Dark Star

the back of the desk, spread the code flimsy out under the lamp, and decrypted it.

TRANSMISSION 5 NOVEMBER 1938 04:30 HOURS

TO: JEAN MARC

A SECOND MEETING WITH OTTER IS APPROVED. FOR 10 NOVEMBER, 01:15 HOURS, AT 8 KLEINERSTRASSE, WITTENAU. YOU WILL BE TRANSPORTED TO THE TOWN OF WITTENAU, APPROXIMATELY 30 MINUTES FROM BERLIN, BY AUTOMOBILE. AT 12:40 HOURS BE AT THE KOLN FISCHMARKT, AT INTERSECTION OF FISCHERSTRASSE AND MUHLENDAMM, ASSIGNED TO COVER STORY OF FISH MARKET VISITED BY TOURISTS AT NIGHT. A MAN IN A PLAID SCARF WILL APPROACH YOU. THE PAROL WILL BE: CAN YOU TELL ME WHAT TIME IT IS? THE COUNTERSIGN WILL BE: I’M SORRY. MY WATCH STOPPED ON THURSDAY.

8 KLEINERSTRASSE IS AN OLD WOODEN BUILDING FACING NORTH, AT THE EASTERN END OF THE STREET BORDERING PRINZALLEE. A SIGN ABOVE THE DOOR IDENTIFIES IT AS BETH MIDRESH, A SYNAGOGUE. APPROACH SUBJECT THROUGH DOOR AT THE END OF THE LEFT-HAND AISLE. YOU ARE TO SPEND NO MORE THAN THIRTY MINUTES WITH SUBJECT, THEN RETURN TO BERLIN BY AUTOMOBILE, HAVING ARRANGED MEETING WITH DRIVER.

NO OFFER OF FUTURE EXFILTRATION OR RESETTLEMENT IS TO BE MADE.

DIRECTOR

7 November.

He arrived at the loft just after nine, a little out of breath, his face cold from the night air, carrying a bottle of expensive wine wrapped in paper. A different mood for Marta: hair carefully pinned up, red Bakelite earrings with lipstick to match, tight sweater and skirt. She gave him a leather case holding a pair of gold cuff links set with tiny citrines, a faded lemon color. His shirt had buttons, so she brought one of her own out of a bureau to show him what they looked like; he found them almost impossible to attach and fumbled grimly till she came to the rescue, grinning at his efforts. They drank the wine and ate cookies from a box with a paper doily in it. He turned the radio to a different station-light Viennese froth that drew a sneer from Marta-but he’d come to associate the serious German composers with the mood of the city and he didn’t want that in his sanctuary. They talked, aimless and comfortable; she picked candied cherries off the tops of the cookies and put them in an ashtray. They would eat supper later, after they made love. But tonight they were in no hurry.

It had become, in just a few days, a love affair with rules of its own, a life of its own, a life that radiated from a bulbous old green sofa at its center, an affair with ups and downs, rough moments smoothed over, and unimportant, courteous lies. Something between adults. Marta, a working woman, a sophisticated Berliner with a life of her own, accepted him for what she thought he was: a Soviet journalist who traveled constantly, a man to whom she was deeply, sexually, attracted, a man she’d encountered in the last days of girlhood who now loved her as a woman.

It was too bad they couldn’t go out to restaurants or concerts, but the present reality was uncertain in that way and they agreed without discussion not to put themselves in a situation where unpleasantness might occur-life was too short for turmoil, it was best to float with the tide. Szara did not mention the Aesopic letter or the trip to Lisbon. He doubted she knew he’d written it. If she did, she’d also decided it would not bear discussion. They had negotiated a treaty, and now they lived by it.

The radio played “Barcarole” from The Tales of Hoffman. She sat on his lap. “This is pretty,” she said. “Two lovers on a boat, drifting along a canal.” He slipped a hand under her sweater; she closed her eyes, leaned her head on his shoulder and smiled. The song ended and an announcer, rattling a paper into the microphone, stated that a special bulletin from Dr. Joseph Goebbels would follow. “Oh, that hideous man!” Marta said.

