Dark Star

ALAN FURST

Dark Star

'You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.'

-Lev Bronshtein, known as Leon Trotsky, June 1919

Silence in Prague

In the late autumn of1937,in the steady beat of North Sea rain that comes with dawn in that season, the tramp freighterNicaea stood at anchor off the Belgian city of Ostend. In the distance, a berthing tug made slow progress through the harbour swell, the rhythm of its engine distinct over the water, its amber running lights twin blurs in the darkness.

The Nicaea, 6,320 gross tonnes, of Maltese registry, had spent her first thirty years as a coastal steamer in the eastern Mediterranean, hauling every imaginable cargo from Latakia to Famagusta, back to Iskenderun, down toBeirat,north to Smyrna, then south to Sidon and Jaffa-thirty years of blistering summers and drizzling winters, trading and smuggling in equal proportion, occasionally enriching, more typically raining, a succession of owner syndicates as she herself was slowly rained by salt,rast,and a long line of engineers whose enthusiasm far exceeded their skill. Now, in her final years, she was chartered to Exportkhleb, the Soviet Union's grain-trading bureau, and she creaked and groaned sorrowfully to lie at anchor in such cold, northern seas.

Riding low in the water, she bore her cargo gracelessly-principally Anatolian wheat bound for the Black Sea port of Odessa, a city that had not seen imported grains for more than a century. She carried, as well, several small consignments: flax-seed loaded in Istanbul, dried figs from Limassol, a steel drum of Ammonal-a mining explosive made of TNT and powdered aluminium-en route to a sabotage cell in Hamburg, a metal trunk of engineering blueprints for an Italian submarine torpedo, deftly copied at a naval research station inBrindisi,and two passengers: a senior Comintern official using a Dutch passport with the alias Van Doom, and a foreign correspondent of the newspaper Pravda travelling under his true name, André Szara.

Szara, hands thrust deep in pockets, hair blown about by the offshore gale, stood in the shelter of a passageway and silently cursed the Belgian tug captain who, from the methodical chug of the engine, was taking his own sweet time attending to theNicaea. Szara knew harbourmen in this part of the world; stolid, reflective pipe smokers who were never far from the coffeepot and the evening paper. Unshakable in crisis, they spent the rest of their days making the world wait on their pleasure. Szara shifted his weight with the roll of the ship, turned his back to the wind, and lit a cigarette.

He had boarded the freighter nineteen days earlier, in Piraeus, having been assigned a story onthe struggle of the Belgian dockworkers .

That was one assignment; there was another. Killing time in a dockside tavern as theNicaea was eased into moorage, he had been approached by the World's Plainest Man. Where, he wondered, did they find them? Russia marked people: deformed most, made some,exquisite, at the very least burned itself deep into the eyes. But not this one. His mother was water, his father a wall. 'A small favour,' said the world's plainest man. 'You'll have a fellow passenger, he is travelling on Comintern business. Perhaps you will find out where he is stopping in Ostend.'

'If I can,' Szara had said. The word if could not really be used between them, but Szara pretended it could be and the NKVD operative-or GRU or whatever he was-graciously conceded his right to suggest he had a choice in the matter. Szara, after all, was an important correspondent.

'Yes. If you can,' he'd said. Then added, 'Leave us a little note at the desk of your hotel. To MonsieurBrun.'

Szara spelled it, to make sure he'd got it right. Defiance was over for the day.

'Just so,' said the man.

There was ample time to do the small favour; theNicaea had been at sea for nineteen days, an eternity of icy, seawater showers, salt cod for dinner, and the smell of coal fumes from the freighter's rusting stack as she butted through the October seas. Squinting through the darkness at the lights of the wallowing tug, Szara ached for something sweet, sugar after salt, a cream cake, rain in a pine forest, a woman's perfume. He had, he thought, been too long at sea. An ironist, he heard the theatrical echo of the phrase and grinned privately.La mélancolie des paquebots-that said it better. He'd come across the phrase in Flaubert and it had stayed with him; it was all in those four words, the narrow cabin with a light bulb swaying on a cord, the seaweed reek of harbours, slanting rains, a column of black smoke from a funnel on the horizon.

The ship's bell sounded once. Four-thirty. The tug's amber lights grew brighter.

The Comintern man known as Van Doom stepped from his cabin carrying a leather valise and joined Szara at the railing. He was swaddled in clothing like a child dressed for a winter day, woollen muffler crossed precisely at his throat, cap set low on his head, overcoat buttoned to the very top. 'One hour, eh? And we'll be down the gangplank. What is your view,AndréAronovich?'Van Doom was, as always, wryly deferential toward 'the famous journalist Szara.'

'If the port officer makes no difficulties, I would agree,' Szara said.

'That will not happen. He is nash.' The word meant ours, we own him, and the tone suggested Szara's great fortune in having such iron-fisted types as Van Doom to watch out for him 'in the real world.'

'Well, then. . .'Szara said, acknowledging superior strength.

It happened that Szara knew who Van Doom was; one of his friends in the Foreign Department of the NKVD had once pointed him out, with a sneer, at a party in Moscow. Szara's NKVD friends were, like himself, Russified Polish Jews or Latvians, Ukrainians, Germans, all sorts, and typically intellectuals. They constituted hiskhvost-the word fell somewhere between clique and gang. Van Doom, in fact Grigory Khelidze, was from a different crowd: Georgians, Armenians, Russified Greeks and Turks, akhvost with roots in the southeast comer of the empire led by Beria, Dekanozov, and Alexei Agayan. It was a smaller group than the Poles and Ukrainians but easily its equal in power. Stalin came from down there; they knew what he liked and how he thought.

From the tugboat's silhouette, a high shape against the rain-softened glow of the city, a blinkered signal light began to operate. This was progress. Khelidze rubbed his hands to warm them up. 'Not long now,' he said merrily. He gave Szara a lecher's grin; in no time at all he'd be with his 'perfect dumpling.'

Thank heaven for the dumpling, Szara thought. Without her he might never have managed the small favour. Khelidze wasn't much to look at, a fattish man in his forties with pale hair worn well brushed and pomaded. His hands were small and chubby, endlessly fussing with a pair of silver-rimmed spectacles of which he was very proud. But he fancied himself a ladies' man. 'I envy you,André Aronovich,' he'd said one night when they were alone in the ship's wardroom after dinner. 'You move in exalted circles. The way it is with my job, well, the best I can hope for is the frau of some German shop steward, a big Inga with red hands, and then, likely as not, all a man gets is an extra potato and a stolen cuddle in the kitchen. Ah, but a man in your position-for you it's professors' daughters and lawyers' wives; those hot, skinny bitches that can't leave a journalist alone. Isn't it so?'

Szara had brought vodka to the feast, also brandy. The vast, green ocean rolled beneath them, the Nicaea's engines coughed and grumbled. Khelidze rested his elbows on the faded oilcloth and leaned forward in expectation, a man who wanted to hear every detail.

Szara obliged. His talent, set alight by alcohol, burned and flamed. A certain lady in, ah, Budapest. Gold earrings like a Gypsy-but no Gypsy, an aristocrat who affected British tweeds and wore a silk scarf, the colour of a cloud, knotted at her throat. Hair dark red, like autumn, Magyar cheekbones, long, delicate fingers. Szara, a good storyteller, took his time. He cast about for a name, came up withMagda,thought it commonplace, but could do no better.Magda,then. The husband was a lout, ignorant,nye kulturny-a man of no culture who exported wool. So Szara had the wife. Where? In the stables? On straw? No, in the apartment,acinq-ŕ-septaffaireby lamplight. The husband was. . .hunting wild boar. Szara watched the level in the brandy bottle on the table. As it descended, so did the pants. And there, the most delicate little triangle, also dark red, like autumn. And fine blue veins beneath the milky skin. The green silk divan was ruined. Khelidze's ears were scarlet. Later it came to Szara that he'd been describing his private musings on a particular secretary he sometimes encountered at the Yugoslav Ministry of Posts and Telegraph.

Khelidze was drunk. He polished his glasses with a handkerchief, his eyes watery and vague. Yes well, he said, one sometimes imagined. For himself, well it was all a matter of taste in this life wasn't it? He had, in all confidence, 'a perfect dumpling' in Ostend, resident at the Hotel Groenendaal in the street of the same name. 'A fat little thing. They dress her up like a child, with a bow and a party dress of white satin. My God, André Aronovich, how we carry on! Such a grand little actress she is, pouting, sulking, tossing her curls about, whining for biscuits and milk. But she can't have them. No, definitely not! Because, well, there's something she must do first. Oh no, she wails. Oh yes.' Khelidze sat back in his chair, put his glasses on, and sighed. 'A marvel,' he said. 'She'll suck ten years off a man's life.'

By the time they went singing off to bed, holding each other upright in the passageway that rolled with the motion of the ship, the dark surface of the sea was turning grey with dawn.

Szara's hotel in Ostend was all flowers: on the wallpaper, heavy cabbage roses on a sombre field; on the bedspread, a jungle of vines and geraniums; and in the park below his window, frostbitten asters, dusty purple and faded pink. And the place was called the Hotel Blommen.Ignore this stern, northern, Flemish light, here we have flowers. Szara stood at the window and listened to the foghorns from the harbour and the rattle of dead leaves as the wind swept them through the deserted park. He folded the note and creased it between thumb and index finger: 'M. Van Doom will be visiting the Hotel Groenendaal.' He put it in an envelope, licked and sealed it, and wrote 'M. Brun' on the front. He didn't know what it meant, why a journalist was asked to report on a Comintern operative. But there was a reason, a single reason that lately explained anything you wanted explained: the purge had shuddered to a halt in '36, now another had begun. The first had taken politicians, Stalin's opposition, and more than a few journalists. This one, it was said, had gone to work on the intelligence services themselves. Szara, beginning in 1934, had learned to live with it: he was careful what he wrote, what he said, who he saw. Not yet what he thought-not yet,he told himself now and then, as though it needed to be said. He took the note down to the reception desk and handed it to the old man behind the counter.

The knock on the door was discreet, two taps with a knuckle. Szara had fallen asleep, still wearing shirt and trousers, on top of the bedspread. He sat up and pulled the damp shirt away from his back. It was a grey dawn outside the window, fog hanging in the tree branches. He looked at his watch-a little after six. The polite knock came a second time and Szara felt his heart accelerate. A knock at the door meant too much, nobody did that in Moscow anymore, they phoned first. 'Yes, a moment,' he said. Somewhere within, a small, urgent voice:out the window. He took a breath, staggered to his feet, and opened the door. It was the old man from the hotel desk, holding a coffee and a newspaper. Had he left a call to be woken up? No.

'Good morning, good morning,' said the old man tartly. It never really was, but one had to pretend. 'Your friend was kind enough to leave you the newspaper,' he added, putting it at the foot of the bed.

Szara fumbled for change and handed over a few coins. Drachmas, he thought. He'd bought Belgian francs in Athens; where were they? But the old man seemed happy enough, thanked him and left. The coffee was cooler than he would have liked, the boiled milk a little sour, but he was grateful for it. The front page of the newspaper was devoted to anti-Jewish riots that had broken out in Danzig,with a photo of shouting, black-shirted Nazis. In Spain the Republican government, under pressure from Franco's columns, had fled from Valencia to Barcelona. On page six, the misfortunes of Ostend's soccer team. Printed down the margin in pen, in a fine Cyrillic hand, were detailed instructions for a noon meeting. The 'small favour' had started to grow.

