She put a hand on his chest. 'Don't,' she said.


They were still for a while. He looked up at the large window, illuminated by the pale night sky of a city. A few snowflakes drifted against the glass and melted into droplets. 'It's snowing,' he said.


She turned halfway around to look. 'It's a sign,' she said.


'You mean the night we met, back again.'


'Yes, just so. I can still see you inDr Baumann'skitchen, making small talk. You hadn't even noticed me. But I knew everything that would happen.'


'Did you truly?'


She nodded yes. 'I knew you would take me off somewhere, a hotel, a room. I thought,a man like you can always have a woman like me. It struck me, that thought, I was so surprised at myself. Because I was sogood. I'd always known boys who wanted me, at the university and so forth, but I was such a littleMädchen,I wouldn't. I'd blush and push them away-they were so earnest! And then-this thing always happens when you aren't expecting it-theBaumanns,the stuffy oldBaumanns,invited me to their house.' She laughed. 'I didn't want to go. My father made me.'


'But you said you knew who I was, that you wanted to meet me.'


'I know I said that. I lied. I meant to flatter you.'


'Ach!'He pretended to be wounded.


'But no, you should be flattered by such a lie, because the moment I saw you I wanted everything, to be made to do everything. Your dark shirt, your dark hair, the way you looked into me-it was so...Russian-I can't describe it. Something about you, not polite, not at all polite the way Germans are, but strong, intense.' She smoothed his hair back above his ear; the gesture seemed to last a long time and he could feel the heat of her hand.


'Isn't that what Germans always think of Russians, when they don't hate them?'


'It'strae. Somehate, and are hateful. But for the rest of us it's complicated. We are all tied up inside ourselves, almost embarrassed at being in the world. It's our German culture I think, and we see Russians-Jews, Slavs, all the people in the East-as passionate and romantic, their feelings out for all to see, and deep in our hearts we're envious of them because we sense that theyfeel, whereas we just think about everything, think and think and think.'


'What aboutDrBaumann?Passionate and romantic?'


'Oh, not him.' She laughed at the idea.


'But he's a Jew.'


'Yes of course he is. But here they're more like us than anything else, all tight and cold, self-conscious. That's the problem here in Germany; the Jews have become German, consider themselves German, just as good as any German, and there are many Germans who feel it is a presumption. They don't???it. Then, after the revolution in1917we had here in Berlin the Russian and Polish Jews, and they are really quite different from us-perhaps rude is the word, not cultured. Mostly they stay off by themselves, but when one sees them, for instance when they are on the trolley car and it is crowded, they stare, and one can smell the onions they eat.'


'The Jews from Poland have been sent back.'


'Yes, I know this and it's sad for them. But there were some who wanted to go back, and Poland would not let them in, and there are people who said why must this be always Germany's problem? So now they all have to go back, and for them I feel sad.'


'AndDrBaumann?Where can he go?'


'Why should he go anywhere? For most Jews it's terrible, a tragedy, they lose everything, but for him it's not like


that. TheDrBaumannsof the world always find a way to get along.'


'Is this something your father tells you?'


'No. Something I know from my own eyes.'


'You see him?'


'Socially? Of course not. But I work for a man calledHerr Hanau,a man from the little town ofGreifswald,up on the Baltic.Herr Hanauhas a small shipping company, one big ship and three little ones, and to receive consideration for government contracts he has moved his business to Berlin, and here I am his assistant. So, some weeks ago, we were awarded a small shipment of machine tools that goes up to Sweden, a great victory for us, and HeirHanauinvited me to lunch at theKaiserhof,to celebrate. And there, large as life, isDrBaumann,eating a cutlet and drinking Rhine wine. Life cannot be so bad for him after all.'


Puzzled, Szara stared at the window, watched the snow-flakes drifting slowly downward on the still air. 'How could he do that?' he asked. 'Can a Jew, likeDrBaumann,walk into one of the better hotels in Berlin and just have lunch?'


'I think not. These waiters have a sense of propriety, alone he would not have been served or there might have been a scene. But he was with his protector, you see, and so everything just went along in the normal way.'


'Protector?'


'Naturally. Though my father stands ready to help him, to take over the ownership of the mill,DrBaumannremains in charge.BaumannMilling does defence work, as you may have guessed, and soDrBaumannis protected.'


'By whom?'


'It seemed strange to me, these two men having lunch.DrBaumannand some very tall, reedy fellow, almost bald, with little wisps of blond hair. An aristocrat, I thought,that's what they look like: late thirties, no chin, and thai hesitant little smile, as though somebody were about to break a priceless vase and they're afraid they'll let on that they're brokenhearted.'


Szara shifted his weight on the couch. 'I hope you don't describe me to anyone,' he said with mock horror.


She clucked. 'I don't tell secrets,Liebchen:


'Who do you suppose he was?'


'I askedHerr Hanau."Don't meddle," says he. "That's Von Polanyi from the Foreign Office, a clever fellow but not someone for you to know.'"


'He sounds Hungarian.'


He felt her shrug. 'During the Austro-Hungarian time the noble families moved around, we have all sorts in Germany. In any event, don't be too concerned forHerr DoktorJuliusBaumann,for it turns out he's rather comfortably situated.'


Szara was silent for a long time.


'Are you asleep?'


'No, dreaming.'


'Of me?'


He moved closer to her.


'Give me your hand,' she said.


And in the morning, when the light woke them up, after the Victorian novel, the affection, the honest talk in darkness, and, well, some condition of absence that at least imitated sleep,Marta Haechttied the little silk robe at her waist and stood before the stove and made blini, thin ones like Frenchcrępes,then spread them with strawberry jam from Berlin's finest store, folded them carefully, and served them on pretty plates and Szara realized, just about then, that had he been able to taste anything at all they would have been, as he'd imagined on the train to Berlin, delicious.




5November.


A telephone message at theAdlondesk requested that he stop by the press office at the embassy. On theUnterden Linden, in a light, dry snowfall that blew about like dust, thousands of black-shirted Nazi party members were marching toward the Brandenburg Gate. They sang in deep voices, roared out their chants, and threw their arms into the air in fascist salutes. Amid the sea of black there were banners denouncing the Comintern and the Soviet Union, and the men marched by slamming their boots against the pavement; Szara could actually feel the rhythm of it trembling beneath his feet. He pulled his raincoat around him and pretended to ignore the marchers. This was what mostBerlinersdid-glanced at the singing men, then hurried on about their business-and Szara followed their example.


The embassy was extremely busy. People were rushing about here and there, clerks ran by with armloads of files, and the tension could be easily felt. Varin, the second secretary, was waiting for him in the press office, rather pointedly not watching the parade below his window. He was a small, serious man, determined, and not inclined toward conversation. He handed over an envelope; Szara could feel the waxy paper of the folded flimsy inside. A radio was playing in the press office and when the news forecast came on at noon, all talk stopped. 'They have a big mess over at Zabaszyn,' Varin said when the commentator had finished. 'Fifteen thousand Polish Jews penned up in barbed wire at the border. Germany's thrown them out, but Poland won't let them in. There's not enough water, hardly any shelter, and it's getting colder. Everybody's waiting to see who gives in first.'


'Maybe I should go up there,' said the journalist Szara.


Varin closed his eyes for an instant and just barelymoved his head to indicate that he should do no such thing.


'Is that what the parade is all about?'


Varin shrugged, indifferent. 'They like to march, so let them. It's the weather-they always feel spirited when the winter comes.'


Szara stood to go.


'Watch yourself,' said Varin quietly.


For just a moment, Szara had been tempted to lay his troubles at Varin's door, but it was a temptation instantly dismissed. Still, as he walked back to theAdlon,the wordFunkspieledrummed relentlessly in his consciousness. Playback, it meant, when a wireless was used. In general, the operation of a doubled agent. There might have been an innocent explanation forBaumannmeeting with someone from the Foreign Office, but Szara didn't think so. The Directorate had been restless withBaumannfrom the very beginning; now he understood that they'd been right. People like Abramov had spent most of their lives in clandestine work-against the Okhrana before1917,against the world after that. One developed sharpened instincts; on certain nights the animals are reluctant to approach thewaterhole.


Suddenly there wasn't a choice, he had to be an intelligence officer like it or not. IfBaumann wasunder German control, all the traditional questions bobbed up to the surface: From the beginning? Or caught, then turned? How accomplished? By coercion, clearly. Not money, not ego, and not, God forbid, ideology. A frightened Jew was appropriate to their purposes. Which were? Deceptive. In what way deceptive, toward what end? If the swage wire figures were high, that meant they wanted to scare the USSR into thinking they had more bombers than they did, a tactic of political warfare, the same method that hadproved fatal for Czechoslovakia. If they were low, it was an attempt to lull the USSR into false strategic assumptions. And that meant war.


At theAdlonhe knocked, harder than he meant to, at Vainshtok's door. The little man was in shirtsleeves, a cloud of cigarette smoke hung in the air, and a sheet of paper protruded from a typewriter on the desk. 'Szara? It better be important. You scared the shit out of my muse.'


'May I come in?'


Vainshtok beckoned him inside and closed the door. 'Don't knock like that, will you? Call from the lobby. These days, a knock on the door. . .'


'Thank you for the MutterKummel story.'


'Don't mention it. I thought you needed all the excitement you could get.'


'Do you know anything about the Reich Foreign Office?'


Vainshtok sighed. He went over to an open briefcase, dug around inside for a time, and emerged with a thin, mimeographed telephone directory. 'Oh the forbidden things we have here in theAdlon.I expect the Gestapo will set fire to it any day now. That'll be something to see-a hundred firemen, all wearing eyeglasses.' He cackled at the idea. 'What do you want to know?'


'Do you find a man called Von Polanyi?'


It took only a moment. 'Von Polanyi, Herbert K.L.Amt9.'


'What is it?'


'I don't know. But then, that in itself is informative.'


'How so?'


'When you don't know, chances are they don't want you to know. So, they're not the people who keep track of the Bulgarian bean harvest.'


Back in his room, Szara drew the blinds, set out pencils and paper, propped up the railway timetable against theback of the desk, spread the code flimsy out under the lamp, and decrypted it.




TRANSMISSION5NOVEMBER1938 04:30HOURS TO: JEAN MARC


A SECOND MEETING WITH OTTER IS APPROVED. FOR10NOVEMBER,01:15HOURS, AT8KLEINERSTRASSE,WTTTENAU. YOU WILL BE TRANSPORTED TO THE TOWN OF WTTTENAU, APPROXIMATELY30MINUTES FROM BERLIN, BY CAR. AT12:40HOURS BE AT THEKÖLN FISCHMARKT,AT INTERSECTION OFFISCHERSTRASSEAND MUHLENDAMM, ASSIGNED TO COVER STORY OF FISH MARKET VISITED BY TOURISTS AT NIGHT. A MAN IN A TARTAN SCARF WILL APPROACH YOU. THE PAROL WILL BE: CAN YOU TELL ME WHAT TIME IT IS? THE COUNTERSIGN WILL BE: I'M SORRY. MY WATCH STOPPED ON THURSDAY.


