yards from the stockade there’d be some shaggy devil on the lookout, and you’d only to blink an eyelid and before you knew where you were you had a lasso round your neck or a bullet in your head. Grand chaps!”
He looked up to see a girl with a basket waiting for the train to go past. Well, whatever else might be true, Polanyi had chosen a book that every Russian had read, but that every Russian liked reading again. And, by the time he reached Subotica, in Yugoslavia, the Balabukhi plums were more than welcome, to Serebin and his fellow travelers, since there’d been practically nothing to eat at the station buffets where the train stopped.
28 January. In Istanbul, Janos Polanyi sat at a table on the second floor of a waterfront lokanta called Karim Bey. He drank a glass of raki as he waited, staring out at a long line of Turkish porters, struggling up the gangplank of a freighter beneath immense burlap sacks.
He was not at all pleased to be there, and he did not look forward to lunch-with the fattish and soft-spoken Mr. Brown and his relentless pipe. His infuriating pipe, a device used to stretch silent pauses out to uncomfortable intervals where disapproval hung in the air amid the fruity smoke. Polanyi unfolded his napkin and refolded it, he was tense and apprehensive and he didn’t like it. What he had to offer Mr. Brown was the best that could be offered but he feared, expected, the usual reaction: a cold, tolerant silence seasoned with contempt. For who he was, for what he did, and for the quality of his proposals. As a social attitude it was, of course, beneath him: an aristocrat from a thousand-year family need not concern himself with the Mr. Browns of the world. But, applied to secret work, this contempt could kill.
Polanyi had always suspected that Mr. Brown was an amateur of chess. That he saw a world of pawns and bishops and helpless kings. But the people who did what Polanyi asked of them were not pawns. They lived, Serebin and Marrano and Marie-Galante and the rest, and he meant for them to keep living. But it would better suit Mr. Brown, he believed, if he could be made to suppress this instinct and sacrifice the occasional pawn for a stronger position on the board.
Polanyi was on the verge of making himself really angry when Mr. Brown approached the table. Fortunately for everyone, perhaps, he was not alone. “This is Mr. Stephens,” he said.
Polanyi stood up and, as they shook hands, the man said, “Julian Stephens.”
A first name! A minor adjustment in the introduction, but it implied a change of style, a change of attitude, and Polanyi’s spirits rose. Stephens took the floor immediately. He was pleased to meet him, had heard such good things about him, was anxious to work with him, Istanbul was an extraordinary city, was it not, and so forth, and so on. Social talk. But, as he spoke, Polanyi began to understand who he was.
A man of some depth, and some cruelty. No, not quite, more the capacity for cruelty. He was maybe thirty- five, a boyish thirty-five, pale, with thin lips and straight hair, straw-colored, cut short above the ears and combed back from a part on the side. And there was something in his manner that brought to mind a story Polanyi had heard long ago, to do with savage contests of intellect that took place at high table at Oxford. No quarter asked and none given, a reputation made or ruined, in a world where reputation meant everything. Had he, in fact, come from the university? Not really any way to know that. Law, or banking, or commerce, the possibilities were endless but, whatever it was, he had been to the wars, and, Polanyi sensed, won them.
“I believe,” Mr. Brown said, “that the two of you will get on well together.”
“I would think so,” Polanyi said.
“What we’ve done,” Mr. Brown said, “is to create a new and different kind of office. At the direction of the prime minister himself, I should add. That will specialize in operations meant to damage the enemy’s industry- particularly war-related industry, his transport, and communications.”
“An office for sabotage,” Polanyi said.
“Yes,” Stephens said. “With the kind of technical support that will make it work.”
Polanyi nodded. This was a good idea, if they meant it. “In the Balkans?”
“Everywhere,” Stephens said. “In the occupied countries.”
“So Switzerland will be left alone.”
“For the moment,” Stephens said, with a thin smile.
