Dark Star (18 page)

On the second floor lived “Odile,” Jeanne de Kouvens, the network's courier who serviced both Goldman in Brussels and the networks in Germany, the latter a twice-monthly run into Berlin
under the pretext of caring for a nonexistent mother. Odile was Belgian, a tough nineteen-year-old with two children and a philandering husband, not a bit beautiful but violently sexy, her hair cut in a short, mannish cap—the street kid look—her cleft chin, swollen upper lip, tip-tilted nose, and indomitable eyes tossing a challenge at any man in the immediate vicinity. Her husband, a working-class fop with bushy, fin de siècle muttonchop whiskers, ran a portable merry-go-round that circulated through the neighborhood squares of Paris. The
tabac
on the ground floor was served by Odile's brother, twenty years older than she, who had been wounded at Ypres and walked with the aid of two canes. He spent his days and nights on a stool behind the counter, selling Gitanes and Gauloises, Métro tickets and postage stamps, lottery chances, pencils, commemorative key rings, and more, an astonishing assortment of stuff, to a steady trickle of customers who created camouflage for operatives entering and leaving the house.

The Moscow Directorate had shuffled assignments to make life a little easier for Szara, putting Schau-Wehrli in charge of the three German networks,
HENRI, MOCHA,
and
RAVEN,
which left him with
SILO,
assigned to attack elements of the German community in Paris, and Dr. Julius Baumann.

Spring died early that year, soft rains came and went, the sky turned its fierce French blue only rarely, a mean little wind arrived at dusk and blew papers around the cobbled streets. The end of April was generally admitted to be
triste,
only the surrealists liked such unhappy weather, then summer came before anybody was really ready for it. The rising temperature seemed to drive the politicians further from sanity than usual.

Nobody could agree about anything: the Socialists had blocked a rearmament program in March, then the Foreign Office claimed the French commitment to Czechoslovakia to be “indisputable and sacred.” One senator pleaded for pacifism in the morning, called for preservation of the national honor in the afternoon, then sued the newspaper that described him as ambivalent. Meanwhile, senior civil servants demanded things of their mistresses that caused them
to raise their eyebrows when they had their girlfriends in for coffee. Nobody was comfortable: the rich found their sheets scratchy and carelessly ironed, the poor thought their
frites
tasted of fish oil.

On the top floor of the house at 8, rue Delesseux, the afternoons grew hot as the sun beat on the roof; the dusty window shades were never raised, no air stirred, and Kranov worked at a large table with his shirt off. He was a small, sullen man with curly hair and Slavic features who seemed, to Szara, to do nothing but work. All
OPAL
transmissions, incoming and outgoing, were based on one-time pads, encrypted into five-digit numerical groups, then transformed—using a changing mathematical key and “false” addition (5
+
0
=
0)—by a second encryption. Brief, pro forma transmissions were fleshed out with null groups to avoid the type of message that had always been the cryptanalyst's point of attack. From Egyptian times to the present, the phrase used to break codes never varied:
nothing new to report today.

Szara usually slipped into the house at night. In Kranov's transmitting room a blanket was nailed across the window, a tiny lamp used for illumination. Swirls of cigarette smoke hung in the air. Kranov's fingers jittered on the telegraph key, the dots and dashes flowing through the ether to a code clerk on Dzerzhinsky Square in Moscow:

91464 22571 83840 75819 11501

On other frequencies, a French captain in the Naval Intelligence section at Sfax, on the Tunisian coast, requested Paris to approve additional funds for Informant 22, the third secretary of the Czechoslovakian embassy in Vienna reported on private meetings held by the Sudeten leader Henlein with German diplomats in the spa town of Karlsbad, the Polish service in Warsaw asked an operative in Sofia to ascertain the whereabouts of the priest
JOSEF.
All night long the W/T operators
played their pianos,
not only for the Rote Kapelle, but in a hundred orchestras performing for scores of espionage
Konzertmeisters
from a dozen countries. Szara could hear it. Kranov let him put the earphones on and turn the dial. It was a theater of sound, pitched treble or bass, quick-fingered or deliberate, an order to liquidate an informer or a request for the local weather forecast. Sometimes crackling with the static of an electrical
storm in the Dolomites or the Carpathians, sometimes clear as a crystal chime, the nightlong symphony of numbers flew through the darkened heavens.

