Red Gold

THE LAWYER

CORBEIL–ESSONNES. 3 DECEMBER.

It was the safest house they had. Thirty kilometers from Paris, it stood invisible behind twelve-foot walls at the edge of the village, with a separate garage that could hide four cars. The property was nominally owned by a company in Stockholm.

4:50 A.M. On the first floor, Ivanic and three others lounged in the kitchen and read newspapers. Two more men stood watch outside. In a parlor on the second floor, a meeting had been in progress since the previous afternoon. Seated at a dining-room table were: Lila Brasova, political commissar to the FTP, who had questioned Casson in the machine shop; an NKVD officer called Juron, of Polish origin and French nationality; Weiss, as liaison officer with Service B; and, chairing the meeting, Colonel Vassily Antipin, a senior executive sent in by Moscow Center. “By way of Berlin,” he’d said dryly.

Square-faced and solid, with neatly combed brown hair, Antipin was in his late thirties. He had enlisted in the GRU, military intelligence, at the age of twenty and had risen to power on the strength of clandestine operations in difficult countries, including recruitment in Bulgarian river villages in the mid-1930s.

Brasova asked him about Berlin.

“It smells of fire,” he said.

Stacked against the wall were some three hundred dossiers of French army officers who had worked in the SR. “The problem is,” Weiss said early on, “that the officer corps is dispersed. Some are prisoners of war in Germany, some have been deported to North Africa, some have fled to London. Some are dead, a few are in hiding. There may be twenty or thirty in Vichy. As we watch Casson we’ll see at least one of them, but he will represent others, and they will be hidden.”

“And the ones who specialize in the French Communist Party?”

“By May of 1939 we’d identified ten officers. There’s one left in Vichy, a lieutenant—much too junior to run an operation like this.”

“What’s Casson like?”

Brasova shrugged. “Intelligent, a good heart, some professional success, some failure. Would like to believe himself a cynic—‘Que l’humanité se débroulle sans moi,’ the world will just have to muddle through without my help. In fact he isn’t like that, quite the opposite.”

“And Kovar?”

“Impossible.”

They broke for dinner, went back to work at ten. Given the difficulty of moving Antipin through enemy lines, Moscow had put together a long agenda. Sometime after four, they returned to the discussion of the SR. Antipin leaned back and knotted his fingers behind his head. “Are they simply trying to see over the wall, is that it? Trying to find out who’s running the FTP—in particular, who’s running Service B.”

“Of course that’s what it is,” Juron said. He was the youngest there, bald at thirty-five, with thick glasses.

“It’s more than that,” Weiss said. “This is a struggle between de Gaulle’s clandestine service and the old-line SR. In that conflict, a working relationship with the FTP is an asset, potentially of great value.”

“To the British,” Antipin said.

“Yes. Whoever wins gets British guns and British money and the aid of the British secret services. De Gaulle, based in London, is ahead in the race, so this could well be SR’s attempt to catch up.”

“What’s British power to us?” Juron said. “We’ve been at war with them, more or less, since 1917.”

“What would you do, then?” Antipin asked.

“Take what they offer, find out everything we can, then cut the lines.” Antipin nodded. This was, Weiss realized, the Center’s point of view. “Comrade Brasova?” Antipin said.

“I would wait and see,” she said. “They will use us, we will use them, the Germans will suffer.”

Outside, the darkness had begun to fade. The bell in the town church rang five. Weiss met Antipin’s eyes. “I’m going to step outside for some air,” he said.

He waited at the back door, Antipin showed up a moment later. They walked on a gravel pathway at the foot of the wall. “The Center has decided that Juron should take care of this,” Weiss said. “Is that it?”

“That’s their preference, but the final decision is up to me.”

“You know what he’ll do, don’t you?”

“Liquidate.”

“Yes. Their answer to everything.”

“We are at war,” Antipin said.

“Can you give me a month?”

“What for?”

“To do what Moscow wants done here, I need help.”

Antipin thought it over. “I’ll give you a month. But Casson and Kovar may have to be sacrificed—that’s the trade-off. No matter how you put it, spies are spies, and, to the Center, this has all the earmarks of a classic penetration. After all, if the Germans allow some form of SR to exist in Vichy, what would it do? Fight the communists. How to do that? One way is to fake a resistance group, approach the party, and tell them you want to work with them.”

“Maybe,” Weiss said, “but maybe not. I think Brasova is right, what’s proposed is a temporary alliance, and I want to take the next step. For that, I’ll need Casson and Kovar. Can you keep Juron away from them?”

“He stays in Paris, but I won’t let him do anything right now. However, when the time comes, you will have to follow his orders. Agreed?”

Weiss agreed.

They stirred in their sleep, Casson and Hélène, gliding spoon-style through the December night in the battered old Benoit. She reached back, pulling him tighter against her, then sighed and, in a moment, fell asleep again, breathing slow and steady, dreaming away, with a muted cry or mumble every now and then.

He had been just too lonely that afternoon, he could not bear it. So he’d found the travel agency she’d said she worked for and, at six in the evening, had waited for her to appear. She came out alone, walking quickly, head down. Carefully put together, he saw. The long black coat that half the women in the city wore, a lavender scarf to improve it, setting off her dark eyes, her dark hair. She was startled to see him. “Did you just happen to be passing by?”

“No,” he said. “I was waiting for you.”

They headed up the boulevard, paused for traffic at a side street. “Perhaps,” he said, “you’d like to come back to the hotel with me.” She didn’t answer, just took his arm, her shoulder pressed against him as the cars and trucks rumbled past.

Back in his room, he watched her undress in the darkness. A little leaner than he might have preferred, but sinuous, with a narrow waist and supple hips. In bed, buried beneath the thin blanket and their overcoats, they waited to get warm. “Do you miss Strasbourg?” he asked.

“Sometimes. I miss living in a home, just the small things that go on all day. And I miss the flowers.”

“In December?”

“Always. Vases everywhere, mostly red gladioli in December. My father was a florist. Actually, my father was the florist. Les Trois Rosiers—his great-grandfather started it, a long time ago.”

“What happened to it?”

“It went, everything went. I miss that too, working in the shop. We did weddings and funerals, banquets, anything important in the city. My uncle had greenhouses in Italy, in San Remo, a little way down the coast from Menton. It’s all gone, now.”

“What made you leave?”

“By the time I was thirty, it was pretty clear I wasn’t going to get married. Not a conventional marriage, anyhow—within the Jewish community in Alsace. I had my chances: a pharmacist, a teacher, but I wasn’t in love. I had affairs, quiet as could be, but people find out. So, I did what all the unmarried girls in France do—or would if they could. I went to Paris.”

“And fell in love.”

“Yes, a real folie, but it didn’t stop there. I was in love with the city, with everything. Of course for you, born here, it would be different.”

“No, the same.”

“Were you rich?”

Casson laughed. “I never could figure that out. We lived among the rich, in Passy, but we never had any money. Somehow, we survived. When I left the Sorbonne I decided to go into the movie business so, once again, I was living without money, or at least living well beyond what I had. But I was young and I didn’t especially care. I was happy to be alive, and I expected I’d get rich someday. And, like you I suspect, I was always in love. First one, then another. Eventually, I got married. She was from a wealthy family, but she didn’t have anything either. We both thought that was funny. After we got engaged, she was summoned to a lunch with her grandparents and they gave her the bad news. She came to my apartment that afternoon, we told each other it didn’t matter, made love, went out and ate at Fouquet.”

