Dark Star

With hatred and with love.

Yes, love, as only our blood can love,

You have forgotten there can be such love

That burns and destroys.

Come to our side.

From the horrors of war

Come to our peaceful arms;

Before it is too late, sheathe the old sword.

Comrades, let us be brothers.

And if not, we have nothing to lose.

We, too, can be perfidious if we choose;

And down all time you will be cursed

By the sick humanity of an age to come.

Before comely Europe

Into our thickets and forests we'll disperse,

And then we shall turn upon you

Our ugly Asiatic face.

But we ourselves henceforth shall be no

shield of yours,

We ourselves henceforth will enter no battle.

We shall look on with our narrow eyes

When your deadly battles rage.

Nor shall we stir when the ferocious Hun

Rifles the pockets of the dead,

Burns down cities, drives herds into churches,

And roasts the flesh of the white brothers.

This is the last time-bethink thee, old world!-

To the fraternal feast of toil and peace,

The last time-to the bright, fraternal feast

The barbarian lyre now summons thee.

There were several very long seconds of silence;only Poziny's graceful inclination of the head summoned applause that resolved the tension in the room. Everyone there knew what the poem meant, in the early days of the revolution and in March of1938.Or thought they knew.

The Austrian chemical engineerH. J.Brandt arrived in Copenhagen on the Baltic ferry????Lindbladfrom Tallinn, Estonia, on4April1938.

The school teacher E. Roberts, from Edinburgh, took the Copenhagen-Amsterdam train, arriving at Amsterdam's Central Station in the early evening of6April.

The naturalized Belgian citizen StefanLeib,of Czecho-slovakian origin, got off the Amsterdam train at Brussels toward noon on7April, going immediately to the shop called Cartesde laMonde-maps of the world; antique,old, and new-he owned in therue de Juyssens,in the winding back streets of the old business district.

A serious man, MonsieurLeib, inhis early thirties, quiet, somewhat scholarly in his tweed jacket and flannels, and notably industrious. He could be found, most nights, in the small office at the rear of the store at a large oak desk piled high with old maps-perhaps the Netherlands of the seventeenth century, decorated with curly-haired cherubs puffing clouds of wind from the cardinal points of the compass-as well as utilitarian road maps of the Low Countries, France, and Germany; tidal charts,Michelinand Baedeker guides, or the latest rendering of Abyssinia (important if you had followed the fortunes of Italian expeditionary forces), Tanganyika, or French Equatorial Africa. Whatever you might want in cartography, Monsieur Leib's shop was almost sure to have it.

On the evening of12April, those with an eye for moderately prominent journalists might have spotted MonsieurLeibout for dinner with A. A. Szara, recently assigned to the Paris bureau ofPravda. Spotted, that is, if one happened to visit a very dark and out-of-the-way Chinese restaurant, of dubious reputation, in the Asian district of Brussels.

In the end, Abramov and his associates had not made a choice of cities or networks forDr Baumann'scase officer. Life and circumstance intervened and chose for them. Even the multiple European networks of the RoteKapelle-the Red Orchestra, as the German security services had nicknamed them-were not immune to the daily vicissitudes and tragedies that the rest of the world had to confront. In this instance, a deputy officer of the Paris-basedopal network, work nameGuillaume,was late for a clandestine meeting established inLyon-one of his group leaders from Berlin was coming in by train underacover identity - and drove recklessly to avoid having to wait for a fallback meeting three days later. His Renault sedan failed to make a curve on theN6just outsideMâconand spun sideways into a roadside plane tree.Guillaumewas thrown clear and died the next day in the hospital inMâcon.

Captain I. J. Goldman,rezident ofopal under the painstakingly crafted cover of StefanLeib, wasbrought back to Moscow by a circuitous route-'using passports like straw,' grumbled one of the 'cobblers' who manufactured or altered identity papers at the NKVD Foreign Department-for lengthy consultations. Goldman, son of a Marxist lawyer from Bucharest, had volunteered for recruitment in1934and was, following productive service in Spain, something of a rising star.

Like allrezidents, he hated personnel problems. He accepted the complicated burdens of secrecy, a religion whose rituals demanded vast expenditures of time, money, and ingenuity, and the occasional defeat managed by the police and counterespionage forces that opposed him, but natural disasters, like road accidents or wireless telegraph breakdowns, seemed especially cruel punishments from heaven. When a clandestine operator likeGuillaume metan accidental death, the first thing the police did was to inform, or try to, a notional family that didn't exist. Had Goldman himself not contacted hospitals, police, and mortuaries in the region,Guillaumemight have been determined a defector or runaway, thereby causing immense dislocation as the entire system was hurriedly restructured to protect itself.

Next, Goldman had to assure himself, and his directorate in Moscow, that the accidentwas an accident, an investigation complicated by the need to operate secretly and from a distance. Goldman, burning a cover identity that had cost thousands of roubles to construct, hired alawyer inMâconto make that determination. Finally, by the time he arrived in Moscow, he was able to defend himself against all accusations save one: his supervision had been lax to the degree that one of his staff drove in an undisciplined manner. On this point he criticized himself before his superiors, then described countermeasures-lectures, display of the autopsy report obtained by theMaçonnaislawyer-that would be undertaken to eliminate such events in the future. Behind their stone faces, the men and women who directedopal laughed at his discomfort: they knew life, love affairs, bizarre sexual aberrations, lost keys, gambling, petty jealousies; all the absurd human horseshit that networkrezidents had to deal with. They'd learned to improvise, now it was his turn.

When they were done scowling, they gave him a choice: elevate the Paris group leader to Guillaume's position or accept a new deputy. This was no choice at all, group leaders were infamously difficult to replace. On their ability to stroke and soothe, wheedle, nag, or threaten, everything depended. He could, on the other hand, accept a new deputy, the journalist Szara, an amateur 'who had done a few things with fair success.'

Goldman would have preferred experienced help, perhaps transferred from what he believed to be less crucial networks, foropal ran some fourteen agents in France and Germany and would now service a fifteenth(Baumann,officially designatedotter), but the purges had eaten down into theapparatfrom the top and operationally sophisticated staff simply wasn't available. It was arranged for him to meet with Szara, who would work with a co-deputy inopal but would essentially be on his own in Paris while Goldman, as 'illegal'rezident, worked in protective isolation in Brussels. In the end he put a good face on it and indicated he was pleased with the arrangement. Somewhere, operating deep within the committeeunderbrush, there was a big, important rat who wanted Szara in Paris-Goldman could smell him.

Then too, for Goldman, it was best to be cooperative; his rising star was lately a little obscured, through no fault of his own, by a dark cloud on the horizon. His training class, the Brotherhood Front of1934 -in fact a fractious crowd recruited from every lost corner of the Balkans-was not turning out as seniorapparatpeople thought it would. A distressing number of the 'brothers' had left home; some defected, harbouring far less fraternal affection than their Russian family had supposed. The undisputed leader of the class, a Bulgarian, had vanished from Barcelona and resurfaced in Paris, where he'd become entangled inémigrépolitics and got himself arrested by French internal security officers in July of'37.A Serbian had disappeared back into the mountains of his homeland after a very complex exfiltration from a Spanish prison-a dreadful instance of ingratitude, though it was the NKVD that had shopped him to Franco's military intelligence in the first place, expedient neutralization after he resisted an order to purge POUM members in his guerrilla unit. And a Hungarian from Esztergom, worthless to theapparatfrom day one, had also fled to Paris where, hiding out ina Montmartrehotel, he'd apparently been murdered by a merchant seaman. What hadhe been involved in? Nobody knew.

Given that chamber of horrors, Goldman would be sayingyes sir to senior officers for the foreseeable future. Privately, he had grave misgivings aboutAndré Szara.The journalist seemed both arrogant and insecure-a normal enough combination but potentially lethal under the stresses of clandestine work. Goldman was familiar with Szara's writing, he thought it sometimes powerful, almost always informative. But Goldman had been in the business just long enough to fear the creative personality. He'd developed a taste for blunt, stolid types, unemotional, whoworked day and night without coming down with fevers, men and women who didn't nurse grudges, who preferred verification to intuition, were endlessly dependable and there when you needed them, could think on their feet in a crisis,recognized a crisis when one developed, and had the sense to ask you what to do when they weren't sure. Careers were made with such people. Not with theAndréSzaras of the world. But he was stuck, in no position to argue, and so he'd do the best he could.

Over the ghastly chop suey in Brussels, Goldman told him,'Se ajournalist!'

What?

'Well, you are one, of course, very good, yes, but you must now make a special effort to live the life, and to be seen to live the life, one would expect of such a person. Go about, seek out your colleagues, haunt the rightcafés.No slinking around, is what I mean. Of course you'll see the necessity of it, yes?'

Goldman made him mad, pointing this out. It was true that he'd habitually avoided journalists' haunts and parties and gone off on his own. For one thing, it didn't pay to be too friendly with Western Europeans-the lead diva of the Moscow Opera had been sent to the camps for dancing at a party with the Japanese ambassador. For another, he forever had to accomplish some special little task for theapparat.Such things took time, care, patience. And you didn't want colleagues around when you did it.So, General Vlasy, the tread problem on the new R-20 tank turns out to be no problem at all, eh? and all that sort of thing, certainlynot with some knowing fellow journalist suppressing a cackle in the background.

Szara never really did respond to Goldman's direction. He looked at the grey noodles on his plate for a moment, then went on with the conversation. Inside hewas broiling. Wasn't he unhappy enough about mortgaging his soul to Abramov and secretly abandoning his profession? Apparently not. They now laid upon his heart a heaping tablespoon of Russian irony, directing him to act more like what he no longer was. All this from some snotty little Romanian who thought he spoke idiomatic Russian, was very much his junior in age, and looked like (and probably acted like) some kind of rodent. Small eyes that glittered, ears a little too big, features set close together. Like a smart mouse. Maybe too smart. Who the hell did he think he was?

Back in Paris the following day, however, he kept his opinions to himself. 'You've met Yves,' said his fellow deputy, using Goldman's work name. 'What do you think?'

Szara pretended to ponder the question. He did not want to commit himself, but neither did he want to seem like a spineless idiot-he was going to have to work closely with this woman. She was the sort of individual who, in the setting of a business office, might well be known asa bit of a terror. Abramov had warned him about her: work name-??,real name-AnniqueSchau-Wehrii,reputation-lioness. In person she turned out to be fiftyish, short, stout, with a thrust-out bosom like a pouter pigeon and glasses on a chain around her neck. She wore a built-up shoe on one foot and walked with a cane, having been born with one leg shorter than the other. Szara found himself drawn to her-she was magnetic, perceptive, and also rather pretty, with rosy complexion, light, curly hair, a screen siren's long eyelashes, and omniscient eyes lit by a brisk, cheerful hatred.

She was an ardent, blistering Marxist, a former pillar of the Swiss Communist party from a wealthy bourgeois (and long ago rejected) family in Lucerne. She had a tongue like a sword, spoke six languages, and feared absolutelynothing. In Paris, she worked as office manager and resident saint for a League of Nations satellite office, the International Law Institute, which issued oceans of studies attempting to encourage the countries of the world to normalize and standardize their legal codes. Wasn't the theft of a female ancestor's soul in Nyasaland much the same, when all was said and done, as a stock swindle in Sweden?

'Well?' she repeated. 'Don't tell me you have no opinion of the man. I won't believe you.'

