Dark star, p.13
Dark Star, page 13
What?
“Well, you are one, of course, very good, yes, but you must now make a special effort to live the life, and to be seen to live the life, one would expect of such a person. Go about, seek out your colleagues, haunt the right cafés. No slinking around, is what I mean. Of course you'll see the necessity of it, yes?”
Goldman made him mad, pointing this out. It was true that he'd habitually avoided journalists' haunts and parties and gone off on his own. For one thing, it didn't pay to be too friendly with Western Europeans—the lead diva of the Moscow Opera had been sent to the camps for dancing at a party with the Japanese ambassador. For another, he forever had to accomplish some special little task for the apparat. Such things took time, care, patience. And you didn't want colleagues around when you did it. So, General Vlasy, the tread problem on the new R-20 tank turns out to be no problem at all, eh? and all that sort of thing, certainly not with some knowing fellow journalist suppressing a cackle in the background.
Szara never really did respond to Goldman's direction. He looked at the gray noodles on his plate for a moment, then went on with the conversation. Inside he was broiling. Wasn't he unhappy enough about mortgaging his soul to Abramov and secretly abandoning his profession? Apparently not. They now laid upon his heart a heaping tablespoon of Russian irony, directing him to act more like what he no longer was. All this from some snotty little Romanian who thought he spoke idiomatic Russian, was very much his junior in age, and looked like (and probably acted like) some kind of rodent. Small eyes that glittered, ears a little too big, features set close together. Like a smart mouse. Maybe too smart. Who the hell did he think he was?
Back in Paris the following day, however, he kept his opinions to himself. “You've met Yves,” said his fellow deputy, using Goldman's work name. “What do you think?”
Szara pretended to ponder the question. He did not want to commit himself, but neither did he want to seem like a spineless idiot—he was going to have to work closely with this woman. She was the sort of individual who, in the setting of a business office, might well be known as a bit of a terror. Abramov had warned him about her: work name—Elli, real name—Annique Schau-Wehrli, reputation—lioness. In person she turned out to be fiftyish, short, stout, with a thrust-out bosom like a pouter pigeon and glasses on a chain around her neck. She wore a built-up shoe on one foot and walked with a cane, having been born with one leg shorter than the other. Szara found himself drawn to her—she was magnetic, perceptive, and also rather pretty, with rosy complexion, light, curly hair, a screen siren's long eyelashes, and omniscient eyes lit by a brisk, cheerful hatred.
She was an ardent, blistering Marxist, a former pillar of the Swiss Communist party from a wealthy bourgeois (and long ago rejected) family in Lucerne. She had a tongue like a sword, spoke six languages, and feared absolutely nothing. In Paris, she worked as office manager and resident saint for a League of Nations satellite office, the International Law Institute, which issued oceans of studies attempting to encourage the countries of the world to normalize and standardize their legal codes. Wasn't the theft of a female ancestor's soul in Nyasaland much the same, when all was said and done, as a stock swindle in Sweden?
“Well? ” she repeated. “Don't tell me you have no opinion of the man. I won't believe you.”
They were in her living room, a typical Parisian concoction of rich red draperies, silk pillows, naked gold women holding ebony-shaded lamps above their heads, and little things—ashtrays, onyx inkwells, ivory boxes, Gallé bottles, and porcelain bull terriers—on every shelf and table. Szara kept his elbows jammed well against his sides.
“Young,” he said.
“Younger than you.”
“Yes.”
“Brilliant, my dear comrade.”
“Glib.”
“Boof!” she said, a Gallic explosion of incredulous air. “But how can you be like this? Measured any way you like, brilliant. Against the norm? Genius. Recall the Russian operative who went to London last year, pockets just stuffed with British pounds. He is there two days, ventures from his hotel for the first time. Persuaded by Soviet propaganda, he actually believes that the English working classes are so poor they wear paper shoes. He suddenly spies a shop window full of leather shoes, not at all expensive. Ah-ha, says he, my lucky day, and buys ten pair. Then, at another store, look, they too have shoes today! He thinks his dear departed mother is sending down gifts from heaven. Again, ten pair. And so on, until the poor soul had over a hundred pairs of shoes, no money for party work, and the MI5 surveillance team is practically rolling on the pavement. Just wait and see what some of our people can do, then you'll change your tune.”