8KLEINERSTRASSEIS AN OLD WOODEN BUILDING FACING NORTH, AT THE EASTERN END OF THE STREET BORDERING PRTNZALLEE. A SIGN ABOVE THE DOOR IDENTIFIES IT AS BETH MIDRESH, A SYNAGOGUE. APPROACH SUBJECT THROUGH DOOR AT THE END OF THE LEFT-HAND AISLE. YOU ARE TO SPEND NO MORE THAN THIRTY MINUTES WITH SUBJECT, THEN RETURN TO BERLIN BY CAR, HAVING ARRANGED MEETING WITH DRIVER. NO OFFER OF FUTUREEXFILTRATIONOR RESETTLEMENT IS TO BE MADE. DIRECTOR




7November.


He arrived at the loft just after nine, a little out of breath, his face cold from the night air, carrying a bottleof expensive wine wrapped in paper. A different mood forMarta:hair carefully pinned up, redBakeliteearrings with lipstick to match, tight sweater and skirt. She gave him a leather case holding a pair of gold cuff links set with tiny citrines, a faded lemon colour. His shirt had buttons, so she brought one of her own out of a bureau to show him what they looked like; he found them almost impossible to attach and fumbled grimly till she came to the rescue, grinning at his efforts. They drank the wine and ate biscuits from a box with a paper doily in it. He turned the radio to a different station-light Viennese froth that drew a sneer fromMarta-but he'd come to associate the serious German composers with the mood of the city and he didn't want that in his sanctuary. They talked, aimless and comfortable; she picked candied cherries off the tops of the biscuits and put them in an ashtray. They would eat supper later, after they made love. But tonight they were in no hurry.


It had become, in just a few days, a love affair with rules of its own, a life of its own,a Ufethat radiated from a bulbous old green sofa at its centre, an affair with ups and downs, rough moments smoothed over, and unimportant, courteous lies. Something between adults.Marta, aworking woman, a sophisticated Berliner with a life of her own, accepted him for what she thought he was: a Soviet journalist who travelled constantly, a man to whom she was deeply, sexually, attracted, a man she'd encountered in the last days of girlhood who now loved her as a woman.


It was too bad they couldn't go out to restaurants or concerts, but the present reality was uncertain in that way and they agreed without discussion not to put themselves in a situation where unpleasantness might occur-life was too short for turmoil, it was best to float with the tide. Szara did not mention the Aesopic letter or the trip to Lisbon. He doubted she knew he'd written it. If she did, she'd alsodecided it would not bear discussion. They had negotiated a treaty, and now they lived by it.


The radio played 'Barcarole' fromThe Tales of Hoffman.She sat on his lap. 'This is pretty,' she said. 'Two lovers on a boat, drifting along a canal.' He slipped a hand under her sweater; she closed her eyes, leaned her head on his shoulder and smiled. The song ended and an announcer, rattling a paper into the microphone, stated that a special bulletin fromDrJosephGoebbelswould follow. 'Oh, that hideous man!'Martasaid.


Goebbels's delivery was professional, but the nasal whine of his personality was more than evident. As he read, from an editorial that would appear the following day in theVölkischer Beobachter,a kind of choked-off rage thickened his voice. This news, the tone implied, was well beyond shouting. ErnstVomRath, third secretary at the German embassy in Paris, had been shot and gravely wounded by a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew named Hershl Grynszpan, a student whose parents had been deported from Germany to Poland, then held at the frontier town of Zbgszyn. Goebbels's point was clear: we try to help these people, by sending them away from a nation where they aren't wanted to a place where they will be more at home, and look what they do-they shoot German diplomats. And just how long shall we Germans be expected to put up with such outrages? The bulletin ended, a Strauss waltz followed. 'This world,' saidMartasadly, closing her eyes again and wriggling to get comfortable. 'We must be tender to one another,' she added, placing her warm hand over his.


10November.


A German dearly loves his fish.Making a show of being a journalist, Szara jotted down impressions on a pocket notepad.Herring and whitebait, he wrote.Flounder andhaddock.After midnight, the stalls of theKöln Fischmarktbegan to fill with the day's catch trucked in from the coast: glistening grey and pink eels on chipped ice, baskets of whelks and oysters trailing seaweed, crayfish floating in a lead tank filled with cloudy brine. The sawdust underfoot was wet with blood and sea water, and the air, even in the cold November night, was rank-the iodine smell of tidal pools,Szara wrote,barrels of cast-off fishheads. Stray cats. There were plenty of people around; vendors shouted snappy fish jokes at their customers-a bit of psychology: lively talk implied fresh seafood. Some local swells and their girlfriends, faces bright with drinking, were waltzing around with hah7a dripping mackerel. There was even a bewildered British tourist, asking questions in slow, loud English, puzzled that he couldn't get an answer.


The operative was precisely on time, a heavy man with eyebrows grown together and red cheeks, hair shearedoff in amilitary cut. After the parol was completed, they walked silently to the car, a blackHumboldtparked a little way down the Muhlendamm. The operative was an expert driver, and cautious, squaring blocks and ceaselessly crossing back over his own tracks to make sure they weren't followed. They worked their way west through theGrunewaldand eventually turned north on the near bank of the Havel, following a succession of little roads to avoid police on the main highways. 'I'm told to warn you there's some kind of trouble brewing,' the driver said.


'What kind of trouble?'


'Aktionen.Actions against the Jews. A monitoring unit at the embassy distributed a teleprinter message just as I was leaving; it was fromMüller'sofficeto all Gestapo headquarters. The timing was specified as "at very short notice." You'll probably get in and out without difficulties-but don't dawdle.'


'Thetreff takes place in a synagogue.'


'I know where it takes place. The point is, there won't be anyone around, and it's best for your contact, who comes from the east without going into the city. We got him in for Friday night services and he just didn't leave.'


The car slowed as they came to the outskirts of Wittenau.The street swung away from the Havel, and the sheds and low buildings of small industrial shops appeared on both sides. The driver pulled over and turned off the engine. The night was still, the air smelling faintly of coal smoke. Theapparathad a genius, Szara thought, for finding such places; dead zones, nighttime deserts on the edges of cities.


'This isPrinzallee,'said the driver. 'Up ahead of you, about fifty paces, is the start ofKleinerstrasse.Your synagogue is on the corner. What time do you have?'


'Eight minutes after one.'


'It will take you only a minute to walk.'


Szara fidgeted in the front seat. A bird started up nearby, otherwise the silence was oppressive. 'Does anybody live here?' he asked.


'No more. It was a ghetto thirty years ago, then it turned into factories. Only the synagogue is left, and a few tenements with old Jews living in them-most of the young ones got out after'33.'


Szara kept looking at his watch.


'All right,' said the driver. 'Don't close the car door-it's a noise everybody knows. And please keep it short.'


Szara climbed out. The bulb had been removed from the roof light, so the interior of the car remained dark. He walked close to a board fence on a dirt pathway that muffled his footsteps, but the night was so quiet he became conscious of his own breathing.


The synagogue was very old, a two-storey wood frame structure with a sloping roof, built perhaps a century earlier for use as a workshop, possibly a carpentry workshopsince it stood against the low shed of a neighbouring lumberyard.


A sign in Hebrew above the door said Beth Midresh, which meant House of Worship. That told Szara that it was being used by immigrant Jews from Poland and Russia-all synagogues in the Pale were identified that way. In France they used the name of the street, while the wealthy Jews of Germany often named their synagogues after a leader in the community-theAdlersynagogue, for instance. Those were grand and glorious temples, nothing like what he approached. Seen in the light of a waning moon, the synagogue onPrinzalleemight have stood in Cracow or Lodz, seemed to come from another time and place.


The impression held. The front door was unlocked, but the frame was warped and Szara had to pull hard to get it open. The interior took him back to Kishinev-the smell of sweat and urine in stale air, as though the windows were never opened. Behind the altar, above the double-doored ark that held the scrolls of the Tor ah, was a tiny lamp, the eternal light, and he could just make out two narrow aisles between rows of wooden chairs of several different styles. He took the aisle on the left and walked toward the front, the boards creaking softly under his feet. The door to one side of the altar was ajar; he gave it a gentle push and it swung open to reveal a man sitting slumped at a bare table. The room was narrow, perhaps serving at one time as a rabbi's study-there were empty book shelves built up one wall.


'DrBaumann,'he said.


Baumannlooked up at him; his collapsed posture didn't change. 'Yes,' he said in a low voice.


There was a chair directly across the table from Baumann's and Szara sat down. 'You're not sick, are you?'


'Tired,'Baumannsaid. He meant the word in both senses: exhausted, and tired of life.


'We have to discuss a few things, quickly, and then we can leave. You have a way to get safely home?'


'Yes. It isn't a problem.'


Perhaps he had a driver waiting or was driving his own car, Szara didn't know. 'We want to find out, first of all, if you've come under pressure from any of the Reichsministries. I don't mean having to hand in your passport, or any of the laws passed against the Jews in general, I mean you in particular. In other words, have you been singled out in any way, any way at all?'


Szara thought he saw the probe hit home. The room was dark, and the reaction was very brief, not much more than a pause, but it was there. ThenBaumannshook his head impatiently, as though Szara was wasting his time with such foolish notions: this was not a question he wished to discuss. Instead, he leaned forward and whispered urgently: 'I'm going to accept your offer. Your offer to leave here, for my wife and I. The dog too, if it can be managed.'


'Of course,' Szara said.


'Soon. Maybe right away.'


'I have to ask. . .'


'We want to go to Amsterdam. It shouldn't be too hard; our friends say that the Dutch are letting us in, no questions asked. So the only difficulty is getting out of Germany. We'll take a suitcase and the little dog, nothing else, they can have it all, everything.'


'One thing we'll need to-'Szara stopped cold and leaned his head to one side.


Baumannsat up straight as though he'd been shocked. 'My God,' he said.


'Is it singing?'


Baumannnodded.


Szara instinctively looked at his watch. 'At one-thirty in the morning?'


'When they sing like that,'Baumannsaid, then paused,his voice fading into silence as he concentrated on the sound.


Szara remembered the parade on theUnter denLinden. These were the same voices, deep and vibrant. Both of them sat still as the sound grew louder, thenBaumannstood suddenly. 'They must not see us.' The beginning of panic was in his voice.


'Would we be better off out in the street?'


"They're coming here.Here.'


Szara stood. He remembered the road into Wittenau-there was nothing there. By now the words of the song were plainly audible; it was something they sang in the Rathskellers as they drank theirbeer:Wenn's Judenblut vom Messer spritztIDann geht's nochmal so gut, dann geht's nochmal so gut.When Jewish blood squirts under the knives/Then all is well, then all is well.Baumannturned away from the door and the two men stared at each other, both frightened, uncertain what to do and, suddenly, perfect equals.


'Hide.'Baumannspoke the word in a broken whisper, the voice of a terrified child.


