by John Meaney
"I have so missed your sophisticated humour."
"And I've missed you." The words just came out. So sue me. "Damn it."
The couple at the next table were smoking post-dessert cigarettes. Maybe they were watchers, too. Jean-Paul was subtle, and it would be just like him to assign two experienced operatives to observe while the neos stood out in their clumsiness as a distraction. But watching his own wife? Even in our trade you have to trust someone, or did I mention that already?
Fern and I turned our talk to idle discussion of recent events that had nothing to do with Outer Germany or New Jerusalem: John Glenn's orbiting the Earth and his near-fatal re-entry, the shocking death of Marilyn Monroe as summer ended, and the raging debate here in France over whom Monsieur Pompidou would appoint to his new cabinet. Not to mention the way that, six weeks earlier, World War III had nearly exploded into being: Cuba's hour of fame.
"It's so nice," said Fern, "to finally see a world leader who looks like a movie star, not a geriatric."
"That Kruschev is such a pin-up."
"I meant JFK." Fern kicked me under the table. "Youth and charisma and a new chance for the world. A time of hope, you old cynic."
We were avoiding subjects that touched on our shadow world, like the American U2 spy plane shot down after flying over Moscow's suburbs, and the show trial of its pilot Gary Powers. The Soviets exchanged Powers for one of their own, a captured KGB colonel called Rudolf Abel. Neither one was headed for a hero's welcome.
And how was Moshe doing, locked in his Sanatorium cell?
"You have to keep your guard up and hold your nerve," I said.
"Now who's admiring Kruschev?" Fern's eyes grew darker, sparkling.
"Excuse me? Didn't he pull his forces back from Cuba?"
"You think Kennedy didn't gave away concessions? It was just that the arrangements were made in secret, and Kruschev is strong enough at home not to need public success."
She was living in France, and being a Left-wing intellectual suited her. But Kennedy, making deals with the Soviets? I would have liked to ask what specifically he might have given away, but this wasn't the place.
Instead, we stopped talking for a time, and nibbled at the crêpes while waiting for the neighbouring couple to vacate their table. Everything we'd said until now could have been the conversation of two civilians, but I had more to discuss. When the two diners were out of earshot, I told Fern I was headed for Poland. It wasn't a security breach: she was married to Head of Station, and she'd have clearance to see my travel papers as they crossed Jean-Paul's desk.
"The uranium thing," she said.
Now that did surprise me.
"What uranium thing would that be?"
"Ha." She laid her hand on the back of mine, electric and exciting. "Did I catch a whisper of bad news about Moshe Boaz?"
She didn't really know him, but she knew he was my friend.
"You could say that."
"It's not our business, I suppose... Listen. Be careful over there."
Her magical, energized grip tightened on my hand.
"They won't put me in a cell and drug me. I won't let it get that far." I blinked, remembering the orderly coming in with the syringe ready to plunge down. "Not like poor bloody Moshe."
"You mean he's not—"
Fern stopped, blinking.
"What?" Everything looked sharp, focused: the neo outside, stamping in the snow to keep warm; the blue-grey pattern of cigarette smoke hugging the ceiling; the parting of Fern's lips, the widening of those dark eyes, drawing in my soul. "You thought he was dead?"
"Oh. Sorry." Fern shook her head. "That's the problem with rumours and reading between the lines."
Was there something desperate in her sudden smile? Something vulnerable, designed to wrong-foot me so that I avoided exploring more deeply?
"Tell me about it," I said.
Then her psychological armour was back in place, and the moment for possible interrogation was gone. But of course I trusted her.
Yet had there been something in her voice when I rang her from Hamburg?
Not Fern.
When I rang her on the day I was planning to meet Moshe.
Never her.
On the day when neo-Nazis were waiting at the dock... the dock where Moshe had been due to disembark from the seaplane, but had never shown up, because he'd gone to ground where no one, not even his wife Shana, suspected he might be. Pinchas had asked who might have known about the meeting and I'd said no one, because there was no reason I could give for ringing up the wife of our Head of Station in Paris.
