Dark Star

young, Nazi Party intellectuals and thus maneuvering her subagents into extremely productive relationships. “What did you do to her?” Schau-Wehrli would ask, teasing him as a great lover. He would smile weakly. “Really nothing. She is just so … so Russian,” he would say. “A little sympathy, a kind word, and a flower suddenly blooms.”

The fever broke after ten days and slowly Szara began to work again. In the last week of January, Abramov ordered a third-country meeting to pursue certain details regarding a reorganization of the OPAL network. This time it was to be in Switzerland, near the town of Sion, a couple of hours up the Rhone valley from Geneva, on the night of 7 February. The transmission took its time coming in and Kranov was annoyed. “They’ve changed W/T operators again,” he said, lighting a cigarette and sitting back in his chair. “Slow as mud, this new one.”

Goldman wired the following day, ordering-as he had when Szara had gone to Berlin-a piggyback courier delivery. Sixty thousand French francs were to be taken to Lausanne on the day after his meeting with Abramov and passed, using a complicated identification/parol procedure, to an unnamed individual. This was a lot of money, and it caused a problem. Couriers were limited to a certain level of funds; after that Moscow, evidently in fear of temptation, dictated the presence of a second courier, specifically a diplomatic or intelligence officer and not just a network agent like Odile.

So Maltsaev told him, anyhow.

Szara was eating dinner at his neighborhood bistro, Le Temps folded in half and propped up against the mustard pot, when a man materialized across the table and introduced himself. “Get in touch with Ilya Goldman,” he said by way of establishing his bona fides. “He’ll confirm who I am-we were in Madrid together. At the embassy.” He was now in Paris, he continued, on temporary assignment from Belgrade, where he’d been political officer for a year or so.

Szara immediately disliked him. Maltsaev was a dark, balding young man with a bad skin and a sour disposition, a man much given to sinister affectations, a man who spoke always as though he were saying only a small fraction of what he actually knew. He wore tinted eyeglasses and a voluminous black overcoat of excellent quality.

Maltsaev made it clear that he found courier work boring and very much beneath him-the order to accompany Szara to Switzerland offended him in any number of ways. “These little czars in Moscow,” he said with a sneer, “throw roubles around as though the world were ending tomorrow.” He had a pretty good idea what went on in Lausanne, he confided, typical of the deskbound comrades to try and solve the problem with money. Typical also that some unseen controller in the Dzerzhinsky Square apparat was using the occasion to make Maltsaev’s life miserable, screwing him with some witless assignment that could be handled by any numskull operative. “Another enemy,” he grumbled. Somebody jealous of his promotions or his assignment in Paris. “But next we’ll see if he gets away with it. Maybe not, eh?” He pointed at Szara’s plate. “What’s that?”

“Andouillette,” Szara said.

“What is it? A sausage? What’s in it?”

“You won’t want it if I tell you,” Szara said.

“Probably the chef’s mistress,” Maltsaev said with a laugh. “Order me a steak. Cooked. No blood or back it goes.” His eyes were animated behind the tinted lenses, flicking around the room, staring at the other customers. Then he leaned confidentially toward Szara. “Who is this Abramov you’re going to see?” He looked triumphant and pleased with himself-surprised I know that?

“Boss. One of them, anyhow.”

“A big shot? “

“He sits on one Directorate, certainly. Perhaps others, I don’t know.”

“Old friend, I’ll bet. The way things go these days, you don’t last long without a protector, right?”

Szara shrugged. “Everybody’s got their own story-mine’s not like that. It’s all business with Abramov.”

“Is it.”

“Yes.”

“Hey!” Maltsaev called as a waiter went past and ignored him.

It snowed on the night of the sixth, and by the time Szara and Maltsaev left the Gare de Lyon on the seventh of February the fields and villages of France were still and white. The nineteenth century, Szara thought with longing: a pair of frost-coated dray horses pulling a cart along a road, a girl in a stocking cap skating on a pond near Melun. The sky was dense and swollen; sometimes a flight of crows circled over the snow- covered fields. But for the presence of Maltsaev, it would have been a time for dreaming. The frozen world outside the train window was unmoving, cold and peaceful, smoke from farmhouse chimneys the only sign of human life.

