“Eleven,” Serebin said.
Polanyi put both hands on the railing, hesitated, then walked away, heading toward the staircase that went to the cabins below.
Serebin spent a half hour on deck, then returned to the cabin. Marie-Galante was seated at the dressing table, putting on lipstick. She wore a slip and stockings, a towel wrapped around her hair. He saw that she’d made the bed, emptied the ashtrays, neatened up as best she could.
“Hello, ours. ” She meant good-bye, her voice deeper than usual, tired, resigned.
He sat in a chair in the corner.
“I have to go away.” She pressed her lips together, turned them in for a moment, studied her image in the mirror. Not so good, but she didn’t care. “I have a wire from Labonniere. He’s been promoted, sent to the legation in Trieste. Ever been there?”
“Once or twice.”
“What’s it like?”
“Italian, Slovene, Croatian-everything, really. Very sunny and bright, at least when I was there.”
“Sunny and bright.”
“Yes.”
“That’s always good. Cheerful.”
She met his eyes in the mirror.
“I have to go,” she said. She undid the towel and began to rub her wet hair.
“I know.”
He walked over to her, she rose and put her arms around him, her damp hair against his cheek. They stayed like that for a time, then she let him go.
They sat around a table in the salon: Polanyi, Marrano, Serebin, Marie-Galante, and a young man in a silvery gray suit worn over a black sweater, with a sharp face and water-combed hair, introduced as Ibrahim. As Marrano began his report on Bucharest, both he and Polanyi took notes.
Serebin watched Marrano as he spoke. The Renaissance assassin. Dark eyes, pitted face, a thin line of beard that traced his jaw. His story did not sound so very different from theirs. A woman who slept with important men- lately, Marrano said, a German general. The manager of a telegraph office. A gossip columnist. A Siguranza officer. The last, after agreeing to meet with Marrano, had disappeared. Marrano telephoned late at night and talked to the man’s sister, who, very agitated, said nobody knew where he was.
“I did manage to see an assistant to Kobas, who was the oil minister until Antonescu took over. He was terrified, but brave. We met after midnight, in an abandoned building. He guessed right away what we were up to. ‘Don’t try anything,’ he said. ‘The fields are closely guarded. They’re just waiting for somebody to show up.’”
Polanyi nodded, he knew.
Marrano went on. Editor of a newspaper, who said that only the Legion could save Roumania from the Jews. A retired diamond merchant, in a wheelchair. A mystery woman, contacted through a Gypsy vendor at a street market. “Ilona, that’s all I know. I had to book an entire compartment on the train for Ruse, in Bulgaria. She appeared after the first stop, we talked for, maybe, five minutes, then she left. Very curious. Long, black hair, worn loose, dressed all in black, a scar by one eye, a gold wedding band on her right ring finger. She wore a purse on a shoulder strap, the way it hung I thought, something in there, am I to be shot? I think, maybe, if I’d said the wrong thing, it might’ve happened. She was very determined.”
Polanyi raised an eyebrow.
“She was paid a great deal of money,” Marrano said, “according to the list. And no last name, not even there. I believe DeHaas may not have known who she was.”
“Political?”
Slowly, Marrano shook his head. “‘If the job is worthy of me,’ she said, ‘I will do it.’”
Polanyi looked at Serebin.
“She did not say very much. Mostly she made me talk, and stared into my soul. Then she left at Daia station, suddenly, just as the train was about to leave. And I got off at the last stop in Roumania, Giurgiu.”
“The pipeline from Ploesti ends in Giurgiu,” Polanyi said.
“I knew that, so I decided to take a little walk, just to see what I could see. What I saw was the inside of a police station. For a very long hour, then a man in a suit showed up. A man who spoke French. Who was I? What was I doing there? Who did I know?”
“What did you tell them?”
“A woman.”
“They believe you?”
“Well, I’m here.”
Polanyi turned to Serebin and Marie-Galante. “ Mes enfants, ” he said. Marie-Galante began, Serebin joined in. Colonel Maniu. The lawyer. Troucelle, Princess Baltazar. Gheorghe Musa. The oil field study.
“We managed to have most of it translated,” Polanyi said. “Depressing, really. The vulnerabilities the General Staff saw in 1922 were exploited by the French in 1938, and by the British a year later. Without success. The French tried to lease the oil-barge fleet, the British mined the fields-but they never used the detonators. What they tried instead was to outbid the Germans for the oil, and that worked very well indeed. Too well, in fact. The price of Roumanian oil went through the roof, and the Germans couldn’t afford it. So they threatened to occupy the country. The Roumanians caved in, and gave them an exclusive sales agreement.”
“Where does that leave us?” Marrano said.
Polanyi sighed. “On the river, I suppose.”
“Broad and flat.”
“Yes. We’re on the wrong fucking end,” Polanyi said. “Maybe up toward the Iron Gates.”
“I would think,” Marrano said, “that the British have been over that ground.”
“They have. But, my friend, you must understand, it’s our turn.”
“Whatever it is, it won’t be permanent.”
Polanyi wasn’t ready to admit that. “The right catastrophe…But, you’re not wrong. More likely I will offer them time, weeks, and at least the potential for repetition. Of course we all dream of the great coup-we have to do that, no?”
Just after midnight, Serebin stood on the pier as the Nereide departed. Watched it motor out the channel into the Black Sea, where, a few minutes later, the light at the stern grew dim in the mist, then disappeared. Marie- Galante had said a final good-bye on deck; reserved, steadfast, a farewell in time of war, tears forborne to preclude the memory of tears.
At the Hotel Tomis, on the Constanta waterfront, he drank, to no effect, and busied himself with housekeeping: committing names to memory, turning phone numbers into letter code concealed in journalist’s notes. Thus his new identity: a French journalist, with the notional assignment of a story on a French traveling circus playing in Bucharest. Crowds of children, clapping their hands in glee as they follow Caca the Elephant in the circus parade.
He burned his notes when he was done, washed the ashes down the sink, turned off the light, stared up at the world. He had met privately with Polanyi for an hour or so, and toward the end of the discussion Polanyi had said, “Labonniere is one of us, Ilya. Please understand. And while it is always preferable for a diplomat to be accompanied by his wife, it is crucial for a diplomat who is engaged in secret work. Crucial for this diplomat, anyhow, and, especially, this wife.”
The Hotel Tomis. By the Portul Tomis, the ancient Latin name for Constanta, infamous as the city of exile for the Latin poet Ovid. Who wrote a love poem that an emperor didn’t like. Thinking about that didn’t make Serebin feel any better, and it didn’t put him to sleep. But with time, and persistence, the vodka did.
In Bucharest, they’d found him a room in an apartment-a long way from the Athenee Palace and the center of the city-which belonged to an elegant, distant woman in her sixties who owned a jewelry shop. The strada Lipscani house was out of bounds, he’d been told, and the Hungarian operative, no Slav it turned out, sent back across the border. Serebin had two or three days’ work to do, then la revedere, Bucuresti. He sat on the bed in his room, unfolding two new shirts, squashing them this way and that to get rid of the creases, which resulted in rumpled shirts with creases.
To see the British foreign correspondent James Carr was not difficult. Serebin called the Reuters bureau, said