“My office will continue as it always has,” Mr. Brown said. “But we will deal strictly with intelligence. In that regard, you and I may work together again, but, for the present, Mr. Stephens is your man.”
Mr. Brown rose and offered Polanyi his hand. “I will leave you to it,” he said. His demeanor was amiable enough, but Polanyi wasn’t persuaded. Whatever else this was, Mr. Brown took it as defeat. Somewhere, in some distant office in the green and pleasant land, there’d been a battle of meetings and memoranda, and Mr. Brown’s side had come off second best.
Stephens watched as his colleague left. Then he said, “So then, here we are. I’d better tell you right away that I’m new to this, ah, this sort of thing. I expect you know that. But, I tend to learn quickly, and the people in London will let me do pretty much whatever I want. For the time being, anyhow, so we’d best take advantage of the honeymoon, right?” He opened the menu and peered at it. “I suppose we should order lunch.”
“Probably we should.”
He read down the page and closed the menu. “Haven’t the faintest idea what any of it is, would you order for me? Nothing too ambitious, if you don’t mind.”
“Perhaps a drink, to start.”
“I daresay. What are you having?”
“Raki.”
“Is it very strong?”
“It is.”
“Splendid.”
Polanyi signaled to the waiter, standing idle in the corner. “And then, lamb?”
“Yes, lamb, good.” He folded the menu and placed it beside him, then took a pen and a small pad from his pocket, unscrewed the top of the pen, and opened the pad to a clean page. “Now,” he said, “on the way down here I had an idea.”
A quiet afternoon in January. The Parisian weather, lately come to its senses, cloudy and gray and soft. One of the city’s favored weathers, this gloom, good for making love, good for idle speculation and small pleasures. This was at heart a southern city, a Latin city, its residents forced to live in the north, between Englishmen and Germans, energetic souls who liked bright sunshine and brisk mornings. Well, they were welcome to it. The true Parisians, and Serebin was one of them, woke happily to damp twilight and, even in an occupied city, believed that anything was possible.
In a narrow street by the Place Bastille, the elegant Brasserie Heininger was closed on Mondays, its red and gold affluence lost in darkness, its gallant waiters home with their wives, its glorious platters of langouste and sausage only aromatic memories in the still air. At the infamous Table Fourteen, where a bullet hole in the mirror served as memorial to a Bulgarian headwaiter assassinated in the Ladies WC, the chairs leaned forward, propped against the table. All was silent, waiting for Tuesday.
But not quite. The kitchen was alive. By some vaguely defined droit de chef, the talented but fulminous Zubotnik served Monday lunch, a banquet of leftovers, to his emigre friends. Zubotnik had never actually thrown his cleaver at anybody but he shook it, often enough, and screamed in six languages. He had ruled the kitchen at the Aquarium restaurant in St. Petersburg, made his way to Paris in 1917, worked as a sous-chef for a month, then, when the incumbent chef fled to Lyons, crying out as he went through the door, “No human man can turn that color,” had, at a horrendous rise in salary, agreed to replace him. Papa Heininger had regretted that decision for twenty-three years but Zubotnik was a genius and what could you do.
Serebin attended the Monday feast whenever he could. He had, since childhood, a passion for second-day delicacies. They got better overnight, and tasted better yet when eaten in the kitchen instead of the dining room.
“Here, you,” Zubotnik said from his white beard. “Take some of this.”
Serebin carefully sawed a slice off half a beef Wellington, the crust still flaky after a night in the refrigerator. He put a teaspoon of Zubotnik’s brutal mustard beside it, and considered a second until Zubotnik growled, “Don’t murder it, Serebin. And give Anya some mousse.”
“Thank you but no, Ivan Ivanovich,” Anya said.
“Just do what I tell you,” Zubotnik said to Serebin.
“Only a little,” Serebin said, commiserating. The salmon mousse had been chilled in a fish-shaped mold and Serebin gave her one of the tail fins.
