Dark Star (16 page)

It was warmer in Central Europe: Hitler marched into Austria, France and Britain protested, crowds cheered in the Vienna streets, Jews were dragged from hiding, humiliated, and beaten. Sometimes they died from the beatings, sometimes from the humiliation. In Moscow, a new trial: Piatakov, Radek (Sobelsohn), Krestinsky, Yagoda, and Bukharin. Accused of conspiring with Nazi intelligence agents, accused of entering into secret agreements with the German government. The final sentence of Vyshinsky's summation had remained constant for three years: “Shoot the mad dogs!” And they did.

Szara dragged himself through his days and drank all the vodka he could find, craving anesthesia that eluded him; only the body went numb. He wanted to call Berlin but it was impossible—no words could leave Moscow. Slowly, the images of the attic room in the narrow house, too often summoned, lost reality. They were now too perfect, like mirages of water in the desert. Angry, lonely, he decided to make love to any woman who came along, but when he met women the signal system went awry and nothing happened.

At Abramov's direction, he attended a series of training schools— an endless repetition of dead-drops, codes and ciphers, forgery, and
the construction of false identities. It was all about paper, he realized, a world of paper. Identity cards, passports, embassy cables, maps of defensive positions, order-of-battle reports. A mirror image of a former life, when he'd also lived amid paper.

Sometimes he wrote for Nezhenko; Abramov insisted on that. Stories about progress, always progress; life was getting better and better. What did such drudgery do to the secret spirit that he imagined lived deep within him? Curiously, nothing. For an hour or two it did what it had to do, then returned to its hiding place. He tried a version of “The Okhrana's Mystery Man” and surprised himself, it positively
blazed.
He burned it.

He did see friends from time to time, those who remained, but no honest thing could be said and the accumulated caution and reserve strangled affection. Still, they met. Sometimes, finding themselves alone and unobserved, they spoke of what they'd seen and heard. Horror stories; separations, disappearances, failures of nerve. The light had gone out, it seemed, the very notion of heroism excised, the world now filled with soft, bruised, frightened people scheming over a few lumps of coal or a spoonful of sugar. You caught fear from friends, like a malady, and they caught it from you, and nobody suggested a cure.

Abramov was a rock, and Szara clung to him like a drowning man. They would sit in a warm office in Dzerzhinsky Square and the officer would teach him what he had to know. The principles of the work couldn't be spelled out precisely, you had to listen to anecdotes until you had an intuitive feel for what was effective and what wasn't. They discussed cities—some operations in Germany were run from neighboring countries, which meant cities like Geneva, Paris, Luxembourg, Amsterdam, Brussels. Prague was no longer a possibility. Warsaw was extremely dangerous; the Polish services were powerful and deft, had an astute understanding of Soviet operational habits. Brussels was best—espionage, as long as it wasn't aimed at the Belgian government, wasn't even illegal.

Sometimes Abramov took him to meet people; these were momentary, casual occasions, a handshake, a few minutes of conversation. He had the impression of individuals who instantly knew who you were, what you were. He met Dershani in his office: a plain
desk, filing cabinets, a dead flower in a glass. The man himself was exceptionally polite; the thin lips smiled. “I'm very pleased to meet you,” he said. Szara thought about that later. The face was memorable—like looking at a hawk, it was the quality of the eyes that held your attention, suggested a world where they had seen things you hadn't.

He kept busy in the daytime, but the nights were not good. When the icy March snow rattled on the window he'd bury himself in blankets and clothing and sometimes his dead wife would visit him, and he would talk to her. Out loud. Talk to an empty room, in a certain quiet, definite language they had devised, a language meant to exclude the world from the fortress of sanity they had built to protect themselves.

They had been married—some might say “married”—by a Red Army major in 1918. “Be as one with the new order” was the way he'd blessed the union. Three years later she was dead, and they'd often been separated during that period by the exigencies of civil war. Working as a nurse in the Byelorussian town of Berdichev, she'd written him every day—notes scrawled on newsprint or scraps of paper—then sent a packet through when the postal system functioned. Byelorussia and the Ukraine were then, as always, the storm centers of madness. During the civil war, Berdichev was taken fourteen times, by Petlyura's army, by Denikin's, by Bolshevik units, by Galician irregulars, Polish infantry, Tutnik's bands, Maroussia's rebels, the anarchists under the insane Nestor Mahkno—whose cavalry favored Jewish prayer shawls as saddlecloths—and by what the writer Grossman referred to as “nobody's Ninth Regiment.” Eventually, somebody had killed her, exactly who or where or under what circumstance he'd never learned.

Despite the long separations, there had been an iron bond between them, as though they were twins. There was nothing he feared to tell her, and nothing she did not understand. In the Moscow nights that March he needed her desperately. It was insane to speak out loud in the empty little apartment—he feared the neighbors, denunciation, so he used his softest voice—but he could not stop doing it. He asked her what to do. She told him to live a day at a
time, and to be kind. Somehow this eased his heart and he could fall asleep.

