Dark Star

slipped, went down on one hand, rose, lifted his knees high for a few steps, fell again, then lurched forward as he tried to reach the edge of the forest, leaving behind him a broken, white path. The homburg suddenly tilted to one side and Abramov grabbed it frantically, instinctively, and held the brim tightly as he ran, as though, late for work, he were running to catch a tram in a city street.

The marksmen in the forest almost let him reach the trees. The first shot staggered him but he kept on a little, only slower, then the second shot brought him down. The reports echoed off the side of the mountain, then faded into silence. Maltsaev walked into the meadow, Szara followed, moving along the broken path. It was slippery and difficult, and soon they were breathing hard. Just before they reached him, Abramov managed to turn on his side. His hat had rolled away and there was snow caught in his beard. Maltsaev stood silently and tried to catch his breath. Szara knelt down. He could see that Abramov had bled into the snow. His eyes were closed, then they flickered open for a moment, perhaps he saw Szara. He made a single sound, a guttural sigh, “Ach,” of exhaustion and irritation, of dismissal, and then he was gone.

The Renaissance Club

At the Brasserie Heininger, at the far corner table where you could see everyone and everyone could see you, seated below the scrupulously preserved bullet hole in the vast and golden mirror, Andre Szara worked hard at being charming and tried to quiet a certain interior voice that told him to shut up and go home. A newcomer to the crowd of regulars at the corner table, and so the center of attention, he proposed a toast: “I would like us to drink to the love … to the hopeless loves … of our childhood days.” Was there a split second of hesitation-my God, is he going to weep? — before the chorus of approval? But then he didn’t weep; his fingers combed a longish strand of black hair off his forehead and he smiled a vulnerable smile. Then everyone realized how very right the toast was, how very right he was, the emotional Russian long after midnight, in his steel gray tie and soft maroon shirt, not exactly drunk, just intimate and daring.

That he was. Beneath the tablecloth, his hand rested warmly on the thigh of Lady Angela Hope, a pillar of the Paris night and a woman he’d been specifically told to avoid. With his other hand, he drank Roederer Cristal from a gold-rimmed champagne flute which, thanks to the attentions of a clairvoyant waiter, turned out to be perfectly full every time he went to pick it up. He smiled, he laughed, he said amusing things, and everyone thought he was wonderful, everyone: Voyschinkowsky, “the Lion of the Bourse;” Ginger Pudakis, the English wife of the Chicago meat-packing king; the Polish Countess K-, who, when properly intrigued, made ingenious gardens for her friends; the terrible Roddy Fitzware, mad, bad, and dangerous to know. In fact the whole pack of them, ten at last count, hung on his every word. Was his manner perhaps just a shade more Slavic than it really needed to be? Perhaps. But he did not care. He smoked and drank like an affable demon, said, “For a drunkard the sea is only knee deep!” and other proverbial Russianisms as they came to him, and generally made a grand and endearing fool of himself.

Yet-he was more Slavic than they knew-the interior voice refused to be still. Stop, it said. This is not in your best interest; you will suffer, you will regret it, they will catch you. He ignored it. Not that it was wrong, in fact he knew it was right, but still he ignored it.

Voyschinkowsky, inspired by the toast, was telling a story: “It was my father who took me to the Gypsy camp. Imagine, to go out so late at night, and to such a place! I could not have been more than twelve years old, but when she began to dance …” Lady Angela’s leg pressed closer under the table, a hand appeared through the smoky air, and a stream of pale Cristal fizzed into his glass. What other wine, someone had said of champagne, can you hear?

Like Lady Angela Hope, the Brasserie Heininger was notorious. In the spring of ‘37 it had been the site of, as the Parisians put it, “une affaire bizarre”: the main dining room had been sprayed with tommy guns, the Bulgarian maitre d’ had been assassinated in the ladies’ WC, and a mysterious waiter called Nick had disappeared soon after. Such violently Balkan goings-on had made the place madly popular; the most desirable table directly beneath the golden mirror with a single bullet hole; in fact the only mirror that survived the incident. Otherwise, it was just one more brasserie, where mustached waiters hurried among the red plush banquettes with platters of crayfish and grilled sausage, a taste of fin de siecle deviltry while outside the February snow drifted down into the streets of Paris and cabmen tried to keep warm.

