that-in the event, the opportunity was too good to pass up and no doubt they had something in mind.
As in Budapest, where agents for Marasz-Gulian located three turbine boilers, of similar dimension, with one old fellow, formerly the pride of the Esztergom Power Authority, weighing in at “over four hundred thousand pounds.” They rather thought. And rescued, just in time, from the scrapyard.
“Let’s see them haul that great fucker off the bottom,” Stephens said, at the restaurant overlooking the wharves. He handed Polanyi a page cut from an old Hungarian catalogue. A photograph of a giant turbine. A little man with a mustache, wearing a gray uniform, stood beside it, dwarfed by its size. “From London, by diplomatic pouch,” Stephens explained. Then added, wistfully, “Such strange and lovely things they have in London.”
Six turbines, then, with a seventh available in Belgrade, from a Serbian steel mill. “Fourteen years old and no longer suitable to our needs, but perfectly reliable.” The decision to use steam turbines, a race of giants in the Land of Industry, had come after some consideration. Bagged cement would break loose from its load and tumble away in the current long before it turned to concrete, and there was no credible reason to ship concrete block to Roumania, where some of it, at least, was manufactured. Similarly, fire brick for blast furnaces, which weighed, as it happened, substantially less than common brick. “And locomotives,” Stephens had said, “are, alas, far too likely to be traveling by rail.” Scrap iron was currently in demand for German tanks, stone was quarried in Roumania. “The world is lighter than one thinks,” Polanyi grumbled, poking at his eggplant.
And the cursed river could never really decide how deep it was, they found. Still, everyone, Herr Doktor Finkelheim, the Roumanian pilot, and specialists at universities in Birmingham and Leeds, agreed that the Stenka ridge was the place. Kilometer 1030. Dangerously shallow at the end of winter, before the spring rains left the river swollen and high in its banks. So, a barge with six feet of draft and six feet above the waterline, crowned with an eleven-foot-high turbine, would come to rest at twenty-three feet. A menace to navigation. Even if, in the course of the accident, one of the barges turned on its side-disaster! — they’d have six more down there, pulled under by the sinking tug. A great navigational mess, surely, but an expensive one to arrange.
“Don’t worry about that,” Stephens said. The Special Operations Executive had a considerable imprest from Treasury, and he was, for the time being, their fair-haired boy.
It was Ibrahim who was sent to Bucharest to meet with Gulian. “Stenka ridge,” he said. “No question. An Austrian company dredges the ship canal and, in the present state of politics, now more than ever. They are always at it.” As for the appropriate cargo, Gulian shrugged and said, “Well, a steam boiler.” He laughed. “If what you want is sheer clumsiness, the most frustrating beast you could imagine, that’s the steam boiler. Monsters, those things, ask your local industrialist.”
Bought new?
“No, impossible. They take months to order, to build, to deliver-a cauchemar. ”
Then?
“In all commerce there are shadow markets, informal dealings between buyer and seller. In all products, machinery as much as any other. I can think of at least two agencies who work this area. And the war has made no difference to them-believe me, they prosper in war. They live on the margin, these men. Hang around your outer office, read the newspaper, discuss the day’s events with your secretary. There used to be one-Brugger, was that it? Always with a toothpick in the mouth. He’d wait for me to go out for lunch. Hello, how are you, heard the one about the plumber and the midget? Want to buy something? Got anything you want to sell? Truth is, you don’t need them, until you need them, and then you really need them.”
So then, who will actually buy the turbines?
“That’s a problem. A paper company won’t work, because the people who watch these things-import licenses and so forth-are not stupid. ‘XYZ,’ they’ll say, ‘who’s that?’ Which means, if you don’t have months to build up a shell business, you’ll need the real thing. So, it’s either me, or someone like me.”
And what happens after the “accident”?
“Delay, temporize, misunderstand, deny, pull your hair out, declare bankruptcy, then run like hell. After all, what makes you think that what works in business won’t work in war?”
Yes, but there’s no history of Gulian, doing things like that.