There was one event that month which was to mean a great deal to him later, though at the time it had no special significance. It seemed just one more manifestation of the Great Inexplicable that lay at the heart of Russia, something you had to get used to if you meant to hang on to your sanity in that place. Nezhenko invited him to a semiofficial evening at the Café Sport on Tverskaya street. This was principally a gathering of Moscow's foreign community, so there was plenty of food and plenty to drink. At the height of the evening, conversation was quieted by somebody banging a spoon on a glass, then a well-known actor rose to present a recitation. Szara knew him slightly, Poziny, a barrel-chested man with a deeply lined face who played character roles in the Moscow Art Theater— Szara had seen him do a splendid Uncle Vanya that had brought the audience to its feet for the curtain call.

To cries of Oop-la! a grinning Poziny was hoisted atop a table by the wall. He cleared his throat, gathered the audience to him, then announced he would recite a work by Aleksandr Blok, written in the early days of the Revolution, called
The Scythians.
The Scythians, he explained for the benefit of foreign guests, were the earliest Russian tribe, one of the world's most ancient peoples, known for intricate goldworking and exemplary horsemanship, who inhabited a region north of the Black Sea. While Poziny introduced the poem, several young men and women distributed translations in French, English, and German so that the guests could read along.

Poziny held nothing back. From the first line on, his powerful voice burned with conviction:

There are millions of you; of us, swarms and swarms and swarms.
Try and battle against us.
Yes, we are Scythians; yes, Asiatics,
With slanting, greedy eyes.
… Oh, old world

Russia is a Sphinx. In joy and grief,
And pouring with black blood,
She peers, peers, peers at thee,
With hatred and with love.

Yes, love, as only our blood can love,
You have forgotten there can be such love
That burns and destroys.

Come to our side. From the horrors of war
Come to our peaceful arms;
Before it is too late, sheathe the old sword.
Comrades, let us be brothers.

And if not, we have nothing to lose.
We, too, can be perfidious if we choose;
And down all time you will be cursed
By the sick humanity of an age to come.

Before comely Europe
Into our thickets and forests we'll disperse,
And then we shall turn upon you
Our ugly Asiatic face.

But we ourselves henceforth shall be no shield of yours,
We ourselves henceforth will enter no battle.
We shall look on with our narrow eyes
When your deadly battles rage.

Nor shall we stir when the ferocious Hun
Rifles the pockets of the dead,
Burns down cities, drives herds into churches,
And roasts the flesh of the white brothers.

This is the last time—bethink thee, old world!—
To the fraternal feast of toil and peace,
The last time—to the bright, fraternal feast
The barbarian lyre now summons thee.

There were several very long seconds of silence; only Poziny's graceful inclination of the head summoned applause that resolved the tension in the room. Everyone there knew what the poem
meant, in the early days of the revolution and in March of 1938. Or thought they knew.

The Austrian chemical engineer H. J. Brandt arrived in Copenhagen on the Baltic ferry
Kren Lindblad
from Tallinn, Estonia, on 4 April 1938.

The grammar school teacher E. Roberts, from Edinburgh, took the Copenhagen-Amsterdam train, arriving at Amsterdam's Central Station in the early evening of 6 April.

The naturalized Belgian citizen Stefan Leib, of Czechoslovakian origin, got off the Amsterdam train at Brussels toward noon on 7 April, going immediately to the shop called Cartes de la Monde— maps of the world; antique, old, and new—he owned in the rue de Juyssens, in the winding back streets of the old business district.

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

On the evening of 12 April, those with an eye for moderately prominent journalists might have spotted Monsieur Leib out for dinner with A. A. Szara, recently assigned to the Paris bureau of
Pravda.
Spotted, that is, if one happened to visit a very dark and out-of-the-way Chinese restaurant, of dubious reputation, in the Asian district of Brussels.

In the end, Abramov and his associates had not made a choice of cities or networks for Dr. Baumann's case officer. Life and circumstance
intervened and chose for them. Even the multiple European networks of the Rote Kapelle—the Red Orchestra, as the German security services had nicknamed them—were not immune to the daily vicissitudes and tragedies that the rest of the world had to confront. In this instance, a deputy officer of the Paris-based
OPAL
network, work name Guillaume, was late for a clandestine meeting established in Lyon—one of his group leaders from Berlin was coming in by train under a cover identity—and drove recklessly to avoid having to wait for a fallback meeting three days later. His Renault sedan failed to make a curve on the N6 just outside Mâcon and spun sideways into a roadside plane tree. Guillaume was thrown clear and died the next day in the hospital in Mâcon.

Captain I. J. Goldman,
rezident
of
OPAL
under the painstakingly crafted cover of Stefan Leib, was brought back to Moscow by a circuitous route—“using passports like straw,” grumbled one of the “cobblers” who manufactured or altered identity papers at the NKVD Foreign Department—for lengthy consultations. Goldman, son of a Marxist lawyer from Bucharest, had volunteered for recruitment in 1934 and was, following productive service in Spain, something of a rising star.

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

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