Szara pretended to be slightly abashed. He was the new boy in the office, he had to make a decent impression, but he'd known Goldman's type before: a genius all right, a genius for self-advancement. “I suppose you're right,” he said amiably.
Friday, the last week in April, in a warm, gentle rain that shone on the spring leaves of the boulevard trees, Szara booked a telephone call to Marta Haecht's magazine office in Berlin.
Twenty minutes later he canceled it.
The gospel according to Abramov: “Look, you can never be sure what they know about you, just as they can never be sure what we know about them. In times of peace, the services do two things in particular, they watch and they wait. This is a war of invisibility, fought with invisible weapons: information, numbers, wireless/telegraph transmissions, social acquaintance, political influence, entrée to certain circles, knowledge of industrial production or infantry morale. So, show me an infantry morale. You can't. It's intangible.
“Counterintelligence operations are the most invisible of all. The people who run them don't want to neutralize their opponents— not right away. Some boss is screaming stop it! stop it! and his operatives are pleading no. We want to see what they do. For you it means this: you have to assume you have typhoid, you're infectious, and anyone you meet or know gets the disease. Whether this meeting is innocent or not, they must fall under suspicion if a third party is watching. You wonder why we recruit friends, family, lovers? We might as well—they're going to be considered guilty anyhow.”
The seed Abramov planted in Moscow grew a frightful garden in Paris. It grew in Szara's imagination, where it took the form of a voice: a quiet, resourceful voice, cultured, sure of itself, German-speaking. It was the voice of presumed surveillance, and when Szara contemplated something foolish, like a telephone call to Germany, it spoke to him. 28 April. 16:25. SZARA (the flat, official format would be similar to DUBOK's file and Szara imagined the German officer to be not unlike the author of the Okhrana dossier) telephones MARTA HAECHT at Berlin 45.633; conversation recorded and currently under analysis for code or Aesopian language.
Aesopian language suggested reality with symbolism or implication. Are you still studying French? I sent you a card from Paris— did you receive it? I'm writing a story about the workers who built the Gare du Nord. I don't know where the time goes, I have to finish the piece by noon on the fourth of May.
It fooled nobody.
Even if the voice did not yet speak, Szara feared discovery. By 1938, Germany had been converted into a counterespionage state. Every patriotic German took it as his or her duty to inform the authorities of any suspicious behavior, denunciation had become a national mania—strangers visited them, a curious sound from their basement, a printing press?
Of course he considered using the network for communication. This would either evade all suspicion or end in absolute tragedy. A lover's choice, nyet? Passion or death. They had described to him the details of what the Gestapo actually did, kaschumbo, whips soaked in pails of water. The idea of exposing her to that …
He worked.
The Parisian spring flared to life—one hot morning and all the women were dressed in yellow and green, on the café terraces people laughed at nothing in particular, aromas drifted through the open doors of bistros where the owner's briard flopped by the cash register, a paw over its nose, dreaming fitfully of stock bones and cheese rinds.
The OPAL network was run from a three-story building near the quais of the canal Saint-Martin and the canal de l'Ourcq, at the tattered edge of the nineteenth arrondissement where the streets around the Porte de Pantin turned to narrow roads leading into the villages of Pantin and Bobigny. A pulsating, sleepless quartier, home to the city's slaughterhouses as well as the stylish restaurants of the avenue Jean-Jaurés, where partygoing swells often ventured at dawn to eat fillet of beef baked in honey and avoid the tourists and taxi drivers down at Les Halles. Paris put things out there she wasn't sure whether she wanted or not—the Hippodrome where they held bicycle races and boxing matches, an infamous maison close where elaborate exhibitions could be arranged. In spring and fall, fog rose from the canal in the evening, the blue neon sign of the Hôtel du Nord glowed mysteriously, slaughterhouse workers and bargemen drank marc in the cafés. In short, a quartier that worked all night long and asked no questions, a place where the indefatigable snooping of the average Parisian wasn't particularly welcome.
