Dark Star

Sénéschalshrugged. 'I just did it.' He flicked his cigarette out the window and eased the Renault into first gear, turning the headlights back on. He swung left onto the deserted boulevard. 'A bad neighbourhood,' he said. 'Nobody comes here at night.'

They drove for five minutes, Szara spotteda Métrostation on the corner. 'Expect a contact by telephone. After that, our meetings will be as usual.'

'I'll be waiting,'Sénéschalsaid, voice mean and edgy. The brush with the Germans had frightened him. Now he was angry.

The car stopped in midblock and Szara got out and closed the door behind him. He thrust his hands in his pockets, squeezing the roll of film to make sure of it, and walked quickly toward theMétroentrance. He reached the grillwork arch above the stairway, saw it was theTolbiacstation, stopped dead as a metallic explosion echoed off the buildings followed by the sound of shattered glass raining on the pavement. He stared at the noise. Two blocks away the Renault was bent around the front of a car that had ploughed into the driver's door. The passenger door was jammed open and something was lying in the street a few feet away from it. Szara started to run. Two men got out of the black car that had struck the Renault. One of them held his head and sat on the ground. The other ran to the thing in the street and bent over it. Szara stopped dead and found the shadows next to a building. Lights began to go on, heads appeared in windows. The glow of the street lamps was reflected in the liquid running into the street from the two cars, and the smell of petrol reached him. The man who had been bending over the thing in the street squatted for a moment, seemed to be searching for something, then rose abruptly and kicked savagely at whatever it was that was lying there. Peoplebegan to come out of their doorways, talking excitedly to each other. The man by the Renault now turned, took the other man under one arm and hauled him to his feet, pulling him forward, at last getting him to stumble along quickly. They disappeared up a side street across the boulevard.

Walking quickly toward the cars, Szara found himself amid a small crowd of people. The Panhard's windscreen was starred on the right side, and the driver's door on the Renault had been mashed halfway across the front seat by the impact. Seneschal lay face down near the Renault's sprung passenger door, his jacket up over his head, shirttail pulled halfway out of his pants. A group of men stood around him, one bent down for a closer look, lifted the jacket, then straightened up, eyes shut in order not to see what he'd seen. He waved a dismissive hand across his body and said, 'Don't look.' Another man said, 'Did you see himkick him?' The voice was quivering. 'He kicked a dead man. He did. I saw it.'

TRANSMISSION11JULY1938 22:30HOURS TO JEAN MARC: DIRECTORATE JOINS YOU IN REGRET FOR LOSS OF COMRADE SILO. INQUIRY TO BE UNDERTAKEN BY YVES WITH ASSISTANCE OF ELLI,A REPORT TO BE MADE TO DIRECTORATE SOONEST OF CIRCUMSTANCES PERTINENT TO THIS INCIDENT WITH SPECIAL REGARD TO PREVIOUS ACCIDENT INVOLVING FORMER DEPUTY. ESSENTIAL TO DETERMINE EXACT CIRCUMSTANCES OF BOTH THESE INCIDENTS WITH REGARD TO THEIR POSSIBLE INTENTIONAL ORIGIN. THE REMOTEST POSSIBILITY TO BE CONSIDERED. ALL OPAL PERSONNEL TO BE ON HIGHEST ALERT FOR HOSTILE ACTION AGAINST THE NETWORK.

THERE ISGRAVECONCERN FOR THE CONTINUITY OF THE ARBOUR PRODUCT. SINCE HECTOR WAS PRESENT WHENINITIALCONTACT MADE BETWEEN ARBOUR AND SILO, AND HECTOR HAS BEEN PRESENTED AS THE FRIEND OF SILO, CAN HECTOR FIND MEANS TO OPERATE AS SILO'S REPLACEMENT IN THIS RELATIONSHIP? HECTOR TO SHOW CONCERN AS FAMILY FRIEND AND PROVIDE COMFORT AS HE IS ABLE.??IS SUGGESTED THAT SILO'S FUNERAL IS THE LOGICAL SETTING FOR CONTACT BETWEEN HECTOR AND ARBOUR. ALTERNATIVELY, IF SILO'S TRUE POLITICAL AFFILIATION IS REVEALED, CAN PRESSURE BE BROUGHT TO BEAR ON ARBOUR? WILL ARBOUR COOPERATE IN THIS CONTEXT? RESPOND BY14JULY.

OTTER MUST BE PRESSED TO EXPAND HIS REPORTING. RECOMMEND NEW MEASURES TO BE TAKEN WITHIN48HOURS.

ACCOUNT NO.414-223-8/74ATBANQUE SUISSE DEGENEVE TO BE CLOSED. NEW ACCOUNT NO.609-846DX12AT CREDIT LEMANS OPERATIVE AS OF15JULY IN NAMECOMPAGNIE ROMAILLESWITH CREDIT OF50,000FRENCH FRANCS.10,000FRANCS TO BE TAKEN BY COURIER TO YVES. DIRECTOR

Sitting in the hot, dirty room where Kranov transmitted and decoded, Szara tossed the message aside. The frantic endgame attempted by the Directorate, their shrill tone, and the certainty of failure he found faintly depressing. He perfectly remembered theAndréSzara who would have been enraged by the Directorate's calculating attitude, a man who, not so very long ago, believed passionately thatthe only unforgivable human sin was a cold heart. Now he was not that man. He understood what they wanted, understood them for wanting it, and knew the result:LotteHuber was lost. Seneschal's friendValais,hector,also a lawyer formerly active in the French Communist party, had been with Seneschal the night they'd 'met' Huber and her friend at the theatre, and had been brought on stage as a confidant-Lotte,he's so worried and upset, you must help him-to move the operation along. But Huber would never accept him as a lover; this wasanalyst's thinking, a scheme created at a great distance from events and in breathtaking ignorance of the personalities involved.Valaiswas a ponderous, contemplative man, a fair-skinned Norman lacking entirely Seneschal's Mediterranean intensity and charm.

And blackmail was absurd. Huber would go to pieces, bring the French police down on their heads. Moscow was clearly rattled: losing first the operative Szara had replaced, in a car accident outsideMâcon,and now Seneschal in what had been presented to them as a second car accident, a hit-and-run tragedy.

For Szara had not told them otherwise.

A pawn inkhvost politics had become an active participant.

Was he to inform the Directorate, and thus Dershani, of photographs taken in a Puteaux garden? A secret meeting of senior Soviet and German intelligence officers, perhaps of diplomatic importance, not so secret after all. Penetrated. Photographed. Maybe the Directorate knew of Dershani's contact with the Nazi service.

Maybe it didn't.

The Germans certainly wanted to keep the contact secret-they'd murdered Seneschal on that basis. So what would the NKVD have in store for him? He chose not to find that out, instead undertook a damage control programme to protect himself, informingSchau-Wehrlithat, according to Huber's final report to Seneschal, the grand meeting had not yet taken place, and cabling both Goldman and Moscow to that effect.

Odile,of course, presented a very different problem and he'd had to approach her directly. He'd got her off by herself and placed hisUfein her hands: there will be an investigation; you must not tell the Brusselsrezident, or anybody, what you were doing on the days leading up to9July. He'd watched her, a tough Belgian girl from the mining towns, raw, nineteen, and loyal to the death once she got it straightened out what was what. She'd thought it over for quite some time. Her face, usually flip and sexy and moody all at once, was closed, immobile, he couldn't read it. Finally, she'd agreed. She trusted him, instinctively, and perhaps she feared it was already too late to tell the truth. She also knew, from growing up within Communist party politics, that conspiracy was bread-and-butter to them all: you chose a side and lived with the result.

The photographs had turned out to be adequate. He'd had them developed by randomly choosing a little shop, assuming the technician would make no particular sense of the subjects. Picking them up in midafternoon, he'd found an empty booth in a desertedcaféand spent an hour turning them over in his hands, cloudy black and white impressions shot from above, eleven prints paid for with a life. The crisp, young security man opening a gate. Head and shoulders of a man at the wheel of a car. Car window with a faint blur behind it. Dershani and the Gestapo officer in a garden, the German speaking tentatively, left hand turned up to emphasize a point. There was no photograph of the man with the cigar who drove the Panhard, Seneschal had not managed to record his own murderer.

Now, what to do with them. He'd thought about that for a long time, then decided that if?loch didn't contact himhe'd pass them to Abramov whenever an opportunity presented itself. Not officially, not through the system, friend to friend. Until then, he'd hide them in his apartment.

As he thought about the photographs, the blacked-out room began to feel claustrophobic. A few feet away, facing the opposite wall, Kranov worked like a machine. The rhythmic tapping of his wireless key grated across Szara's nerves, so he filed the Moscow cable in a metal box and left the house, walking out into the still night air and heading toward the canals. The slaughter-house workers were hard at it on the loading docks of the abattoirs, hefting bloody beef quarters on their shoulders, then swinging them in to butchers who waited in the backs of their trucks. They cursed and laughed as they worked, wiping the sweat from their eyes, brushing the flies off their spattered aprons. In a brightly litcafé, ablind man played the violin and a whore danced on a table while the raucous crowd teased him with lurid descriptions of what he was missing, and he smiled and played in such a way as to let them know he saw more than they did. Szara walked on the cobbled pathway by the canal, then stood for a time and watched the reflections of the neon signs, bending and bowing with the motion of the black water.

To Seneschal, dead because of his, Szara's, ignorance and inexperience, he could only give a place in his heart. He wondered if he'd ever learn how the Germans had managed it-the discovery of the surveillance, the tracking of the Renault while remaining invisible. Technically, they were simply more adept than he was-only the chance decision to use theTolbiac Métrohad saved his life-thus Seneschal was gone, and he was the one left to stare into the dead waters of the canal and think about life. His sentence was to understand that, and to remember it. To remember also, forever, the driver of the Panhard, a dim shape seen at a distance, barely the form of a man,then the savage kick, a spasm of useless rage.Sudden, without warning; like the blow that had knocked him to the floor of a railway station buffet in Prague. He watched the wavering signs in the water, red and blue, recalled what Seneschal had said about his girl-friend, the one who threw nothing away, the one for whom anything could be made to last a little longer.

8July.

He took the night train to Lisbon.

Sat up in coach class, saving money, anticipating the cost of lovers' feasts: iced prawns with mayonnaise, the wine calledBarca Velha,cool from the cellar of thetaberna.Then too, he did not want to sleep. Somewhere out on the ocean, he imagined,Marta Haechtwas also awake. Avoiding the ghastly end-of-voyage parties she would be standing at the rail, watching for a landfall glow in the distance, only dimly aware of the Strength through Joy revellers braying Nazi songs in the ship's ballroom. In her purse she would have the letter, carefully folded, something to laugh about in Portugal.

