Dark Star (35 page)

A steward collected Szara's dripping umbrella and showed him up three flights of stairs to a small library. A waiter appeared and set down an ivory tray bearing a Cinzano apéritif and a dish of nuts. Abandoned to a great hush broken only by an occasional mysterious creak, Szara wandered along the shelves, sampling here and there. The collection was exclusively concerned with railroads, and it was beautifully kept; almost all the books had been rebound. Some were privately printed, many were illustrated, with captioned sepia prints and daguerreotypes:

On the platform at Ebenfurth, Stationmaster Hofmann waits to flag through the Vienna-Budapest mail. Flatcars loaded with timber cross a high trestle in the mountains of Bosnia.
The 7:03 from Geneva passes beneath the rue Lamartine overpass.

“So pleased you've come,” said a voice from the doorway. He was rather ageless, perhaps in the last years of his fifties, with faded steel-colored hair brushed very flat against the sides of his head. Tall and politely stooped, he was wearing a formal dinner jacket and a bow tie that had gone slightly askew. He'd evidently walked a short distance through the rain without coat or umbrella and was patting his face with a folded handkerchief. “I'm Joseph de Montfried,”
he said. He articulated the name carefully, sounding the hard
t
and separating the two syllables, the latter lightly emphasized, as though it were a difficult name and often mispronounced. Szara was amused—a cultured Frenchman would as likely have gotten the Baron de Rothschild's name wrong. This family too had a baron, Szara knew, but he believed that was the father, or the uncle.

“Do you like the collection? ” Said with sincerity, as though it mattered whether Szara liked it or not.

“It's yours?”

“Part of mine. Most of it's at home, up the street, and I keep some in the country. But the club has been indulgent with me, and I've spared them walls of leatherbound Racine that nobody's ever read.” He laughed self-consciously. “What've you got there?” Szara turned the book's spine toward him. “Karl Borns, yes. A perfect madman, Borns, had his funeral cortege on the Zürich local. The local!” He laughed again. “Please,” he said, indicating that Szara should sit down at one end of a couch. De Montfried took a club chair.

“We'll have supper right here, if you don't mind. Do you?”

“Of course not.”

“Good. Sandwiches and something to drink. I've got to meet my wife for some beastly charity thing at ten—my days of eating two dinners are long over, I'm afraid.”

Szara did mind. Going upstairs, he'd caught a glimpse of a silk-walled dining room and a glittering array of china and crystal. All that money invested at the barber and the dry cleaner and now sandwiches. He tried to smile like a man who gets all the elaborate dinners he cares to have.

“Shall we stay in French? ” de Montfried asked. “I can try to get along in Russian, but I'm afraid I'll say awful things.”

“You speak Russian?”

“Grew up speaking French
en famille
and Russian to the servants. My father and uncle built much of the Russian railroad system, then came the revolution and the civil war and most of it was destroyed. Very entrepreneurial place—at one time anyhow. How's it go? ‘Sugar by Brodsky, Tea by Vysotsky, Revolution by Trotsky.' I suppose it's aimed at Jews, but it's reasonably faithful to what
happened. Oh well.” He pressed a button on the wall and a waiter appeared almost instantly. De Montfried ordered sandwiches and wine, mentioning only the year, '27. The waiter nodded and closed the door behind him.

They chatted for a time. De Montfried found out quite a bit about him, the way a certain kind of aristocrat seemed able to do without appearing to pry. The trick of it, Szara thought, lay in the sincerity of the voice and the eyes—
I am so very interested in you.
The man seemed to find everything he said fascinating or amusing or cleverly put. Soon enough he found himself trying to make it so.

There was no need for Szara to find out who de Montfried was. He knew the basic outline: a titled Jewish family, with branches in London, Paris, and Switzerland. Enormously wealthy, appropriately charitable, exceptionally private, and virtually without scandal. Old enough so that the money, like game, was well cured. Szara caught himself seeking something Jewish in the man, but there was nothing, in the features or the voice, that he could identify; the only notable characteristics were the narrow head and small ears that aristocrats had come to share with their hunting dogs.

