Dark Star

with Huber had unnerved him. Szara spoke with authority: “It’s the Frenchwoman of your dreams you’ll marry, my friend, and not the Fraulein. Consider that an order.”

The new information was provocative. Szara’s old instincts-the journalist happening on a story-were sharply aroused. Suddenly the horses churning through the mud seemed triumphant, images of victory: their nostrils flaring, flanks shining with kicked-up spray. The business with the Rote Grutze sauce was curious, but the search for a safe house, that was truly interesting. Trade Missions didn’t acquire safe houses. That was embassy business, a job undertaken by resident intelligence officers. But the embassy was being circumvented, which meant a big secret, and a big secret meant a big fish, and guess who happened to be standing there with a net. Cameras, he thought, just every kind of camera.

He made a decision. “Huber won’t be fired,” he said. “It’s to be quite the opposite. Stollenbauer will be crawling at her feet. And as for you, your only problem will be a woman in triumph, a star of stage, screen, and radio, a princess. Demanding, I think, but not something you can’t deal with.”

Fully mobilized, Szara’s web of contacts had an answer within days.

An Alsatian traiteur was located; a smiling Lotte Huber left his shop trailed by a taxi driver struggling under the weight of two cases of Rote Grutze sauce in special crocks of the Alsatian’s own design. He was also prepared to offer weisswurst, jaegerwurst, freshly cured sauerkraut subtly flavored with juniper berries because-and here the rosy-cheeked traiteur leaned over the counter and spoke an exquisitely polite German-“a man who favors Rote Grutze will always, always, madame, want a hint of juniper in his sauerkraut. This is an appetite for piquancy. And this is an appetite we understand.”

Schau-Wehrli dismissed the house dilemma with an imperious Swiss flick of the hand. Her progressive friends and colleagues at the International Law Institute were sounded out and a suitable property was soon located. It was in Puteaux, a step or two from the city border, a dignified, working-class neighborhood near the Citroen loading docks on the southwestern curve of the Seine: everywhere a grim, sooty brown, but boxes of flowers stood sentry at all the parlor windows, and the single step up to each doorway was swept before eight every morning. At the far edge of the district sat a three-story, gabled brick residence-the home of a doctor now deceased and the subject of an interminable lawsuit-with a high wall covered in ivy and a massive set of doors bound in ironwork. A bit of a horror, but the ivied wall turned out to hide a large, formal garden. Sheets were removed from the furniture, a crew of maids brought in to freshen up. Terra-cotta pots were placed by the entryway and filled to overflowing with fiery geraniums.

Stollenbauer was, as Szara had predicted, magically relieved of much of his burden. The pending visit still made him nervous, much could go wrong, but at least he now felt he had some support. From chubby little Lotte Huber no less! Had he not always said that someday her light would shine? Had he not always sensed the hidden talent and initiative in this woman? She’d been so clever in finding the house-where his pompous assistants had shouted guttural French into the phone, cunning Lotte had taken the feminine approach, spending her very own weekend time wandering about various neighborhoods and inquiring of women in the marketplace if they knew of something to rent, not too much legal folderol required.

Meanwhile, Szara arrayed his forces and played his own office politics. Oh, Goldman was informed, he had to be, but the cable was a masterpiece of its genre-Trade Mission apparently expecting important visitor sometime in near future, item eight of seventeen items, not a chance under heaven that such a phrase would bring the greedy rezident swooping down from Brussels to snaffle up the credit.

Using a copy of the house key, Szara and Seneschal had a look around for themselves one evening. Szara would have dearly loved to record the proceedings, but it would simply have been too dangerous, requiring a hidden operative running a wire recorder. Then too, important visitors usually had security men in attendance, people with a horror of unexplained ridges under carpets, miscellaneous wires, even fresh paint.

Instead they approached a birdlike little lady, the widow of an artillery corporal, who lived on the top floor of the house across the street and whose parlor window looked out over the garden. A troublesome affair, they told her; a wayward wife, a government minister, the greatest discretion. They showed her very official-looking identity documents with diagonal red stripes and handed over a crisp envelope stuffed with francs. She nodded grimly, perhaps an old lady but a little more a woman of the world than they might suppose. They were welcome to her window; it was a change to have something going on in this dull old street. And did they wish to hear a thing or two about the butcher’s wife?