If there was no
critical/immediate
signal, Kranov broke out Moscow's transmissions after he woke from a few hours' sleep. Szara fancied it a kind of critical daylight that inevitably followed the coded mysteries of the night. Slowly, as May turned to June, and the sweat soaked through Kranov's undershirt in the morning heat, Szara began to gain a sharper appreciation of the interplay between
OPAL
and its masters, the simply phrased requests for information and the terse responses now resolved to a dialogue from which the mood of the Directorate could be read.

Moscow was restless. It had been so from the beginning. Abramov, sacrificing information in the hope of enforcing discipline, had let Szara know just exactly what he would be dealing with. Emphatically
not
Nezhenko—or any editor. Both Abramov and his
khvost
rival Dershani sat on the
OPAL
Directorate, as did Lyuba Kurova, a brilliant student in neuropathology in the years before the revolution, a ruthless Chekist in Lenin's terror campaign, now, in her forties, a friend of Poskrebyshev, Stalin's personal secretary; also Boris Grund, an
apparatchik,
an experienced technician, and a majority voter in every instance, and Vitaly Mezhin, at thirty-six years of age quite young for the work, a member of the generation of “little Stalins” who crept into the power vacuum created by the purge, as the Big Stalin intended them to do. “If you willfully disobey an order,” Abramov said, “this is who you disobey.”

Szara now saw that Dr. Baumann made them uncomfortable: (1) He was a Jew in Germany, his future gravely insecure. (2) His motives were unknown. (3) His product was crucial. Szara could imagine them, seated at a table covered with a green baize cloth, flimsies of decrypted signals arranged at every place, smoking nervously at their stubby Troika cigarettes, speaking so very carefully, conscious of nuance in themselves and others, groping toward a protective consensus.

Swage wire figures for January, February, March, and April received,
projections from orders on hand for May. Case officer asked to obtain listing of company personnel, especially in accounting office. Characterize: age, political affiliation, cultural level. They clearly wanted Baumann to get to work finding his own replacement. It was up to Szara to find some sort of honey to make him swallow that pill.

Of course they wanted more than that—Dershani in particular thought Baumann ought to be pumped dry, the quicker the better. He must know other subcontractors—who were they? Could they be approached? If so, how? What were their vulnerabilities? Then too—Mezhin now took his turn, you didn't want to be a wilting flower in this crowd—what of his association with senior officers of Rheinmetall? Might there not be something for them in that? Boris Grund thought this line productive. And what was Baumann paying for austenitic steel? Grund said his pals downstairs in the Economic Section were starving for such information, maybe we should toss them a bone.

Kurova didn't like the dead-drop. They'd gotten the Baumanns to buy a dog, a year-old schnauzer they named Ludwig, so that Baumann could be out on the street at night and use a stone wall near his house as a mailbox. This brought Odile, in a maid's uniform, into the neighborhood two or three times a month to drop off mail and collect a response. A bent nail in a telephone pole was used as a signal: head turned up told Baumann to collect, head turned down confirmed that his deposit had been picked up. All according to standard form and practice, Kurova acknowledged. But Germans were naturally curious, they stared out their windows, and they had an insatiable appetite for detail.
Why does Dr. Baumann reach behind the stone in Herr Bleiwert's wall? Look how poor little Ludwig wants only to play.
Kurova just didn't like it. Both operatives were too much in the open.

Dershani agreed. What about a restaurant, something in the industrial neighborhood where the wire mill was located?

Abramov thought not. As a Jew, Baumann's activities were limited—he couldn't just go to a restaurant. This would be noticed.

The factory, then, Mezhin offered. Best of all, could they reach the engineer Haecht, who would, according to Szara, be nominally
in control of the business as new anti-Jewish statutes were promulgated. They looked in their dossiers. They had a blurry photograph of Haecht, taken by an officer from the Berlin embassy. University records. Exemplar of handwriting. Inventory of family: wife Ilse, son Albert a pharmaceutical salesman, daughter Hedwig married to an engineer in Dortmund, daughter Marta an assistant art editor at a literary magazine.