They were in her living room, a typical Parisian concoction of rich red draperies, silk pillows, naked gold women holding ebony-shaded lamps above their heads, and little things- ashtrays, onyx inkwells, ivory boxes,Gallébottles, and porcelain bull terriers-on every shelf and table. Szara kept his elbows jammed well against his sides.

'Young,' he said.

'Younger than you.'

'Yes.'

'Brilliant, my dear comrade.'

'Glib.'

'Boof!' she said, a Gallic explosion of incredulous air. 'But how can you be like this? Measured any way you like, brilliant. Against the norm? Genius. Recall the Russian operative who went to London last year, pockets just stuffed with British pounds. He is there two days, ventures from his hotel for the first time. Persuaded by Soviet propaganda, he actually believes that the English working classes are so poor they wear paper shoes. He suddenly spies a shop window full of leather shoes, not at all expensive.Ah-ha, says he, my lucky day, and buys ten pairs. Then, at another store,look, they too have shoes today! He thinks his dear departed mother is sending down gifts from heaven. Again, ten pairs. And so on, until the poor soul had over a hundred pairs of shoes, no money forparty work, and the MI5 surveillance team is practically rolling on the pavement. Just wait and see what some of our people can do, then you'll change your tune.'

Szara pretended to be slightly abashed. He was the new boy in the office, he had to make a decent impression, but he'd known Goldman's type before: a genius all right, a genius for self-advancement. 'I suppose you're right,' he said amiably.

Friday, the last week in April, in a warm, gentle rain that shone on the spring leaves of the boulevard trees, Szara booked a telephone call toMarta Haecht'smagazine office in Berlin.

Twenty minutes later he cancelled it.

The gospel according to Abramov: 'Look, you can never be sure what they know about you, just as they can never be sure what we know about them. In times of peace, the services do two things in particular, they watch and they wait. This is a war of invisibility, fought with invisible weapons: information, numbers, wireless telegraph transmissions, social acquaintance, political influence,entréeto certain circles, knowledge of industrial production or infantry morale. So, show me an infantry morale. You can't. It's intangible.

'Counterintelligence operations are the most invisible of all. The people who run them don't want to neutralize their opponents-not right away. Some boss is screamingstop it! stop it! and his operatives are pleadingno. We want to see what they do. For you it means this: you have to assume you have typhoid, you're infectious, and anyone you meet or know gets the disease. Whether this meeting is innocent or not, they must fall under suspicion if a third party is watching. You wonder why we recruit friends, family, lovers? We might as well-they're going to be considered guilty anyhow.'

The seed Abramov planted in Moscow grew a frightful garden in Paris. It grew in Szara's imagination, where it took the form of a voice: a quiet, resourceful voice, cultured, sure of itself, German-speaking. It was the voice of presumed surveillance, and when Szara contemplated something foolish, like a telephone call to Germany, it spoke to him.28April.16:25.szara(the flat, official format would be similar todubok's file and Szara imagined the German officer to be not unlike the author of the Okhrana dossier)telephonesmarta haechtoíBerlin45.633;conversation recorded and currently under analysis for code or Aesopian language.

Aesopian language suggested reality with symbolism or implication. Are you still studying French? I sent you a card from Paris-did you receive it? I'm writing a story about the workers who built theGare duNord.I don't know where the time goes, I have to finish the piece by noon on the fourth of May.

It fooled nobody.

Even ifthe voice did not yet speak, Szara feared discovery. By1938,Germany had been converted into a counterespionage state. Every patriotic German took it as his or her duty to inform the authorities of any suspicious behaviour, denunciation had become a national mania-strangers visited them, a curious sound from their basement, a printing press?

Of course he considered using the network for communication. This would either evade all suspicion or end in absolute tragedy. A lover's choice,nyet? Passion or death. They had described to him the details of what the Gestapo actually did,kaschumbo, whips soaked in pails of water. The idea of exposing her to that. . .

He worked. The Parisian spring flared to life-one hot morning andall the women were dressed in yellow and green, on thecaféterraces people laughed at nothing in particular, aromas drifted through the open doors of bistros where the owner'sbriardflopped by the cash register, a paw over its nose, dreaming fitfully of stock bones and cheese rinds.

Theopal network was ran from a three-storey building near thequaisof the canal Saint-Martin and the canalde rOurcq,at the tattered edge of the nineteentharrondissementwhere the streets around the Portede Pantinturned to narrow roads leading into the villages ofPantinand Bobigny. A pulsating, sleeplessquartier,home to the city's slaughterhouses as well as the stylish restaurants of the avenueJean-Jaurčs,where partygoing swells often ventured at dawn to eat fillet of beef baked in honey and avoid the tourists and taxi drivers down atLes Halles.Paris put things out there she wasn't sure whether she wanted or not-the Hippodrome where they held bicycle races and boxing matches, an infamousmaisonclosewhere elaborate exhibitions could be arranged. In spring and fall, fog rose from the canal in the evening, the blue neon sign of theHôtel duNordglowed mysteriously, slaughterhouse workers and bargemen drankmarc in thecafés.In short, aquartierthat worked all night long and asked no questions, a place where the indefatigable snooping of the average Parisian wasn't particularly welcome.

The house at8, raeDelesseux was crumbling brown brick like the rest of the neighbourhood, dirty and dark and smelling likeapissoir. But it could be entered through a street-level door, through a rear entrance to thetabacthat occupied its tiny commercial space, or through an alley strewn with rags and broken glass that ran at an angle to theraedesArdennes. It was handy to barges, a cemetery, a park, nameless village lanes, a sports arena, restaurants crowded with people-just about every sort of place that operatives liked to use.

The top floor of the house provided living and working space for theopal encipherer and wireless telegraph operator, work nameFrançois,true nameM. K.Kranov, an 'illegal' with Danish passport, suspected to hold NKVD officer rank and, likely, theapparatspy reporting secretly to Moscow on the activities and personnel of the network.

On the second floor lived'Odile,'Jeannede Kouvens,the network's courier who serviced both Goldman in Brussels and the networks in Germany, the latter a twice-monthlyroninto Berlin under the pretext of caring for a nonexistent mother.Odile wasBelgian, a tough nineteen-year-old with two children and a philandering husband, not a bit beautiful but violently sexy, her hair cut in a short, mannish cap-the street kid look-her cleft chin, swollen upper lip, tip-tilted nose, and indomitable eyes tossing a challenge at any man in the immediate vicinity. Her husband, a working-class fop with bushy,fin de sičclemuttonchop whiskers, ran a portable merry-go-round that circulated through the neighbourhood squares of Paris. Thetabaconthe ground floor was served by Odile's brother, twenty years older than she, who had been wounded at Ypres and walked with the aid of two canes. He spent his days and nights on a stool behind the counter, sellingGitanesandGauloises, Métrotickets and postage stamps, lottery chances, pencils, commemorative key rings, and more, an astonishing assortment of stuff, to a steady trickle of customers who created camouflage for operatives entering and leaving the house.

The Moscow Directorate had shuffled assignments to make life a little easier for Szara, puttingSchau-Wehrli in charge of the three German networks,henri, mocha, andraven, which left him withsilo, assigned to attack elements of the German community in Paris, andDrJuliusBaumann.

Springdied early that year, soft rains came and went, the sky turned its fierce French blue only rarely, a mean little wind arrived at dusk and blew papers around the cobbled streets. The end of April was generally admitted to betriste,only the surrealists like such unhappy weather, then summer came before anybody was really ready for it. The rising temperature seemed to drive the politicians further from sanity than usual.

Nobody could agree about anything: the Socialists had blocked a rearmament programme in March, then the Foreign Office claimed the French commitment to Czechoslovakia to be 'indisputable and sacred.' One senator pleaded for pacifism in the morning, called for preservation of the national honour in the afternoon, then sued the newspaper that described him as ambivalent. Meanwhile, senior civil servants demanded things of their mistresses that caused them to raise their eyebrows when they had their girlfriends in for coffee. Nobody was comfortable: the rich found their sheets scratchy and carelessly ironed, the poor thought theirfritestasted of fish oil.

On the top floor of the house at8,rue Delesseux, the afternoons grew hot as the sun beat on the roof; the dusty window shades were never raised, no air stirred, and Kranov worked at a large table with his shirt off. He was a small, sullen man with curly hair and Slavic features who seemed, to Szara, to do nothing but work. Allopal transmissions, incoming and outgoing, were based on onetime pads, encrypted into five-digit numerical groups, then transformed-using a changing mathematical key and 'false' addition(5 + 0 = 0) -by a second encryption. Brief, pro forma transmissions were fleshed out with null groups to avoid the type of message that had always been the cryptanalyst's point of attack. From Egyptian times to the present, the phrase used to break codes never varied:nothing new to report today.

Szara usually slipped into the house at night. In Kranov's transmitting room a blanket was nailed across the window, a tiny lamp used for illumination. Swirls of cigarette smoke hung in the air. Kranov's fingers jittered on the telegraph key, the dots and dashes flowing through the ether to a code clerk on Dzerzhinsky Square in Moscow:

91464 22571 83840 75819 11501

On other frequencies, a French captain in the Naval Intelligence section at Sfax, on the Tunisian coast, requested Paris to approve additional funds for Informant22,the third secretary of the Czechoslovakian embassy in Vienna reported on private meetings held by the Sudeten leader Henlein with German diplomats in the spa town of Karlsbad, the Polish service in Warsaw asked an operative in Sofia to ascertain the whereabouts of the priestjosef. All night long the W/T operatorsplayed their pianos, not only for the RoteKapelle,but in a hundred orchestras performing for scores of espionageKonzertmeistersfrom a dozen countries. Szara could hear it. Kranov let him put the earphones on and turn the dial. It was a theatre of sound, pitched treble or bass, quick-fingered or deliberate, an order to liquidate an informer or a request for the local weather forecast. Sometimes crackling with the static of an electrical storm in the Dolomites or the Carpathians, sometimes clear as a crystal chime, the nightlong symphony of numbers flew through the darkened heavens.

If there was nocritical/immediate signal, Kranov broke out Moscow's transmissions after he woke from a few hours' sleep. Szara fancied it a kind of critical daylight that inevitably followed the coded mysteries of the night. Slowly, as May turned to June, and the sweat soaked through Kranov's undershirt in the morning heat, Szara began to gain a sharper appreciation of the interplay betweenopal and its masters, the simply phrased requests for information and the terse responses now resolved toa dialoguefrom which the mood of the Directorate could be read.

Moscow was restless. It had been so from the beginning. Abramov, sacrificing information in the hope of enforcing discipline, had let Szara know just exactly what he would be dealing with. Emphaticallynot Nezhenko-or any editor. Both Abramov and hiskhvost rival Dershani sat on theopal Directorate, as did Lyuba Kurova, a brilliant student in neuropathology in the years before the revolution, a ruthless Chekist in Lenin's terror campaign, now, in her forties, a friend of Poskrebyshev, Stalin's personal secretary; also Boris Grand, anapparatchik, an experienced technician, and a majority voter in every instance, and Vitaly Mezhin, at thirty-six years of age quite young for the work, a member of the generation of 'littleStalins'who crept into the power vacuum created by the purge, as the Big Stalin intended them to do. 'If you wilfully disobey an order,' Abramov said, 'this is who you disobey.'

