“No, that’s true.”
And there she let it stay.
A waiter pushing a pastry cart arrived at the table. “Just coffee, I think?” the civilized Troucelle suggested. From Marie-Galante, the Genghis Khan of the dessert table, civilized agreement.
“After Poland,” Troucelle said, “I remember thinking, ‘I expect someone from DeHaas will turn up here.’ Appears I was right, no?”
“Logical, really, when you think about it.”
“I enjoyed my connection with Kostyka,” Troucelle said. “One only met his people, of course, he never appeared in person. Always the fusees. ” It meant fuses, in French political slang, intervening layers of aides and assistants who would “burn out” before an important person could be reached by the law. “And in the end,” Troucelle continued, “the whole thing didn’t amount to much, a few research reports on the petroleum industry. And they were quite generous about it.”
“Even more so, now, I would think.”
“Yes, it’s only logical, as you put it. What sort of information do you suppose they’d want?”
Marie-Galante wasn’t sure. “Perhaps what you gave them before, but it’s not for us to say. The war was a shock to the commercial world, even though everybody could see it coming, but business can’t just stop dead. So it’s mostly a matter of flexibility-I suspect that’s the way DeHaas would see it. Find a way to adapt, to adjust, then get on with life.”
The waiter brought tiny cups of coffee, a dish of curled lemon peels, and little spoons.
“Going up to Ploesti?” Troucelle said.
“Think it’s a good idea?”
“I don’t see why not. It’s all there, you know, it was a real, honest-to-God oil town before the war, Texas riggers and all. They used to have contests on Saturday night, get drunk and see who could shoot out the most streetlights. A little bit of Tulsa, east of the Oder.”
“We have business in Bucharest,” Serebin said, “and our time is limited. But, maybe, if we have the opportunity…”
“It would be my pleasure,” Troucelle said. “I’d enjoy showing it to you.”
“Nazi bastard,” Marie-Galante said-but by then they were out in the street, walking back toward the hotel.
“How do you know?”
“I know.” And, a moment later, “Don’t you?”
He did. He couldn’t say how he did, it was just, there. But then, he thought, that’s why they’d hired him. I. A. Serebin-Minor Russian writer, emigre.
After midnight, in the room in the hotel, Serebin stared up at the ceiling and smoked a Sobranie. “Are you awake?” he said.
“I am.”
“Just barely?”
“No, I’m up.”
“Want me to turn on the light?”
“No, leave it dark.”
“Something I want to ask you.”
“Yes?”
“Did DeHaas actually do something? Or did it just, exist?”
“I believe they were in the business of building steam mills. Flour mills.”
“Were they built?”
“That I don’t know. Probably the office functioned, sent letters, telegrams, talked on the phone. Maybe they built a few mills, why not?”
“But these people, Maniu, the lawyer, they knew what they were doing.”
“Oh yes.”
“And Troucelle, of course he knew. And he knows what we’re doing now, and that it has to do with Roumanian oil-all that business about Ploesti.”
“Yes, the instinct of the agent provocateur. ‘And, they’re going up to the oil fields, why not arrest them there?’”
“So?”
“So it’s a problem, and it has to be solved. He may just want to be bribed, and, if that’s it, we’ll bribe him. Or, he may go to the Siguranza, but that’s not the end of the world. You see, Polanyi calculated that we’d talk to the wrong person, sooner or later. But he counted on two things to keep us safe, two forms of reluctance. If Troucelle turns us in, like a good little Vichy fascist, he turns himself in as well. Why do these people, who want to spy on Roumania, come to him? Because he used to spy on Roumania himself. Oh really, they’ll say, you did? When? What did they pay you? Who else did it? You don’t know? Sure you know, why won’t you tell us? Clearly, he’d best think things through very carefully before he goes singing to the Roumanians.
“And then, the second kind of reluctance is in the Siguranza itself, up at the top. They’d better have a meeting, because they’d better talk about how it’s going to go here. Today’s enemy may be tomorrow’s ally, then what? Seven months ago, Germany wouldn’t dare attack the mighty French army behind its impregnable Maginot Line. Seventeen months ago, Germany wouldn’t dare to attack Poland, because the Red Army would go to war against them and in six months the Mongolian hordes would be fucking the Valkyries in the Berlin opera house. The world has come undone, my love, and this thing isn’t over, and, when it is, quite a considerable number of people are going to discover they jumped into the wrong bed.”
“All right. But what if he goes to the Germans?”
“Well, a lot depends on which Germans he goes to. If he’s best pals with the chief of Gestapo counterintelligence in Roumania, that’s the end of us. With the others, the SD or the Abwehr, it’s not so bad. They’ll watch and listen and wait-they’ll want more, there’s always more. And, the way Polanyi has it planned, we have a good chance to disappear while that’s going on. As it is, we’re only here for a few more days, then out. If you don’t have time to do it right, Polanyi figured, do it wrong, do it fast and ugly, break all the rules, and run like hell. That’s why you’re called Marchais, my sweet, so you can return as Serebin.”
“Well, it sounds good,” Serebin said. “Safe in bed, it sounds good.”
“Polanyi is a kind of genius, mon ours, dark as night, but what else would you want? He’s done these things all his life-that’s all he’s done. He once told me that he’d been taken to some kind of lawn party, at the Italian legation in Budapest, where he made his way to a certain office and stole papers from a drawer. He was, at the time, eleven years old.”
“He went with his father?”
“He went with his grandfather. ”
“Good God.”
“Hungarians, my sweet, Hungarians. Swimming for ten centuries in a sea of enemies-how the hell do you suppose they’re still there?”
Readily enough, the Princess Baltazar agreed to receive the friend of Monsieur Richard in Paris. As though, he told Marie-Galante, such calls were commonplace. The house was not hard to find, a white, three-story frosted cake, with turrets and gables, overlooking the botanical gardens. Once upon a time he had played on a beach in Odessa, and a little girl had taught him to take liquid sand from the edge of the sea and drizzle it through his fingers to decorate the top of a castle. The house of the Princess Baltazar reminded him of that.
She was somewhere beyond forty, blond and curly, pink and creamy, with a bosomy decolletage on a purple dress just tight enough to suggest the elaborate and complicated flesh beneath it.
“Monsieur Richard,” she said. “With the pince-nez?”
Who else?
“Such a brilliant man.” Would Monsieur care for coffee? Something to eat? There was a bit of Moldavian Swiss roll, she thought, or was it just too close to lunch?
“A coffee,” he said.
She left the room, haunches shifting high and low, and he could hear her making coffee in a distant part of the house. No maid? The tabletops in the parlor were covered with little things; china cats and porcelain