Szara fought for control of himself. He had been through pogroms before-in Kishinev and Odessa. They always attacked the synagogue. 'We're getting out,' he said. It was an order. Whatever else happened, he wasn't going to end hisUfein dumb shock like an animal that knows it's going to die. He walked quickly out of the narrow room and had taken two steps back up the aisle when one of the dark windows flanking the entry door suddenly brightened; a golden shadow flickered against it for a moment, then the glass came showering in on the floor. The men outside sent up a great cheer and, simultaneously,Baumannscreamed. Szara spun and clapped his hand over the man's mouth; he felt saliva on his palm but held on tight untilBaumannmade a gesture that he could control himself. Behindthem, the other window exploded. Szara leaned dose toBaumann.'A stairway,' he whispered. 'There must be a stairway.'


'Behind the curtain.'


They ran up three steps onto the altar. Szara heard the stubborn door squeak at the other end of the building just asBaumannthrew the curtain aside and they disappeared behind the ark. There was no banister on the stairs, just steps braced against the wall. He raced up,Baumannbehind him, and tried the door. On the other side of the curtain he could hear chairs being kicked around and the other windows being broken to a chorus of laughter and cheers. 'Jews come out!' roared a drunken voice. Szara tore the door open with one hand and reached back for Baumann's sleeve with the other, pulling him into the upstairs room, then turning and kicking the door shut. The second storey was unused-a pile of drapes, cobwebbed corners, broken chairs, the smell of old wood. . .and something else. Burning. He turned to look atBaumann;his mouth was wide open, gasping for air, and his hand was pressed against the middle of his chest. 'No!' Szara said.Baumannlooked at him strangely, then sank to his knees. Szara ran to the closest window, but there were torches below and dim shapes moving across the alley side of the synagogue. He crossed the room to a second window and saw that the upper storey was just above the roof of the lumberyard shed. It was a very old window, tiny panes of glass in wooden strips, and had not been opened for years. He strained at it for a moment, then drew his foot back and kicked out the glass and the bracing, kicking again and again, savagely, even though he felt the fabric of his trousers rip and saw blood droplets suddenly appear in the thick dust on the sill. When the opening was sufficiently wide, he ran toBaumannand took him under the armpits. 'Get up,' he said. 'Get up.'


There were tears on Baumann's face. He did not move.


Szara began dragging him across the floor until, at last,Baumannstarted crawling. Szara spoke to him like a child: 'Yes, that's it.' Somewhere close by he heard the splintering sound of a door being ripped off its hinges and he glanced, horrified, toward the stairway, then realized the noise came from below, that they were after the scrolls of the Torah in the ark. The smell of burning was getting stronger; a curl of smoke worked through the floorboards in one corner. He leanedBaumannagainst the wall below the window and spoke by his ear: 'Go ahead, I'll help you, it isn't far and then we'll be safe.'Baumannmumbled something-Szara couldn't understand what he said but it meant he wanted to be left to die. Infuriated, Szara pushed him aside and worked his way through the jagged circle of broken glass and wood, tumbling forward onto his hands on the tarred gravel surface of the roof of the lumberyard shed. He scrambled to his feet and reached back through the opening, getting a grip on the lapels of Baumann's jacket and hauling him forward. When Baumann's weight began to tilt over the sill, he thrust out his hands instinctively and the two of them fell together.


Szara lay stunned for a moment. Falling backwards and taking Baumann's weight had knocked the wind out of him. Then he began to breathe again and, in the cold air, became aware of a wet sock. He struggled away fromBaumannand sat up to look at his ankle. Blood was welling steadily from a slash down his shin. He pressed the wound together for a moment, then remembered about silhouettes and threw himself on his stomach. Baumann's breathing distracted him-loud and hoarse, like sighing. He moved the man's hand, which lay flaccid against his chest, and felt for a heartbeat. What he found was a shock-a beating of such force and speed it frightened him. 'How is it?' he asked.


'My God in heaven,'Baumannsaid.


'We're going to be all right,' Szara said. 'I'll buy you a dinner in Amsterdam.'


Baumannsmiled weakly, the wind blowing strands of his hair around, one side of his face pressed against the black surface of the roof, and nodded yes, that's what they would do.


Szara began to think about the operative and the car, then decided to try to get a look from the edge of the roof. Very carefully he moved forward, scraping his cheek against the surface, staying as flat as possible, gaining an inch at a time until he could just see over the end of the shed. He could not get a view of the path by the board fence where he'd left the car-the angle was wrong. But he was high enough to look out over part of Wittenau, the Havel, and an ancient stone bridge that crossed the river. His eyes were beginning to water from the smoke-the fire was taking hold; the old wood snapped and exploded as it caught-but what there was to see, he saw: a group of men with torches shifting restlessly in a knot at the centre of the bridge, an instant of motion in the darkness. Then there was a scream that carried perfectly on the night air, a white churning in the water at the foot of the bridge pier, a strangled cry for help, the yellow arc of a torch hurled into the water, then laughter and cheering as the men on the bridge headed back into Wittenau. Some of them began to sing.


As the fire swept up the front of the synagogue it illuminated the shed, and Szara scrambled backwards, afraid of being seen. Burning embers were all over the roof, producing, for the moment, only an oily black smoke from the tar surface. He realized it was only a matter of time before the shed, and the lumberyard, went up in flames. Just before he retreated, he saw fiery shapes flying into the street from the direction of the synagogue door-long dowels on either side of thick, yellow parchment. The Nazis, not content to burn down the synagogue, were making a special, private bonfire of the Torah scrolls from the ark, first stripping off the ceremonial satin covers.Now they'll have to be buried, Szara thought. He wondered how he remembered that but it was true, it was the law: a burnt Torah had to be buried in the graveyard, like a dead person, there was a ceremony for it. It was part of growing up in the Pale of Settlement, knowing such lore-rituals for raped women and all sorts of useful knowledge-for these things had happened many times before.


It was another thirty minutes before they got away. After watching the fire for a time, the mob had gone off in search of further amusement. Szara andBaumannstayed where they were, lying flat to conceal themselves, brushing embers off their clothing with the sleeves of their jackets. From where they lay they could see the dancing orange shadows of other fires against the night sky, could hear the showers of falling glass, occasional shouts or cries, but no sirens. The lumberyard caught first-that was bad because of the burning creosote-and then the shed, an afterthought. Szara andBaumannworked their way backwards off the roof, dropping to the ground on the side away from the street. They circled behind the synagogue, now collapsed into itself around a column of fire that roared like a wind, and made a dash for theHumboldt.


They saw only one person, standing alone in the darkness: a town policeman, wearing the traditional high helmet with polished brasswork and short visor-something like the old-fashioned spikedPickelhaubeof the1914war-with a strap pulled up ferociously tight just under the chin. By the light of the flames Szara saw his face and was struck by a kind of anguish in it. Not sorrow for Jews or synagogues-it wasn't that. It had more to do with a lifededicated to perfect order, where no crime should ever go unpunished-a murder or a piece of paper tossed in the street, it was all the same to this face. Yet tonight the policeman had certainly seen arson-and perhaps murder, if he'd looked in the direction of the river-and had done nothing about it because he had been told to do nothing about it. Evidently, he had not really known what to do, so had stationed himself across the street from the fire, on the night when the firemen never came, and there he stood, rigid, anguished, in some sense ruined and aware of it.


The car was empty, the passenger door ajar as it had been left.


It would make, Szara thought, at least a hiding place, and he directedBaumannto lie flat on the floor below the back seat while he would do the same in front. As they entered the car, the operative materialized, gliding toward them from some shadow he'd used as cover while the mob roamed the streets. Not a mob, in fact, the operative told Szara later. Party men, some uniformedSS, anorganized attack directed by the German state.


It was not the burning and the chaos that upset the operative, he was reasonably used to burning and chaos; it wasDrJuliusBaumann,otter,an agent he was not supposed to know about, much less see, least of all to have in an automobile along with his case officer. This shattered unbreakable rules of every variety and set the man's face dancing with bureaucratic horror. He did the best he could under the circumstances: secretedBaumann inthe trunk, first prying back a section of the metal jamb to make an air passage. Szara quietly protested as he slid into the front seat. 'Be glad I'm doing that much,' said the operative.


'He may have had a heart attack,' Szara said.


The operative shrugged. 'He will be cared for.'


They drove a little way back toward Berlin, crossed theHavel on a narrow, deserted bridge, then turned north, swinging around Wittenau and moving east, through the back of the Berlin suburbs. It was artful navigation, evidently from memory, a slow but steady progress through the winding lanes ofHermsdorf, Lubans,Blankenfelde andNiederschonhausen,where villas and workshops faded into farmland or forest. It was almost four in the morning when they reachedPankow.And here the operative took a complicated route that brought them to theBahnhof.He disappeared into the station for a few minutes and used the public telephone in the waiting room. Then east again, Weissensee and eventually Lichtenburg, where they drove through a very aristocratic part of town, swerving suddenly into the parklike courtyard of a private hospital, the gate closing automatically behind them. The operative opened the trunk and helpedBaumanninto the hospital. He would receive medical attention, the operative explained to Szara, but they'd decided to hide him there whether he needed it or not.


Heinrich Müller'steleprinter message had ordered, along with attacks on synagogues and Jewish businesses throughout Germany, the arrest of twenty to thirty thousand Jews: 'Wealthy Jews in particular are to be selected.' This meant money, which the Nazis especially liked. So, said the operative as they pulled away from the hospital, they needed to putotter somewhere he wouldn't be found, else he would be taken toBuchenwaldor Dachau, stripped of all assets, and eventually deported.


As they turned back toward Berlin, they drove through streets that sparkled with shattered glass-Szara later learned that fifty per cent of the annual plate glass production of Belgium, the manufacturing centre for German glass, had been smashed. At times the traffic police, after checking their Russian identity papers, would steer them politely around the damage. And here and there they sawthings: Jewish men and boys crawling around in the street or capering in the town pond, cheered on by hootingSStroopers and local Nazis. Szara knew them well enough; schoolyard bullies,beerhallfat boys, unpleasant little men with insulted faces, the same trash you would find in any town in Russia, or indeed anywhere at all.


The operative was no Jew. From his accent Szara guessed he might have origins in Byelorussia, where pogroms had been a way of life for centuries, but the events of10November had enraged him. And he swore. His thick hands gripped the wheel in fury and his face was red as a beet and he simply never stopped swearing. Long, foul, vicious Russian curses, the language of a land where the persecutors had always, somehow, remained just beyond the reach of the persecuted, which left you bad words and little else. Eventually, as a grey dawn lightened Berlin and ash drifted gently down on the immaculate streets, they reached theAdlon,where Szara was instructed to use a servants' entrance and a back stairway.


By then the operative had said it all, virtually without repeating himself, having covered Hitler,Himmler,Goring, and Heydrich, Nazis, Germans one and all, their wives and children, their grandparents and forebears back to the Teutonic tribes, their weisswurst and kartoffel, dachshunds andSchnauzers,pigs and geese, and the very earth upon which Germany stood: urged to sow its fucking self with salt and burn fallow for eternity.




11November.


By dusk the weather had turned bitter cold and it was like ice inBenno Ault'sstudio. There was little heat in the Iron Exchange Building at night; the owners maintained a certain commercial fiction, pretending that their tenants, like normal business people, hurried home after dark to the warmth of home and family. But Szara suspected thatthe blind piano tuner, the astrologer, in fact many of the resident shadows, both worked and lived in their offices.