Szara now saw thatDrBaumannmade them uncomfortable:(1)He was a Jew in Germany, his future gravely insecure.(2)His motives were unknown.(3)His product was crucial. Szara could imagine them, seated at a table covered with a green baize cloth, flimsies of decrypted signals arranged at every place, smoking nervously at their stubby Troika cigarettes, speaking so very carefully, conscious of nuance in themselves and others, groping toward a protective consensus.

Swage wire figures for January, February, March, and April received, projections from orders on hand for May. Case officer asked to obtain listing of company personnel, especially in accounting office. Characterize: age, political affiliation, cultural level. They clearly wantedBaumannto get to work finding his own replacement. It was up to Szara to find some sort of honey to make him swallow that pill.

Of course they wanted more than that-Dershani in particular thoughtBaumannought to be pumped dry, the quicker the better. He must know other subcontractors-who were they? Could they be approached? If so, how? What were their vulnerabilities? Then too-Mezhin now took his turn, you didn't want to be a wilting flower in this crowd-what of his association with senior officers ofRheinmetall?Might there not be something for them in that? BorisGrundthought this line productive. And what wasBaumannpaying for austenitic steel?Grundsaid his pals downstairs in the Economic Section were starving for such information, maybe we should toss them a bone.

Kurova didn't like the dead-drop. They'd got theBaumannsto buy a dog, a year-oldschnauzerthey namedLudwig, sothatBaumanncould be out on the street at night and use a stone wall near his house as a letter-box. This broughtOdile, in amaid's uniform, into the neighbourhood two or three times a month to drop off mail and collect a response. A bent nail in a telephone pole was used as a signal: head turned up toldBaumannto collect, head turned down confirmed that his deposit had been picked up. All according to standard form and practice, Kurova acknowledged. But Germans were naturally curious, they stared out their windows, and they had an insatiable appetite for detail.Why doesDrBaumannreach behind the stone inHerr Bleiwert'swall? Look how poor littleLudwigwants only to play.Kurova just didn't like it. Both operatives were too much in the open.

Dershani agreed. What about a restaurant, something in the industrial neighbourhood where the wire mill was located?

Abramov thought not. As a Jew, Baumann's activities were limited-he couldn't just go to a restaurant. This would be noticed.

The factory, then, Mezhin offered. Best of all, couldthey reach the engineer Haecht, who would, according to Szara, be nominally in control of the business as new anti-Jewish statutes were promulgated. They looked in their dossiers. They had a blurry photograph of Haecht, taken by an officer from the Berlin embassy. University records. Exemplar of handwriting. Inventory of family: wife Use, son Albert a pharmaceutical salesman, daughterHedwigmarried to an engineer in Dortmund, daughterMartaan assistant art editor at a literary magazine.

Literary magazine? Perhaps a friend of ours, Dershani wondered idly.

Perhaps, Kurova admitted, but nice German girls don't go to factories.

Slow and easy, Abramov counselled, we don't want to create a panic.

This is no time for caution, Dershani said.

That was true.

Baumann's productwas crucial. They had other sources of information on the German aircraft industry, but none that determined the numbers quite so exactly. The Directorate that handled the product coming in from Burgess and Philby and others in Great Britain confirmed theopal Directorate's hypotheses, as did sources in the French services. The German industrial machine was building a nightmare.

Baumannhad shipped14,842feet of swage wire in October; this meant a monthly bomber production rate of31planes. From there they could project, using range and load factors already in their possession. The German bomber force as constituted in a theoretical month-May of1939,for instance-would be able to fly720sorties in a single day against European targets and deliver945tons of bombs, causing a projected50casualties per ton-a total of almost50,000casualties in atwenty-four-hour period. A million casualties every three weeks.

And the USSR, Great Britain, and France were in absolute harmony on one basic assumption:the bomber would always get through. Yes, antiaircraft fire and fighter planes would take their toll, but simply could not cause sufficient damage to bring the numbers down.

The Russians, using their British spies, had followed with interest developments in British strategic thinking in the last month of1937.The RAF experts had urged building up the British aircraft industry to deliver heavy bombers to match the German numbers, ultimately to create a counterweight of terror: you destroy our cities, we'll destroy yours. But the cabinet had overruled them. Said Sir Thomas Inskip: 'The role of our air force is not an early knockout blow. . .but to prevent the Germans from knocking us out.' This was not the usual thinking, but the cabinet, in the end, had determined the defensive system a better option, and British industry began to build fighters instead of bombers.

In Germany, also, a strategic decision was made, though this one rested on Hitler's power. When the Reich marched into the Rhineland in1936and opposition did not materialize, the German General Staff lost credibility. Hitler was right. It was proven. Soon thereafter, he turned his attention to HermannGöring'sLuftwaffe. Where, Hitler wanted to know, are my aeroplanes? Goring felt the pressure, and took steps to protect himself. Germany stopped production of four-engjned bombers, the Dornier Do-19 and the Junkers Su-89. Those planes could operate at greater distances, in England or the USSR, and stay longer over target, as well as extend the air cover provided to U-boat packs beset by sub chasers or destroyers, but they were not going to be built. Driven by Hitler's impatience, Goring directed the aircraft industry to build twin-enginedbombers.'TheFührer,'Goring said, 'does not ask mewhat kind of bombers I have. He simply wants to knowhow many.' The comment was believed to be private.

It wasn't.

And that was the point. The Moscow Directorate had to know what Goring said, and what the British cabinet thought, and had to do whatever,whatever, had to be done in order to know. In the same complex of buildings where theopal Directorate met, other groups laboured to keep Germany and Great Britain from finding out what Stalin said, or what the Politburo thought. That work, though, was none of their business. Their business wasa million casualties every three weeks. With a threat of that dimension, how carefully couldDrJuliusBaumannbe treated? They had to, as Dershani counselled, take their chances, and if the man went slack with terror or rigid with fury it was Szara's job to handle him. If Szara couldn't do it, they'd find somebody who could. They were not in a position to be gentle with spies, even less with case officers.

'Then we are agreed,' Kurova said. There were stern nods of assent around the table.

That night, the W/T operator in Dzerzhinsky Square settled in on his frequency at1:33a.m., Moscowtime, as scheduled for that date. He discovered a neighbour, some plodding fool out there somewhere, sending five-digit groups as though he had all eternity to get the job done. The operator swore softly with irritation, caressed his dial until he found a private little band of silent air, then began a long signal to his nameless, faceless, yet very familiar colleague in Paris.Paris, he thought,a city I'll never see. But that was fate. So, instead, he put a bit of his soul into the telegraphy, flying ghostlike across the sleeping continent along with his secret numbers.

Goldman had said, 'Be a journalist!' so Szara did what he asked, but he didn't like it. He found a large, gloomy room on therue du Cherche-Midi(literally, the street that looked for the sun, which it rarely found), midway between brawlingMontparnasseand fashionably arty Saint-Germain; coming out of his doorway he turned right to buy a chicken, left to buy a shirt. He drank wine and ate oysters at theDôme, anoisy barnyard of artists and artistes, the people who came to look at them, predators scenting the money of the people who came to look at them,petits-bourgeoiscelebrating their anniversaries and saying 'Ah!' when the food came to the table, and-he only grew aware of them with time-a surprisingly large number of reasonably appealing and attractively dressed people of whom one couldn't say more than that they ate at theDôme.Simply Parisians.

Szara attended the occasional session of the Senate, dropped in at the trial of this week's murderer, browsed the women in bookstores, and showed up at certainsalons. Where journalists were, there wasAndréSzara. He passed through thePravda office from time to time, collected a phone message or two, and if with some frequency he disappeared completely from sight for a day or two, well, so did many people in Paris. Szara was running an espionage network, God only knew what the rest of them were doing.

On the days when IlyaEhrenburgwasn't in town,AndréSzara was the preeminent Soviet journalist in Paris. The city's hostesses made this clear to him-'It's terribly late, I know, but could you come? We'd so love to have you!' He went, andEhrenburg wasnever there. Szara had been called in as a last-minute substitute,the Soviet Journalist in the room, along with the Tragic Ballerina, the Rich American Clod, the Knave of Attorneys, the Sexually Peculiar Aristocrat, the Cynical Politician, and all the rest-like a pack of tarot cards, Szara thought. He much preferredrelaxedsocialevenings at friends' apartments, spontaneous gatherings rich with combative exchanges on politics, art, and life, at the Malrauxs' on therue du???,sometimes atAndré Gide'splace on the rue Vaneau, occasionally at Ehrenburg's apartment on therue Cotentin.

He was jealous ofEhrenburg,who occupied a position above him in the literary and social order of things, and when they did meet, Ehrenburg's kindness and courtesy toward him only made it worse. Not the least of the problem was Ehrenburg's writing itself-not so much the diction, but the sharp eye for a detail that told a story. Reporting from the civil war in Spain,Ehrenburghad described the different reactions of dogs and cats to bombing attacks: dogs sought safety by getting as close to their masters as they could, while cats went out the window and as far from humans as possible.Ehrenburgknew how to capture the reader's emotions better than he did, and now that he'd effectively left the competition, such goodEhrenburgstuff as he saw in print depressed him. There were rumours thatEhrenburgdid favours for theapparat,butif he did, Szara had no evidence of it; and suspected that Ehrenburg's contacts were up in the Central Committee, well beyond his own reach.

One Thursday night in May, Szara dropped around to Ehrenburg's apartment to discoverAndré Gide,under full throttle in a lengthy discourse on some point of literary philosophy. To drive home his point,Gidepicked up a dog biscuit from a plate on the kitchen table and used it to draw lines in the air. Ehrenburg's dog, a terrier-spaniel mix called Bouzou, studied the progress of the biscuit for a time, then rose in the air and snapped it neatly out of Gide's fingers. Unperturbed,Gidepicked up another biscuit and continued the lecture. Bouzou, equally unperturbed, did it again. A girl sitting near Szara leaned over and whispered,'C'est drôle, n'est-ce pas?'

Oh yes. Very funny.

Upstaged by Ehrenburg's dog,he thought, and immediately hated himself for thinking such things.Ingrate!Listen to whatGideis saying, how mankind thrashes amid life's futility; how his tragi-comic destiny is, may be described as, has always been, will always be. . .some French word I don't know. Ah, but everybody is smiling wisely and nodding, so it's evidently a stunning insight.

Such evenings. Wine and oysters. Frosted cakes. Aromatic women who leaned close to say some almost intimate little thing and brushed one's shoulder. The old Szara would have been lighthearted with ecstasy. Not all was roses, of course. The city was famous for its artful, petty humiliations-had not Balzac fashioned a career from such social warfare?-and Szara knew himself to be the sort of individual who took it to heart, who let it get into his bloodstream where it created malicious antibodies. Nonetheless, he told himself, he was lucky. Two thirds of the Russian writers were gone in the purges, yet here he was in Paris. That allthčworld should have no more problems than the envy of a fellow journalist and the obligation to do a bit of nightwork!

He looked at his watch. Stood, smiled genially, and turned to go. "The witching hour, and the mysterious Szara leaves us,' said a voice.

He turned and made a helpless gesture. 'An early day tomorrow,' he said. 'A scene observed at dawn.'

A chorus of good nights and at least one disbelieving snicker accompanied him out the door.

