Dark Star

over, then stood him a Belgian beer at a corner bar. A girl with blond hair flowing like the wind floated by him and said some deliciously indecipherable thing. It made him want the girl in Berlin- to live such a night unshared was a tragedy. It stayed light forever, a flight of little birds took off from the steeple of a church and fled northward past the red-stained clouds in a fading sky. So lovely it hurt. He walked past the Sante prison, looked up at the windows, wondered who might be watching this same sky, could taste the freedom in his own life. He stopped for a sausage in a small French bread, bought from an old lady in a windowed booth. The old lady gave him a look, she knew life, she had him figured out, she knew he’d do the right thing.

Odile returned from her courier run on 12 June. The product generated by the Berlin networks, as well as OTTER material from Dr. Baumann, was photographed on microfilm in the basement of a Berlin butcher shop; the spool was then sewn into the shoulder pad of Odile’s suit jacket for the German border crossing and the train ride back to Paris. By the morning of 13 June the film had been developed, and Szara, working at the rue Delesseux house, had an answer to his carefully phrased-peripheral data, he’d been told to call it, as though nobody really cared-request for identification of Baumann Milling office workers and sketches of their personalities. Baumann’s response was brusque:

FINAL PRODUCTION FOR MAY WAS 17715. WE PROJECT JUNE AT 20588 BASED ON ORDERS AT HAND. THE OTHER DATA YOU REQUEST IS NOT PER OUR AGREEMENT. OTTER.

Szara was not pleased by this rejection but neither was he surprised. A week earlier, he’d made a day trip to Brussels and conferred with Goldman, a discussion that had prepared him for what the rezident suspected might happen, and set up his return message. This he wrote on a sheet of paper that would find its way to Baumann on Odile’s next trip to Berlin:

WE HAVE RECEIVED YOUR MAY/JUNE FIGURES AND ARE APPRECIATIVE AS ALWAYS. ALL HERE ARE CONCERNED FOR YOUR CONTINUED HEALTH AND WELL-BEING. THE ANNOTATED LIST IS NEEDED TO ASSURE YOUR SECURITY AND WE URGE YOU STRONGLY TO COMPLY WITH OUR REQUEST FOR THIS INFORMATION. WE CAN PROTECT YOU ONLY IF YOU GIVE US THE MEANS TO DO SO. JEAN MARC.

Untrue, but persuasive. As Goldman put it, “Telling somebody that you’re protecting him is just about the surest way to help him see that he’s threatened.” Szara looked up from his plate of noodles and asked if it in fact were not the case that Baumann was in peril. Goldman shrugged. “Who isn’t?”

Szara took another piece of paper and wrote a report to Goldman, which would then be retransmitted to Moscow. He assumed that Goldman would, in the particular way he chose to put things, protect himself, Szara, and Baumann, in that order. The message to Goldman went to Kranov for encryption and telegraphy late that night.

Szara checked his calendar, made a note of Odile’s 19 June courier run, Moscow’s incoming transmission, and his next meeting with Seneschal-that afternoon, as it happened. He squashed out a cigarette, lit another. Ran his fingers through his hair. Shook his head to clear it. Times, dates, numbers, codes, schedules, and somebody might die if you made a mistake.

New piece of paper.

He’d acquired from the Lisbon port authority the expected arrival date, 10 July, of a Strength through Joy cruise from Hamburg. Figuring from Odile’s 19 June courier mission, he saw that Marta could just make it if there was room on the boat. For an hour he worked on the letter. It had to be sincere; she had great respect for honesty of a certain kind, yet he knew he mustn’t gush. She would hate that. He tried to be casual, let’s enjoy ourselves, and romantic, I do need to be with you, at the same time. Difficult. Suddenly he sat bolt upright. How on earth could he find a German stamp in Paris? He would have to ask Odile to buy one when she got off the train in Berlin. Should he confide in her? No, better not. He was the deputy director of the net, and this was simply another form of communication with an agent. Even love had become espionage, he thought, or was it just the times he lived in? That aside, when was his meeting with Seneschal? Where was it? He had it written down somewhere. Where? Good God.