Following the rules, they had booked the compartment for themselves, so they were alone. Szara kept a hand or a foot in permanent contact with the small traveling case that held the sixty thousand francs, each packet of hundred-franc notes bound by a strip of paper with Cyrillic initials on it. But even though they were alone, Maltsaev spoke obliquely: your friend in Sion, the man in Brussels. A glutton’s appetite for gossip, Szara thought. Who do you know? How do the loyalties work? What’s the real story? Maltsaev was the classic opportunist, probing for whatever you might have that he could use. Szara parried him on every point, but felt that eventually the sheer weight of the attack might wear him down. To escape, he feigned drowsiness. Maltsaev sneered with delight: “Going to dreamland with our dear gold on your lap?”

They’d left at dawn, and it was again dark when they reached Geneva. They walked three blocks from the railroad station and found the Opel Olympia that had been left in front of a commercial travelers’ hotel, the ignition key taped to the bottom of the gas pedal. Szara drove. Maltsaev sat beside him, smoking his cardboard-tipped Belomor cigarettes, a road map spread across his lap. They circled the north shore of Lake Leman on good roads in intermittent light snow, then, after Villeneuve, began to climb over the mountain passes.

Here the weather cleared and there was a bright, sharp moon, its light sparkling on the ice crystal in the banked snow at the sides of the road. Sometimes, on the curves, they could see down into the valleys spread out below: clusters of stone villages, ice rivers, empty roads. The sense of deep silence and distance at last reached Maltsaev, who ceased talking and stared out the window. By ten o’clock they had descended to Martigny and turned north on the narrow plain by the Rhone, here an overgrown mountain stream. There was hardpack snow on the roads and Szara drove carefully but steadily, encountering only one or two cars along the way.

Sion was dark, no lights anywhere, and they had to hunt for a time until they found the gravel road that went up the mountainside. Five minutes later the grade flattened out and they rolled to a stop in front of an old hotel, tires crunching on newly fallen snow. The hotel-a carved sign above the arched doorway said Hotel du Vaz-was timber and stucco capped by a steep slate roof hung with icicles. It stood high above the road, at the edge of a shimmering white meadow that sloped gently toward the edge of an evergreen forest. The ground-floor shutters were closed; behind them was a faint glow, perhaps a single lamp in what Szara presumed to be a reception area in the lobby. When he turned off the ignition and climbed out of the Opel, he could hear the sound of the wind at the corner of the building. There were no other cars to be seen; perhaps it was a summer hotel, he thought, where people came in order to walk in the mountains.

Maltsaev got out of the car and closed the door carefully. From an upper window, Szara heard Abramov’s voice. “Andre Aronovich? “

“Yes,” Szara called. “Come down and let us in. It’s freezing.”

“Who is with you? “

Looking up, Szara saw one shutter partly opened. Before he could respond, Maltsaev whispered, “Don’t say my name.”

Szara stared at him, not understanding. “Answer him,” Maltsaev said urgently, gripping him hard at the elbow. Abramov must have seen the gesture, Szara thought. Because a moment later they heard the sound, eerily loud in the still, cold air, of a heavy man descending an exterior staircase, perhaps at the back of the hotel. A man in a hurry.

Maltsaev, coat flapping, started to run, and Szara, not knowing what else to do, followed. They were immediately slowed when they moved around the side of the hotel because here the snow was deeper, up to their knees, which made running almost impossible. Maltsaev swore as he stumbled forward. They heard a shout from the trees and to their left. Then it was repeated, urgently. A threat, Szara realized, spoken in Russian.

They came around the corner at the back of the hotel and stopped. Abramov, in a dark suit and homburg hat, was trying to run across the snow-covered meadow. It was absurd, almost comic. He struggled and floundered and