Dark Star

“BREWER reports that SS Hauptsturmfuhrer BRUCKMANN has recently been with his regiment on divisional maneuvers in marshy, swamplike terrain near the Masurian Lakes in East Prussia.” Another pointer, Szara noted, toward the invasion of Poland, where such conditions might be encountered.

A rich, rewarding file.

He worked his way through the last of it on the afternoon of the summer solstice, the day the sun is said to pause, he thought. Pleasing, that idea. Something Russian about it. As though the universe stopped for a moment to reflect, took a day off from work. One could sense it, time slowing down: the weather light and sunny, rather aimless, a bird twittering away on a neighboring balcony, Kranov coding at his desk, humming a Russian melody, the little bell on the door of the ground-floor tabac tinkling as a customer entered.

Then the warning buzzer went off beside Kranov’s table-a danger signal operated from beneath the counter in the tabac. This was followed, a moment later, by a knock on the door at the bottom of the stairs, a door shielded by a curtain on the back wall of the shop.

Szara had absolutely no idea what to do, neither did Kranov. They both froze, sat dead still like two hares caught in a winter field. They were literally surrounded by incrimination-files, flimsies, stolen documents, and the wireless telegraph itself, with its aerial run cleverly up the unused chimney by way of the attic. There was no getting rid of anything. They could have run down the stairs and rushed out the back door, or jumped the three stories and broken their ankles, but they did neither. It was three-thirty on a bright summer afternoon and not a wisp of darkness to cover their escape.

So they sat there and presently heard a second knock, perhaps a bit more insistent than the first. Szara, not knowing what else to do, walked down the stairs and answered it. To find two Frenchmen waiting politely at the door. They were Frenchmen of a certain class, wore tan summerweight suits of a conservative cut, crisp shirts, silk ties not terribly in fashion but not terribly out. The brims of their hats were turned down at precisely the same angle. Szara found himself thinking in Russian, My God, the hats are here. The two men had a particular coloration that a Frenchman of the better sort will assume after lunch, a faint, rose-tinted blush on the cheeks which informs the knowledgeable that the beef was good and the wine not too bad. They introduced themselves and presented cards.

They were, they said, fire inspectors. They would just have a brief look around, if it wasn’t terribly inconvenient.

Fire inspectors they were not.

But Szara had to go along with the game, so he invited them in. By the time they’d climbed to the third floor, Kranov had pulled the blanket off the window and flung it over the wireless, turning it into a curious dark hump on an old table from which a wire ran up the corner of the wall and disappeared into the attic through a ragged hole in the ceiling. Kranov himself was either in a closet or under the bed in Odile’s apartment on the second floor-one of those truly inspired hiding places found amid panic-but in the event he was unseen. The Frenchmen didn’t look, they didn’t strip the blanket off the wireless, and they didn’t even bother to enter Odile’s apartment. One of them said, “So much paper in a room like this. You must be careful with your cigarettes. Perhaps a bucket of sand ought to be placed in the corner.”

They touched the brims of their hats with their forefingers and departed. Szara, his shirt soaked at the armpits, collapsed in a chair. Somewhere on the floor below he heard a bump and a curse as Kranov extricated himself from whatever cranny he’d jammed himself into. A comedy, Szara said to himself, a comedy. He pressed his palms against his temples.

Kranov, swearing under his breath, threw the blanket into a corner and flashed Goldman a disaster signal. For the next two hours messages flew back and forth, Kranov’s pencil scratching out columns of figures as he encoded responses to Goldman’s precise questions. Somewhere, Szara was certain, the French had a receiver and were taking note of all the numbers crackling through the summer air.

By the end of the exchange Szara realized that the game was not actually over, the network was not blown. Not quite. They had, evidently, been warned, probably by the Deuxieme Bureau- diplomatic and military intelligence-using agents of the Paris Prefecture of police or the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, the DST, the French equivalent of the American FBI. The warning came in two parts:

We know what you’re doing, went the first.

This was no great surprise, when Szara had a moment to think about it. The French police had always insisted, since Fouche served Napoleon, on knowing exactly what went on in their country, and most particularly in their capital. Whether they actually did anything about what they knew was treated as a very different matter-here political decisions might be involved-but they were scrupulously careful in keeping track of what went on, neighborhood by neighborhood, village by village. So their knowledge of the existence of OPAL was, finally, no great surprise.

From their point of view it did not hurt them that the Russians spied on Germany, the traditional enemy of France. They may have received, at a very high level, compensation for allowing OPAL a free hand, compensation in the form of refined intelligence product. Always, there were arrangements that did not meet the eye.

But the second part of the warning was quite serious: if you truly mean to become an ally of Germany, we may decide that your days here are numbered, since such an alliance might damage French interests, and that will not be permitted to happen. So here, gentlemen, are a pair of fire inspectors, and we send them to you in a most courteous and considerate fashion, which is to say before anything actually starts burning.

We’re sure you’ll understand.

In July, the OTTER operation ended. They would hear from Dr. Baumann no more. So that month’s exchange of information for emigration certificates was the last. Szara signaled de Montfried for a meeting, he responded immediately.

De Montfried was driven in from his country house, a chateau near Tours. He was wearing a cream-colored suit, a pale blue shirt, and a little bow tie. He carefully placed his straw hat on the marquetry table in the library, folded his hands, and looked expectantly at Szara. When told the operation was over, he covered his face with his hands, as though in great fatigue. They sat for some time without speaking. Outside it was oppressively quiet; a long, empty, summer afternoon.

Szara felt sorry for de Montfried but could find no words of consolation. What was there to say? The man had discovered himself to be rather less powerful than he’d thought. Yet, Szara realized, how little would change for him. He would present the same image to the world, would live beautifully, move easily in the upper realms of French society; the haughty Cercle Renaissance would still be the place where a library of railroad books was maintained for his pleasure. Certainly he was to be envied. He had simply found, and rather late in life, the limits of his power. Perceiving himself to be a wealthy and important man, de Montfried had attempted to exert influence on political events and, based on Szara’s understanding of this world, had succeeded. He simply did not understand how well they’d done. He simply did not understand that he’d imposed himself on a world where the word victory was hardly to be heard.

Together, he and Szara had been responsible for the distribution of one thousand three hundred and seventy-five Certificates of Emigration to Mandate Palestine. As these covered individuals and their families, and were so precious that marriages and adoptions were arranged, sometimes overnight, the number of salvaged lives was perhaps three thousand. What, Szara wondered, could he say? You bloody fool, you want to save the world-now you know what it takes to save three thousand lives! No, he could not say that. And had he said it he would have been wrong. The true price of those lives was yet to be paid and would turn out to be higher, for Szara and others, than either of them could have realized at that moment.

De Montfried dropped his hands heavily to the arms of his chair and sat back, his face collapsed with failure. “Then it’s finished,” he said.

“Yes,” Szara said.

“Can anything be done? Anything at all?”

“No.”

Szara had certainly thought about it-thought wasn’t really the word; his mind had spun endless scenarios, reached desperately for a solution, any solution at all. But to no avail.

It was Szara’s opinion that Evans had told him the truth that afternoon in the movie theater: the British services were able to confirm the figures from other sources. That meant he could not simply lie, offer numbers that would appear to be logical. They would know. Not at first-for a month or two it might