“But later, it didn’t work out.”

“It was good for a few years, then we separated. With the way life went on in the sixteenth, maybe it was inevitable. We started seeing other people—everybody we knew did that so we did it too. Drifted apart, fought too often, decided we’d both be happier if we didn’t live together.”

He reached over to the night table, lit a cigarette and shared it with her. “Looking back now, of course, those days seem like paradise. Even the bad times.”

She nodded. “Yes, for me too. Now I’ll be happy if I can hang on to what I have.”

“The job?”

“Yes. It isn’t so bad, it makes the day pass. What’s extraordinary is that there is an entire class of people who don’t seem to be affected by the war. Some of them French, a few Americans, Argentines, Syrians. They book staterooms; mostly to resorts, in sunny countries. They know about the submarines, but they don’t seem to care.”

“Have you thought about getting out yourself?”

“Yes.” She paused. “Laurette came to me one day, after the registration of Jews last October, and said that Degrave would help me get out. I could go to Algiers.”

“And you didn’t go?”

Slowly, she shook her head. “I thought about it for days, but I was afraid. What could I do? How would I survive? Also, I felt I was abandoning my parents. I’d been able to talk to them once, the day after the invasion. They actually had visas to go to Canada, my brother managed to get them, and space on a steamship—on May tenth. But Rotterdam was being bombed, the city was in a panic, and the dock area was mobbed. They could see the steamship, but they couldn’t get on it. I tried again, two days later, but by then the telephone lines had been cut. Still, I felt that if I stayed in Paris, somehow they would contact me, but they never did.”

“Hélène, what if I asked Degrave again, would you go?”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “Now I would.”

Casson woke for a moment—had he heard voices in the hall? No, it was silent. God he was cold, the window was white with frost flowers. He pulled Hélène tighter against him. Crazy to take off all our clothes—to make love like aristocrats. Sirens in the distance, south of them somewhere. It didn’t mean anything. He drifted back toward sleep.

Suddenly, a door opened, another slammed, somebody called out “Odette!” in a shouted stage whisper, and footsteps pounded down the hall.

Hélène sat bolt upright, a hand pressed against her heart. “What time is it?”

Casson rolled out of bed, put on pants and shirt, opened the door a crack, and peered down the corridor. At the end of the hall, the woman who worked nights at the desk was talking to a heavy woman in a nightdress, her hair gathered up into blond tufts and tied with ribbons. When Casson appeared they turned and glared at him for a moment, then went back to whispering.

“Madame, s’il vous plaît, what’s going on?”

“The Japanese, monsieur.”

“The Japanese? Here?”

“No—not here! Over there somewhere. They have sunk the American navy.”

They all stared at one another for a moment, the clerk in a smock and two sweaters, the blond woman barefoot, toenails painted pink, Casson in his shirt and pants, hair still rumpled with sleep.

“It is the end, monsieur,” the blond woman said dramatically. Her eyes were shining with tears.

“What is it?” Hélène called softly.

Casson went back to the room, got undressed, and burrowed under the covers.

“The Japanese have attacked America,” he said. “Defeated their navy.”

“Oh no.”

“It’s for the best. Now they will come into the war.”

“How will they get here?”

“They will build another navy.”

“A long time, then.”

He had no idea. “A year,” he said, in order to say something.

She held on to him, he could tell she was crying. “It’s too long,” she said.

How long, Casson wondered, would it really take? The Americans would have to land somewhere in Europe. He had no idea what it would take to do that—a million men? Hundreds of ships? What he did know, as a film producer, was what it took to assemble a fifty-guest wedding party. So, the Americans weren’t coming anytime soon.

They lay awake in the darkness. Casson imagined he could almost sense the news as it made its way through the hotel. He had experienced a surge of hope, now he felt it drain away. In the morning, he would have to be Jean Marin again, and for many mornings after that.

“I can’t sleep,” she said. “What time is it?”

“Two-thirty.”

She moved closer, rested her head on his shoulder. He whispered to her, she laughed. Suddenly, a drunk started singing in the hall, somebody opened a door and yelled at him to shut up.

Weiss got off the Métro a stop short of his destination, then walked around for a time, making sure he hadn’t been followed. Soon he’d have to get somebody to watch his back. Now that they’d started to kill Germans, the security noose around Paris was being drawn tight. A new permit needed here, a new rule there, a form in the mail that directed you, in ten days, to call at an office you’d never heard of. It was the same technique the Germans had used against the Jews in the 1930s. But, he thought, not the worst thing that could happen, at least it would drive the sheep his way.

He turned down a tiny passage, stepped over a dead cat—they weren’t eating them yet, but they would—and out onto the fashionable rue Guynemer that bordered the Jardins du Luxembourg. Home and office to one Dr. Vadine, a dentist of genteel Bolshevik sympathies who had, from time to time, assisted Comintern operatives. I hope he’s still in business, Weiss thought. And doing well.

Money. He needed money.

Before the war, moving secret funds from Moscow to Paris was easy, using couriers or borrowed bank accounts or phantom companies. In fact, the party had been notorious for its money. On a trip to London during the spy panics of the 1930s, he’d seen tabloid headlines plastered all over the kiosks—HE BETRAYED HIS COUNTRY FOR RED GOLD. Weiss smiled at the recollection. He supposed that calling money gold made it more sinister.

He entered the dentist’s building and climbed the stairs. The receptionist, an attractive woman in her forties, said, “Do you have an appointment, monsieur?”

He waited a moment in silence. The woman was Vadine’s longtime mistress, she’d last seen Weiss in 1939. “No,” he said, “I don’t.” Again he waited. She was pretending she didn’t know him.

“Doctor is very busy today, monsieur.”

“Tell him it’s Monsieur Berg.” Weiss paused a moment. “I’m an old friend. He’ll remember me.”

They stared at each other, she lowered her eyes. “Very well,” she said.

He stood by the desk and waited. Why did he have to spend time on these errands? He needed help, somebody smart who could take orders and get things done. A door opened at the end of the hallway, he heard the whine of a drill, then an urgent, whispered conversation. Vadine came toward him, wiping his hands on a towel. The receptionist was right behind him.

“What do you want?” Vadine said. He was a thin, nervous man, perpetually irritated, and now he was frightened.

“Your help,” Weiss said.

“Can’t we talk about this later?”

Weiss shook his head slowly. “It won’t wait. We’re having difficulty moving funds into the Occupied Zone.”

“Oh,” Vadine said, “money.” He was clearly relieved. Apparently he’d feared they would ask him for more than that.

“Yes. Five thousand francs would help.”

Vadine nodded. “All right,” he said. “I’ll get it for you. Is there some way we can do this . . .”

“Without meeting?”

“Yes.”

“Of course.”

The receptionist said, “It would be better if you didn’t come here.”

Weiss agreed, told Vadine that a young woman would contact him in a few days, and left immediately. They didn’t want him there, he didn’t want to be there.