"Do you think he's cold out there?" Fern tilted her head toward the window, indicating the neo outside. "Maybe we should invite him in."
"Better to pretend he's inconspicuous. He's frozen but under the illusion of competence."
"There are different kinds of suffering, aren't there, David?"
The conversation was in danger of sliding off the rails, tipping down an embankment and crashing in a heap. That made it time to leave.
We walked for maybe five minutes, then stopped before a ten-foot poster whose slogan read Oui la paix, referring to Algeria. As perfectly as if someone had arranged a tableau, some two hundred metres down the street, two officers of the Police Judiciare were pushing a dark-skinned man up against a stone wall. On the other side of the wall was a college of the Sorbonne where the students could argue about injustice without experiencing it firsthand.
This was a bad time to look Algerian. President de Gaulle might have declared peace, but tension remained. Four months ago, de Gaulle had come that close to dying in Villacoublay where the assassins were waiting. You might have thought that would give him more sympathy with New Jerusalem's stance against arming former enemies, like Outer Germany, but as far as I knew he was still staying oui to German re-arming and non to Berlin's hardliners, if he was talking to them at all. Only Muslim extremists worried de Gaulle, not because he didn't hate Nazis but because he didn't believe in their resurgence.
The cops stepped back, allowing the man to go. Fern and I turned away.
"I have to go," she said. "He's expecting me."
Jean-Paul, who else?
"Will I see you before I—?"
"There's a party at the apartment. Eight o'clock tonight. Please come."
I blew out a breath, a cloud of my life's moisture dissipating in the winter air.
"All right."
"Listen... You know I've never told anyone else about Lithuania. About my sister."
Her face was so perfect. The universe seemed to coalesce around her.
"That's..."
"Because I trust you, David."
"And I... You know how I—"
Her kiss stopped me talking. Then she drew back.
"Take care of yourself, darling."
And she turned and walked away, a diminishing elegant figure amid the thickening snow, while I could only stand and watch and let her leave. When she and both of the trailing neos were gone from sight, I hunched my shoulders, stuffed my hands in my pockets, and headed for the Boulevard St Michel, the fastest route to the Sorbonne.
Cold air brings moisture to the eyes; isn't that the way it always works?
The physics department was where I remembered it from the last time I'd visited Charles. I went into the warmth, unbuttoning my overcoat, trying not to think of Fern.
My travel plans were to fly out in the morning, and in the meantime here was an old friend to visit, a friend who might help me understand the threat, because whatever I'd told Schröder, there was this: if someone handed me a lump of uranium, I wouldn't know where to start in building a bomb.
As I climbed the steps, students came clattering downwards, passing me on both sides. At the top was a parquet-floored corridor where a long-faced man in a brown work-coat was polishing a cabinet filled with brass weighing-scales. It was like university, like school: a good memory, until it led back to that day in the headmaster's study.
This is work. Concentrate.
The lab was cluttered.
Cables dangled everywhere, a geigerscope glowed orange, and a distorted, swirling band of green light – it's called a Lissajous loop – bounced around an oscilloscope screen like some electric Spirograph. A pale woman paused amid the tangle of equipment, a soldering-iron in hand.
"M'sieur?"
"Je cherche Charles Montagu. Il travaille encôre ici?"
Apparently, Charles was in the gym. "À ce moment, il joue au salle de frappe." Still holding the soldering-iron, the woman made dainty boxing movements. "Comme il est fou, quoi?"
She meant that Charles was mad, but she had a certain look in her eye: a look women tend to get when Charles is around. She gave directions, acknowledged my thanks, and bent to work, soldering a capacitor in place. A pretty female scientist with no wedding-ring. Just the kind of person I should have fallen for, given half an ounce of sense.
But then there was Fern.
Leningrad been even colder than this, during that short, intense time with Fern (in what was supposed to be a covert document handover, nothing more). My thoughts kept leading back there, particularly since my return to Soviet territory was looming.