Nothing so good for a lover as a train ride through the length of the night, the endless click of the rails, the engine sometimes visible in the moonlight as it worked its way around a long curve. All night long he summoned memories-Is there a place I may undress?The train pounded through the vineyards of Gascony at dawn. He stood in the alcove at the end of the car, watched the rails glitter as they swept below the coupling, smelled the burnt cinder in the air. It was cold in the foothills of thePyrénées;the scent of pine resin sharpened as the sun climbed the slopes. FalangistGuardia inleather hats checked the passports at the Hendaye border crossing, then they were in Franco's Spain all day long. They passed a burned-out tank, a raw lumber gallows standing at the edge of a town.

The haze shimmered in the hills north of Lisbon.The city itself was numb, exhausted in the faded summer light of evening. The carriage horses at the station barely bothered to nick their tails. Szara found a hotel called theMirador,with Moorish turrets and balconies, and took a room above a courtyard where a fountain gushed rusty water over broken tiles and heavy roses lay sodden in the heat. He put his toothbrush in a glass, then went out for a long walk, eventually buying a pair of linen trousers, a thin white shirt, anda panamahat. He changed in the store and a Spanish couple asked directions of him on the way back to the hotel.

He spotted a Russianémigrénewspaper at a kiosk, then spent the night reading to the whirr of cicadas and the splashing of the cracked fountain.Stalin the Murderer! Prince Cheyalevsky Presents a Cheque to the Orphans' League.Mme TsoutskayaOpens Milliner's Shop.At dawn, he forced the ancient shutters closed, but he could not sleep. He had not asked Goldman's permission to leave Paris-he doubted it would have been granted; Seneschal's death had everybody on edge-nor had he toldSchau-Wehrli where he was going. Nobody knew where he was, and such freedom made it impossible to sleep. He wasn't seriously missing, not yet. He gave himself a week for that; then they'd panic, start calling the morgue and the hospitals.

Walking back to the hotel, he'd happened on a family of Jews: ashen faces, downcast eyes, dragging what remained of their possessions down the hill toward the docks. From Poland, he suspected. They'd come a long way, and now they were headed-where? South America? Or the United States?

Wouldshe go? Yes, eventually she would. Not at first, not right away-one didn't just walk away from one's life. But later, after they'd made love, really made love, thenshe would go with him. He could see her: head propped on hand, sweat between her breasts, brown eyes liquid and intense; could hear the cicadas, the shutter creaking in the evening breeze.

He had money. Barely enough, but enough. They'd go to the American consulate and request visitors' visas. Then they would vanish. What else was America but that, the land of the vanished.

At ten the next morning he watched the docking of the linerHermannKrieg-a Nazi martyr, no doubt. A crowd of German workers streamed down the gangplank, grinning at the brutal white sun they'd come to worship. The men leered at the dark Portuguese women in their black shawls, the wives took a firm grip on their husbands' arms.

Marta Haechtwas nowhere to be seen.

That summer, the heat spared nobody.

And while London gardens wilted and Parisian dogs slept undercafétables, New York positively steamed.another scorcher, theDaily Mirror howled, while theNew York Times said 'Temperatures Are Expected to Reach98°Today.' It was impossible to sleep at night. Some people gathered on tenement stoops and spoke in low voices; others sat in the darkness, listened to Benny Goodman's band on the radio, and drank gallons of iced tea.

It was bad during the week, but the August heat wave seemed to save its truly hellish excesses for the weekends. You could take the subway to Coney Island or the long trolley ride to Jones Beach, but you could hardly see the sand for the bodies much less find a spot to spread out your towel. The ocean itself seemed warm and sticky, and a sunburn made everything worse.

About the best you could hope for on the weekends was to own a little house in the country somewhere or, almostas good, to have an invitation to stay with somebody who did. Thus Herb Hull, senior editor at the magazine trying to make space for itself between theNation and theNew Republic, was elated to receive a Tuesday morning telephone call from Elizabeth May, asking him to come down with them on Friday night to their place in Bucks County. Jack May ran one of the Schubert box offices in the West Forties theatre district, Elizabeth was a social worker at a Lower East Side settlement house. They were not Hull's close friends, but neither were they simply acquaintances. It was instead something in between, a sort of casual intimacy New Yorkers often fell into.

After the usual misadventures-a traffic jam in the Holland Tunnel, an overheating problem in the Mays''32Ford outside Somerville, New Jersey-they reached a sturdy little fieldstone house at the edge of a small pond. The house was typical: small bedrooms reached by a staircase with a squeaky step, battered furniture, bookcase full of murder mysteries left by former guests, and a bed in the guest room that smelled of mildew. Not far from Philadelphia, Bucks County had summer homes and artists' studios up every dirt road. Writers, painters, playwrights, editors, and literary agents tended to cluster there, as did people who worked at a great range of occupations but whose evenings were committed to books and plays and Carnegie Hall. They arrived on Friday night, unloaded the weekend groceries (corn, tomatoes, and strawberries would be bought at roadside stands), ate sandwiches, and went to bed early. Saturday morning was spent fussing at projects that never got done-you just weren't enjoying the country if you didn't 'fix' something-then the rest of the weekend drifted idly by in talking and drinking and reading in all their combinations. At Saturday night parties you'd see the same people you saw in Manhattan during the week.

Herb Hull was delighted to spend the weekend with the Mays. They were very bright and well read, the rye and bourbon flowed freely, and Elizabeth was a fine cook, known for corn fritters and Brunswick stew. That's what they had for dinner on Saturday night. Then they decided to skip the usual party, instead sat around, sipping drinks while Jack played Ellington records on the Victrola.

The Mays were charter subscribers to Hull's magazine and avid supporters of the causes it embraced. Not Party people but enlightened and progressive, fairly staunch for Roosevelt though they had voted for Debs in'32.The conversation all across Bucks County that night was politics, and the Mays' living room was no exception. In unison, the three lamented the isolationists, who wanted no part of 'that mess in Europe,' and the German-American Bund, which supported them,defacto encouragement to Hitler. Sorrowfully, they agreed that there was no saving theSudetenland;Hitler would snap it up as he had Austria. There would eventually be war, but America would stay out. That was shameful, cowardly, ultimately frightening. What had become of American idealism? Had the grinding poverty of the Depression gutted the national values? Was the country really going to be run by Westbrook Pegler and Father Coughlin? Did the American people hate Russia so much they were going to let Hitler have his way in Europe?

"That's the crux of it,' Jack May said angrily, shaking his head in frustration.

Hull agreed. It was all pretty sad stuff: Henry Ford and his anti-Semite pals, plenty of people down in Washington who didn't want to get involved in Europe, the hate groups claiming that Roosevelt was'Rosenfeld,'a Bolshevik Jew. 'But you know,' Hull said, 'Stalin isn't exactly helping matters. Some of the statements out of Moscow are pretty wishy-washy, and he's got Litvinov, the foreign minister,running all over Europe trying to play the same sort of diplomacy game as England and France. That won't stop Hitler, he understands the difference between treaties and tanks.'

'Ah for Christ sakes,' Jack May said. 'You know the situation in Russia. Stalin's got two hundred million peasants to feed. What's he supposed to do?'

'Herb, weren't you there this year?' Elizabeth asked.

'Last winter.'

'What was it like?'

'Oh, secret and strange-you get the sense of people listening behind the drapes. Poor. Just not enough to go around. Passionate for ideas and literature. A writer there is truly important, not just a barking dog on a leash. If I had to put it in two words, I guess one would beinconvenient. Why I don't know, but everything, and I do mean everything, is just so damn difficult. But the other word would have to be something likeexhilarating. They're really trying to make it all work, and you can definitely feel that, like something in the air.'

Jack May looked at his wife, a mock-quizzical expression on his face. 'Did he have a good time?'

Elizabeth laughed.

'It was fascinating, that I can't deny.'

'And Stalin? What do they think about him?' she asked.

May took Hull's glass from the coffee table and splashed some bourbon over a fresh ice cube. Hull took a sip while May turned the record over. "They certainly watch what they say. You never know who's listening. But at the same time they're Slavs, not Anglo-Saxons, and they want to open their heart to you if you're a friend. So you do hear stories.'

'Gossip?' May said. 'Or the real thing?'

'Funny, they don't gossip, not truly, not the way we do. They're instinctively restrained about love affairs and such.

Asfor "the real thing," yes, sometimes. I met one fellow who's got a story about how Stalin was secretly in cahoots with the Okhrana. Pretty good story, actually-lively, factual. I think we'll run it around Christmas.'

'Oh, that old red herring,' Elizabeth scoffed. 'That's been around for years.'

Hull chuckled. 'Well, there you have the magazine business. It'll make the Stalinists mad as hell, but they won't cancel their subscriptions, they'll just write letters. Then the socialists and the Trotskyites will write back, madder yet. We'll sell some newsstand copies in the Village. In the long run it's just dialogue, open forum, everyone gets to take their turn at bat.'

'But is this person actually in a position to know something like that?' Elizabeth was slightly wide-eyed at the possibility.

Hull thought for a time. 'Maybe. Maybe not. We'll acknowledge, implicitly, that we really don't know. "Who can say what goes on behind the walls of the Kremlin?" Not quite so obvious as that, but in that general direction.'

'What are you?Time magazine?' May was getting ready to argue.

Hull shrugged it off. 'I wish we had the Luces' money. But I'll tell you something, though it's never to leave this room. We're all of us,Time included, in the same boat. The editorial slant is different-is it ever-but we're nothing without the readership, and we've just got to come up with something juicy once in a while. But don't be alarmed, the rest of the issue will be as usual-plenty of polemic, snarling capitalists and courageous workers, a Christmas cry for justice. I think you'll like it.'

'Sounds pretty damn cynical to me,' May grumbled.

Elizabeth rushed in. 'Oh poo! Just think about the stuff they put on stage where you work. You're just being critical, Jack, admit it.'

May smiled ruefully. 'Democracy in action,' he said. 'Makes everybody mad.'

It certainly made somebody mad.

On the night of14September the editorial offices of Hull's magazine were burned, and 'Who Was the Okhrana's Mysterious Man?' went up with all the other paper, or was presumed to have, because all they ever found were grey mounds of wet ash that went into the East River along with the chairs and desks and typewriters and, in the event, the magazine itself.

It was certainly no accident-the petrol can was left right there on the floor of the editor-in-chief's office, where the arson investigators found it when they picked through what remained of the ceiling. Some of the newspaperbeatmenasked the Fire lieutenant who'd done it, but all he gave them was an eloquent Irish smile: these little commie outfits, how the hell was anybody going to know what went on, maybe a rival, maybe they didn't pay the printer, the list was too long.