Outside, he headed back toward the Métro. His next call was on the other side of the city—a socially prominent woman whose father owned a coal mine. He had two other donors in mind—add Brasova’s contributors and some money from the unions, and they could survive for another month.

3:30 P.M. Casson and Degrave sat at the bar of a café on the place Blanche. Dry snow floated past the window and covered the outdoor tables.

Degrave had spent three days in Vichy. “I couldn’t wait to get out of there,” he said. “It’s like a comic opera. It says it’s a government, it says it’s France, but it’s all a fraud. Everybody in uniform—sashes, medals, gold braid—you expect them to sing and dance.” He ran a hand over his face. “Have a cognac with me.”

“All right.”

Degrave ordered the cognac. “We had meetings that went on for hours. I told them everything about your contact with the FTP, and the demand for guns, but nobody wanted to make a decision.”

The barman set two cognacs in front of them and Degrave paid.

“Is it over?”

“I can go ahead, if I want to, but there won’t be a lot of support. My friends will help us, when they can. We’ll have to do most of it ourselves.”

“They don’t like the idea?”

“They don’t like the risk. The problem is, we need the alliance, it will allow us to do things we can’t do ourselves. But there are difficulties. For example, we don’t have the guns. We’ve been disarmed, which is what happens to defeated nations, and the Germans, using the Armistice Control Commission, are making sure it stays that way.”

“But you—of course you know arms merchants.”

“Out of business. For the moment, anyhow. Put out of business by national industries running twenty-four hours a day. We’ll have to work with the black market.”

“You mean criminals, smugglers.”

“Yes. If we can find somebody, we’ll be allowed to spend whatever it costs. That much I did get. But I want to make sure you understand that this is well beyond what we originally asked you to do. So, if you’re going to say no, say it now.”

Casson hesitated, but he couldn’t say no. “You’ll have to help me get started.”

“The inspector who found you up in Clichy is an old friend. He’ll know somebody—there isn’t much he doesn’t know.”

“How would I find him?”

“He’s at the main préfecture. On Thursday mornings he supervises the office that accepts denunciations.”

Casson nodded.

“This will work,” Degrave said. “It won’t be easy, but it needs to be done. The principle is right, believe me it is, I just couldn’t get the people in Vichy to see it that way.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know—tradition, living in the past. French military officers don’t like secret committees, they believe in chain of command. They don’t like communists, and they don’t believe in partizan operations—assassination, dynamite, luring the enemy into reprisals against civilians. They think of that as terrorism, that it turns the population against the resistance.”

“Are they wrong?”

“They could be right.” His tone was almost sarcastic. “Wait a few months and see what the Germans do here—then let me know what you think.”

They had another cognac. Degrave went to the back of the café and made a phone call. When he returned, Casson said, “I want to ask you about Hélène.”

“You’re seeing her?”

“Yes. Now and then.”

“She’s been a real friend to Laurette.”

“She mentioned that you offered to help her leave the country.”

“I did. She wanted to go, then decided against it.”

“She’s changed her mind.”

“I don’t blame her,” Degrave said. “It’s a little more complicated now, but we can probably do it. I’m in Paris for the next three weeks, then I go down to Vichy. Unfortunately, there’s a limit to how many people we can move. She may have to wait until February, or March. Tell her I’m working on it. Meanwhile, she should be careful—respect the curfew, avoid the black market.”

The préfecture, on Thursday morning, was a living hell. Mobs of people; some of them scared, all of them uncomfortable. Who knew what buried sins might suddenly spring to life in a place like this?

Daily life in Paris had always churned up business for the flics, but the Occupation, with its curfew, black market, and hundreds of petty rules and regulations, had provoked a tidal surge of activity at police headquarters. A madhouse, Casson thought. Permits and papers to be applied for, changed, renewed. Summonses answered, fines paid. And all of it required standing on line—one of the few Anglo-Saxon perversions that Parisians truly disliked.

Casson had to present his identity card three times; first at the courtyard entry, then in an office, then again in another office, where the information was laboriously copied down in a huge, frightening ledger. Each time his heart pounded, but the false identity held. He also had to show his work permit—Marin was a claims investigator for a large insurance company, a job that allowed him to travel, and explained his presence in any town or neighborhood.

Worst of all, for Casson, was that his progress through the tight-lipped crowds in the maze of corridors turned up two acquaintances from his former life. In one case, a woman who had worked in the office of a film distributor. Their eyes met, Casson turned sharply and walked away. Then he came face to face with a distant social connection of his former wife, a man who called out “Jean Casson!” in a great, rumbling voice. Casson simply said “Pardon?” and glared at the man, who apologized and retreated into the crowd.

Room 15 was off by itself on the second floor, in a cul-de-sac isolated by some ancient renovation. Casson was given a brass disc with a number on it and told to wait. There were two other people on the wooden benches and only later did Casson realize that he never saw their faces. He sat there for almost an hour, staring into space, the monotony broken only by the delivery of the mail, a large canvas sack so heavy it had to be dragged across the floor before being left by the secretary’s desk.

The inspector was just as Casson remembered him. A heavy old man with thick white hair, a battered face, and pale blue eyes. “Monsieur Casson,” he said, jovial as before, apparently quite pleased to see him. “I am sorry you had to wait in that shithouse out there, but we must pretend that all is as usual.”

Casson said he understood.

“Dégueulasse!” Sickening. “The boss makes me do this once a week because he knows I hate it. A national illness, this business. We get them all, jilted lovers, angry wives, the petits commerçants trying to wreck the competition. And the rather ordinary people who get up one morning and look at their neighbor and say to themselves, see how they live! What right do they have to such good fortune?”

“Sad,” Casson said.

“Yes, I suppose that’s the word.” He paused a moment. “But nothing new. Back when I was young I worked in the countryside, a small town in the Sarthe. We used to get letters from a man whose apple tree had a branch that grew over a neighbor’s fence. When the apples fell on the ground, the neighbor ate them.”

“The scoundrel.”

“It’s funny, yet it’s not funny. This man brooded over his lost apples, and the idea that someone else might profit from his labor drove him to the edge of madness. Well, in those days it didn’t matter. We’d read his letters, put them in a file—he accused the neighbor of everything he could think of—and forget about them. But now, with the Occupation, and the Gestapo . . .” He looked grim and shook his head in sorrow. “Well, to hell with the things you can’t change, right?”

Casson nodded. “Our mutual friend suggested I come to see you.”

“How can I help?”

“We need to buy—”

The inspector smiled. “I’ve heard it all,” he said.

“Guns.”

“Meaning?”

“Submachine guns, a few hundred.”

The inspector scowled. “Morphine, not a problem. White slaves, maybe. But that—” He let it hang.

“It’s important,” Casson said.

“It may not be possible.”

“We have to try.”

The inspector stared at him. Finally he sighed. “I hope you know what you’re doing.” He took a fountain pen from his pocket and deliberately unscrewed the cap. He hesitated a moment, wrote a few words on a slip of paper, blew the ink dry, and handed it to Casson. Then he stood abruptly and walked to the window.

“We have dinner with our daughter out in Thiais tonight, and I worry about the roads. Snow, it said in the paper. Meanwhile, you can memorize that.”

