Dark star: a novel by Alan Furst

Author:Alan Furst
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Europe, Europe - History - 1918-1945, Fiction, Science Fiction, Literary Criticism, Espionage, Historical fiction, War & Military, Thrillers, General, Spy stories
ISBN: 9780375759994
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2002-07-09T16:38:46.659000+00:00

The car was empty, the passenger door ajar as it had been left.

It would make, Szara thought, at least a hiding place, and he directed Baumann to lie flat on the floor below the back seat while he would do the same in front. As they entered the car, the operative materialized, gliding toward them from some shadow he'd used as cover while the mob roamed the streets. Not a mob, in fact, the operative told Szara later. Party men, some uniformed SS, an organized attack directed by the German state.

It was not the burning and the chaos that upset the operative, he was reasonably used to burning and chaos; it was Dr. Julius Baumann, OTTER, an agent he was not supposed to know about, much less see, least of all to have in an automobile along with his case officer. This shattered unbreakable rules of every variety and set the man's face dancing with bureaucratic horror. He did the best he could under the circumstances: secreted Baumann in the trunk, first prying back a section of the metal jamb to make an air passage. Szara quietly protested as he slid into the front seat. “Be glad I'm doing that much,” said the operative.

“He may have had a heart attack,” Szara said.

The operative shrugged. “He will be cared for.”

They drove a little way back toward Berlin, crossed the Havel on a narrow, deserted bridge, then turned north, swinging around Wittenau and moving east, through the back of the Berlin suburbs. It was artful navigation, evidently from memory, a slow but steady progress through the winding lanes of Hermsdorf, Lubans, Blankenfelde and Niederschonhausen, where villas and workshops faded into farmland or forest. It was almost four in the morning when they reached Pankow. And here the operative took a complicated route that brought them to the Bahnhof. He disappeared into the station for a few minutes and used the public telephone in the waiting room. Then east again, Weissensee and eventually Lichtenburg, where they drove through a very aristocratic part of town, swerving suddenly into the parklike courtyard of a private hospital, the gate closing automatically behind them. The operative opened the trunk and helped Baumann into the hospital. He would receive medical attention, the operative explained to Szara, but they'd decided to hide him there whether he needed it or not.

Heinrich Müller's teleprinter message had ordered, along with attacks on synagogues and Jewish businesses throughout Germany, the arrest of twenty to thirty thousand Jews: “Wealthy Jews in particular are to be selected.” This meant money, which the Nazis especially liked. So, said the operative as they pulled away from the hospital, they needed to put OTTER somewhere he wouldn't be found, else he would be taken to Buchenwald or Dachau, stripped of all assets, and eventually deported.

As they turned back toward Berlin, they drove through streets that sparkled with shattered glass—Szara later learned that fifty percent of the annual plate glass production of Belgium, the manufacturing center for German glass, had been smashed.

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