Dark Star

“

“Exactly. You’re not alone in this, of course. All the Soviet writers will take a hand-they’ll likely have a play onstage in Moscow in ninety days. Your participation was directly ordered, by the way: You’ve got Szara over there, put him to work!’ is exactly how it was said. It’s a broad effort now-they’ve brought Molotov in to negotiate with Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, in case you wondered about that. We can’t be sending a chubby little Jewish man off to deal with the Nazis, you agree?”

“Realpolitik, as you said.”

“That is the word. By the way, I suggest you pack a bag and keep it by the door. If the situation evolves the way we think it might, there’s a possibility you may be traveling on short notice.”

“On OPAL business?”

“No, no. As the journalist Szara, the voice of Russia speaking out from foreign lands. You really ought to treat yourself to a grand dinner, Andre Aronovich, I see great professional advancement in your future.”

The Molotov appointment-on the surface no more than a piece of diplomatic business during a time when there was more than an ample supply of it-induced in Paris, and evidently in other European capitals, a change of chemistry.

Andre Szara found himself doing things he didn’t quite understand but felt compelled to do anyhow. As Goldman had suggested, he prepared to travel on a moment’s notice. Climbed up on a chair, took his suitcase down from the top of the armoire, blew some of the dust off it, and decided he needed something else. His twelve-year- old suitcase, its pebbled surface a soiled ocher color with a maroon stripe, had seen hard service in his Pravda days. It was nicked and scratched and faded and made him look, he thought, like a refugee. All it needed was the knotted rope around the middle. So he went off to the luggage stores, but he didn’t really like what he found-either too fashionable or too flimsy.

He passed a custom leathergoods store one day in the seventh arrondissement-saddles and riding boots in the window-and, on the spur of the moment, went inside. The owner was a Hungarian, a no-nonsense craftsman in a smock, his hands hard and knotted from years of cutting and stitching leather. Szara explained what he wanted, a kind of portmanteau like a doctor’s bag, an old-fashioned but enduring form, made of long-wearing leather. The Hungarian nodded, produced some samples, and quoted an astonishing price. Szara agreed nonetheless. He hadn’t wanted an object so badly for a long while. Oh, and one last thing: from time to time he carried confidential business papers, and what with the sort of people one finds working in hotels these days … The Hungarian was entirely understanding and indicated that Szara was not the only customer to express such concerns. The traditional false bottom was as old as the hills, true, but when properly crafted it remained effective. A second panel would be fashioned to fit precisely on the bottom; papers could be safely stored between the two layers. “It is, sir, naturally safest if you were to have it sewn in place. Not so much for light-fingered hotel staff, you understand, for the bag will be provided with an excellent lock, but more a matter of, one might say, frontiers.” The delicate word hung in the air for a moment, then Szara made a deposit and promised to return in June.

A week later he decided that if he was to travel, he didn’t want to leave the Jean Bonotte passport in his apartment. Robberies were rare but they did occur, especially when people went away for an extended period. And from time to time the NKVD might send a couple of technicians around, just to see whatever there was to see. So he opened an account in the Bonotte name, using the passport for identification, at a Banque du Nord office on the boulevard Haussmann, then rented a safe deposit box for the passport itself. Three days later he returned, on a perfect June morning, and put an envelope holding twelve thousand francs on top of the passport. What are you doing? he asked himself. But he really didn’t know; he only knew he was uncomfortable, in some not very definable way, like a dog that howls on the eve of a tragedy. Something, somewhere, was warning him. His ancestry, perhaps. Six hundred years of Jewish life in Poland, of omens, signs, portents, instincts. His very existence proved him to be the child of generations that had survived when others didn’t, perhaps born to know when the blood was going to run. Hide money, something told him. Arm yourself, said the same voice, a few nights later. But that, for the moment, he did not do.