Casson worked at it, it wasn’t very hard. “Vasilis,” he said. “Greek?”

Staring out the window, the inspector shrugged. “Greek, Turkish, Bulgarian. Just keep asking till you hear one you like.”

The inspector returned to his desk, took the piece of paper from Casson, leaned forward, and said, “Some personal advice. You should keep in mind that these people in Vichy have to walk a certain line. What they are doing with you is all well and good. I don’t know that it matters, but it might. However, the rest of the time, they are part of the government. Which means doing what Pétain and Laval and their friends think they ought to be doing—working against the enemies of France. That’s a big category, a lot fits in it. If the war ended tomorrow, and Britain won, they’d say, ‘Look what we did, we were on the right side.’ On the other hand, if the war ends tomorrow and Germany wins, God forbid, they could say the same thing.”

“All right,” Casson said after a moment. “I understand.”

“I hope you do. Maybe you don’t like it, but that’s the way life is. Not that we’re any better. When the Germans took over, the préfecture went back to work, just like it always had. The files were all in place, and if a call came and somebody said, ‘Send over Pierre’s dossier’ in a German accent, there went Pierre. Comprends?”

“Yes.”

“Still a patriot?”

“Trying,” Casson said.

The inspector smiled.

SS-Unterscharführer—Corporal—Otto Albers strolled up and down the rue St.-Denis, where two or three women were posed in each doorway. From the way he looked them over, casual and thoughtful at once, it was clear that he considered himself a connoisseur, a man who knew precisely what he wanted and would insist on having it. To the women in the doorways there wasn’t much new in that. They smiled or sneered, opened their coats to give him a glimpse of the merchandise, made kisses in the air, or just looked haughty—I have not always been as you see me today. This last was not easy, wearing red panties or nothing at all under a bulky coat, but a proven technique with German customers. “Hey, Fritz, got a big wiener?” one of them called to Albers. But that was an act of spontaneous resistance, she’d already given up on him.

In fact, whores were not really what Albers wanted—there were dangers here, one had to be careful of one’s health—but he had been driven to it. Before the war, life in this area had always gone his way, he’d never had to pay for it. In what the Americans called the Roaring Twenties, he’d done his roaring in the nightclubs of Berlin, where sad days—a war lost, inflation, ruin—led to wild nights. What those girls wouldn’t do! Nothing he’d ever been able to think up. His complicated suggestions had always been met with greedy enthusiasm. Ach ja! How fine to encounter such an ingenious gentleman.

In the thirties, his luck held. Joining the Nazi Party in 1933, he’d made good use of the blond maidens whose patriotic duty it was to fuck his brains out. Usually in a forest, on a carpet of pine needles, but he’d learned to live with that. The fantasies were pretty much the same, only the girls had given up slinking in favor of frolicking, the prescribed form for Aryan womanhood. Sullen ennui gave way to lusty giggles and they saved a bundle on the eye shadow.

But Paris was a different proposition. Stationed at Gestapo headquarters, essentially a military clerk, he discovered that Frenchwomen were not quite as he’d imagined. Many of them wouldn’t have anything to do with Germans, which was understandable, but some would. Unfortunately, the best of those went to the officers, and what remained for the enlisted men was not to Albers’s taste. Very materialistic, he thought. They didn’t want exotic adventures, they wanted little gifts.

For a long time, he tried. A chubby redhead, who worked in a shop; an overworked housewife, her husband off somewhere; but they turned him down. For one thing, there were language difficulties. He wasn’t sure how the French talked about such things, to be subtle or artful was out of the question. “What,” they said, freezing up, “do you want?” Forced to say words from a dictionary, he came off as a boor or a pervert, or both.

But none of this mattered on the rue St.-Denis. You paid for your pleasures and the women were quick to figure out what you wanted and what you would pay to get it.

A gray, bleak afternoon, Albers walked with hands in pockets, past frowzy blondes and swarthy Corsicans, past a fat girl stuffed into a child’s jumper, past a dominatrice wearing a broad leather belt and a fearsome scowl. Past housemaids and Marie Antoinettes and femmes fatales with cigarette holders. Oh the trashy circus of it, he thought, yearning for the giggling pine maidens in their dirndls.

But wait, wait one minute, what have we here? Brown hair snipped off in a pageboy, tatty old coat, submissive little smile, spectacles, and holding no less than a Bible in both hands. Both mittens. A mouse! Why not? It was, Albers thought, at least a beginning.

EVREUX. 14 DECEMBER.

They drove north in the late afternoon, slowly. With snow and ice on the roads, the old Renault skidded now and then. Bare trees, empty fields. Weiss did not like the countryside in the winter.

He was a doctor that day, which allowed him, under Occupation rules, to drive the car. A pediatrician, working in the factory districts. Surprising, the number of doctors and nurses in the party— a year or two working with the poor and they joined up. But, of course, nothing guaranteed anything; the doctor who wrote under the name Céline had worked with the poor, and now shrieked against the Jews on the radio.

Outside the town of Mantes he had to apply the brakes and slid to a stop behind a Wehrmacht truck. Troops with rifles between their knees sat on facing benches.

“Look at them,” Ivanic said.

“Better not,” Weiss said. “They don’t like to be looked at.”

Slow truck, Weiss thought, maybe he should pass. But there was possibly a motorcycle in front, or a staff car, and they might stop him. His papers were good. A doctor’s black bag was on the seat in the back, and Ivanic would be explained as a patient. This man has tuberculosis, please don’t get too close to him. Sir.

Weiss looked at the men in the truck. A sergeant sat on the end of the bench, his white face vacant, almost hypnotized. Weiss pulled out to pass, the Renault coughed and sputtered. Slowly, he overtook the truck. Then he saw a car speeding toward him. Now this, he thought. The other driver saw he was stuck in the passing lane and slowed to a crawl, but the driver of the truck never touched his brakes. Weiss finally pulled back in—behind another Wehrmacht truck. Apparently he was in the middle of a convoy.

“Where are they going, do you think?” Ivanic said.

“One of the ports, Caen or Antwerp. Off to Russia, maybe.”

“That must be it,” Ivanic said. Then, softly, to the men looking out the opening in the canvas cover, “Good-bye.”

The Russians were fighting back now, finally. It took forever to get anything organized in that place, Weiss thought. With them, chaos was fine art. He’d been there twice—more than enough. Ordered to Moscow in 1934 and again in ’37, he’d somehow survived both purges. He’d made a point of staying away from the cliques, the khvosts, and luck had handed him one or two of the right bosses. Also, he kept his mouth shut, kept his opinions to himself. In Paris, before the war, he’d met Willi Muenzenberg, who ran magazines and cultural events for the Comintern. A law unto himself, Muenzenberg—Moscow could say what it wanted, he was a citizen of the world. “We should get together sometime,” he told Weiss. “And talk things over.” It never happened, Weiss made sure it never happened. In the days after the Germans reached Paris, amid the general disorder, Muenzenberg was beaten up and hanged from a tree.

He passed the second truck, and a third, the road was empty after that. Weiss accelerated. The Renault backfired, ran like a greyhound for half a mile, then settled back to three cylinders, valves tapping like a drum solo, the smell of gasoline so strong they had to open the windows.

