Midnight in Europe (28 page)

While she was at work, Malkin and the committee had finished the inspection of the third floor and descended to the second, walking along aisles where crates with stenciled identification markings were stacked to the ceiling. Midway down an aisle, one of the apparatchiks paused and said to Malkin, “I will take a count of some of these crates, you go on ahead, I will catch up with you.”

“As you wish, comrade inspector,” Malkin said.

But the apparatchik didn’t count anything, he worked his way back two aisles, where a certain marking had caught his attention. He found the camera in his briefcase and began to take photographs, focusing on the stenciled identification:
76MM MODEL F-22
. When he was done, he went off to find the rest of the committee.

They were there for an hour, by which time there wasn’t much left of Malkin, who wiped at his brow with a handkerchief. What unnerved him was that they didn’t
say
anything, never asked a question, simply looked here and there and scribbled little notes in their notebooks. What had they found? When at last they returned to the office, Inspector Kostova was waiting for them. “Have you finished your work, comrade?” said the apparatchik who seemed to be in charge.

“I have,” she said. “The office appears to meet the standard.”

The lead apparatchik turned to face Malkin and said, his voice angry and hard, “But the armoury does
not
meet the standard.” He let that sink in, then said, “Listen to me carefully, comrade, there are many things wrong here, I won’t read you the list, but it is obvious that little effort has been made to maintain this facility.” Malkin winced, these words meant he was to be accused of
wrecking
. “Some of it we may report—the committee must meet and decide what to do with you. But, until that decision is made, you may not discuss this inspection with
anybody
, is that clear? The work we do is considered a state secret and, if you talk about it, you will be guilty of
revealing
a state secret. And what happens next is just what you think. Do you understand?”

“Yes, comrade inspector, perfectly I understand, completely.”

The apparatchik stared at him—for a long time, perhaps twenty seconds, an even sharper threat than could be put into words. Then the committee left the armoury, driving away in a large, official-looking black car. So, what he’d feared had come to pass, he would next face investigation by the Cheka, then they would force him to sign a confession. Still, the committee hadn’t taken him into custody, which meant he was safe until two in the morning, the hour when the Cheka came to call. Or perhaps that would happen the following night, or the one after that.

Malkin went back to his office and telephoned his wife, “I will be home soon,” he said.

She knew what that meant—he was still a free man. “I will have dinner waiting,” she said.
Thank God
.

At the Oficina Técnica, Max de Lyon received a telephone call from a man called Morand, the Odessa gangster’s confidential agent in Paris. “I have a telegram for you,” Morand said. “I assume it’s important so you may want to come over here and collect it. I’m at 12, rue de Liège, one flight up.”

De Lyon took a taxi to the address, and found the office easily
enough—a sign painted on the pebbled glass door said
J. P. MORAND, CONFIDENTIAL INVESTIGATIONS
. De Lyon knocked at the door, which opened to reveal a man who, as Vadik had said, looked something like Oliver Hardy—the resemblance evidently appealed to the detective because he had grown a duplicate of the comedian’s little mustache. Standing at his side was a woman, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. Morand acknowledged de Lyon with a glance and said to the woman, “Now, now, my dear, don’t cry, I’m sure it will all work out for the best.”

Trying to hold back the tears, she nodded, and closed the door behind her.

As Morand showed de Lyon into the office, he said, “That’s the
worst
part of this job, but it pays the rent. So, you are Monsieur de Lyon?”

“I am.”

“Here is a telegram from Vadik—I didn’t want to use his name on the phone. It supposedly comes from a Soviet trading company in Odessa.” Although Russians didn’t have enough to eat, the state needed hard currency so they sold wheat abroad. Thus the wire was addressed to a grain brokerage in Paris, and said:
We have found the variety of wheat you requested stop In future we will specify date of shipping stop signed R. Szapera for SovExportBuro Odessa
.

“Make sense?” Morand said.

“It does. Vadik has found what we’re looking for. If we want to wire back, can you do that?”

“Whenever you like. The reception of the telegram will cost you a service fee, three thousand francs.”

“Very well, I just happen to have the cash.”

“Money on hand,” Morand said. “Always a good idea.”

