Dark Star

“My God, the Jews in Poland are living in the ninth century. Do you know? They’re … when the Hasid hear of the possible invasion they dance to show their joy-the worse it gets, the more they are certain that Messiah is coming. Meanwhile, it’s already started, the Poles themselves have started it. No pogroms just yet but beatings and knifings-the gangs are running free in Warsaw.” He glared angrily at Szara. His face was twisted with pain but, at the same moment, he was an important man who had the right to demand explanations.

“I was born in Poland,” Szara said. “I know what it’s like.”

“But why is he alive, this man, this Adolf Hitler? Why is he permitted to live? ” He folded the newspaper and put it down on a small marquetry table. The club’s dinner hour was approaching and Szara could smell roasting beef.

“I don’t know.”

“Can nothing be done?”

Szara was silent.

“An organization like yours, its capacities, resources for such things … I don’t understand.”

Szara opened his briefcase and passed the stack of certificates to de Montfried, who held them in his hands and stared at them vacantly. “I have another engagement,” Szara said, as gently as he could.

De Montfried shook his head to clear it. “Forgive me,” he said. “What I feel is like an illness. It will not leave me.”

“I know,” Szara said, rising to leave.

Back to the rue du Cherche-Midi. Briefcases exchanged. Szara headed out into the windy night and slowly made his way to the rue Delesseux house. The Directorate, he thought, would want physical possession of the pamphlets, would have a special courier bring them to Moscow. Still, he believed it was best to transmit the contents and the WEISS code name as soon as possible. He began to switch from Metro line to Metro line, now following procedures closely; rue Delesseux was not to be approached by a direct route. At the La Chapelle station there was fighting. Perhaps communists and fascists, it was hard to tell. A crowd of workingmen in caps, all mixed together, three or four of them down on the floor with blood on their faces, two holding a third against a wall while a fourth worked on him. The motorman didn’t stop. The train rolled slowly through the station with white faces staring from the windows. They could hear the shouts and curses over the sound of the train, and one man was hurled against the side of the moving car and bounced hard, the shock felt by the passengers as he hit-several people gasped or cried out when it happened. Then the train returned to the darkness of the tunnel.

Schau-Wehrli was at work in the rue Delesseux. Szara handed her a pamphlet and stood quietly while she looked it over. “Yes,” she said reflectively, “everything points to it now. My commissary people in Berlin, who work for the German railway system, say the same thing. They’ve heard about requests for a traffic analysis on the lines that go to the Polish border. That means troop trains.”

“When?”

“Nobody knows.”

“Is it a bluff?”

“No, I think not. It most certainly was with the Czechs, but not now. The Reich industrial production is meeting quotas, the war machinery is just about in place.”

“And what will we do?”

“Stalin alone knows that,” Schau-Wehrli said. “And he doesn’t tell me.”

It was well after midnight when Szara finally got home. He’d never managed to eat anything, but hunger was long gone, replaced by cigarettes and adrenaline. Now he just felt cold and grimy and used up. There was a large tin bathtub in the kitchen, and he turned on the hot water tap to see what might be left. Yes, there was one good thing in the world that night, a bath, and he would have it. He stripped off his clothes and threw them on a chair, poured himself a glass of red wine, and turned the radio dial until he found some American jazz. When the tub was ready he climbed in and settled back, drank a little wine, rested the glass on the broad part of the rim, and closed his eyes.