"I've never told anyone else about Lithuania," she had said. "About my sister."
I paused now in front of a bookshop half-way between the lab and the gym. There was a window full of books, but the titles seemed blurred.
"What I remember most," Fern told me that time, "is the painful cold. And I mean painful. Snow on the ground, and the air cold enough to hurt."
At the height of the war Fern was ten years old, living in a harsh Lithuanian forest as part of a Soviet group. The partisans modelled themselves after the Belski Brigade in Bellorussia, and they kept some kind of civilized life going: marriages, social gatherings when possible, helping each other to survive among the iron-hard trees... and to seek retribution.
Two decades ago. Can't she let it rest?
Stupid question. Who ever lets go of the past?
Trying to pull back into the moment, I went inside the bookshop. Behind the glass-topped counter, a tall man with a long nose stared at me through round-framed glasses. The shelves were filled with titles, their covers tending toward monochrome white.
It looked like Jean-Paul Sartre was popular. Talk about miserable. Iron in the Heart was there – Le Fer dans le Coeur – with its stark delineation of defeat. Disheartened by the Nazi victory and the disbanding of the French army, a starving Frenchman, a soldier, wanders around the countryside with his disorganized comrades, until Nazis put them aboard a death-train. When there's an opportunity to escape, he is too stunned to take action, and then he is done for, because starvation unmanned him. Apathetic and weak, he could do nothing but follow Nazi orders, unquestioning.
I'd read the book in a single sitting, hating the story, unable to stop.
(You feel sleepy after eating, therefore souls do not exist. That's because thought is a property of the physical brain. I ran that argument past Uncle Isaak when I was nineteen, and when he'd finished laughing, he bought me a new slide-rule and a copy of Principia Mathematica as a reward. If Uncle Isaak was the black sheep of the family, God knows what they'd make of me – if they knew me well enough.)
Jews who remained in the ghettoes faced the same kind of dilemma as Sartre's fictional character when it came to obeying orders. The Jewish councils, the Judenraten, tried to keep stability at all costs, cooperating as if their oppressors were rational men. But it was the renegades who survived: the ones who took to the forests in defiance of the Judenraten edicts.
In the ghettoes, some prayed until the end, finding refuge in ritual; others committed suicide, expressing the only power left to them. But the Jewish partisans in their forest tribes created a new purpose: to kill as many Nazis as they could before their own extinction.
Fern. What was it really like for you?
If she still suffered because of traumatic memories, then I was sorry for it. But I couldn't help analysing the hints I'd picked up over the years, looking for some specific memory, some compelling association, to account for her staying with Jean-Paul. Perhaps a sense of obligation.
The partisans that Fern and her pregnant mother Lisa joined were largely non-Jewish, and the bear-like man that Lisa unofficially married was a Gentile. Was that it? Marrying the one who offered protection? Or perhaps I was misreading the story of Lisa, whom I had never met. The Lithuanian partisans called themselves the Merkl Company, and they were hardcore Communists who allowed Jews into their midst simply because they needed fighters: anyone who hated Nazis.
"They accepted us," Fern said that time, "because my mother could shoot straight and field-strip an AK47."
Forget Sartre. Needing something to alter the mood, I found a copy of Le Saint Détective Magazine, featuring Simon Templar. Good enough. The assistant frowned as he took my money.
"And Mother taught me," Fern had added, "how to shoot and stab. But it was the way she killed my sister that brought the real lesson home. Do anything to survive."
Her sister. That was hard to imagine.
"Merci bien."
"M'sieur," said the assistant.
Outside, the boulevard was colder, and snow was still falling.
The corridor was bleak, with grey paint flaking from the walls and the air thick with mixed scents of ancient sweat and recently spilled blood, with yesterday's adrenaline, today's fear. It's the same in any fight gym or dojo anywhere in the world. A warm vibration grew inside as the corridor led me deeper into the building. The thumping sounds grew louder.
If I have a home, it's places like this.