Szara walked down the hall, locked the door of the bathroom, and started to wash. The instructions in the newspaper frightened him; he was afraid of being forced into a car and taken away. The purge sometimes worked like that-the security apparat worked quietly when it took public figures. Senior NKVD officers were called to meetings in small towns just outside Moscow, then arrested as they got off the train, a tactic that kept friends and family from trying to intervene. A foreign country, he reasoned, would be even more convenient. Should he run? Was now the time? There was a part of him that thought so.Go to the British consulate, it said.Fly for your life. Call the friends in Moscow who protect you. Buy a gun. Meanwhile, he shaved.

Then he sat in the park, where a nursemaid with a baby carriage flirted with him.Go with her, he told himself,hide in her bed. She will do anything you want. Perhaps it was true. He very well knew, at the age of forty, somewhat past illusion, what she saw. The longish black hair he combed back with his fingers, the tight line of the jaw, a concentration of personality in the eyes. These were hooded, knowing, of a grey-green sea colour that women had more than once called 'strange,' and often read as both expectant and sorrowful, like dogs' eyes. His features were delicate, skin colourless, made to seem pallid by a permanent beard shadow. It was, taken altogether, a sad,attentive presence, anxious for happiness, certain of disappointment. He dressed the role of worldly intellectual, favouring soft clothing: thick grey cotton shirts, monochromatic ties in the sombre tones of basic colours. He was, in the world's mirror, a man you could take seriously, at least for a time. Then, later, there would be affection or intense dislike, a strong reaction whichever way it went.

The nursemaid, in a starched cap, plain, hand mindlessly rocking the carriage where some other woman's baby slept, had no doubts at all. He need only rescue her, from boredom, servitude, chapped hands, and she would do whatever was necessary. Below a broad forehead her eyes were frank.Don't be frightened. I can fix anything.

Just before ten-thirty he stood, pulled his raincoat tightly about him, and walked away. Glancing back, he easily read her expression:Then no? Stupid man.

A series of tram lines took him to a neighbourhood of worker tenements, the narrow streets smelled like fish, urine, fried onions. The November day was cool in the shadow of the buildings. Was he followed? He thought not. They had something better, a kind of invisible cable, the method the psychologist Pavlov used with laboratory animals. It was called-he had to look for the word-conditioning. His last day on earth, yet he did what he was told. His mind stood off and watched the scene: a man of intellect, independence, delivering himself to the apparat. Pitiful. Contemptible. Szara glanced at his watch. He didn't want to be late.

At a small market he stopped and bought fruit, then paid a few sous extra for a paper bag. The market woman wore a shawl over her head; her glance was suspicious. What was he, a foreigner, doing in this part of the city? Szara walked another block, made sure nobody was watching, and left most of the fruit in an alley. He watched the street behind him in a shop window where wooden soldiers were for sale. Then he moved off again, entering a small square lined by plane trees cut back to rounded pollard shapes for the coming winter. A driver slept in a parked taxi, a man in bleu de travail sat on a bench and stared at his feet, the war memorial fountain was dry: the square at the end of the world. A small brasserie, Le Terminus, had no patrons on its glassed-interrasse.

Szara, more and more now the critic of his own abduction, was struck by the normalcy of the scene. What a placid, ordinary place they'd chosen. Perhaps they liked the name of the brasserie, Le Terminus -the terminal, the end of the line. Was the choice ironic? Were they that clever? Perhaps Pavlov was not, after all, the day's guiding spirit; perhaps that honour belonged to Chekhov, or Gorky. He searched for a terminal, for tramways, a railway station, but there was nothing he could see.

The interior of the brasserie was enormous and silent. Szara stood in the foyer as the door behind him bumped back and forth until it came to rest. Behind the zinc bar a man in a white shirt with cuffs turned back was aimlessly stirring a coffee, a few patrons sat quietly with a glass of beer, one or two were eating. Szara felt himself swept by intuition, a sense of loss, a conviction that this still life of a brasserie in Ostend was a frozen image of what had been and would now vanish forever: amber walls, marble tables, a wooden fan slowly turning on the smoke-darkened ceiling, a florid-faced man with a handlebar moustache who rattled his newspaper into place, the scrape of a chair on the tile floor, the cry of a seagull from the square, the sound of a ship's horn from the harbour.

There was an old weather glass on one wall, beneath it sat a woman in a brown, belted raincoat with buttoned epaulettes on the shoulders. She glanced at him, then went back to eating, a plate of eels and pommes frites; Szara could smell the horse fat the Belgians used for frying. A red wool scarf was looped over the top of an adjacent chair. The glass and the scarf were the recognition signals described in the margin of the newspaper.

The woman was perhaps in her late thirties. She had strong hands with long fingers-the knife and fork moved gracefully as she ate. She wore her chestnut hair cut close and short, a strand or two of grey caught the light when she moved. Her skin was pale, with the slight reddening at the cheekbones of a delicate complexion chapped by a sea breeze.An aristocrat, he thought.Once upon a time. Something fine and elegant in her had been discouraged, she wished to be plain, and almost was. Russian she was not, he thought. German perhaps, or Czech.

When he sat down across from her he saw that her eyes were grey and serious, with dark blushes of fatigue beneath them. The nonsense greetings of theparol, the confirmation passwords, were exchanged, and she lowered the edge of the paper bag he'd carried to make sure there was an orange inside.

Isn't this all absurd, I mean, oranges and a red scarf and. . .But these were words he never got to say. Just as he leaned toward her, to make contact, to let her know that they were the sort of people who could easily bridge the nonsense a foolish world imposed on them, she stopped him with a look. It made him swallow. 'I am calledRenate Braun,'she said.Called meant what? An alias? Or simply a formal way of speaking. 'I know who you are,' she added. The notionand that will suffice was unstated but clear.

Szara liked women and they knew it. All he wanted to do, as the tension left him, was chatter, maybe make her laugh. They were just people, a man and a woman, but she wasn't buying. Whatever this was, he thought, it was not an arrest. Very well, then a continuation of the business he did with the NKVD from time to time. Every journalist, everycitizen outside the Soviet Union, had to do that. But why make it into a funeral? Internally, he shrugged. She was German, he thought. Or Swiss or Austrian-one of those places where position, station in life, excluded informality.

She put a few francs on the waiter's saucer, retrieved her scarf, and they went outside into a hard, bright sky and a stiff wind. A boxy Simca sedan was now parked by the brasserie. Szara was certain it hadn't been there when he'd gone into the place. She directed him into the passenger seat and positioned herself directly behind him. If she shot him in the back of the neck, he thought, his dying words would bewhy did you go to all this trouble? Unfortunately, that particular wound didn't allow for last words, and Szara, who had been on battlefields in the civil war that followed the revolution, knew it. All he'd manage waswhy-zachto?what for?-but everyone, all the victims of the purge, said that.

The driver turned on the ignition and they drove away from the square. 'Heshel,' said the woman behind him, 'did it. . .?'

'Yes, missus,' the driver said.

Szara studied the driver as they wound through the cobbled streets of the city. He knew the type, to be found among the mud lanes in any of the ghettos in Poland or Russia: the body of a gnome, not much over five feet tall, thick lips, prominent nose, small, clever eyes. He wore a tweed worker's cap with a short brim tilted down over one eyebrow, and the collar of his old suit jacket was turned up. The man was ageless, and his expression, cold and humorous at once, Szara understood perfectly. It was the face of the survivor, whatever survival meant that day-invisibility, guile, abasement, brutality-anything at all.

They drove for fifteen minutes, then rolled to a stop in a crooked street where narrow hotels were jammed side by side and women in net stockings smoked lazily in doorways.

Renate Braunclimbed out, Heshel waited. 'Come with me,' she said. Szara followed her into the hotel. There was no desk clerk to be seen, the lobby was empty except for a Belgian sailor sitting on the staircase with his head in his hands, a sailor cap balanced on his knee.

The stairway was steep and narrow, the wooden steps dotted with cigarette burns. They walked down a long corridor, then stopped in front of a door with 26 written on it in pencil. Szara noticed a tiny smudge of blue chalk at eye level on the door frame. The woman opened her shoulder bag and withdrew a ring of keys-Szara thought he saw the crosshatched grain of an automatic pistol grip as she snapped the bag closed. The keys were masters, with long shanks for leverage when the fit wasn't precise.

She unlocked the door and pushed it open. The air smelled like overripe fruit cut with ammonia. Khelidze stared at them from the bed, his back resting against the headboard, his pants and underpants bunched around his knees. His face was spotted with yellow stains and his mouth frozen in the shape of a luxurious yawn. Wound within the sheets was a large, humped mass. A waxy leg had ripped through the sheet; its foot, rigid as if to dance on point, had toenails painted baby pink. Szara could hear a fly buzzing against the windowpane and the sound of bicycle bells in the street.

'You confirm it is the man from the ship?' she said.

'Yes.' This was, he knew, an NKVD killing, a signed NKVD killing. The yellow stains meant hydrocyanic acid used as a spray, a method known to be employed by the Soviet services.

She opened her bag, put the keys inside, and took out a white cotton^handkerchief scented with cologne. Holding it over her nose and mouth, she pulled a corner of the sheet free and looked underneath. Szara could see curly blond hair and part of a ribbon.

The woman dropped the sheet and rubbed her hand against the side of her raincoat. Then she put the handkerchief away and began to go through Khelidze's trouser pockets, tossing the contents onto the end of the bed: coins, rumpled notes of various currencies, a squeezed-out tube of medication, the soft cloth he'd used to polish his glasses, and a Dutch passport.

Next she searched the coat and jacket, hung carefully in a battered armoire, finding a pencil and a small address book that she added to the pile. She took the pencil and poked through the items on the bed, sighed with irritation, and searched in her bag until she found a razor blade with tape along both edges. She peeled off one of the tapes and went to work on the jacket and the coat, slicing open the seams and splitting the pads in the shoulders. This yielded a Soviet passport, which she put in her bag. Taking hold of the cuffs, she removed the trousers and methodically took them apart. When she let out the second cuff, a folded square of paper was revealed. She opened it, then handed it to Szara.

'What is it, please?'

'The printing is Czech. A form of some kind.'

'Yes?'

He studied the paper for a moment. 'I think it is a baggage receipt, from a shipping company. No, for the railway station. In Prague.'

She looked the room over carefully, then walked to the tiny, yellowed sink in the corner and began to wash her hands. 'You will collect the parcel,' she said, drying herself with her handkerchief. 'It is for you.'

They left the room together; she did not bother to lock the door. In the lobby she turned to him and said, 'Of course you'll be leaving Ostend immediately.'

He nodded that he would.

'Your work is appreciated,' she said.

He followed her out of the hotel and watched her get into the Simca. He crossed the narrow street and turned to look back. Heshel was watching him through the window of the car and smiled thinly as their eyes met.Here is the world, said the smile,and here we are in it.

