Dark Star

beyond that lay the Seine.

A steward collected Szara’s dripping umbrella and showed him up three flights of stairs to a small library. A waiter appeared and set down an ivory tray bearing a Cinzano aperitif and a dish of nuts. Abandoned to a great hush broken only by an occasional mysterious creak, Szara wandered along the shelves, sampling here and there. The collection was exclusively concerned with railroads, and it was beautifully kept; almost all the books had been rebound. Some were privately printed, many were illustrated, with captioned sepia prints and daguerreotypes:

On the platform at Ebenfurth, Stationmaster Hofmann waits to flag through the Vienna-Budapest mail. Flatcars loaded with timber cross a high trestle in the mountains of Bosnia.

The 7:03 from Geneva passes beneath the rue Lamartine overpass.

“So pleased you’ve come,” said a voice from the doorway. He was rather ageless, perhaps in the last years of his fifties, with faded steel-colored hair brushed very flat against the sides of his head. Tall and politely stooped, he was wearing a formal dinner jacket and a bow tie that had gone slightly askew. He’d evidently walked a short distance through the rain without coat or umbrella and was patting his face with a folded handkerchief. “I’m Joseph de Montfried,” he said. He articulated the name carefully, sounding the hard t and separating the two syllables, the latter lightly emphasized, as though it were a difficult name and often mispronounced. Szara was amused-a cultured Frenchman would as likely have gotten the Baron de Rothschild’s name wrong. This family too had a baron, Szara knew, but he believed that was the father, or the uncle.

“Do you like the collection? ” Said with sincerity, as though it mattered whether Szara liked it or not.

“It’s yours?”

“Part of mine. Most of it’s at home, up the street, and I keep some in the country. But the club has been indulgent with me, and I’ve spared them walls of leatherbound Racine that nobody’s ever read.” He laughed self- consciously. “What’ve you got there?” Szara turned the book’s spine toward him. “Karl Borns, yes. A perfect madman, Borns, had his funeral cortege on the Zurich local. The local!” He laughed again. “Please,” he said, indicating that Szara should sit down at one end of a couch. De Montfried took a club chair.

“We’ll have supper right here, if you don’t mind. Do you?”

“Of course not.”

“Good. Sandwiches and something to drink. I’ve got to meet my wife for some beastly charity thing at ten-my days of eating two dinners are long over, I’m afraid.”

Szara did mind. Going upstairs, he’d caught a glimpse of a silk-walled dining room and a glittering array of china and crystal. All that money invested at the barber and the dry cleaner and now sandwiches. He tried to smile like a man who gets all the elaborate dinners he cares to have.

“Shall we stay in French? ” de Montfried asked. “I can try to get along in Russian, but I’m afraid I’ll say awful things.”

“You speak Russian?”

“Grew up speaking French en famille and Russian to the servants. My father and uncle built much of the Russian railroad system, then came the revolution and the civil war and most of it was destroyed. Very entrepreneurial place-at one time anyhow. How’s it go? ‘Sugar by Brodsky, Tea by Vysotsky, Revolution by Trotsky.’ I suppose it’s aimed at Jews, but it’s reasonably faithful to what happened. Oh well.” He pressed a button on the wall and a waiter appeared almost instantly. De Montfried ordered sandwiches and wine, mentioning only the year, ‘27. The waiter nodded and closed the door behind him.

They chatted for a time. De Montfried found out quite a bit about him, the way a certain kind of aristocrat seemed able to do without appearing to pry. The trick of it, Szara thought, lay in the sincerity of the voice and the eyes-I am so very interested in you. The man seemed to find everything he said fascinating or amusing or cleverly put. Soon enough he found himself trying to make it so.

There was no need for Szara to find out who de Montfried was. He knew the basic outline: a titled Jewish family, with branches in London, Paris, and Switzerland. Enormously wealthy, appropriately charitable, exceptionally private, and virtually without scandal. Old enough so that the money, like game, was well cured. Szara caught himself seeking something Jewish in the man, but there was nothing, in the features or the voice, that he could identify; the only notable characteristics were the narrow head and small ears that aristocrats had come to share with their hunting dogs.

The sandwiches were, Szara had to admit, extremely good. Open-faced, sliced duck and salmon, with little pots of flavored mayonnaise and cornichons to make them interesting. The wine, according to its white and gold label, was a premier cru Beaune called Chateau de Montfried-it was easily the best thing Szara had ever tasted.

“We’ve my father to thank for this,” de Montfried said of the wine, holding it up against the light. “After we were tossed out of Russia he took an interest in the vineyards, more or less retired down there. For him, there was something rather biblical in it: work thy vines. I don’t know if it actually says that anywhere, but he seemed to think it did.” De Montfried was hesitantly sorrowful; the world would not, he understood, be much moved by small tragedies in his sort of family.

“It is extraordinary,” Szara said.

De Montfried leaned toward him slightly, signaling a shift in the conversation. “You are recommended to me, Monsieur Szara, by an acquaintance who is called Bloch.”

“Yes?”

De Montfried paused, but Szara had no further comment. He reached into the inside pocket of his dinner jacket, withdrew an official-looking document with stamps and signatures at the bottom, and handed it to Szara. “Do you know what this is?”

The paper was in English, Szara started to puzzle through it.

“It’s an emigration certificate for British Palestine,” de Montfried said. “Or Eretz Israel-a name I prefer. It’s valuable, it’s rare, hard to come by, and it’s what I want to talk to you about.” He hesitated, then continued. “Please be good enough to stop this discussion, now, if you feel I’m exceeding a boundary of any kind. Once we go further, I’m going to have to ask you to be discreet.”

“I understand,” Szara said.

“No hesitation? It would be understandable, certainly, if you felt there were just too many complications in listening to what I have to say.”

Szara waited.

“According to Monsieur Bloch, you were witness to the events in Berlin last month. He seems to feel that you might, on that basis, be willing to provide assistance for a project in which I take a great interest.”

“What project is that?”

“May I pour you a little more wine? “

Szara extended his glass.

“I hope you’ll forgive me if I work up to a substantive description in my own way. I don’t want to bore you, and I don’t want you to think me a hopeless naif-it’s just that I’ve had experience of conversations about the Jewish return to Palestine and, well, it can be difficult, even unpleasant, as any political discussion is likely to be. Polite people avoid certain topics, experience shows the wisdom in that. Like one’s dreams or medical condition-it’s just better to find something else to talk about. Unfortunately, the world is now acting in such a way as to eliminate that courtesy, among many others, so I can only ask your forbearance.”

Szara’s smile was sad and knowing, with the sort of compassion that has been earned from daily life. He was that listener who can be told anything without fear of criticism because he has heard and seen worse than whatever you might contrive to say. He withdrew a packet of Gitanes, lit one, and exhaled. I cannot be offended, said the gesture.

“At the beginning of the Great War, in 1914, Great Britain found itself fighting in the Middle East against Turkey. The Jews in Palestine were caught up in the Turkish war effort-taxed into poverty, drafted into the Turkish armies. A certain group of Jews, in the town of Zichron Yaakov, not far from Haifa, believed that Great Britain ought to win the war in the Middle East, but what could they do? Well, for a small, determined group of people arrayed against a major power there is only one traditional answer, other than prayer, and that is espionage. Thus a botanist named Aaron Aaronson, his sister Sarah, an assistant called Avshalom Feinberg, and several others formed a network they called NILI-it’s taken from a phrase in the Book of Samuel, an acronym of the Hebrew initials for The Eternal One of Israel will not prove false. The conspiracy was based at the Atlit Experimental Station and was facilitated by Aaron Aaronson’s position as chief of the locust control unit-he could