Dark Star ns-2

by Alan Furst

  When he sat down across from her he saw that her eyes were gray and serious, with dark blushes of fatigue beneath them. The nonsense greetings of the parol, the confirmation passwords, were exchanged, and she lowered the edge of the paper bag he’d carried to make sure there was an orange inside.

  Isn’t this all absurd, I mean, oranges and a red scarf and … But these were words he never got to say. Just as he leaned toward her, to make contact, to let her know that they were the sort of people who could easily bridge the nonsense a foolish world imposed on them, she stopped him with a look. It made him swallow. “I am called Renate Braun,” she said. Called meant what? An alias? Or simply a formal way of speaking. “I know who you are,” she added. The notion and that will suffice was unstated but clear.

  Szara liked women and they knew it. All he wanted to do, as the tension left him, was chatter, maybe make her laugh. They were just people, a man and a woman, but she wasn’t buying. Whatever this was, he thought, it was not an arrest. Very well, then a continuation of the business he did with the NKVD from time to time. Every journalist, every citizen outside the Soviet Union, had to do that. But why make it into a funeral? Internally, he shrugged. She was German, he thought. Or Swiss or Austrian-one of those places where position, station in life, excluded informality.

  She put a few francs on the waiter’s saucer, retrieved her scarf, and they went outside into a hard, bright sky and a stiff wind. A boxy Simca sedan was now parked by the brasserie. Szara was certain it hadn’t been there when he’d gone into the place. She directed him into the passenger seat and positioned herself directly behind him. If she shot him in the back of the neck, he thought, his dying words would be why did you go to all this trouble? Unfortunately, that particular wound didn’t allow for last words, and Szara, who had been on battlefields in the civil war that followed the revolution, knew it. All he’d manage was why-za chto? what for? — but everyone, all the victims of the purge, said that.

  The driver turned on the ignition and they drove away from the square. “Heshel,” said the woman behind him, “did it …?”

  “Yes, missus,” the driver said.

  Szara studied the driver as they wound through the cobbled streets of the city. He knew the type, to be found among the mud lanes in any of the ghettos in Poland or Russia: the body of a gnome, not much over five feet tall, thick lips, prominent nose, small, clever eyes. He wore a tweed worker’s cap with a short brim tilted down over one eyebrow, and the collar of his old suit jacket was turned up. The man was ageless, and his expression, cold and humorous at once, Szara understood perfectly. It was the face of the survivor, whatever survival meant that day-invisibility, guile, abasement, brutality-anything at all.

  They drove for fifteen minutes, then rolled to a stop in a crooked street where narrow hotels were jammed side by side and women in net stockings smoked lazily in doorways.

  Renate Braun climbed out, Heshel waited. “Come with me,” she said. Szara followed her into the hotel. There was no desk clerk to be seen, the lobby was empty except for a Belgian sailor sitting on the staircase with his head in his hands, a sailor cap balanced on his knee.

  The stairway was steep and narrow, the wooden steps dotted with cigarette burns. They walked down a long corridor, then stopped in front of a door with 26 written on it in pencil. Szara noticed a tiny smudge of blue chalk at eye level on the door frame. The woman opened her shoulder bag and withdrew a ring of keys- Szara thought he saw the crosshatched grain of an automatic pistol grip as she snapped the bag closed. The keys were masters, with long shanks for leverage when the fit wasn’t precise.

  She unlocked the door and pushed it open. The air smelled like overripe fruit cut with ammonia. Khelidze stared at them from the bed, his back resting against the headboard, his pants and underpants bunched around his knees. His face was spotted with yellow stains and his mouth frozen in the shape of a luxurious yawn. Wound within the sheets was a large, humped mass. A waxy leg had ripped through the sheet; its foot, rigid as if to dance on point, had toenails painted baby pink. Szara could hear a fly buzzing against the windowpane and the sound of bicycle bells in the street.

  “You confirm it is the man from the ship? ” she said.