Marta Haechtwas asleep in the bed fitted into an alcove at one end of the studio, warm beneath a mound of feather quilts that rose and fell with her steady breathing. A dreamless sleep, he suspected. Untroubled. When he'd arrived, just after dusk, the street cleaners were still at it in theBischofstrasse;he could hear them sweeping up the broken glass and dumping it in metal garbage cans.


A blanket pulled over his shoulders, he sat on the green sofa, smoked cigarettes, and stared out of the tall window. His ankle burned beneath the handkerchief he'd tied over the gash, but that wasn't what kept him awake. It was a coldness that had nothing to do with the building. He'd seen it that morning, in his room at theAdlon,when he'd looked in the mirror. His face seemed white and featureless, almost dead, the expression of a man who no longer concerns himself with what the world might see when it looked at him. Malta's breathing changed, the quilt stirred, then everything was again peaceful.A healthy animal, he thought. She'd been only briefly disturbed by the events of what they calledKristallnacht.Night of glass. A clever name, like the Night of the Long Knives, when Roehm and his Brown Shirts were murdered in1934.Not just knives-those were for brawling sailors and thieves-butlong knives. A mythic dimension. 'This is Goebbels's work,' she'd said, shaking her head at the sorry brutality of bad elements. Then she'd closed the door on it, coaxing him to her, twining herself around him, refusing to consider the possibility of the poison reaching either of them.


But it was Tscherova, the actress, who occupied his thoughts. The second secretary, Varin, and the nameless operative. The war they fought. He'd been contacted at theAdlonand told in no uncertain terms to get out of Germany and go back to Paris. His train left in the morningand he would be on it. He looked at his watch. After2:30.Itwas the morning-in seven hours he'd be gone. He'd not toldMarta Haecht,not yet, he didn't know why. He wouldn't be able to explain convincingly, but that was only part of it. He wished to keep her in his mind a certain way, without tears or, worse, dry-eyed and cool. He treasured the memory of her as she'd been-the girl who thought that deep down she was perhaps Italian, Mediterranean, softer and finer than the stiff, northern people she lived among. The girl in the falling snow.


He stood and walked to the window. By the light of the street lamps he could see a boarded-up shop window downBischofstrasse;yesterday a toy shop, evidently a Jewish toy shop. In a nearby doorway he caught a momentary pinpoint of red. A cigarette. Was this for him? Some poor bastard freezing through a long night of surveillance? An SD operative? Or somebody fromVon Polanyi'sAmt9,perhaps. Making sure their secret communicationUneinto Dzerzhinsky Square came to no harm so that Moscow continued to believe whatever Berlin wanted it to believe. Or was it a Russian down there-or a German described asnash-some operative sent to make sure nothing happened to him on Berlin territory-let him screw her, he leaves in the morning.


Or was it just a man smoking a cigarette in a doorway.


'Can't you sleep?' She was propped on one elbow, hair thick and wild. 'Come and keep warm,' she pouted, folding back the quilts as an invitation.


'In a minute,' he said. He didn't want to be warm, to fold himself around her sweetly curved back; he didn't want to make love. He wanted to think. Like the self-absorbed man he knew he was, he wanted to stay cold and think. He remembered a nursemaid in a little park in Ostend.Come escape with me.Martaflopped over on one side andgrumbled as she pulled up the bedding. Soon her breathing changed to the rhythm of sleep.


He didn't want her to know he was leaving-it was better simply to disappear. He saw a scrap of paper she used for a marker in the book she was reading-Saint-Exupéry,of all things; no, that was right-and retrieved a pen from the pocket of his jacket.Dearest love, he wrote,/had to go away this morning.Then he signed itAndré.He doubted he'd see her again, not while the war between Moscow and Berlin went on. He'd caught himself earlier in the evening in the midst of a certain kind of speculation:Her boss,Herr Hanau,owns ships. What cargoes do they carry and where do they go?No, he told himself; he wasn't going to let it come to that. Hard enough to report the truth aboutBaumannto Goldman or Abramov and keep her name out of it. Really very difficult, but he would find a way. Whether they loved each other or not they were lovers, and he was damned if he'd see her sucked into this brutal business.


'What are you writing?'


'Something to remember,' he said, and put the scrap of paper back in her book, hiding his hands behind a vase of flowers on the table. 'I thought you'd gone back to sleep,' he added.


'I fooled you,' she said.




11November. Strasbourg.


It was well after elevena.m.-the official minute of the armistice of the1914war, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month-when Szara's train crossed the border but the train's engineer was French, thus not a man to permit clocks to interfere with honour. Many of the passengers on the train got off when notified by the conductors that a three-minute observance would be held on Frenchsoil. Szara left with them, stood beneath a rich blue sky in a fresh breeze, held his hand against his heart and meant it. A few kilometres of trees and fields, yet another world: the smell of frying butter, the sound of sputtering car engines, the look in women's eyes; France. Mentally, he was down on his knees at the foot of a wind-whipped Tricolor and kissing the earth. It was as though the passage across the border had severed a tangled knot in his heart and he could breathe again.


By the time he pushed open the shutters in his musty apartment and welcomed himself back to his courtyard-busy, loud, and smelly as always-Germany seemed like a land of apparitions, a dream, a play. It made no logical sense-truly he believed that people were people-but his instinctive sense of the world told a very different story. He leaned on the windowsill, closed his eyes, and let Paris wash over him.


Theapparatdid not leave him to his pleasures for long-an hour laterOdile wasat his door to tell him he was expected at Stefan Leib's shop in Brussels that same night. Dutifully he took the train up to Belgium. Goldman shook his hand, welcomed him back like a hero, locked the door, and pulled down the shades.


If they'd given him a little room to breathe, things might have turned out differently; he would have shaped and crafted a functional deception and told them the part of the truth they needed to know: they had a compromised agent in Berlin. Not necessarily-Baumannand Von Polanyi could, at theKaiserhof,have been discussing the price of pears, orAmt9might be the section of the Foreign Office that ordered clothes hangers from wire manufacturers.


But as a rule what you got in the intelligence business was a protruding corner, almost never the whole picture. That nearly always had to be inferred. But it was enough of a corner and Szara knew it. Von Polanyi was an intelligenceofficer;Herr Hanauseemed to have said so, Vainshtok had more or less confirmed it, and that was certainly more than enough to set the dogs running. Other sources would be tapped-you had the corner, somebody else had the top of the frame, a file already held the name of the artist, a local critic would be sent in to steal the dried paint off the palette. Result: full portrait with provenance.Funkspiele.Playback.


He had quite a bit, actually. For instance, the Germans were playingDrBaumann ina very effective way. They didn't have him sneaking around dead-drops at midnight or playing host to journalists who climbed over his garden wall; they took him for an excellent lunch at the best hotel. Really, there was a lot Szara could have told them, more than enough. From there, they could have either declaredBaumanninnocent or turned the game back around on the Germans.


But he would not give themMarta Haecht,he would not compromise himself, he would not permit them to own him that completely. And if you were going to report pillow talk, because that's exactly what they called it and that's exactly what it was, you had to put a name and address to the head on the pillow.


So Szara lied. A lie of omission-the hard kind to discover. And in a way Goldman abetted the lie. With the death of Seneschal, one of the Paris networks wasn't all that productive, because there was no realistic way to regain control ofLotte Huber,and she'd been the star of the show. This had the effect of expanding Baumann's importance to the stature of theopal network itself, and Goldman asrezident was neither more nor less important than the network he ran. There was competition anywhere you cared to look; hundreds of networks spread out all over Europe, Asia, and America, every one of them run by an officer of theGRUor the NKVD who wanted success,promotion, the usual prizes. So Goldman wanted to hear everything-especially everything good for Goldman.


Szara describedBaumanntruthfully: grey, suddenly old, under frightful tension.


'It could not be otherwise,' Goldman said sympathetically.


'He almost died at the second meeting,' Szara pointed out.


'Do you know that for a fact?'


'No. It was my impression.'


'Ah.'


This information produced from Goldman a reminiscence of Spain. Some poor soul infiltrated into theFalangein1936,when the Republican side still had a chance to win the war. 'He too was grey,' Goldman mused. 'He too suffered. The pressure of living a doubleUfeconsumed him-the Bulgarian case officer watched it happen-and he died in Paris a year later.' Of what? Nobody was really sure. But Goldman and others believed it was the strain and constant danger of duplicity that finished him. AndBaumann wasnotproniknoveniya, an agent in the heart of the enemy camp, as the man in Spain had been. 'I appreciate the problem, really I do,' Goldman said. 'Just servicing a drop is enough to make some men quake with terror. From one personality to the next, courage is eternally a variable, but it is our job,AndréAronovich,to make them heroes, to give them heart.'


Thus Goldman.


An attitude sharply confirmed when Szara offered warm news of Tscherova. 'She is for the cause,' Szara said. 'I know she was coerced, originally-induced and threatened and paid and what you like. Things have changed, however. Anémigréefrom Russia she may be, but she is noémigréefrom human decency. And the Nazis themselves, by being as they are, have made us a gift of her soul.'


'What did she look like, exactly?' Goldman asked.


But Szara wasn't falling for that. 'Tall and thin. Plain-for an actress. I suppose the greasepaint and the stage lighting might make her attractive to an audience, but up close it's another story.'


'Does she play the romantic lead?'


'No. Maids.'


'Aside from the work, do you suppose she's promiscuous?'


'I don't believe so, she's not really the type. She claims to have had a lover or two in Berlin, but I believe most of that has actually been done by her associates. She is constantly around it, and she is no saint, but neither is she the devil she pretends to be. If I were you, I'd direct Schau-Wehrli to handle her carefully and to make sure nothing happens to her. She's valuable, and certainly worth protection, whatever it takes.'


Goldman nodded appreciatively. He seemed, Szara thought, more and more like StefanLeibas time went by: hair a little too long, corduroy jacket shapeless and faded, the introverted cartographer, absentminded, surrounded by his tattered old maps. 'And Germany?' he asked.


'In a word?'


'If you like.'


'An abomination.'


Goldman's mask slipped briefly and Szara had a momentary view of the man beneath it. 'We shall settle with them this time, and in a way they will not forget,' he said softly. 'The world will yet thank God for Joseph Stalin.'


WithKristallnacht,a kind of shiver passed through Paris. The French had their own problems: communists and the Comintern, the fascistCroix de Feu,conspiracy and political actions among the variousémigrégroups, strikes and riots, bank failures and scandals-all against a deafeningdrumbeat from the Senate and the ministries. Stripped of all the rhetoric, it came outtrouble in Germany and Russia, now what? They'd not really got over the Great War-there was a political sophism afoot that the French did not die well, that they loved life a little more than they should. But in the1914war they had died anyhow, and in great numbers. And for what? Because now, twenty years later, the trouble was back, three hundred miles east of Paris.


Troubles from the east were nothing new. Napoleon's experiment in Russia hadn't gone at all well, and with the defeat at Waterloo in1815,Russian squadrons, among them the Preobajansky Guard, had occupied Paris. But the French were never quite as defeated as you thought they were; the Russians had, in time, gone home, bearing with them various French maladies of which two proved ultimately to be chronic: unquenchable appetites for champagne and liberty, the latter eventually leading to the Decembrist uprising of1825 -the first in a series of revolutions ending in1917.