The house at 8, rue Delesseux was crumbling brown brick like the rest of the neighborhood, dirty and dark and smelling like a pissoir. But it could be entered through a street-level door, through a rear entrance to the tabac that occupied its tiny commercial space, or through an alley strewn with rags and broken glass that ran at an angle to the rue des Ardennes. It was handy to barges, a cemetery, a park, nameless village lanes, a sports arena, restaurants crowded with people—just about every sort of place that operatives liked to use.
The top floor of the house provided living and working space for the OPAL encipherer and wireless/telegraph operator, work name François, true name M. K. Kranov, an “illegal” with Danish passport, suspected to hold NKVD officer rank and, likely, the apparat spy reporting secretly to Moscow on the activities and personnel of the network.
On the second floor lived “Odile,” Jeanne de Kouvens, the network's courier who serviced both Goldman in Brussels and the networks in Germany, the latter a twice-monthly run into Berlin under the pretext of caring for a nonexistent mother. Odile was Belgian, a tough nineteen-year-old with two children and a philandering husband, not a bit beautiful but violently sexy, her hair cut in a short, mannish cap—the street kid look—her cleft chin, swollen upper lip, tip-tilted nose, and indomitable eyes tossing a challenge at any man in the immediate vicinity. Her husband, a working-class fop with bushy, fin de siècle muttonchop whiskers, ran a portable merry-go-round that circulated through the neighborhood squares of Paris. The tabac on the ground floor was served by Odile's brother, twenty years older than she, who had been wounded at Ypres and walked with the aid of two canes. He spent his days and nights on a stool behind the counter, selling Gitanes and Gauloises, Métro tickets and postage stamps, lottery chances, pencils, commemorative key rings, and more, an astonishing assortment of stuff, to a steady trickle of customers who created camouflage for operatives entering and leaving the house.
The Moscow Directorate had shuffled assignments to make life a little easier for Szara, putting Schau-Wehrli in charge of the three German networks, HENRI, MOCHA, and RAVEN, which left him with SILO, assigned to attack elements of the German community in Paris, and Dr. Julius Baumann.
Spring died early that year, soft rains came and went, the sky turned its fierce French blue only rarely, a mean little wind arrived at dusk and blew papers around the cobbled streets. The end of April was generally admitted to be triste, only the surrealists liked such unhappy weather, then summer came before anybody was really ready for it. The rising temperature seemed to drive the politicians further from sanity than usual.
Nobody could agree about anything: the Socialists had blocked a rearmament program in March, then the Foreign Office claimed the French commitment to Czechoslovakia to be “indisputable and sacred.” One senator pleaded for pacifism in the morning, called for preservation of the national honor in the afternoon, then sued the newspaper that described him as ambivalent. Meanwhile, senior civil servants demanded things of their mistresses that caused them to raise their eyebrows when they had their girlfriends in for coffee. Nobody was comfortable: the rich found their sheets scratchy and carelessly ironed, the poor thought their frites tasted of fish oil.
On the top floor of the house at 8, rue Delesseux, the afternoons grew hot as the sun beat on the roof; the dusty window shades were never raised, no air stirred, and Kranov worked at a large table with his shirt off. He was a small, sullen man with curly hair and Slavic features who seemed, to Szara, to do nothing but work. All OPAL transmissions, incoming and outgoing, were based on one-time pads, encrypted into five-digit numerical groups, then transformed—using a changing mathematical key and “false” addition (5 + 0 = 0)—by a second encryption. Brief, pro forma transmissions were fleshed out with null groups to avoid the type of message that had always been the cryptanalyst's point of attack. From Egyptian times to the present, the phrase used to break codes never varied: nothing new to report today.
