Dark Star

organization there is always a chance, we can do almost anything. “If you are taken,” Abramov had said, “you must cling to hope as a sailor cast into the sea clings to a spar.”

Szara closed his eyes and rested his head against the cold cement wall. No, Sergei Jakobovich-he addressed Abramov’s departed soul-not this time. Hope, despair-all such fancies were now entirely beside the point. He’d at last made the error that could not be overcome. Had not sufficiently understood the capability, the magnitude, of the German security machine-not until he’d seen the long sheet of yellow teletype paper with the name KRINGEN in the left-hand column. The identity that had been purchased in Paris would not hold up, not once they went to work on it, it wouldn’t. When he worked his way back through the last two years of his life-Khelidze, Renate Braun, Bloch, Abramov, the OPAL network, then de Montfried and the British, finally the assignment in eastern Poland-he saw himself as a man willing to do almost anything in order to stay alive. He’d not done badly, had lasted a long time compared to the others-the intellectuals, Old Bolsheviks, Jews, foreign communists. Had outlived almost all of them, twisted and turned, lied and schemed, survived.

But it was not meant to be, and this he faced.

He suspected that what he’d almost done to himself in the Pripet marsh, the day he’d crossed into Lithuania, had been a shadow of the future-somehow he’d sensed that he was living out his last few days. But he had slightly misread the omen; he wasn’t done with life, that wasn’t it. Life was done with him. And in his deepest heart, he wondered if he hadn’t come to Berlin knowing that he would find a way to Tscherova, an unconscious appeal to fate to let him passionately love a woman once more before he left the earth. If so, his wish had been granted, and now it was time to accept the inevitable cost of the bargain. He marveled at the coldness of his heart. The time of dreams and delusions was ended; he saw the world, and himself, in perfect clarity. Certain obligations remained-to protect Tscherova, principally-but there were others, and he would now plan how to sacrifice himself in the most effective way. How late, he thought, strength comes to some people.

The interrogator was called Hartmann. An SS Obersturmbannfuhrer, a major, a well-fed man with a placid face and small, carefully groomed hands, who addressed him politely. Hartmann was nothing more, Szara realized, than the intake valve of an information machine. He existed to acquire facts-perhaps a lawyer, or some functionary in a judicial system, before being called to his present duty by the Nazi party. He did not process the information. That happened elsewhere, far above him in the hierarchy, where an administrative panel, a directorate, made decisions.

To begin with, Hartmann pointed out that if they were straightforward with each other, all would turn out for the best. He implied, without actually saying it, that his job was best done if Szara did not have to be taken to the cellars; they were, together, men who could proceed with their obligations-Szara’s to confess, Hartmann’s to certify the quality of that confession-while remaining innocent of such measures. That sort of thing was for another sort of person.

Szara did not resist. He cooperated. By the afternoon of the first day he had to admit he was not Jean Bonotte. Hartmann had provided paper and pencil and asked him to write a biography, beginning with his childhood in Marseille-names and places, schools and teachers. “I cannot write such a biography because I did not grow up there,” Szara said. “And I am not named Jean Bonotte.”

“This passport is a forgery, then,” Hartmann said.

“Yes, Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer, it is.”

“Then will you tell me your true name? And your nationality, if it is not French?”

“I will,” Szara said. “My real name is Andre Aronovich Szara. As for my nationality, I was born a Polish Jew when Poland was a province of Russia. By 1918 I was living in Odessa, and so remained a citizen of the Soviet Union, eventually becoming a journalist for the newspaper Prcwda.”

Hartmann was puzzled. “Is it a newspaper that sent you to Berlin? With false identity? I wonder if you could clarify this.”

“I can. I obtained the false identity myself, and the newspaper has known nothing of me since I left Poland.”