But the present trouble from the east was German trouble, and the French could think of nothing worse. Burned in1870and scorched in1914,they prayed it would go away. Hitler was suchacui,with his little moustache and his little strut; nobody wanted to take him seriously. ButKristallnacht wasserious, broken glass and broken heads, and Frenchmen knew in their stomachs what that meant no matter what the politicians said. They had tried to manoeuvre diplomatically with Stalin, figuring that with an alliance on either side of Hitler they could crush the shitty little weasel between them. But, manoeuvring with Stalin. . .You thought you had it all agreed and then something always just seemed to go wrong.


The days grew shorter and darker but the bistros did not grow brighter-not this year they didn't. The fog swirledalong therue du Cherche-Midiand Szara sometimes went home with the carefree girls from thecafés, butit never made him all that happy. He thought it would, each time-oh, that strawberry blond hair and those freckles-but only the usual things happened. He missed being in love-definitely he missed that-but winter1938didn't seem to be the season for it. So he told himself.


Life ground on.


Baumannreported obediently, milling more swage wire every month as the bombers rolled out of the Reich factories.


Or maybe didn't.


Or maybe did even more than Moscow knew.


The lawyerValais,hector,picked up a new agent, a mercenary Bavarian corporal called Gettig who assisted one of the German militaryattachés. Odile'shusband ran off with a little Irish girl who worked in a milliner's sewing room. Kranov now wore a thick sweater in the cold upstairs room on the rue Delesseux and stolidly punched away at the W/T key: the eternal Russian peasant in the technological age. To Szara he became a symbol, as the journalist for the first time sawopal clearly for what it was: a bureaucratic institution in the business of stealing and transmitting information. It was Kranov who handed Szara the decoded flimsy announcing the accession of Lavrenti Beria to the chairmanship of the NKVD. The official triumph of the Georgiankhvost meant little to Szara at the time; it was simply one more manifestation of a bloody darkness that had settled on the world. When Beria cleaned the last of the Old Bolsheviks out of high positions in the intelligenceapparat,the purge ended.


In the middle of December they came at him again-this time from a different angle, and this time they meant it. A stiff, creamy envelope addressed to him, by hand, atthePravda bureau, the sort of thing journalists sometimes got.Le Cercle Rénaissanceinvites you...A square of clear cellophane slipped from within the card and floated to the floor at his feet. He didn't bite the first time so they tried him again-just before Christmas when nobody in Paris has enough invitations-and this time somebody took a Mont Blanc pen and wroteWon't you please come? below the incised lettering.


It meant the barber and it meant the dry cleaner and it meant a white shirt laundered to the consistency of teak-expensive indignities to which he submitted in the vain, vain hope that the invitation was precisely what it said it was. He checked the organization, the Renaissance Club; it did exist, and it was extremely exclusive. One of the excluded, a guest at a gallery opening, shot an eyebrow when he heard the name and said, 'You are very fortunate to be asked there,' with sincere and visible loathing in his expression.


The address was in Neuilly, home to some of the oldest and quietest money in France. The street, once the frantic taxi driver managed to find it, was a single row of elegant three-storey houses protected by wrought-iron palings, discreetly obscured by massed garden foliage-even in December-and bathed in a satin light by Victorian street lamps. The other side of the street was occupied by a private park, to which residents received a key, and beyond that lay the Seine.


A steward collected Szara's dripping umbrella and showed him up three flights of stairs to a small library. A waiter appeared and set down an ivory tray bearing a Cinzanoapéritifand a dish of nuts. Abandoned to a great hush broken only by an occasional mysterious creak, Szara wandered along the shelves, sampling here and there. The collection was exclusively concerned with railways, and it was beautifully kept; almost all the books had beenrebound. Some were privately printed, many were illustrated, with captioned sepia prints and daguerreotypes:


On the platform at Ebenfurih,StationmasterHofmannwaits to flag through the Vienna-Budapest mail.


Flatcars loaded with timber cross a high trestle in the mountains of Bosnia.


The7:03from Geneva passes beneath the rueLamartineoverpass.


'So pleased you've come,' said a voice from the doorway. He was rather ageless, perhaps in the last years of his fifties, with faded steel-coloured hair brushed very flat against the sides of his head. Tall and politely stooped, he was wearing a formal dinner jacket and a bow tie that had gone slightly askew. He'd evidently walked a short distance through the rain without coat or umbrella and was patting his face with a folded handkerchief. 'I'm Josephde Montfried,'he said. He articulated the name carefully, sounding the hardt and separating the two syllables, the latter lightly emphasized, as though it were a difficult name and often mispronounced. Szara was amused-a cultured Frenchman would as likely have got the BarondeRothschild's name wrong. This family too had a baron, Szara knew, but he believed that was the father, or the uncle.


'Do you like the collection?' said with sincerity, as though it mattered whether Szara liked it or not.


'It's yours?'


'Part of mine. Most of it's at home, up the street, and I keep some in the country. But the club has been indulgent with me, and I've spared them walls of leatherbound Racine that nobody's ever read.' He laughed self-consciously. 'What've you got there?' Szaraturned the book's spine toward him.'Karl Borns,yes. A perfect madman, Boms, had his funeral cortege on theZürichlocal. The local!' He laughed again. 'Please,' he said, indicating that Szara should sit down at one end of a couch.DeMontfried took a club chair.


'We'll have supper right here, if you don't mind. Do you?'


'Of course not.'


'Good. Sandwiches and something to drink. I've got to meet my wife for some beastly charity thing at ten-my days of eating two dinners are long over, I'm afraid.'


Szara did mind. Going upstairs, he'd caught a glimpse of a silk-walled dining room and a glittering array of china and crystal. All that money invested at the barber and the dry cleaner and now sandwiches. He tried to smile like a man who gets all the elaborate dinners he cares to have.


'Shall we stay in French?'deMontfried asked. 'I can try to get along in Russian, but I'm afraid I'll say awful things.'


'You speak Russian?'


'Grew up speaking Frenchen familleand Russian to the servants. My father and uncle built much of the Russian railway system, then came the revolution and the civil war and most of it was destroyed. Very entrepreneurial place-at one time anyhow. How's it go? "Sugar by Brodsky, Tea by Vysotsky, Revolution by Trotsky." I suppose it's aimed at Jews, but it's reasonably faithful to what happened. Oh well.' He pressed a button on the wall and a waiter appeared almost instantly.DeMontfried ordered sandwiches and wine, mentioning only the year,'27.The waiter nodded and closed the door behind him.


They chatted for a time.DeMontfried found out quite a bit about him, the way a certain kind of aristocrat seemed able to do without appearing to pry. The trick of it, Szara thought, lay in the sincerity of the voice and the eyes-I am so very interested in you.The man seemed to find everything he said fascinating or amusing or cleverly put. Soon enough he found himself trying to make it so.


There was no need for Szara to find out whodeMontfried was. He knew the basic outline: a titled Jewish family, with branches in London, Paris, and Switzerland. Enormously wealthy, appropriately charitable, exceptionally private, and virtually without scandal. Old enough so that the money, like game, was well cured. Szara caught himself seeking something Jewish in the man, but there was nothing, in the features or the voice, that he could identify; the only notable characteristics were the narrow head and small ears that aristocrats had come to share with their hunting dogs.


The sandwiches were, Szara had to admit, extremely good. Open-faced, sliced duck or smoked salmon, with little pots of flavoured mayonnaise andcornichonsto make them interesting. The wine, according to its white and gold label, was apremiercruBeaunecalledChâteau deMontfried-it was easily the best thing Szara had ever tasted.


'We've my father to thank for this,'deMontfried said of the wine, holding it up against the light. 'After we were tossed out of Russia he took an interest in the vineyards, more or less retired down there. For him, there was something rather biblical in it:work thy vines. I don't know if it actually says that anywhere, but he seemed to think it did.'DeMontfried was hesitantly sorrowful; the world would not, he understood, be much moved by small tragedies in his sort of family.


'It is extraordinary,' Szara said.


DeMontfried leaned toward him slightly, signalling a shift in the conversation. 'You are recommended to me, Monsieur Szara, by an acquaintance who is called?loch.'


'Yes?'


De Montfriedpaused, but Szara had no further comment. He reached into the inside pocket of his dinner jacket, withdrew an official-looking document with stamps and signatures at the bottom, and handed it to Szara. 'Do you know what this is?'


The paper was in English, Szara started to puzzle through it.


'It's an emigration certificate for British Palestine,'deMontfried said. 'Or Eretz Israel-a name I prefer. It's valuable, it's rare, hard to come by, and it's what I want to talk to you about.' He hesitated, then continued. 'Please be good enough to stop this discussion, now, if you feel I 'm exceeding a boundary of any kind. Once we go further, I 'm going to have to ask you to be discreet.'


'I understand,' Szara said.


'No hesitation? It would be understandable, certainly, if you felt there were just too many complications in listening to what I have to say.'


Szara waited.


'According to Monsieur Bloch, you were witness to the events in Berlin last month. He seems to feel that you might, on that basis, be willing to provide assistance for a project in which I take a great interest.'


'What project is that?'


'May I pour you a little more wine?'


Szara extended his glass.


'I hope you'll forgive me if I work up to a substantive description in my own way. I don't want to bore you, and I don't want you to think me a hopeless naif-it's just that I've had experience of conversations about the Jewish return to Palestine and, well, it can be difficult, even unpleasant, as any political discussion is likely to be. Polite people avoid certain topics, experience shows the wisdom in that. Like one's dreams or medical condition-it's just better to find something else to talk about.


Unfortunately, the world is now acting in such a way as to eliminate that courtesy, among many others, so I can only ask your forbearance.'


Szara's smile was sad and knowing, with the sort of compassion that has been earned from daily life. He was that listener who can be told anything without fear of criticism because he has heard and seen worse than whatever you might contrive to say. He withdrew a packet ofGitanes, litone, and exhaled./cannot be offended,said the gesture.


'At the beginning of the Great War, in1914,Great Britain found itself fighting in the Middle East against Turkey. The Jews in Palestine were caught up in the Turkish war effort-taxed into poverty, drafted into the Turkish armies. A certain group of Jews, in the town of Zichron Yaakov, not far from Haifa, believed that Great Britain ought to win the war in the Middle East, but what could they do? Well, for a small, determined group of people arrayed against a major power there is only one traditional answer, other than prayer, and that is espionage. Thus a botanist named Aaron Aaronson, his sister Sarah, an assistant called AvshalomFeinberg,and several others formed a network they callednili-it's taken from a phrase in the Book of Samuel, an acronym of the Hebrew initials forThe Eternal One of Israel will not prove false. The conspiracy was based at the Atlit Experimental Station and was facilitated by Aaron Aaronson's position as chief of the locust control unit-he could show up anywhere, for instance at Turkish military positions, without provoking suspicion. Meanwhile Sarah Aaronson, who was ravishing, became a fixture at parties attended by high-ranking Turkish officers. The British at first were suspicious-the Aaronsons did not ask for money-but eventually, in1917,niliproduct was accepted by British officers stationed on ships anchored off Palestine. There were-it's a typical problem, I understand-communications difficulties, andAvshalomFeinbergset out across the Sinai desert to make contact with the British. He was ambushed by Arab raiders and murdered near Rafah, in the Gaza strip. Local legend has it that he was buried in the sand at the edge of the town and a palm tree grew up from his bones, seeded by dates he carried in his pockets. Then the spy ring was uncovered-too many people knew about it-and Sarah Aaronson was arrested by the Turks and tortured for four days. At that point she tricked her captors into letting her use the washroom, unsupervised, where she had secreted a revolver, and took her own life. All the other members of the network were captured by the Turks, tortured and executed, except for Aaron Aaronson, who survived the war only to die in a plane crash in the English Channel in1919.