A grey-haired coach was moving the focus pads – they looked like baseball mitts – while his trainee, a slender black-skinned youth, whipped out clean jabs and crosses. Then he threw a spectacular spinning kick, a revers, with his right heel smacking into the pad, because this wasn't boxing: this was la boxe française.
At school in England, they said that anyone who kicked in a confrontation was fighting like a girl. But in Branch 7, I learned different – very different. It's not just foreign languages and psych manipulation on the curriculum: our syllabus includes la boxe Marseillaise, which is a hard, streetfighting style of savate that comes straight from the toughest dockyards in the world, with the exception of Shanghai.
A sparring ring stood at the rear. In it, a squat bearded man with heavy shoulders was beating the crap out of Charles Montagu, physicist and friend. I needed his brain intact for questions on atomic physics. Just then the bearded man ripped a circling low kick, called a fouetté bas, straight into the meaty part of Charles's left thigh. It smacked loudly, and Charles's leg gave way. He dropped.
The referee, an assistant coach, stepped in between the fighters, moving fast. It was a practice match but the blow had been hard, and he was saving Charles from further pain. After rubbing his leg for a few moments, Charles was able to get to his feet, giving a downturned smile, breathing hard.
Then both fighters gave the formal salute, each man tapping his right glove against his chest, before straightening the arm. If you squinted, you'd think you were watching a Nazi salute. That would be a mistake.
When Charles turned round he saw me, and ducked through the ropes, pulling off the gloves as he came over. He was soaked with sweat.
"Hey, Wolf. How are you doing?"
The senior coach was staring this way.
"Charles, my friend. Not bad. Fancy a coffee?"
The coach didn't know me but he was a fighter: we give off vibrations that register on others of our kind.
"Absolutely, old chap," Charles said. "Spiffing. A jolly old coffee would be splendid."
"For God's sake, no one talks like that, not even in Oxford."
"You don't remember Quentin-Smythe?"
"Oh, yeah." Old QS had been Charles's supervisor. "Maybe they do."
I waited on a hard bench while Charles showered and changed. When he appeared, he was
wearing a dark suit with neat, narrow lapels beneath his open raincoat. He looked smart, but I'd rehearsed a pun in French about his appearance, so I used it anyway.
"Tu traînes la savate, hein?"
It didn't mean literally that he trained in savate; it meant he looked down-at-heel.
"Not bad for a foreigner," Charles said. "But I am poor, my friend. I should move to the States."
We headed for a crowded café. The chatter of a hundred students spilled out.
"You'd triple your salary overnight, Charles, if you did go."
And he could do even better if he went to work at the Livermore labs. They need good physicists to design atomic weapons.
"But the Americans," Charles said, "have only Audrey Hepburn. I have an elegant city full of les Parisiennes."
I gave a Gallic shrug. Charles shook his head, a signal to try again. Then he told me that he was spending the next year back in Oxford.
"I'm not surprised," I said. "Just think of all that wonderful food."
"You are a bad person, Dr Wolf."
Inside the café we found a table at the back. The clientele was mostly animated students, young and serious and energetic. Their blue-grey cigarette smoke rose to the rafters, seeming to modulate the soft jazz emanating from the record-player.
"What's that?" Charles pointed to the magazine tucked into my coat pocket. "The Saint? Simon Templar?"
I put the magazine down on the table. "The latest philosophical volume. Naturally."
On the table next to ours, a battered copy of de Chardin's Le Phenomène Humain lay open. A group of young men and women were arguing about the difference between polycentric hologenesis and polyphyletism as if it mattered.
Charles winked at me.
I tapped my copy of Le Saint Détective Magazine. "The detective is engaged on an eternal, existential quest for meaning at the fringes of society."
"Of course he is." Charles glanced at the students, and raised his voice. "It's a well known fact that half of the Saint adventures were penned by Sartre."
"I'm glad you agree, Professor, though I believe he may have collaborated with de Beauvoir on some of the racier tales."
