to send you to Spain, and you have to go. How’s your Spanish?”
“Nonexistent.”
“Fine. This will give you objectivity.”
Gone, two years later. Worked to death in a gold mine.
The girl snuggled up to him and whispered Turkish words in his ear. Ran a finger, slow and gentle, back and forth across his lips. “Mmm?” Then she slid from his lap, pale and succulent beneath the gauze, and walked, if that was the word for it, toward the staircase, looking back at him over her shoulder. But his smile of regret told her what she needed to know, and she went off to another room.
Serebin closed his eyes. Where Tamara was waiting for him. He was never going to write stories in the white room. Eight years earlier, it was she who had left him. She’d become involved with somebody else but that wasn’t the whole story and maybe he was, at the time, not all that sorry when it happened. But she was still in the world, somewhere, and that was different. That was different. He heard the sound of an automobile, the engine stuttering and grumbling, somewhere nearby. It idled for a moment, then died.
A few minutes later, the madam appeared at his side. “Your friend is waiting for you,” she said. “Upstairs. The door is marked number four.” No more the lost soul. Business now.
At the top of the stairs, a long, crooked corridor, like a passageway in a dream. Serebin peered at the numbers in the darkness-behind one of the doors somebody, from the sound of it, was having the time of his life- and found Room 4 at the very end. He waited for a moment, then entered. The room was heavily draped and carpeted, with mirrors on the walls alongside colorful drawings, lavishly obscene, of the house specialties. There was a large bed, a divan, and an ottoman covered in green velvet. Bastien was sitting on the ottoman, in the process of lighting a cigar.
Serebin sat on the divan. He could hear music below, the horn mournful and plaintive. From Bastien, a sigh. “You shouldn’t do this, you know.”
“Yes, I know.”
“It always ends badly, one way or another.”
Serebin nodded.
“Not money, is it?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. What then?”
“Somebody told me what I already knew, that I had to get in or get out.”
“‘Get out’ means what?”
“Oh, Geneva, perhaps. Somewhere safe.”
Bastien spread his hands, cigar between two fingers. “What’s wrong with Geneva? Courteous people, the food is good. Quite a stylish crowd there, now, they’d be glad to have you. I’m sure you hate fascism, as only a poet can. A place like Geneva, you could hate it from dawn to dusk and never get your door smashed in.”
“Not to be.” Serebin smiled. “And you’re not in Geneva.”
Bastien laughed, a low rumble. “Not yet.”
“Well…”
For a few moments Bastien let the silence gather, then leaned forward and said, in a different sort of voice, “Why now, Monsieur Serebin?”
That he could not answer.
“Surely they’ve recruited you.”
“Oh yes.”
Bastien waited.
“It goes on all the time. Six months after I settled in Paris, I was approached by a French lawyer-would I consider going back to Russia? Then, after the occupation, a German officer, an intellectual who’d published a biography of Rilke. ‘The Nazis are vulgar, but Germany wants to save the world from Bolshevism.’ On and on, one after the other. Of course, you aren’t always sure, it can be very oblique.” Serebin paused a moment. “Or not. There was a British woman-this was in Paris, in the spring of ’39-some sort of aristocrat. She was direct-dinner in a private room at Fouquet, came right out and asked. And it didn’t stop there, she said she could be ‘very naughty,’ if I liked that sort of thing.”
“Lady Angela Hope.”
“You know.”
“Everybody knows. She’d recruit God.”
“Well, I declined.”
Bastien was amused, some irony afoot that Serebin didn’t understand, at first, but then, a moment later, he realized precisely what the smile meant: that was Britain, so is this. “Sometimes it doesn’t happen right away,” Bastien said. “Takes-a few turns of the world.”
Serebin wondered if he meant time or politics. Maybe both.
“People who trust you will get hurt,” Bastien said. “Is a dead Hitler worth it?”
“Probably.”
They were silent for a time. Somebody was singing, downstairs, somebody drunk, who knew the words to the song the musicians were playing.
“I don’t worry about your heart, Ilya. I worry about your stomach.”
Holding a cupped hand beneath the gray ash on the cigar, Bastien walked over to a table beside the bed and took an ashtray from the drawer. Then he settled back down on the ottoman and leaned forward, elbows on knees. “So now,” he said, “we will put you to work.”
The train rattled along through the brown hills, the sky vast and blue and, to his eyes, ancient. They had talked for a long time, in Room 4, the life of the Club Xalaphia all around them; banging doors, a woman’s laughter, a heavy tread in the corridor. “I will tell you some truth,” the man on the ottoman said. “My real name is Janos Polanyi, actually von Polanyi de Nemeszvar-very old Magyar nobility. I was formerly Count Polanyi, formerly a diplomat at the Hungarian legation in Paris. I got into difficulties, couldn’t get out, and came here. A fugitive, more or less. Now, for you to know this could be dangerous to me, but then, I intend to be dangerous to you, perhaps lethal, so a little parity is in order. Also, I don’t want you hearing it from someone else.”
“Can one be a former count?”
“Oh, one can be anything.”
“And the Emniyet, do they know you’re here?”
“They know, but they choose not to notice, for the moment, and I’m careful to do nothing within their borders.”
“What about, well, what we’re doing here?”
“This is nothing.”
Polanyi, then. With a few questions, he’d led Serebin back through his life: his mother, fled from Paris to Mexico City in 1940, now waiting for a visa to the United States. His younger brother, fourteen years his junior, always a stranger to him and everybody else, a cosmetics executive in South Africa, married to a local woman, with two little girls. His father, returning to the army in 1914, taken prisoner, it was reported, during the Brusilov offensive in the Volhynia in 1916, but never heard from again. “Too brave to live through a war,” his aunt said. Thus the history of the Family Serebin-life in their corner of the world spinning faster and faster until the family simply exploded, coming to earth here and there, oceans between them.
As for his mother’s sister, Malya Mikhelson, a lifelong chekist. Her last letter postmarked Brussels, but that meant nothing.
“The INO, one would assume.” Inostranny Otdel, the foreign department of the secret services. “Jews and intellectuals, Hungarians, foreigners. Not in the Comintern, is she?”
He didn’t think so. But, who knew. He never asked and she never said.
They stared at each other, sniffing for danger, but, if it was there, they didn’t see it.
“And money?”
God bless his grandfather, who had foreseen and foreseen. Maybe, in the end, it killed him, all that foresight. He had prospered under the Czar, selling German agricultural equipment up and down the Ukraine and all over the Crimea. “Paradise, before they fucked it,” Serebin said. “Weather like Provence, like Provence in all sorts of ways.” Old Mikhelson felt something coming, cast the Jewish tarot, put money in Switzerland. A Parisian office worker