At first, the magazine's board of directors thought they intended to go forward bravely, but wisdom ultimately prevailed. The venture had already eaten one trust fund and ruined a marriage, maybe they'd best leave the field to the competition. Herb Hull was on the street for exactly three weeks, then signed on with a glossy, general readership magazine, a big one. His new job was to go up againstCollier's and theSaturday Evening Post, which meant getting to know a whole new crowd of writers, but Hull, God help him, liked writers and soon enough he had the stories coming-'Amelia Earhart, Is She Still Alive?'-andUfefor him was back to normal. He had a pretty good idea of why the magazine office burned up but he kept it to himself-martyrdom was not in his stars-though he did sometimes play a little game withfour or five names he could have jotted down if he'd wanted to.

AndréSzara found out a few days later. Standing at a zinc bar in therue du Cherche-Midi,drinking his morning coffee, he thumbed through one of the official newspapers of the French left and read about the fire, obviously set, said its American correspondent, by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI or its fascist stooges, as part of their hate campaign against the progressive and peace-loving workers of all nations.

Szara felt little enough on reading it, simply a sense of recognition. He turned the event over in his mind for a time, staring out at the street. The purge was slowly dying out, like a fire that has consumed everything in its path and at last consumes itself: one week earlier, Goldman had quietly informed him during a meeting in Brussels that Yezhov was on the way out. What had actually happened? The NKVD had surely learned of the article and prevented its publication. But just as surely Stalin had been told-or seen the article himself, since they had likely stolen it before they started the fire. Had he been influenced? Jogged just enough in a certain way at a certain time so that ending the purge now seemed preferable to continuing it? Or was it simply coincidence, a confluence of events? Or was there yet more to the story than he knew? There was an excellent possibility that he had not been the only one set in motion against the purge; intelligence operations simply did not work that way-one brave man against the world. The expectation of failure was too high in any individual case for the skilful operator not to have several attacks going at once.

Finally, he couldn't be sure of anything.Perhaps this morning I have actually been victorious, he thought. He could not imagine a greater absence of drums and trumpets. And he did not care. Since Seneschal's death andhis return from Lisbon he found he didn't particularly care about anything, and he found also that this made life, or his life anyhow, much simpler. He finished the coffee, left a few coins on the bar, and headed off to a press conference with the Swedish ambassador, first putting up his umbrella, for it had begun to rain.

The Iron Exchange

10October1938.

André Szara, as longas he lived, remembered that day as a painting.

A curious painting. Quite literal, in the style of the 1880s yet touched by an incongruity, something askew, that suggested the surrealism of a later period. The subject was a long, empty beach near the Danish city of Aarhus on the coast of Jutland; the time was late afternoon, beneath the mackerel sky of the Scandinavian autumn, rows of white scud shifting slowly toward a pale wash horizon. To the east lay an expanse of flat, dark water, then a cloud bank obscuring the island of Samsoe. Small waves lapped at the shore; pebbly, dark sand with a meandering tideline marked by a refuse of broken shells. Gulls fed at the water's edge, and on the dunes that rose behind the beach the stiff grass swayed in the offshore breeze. A common, timeless seascape caught at a common, timeless moment.

But the figures in the scene were alien to it. Sergei Abramov, in his dark blue suit and vest with watch chain, his black homburg and black beard and black umbrella-just there the painting had gone wrong. This was a city man who belonged to city places-restaurants, theatres-and his presence on the beach somehow denied nature. No less his companion, the journalist A. A. Szara, in a rumpled raincoat with a French newspaper rolled up in one pocket.

The final touch, which perfected the incongruity, was the stack of eleven photographs that Abramov held, studying them as people do, placing the topmost at the back whenhe was done with it, proceeding in turn until it reappeared, then starting over.

Could the artist have caught Abramov's mood? Only a very good artist, Szara felt, could have managed it. There was too much there. Drawn deep inside himself, impervious to the screaming gulls, to the gust of wind that toyed with his beard, Abramov wore the expression of a man whose brutal opinion of humankind has, once again, been confirmed. But, in the cocked eyebrow, in the tug of a smile at one corner of the mouth, there was evidence that he expected no less, that he was a man so often betrayed that such events now seemed to him little more than an inconvenience. Very deliberately he squared the stack of photographs, resettled them in an envelope, and slid them into the inside pocket of his jacket. 'Of course,' he said to Szara.

Szara's expression showed that he didn't understand.

'Of course it happened, of course it was Dershani who made it happen, of course the proof comes too late.' He smiled grimly and shrugged, his way of sayingudori sudbi,the blows of fate, wasn't this exactly the way of the world. 'And the negatives?'

'Burned.'

'Sensible.'

'Will you burn these as well?'

Abramov thought a moment. 'No,' he said. 'No, I shall confront him.'

'What will he do?'

'Dershani? Smile. We will smile at each other: brothers, enemies, conspirators, fellow wolves. When we've got that over with, he'll inquire how I came to have such photographs.'

'And you'll tell him?'

Abramov shook his head. 'I will tell him some rich, transparent lie. Which he will acknowledge with one of hispredatory stares. I'll stare back, though he'll know that's a bluff, and that will be that. Then, later, as if from nowhere, something may happen to me. Or it may not. Something may happen to Dershani instead-political fortune is a tide like any other. In any event, the photographs prove he was clumsy enough to get caught, perhaps a margin of vulnerability that will keep me alive a little longer. Or, perhaps, not.'

'I didn't know,' Szara apologized. 'I thought we'd caught him at it.'

'At what?'

'Collaboration.'

Abramov smiled gently at Szara's innocence. 'Such a meeting can be explained a thousand ways. For instance, one could say thatHerrJoseph Uhlrich has now been brought under Soviet control.'

'You know him.'

'Oh yes, it's a small world. TheSS Obersturmbannführer,to give him his proper rank, the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel in Russia, is an old friend. A brave, fighting street communist in his youth, then a Brown Shirt thug, eventually a spy for Hitler's faction, the Black Shirts, against ErnstRöhm.He took part in the Brown Shirt executions of1934and is now one of Heydrich's assistants in theSicherheitsdienst, SD,Gestapo foreign intelligence. He works in theUnterabteilungsubdivision that concerns itself with Soviet intelligence services. Perhaps Dershani has been brought under the control of the SD rather than the other way around.'

'Uhlrich had the security, the Germans planned the meeting, Dershani was essentially alone and unguarded. To me, it seemed a courteous welcome for a traitor.'

Abramov shrugged. 'I will find out.' He put his back to the wind, lit a cigarette, and put the extinguished match in his pocket. 'But, even so, doing something about itmay be impossible. Dershani is now chairman of theopal Directorate. Abramov is demoted to simple membership. He may be demoted further, even much further

-you understand-and Yezhov is no longer Dershani's superior. That position now belongs to the Georgian Beria, so the Georgiankhvost is victorious. And they are cleaning house. A writers' conspiracy has been uncovered; Babel, too friendly with Yezhov's wife, has disappeared, and so has Kolt'sev.Pravda will soon have a new editor. Then there were others, many others: writers, poets, dramatists, as well as Yezhov's associates, every single one of them, seventy at last count.'

'And Yezhov?'

Abramov nodded. 'Ah yes, Yezhov himself. Well, I may inform you that Comrade Yezhov turned out to be a British spy. Imagine that! But, poor man, perhaps he was not fully aware of what he was doing.' Abramov closed one eye and tapped his temple with an index finger.

'Nicolai Ivanovichevidently went mad. For late one night an ambulance appeared at his apartment block, then two attendants, sturdy fellows, were seen to remove him in a straitjacket. He was taken to the Serbsy Psychiatric Institute and, regrettably, left alone in a cell, where he contrived to hang himself from the barred window by ingeniously fashioning his underpants into a noose. This would have required an extraordinary feat of acrobatics, and "the bloody dwarf" was never known as much of an athlete, but, who knows, perhaps madness lent him unimagined physical prowess. We all like to think so, at any rate.'

'I was told that Yezhov was in decline,' Szara said, 'but not this.'

'Declinecould describe it, I suppose. Meanwhile,bratets'-the affectionate term meant 'little brother'-'now more than ever, you better keep your nose clean. I don't knowwhat actually happened to your agentsilo in Paris, but here I see these photographs and they tell me you've been meddling with Germans, and so to put two and two together doesn't take a genius.'

'But it was-'

'Don't tell me,' Abramov interrupted. 'I don't want to know. Just understand that, once again, it's a good time for Jews to be invisible, even in Paris. Beria is noshabbos goy-you know, a friend of the Orthodox Jews who turns the lights on and off on the sabbath so the prohibition against work is observed. Far from it. His most recent experience involved a man you may have known, Grisha Kaminsky, formerly people's commissar for health. He came forward at the February Plenum and made a most interesting speech, claiming that Beria once worked for the Transcaucasian Muslims, the Mussavat nationalists, at a time when the British controlled them during the intervention at Baku, just after the revolution. According to Kaminsky's speech, Beria was operating a Mussavatist counterinteUigence network, and that madehim a British spy. Needless to say, Kaminsky disappeared into thin air after the Plenum. So, you'll understand I'm in no hurry to run to Beria with a story, even an illustrated story, that hiskhvost pal Dershani is in contact with the fascist enemy.'

Abramov paused to let it all sink in, and the two men stood silently on the beach for a time.

In Szara's understanding, the ascendency of Beria, despite Kaminsky's near suicidal attack, confirmed what Bloch had said five months earlier: the purge, grinding, deliberate, somehow both efficient and random at once, was in effect a pogrom. He doubted that Abramov, as strong and as smart as he was, would survive it. And if Yezhov's allies were murdered, Abramov's friends would be treated no differently when the time came. 'Perhaps,Sergei Jakobovich,' he said hesitantly, 'you ought to consider your personal safety. From Denmark, for instance, one can go virtually anywhere.'

'Me? Run? No, never. So far I'm just demoted, and I've absorbed that like a good ghettozhid-eyes cast down, quiet as a mouse, no trouble from me, Gospodin, sir. No, what saves me is that with Hitler in theSudetenland,Germany gains three and a half million people-all but seven hundred thousand of them ethnic Germans-easily four army divisions, the way we think, plus industrial capacity, raw materials, food, you name it. Ibis adds up to one more big, strategic headache for Russia and, when all is said and done, that's my business, and I've been in that business since1917 -it's what I know how to do. So they'll want to keep me around, at least for the time being.'

'And me too, they'll want to keep around.'

'Oh very definitely you. After all, you operate an important mine for us-without you and your brethren the Directorate can produce nothing. We manufacture precision tools, at least we try to, but where would we be without iron ore? Which brings me to what I came here to talk about, I didn't drag myself to some beach in Denmark just to get a pocketful of dirty pictures.