Arriving in Antwerp at dusk, and adding two hours to local time for Moscow, he called his editor at home. From Nezhenko, who handled foreign assignments, he expected no trouble. This would not normally be the case, given a three-week lapse in communication, but when he was asked to do 'favours' for the apparat, someone stopped by the Pravda office for a cup of tea. 'That André Aronovich, what fine work he does! He must take endless time and pains in writing his dispatches. Your patience is admirable.' Enough said. And just as well, for Viktor Nezhenko smoked sixty cigarettes every day and had a savage temper; he could, if he chose, make life miserable for his staff.

Szara booked his call from a hotel room, it went through an hour later. Nezhenko's wife answered the phone, her voice bright and shrill with feigned insouciance.

When Nezhenko came to the phone, he offered no patronymic and no greeting, just, 'Where have you been?'

'I'm in Antwerp.'

'Where?'

Szara repeated himself. Something had gone wrong - Nezhenko had not been 'advised' of his assignment.

'So good of you to call,' Nezhenko said.

Szara hunted desperately for water to put out the fire. 'I'm doing a piece on dockworkers up here.'

'Yes? That will be interesting.'

'I'll wire it tomorrow.'

'Send it by mail if you like. Third class.'

'Did Pavel Mikhailovich cover for me?'

'Pavel Mikhailovich isn't here anymore.'

Szara was stunned. He isn't here anymore was code. When heard from friends, family, landladies, it meant that the person had been taken away. And Pavel Mikhailovich was - had been - a decent little man without enemies. But none of Szara's reactions, to ask questions, to show even the most civilized grief, was permissible on a telephone line.

'And people have been asking for you,' Nezhenko added. This too was code, it meant the apparat was looking for him.

Szara felt as though he'd walked into a wall. Why were they looking for him? They knew very well where he was and what he was doing-the world's plainest man had not been a mirage, and Renate Braunand her helper were realleryet. 'It's all a misunderstanding,' he said after a moment. 'The right hand doesn't tell the left hand. . .'

'No doubt,' Nezhenko said. Szara could hear him lighting a cigarette.

'I want to go down to Prague after I finish the piece on the dockworkers. There's the reaction to the Anti-, Comintern Pact, views on theSudetenland, allsorts of[ things. What do you think?'

'What do I think?'

'Yes.'

'Do as you like, André Aronovich.You must please yourself in all things.'

'I'll file on the dockworkers tomorrow,' Szara said.

Nezhenko hung up.

Writing the story of the Belgian dockworkers was like eating sand.

Once upon a time he'd persuaded himself that technical facility was its own reward: a sentence singing hymns to the attainment of coal production norms in the Donets Basin was, nonetheless, a sentence, and could be well rendered. It was the writer's responsibility in a progressive society to inform and uplift the toiling masses-word had, in fact, reached him that the number one toiler himself had an eye for his byline-so when some demon within wanted to write dark fables of an absurd universe, he knew enough to keep that imp well bottled up. To stay alive, Szara had taught himself discretion before the apparat had a chance to do the job for him. And if. by chance, an intransigent pen stubbornly produced commissar wolves guarding flocks of worker sheep or Parisian girls in silk underwear, well, then the great characteristic of paper was the ease with which it burned.

And these were, had to be, private fires. The world didn't want to know about your soul, it took you for who you said you were. The workers in the dark little hiring hall by the Antwerp docks were impressed that anybody cared enough to come around and ask them how they felt. 'Stalin is our great hope,' one of them said, and Szara sent his voice around the world.

He sat in yet one more hotel room as the Atlantic fog came curling up the streets and wrote these men into the brutal drama being played out in Europe. He caught the strength in their rounded shoulders and brawlers' hands, the way they quietly took care of one another, the granite decency of them. But for the wives and children who depended on them they would fight in Spain-some of the younger ones in fact were there-would fight in the worker suburbs of Berlin, would yet, families or not, fight from behind the cranes and sheds of their own docks. It was true, and Szara found a way to make it true on the page.

Stalin was their great hope. And if Khelidze mocked this with the yawn on his yellow-stained face, that was Szara's private problem. And if the 'small favour' was now a large favour, that, too, was Szara's private problem. And if all that made it hard to write, made writing the story like eating sand, who really could he blame? He could always say no and take the consequences. The Russian proverb had it just right:You said you were a mushroom, now jump into the basket.

And people have been asking for you.

Nezhenko's phrase rode the cadence of the train over the rails from Antwerp all the way to Paris. Much for the best, he calculated, to rush into their arms and find out what they wanted. He hadn't the courage to stand coolly apart from it all, whatever it was, so he did the next best thing. Checked in with the large Pravda bureau in Paris and asked the secretary to book him on the Paris-Prague express for the following day. He looked into her eyes, saw ball bearings, swore he could hear her lift the phone before the door was properly latched.

He stopped back that evening, picked up the ticket and drew both salary and expense funds, then went early to the Gare d'Austerlitzthe following day in case they wanted to talk to him there. He did not precisely fear abduction, he was simply more comfortable in an open, public space with crowds of people about. He dawdled over coffee at a café by the departure platform, gazed mindlessly at the sullen Parisian sky above the glass roof on its vast iron fretwork, read Le Temps, found himself quoted in the Communist daily, L'Humanité-' as Pravda correspondent André Szarahas pointed out, bilateral relations between France and the USSR can only proceed once the Czechoslovakian question has been. . .' -and watched the appetizing French women sweep past, their heels clattering on the cement, their animation seemingly inspired by a grave sense of mission.

He had made himself available, but no contact was made. When his train was announced and the engine vented plumes of white steam on the platform, he climbed aboard and found himself alone in a first-class compartment. Pravda did not buy whole compartments-only the apparat did that. Clearly, something was planned. Perhaps in Nancy, he thought.

He was wrong. Spent the afternoon staring through the rain at the low hills of eastern France and watching the names of battlefields glide past on the railroad stations. At the Strasbourg border control, just on the other side of the Rhine, a trio of German passport officials, two soldiers and a civilian in streaming black rubber raincoats, entered the compartment. They were cold-eyed and courteous, and his Soviet passport produced no evident reaction. They asked him a question or two, apparently just to hear his voice. Szara's German was that of someone who'd spoken Yiddish as a child, and the civilian, a security type, made clear that he knew Szara was a Jew, a Polish Jew, a Soviet Bolshevik Jew of Polish origin. He probed efficiently through Szara's travelling bag without removing his black gloves, then examined press and travel documents and, when he was done, stamped the passport with a fat swastika in a circle and handed it back politely. Their eyes met for just a moment: this business they had with each other would be seen to in the future, that far they could agree.

But Szara travelled too much to take the hostility of border police to heart and, as they gained speed leaving Stuttgart station, he fell into the rhythm of the tracks and the dense twilight of Germany: smoking factories on the horizon, fields left to the November frost.

He touched the baggage receipt in the inside pocket of his jacket for the tenth time that day; he might have taken yet one more look at the thing, but the sound of the train was suddenly amplified as the door to his compartment swung open.

On first glance, an ordinary businessman of Central Europe in dark overcoat and soft-brimmed hat, carrying a buckled briefcase of the kind that is held under one arm. Then, recognition. This was a man to whom he had been briefly introduced, perhaps a year earlier, at some Moscow function he couldn't recall. His name was Bloch, a lieutenant general of the GRU, military intelligence, and recently, according to rumour, the illegal-clandestine-rezident operating GRU and NKVD networks based in Tarragona. Thus a very senior member of the Soviet cadre involved in the Spanish Civil War.

Szara was immediately on his guard; powerful people in Moscow were afraid of this man. It was nothing specific. Those who knew the details didn't tell war stories, but they veered away from his name when it came up in conversation, looked around to see who might be listening, made a certain gesture of the face that meant stay away. What little was said about Bloch implied an insatiable appetite for success-an appetite gratified by means of ferocious tyranny. Life for those assigned to work for him was said to be a nightmare.

Yaschyeritsa, they called him behind his back, a kind of lizard. Because he had the look of the basilisk: a sharp triangular face, stiff hair combed back flat from the forehead, thin eyebrows angled steeply toward the inner corners of his eyes, which, long and narrow, were set above hard cheekbones that slanted upward.

AndréSzara, like everyone who moved in those circles known as the nomenklatura, the elite, was an adroit reader of faces. You had to know who you were dealing with. A Byelorussian? An Armenian? A native Russian? With Jews, it was often difficult because Jewish women had for centuries borne the children of their tormentors and thus carried the genes of many races. God only knew, Szara thought, what brutal band of marauders had forced themselves on Bloch's female ancestor to make him look as he did. Did evil, he wondered, travel in the blood as well?

Bloch nodded a greeting, sat down across from Szara, leaned over and locked the compartment door, then turned off the lamps on the wall around the window. The train was moving slowly through a village, and from the darkened compartment they could see that a local festival was in progress; a bonfire in the public square, cattle wearing garlands, Hitler Youth in shorts holding swastika banners hung lengthwise down long poles, like Roman fasces.

Bloch stared intently at the scene. 'At last,' he said pensively, 'they are back in the Middle Ages.' He turned his attention to Szara. 'Forgive me, comrade journalist, I am General Y. I. Bloch. I don't think we've ever spoken, but I read your work when I have a moment, so I know who you are. Do I need to tell you who I am?'

'No, comrade General. I know you are with the special services.'

Bloch acknowledged Szara's awareness as a compliment: a knowing smile, a brief inclination of the head,at yourservice.

'Tell me,' the general said, 'is it true you've been away from Moscow for a time? Several months?'

'Since late August,' Szara said.

'No easy life-trains and hotel rooms. Slow steamships. But foreign capitals are certainly more amusing than Moscow, so there are compensations. No?'

This was a trap. There was a doctrinal answer, something to do withbuilding socialism, but Bloch was no fool and Szara suspected a pious response would embarrass them both. 'It's true,' he said, adding, 'though one gets tired of being the eternal stranger,' just in case.

'Do you hear the Moscow gossip?'

'Very little,' Szara said. A loner, he tended to avoid the Tass andPravda crowd on the circuit of European capitals.

Bloch's face darkened. 'This has been a troubled autumn for the services, surely you've heard that much.'

'Of course I see the newspapers.'

'There is more, much more. We've had defections, serious ones. In the last few weeks, Colonel Alexander Orlov and Colonel Walter Krivitsky, who is called general in the European press, have left the service and sought refuge in the West. The Krivitsky matter has been made public, also the flight of the operative Reiss. As for Orlov, we'll keep that to ourselves.'

Szara nodded obediently. This had quickly become a very sensitive conversation. Orlov-a cover name within the service, he was in factLeon Lazarevich Feldbin-and Krivitsky-Samuel Ginsberg-were important men, respectively NKVD andGRUofficials of senior status. TheIgnaceReiss affair had shocked him when he read about it. Reiss, murdered in Switzerland as he attempted to flee, had been a fervent idealist, a Marxist-Leninist in his bones.

'Friends?' Bloch raised an eyebrow.

'I knew Reiss to say hello to. No more than that.'

'And you? How does it go with you?' Bloch was concerned, almost fatherly. Szara wanted to laugh, had the services been panicked intokindness?

'My work is difficult, comrade General, but less difficult than that of many others, and I am content to be what I am.'

Bloch absorbed his answer and nodded to himself. 'So you march along,' he said. 'There are some,' he continued pensively, 'who find themselves deeply disturbed by the arrests, the trials. We cannot deny it.'