  “Yes.” This was, he knew, an NKVD killing, a signed NKVD killing. The yellow stains meant hydrocyanic acid used as a spray, a method known to be employed by the Soviet services.

  She opened her bag, put the keys inside, and took out a white cotton handkerchief scented with cologne. Holding it over her nose and mouth, she pulled a corner of the sheet free and looked underneath. Szara could see curly blond hair and part of a ribbon.

  The woman dropped the sheet and rubbed her hand against the side of her raincoat. Then she put the handkerchief away and began to go through Khelidze’s pants pockets, tossing the contents onto the end of the bed: coins, rumpled notes of various currencies, a squeezed-out tube of medication, the soft cloth he’d used to polish his glasses, and a Dutch passport.

  Next she searched the coat and jacket, hung carefully in a battered armoire, finding a pencil and a small address book that she added to the pile. She took the pencil and poked through the items on the bed, sighed with irritation, and searched in her bag until she found a razor blade with tape along both edges. She peeled off one of the tapes and went to work on the jacket and the coat, slicing open the seams and splitting the pads in the shoulders. This yielded a Soviet passport, which she put in her bag. Taking hold of the cuffs, she removed the trousers and methodically took them apart. When she let out the second cuff, a folded square of paper was revealed. She opened it, then handed it to Szara.

  “What is it, please?”

  “The printing is Czech. A form of some kind.”

  “Yes?”

  He studied the paper for a moment. “I think it is a baggage receipt, from a shipping company. No, for the railway station. In Prague.”

  She looked the room over carefully, then walked to the tiny, yellowed sink in the corner and began to wash her hands. “You will collect the parcel,” she said, drying herself with her handkerchief. “It is for you.”

  They left the room together; she did not bother to lock the door. In the lobby she turned to him and said, “Of course you’ll be leaving Ostend immediately.”

  He nodded that he would.

  “Your work is appreciated,” she said.

  He followed her out of the hotel and watched her get into the Simca. He crossed the narrow street and turned to look back. Heshel was watching him through the window of the car and smiled thinly as their eyes met. Here is the world, said the smile, and here we are in it.

  Arriving in Antwerp at dusk, and adding two hours to local time for Moscow, he called his editor at home. From Nezhenko, who handled foreign assignments, he expected no trouble. This would not normally be the case, given a three-week lapse in communication, but when he was asked to do “favors” for the apparat, someone stopped by the Pravda office for a cup of tea. “That Andre Aronovich, what fine work he does! He must take endless time and pains in writing his dispatches. Your patience is admirable.” Enough said. And just as well, for Viktor Nezhenko smoked sixty cigarettes every day and had a savage temper; he could, if he chose, make life miserable for his staff.

  Szara booked his call from a hotel room, it went through an hour later. Nezhenko’s wife answered the phone, her voice bright and shrill with feigned insouciance.

  When Nezhenko came to the phone, he offered no patronymic and no greeting, just, “Where have you been?”

  “I’m in Antwerp.”

  “Where?”

  Szara repeated himself. Something had gone wrong-Nezhenko had not been “advised” of his assignment.

  “So good of you to call,” Nezhenko said.

  Szara hunted desperately for water to put out the fire. “I’m doing a piece on dockworkers up here.”

  “Yes? That will be interesting.”

  “I’ll wire it tomorrow.”

  “Send it by mail if
you like. Third class.”

  “Did Pavel Mikhailovich cover for me? “

  “Pavel Mikhailovich isn’t here anymore.”

  Szara was stunned. He isn’t here anymore was code. When heard from friends, family, landladies, it meant that the person had been taken away. And Pavel Mikhailovich was-had been-a decent little man without enemies. But none of Szara’s reactions, to ask questions, to show even the most civilized grief, was permissible on a telephone line.

  “And people have been asking for you,” Nezhenko added. This too was code, it meant the apparat was looking for him.