“What’s going on with Casson and Kovar?” Weiss said.

“Kovar’s not so easy. We had him, then we lost him. We’ve gone back to Somet but, according to him, Kovar materialized out of the night, then disappeared. We’ll find him, of course. Only a matter of time.”

“What about the other one, Casson?”

Ivanic shrugged. “Say when.”

They came to a village, shut down for winter, squat little granite houses and a Norman church. “What’s this?” Weiss asked.

“Bonnières.”

“Hm.”

“Not far now.”

“No.”

“Looks like the road goes left, over the bridge.”

He drove straight ahead. The street narrowed to a lane, a young girl leading a cow on a rope moved over to let them by. “Merde,” Weiss said. The lane ended at a meadow. Weiss started to back up to turn around. Reverse gear whined and the wheels spun in the icy mud. He swore.

“Hold on, I’ll give us a push.”

“In a minute.” Weiss pressed the clutch pedal to the floor, let it up very, very slowly until he felt the wheels start to turn. The car moved backward. He stopped, shifted into first gear, got halfway round, backed up, then drove down the lane. The little girl still had the cow over to one side—she lived in Bonnières, she knew they’d be back.

Weiss turned right at the bridge, a sign on the other side said EVREUX 34.

It took some time to find Brico’s street. The workers’ district ran on forever, high walls, barely enough room for the car. Weiss could see redbrick chimney stacks in the distance, smoke barely moving in the frozen air. Finally, rue de Verdun. The Germans would eventually change the name, but they probably weren’t in a hurry to come in here. Weiss looked at his watch. It was a few minutes after five. Unless the shift worked overtime, the workers would be heading home. Brico was a party member. He’d helped to distribute Le Métallo, a version of Humanité for metal workers, edited by Narcisse Somet. Too bad, Weiss thought, but that didn’t change anything, that only made it worse.

Weiss parked the car, then settled down to watch the rearview mirror. The street was deserted, only an orange-and-white cat lying curled up on Brico’s windowsill. Brico’s door opened, a lean woman in an apron banged a dust mop against the edge of the stone step, said something to the cat, then went back inside.

The first workers started to come off shift; a teenager racing his bicycle, two men riding side by side. The factory whistle sounded twice, and twice again.

“Any sign?” Ivanic said.

“No.”

Ivanic reached inside his jacket, took out an automatic pistol, and freed the magazine from the grip. He studied the top bullet and pressed it lightly with his finger to make sure the spring had tension before reassembling the gun, ramming the magazine home with the heel of his hand.

“Everything all right?”

Ivanic nodded.

“Don’t go inside,” Weiss said.

“I won’t.”

Weiss glanced in the mirror. A crowd of men were walking up the street. A moment later, Brico. Ivanic knew before Weiss had a chance to say anything, pulled the brim of his cap down low and got out of the car.

Weiss watched the two of them talking. He saw Ivanic nod his head toward the car. Brico said something, Ivanic agreed, and the two of them walked slowly toward him. Ivanic waited while Brico climbed into the back seat, then got in next to him. As the car moved off, the two of them talked, about production schedules, cell meetings, leaflets. Brico seemed to know a lot about what went on in the factory. He was short and muscular, with big hands, and very sure of himself.

“They put the shift back up to twelve hours,” he said. “After all the shit we went through in ’38.”

Weiss turned down a back road at the edge of the town and parked by a field. Brico said, “What’s all this?”

Weiss spoke for the first time. “When Renan was shot, the Germans knew what was going on. You turned him in.”

“That’s a lie,” Brico said.

“No,” Weiss said. “We know.”

“I have a family,” Brico said.

“So did Renan.”

Ivanic took the gun from inside his jacket. Brico swallowed. “It had to be like that,” he said. “You people sit down there in Paris—” He didn’t finish. It was quiet in the car.

“Out,” Ivanic said.

Weiss watched as Brico, head down, walked away from the car. Ivanic took him into the field and shot him.

The lawyer’s office was in the lawyers’ district, on the rue Châteaud’Eau. This was not the neighborhood for grand offices, Casson thought, his old lawyer friends wouldn’t be caught dead here. This was where the notaries worked, and the huissiers—bailiffs—who collected bad debts by breaking down the door and taking everything except, by law, a bed, a chair, and a cooking pot. The lawyers on these streets made out wills, then helped the heirs sue each other, these lawyers presided over property disputes that carried over from one generation to the next. And these lawyers defended criminals, like the merchant Vasilis.

Casson climbed the staircase, passing a variety of avocats and notaires, a marriage broker and an astrologer, before he found the office—a cramped room on the top floor. “Georges Soutane,” the lawyer said, as they shook hands. Sharp, Casson thought. Beginning to thicken in his late thirties but still boyish, with sharp eyes, and essentially fearless. His desk was piled high with papers— separated only by a green ribbon tied around each file. After a few pleasantries, he got down to business. “Captain Vasilis is in prison,” he said.

That much Casson knew, the inspector had told him.

“In Holland,” he added.

“For a long time?”

“A couple of months to go,” the lawyer said. “It’s an occupational hazard.”

“What’s he in jail for?”

“Herring. A boat working out of Rotterdam, without licenses.”

“We have something a little different in mind.”

“Of course. But what matters here is money. If you’re prepared to pay, we’re ready to consider almost anything.”

“We’re prepared to pay.”

“What, in general terms if you like, are we talking about?”

Casson paused. “I would prefer to discuss it with Captain Vasilis.”

“Well, I’ll have to take you up there, so you can expect to pay for my time along with everything else. What’s the scale of the purchase?”

“Significant. A million francs at least, likely a good deal more.”

Now the lawyer was interested. He looked Casson over. One of those individuals, Casson thought, with no family or social connections to ease his way in the world, but smart, very smart—only his mind between him and the poorhouse. “There’s a question of currency,” he said. “It’s something we’ll have to talk about.”

“You have a preference?”

“We’ll take Swiss francs, gold, diamonds, American dollars. If this is going to involve French francs, it will require some negotiation. I won’t say we’ll refuse, but the figure is going to be higher— we’ll have to discount the rate heavily in our favor. To be blunt with you, monsieur, French currency simply isn’t worth anything.”

“Yes, we know that.”

“And you will have to pay a very substantial portion of the money before we can proceed.”

“We know that too,” Casson said.

The lawyer nodded—so far, so good. “We will consider anything of value,” he said. “Paintings, for example. Substantial properties in the countryside. A business, or even a hotel.”

“Money would be best,” Casson said.

“For us as well.” The lawyer opened a drawer and took out a small calender with circled dates. “This coming Thursday—is that too soon for you?”

“Not at all.”

“Thursday is visiting day. Other arrangements are possible, but this is the simplest way. You’ll have to tell the prison authorities you’re a lawyer, or a relative.”

“What kind of prison is it?”

“The administration is Dutch, not German. It’s a prison for tax evaders, people like that. Captain Vasilis has a room in the hospital.”

“Not too bad, then.”

“No. This is the sort of thing that can happen in peacetime just as easily as in war. One other thing I’ll need to ask you. I trust your identity papers will permit you to cross borders—without, ah, special attention?”

“It won’t be a problem.”

