Dark Star (43 page)

Szara felt sorry for de Montfried but could find no words of consolation.
What was there to say? The man had discovered himself to be rather less powerful than he'd thought. Yet, Szara realized, how little would change for him. He would present the same image to the world, would live beautifully, move easily in the upper realms of French society; the haughty Cercle Rénaissance would still be the place where a library of railroad books was maintained for his pleasure. Certainly he was to be envied. He had simply found, and rather late in life, the limits of his power. Perceiving himself to be a wealthy and important man, de Montfried had attempted to exert influence on political events and, based on Szara's understanding of this world, had succeeded. He simply did not understand how well they'd done. He simply did not understand that he'd imposed himself on a world where the word
victory
was hardly to be heard.

Together, he and Szara had been responsible for the distribution of one thousand three hundred and seventy-five Certificates of Emigration to Mandate Palestine. As these covered individuals and their families, and were so precious that marriages and adoptions were arranged, sometimes overnight, the number of salvaged lives was perhaps three thousand. What, Szara wondered, could he say?
You bloody fool, you want to save the world—now you know what it takes to save three thousand lives!
No, he could not say that. And had he said it he would have been wrong. The true price of those lives was yet to be paid and would turn out to be higher, for Szara and others, than either of them could have realized at that moment.

De Montfried dropped his hands heavily to the arms of his chair and sat back, his face collapsed with failure. “Then it's finished,” he said.

“Yes,” Szara said.

“Can anything be done? Anything at all?”

“No.”

Szara had certainly thought about it—
thought
wasn't really the word; his mind had spun endless scenarios, reached desperately for a solution, any solution at all. But to no avail.

It was Szara's opinion that Evans had told him the truth that afternoon in the movie theater: the British services
were
able to confirm the figures from other sources. That meant he could not simply lie, offer numbers that would appear to be logical. They would
know. Not at first—for a month or two it might be managed, and a month or two meant another three hundred and fifty certificates, at least seven hundred lives. Seven hundred lives were worth a lie—in Szara's calculus they certainly were. But it was worse than that.

When he'd first gone to the British, he'd believed his figures to be false, part of a German counterintelligence attack. It had not mattered, then. But the world had shifted beneath his feet; Germany would take Poland, and Russia would agree to a treaty that left Britain and France isolated. False figures delivered now might deform the British armament effort in unforeseen ways, false figures could well help the Nazis, false figures could cost thousands of lives, tens of thousands, once the Luftwaffe bombers flew. So those seven hundred lives were lost.

“Have you told them? ” de Montfried asked.

“Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“On the possibility that you and I, sitting here, might invent something, discover something, find another way. On the possibility that you have not been forthcoming with me and that you have resources I don't know about, perhaps information of some kind that can be substituted.”

De Montfried shook his head.

They sat in silence.

“What will you tell them?” de Montfried said at last.

“That there has been an interruption at the source, that we wish to continue until a new method can be worked out.”

“And will they accept that?”

“They will not.”

“Not even for one month?”

“Not even that.” He paused for a moment. “I know it's difficult to understand, but it's like not having money. Lenin said that grain was ‘the currency of currencies.' That was in 1917. For us, it might now be said that information is the currency of currencies.”

“But surely you know other things, things of interest.”

“For the people I deal with directly, that might very well work. But we are asking for something I'm certain they—MI6—had to fight for, and only the magnitude of what we were offering made it
possible for them to win that battle. I don't think they'll go back to war for other material I might offer. I'm sure they won't. Otherwise, believe me, I would try it.”

Slowly, de Montfried gathered himself to face the inevitable. “It is very hard for me to admit to failure, but that is what's happened, we've failed.”

“We've stopped, yes.”

De Montfried withdrew a leather case and a fountain pen from the inside pocket of his jacket, unscrewed the top of the pen, and began to write a series of telephone numbers on the back of a business card. “One of these will find me,” he said. “I am almost never out of touch with my office—that's the number you've been using— but I've included several other numbers, places where I'm to be found. Otherwise we'll leave it as it's been, simply say
Monsieur B. is calling.
I'll leave instructions for the call to be put through to me directly. Day or night, any time. Whatever I have is at your disposal should you need it.”