"The background is this: Hitler has theSudetenland,we know he's going for all of Czechoslovakia, we think he wants more, a lot more. If theotter material was significant, it's now crucial, and the Directorate is going to have its way with this man whether he likes it or not. To that end, we've determined to send you to Berlin. This is dangerous, but necessary. Either you can talkotter into a more, ah, generous frame of mind or we're really going to put the screws on. In other words, patience now exhausted. Understood?'

'Yes.'

'Also, we want you to deliver money to theravennetwork, toraven herself. Take a good look at her; you're going to be asked for your views when you return to Paris. The Directorate has faith inSchau-Wehrli, please don't misunderstand, but we'd like a second opinion.'

'Will Goldman supply passports for the trip?'

'What passports? Don't be such a noodle. You go as yourself, writing forPravda, on whatever takes your fancy. Goldman will discuss with you the approach tootter and toraven, and you'll work with him on questionnaires-we want you to guideotter into very particular and specific areas. Questions?'

'One.'

'Only one?'

'Why were you sent all this way? The "third country" meeting is usually reserved for special circumstances-you taught me that-and I haven't heard anything, anything official that is, that couldn't have been communicated by wireless. Am I missing something?'

Abramov inhaled deeply and acknowledged the impact of the question with a sigh that meantlook how smart he's getting. 'Briefly, they're not so sure about you. You haven't made headway withotter, you lost an agent-even if that wasn't your fault, the Directorate doesn't excuse bad luck-and your one great triumph, which I now have in my pocket, is unknown to them. To be blunt, your credit is poor. So they wanted me to have a look at you, and make a decision about whether or not you should continue.'

'And if not?'

'That's not the decision, so don't be too curious. Now I used a car to get here, but I want you to leave first. You've got about a half-hour walk back into Aarhus, so you'll forgive me if I pass you on the road like I never saw you. Last word: again I remind you to be very careful in Berlin. Your status as a correspondent protects you, but don't go finding out how far. When you contact agents, follow procedure tothe letter. As for all the chaos in Moscow, don't let it get you down. No situation is as hopeless as it appears,AndréAronovich-remember the old saying: nobody ever found a cat skeleton in a tree.'

They said good-bye and Szara struggled up the soft sand to the top of the dunes. Looking back, the sense of the scene as a painting returned to him. Sergei Abramov, umbrella hooked on one forearm, hands thrust in pockets, stared out to sea. The autumn seascape surrounded him-crying gulls, incoming waves, the rustling beach grass, and pale-wash sky-but he was alien to it. Or, rather, it was alien to him, as though the idea of the painting was that the solitary figure on the shore was no longer part of life on earth.

27October1938.

Such visions did not leave him.

A fragment of bureaucratic language,date of expiry, the sort of phrase one saw on passports, visas, permits of every kind, became his private symbol for what was essentially a nameless feeling.Europe is dying, he thought. The most commonplacegood-bye had an undertone offarewell. It was in the songs, in the faces in the streets, in the wild changes of mood-absurd gaiety one moment, desolation the next-he saw in friends and in himself.

The dining car on theNordExpress to Berlin was nearly deserted, the vibrations of stemware and china at the empty tables far too loud without the normal babble of conversation. An elderly waiter stood half asleep at his station, napkin draped over one arm, as Szara forced himself to eat a lukewarm veal chop. When the train approached the border, an officious porter came through the car lowering the window shades, presumably denying Szara and one other couple a view of French military fortifications.

And the passport control in Germany was worse thanusual. Nothing he could exactly put his finger on, the process was the same. Perhaps there were more police, their sidearms more noticeable. Or perhaps it was in the way they moved about, bumping into things, their voices a little louder, their intonations not so polite, something almost exultant in their manner. Or it might have been the men in suits, sublimely casual, who hardly bothered to look at his documents.

Or was he, he asked himself, merely losing his nerve? There had been no horrid Chinese food in Brussels this time. He'd spent hours in the back office of Stefan Leib's cartography shop, where Goldman had inflicted on him a series of exhausting, repetitious briefings that often lasted well past midnight. This was a different Goldman, leaning over a cluttered desk in the glow of a single lamp, voice tense and strained, breath sharp with alcohol, slashing pencilUnesacross a street map of Berlin or explaining, in sickening detail, the circumstances in whichDrBaumannnow found himself.

The situation for German Jews had deteriorated, but far worse was the form the deterioration took. There was something hideously measured about it, like a drum, as some new decree appeared every month, each one a little worse than the last, each one inspiring, and clearly meant to inspire, its victims with a terrifying sense of orchestration. Whatever ruled their destiny simply refused to be placated. No matter how precisely and punctually they conformed to the minutiae of its rules, it grew angrier and more demanding. The more they fed it, the hungrier it got.

In April of1938only forty thousand Jewish firms remained in Germany; all others had passed to Aryan ownership, sometimes for a nominal fee, sometimes for nothing. Those businesses that remained under Jewish control either brought in foreign currency, which Germanydesperately needed to buy war materials or, likeBaumannMilling, were directly connected to rearmament efforts. In June, Jews had to provide an inventory of everything they owned, with the exception of personal and household goods.

In July, a glimmer of hope, a conference on Jewish emigration held at the French spa town ofÉvian,where representatives of the world's nations met to consider the problem. But they refused to take in the German Jews. The United States would accept only twenty-eight thousand, in severely restricted categories. Australia did not wish to import 'a racial problem.' South and Central American countries wanted only farmers, not traders or intellectuals. France had already accepted too many refugees. Britain claimed not to have space available, and immigration to British-controlled Palestine was sharply curtailed to a few hundred certificates a month since Arab riots and ambushes-beginning in1936 -had created political difficulties for those who favoured letting Jews into the country. In addition, British access to oil in the Middle East was based on the maintenance of good relations with the Arab sheikdoms, and they were in general opposed to Jewish settlement in Palestine. Of all the nations convened atÉvian,only Holland and Denmark would accept Jewish refugees who could leave Germany. By the end of the conference, most German Jews understood they were trapped.

The decrees did not stop. On23July, all Jews were required to apply for special identification cards. On17August it was ordered that Jews with German given names would have to change them-male Jews now to be known as Israel, females to be called Sarah. On5October, Jews were forced to hand in their passports. These would be returned, they were told, with an entry identifying the holder as a Jew.

As the train sped through the Rhine valley towardDüsseldorf,Szara raised the window shade and watched the little clusters of village lights go by. He consciously tried to free his mind of Goldman's briefing and to concentrate on the likelihood of seeingMartaHaecht during his time in Berlin. But even in his imagination she lived in the shadow of her city, a very differentMartafrom the one he had believed was rushing to meet him in Lisbon. Perhaps she was nothing at all like his construction of her. Was it possible that she existed only in a fantasy world he'd built for himself? It did not matter, he realized, letting his head rest against the cold glass of the window. Whatever she might be, he ached for her presence, and this need was the single warmth that survived from the time when he'd believed the whole world lived for desire. Otherwise, there was only ice.

The journalist Szara got off the train at Potsdam station a few minutes after three in the morning, woke a taxi driver, and was taken to theAdlon,where all Russian journalists and trade delegations stayed. The hotel, musty and creaky and splendidly comfortable, was onPariser Platzat the foot of the grandiose avenueUnter denLinden, next to the British embassy and three doors down from the Russian embassy. Trailing a sleepy porter down the long hall to his room, Szara heard exuberant, shouted Russian and the crash of a lamp.Home at last, he thought. The old man carrying his bag just shook his head sorrowfully at the uproar.

In the morning he saw them, groping toward coffee in the elegant dining room. Tass correspondents, officially, a range of types-from the broad-shouldered, fair-haired, and pale-eyed to the small, intense ones with glasses and beards and rumpled hair. Nobody he knew, or so he thought, until Vainshtok materialized at his table with a dish of stewed figs. 'So, now Szara arrives. Big news mustbe on the way.' Vainshtok, son of a timber merchant from Kiev, was infamously abrasive. He had wildly unfocused eyes behind round spectacles and a lip permanently curled with contempt. 'Anyhow, welcome to Berlin.'

'Hello, Vainshtok,' he said.

'So pleased you have chosen to honour us. I have to file oneverything, up half the night. Now you're here maybe I get a break now and then.'

Szara gestured inquisitively toward the Tass reporters scattered about the dining room.

'Them? Ha!' said Vainshtok. 'They don't actually write anything. You and me, Szara, we have to do the work.'

After breakfast he tried to phoneMarta Haecht.He learned she'd left the magazine two months earlier. He tried her home. Nobody answered.

The day before he left Paris, Kranov had handed him a personal message from Brussels:

THE WORK HAS BEEN COMPLETED FOR YOUR ASSIGNMENT. HAVE A SAFE ANDPRODUCTIVEJOURNEY. REZIDENT.

In Berlin, on the night of28October,AndréSzara understood what that message truly meant. Of those who undertookthe work, he knew only one,Odile,whose26October dead-drop deposit forotter had warned ofa visit from a friend who would arriveat night. The greatest part of the preparation, however, had been managed by nameless, faceless operatives-presumably stationed in Berlin, though he could not be certain of that. Perhaps some of the Tass reporters seen stumbling toward their morning coffee at theAdlon,perhaps a team brought in from Budapest; he was not to know. Once again, the unseen hand.

But theAndré Szaramoving toward a clandestine meeting in Gestapo territory was more than grateful for it. He entered the Gronewald neighbourhood in the gathering dusk, leaving theRingbahntram stop with a few other men carrying briefcases and indistinguishable from them. Most of the residents of the Gronewald came and went by car, many of them chauffeured. But the evening return from business was as much cover as the operatives had been able to devise, and Szara was thankful for even that minimal camouflage.

TheBaumannvilla faced Salzbrunner street, but he was going in the back way. Thus he walked briskly up Charlottenbrunner, slowed to let one last returning businessman find his way home, crossed a narrow lane, then counted steps until he saw a rock turned earth side up. Here he entered a well-groomed pine wood-at the blind spot the operatives had discovered, away from the view of nearby houses-found the path that was supposed to be there, and followed it to the foot of a stucco wall that enclosed the villa adjoining theBaumannproperty.

Now he waited. The Berlin weather was cold and damp, the woods dark, and time slowed to a crawl, but they'd hidden him here to accommodate an early entry into the neighbourhood, at dusk, and now kept him on ice to await the magic hour of nine o'clock, when the servant couple who occupied the main residence on theBaumannproperty were known to go to sleep-or at least turn off their lights. At ten minutes after nine he set out, feeling his way along the wall and counting steps until, just where they said it would be, he found a foothold that an operative had dug into the stucco facing. He put his left foot into the small niche, drove his weight upward, and grabbed the tiled cap of the wall. He'd been told to wear robber-soled shoes, and the traction helped him as he scrabbled his feet against the smooth surface. It wasn't graceful, but he eventually layflat on the corner formed by the wall he'd climbed and that which divided the two properties.