  Szara felt as though he’d walked into a wall. Why were they looking for him? They knew very well where he was and what he was doing-the world’s plainest man had not been a mirage, and Renate Braun and her helper were realer yet. “It’s all a misunderstanding,” he said after a moment. “The right hand doesn’t tell the left hand …”

  “No doubt,” Nezhenko said. Szara could hear him lighting a cigarette.

  “I want to go down to Prague after I finish the piece on the dockworkers. There’s the reaction to the Anti-Comintern Pact, views on the Sudetenland, all sorts of things. What do you think? “

  “What do I think? “

  “Yes.”

  “Do as you like, Andre Aronovich. You must please yourself in all things.”

  “I’ll file on the dockworkers tomorrow,” Szara said. Nezhenko hung up.

  Writing the story of the Belgian dockworkers was like eating sand.

  Once upon a time he’d persuaded himself that technical facility was its own reward: a sentence singing hymns to the attainment of coal production norms in the Donets Basin was, nonetheless, a sentence, and could be well rendered. It was the writer’s responsibility in a progressive society to inform and uplift the toiling masses- word had, in fact, reached him that the number one toiler himself had an eye for his byline-so when some demon within wanted to write dark fables of an absurd universe, he knew enough to keep that imp well bottled up. To stay alive, Szara had taught himself discretion before the apparat had a chance to do the job for him. And if, by chance, an intransigent pen stubbornly produced commissar wolves guarding flocks of worker sheep or Parisian girls in silk underwear, well, then the great characteristic of paper was the ease with which it burned.

  And these were, had to be, private fires. The world didn’t want to know about your soul, it took you for who you said you were. The workers in the dark little hiring hall by the Antwerp docks were impressed that anybody cared enough to come around and ask them how they felt. “Stalin is our great hope,” one of them said, and Szara sent his voice around the world.

  He sat in yet one more hotel room as the Atlantic fog came curling up the streets and wrote these men into the brutal drama being played out in Europe. He caught the strength in their rounded shoulders and brawlers’ hands, the way they quietly took care of one another, the granite decency of them. But for the wives and children who depended on them they would fight in Spain-some of the younger ones in fact were there-would fight in the worker suburbs of Berlin, would yet, families or not, fight from behind the cranes and sheds of their own docks. It was true, and Szara found a way to make it true on the page.

  Stalin was their great hope. And if Khelidze mocked this with the yawn on his yellow-stained face, that was Szara’s private problem. And if the “small favor” was now a large favor, that, too, was Szara’s private problem. And if all that made it hard to write, made writing the story like eating sand, who really could he blame? He could always say no and take the consequences. The Russian proverb had it just right: You said you were a mushroom, now jump into the basket.

  And people have been asking for you.

  Nezhenko’s phrase rode the cadence of the train over the rails from Antwerp all the way to Paris. Much for the best, he calculated, to rush into their arms and find out what they wanted. He hadn’t the courage to stand coolly apart from it all, whatever it was, so he did the next best thing. Checked in with the large Pravda bureau in Paris and asked the secretary to book him on the Paris-Prague express for the following day. He looked into her eyes, saw ball bearings, swore he could hear her lift the phone before the door was properly latched.

  He stopped back that evening, picked up the ticket and drew both salary and expense funds, then went early to the Gare d’Austerlitz the following day in case they wanted to talk to him there. He did not precisely fear abduction, he was simply more comfortable in an open, public space with crowds of people about. He dawdled over coffee at a cafe by the departure platform, gazed mindlessly at the sullen Parisian sky above the glass roof on its vast iron fretwork, read Le Temps, found himself quoted in the Communist daily, L’Humanite-“as Pravda correspondent Andre Szara has pointed out, bilateral relations between France and the USSR can only proceed once the Czechoslovakian question has been …”-and watched the appetizing French women sweep past, their heels clattering on the cement, their animation seemingly inspired by a grave sense of mission.

  He had made himself available, but no contact was made. When his train was announced and the engine vented plumes of white steam on the platform, he climbed aboard and found himself alone in a first-class compartment. Pravda did not buy whole compartments- only the apparat did that. Clearly, something was planned. Perhaps in Nancy, he thought.

