The weapon snapped, something fizzed-it was as though he sensed the path of the bullet-and he could smell burned air.
Maltsaev was furious. “Oh you didn’t,” he said. He started to take one hand out of his pocket but Szara reached over and grasped him by the wrist. He was curiously weak; Szara held him easily. Maltsaev bit his lip and scowled with discomfort. Szara shot him again and he sat down abruptly, his weight falling back against an iron rung of the stairway. He died a few seconds later. By then he just looked melancholy.
Szara stared at the weapon. It was the blued-steel Steyr that Vainshtok had carried. Why had he given it up? Why had he not defended himself? Szara found the safety device, then put the automatic in the side pocket of his jacket. He listened hard, but there was no running, no commotion above him. The shots had not been heard. Perhaps the powder load in the bullet was minimal; he really didn’t understand. He pulled Maltsaev’s hand free of his pocket and went looking for the weapon he knew was there, but he didn’t find it. Nor could he find it anywhere else. That meant Maltsaev’s crew, perhaps the same one that had finished Abramov, was nearby. Maltsaev wasn’t a murderer, Szara reminded himself, he was an arranger of murders. Szara found a car key in an inside pocket and a set of identity papers. Running his hands down the overcoat, he discovered a flap sewn into the sleeve that held a sword and shield NKVD pin in a soft pigskin bag with a drawstring. There was also a wallet with a thick sheaf of roubles, zlotys, and reichsmarks. Szara put everything in his own pockets. Next he grabbed Maltsaev’s ankles and pulled. It was difficult, he had to use all his strength, but once he got the body moving, the smooth wool overcoat slid easily across the floor. It took at least two minutes to drag Maltsaev down the hall and into the unlocked room, and the trip left a long maroon streak on the tile. The lock on the door was simple enough, it worked on a lever. Szara thumbed it down and pulled the door closed until he heard it click.
At the foot of the iron stairway he paused, retrieved both ejected cartridges, then climbed, shoes in one hand, gun in the other; but there was no one waiting for him on the landing and he dropped the weapon into his pocket and hopped on one foot to put his shoes back on. The lobby was as he’d left it; people milling about, affable confusion, a line working its way up to the table. “Well,” said the Spanish official who’d shared the sunporch with him, “your friend has finally made it out of here. It’s given us all hope.”
“He’s known to be clever-and lucky,” Szara said, clearly a bit envious.
The Spaniard sighed. “I’ll be going back to Warsaw eventually. As you know, Germany is exceptionally sympathetic to our neutrality. Perhaps it won’t be too long.”
“I hope not,” Szara said. “Such disorder helps nothing.”
“How true.”
“Perhaps we’ll dine together this evening.”
The Spaniard inclined his head, an informal bow of acceptance.
Szara used a wall mirror to assure himself that the observer was still at the table, then avoided his line of vision by taking a back door, walking behind the kitchen area where the two young Polish women were preparing beets over a wooden tub, saving every last peeling in a metal pan. They both smiled at him as he went past, even the shy one. He entered the sunporch by a side door and looked out through the screen. There were two black Pobedas parked in the gravel semicircle. One was coated with road dust and grime, the other spattered with mud and clay. Recalling what Maltsaev had said about Soviet armor on the roads, he decided to try the latter. He picked up his valise, took a deep breath, and walked off the sunporch onto the lawn. He nodded to a few diplomats strolling along the paths, then slid into the front seat of the muddy Pobeda as though it were the most natural thing in the world for him to do.
The car’s interior smelled strongly: of pomade, sweat, cigarettes, vodka, mildewed upholstery, and gasoline. He put Maltsaev’s key into the ignition and turned it, the starter motor whined, died, whined on a higher note, produced a single firing of the engine, sank to a whisper, suddenly fired twice, and at last brought the engine to sputtering life. He wrestled with the gearshift-mounted on the steering column-until it went into one of the gears. Through the streaked panel window on his left he could see the diplomats staring at him: who was he to simply climb into a car, valise in hand, and drive away? One of them started to walk toward him. Szara lifted the clutch pedal-the car lurched forward a foot and stalled. The diplomat, a handsome, dignified man with gray wings of hair that rested on his ears, had raised an interrogatory index finger-
There wasn’t a road sign left in Poland-Vyborg’s colleagues had seen to that-only a maze of dirt tracks that ran off every which way. But he had walked the route to Lvov and that was the one direction he knew he had to avoid. Maltsaev’s assistants could well be waiting for him there, by the side of the road, just conveniently out of sight of the diplomatic corps at the spa.
There was a much-used map of eastern Poland on the floor of the car, and the sun, at six-twenty on an afternoon in late September, was low in the sky. That was west. Szara kept the sun on his left side and headed north, managing some ten miles before dusk overtook him. Then he backed off what he believed to be a main road onto a smaller road and turned off the engine. Next he took a careful inventory: he had plenty of money, no water, no food, the best part of a tank of gasoline, six rounds in the Steyr. It was, he now saw, an M12, thus a Steyr- Hahn-Steyr-with-hammer-stamped o8 on the left-hand surface of the slide, which had something to do with the absorption of the Austrian army into the German army after 1938, a mechanical retooling. Exactly what this was he could not remember; a rue Delesseux circular unread, who cared about guns? He also had three sets of identity papers: his own, Maltsaev’s, and the Jean Bonotte passport in the false bottom of the valise, bound with a rubber band to a packet of French francs and a card with telephone numbers written on it. In the trunk of the Pobeda was a full can of gasoline and a blanket.
Enough to start a new life. Many had started with less.
“The wind and the stars.” Whose line was that? He didn’t remember. But it perfectly described the night. He sat on the blanket at the foot of an ancient linden tree-the road was lined with them, creating an avenue that no doubt wound its way to some grand Polish estate up the road. The night grew chilly, but if he pulled his jacket tight he stayed warm enough.
He had thought he’d sleep in the car, but the smell of it sickened him. Not that he wasn’t used to what he took to be its various elements. Nothing new about vodka or cigarettes, his own sweat was no better than anyone else’s, and all Russian cars reeked of gasoline and damp upholstery. Something else. To do with what they’d used the Pobeda for, perhaps a lingering scent of the taken, the captured. Or maybe it was the smell of executioners. Russian folklore had it that murder left its trace: the vertical line at the side of the mouth, the mark of the killer. Might it not change the way a man smelled?
A former Szara would have turned such light on himself, but not now. He had done what he had to do. “Let those who can, do what they must.” Thus Vainshtok had saved his life. Because he would not, or could not, use the weapon himself? No, that was absurd. Szara refused to believe it. There was some other reason, and he had to face the possibility that he might never find out what it was.
There was a great deal he didn’t understand. Why, for instance, had they sent Maltsaev after him? Because he’d disappeared from view for several days? Had they found out what he’d done in Paris with the British? No, that was impossible. Of all the world’s secret services it was the British the Soviets truly feared. Their counter- intelligence array-Scotland Yard, MI 5-was extremely efficient; Comintern agents trying to enter Great Britain under false identities were time and again discovered, for the British maintained and used their files to great effect. As for MI6, it was, in its way, a particularly cold-blooded and predatory organization. A consequence of the British national character, with its appetite for both education and adventure, a nasty combination when manifested in an intelligence service. Szara could not imagine the problem lay in that direction. Fitzware, for all his peculiarities of style, was a serious, a scrupulous officer. The courier, then, Evans. No. It was something else, something in Russia, something to do with Abramov, Bloch, the Jewish
