“What is it, some business you’re doing with Ivan Kostyka? Is that it? You want money, all of a sudden?”
Serebin didn’t answer.
“Look, this has everything to do with Poland, I don’t need to tell you the stories, and it’s coming here. Nothing wrong with chess tournaments and magazines, Ilya, but we’re responsible for these people. They’re coming to me, they’re asking for help. What am I to tell them? You’re busy?”
“Boris, I have to do something else. I am doing something else. For God’s sake don’t make me tell you more than that.”
“You are?” He was going back and forth-truth or cowardice?
“Yes.”
“Swear it to me.”
“I swear. On anything you like. Please understand, as long as I’m in Paris, I’ll do whatever you want. But I cannot promise to be in such and such a place at such and such a time, and, in what you’re talking about, that’s everything.”
Ulzhen took a deep breath and let it out. It meant concession-to disappointment, betrayal. That betrayal came for some noble reason, ghostly, beyond explanation, did not matter.
“How did this happen?” Ulzhen said, defeat in his voice.
“I got involved,” Serebin said.
Ulzhen wanted to argue, then thought better of it. “Well, you have to do what you think is right,” he said.
“I know.” Serebin looked for words, to somehow bridge the space that had opened between them, but all he could say was, “I’m sorry, Boris.”
Ulzhen shrugged. So life went.
It was almost five when they left. Klimov and Claudette, Anya Zak and Serebin walking together for a time, then parting at the rue de Turenne, where Anya Zak headed off into the Eleventh and Serebin went with her. To a street that reminded Serebin of the tenement districts of Russian cities, old and poor and silent, where Anya Zak had a room above a tailor shop. “It isn’t much,” she said, “but you can come up if you want.” He did. He was very lonely, and he couldn’t face going back to the Winchester just to be by himself.
A small room, cluttered and warmed with things she liked. A fish bowl filled with mussel shells on an upturned crate, Bal Musette posters and Victorian silhouettes tacked to the wall. Books everywhere, a glass of dried weeds, a copper lion.
They talked idly for a while, then she read him a poem. “No title yet,” she said. “For me, that is always difficult.” She settled herself into the corner of an easy chair, drew her feet up beneath her bulky skirt, and read from a paper in one hand while the other held a Sobranie, its blue smoke curling straight up in the airless room. The poem was intricate, about a lover, more or less, the lines simple, declarative, and opaque. She’d been, sometime, somewhere, easy prey. Was still? Didn’t care? “But the heart was blind that summer,” she recited, inhaled the cigarette, spoke the next line in puffs of smoke. Loss in a crowded room, in a storm, a dream, a shop. She had long dark hair, with a few silver strands, that hung down around her face, and, as she read, she would tuck one side of it behind her ear but it didn’t stay. She looked up at him when she finished and said, “Awful, isn’t it.”
“No, not at all.”
“A little awful, admit it. One’s intimate self is, you know.”
She was narrow-shouldered and lean on top, broad below the waist, heavy-legged. On the windowsill by the bed, half a burned candle, its wax congealed in a saucer. “You are looking at me,” she said.
“True.” He smiled at her.
“Tell me, are you working?”
“I wish I could, but life takes sharp corners, lately, so all I do is watch the road. A line sometimes, now and then, but who knows where it belongs.”
She understood. “They are killing us,” she said. “One way and another.”
“What will become of you, Anya?”
“Such a question!”
“Forgive me, I didn’t mean…”
“No, it’s all right,” she said. “I know what you mean. In fact, I think I’ve been offered a way out, if things go wrong here. About a year ago I met this couple. Nice enough, haute bourgeois types, but sweet. They were rich and social, before the occupation. Likely still are, now that I think about it. Anyhow, they somewhat adopted me, the saintly poetess, poor as a mouse, you know how it is. Sunday afternoons, they would have me up to their apartment, in Passy, all kinds of sexy nonsense in the air though nothing said, of course. Then, about a month ago, they told me that they had a little house in a village, in Normandy somewhere, at the end of a road, and if life went bad in Paris, I was invited to go up there and hide out for as long as I needed to.”
“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” Serebin said. “Still…”
“What about you?” she said.
“I don’t think I’ll have to run,” he said. “Of course, you can never be certain.”
“No you can’t. Not about anything, ever. You and I know all about that.” She took her spectacles off, blinked at a fuzzy world, folded them up, and put them on the table beside her.
More would come off, he imagined. Everything. By the light of the candle on the windowsill. And, as time went by, she would wear the very same smile she wore at the moment, opening, as her eyes closed, to a shape he dearly loved to see. Stripped, languid, appetitious, a true partner in crime, no saintly poetess at all and very pointed about it. Oh, his heart might be a little somewhere else, but that he couldn’t help and there was no way on earth she could know about it.
“Well,” she said.
As he stood up, she leaned her head back against the top of the chair. “Getting late,” she said. “Would you like to come and kiss me good night?”
As he walked toward the hotel, a long way away, it occurred to him that maybe she did know. Sensed it, understood him better than he thought possible. But, whether she did or she didn’t, it had been a long kiss good night, warm and elaborate, and a lot happened while it was going on. Was it possible they’d had a love affair? A thirty-second love affair? Well, why not. He stopped at the far end of the Pont Marie. I’ll do anything you like. She hadn’t said it out loud but even so she’d told him that. He wasn’t wrong. He could turn around, go back, she’d be waiting for him. No, he thought, that’s crazy. Don’t think about it, go home to bed.
A direct order, half of which he obeyed.
Polanyi’s Orchestra.
Performing the Roumanian Symphony, Opus 137.
Was it 137? One hundred and thirty-seven operations? He’d tried, now and then, to count them all, but it never worked. What to include? What to leave out? It wasn’t always clear, so, in the end, he declared it to be, over thirty years, some number not far from that, then burned the notes-jotted initials and dates, typically on the backs of envelopes-and got rid of the ashes.
This one had, at least, a name. Medallion. Or, Operation MEDALLION, as it would appear in the records. Not that any of the people involved would ever be allowed to know it, that was for him and Stephens, and the warlords in London. Medallion. He hoped it sounded noble and enduring, in English. It certainly sounded damned strange in Hungarian, but then what didn’t.
It was by his own initiative that Jamie Carr played in the orchestra. In fact, he belonged to a different operation, with another name, yet, even so, he played. When inspiration struck he was with Girlfriend Three, a tall Polish nightclub dancer with penciled eyebrows. They were alone in an office, the street outside deserted on a Sunday morning.
Time to leave, they’d told him. The British legation in Bucharest would close down on the 10th of February, be gone by then. So, he’d packed. Taking along much more than he’d planned-what a lot of stuff he’d acquired! Clothes and books and papers and whatnot from the apartment. The iron lamp in the parlor, for example. Lots of memories in that lamp, couldn’t just leave it behind. And, of course, he’d take a few things from his desk at the office, good friends, with him for two long years of writing and conniving.
Once in the office-Girlfriend Three had spent the night and come along to keep him company-he thought, well, pity to leave all these files. Press clippings, cabinets packed with them. He wanted, at first, a few for his own
