Dark Star

in the shadow of her city, a very different Marta than the one he had believed was rushing to meet him in Lisbon. Perhaps she was nothing at all like his construction of her. Was it possible that she existed only in a fantasy world he’d built for himself? It did not matter, he realized, letting his head rest against the cold glass of the window. Whatever she might be, he ached for her presence, and this need was the single warmth that survived from the time when he’d believed the whole world lived for desire. Otherwise, there was only ice.

The journalist Szara got off the train at Potsdam station a few minutes after three in the morning, woke a taxi driver, and was taken to the Adlon, where all Russian journalists and trade delegations stayed. The hotel, musty and creaky and splendidly comfortable, was on Pariser Platz at the foot of the grandiose avenue Unter den Linden, next to the British embassy and three doors down from the Russian embassy. Trailing a sleepy porter down the long hall to his room, Szara heard exuberant, shouted Russian and the crash of a lamp. Home at last, he thought. The old man carrying his bag just shook his head sorrowfully at the uproar.

In the morning he saw them, groping toward coffee in the elegant dining room. Tass correspondents, officially, a range of types- from the broad-shouldered, fair-haired, and pale-eyed to the small, intense ones with glasses and beards and rumpled hair. Nobody he knew, or so he thought, until Vainshtok materialized at his table with a dish of stewed figs. “So, now Szara arrives. Big news must be on the way.” Vainshtok, son of a timber merchant from Kiev, was infamously abrasive. He had wildly unfocused eyes behind round spectacles and a lip permanently curled with contempt. “Anyhow, welcome to Berlin.”

“Hello, Vainshtok,” he said.

“So pleased you have chosen to honor us. I have to file on everything, up half the night. Now you’re here maybe I get a break now and then.”

Szara gestured inquisitively toward the Tass reporters scattered about the dining room.

“Them? Ha!” said Vainshtok. “They don’t actually write anything. You and me, Szara, we have to do the work.”

After breakfast he tried to phone Marta Haecht. He learned she’d left the magazine two months earlier. He tried her home. Nobody answered.

The day before he left Paris, Kranov had handed him a personal message from Brussels:

THE WORK HAS BEEN COMPLETED FOR YOUR ASSIGNMENT. HAVE A SAFE AND PRODUCTIVE JOURNEY. REZIDENT.

In Berlin, on the night of 28 October, Andre Szara understood what that message truly meant. Of those who undertook the work, he knew only one, Odile, whose 26 October dead-drop deposit for OTTER had warned of a visit from a friend who would arrive at night. The greatest part of the preparation, however, had been managed by nameless, faceless operatives-presumably stationed in Berlin, though he could not be certain of that. Perhaps some of the Tass reporters seen stumbling toward their morning coffee at the Adlon, perhaps a team brought in from Budapest; he was not to know. Once again, the unseen hand.

But the Andre Szara moving toward a clandestine meeting in Gestapo territory was more than grateful for it. He entered the Grunewald neighborhood in the gathering dusk, leaving the Ringbahn tram stop with a few other men carrying briefcases and indistinguishable from them. Most of the residents of the Grunewald came and went by automobile, many of them chauffeured. But the evening return from business was as much cover as the operatives had been able to devise, and Szara was thankful for even that minimal camouflage.

The Baumann villa faced Salzbrunner street, but he was going in the back way. Thus he walked briskly up Charlottenbrunner, slowed to let one last returning businessman find his way home, crossed a narrow lane, then counted steps until he saw a rock turned earth side up. Here he entered a well-groomed pine wood- at the blind spot the operatives had discovered, away from the view of nearby houses-found the path that was supposed to be there, and followed it to the foot of a stucco wall that enclosed the villa adjoining the Baumann property.