Literary magazine? Perhaps a friend of ours, Dershani wondered idly.

Perhaps, Kurova admitted, but nice German girls don't go to factories.

Slow and easy, Abramov counseled, we don't want to create a panic.

This is no time for caution, Dershani said.

That was true.

Baumann's product
was
crucial. They had other sources of information on the German aircraft industry, but none that determined the numbers quite so exactly. The Directorate that handled the product coming in from Burgess and Philby and others in Great Britain confirmed the
OPAL
Directorate's hypotheses, as did sources in the French services. The German industrial machine was building a nightmare.

Baumann had shipped 14,842 feet of swage wire in October; this meant a monthly bomber production rate of 31 planes. From there they could project, using range and load factors already in their possession. The German bomber force as constituted in a theoretical month—May of 1939, for instance—would be able to fly 720 sorties in a single day against European targets and deliver 945 tons of bombs, causing a projected 50 casualties per ton—a total of almost 50,000 casualties in a twenty-four-hour period. A million casualties every three weeks.

And the USSR, Great Britain, and France were in absolute harmony on one basic assumption:
the bomber would always get through.
Yes, antiaircraft fire and fighter planes would take their
toll, but simply could not cause sufficient damage to bring the numbers down.

The Russians, using their British spies, had followed with interest developments in British strategic thinking in the last month of 1937. The RAF experts had urged building up the British aircraft industry to deliver heavy bombers to match the German numbers, ultimately to create a counterweight of terror: you destroy our cities, we'll destroy yours. But the cabinet had overruled them. Said Sir Thomas Inskip: “The role of our air force is not an early knockout blow … but to prevent the Germans from knocking us out.” This was not the usual thinking, but the cabinet, in the end, had determined the defensive system a better option, and British industry began to build fighters instead of bombers.

In Germany, also, a strategic decision was made, though this one rested on Hitler's power. When the Reich marched into the Rhineland in 1936 and opposition did not materialize, the German General Staff lost credibility. Hitler was right. It was proven. Soon thereafter, he turned his attention to Hermann Göring's Luftwaffe. Where, Hitler wanted to know, are my airplanes? Göring felt the pressure, and took steps to protect himself. Germany stopped production of four-engine bombers, the Dornier Do-19 and the Junkers Su-89. Those planes could operate at greater distances, in England or the USSR, and stay longer over target, as well as extend the air cover provided to U-boat packs beset by sub chasers or destroyers, but they were not going to be built. Driven by Hitler's impatience, Göring directed the aircraft industry to build twin-engine bombers. “The Führer,” Göring said, “does not ask me
what kind
of bombers I have. He simply wants to know
how many.”
The comment was believed to be private.

It wasn't.

And that was the point. The Moscow Directorate had to know what Göring said, and what the British cabinet thought, and had to do whatever,
whatever,
had to be done in order to know. In the same complex of buildings where the
OPAL
Directorate met, other groups labored to keep Germany and Great Britain from finding out what Stalin said, or what the Politburo thought. That work,
though, was none of their business. Their business was
a million casualties every three weeks.
With a threat of that dimension, how carefully could Dr. Julius Baumann be treated? They had to, as Dershani counseled, take their chances, and if the man went slack with terror or rigid with fury it was Szara's job to handle him. If Szara couldn't do it, they'd find somebody who could. They were not in a position to be gentle with spies, even less with case officers.

“Then we are agreed,” Kurova said. There were stern nods of assent around the table.

That night, the W/T operator in Dzerzhinsky Square settled in on his frequency at 1:33
A.M.,
Moscow time, as scheduled for that date. He discovered a neighbor, some plodding fool out there somewhere, sending five-digit groups as though he had all eternity to get the job done. The operator swore softly with irritation, caressed his dial until he found a private little band of silent air, then began a long signal to his nameless, faceless, yet very familiar colleague in Paris.
Paris,
he thought,
a city I'll never see.
But that was fate. So, instead, he put a bit of his soul into the telegraphy, flying ghostlike across the sleeping continent along with his secret numbers.