“Good. Officially, you’ll be my associate. The prison administration is quite understanding.” He took a railway timetable from the drawer. “There’s a local that leaves from the Gare du Nord Thursday morning at 9:08. The local is the French train—the Germans like to get places in a hurry so they take the express. If the track hasn’t been blown up, we’ll be in Amsterdam by early evening, and we can see Captain Vasilis the following morning.”

Casson stood to go. “I’ll see you on Thursday, then.”

“Yes. One last thing—of course we assume that you’re coming to see us in good faith. I should mention, however, that Captain Vasilis has friends, loyal friends, everywhere. As long as you’re legitimate, pay what we agree, take delivery, and that’s the last we hear about it, there would be no reason for you to meet them.”

“That’s understood,” Casson said. “And equally true for us.”

7:30 A.M., Hélène Schreiber walked through the morning darkness and went into the travel agency. Her friend Natalie was already at her desk and they chatted for a while. Office buildings had at least some heat, apartments were cold in the daytime—better to come to work early and stay as long as possible.

Hélène was filing carbon copies when somebody said good morning. She looked up to see Madame Oris, the supervising agent. They smiled as they said hello, had liked each other since the first day they’d met. “Can you come and see me, Hélène? Around eleven?”

Hélène agreed. Madame Oris returned to the glass-topped cubicle that went with her position. She was a tall woman, thin and worried and courtly, who had worked for the agency for thirty years, a dedicated soul who had made a career of cleaning up other people’s messes. When she’d first met Hélène she’d recognized a kindred spirit—one didn’t cut corners, one rose to emergencies. Now nearing seventy, Madame Oris had let it be known that she was going to retire.

Natalie leaned over and said, “Today is the day.”

“I think so,” Hélène said. The job was hers if she wanted it.

“What are you going to do?”

Hélène shook her head, as if she didn’t know.

Natalie’s whisper was fierce. “You can’t give in to that garce!” Bitch.

Hélène had an enemy in the office, a young woman named Victorine; pretty and cold, with a bright manner, and very ambitious. She wasn’t shy about going after what she wanted. “I’m sure you’ve heard that Madame Oris is leaving,” she’d said. “There’s a chance I can have her job.”

Only if Hélène turned it down. Back in May, when Madame Oris first mentioned retirement, most of the people in the office had let Hélène know they were glad she’d be taking over. But Victorine had a different view. “What a terrible day,” she’d said one evening as they were leaving the office. “A couple from Warsaw, they wouldn’t take no for an answer.” Hélène was politely sympathetic, but Victorine’s voice sharpened as she continued. “Isn’t it odd,” she’d said, “how certain people feel they should have whatever they want? They just grab it, not a thought for the rest of the world. What would you call such people?”

You, Hélène thought, would call them Jews.

How had she found out? Hélène didn’t know, but the statement was aimed directly at her, a threat, and it had to be taken seriously. Because a German decree in April had forbidden Jews to work in companies where there was contact with the public. Would Victorine turn her in? To the owner of the agency? To the Gestapo? Or was it a bluff?

In the next few weeks, a number of things went inexplicably wrong. For example, Madame Kippel’s lost steamship ticket— Hélène’s fault? Or stolen from her desk? Or, mysteriously, Monsieur Babeau in the wrong Spanish hotel; a sputtering, static-filled phone call summoning up the lower depths of Madrid, bandits and highwaymen and no flush-chain on the porcelain squatter.

“No highwayman would ever put up with that,” Natalie said later. But it wasn’t exactly funny. If Victorine had sabotaged Hélène’s clients, she was easily capable of denunciation.

You have until eleven, Hélène told herself. But she’d already made a decision. “I don’t want to give in to anybody,” she explained to Natalie. “On the other hand, what I really want is peace.”

Natalie looked glum. If Victorine got the job she’d make Natalie’s life miserable, because Natalie was Hélène’s friend. “But,” she said, “what about the money?”

She’d thought about it. The raise wasn’t much, but it might be enough for her to bribe her way into a new apartment—even without a residence permit. Tempting, but Victorine could kill any chance of a paycheck. “The money’s not bad,” she said. “But money isn’t everything.”

Natalie was about to answer, then abruptly said, “Attention! ”

Victorine was coming down the aisle, back straight, chin held high, a stack of dossiers in her hands.

“Bonjour, Hélène,” she said.

“Bonjour, Victorine.”

“Did I see Madame Oris stop by?”

“You did.”

“Oh Hélène, this is going to be such an important day for you. I hope you do the right thing.”

Behind her back, Natalie made a Victorine face—a beaming mock smile.

“I’m sure I will,” Hélène said. She could hear the defeat in her voice.

Victorine swept off, her skirt swinging. “See you later,” she sang.

Natalie shook her head in disbelief. “Hélène, can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“Does she have something on you?”

“No.”

“It’s in her voice,” Natalie said. “We’re friends, Hélène. If you need help, you should tell me.”

“I know.” The urge to confide was strong, but she fought it off. “Really, I know.”

Natalie waited a moment longer, then went back to work. Hélène stared at a pile of confirmations that had come in by teleprinter the night before. Herr and Frau Von Schaus, arriving 20 December for one week at the Plaza-Athénée. Madame Dupont, by first-class compartment to Rome.

Her phone rang, the office intercom. “Yes?”

“Hélène, there’s a couple waiting in the réception.”

“I’ll be right there.”

“You’re going to give up, aren’t you,” Natalie said.

Hélène nodded.

She saw Casson that night—waited for him in the park across from the Benoit. He came over and sat next to her on the bench, sensed right away that something was wrong. “What is it?” he said. She told him everything. He sighed at the end, a fatalist, a realist—he didn’t want her to know what went on inside him. “Well,” he said, “of course you had to give her what she wanted.”

“I know. It just made me sick to do it.”

“Now that she’s got the job, will she shut up?”

“I think so. The triumph should be enough for her, that, and rubbing my nose in it.”

Casson sat back against the bench and put his hands in his pockets. “The war will end, Hélène. And, when it does, a lot of scores will be settled.”

“Yes, that’s what I keep telling myself. Oh, if you could just see her. She has the shape of a hen.”

“How did she find out?”

Hélène shook her head. “Guessed, maybe. Do I look Jewish?”

He didn’t think so. She had dark, glossy hair, deep eyes, strong features, a face that was, at times, seductive for no reason he could think of. Like half the women in Paris, he thought. “Not to me,” he said.

She stood and took his hand; despite the cold her skin was hot and damp. “Let’s walk,” she said.

They walked through the park. The bare branches of the chestnut trees were stark against the sky. At the entrance there was a bust of Verlaine.

“I’ve talked to Degrave,” he said. “He told me he might be able to get you out in February, or maybe March. Until then, the important thing is to survive. Whatever you have to do.”

“You must survive, you must survive.” She stared down at the ground for a time. “I’ll tell you something I discovered, Jean-Claude. You can be scared for only so long, then a day comes when you don’t care anymore.”

Belgium in December. Through the cloudy window of a slow train. Like a pastoral drawing from the nineteenth century, he thought. Black and white and a hundred shades of gray; cows by a stream in a field, cows by a stream in a field, cows . . . A lone elm in the mist, a farmer in rubber boots, his dog by his side.