Oh cannot we?'We've always had enemies, within and without. I served in the civil war, from1918to1920,and fought against the Poles. It isn't for me to judge the operations of state security forces.'

Bloch sat back in his seat. 'Very well put,' he said after a time. Then his voice softened, just barely audible above the steady rumble of the train. 'And should it come your turn? Then what?'

Szara could not quite see Bloch's face in the shadow of the seat across from him, the countryside was dark, the light from the corridor dim. 'Then that is how it will be.' Szara said.

'You are a fatalist.'

'What else?' They lingered there a moment too long for Szara. 'I have no family,' he added.

Bloch seemed to nod at that, a gesture of agreement with a point made or a confirmation of something he believed. 'Not married,' he mused. 'I would have guessed otherwise.'

'I am a widower, comrade General. My wife died in the civil war. She was a nurse, in Berdichev.'

'So you are alone,' Bloch said. 'Some men, in such circumstances, might be careless of their lives, since nothing holds them to the world. Unconcerned with consequence, such men rise to an opportunity, sacrifice themselves, perhaps to cure their nation of a great evil. And then we have-why not say it? A hero! Do I have it right? Is this your view?'

A man and a woman-she had just said something that made him laugh-went by in the corridor. Szara waited until they passed. 'I am like everybody else,' he said.

'No,' Bloch said. 'You are not.' He leaned forward, his face taut, concentrated. 'To be a writer, that requires work. Work and sacrifice. And the determination to follow a certain road, wherever it may lead. Remember that, comrade journalist, whatever might happen in the days ahead.'

Szara started to reply, to fend off a version of himself he found grandiose, but Bloch raised a hand for silence. The gesture was casual enough, but it struck Szara dumb.

The general stood and unlatched the door, stared at Szara a moment, a look that openly weighed and calculated, then left the compartment abruptly, closing the door firmly behind him and disappearing down the passageway.

Some time later, the train halted atUlm.The station platform was a lacework of shadows, and raindrops refracted trails of light as they rolled down the compartment window. A figure with a hat and an underarm briefcase hurried across the platform and entered the passenger door of a black Grosser Mercedes-an automobile often used by Reich officials-which sped away from the railroad station and was soon lost in the darkness.

A hero?

No, Szara thought. He knew better. He'd learned that lesson in war.

At the age of twenty-three, in1920,he had campaigned with Marshal Tukachevsky, writing dispatches and inspirational stories for the home front, much as the writer Babel-a Jew who rode with Cossack cavalry-had served General Budenny. In the midst of the war against Poland, the Soviet forces had been driven back from Warsaw, from the banks of the Vistula, by an army commanded by General Pilsudski and his adviser, the French general Weygand. Szara's squadron, during the retreat, had been set upon by Ukrainian bandits, a remnant of the Petlyura army that had occupied Kiev. Attacked from the ridge of a hillside, and outnumbered, they had fought like men possessed, all of them-cooks, clerks, wagonmasters, and military correspondents. For the previous day they'd come upon the body of a Polish colonel, stripped bare, tied by one foot to a high tree branch, the impaling stake protruding from between his legs. The Ukrainian bands fought both sides, Poles and Russians, and God help anyone they took alive.

From horseback, Szara had ridden down one man, slashed at another with his sabre. In the next instant he and his horse were down in the dust, the horse whinnying in pain and terror, its legs thrashing. Szara rolled frantically away from the animal, then a smiling man walked towards him, a small dagger in his hand. Horses galloped past them, there were shots and screams and pointless shouted commands, but this man, in cap and overcoat, never stopped smiling. Szara crawled on all fours, a horse leapt over him and its rider cursed, but he could gain no ground. The battle that raged around them mattered not to Szara nor, apparently, to his good-humoured pursuer. The smile was meant, he understood, to be reassuring, as though he were a pig in a sty. As the man closed on him he made a cooing sound and Szara came suddenly to his senses, fumbled his revolver loose of its holster, and fired wildly. Nothing happened. The smile broadened. Then Szara took hold of his fear, as though he could squeeze it in hisfěst,aimed like a marksman on a target range, and shot the man in the eye. What he remembered later was not that he had fought bravely, he had simply decided that life mattered more than anything else in the world and had contrived to cling to it. In those years he had seen heroes, and how they went about their work, how they did what had to be done, and he knew he was not one of them.

The train was late getting into Prague. A Jewish family had attempted to board atNürnberg,the last stop on German soil. Jews had been strongly 'encouraged' to emigrate from Germany-not least by a hundred and thirty-five racial decrees, together entitled "The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour'-to whatever country would accept them. But the situation, Szara knew, was not unlike that under the czar: a bureaucratic spider's web. While you could get Paper A stamped at the local police station, the stamp on Paper B, received from theEconomic Ministry, was now out of date and would have to be applied for all over again. Meanwhile, Paper A ran its term and automatically revoked itself.

The Jewish family atNürnbergsimply attempted to board the train, a pointless act of desperation. Thus young children, grandparents, mother and father, scampered in terror all around the station while policemen in leather coats chased them down, shouting and blowing whistles. Meanwhile, the passengers peered curiously from the train windows. Some, excited by the chase, tried to help, calling out, 'There, under the luggage compartment!' or 'She's crossed the tracks!'

Just after midnight it was cold in Prague, there were frost flowers on the paving stones, but the hotel was not far from the station, and Szara was soon settled in his room. He stayed up for hours, smoking, writing notes on the margin ofLeTemps,studying the luggage ticket he'd been given. He was being drawn into something he did not understand, but he had a strong intuition about what awaited him at the end of it.

This extramarital affair with the services had been simple in the beginning, five or six years earlier, for they'd used him as an intellectual, an agent of influence, and he'd liked it, found it flattering to be trusted. Now he had got in over his head, and he had no doubt it would kill him. They were using him for something important, an official operation of theapparator, and here was the death sentence, the plotting of a cabal within it. He only knew it was very dark and very serious. Soviet generals of military intelligence did not board German trains to chat with writers.

Nonetheless, he refused to blind himself to the possibility of exits. He would die, he thought, but did not want to discover as he died that there had been, after all, a way out.That is the difference, comrade General, between thehero and the survivor.The hours of reflection revealed nothing, but did serve to dissipate tension and tire him out. He crawled into bed and slept without dreams.

He woke to a day of light snow and subtle terror in Prague. He saw nothing, felt everything. On the fifth of November, Hitler had made a speech once again declaring the urgency, for Germany, ofLebensraum,the acquisition of new territory for German growth and expansion, literally 'room to live.' Like an operatic tenor, singing counterpoint to Hitler's bass, Henlein, the leader of the Sudeten Germans, pleaded publicly in an open letter carried by Czech newspapers the following day for a halt to Czech 'persecution' of German minorities in theSudetenland,the area bordering southern Germany. On12November the countertenor, Reich Interior MinisterWilhelm Frick,said on the radio: 'Race and nationality, blood and soil, are the principles of National Socialist thought, we would be acting in contradiction if we attempted to assimilate a foreign nationality by force.'

This may have sounded warm and comforting in France, but the Sudeten Germans were not a foreign nationality, and neither were the Austrians-not according to German diplomatic definitions. Sudeten German representatives next staged a mass exodus from parliament, informing reporters waiting outside that they had been physically abused by Czech police.

Everybody in Prague knew this game-incidents, provocations, speeches-it meant that the German tank divisions sitting up on the border were coming down. Today? Tomorrow? When?

Soon.

On the surface, there was nothing to see. But what they felt here made itself known in subtle ways: the way peoplelooked at each other, a note in a voice, the unfinished sentence. Szara took the receipt he'd been given in Ostend to the central railway station. The attendant shook his head, this was from a smaller station, and gestured toward the edge of the city.

He took a taxi, but by the time he arrived, the left-luggage room of the outlying station was closed for lunch. He found himself in a strange, silent neighbourhood with signs in Polish and Ukrainian, boarded windows, groups of tieless men with buttoned collars gathered on street corners. He walked along empty streets swept by wind-driven swirls of dust. The women were hidden in black shawls, children held hands and kept close to the buildings. He heard a bell, looked down a steep lane, and saw a Jewish pedlar with a slumped, starved horse, plumes of breath streaming from its nostrils as it attempted to pull a cart up a hill.

Szara found a tinycafé;conversation stopped when he walked in. He drank a cup of tea. There was no sugar. He could hear a clock ticking behind a curtained doorway. What was it in this place? A demon lived here. Szara struggled to breathe, his persona flowed away like mist and left a dull and anxious man sitting at a table. The clock behind the curtain chimed three and he walked quickly to the station. The left-luggage clerk limped painfully and wore a blue railway uniform with a war medal pinned on the lapel. He took the receipt silently and, after a moment of study, nodded to himself. He disappeared for a long time, then returned with a leather satchel. Szara asked if a taxi could be called. 'No,' the man said. Szara waited for more, for an explanation, something, but that was it.No.

So he walked. For miles, through zigzag streets clogged with Saturday life, where every ancient stone leaned or sagged; past crowds of Orthodox Jews in caftans and curling sidelocks, gossiping in front of tiny synagogues;past Czech housewives in their print dresses, carrying home loaves of black bread and garlic sausages from the street markets; past children and dogs playing football on the cobblestones and old men who leaned their elbows on the windowsills and smoked their pipes and stared at the life in the street below. It was every quarter in every city in Europe in the cold, smoky days of November, but to Szara it was like being trapped in the dream where some terrifying thing was happening but the world ignored it and went blindly about its business.

Reaching the hotel, he trudged upstairs and hurled the satchel onto the bed. Then he collapsed in a chair and closed his eyes in order to concentrate. Certain instincts flared to life: he must write about what he'd felt, must describe the haunting of this place. Done well, he knew, such stories spread, took on a life of their own. The politicians would do what they did, but the readers, the people, would understand, care, be animated by pity to speak out for the Czech republic. How to do it? What to select? Which fact reallyspoke, so that the writer could step aside and allow the story to tell itself. And if his own dispatch did not appear in other countries, it most certainly would run in the Communist party press, in many languages, and more foreign journalists than cared to admit it had a glance at such newspapers. Editorial policy saidanything to keep the peace, but let the correspondents come here and see it for themselves.

Then the satchel reminded him of its presence. He examined it and realized he'd never seen one like it: the leather was dense, pebbled, the hide of a powerful, unknown animal. It was covered with a thick, fine dust, so he wet his index finger and drew a line through it, revealing a "colour that had once been that of bitter chocolate but was now faded by sun and time. Next he saw that the seams were hand-sewn; fine, sturdy work using a threadhe suspected was also handmade. The satchel was of the portmanteau style-like a doctor's bag, the two sides opened evenly and were held together by a brass lock. Using a damp towel, he cleaned the lock and found a reddish tracery etched into the metal surface. This was vaguely familiar. Where had he seen it? In a moment it came to him: such work adorned brass bowls and vases made in western and central Asia-India, Afghanistan, Turkestan. He tried to depress the lever on the underside of the device, but it was locked.

The handgrip bore half a label, tied on with string. Peering closely, he was able to make out the date the satchel had been deposited as left luggage:8February1935.He swore softly with amazement. Almost three years.

