Dark Star (17 page)
When they were done scowling, they gave him a choice: elevate the Paris group leader to Guillaume's position or accept a new deputy. This was no choice at all, group leaders were infamously difficult to replace. On their ability to stroke and soothe, wheedle, nag, or threaten, everything depended. He could, on the other hand, accept a new deputy, the journalist Szara, an amateur “who had done a few things with fair success.”
Goldman would have preferred experienced help, perhaps transferred from what he believed to be less crucial networks, for
OPAL
ran some fourteen agents in France and Germany and would now service a fifteenth (Baumann, officially designated
OTTER),
but the purges had eaten down into the
apparai
from the top and operationally sophisticated staff simply wasn't available. It was arranged for him to meet with Szara, who would work with a co-deputy in
OPAL
but would essentially be on his own in Paris while Goldman, as “illegal”
rezident,
worked in protective isolation in Brussels. In the end he put a good face on it and indicated he was pleased with the arrangement. Somewhere, operating deep within the committee underbrush, there was a big, important rat who wanted Szara in Paris—Goldman could smell him.
Then too, for Goldman, it was best to be cooperative; his rising star was lately a little obscured, through no fault of his own, by a dark cloud on the horizon. His training class, the Brotherhood Front of 1934—in fact a fractious crowd recruited from every lost
corner of the Balkans—was not turning out as senior
apparat
people thought it would. A distressing number of the “brothers” had left home; some defected, harboring far less fraternal affection than their Russian family had supposed. The undisputed leader of the class, a Bulgarian, had vanished from Barcelona and resurfaced in Paris, where he'd become entangled in émigré politics and gotten himself arrested by French internal security officers in July of '37. A Serbian had disappeared back into the mountains of his homeland after a very complex exfiltration from a Spanish prison—a dreadful instance of ingratitude, though it was the NKVD that had shopped him to Franco's military intelligence in the first place, expedient neutralization after he resisted an order to purge POUM members in his guerrilla unit. And a Hungarian from Esztergom, worthless to the
apparat
from day one, had also fled to Paris where, hiding out in a Montmartre hotel, he'd apparently been murdered by a merchant seaman. What had
he
been involved in? Nobody knew.
Given that chamber of horrors, Goldman would be saying
yes sir
to senior officers for the foreseeable future. Privately, he had grave misgivings about André Szara. The journalist seemed both arrogant and insecure—a normal enough combination but potentially lethal under the stresses of clandestine work. Goldman was familiar with Szara's writing, he thought it sometimes powerful, almost always informative. But Goldman had been in the business just long enough to fear the creative personality. He'd developed a taste for blunt, stolid types, unemotional, who worked day and night without coming down with fevers, men and women who didn't nurse grudges, who preferred verification to intuition, were endlessly dependable and there when you needed them, could think on their feet in a crisis,
recognized
a crisis when one developed, and had the sense to ask you what to do when they weren't sure. Careers were made with such people. Not with the André Szaras of the world. But he was stuck, in no position to argue, and so he'd do the best he could.
Over the ghastly chop suey in Brussels, Goldman told him,
“Be
a journalist!”
What?
“Well, you are one, of course, very good, yes, but you must now make a special effort to live the life, and to be seen to live the life, one would expect of such a person. Go about, seek out your colleagues, haunt the right cafés. No slinking around, is what I mean. Of course you'll see the necessity of it, yes?”
Goldman made him mad, pointing this out. It was true that he'd habitually avoided journalists' haunts and parties and gone off on his own. For one thing, it didn't pay to be too friendly with Western Europeans—the lead diva of the Moscow Opera had been sent to the camps for dancing at a party with the Japanese ambassador. For another, he forever had to accomplish some special little task for the
apparat.
Such things took time, care, patience. And you didn't want colleagues around when you did it.
So, General Vlasy, the tread problem on the new R-20 tank turns out to be no problem at all, eh?
and all that sort of thing, certainly
not
with some knowing fellow journalist suppressing a cackle in the background.