The sandwiches were, Szara had to admit, extremely good. Open-faced, sliced duck and salmon, with little pots of flavored mayonnaise and cornichons to make them interesting. The wine, according to its white and gold label, was a
prémier cru
Beaune called Château de Montfried—it was easily the best thing Szara had ever tasted.

“We've my father to thank for this,” de Montfried said of the wine, holding it up against the light. “After we were tossed out of Russia he took an interest in the vineyards, more or less retired down there. For him, there was something rather biblical in it:
work thy vines.
I don't know if it actually says that anywhere, but he seemed to think it did.” De Montfried was hesitantly sorrowful; the world would not, he understood, be much moved by small tragedies in his sort of family.

“It is extraordinary,” Szara said.

De Montfried leaned toward him slightly, signaling a shift in the conversation. “You are recommended to me, Monsieur Szara, by an acquaintance who is called Bloch.”

“Yes?”

De Montfried paused, but Szara had no further comment. He reached into the inside pocket of his dinner jacket, withdrew an official-looking document with stamps and signatures at the bottom, and handed it to Szara. “Do you know what this is?”

The paper was in English, Szara started to puzzle through it.

“It's an emigration certificate for British Palestine,” de Montfried said. “Or Eretz Israel—a name I prefer. It's valuable, it's rare, hard to come by, and it's what I want to talk to you about.” He hesitated, then continued. “Please be good enough to stop this discussion, now, if you feel I'm exceeding a boundary of any kind. Once we go further, I'm going to have to ask you to be discreet.”

“I understand,” Szara said.

“No hesitation? It would be understandable, certainly, if you felt there were just too many complications in listening to what I have to say.”

Szara waited.

“According to Monsieur Bloch, you were witness to the events in Berlin last month. He seems to feel that you might, on that basis, be willing to provide assistance for a project in which I take a great interest.”

“What project is that?”

“May I pour you a little more wine? ”

Szara extended his glass.

“I hope you'll forgive me if I work up to a substantive description in my own way. I don't want to bore you, and I don't want you to think me a hopeless naïf—it's just that I've had experience of conversations about the Jewish return to Palestine and, well, it can be difficult, even unpleasant, as any political discussion is likely to be. Polite people avoid certain topics, experience shows the wisdom in that. Like one's dreams or medical condition—it's just better to find something else to talk about. Unfortunately, the world is now acting in such a way as to eliminate that courtesy, among many others, so I can only ask your forbearance.”

Szara's smile was sad and knowing, with the sort of compassion that has been earned from daily life. He was that listener who can
be told anything without fear of criticism because he has heard and seen worse than whatever you might contrive to say. He withdrew a packet of Gitanes, lit one, and exhaled.
I cannot be offended,
said the gesture.

“At the beginning of the Great War, in 1914, Great Britain found itself fighting in the Middle East against Turkey. The Jews in Palestine were caught up in the Turkish war effort—taxed into poverty, drafted into the Turkish armies. A certain group of Jews, in the town of Zichron Yaakov, not far from Haifa, believed that Great Britain ought to win the war in the Middle East, but what could they do? Well, for a small, determined group of people arrayed against a major power there is only one traditional answer, other than prayer, and that is espionage. Thus a botanist named Aaron Aaronson, his sister Sarah, an assistant called Avshalom Feinberg, and several others formed a network they called
NILI
—it's taken from a phrase in the Book of Samuel, an acronym of the Hebrew initials for
The Eternal One of Israel will not prove false.
The conspiracy was based at the Atlit Experimental Station and was facilitated by Aaron Aaronson's position as chief of the locust control unit—he could show up anywhere, for instance at Turkish military positions, without provoking suspicion. Meanwhile Sarah Aaronson, who was ravishing, became a fixture at parties attended by high-ranking Turkish officers. The British at first were suspicious—the Aaronsons did not ask for money—but eventually, in 1917,
NILI
product was accepted by British officers stationed on ships anchored off Palestine. There were—it's a typical problem, I understand—communications difficulties, and Avshalom Feinberg set out across the Sinai desert to make contact with the British. He was ambushed by Arab raiders and murdered near Rafah, in the Gaza strip. Local legend has it that he was buried in the sand at the edge of the town and a palm tree grew up from his bones, seeded by dates he carried in his pockets. Then the spy ring was uncovered—too many people knew about it—and Sarah Aaronson was arrested by the Turks and tortured for four days. At that point she tricked her captors into letting her use the washroom, un-supervised, where she had secreted a revolver, and took her own
life. All the other members of the network were captured by the Turks, tortured and executed, except for Aaron Aaronson, who survived the war only to die in a plane crash in the English Channel in 1919.