In Odessa, Vadik’s people began to shadow the armoury. At a late-night restaurant across from the entry gate, a man in workman’s clothes took a window seat for three nights in a row. Drunks staggered
past the gate at midnight. A woman in a kerchief sold meat pies from a wicker basket. They were interested in the quality of the armoury’s security and the news was not good. There were eight guards, sailors with rifles, who arrived at eight in the evening to relieve the day shift. The sailors showed up for guard duty, on time and apparently sober, and did not sneak away for a nap, and the officer who supervised the guards was young and brisk and seemed to take his job seriously. In a tenement room, Vadik met with one of his lieutenants and said, “We can’t do it by force, there would be a bloodbath.”

“No, we can’t. They would send Chekists down here from Moscow, hundreds of them, and some of us wouldn’t get away.”

One of Vadik’s people entered the armoury, dressed as a sailor, with the crowd that arrived in the morning. He found the aisle where the 76mm ammunition was stored and began to count the crates. The shells weighed twelve pounds apiece and were packed twenty to a crate, to be managed by two loaders—which meant twenty-five hundred crates. But all he could find were one thousand nine hundred and thirty crates, which reduced the anti-aircraft ammunition to thirty-eight thousand six hundred shells. This he reported to Vadik, who went off to see his friend at SovExportBuro and sent a telegram revising the order and the price.

Meanwhile, the woman who had played the part of Inspector Kostova, in fact Vadik’s sister-in-law, was hard at work on the forms she’d stolen. This was not easy; the language used on the forms was strange and stilted, created by bureaucratic gods in a distant heaven. A form requesting a resupply of pencils asked for all sorts of information, that is, if a
hand-managed writing tool—lead
even
was
a pencil. Still, what else could it be? But an hour at the task taught her to deal with the language, and it was then she came upon
E-781 L2. Authorization for Emergency Distribution of Inventory
. Three pages of it. Asking, again, for unimaginable volumes of detail. She walked over to Vadik’s tenement-room office and showed him the form.

“Is this of use?”

“What is it?”

When she told him, he was delighted.

“Will it work?”

“Normally, it wouldn’t. There isn’t a naval officer in the world who would act on such a request without at least a telephone call. You can’t just send weapons out into the night. However …”

“Yes?”

“This is the Soviet Union, and here it may not be smart to ask questions, here it is smart to obey a directive while finding a way to protect yourself. And, in our case, we know who we are dealing with, and that
will
make a difference. Maybe.”

“And, dear Vadik, if maybe not?”

Vadik shrugged. “Run like hell. I know all about that.”

Working with Morand, Vadik arranged for a telephone call to the detective’s office and spoke with de Lyon. “We may have found a way,” Vadik said, “it depends on the individual approving the paperwork.”

“Some money, perhaps.”

“In this case, no. But we will use another approach. Do you have transport?”

“We’re working on it. Any idea of the date?”

“Not yet. Could be a week from now, maybe ten days.”

When de Lyon hung up the telephone he remembered Professor Z and the particular way he’d said the word
diversion
.

Ferrar had met, through involvement in a legal matter, one of the more respected shipping brokers in Paris. Dupre’s office was close to the heart of the financial district, up past the Bibliothèque Nationale and near the Bourse, in a genteel, elegant building served by a very slow elevator with a cage for a door. Dupre was a dignified old gentleman, courtly, often amused. Leaning against the walls of his office were large squares of green felt tacked to thin boards
where Dupre, by means of notations on slips of paper pinned to the felt, and a telex machine in the corner, kept track of much of the world’s merchant shipping. As Dupre would explain, the liners, which ran on schedule between two ports, kept their cargo and location up to date, not so much the tramp freighters—sometimes they reported, sometimes not.

Dupre had a vast, antique desk with a ship in a bottle set on a wooden trestle. “Have you been working hard?” he asked Ferrar. His smile indicated that he knew the answer.

“Yes, it’s the war.”

“Here as well, and curses on the man who invented the torpedo. What can I do for you, Monsieur Ferrar?”

“I’m here to find a ship.”

“Plenty still afloat. I would imagine you are representing a client.”