'Of course the Arabs fought on the side of the British as well-they too wished an end to Turkish occupation-and their revolt was led by skilled British military intelligence officers, such asT. E.Lawrence and Richard Meinertzhagen. The Arabs believed they were fighting for independence, but it did not quite turn out that way. When the smoke cleared, when Allenby took Jerusalem, the British ruled Mandate Palestine and the French held Syria and the Lebanon.


'But theNilinetwork was not the only effort made on Britain's behalf by the Jews. Far more important, in its ultimate effect, was the contribution ofDr ChaimWeizmann. Weizmann is well known as a Zionist, he is an articulate and persuasive man, but he is also known, by people who have an interest in the area, as a biochemist. While teaching and doing research at the University of Manchester, he discovered a method of producing synthetic acetone by a process of natural fermentation. As Great Britain's war against Germany intensified, they discovered themselves running out of acetone, which is the solvent that must beused in the manufacture of cordite, a crucial explosive in artillery shells and bullets. In1916Weizmann was summoned before Winston Churchill, at that time first lord of the Admiralty. Churchill said, "Well,DrWeizmann, we need thirty thousand tons of acetone. Can you make it?" Weizmann did not rest until he'd done it, ultimately taking over many of Britain's large whisky distilleries until production plants could be built.


'Did Weizmann's action produce the Balfour Declaration? It did not hurt, certainly. In1917Balfour, as foreign secretary, promised that the British government would "use their best endeavours to facilitate the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." The League of Nations and other countries supported that position. It would be pleasant to think Weizmann had a hand in that, but the British are a wonderfully practical people, and what they wanted at that moment was America's entry into the war against the Germans, and it was felt that Lord Balfour's declaration would mobilize American Jewish opinion in that direction. But Weizmann played his part.'


De Montfriedpaused, refilled Szara's glass, then his own. 'By now, Monsieur Szara, you likely see where this is headed.'


'Yes and no,' Szara said. 'And the story isn't over.'


'That's true, it continues. But this much can be said: the survival of Jewish Palestine depends on the attitude of the British, and from that perspective, the Chamberlain government has been a disaster.'


'The Czechs would certainly agree.'


'No doubt. When Chamberlain, after giving in to Hitler in September, asked why Great Britain should risk war for the sake of what he called "a far-away country of which we know very little and whose language we don't understand," people who share my views were horrified.If he perceived the Czechs in that way, what does he think about the Jews?'


'You see Munich as a moral failure, then.'


De Montfriedteetered on the edge of indignation, then asked quietly, 'Don't you?'


He wasn't precisely angry, Szara thought. Simply, momentarily, balked. And he wasn't used to that. His life was ordered to keep him clear of uncertainties of any kind, and Szara had, rather experimentally, said something unexpected. TodeMontfried it was like being served cold coffee for breakfast-it wasn't wrong, it was unthinkable.


'Yes, I do,' Szara said at last. 'But one ought to wonder out loud what Chamberlain was hearing from the other end of the conference table-from the generals, and the discreet gentlemen in dark suits. But then, after they made their case, he had the choice to believe them or not. And then to act. I can theorize that what he heard concerned what might happen to England's cities, particularly London, if they started a war with Germany-bombers and bomb tonnage and what happened in Guernica when it was bombed. People get hurt in war.'


'People get hurt in peace,'deMontfried said. 'In Palestine, since1920,Arab mobs have murdered hundreds of Jewish settlers, and the British Mandate police haven't always shown much interest in stopping them.'


'Great Britain runs on oil, which the Arabs have and it doesn't.'


'That's true,Monsieur Szara, but it's not the whole story. Like Lawrence, many officials in the British Foreign Service idealize the Arabs-the fierce and terrible purity of the desert and all that sort of thing. Whereas with the Jews, well, all you get is a bunch of Jews.'


Szara laughed appreciatively anddeMontfried softened. 'For a moment,' he said, 'I was afraid we were very far apart in the way we see these things.'


'No. I don't think so. But yourChâteau deMontfried gives one an elevated view of existence, so I'm afraid you're going to have to be very direct with me.'


Szara waited to see what that might produce.DeMontfried thought for a time, then said, 'The Arabs have made it clear they don't want Jewish settlement in the Middle East. Some are more hostile than others-several of the diplomats, in person, are more than decent in their understanding of our difficulties and not insensible to what we have to offer them. The German migration brought to Palestine a storehouse of technical information: medicine, engineering, horticulture; and they are people for whom the sharing of knowledge is instinctive, second nature. But RashidAliin Iraq is a creature of the Nazis and so is the mufti of Jerusalem. They've chosen the Gennan side;other Arabs may join them if they don't get what they want. England is in a difficult position: how to retain the good will of the Arab nations without alienating America and other liberal countries. So they've adopted, on the subject of the Jewish question, a regime of conferences and more conferences. Instead of actually doing something, they have taken refuge in deciding what to do. I'll grant it's a legitimate diplomatic manoeuvre, one way to simply avoid trouble: thus the Peel Report and the Woodhead Commission and theÉvianConference, and next we're to have, in February, the St James's Conference, after which a White Paper will be issued. Meanwhile,Kristallnacht. . .'


'That was not a conference,' Szara said.


'Hitler spoke to the world: Jews may not live in Germany any longer, this is what we intend to do to them. A hundred dead, thousands beaten, tens of thousands locked up in the Dachau andBuchenwaldcamps. The Gennan and Austrian Jews certainly understood; they're fighting to get out any way they can. But the problem is, they can't just get out, they have to go somewhere, and there is nowherefor them to go. I happen to have a rather accurate forecast of the White Paper that's going to be written after the St James's Conference. You, ah, journalists will understand how one comes upon such things.'


'One is never entirely without friends. One had better not be, at any rate.'


'Just so. We hear that emigration to Mandate Palestine is going to be limited to fifteen thousand Jews a year for five years, then it stops dead. At the moment, there are still three hundred thousand Jews in Germany, another sixty-five thousand remain in Austria, and only fifteen thousand of them can get into Palestine. And, if this thing were somehow to spread to Poland-and the way Hitler talks about Poland is the way he used to talk about theSudetenland-then what? That's three million three hundred thousand more.'


'What is being done?'


DeMontfried leaned back in his chair and stared. His eyes were dark, difficult to read, but Szara sensed a conflict between mistrust-the natural, healthy sort-and the need to confide.


'Beginnings,' he said finally. 'From all points on the political compass, the established groups have been fighting this battle for years-the labour people in the Histadrut, Vladimir Jabotinsky's New Zionists and the organization they call Betar. DavidBen-Gurionand the Jewish Agency. And others, many others, are doing what they can. It is a political effort-letters written, favours called in, donations given, resolutions passed. It all creates a kind of presence. Also, in Palestine there is the Haganah, a fighting force, and its information bureau, known as Sherut Yediot, generally called Shai, its first initial. But it is all they can do to keep the Jews ofPalestine alive.


'Then, just lately, there is something more. As you know, emigration to Palestine is called by the name Aliyah.


The word has the sense ofreturn. The British entry certificates permit a few thousand people a year into the country, and there is a Jewish organization to administer the details-travel, reception, and so on. But there exists within that group, in its shadow, another. There are only ten of them at the moment, nine men and a very young woman, who call themselves the Mossad Aliyah Bet, that is, the Institute for Aliyah?-the letter indicates illegal, as opposed to legal, emigration. This group is now in the process of leasing ships-whatever derelict hulk can be found in the ports of southern Europe-and they intend to bring Jews out of danger and effect clandestine landings on the coast of Palestine.'


'Will they succeed?'


"They will try. And I am in sympathy with them. A moment comes and if you wish to look upon yourself as human you must take some kind of action. Otherwise, you can read the newspapers and congratulate yourself on your good fortune. Weizmann, however, makes an interesting point. AfterKristallnachthe said to Anthony Eden that the fire in the German synagogues may easily spread to Westminster Abbey. So the self-congratulatory souls may one day have their own moment of reckoning, we shall see.'


'And you, Monsieurde Montfried,what is it that you do?'


'I invite you to the Renaissance Club of Neuilly, among other things. I somehow happen to meet Monsieur Bloch. I have a few friends, here and there; we try to spend money wisely, in the right places. When I can, I tell important people those things I believe they ought to know.'


'A group of friends. It has, perhaps, a name?'


'No.'


'Truly?'


'The less official the better, is what we think. One canbe without structure of any kind and still be of enormous help.'


'What kind of help, MonsieurdeMontfried?'


'There are two areas in which we have a very special interest. The first is simple: legitimate emigration certificates above and beyond the publicly stated number allowed by the British foreign office. Each one represents several lives saved, because they can be used by families. The second area is not simple, but can be of far greater impact. Shall we call it a demonstration? As good a word as any. A demonstration that groups sympathetic to Jewish settlement in Palestine are a source of assistance that the British cannot ignore. It's a way of buying influence-asniij did, as Weizmann did, by serving the interests of the governing nation. It's what, finally, the British understand. Quid pro quo. The White Paper will be debated in Parliament, where there are those who want to help us; we'd like to make it easier for them. The only way to accomplish that is with concrete acts, something definite they can point to. Not in public. Nothing happens in public. But in the halls, in the cloakrooms, the gentlemen's clubs, the country houses-that's where the serious business is done. That's where we must be represented.'


'Can the emigration certificates be produced privately?'


'Forged, you mean.'


'Yes.'


'Of course it's tried, and if one can be proud of forgers, Jewish forgers are among the best, though they have been known to go off on their own and produce the occasional Rembrandt.


'Unfortunately, the British have a tendency to count. And their colonial bureaucracy is efficient. The weakness in the system is that the civil servants in their passport offices are underpaid, a situation that leads only one place. Bribes have been offered, and accepted.


Also discovered. The same situation is present in many embassies: Argentine,Libertan,Guatemalan-Jews are turning up as citizens of virtually everywhere. There are also instances where passport officers just give in to compassion when confronted with the unbearable condition of certain applicants-the horrors of this thing simply multiply the more you look at it. But forgery and bribery and whatever else occurs to you do not begin to create the numbers we need. What we have in mind is quite different, a private arrangement that produces real certificates.'


'Difficult. And sensitive.'


DeMontfried smiled. 'Monsieur Bloch has great faith in you.'


"Theoretically, in what way would a Soviet journalist involve himself in such matters?'