“Of course the Arabs fought on the side of the British as well— they too wished an end to Turkish occupation—and their revolt was led by skilled British military intelligence officers, such as T E. Lawrence and Richard Meinertzhagen. The Arabs believed they were fighting for independence, but it did not quite turn out that way. When the smoke cleared, when Allenby took Jerusalem, the British ruled Mandate Palestine and the French held Syria and the Lebanon.

“But the N
ILI
network was not the only effort made on Britain's behalf by the Jews. Far more important, in its ultimate effect, was the contribution of Dr. Chaim Weizmann. Weizmann is well known as a Zionist, he is an articulate and persuasive man, but he is also known, by people who have an interest in the area, as a biochemist. While teaching and doing research at the University of Manchester, he discovered a method of producing synthetic acetone by a process of natural fermentation. As Great Britain's war against Germany intensified, they discovered themselves running out of acetone, which is the solvent that must be used in the manufacture of cordite, a crucial explosive in artillery shells and bullets. In 1916 Weizmann was summoned before Winston Churchill, at that time first lord of the Admiralty. Churchill said, ‘Well, Dr. Weizmann, we need thirty thousand tons of acetone. Can you make it?' Weizmann did not rest until he'd done it, ultimately taking over many of Britain's large whiskey distilleries until production plants could be built.

“Did Weizmann's action produce the Balfour Declaration? It did not hurt, certainly. In 1917 Balfour, as foreign secretary, promised that the British government would ‘use their best endeavors to facilitate the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.' The League of Nations and other countries supported that position. It would be pleasant to think Weizmann had a hand in that, but the British are a wonderfully practical people, and what they wanted at that moment was America's entry into the war against the Germans, and it was felt that Lord Balfour's declaration
would mobilize American Jewish opinion in that direction. But Weizmann played his part.”

De Montfried paused, refilled Szara's glass, then his own. “By now, Monsieur Szara, you likely see where this is headed.”

“Yes and no,” Szara said. “And the story isn't over.”

“That's true, it continues. But this much can be said: the survival of Jewish Palestine depends on the attitude of the British, and from that perspective, the Chamberlain government has been a disaster.”

“The Czechs would certainly agree.”

“No doubt. When Chamberlain, after giving in to Hitler in September, asked why Great Britain should risk war for the sake of what he called ‘a far-away country of which we know very little and whose language we don't understand,' people who share my views were horrified. If he perceived the Czechs in that way, what does he think about the Jews?”

“You see Munich as a moral failure, then.”

De Montfried teetered on the edge of indignation, then asked quietly, “Don't you?”

He wasn't precisely angry, Szara thought. Simply, momentarily, balked. And he wasn't used to that. His life was ordered to keep him clear of uncertainties of any kind, and Szara had, rather experimentally, said something unexpected. To de Montfried it was like being served cold coffee for breakfast—it wasn't wrong, it was unthinkable.

“Yes, I do,” Szara said at last. “But one ought to wonder out loud what Chamberlain was hearing from the other end of the conference table—the generals, and the discreet gentlemen in dark suits. But then, after they made their case, he had the choice to believe them or not. And then to act. I can theorize that what he heard concerned what might happen to England's cities, particularly London, if they started a war with Germany—bombers and bomb tonnage and what happened in Guernica when it was bombed. People get hurt in war.”

“People get hurt in peace,” de Montfried said. “In Palestine, since 1920, Arab mobs have murdered hundreds of Jewish settlers, and the British Mandate police haven't always shown much interest in stopping them.”

“Great Britain runs on oil, which the Arabs have and it doesn't.”