Dark Star

end, it wasn’t his fault that it didn’t work. Fortunes of war, one might say.

He began with the hospitals. Wiggins helped him-the wealthy members of the German community went here, those of lesser means went there. Szara went there. A sad, brown brick structure, according to the name a Lutheran institution, in an innocuous neighborhood away from the center of the city. In a day or two of watching he’d determined how the hospital worked. In need of coffee or something stronger, the doctors, in accordance with their standing, patronized the Vienna, a dignified restaurant and pastry shop. The orderlies, janitors, clerks, and the occasional nurse used a nearby rathskeller for the same purposes. Szara chose the rathskeller. The hospital’s day shift ended at four in the afternoon, so the productive time at the rathskeller ran for an hour or two after that. He spent three days there during the busy hours, just watching, and he spotted the loners. On day four he picked his man: sulky, homely, no longer young, with large ears and slicked-back hair, always one of the last to leave, not in a hurry to go home to a family. Szara bought him a beer and struck up a conversation. The man was a native Lithuanian, but he could speak German. Szara found out quickly why he drank alone: there was something a little evil about this man, something he covered up by use of a sneering, suggestive tone that implied there was something a little evil about everybody. Asked just what it was that he did, Szara admitted he was a dealer in paper. He bought and sold paper, he said, adding a sly glance to show the man what a smart fellow he thought he was.

The orderly, as he turned out to be, understood immediately. He knew about such matters. He even winked. This one, Szara guessed, had seen the inside of a jail, perhaps for a long time, perhaps for something very unpleasant.

And what kind of paper was the gentleman buying these days?

German paper.

Why?

Who could say. A client wanted German paper. Not from Germany, mind you, and not from Lithuania. Paper from Poland or Hungary would do. Yugoslavia was even better.

The orderly knew just the man. Old Kringen.

Szara ordered another round, the best they had, and a discussion of money ensued. A bit of bargaining. Szara pretended to be shocked, leaned on the price, didn’t gain an inch, looked grumpy, and gave in. Would old Kringen, he wanted to know, get much older?

No. He was finished, but he was taking his time about it, didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry.

Szara could understand, but his client couldn’t afford any, ah, embarrassment.

The orderly snickered, a horrible sound. Old Kringen wasn’t going anywhere. And lying where he was he didn’t need his passport, which was kept in the hospital records office. The orderly had a friend, however, and the friend would see him right. It was going to cost a little more, though.

Szara gave in on the price a second time.

And a third, visiting the rathskeller two days later. But he had what he needed. Old Kringen was a Siebenburger, from the Siebenburgen-Seven Hills-district of Romania, an area long colonized by German settlers. Szara had no idea why he’d come to Kovno, perhaps to take advantage of the emigration offer in neighboring Latvia, perhaps for other reasons. He was much older than Szara, from his photo a grumpy, hard-headed fellow, his occupation listed as swine breeder. Szara bought what he needed and, in search of privacy, found a hotel room in the tenement district that could be rented by the hour. He eradicated the birth date with lemon juice, wrote in an appropriate year for himself, smeared the page with fine dust to coat the damage to the paper, and changed the photograph, signing something illegible across the corner. Then he held it up to the light.

The new Kringen.

He had disposed of the Maltsaev papers while still in Poland; now it was the turn of the Szara papers. The walls of the tiny room were thin, and various groans and shouts to either side of him indicated that Friday night was in Kovno much as it was everywhere else. There was a woman-he imagined her as an immensely fat woman-with an enormous laugh on the other side of the wall. Something went thud and she shrieked with mirth, making whooping noises and pausing, he guessed, only to wipe her eyes. To such accompaniment, Andre Szara died. He sat on a straw mattress with a soiled sheet spread over it, his only light a candle, and scratched at whatever was biting his ankle. He’d borrowed a coffee cup from his afternoon cafe and used it as a fireplace, ripping a page at a time from his passport, setting the corner aflame, and watching the entry and exit stamps disappear as the paper curled and blackened. The red cover resisted-he had to tear it into strips and light match after match-but finally it too was dropped, its flame blue and yellow, into the cup of ashes. Farewell. He wondered at such soreness of heart, but there was no denying what he felt. It was as though Andre Szara, his raincoat and smile and a clever thing to say, had ceased to exist. Troublesome bastard just the same, Szara thought, stirred the ashes with his finger and poured them out the window into a courtyard full of cats.

