by Alan Furst
Szara’s interrogation-a form of debriefing for those cooperating with the special services-was the province of his official “friend” in Moscow, Abramov. Nonetheless, an interrogation. And the fact that it was supervised by a friend made it, as the apparat intended, worse not better-a system that turned friends into hostages held against the subject’s honesty. If you lied, and your interrogator believed it, and then they caught you lying, you were both finished: de facto conspirators. Maybe you didn’t care to save your own miserable life, but perhaps you’d think twice about murdering a friend.
Szara lied.
Sergei Abramov lived in the higher reaches of the NKVD Foreign Department, a confidant of the godlings Shpigelglas and Sloutsky if not officially their equal. He would arrive at Szara’s apartment every day at about eleven with egg sandwiches wrapped in newspaper, a paper sack of tea, sometimes vodka, occasionally little almond cakes with a sticky coating of honey that had you licking your fingers while you answered questions. He was a thickset, bulky man, handsome in his bulk, in a much-worn blue pinstripe suit, the jacket buttoned across his belly over a rippling vest with a gold watch chain stretched from pocket to pocket. Abramov had sharp eyes that caught the light, a broken nose, a black homburg that he never removed, and a full black beard that gave him the air of a successful operatic baritone-an artist used to getting his own way and certain to create havoc if he didn’t. He would sit on a kitchen chair with his knees apart, place a cigarette between his lips, light it with a long, wooden match, then half close his eyes as he listened to you, apparently on the verge of sleep. Often he made a small noise, a grunt that might mean all sorts of things: sympathy- what a time you’ve had of it-or disbelief, perhaps an acknowledgment that what you said was true, perhaps the groan of a man too often deceived. It was in fact a stratagem, meant nothing, and Szara knew it.
Abramov spoke in a low, hoarse rumble, a voice rich with sorrow at having found all humankind to be the most absurd collection of liars and rogues. Posing a question, his face was filled with gloom. Like a teacher who knows his hopeless pupils will offer only wrong answers, Abramov was an interrogator whose subjects never told the truth. The method was ingenious. Szara understood and admired it but nevertheless felt the powerful undertow it created: he found himself wanting to please Abramov, to offer such resoundingly honest statements that the man’s sour view of the world would be swept away by idealism reborn.
Alert to Abramov’s dangerous gift, the ability to stimulate the essential human desire to please, Szara laid out his defenses with care. To begin with, resistance. Later, a strategic submission, giving up everything but that which mattered most: Marta Haecht and all the signposts that pointed to her existence. Thus Szara’s description of dinner at the Villa Baumann was laden with detail while the cast of characters was decreased by one. On visiting the wire mill he encountered the chief engineer, called Haecht, the man who might become the nominal owner of the company. A technician, Szara said, not anybody they could work with. Abramov grunted at that but did not pursue it.
Bloch and Renate Braun he assigned to the second, the confessional, stage, thus restricting the initial part of the interrogation to writing the dockworkers story in Antwerp, an uneventful journey to Prague, conditions in that city, and his rejected dispatch on the potential abandonment of Czechoslovakia. Baumann’s revelation on the manufacture of swage wire he reported in perfect detail and was rewarded by a series of appreciative grunts. This ground was then covered a second time-Abramov’s probing was artful, ingenious, a series of mirrors revealing every possible surface of the exchange. As for Khelidze, Szara described the conversations aboard the Nicaea, omitting their final confrontation in Ostend.
Until Monday of the second week, when Abramov began to show signs of restlessness. Interrogations always revealed something, something even better than a little orgy with a nightclub animateur. So? Where was it? Had he at last met a true saint? Szara caved in, warned elliptically that he now needed to say things that could not be said in a Moscow apartment. Abramov nodded sorrowfully, a physician coming at last upon the feared diagnosis, and touched his lips with his index finger. “You’ve done well today, Andre Aronovich,” he said for the benefit of the listeners. “Let us adjourn to the Metropol for a change of scenery.”
