Dark Star (29 page)

He grouped his numbers, did his false addition, counted letters in the timetable a second time, just to be sure. Garbled transmissions drove Moscow wild—
What's a murn? And why does he ask for raisins?
—and he urgently needed to have their trust and good faith if they were going to accept his analysis of the situation.

He walked the half block to the embassy, a place the journalist Szara would be expected to visit, found his contact, a second secretary named Varin, and delivered the cable. Then he disappeared into the Berlin night.

He had, oh, a little company, he thought. Nothing too serious. Nothing he couldn't deal with.

Said Goldman: “There are two situations which, if I were you, would be of concern: (a) You find yourself truly blanketed— perhaps a moving box: one in front, one behind, two at three o'clock and nine o'clock, go down an alley and the whole apparatus shifts with you. Or maybe it's people in parked cars on an empty street, women in doorways. All that sort of thing, they're simply not going to let you out of their sight. Either they insist on knowing who you really are and where you're going, or they're trying to
panic you, to see what you do. You'll break it off, of course. Go back to the hotel, use your telephone contact, the 4088 number. There'll be no answer, but one ring will do the job.

“Or, (b) you ought to be alarmed if there's absolutely no sign of surveillance. A Soviet journalist in Berlin must,
must,
be of interest at some level of the counterintelligence bureaux. The normal situation would be periodic, one or two men, probably detectives who'll look like what they are. They'll follow at a medium distance. Ideally, don't go showing them a lot of tradecraft—if you're too slick it will provoke their curiosity. If you can't dispose of them with a casual maneuver or two, give it up and try again later. A normal approach for the Germans would be to tag along at night, leave you free in the daytime. But if it's—what? the Sahara, then be careful. It may mean they're really operating—that is, they've put someone really good on you, and he, or she for that matter, is better than you are. In that case, see the second secretary at the embassy and we'll get you some help.”

Very well, he thought. This time the little genius in Brussels knew what he was talking about.
Out for a stroll,
Szara lit a cigarette on the Kanonierstrasse, standing in front of the vast gloomy facade of the Deutsche Bank, then,
stranger in your city,
he peered about him as though he were slightly at sea. The other man lighting a cigarette, about forty meters in back of him, visible only as a hat and an overcoat, was company.

Not a good night for company. With ten thousand reichsmarks wadded up in his pockets he was headed toward the Reichshallen theater for a meeting with Nadia Tscherova, actress, émigrée,
RAVEN,
and group leader of the
RAVEN
network. Tscherova would be available to him backstage—not at the grandiose Reichshallen but at a small repertory theater in a narrow lane called Rosenhain Passage—after 10:40. Szara refused to hurry, wandering along, waiting until he reached Kraussenstrasse before making a move to verify the surveillance. If he didn't make the
treff
tonight, Tscherova would be available to him for three nights following. Run by Schau-Wehrli with a very firm hand,
RAVEN
was known to follow orders, so Szara relaxed, taking in the sights, a man with no particular place to go and all the time in the world to get there.

About Tscherova he was curious. Schau-Wehrli handled her with fine Swiss contempt, referring to her as
stukach,
snitch, the lowest rank of Soviet agents who simply traded information for money. Goldman's view differed. He used the word
vliyaniya,
fellow traveler. This term was traditionally reserved for agents of influence, often self-recruited believers in the Soviet dream: typically academics, civil servants, artists of all sorts, and the occasional forward-looking businessman. In the sense that Tscherova moved in the upper levels of Nazi society, he supposed she was
vliyaniya,
yet she was paid, as were the brother and sister Brozin and Brozina and the Czech balletmaster Anton Krafic, the remainder of the
RAVEN
network. As for the highest-level agents, the
proniknoveniya
—penetration specialists serving under direct, virtually military discipline—Szara was not allowed anywhere near them, though he suspected Schau-Wehrli's
MOCHA
group might fall under that classification, and Goldman was rumored to be running, personally, an asset buried in the very heart of the Gestapo.

