Dark Star

rezident operating GRU and NKVD networks based in Tarragona. Thus a very senior member of the Soviet cadre involved in the Spanish Civil War.

Szara was immediately on his guard; powerful people in Moscow were afraid of this man. It was nothing specific. Those who knew the details didn’t tell war stories, but they veered away from his name when it came up in conversation, looked around to see who might be listening, made a certain gesture of the face that meant stay away. What little was said about Bloch implied an insatiable appetite for success-an appetite gratified by means of ferocious tyranny. Life for those assigned to work for him was said to be a nightmare.

Yaschyeritsa, they called him behind his back, a kind of lizard. Because he had the look of the basilisk: a sharp triangular face, stiff hair combed back flat from the forehead, thin eyebrows angled steeply toward the inner corners of his eyes, which, long and narrow, were set above hard cheekbones that slanted upward.

Andre Szara, like everyone who moved in those circles known as the nomenklatura, the elite, was an adroit reader of faces. You had to know who you were dealing with. A Byelorussian? An Armenian? A native Russian? With Jews, it was often difficult because Jewish women had for centuries borne the children of their tormentors and thus carried the genes of many races. God only knew, Szara thought, what brutal band of marauders had forced themselves on Bloch’s female ancestor to make him look as he did. Did evil, he wondered, travel in the blood as well?

Bloch nodded a greeting, sat down across from Szara, leaned over and locked the compartment door, then turned off the lamps on the wall around the window. The train was moving slowly through a village, and from the darkened compartment they could see that a local festival was in progress; a bonfire in the public square, cattle wearing garlands, Hitler Youth in shorts holding swastika banners hung lengthwise down long poles, like Roman fasces.

Bloch stared intently at the scene. “At last,” he said pensively, “they are back in the Middle Ages.” He turned his attention to Szara. “Forgive me, comrade journalist, I am General Y I. Bloch. I don’t think we’ve ever spoken, but I read your work when I have a moment, so I know who you are. Do I need to tell you who I am? “

“No, comrade General. I know you are with the special services.”

Bloch acknowledged Szara’s awareness as a compliment: a knowing smile, a brief inclination of the head, at your service.

“Tell me,” the general said, “is it true you’ve been away from Moscow for a time? Several months?”

“Since late August,” Szara said.

“No easy life-trains and hotel rooms. Slow steamships. But foreign capitals are certainly more amusing than Moscow, so there are compensations. No? “

This was a trap. There was a doctrinal answer, something to do with building socialism, but Bloch was no fool and Szara suspected a pious response would embarrass them both. “It’s true,” he said, adding, “though one gets tired of being the eternal stranger,” just in case.

“Do you hear the Moscow gossip? “

“Very little,” Szara said. A loner, he tended to avoid the Tass and Pravda crowd on the circuit of European capitals.

Bloch’s face darkened. “This has been a troubled autumn for the services, surely you’ve heard that much.”

“Of course I see the newspapers.”

“There is more, much more. We’ve had defections, serious ones. In the last few weeks, Colonel Alexander Orlov and Colonel Walter Krivitsky, who is called general in the European press, have left the service and sought refuge in the West. The Krivitsky matter has been made public, also the flight of the operative Reiss. As for Orlov, we’ll keep that to ourselves.”

Szara nodded obediently. This had quickly become a very sensitive conversation. Orlov-a cover name within the service, he was in fact Leon Lazarevich Feldbin-and Krivitsky-Samuel Ginsberg- were important men, respectively NKVD and GRU officials of senior status. The Ignace Reiss affair had shocked him when he read about it. Reiss, murdered in Switzerland as he attempted to flee, had been a fervent idealist, a Marxist/Leninist in his bones.

“Friends?” Bloch raised an eyebrow.

“I knew Reiss to say hello to. No more than that.”

“And you? How does it go with you? ” Bloch was concerned, almost fatherly. Szara wanted to laugh, had the services been panicked into kindness?

“My work is difficult, comrade General, but less difficult than that of many others, and I am content to be what I am.”

Bloch absorbed his answer and nodded to himself. “So you march along,” he said. “There are some,” he continued pensively, “who find themselves deeply disturbed by the arrests, the trials. We cannot deny it.”

Oh cannot we? “We’ve always had enemies, within and without. I served in the civil war, from 1918 to 1920, and fought against the Poles. It isn’t for me to judge the operations of state security forces.”

Bloch sat back in his seat. “Very well put,” he said after a time. Then his voice softened, just barely audible above the steady rumble of the train. “And should it come your turn? Then what?”

Szara could not quite see Bloch’s face in the shadow of the seat across from him, the countryside was dark, the light from the corridor dim. “Then that is how it will be,” Szara said.

“You are a fatalist.”

“What else?” They lingered there a moment too long for Szara. “I have no family,” he added.

Bloch seemed to nod at that, a gesture of agreement with a point made or a confirmation of something he believed. “Not married,” he mused. “I would have guessed otherwise.”

“I am a widower, comrade General. My wife died in the civil war. She was a nurse, in Berdichev.”

“So you are alone,” Bloch said. “Some men, in such circumstances, might be careless of their lives, since nothing holds them to the world. Unconcerned with consequence, such men rise to an opportunity, sacrifice themselves, perhaps to cure their nation of a great evil. And then we have-why not say it? A hero! Do I have it right? Is this your view?”

A man and a woman-she had just said something that made him laugh-went by in the corridor. Szara waited until they passed. “I am like everybody else,” he said.

“No,” Bloch said. “You are not.” He leaned forward, his face taut, concentrated. “To be a writer, that requires work. Work and sacrifice. And the determination to follow a certain road, wherever it may lead. Remember that, comrade journalist, whatever might happen in the days ahead.”

Szara started to reply, to fend off a version of himself he found grandiose, but Bloch raised a hand for silence. The gesture was casual enough, but it struck Szara dumb. The general stood and unlatched the door, stared at Szara a moment, a look that openly weighed and calculated, then left the compartment abruptly, closing the door firmly behind him and disappearing down the passageway.

Some time later, the train halted at Ulm. The station platform was a lacework of shadows, and raindrops refracted trails of light as they rolled down the compartment window. A figure with a hat and an underarm briefcase hurried across the platform and entered the passenger door of a black Grosser Mercedes-an automobile often used by Reich officials-which sped away from the railroad station and was soon lost in the darkness.

A hero?

No, Szara thought. He knew better. He’d learned that lesson in war.

At the age of twenty-three, in 1920, he had campaigned with Marshal Tukachevsky, writing dispatches and inspirational stories for the home front, much as the writer Babel-a Jew who rode with Cossack cavalry-had served General Budenny. In the midst of the war against Poland, the Soviet forces had been driven back from Warsaw, from the banks of the Vistula, by an army commanded by General Pilsudski and his adviser, the French general Weygand. Szara’s squadron, during the retreat, had been set upon by Ukrainian bandits, a remnant of the Petlyura army that had occupied Kiev. Attacked from the ridge of a hillside, and outnumbered, they had fought like men possessed, all of them-cooks, clerks, wagon-masters, and military correspondents. For the previous day they’d come upon the body of a Polish colonel, stripped bare, tied by one foot to a high tree branch, the impaling stake protruding from between his legs. The Ukrainian bands fought both sides, Poles and Russians, and God help anyone they took alive.