But, crunching through the fresh snow on Kusnetzki Most, they passed the Hotel Metropol and its popular cafe-where apparat operatives were in abundance-and entered instead a grimy hole-in-the-wall on a side street. Abramov ordered viesni, parfaits, which were served in chipped, grayish coffee cups but swam in fresh cream.
Szara told stage two: the corpse in the hotel, the receipt, the satchel, General Bloch, the dossier, and the American magazine editor. Abramov was a study in acute discomfort. Every word of Szara’s took him deeper into the affair and he knew it-his face knotted with pain, the encouraging grunts became groans of horror, he signaled for more viesni, swore in Yiddish, drummed his thick fingers on the tabletop. When Szara finally wound down he sighed. “Andre Aronovich, what have you done.”
Szara shrugged. How was he to have known that his orders did not come from Abramov or his associates? The second group based their play on that very assumption.
“I absolve you,” Abramov rumbled. “But I am the least of your problems. I doubt the Georgians will shoot you in Moscow, but it would be wise to watch what you eat here, and stay away from high windows. It’s a commonplace of ours; anyone can commit a murder, but suicide requires an artist. They have such artists. However, the fact that they’ve left you alone this long means they’re scheming. This too they do very expertly. After all, they are our Sicilians, these southerners, and their feuds end only one way. Apparently, they have their own plans for the Okhrana material, and have not informed the Great Leader or his official toads; thus you remain alive. Of course, if you were to publish such an article …”
“Then what shall be done?”
Abramov rumbled.
“Nothing?”
Abramov thought for a moment, spooned the last of his viesni from the coffee cup. “This khvost business is a little more complicated than meets the eye. Yes, things have happened, but. Instance: two years ago, at the trial of Lev Rosenfeld and Grigory Radomilsky- ‘Kamenev’ and ‘Zinoviev’-the prosecutor Vyshinsky, in his summation to the judges, said an odd thing, something that sticks in the mind. He called them ‘men without a fatherland.’ He would claim that he meant they’d betrayed, as Trotskyites, their country. But we’ve heard that kind of thing before, and we know what it means, just as it’s said very openly in Germany, not so quietly in Poland, and has been said in all sorts of places for a very long time.
“Still, if somebody simply yearned to believe Vyshinsky, and such people exist, let them consider the case of the diplomat Rosengolts. They played with him like a cat with a mouse: released him from all official positions and let him stew for many weeks. He knew what was coming, for a certainty, but the apparat let it fester so that every day became a hundred hours long. This was hardest on his wife, a happy sort of person, not worldly, not so educated, from a typical shtetl somewhere in the Pale. Over a period of months, the waiting destroyed her, and when the NKVD searched Rosengolts after they finally got around to arresting him, they found she’d written out a charm against misfortune, the Sixty-eighth and Ninety-first psalms, secreted it within a piece of dry bread, wrapped it in a cloth, then sewed it into his pocket.
“At the trial, Vyshinsky made much humor of this pathetic little piece of paper. He read the psalms, such as, ‘For He shall deliver thee from the snare of the hunter: and from the noisome pestilence. He shall defend thee under his wings and thou shalt be safe under his feathers: His faithfulness and truth shall be thy shield and buckler. Thou shalt not be afraid for any terror by night: nor for the arrow that flieth by day.’ You see what she’d done. Vyshinsky spoke these words in a tone of savage contempt, then asked Rosengolts how the paper had gotten into his pocket. He admitted his wife put it there and told him
it was for good luck. Vyshinsky pressed him on the point, mentioning ‘good luck’ again and again, until the spectators in the courtroom were roaring with laughter and Vyshinsky turned and winked at them.
“Very well, you’ll say, the case is made. The purge is really a pogrom. But is it? Is this really true? Maybe not. The Section for Extraordinary Matters is headed by I. I. Shapiro-so if Jews are being purged, the purge is, often, guided by Jews. Now we come to the people who’ve involved you in their operation. General Bloch is a Jew, granted, though I should mention he is in military intelligence, the GRU, and not the NKVD-a fact you might keep in mind. Renate Braun is a German, likely from one of the Protestant sects, and she has nothing to do with the NKVD. She is a spez-a foreign specialist-employed by Meshdunarodnaja Kniga, the State Publishing House, where she works on the publication of German texts to be smuggled into Germany. That clearly associates her with the Comintern.