“The client is the Spanish Republic.”

Eyes to heaven, Dupre said, “Something tells me to put my fingers in my ears.”

“I wouldn’t blame you, Monsieur Dupre.”

“You will have to find a way to deal with the non-intervention pact, but some of the tramp freighters will carry anything, if somebody fiddles with the shipping manifest. Of course I can’t recommend that. Why not a Spanish ship?”

“We inquired at the office of the naval attaché—no shipping available for two months. And, if we started a fight over that, it would take weeks. We want to ship as soon as possible.”

Dupre found a clean sheet of paper and uncapped his fountain pen. “From where to where, Monsieur Ferrar?”

“From port of Odessa to port of Valencia.”

“I see. And the cargo?”

“Anti-aircraft ammunition in wooden crates.”

“You’ll pay a price for that, Monsieur Ferrar; hazardous cargo. You’re buying from the USSR?”

“No one else will sell us ammunition,” Ferrar said. Which was true, but not the answer to Dupre’s question.

“What’s the tonnage?”

“Two hundred and thirty tons, more or less.”

Dupre stood, and began to walk around the room, peering at his paper slips. “We should be able to find something, there are always merchant vessels working on the Black Sea. And just about every port is two days from Odessa, even for the older ships that do ten knots an hour.”

As Dupre moved to a different board, the telex machine printed out a new length of tape. “Let’s try your allies first; South American countries, and Mexico, they carry tons of oranges and bananas up to Odessa—you don’t want to get between a Russian and a banana. Aah, here’s what you need.”

He unpinned a slip of paper and returned to his desk. “The
Santa Cruz
, out of Tampico, Mexico, thirty-two hundred tons, built in 1909. She’s at the dock in Constanta, Roumania, waiting for a tramping contract. Shall I get you a price?”

“That’s the usual thing to do, but we’ll pay whatever they ask.”

“Then I’ll wire.
Santa Cruz
is owned by the Compañía Aguilar, in Tampico—you’ll have to pay in advance of course; ammunition, submarines, time of war.”

When Ferrar returned to the office, Jeannette told him that Barabee wanted to see him right away. Then she gave him a certain look, a warning. As Ferrar sat down, Barabee stood up and closed his door. He wasted no time and said, “My contact at the Sûreté called this morning.”

“Now what?”

“It seems they have an interest in the marquesa, he didn’t say why. So I told him that I don’t know much about the case but that you were representing her. He asked that you call him at his office—you don’t mind, do you?”

“Not at all.”

“Do we have anything to worry about?”

“I don’t think so, but I’ll let you know after I speak with him.”

“By the way, he’s the one who helped you out with the Poles, so you should do the best you can.”

“I will,” Ferrar said.

Barabee gave him a telephone number and the name of a colonel.

Ferrar took the information back to his office. Barabee had been brusque, not his usual style, but Ferrar couldn’t blame him. Calls from French security officials could be handled, but Barabee clearly didn’t like dealing with them. Ferrar dialed the number, which was a direct line to the colonel’s office.

“Monsieur Ferrar? Thank you for calling. I should say first of all that this is something of a sensitive matter, so your discretion would be appreciated.”

“I ought to inform Mr. Barabee if it concerns the law firm.”

“Very well, but nobody else.”

“No, only Mr. Barabee.”

“This matter concerns a marquesa, Marquesa Maria Cristina with plenty of title after that, Bourbon, Braganza, and so forth. Husband’s title, I believe.”

“That’s my understanding.”

“Well, she came to see us. Talked to a junior officer, who sent her on to a senior officer, who sent her on to me. So, the nature of your relationship, please.”

“The marquesa was a Coudert client—she was seeking to recover a debt owed to her deceased husband’s estate. Then, we became friends, if you understand what I mean.”

“Intimate friends.”

“Yes.”

“We had a long and serious discussion with the marquesa, and in the course of that discussion she told us she was a Coudert client, so I telephoned Mr. Barabee, and he suggested I speak with you. Now, the marquesa came to see us with the intention of freeing herself from a connection with the Spanish Nationalist secret service, she had some harebrained scheme involving a faked automobile accident. Did you know she was a spy?”