He put onefěngeron the lock. It was ingenious, a perfectly circular opening that did not suggest the shape of its key. He probed gently with a match, it seemed to want a round shaft with squared ridges at the very end. Hopefully, he jiggled the match about but of course nothing happened. From another time the locksmith, perhaps an artisan who sat cross-legged in a market stall in some souk, laughed at him. The device he'd fashioned would not yield to a wooden match.

Szara went downstairs to the hotel desk and explained to the young clerk on duty: a lost key, a satchel that couldn't be opened, important papers for a meeting on Monday, what could be done? The clerk nodded sympathetically and spoke soothingly. Not to worry. This happens here every day. A boy was sent off and returned an hour later with a locksmith in tow. In the room the locksmith, a serious man who spoke German and wore a stiff, formal suit, cleared his throat politely. One didn't see this sort of mechanism. But Szara was too impatient to make up answers to unasked questions and simply urged the man to proceed. Aftera few minutes of meditation, the locksmith reluctantly folded up his leather tool case, put it away, and, reddening slightly, drew a set of finely made burglar's picks from the interior pocket of his jacket. Now the battle between the two technicians commenced.

Not that the Tadzik, the Kirghiz, the craftsman of the Bokhara market-whoever he'd been-didn't resist, he did, but in the event he was no match for the modern Czech and his shining steel picks. With the emphaticsnick of the truly well made device the lock opened, and the locksmith stood back and applied an immaculate grey cloth to his sweaty forehead. 'So beautiful a work,' he said, mostly to himself.

So beautiful a bill, as well, but Szara paid it and tipped handsomely besides, for he knew theapparatcould eventually find out anything, and he might have signed this man's death warrant.

At dusk,AndréSzara sat in his unlit room with the remnants of a man'sUfespread out around him.

There wasn't a writer in the world who could resist attributing a melancholy romance to these artifacts, but, he argued to his critical self, that did not diminish their eloquence. For if the satchel itself spoke of Bokhara, Samarkand, or the oasis towns of the Kara Kum desert, its contents said something very different, about a European, a European Russian, who had travelled-served? hidden? died?-in those regions, about the sort of man he was, about pride itself.

The objects laid out on the hotel desk and bureau made up an estate. Some clothing, a few books, a revolver, and the humble tools-thread and needle, digestive tea, well-creased maps-of a man on the run. On the run, for there was equal clarity, equal eloquence, in the itemsnot found. There were no photographs, no letters. No addressbook, no traveller's journal. This had been a man who understood the people he fled from and protected the vulnerability of those who may have loved him.

The clothing had been packed on top, folded loosely but perfectly, as though by someone with a long history of military service, someone to whom the ordered neatness of a footlocker was second nature. It was good clothing, carefully preserved, often mended but terribly worn, its wear the result of repeated washings and long use in hard country. Cotton underdrawers and wool shirts, a thick sailor's sweater darned at the elbows, heavy wool socks with virtually transparent heels.

The service revolver dated from prerevolutionary days, a Nagant, the double-action officer's model, 7.62mm from a design of1895.It was well oiled and fully loaded. From certain characteristics, Szara determined that the sidearm had had a long and very active life. The lanyard ring at the base of the grip had been removed and the surface filed flat, and the metal at the edges of the sharp angles, barrel opening, cylinder, the trigger itself, was silvery and smooth. A look down the barrel showed it to be immaculate, cleaned not with the usual brick dust-an almost religious (and thereby ruinous) obsession with the peasant infantry of the Great War-but with a scouring brush of British manufacture folded in a square of paper. Not newspaper, for that told of where you had been and when you were there. Plain paper. A careful man.

The books were also from the time before the revolution, the latest printing date1915;and Szara handled them with reverence for they were no longer to be had. Dobrilov's lovely essays on noble estates, Ivan Krug'sPoems at Harvest, Gletkhin's tales of travel among the Khivani, Pushkin of course, and a collection by one Churnensky,Letters from a Distant Village, which Szara had never heard of. These were companions of journey,books to be read and read again, books for a man who lived in places where books could not be found. Eagerly, Szara paged through them, looking for commentary, for at least an underlined passage, but there was, as he'd expected, not a mark to be found.

Yet the most curious offering of the opened satchel was its odour. Szara could not really pin it down, though he held the sweater to his face and breathed in it. He could identify a hint of mildew, woodsmoke, the sweetish smell of pack animals, and something else, a spice perhaps, cloves or cardamom, that suggested the central Asian marketplace. It had been carried in the satchel for a long time, for its presence touched the books and the clothing and the leather itself. Why? Perhaps to make spoiled food more palatable, perhaps to add an ingredient of civilization to life in general. On this point he could make no decision.

Szara was sufficiently familiar with the practices of intelligence services to know that chronology meant everything. 'May God protect and keep the czar' at the end of a letter meant one thing in1916,quite another in1918.With regard to the time of 'the officer,' for Szara discovered himself using that term, the satchel's contents offered an Austrian map of the southern borders of the Caspian Sea dated1919.The cartography had certainly begun earlier (honorary Bolshevik names were missing), but the printing date allowed Szara to write on a piece of hotel stationery 'alive in1919.'Checking the luggage label once again, he noted 'tentative terminal date,8February1935.'A curious date, following by two months and some days the assassination of Sergei Kirov at the Smolny Institute in Leningrad,1December1934,which led to the first round of purges under Yagoda.

A terminal date?Yes, Szara thought,this man is dead.

He simply knew it. And, he felt, much earlier than1935.Somehow, another hand had recovered the satchel andmoved it to the left-luggage room of a remote Prague railway station that winter. Infinite permutations were of course possible, but Szara suspected that a life played out in the southern extremity of the Soviet empire had ended there. The Red Army had suppressed the pashas' risings in1923.If the officer, perhaps a military adviser to one of the local rulers, had survived those wars, he had not left the region. There was nothing of Europe that had not been packed on some night in, Szara guessed,1920.

That the satchel itself had survived was a kind of miracle,though presently Szara came upon a rather more concrete possibility-the stitching on the bottom lining. This was not the same hand that had lovingly and expertly crafted the seams. The reattachment had been managed as best it could be done, with waxed thread sewn into a cruciform shape anchoring each corner. So, the officer carried more than books and clothes. Szara remembered whatRenate Braunhad said in the lobby of Khelidze's hotel: 'It is for you.' Not old maps, books, and clothing certainly, and not a Nagant pistol. What was now 'his' lay beneath the satchel's false bottom in a secret compartment.

Szara called the desk and had a bottle of vodka sent up. He sensed a long, difficult night ahead of him-the city of Prague was bad enough, the officer's doomed attempt to survive history didn't make things any better. He must, Szara reasoned, have been a loyal soldier in the czar's service, thus fugitive after the revolution in1917.Perhaps he'd fought alongside WhiteGuardisielements in the civil war. Then flight, always southeast, into central Asia, as the Red Army advanced. The history of that place and time was as evil as any Szara knew-Basmatchi, the marauding bandits of the region, Baron Ungarn-Sternberg, a sadist and a madman, General Ma and his Muslim army; rape, murder, pillage, captives thrown into locomotive boilers to die in the steam. He suspected that this man, who carried acivilized little library and carefully darned the elbows of his sweater, had died in some unremembered minor skirmish during those years. There were times when a bullet was the best of all solutions. Szara found himself hoping it had been that way for the officer.

The vodka helped. Szara was humming a song by the time he had his razor out, sawing away at the thick bands of crisscrossed thread. The officer was no fool. Who, Szara wondered, did he think to deceive with this only too evident false bottom contrivance? Perhaps the very densest border patrolman or the most slow-witted customs guard. The NKVD workshops did this sort of thing quite well, leaving only the slimmest margin for secreting documents and disguising the false bottom so that you really could not tell. On the other hand, the officer had likely done what he could, used the only available hiding place and hoped for the best. Yes, Szara understood him now, better and better; the sewn-down corners revealed a sort of determination in the face of hopeless circumstances, a quality Szara admired above all others. Having cut loose the final corner, he had to use a nail file to pry up the leather flap.

What had he hoped to find? Not this. A thick stack of greyish paper, frayed at the edges, covered with a careful pen scrawl of stiff Russian phrases-the poetry of bureaucrats. It was official paper, a bluntly printed letterhead announcing its origin as Bureau of Information, Third Section, Department of State Protection (Okhrannoye Otdyelyenye), Ministry of the Interior, Transcaucasian District, with a street address in Tbilisi-the Georgian city of Tiflis.

A slow, sullen disappointment drifted over Szara's mood. He carried the vodka bottle over to the window and watched as a goods train crawled slowly away fromthe railway station, its couplings clanking and rattling as the cars jerked into motion. The officer was not a noble colonel or a captain of cavalry but a slow-footed policeman, no doubt a cog in the czar's vast but inefficient secret police gendarmerie, the Okhrana, and this sheaf of misery on the hotel desk apparently represented a succession of cases, a record ofagents provocateurs, payments to petty informers, and solemn physical descriptions of Social Revolutionary party workers in the early days of the century. He'd seen this kind of report from time to time, soul-destroying stuff it was, humanity seen through a window by the dim glow of a street lamp, sad and mean and obsessed with endless conspiracies. The thought of it made you want to retire to the countryside with a milk cow and a vegetable patch.

Not a military officer, a police officer. Poor man, he had carried this catalogue of small deceits over mountain and across desert, apparently certain of its value once the counterrevolution had succeeded and some surviving spawn of the Romanovs once again sat upon the Throne of All the Russias. In sorrow more than anger Szara soothed his frustrated imagination with two tiltings of the vodka bottle.A paper creature, he thought.A uniform with a man in it.

He walked back to the desk and adjusted the gooseneck lamp. The organization Messame Dassy (Third Group) had been founded in1893,of Social Democratic origin and purpose, in political opposition to Meori Dassy (Second Group)-Szara sighed at such grotesque hair-splitting-and made its views known in pamphlets and the newspaperKvali (The Furrow). Known principals of the organization includedN.K.Jordania,?.?.Muridze,G. M. Tseretelli. The informantdubok(it meant 'little oak' and had gone on to become the name for a dead-drop of any kind) enrolled and became active in1898,at age nineteen.

Szara flipped through the stack of pages, his eye falling randomly on summaries of interviews, memoranda, alterations in handwriting as other officers contributed to the record, receipts for informer payments signed with cover names (not code names likedubok; one never knew one's code name, that belonged to the Masters of the File), a change to typewriter as the case spanned the years and reports were sent travelling upward from district to region to central bureau to ministry to Czar Nicholas and perhaps to God Himself.

Szara's temples throbbed.

Serves you right!What in the name of heaven had he expected? Swiss marks? Perhaps he had, deep down. Those exquisitely printed passports to anywhere and everything.Idiot! Maybe gold coins? The molten rubies of children's books? Or a single pressed rose, its last dying fragrance only just discernible?

Yes, yes, yes. Any or all of it.His eye fell in misery on the false plate lying on the floor amid a tangle of cut-up thread. He'd learned to sew as a child in Odessa, but this was not the sort of job he could do. How was he to put all this back together again? By employment of the hotel seamstress?The guest in Room35requires the false bottom sewed back on his suitcase-hurry woman, he must cross the Polish frontier tonight!A victim of betrayed imagination, Szara cursed and mentally called down theapparatasthough summoning evil spirits. He willed Heshel with his sad little smile orRenate Braunwith her purse full of skeleton keys, or any of them, grey shapes or cold-eyed intellectuals, to come and take this inhuman pettifoggery away from him before he hurled it out of the window.

