Dark Star by Alan Furst Read Free Book Online Page A

descriptions of Social Revolutionary party workers in the early days of the century. He'd seen this kind of report from time to time, soul-destroying stuff it was, humanity seen through a window by the dim glow of a street lamp, sad and mean and obsessed with endless conspiracies. The thought of it made you want to retire to the countryside with a milk cow and a vegetable patch.
    Not a military officer, a police officer. Poor man, he had carried this catalogue of small deceits over mountain and across desert, apparently certain of its value once the counterrevolution had succeeded and some surviving spawn of the Romanovs once again sat upon the Throne of All the Russias. In sorrow more than anger Szara soothed his frustrated imagination with two tiltings of the vodka bottle. A paper creature, he thought. A uniform with a man in it.
    He walked back to the desk and adjusted the gooseneck lamp. The organization Messame Dassy (Third Group) had been founded in 1893, of Social Democratic origin and purpose, in political opposition to Meori Dassy (Second Group)—Szara sighed at suchgrotesque hair-splitting—and made its views known in pamphlets and the newspaper Kvali (The Furrow). Known principals of the organization included N. K. Jordania, K. K. Muridze, G. M. Tseretelli. The informant DUBOK (it meant “little oak” and had gone on to become the name for a dead-drop of any kind) enrolled and became active in 1898, at age nineteen.
    Szara flipped through the stack of pages, his eye falling randomly on summaries of interviews, memoranda, alterations in handwriting as other officers contributed to the record, receipts for informer payments signed with cover names (not code names like DUBOK; one never knew one's code name, that belonged to the Masters of the File), a change to typewriter as the case spanned the years and reports were sent traveling upward from district to region to central bureau to ministry to Czar Nicholas and perhaps to God Himself.
    Szara's temples throbbed.
    Serves you right! What in the name of heaven had he expected? Swiss francs? Perhaps he had, deep down. Those exquisitely printed passports to anywhere and everything. Idiot! Maybe gold coins? The molten rubies of children's books? Or a single pressed rose, its last dying fragrance only just discernible? Yes, yes, yes. Any or all of it. His eye fell in misery on the false plate lying on the floor amid a tangle of cut-up thread. He'd learned to sew as a child in Odessa, but this was not the sort of job he could do. How was he to put all this back together again? By employment of the hotel seamstress? The guest in Room 35 requires the false bottom sewed back on his suitcase—hurry woman, he must cross the Polish frontier tonight! A victim of betrayed imagination, Szara cursed and mentally called down the apparat as though summoning evil spirits. He willed Heshel with his sad little smile or Renate Braun with her purse full of skeleton keys, or any of them, gray shapes or cold-eyed intellectuals, to come and take this inhuman pettifoggery away from him before he hurled it out the window.
    In fact, where were they?
    He glanced at the bottom of the door, expecting a slip of paper to come sliding underneath at that very moment, but all he saw wasworn carpet. The world suddenly felt very silent to him, and another visit with the vodka did not change that.
    In desperation he shoved the paper to one side and replaced it with sheets of hotel stationery from the desk drawer. If, in the final analysis, the officer did not deserve this vodka-driven storm in the emotional latitudes, the anguished people of Prague most assuredly did.
It was midnight when he finished, and his back hurt like a bastard. But he'd gotten it. The reader would find himself; his street, his neighborhood, his nation. And the hysteria, the nightmare, was where it belonged, just below the horizon so you felt it more than saw it. To balance a story on “the people” he'd have to do one on “the