'Who can say? It's been my experience ofUfethat one does not try to control influential people. One can only present one's case and hope for the best. If on reflection you find yourself in agreement with what has been said here this evening, you'll find a way, I suspect, to bring your abilities to bear on the situation. I myself don't know the solution, so I seek people out and pose the problem. But if I could believe that you would go home tonight and think about these matters I would be frankly overjoyed.'


Gently, and by mutual agreement, the conversation was allowed to drift off into pleasantries and, just in time fordeMontfried to attend his 'beastly charity thing,' they parted. Outside the little library, a club member with a bright red face and white hair greeteddeMontfried effusively, pretending to pull an engineer's whistle cord and making the French sound fortoot, toot.DeMontfried laughed heartily, the most amiable fellow imaginable. 'We've known each other forever,' he said to Szara. They shook hands in the downstairs hall and the stewardreturned Szara's umbrella, which had apparently been dried with a cloth.




January1939.


08942 57661 44898


And so on, which turned out to meanSnovymgodomandSnovym schastyem-happy new year and the best to you all-cold and formal wishes from the Great Father Stalin. During his week in Berlin, Szara had found himself in the neighbourhood of the storage building that held the painting with the DUBOK dossier secreted behind the canvas. It had seemed to him remote, and very much beside the point. 77ii$is a lesson about time, he thought. With the surge of German power into Austria and Czechoslovakia, Russia assumed the role of counterweight, and if Stalin had been vulnerable when he decimated the military and intelligence services, he wasn't now. Hitler was driving the world to his door. Stalin's murders were achieved in basements; Hitler's work was photographed for the newspapers. Russia was weak, full of starving peasants. Germany buUt superb locomotives. The Okhrana dossier had best remain where it was.


In early January, Szara suddenly ran a terrible fever. He lay amid soaked sheets; saw, when he closed his eyes, the splashing in the moonlit river Havel and heard, again and again, the scream for mercy. It was not delirium, it was a sickened memory that refused to heal. He sawMartaHaecht dancing in the yard of a thatched-roof cottage in some Ukrainian ghetto village. He saw the eyes of people who had stared at him in Berlin, a long tile hall, the broken face of a Wittenau policeman, the room in the narrow house. It had no name, this sickness; that was its secret, he thought; it fed deep, where words and ideas didn't reach. He tried the writer's time-honoured cure: writing. Unshaven, in wrinkled pyjamas, he spent a few morningsat it, producing journalistic short stories in pursuit of the German character. Brutal, nasty stuff. He attacked hypocrisy, cruelty, fulminous envy, an obsessive sense of having been wronged, grievously, and misunderstood, eternally. Rereading, he was both horrified and pleased, recalled Lenin's wondrously sly dictum that 'paper will stand for anything you write on it,' and thought for a moment he might actually seek publication. But it was not, he came to realize, the blow he needed to strike. All it would do was make them angry. And they already were that, most of the time. It was not something he'd accused them of, yet in some ways he saw it as their dominant characteristic-he had no idea why, not really. One morning, as a fall of thick, wet snowflakes silenced the city, he tore the stories up.


Schau-Wehrli was his January angel, crisscrossed the icy streets of Paris and made histreffs withValais,paid the concierge to bring him bowls of thick, amber soup, and sat on the edge of his bed when she had a spare moment. He came to understand, eventually, that the possibility of feverish babbling made them nervous-they didn't want him in the hospital. Nobody quite said anything about it, but a doctor from the medical faculty at theSorbonne,a sympathizer, suddenly made house calls to a man with a bad fever. A professor with a grand beard, peering down at him from the heights of professional achievement to say 'Rest and keep warm and drink plenty of hot tea.'


WhenSchau-Wehrli stopped by they'd gossip-like himself, she really had no one to talk to. After the meeting in the Berlin theatre, she told him, Tscherova had apparently redoubled her efforts, joining the rather lively circles of young, Nazi party intellectuals and thus manoeuvring hersubagentsinto extremely productive relationships. 'What did you do to her?'Schau-Wehrli would ask, teasing him as a great lover. He would smile weakly. 'Really nothing. Sheis just so...so Russian/ he would say. 'A little sympathy, a kind word, and a flower suddenly blooms.'


The fever broke after ten days and slowly Szara began to work again. In the last week of January, Abramov ordered a third-country meeting to pursue certain details regarding a reorganization of theopal network. This time it was to be in Switzerland, near the town of Sion, a couple of hours up theRhônevalley from Geneva, on the night of7February. The transmission took its time coming in and Kranov was annoyed. 'They've changed W/T operators again,' he said, lighting a cigarette and sitting back in his chair. 'Slow as mud, this new one.'


Goldman wired the following day, ordering-as he had when Szara had gone to Berlin-a piggyback courier delivery. Sixty thousand French francs were to be taken to Lausanne on the day after his meeting with Abramov and passed, using a complicated identification/parol procedure, to an unnamed individual. This was a lot of money, and it caused a problem. Couriers were limited to a certain level of funds; after that Moscow, evidently in fear of temptation, dictated the presence of a second courier, specifically a diplomatic or intelligence officer and not just a network agent likeOdile.


So Maltsaev told him, anyhow.


Szara was eating dinner at his neighbourhood bistro,LeTempsfolded in half and propped up against the mustard pot, when a man materialized across the table and introduced himself. 'Get in touch with Ilya Goldman,' he said by way of establishing hisbonafides. 'He'll confirm who I am-we were in Madrid together. At the embassy.'He was now in Paris, he continued, on temporary assignment from Belgrade, where he'd been political officer for a year or so.


Szara immediately disliked him. Maltsaev was a dark, balding young man with a bad skin and a sour disposition, a man much given to sinister affectations, a man who spokealways as though he were saying only a small fraction of what he actually knew. He wore tinted eyeglasses and a voluminous black overcoat of excellent quality.


Maltsaev made it clear that he found courier work boring and very much beneath him-the order to accompany Szara to Switzerland offended him in any number of ways. 'These little czars in Moscow,' he said with a sneer, 'throw roubles around as though the world were ending tomorrow.' He had a pretty good idea what went on in Lausanne, he confided, typical of the deskbound comrades to try and solve the problem with money. Typical also that some unseen controller in the Dzerzhinsky Squareapparatwas using the occasion to make Maltsaev'sUfemiserable, screwing him with some witless assignment that could be handled by any numskull operative. 'Another enemy,' he grumbled. Somebody jealous of his promotions or his assignment in Paris. 'But next we'll see if he gets away with it. Maybe not, eh?' He pointed at Szara's plate. 'What's that?'


'Andouillette,' Szara said.


'What is it? A sausage? What's in it?'


'You won't want it if I tell you,' Szara said.


'Probably the chef's mistress,' Maltsaev said with a laugh. 'Order me a steak. Cooked. No blood or back it goes.' His eyes were animated behind the tinted lenses, flicking around the room, staring at the other customers. Then he leaned confidentially toward Szara. 'Who is this Abramov you're going to see?' He looked triumphant and pleased with himself-surprised I know that?


'Boss. One of them, anyhow.'


'A big shot?'


'He sits on one Directorate, certainly. Perhaps others, I don't know.'


'Old friend, I'll bet. The way things go these days, you don't last long without a protector, right?'


Szara shrugged. 'Everybody's got their own story-mine's not like that. It's all business with Abramov.'


'Is it.'


'Yes.'


'Hey!' Maltsaev called as a waiter went past and ignored him.


It snowed on the night of the sixth, and by the time Szara and Maltsaev left theGare de Lyon onthe seventh of February the fields and villages of France were still and white.The nineteenth century, Szara thought with longing: a pair of frost-coated dray horses pulling a cart along a road, a girl in a stocking cap skating on a pond near Melun. The sky was dense and swollen; sometimes a flight of crows circled over the snow-covered fields. But for the presence of Maltsaev, it would have been a time for dreaming. The frozen world outside the train window was unmoving, cold and peaceful, smoke from farmhouse chimneys the only sign of humanUfe.


Following the rules, they had booked the compartment for themselves, so they were alone. Szara kept a hand or a foot in permanent contact with the small travelling case that held the sixty thousand francs, each packet of hundred-franc notes bound by a strip of paper with Cyrillic initials on it. But even though they were alone, Maltsaev spoke obliquely:your friend in Sion, the man in Brussels. A glutton's appetite for gossip, Szara thought. Who do you know? How do the loyalties work? What's the real story? Maltsaev was the classic opportunist, probing for whatever you might have that he could use. Szara parried him on every point, but felt that eventually the sheer weight of the attack might wear him down. To escape, he feigned drowsiness. Maltsaev sneered with delight: 'Going to dreamland with our dear gold on your lap?'


They'd left at dawn, and it was again dark when theyreached Geneva. They walked three blocks from the railway station and found the OpelOlympiathat had been left in front of a commercial travellers' hotel, the ignition key taped to the base of the steering wheel column. Szara drove. Maltsaev sat beside him, smoking his cardboard-tipped Belomor cigarettes, a road map spread across his lap. They circled the north shore of LakeLemanon good roads in intermittent light snow, then, afterVilleneuve,began to climb over the mountain passes.


Here the weather cleared and there was a bright, sharp moon, its light sparkling on the ice crystal in the banked snow at the sides of the road. Sometimes, on the curves, they could see down into the valleys spread out below: clusters of stone villages, ice rivers, empty roads. The sense of deep silence and distance at last reached Maltsaev, who ceased talking and stared out of the window. By ten o'clock they had descended to Martigny and turned north on the narrow plain by theRhône,here an overgrown mountain stream. There was hardpack snow on the roads and Szara drove carefully but steadily, encountering only one or two cars along the way.


Sion was dark, no lights anywhere, and they had to hunt for a time until they found the gravel road that went up the mountainside. Five minutes later the grade flattened out and they rolled to a stop in front of an old hotel, tyres crunching on newly fallen snow. The hotel-a carved sign above the arched doorway saidHôtel du Vaz-was timber and stucco capped by a steep slate roof hung with icicles. It stood high above the road, at the edge of a shimmering white meadow that sloped gently toward the edge of an evergreen forest. The ground-floor shutters were closed; behind them was a faint glow, perhaps a single lamp in what Szara presumed to be a reception area in the lobby. When he turned off the ignition and climbed out of the Opel, he could hear the sound of the wind at the corner ofthe building. There were no other cars to be seen; perhaps it was a summer hotel, he thought, where people came in order to walk in the mountains.


Maltsaev got out of the car and closed the door carefully. From an upper window, Szara heard Abramov's voice.'AndréAronovich?'


'Yes,' Szara called. 'Come down and let us in. It's freezing.'


'Who is with you?'


Looking up, Szara saw one shutter partly opened. Before he could respond, Maltsaev whispered, 'Don't say my name.'


Szara stared at him, not understanding. 'Answer him,' Maltsaev said urgently, gripping him hard at the elbow. Abramov must have seen the gesture, Szara thought. Because a moment later they heard the sound, eerily loud in the still, cold air, of a heavy man descending an exterior staircase, perhaps at the back of the hotel. A man in a hurry.


