Dark Star (37 page)

So Maltsaev told him, anyhow.

Szara was eating dinner at his neighborhood bistro,
Le Temps
folded in half and propped up against the mustard pot, when a man materialized across the table and introduced himself. “Get in touch with Ilya Goldman,” he said by way of establishing his bona fides. “He'll confirm who I am—we were in Madrid together. At the embassy.” He was now in Paris, he continued, on temporary assignment from Belgrade, where he'd been political officer for a year or so.

Szara immediately disliked him. Maltsaev was a dark, balding young man with a bad skin and a sour disposition, a man much given to sinister affectations, a man who spoke always as though he were saying only a small fraction of what he actually knew. He
wore tinted eyeglasses and a voluminous black overcoat of excellent quality.

Maltsaev made it clear that he found courier work boring and very much beneath him—the order to accompany Szara to Switzerland offended him in any number of ways. “These little czars in Moscow,” he said with a sneer, “throw roubles around as though the world were ending tomorrow.” He had a pretty good idea what went on in Lausanne, he confided, typical of the deskbound comrades to try and solve the problem with money. Typical also that some unseen controller in the Dzerzhinsky Square
apparat
was using the occasion to make Maltsaev's life miserable, screwing him with some witless assignment that could be handled by any numskull operative. “Another enemy,” he grumbled. Somebody jealous of his promotions or his assignment in Paris. “But next we'll see if he gets away with it. Maybe not, eh?” He pointed at Szara's plate. “What's that?”

“Andouillette,” Szara said.

“What is it? A sausage? What's in it?”

“You won't want it if I tell you,” Szara said.

“Probably the chef's mistress,” Maltsaev said with a laugh. “Order me a steak. Cooked. No blood or back it goes.” His eyes were animated behind the tinted lenses, flicking around the room, staring at the other customers. Then he leaned confidentially toward Szara. “Who is this Abramov you're going to see?” He looked triumphant and pleased with himself—
surprised I know that?

“Boss. One of them, anyhow.”

“A big shot? ”

“He sits on one Directorate, certainly. Perhaps others, I don't know.”

“Old friend, I'll bet. The way things go these days, you don't last long without a protector, right?”

Szara shrugged. “Everybody's got their own story—mine's not like that. It's all business with Abramov.”

“Is it.”

“Yes.”

“Hey!” Maltsaev called as a waiter went past and ignored him.

•

It snowed on the night of the sixth, and by the time Szara and Maltsaev left the Gare de Lyon on the seventh of February the fields and villages of France were still and white.
The nineteenth century,
Szara thought with longing: a pair of frost-coated dray horses pulling a cart along a road, a girl in a stocking cap skating on a pond near Melun. The sky was dense and swollen; sometimes a flight of crows circled over the snow-covered fields. But for the presence of Maltsaev, it would have been a time for dreaming. The frozen world outside the train window was unmoving, cold and peaceful, smoke from farmhouse chimneys the only sign of human life.

Following the rules, they had booked the compartment for themselves, so they were alone. Szara kept a hand or a foot in permanent contact with the small traveling case that held the sixty thousand francs, each packet of hundred-franc notes bound by a strip of paper with Cyrillic initials on it. But even though they were alone, Maltsaev spoke obliquely:
your friend in Sion, the man in Brussels.
A glutton's appetite for gossip, Szara thought. Who do you know? How do the loyalties work? What's the real story? Maltsaev was the classic opportunist, probing for whatever you might have that he could use. Szara parried him on every point, but felt that eventually the sheer weight of the attack might wear him down. To escape, he feigned drowsiness. Maltsaev sneered with delight: “Going to dreamland with our dear gold on your lap?”

They'd left at dawn, and it was again dark when they reached Geneva. They walked three blocks from the railroad station and found the Opel Olympia that had been left in front of a commercial travelers' hotel, the ignition key taped to the bottom of the gas pedal. Szara drove. Maltsaev sat beside him, smoking his cardboard-tipped Belomor cigarettes, a road map spread across his lap. They circled the north shore of Lake Leman on good roads in intermittent light snow, then, after Villeneuve, began to climb over the mountain passes.