4:20 P.M. The racetrack at Auteuil. By the rail, facing the entrance to Section D. A well-conceived location for a treff-shifting crowds, anonymous faces-except if it was raining, which it was. Szara saw immediately that he and Seneschal would wind up standing together, isolated, in the view of thousands of people with sense enough to move into the shelter of the grandstand.

Such tradecraft, he thought, whistling loudly to catch Seneschal’s attention as he emerged from the entry gate. Silently they climbed to the last row of the grandstand as a few horses splattered mud on each other at the far turn of the oval track. “Allez you shithead,” said a dispirited old man in an aisle seat.

Szara was by nature acutely aware of shifts in mood, and he sensed Seneschal’s discomfort right away. The lawyer’s tousled hair was soaked, a damp cigarette hung from his lips-nobody liked getting wet, but there was more to it than that. His face was pale and tense, as though something had broken through his insouciant defenses and drained his optimism.

For a time they watched galloping horses, a primitive loudspeaker system crackled and popped, the muffled voice of an excited Frenchman could just barely be made out as he called the race.

“A difficult weekend with Fraulein? ” Szara asked, not unsympathetically. He had a hunch that the romantic trip to Normandy had gone wrong.

A Gallic shrug, then, “No. Not so bad. She gives herself like a woman in love-anything at all to please since nothing between lovers can be wrong. If she feels I’m not sufficiently passionate she gets up to tricks. You’re a man, Jean Marc, you know.”

“It can’t always be easy,” Szara said. “Humans aren’t made of steel, and that includes communists.”

Seneschal watched eight new horses being led out into the rain.

“Shall we give you a little breathing space? Perhaps a notional journey, something to do with the Foreign Office. The crisis in Greece.”

“Is there one?”

“Usually.”

Seneschal grunted, not terribly interested. “She wants to get married. Immediately.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t use a …”

“No. It’s not that. She thinks she’s to be dismissed from her position, sent back to Germany in disgrace. Last weekend, after we’d done with all the little shrieks and gasps, there were tears. Floods. She turned bright red and puffed up. It rained like a bastard up there. All weekend the stuff ran down the windows. She bawled, I tried to comfort her but she was inconsolable. Now, she says, only marriage can keep her in France, with me. As for my job at the Foreign Office and the information she’s provided, well, too bad. We will live on love, she says.”

“Did she explain? “

“She gabbled like a goose. What I can make of it is that her boss, Herr Stollenbauer, is under severe pressure. Lotte spent all last week running around Paris in taxis-and she claims she’s frightened of Parisian cab drivers-because no Mission cars were available. She says she hunted through every fancy shop in the city, Fauchon, Vigneau, Rollet, the finest traiteurs you see, in search of what she calls Rote Grutze. Do you know what that is? Because I don’t.”

“A sort of sweetened sauce. Made of red berries,” Szara said.

“Also, they’re trying to rent a house, somewhere just outside Paris. In Suresnes or Maisons-Laffitte, places like that. According to her they’re more than willing to pay, but French proprietaries take their time, want papers signed, bank guarantees, first this, then that. It’s ceremonial, drives the Germans crazy; they just want to wave money about and get what they want. They think the French are venal-they aren’t wrong but they don’t understand how French people worry about their properties. From her stories I gathered, more or less, that this is what’s going on. And the worse it gets, the more Stollenbauer feels the pressure, the more he shouts at her. She isn’t used to that, so now the answer is to get married, she’ll stay in France, and I suppose tell Stollenbauer off in the bargain.”

“Somebody’s coming to Paris.”“Evidemment.”

“Somebody with an aide to call up and say, ‘Oh yes, and make sure the man’s Rote Grutze sauce is available when he eats his pannkuchen.’ “

“Shall one go to the forest and pick red berries?”

To Szara’s horror, Seneschal was not at all sarcastic. “Not to worry,” he said sternly. Seneschal was clearly in the process of wilting. He was physically brave, Szara knew that for a fact, but the prospect of daily married life