“What I’m saying is this: consider the intelligence services as an ocean. Now consider the currents that might be found in it, some running one way, some another, side by side for a time, then diverging. So new? Nothing’s new. It would be so at U.S. Steel or the British telephone company. In work there is competition, alliance, betrayal. Unhappily, when an intelligence apparat plays these games, they are equipped with very sharp tools, vast and practical experience, and the level of play can be frightful. A journalist, any normal citizen, will simply be eaten alive. What do we have here? A political battle between nationalist interests? Or a pogrom? They’re not the same thing.
“If a pogrom, a very quiet one. Of course Stalin cannot afford, politically, to estrange the Jews of the world because we have many friends among them. You know the old saying: they join the ideology. And now, with the birth of a hideous monster in Germany, they are mad to take action, any action, against fascism. This is, you understand, a useful circumstance for people in my profession. One can ask favors. Is Stalin capable of running a secret pogrom? Yes. And he would have to do it that way in the present political climate. Therefore, it’s not so easy to pin down.
“Meanwhile, you. Drawn into an operation you cannot survive, yet I take it you wish to do so. You seem different, I might add. Changed. Not quite the cynical bastard I’ve known all these years. Why is that? All right, you had a close call; the Turk, Ismailov, almost did your business. Is that it? You looked death in the face and became a new man? Can happen, Andre Aronovich, but one sees that rarely, sometimes in a grave illness, where a man may ask a favor of his God, but less often in wet affairs. Still, it happened. I’m your friend. I don’t ask why. I say what’s to be done for poor Andre Aronovich?
“Now it would be normal to hand Baumann on to one of our operators in Germany-a thousand ways he can be run, even under present Jewish restrictions. He has a love affair, sees a dentist, goes to shul, takes a walk in the country and fills a dead-drop or visits his father’s grave. Believe me, we can service him.
“On the other hand, we might make a case that he’s skittish, nervous, not really committed, which in turn implies special needs in the selection of a case officer. What, in fact, are his motives? I might make a point of asking that question. Is he out to hurt Hitler? Or does he wish to feather a nest if things get worse in Germany? To aid the working classes? To get rich? Mice, we say of spies; the m stands for money, the i for ideology, the c for coercion, and the e for egotism. Which is it with Baumann? Or is there, we must ask, a fifth letter?
“Prove to me he’s not the toy of the Abwehr, or worse, the Referat VI C of the Reichsicherheitshauptamt, the Main Security Office under that insufferable prick Heydrich. Referat VI C is Gestapo counterespionage both within and outside German borders, Walter Schellenberg’s little shop, and Schellenberg is perfectly capable of this sort of dangle-he’ll get hold of one end of the thread and pull so slowly and sweetly that you’ll see an entire network unravel. Years of work wasted! And, in Moscow, careers destroyed. So I’m suspicious. My job depends on it. I’ll surely point out that Szara can’t be expected to know whether this is any good or it’s the RSHA offering a temptation. What do we know? That a third secretary had a piece of paper slipped in his overcoat pocket while it was in the cloakroom of the opera house and he was suffering through three hours of Wagner. That a journalist had a dinner and heard a proposal and saw a piece of wire. What’s that? That’s nothing. We Russians have always favored the agent provocateur, our intelligence history is crowded with them, and the Cheka learned the trick the hard way-from the Okhrana. Azeff, Malinovsky, maybe you-know-who himself. So, naturally, we fear it above all things for we know how well it works, how well it tickles our great vulnerability-intelligence officers are like men in love, they want to believe.
“What’s the answer? What to do? Abramov is brilliant! Let Szara do the work, he says. Make him truly nasch, our very own. He’s been a journalist who does his patriotic duty and, from time to time, undertakes special work; now he’ll be one of us, and now and then he’ll write something. Kol’tsev, the editor of Pravda, is finished-sorry to tell you that, Andre Aronovich-and Nezhenko, the foreign editor, is no problem. We’ll hook Szara up with one of the networks in Western Europe and let him play spymaster.”
