Dark Star

“That’s the crux of it,” Jack May said angrily, shaking his head in frustration.

Hull agreed. It was all pretty sad stuff: Henry Ford and his anti-Semite pals, plenty of people down in Washington who didn’t want to get involved in Europe, the hate groups claiming that Roosevelt was “Rosenfeld,” a Bolshevik Jew. “But you know,” Hull said, “Stalin isn’t exactly helping matters. Some of the statements out of Moscow are pretty wishy-washy, and he’s got Litvinov, the foreign minister, running all over Europe trying to play the same sort of diplomacy game as England and France. That won’t stop Hitler, he understands the difference between treaties and tanks.”

“Ah for Christ sakes,” Jack May said. “You know the situation in Russia. Stalin’s got two hundred million peasants to feed. What’s he supposed to do?”

“Herb, weren’t you there this year? ” Elizabeth asked.

“Last winter.”

“What was it like? “

“Oh, secret and strange-you get the sense of people listening behind the drapes. Poor. Just not enough to go around. Passionate for ideas and literature. A writer there is truly important, not just a barking dog on a leash. If I had to put it in two words, I guess one would be inconvenient. Why I don’t know, but everything, and I do mean everything, is just so damn difficult. But the other word would have to be something like exhilarating. They’re really trying to make it all work, and you can definitely feel that, like something in the air.”

Jack May looked at his wife, a mock-quizzical expression on his face. “Did he have a good time?”

Elizabeth laughed.

“It was fascinating, that I can’t deny.”

“And Stalin? What do they think about him? ” she asked.

May took Hull’s glass from the coffee table and splashed some bourbon over a fresh ice cube. Hull took a sip while May turned the record over. ” They certainly watch what they say. You never know who’s listening. But at the same time they’re Slavs, not Anglo-Saxons, and they want to open their heart to you if you’re a friend. So you do hear stories.”

“Gossip?” May said. “Or the real thing?”

“Funny, they don’t gossip, not truly, not the way we do. They’re instinctively restrained about love affairs and such. As for ‘the real thing,’ yes, sometimes. I met one fellow who’s got a story about how Stalin was secretly in cahoots with the Okhrana. Pretty good story, actually-lively, factual. I think we’ll run it around Christmas.”

“Oh, that old red herring,” Elizabeth scoffed. “That’s been around for years.”

Hull chuckled. “Well, there you have the magazine business. It’ll make the Stalinists mad as hell, but they won’t cancel their subscriptions, they’ll just write letters. Then the socialists and the Trotskyites will write back, madder yet. We’ll sell some newsstand copies in the Village. In the long run it’s just dialogue, open forum, everyone gets to take their turn at bat.”

“But is this person actually in a position to know something like that?” Elizabeth was slightly wide-eyed at the possibility.

Hull thought for a time. “Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll acknowledge, implicitly, that we really don’t know. ‘Who can say what goes on behind the walls of the Kremlin?’ Not quite so obvious as that, but in that general direction.”

“What are you? Time magazine?” May was getting ready to argue.

Hull shrugged it off. “I wish we had the Luces’ money. But I’ll tell you something, though it’s never to leave this room. We’re all of us, Time included, in the same boat. The editorial slant is different-is it ever-but we’re nothing without the readership, and we’ve just got to come up with something juicy once in a while. But don’t be alarmed, the rest of the issue will be as usual-plenty of polemic, snarling capitalists and courageous workers, a Christmas cry for justice. I think you’ll like it.”

“Sounds pretty damn cynical to me,” May grumbled.

Elizabeth rushed in. “Oh poo! Just think about the stuff they put on stage where you work. You’re just being critical, Jack, admit it.”

May smiled ruefully. “Democracy in action,” he said. “Makes everybody mad.”

It certainly made somebody mad.

On the night of 14 September the editorial offices of Hull’s magazine were burned, and “Who Was the Okhrana’s Mysterious Man? ” went up with all the other paper, or was presumed to have, because all they ever found were gray mounds of wet ash that went into the East River along with the chairs and desks and typewriters and, in the event, the magazine itself.

It was certainly no accident-the gasoline can was left right there on the floor of the editor-in-chief’s office, where the arson investigators found it when they picked through what remained of the ceiling. Some of the newspaper beatmen asked the Fire lieutenant who’d done it, but all he gave them was an eloquent Irish smile: these little commie outfits, how the hell was anybody going to know what went on, maybe a rival, maybe they didn’t pay the printer, the list was too long.

At first, the magazine’s board of directors thought they intended to go forward bravely, but wisdom ultimately prevailed. The venture had already eaten one trust fund and ruined a marriage, maybe they’d best leave the field to the competition. Herb Hull was on the street for exactly three weeks, then signed on with a glossy, general readership magazine, a big one. His new job was to go up against Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post, which meant getting to know a whole new crowd of writers, but Hull, God help him, liked writers and soon enough he had the stories coming-“Amelia Earhart, Is She Still Alive?”- and life for him was back to normal. He had a pretty good idea of why the magazine office burned up but he kept it to himself-martyrdom was not in his stars-though he did sometimes play a little game with four or five names he could have jotted down if he’d wanted to.

Andre Szara found out a few days later. Standing at a zinc bar in the rue du Cherche-Midi, drinking his morning coffee, he thumbed through one of the official newspapers of the French left and read about the fire, obviously set, said its American correspondent, by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI or its fascist stooges, as part of their hate campaign against the progressive and peace-loving workers of all nations.

Szara felt little enough on reading it, simply a sense of recognition. He turned the event over in his mind for a time, staring out at the street. The purge was slowly dying out, like a fire that has consumed everything in its path and at last consumes itself: one week earlier, Goldman had quietly informed him during a meeting in Brussels that Yezhov was on the way out. What had actually happened? The NKVD had surely learned of the article and prevented its publication. But just as surely Stalin had been told-or seen the article himself, since they had likely stolen it before they set the fire. Had he been influenced? Jogged just enough in a certain way at a certain time so that ending the purge now seemed preferable to continuing it? Or was it simply coincidence, a confluence of events? Or was there yet more to the story than he knew? There was an excellent possibility that he had not been the only one set in motion against the purge; intelligence operations simply did not work that way-one brave man against the world. The expectation of failure was too high in any individual case for the skillful operator not to have several attacks going at once.

Finally, he couldn’t be sure of anything. Perhaps this morning I have actually been victorious, he thought. He could not imagine a greater absence of drums and trumpets. And he did not care. Since Seneschal’s death and his return from Lisbon he found he didn’t particularly care about anything, and he found also that this made life, or his life anyhow, much simpler. He finished the coffee, left a few coins on the bar, and headed off to a press conference with the Swedish ambassador, first putting up his umbrella, for it had begun to rain.

The Iron Exchange

10 October 1938.

Andre Szara, as long as he lived, remembered that day as a painting.