Looking down to his left, he saw a woman in a flowered robe reading in a chair by the window. To his right, the servants' cottage had its blinds drawn. Just below, a garden shed stood against the wall-he cautiously lowered himself to its shingle roof, which gave unpleasantly under the strain but held until he hopped off. From the cottage came the high-pitched barking of a small dog-that would beLudwig,theapparatmechanism for movingBaumannout into the neighbourhood at night-which was almost immediately calmed. Staying out of sight of the villa itself, he found the back door of the cottage and knocked lightly three times-not a signal, but a style recommended by Goldman as 'informal' and 'neighbourly.' The door opened quickly andDrBaumannlet him in.

The operatives had got him safely inside. Somebody, shivering in the Berlin mist at dawn, had dug a piece out of the wall with a clasp knife-or however it had been done,by twelve-year-olds for all he knew-anyhow, he was in. He had been manoeuvred, like a weapon, into a position where his light, his intellect, influence, craft, whatever it was, could shine.

They'd done their job. Pity he couldn't do his.

Oh, he tried. Goldman had said, 'You must control this man. You can be courteous, if you like, or lovable. Threats sometimes work. Be solemn, patriotic, or just phenomenally boring-this too has been done-but you must control him.' Szara couldn't.

DrJuliusBaumann wasgrey. The brutal, ceaseless pressure orchestrated by the Reich bureaucracies was proceeding quite successfully in his case. His face was ruined by tension and lack of sleep; he had become thin, stooped, old. 'You cannot know what it's like here.' This hesaid again and again, and Szara could find no way through it. 'Can we help you?' he asked. 'Do you need anything?'Baumannjust shook his head, somehow closed off behind a wall that no such offer could breach.

'Be positive,' Goldman had said. 'You represent strength. Make him feel the power you stand for, let him know it supports him.'

Szara tried: 'There's little we can't do, you know. Your account with us is virtually unlimited, but you must draw on it.'

'What is there to want?'Baumannsaid angrily. 'What they've taken from me you cannot give back. Nobody can do that.'

'The regime is weakening. Perhaps you can't see it, but we can. There's reason to hope, reason to hang on.'

'Yes,'Baumannsaid, the man who will agree to anything because he finds the argument itself tiresome. 'We try,' he added.But we do not succeed, his eyes said.

Frau Baumannhad changed in a different way. She was now more hausfrau thanFrau Doktor.If in fact it was her pretensions-the desire for social prominence and the need to condescend-that had driven a nation of fifty million people into a blind fury, she had certainly been cured of all that. Now she fussed and fiddled, her hands never still. She had reduced her existence to a series of small, household crises, turned fear into exasperation with domestic life; thimbles, brooms, potatoes. Perhaps it was her version of the world in which the common German housewife lived, perhaps she hoped that by joining the enemy she could keep-they would allow her to keep-what remained of herUfe.When she left the room,Baumannfollowed her with his eyes. 'You see?' he whispered to Szara, as though something needed to be proved.

Szara nodded sorrowfully; he understood. 'And work?'he asked. 'The business? What's it like there? How do they feel about you, your employees. Still faithful? Or do most of them follow the party line?'

'They look out for themselves. Everybody does, now.'

'No kindness? Not one good soul?'

PerhapsBaumannwavered for an instant, then realized what came next-just who is that good soul-and said, 'It doesn't matter what they think.'

Szara sighed. 'You refuse to help us. Or yourself.'

Something flickered in Baumann's eyes-a strange kind of sympathy? Then it was gone. 'Please,' he said, 'you must not ask too much of me. I am less brave every day. Going to the stone wall for the message is an agony, you understand? I make myself do it. I-'

The telephone rang.

Baumann wasparalysed. He stared through the doorway into the kitchen while the phone rang again and again. FinallyFrau Baumannpicked up the receiver. 'Yes?' she said. Then: 'Yes.' She listened for a time, started to exclaim, was evidently cut off by the person at the other end of the line. 'Can you wait a moment?' she asked. They heard her set the receiver down carefully on a wooden shelf. When she entered the living room she was holding both hands lightly to the sides of her face.

'Julius, darling, do we have money in the house?' She spoke calmly, as though drawing on a reserve of inner strength, but her hands were trembling and her cheeks were flushed.

'Who is it?'

"This is Natalya. Calling on the telephone to say that she must return to Poland. Tonight.'

'Why would she. . .?'

'It has been ordered, Julius. The police are there and she is to be put on a train after midnight. They are being verypolite about it, she says, and are willing to bring her here on the way to the station.'

Baumanndid not react; he stared.

'Julius?' Frau Baumannsaid. 'Natalya is waiting to see if we can help her.'

'In the drawer,'Baumannsaid. He turned to Szara. 'Natalya is her cousin. She came here from Lublin six years ago.'

'There isn't very much in the drawer,'Frau Baumannsaid.

Szara took a thick handful of reichsmarks out of his pocket. 'Give her this,' he said, handing it toBaumann.

Frau Baumannreturned to the telephone. 'Yes, it's all right. When are you coming?' She paused for the answer. 'Good, then we'll see you. I'm sure it will be straightened out. Don't forget your sweaters, Polish hotels. . .Yes. . .I know. . .Twenty minutes.' She hung up the phone and returned to the living room. 'All the Jewish immigrants from Poland must leave Germany,' she said. 'They are being deported.'

'Deported?'Baumannsaid.

His wife nodded. 'To a place called Zbaszyn.'

'Deported,'Baumannsaid. 'A sixty-three-year-old woman, deported. What in God's name will she do in Poland?' He stood up abruptly, then walked to a bookcase by the window, took a large book down and thumbed through the pages. 'What is it called?'

'Zbaszyn.'

Baumannmoved the atlas under a lamp and squinted at the page. 'Warsaw I could understand,' he said. 'I can't find it.' He looked up at his wife. 'Did she think to call ahead for a room at least?'

Szara stood. 'I'll have to be going,' he said. 'The police will. . .'

Baumannlooked up from the book.

'I think you should get out,' Szara said. 'This must involve thousands of people. Tens of thousands. Next they'll find someplace to send you, it's possible.'

'But we're not Polish,'Frau Baumannsaid. 'We're German.'

'We'll get you out,' Szara said. 'To France or Holland.'

Baumannseemed dubious.

'Don't answer now. Just think about it. I'll have you contacted and we'll meet again in a few days.' He put his raincoat on. 'Will you consider it?'

'I'm not sure,'Baumannsaid, evidently confused.

'We'll at least discuss it,' Szara said and, looking at his watch, headed for the door.

Outside, the still air was cold and wet. A rickety ladder got him to the roof of the shed; from there he mounted the wall, hung by his hands to decrease the distance, then dropped the few feet to the ground. His exfiltration time was10:08,but the forced exit had made him early, so he waited in the woods as he'd done before. In the silence of theGrunewaldneighbourhood, he heard what he took to be the brief visit of the cousin: opening and closing car doors, an idling engine, muffled voices, doors again, then a car driving away. That was all.

29October.

Szara decided that callingMarta Haechton the telephone was a bad idea; a conversation necessarily awkward, difficult. Instead he wrote, on a sheet ofAdlonstationery, 'I've returned to Berlin on assignment from my paper. I would like, more than I can say in this letter, to be with you for whatever time we can have. Of course I'll understand if your life has changed, and it would be better not to meet. In any case your friend,André.'

He spent a listless day, trying not to think about theBaumanns.There was no Directorate plan to take themout of Germany, and he had no authorization to make such an offer, but Szara didn't care.Enough is enough, he thought.

The following morning, Szara had an answer to his letter, in the form of a telephone message taken at theAdlondesk.

An address, an office number, a date, a time. FromFräulein H.

31October.

Szara stood by the open window and stared out into theBischofstrasse,shiny with rain in midaftemoon, wet brown and yellow leaves plastered to the pavements. The damp air felt good to him. He heard Marta's heavy tread as she moved across the room, then felt her warm skin against his back as she hid behind him. 'Please don't stand there,' she whispered. "The whole world will see there's a naked man in here.'

'What will you give me?'

'Ah, I will give you that for which you dare not ask, yet want beyond all things.'

'Name it.'

'A cup of tea.'

They walked away from the window together and he sat at a table covered with an Indian cloth and watched as she made tea.

The room was a loft on the top floor of an office building, with large windows and a high ceiling that made it the perfect studio for an artist.BennoAult.So the name read on a directory in the great, echoing marble lobby below, vestige of a lost grandeur.Herr Benno Ault,Room709.And he was? According toMarta, 'auniversity friend. Dear, sweet, lost.' An artist who now lived elsewhere and rented her his studio as an apartment. His presence remained. Tacked to the walls-painted an industrial beige many years before,now water-stained and flaking-was what Szara took to be theoeuvreofBenno Ault.Dear, sweet, and lost he may well have been but also, from the look of the thing, mad as a hatter. The unframed canvases writhed with colour, garish yellows and greens. These were portraits of the shipwrecked and the damned, pink faces howled from every wall as saffron oceans pulled them under and they clawed at the air with grotesque hands.

She brought him tea in a steaming mug, standing by his chair and spooning in sugar until he told her to stop, the curve of her hip pressed against his side. 'It's sweet the way you like?' she said, innocent as dawn.

'Just exactly,' he said.

'Good,' she said firmly and arranged herself in a nearby armchair, a huge velvet orphan that had seen better times. She spread a napkin across her bare tummy-a pun on decorum, as though she were a Goya nude minding her manners. When she sipped her tea she closed her eyes, then wiggled her toes with pleasure. The background for this performance was provided by a giant radio with a station band lit up bright amber, which had played Schubert lieder since the moment he'd walked in the door. Now she conducted, waving a stern index finger back and forth. 'Am I,' she said suddenly, 'as you remember?'

'Am I?' he said.

'Actually, you are quite different.'

'You also.'

'It's the world,' she said. 'But I don't care. Your letter was sweet-a little forlorn. Did you mean it? Or was it just to make things easy? Either way it's all right, I'm just curious.'

'I meant it.'

'I thought so. But then I thought; after an hour, we'll see.'

'The hour's over. The letter stands.'

'Soon I must go back to work. Shall I see you again? Or will we wait another year?'

'Tomorrow.'

'I haven't said I would.'

'Will you?'

'Yes.'

She had answered his knock at the door in a short silk robe tied loosely at the waist-just purchased; the scent of new clothing lingered on it beneath her perfume-hair worn loose and brushed out, red lipstick freshly applied. A woman of the world now, looking forward to an assignation in the middle of the day. Seeing her like that, framed in the doorway, stunned him. It was too good to be true. When she lifted her face to him and closed her eyes he felt like a man suddenly and unexpectedly warmed by sunlight. He actually, for an instant as they embraced, felt her mouth smile with pleasure. But after that everything-being led by the hand to a sofa, pillows kicked off, robe flung away-happened too quickly. What he had imagined would be artful and seductive wasn't like that at all. It wasn't really like them. Two other people, then, very hungry, urgent, selfish people. They laughed about it later, but things were different and they knew it.