A strange month, that June. Everything happened. Schau-Wehrli was contacted by a group of Czech emigres who lived in the town of Saint-Denis, in the so-called Red Belt north of Paris. They were communists who’d fled when Hitler took over the remainder of Czechoslovakia in March, and the contact with OPAL was made through the clandestine apparatus of the French Communist party. The group was receiving intelligence by means of secret writing on the backs of bank envelopes, which contained receipts for funds mailed to Prague and Brno for the support of relatives. They were using an invisible ink concocted in a university chemistry laboratory. Like the classics, lemon juice and urine, application of a hot iron brought up the message. The information itself was voluminous, ranging from Wehrmacht order of battle, numbers and strengths of German units, to financial data, apparently stolen by the same bank employees who prepared the envelopes, as well as industrial information- almost all the renowned Czech machine shops were now at work on Reich war production.

This group required a great deal of attention. There were eight of them, all related by blood or marriage, and though motivated by a passionate loathing of the Nazis, they perceived their contribution as a business and knew exactly what this kind of information was worth. Three of the Saint-Denis members had intelligence experience and had created a network in Czechoslovakia, after Hitler took the Sudetenland, with the goal of supporting themselves and their families when they resettled in France. The two bank employees were the daughters of sisters, first cousins, and their husbands worked at acquiring information through friendships maintained at men’s sports clubs. Such an in-place network, already functioning efficiently, was almost too good to be true, thus the Directorate in Moscow was simultaneously greedy for the product and wary of Referat VI C counterintelligence deception. This ambivalence created a vast flow of cable traffic and exceptional demands on the time of the deputy director, Schau-Wehrli, so that Goldman eventually ordered the RAVEN network transferred to Szara’s care.

He nodded gravely when given the new assignment, but the idea of working with Nadia Tscherova did not displease him. Not at all.

At the rue Delesseux he read his way through the RAVEN file, which included Tscherova’s most recent reports in their original format: an aristocratic literary Russian printed in tiny letters, on strips of film that had been carried over the border in Odile’s shoulder pads, then developed in an attic darkroom. Previous reports had been retyped, verbatim, and filed in sequence.

Szara read with pure astonishment. After the tense aridity of Dr. Baumann and the lawyer’s precision of Valais, it was like a night at the theater. What an eye she had! Penetrating, malicious, ironic, as though Balzac were reborn as a Russian emigre in 1939 Berlin. Read serially, RAVEN’S reports worked as a novel of social commentary. Her life was made up of small roles in bad plays, intimate dinners, lively parties, and country house weekends in the Bavarian forest, with boar hunting by day and bed hopping by night.

Szara had tender feelings for this woman, even though he suspected she was a specialist in the provocation of tender feelings, and he would have expected himself to read of her never-quite-consummated liaisons intimes with a leaden heart. But it just wasn’t so. She’d told him the truth that night in her dressing room: she protected herself from the worst of it and was unmoved by what went on around her. This casual invulnerability was everywhere in her reports, and Szara found himself, above all else, amused. She had something of a man’s mind in such matters, and she characterized her fumbling, half-drunken, would-be lovers and their complicated requests with a delicate brutality that made him laugh out loud. By God, he thought, she was no better than he was.

Nor did she spare her subagents. Lara Brozina she described as writing “a kind of ghastly, melancholy verse that Germans of a certain level adore.” Brozina’s brother, Viktor Brozin, an actor in radio plays, was said to have “the head of a lion, the heart of a parakeet.” And of the balletmaster Anton Krafic she wrote that he was “sentenced every morning to live another day.” Szara could positively see them-the languid Krafic, the leonine Brozin, the terribly sensitive Brozina-amusing frauds making steady progress along the shady underside of Nazi society.

And Tscherova did not spare the details. During a weekend in a castle near the town of Traunstein, she entered a bathroom after midnight “to discover B. [that meant BREWER, Krafic] drinking champagne in the bathtub with SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Bruckmann, who was wearing a cloche hat with a veil and carmine lipstick.” What in heaven’s name, Szara wondered, had the Directorate made of this?

Referring to the file of outgoing reports he discovered the answer: Schau-Wehrli had reprocessed the material to make it palatable. Thus her dispatch covering RAVEN’S description of the jolly bath said only that