Dark Star Read Free Page B

back of the neck, he thought, his dying words would be why did you go to all this trouble? Unfortunately, that particular wound didn't allow for last words, and Szara, who had been on battlefields in the civil war that followed the revolution, knew it. All he'd manage was why—za chto? what for?—but everyone, all the victims of the purge, said that.
    The driver turned on the ignition and they drove away from the square. “Heshel,” said the woman behind him, “did it … ?”
    “Yes, missus,” the driver said.
    Szara studied the driver as they wound through the cobbled streets of the city. He knew the type, to be found among the mud lanes in any of the ghettos in Poland or Russia: the body of a gnome, not much over five feet tall, thick lips, prominent nose, small, clever eyes. He wore a tweed worker's cap with a short brim tilted down over one eyebrow, and the collar of his old suit jacket was turned up. The man was ageless, and his expression, cold and humorous at once, Szara understood perfectly. It was the face of the survivor, whatever survival meant that day—invisibility, guile, abasement, brutality—anything at all.
    They drove for fifteen minutes, then rolled to a stop in a crooked street where narrow hotels were jammed side by side and women in net stockings smoked lazily in doorways.
    Renate Braun climbed out, Heshel waited. “Come with me,” she said. Szara followed her into the hotel. There was no desk clerk to be seen, the lobby was empty except for a Belgian sailor sitting on the staircase with his head in his hands, a sailor cap balanced on his knee.
    The stairway was steep and narrow, the wooden steps dotted with cigarette burns. They walked down a long corridor, then stopped in front of a door with 26 written on it in pencil. Szara noticed a tiny smudge of blue chalk at eye level on the door frame. The woman opened her shoulder bag and withdrew a ring of keys— Szara thought he saw the crosshatched grain of an automatic pistolgrip as she snapped the bag closed. The keys were masters, with long shanks for leverage when the fit wasn't precise.
    She unlocked the door and pushed it open. The air smelled like overripe fruit cut with ammonia. Khelidze stared at them from the bed, his back resting against the headboard, his pants and underpants bunched around his knees. His face was spotted with yellow stains and his mouth frozen in the shape of a luxurious yawn. Wound within the sheets was a large, humped mass. A waxy leg had ripped through the sheet; its foot, rigid as if to dance on point, had toenails painted baby pink. Szara could hear a fly buzzing against the windowpane and the sound of bicycle bells in the street.
    “You confirm it is the man from the ship? ” she said.
    “Yes.” This was, he knew, an NKVD killing, a signed NKVD killing. The yellow stains meant hydrocyanic acid used as a spray, a method known to be employed by the Soviet services.
    She opened her bag, put the keys inside, and took out a white cotton handkerchief scented with cologne. Holding it over her nose and mouth, she pulled a corner of the sheet free and looked underneath. Szara could see curly blond hair and part of a ribbon.
    The woman dropped the sheet and rubbed her hand against the side of her raincoat. Then she put the handkerchief away and began to go through Khelidze's pants pockets, tossing the contents onto the end of the bed: coins, rumpled notes of various currencies, a squeezed-out tube of medication, the soft cloth he'd used to polish his glasses, and a Dutch passport.
    Next she searched the coat and jacket, hung carefully in a battered armoire, finding a pencil and a small address book that she added to the pile. She took the pencil and poked through the items on the bed, sighed with irritation, and searched in her bag until she found a razor blade with tape along both edges. She peeled off one of the tapes and went to work on the jacket and the coat, slicing open the seams and splitting the pads in the