At one point she'd raised her head from the sofa and whispered delicately next to his ear. The words were familiar enough, a lover's request, but they had shocked him-because they were German words and the sound of them unlocked something inside him, something cold and strong and almost violent. Whatever it was, she felt it. She liked it. This was a very dangerous place to go, he sensed, but they went there just the same.

He had wondered, later on, drinking tea, how much she understood of what had happened. Was thiseternal woman, accepting, absorbing? Or had she, for a moment, become his companion in decadence, playing her part insome mildly evil version of a lovers' game? He couldn't ask. She seemed happy, making jokes, wiggling her toes, content with herself and the afternoon.

Then she got dressed. This too was different. By degrees she became a working woman, a typical Berliner: the ingenuous, vaguely BohemianMarta,adoring of Russian journalists, was no more. Garter belt, stockings, a crisp shirt with a rounded collar, a rusty tweed, mid-calf-length suit, then a small, stylish hat with a feather-the perfect disguise, ruined at the last when she made a little-girl brat face at him: what they called hereSchnauze,literally snout, a way of telling the world to go to hell. She gave him a cool cheek to kiss on the way out-not to ruin the lipstick-and rumpled his hair.

He stayed for a time after she left, drinking tea, watching out of the window as a cloud of starlings swerved away through the rainy sky. The radio programme changed, to what he guessed was Beethoven-something dark and thoughtful at any rate. The city drew him into its mood; he found it almost impossible to resist, became autumnal and meditative, asked questions that really could not be answered.Marta Haecht,for instance: had she, he wondered, become so newly sophisticated at the hands of other lovers? Certainly, that was it. Who, he wondered. That was, in his experience of such things, always a surprise.Him?

With a Russian girl he would have known all. Every private thought would have been bashed about between them, plenty of tears to wash it all down with, then forgiveness, tenderness, and wild-likely drunken-love-making to paste everything back together again. Poles and Russians knew how hidden feelings poisonedUfe;in the end the vodka was just a catalyst.

But she wasn't Russian or Polish, she was German, likethis damned sorrowful music. The reality of that had come home to him when they were on the sofa. What wasthat? The Eastern conqueror takes the Teutonic princess? Whatever it was, it was no game.

Restless now, wishing thatMartahadn't gone back to work, Szara walked around the room as he got dressed, confronted by Ault's maniacal paintings.Strange people, he thought.They make a virtue of anguish. Nonetheless, he began counting the hours until he'd see her again and tried to shake off the sense of oppression gathering in his heart.

Perhaps it was the influence of the building itself. Dating from the early days of the century, its long hallways, set in tiny octagonal black and white tiles, echoed with every footstep and lived in perpetual dusk, a greyish light that spilled from frosted glass door panels numbered in Gothic script. Called Die EisenbourseHaus,the Iron Exchange Building, it had certainly been some builder's cherished dream. There was no Iron Exchange, not that Szara knew about. Had one been planned, perhaps somewhere nearby? Only its adjunct had been built, in any case, seven storeys of elaborate brickwork with the name in gold script on the glass above the entryway. The lift would have been installed later, he thought. It was enormous, an anthill intended as home to every sort of respectable commerce. But the builder had raised it in the wrong place.Bischofstrasse wasacross the river Spree from the better part of Berlin, reached by the KaiserWilhelmbridge, on the edge of the ancient Jewish quarter. Had a commercial district once been planned here? The builder evidently thought so, locating just west of the Judenstrasse, across fromNeue Markt,between Pandawer andSteinwegstreets.

But it had not turned out that way. The building stood as a grand edifice among tenements and dreary shops, and its lobby directory told the story: piano teachers, theatricalagents, a private detective, a club for sailing instruction and a club for lonely hearts, an astrologer, an inventor, andGrömmelinkthe cut-rate denture man.

Szara rang for the lift, which wheezed ponderously to the top floor. The metal door slid open, then a soiled white glove slowly drew the gate aside. The operator was an old man with lank hair parted in the middle and swept back behind his ears, fine, almost transparent skin, and a face lined by tragedy. He was called Albert, according toMarta,who thought him an original, rather amusing, the ruling troll of the Castle Perilous, her moat-keeper. Szara, however, was not amused by Albert, who stared at him with sullen and intense dislike as he got on the elevator, then sniffed loudly as he slammed the gate.I smell a Jew, that meant. On the wall above the control handle were taped two curling photographs of serious young men inLandwehruniform. Sons dead in the war? Szara thought so. As the floors bumped slowly past, Szara repressed a shiver. He never would have imaginedMarta Haechtliving in such a place.

But then there were all sorts of new things aboutMarta.Wandering about in the apartment, he'd found a wooden rack holding a further collection of Ault's paintings-these evidently not worthy of display. Idly curious, he'd looked through them, come upon a pink nude standing pensively, almost self-consciously, amid frantic swirls of green and yellow. Something familiar piqued his interest, then he realized he knew the model, knew her in that very pose. All sorts of things new aboutMarta.

The elevator came to a stop. Albert opened the gate, then the exterior door. 'Lobby,' he said harshly. 'Now you get out.'

Back in his room at theAdlonhe closed the heavy drapes to shut out the dusk, locked the door, and lost himself in ciphering. Using the German railway timetable Goldman had handed him-a very unremarkable find if he were searched-he converted his plaintext into numerical groups. In his statement to the Directorate he'd been extremely cautious, in fact deceptive: the broken man in theGrunewald,described as he was, would set off alarms and excursions all over Dzerzhinsky Square.DrBaumannwas not under anyone's control, including his own, and Szara could only imagine what the Directorate might order done if they found that out, especially the Directorate as led by Dershani.

The report described an agent under stress yet operating efficiently. Stubborn, self-motivating, a prominent and successful businessman after all, thus not just somebody that could be ordered about. Szara strengthened the deception by implying, faintly, that the Directorate should soften its instinct for bureaucratic domination and acknowledge that it was dealing with a man to whom independence, even as a Jew in Germany, was instinctive, habitual.Baumannhad to believe he was in control, Szara suggested, and to perceive theapparatas akind of servant.

But ifBaumann wassteadfast, Szara continued, the situation as he found it in Germany was extremely unstable. He described the telephone call from the cousin forced to return to Poland, noted the disbursement of emergency funds, then went on to suggest thatotter ought to be offered exfiltration-if the time should ever come-followed by resettlement in a European city. Against that day,BaumannMilling ought to hire a new employee, as designated by the case officer, who would remain in deep cover until activated. Szara closed with the statement that he would be remaining in Berlin for at least seven days, and requested local operative support in arranging a second meeting.

He grouped his numbers, did his false addition, counted letters in the timetable a second time, just to be sure. Garbled transmissions drove Moscow wild-What's a murn? And why does he ask for raisins?-and he urgently needed to have their trust and good faith if they were going to accept his analysis of the situation.

He walked the half block to the embassy, a place the journalist Szara would be expected to visit, found his contact, a second secretary named Varin, and delivered the cable. Then he disappeared into the Berlin night.

He had, oh, a little company, he thought. Nothing too serious. Nothing he couldn't deal with.

Said Goldman: 'There are two situations which, if I were you, would be of concern: (a) You find yourself truly blanketed-perhaps a moving box: one in front, one behind, two at three o'clock and nine o'clock, go down an alley and the whole apparatus shifts with you. Or maybe it's people in parked cars on an empty street, women in doorways. All that sort of thing, they're simply not going to let you out of their sight. Either they insist on knowing who you really are and where you're going, or they're trying to panic you, to see what you do. You'll break it off, of course. Go back to the hotel, use your telephone contact, the4088number. There'll be no answer, but one ring will do the job.

'Or, (b) you ought to be alarmed if there's absolutely no sign of surveillance. A Soviet journalist in Berlin must,must, be of interest at some level of the counterintelligence bureaux. The normal situation would be periodic, one or two men, probably detectives who'll look like what they are. They'll follow at a medium distance. Ideally, don't go showing them a lot of tradecraft-if you're too slick it will provoke their curiosity. If you can't dispose of them with a casual manoeuvre or two, give it up and try again later. A normal approach for the Germans would be to tag alongat night, leave you free in the daytime. But if it's-what? the Sahara, then be careful. It may mean they're really operating-that is, they've put someone really good on you, and he, or she for that matter, is better than you are. In that case, see the second secretary at the embassy and we'll get you some help.'

Very well, he thought. This time the little genius in Brussels knew what he was talking about.Out for a stroll, Szara lit a cigarette on theKanonierstrasse,standing in front of the vast gloomy facade of the Deutsche Bank, then,stranger in your city, he peered about him as though he were slightly at sea. The other man lighting a cigarette, about forty metres behind him, visible only as a hat and an overcoat, was company.

Not a good night for company. With ten thousand reichsmarks wadded up in his pockets he was headed toward theReichshallentheatre for a meeting withNadiaTscherova, actress,émigrée,raven,and group leader of theraven network. Tscherova would be available to him backstage-not at the grandioseReichshallenbut at a small repertory theatre in a narrow lane calledRosenhainPassage-after10:40.Szara refused to hurry, wandering along, waiting until he reachedKraussenstrassebefore making a move to verify the surveillance. If he didn't make thetreff tonight, Tscherova would be available to him for three nights following. Run bySchau-Wehrli with a very firm hand,raven was known to follow orders, so Szara relaxed, taking in the sights, a man with no particular place to go and all the time in the world to get there.

About Tscherova he was curious.Schau-Wehrli handled her with fine Swiss contempt, referring to her asstukach, snitch, the lowest rank of Soviet agents, who simply traded information for money. Goldman's view differed. He used the wordvliyaniya, fellow traveller. This term was traditionally reserved for agents of influence, oftenself-recruited believers in the Soviet dream: typically academics, civil servants, artists of all sorts, and the occasional forward-looking businessman. In the sense that Tscherova moved in the upper levels of Nazi society, he supposed she wasvliyaniya, yet she was paid, as were the brother and sister Brozin and Brozina and the Czech baUetmaster Anton Krafic, the remainder of theraven network. As for the highest-level agents, theproniknoveniya-penetration specialists serving under direct, virtually military discipline-Szara was not allowed anywhere near them, though he suspectedSchau-Wehrli'smocha group might fall under that classification, and Goldman was rumoured to be running, personally, an asset buried in the very heart of the Gestapo.

Of course the system varied with the national point of view. Low-level agents for the French were calleddupeurs, deceivers, and principally reported on the military institutions of various countries.Moutons,sheep, went after industrial intelligence whilebaladeurs,strolling players, took on free-lance assignments. The French equivalent of theproniknoveniya, highly controlled and highly placed, was theagent fixe, while thetrafiquant,like Tscherova, handled a net ofsubagents.

