Dark Star

wound together for a moment, then remembered about silhouettes and threw himself on his stomach. Baumann’s breathing distracted him-loud and hoarse, like sighing. He moved the man’s hand, which lay flaccid against his chest, and felt for a heartbeat. What he found was a shock-a beating of such force and speed it frightened him. “How is it?” he asked.

“My God in heaven,” Baumann said.

“We’re going to be all right,” Szara said. “I’ll buy you a dinner in Amsterdam.”

Baumann smiled weakly, the wind blowing strands of his hair around, one side of his face pressed against the black surface of the roof, and nodded yes, that’s what they would do.

Szara began to think about the operative and the car, then decided to try to get a look from the edge of the roof. Very carefully he moved forward, scraping his cheek against the surface, staying as flat as possible, gaining an inch at a time until he could just see over the end of the shed. He could not get a view of the path by the board fence where he’d left the car-the angle was wrong. But he was high enough to look out over part of Wittenau, the Havel, and an ancient stone bridge that crossed the river. His eyes were beginning to water from the smoke-the fire was taking hold; the old wood snapped and exploded as it caught-but what there was to see, he saw: a group of men with torches shifting restlessly in a knot at the center of the bridge, an instant of motion in the darkness. Then there was a scream that carried perfectly on the night air, a white churning in the water at the foot of the bridge pier, a strangled cry for help, the yellow arc of a torch hurled into the water, then laughter and cheering as the men on the bridge headed back into Wittenau. Some of them began to sing.

As the fire swept up the front of the synagogue it illuminated the shed, and Szara scrambled backward, afraid of being seen. Burning embers were all over the roof, producing, for the moment, only an oily black smoke from the tar surface. He realized it was only a matter of time before the shed, and the lumberyard, went up in flames. Just before he retreated, he saw fiery shapes flying into the street from the direction of the synagogue door-long dowels on either side of thick, yellow parchment. The Nazis, not content to burn down the synagogue, were making a special, private bonfire of the Torah scrolls from the ark, first stripping off the ceremonial satin covers. Now they’ll have to be buried, Szara thought. He wondered how he remembered that but it was true, it was the law: a burnt Torah had to be buried in the graveyard, like a dead person, there was a ceremony for it. It was part of growing up in the Pale of Settlement, knowing such lore-rituals for raped women and all sorts of useful knowledge-for these things had happened many times before.

It was another thirty minutes before they got away. After watching the fire for a time, the mob had gone off in search of further amusement. Szara and Baumann stayed where they were, lying flat to conceal themselves, brushing embers off their clothing with the sleeves of their jackets. From where they lay they could see the dancing orange shadows of other fires against the night sky, could hear the showers of falling glass, occasional shouts or cries, but no sirens. The lumberyard caught first-that was bad because of the burning creosote-and then the shed, an afterthought. Szara and Baumann worked their way backward off the roof, dropping to the ground on the side away from the street. They circled behind the synagogue, now collapsed into itself around a column of fire that roared like a wind, and made a dash for the Humboldt.

They saw only one person, standing alone in the darkness: a town policeman, wearing the traditional high helmet with polished brasswork and short visor-something like the old-fashioned spiked Pickelhaube of the 1914 war-with a strap pulled up ferociously tight just under the chin. By the light of the flames Szara saw his face and was struck by a kind of anguish in it. Not sorrow for Jews or synagogues-it wasn’t that. It had more to do with a life dedicated to perfect order, where no crime should ever go unpunished- a murder or a piece of paper tossed in the street, it was all the same to this face. Yet tonight the policeman had certainly seen arson- and perhaps murder, if he’d looked in the direction of the river- and had done nothing about it because he had been told to do nothing about it. Evidently, he had not really known what to do, so had stationed himself across the street from the fire, on the night when the firemen never came, and there he stood, rigid, anguished, in some sense ruined and aware of it.

The car was empty, the passenger door ajar as it had been left.