In fact, where were they?

He glanced at the bottom of the door, expecting a slip of paper to come sliding underneath at that very moment, but all he saw was worn carpet. The world suddenly feltvery silent to him, and another visit with the vodka did not change that.

In desperation he shoved the paper to one side and replaced it with sheets of hotel stationery from the desk drawer. If, in the final analysis, the officer did not deserve this vodka-driven storm in the emotional latitudes, the anguished people of Prague most assuredly did.

It was midnight when he finished, and his back hurt like a bastard. But he'd got it. The reader would find himself;his street,his neighbourhood,his nation. And the hysteria, the nightmare, was where it belonged, just below the horizon so you felt it more than saw it. To balance a story on 'the people' he'd have to do one on 'the ministry': quote from BeneS, quote from General Vlasy, something vicious from Henlein, and the slant-since the country had been created a parliamentary democracy in1918and showed no sign of yearning to become a socialist republic-would have to serve Soviet diplomatic interests by fervid anti-Hitlerism. No problem there. He could file on ministries with one eye shut and the pencil in his ear, and it would mean just about that much. Politicians were like talking dogs in a circus: the fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what they said.

Then, as always happened after he wrote something he liked, the room began to shrink. He stuffed some money in his pocket, pulled up his tie, threw on his jacket, and made his escape. He tried walking, but the wind blowing down from Poland was fierce and the air had the smell of winter, so he waved down a taxi and gave the address of the Luxuria, anachtlokal where the cabaret was foul and the audience worse, thus exactly where he belonged in his present frame of mind.

Nor was he disappointed. Sitting alone at a tiny table, a glass of flat champagne at his elbow, he smoked steadily and lost himself in the mindless fog of the place, content beneath the soiled cutout of yellow paper pinned to a velvet curtain that served as the Luxuria's moon-a thin slice, a weary old moon for nights when nothing mattered.

Momo Tsiplerand hisWienerwaldCompanions.

Five of them, including the oldest cellist in captivity, a death-eyed drummer called Rex, andMomohimself, one of those dark celebrities nourished by the shadows east of the Rhine, a Viennese Hungarian in a green dinner-jacket with a voice full of tears that neither he nor anyone else had ever cried.

'Noch einmalalAbscheid dein Händchen mir gib,'sangMomoas the cello sobbed. 'Just once again give me your hand to press'-the interior Szara was overjoyed, this horrid syrup was delicious, a wicked joke on itself, an anthem to Viennese love gone wrong. The title of the song was perfect: "There Are Things We Must All Forget.' The violinist had fluffy white hair that stood out in wings and he smiled like Satan himself as he played.

The Companions of theWienerwaldthen took up a kind of 'drunken elephant' theme for the evening's main attraction: the enormous Mottel Motkevich, who staggered into the spotlight to a series of rimshots from the drummer and began his famous one-word routine. At first, his body told the story: I just woke up in the maid's bed with the world's worst hangover and someone pushed me out onto the stage of a nightclub in Prague. What am I doing here? What areyou doing here?

His flabby face sweated in the purple lights-for twenty years he'd looked like he was going to die next week. Then he shaded his eyes and peered around the room. Slowly, recognition took hold. He knew what sort of swine had come out to thenachtlokal tonight, ah yes, he knew themall too well. 'Ja,' he said, confirming the very worst, his thick lips pressed together with grim disapproval.

He began to nod, confirming his observation: drunkards and perverts, dissolution and depravity. He put his hands on his broad hips and stared out at a Yugoslav colonel accompanied by a well-rouged girl in a shiny feather hat that hugged her head tightly.lJaP said Mottel Motkevich. There's no doubt about you two. Likewise to a pair of pretty English boys in plus fours, then to a Captain of Industry caught in the act of schnozzling a sort of teenage dairymaid by his side.

Suddenly, a voice from the shadows in the back of the room: 'But Mottel, why not?' Quickly the audience began to shout back at the comedian in a stew of European languages: 'Is it bad?'

'Why shouldn't we?'

'What can be so wrong?'

The fat man recoiled, grasped the velvet curtain with one hand, eyes and mouth widening with new understanding. 'Ja?' You mean it's really all right after all? To do just every sort of thing we all know about and some we haven't figured out yet?

Now came the audience's great moment.'Ja!' they cried out, again and again; even the waiters joined in.

Poor Mottel actually crumpled under the assault. A world he presumed to love, of order and rectitude, had been torn to shreds before his very eyes and now the truth lay bare. With regret, he bade all that fatuous old nonsense adieu. 'Ja, ja,' he admitted ruefully, so it has always been, so it will always be, so, particularly so, will it be tonight.

Just then something extremely interesting caught his eye, something going on behind the curtain to his right, and, eyes glittering like a love-maddened satyr, he bequeathed his audience one final, drawn-outjaaa, then stomped ofl the stage to applause as the Companions struck upa circuímelody and the zebras ran out from behind the curtainbucking and neighing, pawing their little forehooves in the air.

Naked girls inpapier-mâchézebra masks, actually. Prancing and jiggling among the tables, stopping now and again to stick their bottoms out at the customers, then taking off again with a leap. After a few minutes they galloped away into the wings, the Companions swung into a sedate waltz, and the dancers soon reappeared, without masks and wearing gowns, asAnimierdamenwho were to flirt with the customers, sit on their laps, and tickle them into buying champagne by the bottle.

Szara's was heavy-hipped, with hair dyed a lustrous, sinister black. 'Can you guess which zebra was me? I was so very close to you!'

Later he went with her. To a secret room at the top of a cold house where you walked upstairs, then downstairs, across two courtyards where cats lived, finally to climb again, past blind turns and dark passageways, until you came to a low corridor under the roof gables.

'Zebra,' he called her; it made things simpler. He doubted he was the originator of the idea, for she seemed quite comfortable with it. She cantered and whinnied and shook her little white tummy-all for him.

His spirit soared, at last he'd found an island of pleasure in his particular sea of troubles. There were those, he knew, who would have found such sport sorrowful and mean, but what furies did they know? What waited for them on the other sides of doors?

The Zebra owned a little radio; it played static, and also a station that stayed on the air all night long, playing scratchy recordings of Schumann and Chopin from somewhere in the darkness of Central Europe, where insomnia had become something of a religion.

To this accompaniment they made great progress. And delighted themselves by feigning shock at having tumbledinto such depths where anything at all may be found to swim. 'Ah yes?' cried the Zebra, as though they'd happened on some new and complex amusement, never before attempted in the secret rooms of these cities, as though their daring to play the devil's own games might stay his hand from that which they knew, by whatever obscure prescience, he meant to do to them all.

Warm and exhausted at last, they dozed off in the smoky room while the radio crackled, faded in and out, voices sometimes whispering to them in unknown languages.

The leaders of the Georgiankhvost of the NKVD usually met for an hour or two on Sunday mornings in Alexei Agayan's apartment on Tverskaya street. Beria himself never came-he was, in some sense, a conspiracy of one-but made his wishes known through Dershani, Agayan, or one of the others. Typically, only the Moscow-based officers attended the meeting, though comrades from the southeast republics stopped by from time to time.

They met in Agayan's kitchen, large, dilapidated, and very warm, on21November at eleven-thirty in the morning. Agayan, a short, dark-skinned man with a thick head of curly grey hair and an unruly moustache, wore an old cardigan in keeping with the air of informality. Ismailov, a Russified Turk, and Dzakhalev, anOssete-the Farsi-speaking tribe of the north Caucasus from whom Stalin's mother was said to be descended-were red-eyed and a little tender from Saturday-night excesses. Terounian, from the city of Yerevan in Armenia, offered a small burlap sack of ripe pears brought to Moscow by his cousin, a locomotive engineer. These were laid out on the table by Stasia, Agayan's young Russian wife, along with bowls of salted and sugared almonds, pine nuts, and a plate of Smyrna raisins. Agayan's wife also served an endless succession of tiny cups of Turkish coffee,sekerli,the sweetest variety, throughout the meeting. Dershani, a Georgian, the most important among equals, was also the last to arrive. Such traditions were important to thekhvost and they observed them scrupulously.

It was altogether a traditional sort of gathering, as though in a coffeehouse in Baku or Tashkent. They sat in their shirt-sleeves and smoked, ate, and drank their coffees and took turns to speak-in Russian, their only common language-with respect for one another and with a sense of ceremony. What was said mattered, that was understood, they would have to stand by it.

Agayan, squinting in the rising smoke of a cigarette held in the centre of his lips, spoke solemnly of comrades disappeared in the purges. The Ukrainian and Polishzhids, he admitted, were getting much the worst of it, but many Georgians and Armenians and their allies from all over (somezhids of their own, for that matter) had also vanished into the Lubyanka and the Lefortovo. Agayan sighed mournfully when he finished his report, all the eulogy many of them would ever have.

'One can only wonder. . .'Dzakhalev said.

Agayan's shrug was eloquent. 'It's what he wants. As for me, I was not asked.' The namelesshe in these conversations was always Stalin.

'Still,' Dzakhalev said, 'Yassim Ferimovich was a superb officer.'

'And loyal,' Terounian added. At thirty-five, he was by far the youngest man in the room.

Agayan lit a new cigarette from the stub of the old one. 'Nonetheless,' he said.

'You have heard what he said to Yezhov, in the matter of interrogation? "Beat and beat and beat.'" Terounian paused to let the felicity of that phrasing hang in the air, to make sure everyone understood he honoured it. 'Thus anyone will admit anything, will surely name his own mother.'

'Yours too,' Ismailov said.

Dershani raised his right hand a few inches off the table; the gesture meantenough and stopped Ismailov dead in his tracks. Dershani had the face of a hawk-sharp beak, glittering, lifeless eyes-thin lips, high forehead, hair that had gone grey when he was young-some said in a single night when he was sentenced to die. But he'd lived. Changed. Into something not quite a man. A specialist at obtaining confessions, a man whose hand was rumoured to have 'actually held the pliers.' Ismailov's tone of voice was clearly not to his taste.

'His thinking is very broad,' Dershani said. 'We are not meant to understand it. We are not meant to comment upon it.' He paused for coffee, to permit the atmosphere in the room to rise to his level, then took a few pine nuts. 'These are delicious,' he said. 'If you look at our history-the history of our service, I mean-his hand may be seen to have grasped the tiller just at the crucial moment. We began with Dzerzhinsky, a Pole of aristocratic background from VUna. Catholic by birth, he shows, early in life, a great affection for Jews. He comes to speak perfect Yiddish, his first lover is one Julia Goldman, the sister of his best friend. She dies of tuberculosis, in Switzerland, where he had placed her in a sanatorium, and his sorrow is soothed by a love affair with a comrade calledSabinaFeinstem.Eventually he marries a Polish Jewess, from the Warsaw intelligentsia, named Sophie Mushkat. His deputy, the man he depends on, is Unshlikht, also a Polish Jew, also an intellectual, from Mlawa.