Casson dozed off, then woke up suddenly and made sure the paper-wrapped parcel was still on the seat next to him. Expensive, almost very expensive. What seemed like a mindless errand had sent him deep into the heart of his old neighborhood, where every passing stranger threatened to turn into somebody he knew.

The train rattled along, stopping at every village. He shared the first-class compartment—the German border guards tended to go easy on first-class passengers—with a Belgian couple and two French businessmen. The lawyer was riding in another car, a safety precaution. The Belgian couple started eating in Cambrai and never quite stopped. Slow and determined, unsmiling, they opened a wicker basket and worked their way from radishes to salted beef tongue, to some kind of white, waxy cheese, then to small, dried-out winter apples, demolishing a loaf of bread in the process. They didn’t talk, or look out the window. Just chewed, from Valenciennes to Mons. Casson pretended not to notice. It made him hungry, but he was used to that. When the couple got off the train, one of the businessmen, in an aside to his friend, said something about vaches, cows. But it was just bravado, Casson realized, they were hungry too.

The guards at Esschen, on the Dutch-Belgian border, were looking for somebody. They made all the passengers get out and stand by the train. The package. He made a fast decision, fumbled with his coat until everyone had left the compartment, then slid it under the seat across from his.

On the platform, the border guards were angry, Casson was shoved with a rifle. “You. Get over there.” It hurt more than it should have. There was an old Frenchman next to him, a dignified little man in a white goatee, who stood at attention, shoulders back, waiting for the Germans to let them go.

Casson could hear the guards searching the railroad car. Stomping down the aisles, slamming doors. He heard glass breaking, somebody laughed. An hour later, when they got back on, his package was where he’d left it. The train crawled north. Night fell. Casson could see the evening star. The old man, now sitting across from him, fell sound asleep, mouth wide open, breath whistling through his nose.

The prison was in Zunderdorp, across the Nordzee Canal from the main part of Amsterdam. They walked through silent streets for a long time, showed their papers to various guards, and finally to a prison official in a gray suit. They climbed an iron staircase to the top floor and were led past a tier of cells to a small, private room in the hospital.

Captain Vasilis rose from a hospital bed, embraced his lawyer, and shook Casson’s hand. He wore a robe over silk pajamas and good leather slippers. He had red-rimmed eyes set in heavy pouches, two days’ growth of gray beard on a face that ended in three chins, a voice like a rake drawn through gravel.

“Forgive us a minute,” he said to Casson. The accent was so heavy it took Casson a moment to realize the man had spoken French. The three of them sat at a small table. Vasilis and the lawyer leaned close to each other and spoke in low voices.

Casson could hear what they were saying, but it didn’t matter. “Did he go over there?” Vasilis asked.

“Not yet. His friend wasn’t ready.”

“When will it happen?”

“A week, maybe. The new figure is a little higher.”

“We don’t care.”

“No.”

“You can say something?”

“It won’t help.”

“Let it go, then.”

Eventually, Vasilis turned to him and said, “Sorry, business.”

“I understand,” Casson said. He handed over the package.

Vasilis tore the paper off and cradled the melon in both hands. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you.” He smelled the soft end, then pressed it expertly with his thumbs. “Very nice,” he said. He took a pair of glasses from the breast pocket of his bathrobe, looked at Casson for a moment, then put them away. “What are you?”

“I’m in the insurance business.”

“Ouay?” He drew the oui out to form the slang oh yeah? Then nodded in a way that meant and if my grandmother had wheels she would’ve been a cart.

“Yes, that’s what I do.”

“D’accord.” If that’s the way you want it, fine. He turned to the lawyer and said, “What time?”

“Almost noon.”

“Hey!” the captain shouted. “Van Eyck!”

The door opened, a guard peered into the room.

“Bring trays!”

“Yes, Captain,” the guard said, closing the door politely behind him.

Vasilis met Casson’s eyes and shook his head sorrowfully—you can barely imagine what this is costing me.

“Sir,” he said to Casson, “what you want?”

“Submachine guns. Six hundred of them. And ammunition.”

“Guns?” Vasilis sucked in his breath like a man who just burned his fingers. The expense!

“Yes,” Casson said. “We know.”

“Very difficult.”

Casson nodded, sympathetic.

“What for?”

Casson didn’t answer immediately—wasn’t it obvious?—but Vasilis waited. Finally he said, “Freedom.”

Vasilis sighed, the sound of a doomed man. Now he had to involve himself in difficulties. He turned to the lawyer. “You tell him what cost?”

“No.”

“I can get MAS 38 for you. French gun. You know problem?”

“No.”

“Cartridge is 7.65. You still want it?”

“We’re buying a thousand rounds per gun.”

“Yes, but after that, pfft.”

“That’s our problem.”

“A hundred and fifty American dollars for each. Ninety thousand dollars. Three million six hundred thousand in French francs—premium sixty percent if you want to pay that way. Four hundred fifty thousand Swiss. We prefer.”

“What about ammunition?”

“Six hundred thousand rounds—a box of two hundred is three American, so nine thousand dollars, forty-five thousand Swiss. Still good?”

“Yes.”

“For guns, all paid before we ship.”

“All?”

“Yes. You want figs, or shoes, it’s different.”

“All right. Agreed.”

“You sell to somebody?”

“No.”

“Four hundred ninety-five thousand Swiss. It’s made?”

“Yes. When can it be done?”

“These guns are in Syria. In the armories of the French Occupation force. We bring them in caïque—fishing boat. Two tons, a little more. You know Mediterranean?”

“Well—”

“It eat ships. And sailors. So then, we give back half.”

“All right.”

“Any chance you pay gold?”

“No.”

“Will discount.”

“It will have to be Swiss francs.”

“All right. We deliver to Marseilles, the lawyer will give you a few days’ notice. It will be at warehouse, maybe on dock. We’ll let you know.”

“Money to the lawyer?”

“Yes. When you bring?”

“A few days.”

“We start then.” He made a spitting noise toward his hand, thrust it out and Casson shook it. “Done,” Vasilis said.

Isidor Szapera didn’t really recover from being shot during the attempted robbery at Aubervilliers. He couldn’t run—he dragged a foot when he walked—and he had almost no strength at all in one hand. At night, his back ached where he’d been wounded and it was hard to sleep. They’d taken him to a home for retired railroad workers out in Saint-Denis, where a doctor had removed some of the bullet, but not all of it. When he could walk again, the party had offered to hide him with a family in the south, but he’d turned them down. “I can do something,” he’d said.

They trained him to operate a wireless telegraph—they suffered constant losses in radio operators, were always recruiting for that position. He worked hard hours, late into the night. He missed Eva Perlemère, and was angry at himself for having lost her. She haunted his dreams, sometimes he saw her undressing, sometimes he saw her face, eyes closed, as they were making love. The dreams woke him up.

Another loss, he thought, the Germans would have to pay for. He practiced on the dummy telegraph key until his hand throbbed. By late December he was ready to go to work and they stationed him in the attic of a house in Montrouge, just outside Paris.