He strolled a few blocks toward the edge of the seventharrondissement,idling, crossing and recrossing a boulevard, then flagged a cab from the line at the DurocMétroand sped to theGare Saint-Lazare.Here he rushed through the station-late for a train-then found another taxi at the ruede Romeexit and gave his destination astheGare d'Austerlitz.'No hurry,' he said to the driver. 'There's something extra for you if we just wander a bit.' A novel instruction, but heeded, and as the cab meandered eastward Szara slumped lazily in the back seat, a posture that allowed him to watch the street behind him in the driver's rearview mirror. He changed cabs again at the Austerlitz station, then paid off the new driver on the boulevardde la Gareand crossed the Seine, now at the eastern edge of Paris where the railway tracks ran southeast between theGare de Lyonand the winecommerçants'warehouses in theBercydistrict. He had become, in the course of these clandestine exercises, what he thought of asthe other Szara, a midnight self, a figure in a raincoat on a bridge above theBercymarshalling yards, avoiding the yellow flare of a street lamp.And here, he thought,MonsieurGide,MonsieurEhrenburg,Master Bouzou, we have quite another sort of antidote to the futility of existence.A goods train chugged slowly under the bridge, the white steam from its engine spilling over the rampart as it passed beneath him. He liked the burned smell of the railway yards, the distant crash of couplings, the bright steel maze of rails that merged and parted and merged again, the hiss of decompression from an idling locomotive. He glanced at his watch, one-twenty, strolled casually-a reflective man thinking things over-to the end of the bridge. Reached the street just as a boxy Renault puttered to a stop. The passenger door opened and he swung smoothly into the front seat, the car accelerating onto the empty boulevard as he closed the door. It was well timed, he thought, quite artistic in its own way.

'Et bonsoir, mon cher,'said the driver cheerfully. He was thesilo group leader, Robert Seneschal, the very perfection of the young, French, communist lawyer. Like so many French men, he seemed theatrically suited to his role in life-the spiky hair, acerbic smile, pigskin gloves,and upturned raincoat collar would have quite pleased a film director. Szara was drawn to him. Seneschal's charm, his throwaway courage, reminded him of his own style ten years earlier: committed, self-assured, amused by the melodrama of clandestine life yet scrupulously meeting its demands.

Szara reached into the glove compartment and withdrew a thickmanilaenvelope. He unwound the string and riffled through a sheaf of paper, squinting in order to make out the writing in the glow of the boulevard street lamps. He held up a page with twelve words on it, enormous letters fashioned in a torturous scrawl. Slowly, he tried to decipher the German. 'Can you make any sense of this?'

'A letter from the sister, it seems.'

'He steals a bit of everything.'

'Yes. Pooralto. He takes whatever feels important to him.'

'What isKra.. .Krai...'

'Kraft,I think.Kraftdurch Freude."Strength through Joy," the Nazi recreation clubs for workers.'

'What's it to do with anything?'

'I managed to work my way through all of it. The sister inLübeckis taking a cruise to Lisbon on one of the chartered liners they have, it's only costing a few reichsmarks, how she looks forward to it after the demands of her job.alto offers as well the telephone numbers of procurement specialists in the attache's office.'

'That they'll like. As for the letter

'I'm just the postman,' Seneschal said. He turned into the trafficronde-pointat the place Nation. Even though the May night was chilly, the terraces of the brasseries were crowded, people drinking and eating and talking, a white blur of faces and amber lights as the Renault swept past. Seneschal moved up on the bumper of a rattletrap market truck in front of him, preventing anaggressiveCitroënfrom cutting in. 'So much for you,' he said triumphantly.

altowas a sixteen-year-old boy known as Dolek, a Slovak nickname. His mother, whom Seneschal had secretly observed and termed 'ravishing,' lived with a German major who worked in the office of the militaryattaché.They'd begun their love affair when the major was stationed in Bratislava and stayed together when he was transferred to Paris. The child of a previous love affair, Dolek suffered from a disease of the nervous system: his speech was slurred and difficult to understand, and he hobbled along with one arm folded against his chest while his head rested on his collarbone. His mother and her lover, intoxicated by the physical perfection of their own bodies, were sickened by his condition and ashamed of him, and kept him out of sight as much as they could. They treated him as though he were retarded and did not understand what they said about him. But he was not retarded, he understood everything, and eventually a desperate anger drove him to seek revenge. Left alone in the apartment, he copied out, as best he could and with immense effort, the papers the major brought home and left in a desk drawer. He made no distinctions-thus the letter from the sister-if the major treated the paper as private, Dolek copied it. Some months after the move to Paris he'd been locked in the apartment while his mother and the major spent a weekend at a country house. He'd got the door open and dragged himself to Communist party headquarters, where a young nurse, busy making banners for a workers' march, had listened sympathetically to his story. Word of the situation had then reached Seneschal, who'd visited the boy while the mother and her lover were at work.

Szara sighed and stuffed the paper back in the envelope. The Renault turned up a dark side street and he could see into an apartment with open drapes, lit in such a way as tomake the room seem suffused with golden light. 'Are you still taking Huber to Normandy?' he asked.

'That's the plan,' Seneschal said. 'To make love, and eat apples in cream.'

Szara reached into an inside pocket and handed a wad of fifty-franc notes across the gearshift. 'Go to a nice restaurant,' he said.

Seneschal took the packet. 'I thank you,' he said lightly.

'We want you to know you're appreciated.' Szara paused. 'I don't suppose you actually have much feeling for her.'

'It'scurieux,if you want the truth. The fat little Nazi maiden squirming away. . .one closes one's eyes with passion.'

Szara smiled. Seneschal clearly didn't mind all that much, yet there was a melancholy note of martyrdom in his voice,that the world should come to this. 'The broad masses stand and applaud as you build socialism.'

Seneschal laughed and Szara was gratified that the joke worked. Being funny was easily the most difficult trick of all in a foreign language, sometimes the French just stared at him in palpable confusion-whatdid this man mean?

Lotte Huber wasa chubby German woman employed as a clerk at the German Trade Mission. Working with his lawyer friendValais,who helped various German enterprises with residence permits and the infinite complexities of French bureaucracy, Seneschal had 'met' Huber by sitting next to her and a girlfriend at the theatre. During the intermission the four of them got to talking, then went out for drinks after the play. Seneschal had presented himself as a young man of wealthy and aristocratic family, seduced the clerk, eventually proposed marriage. To his fury, his unseen 'parents' categorically rejected the match. He then estranged himself from his family, abandoning the vast inheritance that awaited him, sacrificing all for his darlingLotte.He determined, once the dust settled, to make his own way in life, supposedly obtaining employment as a minor functionary in the French Foreign Office. But they could only, he told her, afford to get married if he were able to advance himself, which he would certainly do if she would supply helpful information about German Trade Mission business and personnel. In love, she told him all sorts of things, more than she could have understood, for the Gestapo intelligence service, the SD, used jobs at the Mission as cover for operatives-individuals seen to have contacts well beyond the scope of commercial affairs.

When this information was added to whatValaissupplied-new arrivals needingcartesde séjours-theapparatwas able to track German intelligence officers with considerable efficiency, leading to knowledge of French traitors, operations run against third countries, and insights into German objectives both in France and several other countries in Europe. Seneschal had more than earned his weekend in Normandy.

The money was not at all a bribe-Seneschal was motivated by idealism-but rather recognition that a group leader simply hadn't the time to earn much of a living for himself.

Seneschal rolled down the window of the Renault and lit a cigarette. Szara closed the envelope and checked the signs on corner buildings to see what street they were on-anywhere but the neighbourhood of the rue Delesseux base would serve his purposes. Seneschal was essentially the cut-out; the people he worked with did not know of Szara's existence, and he himself knew Szara only as 'Jean Marc,' had no idea of his true name, where he lived or the location of radios or safe houses. Meetings were arranged at different sites every time, with fallbacks in case one party or the other failed to show up. If the network were closed down, Seneschal wouldappear three times at various places, nobody would be there to meet him, and that would be the end of it. Theapparatcould, of course, find him again if they wanted to.

Preparing to disengage, Szara asked, 'Anything you want or need?'

Seneschal shook his head. He seemed to Szara, at that instant, a man perfectly content, doing what he wished to do without reservations, even though he could not safely share this side of his life with anyone. There were moments when Szara suspected that many idealists drawn to communism were at heart people with an appetite for clandestine life.

Szara said, 'Thelichen situation remains as before?'lichen was a prostitute,a dark, striking woman of Basque origin who had fled north from the civil war in Spain. The intention was to uselichen to entice low-level German staff into compromising situations, but she had yet to produce anything beyond free sexual entertainment for a few Nazi chauffeurs.

'It does. Madame has the clap and will not work.'' 'Is she seeing a doctor?'

'Being paid to. Whether she actually does it or not I don't know. Whores do things their own way. The occasional dose gets them vertical for a while, and she really doesn't seem to mind.'

'Anything else?'

'A message for you was left at my law office. It's in with the reports.'

'For me?'

'It says Jean Marc on the envelope.'

This was unusual, but Szara did not intend to go burrowing for the message in front of Seneschal. They drove in silence for a time, up the deserted boulevardBeaumarchaispast the huge wedding cake of a buildingthat housed the Winter Circus. Seneschal flipped his cigarette out the window and yawned. The light changed to red and the Renault rolled to a stop beside an empty taxi. Szara handed over a small slip of paper with the location, time, and date of the next meeting. 'Enjoy your weekend,' he said, jumped out of the Renault, and slid neatly into the back of the taxicab, slightly startling the driver. 'Turn right,' he said as the light went green, then watched as Seneschal's car disappeared up the boulevard.

It was a little after three in the morning when Szara slipped into the rue Delesseux house and climbed to the third floor. Kranov was done with his W/T chores for the evening and Szara had the room to himself. First he found the envelope with Jean Marc printed across the front. Inside was a mimeographed square of paper with a drawing of a bearded man in Roman armour, a six-point star on his shield and a dagger held before him. The ticket entitled the bearer to Seat46in the basement theatre at the RueMuretSynagogue at seven-thirty in the evening of the eighteenth day of the month of Iyyar, in the year5698,for the annual Lag b'Omer play performed by the synagogue youth group. The address was deep in theMarais,the Jewishquartierof Paris. For those who might need a date according to the Julian calendar, a rather grudging18May was written in a lower corner.

Szara tucked it in a pocket-really, what would they think of next. A communication travelling upward from a network operative to a deputy was something he'd never heard of, and he rather thought that Abramov would go a little pale if he found out about it, but he was becoming, over time, quite hardened to exotic manifestations, and he had no intention of permitting himself to brood about this one. He had a ticket to a synagogue youth play, so he'd go to a synagogue youth play.

A thin sheet of paper bearing decrypts from the previous night's Moscow traffic awaited his attention, and this he did find disturbing. The problem wasn't with thesilo net-some of the answers to the Directorate's questions were probably in themanilaenvelope he'd picked up from Seneschal-but the transmission that concernedotter,DrBaumann,worried him. Moscow wanted him squeezed. Hard. And right away. There was no misreading their intention, even in the dead, attenuated language of decoded cables. At first glance, it seemed as though they wanted to turnBaumannMilling into what the Russians called anespionage centre-why else show such a profound interest in personnel? Because, if you thought about it a moment, they expected a conflagration. Soviet intelligence officers were not queasy types. Disaster only made them colder-that he'd seen for himself. The Foreign Department of the NKVD-now called the First Chief Directorate-had a hundred windows on Germany. What did they see coming? Whatever it was, they didn't believe thatBaumannwould survive it.