Hartmann paused. Szara sensed discomfort. The interrogator took refuge in the notes he’d made to himself to guide him in the interview, but they were all wrong now. His Frenchman, trapped on the wrong side of the lines, had disappeared. In his place stood a Russian, a rather prominent one he suspected, captured while in flight from the USSR, Germany’s nominal ally. Hartmann cleared his throat, for him a gesture of irritation. He had to question his competence to work in such areas. All sorts of intimidating issues suddenly made themselves felt; the prisoner’s culpability under German law, possible extradition, others he could not even imagine. All of them grave, difficult, complex, and ultimately to be resolved in a political, not a legal, context. This was obviously not going to be a case he would be allowed to pursue; he could put himself in a good light only by presenting to his superiors the most precise information. Hartmann took up his pen and turned to a fresh page in his writing tablet. “Slowly and clearly,” he said, “and beginning with your surname, you will please spell.”

It rained hard that night, for Szara a blessing. It reminded him that there was a world outside his cell, and the steady splash on the high, grilled window muted, if it could not quite obliterate, the sounds of a Gestapo prison. His plan was successfully launched; Hartmann had ended the interview with the utmost correctness. Szara suspected they would not see each other again, and in the event this turned out to be the case.

Szara’s strategy of revelation without defiance had proceeded from one basic assumption: he could not be sure he would withstand what was euphemistically known as intensive interrogation. He feared he would first give up the existence of the OPAL network, and that would lead inexorably to the exposure of Nadia Tscherova. He had to avoid the cellars in Berlin and then, if it came to that, the cellars in Moscow.

The conventions of the German character first specified efficiency-thus they’d arrested him. A crucial component of that efficiency, however, was thoroughness, and this he perceived to be his possible ally. Now that they knew who he was, he expected they would want from him all they could get, essentially political intelligence. Who did he know? What were they like? How, precisely, was the political line of Pravda determined? What personalities were at play? For his part, he meant to make use of what he called the Scheherazade defense: as long as he intrigued them with stories, they would not execute him or send him back to Russia. In the normal interrogation process, where every statement raised questions, a cooperative subject might continue the discussion for a period of months. Szara’s hope lay in the fact that Germany was at war, and in war it was a given that unpredictable things happened, including catastrophes of all sorts-invasions, raids, bombings, mass escapes, even negotiations and peace. Any or all of it might be to his advantage. And if they should reach the end of the line with him and determine to ship him back to Russia, he then had one last move to make: he could contrive to take his life by attempted escape, from the Germans or the Russians, whoever gave him the barest edge of an opportunity.

It wasn’t much of a plan, he knew, but in his circumstances it was all he had. It might have worked. He was never to find out, because there was one convention of the German character he’d neglected to include in the equation.

They came for him after midnight, when the sounds of the Gestapo interrogations were impossible not to hear and sleep was out of the question. First there was the clang of a gate, then approaching footsteps in the corridor. Szara gripped the frame of the cot with all the strength in his hands, but the footsteps halted outside his cell and the door burst open. Two SS troopers stood in the spill of strong light, recruiting poster SS, tall and fair and sallow in their black uniforms. Then it was “Raus!” and all that, toothy grins, the silent sharing of the great joke that only they understood. Holding his beltless pants up with his hands, he hurried along the corridor as best he could, shuffling because they’d taken his shoelaces as well. His mind had gone numb, yet his senses seemed to operate independently: the troopers smelled like a gymnasium, a man in an isolation cell moaned as though in a dream. They went down several flights of stairs, at last arriving in a brightly lit office filled with desks, the walls covered with beautifully drawn charts and lists.

A little gnome of a man waited for him at a railing; in his hands a wet hat dripped onto the linoleum. Eyes down, Szara thought he saw an edge of pajama bottom peeking out from one leg of the man’s trousers. “Ah,” said the man in a soft voice. “It’s Herr Szara.”

“You’ll have to sign for him,” said the taller of the two SS.

“It’s what I do,” said the man, almost to himself.

Papers were produced and laid on a desk. The gnome carefully unscrewed the cap of a silver fountain pen. He began to scratch a well-flourished signature at the bottom of each page. “Have we all his things?” he asked as he