the bed.
“Know what?” she called out.
“What?”
“We’re going to Bucharest.”
“We are?”
“Tomorrow morning. Gare de Lyon.”
Serebin waited.
“Isn’t that exciting?”
“Very.”
“I knew you’d think so.” She ran the water for a moment. “It’s almost warm, ours. ”
“Can I ask why?”
“Absolutely you can. You’re going to buy folk art. For your little shop on the rue de Seine, in arty Faubourg St.-Germain. And you’re bringing your wife along. Difficult, the wife. Doesn’t like the idea of your being footloose and fancy-free in sexy Bucharest.”
“Folk art?”
He could hear her sloshing water around, wringing the cloth out. “Little wooden animals. Corn-silk dolls. Embroidered Gypsy shirts. Maybe, if you’re lucky, a saint painted on a board.”
“Is there really such a shop?”
“Of course! Who do you think we are?”
“Am I me?”
“Heavens no.” She emptied the basin into the sink. “ Ours? ”
“Yes?”
“I’m going to put on clean underwear and sleep in your bed. You don’t mind do you?”
“No, not at all.” Then, after a moment, “It doesn’t matter, but I wondered…”
“What?”
“On the boat? The first time?”
She laughed at him. “Oh no! Was I told to do that? No, only to talk to you, the rest was my idea. I’m not-I’ve had lovers, ours, but not so many. I just, liked you, and, if we’re being horribly honest, I liked also the boat, the night at sea, maybe the weather. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Now that we’ve settled that, could you, maybe, go out and find us something to eat?”
“There’s a restaurant nearby, not so bad.”
“Better not. One thing about Polanyi-land, one does spend time indoors.”
“Bread and cheese, then. Wine?”
She came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, her clothes in hand. “Whatever you can get. And I think I saw a patisserie out on the boulevard and, unless it was a mirage, there were, in the window, eclairs.”
Just outside the railyards of Trieste, the night frozen and black and starless, it turned 1941. The engineer sounded the train whistle, more lost and melancholy than usual, the way Serebin heard it, and Marie-Galante looked at her watch and kissed him. Then they held on to each other for a long time-for hope, for warmth in a cold world, because at least they weren’t alone, and it would have been bad luck not to.
They shared a first-class compartment, on that part of the journey, with a sallow young man reading an Italian book, dense and difficult by the look of it, who waited until they parted, then said, “Please allow me to wish you both a happy and prosperous New Year.” They returned the Italian salutation in French, everybody smiled, life was bound to get better.
And maybe it would but, for the moment, they traveled incognito.
A month earlier, in the hours before he left the city of Izmir, Serebin, following the written instructions he’d found in his room, had two dozen passport photos made, then left at the portrait studio to be picked up later. Now he understood why. Marie-Galante had brought him a new identity, the passport of Edouard Marchais, well-used, with several stamps from here and there, an Ausweis permit for travel to Roumania, and various other documents Marchais would be expected to have. Marie-Galante, newly Madame Marchais, was dressed for the part in a black, belted overcoat, cut in the latest Parisian style, and a brown beret. On the subject of new identities she was exceptionally casual-paper was paper, it could be made to appear when you needed it. So, now that all he wanted was to be invisible, he could be whoever he liked.
They had to change trains in Belgrade, and waited for hours in the station, where they found, left on a bench, a Paris Soir, with the headline CIVIL WAR IN ROUMANIA? This did not sound like life getting better, unless you believed in question marks.
No evidence of that in Bucharest, at least not right away. It was dawn when they arrived at the Gara de Nord and took a taxi through the empty streets to the Athenee Palace on the strada Episcopiei. The city’s grandest hotel, infamous for having cards on its dining room tables that forbade political discussion, and much loved by cartoonists, whose spies peered out from the potted palms, at slinky seductresses and confidence men and cigar-smoking tycoons.
But, too early for them to be out at that hour. There were only maids, plodding down the endless corridors, and one yawning room service waiter, with a tray of glasses and whiskey bottles, for some guest determined not to let the night end just yet. Serebin and Marie-Galante unpacked and fell into bed and made love, made love like lovers, the slow, affectionate, and tired version of the thing, then slept like the dead until the winter sun lit the room and woke them up. “So now,” she said, “we will order coffee. Then we must go to our hideout. A breath of fresh air for us, and some leisure for the Siguranza to search the luggage.”
They walked a few blocks, to the strada Lipscani, then down a lane to a small building in the Byzantine style- lime green stucco, with a steep roof covered in fish-scale slates. Some Ottoman bey lived here, Serebin thought. Inside, it smelled of spice and honey and mildew, and there was a cage elevator-a gold-painted coat of arms mounted atop the grille-that moaned like a cat as it crept slowly to the fourth floor.
The apartment was almost empty. On yards of polished teak floor stood three narrow beds, and a marquetry chest filled with Swiss francs, gold coins, Roumanian lei, a map of Roumania, a map of Bucharest, two Walther automatics and two boxes of ammunition, valerian drops, rolls of gauze bandage, and a horrible knife. There was also a large Emerson radio, with an antenna cable run through a hole in a window frame and out into the thick ivy that covered the wall above a tiny garden.
“This is the safe place to talk,” she said. “Don’t say too much in the hotel room-keep it down to a whisper- and for God’s sake don’t say anything in the lobby of the Athenee Palace. It has one of those acoustic peculiarities; what you say in one corner can be clearly heard in the opposite corner.” She sat on the edge of a bed, produced five sheets of paper from her purse, and handed them to Serebin. It was a typewritten list of names, numbered 1 to 158, with a few words of description by each name:
Senior official, Defense ministry
Private investigator
Sofrescu’s mistress
Assistant manager, Bucharest branch of Lloyd’s Bank, Hungarian
Former ambassador to Portugal, silk stockings
Siguranza, financial specialist
Colonel, General Staff, ordnance acquisition
Publisher, friend of the playwright Ionesco
Journalist, gossip and blackmail
A hundred and fifty-eight times.
Some of the entries had numbers beside them, a price quoted in Swiss francs.
“The British,” Marie-Galante said, “call this an Operative List of Personalities.”
“A kind of poem,” Serebin said. “The way it runs down the page.” He couldn’t stop reading.
The idea amused her. “Called?”
“Oh, how about, ‘Bucharest’?”
Now she was amused. “Don’t kid yourself,” she said.
They needed to know, she told him, who would work for them, which meant who would work against German interests in Roumania. Before the war, the operation had been run as the Roumanian branch of a Swiss company-