Szara usually slipped into the house at night. In Kranov's transmitting room a blanket was nailed across the window, a tiny lamp used for illumination. Swirls of cigarette smoke hung in the air. Kranov's fingers jittered on the telegraph key, the dots and dashes flowing through the ether to a code clerk on Dzerzhinsky Square in Moscow:
91464 22571 83840 75819 11501
On other frequencies, a French captain in the Naval Intelligence section at Sfax, on the Tunisian coast, requested Paris to approve additional funds for Informant 22, the third secretary of the Czechoslovakian embassy in Vienna reported on private meetings held by the Sudeten leader Henlein with German diplomats in the spa town of Karlsbad, the Polish service in Warsaw asked an operative in Sofia to ascertain the whereabouts of the priest JOSEF. All night long the W/T operators played their pianos, not only for the Rote Kapelle, but in a hundred orchestras performing for scores of espionage Konzertmeisters from a dozen countries. Szara could hear it. Kranov let him put the earphones on and turn the dial. It was a theater of sound, pitched treble or bass, quick-fingered or deliberate, an order to liquidate an informer or a request for the local weather forecast. Sometimes crackling with the static of an electrical storm in the Dolomites or the Carpathians, sometimes clear as a crystal chime, the nightlong symphony of numbers flew through the darkened heavens.
If there was no critical/immediate signal, Kranov broke out Moscow's transmissions after he woke from a few hours' sleep. Szara fancied it a kind of critical daylight that inevitably followed the coded mysteries of the night. Slowly, as May turned to June, and the sweat soaked through Kranov's undershirt in the morning heat, Szara began to gain a sharper appreciation of the interplay between OPAL and its masters, the simply phrased requests for information and the terse responses now resolved to a dialogue from which the mood of the Directorate could be read.
Moscow was restless. It had been so from the beginning. Abramov, sacrificing information in the hope of enforcing discipline, had let Szara know just exactly what he would be dealing with. Emphatically not Nezhenko—or any editor. Both Abramov and his khvost rival Dershani sat on the OPAL Directorate, as did Lyuba Kurova, a brilliant student in neuropathology in the years before the revolution, a ruthless Chekist in Lenin's terror campaign, now, in her forties, a friend of Poskrebyshev, Stalin's personal secretary; also Boris Grund, an apparatchik, an experienced technician, and a majority voter in every instance, and Vitaly Mezhin, at thirty-six years of age quite young for the work, a member of the generation of “little Stalins” who crept into the power vacuum created by the purge, as the Big Stalin intended them to do. “If you willfully disobey an order,” Abramov said, “this is who you disobey.”
Szara now saw that Dr. Baumann made them uncomfortable: (1) He was a Jew in Germany, his future gravely insecure. (2) His motives were unknown. (3) His product was crucial. Szara could imagine them, seated at a table covered with a green baize cloth, flimsies of decrypted signals arranged at every place, smoking nervously at their stubby Troika cigarettes, speaking so very carefully, conscious of nuance in themselves and others, groping toward a protective consensus.
Swage wire figures for January, February, March, and April received, projections from orders on hand for May. Case officer asked to obtain listing of company personnel, especially in accounting office. Characterize: age, political affiliation, cultural level. They clearly wanted Baumann to get to work finding his own replacement. It was up to Szara to find some sort of honey to make him swallow that pill.
Of course they wanted more than that—Dershani in particular thought Baumann ought to be pumped dry, the quicker the better. He must know other subcontractors—who were they? Could they be approached? If so, how? What were their vulnerabilities? Then too—Mezhin now took his turn, you didn't want to be a wilting flower in this crowd—what of his association with senior officers of Rheinmetall? Might there not be something for them in that? Boris Grund thought this line productive. And what was Baumann paying for austenitic steel? Grund said his pals downstairs in the Economic Section were starving for such information, maybe we should toss them a bone.
Kurova didn't like the dead-drop. They'd gotten the Baumanns to buy a dog, a year-old schnauzer they named Ludwig, so that Baumann could be out on the street at night and use a stone wall near his house as a mailbox. This brought Odile, in a maid's uniform, into the neighborhood two or three times a month to drop off mail and collect a response. A bent nail in a telephone pole was used as a signal: head turned up told Baumann to collect, head turned down confirmed that his deposit had been picked up. All according to standard form and practice, Kurova acknowledged. But Germans were naturally curious, they stared out their windows, and they had an insatiable appetite for detail. Why does Dr. Baumann reach behind the stone in Herr Bleiwert's wall? Look how poor little Ludwig wants only to play. Kurova just didn't like it. Both operatives were too much in the open.