It would make, Szara thought, at least a hiding place, and he directed Baumann to lie flat on the floor below the back seat while he would do the same in front. As they entered the car, the operative materialized, gliding toward them from some shadow he’d used as cover while the mob roamed the streets. Not a mob, in fact, the operative told Szara later. Party men, some uniformed SS, an organized attack directed by the German state.

It was not the burning and the chaos that upset the operative, he was reasonably used to burning and chaos; it was Dr. Julius Baumann, OTTER, an agent he was not supposed to know about, much less see, least of all to have in an automobile along with his case officer. This shattered unbreakable rules of every variety and set the man’s face dancing with bureaucratic horror. He did the best he could under the circumstances: secreted Baumann in the trunk, first prying back a section of the metal jamb to make an air passage. Szara quietly protested as he slid into the front seat. “Be glad I’m doing that much,” said the operative.

“He may have had a heart attack,” Szara said.

The operative shrugged. “He will be cared for.”

They drove a little way back toward Berlin, crossed the Havel on a narrow, deserted bridge, then turned north, swinging around Wittenau and moving east, through the back of the Berlin suburbs. It was artful navigation, evidently from memory, a slow but steady progress through the winding lanes of Hermsdorf, Lubans, Blankenfelde and Niederschonhausen, where villas and workshops faded into farmland or forest. It was almost four in the morning when they reached Pankow. And here the operative took a complicated route that brought them to the Bahnhof. He disappeared into the station for a few minutes and used the public telephone in the waiting room. Then east again, Weissensee and eventually Lichtenburg, where they drove through a very aristocratic part of town, swerving suddenly into the parklike courtyard of a private hospital, the gate closing automatically behind them. The operative opened the trunk and helped Baumann into the hospital. He would receive medical attention, the operative explained to Szara, but they’d decided to hide him there whether he needed it or not.

Heinrich Muller’s teleprinter message had ordered, along with attacks on synagogues and Jewish businesses throughout Germany, the arrest of twenty to thirty thousand Jews: “Wealthy Jews in particular are to be selected.” This meant money, which the Nazis especially liked. So, said the operative as they pulled away from the hospital, they needed to put OTTER somewhere he wouldn’t be found, else he would be taken to Buchenwald or Dachau, stripped of all assets, and eventually deported.

As they turned back toward Berlin, they drove through streets that sparkled with shattered glass-Szara later learned that fifty percent of the annual plate glass production of Belgium, the manufacturing center for German glass, had been smashed. At times the traffic police, after checking their Russian identity papers, would steer them politely around the damage. And here and there they saw things: Jewish men and boys crawling around in the street or capering in the town pond, cheered on by hooting SS troopers and local Nazis. Szara knew them well enough; schoolyard bullies, beer-hall fat boys, unpleasant little men with insulted faces, the same trash you would find in any town in Russia, or indeed anywhere at all.

The operative was no Jew. From his accent Szara guessed he might have origins in Byelorussia, where pogroms had been a way of life for centuries, but the events of 10 November had enraged him. And he swore. His thick hands gripped the wheel in fury and his face was red as a beet and he simply never stopped swearing. Long, foul, vicious Russian curses, the language of a land where the persecutors had always, somehow, remained just beyond the reach of the persecuted, which left you bad words and little else. Eventually, as a gray dawn lightened Berlin and ash drifted gently down on the immaculate streets, they reached the Adlon, where Szara was instructed to use a servants entrance and a back stairway.

By then the operative had said it all, virtually without repeating himself, having covered Hitler, Himmler, Goring, and Heydrich, Nazis, Germans one and all, their wives and children, their grandparents and forebears back to the Teutonic tribes, their weisswurst and kartoffel, dachshunds and schnauzers, pigs and geese, and the very earth upon which Germany stood: urged to sow its fucking self with salt and burn fallow for eternity.

11 November.

By dusk the weather had turned bitter cold and it was like ice in Benno Ault’s studio. There was little heat in the Iron Exchange Building at night; the owners maintained a certain commercial fiction, pretending that their tenants, like normal business people, hurried home after dark to the warmth of home and family. But Szara