With some effort he recaptured his mind and forced himself to go to work, emptying themanilaenvelope on the table. Valais's list of German applications for residence permits presented no problems, he simply recopied it. Seneschal's material fromarbour,Lotte Huber, wasbrief and to the point, the lawyer had essentially synthesized what he got and in effect done Szara's job for him: the German Trade Mission was probing the French markets for bauxite (which meant aluminium, which meant airframes), phosphorus, (flares, artillery shells, tracer bullets), cadmium (which meant nothing at all to him), and assorted domestic products, notably coffee and chocolate. Fromalto, Dolek, he would pass on the revised telephone directory of the attache's office but would eliminate the major's letter from his sister inLübeck.For himself, heinformed the Directorate that he'd met with thesilo group leader, disbursed funds, and learned thatlichen was not functioning due to illness.

Next he tore up thesilo originals, burned them in a ceramic ashtray, then walked down the hall and flushed the ashes down the toilet. Almost anyone who came in contact with the espionage world was told the story of the beginner operative who'd been instructed to either burn his papers or tear them into bits and flush them down the toilet. An anxious sort, he'd become confused, crumpled up a large wad of paper and dropped it in the toilet, then put a match to it and watched, aghast, as the flames set the toilet seat on fire.

Back in the W/T office, the big alarm clock by Kranov's work area said it was four-fifteen in the morning. Szara sat at the table and lit a cigarette; the darkened window hid any change of light, but he could hear a bird start up outside. He thought of the hundreds of operatives all across Europe who had finished with their nightwork, as he had, and now fell prey to the same predawn malaise: useless white energy, a nagging sense of some nameless thing left undone, a mind that refused to disengage. Sleep was out of the question.

He squared up the pad of flimsy paper and began to doodle. The memory of Dolek's handwriting, the enormous letters painfully carved into the paper with successive jerks of the pencil, would not leave his mind. Nor would the substance of the letter, especially the Strength through Joy cruise. His imagination wandered, picturing the sort of German worker who would sail off for Lisbon.

DearestSchätzchen-Little Treasure-he wrote./wish to invite you on a special outing arranged by my Kraftdurch Freudeclub.

He went on a bit with it, mawkish, blustering, thensigned itHans. Changed that toHansi. Then triedYour Sweet Hansi. No, too much. JustHansi would do.

What wouldMarta doif she got such a letter? At first she'd think it was a practical joke, tasteless, upsetting. But what if he crafted it in such a way that he made it clear, to her, who was writing?Odilecould drop it in a letter box in Hamburg, that would bypass the postal inspectors who processed all foreign mail. He could address it to her personally and sign with a meaningful alias. She could sail to Lisbon on such a cruise. He had to consider it carefully, a lot could go wrong.

But, in principle, why not?

The evening of18May was cool and cloudy, but the basement of theRue MuretSynagogue was warm enough for the women in the audience to produce scented handkerchiefs from their shiny leather handbags. It was not, Szara discovered, an extremely Orthodox synagogue, nor was it quite as poor as it first seemed. Buried deep in the gloom of a twisting little street in theMarais,the building seemed to sag in every possible direction, its roofime jagged as though scribbled on paper. But the basement was packed with well-dressed men and women, probably parents of the children in the play, their relatives and friends. The women seemed more French than Jewish, and though Szara had taken the precaution of buying a yarmulke (let the Moscow Directorate reimburse him forthat), there were one or two men in the audience with uncovered heads. Certain cars parked outside, half on the narrow pavement, indicated to Szara by their licence plates that some members of the congregation were now doing well enough to live just outside Paris, but retained a loyalty to the old synagogue on therue Muret, astreet that retained a distinct flavour, and aroma, of its medieval origins. Szara expected to recognize the occupant of Seat47or45,buttheplaceto his right was more than filled by a bulky matron in diamond rings while to his left, on the aisle, sat a dark, teenage girl in a print dress. He had arrived early, been handed a playbill, and waited patiently for contact. But nobody showed up. Eventually, two droopy curtains creaked apart to reveal ten-year-old PierreBerger, incardboard armour, as Bar Kochba, the Jewish rebel of Judea ina.D.132,in the act of recruiting his friendLazarfor service against the legions of the Emperor Hadrian.

bar kochba(pointing at the roof): Look,Lazar!There,in the east. There it is!

lazar:What do you see, Simon Bar Kochba?bar kochba: I see a star. Brighter than all others. A starout of Jacob.lazar:Asin the Torah? 'A star out of Jacob, a sceptre outof Israel'?bar kochba:Yes, Lazar.Can you see it? It means weshall free ourselves from the tyrant, Hadrian.lazar:Always you dream! How can we do this?bar kochba: By our faith, by our wisdom, and by thestrength of our right hand. And you,Lazar,shall be myfirst recruit, but you must pass a test of strength.lazar:A test?bar kochba: Yes. Do you see that cedar tree over there?

You must tear it from the earth to prove you are strongenough to join our rebellion.

AsLazarstrode across the stage to a paper cedar pinned to a clothes tree, a grandmother's aside was stilled by a loud 'Shhh!'Lazar,a stocky, red-cheeked-the makeup artist had been a little overenthusiastic with the rouge-child in a dark blue tunic, huffed and puffed as he struggled with the clothes tree. Finally, he lifted it high, shook it at Bar Kochba, and laid it carefully on its side.

The play,A Star out of Jacob, proceeded as Szara, from his own days at thecheders in Kishinev and Odessa, knew it had to. A curious holiday, Lag b'Omer, commemorating a host of events all across the span of Jewish tradition and celebrated in a variety of ways. It was sometimes the Scholars' Festival, recalling the death of Rabbi Akiva's students in an epidemic, or the celebration of the first day of the fall of Manna as described in the Book of Exodus. It was a day when the three-year-old children of Orthodox Jews got their first haircuts or a day of weddings. But in Szara's memory of eastern Poland, it was particularly the day that Jewish children played with weapons. Toy bows and arrows long ago, then, during his own childhood, wooden guns. Szara perfectly remembered the Lag b'Omer rifle that he and his father had carved from the fallen branch of an elm tree. Szara and his friends had chased each other through the mud alleys of their neighbourhoods, street fighting, peering around corners and going 'Krah, krah' as they fired, a fairly accurate approximation by kids who had heard the real thing.

These children were different, he mused, more sophisticated, miniature Parisians with Parisian names: PierreBerger, Moďse Franckel, YvesNachmann,and, standing out sharply from all the others, the stunning NinaPerlemčre, asHannah, inspiring the Bar Kochba rebels when they are reluctant to creep through the underground passages of Jerusalem to attack the legionnaires, sweeping her cardboard sword into the sky and slaying Szara entirely with her courage.

hannah:Let there be no despair. First we will pray, then we will do what we must.

This one, pretty as she was, was the warrior: her lines rangout and produced a scattering of spontaneous applause, causing a Roman centurion in the wings to peer around the curtain through blue-framed eyeglasses. There was a slight disturbance to Szara's left as the dark girl in the print dress moved up the aisle and was replaced by General Yadomir Bloch. He reached over and took Szara's left hand in his right for a moment, then whispered, 'Sorry I'm late, we'll talk after the play.' This produced a loud 'Shh!' from the row behind them.

Through the dark streets of theMarais,Bloch led him to a Polish restaurant on the second floor of a building propped up by ancient wooden beams braced against the pavement. The tiny room was lit by candles, not for atmosphere but-Szara could smell the paraffin they were using for the stove-because there was no electricity in the building. Squinting at the menu written in chalk on the wall, they ordered a half bottle of Polish vodka, bowls of tschav-sorrel soup-a plate of radishes, bread, butter, and coffee.

'The little girl who played Hannah,' Bloch said, shaking his head in admiration. 'There was one like that in Vilna when I was a boy, eleven years old and she drew every eye. You didn't mind coming to the play?'

'Oh no. It brought back the past. Lag b'Omer, playing guns.'

'Perfect, yes, I intended it so. Soviet Man this, Soviet Man that, but we mustn't forget who we are.'

'I don't think I ever forget, comrade General.'

Bloch tore a strip of crust from the brown loaf, trailed it through his soup, leaned over his bowl to eat it. 'No? Good,' he said. 'Too many do. A little hint of pride in one's heritage and somebody screamsbourgeois nationalism! Take the Zionist away!'Having finished the bread, he4wiped his mouth with a small cloth napkin, then began an expedition through his pockets, finally retrieving a foldedpage torn from a journal, which he opened carefully. 'You know Birobidzhan?'

'Yes.' Szara smiled grimly. 'The Jewish homeland in Siberia-or so they insisted. Lenin's version of Palestine, to keep the Zionists in Russia. I believe some thousands of people actually went there, poor souls.'

'They did. A sad place, surely, but effective propaganda. Here, for instance, is a German Jew writing on the subject: "The Jews have gone into the Siberian forests. If you ask them about Palestine, they laugh. The Palestine dream will have long receded into history when in Birobidzhan there will be motorcars, railways and steamers, huge factories belching forth their smoke.. . .These settlers are founding a home in the taigas of Siberia not only for themselves but for millions of their people.. . .Next year in Jerusalem? What is Jerusalem to the Jewish proletarian? Next year in Birobidzhan!" '

Szara raised his glass in a mock Seder toast and drank off the vodka. Bloch folded his paper back up and put it in his pocket. 'It would be funnier if people didn't believe it,' Bloch said.

Szara shrugged. 'Bundists, communists, socialists left and right, three kinds of Zionists, and mostly, when all is said and done, people in the shtetls of the Pale who saydo nothing, wait for the Messiah. We may not own anything to speak of, but we are wealthy when it comes to opinions.'

'So, you must have one too.'

Szara thought for a moment. 'For centuries we have run around Europe like scared mice, maybe it's time to at least consider a hole in the wall, especially lately, as the cat population seems to be on the rise.'

Bloch seemed satisfied. 'I see. Now, to a tender subject. You have, one is told, a splendid opportunity to write something for an American magazine, but nothing appears. Perhaps others counsel you not to do it. Maybesomebody like Abramov, a man youadmire-aman Iadmire,come to that-convinces you that it's not really worth it. He takes you under his protection, he solves your problems with the Georgians, he makes life possible. If it's that, well, you've made a decision and, really, what can I do about it. On the other hand, maybe there's something you need, maybe I can be of assistance. Or not. It's for you to say. At worst, a little play from the synagogue youth group and a plate of nice tschav-not a wasted evening at any rate.'

'Comrade General, may one ask a frank question?'

'Of course.'

'What, actually, is the nature of your business?'

'That's a good question, I'll try to answer it. The truth is I'm in several businesses. Like you,???all of us, I was in the paradise business. We got rid of the czar and his pogroms to make a place where Jews, where everyone, could live like human beings and not like slaves and beasts-that's one definition of paradise and not a bad one. This paradise, we soon saw, needed a few willing souls to serve as guardians. Isn't that always the way with paradise? So I offered my humble services. Thus my second business, one could say, became theGRU,the military intelligence business. In this choice I was guided by the example of Trotsky, who became a soldier when he had to and did pretty well at it. And yet, even so, paradise slipped away. Because now we have a new pogrom, run, like so many in history, by a shrewd peasant who understands hatred, who knows its true value and how to use it.