Of course the system varied with the national point of view. Low-level agents for the French were called
dupeurs,
deceivers, and principally reported on the military institutions of various countries.
Moutons,
sheep, went after industrial intelligence while
baladeurs,
strolling players, took on free-lance assignments. The French equivalent of the
proniknoveniya,
highly controlled and highly placed, was the
agent fixe,
while the
trafiquant,
like Tscherova, handled a net of subagents.

At the corner of Kraussenstrasse Szara paused, studied the street signs, then hurried across the intersection, not running exactly, but managing in such a way that two speeding Daimlers went whizzing past his back. A tobacconist's shop window, briefly inspected, revealed his company peering anxiously from the other side of the street, then crossing behind him. Szara quickened his pace slightly, then trotted up the steps of the Hotel Kempinski, passed through the elegant lobby, then seated himself at a table in the hotel bar. This was sophisticated Berlin; a study in glossy black and white surfaces with chrome highlights, palm trees, a man in a white tuxedo playing romantic songs on a white piano, a scattering of well-dressed people, and the soothing, melodic hum of conversation.
He ordered a schnapps, leaned back in a leather chair, and focused his attention on a woman who was alone at a nearby table—rather ageless, not unattractive, very much minding her own business; which was a tall drink with a miniature candy cane hung on the side of the glass.

Ten minutes later, company arrived. Sweaty, moon-faced, anxious; an overworked detective who'd evidently parked himself on a chair in the lobby, then got nervous being out of contact with his assignment. He stood at the bar, ordered a beer, counted out pocket change to pay for it. Szara felt sorry for him.

Meanwhile, the woman he'd picked out made steady progress with her drink. Szara walked over to her and, presenting his back to the detective, leaned over and asked her what time it was. She said, politely enough, that she didn't know, but thought it was getting on toward ten. Szara laughed, stood up, turned halfway back toward his table, thought better of it, looked at his watch, said something like “I'm afraid my watch has stopped” in a low voice, smiled con-spiratorially, then returned to his chair. Fifteen minutes later, she left. Szara checked his watch, gave her five minutes to get wherever she was going, then threw a bill on the table and departed. Out in the lobby, he hurried onto an elevator just before the door closed and asked to be let off at the fourth floor. He walked purposefully down the hall, heard the door close behind him, then found a stairway and returned to the lobby. The detective was sitting in a chair, watching the elevator door like a hawk, waiting for Szara to return from his assignation. Szara left the hotel through a side entrance, made certain he had no further company, then hailed a cab.

Rosenhain Passage was medieval, a crooked lane surfaced with broken stone. Half-timbered buildings, the plaster gray with age, slanted backward as they rose, and a cold smell of drains hung in the dead air. What had happened here? He heard water trickling from unmended pipes, all shutters were closed tight, the street was lifeless, inert. There were no people. In the middle of all this stood Das Schmuckkästchen—the Jewel Box—theater, as though a city cultural commission had been told to
do something about Rosenhain Passage
and here was their solution, a way of brightening things up. A hand-painted banner hung from the handle of an old-fashioned coach horn announcing the performance of
The Captain's Dilemma
by Hans-Peter Mütchler.

Midway down an alley next to the theater, a door had been propped open with a pressing iron. Szara shoved it out of the way with his foot, let the door close gently until the lock snapped. Behind a thick curtain he could hear a play in progress, a man and a woman exchanging domestic insults in the declamatory style reserved for historical drama—
listen carefully, this was written a long time ago.
The insults were supposed to be amusing, the thrust of the voice told you that, and someone in the theater did laugh once, but Szara could feel the almost palpable discomfort—the shifting and coughing, the unvoiced sigh—of an audience subjected to a witless and boring evening.

As Goldman had promised, there wasn't a soul to be seen where he entered. He peered through the darkness, found a row of doors, and tapped lightly at the one marked C.

“Yes? Come in.”

He found himself in a small dressing room: mirrors, costumes, clutter. A woman with a book in her hand, place held with an index finger, was sitting upright on a chaise longue, her face taut and anxious. Goldman had shown him a photograph. An actress. But the reality left him staring. Perhaps it was Berlin, the grotesque weight of the place, its heavy air, thickly made people, the brutal density of its life, but the woman seemed to him almost transparent, someone who might float away at any moment.

