritance that awaited him, sacrificing all for his darling Lotte. He determined, once the dust settled, to make his own way in life, supposedly obtaining employment as a minor functionary in the French Foreign Office. But they could only, he told her, afford to get married if he were able to advance himself, which he would certainly do if she would supply helpful information about German Trade Mission business and personnel. In love, she told him all sorts of things, more than she could have understood, for the Gestapo intelligence service, the SD, used jobs at the Mission as cover for operatives-individuals seen to have contacts well beyond the scope of commercial affairs.

When this information was added to what Valais supplied-new arrivals needing cartes de sejours-the apparat was able to track German intelligence officers with considerable efficiency, leading to knowledge of French traitors, operations run against third countries, and insights into German objectives both in France and several other countries in Europe. Seneschal had more than earned his weekend in Normandy.

The money was not at all a bribe-Seneschal was motivated by idealism-but rather recognition that a group leader simply hadn’t the time to earn much of a living for himself.

Seneschal rolled down the window of the Renault and lit a cigarette. Szara closed the envelope and checked the signs on corner buildings to see what street they were on-anywhere but the neighborhood of the rue Delesseux base would serve his purposes. Seneschal was essentially the cut-out; the people he worked with did not know of Szara’s existence, and he himself knew Szara only as “Jean Marc,” had no idea of his true name, where he lived or the location of radios or safe houses. Meetings were arranged at different sites every time, with fallbacks in case one party or the other failed to show up. If the network were closed down, Seneschal would appear three times at various places, nobody would be there to meet him, and that would be the end of it. The apparat could, of course, find him again if they wanted to.

Preparing to disengage, Szara asked, “Anything you want or need?”

Seneschal shook his head. He seemed to Szara, at that instant, a man perfectly content, doing what he wished to do without reservations, even though he could not safely share this side of his life with anyone. There were moments when Szara suspected that many idealists drawn to communism were at heart people with an appetite for clandestine life.

Szara said, “The LICHEN situation remains as before?” LICHEN was a prostitute, a dark, striking woman of Basque origin who had fled north from the civil war in Spain. The intention was to use LICHEN to entice low-level German staff into compromising situations, but she had yet to produce anything beyond free sexual entertainment for a few Nazi chauffeurs.

“It does. Madame has the clap and will not work.”

“Is she seeing a doctor?”

“Being paid to. Whether she actually does it or not I don’t know. Whores do things their own way. The occasional dose gets them vertical for a while, and she really doesn’t seem to mind.”

“Anything else? “

“A message for you was left at my law office. It’s in with the reports.”

“For me?”

“It says Jean Marc on the envelope.”

This was unusual, but Szara did not intend to go burrowing for the message in front of Seneschal. They drove in silence for a time, up the deserted boulevard Beaumarchais past the huge wedding cake of a building that housed the Winter Circus. Seneschal flipped his cigarette out the window and yawned. The light changed to red and the Renault rolled to a stop beside an empty taxi. Szara handed over a small slip of paper with the location, time, and date of the next meeting. “Enjoy your weekend,” he said, jumped out of the Renault, and slid neatly into the back of the taxicab, slightly startling the driver. “Turn right,” he said as the light went green, then watched as Seneschal’s car disappeared up the boulevard.

It was a little after three in the morning when Szara slipped into the rue Delesseux house and climbed to the third floor. Kranov was done with his W/T chores for the evening and Szara had the room to himself. First he found the envelope with Jean Marc printed across the front. Inside was a mimeographed square of paper with a drawing of a bearded man in Roman armor, a six-point star on his shield and a dagger held before him. The ticket entitled the bearer to Seat 46 in the basement theater at the Rue Muret Synagogue at seven-thirty in the evening of the eighteenth day of the month of Iyyar, in the year 5698, for the annual Lag b’Omer play performed by the synagogue youth group. The address was deep in the Marais, the Jewish quartier of Paris. For those who might need a date according to the Julian calendar, a rather grudging 18 May was written in a lower corner.

Szara tucked it in a pocket-really, what would they think of next. A communication traveling upward from a network operative to a deputy was something he’d never heard of, and he rather thought that Abramov would go a little pale if he found out about it, but he was becoming, over time, quite hardened to exotic manifestations, and he had no intention of permitting himself to brood about this one. He had a ticket to a synagogue youth play, so he’d go to a synagogue youth play.

A thin sheet of paper bearing decrypts from the previous night’s Moscow traffic awaited his attention, and this he did find disturbing. The problem wasn’t with the SILO net-some of the answers to the Directorate’s questions were probably in the manila envelope he’d picked up from Seneschal-but the transmission that concerned OTTER, Dr. Baumann, worried him. Moscow wanted him squeezed. Hard. And right away. There was no misreading their intention, even in the dead, attenuated language of decoded cables. At first glance, it seemed as though they wanted to turn Baumann Milling into what the Russians called an espionage center-why else show such a profound interest in personnel? Because, if you thought about it a moment, they expected a conflagration. Soviet intelligence officers were not queasy types. Disaster only made them colder-that he’d seen for himself. The Foreign Department of the NKVD-now called the First Chief Directorate-had a hundred windows on Germany. What did they see coming? Whatever it was, they didn’t believe that Baumann would survive it.

With some effort he recaptured his mind and forced himself to go to work, emptying the manila envelope on the table. Valais’s list of German applications for residence permits presented no problems, he simply recopied it. Seneschal’s material from ARBOR, Lotte Huber, was brief and to the point, the lawyer had essentially synthesized what he got and in effect done Szara’s job for him: the German Trade Mission was probing the French markets for bauxite (which meant aluminum, which meant airframes), phosphorus (flares, artillery shells, tracer bullets), cadmium (which meant nothing at all to him), and assorted domestic products, notably coffee and chocolate. From ALTO, Dolek, he would pass on the revised telephone directory of the attache’s office but would eliminate the major’s letter from his sister in Lubeck. For himself, he informed the Directorate that he’d met with the SILO group leader, disbursed funds, and learned that LICHEN was not functioning due to illness.

Next he tore up the SILO originals, burned them in a ceramic ashtray, then walked down the hall and flushed the ashes down the toilet. Almost anyone who came in contact with the espionage world was told the story of the