Dark Star (23 page)

The smoky haze of regret thickened to a fog. What point in having Sénéschal or Odile watch the house if Szara could not be reached when something finally happened—this was
his
operation.

But the rules emphatically excluded contact with an agent-operator at his home or, God forbid, at the communications base. Thus he found a rooming house in Suresnes with a telephone on the wall in the corridor, gave the landlady a month's rent and an alias, and there, when he wasn't on duty in Puteaux, he stayed, waiting for Sénéschal or Odile to use the telephone in a café just down the street from the old lady's building.

Waiting.

The great curse of espionage: Father Time in lead boots, the skeleton cobwebbed to the telephone—any and all of the images applied. If you were lucky and good an opportunity presented itself. And then you waited.

July came. Paris broiled in the sun, you could smell the butcher shops half a block away. Szara sat sweating in a soiled little room, not a breath of air stirred through the window; he read trashy French novels, stared out at the street.
I dared to enter the world of spies,
he thought,
and wound up like the classic lonely-pensioner-alone-in-a-room of a Gogol story.
There was a woman who lived just down the hall, fortyish, dyed blond, and fleshy. Fleshy the first week, sumptuous the second, Rubenesque thereafter. She too seemed to be waiting for something or other, though Szara couldn't imagine what.

Actually he could imagine, and did. Her presence in the hallway was announced by a trail of scent called Cri de la Nuit, cheap, crude, sweet, which drove his imagination to absurd excesses. As did her bitter mouth, set in a permanent sneer that said to the world, and especially to him, “Well?”

Before he could answer, the phone rang.

“Can you come to dinner?” Odile said. Heart pounding, Szara found a cranky old taxi at the Suresnes Mairie and reached the Puteaux house in minutes. Odile was standing well back from the window, looking through a pair of opera glasses. With a little grin of triumph she handed them over. “Second floor,” she said. “To the left of the entryway.”

By the time he focused, they weren't where she said they were, but had moved to the top floor, two colorless men in dark suits seen
dimly through the gauze curtain shielding the window. They vanished, then reappeared for a moment when they parted the drapes in an adjoining room. “A security check,” he said.

“Yes,” Odile said. “Their car is parked well down the street.”

“What model?”

“Not sure.”

“Big?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “And shiny.”

Szara felt his blood race.

The following afternoon, 8 July, they were back. This time it was Szara on duty. He'd moved the bezique table in front of the window and, having begged the old lady's pardon, removed his shirt, appearing in sleeveless undershirt, a cigarette stuck in his lips, a hand of playing cards held before him, a sullen expression on his face. This time a heavy man with a bow tie accompanied the other two and from the open gateway stared up at Szara, who stared right back.
A living Brassai,
he thought,
Card Player in Puteaux
—he lacked only a bandanna tied around his neck. The man in the bow tie broke off the staring contest, then slowly closed the door that concealed the garden from the street.

9 July was the day.

At 2:00
P.M.
sharp, two glossy black Panhards pulled up at the gate. One of the security men left the first car and opened the gate as his partner drove off. The second car was aligned in such a way that Szara could identify the driver as the man with the bow tie. He also caught a glimpse of the passenger, who sat directly behind the driver and glanced out the window just before the Panhard swung through the gateway and the security man pushed the doors shut. The passenger was in his early forties, Szara guessed. The angle of sight, from above, could be misleading, but Szara took him to be short and bulky. He had thick black hair sharply parted, a swarthy, deeply lined face, and small dark eyes. For the occasion he wore a double-breasted suit, a shirt with a stiff high collar, a gray silk tie.
Gestapo,
Szara thought, dressed up like a diplomat, but the face read policeman and criminal at once, with a conviction of power that Szara had seen in certain German faces, especially—no matter how they preached the Nordic ideal—the dark men who ruled the nation. Important, Szara realized. The single glance out the window had asked the question
Am I pleased?

“Ten of clubs,” said the old lady.

Fifteen minutes later, a gray Peugeot coasted to a stop in front of the house. A hawk-faced man got out on the side away from Szara and the car immediately left. The man looked about him for a moment, made certain of his tie, then pressed the doorbell set into the portal of the gateway.

