As to where Von Polanyi’s information would go next, that depended on what he provided, and it was clearly Szara’s choice to make: Geneva was rich with possibilities. Carefully, quietly, Szara built an inventory of candidates. The obvious-French and British political officers-and the not so obvious. Szara made contact with organizations interested in progressive political causes. He used the library, read old newspapers, identified journalists with strong contacts within the diplomatic community. Through one of de Montfried’s attorneys, he managed an introduction to one of them, now retired, who had written about the Swiss political world with extraordinary insight. He took a vanilla cake and a bottle of kirschwasser to the man’s home and they spent the afternoon in conversation. Yes, information was considered a crucial resource in Switzerland, a good deal of buying and selling went on. A certain Swedish businessman, a French oil executive, a professor of linguistics at the university. On hearing the last, Szara feigned surprise. The old journalist grinned. “A terrific communist in the old days, but I guess he saw the light.” The look on the man’s face- cynical, amused-told Szara everything he needed to know. He’d turned up the corner of a network.
Paris fell on 14 June.
Szara saw the famous photograph of the Wehrmacht marching past the Arc de Triomphe. He had hoped desperately for a miracle, a British miracle, an American miracle, but none had been performed. Because all eyes were on France, the USSR chose that moment for the military occupation of Latvia and Estonia, then took the Romanian territories of Bessarabia and the northern Bukovna on the twenty-sixth. Szara mailed a postal card to a drapery shop in Frankfurt. “My wife and I plan to return home on the third of July. Can new curtains be ready by that date? ” Three weeks later, a letter to M. Jean Bonotte, Poste Restante, Thonon. In response to his inquiry, Herr Doktor Bruckmann would arrive at the Hotel Belvedere on the tenth of September. Patients wishing to consult with the doctor on neurological disorders should arrange appointments by reference from their local physicians.
“Dear, dear,” said the little man who’d driven him to the inn near Altenburg, “you seem to have had a difficult time of it.”
Szara fingered the scar, now turned white. “It could have been worse,” he said.
“We assume you are ready to cooperate with us.” “I’m at your pleasure,” Szara said, and outlined how he wished to proceed, particularly in the matter of couriers. He implied that a certain individual in Berlin would regularly perform such services, but here he was deceptive. That individual, Szara swore to himself, once in Switzerland, would never leave it, not as long as war continued.
“As you wish,” said the little man, accepting his choice. “Now, I believe this will show our sincerity.” He handed Szara a brown envelope. “Oh yes, one thing more. On turning over this document, Herbert asked me to say ‘Now lovers quarrel.’ I trust it makes some kind of sense to you.”
Until Szara, later that night, opened the envelope in his kitchen, it did not.
Then it took his breath away. In his hand he had two pages of single-spaced typewriting on plain white paper of indifferent quality. The first item concerned a Berlin photography studio on the Unter den Linden owned by a man named Hoffmann. Herr Hoffmann was Hitler’s favorite photographer; he took portraits of Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress, and other Nazi dignitaries. The month before Hitler attacked Poland, Hoffmann had used a large map of that country to decorate his shop window. In April of 1940, he’d displayed maps of Holland and Scandinavia. Just one week before, the third of September, maps of the Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the Baltic countries had been posted.
The second item stated that the German transportation ministry had been ordered to make a study of east- west rail capacities leading to Germany’s eastern border-the ministry had been told to assume that troops in excess of one million, plus artillery and horses, would have to be moved east.
The third item cited aviation and maintenance requests for Luftwaffe reconnaissance aircraft operating over Liepaja, Tallinn, the island of Oesel, and the Moonzund archipelago-all Soviet defense lines in the Baltic-as well as the road network leading to Odessa, on the Black Sea.
The fourth item described the German General Staff’s planning process for replacing border guard units in the region of the river Bug, the dividing line in Poland between German and Russian forces, with attack divisions. A study of evacuation plans for civilians in the area had been accelerated. Military staff was to replace civilian directors of all hospitals.
The final item stated simply that the operation was called Barbarossa: a full-scale attack on the Soviet Union, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, to take place in the late spring or early summer of 1941.
Szara had to go outside, into the air. He opened his front door cautiously, but all the houses on the street were dark, everyone was asleep. It was an overcast, warmish night, terribly still. He felt as though he’d been caught in amber, as though time had stopped dead on a wooded hill above Geneva. He had never in his life wanted so badly to walk, he realized. But he couldn’t. He could not. To walk aimlessly up and down these empty streets would be to call attention to himself, and the paper lying on the yellow oilcloth that covered his kitchen table forbade such a thing; now more than ever he could not compromise the gentility that made him invisible. Just walking-it seemed so harmless. In fact he wanted more, much more. He wanted what he thought of as
He did what had to be done. The linguistics professor was a short, angry man with a few brilliantined hairs pasted over a pink scalp. Szara understood him very well-combative, cocksure, vain, bathed in the arrogance of his theories. And, to be truthful, rather clever in his own devious way. The Communist party had always drawn such types, conferring importance on those denied it by their fellow humans. The man’s eyes glittered with a sense of mission, and he was, Szara had to admit, terribly sly about what he was doing.
But Szara was the inheritor of a great tradition; Abramov’s heir and Bloch’s, one could trace it all the way back to the Okhrana officer and beyond, and he was more than a match for the professor. Szara wandered through the stacks of the university library, tracking his prey. Then he missed it the first time, but not the second. Just a slick little brush pass with a fortyish woman in a dark knit suit. Szara, nudging a Victorian study of phonemes out of his field of vision, saw a matchbox change hands, and that was enough for him. When the professor next visited his office, an envelope had been slipped beneath his door. Von Polanyi’s second installment was scheduled for October, and Szara knew there would be more to come. He took a rather malicious glee in all the variations he would visit upon the professor. Perhaps next time he would mail him a key to a storage locker.
But the professor would do his job, of that Szara was certain. Passing the information up the network until some Kranov would tap out code on his wireless in the dead of night. So it would come to Moscow. In Szara’s imagination, a welcome was prepared for the Wehrmacht: Red Army units brought secretly to the border in freight cars and covered trucks, tank traps dug in the dark hours when the Luftwaffe was blind, pillboxes reinforced, concrete poured. Until the lesser demon broke the greater, and the world could go on about its business.
18 October 1940.
Andre Szara stood among the autumn-colored trees of a forest in the Alpine foothills and watched the waters of the Rhine curl white at the pillars of a bridge. On the other side of the river he could see the German village of Hohentengen; the red and black flag moved lightly in the wind above the town hall. A pretty place, at the southern extremity of the Black Forest, and quiet. On Szara’s side of the Rhine, a few miles away, was the Swiss village of