Szara never really did respond to Goldman's direction. He looked at the gray noodles on his plate for a moment, then went on with the conversation. Inside he was broiling. Wasn't he unhappy enough about mortgaging his soul to Abramov and secretly abandoning his profession? Apparently not. They now laid upon his heart a heaping tablespoon of Russian irony, directing him to act more like what he no longer was. All this from some snotty little Romanian who thought he spoke idiomatic Russian, was very much his junior in age, and looked like (and probably acted like) some kind of rodent. Small eyes that glittered, ears a little too big, features set close together. Like a smart mouse. Maybe too smart. Who the hell did he think he was?
Back in Paris the following day, however, he kept his opinions to himself. “You've met Yves,” said his fellow deputy, using Goldman's work name. “What do you think?”
Szara pretended to ponder the question. He did not want to commit himself, but neither did he want to seem like a spineless idiot—he was going to have to work closely with this woman. She
was the sort of individual who, in the setting of a business office, might well be known as
a bit of a terror.
Abramov had warned him about her: work name—Elli, real name—Annique Schau-Wehrli, reputation—lioness. In person she turned out to be fiftyish, short, stout, with a thrust-out bosom like a pouter pigeon and glasses on a chain around her neck. She wore a built-up shoe on one foot and walked with a cane, having been born with one leg shorter than the other. Szara found himself drawn to her—she was magnetic, perceptive, and also rather pretty, with rosy complexion, light, curly hair, a screen siren's long eyelashes, and omniscient eyes lit by a brisk, cheerful hatred.
She was an ardent, blistering Marxist, a former pillar of the Swiss Communist party from a wealthy bourgeois (and long ago rejected) family in Lucerne. She had a tongue like a sword, spoke six languages, and feared absolutely nothing. In Paris, she worked as office manager and resident saint for a League of Nations satellite office, the International Law Institute, which issued oceans of studies attempting to encourage the countries of the world to normalize and standardize their legal codes. Wasn't the theft of a female ancestor's soul in Nyasaland much the same, when all was said and done, as a stock swindle in Sweden?
“Well? ” she repeated. “Don't tell me you have no opinion of the man. I won't believe you.”
They were in her living room, a typical Parisian concoction of rich red draperies, silk pillows, naked gold women holding ebony-shaded lamps above their heads, and little things—ashtrays, onyx inkwells, ivory boxes, Gallé bottles, and porcelain bull terriers—on every shelf and table. Szara kept his elbows jammed well against his sides.
“Young,” he said.
“Younger than you.”
“Yes.”
“Brilliant, my dear comrade.”
“Glib.”
“Boof!” she said, a Gallic explosion of incredulous air. “But how can you be like this? Measured any way you like, brilliant. Against the norm? Genius. Recall the Russian operative who went
to London last year, pockets just stuffed with British pounds. He is there two days, ventures from his hotel for the first time. Persuaded by Soviet propaganda, he actually believes that the English working classes are so poor they wear paper shoes. He suddenly spies a shop window full of leather shoes, not at all expensive.
Ah-ha,
says he, my lucky day, and buys ten pair. Then, at another store,
look, they too have shoes today!
He thinks his dear departed mother is sending down gifts from heaven. Again, ten pair. And so on, until the poor soul had over a hundred pairs of shoes, no money for party work, and the MI5 surveillance team is practically rolling on the pavement. Just wait and see what some of our people can do, then you'll change your tune.”
Szara pretended to be slightly abashed. He was the new boy in the office, he had to make a decent impression, but he'd known Goldman's type before: a genius all right, a genius for self-advancement. “I suppose you're right,” he said amiably.
Friday, the last week in April, in a warm, gentle rain that shone on the spring leaves of the boulevard trees, Szara booked a telephone call to Marta Haecht's magazine office in Berlin.
Twenty minutes later he canceled it.
The gospel according to Abramov: “Look, you can never be sure what they know about you, just as they can never be sure what we know about them. In times of peace, the services do two things in particular, they watch and they wait. This is a war of invisibility, fought with invisible weapons: information, numbers, wireless/telegraph transmissions, social acquaintance, political influence, entrée to certain circles, knowledge of industrial production or infantry morale. So, show me an infantry morale. You can't. It's intangible.