At the corner ofKraussenstrasseSzara paused, studied the street signs, then hurried across the intersection, not running exactly, but managing in such a way that two speeding Daimlers went whizzing past his back. A tobacconist's shop window, briefly inspected, revealed his company peering anxiously from the other side of the street, then crossing behind him. Szara quickened his pace slightly, then trotted up the steps of the Hotel Kempinski, passed through the elegant lobby, then seated himself at a table in the hotel bar. This was sophisticated Berlin; a study in glossy black and white surfaces with chrome highlights, palm trees, a man in a white dinner-jacketplaying romantic songs on a white piano, a scattering of well-dressed people, and the soothing, melodic hum of conversation. He ordered a schnapps, leaned back in a leather chair, and focused his attention on a woman who was alone at a nearby table-rather ageless, not unattractive, very much minding her own business; which was a tall drink with a miniature candy cane hung on the side of the glass.

Ten minutes later, company arrived. Sweaty, moonfaced, anxious; an overworked detective who'd evidently parked himself on a chair in the lobby, then got nervous being out of contact with his assignment. He stood at the bar, ordered a beer, counted out pocket change to pay for it. Szara felt sorry for him.

Meanwhile, the woman he'd picked out made steady progress with her drink. Szara walked over to her and, presenting his back to the detective, leaned over and asked her what time it was. She said, politely enough, that she didn't know, but thought it was getting on towards ten. Szara laughed, stood up, turned halfway back toward his table, thought better of it, looked at his watch, said something like 'I'm afraid my watch has stopped' in a low voice, smiled conspiratorially, then returned to his chair. Fifteen minutes later, she left. Szara checked his watch, gave her five minutes to get wherever she was going, then threw a bill on the table and departed. Out in the lobby, he hurried into an elevator just before the door closed and asked to be let off at the fourth floor. He walked purposefully down the hall, heard the door close behind him, then found a stairway and returned to the lobby. The detective was sitting in a chair, watching the elevator door like a hawk, waiting for Szara to return from his assignation. Szara left the hotel through a side entrance, made certain he had no further company, then hailed a cab.

RosenhainPassage was medieval, a crooked lane surfaced with broken stone. Half-timbered buildings, the plaster grey with age, slanted backwards as they rose, and a cold smell of drains hung in the dead air. What had happened here? He heard water trickling from unmended pipes, all shutters were closed tight, the street was lifeless, inert. There were no people. In the middle of all this stood DasSchmuckkästchen-the Jewel Box-theatre, as though a city cultural commission had been told todo something aboutRosenhainPassageand here was their solution, a way of brightening things up. A hand-painted banner hung from the handle of an old-fashioned coach horn announcing the performance ofThe Captain's Dilemma by Hans-PeterMütchler.

Midway down an alley next to the theatre, a door had been propped open with a pressing iron. Szara shoved it out of the way with his foot, let the door close gently until the lock snapped. Behind a thick curtain he could hear a play in progress, a man and a woman exchanging domestic insults in the declamatory style reserved for historical drama-listen carefully, this was written a long time ago.The insults were supposed to be amusing, the thrust of the voice told you that, and someone in the theatre did laugh once, but Szara could feel the almost palpable discomfort-the shifting and coughing, the unvoiced sigh-of an audience subjected to a witless and boring evening.

As Goldman had promised, there wasn't a soul to be seen where he entered. He peered through the darkness, found a row of doors, and tapped lightly at the one marked C.

'Yes? Come in.'

He found himself in a small dressing room: mirrors, costumes, clutter. A woman with a book in her hand, place held with an indexfěnger,was sitting upright on a chaiselongue,her face taut and anxious. Goldman had shownhim a photograph. An actress. But the reality left him staring. Perhaps it was Berlin, the grotesque weight of the place, its heavy air, thickly made people, the brutal density of its life, but the woman seemed to him almost transparent, someone who might float away at any moment.

She put her head to one side and studied him clinically. 'You're different,' she said in Russian. Her voice was hoarse, and even in two words he could hear contempt.

'Different?'

'They usually send me a sort of boar. With bristles.' She was tall and slight, had turned up the cuffs of a thick sweater to reveal delicate wrists. Her eyes were enormous, a blue so pale and fragile it reminded him of blindness, and her hair, worn long and loose, was the colour of an almond shell. It was very fine hair, the kind that stirred with the slightest motion. Also she had been drinking; he could smell wine. 'Sit down,' she said softly, changing moods.

He sat in a thronelike armchair, clearly a stage prop. 'Are you in the play?' She was wearing slacks and strapped shoes with low heels, the outfit didn't go with the old-fashioned bluster he could hear from the stage.

'Done for the night.' Her voice easily suggested quotation marks when she added, 'Beatrice, a maid.' She shrugged, a dismissive Russian gesture. 'It's my rotten German. Sometimes I play a foreigner, but mostly it's maids. In little maid costumes. Everybody likes little maid costumes. When I bend over you can almost see my ass. But not quite.'

'What play is it?'

'What? You don't knowThe Captain's Dilemma? I thought everybody did.'

'No. Sorry.'

'Miitchler suits the current taste-that is, Goebbels's taste. He's said to consider it quite excellent. The captain returns to his home ten years after a shipwreck; he findshis wife living beyond her means, a slave to foolish fashion, beset by sycophants and usurers. He, on the other hand, is a typicalVolk:sturdy, forthright, honest, a simple man from Rostock with the pleasures of a simple man. Simple pleasures, you see-we play him as a turnip. So now we haveconflict, and a kind of drawing room comedy, with all sorts of amusing character parts: hypocrites, fops, oily Jews.'

'And the dilemma?'

"The dilemma is why the playwright wasn't strangled at birth.'

Szara laughed.

'What are you? A writer? I mean beside the other thing.'

'How do you know I'm the other thing?'

'Cruel times forNadiaif you're not.'

'And why a writer?'

'Oh, I know writers. I have them in my family, or used to. Do you want some wine? Be careful-it's a test.'

'Just a little.'

'You fail.' She reached behind a screen, poured wine into a water glass, and handed it to him, then retrieved her own glass, hidden behind a leg of the chaiselongue. 'Nűz/idrov'ya.'

'Nazhdrov'ya.'

'Phooey.' She wrinkled her nose at the glass. 'Your pretty little niece, who is no doubt dying to be an actress-tell her it all rests on a tolerance for atrocious white wine.'

'You are from Moscow?' he asked.

'No, Piter, St Petersburg. So sorry, I mean Leningrad. An old, old family. Tscherova is my married name.'

'And Tscherov? He's in Berlin?'

'Pfft,' she said, casting her eyes up at the ceiling and springing four fingers from beneath her thumb, flicking Tscherov's soul up to heaven. 'November1917.'

'Difficult times,' he said in sympathy.

'A Menshevik, a nice man. Married me when I was sixteen and didn't I give him a hellish time of it. The last eight months of his life, too. Poor Tscherov.' Her eyes shone for a moment and she looked away.

'At least you survived.'

'We all did. Aristocrats and artists in my family, all crazy as bats; revolution was the very thing for us. I have a brother in your business. Or I should say had. He seems to have vanished.Sascha.'She laughed at his memory, a harsh cackle, then put her fingers to her mouth, as though it were a drunken sound and embarrassed her. 'Sorry. Colonel Alexander Vonets-did you know him?'

'No.'

'Too bad. Charming bastard. Ah, the elegant Vonets family-but see what they've come to now. Miserablestukachi, dealing in filthy Nazi gossip. "Oh, but my dear General, how absolutely fasss-cinating!'" She snickered at her own performance, then leaned toward him. 'You know what they say in Paris, that a woman attendinga soiréeneeds only two words of French to be thought an elegant conversationalist?Formidable andfantastique.Well, it's the same here. You look up at them-you sit down if they're squatty little things; the eyes simply must look up at them-and they talk and talk, and you say-in German of course-formidable*, after one sentence andfantastique]after the next. "Brilliant woman!" they say later.'

'So it's all nothing more than conversation.'

She studied him for a moment. 'You are very rude,' she said.

'Forgive me. It's just curiosity. I don't care what you do.'

'Well, as I'm certain you know, this wasn't my idea.'

'No?'

'Hardly. When they discovered I'd escaped from Russiaand was in Berlin, they sent somepeople, not like you, around.' She shrugged, remembering the moment. 'Offered a choice between death and money, I chose money.'

Szara nodded in sympathy.

'We go to...parties, my little troupe and I. Parties of a sort, you know. We're considered a terrific amount of fun. People drink. Lose their inhibitions. Shall you hear it all?'

'Of course not.'

She smiled. 'It isn't so bad as you think. I avoid the worst of it, but my associates, well. Not that I'm innocent, you understand. I've known a couple of them better than I should have.' She paused. Looked at him critically, closed one eye. 'You must be a writer-so serious. Everythingmeans something, but for us...In the theatre, you know, we're like naughty children, like brothers and sisters playing behind the shed. So these things don't mean so much, it's a way to forget yourself, that's all. One night you're this person and the next night you're that person, so that sometimes you're no person at all. This profession...it deforms the heart. Perhaps. I don't know.'

She was lost for a moment, sitting on the edge of the chaise, weight borne by elbows on knees, glass held in both hands. 'As for the Nazis, well, they're really more like pigs than humans, if you think about it. The men-and the women-just like pigs, they even squeal like pigs. It's no insult to say this, it's literal. It isn't their"Schweine"that I'm talking about but real pigs: pink, overweight, quite intelligent if you know anything about them, certainly smarter than dogs, but very appetitious, there the common wisdom has it just right. They do want what they want, and lots of it, and right away, and then, when they get it, they're happy. Blissful.'

'I thought you said the man who came to see you was like a boar.'

'I did say that, didn't I. I'm sure there's a difference, though. You just have to be much smarter than me to see it.'

From the stage Szara could hear the ringing tones of a soliloquy, a kind of triumphant anger shot through with blistering rectitude. Then a pause, then desultory applause, then the creak of an unoiled mechanism closing the curtain. This was followed by a heavy tread in the hallway, a man's gruff voice,'Scheiss? and the emphatic slam of a door.

'There,' said Tscherova, switching into German, 'that's the captain now. A simpleVolk.'

Szara reached into his pockets and withdrew the thick wads of reichsmarks. She nodded, took them from him, stood, and stuffed the pockets of a long wool coat hanging on a peg.

Szara now assumed their conversation to be perfectly audible to the 'captain' next door. 'You'll take care of your, ah, health. I really hope you will.'

'Oh yes.'

He stood in order to leave; in the small room they were a little closer together than strangers would normally have been. 'It's better,' he said quietly, 'not to find out how it would be. Yes?'