She put her head to one side and studied him clinically. “You're different,” she said in Russian. Her voice was hoarse, and even in two words he could hear contempt.

“Different? ”

“They usually send me a sort of boar. With bristles.” She was tall and slight, had turned up the cuffs of a thick sweater to reveal delicate wrists. Her eyes were enormous, a blue so pale and fragile it reminded him of blindness, and her hair, worn long and loose, was the color of an almond shell. It was very fine hair, the kind that
stirred with the slightest motion. Also she had been drinking; he could smell wine. “Sit down,” she said softly, changing moods.

He sat in a thronelike armchair, clearly a stage prop. “Are you in the play?” She was wearing slacks and strapped shoes with low heels, the outfit didn't go with the old-fashioned bluster he could hear from the stage.

“Done for the night.” Her voice easily suggested quotation marks when she added, “Beatrice, a maid.” She shrugged, a dismissive Russian gesture. “It's my rotten German. Sometimes I play a foreigner, but mostly it's maids. In little maid costumes. Everybody likes little maid costumes. When I bend over you can almost see my ass. But not quite.”

“What play is it?”

“What? You don't know
The Captain's Dilemma?
I thought everybody did.”

“No. Sorry.”

“Mütchler suits the current taste—that is, Goebbels's taste. He's said to consider it quite excellent. The captain returns to his home ten years after a shipwreck; he finds his wife living beyond her means, a slave to foolish fashion, beset by sycophants and usurers. He, on the other hand, is a typical
Volk:
sturdy, forthright, honest, a simple man from Rostock with the pleasures of a simple man. Simple pleasures, you see—we play him as a turnip. So now we have
conflict,
and a kind of drawing room comedy, with all sorts of amusing character parts: hypocrites, fops, oily Jews.”

“And the dilemma? ”

“The dilemma is why the playwright wasn't strangled at birth.”

Szara laughed.

“What are you? A writer? I mean beside the other thing.”

“How do you know I'm the other thing? ”

“Cruel times for Nadia if you're not.”

“And why a writer? ”

“Oh, I know writers. I have them in my family, or used to. Do you want some wine? Be careful—it's a test.”

“Just a little.”

“You fail.” She reached behind a screen, poured wine into a
water glass, and handed it to him, then retrieved her own glass, hidden behind a leg of the chaise longue.
“Nazhdrov'ya.”

“Nazhdrov'ya.”

“Phooey.” She wrinkled her nose at the glass. “Your pretty little niece, who is no doubt dying to be an actress—tell her it all rests on a tolerance for atrocious white wine.”

“You are from Moscow?” he asked.

“No, Piter, St. Petersburg. So sorry, I mean Leningrad. An old, old family. Tscherova is my married name.”

“And Tscherov? He's in Berlin?”

“Pfft,” she said, casting her eyes up at the ceiling and springing four fingers from beneath her thumb, flicking Tscherov's soul up to heaven. “November 1917.”

“Difficult times,” he said in sympathy.

“A Menshevik, a nice man. Married me when I was sixteen and didn't I give him a hellish time of it. The last eight months of his life, too. Poor Tscherov.” Her eyes shone for a moment and she looked away.

“At least you survived.”

“We all did. Aristocrats and artists in my family, all crazy as bats; revolution was the very thing for us. I have a brother in your business. Or I should say had. He seems to have vanished. Sascha.” She laughed at his memory, a harsh cackle, then put her fingers to her mouth, as though it were a drunken sound and embarrassed her. “Sorry. Colonel Alexander Vonets—did you know him?”

“No.”

“Too bad. Charming bastard. Ah, the elegant Vonets family— but see what they've come to now. Miserable
stukachi,
dealing in filthy Nazi gossip. ‘Oh, but my dear General, how absolutely fasss-cinating!' ” She snickered at her own performance, then leaned toward him. “You know what they say in Paris, that a woman attending a soirée needs only two words of French to be thought an elegant conversationalist?
formidable
and
fantastique.
Well, it's the same here. You look up at them—you sit down if they're squatty little things; the eyes simply must look up at them—and they talk and talk, and you say—in German of course—
formidable!
after one
sentence and
fantastique!
after the next. ‘Brilliant woman!' they say later.”