Here the weather cleared and there was a bright, sharp moon, its light sparkling on the ice crystal in the banked snow at the sides of the road. Sometimes, on the curves, they could see down into the
valleys spread out below: clusters of stone villages, ice rivers, empty roads. The sense of deep silence and distance at last reached Maltsaev, who ceased talking and stared out the window. By ten o'clock they had descended to Martigny and turned north on the narrow plain by the Rhône, here an overgrown mountain stream. There was hardpack snow on the roads and Szara drove carefully but steadily, encountering only one or two cars along the way.

Sion was dark, no lights anywhere, and they had to hunt for a time until they found the gravel road that went up the mountainside. Five minutes later the grade flattened out and they rolled to a stop in front of an old hotel, tires crunching on newly fallen snow. The hotel—a carved sign above the arched doorway said Hôtel du Vaz—was timber and stucco capped by a steep slate roof hung with icicles. It stood high above the road, at the edge of a shimmering white meadow that sloped gently toward the edge of an evergreen forest. The ground-floor shutters were closed; behind them was a faint glow, perhaps a single lamp in what Szara presumed to be a reception area in the lobby. When he turned off the ignition and climbed out of the Opel, he could hear the sound of the wind at the corner of the building. There were no other cars to be seen; perhaps it was a summer hotel, he thought, where people came in order to walk in the mountains.

Maltsaev got out of the car and closed the door carefully. From an upper window, Szara heard Abramov's voice. “André Aronovich? ”

“Yes,” Szara called. “Come down and let us in. It's freezing.”

“Who is with you? ”

Looking up, Szara saw one shutter partly opened. Before he could respond, Maltsaev whispered, “Don't say my name.”

Szara stared at him, not understanding. “Answer him,” Maltsaev said urgently, gripping him hard at the elbow. Abramov must have seen the gesture, Szara thought. Because a moment later they heard the sound, eerily loud in the still, cold air, of a heavy man descending an exterior staircase, perhaps at the back of the hotel. A man in a hurry.

Maltsaev, coat flapping, started to run, and Szara, not knowing what else to do, followed. They were immediately slowed when
they moved around the side of the hotel because here the snow was deeper, up to their knees, which made running almost impossible. Maltsaev swore as he stumbled forward. They heard a shout from the trees and to their left. Then it was repeated, urgently. A threat, Szara realized, spoken in Russian.

They came around the corner at the back of the hotel and stopped. Abramov, in a dark suit and homburg hat, was trying to run across the snow-covered meadow. It was absurd, almost comic. He struggled and floundered and slipped, went down on one hand, rose, lifted his knees high for a few steps, fell again, then lurched forward as he tried to reach the edge of the forest, leaving behind him a broken, white path. The homburg suddenly tilted to one side and Abramov grabbed it frantically, instinctively, and held the brim tightly as he ran, as though, late for work, he were running to catch a tram in a city street.

The marksmen in the forest almost let him reach the trees. The first shot staggered him but he kept on a little, only slower, then the second shot brought him down. The reports echoed off the side of the mountain, then faded into silence. Maltsaev walked into the meadow, Szara followed, moving along the broken path. It was slippery and difficult, and soon they were breathing hard. Just before they reached him, Abramov managed to turn on his side. His hat had rolled away and there was snow caught in his beard. Maltsaev stood silently and tried to catch his breath. Szara knelt down. He could see that Abramov had bled into the snow. His eyes were closed, then they flickered open for a moment, perhaps he saw Szara. He made a single sound, a guttural sigh, “Ach,” of exhaustion and irritation, of dismissal, and then he was gone.