She smiled impishly, amused that the proximity affected him. 'Youare different, you are. And you mustn't be too concerned.' Her slim hand brushed the waistband of her slacks, then held up a tiny vial of yellow liquid. Her eyebrow lifted,see how clever? 'End of story,' she said. 'Curtain.' Then she hid it behind her back, as though it didn't exist. She bent toward him, kissed him lightly on the mouth-very warm and very brief-and whispered good-bye, in Russian, next to his ear.

Szara walked east from the theatre, away from theAdlon,unconsciously following procedure. Balked by the Neu-KöllnCanal, he veered south to Gertraudten Bridge, lit a cigarette, watched orange peels and scrapwood drifting past on the black water. It was colder, the lamp lights had pale haloes as mist drifted off the canal.

The Directorate never knew their agents in person; Szara now saw the reason for that. Tscherova's vulnerability would not leave his mind. Caught between the Gestapo and the NKVD, between Germany and Russia, she lived by her wits, by looking as she did, by clever talk. But she would have to drink the yellow liquid eventually, maybe soon, and the idea of so much life-all the emotional weather that blew across her heart-winding up as a formless shape collapsed in a corner tormented him. Could a woman be too beautiful to die? Moscow wouldn't like his answer to that. Was he a little bit in love with her? What if he was. Was all her capering about, the way she worked on him with her eyes, meant to draw him to her? He was sure of it. How could that be wrong?

She'd have to drink the liquid because agents didn't survive. The result of all the elaborate defences, secrecy and codes and clandestine methods of every sort, was time gained, only that, against a known destiny. Things went wrong. Things always, eventually, went wrong. The world was unpredictable, inconsistent, volatile, ultimately a madhouse of bizarre events. Agents got caught. Almost always. You replaced them. That's what theapparatexpected you to do: reorganize the chaos, mend the damage, and go on. There were ways in which he accepted that, but when women entered the equation he failed. His need was to protect women, not to sacrifice them, and he could not, would not, change. An ancient instinct, to stand between women and danger, sapped his will to run operations the way they had to be run and made him a bad intelligence officer-it was just that simple. And the worst part of itwas that the yellow liquid wasn't part of some spy kit-the NKVD didn't believe in such things. No, Tscherova had obtained the liquid herself, because she knew what happened to agents just as well as he did and she wanted to have it over and done with when the time came.The idea made him ill, the world couldn't go on that way.

But they had a Jew up on the end ofBrüderstrasse,where Szara turned north, a pack of drunkenHitlerjugendin their fancy uniforms, teenagers, forcing some poor soul on hands and knees to drink the black water in a gutter, and they were shouting and laughing and singing and having a tremendously good time at it.

Szara faded into a doorway. For a moment he thought he was having a stroke-his vision swam and a terrible force hammered against his temples likea fěst.Steadying himself against a wall, he realized it wasn't a stroke, it was rage, and he fought to subdue it. For a moment he went mad, shutting his eyes against the pounding blood and pleading with God for a machine gun, a hand grenade, a pistol, any weapon at all-but this prayer was not immediately answered. Later he discovered a small chip missing from a front tooth.

Some time after midnight, having crept away into the darkness, walking through deserted streets toward his hotel, he made the inevitable connection: Tscherova, by what she did, could help to destroy these people, these youths with their Jewish toy. She could weaken them in ways they did not understand, she was more than a machine gun or a pistol, a far deadlier weapon than any he'd wished for. The knowledge tore at him, on top of what he'd seen, and there were tears on his face that he wiped off with the sleeve of his raincoat.

The following afternoon, he toldMarta Haechtwhat he'd seen. Instinctively she reached for him, but when herhands flew to touch him he no more than allowed it, unwilling to reject an act of love, but equally unwilling to be comforted. This was pain he meant to keep.

To maintain his cover, he had to write something.

'Nothing political,' Goldman had warned. 'Let Tass file on diplomatic developments; you find yourself something meaningless, filler. Just pretend that some ambitious editor has taken it into his head thatPravda's view on Germany needs the Szara touch. Even with all the bad blood and political hostility, life goes on. A bad job but you're making the best of it; you want to lead the Reich press office to believe that, a little of their fine Teutonic contempt is the very thing for you. For the moment, let them sneer.'

Midmorning, in the dining room at theAdlon,Szara submitted himself to the tender mercies of Vainshtok. The little man ran his fingers through his hair and studied his list of possible stories. 'A Szara needs help from a Vainshtok?' he said. 'I knew the world was turning upside down, Armageddon expected any day now, but this!'

'What have you got?' Szara said. He caught the attention of a passing waiter: 'A Linzertortefor my friend, plenty ofschlagon it.'

Vainshtok's eyebrows shot up. 'You're in trouble. That I can tell. My mama always warned me, "Darling son, when they put the whipped cream on the Linzertorte,watch out." What is it,AndréAronovich?Have you fallen from favour at last? Got a girlfriend who's giving you a hard time? Getting older?'

'I can't stand Berlin, Vainshtok. I can't think in this place.'

'Oy, he can't stand Berlin. Last year they sent me to Madagascar. I ate, I believe I actually ate, a lizard. Did you hear the china breaking, Szara, wherever you were?Eleven generations of Vainshtok rabbis were going wild up in heaven, breaking God's kosher plates,"Gott im Himmel!Little Asher Moisevich is eating a lizard!" Ah, here's something, how about weather?'

'What about it?'

'It's happening every day.'

'And?'

'Well, it's not especially cold, and it's not especially hot. But more than likely such a story won't stir up the Reichsministries. On the other hand, it might. "What do you mean,normal? Our German weather is clean and pure, like no other weather anywhere!"'

Szara sighed. He hadn't the strength to fight back.

'All right, all right,' Vainshtok said as his treat arrived, swimming in cream. 'You're going to make me cry. TakeFrauKummel,up inLübeck.Actually she's called MutterKummel,MotherKummel.It's a story you can write, and it gets you out of Berlin for the day.'

'MutterKummel?'

'I'll write down the address for you. Yesterday she turned a hundred years old. Born the first of November,1838.Imagine all the exciting things she's seen-she may even remember some of them.1838?Schleswig-Holsteinstill belonged to the Danes,Lübeck waspart of the independent state of Mecklenburg. Germany-of course you'll have to sayGermany as we know it today-didn't exist. You're to be envied, Szara. What a thrilling time that was, and MutterKummelsomehow lived through every minute of it.'

He took the train that afternoon, a grim ride up through the flatlands of the Luneberg Plain, through marshy fields where gusts of wind flattened the reeds under a hard, grey sky. He avoided Hamburg by taking the line that went throughSchwerin,and outside a little village not far from the sea he spotted a traffic sign by a tight curvein the road:Drive carefully! Sharp curve! Jews75miles an hour!

MutterKummellived with her eighty-one-year-old daughter in a gingerbread house in the centre ofLübeck.'Another reporter, dear mother,' said the daughter when Szara knocked at the door. The house smelled of vinegar, and the heat of the place made him sweat as he scribbled in his notebook. MutterKummelremembered quite a bit aboutLübeck:where the old butcher shop used to be, the day the rope parted and the tumbling church bell broke through the belfry floor and squashed a deacon. What Nezhenko would make of all this Szara could only imagine, let alone some coal miner in the Donbas, wrapping his lunch potato in the newspaper. But he worked at it and did the job as best he could. Toward the end of the interview the old lady leaned forward, her placid face crowned by a bun of white hair, and told him howdieJudenwere no longer to be found inLübeck-yet one more change she'd witnessed in her many years in the town. Polite people when one met them in the street, it had to be admitted, but she wasn't sorry to see them go. 'Those Jews,' she confided, 'for too long they've stolen our souls.' Szara must have looked inquisitive. 'Oh yes, young man. It's what they did, and we here inLübeckknew about it,' she said slyly. Szara, for a moment, was tempted to ask her to explain-for he sensed she'd worked it out-the mechanics of such a thing: how it was actually accomplished, where the Jews hid the stolen souls and what they did with them. But he didn't. He thanked the ladies and took the train back to Berlin and an evening withMartaHaecht, the promise of which had kept him more or less sane for another day.

Later on, he would have reason to remember that afternoon.

Later on, when everything had changed, he would wonder what might have happened if he'd missed the Berlin train, if he'd had to spend the night inLübeck.But he knew himself, knew that he would have found some way to be withMarta Haechtthat night. He considered himself a student of destiny, perhaps even aconnoisseur-that obnoxious word-of its tricks and turns: how it hunted, how it fed.

He would see himself on the train to Berlin, a man who'd beaten his way across a lifeless afternoon by banking thoughts of the evening. And though the browns and greys of the German November flowed past the train window he was not there to see them; he was lost in anticipation, lost in lover's greed. In fact, he would ask himself, whatdidn't he want? He certainly wanted her, wanted her in the ways of a Victorian novel kept in a night table drawer-what magnificent fantasies he made for himself on that train! But that wasn't all. He wanted affection; kindness, refuge. He wanted to spend the night with his lover. He wanted to play. The game of temptations and surrenders, cunning noes and yesses. And then he wanted to talk-to talk in the darkness where he could say anything he liked, then he wanted to sleep, all wrapped and twined around her in a well-warmed bed. He even wanted breakfast. Something delicious.

And what he wanted, he got.

In its very own diabolical way, destiny delivered every last wish. Only it added a little something extra, a little something he didn't expect, buried it right in the midst of all his pleasures where he'd be sure to find it.

The Iron Exchange Building was even stranger at night: the long tile hallways in shadow, the frosted glass doors opaque and secretive, the silence broken only by an agonizing piano lesson in progress on the floor below and the echo of his footsteps.

But in low light the studio of the painterBenno Aultwas agreeably softened. The shrieks and torments pinned to the wall faded to sighs, andMarta Haecht,at centre stage, appeared in short silk robe and Parisian scent, slid gracefully into his arms, and gave him every reason to hope that his thoughts on the train had not been idle fantasies.

They had their Victorian novel-in feeling if not in form-and wound up sprawled together across the sofa, for a moment stunned senseless. ThenMartaturned the lamp off and they lay peacefully in the darkness for a time,sticky, sore, thoroughly pleased with themselves and the very best of friends. 'What was that you said?' she asked idly. 'Was it Russian?'

'Yes.'

'I wasn't sure, perhaps it was Polish.'

'No, Russian. Very much so.'

'Was it a sweet thing to say?'

'No, a rough thing. Common. A command.'

'Ah, a command. And I obeyed?' She was smiling in the darkness.

'You did. Somehow you understood.'

'And that you liked.'

'Couldn't you tell?'

'Yes. Of course.' She thought for a time. 'We are so different,' she mused.-

'Not really.'

'You mustn't say that. Such a difference is a, a pleasure for me.'

'Oh. Day and night, then.'