As for Lady Angela Hope, she was notorious among two very different sets: the late-night crowd of aristocrats and parvenus, of every nationality and none at all, that haunted certain brasseries and nightclubs, as well as another, more obscure perhaps, which followed her career with equal, or possibly keener, interest. Her name had been raised in one of Goldman’s earliest briefings, taken from a file folder kept in a safe in the Stefan Leib shop in Brussels. Both Szara’s predecessor and Annique Schau-Wehrli had been “probed” by Lady Angela, who was “known to have informal connections with British intelligence stations in Paris.” She was, as promised, fortyish, sexy, rich, foul-mouthed, promiscuous, and, in general, thoroughly accessible; an indefatigable guest and hostess who knew “everybody.” “You will meet her certainly,” said Goldman primly, “but she has entirely the wrong friends. Stay away.”

But then, Goldman.

Szara smiled to himself. Too bad Goldman couldn’t see him now, the forbidden Lady Angela snugly by his side. Well, he thought, this is fate. This had to happen, and so now it is happening. Yes, there may have been some kind of alternative, but the one person in his life who really understood alternatives, knew where they hid and how to find them, was gone.

That was Abramov, of course. And on 7 February, in a meadow behind the Hotel du Vaz in Sion, Abramov had resigned from the service. Exactly how that came to happen Szara didn’t know, but he’d managed to unwind events to a point where he had a pretty good idea of what had gone on.

Abramov, he suspected, had attempted to influence Dershani by use of the photographs taken in the garden of the house at Puteaux. It hadn’t worked. Realizing his days were numbered, he’d at last taken Szara’s advice offered on the beach at Aarhus and planned one final operation: his own disappearance. He’d arranged the meeting at the Hotel du Vaz in Sion (owned, Szara was told that night, by a front corporation operated by the NKVD Foreign Department), which gave him a legitimate reason to leave Moscow. He’d then created a notional agent in Lausanne who needed sixty thousand French francs. This made Goldman in Brussels a logical source and Szara’s scheduled trip to Sion a convenient method of delivery. The money was meant to give Abramov a running start in a new life; the operation was dovetailed and simple, but it hadn’t worked.

Why? Szara could see two possibilities: Kranov, already thought to spy on the OPAL network for the Directorate, might have alerted security units when an untrained and uncertain hand operated the wireless key in Moscow. Every operator had a characteristic signature, and Kranov, trained to be sensitive to change of any kind, had probably reacted to Abramov’s rather awkward keying of his own message.

To Szara, however, Goldman was the more interesting possibility. Network gossip suggested the rezident had previously had a hand in a rogue operation, something well outside the usual scope of OPAL‘s activities, in which a young woman was kidnapped from a rooming house in Paris. And when Szara described to Schau-Wehrli the operatives he’d met later that night at the Hotel du Vaz-especially the one who used the work name Dodin, a huge man, short and thick, with the red hands and face of a butcher-she had reacted. In the next instant she was all unknowing, but he’d felt a shadow touch her, he was sure of it.

Through Kranov or Goldman-or both-the special section of the Foreign Department had become involved, dispatched Maltsaev to Paris to keep watch on Szara as he went to meet Abramov and to find out if he was an accomplice, or even a fellow fugitive. Szara realized that his instinctive distaste for Maltsaev’s personality had provoked him into a blank and businesslike response to the man’s offensive needling, and that in turn had quite probably saved his life.

They’d buried Abramov at the edge of the meadow, under the snow-laden boughs of a fir tree, chipping at the frozen ground with shovels and sweating in the cold moonlight. There were four of them besides Maltsaev; they took off their overcoats and worked in baggy, woolen suits, swearing as they dug, their Swiss hunting rifles propped against a tree. They spread snow over the dirt and returned to the empty hotel, building a fire in the fireplace