'There is a trick,AndréAronovich,played on us through the centuries and now played again: the Jew is accused of being cunning, by someone a thousand times more cunning than any Jew has ever been. So, sorrowfully, this problem has become my third business, and now I'm taking you out to theatre and dinner in a businesslike sort of way andtrying to interest you in becoming an associate. What do I offer my associates? A chance to save a few Jewish lives, never a commodity with much value, but then Jews have always found their way to such enterprises-they deal in cheap stuff: old rags, scrap metal, bones and gristle, whatever, like themselves, people don't really want. And that's all, frankly, that I can offer you. Is it dangerous? Oh yes. Could you die? It's likely. Will your heroism be known to history? Very doubtful. Now, have I successfully persuaded you to throw everything you value in life away and follow this peculiar, ugly man over the nearest horizon to some dreadful fate?'

General Bloch threw his head back and laughed-it was unfettered, infectious. Szara joined in, was then unable to stop. People at other tables turned to look at them, smiling nervously, a little frightened to be trapped in a tiny Polish restaurant with a pair of madmen. Neither of them could have explained it. They had, somehow, in this strange, hidden, broken building, caught the tail of absurdity, and the thrash of it made them laugh. 'God forgive me,' Bloch said, wiping his eyes with his hand, 'for enjoying such a life as much as I do.'

A good laugh. A successful laugh. For it prevented Szara from actually having to answer Bloch's question, from sayingno immediately. Later they walked to theMétrotogether. Bloch kept coming back to the play. Oh the little girl who played the part of Hannah, what was her name? Perlemere? Yes, he was sure Szara had it right, a few months on the front lines and already he had the operative's trained memory. Perlemere, mother-of-pearl, likePerlmutter inGerman. Where did Jews get these names? But, under any name at all, wasn't she a treasure.

Weren't they all.

Even those in Russia. Not so quick and clever as thesechildren, perhaps, but bright and eager, little optimists, knock them down and they bounce. Szara surely knew them: the sons and daughters of the Jews in the universities, in the state bureaus and the diplomatic corps, yes, even in the security services.

Those children. The ones who no longer had homes or parents. The ones who ate from garbage cans in the darkness.

Long after Bloch left him, Szara continued the conversation with himself.

A writer once again, Szara sat at his kitchen table at noon; through the open window he could smell lunch being cooked in the other apartments on the courtyard. When it was served, he could hear the sounds of knives and forks on porcelain and the solemn lilt of conversation that always accompanied the midday meal.

He would write the story.

Then he would have to disappear. For, under NKVD scrutiny,a nom deplume would not protect him for long.

So, where did one disappear to these days? America. Shanghai? Zanzibar? Mexico?

No, America.

You met people in Moscow now and then who'd gone off to America-the ones who had come back to Russia. That little fellow who'd worked in a tie factory. What was his name? At some party somewhere they'd been introduced. Szara remembered a face soured by despair. 'Hat in hand,' he'd said. 'Always hat in hand.'

Szara was haunted by that image, and now it coloured his vision of the future. He saw himself withMartaHaecht, they were hand in hand like fugitives in a storybook. The mad run from Paris at midnight, the steamship boarded atLeHavre. Ten days in steerage, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island. New York! Vast confusion, adrift in a sea ofhopes and dreams, the sidewalks jammed with his fellow adventurers, everybody could be a millionaire if they tried. The pennies scraped together for the new suit, the offices, editors, lunches, encouragements, high hopes, then, ultimately...a janitor.

A janitor with an alias.Anom demop.A cartoon capitalist with a cigar loomed up before him: 'You, Cohen, you call this floor clean? Lookit here! And here!' Hat in hand, always hat in hand. The obsequious immigrant, smiling and smiling, the sweat running from his armpits.

But what would he do in Shanghai? Or Zanzibar? Where, in fact,was Zanzibar? Or did it exist only in pirate movies?

On the table before him sat a secondhand Underwood, bought at a junk shop, some vanished novelist's golden calf, no doubt. Poor thing, it would have to be left on a street comer somewhere; it too would have to run away once it wrote forbidden words in its own, very identifiable handwriting. Szara stabbed idly at the keyboard with his index fingers, writing in Polish, putting in accents with a sharp pencil.

To the musical clatter of lunchtime in the courtyard,AndréSzara wrote a magazine story.Who was the Okhrana's mysterious man? Certain documents are said to exist. . .revolutionary times in Baku. . .intrigue. . .rumours that won't die. ..perhaps high in the Soviet government today. . .tradition of the agent provocateur, Roman Malinovsky who rose to be head of the Bolshevik party in the Russian Duma was known to have been an Okhrana agent and so was the engineer Azeff, who actually led the Battle Organization of the Socialist Revolutionary party and personally organized the bomb assassination of the minister of the interior, Plehve, in1904 . . .banished to Siberia. . .records said to have been burned in1917,but did they get them all? Will we ever know for certain. . .secretshave a way. . .oncethe identity is known. . .that the course of history will once again be altered, perhaps violently, by the Okhrana's mysterious man.

In personal code, Szara had the address in a little book. He found an envelope and typed across the front Mr Herbert Hull, Editor, and the rest of it. The following morning would be time enough to put it in the mail. One always liked to let these articles settle a bit, to see later on, with fresh eyes, what might need changing.

That evemng he took a long walk. If nothing else, he owed himself some serious thinking. Perhaps he was letting fate decide, but, if he was, it did. Paris chose that night to be rather a movie of itself. An old man was playing a concertina and a few aristocrats were dancing in the street-the French were tight as fiddle strings until they decided to let loose, and then they could be delightfully mad. Or, perhaps, it was a day for some special little ritual-they arrived frequently and Szara never knew exactly what was going on-when everybody was expected to do the same thing: eat a particular cake, buy a prescribed bouquet, join open-air dancing on the boulevards. Some street corner toughs; wide jackets, black shirts, white ties, their shoulders hunched a certain way, beckoned him over, then stood him a Belgian beer at a corner bar. A girl with blond hair flowing like the wind floated by him and said some deliriously indecipherable thing. It made him want the girl in Berlin-to live such a night unshared was a tragedy. It stayed light forever, a flight of little birds took off from the steeple of a church and fled northwards past the red-stained clouds in a fading sky. So lovely it hurt. He walked past theSantéprison, looked up at-the windows, wondered who might be watching this same sky, could taste the freedom in his own life. He stopped for a sausage in a small French loaf, bought from an old lady in a windowedbooth. The old lady gave him a look, she knew life, she had him figured out, she knew he'd do the right thing.

Odilereturned from her courier run on12June. The product generated by the Berlin networks, as well asotter material fromDrBaumann, wasphotographed on microfilm in the basement of a Berlin butcher shop; the spool was then sewn into the shoulder pad of Odile's suit jacket for the German border crossing and the train ride back to Paris. By the morning of13June the film had been developed, and Szara, working at the rue Delesseux house, had an answer to his carefully phrased-peripheral data,he'd been told to call it, as though nobody really cared-request for identification ofBaumannMilling office workers and sketches of their personalities. Baumann's response was brusque:

FINAL PRODUCTION FOR MAY WAS17715.WE PROJECT JUNE AT20588BASED ON ORDERS AT HAND. THE OTHER DATA YOU REQUEST IS NOT PER OUR AGREEMENT. OTTER.

Szara was not pleased by this rejection but neither was he surprised. A week earlier, he'd made a day trip to Brussels and conferred with Goldman, a discussion that had prepared him for what therezident suspected might happen, and set up his return message. This he wrote on a sheet of paper that would find its way toBaumannon Odile's next trip to Berlin:

WE HAVE RECEIVED YOUR MAY/ JUNE FIGURES AND ARE APPRECIATIVE AS ALWAYS. ALL HERE ARE CONCERNED FOR YOUR CONTINUED HEALTH AND WELL-BEING. THE ANNOTATED LIST IS NEEDEDTO ASSURE YOUR SECURITY AND WE URGE YOU STRONGLY TO COMPLY WITH OUR REQUEST FOR THIS INFORMATION. WE CAN PROTECT YOU ONLY IF YOU GIVE US THE MEANS TO DO SO. JEAN MARC.

Untrue, but persuasive. As Goldman put it, 'Telling somebody that you're protecting him is just about the surest way to help him see that he's threatened.' Szara looked up from his plate of noodles and asked if it in fact were not the case thatBaumann wasin peril. Goldman shrugged. 'Who isn't?'

Szara took another piece of paper and wrote a report to Goldman, which would then be retransmitted to Moscow. He assumed that Goldman would, in the particular way he chose to put things, protect himself, Szara, andBaumann,in that order. The message to Goldman went to Kranov for encryption and telegraphy late that night.

Szara checked his calendar, made a note of Odile's19June courier run, Moscow's incoming transmission, and his next meeting with Seneschal-that afternoon, as it happened. He squashed out a cigarette, lit another. Ran his fingers through his hair. Shook his head to clear it. Times, dates, numbers, codes, schedules, and somebody might die if you made a mistake.

New piece of paper.

He'd acquired from the Lisbon port authority the expected arrival date,10July, of a Strength through Joy cruise from Hamburg. Figuring from Odile's19June courier mission, he saw thatMartacould just make it if there was room on the boat. For an hour he worked on the letter. It had to be sincere; she had great respect for honesty of a certain kind, yet he knew he mustn't gush. She would hate that. He tried to be casual,let's enjoy ourselves, and romantic,/do need to be with you,at the same time. Difficult. Suddenly he sat bolt upright.

How on earth could he find a German stamp in Paris? He would have to askOdileto buy one when she got off the train in Berlin. Should he confide in her? No, better not. He was the deputy director of the net, and this was simply another form of communication with an agent. Even love had become espionage, he thought, or was it just the times he lived in? That aside, when was his meeting with Seneschal? Where was it? He had it written down somewhere. Where? Good God.

4:20p.m.The racetrack at Auteuil. By the rail, facing the entrance to Section D. A well-conceived location for atreff- shining crowds, anonymous faces-except if it was raining, which it was. Szara saw immediately that he and Seneschal would wind up standing together, isolated, in the view of thousands of people with sense enough to move into the shelter of the grandstand.

Such tradecraft,he thought, whistling loudly to catch Seneschal's attention as he emerged from the entry gate. Silently they climbed to the last row of the grandstand as a few horses splattered mud on each other at the far turn of the oval track.'Allezyou shithead,' said a dispirited old man in an aisle seat.

Szara was by nature acutely aware of shifts in mood, and he sensed Seneschal's discomfort right away. The lawyer's tousled hair was soaked, a damp cigarette hung from his lips-nobody liked getting wet, but there was more to it than that. His face was pale and tense, as though something had broken through his insouciant defences and drained his optimism.

For a time they watched galloping horses, a primitive loud-speaker system crackled and popped, the muffled voice of an excited Frenchman could just barely be made out as he called the race.

'A difficult weekend withFräulein?'Szara asked, notunsympathetically.He had a hunch that the romantic trip to Normandy had gone wrong.

A Gallic shrug, then, 'No. Not so bad. She gives herself like a woman in love-anything at all to please since nothing between lovers can be wrong. If she feels I'm not sufficiently passionate she gets up to tricks. You're a man, Jean Marc, you know.'

'It can't always be easy,' Szara said. 'Humans aren't made of steel, and that includes communists.'

Seneschal watched eight new horses being led out into the rain.

'Shall we give you a little breathing space? Perhaps a notional journey, something to do with the Foreign Office. The crisis in Greece.'

'Is there one?'

'Usually.'

Seneschal grunted, not terribly interested. 'She wants to get married. Immediately.'

'I can't believe you didn't use a. . .'