'When Dzerzhinsky dies, his other deputy, Menzhinsky, takes over. No Jew, Menzhinsky, but anartiste. A man who speaks Chinese, Persian, Japanese, in all twelve languages and who, while doing our work in Paris, is a poet one day, a painter the next, and lies around in silk pyjamas, smoking a perfumed cigarette in an ivory holder, the leader of a,a salon. Lenin dies. This young state, troubled, gravely threatened, thrusts itself at our leader, and he agrees to take its burdens upon his shoulders. He seeks only to continue the work of Lenin but, in1934,the Trotskyite centre begins to gather power. Something must be done. In Lenin's tradition he turns to Yagoda, a Polish Jew from Lodz, a poisoner, who eliminates the writer Gorky through seemingly natural means. But he is too clever, keeps his own counsel, and by1936he is no longer the right sort of person for the job. Now what is the answer? Perhaps the dwarf, Yezhov, called familiarly "the blackberry," which his name suggests. But this one is no better than the other-not a Jew this time but a madman, truly, and malicious, like a child of the slum who soaks cats' tails in paraffin and sets them alight.'

Dershani stopped dead, tapping four fingers on the kitchen table. A glance at Agayan's wife, standing at the stove in the far part of the kitchen, brought her swiftly with a fresh little cup of coffee.

'Tell us, Efim Aleksandrovich, what will happen next?' Ismailov thus declared himself suitably chastened, symbolically sought Dershani's pardon for his momentary flippancy.

Dershani closed his eyes politely as he drank off his coffee, smacked his lips politely in appreciation. 'Stasia Marievna, you are a jewel,' he said. She nodded silently to acknowledge the compliment.

'It evolves, it evolves,' Dershani said. 'It is beautiful history, after all, and guided now by genius. But he must move at the proper speed, certain matters must be allowed to play themselves out. And, I tell you in confidence, there are many considerations that may elude our vision. Thesezhids from Poland cannot just be swept away wholesale. Such cleaning, no matter how appropriate, would draw unwelcome attention, might alienate theJews of America, for instance, who are great idealists and do our special work in their country. Thus Russians and Ukrainians, yes, and even Georgians and Armenians must leave the stage along with the others. This is necessity, historical necessity, a stratagem worthy of Lenin.'

'Then tell us, Efim Aleksandrovich,' said Agayan, not unconsciously echoing Ismailov's phrasing, 'if today we are not in fact privileged to hear the views of our comrade in Tbilisi?' He referred to Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, presently first secretary of the Georgian Communist party and previously head of the Georgian NKVD. The modest bite in the question suggested that Dershani should perhaps not call his wife a jewel in front of his colleagues.

Dershani took only the smallest step backwards. 'Lavrenty Pavlovich might not disagree with the drift of what I am saying. We both believe, I can say, that we will win this battle-though there are actions which must be taken if we intend to do so. Most important, however, to perceive his,Ais,wishes and to act upon them with all possible measures.'

This opened a door. Agayan tapped his cup on the saucer and his wife brought him a fresh coffee. Dershani had citedall possible measures, and form now decreed that Agayan seek to discover what they were. Once described, they had to be undertaken.

Dershani glanced at his watch. Agayan leapt at the possibility. 'Please, Efim Aleksandrovich, do not permit us to detain you if duty calls elsewhere.'

'No, no,' Dershani said dismissively, 'I'm simply wondering what's become of Grigory Petrovich-he was specifically to join us this morning.'

'You refer to Khelidze?' Ismailov asked.

'Yes.'

'I'll call his apartment,' Agayan said, rising quickly, delighted with the interruption. 'His wife will know where he's got to.'

Dzakhalev snickered briefly. 'Not likely,' he said.

Monday morning, striding through a fine, wet mist that made the streets of Prague even greyer than usual, Szara went early to the SovPressBuro, which handled all Soviet dispatches, and filed the story he'd written on Saturday night. It had taken him some twenty-eight tries to get a title that settled properly on the piece. His initial instinct led down a path marked 'Prague, City in-.'He tried 'Peril,' 'Sorrow,' 'Waiting,' 'Despair,' and, at last, in fury that it wouldn't work, 'Czechoslovakia.'

At the end of patience the rather literal 'Silence in Prague' took the prize, a title, on reflection, that turned out to be a message from the deep interior where all the work really went on. For those who read with both eyes, the melodramatic heading would imply a subtle alteration of preposition, so that the sharper and truer message would concern silenceabout Prague-not the anguished silence of a city under political siege but the cowardly silence of European statesmen, a silence filled with diplomatic bluster that nobody took seriously, a silence that could be broken only by the sputter of tank ignitions as armoured columns moved to reposition themselves on the borders of Germany.

There was, in fact, another zone of silence on the subject of Prague, to the east of Czechoslovakia, where Stalin's Franco-Russian alliance specified that the USSR would come to the aid of the Czechs if Hitler attacked them, but only after the French did. Thus the USSR had positioned itself to hide behind the promises of a regime in Paris that compromised on every issue and staggered from scandal to catastrophe and back again. Yes, Stalin's Red Army wasin bloody disarray from the purges of June'37,but it was sorrowful, Szara thought, that the Czechs would get the bill for that.

And there was, unknown to Szara, some further silence to come.

The dispatch clerk at the bureau near theJiráskuvbridge, a stern, full-breasted matron with mounds of pinned-up grey hair, read 'Silence in Prague' sitting in front of her typewriter. 'Yes, comrade Szara,' she breathed, 'you have told the truth here, this is just the way this city feels.' He accepted the compliment, and more than a little adoration in her eyes, with a deflective mumble. It wouldn't do to let her know just how much such praise meant to him. He saw the story off, then wandered along the streets that ran next to the Vltava and watched the barges moving slowly up the steel-coloured November river.

Szara returned to the press bureau on Tuesday morning, meaning to wire Moscow his intention to travel up to Paris. There was always a story to be found in Paris, and he badly needed to breathe the unhealthy, healing air of that city. What he got instead, as he came through the door, was a pitying stare from the maternal transmission clerk. 'A message for the comrade,' she said, shaking her head in sympathy. She handed him a telegram, in from Moscow an hour earlier:

CANNOT ACCEPT SILENCE/PRAGUE IN PRESENT FORM STOP BY25NOVEMBER DEVELOP INFORMATION FOR PROFILE OFDRJULIUSBAUMANN,SALZBRUNNER8,BERLIN, SUCCESSFUL INDUSTRIALIST STOP SUBMIT ALL MATERIAL DIRECTLY TO SOVPRESS SUPERVISOR BERLIN STOP SIGNED NEZHENKO

He saw that the clerk was waiting for him to explode but he shut his emotions down at once. He was, he told himself, a big boy, and shifts of party line were nothing new. His success as a correspondent, and the considerable freedom he enjoyed, were based equally on ability and a sensitivity to what could and could not be written at any given moment. He was annoyed with himself for getting it wrong, but something was brewing in Moscow, and it was not the moment for indignation, it was the moment for understanding that political developments excluded stories on Prague. For the clerk's benefit, he nodded in acceptance: Soviet journalism worker accepts criticism and forges ahead to build socialism. Yes, there was an overflowing wastebasket at his feet, and yes, he yearned to give it a mighty kick that would send it skittering into the wall, but no, he could not do it. 'Then it's to be Berlin,' he said calmly. He folded the telegram and slid it into the pocket of his jacket, said good-bye to the clerk, smiled brightly, and left, closing the door behind him so softly it made not a sound.

That night he was early for the Berlin express and decided to have a sandwich and coffee at the railway station buffet. He noticed a group of men gathered around a radio in one corner of the room and wandered over to see what was so interesting. It was, as he'd supposed, a political speech, but not in Czech, in German. Szara recognized the voice immediately-Adolf Hitler was born to speak on the radio. He was a brilliant orator to begin with, and somehow the dynamics of wireless transmission-static, the light hiss of silence-added power to his voice. Hitler teased his audience, tiptoeing up to a dramatic point, then hammering it home. The audience, tens of thousands by the sound of it, cheered itself hoarse, swept by political ecstasy, ready to die then and there for German honour.

Szara stood at the outer fringe of the group and listened without expression or reaction, pointedly ignoring an unpleasant glance of warning from one of the Czechs-Slovakians? Sudeten Germans?-gathered around the radio. The voice, working toward a conclusion, was level and sensible to begin with:

Then the final aim of our whole party is quite clear for all of us. Always I am concerned only that I do not take any step from which I will have to retreat, and not to take any step that will harm us.

I tell you that I always go to the outermost limits of risk, but never beyond. For this you need to have a nose [laughter; Szara could imagine the gesture], a nose to smell out, more or less, 'What can I still do?' Also, in a struggle against an enemy, I do not summon an enemy backed by a fighting force, I do not say 'Fight!' because I want to fight. Instead I say 'I will destroy you' [a swell of voices here, but Hitler spoke through it]. And now, Wisdom, help me. Help me to manoeuvre you into a corner where you cannot fight back. And then you get the blow, right in the heart. That's it!

The crowd roared in triumph and Szara felt his blood chill. As he turned to walk away there was a blur of motion to his right, the side of his head exploded, then he found himself sprawled on the filthy tiles of the restaurant floor. Looking up, he saw a man with a twisted mouth, his upper body coiled like a spring, his right fist drawn back over his left shoulder in order to hit a second time. The man spoke German. 'Jew shit,' he said.

Szara started to get up, but the man took a step toward him so he stayed where he was, on hands and knees. Helooked around the restaurant; people were eating soup, blowing on their spoons before sipping it up. On the radio, a commentator's voice sounded measured and serious. The other men around the radio did not look at him, only the man with his fist drawn back-young, ordinary, broad, in a cheap suit and a loud tie. Szara's position seemed to mollify the man, who pulled a chair toward him and sat back down with his friends. He placed a metal salt shaker next to the pepper.

Slowly, Szara climbed to his feet. His ear was on fire, it throbbed and buzzed and he could hear nothing on that side. His vision was a little fuzzy and he blinked to clear it. As he walked away he realized that there were tears in his eyes-physical, physical,he told himself-but he was in many kinds of pain and he couldn't sort it out at all.

The Prague-Berlin night express left the central station at9:03p.m.,due in at Berlin'sBahnhof amZoo station at11:51,stopping only at theAussigborder control post on the east bank of the Elbe. Szara now travelled with two bags, his own and the leather satchel. The train was cold and crowded and smoky. Szara shared a compartment with two middle-aged women he took to be sisters and two teenage boys whose windburned faces and khaki shorts suggested they'd been on a weekend mountain-climbing holiday in Czechoslovakia and had stayed on until Tuesday before returning to school in Germany.

Szara had some anxiety about the German customs inspection, but the officer's revolver now lay at the bottom of the Vltava and he doubted that a file written in Russian-something it would be normal for him to have-would cause any difficulty. Border inspections concentrated on guns, explosives, large amounts of currency, and seditious literature-the revolutionary toolkit. Beyond that, the inspectors were not very interested. He was taking,perhaps, a small chance, that a Gestapo officer would be in attendance (not unlikely) and that he would know enough Russian to recognize what he was looking at (very unlikely). In fact, Szara realized he didn't have much of a choice: the file was 'his,' but not his to dispose of. Sooner or later,they would want to know what had become of it. As the train wound through the pine forests of northern Czechoslovakia, Szara's hand rose continually to his ear, slightly red and swollen and warm to the touch. He'd been hit, apparently, with the end of a metal salt shaker enclosed in a fist. As for other damage-heart, spirit, dignity; it had a lot of names-he finally managed to stand off from it and bring himself under control.No, he told himself again and again, youshouldn't have fought back. The men listening to the radio would've done far worse.