Maltsaev, coat flapping, started to run, and Szara, not knowing what else to do, followed. They were immediately slowed when they moved around the side of the hotel because here the snow was deeper, up to their knees, which made running almost impossible. Maltsaev swore as he stumbled forward. They heard a shout from the trees and to their left. Then it was repeated, urgently. A threat, Szara realized, spoken in Russian.


They came around the corner at the back of the hotel and stopped. Abramov, in a dark suit and homburg hat, was trying to run across the snow-covered meadow. It was absurd, almost comic. He struggled and floundered and slipped, went down on one hand, rose, lifted his knees high for a few steps, fell again, then lurched forward as he tried to reach the edge of the forest, leaving behind him a broken, white path. The homburg suddenly tilted to oneside and Abramov grabbed it frantically, instinctively, and held the brim tightly as he ran, as though, late for work, he were running to catch a tram in a city street.


The marksmen in the forest almost let him reach the trees. The first shot staggered him but he kept on a little, only slower, then the second shot brought him down. The reports echoed off the side of the mountain, then faded into silence. Maltsaev walked into the meadow, Szara followed, moving along the broken path. It was slippery and difficult, and soon they were breathing hard. Just before they reached him, Abramov managed to turn on his side. His hat had rolled away and there was snow caught in his beard. Maltsaev stood silently and tried to catch his breath. Szara knelt down. He could see that Abramov had bled into the snow. His eyes were closed, then they flickered open for a moment, perhaps he saw Szara. He made a single sound, a guttural sigh,'Ach,'of exhaustion and irritation, of dismissal, and then he was gone.










The RenaissanceClub




At the Brasserie Heininger, at the far corner table where you could see everyone and everyone could see you, seated below the scrupulously preserved bullet hole in the vast and golden mirror,André Szaraworked hard at being charming and tried to quiet a certain interior voice that told him to shut up and go home.


A newcomer to the crowd of regulars at the corner table, and so the centre of attention, he proposed a toast: 'I would like us to drink to the love...to the hopeless loves...of our childhood days.' Was there a split second of hesitation-my God, is he going to weep?-before the chorus of approval? But then he didn't weep; his fingers combed a longish strand of black hair off his forehead and he smiled a vulnerable smile. Then everyone realized how very right the toast was, how very righthe was, the emotional Russian long after midnight, in his grey tie and soft maroon shirt, not exactly drunk, just intimate and daring.


That he was. Beneath the tablecloth, his hand rested warmly on the thigh of Lady Angela Hope, a pillar of the Paris night and a woman he'd been specifically told to avoid. With his other hand, he drank RoedererCristalfrom a gold-rimmed champagne flute which, thanks to the attentions of a clairvoyant waiter, turned out to be perfectly full every time he went to pick it up. He smiled, he laughed, he said amusing things, and everyone thought he was wonderful, everyone: Voyschinkowsky, 'the Lion of the Bourse'; Ginger Pudakis, the English wife of the Chicago meat-packing king; the Polish Countess?—,who, when properly intrigued, made ingenious gardensfor her friends; the terrible Roddy Pitzware,mad, bad, and dangerous to know. In fact the whole pack of them, ten at last count, hung on his every word. Was his manner perhaps just a shade more Slavic than it really needed to be? Perhaps. But he did not care. He smoked and drank like an affable demon, said, 'For a drunkard the sea is only knee deep!' and other proverbial Russianisms as they came to him, and generally made a grand and endearing fool of himself.


Yet-he was more Slavic than they knew-the interior voice refused to be still.Stop, it said.This is not in your best interest; you will suffer, you will regret it, they will catch you. He ignored it. Not that it was wrong, in fact he knew it was right, but still he ignored it.


Voyschinkowsky, inspired by the toast, was telling a story: 'It was my father who took me to the Gypsy camp. Imagine, to go out so late at night, and to such a place! I could not have been more than twelve years old, but when she began to dance. . .'Lady Angela's leg pressed closer under the table, a hand appeared through the smoky air, and a stream of pale Cristal fizzed into his glass. What other wine, someone had said of champagne, can you hear?


like Lady Angela Hope, the Brasserie Heininger was notorious. In the spring of'37it had been the site of, as the Parisians put it,lune affaire bizarre'-, the main dining room had been sprayed with tommy guns, the Bulgarianmaîtred' had been assassinated in the ladies' WC, and a mysterious waiter called Nick had disappeared soon after. Such violently Balkan goings-on had made the place madly popular; the most desirable table directly beneath the golden mirror with a single bullet hole; in fact the only mirror that survived the incident. Otherwise, it was just one more brasserie, where moustached waiters hurried among the red plush banquettes with platters of crayfish and grilled sausage, a taste offin-de-sičcledeviltry whileoutside the February snow drifted down into the streets of Paris and cabmen tried to keep warm.


As for Lady Angela Hope, she was notorious among two very different sets: the late-night crowd of aristocrats and parvenus, of every nationality and none at all, that haunted certain brasseries and nightclubs, as well as another, more obscure perhaps, which followed her career with equal, or possibly keener, interest. Her name had been raised in one of Goldman's earliest briefings, taken from a file folder kept in a safe in the StefanLeibshop in Brussels. Both Szara's predecessor and AnniqueSchau-Wehrli had been 'probed' by Lady Angela, who was 'known to have informal connections with British intelligence stations in Paris.' She was, as promised, fortyish, sexy, rich, foul-mouthed, promiscuous, and, in general, thoroughly accessible; an indefatigable guest and hostess who knew 'everybody.' 'You will meet her certainly,' said Goldman primly, 'but she has entirely the wrong friends. Stay away.'


But then, Goldman.


Szara smiled to himself. Too bad Goldman couldn't see him now, the forbidden Lady Angela snugly by his side. Well, he thought, this is fate. This had to happen, and so now it is happening. Yes, there may have been some kind of alternative, but the one person in his life who really understood alternatives, knew where they hid and how to find them, was gone.


That was Abramov, of course. And on7February, in a meadow behind theHôtel duVaz in Sion, Abramov had resigned from the service. Exactly how that came to happen Szara didn't know, but he'd managed to unwind events to a point where he had a pretty good idea of what had gone on.


Abramov, he suspected, had attempted to influence Dershani by use of the photographs taken in the garden ofthe house at Puteaux. It hadn't worked. Realizing his days were numbered, he'd at last taken Szara's advice offered on the beach at Aarhus and planned one final operation: his own disappearance. He'd arranged the meeting at theHôtel duVaz in Sion (owned, Szara was told that night, by a front corporation operated by the NKVD Foreign Department), which gave him a legitimate reason to leave Moscow. He'd then created a notional agent in Lausanne who needed sixty thousandFrench francs. This made Goldman in Brussels a logical source and Szara's scheduled trip to Sion a convenient method of delivery. The money was meant to give Abramov a running start in a new life; the operation was dovetailed and simple, but it hadn't worked.


Why? Szara could see two possibilities: Kranov, already thought to spy on theopal network for the Directorate, might have alerted security units when an untrained and uncertain hand operated the wireless key in Moscow. Every operator had a characteristic signature, and Kranov, trained to be sensitive to change of any kind, had probably reacted to Abramov's rather awkward keying of his own message.


To Szara, however, Goldman was the more interesting possibility. Network gossip suggested therezident had previously had a hand in a special operation, something well outside the usual scope ofopal's activities, in which a young woman was kidnapped from a rooming house in Paris. And when Szara described to Schau-Wehrli the operatives he'd met later that night at theHôtel du Vaz-especially the one who used the work name Dodin, a huge man, short and thick, with the red hands and face of a butcher-she had reacted. In the next instant she was all unknowing, but he'd felt a shadow touch her, he was sure of it.


Through Kranov or Goldman-or both-the specialsection of the Foreign Department had become involved, dispatched Maltsaev to Paris to keep watch on Szara as he went to meet Abramov and to find out if he was an accomplice, or even a fellow fugitive. Szara realized that his instinctive distaste for Maltsaev's personality had provoked him into a blank and businesslike response to the man's offensive needling, and that in turn had quite probably saved his life.


They'd buried Abramov at the edge of the meadow, under the snow-laden boughs of a fir tree, chipping at the frozen ground with shovels and sweating in the cold moonlight. There were four of them besides Maltsaev; they took off their overcoats and worked in baggy, woollen suits, swearing as they dug, their Swiss hunting rifles propped against a tree. They spread snow over the dirt and returned to the empty hotel, building a fire in the fireplace downstairs, sitting in handmade pine chairs and smoking Maltsaev's Belomors, talking among themselves. Szara was part of every activity, taking his turn with the shovel, struggling with Abramov's weight as they put him in the ground. He had no choice; he became a temporary member of the unit. They talked about what they could buy in Geneva before they went back to Kiev, they talked about other operations; something in Lithuania, something in Sweden, though they were oblique with a stranger in their midst. The only ceremony for Abramov was Szara's silent prayer, and he made very sure his lips did not move as he said it. Yet, even at that moment, in the dark meadow, he planned further memorials.


Early in the morning, standing on the platform of the railway station in Geneva and waiting for the Paris train, Maltsaev was blunt: 'The usual way in these affairs is to send the accomplice along on the same journey, innocent or not doesn't matter. But, for the moment, somebody considers you worth keeping alive. Personally I don't agree-you are a traitor in your heart-but I just do what they tell me. That's a good lesson for you, Szara, come to think of it. Being smart maybe isn't so smart as you think-you see where it got Abramov. I blame it on the parents, they should have made him study the violin like all the rest of them.' The train pulled in. Maltsaev, after a contemptuous bow and a sweep of the hand toward the compartment door, turned and walked away.


Staring at Voyschinkowsky across the table, pretending to listen as the man told a story about his childhood, Szara for the first time understood the chain of events that had led to the night of7February. It had started withLotteHuber's romance with Seneschal and from there moved, seemingly driven by fate, to its conclusion.Inevitable, he thought. The champagne was cunning; the opposite of vodka in that it didn't numb, it revealed. One could say, he realized, that a Nazi official's appetite for red berry sauce had two years later led to the death of a Russian intelligence officer in a Swiss meadow. He shook his head to make such thoughts go away.Remember, he told himself silently,this must be done with a cold heart.


Voyschinkowsky paused to take a long sip of champagne. "The Lion of the Bourse" was in his early sixties, with a long, mournful face marked by the chronically red-rimmed eyes and dark pouches of the lifelong insomniac. He was reputed to be one of the richest men in Paris. 'I wonder whatever became of her?' he said. He had a thick Hungarian accent and a heavy, hoarse voice that seemed to come from the bottom of a well.


'But Bibi,' Ginger Pudakis said, 'did you make love?'


'I was twelve years old, my dear.'


'Then what?'


One side of Voyschinkowsky's mouth twisted briefly into a tart grin. 'I looked at her breasts.'


'Finis?'


'Let me tell you, from one who has lived a, a rich and varied cosmopolitanlife,there was never again a moment like it.'


'Oh Bibi,' she breathed. 'Too sad!'


Lady Angela whispered in Szara's ear, 'Say something clever, can you?'


'Not sad. Bittersweet,' he said. 'Not at all the same thing. I think it is a perfect story.'


'Hear, hear,' said Roddy Fitzware.

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