'No. It's not that. She thinks she's to be dismissed from her position, sent back to Germany in disgrace. Last weekend, after we'd done with all the little shrieks and gasps, there were tears. Floods. She turned bright red and puffed up. It rained like a bastard up there. All weekend the stuff ran down the windows. She bawled, I tried to comfort her but she was inconsolable. Now, she says, only marriage can keep her in France, with me. As for my job at the Foreign Office and the information she's provided, well, too bad. We will live on love, she says.'

'Did she explain?'

'She gabbled like a goose. What I can make of it is that her boss,Herr Stollenbauer,is under severe pressure.Lottespent all last week running around Paris in taxis-and she claims she's frightened of Parisian cab drivers-because no Mission cars were available. She says shehunted through every fancy shop in the city, Fauchon,Vigneau,Rollet,the finesttraiteursyou see, in search of what she calls RoteGrütze.Do you know what that is? Because I don't.'

'A sort of sweetened sauce. Made of red berries,' Szara said.

'Also, they're trying to rent a house, somewhere just outside Paris. In Suresnes or Maisons-Laffitte, places like that. According to her they're more than willing to pay, but Frenchpropriétairestake their time, want papers signed, bank guarantees, first this, then that. It's ceremonial, drives the Germans crazy; they just want to wave money about and get what they want. They think the French are venal-they aren't wrong but they don't understand how French people worry about their properties. From her stories I gathered, more or less, that this is what's going on. And the worse it gets, the moreStollenbauerfeels the pressure, the more he shouts at her. She isn't used to that, so now the answer is to get married, she'll stay in France, and I suppose tellStollenbaueroff in the bargain.'

'Somebody'scoming to Paris.'

'Évidemment.'

'Somebody with an aide to call up and say, "Oh yes, and make sure the man's RoteGrützesauce is available when he eats his pfannkuchen."'

'Shall one go to the forest and pick red berries?'

To Szara's horror, Seneschal was not at all sarcastic. 'Not to worry,' he said sternly. Seneschal was clearly in the process of wilting. He was physically brave,Szara knew that for a fact, but the prospect of daily married life with Huber had unnerved him. Szara spoke with authority: 'It's the Frenchwoman of your dreams you'll marry, my friend, and not theFräulein.Consider that an order.'

The new information was provocative. Szara's old instincts-the journalist happening on a story-weresharply aroused. Suddenly the horses churning through the mud seemed triumphant, images of victory: their nostrils flaring, flanks shining with kicked-up spray. The business with the RoteGrützesauce was curious, but the search for a safe house, that was trulyinteresting. Trade Missions didn't acquire safe houses. That was embassy business, a job undertaken by resident intelligence officers. But the embassy was being circumvented, which meant a big secret, and a big secret meant a big fish, and guess who happened to be standing there with a net.Cameras, he thought,just every kind of camera.

He made a decision. 'Huber won't be fired,' he said. 'It's to be quite the opposite.Stollenbauer willbe crawling at her feet. And as for you, your only problem will be a woman in triumph, a star of stage, screen, and radio, a princess. Demanding, I think, but not something you can't deal with.'

Fully mobilized, Szara's web of contacts had an answer within days.

An Alsatiantraiteurwas located; a smilingLotte Huberleft his shop trailed by a taxi driver straggling under the weight of two cases of RoteGrützesauce in special crocks of the Alsatian's own design. He was also prepared to offer weisswurst, jaegerwurst, freshly cured sauerkraut subtly flavoured with juniper berries because-and here the rosy-cheekedtraiteurleaned over the counter and spoke an exquisitely polite German-'a man who favours RoteGrütze willalways,always,madame,want a hint of juniper in his sauerkraut. This is an appetite for piquancy. And this is an appetite we understand.'

Schau-Wehrli dismissed the house dilemma with an imperious Swiss flick of the hand. Her progressive friends and colleagues at the International Law Institute were sounded out and a suitable property was soon located.

It was in Puteaux, a step or two from the city border, a dignified, working-class neighbourhood near the Citroen loading docks on the southwestern curve of the Seine: everywhere a grim, sooty brown, but boxes of flowers stood sentry at all the parlour windows, and the single step up to each doorway was swept before eight every morning. At the far edge of the district sat a three-storey, gabled brick residence-the home of a doctor now deceased and the subject of an interminable lawsuit-with a high wall covered in ivy and a massive set of doors bound in ironwork. A bit of a horror, but the ivied wall turned out to hide a large, formal garden. Sheets were removed from the furniture, a crew of maids brought in to freshen up. Terracotta pots were placed by the entryway and Med to overflowing with fiery geraniums.

Stollenbauer was,as Szara had predicted, magically relieved of much of his burden. The pending visit still made him nervous, much could go wrong, but at least he now felt hehad some support. From chubby littleLotte Huberno less! Had he not always said that someday her light would shine? Had he not always sensed the hidden talent and initiative in this woman? She'd been so clever in finding the house-where his pompous assistants had shouted guttural French into the phone, cunningLottehad taken the feminine approach, spending her very own weekend time wandering about various neighbourhoods and inquiring of women in the marketplace if they knew of something to rent, not too much legal foolishness required.

Meanwhile, Szara arrayed his forces and played his own office politics. Oh, Goldman wasinformed, he had to be, but the cable was a masterpiece of its genre-Trade Mission apparently expecting important visitor sometime in near future,item eight of seventeen items, not a chance under heaven that such a phrase would bring the greedyrezident swooping down from Brussels to snaffle up the credit.

Using a copy of the house key, Szara and Seneschal had a look around for themselves one evening. Szara would have dearly loved to record the proceedings, but it would simply have been too dangerous, requiring a hidden operative running a wire recorder. Then too, important visitors usually had security men in attendance, people with a horror of unexplained ridges under carpets, miscellaneous wires, even fresh paint.

Instead they approached a birdlike little lady, the widow of an artillery corporal, who lived on the top floor of the house across the street and whose parlour window looked out over the garden.A troublesome affair, they told her;a wayward wife, a government minister, the greatest discretion. They showed her very official-looking identity documents with diagonal red stripes and handed over a crisp envelope stuffed with francs. She nodded grimly, perhaps an old lady but a little more a woman of the world than they might suppose. They were welcome to her window; it was a change to have something going on in this dull old street. And did they wish to hear a thing or two about the butcher's wife?

StollenbauersummonedLotte Huberto his office, sat her down on a spindly little chair, rested his long fingers lightly on her knee, and told her, in strictest confidence, that their visitor was an associate of Heydrich himself.

Seneschal had walkedLotte Huberthrough the 'discovery' of the safe house and the RoteGrützesauce and counselled how these successes should be explained. And what thanks did he get? The young woman's new sense of pride and achievement made her shut up like a clam. Under Szara's tutelage, he applied pressure every way he could. Told herthe big job was now open at the Foreign Office-would he get it, or would his sworn enemy? Only she could help him now.

He took her to dinner at Fouquet's, fed her triangles of toast covered thickly with goose liverpâtéand a bottle of Pomerol. The wine made her cute, funny, and romantic, but not talkative. Finally they fought. What use, she wanted to know, had the French Foreign Office for information that an associate of Heydrich's was coming to town for an important meeting? That wasthe very sort of thing that interested them, he said. The big cheese in his office was secretly a great admirer of Hitler and could be counted on to help, quietly, if any more problems developed with the meeting. But he had to be told exactly what was going on. No, she said, stop, you begin to sound like a spy. That madeSénéschal paleand Szara even paler when the conversation was reported. 'Apologize,' Szara said. 'Tell her you were overwrought and'-he reached into a pocket and came forth with francs-'buy her jewelry.'

Szara accepted the inevitable. They weren't going to get the meeting date or the names of the other participants, surveillance was their only other option. He could not risk pressing Huber too hard and losing her as a source. It was the first time a wisp of regret floated across his view of the operation-it was not to be the last.

They drove to Puteaux in Seneschal's car, parked in the narrow street, and watched the house-a surveillance technique that lasted exactly one hour and twelve minutes, perhaps a record for brevity. Children stared, young women pretended not to notice, an angry streetsweeper scraped the hubcap with his twig broom, and a drunk demanded money.Discomfort did not begin to describe how it felt; it just wasn't a neighbourhood where you could do something like that.

Odilereturned from her courier run to Berlin on22June(Baumannwouldn't budge), so she,Sénéschal,and Szara took turns sitting in the old lady's parlour. The wisp of regret had by now become a smoky haze that refused todissipate.Goldmanhad the people to do this kind of work; Szara had to improvise with available resources. As for surveillance from the apartment, the principle was one thing, the reality another. The building, cold stone to the eye, was alive, full of inquisitive neighbours you couldn't avoid on the stairs. Szara squared his shoulders and scowled-lama policeman-and left the old lady to deal with the inevitable tongue-wagging.

For her part, she seemed to be enjoying the attention. What she did not enjoy, however, was their company. They were, well,there. If somebody read a newspaper, it rattled; if she wanted to clean the carpet, they had to lift their feet.Odilefinally saved the situation, discovering that the old lady had a passion for the card game called bezique, a form of pinochle. So the surveillance evolved into a more or less permanent card party, all three watchers contriving to play just badly enough to lose a few francs.

The smoky haze of regret thickened to a fog. What point in havingSénéschal or Odilewatch the house if Szara could not be reached when something finally happened-this washis operation. But the rules emphatically excluded contact with an agent-operator at his home or, God forbid, at the communications base. Thus he found a rooming house in Suresnes with a telephone on the wall in the corridor, gave the landlady a month's rent and an alias, and there, when he wasn't on duty in Puteaux, he stayed, waiting forSénéschal or Odileto use the telephone ina caféjust down the street from the old lady's building.

Waiting.

The great curse of espionage: Father Time in lead boots, the skeleton cobwebbed to the telephone-any and all of the images applied. If you were lucky and good an opportunity presented itself. And then you waited.

July came. Paris broiled in the sun, you could smell the butcher shops half a block away. Szara sat sweating in asoiled little room, not a breath of air stirred through the window; he read trashy French novels, stared out at the street./dared to enter the world of spies,he thought,and wound up like the classic lonely-pensioner-alone-in-a-room of a Gogol story. There was a woman who lived just down the hall, fortyish, dyed blond, and fleshy. Fleshy the first week, sumptuous the second, Rubenesque thereafter. She too seemed to be waiting for something or other, though Szara couldn't imagine what.

Actually he could imagine, and did. Her presence in the hallway was announced by a trail of scent calledCri de la Nuit, cheap, crade,sweet, which drove his imagination to absurd excesses. As did her bitter mouth, set in a permanent sneer that said to the world, and especially to him, 'Well?'

Before he could answer, the phone rang.

'Can you come to dinner?'Odilesaid. Heart pounding, Szara found a cranky old taxi at the SuresnesMairieand reached the Puteaux house in minutes.Odile wasstanding well back from the window, looking through a pair of opera glasses. With a little grin of triumph she handed them over. 'Second floor,' she said. 'To the left of the entryway.'

By the time he focused, they weren't where she said they were, but had moved to the top floor, two colourless men in dark suits seen dimly through the gauze curtain shielding the window. They vanished, then reappeared for a moment when they parted the drapes in an adjoining room. 'A security check,' he said.

'Yes,'Odilesaid. "Their car is parked well down the street.'

'What model?'

'Not sure.'

'Big?'

'Oh yes,' she said. 'And shiny.'

