Read Online Dark Star by Alan Furst - Free Book Online

interruption. “His wife will know where he's gotten to.”
    Dzakhalev snickered briefly. “Not likely,” he said.
    •
    Monday morning, striding through a fine, wet mist that made the streets of Prague even grayer than usual, Szara went early to the SovPressBuro, which handled all Soviet dispatches, and filed the story he'd written on Saturday night. It had taken him some twenty-eight tries to get a title that settled properly on the piece. His initial instinct led down a path marked “Prague, City in —.” He tried “Peril,” “Sorrow,” “Waiting,” “Despair,” and, at last, in fury that it wouldn't work, “Czechoslovakia.”
    At the end of patience the rather literal “Silence in Prague” took the prize, a title, on reflection, that turned out to be a message from the deep interior where all the work really went on. For those who read with both eyes, the melodramatic heading would imply a subtle alteration of preposition, so that the sharper and truer message would concern silence about Prague—not the anguished silence of a city under political siege but the cowardly silence of European statesmen, a silence filled with diplomatic bluster that nobody took seriously, a silence that could be broken only by the sputter of tank ignitions as armored columns moved to reposition themselves on the borders of Germany.
    There was, in fact, another zone of silence on the subject of Prague, to the east of Czechoslovakia, where Stalin's Franco-Russian alliance specified that the USSR would come to the aid of the Czechs if Hitler attacked them, but only after the French did. Thus the USSR had positioned itself to hide behind the promises of a regime in Paris that compromised on every issue and staggered from scandal to catastrophe and back again. Yes, Stalin's Red Army was in bloody disarray from the purges of June '37, but it was sorrowful, Szara thought, that the Czechs would get the bill for that.
    And there was, unknown to Szara, some further silence to come.
    The dispatch clerk at the bureau near the Jiráskuv bridge, a stern, full-breasted matron with mounds of pinned-up gray hair, read “Silence in Prague” sitting in front of her typewriter. “Yes, comrade Szara,” she breathed, “you have told the truth here, this is just the way this city feels.” He accepted the compliment, and more than a little adoration in her eyes, with a deflective mumble. It wouldn't do to let her know just how much such praise meant tohim. He saw the story off, then wandered along the streets that ran next to the Vltava and watched the barges moving slowly up the steel-colored November river.
    Szara returned to the press bureau on Tuesday morning, meaning to wire Moscow his intention to travel up to Paris. There was always a story to be found in Paris, and he badly needed to breathe the unhealthy, healing air of that city. What he got instead, as he came through the door, was a pitying stare from the maternal transmission clerk. “A message for the comrade,” she said, shaking her head in sympathy. She handed him a telegram, in from Moscow an hour earlier:
CANNOT ACCEPT SILENCE/PRAGUE IN PRESENT FORM STOP BY 25 NOVEMBER DEVELOP INFORMATION FOR PROFILE OF DR JULIUS BAUMANN, SALZBRUNNER 8, BERLIN, SUCCESSFUL INDUSTRIALIST STOP SUBMIT ALL MATERIAL DIRECTLY TO SOVPRESS SUPERVISOR BERLIN STOP SIGNED NEZHENKO.
    He saw that the clerk was waiting for him to explode but he shut his emotions down at once. He was, he told himself, a big boy, and shifts of party line were nothing new. His success as a correspondent, and the considerable freedom he enjoyed, were based equally on ability and a sensitivity to what could and could not be written at any given moment. He was annoyed with himself for getting it wrong, but something was brewing in Moscow, and it was not the moment for indignation, it was the moment for understanding that political developments excluded stories on Prague. For the clerk's benefit, he nodded in acceptance: Soviet