Abramov settled back in his chair, put a cigarette in his mouth, and lit it with a long wooden match.
“Do you mean they won’t find me in Europe?”
“They’ll find you in hell. No, that’s not what I mean. We become your protection, not this khvost and not that, the service itself. Your status will be adjusted and narrowly made known. I see Dershani every day, his office is down the hall from mine; we’re both citizens of the USSR, we work in the same profession, and we don’t shoot each other. I’ll let him know, obliquely, that you’re doing important work for us. So, hands off. That’s an implicit promise from me, by the way, that you’re going to be a good boy and not go off involving yourself in conspiracies and pranks. Understood? “
He did understand. Suddenly he stood on the threshold of a new life. One where he’d have to follow orders, trade freedom for survival, and live in a completely different way. Yes, he’d seen this opening after receiving information from Baumann, and quite smug he’d been about it. But the reality tasted awful, and Abramov laughed at his evident discomfort.
“This is a web you climbed into all by yourself, my friend; now don’t go cursing the spider.”
“And shall I write for the American magazine?”
“After I have protected you? Well, that would be gratitude, wouldn’t it. No good deed goes unpunished, Abramov, so here’s a knife in the back for you. Andre Aronovich, you are forty years of age, perhaps it’s time you grew up. Ask yourself: why have these people chosen me to do their dirty work? What will it accomplish? If the game is entirely successful and Soso-Joe-hurls himself out a Kremlin window, what is gained? Who takes over? Are you expecting some sort of Russian George Washington to appear? Are you? Look in your heart. No, forget your heart, look in your mind! Do you want to make Adolf Hitler happy? Why do you think anything will happen? Molotov will say ‘more imperialist lies’ and the world will yawn, all except for one journalist, floating face down in a swamp somewhere so that nobody can see what a noble and superior smile he wore when he died.”
Szara felt miserable.
Abramov sighed. “For the moment,” he said kindly, “why not just do what everybody else in the world does. Try to get along, do the best you can, hope for a little happiness.” Abramov leaned across the table and patted him reassuringly on the cheek. “Go to work, Andre Aronovich. Be a mensch.”
March 1938.
Winter would not go. At night the air froze and the stars did not shimmer, but stood as cold, steady lights in the distance. In the wind, the eyes ran, then tears turned to ice. Indoors it was not much better-when Szara woke in the morning his breath was a white plume against the dark blanket.
It was warmer in Central Europe: Hitler marched into Austria, France and Britain protested, crowds cheered in the Vienna str
eets, Jews were dragged from hiding, humiliated, and beaten. Sometimes they died from the beatings, sometimes from the humiliation. In Moscow, a new trial: Piatakov, Radek (Sobelsohn), Krestinsky, Yagoda, and Bukharin. Accused of conspiring with Nazi intelligence agents, accused of entering into secret agreements with the German government. The final sentence of Vyshinsky’s summation had remained constant for three years: “Shoot the mad dogs!” And they did.
Szara dragged himself through his days and drank all the vodka he could find, craving anesthesia that eluded him; only the body went numb. He wanted to call Berlin but it was impossible-no words could leave Moscow. Slowly, the images of the attic room in the narrow house, too often summoned, lost reality. They were now too perfect, like mirages of water in the desert. Angry, lonely, he decided to make love to any woman who came along, but when he met women the signal system went awry and nothing happened.
At Abramov’s direction, he attended a series of training schools- an endless repetition of dead-drops, codes and ciphers, forgery, and the construction of false identities. It was all about paper, he realized, a world of paper. Identity cards, passports, embassy cables, maps of defensive positions, order-of-battle reports. A mirror image of a former life, when he’d also lived amid paper.
Sometimes he wrote for Nezhenko; Abramov insisted on that. Stories about progress, always progress; life was getting better and better. What did such drudgery do to the secret spirit that he imagined lived deep within him? Curiously, nothing. For an hour or two it did what it had to do, then returned to its hiding place. He tried a version of “The Okhrana’s Mystery Man” and surprised himself, it positively blazed. He burned it.
