Dark Star

And that was that.

Fitzware had hoisted a signal flag of inquiry, and Szara had responded. Fitzware took a moment to swirl his cognac and exhale a long, satisfied plume of cigar smoke. Szara let him exult a little in his victory; for somebody in their line of work, recruitment was the great, perhaps the only, victory. Now it was settled, they would work together for peace. As who wouldn’t? They both knew, as surely as the sun rose in the morning, that there would be war, but that was entirely beside the point.

“We’re terribly at sea, you know, we British,” said Fitzware, following the script. “I fear we haven’t a clue to the Soviet Union’s intentions regarding Poland-or the Baltics, or Turkey. The situation is complex, a powder keg ready to go up. Wouldn’t it be dreadful if the armies of Europe marched over a simple misunderstanding?”

“It must be avoided,” Szara agreed. “At all cost. You’d think we would have come to understand, in 1914, the price of ignorance.”

“Sorrowfully, the world doesn’t learn.”

“No, you’re right. It seems we are destined to repeat our mistakes.”

“Unless, of course, we have the knowledge, the information, that permits us to work these things out between diplomats-in the League of Nations, for instance.”

“Ideally, it is the answer.”

“Well,” said Fitzware, brightening, “I believe there’s still a chance, don’t you? “

“I do,” Szara said. “To me personally, the critical information at this time would concern developments in Germany. Would you agree with that?”

Fitzware did not respond immediately; simply stared as though hypnotized. He’d led himself some way down a false trail, assuming that Szara’s information concerned Soviet operations-intelligence; political or otherwise. Now he had to shift to a completely different area. Quickly, it dawned on him that what he was being offered was, on balance, even better than he’d realized. Offers of Soviet secrets were, in many cases, provocations or dangles- attempts to involve a rival service in deluding itself or revealing its own resources. One had to wear fireproof gloves in such cases. Offers of German secrets, on the other hand, coming from a Russian, would very likely be hard currency. Fitzware cleared his throat. “Emphatically,” he said.

“To me, the key to a peaceful solution of the current difficulties would be a mutual knowledge of armaments, particularly combat aircraft. What would be your view on that?”

In Fitzware’s eyes Szara glimpsed the momentary light of elation, as though an inner voice cried out, I’d dance naked on me fookin’ birthday cake! In fact, Fitzware permitted himself a civilized grunt. “Hm, well, yes, of course I agree.”

“With discretion, Mr. Fitzware, it’s entirely possible.”

An unspoken question answered: Fitzware was not in communication with the USSR, was not being drawn into the occluded maze of diplomatic initiatives achieved by intelligence means. He was in communication with Andre Szara, a Soviet journalist operating on his own. That was the meaning of the word discretion. Fitzware considered carefully; matters had reached a delicate point. “Your terms,” he said.

“I have great anxiety on the question of Palestine, particularly with the St. James’s Conference in session.”

At this, Fitzware’s triumphant mood slightly deflated. Szara could not have raised a more difficult issue. “There are easier areas in which we might work,” he said.

Szara nodded, leaving Fitzware to tread water.

“Can you be specific?” Fitzware said at last.

“Certificates of Emigration.”

“Real ones?”

“Yes.”

“Above the legal limit, of course.”

“Of course.”

“And in return?”

“Determination of the Reich’s monthly bomber production. Based on the total manufacture of the cold- process swage wire that operates certain nonelectronic aircraft controls.”

“My board of directors will want to know the reason you say ‘total.’ “

“My board of directors believes this to be the case. It is, whatever else one might say, Mr. Fitzware, a very good, a very effective, board of directors.”

Fitzware sighed in agreement. “Don’t suppose, dear boy, you’d consider taking something simple, like money.”

“No.”

“Another Cognac, then.”

“With pleasure.”

“We have a good deal of work yet to do, and I can’t promise anything. All the usual, you understand,” Fitzware said, pressing the button on the wall that summoned a waiter.

“I understand perfectly,” Szara said. He paused to finish his Cognac. “But you must understand that time is very important to us. People are dying, Great Britain needs friends, we must make it all work out somehow. If you will save lives for us, we will save lives for you. Surely that’s world peace, or damn close to it.”

“Close enough,” Fitzware said.

In the violent, changeable weather of early March, Szara and Fitzware got down to serious negotiation. “Call it what you like,” Szara was later to tell de Montfried, “but what it was was pushcart haggling.” Fitzware played all the traditional melodies: it was his board of directors that wanted something for nothing; the mandarins in Whitehall were a pack of blind fools; he, Fitzware, was entirely on Szara’s side, but making headway through the bureaucratic underbrush was unspeakably frustrating.

Much of the negotiating was done at the Brasserie Heininger. Fitzware sat with Lady Angela Hope and Voyschinkowsky and the whole crowd. Sometimes Szara joined them, other times he took one of his cafe girls out for dinner. He would meet Fitzware in the men’s WC, where they would whisper urgently back and forth, or they would go out on the sidewalk for a breath of fresh air. Once or twice they talked in a corner at the social evenings held in various apartments. Over the course of it, Szara realized that being a Jew made bargaining difficult. Fitzware was eternally proper, but there were moments when Szara thought he caught a whiff of the classical attitude: why are you people so difficult, so greedy, so stubborn?

And of course Fitzware’s board of directors tried to do to him what his own Directorate had done to Dr. Julius Baumann. Who are we really dealing with? they wanted to know. We need to have a sense of the process; where is the information coming from? More, give us more! (And why are you people so greedy?)

But Szara was like a rock. He smiled at Fitzware tolerantly, knowingly, as the Englishman went fishing for deeper information, a smile that said, We’re in the same business, my friend. Finally, Szara made a telling point: this negotiation is nothing, he admitted ruefully to Fitzware, compared to dealings with the French, who had their own Jewish communities in Beirut and Damascus. That seemed to work. Nothing, in love and business, quite like a rival to stimulate desire.

They struck a deal and shook hands.

Baumann’s figures, from 1 January 1937 through February 1939, brought an initial payment of five hundred Certificates of Emigration-up from Fitzware’s offer of two hundred, down from Szara’s demand for seven hundred. One hundred and seventy-five certificates a month would be provided as the information was exchanged thereafter. The White Paper would produce seventy-five thousand legal entries through 1944, fifteen thousand a year, one thousand two hundred and fifty a month. Szara’s delivery of intelligence from Germany would increase that number by a factor of fourteen percent. Thus the mathematics of Jewish lives, he thought.

He told himself again and again that the operation had to be run with a cold heart, told himself to accept a small victory, told himself whatever he could think of, yet he could not avoid the knowledge that his visits to the corner tabac seemed much more frequent, his ashtrays overflowed, he took more empty bottles to the garbage can in the courtyard, his bistro bills rose sharply, and he ate aspirin and splashed gallons of cold water on his eyes in the morning.

There was too much to think about: for one, unseen Soviet counterintelligence work that was meant to keep