Dark Star

“I thought so. But then I thought; after an hour, we’ll see.”

“The hour’s over. The letter stands.”

“Soon I must go back to work. Shall I see you again? Or will we wait another year? “

“Tomorrow.”

“I haven’t said I would.”

“Will you?”

“Yes.”

She had answered his knock at the door in a short silk robe tied loosely at the waist-just purchased; the scent of new clothing lingered on it beneath her perfume-hair worn loose and brushed out, red lipstick freshly applied. A woman of the world now, looking forward to an assignation in the middle of the day. Seeing her like that, framed in the doorway, stunned him. It was too good to be true. When she lifted her face to him and closed her eyes he felt like a man suddenly and unexpectedly warmed by sunlight. He actually, for an instant as they embraced, felt her mouth smile with pleasure. But after that everything-being led by the hand to a sofa, pillows kicked off, robe flung away-happened too quickly. What he had imagined would be artful and seductive wasn’t like that at all. It wasn’t really like them. Two other people, then, very hungry, urgent, selfish people. They laughed about it later, but things were different and they knew it.

At one point she’d raised her head from the sofa and whispered delicately next to his ear. The words were familiar enough, a lover’s request, but they had shocked him-because they were German words and the sound of them unlocked something inside him, something cold and strong and almost violent. Whatever it was, she felt it. She liked it. This was a very dangerous place to go, he sensed, but they went there just the same.

He had wondered, later on, drinking tea, how much she understood of what had happened. Was this eternal woman, accepting, absorbing? Or had she, for a moment, become his companion in decadence, playing her part in some mildly evil version of a lovers’ game? He couldn’t ask. She seemed happy, making jokes, wiggling her toes, content with herself and the afternoon.

Then she got dressed. This too was different. By degrees she became a working woman, a typical Berliner: the ingenuous, vaguely Bohemian Marta, adoring of Russian journalists, was no more. Garter belt, stockings, a crisp shirt with a rounded collar, a rusty tweed, mid-calf-length suit, then a small, stylish hat with a feather- the perfect disguise, ruined at the last when she made a little-girl brat face at him: what they called here Schnauze, literally snout, a way of telling the world to go to hell. She gave him a cool cheek to kiss on the way out-not to ruin the lipstick-and rumpled his hair.

He stayed for a time after she left, drinking tea, watching out the window as a cloud of starlings swerved away through the rainy sky. The radio program changed, to what he guessed was Beethoven- something dark and thoughtful at any rate. The city drew him into its mood; he found it almost impossible to resist, became autumnal and meditative, asked questions that really could not be answered. Marta Haecht, for instance: had she, he wondered, become so newly sophisticated at the hands of other lovers? Certainly, that was it. Who, he wondered. That was, in his experience of such things, always a surprise. Him?

With a Russian girl he would have known all. Every private thought would have been bashed about between them, plenty of tears to wash it all down with, then forgiveness, tenderness, and wild-likely drunken-love-making to paste everything back together again. Poles and Russians knew how hidden feelings poisoned life; in the end the vodka was just a catalyst.

But she wasn’t Russian or Polish, she was German, like this damned sorrowful music. The reality of that had come home to him when they were on the sofa. What was that? The Eastern conqueror takes the Teutonic princess? Whatever it was, it was no game.

Restless now, wishing that Marta hadn’t gone back to work, Szara walked around the room as he got dressed, confronted by Ault’s maniacal paintings. Strange people, he thought. They make a virtue of anguish. Nonetheless, he began counting the hours until he’d see her again and tried to shake off the sense of oppression gathering in his heart.