A
T THE
B
RASSERIE
H
EININGER, AT THE FAR CORNER TABLE
where you could see everyone and everyone could see you, seated below the scrupulously preserved bullet hole in the vast and golden mirror, André Szara worked hard at being charming and tried to quiet a certain interior voice that told him to shut up and go home. A newcomer to the crowd of regulars at the corner table, and so the center of attention, he proposed a toast: “I would like us to drink to the love … to the hopeless loves … of our childhood days.” Was there a split second of hesitation—my God, is he going to weep?—before the chorus of approval? But then he didn't weep; his fingers combed a longish strand of black hair off his forehead and he smiled a vulnerable smile. Then everyone realized how very right the toast was, how very right
he
was, the emotional Russian long after midnight, in his steel gray tie and soft maroon shirt, not exactly drunk, just intimate and daring.

That he was. Beneath the tablecloth, his hand rested warmly on the thigh of Lady Angela Hope, a pillar of the Paris night and a woman he'd been specifically told to avoid. With his other hand, he drank Roederer Cristal from a gold-rimmed champagne flute which, thanks to the attentions of a clairvoyant waiter, turned out to be perfectly full every time he went to pick it up. He smiled, he laughed, he said amusing things, and everyone thought he was wonderful, everyone: Voyschinkowsky, “the Lion of the Bourse;” Ginger Pudakis, the English wife of the Chicago meat-packing king; the Polish Countess K—, who, when properly intrigued, made ingenious gardens for her friends; the terrible Roddy Fitzware,
mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
In fact the whole pack of them, ten at last count, hung on his every word. Was his manner perhaps just a shade more Slavic than it really needed to be? Perhaps. But he did not care. He smoked and drank like an affable demon, said, “For a drunkard the sea is only knee deep!” and other proverbial Russianisms as they came to him, and generally made a grand and endearing fool of himself.

Yet—he was more Slavic than they knew—the interior voice refused to be still.
Stop,
it said.
This is not in your best interest; you will suffer, you will regret it, they will catch you.
He ignored it. Not that it was wrong, in fact he knew it was right, but still he ignored it.

Voyschinkowsky, inspired by the toast, was telling a story: “It was my father who took me to the Gypsy camp. Imagine, to go out so late at night, and to such a place! I could not have been more than twelve years old, but when she began to dance …” Lady Angela's leg pressed closer under the table, a hand appeared through the smoky air, and a stream of pale Cristal fizzed into his glass. What other wine, someone had said of champagne, can you hear?

Like Lady Angela Hope, the Brasserie Heininger was notorious. In the spring of '37 it had been the site of, as the Parisians put it,
“une affaire bizarre”:
the main dining room had been sprayed with tommy guns, the Bulgarian maître d' had been assassinated in the ladies' WC, and a mysterious waiter called Nick had disappeared soon after. Such violently Balkan goings-on had made the place madly popular; the most desirable table directly beneath the golden
mirror with a single bullet hole; in fact the only mirror that survived the incident. Otherwise, it was just one more brasserie, where mustached waiters hurried among the red plush banquettes with platters of crayfish and grilled sausage, a taste of fin de siècle deviltry while outside the February snow drifted down into the streets of Paris and cabmen tried to keep warm.

As for Lady Angela Hope, she was notorious among two very different sets: the late-night crowd of aristocrats and parvenus, of every nationality and none at all, that haunted certain brasseries and nightclubs, as well as another, more obscure perhaps, which followed her career with equal, or possibly keener, interest. Her name had been raised in one of Goldman's earliest briefings, taken from a file folder kept in a safe in the Stefan Leib shop in Brussels. Both Szara's predecessor and Annique Schau-Wehrli had been “probed” by Lady Angela, who was “known to have informal connections with British intelligence stations in Paris.” She was, as promised, fortyish, sexy, rich, foul-mouthed, promiscuous, and, in general, thoroughly accessible; an indefatigable guest and hostess who knew “everybody.” “You will meet her certainly,” said Goldman primly, “but she has entirely the wrong friends. Stay away.”

But then, Goldman.