Stollenbauer summoned Lotte Huber to his office, sat her down on a spindly little chair, rested his long fingers lightly on her knee, and told her, in strictest confidence, that their visitor was an associate of Heydrich himself.

Seneschal had walked Lotte Huber through the “discovery” of the safe house and the Rote Grutze sauce and counseled how these successes should be explained. And what thanks did he get? The young woman’s new sense of pride and achievement made her shut up like a clam. Under Szara’s tutelage, he applied pressure every way he could. Told her the big job was now open at the Foreign Office- would he get it, or would his sworn enemy? Only she could help him now.

He took her to dinner at Fouquet’s, fed her triangles of toast covered thickly with goose liver pate and a bottle of Pomerol. The wine made her cute, funny, and romantic, but not talkative. Finally they fought. What use, she wanted to know, had the French Foreign Office for information that an associate of Heydrich’s was coming to town for an important meeting? That was the very sort of thing that interested them, he said. The big cheese in his office was secretly a great admirer of Hitler and could be counted on to help, quietly, if any more problems developed with the meeting. But he had to be told exactly what was going on. No, she said, stop, you begin to sound like a spy. That made Seneschal pale and Szara even paler when the conversation was reported. “Apologize,” Szara said. “Tell her you were overwrought and”-he reached into a pocket and came forth with francs-“buy her jewelry.”

Szara accepted the inevitable. They weren’t going to get the meeting date or the names of the other participants, surveillance was their only other option. He could not risk pressing Huber too hard and losing her as a source. It was the first time a wisp of regret floated across his view of the operation-it was not to be the last.

They drove to Puteaux in Seneschal’s car, parked in the narrow street, and watched the house-a surveillance technique that lasted exactly one hour and twelve minutes, perhaps a record for brevity. Children stared, young women pretended not to notice, an angry streetsweeper scraped the hubcap with his twig broom, and a drunk demanded money. Discomfort did not begin to describe how it felt; it just wasn’t a neighborhood where you could do something like that.

Odile returned from her courier run to Berlin on 22 June (Baumann wouldn’t budge), so she, Seneschal, and Szara took turns sitting in the old lady’s parlor. The wisp of regret had by now become a smoky haze that refused to dissipate. Goldman had the people to do this kind of work; Szara had to improvise with available resources. As for surveillance from the apartment, the principle was one thing, the reality another. The building, cold stone to the eye, was alive, full of inquisitive neighbors you couldn’t avoid on the stairs. Szara squared his shoulders and scowled-I am a policeman- and left the old lady to deal with the inevitable tongue- wagging.

For her part, she seemed to be enjoying the attention. What she did not enjoy, however, was their company. They were, well, there. If somebody read a newspaper, it rattled; if she wanted to clean the carpet, they had to lift their feet. Odile finally saved the situation, discovering that the old lady had a passion for the card game called bezique, a form of pinochle. So the surveillance evolved into a more or less permanent card party, all three watchers contriving to play just badly enough to lose a few francs.

The smoky haze of regret thickened to a fog. What point in having Seneschal or Odile watch the house if Szara could not be reached when something finally happened-this was his operation.

But the rules emphatically excluded contact with an agent-operator at his home or, God forbid, at the communications base. Thus he found a rooming house in Suresnes with a telephone on the wall in the corridor, gave the landlady a month’s rent and an alias, and there, when he wasn’t on duty in Puteaux, he stayed, waiting for Seneschal or Odile to use the telephone in a cafe just down the street from the old lady’s building.

Waiting.

The great curse of espionage: Father Time in lead boots, the skeleton cobwebbed to the telephone-any and all of the images applied. If you were lucky and good an opportunity presented itself. And then you waited.

July came. Paris broiled in the sun, you could smell the butcher shops half a block away. Szara sat sweating