Dark Star

suspected that the blind piano tuner, the astrologer, in fact many of the resident shadows, both worked and lived in their offices.

Marta Haecht was asleep in the bed fitted into an alcove at one end of the studio, warm beneath a mound of feather quilts that rose and fell with her steady breathing. A dreamless sleep, he suspected. Untroubled. When he’d arrived, just after dusk, the street cleaners were still at it in the Bischofstrasse; he could hear them sweeping up the broken glass and dumping it in metal garbage cans.

A blanket pulled over his shoulders, he sat on the green sofa, smoked cigarettes, and stared out the tall window. His ankle burned beneath the handkerchief he’d tied over the gash, but that wasn’t what kept him awake. It was a coldness that had nothing to do with the building. He’d seen it that morning, in his room at the Adlon, when he’d looked in the mirror. His face seemed white and featureless, almost dead, the expression of a man who no longer concerns himself with what the world might see when it looked at him. Marta’s breathing changed, the quilt stirred, then everything was again peaceful. A healthy animal, he thought. She’d been only briefly disturbed by the events of what they called Kristallnacht. Night of glass. A clever name, like the Night of the Long Knives, when Roehm and his Brown Shirts were murdered in 1934. Not just knives-those were for brawling sailors and thieves-but long knives. A mythic dimension. “This is Goebbels’s work,” she’d said, shaking her head at the sorry brutality of bad elements. Then she’d closed the door on it, coaxing him to her, twining herself around him, refusing to consider the possibility of the poison reaching either of them.

But it was Tscherova, the actress, who occupied his thoughts. The second secretary, Varin, and the nameless operative. The war they fought. He’d been contacted at the Adlon and told in no uncertain terms to get out of Germany and go back to Paris. His train left in the morning and he would be on it. He looked at his watch.

After 2:30. It was the morning-in seven hours he’d be gone. He’d not told Marta Haecht, not yet, he didn’t know why. He wouldn’t be able to explain convincingly, but that was only part of it. He wished to keep her in his mind a certain way, without tears or, worse, dry-eyed and cool. He treasured the memory of her as she’d been-the girl who thought that deep down she was perhaps Italian, Mediterranean, softer and finer than the stiff, northern people she lived among. The girl in the falling snow.

He stood and walked to the window. By the light of the street lamps he could see a boarded-up shop window down Bischofstrasse; yesterday a toy shop, evidently a Jewish toy shop. In a nearby doorway he caught a momentary pinpoint of red. A cigarette. Was this for him? Some poor bastard freezing through a long night of surveillance? An SD operative? Or somebody from Von Polanyi’s Amt 9, perhaps. Making sure their secret communication line into Dzerzhinsky Square came to no harm so that Moscow continued to believe whatever Berlin wanted it to believe. Or was it a Russian down there-or a German described as nasch-some operative sent to make sure nothing happened to him on Berlin territory- let him screw her, he leaves in the morning.

Or was it just a man smoking a cigarette in a doorway.

“Can’t you sleep?” She was propped on one elbow, hair thick and wild. “Come and keep warm,” she pouted, folding back the quilts as an invitation.

“In a minute,” he said. He didn’t want to be warm, to fold himself around her sweetly curved back; he didn’t want to make love. He wanted to think. Like the self-absorbed man he knew he was, he wanted to stay cold and think. He remembered a nursemaid in a little park in Ostend. Come escape with me. Marta flopped over on one side and grumbled as she pulled up the bedding. Soon her breathing changed to the rhythm of sleep.

He didn’t want her to know he was leaving-it was better simply to disappear. He saw a scrap of paper she used for a marker in the book she was reading-Saint-Exupery, of all things; no, that was right-and retrieved a pen from the pocket of his jacket. Dearest love, he wrote, I had to go away this morning. Then he signed it Andre. He doubted he’d see her again, not while the war between Moscow and Berlin went on. He’d caught himself earlier in the evening in the midst of a certain kind of speculation: Her boss, Herr Hanau, owns ships. What cargoes do they carry and where do they go? No, he told himself; he wasn’t going to let it come to that. Hard enough to report the truth about Baumann to Goldman or Abramov and keep her name out of it. Really very difficult, but he would find a way. Whether they loved each other or not they were lovers, and he was damned if he’d see her sucked into this brutal business.

“What are you writing?”

“Something to remember,” he said, and put the scrap of paper back in her book, hiding his hands behind a vase of flowers on the table. “I thought you’d gone back to sleep,” he added.

“I fooled you,” she said.

11 November.

Strasbourg.

It was well after eleven A.M.-the official minute of the armistice of the 1914 war, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month-when Szara’s train crossed the border but the train’s engineer was French, thus not a man to permit clocks to interfere with honor. Many of the passengers on the train got off when notified by the conductors that a three-minute observance would be held on French soil. Szara left with them, stood beneath a rich blue sky in a fresh breeze, held his hand against his heart and meant it. A few kilometers of trees and fields, yet another world: the smell of frying butter, the sound of sputtering car engines, the look in women’s eyes; France. Mentally, he was down on his knees at the foot of a wind-whipped Tricolor and kissing the earth. It was as though the passage across the border had severed a tangled knot in his heart and he could breathe again.

By the time he pushed open the shutters in his musty apartment and welcomed himself back to his courtyard-busy, loud, and smelly as always-Germany seemed like a land of apparitions, a dream, a play. It made no logical sense-truly he believed that people were people-but his instinctive sense of the world told a very different story. He leaned on the windowsill, closed his eyes, and let Paris wash over him.

The apparat did not leave him to his pleasures for long-an hour later Odile was at his door to tell him he was expected at Stefan Leib’s shop in Brussels that same night. Dutifully he took the train up to Belgium. Goldman shook his hand, welcomed him back like a hero, locked the door, and pulled down the shades.

If they’d given him a little room to breathe, things might have turned out differently; he would have shaped and crafted a functional deception and told them the part of the truth they needed to know: they had a compromised agent in Berlin. Not necessarily- Baumann and Von Polanyi could, at the Kaiserhof, have been discussing the price of pears, or Amt 9 might be the section of the Foreign Office that ordered clothes hangers from wire manufacturers.

But as a rule what you got in the intelligence business was a protruding corner, almost never the whole picture. That nearly always had to be inferred. But it was enough of a corner and Szara knew it. Von Polanyi was an intelligence officer; Herr Hanau seemed to have said so, Vainshtok had more or less confirmed it, and that was certainly more than enough to set the dogs running. Other sources would be tapped-you had the corner, somebody else had the top of the frame, a file already held the name of the artist, a local critic would be sent in to steal the dried paint off the palette. Result: full portrait with provenance. Funkspiele. Playback.

He had quite a bit, actually. For instance, the Germans were playing Dr. Baumann in a very effective way. They didn’t have him sneaking around dead-drops at midnight or playing host to journalists who climbed over his garden wall; they took him for an excellent lunch at the best hotel. Really, there was a lot Szara could have told them, more than enough. From there, they could have either declared Baumann innocent or turned the game back around on the Germans.

But he would not give them Marta Haecht, he would not compromise himself, he would not permit them to own him that completely. And if you were going to report pillow talk, because that’s exactly what they called it and that’s exactly what it was, you had to put a name and address to the head on the pillow.

So Szara lied. A lie of omission-the hard kind to discover. And in a way Goldman abetted the lie. With the death of Seneschal, one of the Paris networks wasn’t all that productive, because there was no realistic way to regain control of Lotte Huber, and she’d been the star of the show. This had the effect of expanding Baumann’s importance to the stature of the OPAL network itself, and Goldman as rezident was