Poor de Montfried, he thought. All that money, yet he could do little, at least that was the way he saw it. The man had virtually humiliated him in the library, had been so angry that the certificates, bought at a cost he could not imagine, seemed a small and insufficient gesture. Oh the rich. Would any of the cafe girls still be about? No, that was hopeless. There was one he could telephone-full of understanding, that one, she loved what she called adventures of the night. No, he thought, sleep. The music ended and a man began to announce the news. Szara reached for the dial, his arm dripping water on the kitchen floor, but the radio was just a little too far. So he had to hear that the miners were on strike in Lille, that the minister of finance had denied all allegations, that the little girl missing in the Vosges had been found, that Madrid continued to hold out, factions fighting each other in the besieged city. Stalin had issued an important political statement, referring to the current crisis as “the Second Imperialistic War.” He stated he would “not allow Soviet Russia to be drawn into conflicts by warmongers who are accustomed to having others pull their chestnuts out of the fire,” and attacked those nations who wanted “to arouse Soviet anger against Germany, to poison the atmosphere, and to provoke a conflict with Germany without visible reason.”

Then the music returned, saxophones and trumpets from a dance hall on Long Island. Szara rested his head against the tub and closed his eyes. Stalin claimed that England and France were plotting against him, maneuvering him to fight Hitler while they waited to pounce on a weakened winner. Perhaps they were. Aristocrats ran those countries, intellectuals and ministers of state, graduates of the best universities. Stalin and Hitler were scum from the gutters of Europe who’d managed to float to the top. Well, one way or another, there would be war. And he would be killed. Marta Haecht as well. The Baumanns, Kranov, the operative who’d driven him away from Wittenau on Kristallnacht, Valais, Schau-Wehrli, Goldman, Nadia Tscherova. All of them. The bath was cooling much too fast. He pulled the plug and let some of it gurgle out, then added more hot water and lay back in the stream.

In London, on the fourth floor at 54 Broadway-supposedly the headquarters of the Minimaz Fire Extinguisher Company-MI6 officers analyzed the CURATE product, packaged it alongside information from a variety of other sources, then shipped it off to intelligence consumers in quiet little offices all over town. It traveled by car and bicycle, by messenger and pneumatic tube, sometimes down long, damp corridors, sometimes to paneled rooms warmed by log fires. The product came recommended. Confirming data on German swage wire manufacture was independently available, and German bomber production numbers were further supported by factory orders, in Britain itself, for noninterference technology that protected aviation spark plugs, and by engineers and businessmen who had legitimate associations with German industry. The material arrived, for example, at the Industrial Intelligence Center, which played the key role in analyzing Germany’s ability to fight a war. The center had become quite important and was connected to the Joint Planning subcommittee, the Joint Intelligence subcommittee, the Economic Pressure on Germany subcommittee, and the Air Targets committee.

The CURATE story also floated upwards, sometimes unofficially, into the precincts of Whitehall and the Foreign Office, and from there it wandered even further. There was always somebody else who really ought to hear about it; knowledge was power, and people liked to be known to have secret information because it made them seem important: secret, but not secret from them. Simultaneously, in a very different part of the civil service, the bureaux that dealt in colonial affairs had been stirred up like hornet’s nests when the espionage types had come poaching on their territory. British Mandate Palestine was their domain and-love the Arabs or love the Jews or hate them all-the brawl over legitimate Certificates of Emigration had been bloody and fierce. And it was discussed.

So people knew about it, this CURATE, a Russian in Paris feeding the odd morsel to the British lion in return for a subtle shift of the paw. And some of the people who knew about it were, privately, rather indignant. To begin with, their hearts’ passion lay elsewhere. From the time of their undergraduate days at Cambridge they’d thrown in their lot with the idealists, the progressives, the men of conscience and good will at the Kremlin. Precisely who did the work it would be difficult to say-Anthony Blunt or Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean or H. A. R. Philby, or others unknown; they all traded on the information exchanges of the intelligence and diplomatic bureaucracies-but one or more of them thought it worthwhile to let somebody know, and so they did. Spoken over supper at a private club or left in a dead-drop in a cemetery wall, the code name CURATE and the very general outline of what it meant began to move east.

It did not move alone-many other facts and all sorts of gossip needed to be passed along-and it did not move with great speed; alarms were not raised. But it did, in time, reach Moscow and, a little later, the proper office in the appropriate department. It fell among cautious people, survivors of the purge who lived in a dangerous,