Perhaps it was the influence of the building itself. Dating from the early days of the century, its long hallways, set in tiny octagonal black and white tiles, echoed with every footstep and lived in perpetual dusk, a grayish light that spilled from frosted glass door panels numbered in Gothic script. Called Die Eisenbourse Haus, the Iron Exchange Building, it had certainly been some builder’s cherished dream. There was no Iron Exchange, not that Szara knew about. Had one been planned, perhaps somewhere nearby? Only its adjunct had been built, in any case, seven stories of elaborate brickwork with the name in gold script on the glass above the entryway. The elevator would have been installed later, he thought. It was enormous, an anthill intended as home to every sort of respectable commerce. But the builder had raised it in the wrong place. Bischofstrasse was across the river Spree from the better part of Berlin, reached by the Kaiser Wilhelm bridge, on the edge of the ancient Jewish quarter. Had a commercial district once been planned here? The builder evidently thought so, locating just west of the Judenstrasse, across from Neue Markt, between Pandawer and Steinweg streets.

But it had not turned out that way. The building stood as a grand edifice among tenements and dreary shops, and its lobby directory told the story: piano teachers, theatrical agents, a private detective, a club for sailing instruction and a club for lonely hearts, an astrologer, an inventor, and Grommelink the cut-rate denture man.

Szara rang for the elevator, which wheezed ponderously to the top floor. The metal door slid open, then a soiled white glove slowly drew the gate aside. The operator was an old man with lank hair parted in the middle and swept back behind his ears, fine, almost transparent skin, and a face lined by tragedy. He was called Albert, according to Marta, who thought him an original, rather amusing, the ruling troll of the Castle Perilous, her moat- keeper. Szara, however, was not amused by Albert, who stared at him with sullen and intense dislike as he got on the elevator, then sniffed loudly as he slammed the gate. I smell a Jew, that meant. On the wall above the control handle were taped two curling photographs of serious young men in Landwehr uniform. Sons dead in the war? Szara thought so. As the floors bumped slowly past, Szara repressed a shiver. He never would have imagined Marta Haecht living in such a place.

But then there were all sorts of new things about Marta. Wandering about in the apartment, he’d found a wooden rack holding a further collection of Ault’s paintings-these evidently not worthy of display. Idly curious, he’d looked through them, come upon a pink nude standing pensively, almost self-consciously, amid frantic swirls of green and yellow. Something familiar piqued his interest, then he realized he knew the model, knew her in that very pose. All sorts of things new about Marta.

The elevator came to a stop. Albert opened the gate, then the exterior door. “Lobby,” he said harshly. “Now you get out.”

Back in his room at the Adlon he closed the heavy drapes to shut out the dusk, locked the door, and lost himself in ciphering. Using the German railway timetable Goldman had handed him-a very unremarkable find if he were searched-he converted his plaintext into numerical groups. In his statement to the Directorate he’d been extremely cautious, in fact deceptive: the broken man in the Grunewald, described as he was, would set off alarms and excursions all over Dzerzhinsky Square. Dr. Baumann was not under anyone’s control, including his own, and Szara could only imagine what the Directorate might order done if they found that out, especially the Directorate as led by Dershani.

The report described an agent under stress yet operating efficiently. Stubborn, self-motivating, a prominent and successful businessman after all, thus not just somebody that could be ordered about. Szara strengthened the deception by implying, faintly, that the Directorate should soften its instinct for bureaucratic domination and acknowledge that it was dealing with a man to whom independence, even as a Jew in Germany, was instinctive, habitual. Baumann had to believe he was in control, Szara suggested, and to perceive the apparat as a kind of servant.

But if Baumann was steadfast, Szara continued, the situation as he found it in Germany was extremely unstable. He described the telephone call from the cousin forced to return to Poland, noted the disbursement of emergency funds, then went on to suggest that OTTER ought to be offered exfiltration-if the time should ever come-followed by resettlement in a European city. Against that day, Baumann Milling ought to hire a new employee, as designated by the case officer, who would remain in deep cover until activated. Szara closed with the statement that he would be remaining in Berlin for at least seven days, and requested local operative support in arranging a second meeting.

He grouped his numbers, did his false addition, counted letters in the timetable a second time, just to be sure. Garbled transmissions drove Moscow wild-What’s a murn? And why does he ask for raisins?