Now he waited. The Berlin weather was cold and damp, the woods dark, and time slowed to a crawl, but they’d hidden him here to accommodate an early entry into the neighborhood, at dusk, and now kept him on ice to await the magic hour of nine o’clock, when the servant couple who occupied the main residence on the Baumann property were known to go to sleep-or at least turn off their lights. At ten minutes after nine he set out, feeling his way along the wall and counting steps until, just where they said it would be, he found a foothold that an operative had dug into the stucco facing. He put his left foot into the small niche, drove his weight upward, and grabbed the tiled cap of the wall. He’d been told to wear rubber-soled shoes, and the traction helped him as he scrabbled his feet against the smooth surface. It wasn’t graceful, but he eventually lay flat on the corner formed by the wall he’d climbed and that which divided the two properties.

Looking down to his left, he saw a woman in a flowered robe reading in a chair by the window. To his right, the servants’ cottage had its blinds drawn. Just below, a garden shed stood against the wall-he cautiously lowered himself to its shingle roof, which gave unpleasantly under the strain but held until he hopped off. From the cottage came the high-pitched barking of a small dog- that would be Ludwig, the apparat mechanism for moving Baumann out into the neighborhood at night-which was almost immediately calmed. Staying out of sight of the villa itself, he found the back door of the cottage and knocked lightly three times- not a signal, but a style recommended by Goldman as “informal” and “neighborly.” The door opened quickly and Dr. Baumann let him in.

The operatives had gotten him safely inside. Somebody, shivering in the Berlin mist at dawn, had dug a piece out of the wall with a clasp knife-or however it had been done, by twelve-year-olds for all he knew-anyhow, he was in. He had been maneuvered, like a weapon, into a position where his light, his intellect, influence, craft, whatever it was, could shine.

They’d done their job. Pity he couldn’t do his.

Oh, he tried. Goldman had said, “You must control this man. You can be courteous, if you like, or lovable. Threats sometimes work. Be solemn, patriotic, or just phenomenally boring-this too has been done-but you must control him.” Szara couldn’t.

Dr. Julius Baumann was gray. The brutal, ceaseless pressure orchestrated by the Reich bureaucracies was proceeding quite successfully in his case. His face was ruined by tension and lack of sleep; he had become thin, stooped, old. “You cannot know what it’s like here.” This he said again and again, and Szara could find no way through it. “Can we help you?” he asked. “Do you need anything?” Baumann just shook his head, somehow closed off behind a wall that no such offer could breach.

“Be positive,” Goldman had said. “You represent strength. Make him feel the power you stand for, let him know it supports him.”

Szara tried: “There’s little we can’t do, you know. Your account with us is virtually unlimited, but you must draw on it.”

“What is there to want?” Baumann said angrily. “What they’ve taken from me you cannot give back. Nobody can do that.”

“The regime is weakening. Perhaps you can’t see it, but we can. There’s reason to hope, reason to hang on.”

“Yes,” Baumann said, the man who will agree to anything because he finds the argument itself tiresome. “We try,” he added. But we do not succeed, his eyes said.

Frau Baumann had changed in a different way. She was now more hausfrau than Frau Doktor. If in fact it was her pretensions- the desire for social prominence and the need to condescend-that had driven a nation of fifty million people into a blind fury, she had certainly been cured of all that. Now she fussed and fiddled, her hands never still. She had reduced her existence to a series of small, household crises, turned fear into exasperation with domestic life; thimbles, brooms, potatoes. Perhaps it was her version of the world in which the common German housewife lived, perhaps she hoped that by joining the enemy she could keep-they would allow her to keep-what remained of her life. When she left the room, Baumann followed her with his eyes. “You see?” he whispered to Szara, as though something needed to be proved.

Szara nodded sorrowfully; he understood. “And work? ” he asked. “The business? What’s it like there? How do they feel about you, your employees. Still faithful? Or do most of them follow the party line? “

“They look out for themselves. Everybody does, now.”

“No kindness? Not one good soul?”

Perhaps Baumann wavered for an instant, then realized what came next-just who is that good soul-and said, “It doesn’t matter what they think.”