Goebbels’s delivery was professional, but the nasal whine of his personality was more than evident. As he read, from an editorial that would appear the following day in the Volkischer Beobachter, a kind of choked-off rage thickened his voice. This news, the tone implied, was well beyond shouting. Ernst Vom Rath, third secretary at the German embassy in Paris, had been shot and gravely wounded by a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew named Hershl Grynszpan, a student whose parents had been deported from Germany to Poland, then held at the frontier town of Zbaszyn. Goebbels’s point was clear: we try to help these people, by sending them away from a nation where they aren’t wanted to a place where they will be more at home, and look what they do- they shoot German diplomats. And just how long shall we Germans be expected to put up with such outrages? The bulletin ended, a Strauss waltz followed. “This world,” said Marta sadly, closing her eyes again and wriggling to get comfortable. “We must be tender to one another,” she added, placing her warm hand over his.

10 November.

A German dearly loves his fish. Making a show of being a journalist, Szara jotted down impressions on a pocket notepad. Herring and whitebait, he wrote. Flounder and haddock. After midnight, the stalls of the Koln Fischmarkt began to fill with the day’s catch trucked in from the coast: glistening gray and pink eels on chipped ice, baskets of whelks and oysters trailing seaweed, crayfish floating in a lead tank filled with cloudy brine. The sawdust underfoot was wet with blood and sea water, and the air, even in the cold November night, was rank-the iodine smell of tidal pools, Szara wrote, barrels of cast-off fishheads. Stray cats. There were plenty of people around; vendors shouted snappy fish jokes at their customers-a bit of psychology: lively talk implied fresh seafood. Some local swells and their girlfriends, faces bright with drinking, were waltzing around with half a dripping mackerel. There was even a bewildered British tourist, asking questions in slow, loud English, puzzled that he couldn’t get an answer.

The operative was precisely on time, a heavy man with eyebrows grown together and red cheeks, hair sheared off in a military cut. After the parol was completed, they walked silently to the car, a black Humboldt parked a little way down the Muhlendamm. The operative was an expert driver, and cautious, squaring blocks and ceaselessly crossing back over his own tracks to make sure they weren’t followed. They worked their way west through the Grunewald and eventually turned north on the near bank of the Havel, following a succession of little roads to avoid police on the main highways. “I’m told to warn you there’s some kind of trouble brewing,” the driver said.

“What kind of trouble? “

“Aktionen. Actions against the Jews. A monitoring unit at the embassy distributed a teleprinter message just as I was leaving; it was from Muller’s office to all Gestapo headquarters. The timing was specified as ‘at very short notice.’ You’ll probably get in and out without difficulties-but don’t dawdle.”

“The treff takes place in a synagogue.”

“I know where it takes place. The point is, there won’t be anyone around, and it’s best for your contact, who comes from the east without going into the city. We got him in for Friday night services and he just didn’t leave.”

The car slowed as they came to the outskirts of Wittenau. The street swung away from the Havel, and the sheds and low buildings of small industrial shops appeared on both sides. The driver pulled over and turned off the engine. The night was still, the air smelling faintly of coal smoke. The apparat had a genius, Szara thought, for finding such places; dead zones, nighttime deserts on the edges of cities.

“This is Prinzallee,” said the driver. “Up ahead of you, about fifty paces, is the start of Kleinerstrasse. Your synagogue is on the corner. What time do you have? “

“Eight minutes after one.”

“It will take you only a minute to walk.”

Szara fidgeted in the front seat. A bird started up nearby, otherwise the silence was oppressive. “Does anybody live here? ” he asked.

“No more. It was a ghetto thirty years ago, then it turned into factories. Only the synagogue is left, and a few tenements with old Jews living in them-most of the young ones got out after ‘33.”

Szara kept looking at his watch.

“All right,” said the driver. “Don’t close the car door-it’s a noise everybody knows. And please keep it short.”

Szara climbed out. The bulb had been removed from the dome light, so the interior of the car remained dark. He walked close to a board fence on a dirt pathway that muffled his footsteps, but the night was so quiet he