True. “But go see my enemies, they’ll tell you they always knew it would come to that. So, finally, they’ll be right.”
A lot of enemies, were there?
“I’m rich and successful,” Gulian said. “You fill in the rest.”
So, through various banks, in Geneva and Lisbon, the money began to move.
28 February. At the IRU office, a quiet morning. On the radio, an endless suite and variations for guitar, accompanied, now and then, by the rattle of a newspaper, and an occasional, mournful, ping from the tepid radiator, remembering better days. In the window, a lead-colored sky. Serebin dropped by that morning because he had nowhere else to go and nothing to do. This was called, in the parlance of the clandestine world, waiting. He needed urgently to speak with Polanyi-to tell him what had happened at the cafe by the abattoirs, to warn him, perhaps, of a dangerous change of heart, or to be scoffed at, gently, for seeing things that weren’t there. But, short of an emergency wire to Helikon Trading, there was nothing he could do. He’d been left in Paris, awaiting assignment, dangling. Had the operation been, for whatever reason, canceled? Maybe. And the way he would be told about it was-silence. No further contact. Would Polanyi do that? Yes, that was precisely what he would do. That was, he suspected, the traditional, the classical, way it was done.
He considered the wire. Wrote and rewrote it in the Aesopian language they used, oblique and commonplace- representative important principal currently unwilling to proceed. In other words, the bastard tried to kill me. No, it wouldn’t work. Or, worse, it would work, and stop everything cold for no good reason.
He spent the morning pretending to be busy, seated in front of a stack of problem papers-letters to be answered, forms to be filled out-that he shared with Boris Ulzhen, but mostly thinking about things that were bad for him to think about. Then the telephone rang, and a man called out, “Ilya Aleksandrovich? A call for you.”
“Who is it?”
After a moment, the man said, “Madame Orlov.”
The name meant nothing- another lost soul. Serebin hesitated, he was tired of the world, of people who wanted things. Finally, he lost the battle with his conscience and walked over to the desk. “Yes?” he said. “Madame Orlov?”
“Hello, ours. ”
Four-thirty, she’d said.
But by five-thirty she still wasn’t there. Serebin waited, looked at his watch and waited. Sometimes he stared out the window, at people passing by on the street in front of the hotel. Sometimes he tried to read, gave up, walked around the room, went back to the window. So she’s late, he told himself, women do that in love affairs, it’s nothing new. But this was an occupied city, and sometimes people didn’t show up when they said they would. Sometimes, it turned out, they’d had to stand on line at a passport controle, and sometimes they were taken away to be questioned. And, sometimes, they just disappeared.
Then, after six, he heard footsteps in the hallway, almost running, and waited by the door until she knocked. She was breathless and cold, said she was sorry to be so late, put a chilled glove on his cheek and, eyes closed, lips apart, waited for him to kiss her. He started to, then didn’t. Instead, from the curve between her neck and shoulder he inhaled a great, deep breath of her-perfume, plain soap, the scent of her skin, and, when he exhaled, it was audible; half growl, half sigh, a dog by a fire.
She knew what that meant. Held him tight for a moment, then said “God, it’s freezing in here,” and ran for the bed, shedding her coat and kicking her shoes off on the way, burrowing under the covers and pulling them up to her nose. He sat beside her, and she gave him her jacket and skirt, then her sweater and slip. A brief struggle beneath the blanket produced first an oath, then a stocking.
“How long?” he said.
She handed him a second stocking. “The weekend. Labonniere’s in Vichy, at the foreign ministry. So…”
“Are you…is it work? For us?”
She wriggled briefly beneath the covers and gave him a garter belt. “No, love, it isn’t.” She unhooked her bra, put it on his lap with everything else, then slid her panties off, reached out from her den and, turning them upside down, pulled them over his head.
“I dread going back there,” she said later. They were warm beneath the snarled covers, the room dark, the city silent. “Awful place, the Trieste. One of those border towns where everybody’s got it in for everybody