He was assigned a liaison girl, Sylvie. Skinny and somber, eighteen, a pharmacy student at the Sorbonne. Her job was to maintain a clandestine apartment and telephone, to accept and relay messages, to deliver wireless transmissions as they came in from Russia, to take the answers back to the W/T operator for encryption and transmission. Liaison girls tended to last a few months, not much longer.

Szapera liked Sylvie because she was all business. La Vierge, they called her when she wasn’t around, the virgin. Some of the FTP men had tried to seduce her, but she wasn’t interested. That was fine with Szapera. When Germany was in flames it would be time enough for such things to begin again.

By late December, after the Japanese attack on the USA, the wireless traffic between the Center in Kuibyshev and the Paris stations had gone wild. Everything had changed. Comrade, went one message to an FTP commander, this is no longer a twenty-year war, this is now a two-year war, and we must act accordingly. Order-of-battle information about the Wehrmacht went east—this unit in Normandy, that divisional insignia seen on a train—along with production norms from French arms factories, diplomatic gossip, intelligence gathered from photographed papers and stolen maps, a vast river of coded signals.

In return, the Kuibyshev Center kept demanding more. They sent orders, instructions, requests for clarification, questionnaires for spies, directions of all kinds: you will find out, you will watch, you will photograph, you will obtain. The radio operators could transmit safely for fifteen minutes, but the Center kept them at it for hours.

German signal detection units worked around the clock. Vans with rotating antennas cruised the streets, listening for transmissions, working up and down the scale of the wireless frequencies. The radio operators were assigned lookouts at both ends of the street, to watch for trucks. The Germans knew it, and started to use men carrying suitcases with receiving sets packed inside.

It snowed on the night of 30 December. Just after midnight, a long message came in from the Center. Reception was difficult— somewhere between Kuibyshev and Paris there was an electrical storm, the airwaves crackled and hissed, the Russian operator’s dots and dashes disappeared into sudden bursts of static. Please repeat. Szapera turned the volume on the receiver up to ten, the end of the dial, played with the tuning device—trying to find clear air on the edge of the frequency, then pressed his hands against the headphones.

At 1:20 the transmission ended. A signal indicated further transmission in fifteen minutes, change of frequency to 3.8 megacycles. Szapera rubbed his eyes, started to decode the previous message. For M20, Comrade Brasova, eight questions for the agent code-named GAZELLE.

The phone rang. Once. Sylvie looked up from her textbook, Szapera stopped writing. “Signal,” she said.

“Have a look,” Szapera said.

She went to the window, edged the blackout curtain aside. The wet snow melted as it hit the pavement. The building across from her was dark and silent. She raised the window an inch and listened. Slowly, a car drove down the street, turned the corner, and disappeared into the night.

“A car,” she said.

“What kind?”

“Some old kind of car, I don’t know which model.”

“Anything else?”

“No.”

Probably a false alarm. Szapera went back to work—after all, he was only in danger when he was transmitting. Final assignment for Brasova’s agent: Have her record the serial number stamped in the margin of the document. The next section of the transmission was for J42. Weiss, he thought. Item one: At the Lille railway freight office on the rue Cheval . . .

Again, the telephone.

“Something’s going on,” Szapera said.

“Yes.”

Szapera looked at the small coal stove in the corner, the edges of the firebox door glowed bright orange. He could start burning papers if he felt it was necessary. There was a revolver on the table beside the wireless.

“Who are the lookouts tonight?” he asked.

“There is only one, Fernand. The other is in the hospital.”

“Fernand.” Szapera didn’t know him.

“He works in the Citroën plant.”

Szapera thought for a moment, and came up with a compromise. “Take the messages now,” he said. “Decryptions and the rest of it, everything that came in tonight.”

“What about you?”

“I’m going to stay for the 1:35 transmission.”

“He signaled twice,” Sylvie said.

“Here. Take it,” Szapera said. He handed her several sheets of paper, cheap stuff with brown flecks in it, covered with tiny numbers and block letters.

Sylvie put on her wool muffler, then her coat. She’d be safe enough in the streets, Szapera thought. The curfew had been moved back for Christmas and New Year, a reward from the Germans for a compliant population.

Sylvie stood by the door, her face taut and unsmiling as always. “I think you should go,” she said.

“No. I’ll be all right.”

“The rules are that you should leave.”

“I will. Fifteen minutes, plus whatever time they take to send.” Goddamn her, he thought, she won’t go. She stared at him, her hand on the doorknob. “I’ll make some tea for us,” she said. “In my room. After we drop off the papers.”

What was this? She felt nothing for him, not that way anyhow. A ruse, he thought. He wanted to mock her, but he didn’t have it in his heart to do that, not anymore.

“Wait for me then,” he said. “At the rue Lenoir apartment, then we’ll have tea together.”

For a long moment she stood there, not wanting to leave without him. Finally she said, “All right, then,” and closed the door behind her.

He heard her walk lightly down the stairs, heard the street door open and shut, then listened at the window as her footsteps receded up the street. Good. Whatever the phone signal meant, the night’s transmissions were safe. It wasn’t the first time there had been a false alarm. He paced around the room. Now, his decoding work gone, he had nothing to do, not even anything to read. Ah, Sylvie’s biology text, left on the chair. He picked it up, thumbed through it. Look at this, he thought, she’s written her name on the title page.

Smiling grimly to himself, he tore the page out, took a rag from a nail beside the stove, opened the door and threw it in. Now she’ll be mad at me for damaging her book. But, really, she should have known better.

He walked over to the table, sat in the office chair and leaned back, putting his feet up. Only a few minutes until the last transmission of the night—his work would be complete, then he could relax. He flipped through the book, stopping now and then to look at the illustrations. A long time since he’d studied this kind of stuff. The Sea Horse, fish of the genus Hippocampus (See Fig. 18—Hippocampus hudsonius), belonging to the pipefish family, with prehensile tail and elongated snout, the head at a right angle to the body. While the habitat of the Sea Horse is known to include—

He went back to the window. Checked his watch. 1:29. Quiet out, dead in this neighborhood. Footsteps? Yes, somebody coming home. No, two people. In a hurry. The street door flew open, the knob banging hard against the wall. People, several of them, pounding up the staircase. What?

His heart fluttered, but he was already moving toward the table. He grabbed the sheaf of encryption tables and shoved them in the stove, threw the rag in after them, and kicked the door closed. Let them try to grab it barehanded.

Next, the revolver. He swept it off the table as the footsteps came around the corner of the staircase and down the hall. Could there be some perfectly good explanation? No. Could he get to the roof? No, too late. He pulled back the hammer of the revolver until it cocked. He wasn’t going alone, that was certain. And they weren’t going to have him alive. A fist pounded on the door, a voice shouted in German.

He fired the first shot, was deafened by the sound. A ragged hole, chest-high, appeared in the door. From the landing, an indignant yelp. Streams of German, hysterical shouting. There was a whole crowd out there. He reminded himself to kneel down, fired a second time, and a third.

The return fusillade blew the door apart, two machine pistols firing on full automatic. Szapera was knocked backward, under the table. He worked himself around to shoot again, knees slipping in blood on the floorboards. He aimed the revolver, the room echoed with the shot, his ears rang. Again they fired through the door. Szapera was amazed, not that a bullet had gone through his heart, had killed him, but that he could still be conscious for the instant it took to know such a thing.