Szara put the card in his pocket. “One can never be sure what might happen. One has to hope for the best.”

De Montfried nodded sadly.

Szara stood and offered his hand. “Good-bye,” he said.

“Yes,” de Montfried said, rising to shake hands. “Good luck.”

“Thank you,” Szara said.

The card joined the money and the Jean Bonotte passport that afternoon.

The
OTTER
operation had ended suddenly and badly.

Odile must have activated an emergency signal available in Berlin, because Goldman called a special meeting, to take place just after she got off the train. Szara and Schau-Wehrli were summoned to a place called Arion, in Belgium, an iron mining town just over the Luxembourg border a few kilometers north of the French city of Longwy. It was hot and dirty in Arion. Coal smoke from the mills drifted through the soot-blackened streets, the sunset was a dark, sullen orange, and the night air was dead still. The meeting was held in a worker's tenement near the center of town, the home of a
party operative, a miner asked to spend the night with relatives. They sat in the cramped parlor with the shutters closed amid the smells of sweaty clothes and boiled food.

Odile was shaken—her face an unnatural white—but determined. She had gotten off a local train from the German border only a few minutes before they arrived. Goldman was there with another man Szara did not know, a short, heavy Russian in middle age, with wavy fair hair and extremely thick glasses that distorted his eyes. At first Szara thought he might be asthmatic: his breath rasped audibly in the little room. After they'd settled down, Szara noticed that the man was staring at him. Szara met his glance but the man did not look away. He put an oval cigarette between his lips, creased the head of a wooden match with his thumbnail, and lit the cigarette from the flare. Only then did he turn to face Odile. As he shook the match out, Szara saw that he wore a large gold watch on his wrist.

By the time Szara and Schau-Wehrli arrived, Odile had told her story to Goldman and the other man and produced Baumann's message. Goldman handed it to Szara. “Have a look,” he said.

Szara took the slip of paper, read quickly over the production numbers, then discovered a terse sentence scrawled along the bottom of the sheet:
You should be aware that rumors of a rapprochement between Germany and the USSR have angered members of the diplomatic and military class.

“What is your opinion?” Goldman asked.

“My opinion,” Szara said. “It seems he's trying to supply additional information. We've been after him for months to do that. Do such rumors exist? ”

“Perhaps. In the class of people he refers to, they could easily be more than rumors,” Goldman said. “But how would Baumann know such things? Who is he talking to? ”

Szara said he didn't know.

Goldman turned to Odile. “Please tell us again what happened.”

“I always clear the drop early in the morning,” Odile said, “when the maids go to work in the neighborhood. I went to the wall by the little wood, made certain I was not observed, reached over the wall and felt around until I found the loose rock, then
withdrew the paper and put it in the pocket of my raincoat. There was no message from the network, so I was next going to the telephone pole to acknowledge reception by turning the bent nail. I went about ten steps when a woman came out of the woods. She was approximately fifty years old, wearing a housedress, and extremely agitated and nervous. ‘He has been taken,' she said to me in German. I pretended not to understand what it was all about. ‘He is in a camp, in Sachsenhausen,' she said, ‘and his friends can't help him.' I stared at her and started to hurry away. ‘Tell them they must help him,' she called after me. I walked very fast. She came a few steps after me, then stopped and went back into the woods. I did not see her do this, but I looked over my shoulder a few seconds later and she was gone. I heard a dog barking, a little dog, from the woods somewhere. I made my way to the Ringbahn station at Hohenzollern-Damm, went into the public toilet, and hid the message in my shoulder pad. I was out of Berlin on a local train about one hour later. I saw nobody unusual on the train, had no other experience out of the ordinary.”

“Friends?” Schau-Wehrli said. “His
friends
can't help? Did she mean the Jewish community? Lawyers, people like that? ”

“Or work associates,” Szara mused. “People at the German companies he deals with.”

“The point is,” Goldman said, “has he been arrested as a Jew? Or a spy?”

