Dark Star

“Oh yes.”

He stood in order to leave; in the small room they were a little closer together than strangers would normally have been. “It’s better,” he said quietly, “not to find out how it would be. Yes?”

She smiled impishly, amused that the proximity affected him. “You are different, you are. And you mustn’t be too concerned.” Her slim hand brushed the waistband of her slacks, then held up a tiny vial of yellow liquid. Her eyebrow lifted, see how clever? “End of story,” she said. “Curtain.” Then she hid it behind her back, as though it didn’t exist. She bent toward him, kissed him lightly on the mouth-very warm and very brief-and whispered good-bye, in Russian, next to his ear.

Szara walked east from the theater, away from the Adlon, unconsciously following procedure. Balked by the Neu-Kolln Canal, he veered south to Gertraudten Bridge, lit a cigarette, watched orange peels and scrapwood drifting past on the black water. It was colder, the lamp lights had pale halos as mist drifted off the canal.

The Directorate never knew their agents in person; Szara now saw the reason for that. Tscherova’s vulnerability would not leave his mind. Caught between the Gestapo and the NKVD, between Germany and Russia, she lived by her wits, by looking as she did, by clever talk. But she would have to drink the yellow liquid eventually, maybe soon, and the idea of so much life-all the emotional weather that blew across her heart-winding up as a formless shape collapsed in a corner tormented him. Could a woman be too beautiful to die? Moscow wouldn’t like his answer to that. Was he a little bit in love with her? What if he was. Was all her capering about, the way she worked on him with her eyes, meant to draw him to her? He was sure of it. How could that be wrong?

She’d have to drink the liquid because agents didn’t survive. The result of all the elaborate defenses, secrecy and codes and clandestine methods of every sort, was time gained, only that, against a known destiny. Things went wrong. Things always, eventually, went wrong. The world was unpredictable, inconsistent, volatile, ultimately a madhouse of bizarre events. Agents got caught. Almost always. You replaced them. That’s what the apparat expected you to do: reorganize the chaos, mend the damage, and go on. There were ways in which he accepted that, but when women entered the equation he failed. His need was to protect women, not to sacrifice them, and he could not, would not, change. An ancient instinct, to stand between women and danger, sapped his will to run operations the way they had to be run and made him a bad intelligence officer-it was just that simple. And the worst part of it was that the yellow liquid wasn’t part of some spy kit-the NKVD didn’t believe in such things. No, Tscherova had obtained the liquid herself, because she knew what happened to agents just as well as he did and she wanted to have it over and done with when the time came. The idea made him ill, the world couldn’t go on that way.

But they had a Jew up on the end of Bruderstrasse, where Szara turned north, a pack of drunken Hitlerjugend in their fancy uniforms, teenagers, forcing some poor soul on hands and knees to drink the black water in a gutter, and they were shouting and laughing and singing and having a tremendously good time at it.

Szara faded into a doorway. For a moment he thought he was having a stroke-his vision swam and a terrible force hammered against his temples like a fist. Steadying himself against a wall, he realized it wasn’t a stroke, it was rage, and he fought to subdue it. For a moment he went mad, shutting his eyes against the pounding blood and pleading with God for a machine gun, a hand grenade, a pistol, any weapon at all-but this prayer was not immediately answered. Later he discovered a small chip missing from a front tooth. Some time after midnight, having crept away into the darkness, walking through deserted streets toward his hotel, he made the inevitable connection: Tscherova, by what she did, could help to destroy these people, these youths with their Jewish toy. She could weaken them in ways they did not understand, she was more than a machine gun or a pistol, a far deadlier weapon than any he’d wished for. The knowledge tore at him, on top of what he’d seen, and there were tears on his face that he wiped off with the sleeve of his raincoat.

The following afternoon, he told Marta Haecht what he’d seen. Instinctively she reached for him, but when her hands flew to touch him he no more than allowed it, unwilling to reject an act of love, but equally unwilling to be comforted.

This was pain he meant to keep.

To maintain his cover, he had to write something.