  He was wrong. Spent the afternoon staring through the rain at the low hills of eastern France and watching the names of battlefields glide past on the railroad stations. At the Strasbourg border control, just on the other side of the Rhine, a trio of German passport officials, two soldiers and a civilian in streaming black rubber raincoats, entered the compartment. They were cold-eyed and courteous, and his Soviet passport produced no evident reaction. They asked him a question or two, apparently just to hear his voice. Szara’s German was that of someone who’d spoken Yiddish as a child, and the civilian, a security type, made clear that he knew Szara was a Jew, a Polish Jew, a Soviet Bolshevik Jew of Polish origin. He probed efficiently through Szara’s traveling bag without removing his black gloves, then examined press and travel documents and, when he was done, stamped the passport with a fat swastika in a circle and handed it back politely. Their eyes met for just a moment: this business they had with each other would be seen to in the future, that far they could agree.

  But Szara traveled too much to take the hostility of border police to heart and, as they gained speed leaving Stuttgart station, he fell into the rhythm of the tracks and the dense twilight of Germany: smoking factories on the horizon, fields left to the November frost.

  He touched the baggage receipt in the inside pocket of his jacket for the tenth time that day; he might have taken yet one more look at the thing, but the sound of the train was suddenly amplified as the door to his compartment swung open.

  On first glance, an ordinary businessman of Central Europe in dark overcoat and soft-brimmed hat, carrying a buckled briefcase of the kind that is held under one arm. Then, recognition. This was a man to whom he had been briefly introduced, perhaps a year earlier, at some Moscow function he couldn’t recall. His name was Bloch, a lieutenant general of the GRU, military intelligence, and recently, according to rumor, the illegal-clandestine-rezident operating GRU and NKVD networks based in Tarragona. Thus a very senior member of the Soviet cadre involved in the Spanish Civil War.

  Szara was immediately on his guard; powerful people in Moscow were afraid of this man. It was nothing specific. Those who knew the details didn’t tell war stories, but they veered away from his name when it came up in conversation, looked around to see who might be listening, made a certain gesture of the face that meant stay away. What little was said about Bloch implied an insatiable appetite for success-an appetite gratified by means of ferocious tyranny. Life for those assigned to work for him was said to be a nightmare.

  Yaschyeritsa, they called him behind his back, a kind of lizard. Because he had the look of the basilisk: a sharp triangular face, stiff hair combed back flat from
the forehead, thin eyebrows angled steeply toward the inner corners of his eyes, which, long and narrow, were set above hard cheekbones that slanted upward.

  Andre Szara, like everyone who moved in those circles known as the nomenklatura, the elite, was an adroit reader of faces. You had to know who you were dealing with. A Byelorussian? An Armenian? A native Russian? With Jews, it was often difficult because Jewish women had for centuries borne the children of their tormentors and thus carried the genes of many races. God only knew, Szara thought, what brutal band of marauders had forced themselves on Bloch’s female ancestor to make him look as he did. Did evil, he wondered, travel in the blood as well?

  Bloch nodded a greeting, sat down across from Szara, leaned over and locked the compartment door, then turned off the lamps on the wall around the window. The train was moving slowly through a village, and from the darkened compartment they could see that a local festival was in progress; a bonfire in the public square, cattle wearing garlands, Hitler Youth in shorts holding swastika banners hung lengthwise down long poles, like Roman fasces.

  Bloch stared intently at the scene. “At last,” he said pensively, “they are back in the Middle Ages.” He turned his attention to Szara. “Forgive me, comrade journalist, I am General Y I. Bloch. I don’t think we’ve ever spoken, but I read your work when I have a moment, so I know who you are. Do I need to tell you who I am? “

  “No, comrade General. I know you are with the special services.”

  Bloch acknowledged Szara’s awareness as a compliment: a knowing smile, a brief inclination of the head, at your service.