“If they caught him spying, they would have taken her as well,” Schau-Wehrli said. “And the Gestapo would have him—that means Columbia House, not Sachsenhausen.”

“Perhaps,” Goldman said. “It's hard to know.”

“Can he be helped?” Szara asked.

“That's a question for the Directorate, but yes, it has been done before. For the time being, the Berlin operatives are going to try and contact him in the camp and let him know we're aware of what's happened and that we're going to get him out. We're trying to help him to resist interrogation. Do you think he can? ”

Szara sensed that Baumann's life hung on his answer: “If anyone can, he will. He's a strong man, psychologically. His physical condition
is another matter. If the interrogation is extreme, he may die on them.”

Goldman nodded at the answer. “At your meeting in Berlin, was anything said that can help explain either his message, the ‘members of the diplomatic and military classes' business, or his wife's reference to ‘friends.' Are those, perhaps, the same people?”

“They could be,” Szara lied. “I can't say.”

“Is that your answer?” the man in the glasses asked.

Szara faced him. The eyes behind the thick lenses were watery and lifeless. “My answer is no. Nothing was said that would explain either of those statements.”

Traveling back to Paris on a succession of local trains they had to sit in separate compartments. That gave Szara time to think while the somber towns of northeastern France rolled past the window.

He felt old. It was the business with Nadia Tscherova again, only worse. He was tormented by what had happened to Baumann, and by his own part in the man's destruction, yet what he had seen on Kristallnacht went a long way toward justifying what they had done together. A sacrifice of war. A machine gun position left to delay an enemy's progress down a road while the rear guard retreats. All very well, he thought, until you're the machine gunner. In his not so secret heart he thought it might be for the best if Baumann were to die. Peacefully. A death of mercy. But his instinct told him that would not happen. Baumann was frightened, exhausted, beaten down and humiliated, but also strong. A hard soul lived in that old gray man.

Of course the Russian-German treaty explained it all. From the beginning, Von Polanyi's intelligence unit in the German Foreign Office had fathered Baumann's approach to the Soviet
apparat:
a communications channel had been opened up. Baumann's production figures were probably being traded for information coming back the other way, but moving along an entirely different path. At this very moment, he speculated, some Russian in Leningrad was being told to have no further contact with a certain Finnish
ferry captain. That's how things were done, agreements made and kept.
We will keep you informed,
they'd said to somebody in 1937,
of our bomber production.
Secretly, by intelligence means, because neither our countries, nor our leaders, Hitler and Stalin, may be seen by the world to accept each other's existence. We are officially mortal enemies, yet it is to our mutual advantage to have certain understandings. Thus, Szara realized, Baumann's numbers were confirmed by the British because he was
not
being run by Nazi counterintelligence, Schellenberg's office in the Referat VI C.

In another month the pact between Hitler and Stalin would be revealed to the world. Thus they'd shut down the Baumann operation because they no longer needed to communicate in this way. Henceforth such figures would travel by telex from foreign office to foreign office. Meanwhile somebody—
not
Von Polanyi, based on what Frau Baumann had said to Odile—had decided to throw Baumann into Sachsenhausen. Their way of saying thank you, evidently.

No, Szara told himself, you may not think that way. Germans do things for reasons. It was more likely their way of saying
now get out of Germany, Jew.
And here's a little taste of something unpleasant to help you remember to keep your mouth shut.

Maybe, Szara told himself. Just maybe. Something in Goldman's statement about Sachsenhausen had been hopeful, as though Baumann's extrication could be achieved and he knew it.

Oh, but that clever little bastard was smart! He'd sniffed all around the truth. Which was that the “friends” and the “diplomats” were one and the same and that “you” meant Szara and nobody else. What had Baumann actually intended? That would bear thinking about, but there was a nugget to be mined somewhere in those formal words, something he wanted to give to Szara—a present to his case officer. Why? Because he knew Szara, and, despite endless orders and urgent requests for more information— requests unheeded, orders ignored—Szara had not abandoned him or threatened him. Now he said: Please help me, and I'll help you.