Szara felt his blood race.

The following afternoon,8July, they were back. This time it was Szara on duty. He'd moved the bezique table in front of the window and, having begged the old lady's pardon, removed his shirt, appearing in sleeveless undershirt, a cigarette stuck in his lips, a hand of playing cards held before him, a sullen expression on his face. This time a heavy man with a bow tie accompanied the other two and from the open gateway stared up at Szara, who stared right back.A livingBrassai,he thought,Card Player in Puteaux-he lacked only a bandanna tied around his neck. The man in the bow tie broke off the staring contest, then slowly closed the door that concealed the garden from the street.

9July was the day.

At2:00p.m.sharp, two glossy black Panhards pulled up at the gate. One of the security men left the first car and opened the gate as his partner drove off. The second car was aligned in such a way that Szara could identify the driver as the man with the bow tie. He also caught a glimpse of the passenger, who sat directly behind the driver and glanced out the window just before the Panhard swung through the gateway and the security man pushed the doors shut. The passenger was in his early forties, Szara guessed. The angle of sight, from above, could be misleading, but Szara took him to be short and bulky. He had thick black hair sharply parted, a swarthy, deeply lined face, and small dark eyes. For the occasion he wore a double-breasted suit, a shirt with a stiff high collar, a grey silk tie.Gestapo, Szara thought, dressed up like a diplomat, but the face read policeman and criminal at once, with a conviction of power that Szara had seen in certain German faces, especially-no matter how they preached the Nordic ideal-the dark men who ruled the nation. Important, Szara realized. Thesingle glance out the window had asked the questionAm I pleated?

'Ten of clubs,' said the old lady.

Fifteen minutes later, a grey Peugeot coasted to a stop in front of the house. A hawk-faced man got out on the side away from Szara and the car immediately left. The man looked about him for a moment, made certain of his tie, then pressed the doorbell set into the portal of the gateway.

Dershani.

Seneschal knocked twice, then entered the apartment. 'Christ, the heat,' he said. He collapsed in an armchair, set a Leica down carefully among the framed photographs on a rickety table. His suit was hopelessly rumpled, black circles at the armpits, a grey shadow of newsprint ink darkening the front of his shirt. He had spent the last two hours lying on sheets of newspaper in a lead-lined gutter at the foot of the sloped roof. The building's scrollwork provided a convenient portal for photography.

Seneschal wiped his face with a handkerchief. 'I took all the automobiles,' he said. "The security man who worked the door-several of him. Tried for the second man, but not much there I'm afraid, perhaps a one-quarter profile, and he was moving. As for the face in the back seat of the Panhard, I managed two exposures, but I doubt anything will show up.'

Szara nodded silently.

"Well? What do you think?'

Szara gestured with his eyes toward the old lady, waiting not quite patiently to resume the card game. 'Too early to know much of anything. We'll wait for them to use the garden,' he said.

'What if it rains?'

Szaralooked up at the sky, a mottled grey in the Paris humidity. 'Not before tonight,' he said.

They appeared just before five-a break in the negotiation.Odilehad arrived at her usual time, Szara now used her opera glasses and stood well back from the window.

The man he took to be a German intelligence officer was short and heavy, as he'd supposed. Magnification revealed a thin white scar crossing his left eyebrow, a street fighter's badge of honour. The two men stood at the garden entrance for a moment, open French doors behind them. The German spoke a few words, Dershani nodded, and they walked together into the garden. They were the image of diplomacy, strolling pensively with hands clasped behind their backs, continuing a very deliberate conversation, choosing their words with great care. Szara studied their lips through the opera glasses but could not, to his surprise, determine if they were speaking German or Russian. Once they laughed. Szara fancied he could hear it, faintly, carried on the heated air of the late afternoon amid the sound of sparrows chirping in the trees of the garden.

They made a single circuit on the gravel path, stopping once while the German pointed at an apple tree, then returned to the house, each beckoning the other to enter first. Dershani laughed, clapping the German on the shoulder, and went in ahead of him.

At7:20,Dershani left the house. He turned up the street in the direction his car had gone and disappeared from view. A few minutes later, the security man opened the gate and, after the car had passed through, closed it again. He climbed in beside the driver and the Panhard sped away. In the garden, the setting sun made long shadows on the dry grass, the birds sang, nothing moved in the still summer air.

'Tiens,'said the old lady. 'Will the government fall tomorrow?'

Seneschal was grave. 'No,madame,I can in confidence inform you that, thanks to your great kindness and patience, the government will stand.'

'Oh, too bad,' she said.

Odileleft first, to walk to the NeuillyMétrostop. Seneschal disappeared into the old lady's closet and emerged a few minutes later smelling faintly of mothballs. He handed Szara a spool of film. Szara thanked the old lady, told her they might be back the following day, gave her a fresh packet of money, and went out into the humid dusk.

Seneschal's car was parked several blocks away. They walked through streets deserted by the onset of the dinner hour; smells of frying onions and potatoes drifted through the open windows.

'Do we try again tomorrow?' Seneschal asked.

Szara thought it over. 'I sense that they've done what they came together to do.'

'Can't be certain.'

'No. I'll contact you at your office, if you don't mind.'

'Not at all.'

'I should say, officially, that gratitude is expressed-charming the way they put these things. Personally, thank you for everything, and I'm sorry your shirt is ruined.'

Seneschal inspected the front of his shirt. 'No. My little friend is a wonder. No matter what I get into she knows a way to take care of it. Nothing is to be thrown out, it can always last "a bit longer.'"

'Is she aware of your, ah, love affair?'

'They always know, Jean Marc, but it's part of life here. It's what all those sad littlecafésongs are about.'

'You are in love, then.'

'Oh that word. Perhaps, or perhaps not. She is myconsolation,however, always that, and doesn't she ever know it.L'amourcovers quite some territory, especially in Paris.'

'I expect it does.'

'Have you a friend?'

'Yes. Or I should say "perhaps."'

'She's good to you?'

'Good for me.'

lEt alorsP

Szara laughed.

'Beautiful too, I'd wager.'

'You would win, eventually, but it's not the sort of dazzle that catches the eye right away. There's just something about her.'

They reached the car; the smell of overheated upholstery rushed out when Seneschal opened the door. 'Come have a beer,' he said. 'There's plenty of time for your vanishing act.'

"Thank you,' Szara said.

Seneschal turned the ignition, the Renault came reluctantly to life as he fiddled expertly with the choke. 'This whore drinks petrol,' he said sourly, racing the engine.

They wandered through the twisting streets of Puteaux, crossed the Seine on thepont de Suresnes-the tied-up barges had pots of flowers and laundry drying on lines-then theBois deBoulogne appeared on their left, a few couples out strolling, men with jackets over their arms, an organ grinder. Seneschal stopped by an ice cream seller. 'What kind?'

'Chocolate.'

'A double?'

'Of course. Here's a few francs.'

'Keep it.'

'I insist.'

Seneschal waved the money away and bought the cones.

When he got back in the car he drove slowly through theBois,steering with one hand. 'Watch, now I really will ruin the shirt.'

Szara's double cone was a masterpiece-he ate the ice cream and looked at the girls in their summer dresses.

But what he'd seen that afternoon did not leave him. His mind was flying around like a moth in a lamp. He didn't understand what he'd witnessed, didn't know what it meant or what, if anything, to do about it. He'd seen something he wasn't supposed to see, that much he did know. Maybe it meant nothing-intelligence services talked to each other when it was in the interest of both to do so, and Paris was a good, neutral place to do it.

'If you've the time, we'll find ourselves a brasserie,' Seneschal said.

'Good idea. Is there a place you go?' Szara wanted the company.

Seneschal looked at him oddly. Szara realized his error, they couldn't go to a place where Seneschal was known. 'We'll just pick one that looks good,' he said. 'In this city you can't go too far wrong.'

They'd drifted into the fifteentharrondissement,headed east on the boulevard Lefebvre. 'We're in the right place out here,' Seneschal said. "They have great big ones where the whole family shows up-kids, dogs. A night like this'-the Renault idled roughly at a red light; a fat man in suspenders was picking through books at a stall-'the terraces will be. . .'The Panhard rolled to a gentle stop on Seneschal's side of the car.

Seen from a window in the old lady's apartment, he'd been a colourless man in a suit. Now, looking through the Panhard's passenger window, he was muchrealerthan that. He was young, not yet thirty, and very bright and crisp. His hair was combed just so, swept up into a stiff pompadour above his white forehead. 'Please,' he said inmeasured French, 'may we speak a moment?' He smiled.What merry eyes, Szara thought. For a moment he was unable to breathe.

Seneschal turned to him for help, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.

'Please? Yes?' said the man.

The driver was older, his face a silhouette in the lights of the boulevard shops. 'Don't be so fucking polite,' he grumbled in German. He turned and looked at Seneschal. It was the face of a German worker, blunt and stolid, with hair shaved above the ears. He was smoking a cigar, the tip reddened as he inhaled.

The light went green. A horn beeped behind them. 'Drive away,' Szara said. Seneschal popped the clutch and the car stalled. Swearing under his breath, he twisted the ignition key and fumbled with the choke. The driver of the Panhard laughed, his partner continued to smile.Like a clown in a nightmare, Szara thought.

The engine caught and the Renault roared away from the light. Seneschal cut into an angled street, took a narrow cobbled alley between high walls at full speed-the car bouncing and shimmying-tried to turn sharply back into the boulevard traffic, but the light had changed again and he had nowhere to go. The Panhard rolled up beside them. 'Whew,' said the smiling man. 'What a bumping!'

'Look,' the driver said in French, holding his cigar between thumb and forefinger, 'don't make us chase you around all night. . .'

Traffic started to move and Seneschal forced his way between two cars. The Panhard tried to follow, but the driver of a little Fiat cut them off with a spiteful glare.

'Tell me what to do,' Seneschal said.

Szara tried to think of something, as though he knew. 'Stay with the traffic,' he said. Seneschal nodded vigorously, he would follow Szara's plan meticulously. Hesettled the Renault into traffic, which now began to thin out noticeably as they approached the eastern border of the city. At the next light, Szara leaned over in order to look in the rearview mirror. The Panhard was two cars back in the adjoining lane. The passenger saw what he was doing, stuck his arm out the window and waved. When the light changed, Seneschal stamped the gas pedal against the floorboards, swerved around the car in front, changed lanes, turned off the headlights, and shot across the oncoming traffic into a side street.

Szara twisted around, but the Panhard was not to be seen. Seneschal began to make lefts and rights, tearing through the darkness of deserted side streets while Szara watched for the Panhard. 'Any idea where we are?' he said.

"The thirteenth.'

A shabby neighbourhood, unlit; peeling wooden shutters protected the shopfronts. Up ahead, a broad boulevard appeared and Seneschal pulled over and left the car idling as they both lit cigarettes. Szara's hands were trembling. 'The passenger was at the safe house,' Seneschal said. 'You have his photograph. But the other one, with the cigar, where did he come from?'

'I never saw him.'

'Nazis,' Seneschal said. 'Did yousee them?'

'Yes.'

'What did they want?'

'To talk, they said.'

'Oh yes! I believe it!' He exhaled angrily and shook his head. 'Shit.'

"Their time will come,' Szara said.

'Did you hear him? That cunt? "Please, may we speak a moment.'" Seneschal made the man sound effeminate and mincing.

'That was a good idea, cutting across.'