The border control atAussig wasuneventful. The train slowly gained speed, ran briefly beside the Elbe, shallow and still in the late autumn, and soon after passed the brown brick porcelain factories of Dresden, red shadows from the heating kilns flickering on the train windows. The track descended gradually from the high plain of Czechoslovakia to sea-level Germany, to flat fields and small, orderly towns,aStationmasterwith a lantern standing on the platform at every village.

The train slowed to a crawl-Szara glanced at his watch, it was a few minutes after ten-then stopped with a loud hiss of decompression. The passengers in his compartment stirred about irritably, said'Wuss?' and peered out the windows, but there was nothing to see, only farm fields edged by woodland. Presently, a conductor appeared at the door to the compartment. An old gentleman with a hat a size too large for him, he licked his lips nervously and said,'Herr Szara?'His eye roamed among the passengers, but there was really only one possible candidate.

'Well?' Szara said.Now what?.

'Would you be so kind as to accompany me, it's just. . .'

Entirely without menace. Szara considered outrage, then sensed the weight of Teutonic railway bureaucracy standing behind this request, sighed with irritation, and stood up.

'Please, your luggage,' the conductor said.

Szara snatched the handles and followed the man down the corridor to the end of the car. A chief conductor awaited him there. 'I am sorry,HerrSzara, but you must leave the train here.'

Szara stiffened. 'I will not,' he said.

'Please,' said the man nervously.

Szara stared at him for a moment, utterly confounded. There was nothing outside the open door but dark fields. 'I demand an explanation,' he said.

The man peered over Szara's shoulder and Szara turned his head. Two men in suits stood at the end of the corridor. Szara said, 'Am I to walk to Berlin?' He laughed, inviting them to consider the absurdity of the situation, but it sounded false and shrill. The supervisor placed a tentative hand above his elbow; Szara jerked away from him. 'Take your hands off me,' he said.

The conductor was now very formal. 'You must leave.'

He realized he was going to be thrown off if he didn't move, so he took his luggage and descended the iron stairway to thecinderbédon which the rails lay. The conductor leaned out, was handed a red lantern from within, and swung it twice towards the engine. Szara stepped away from the train as it jerked into motion. He watched it gather momentum as it rolled past him-a series of white faces framed by windows-then saw it off into the distance,two red lamps at the back of the guard's van fading slowly, then blackness.

The change was sudden, and complete. Civilization had simply vanished. He felt a light wind against his face, the faint rime of frost on a furrowed field sparkled in the light of the quarter moon, and the silence was punctuated by the sound of a night bird, a high-low call that seemed very far away. He stood quietly for a time, watched the slice of moon that dimmed and sharpened as haze banks drifted across it in a starless sky. Then, from the woodland at the near horizon, a pair of headlights moved very slowly toward a point some fifty yards up the track. He could see strands of ground mist rising into the illumination of the beams.

Ah.With a sigh Szara hefted the two bags and trudged towards the lights, discovering, as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, a narrow country lane that crossed the railway tracks.General Bloch, he thought.Doing tricks with the German rail system.

The car reached the crossing before he did and rolled gently to a stop. Somehow, he'd missed a signal-this meeting had the distinct feel of an improvised fallback. He was, on balance, relieved. The heart of theapparathad skipped a beat but now returned to form and required the parcel from Prague. Well, thank God he had it. As he approached the car, its outline took shape in the ambient glow of the headlamps. It was not the same Grosser Mercedes that had carried General Bloch away from the station atUlm,but the monarchs of theapparatchanged cars about as casually as they changed mistresses and tonight had selected something small and anonymous for thetreff, clandestine meeting, in a German beet field.

The middle-aged sisters in the train compartment that Szara had recently occupied were amused, rather sentimentally amused, at the argument that now began between the two students returning from their mountain-climbingexertions in theTatra.Sentiment was inspired by the recollection of their own sons; wholesome, Nordic youths quite like these who had, from time to time, gone absolutely mulish over some foolery or other, as boys will, and come nearly to blows over it. The sisters could barely keep from smiling. The dispute began genially enough-a discussion of the quality of Czech matches made for woodcutters and others who needed to make outdoor fires. One of the lads was quite delighted with the brand they'd purchased, the other had reservations. Yes, he'd agree that theystrackconsistently, even when wet, but they burned for only a few seconds and then went out: with damp kindling, clearly a liability. The other boy was robust in defence. Was his friend blind and senseless? The matches burned fora long time. No, they didn't.Yes, they did. Just like miniature versions of their papas, weren't they, disputing some point in politics or machinery or dogs.

As the train approached the tiny station atFeldhausen,where the track crosses a bridge and then swings away from the riverElster,a bet of a few groschen wasstrackand an experiment undertaken. The defender of the matches lit one and held it high while the other boy counted out the seconds. The sisters pretended not to notice, but they'd been drawn inexorably into the argument and silently counted right along.

The first boy was an easy winner and the groschen were duly handed over-offered cheerfully and accepted humbly, the sisters noted with approval. The match had burned for more than thirty-eight seconds, from a point just outsideFeldhausento the other end of the station platform and even a little way out into the countryside. The point was made: those were excellent matches, just the thing for woodsmen, mountain climbers, and any others who might need to light a fire.

As Szara approached the car, the man next to the driver climbed out, held the back door open and said, 'Change of travel plans,' with a smile of regret.

His Russian was elementary but clear, phrased in the slow cadence characteristic of the southeastern reaches of the country, near the Turkish border. 'It won't be so inconvenient.' He was a dark man with a great belly; Szara could make out a whitening moustache and thinning grey hair spread carefully over a bald head. The driver was young-a relative, perhaps even a son of the passenger. For the moment he was bulky and thick, the extra chin just beginning, the hair at the crown of his head growing sparse.

Szara settled himself in the back seat and the car moved forward cautiously through the night mist. 'You tried to contact me in Prague?' he asked.

'Couldn't get your attention, but no matter. Which one do we want?'

Szara handed the satchel over the seat.

'Handsome old thing, isn't it,' said the man, running an appreciative hand over the pebbled hide.

'Yes,' Szara said.

'All here?'

'Except for a pistol. That I dared not take through German border control. It's at the bottom of the river.'

'No matter. It's not pistols we need.'

Szara relaxed. Wondered where and how he'd be put back on his way to Berlin, knew enough about suchtreffs not to bother asking. The Great Hand moved everyone about as it would.

'Must keep to form,' said the man, reaching inside his coat. He brought out a pair of handcuffs and held them out to Szara over the back of the seat. The car entered a farming village, every window dark, thatched-roof stone barns, then they were again among the fields.

Szara's heart pumped hard; he willed his hand not to rise and press against his chest.

'What?' he said.

'Rules, rules,' said the fat man disconsolately. Then, a bit annoyed: 'Always something.' He shook the handcuffs impatiently. 'Come, then. . .'

'For what?'Za chto?

'It isn'tfor anything, comrade.' The man made a sucking noise against his tooth. He tossed the handcuffs into Szara's lap. 'Now don't make me irritable.'

Szara held the cuffs in his hand. The metal was unpolished, faintly oily.

'You better do what we say,' the young driver threatened, his voice uncertain, querulous. Clearly he wanted to give orders but was afraid that nobody would obey him.

'Am I arrested?'

'Arrested?Arrested?' The fat man had a big laugh. 'He thinks we're arresting him!' The driver tried to laugh like the other man but he didn't have the voice for it.

The fat man pointed a blunt index finger at him and partly closed one eye. 'You put those on now, that's plenty of discussion.'

Szara held his wrist up to the faint moonlight in the back window.

'In back-don't you know anything?' He sighed heavily and shook his head. 'Don't worry, nothing will happen to you. It's just one of those things that has to be done-you're certainly aware, comrade, of the many things we all must do. So, humour me, will you?' He turned back around in his seat, dismissively, and peered through the ground mist rising from the road. As he turned, Szara could hear the whisper of his woollen coat against the car upholstery.

Szara clicked the handcuff around his left wrist, then put it behind his back and held the other cuff in his right hand.

For a time, the men in the front seat were silent. The road moved uphill into a wood where it was very dark. The fat man leaned forward and peered through the window. 'Take care,' he said. 'We don't want to hit an animal.' Then, without turning around, 'I'm waiting.'

Szara closed the cuff on his right wrist.

The car left the forest and headed down a hill. 'Stop here,' the fat man said. 'Turn on the light.' The driver stared at the dashboard, twisted a button; a windshield wiper scraped across the dry glass. Both men laughed and the driver turned it off. Another button did nothing at all. Then the dome light went on.

The fat man leaned over and rummaged through the open satchel between his feet. He drew out a sheet of paper and squinted at it. 'I'm told you're sly as a snake,' he said to Szara. 'Haven't been hiding anything, have you?'

'No,' Szara said.

'If I have to, I'll make you tell.'

'You have all of it.'

'Don't sound so miserable. You'll have me weeping in a minute.'

Szara said nothing. He shifted in the seat to make his hands more comfortable and looked out the side window at the cloudy silhouette of the moon.

'Well,' the fat man said at last, 'this is just the way life is.' A shrill whine reached them from around a bend in the road and the single light of a motorcycle appeared. It shot past them at great speed, a passenger hanging on to the waist of the driver.

'Crazy fools,' the young man said.

'These Germans love their machines,' the fat man said. 'Drive on.'

They went around the bend where the motorcycle had come from. Szara could see more woodland on the horizon. 'Slowly, now,' said the fat man. He reached over andturned off the dome light, then stared out the side window with great concentration. 'I wonder if it's come time for eyeglasses?'

'Not you,' the driver said. 'It's the mist.'

They drove on, very slowly. A dirt track for farm machines broke away from the road into a field that had been harvested to low stubble. 'Ah,' the fat man said. 'You better back up.' He looked over the seat at Szara as the car reversed. 'Let's see those hands.' Szara twisted around and showed him. 'Not too tight, are they?'

'No.'

'How far?' said the driver.

'Just a little. I'm not pushing this thing if we get stuck in a hole.'

The car inched forward down the dirt path. 'All right,' said the fat man. 'This will do.' He struggled out of the car, walked a few feet, turned his back, and urinated. Still buttoning his fly, he walked to Szara's door and opened it. 'Please,' he said, indicating that Szara should get out. Then, to the driver: 'You stay here and keep the car running.'

Szara shifted himself along the seat, swung his legs out, and, leaning forward in a crouch, managed to stand upright.

'Let's walk a little,' said the fat man, positioning himself just behind Szara and a little to his right.

Szara walked a few paces. As the car idled he could hear that one cylinder was mistimed and fired out of rhythm. 'Very well,' said the fat man. He took a small automatic pistol from the pocket of his coat. 'Is there anything you would like to say? Perhaps a prayer?'

Szara didn't answer.

'Jews have prayers for everything, certainly for this.'

'There's money,' Szara said. 'Money and gold jewelry.'

'In your valise?'

'No. In Russia.'