“Counterintelligence operations are the most invisible of all. The people who run them don't want to neutralize their opponents— not right away. Some boss is screaming
stop it! stop it!
and his operatives are pleading
no. We want to see what they do.
For you it means this: you have to assume you have typhoid, you're infectious, and anyone you meet or know gets the disease. Whether this meeting
is innocent or not, they must fall under suspicion if a third party is watching. You wonder why we recruit friends, family, lovers? We might as well—they're going to be considered guilty anyhow.”
The seed Abramov planted in Moscow grew a frightful garden in Paris. It grew in Szara's imagination, where it took the form of a voice: a quiet, resourceful voice, cultured, sure of itself, German-speaking. It was the voice of presumed surveillance, and when Szara contemplated something foolish, like a telephone call to Germany, it spoke to him.
28 April. 16:25.
SZARA
(the flat, official format would be similar to
DUBOK
's file and Szara imagined the German officer to be not unlike the author of the Okhrana dossier)
telephones
MARTA HAECHT
at Berlin 45.633; conversation recorded and currently under analysis for code or Aesopian language.
Aesopian language suggested reality with symbolism or implication. Are you still studying French? I sent you a card from Paris— did you receive it? I'm writing a story about the workers who built the Gare du Nord. I don't know where the time goes, I have to finish the piece by noon on the fourth of May.
It fooled nobody.
Even if
the voice
did not yet speak, Szara feared discovery. By 1938, Germany had been converted into a counterespionage state. Every patriotic German took it as his or her duty to inform the authorities of any suspicious behavior, denunciation had become a national mania—
strangers visited them, a curious sound from their basement, a printing press?
Of course he considered using the network for communication. This would either evade all suspicion or end in absolute tragedy. A lover's choice,
nyet?
Passion or death. They had described to him the details of what the Gestapo actually did,
kaschumbo,
whips soaked in pails of water. The idea of exposing her to that …
He worked.
The Parisian spring flared to life—one hot morning and all the women were dressed in yellow and green, on the café terraces people laughed at nothing in particular, aromas drifted through the open doors of bistros where the owner's briard flopped by the cash
register, a paw over its nose, dreaming fitfully of stock bones and cheese rinds.
The
OPAL
network was run from a three-story building near the quais of the canal Saint-Martin and the canal de l'Ourcq, at the tattered edge of the nineteenth arrondissement where the streets around the Porte de Pantin turned to narrow roads leading into the villages of Pantin and Bobigny. A pulsating, sleepless
quartier,
home to the city's slaughterhouses as well as the stylish restaurants of the avenue Jean-Jaurés, where partygoing swells often ventured at dawn to eat fillet of beef baked in honey and avoid the tourists and taxi drivers down at Les Halles. Paris put things out there she wasn't sure whether she wanted or not—the Hippodrome where they held bicycle races and boxing matches, an infamous
maison close
where elaborate exhibitions could be arranged. In spring and fall, fog rose from the canal in the evening, the blue neon sign of the Hôtel du Nord glowed mysteriously, slaughterhouse workers and bargemen drank
marc
in the cafés. In short, a
quartier
that worked all night long and asked no questions, a place where the indefatigable snooping of the average Parisian wasn't particularly welcome.
The house at 8, rue Delesseux was crumbling brown brick like the rest of the neighborhood, dirty and dark and smelling like a
pissoir.
But it could be entered through a street-level door, through a rear entrance to the
tabac
that occupied its tiny commercial space, or through an alley strewn with rags and broken glass that ran at an angle to the rue des Ardennes. It was handy to barges, a cemetery, a park, nameless village lanes, a sports arena, restaurants crowded with people—just about every sort of place that operatives liked to use.
The top floor of the house provided living and working space for the
OPAL
encipherer and wireless/telegraph operator, work name François, true name M. K. Kranov, an “illegal” with Danish passport, suspected to hold NKVD officer rank and, likely, the
apparat
spy reporting secretly to Moscow on the activities and personnel of the network.