“Nothing political,” Goldman had warned. “Let Tass file on diplomatic developments; you find yourself something meaningless, filler. Just pretend that some ambitious editor has taken it into his head that Pravda’s view on Germany needs the Szara touch. Even with all the bad blood and political hostility, life goes on. A bad job but you’re making the best of it; you want to lead the Reich press office to believe that, a little of their fine Teutonic contempt is the very thing for you. For the moment, let them sneer.”

Midmorning, in the dining room at the Adlon, Szara submitted himself to the tender mercies of Vainshtok. The little man ran his fingers through his hair and studied his list of possible stories. “A Szara needs help from a Vainshtok?” he said. “I knew the world was turning upside down, Armageddon expected any day now, but this!”

“What have you got?” Szara said. He caught the attention of a passing waiter: “A Linzer torte for my friend, plenty of schlag on it.”

Vainshtok’s eyebrows shot up. “You’re in trouble. That I can tell. My mama always warned me, ‘Darling son, when they put the whipped cream on the Linzer torte, watch out.’ What is it, Andre Aronovich? Have you fallen from favor at last? Got a girlfriend who’s giving you a hard time? Getting older?”

“I can’t stand Berlin, Vainshtok. I can’t think in this place.”

“Oy, he can’t stand Berlin. Last year they sent me to Madagascar. I ate, I believe I actually ate, a lizard. Did you hear the china breaking, Szara, wherever you were? Eleven generations of Vainshtok rabbis were going wild up in heaven, breaking God’s kosher plates, ‘Gott im Himmel! Little Asher Moisevich is eating a lizard!’ Ah, here’s something, how about weather? “

“What about it?”

“It’s happening every day.”

“And?”

“Well, it’s not especially cold, and it’s not especially hot. But more than likely such a story won’t stir up the Reichsministries. On the other hand, it might. ‘What do you mean, normal? Our German weather is clean and pure, like no other weather anywhere!’ “

Szara sighed. He hadn’t the strength to fight back.

“All right, all right,” Vainshtok said as his treat arrived, swimming in cream. “You’re going to make me cry. Take Frau Kummel, up in Lubeck. Actually she’s called Mutter Kummel, Mother Kummel. It’s a story you can write, and it gets you out of Berlin for the day.”

“Mutter Kummel?”

“I’ll write down the address for you. Yesterday she turned a hundred years old. Born the first of November, 1838. Imagine all the exciting things she’s seen-she may even remember some of them. 1838? Schleswig-Holstein still belonged to the Danes, Lubeck was part of the independent state of Mecklenburg. Germany-of course you’ll have to say Germany as we know it today-didn’t exist. You’re to be envied, Szara. What a thrilling time that was, and Mutter Kummel somehow lived through every minute of it.”

He took the train that afternoon, a grim ride up through the flat-lands of the Luneberg Plain, through marshy fields where gusts of wind flattened the reeds under a hard, gray sky. He avoided Hamburg by taking the line that went through Schwerin, and outside a little village not far from the sea he spotted a highway sign by a tight curve in the road: Drive carefully! Sharp curve! Jews yj miles an hour!

Mutter Kummel lived with her eighty-one-year-old daughter in a gingerbread house in the center of Lubeck. “Another reporter, dear mother,” said the daughter when Szara knocked at the door. The house smelled of vinegar, and the heat of the place made him sweat as he scribbled in his notebook. Mutter Kummel remembered quite a bit about Lubeck: where the old butcher shop used to be, the day the rope parted and the tumbling church bell broke through the belfry floor and squashed a deacon. What Nezhenko would make of all this Szara could only imagine, let alone some coal miner in the Donbas, wrapping his lunch potato in the newspaper. But he worked at it and did the job as best he could. Toward the end of the interview the old lady leaned forward, her placid face crowned by a bun of white hair, and told him how die Juden were no longer to be found in Lubeck-yet one more change she’d witnessed in her many years in the town. Polite people when one met them in the street, it had to be admitted, but she wasn’t sorry to see them go. “Those Jews,” she confided, “for too long they’ve stolen our souls.” Szara must have looked inquisitive. “Oh yes, young man. It’s what they did, and we here in Lubeck knew