A small canal ran through that part of Kovno. The NKVD badge sank like a stone. So did the Steyr.

The dock in Riga was packed with Germans-their baggage, their clocks, their dogs, and a band to play while it all marched up the gangplank. German newsreel cameramen were much in evidence, Szara kept his face averted. By a curious tribal magic he could not divine, the crowds had organized themselves into castes-the prominent and the wealthy in front, pipe-smoking farmers next, and workmen and other assorted types to the rear. Everybody seemed content with the arrangement.

His papers had received only the most cursory check-who in God’s name would want to sneak under the tent of this circus? In fact, though it did not occur to Szara, the NKVD took full advantage of the Baltic migration to infiltrate agents into Germany: such returns to the homeland had always suggested interesting possibilities to intelligence services.

Szara was fully prepared for exposure. Any determined Gestapo officer would spot the crudely altered passport, and five minutes of interrogation was all it would require for the certain knowledge that he was an imposter. He planned to admit it, long before they ever went to work on him. The Jean Bonotte passport was sewn into his jacket, the French francs hidden in the false bottom of the valise, just where a type like Bonotte, a man from Marseille, no doubt a Corsican, no doubt a criminal type, would hide them. Germany and France were legally at war, though it had not yet come to any serious fighting. Mostly talk. German diplomacy was continuing, an attempt to smooth things over with the British and the French-why should the world be set on fire over a bunch of Poles? Szara expected he would, if discovered, be interned as a citizen of France. At worst a war spent in excruciating boredom in a camp somewhere, at best exchanged for a German citizen who happened to be on the wrong side of the line when the first cannon was fired. On the bright side, a German internment camp was probably the last place in the world the NKVD would think to look for Andre Szara.

Still, he did not wish to be caught. He was no German, not even a Romanian swine-breeding German from the Seven Hills, and he did not wish to be beaten up by this crowd. There was a deep and patient anger in them. For the newsreel cameras they were glad to be “going home,” but among themselves they promised that they would soon enough be “going back.” At which time, evidently, certain scores would be definitively settled. And worst of all, he knew, if they had cause to single him out and concentrate on his features, they were not above having a look to see if he were a Jew. No, he did not wish to be caught, and he had determined to avoid direct contact in every possible way.

To this end he played the part of a man ruined by sorrow, a victim of anti-German hostility. Practiced saying a single sentence in the sort of Volksdeutsch accent common to a man like Kringen: “They took … everything.” He had to use it almost immediately. A burly fellow, standing next to him on the dock, wanted to strike up a conversation and offered a greeting. Szara stared at him, as though he were intruding on a world of private anguish, and delivered his line. It worked. As Szara watched, the man’s expression went from surprise to pained sympathy, then tightened with anger. Szara bit his lip; he could not say any more without losing control. He turned his face away, and the man laid a great paw of a hand on his shoulder, the honest human warmth of the gesture very nearly shaming him into real tears.

A bright day. A calm sea.

Life aboard the passenger steamer was tightly organized. There were numerous officials in attendance but they seemed to Szara benign, meant to ease the transition of the emigrants into German life. He was processed-a matter of saying yes and no-given a temporary identity card, and told to report to the proper authorities wherever he settled and permanent residence documents would be provided at that time. Had he any notion of where he wished to live? Family in Germany? Friends? Szara hid behind his catastrophe. “Don’t worry, old fellow, you’re in