Dershani.

Sénéschal knocked twice, then entered the apartment. “Christ, the heat,” he said. He collapsed in an armchair, set a Leica down carefully among the framed photographs on a rickety table. His suit was hopelessly rumpled, black circles at the armpits, a gray shadow of newsprint ink darkening the front of his shirt. He had spent the last two hours lying on sheets of newspaper in a lead-lined gutter at the foot of the sloped roof. The building's scrollwork provided a convenient portal for photography.

Sénéschal wiped his face with a handkerchief. “I took all the automobiles,” he said. “The security man who worked the door— several of him. Tried for the second man, but not much there I'm afraid, perhaps a one-quarter profile, and he was moving. As for the face in the back seat of the Panhard, I managed two exposures, but I doubt anything will show up.”

Szara nodded silently.

“Well? What do you think?”

Szara gestured with his eyes toward the old lady, waiting not quite patiently to resume the card game. “Too early to know much of anything. We'll wait for them to use the garden,” he said.

“What if it rains?”

Szara looked up at the sky, a mottled gray in the Paris humidity. “Not before tonight,” he said.

•

They appeared just before five—
a break in the negotiation.
Odile had arrived at her usual time, Szara now used her opera glasses and stood well back from the window.

The man he took to be a German intelligence officer was short and heavy, as he'd supposed. Magnification revealed a thin white scar crossing his left eyebrow, a street fighter's badge of honor. The two men stood at the garden entrance for a moment, open French doors behind them. The German spoke a few words, Dershani nodded, and they walked together into the garden. They were the image of diplomacy, strolling pensively with hands clasped behind their backs, continuing a very deliberate conversation, choosing their words with great care. Szara studied their lips through the opera glasses but could not, to his surprise, determine if they were speaking German or Russian. Once they laughed. Szara fancied he could hear it, faintly, carried on the heated air of the late afternoon amid the sound of sparrows chirping in the trees of the garden.

They made a single circuit on the gravel path, stopping once while the German pointed at an apple tree, then returned to the house, each beckoning the other to enter first. Dershani laughed, clapping the German on the shoulder, and went in ahead of him.

At 7:20, Dershani left the house. He turned up the street in the direction his car had gone and disappeared from view. A few minutes later, the security man opened the gate and, after the car had passed through, closed it again. He climbed in beside the driver and the Panhard sped away. In the garden, the setting sun made long shadows on the dry grass, the birds sang, nothing moved in the still summer air.

“Tiens,”
said the old lady. “Will the government fall tomorrow?” Sénéschal was grave. “No, madame, I can in confidence inform you that, thanks to your great kindness and patience, the government will stand.”

“Oh, too bad,” she said.

Odile left first, to walk to the Neuilly Métro stop. Sénéschal disappeared into the old lady's closet and emerged a few minutes later smelling faintly of mothballs. He handed Szara a spool of film. Szara thanked the old lady, told her they might be back the following day, gave her a fresh packet of money, and went out into the humid dusk.

Sénéschal's car was parked several blocks away. They walked through streets deserted by the onset of the dinner hour; smells of frying onions and potatoes drifted through the open windows.

“Do we try again tomorrow? ” Sénéschal asked.

Szara thought it over. “I sense that they've done what they came together to do.”

“Can't be certain.”

“No. I'll contact you at your office, if you don't mind.”

“Not at all.”

“I should say, officially, that gratitude is expressed—charming the way they put these things. Personally, thank you for everything, and I'm sorry your shirt is ruined.”

Sénéschal inspected the front of his shirt. “No. My little friend is a wonder. No matter what I get into she knows a way to take care of it. Nothing is to be thrown out, it can always last ‘a bit longer.' ”

“Is she aware of your, ah, love affair?”

“They always know, Jean Marc, but it's part of life here. It's what all those sad little café songs are about.”

“You are in love, then.”

“Oh that word. Perhaps, or perhaps not. She is my consolation, however, always that, and doesn't she ever know it.
L'amour
covers quite some territory, especially in Paris.”

“I expect it does.”

“Have you a friend? ”

“Yes. Or I should say ‘perhaps.' ”

“She's good to you?”

“Good for me.”

“Et alors!”

Szara laughed.

“Beautiful too, I'd wager.”

“You would win, eventually, but it's not the sort of dazzle that catches the eye right away. There's just something about her.”

They reached the car; the smell of overheated upholstery rushed out when Sénéschal opened the door. “Come have a beer,” he said. “There's plenty of time for your vanishing act.”

“Thank you,” Szara said.

Sénéschal turned the ignition, the Renault came reluctantly to life as he fiddled expertly with the choke. “This whore drinks petrol,” he said sourly, racing the engine.

They wandered through the twisting streets of Puteaux, crossed the Seine on the pont de Suresnes—the tied-up barges had pots of flowers and laundry drying on lines—then the Bois de Boulogne appeared on their left, a few couples out strolling, men with jackets over their arms, an organ grinder. Sénéschal stopped by an ice cream seller. “What kind?”

“Chocolate.”

“A double?”

“Of course. Here's a few francs.”

“Keep it.”

“I insist.”

Sénéschal waved the money away and bought the cones. When he got back in the car he drove slowly through the Bois, steering with one hand. “Watch, now I really will ruin the shirt.”

Szara's double cone was a masterpiece—he ate the ice cream and looked at the girls in their summer dresses.

But what he'd seen that afternoon did not leave him. His mind was flying around like a moth in a lamp. He didn't understand what he'd witnessed, didn't know what it meant or what, if anything, to do about it. He'd seen something he wasn't supposed to see, that much he did know. Maybe it meant nothing—intelligence services talked to each other when it was in the interest of both to do so, and Paris was a good, neutral place to do it.

“If you've the time, we'll find ourselves a brasserie,” Sénéschal said.

“Good idea. Is there a place you go?” Szara wanted the company.

Sénéschal looked at him oddly. Szara realized his error, they
couldn't go to a place where Sénéschal was known. “We'll just pick one that looks good,” he said. “In this city you can't go too far wrong.”

They'd drifted into the fifteenth arrondissement, headed east on the boulevard Lefebvre. “We're in the right place out here,” Sénéschal said. “They have great big ones where the whole family shows up—kids, dogs. A night like this”—the Renault idled roughly at a red light; a fat man in suspenders was picking through books at a stall—“the terraces will be …” A black Panhard rolled to a gentle stop on Sénéschal's side of the car.

Seen from a window in the old lady's apartment, he'd been a colorless man in a suit. Now, looking through the Panhard's passenger window, he was much realer than that. He was young, not yet thirty, and very bright and crisp. His hair was combed just so, swept up into a stiff pompadour above his white forehead. “Please,” he said in measured French, “may we speak a moment?” He smiled.
What merry eyes,
Szara thought. For a moment he was unable to breathe.

Sénéschal turned to him for help, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.

“Please? Yes?” said the man.

The driver was older, his face a silhouette in the lights of the boulevard shops. “Don't be so fucking polite,” he grumbled in German. He turned and looked at Sénéschal. It was the face of a German worker, blunt and stolid, with hair shaved above the ears. He was smoking a cigar, the tip reddened as he inhaled.

The light went green. A horn beeped behind them. “Drive away,” Szara said. Sénéschal popped the clutch and the car stalled. Swearing under his breath, he twisted the ignition key and fumbled with the choke. The driver of the Panhard laughed, his partner continued to smile.
Like a clown in a nightmare,
Szara thought.

The engine caught and the Renault roared away from the light. Sénéschal cut into an angled street, took a narrow cobbled alley between high walls at full speed—the car bouncing and shimmying— tried to turn sharply back into the boulevard traffic, but the light had changed again and he had nowhere to go. The Panhard rolled up beside them. “Whew,” said the smiling man. “What a bumping!”

“Look,” the driver said in French, holding his cigar between thumb and forefinger, “don't make us chase you around all night …”

Traffic started to move and Sénéschal forced his way between two cars. The Panhard tried to follow, but the driver of a little Fiat cut them off with a spiteful glare.