Dark Star by Alan Furst

know—that our generals were astounded. Hitler told them how it would be, and then it was as he said, and then suddenly they began to believe in miracles.”
    “And now this terrible politics must be put aside, Herr Szara,” said Frau Baumann, “for it is time to be naughty.” The Bavarian cream, a velvety mocha pond quivering in a soup plate, appeared before him.
    As the evening wore on, with cognac served in the cramped parlor, Dr. Julius Baumann became reflective and nostalgic. Recalled his student days at Tübingen, where the Jewish student societies had taken enthusiastically to beer drinking and fencing, in the fashion of the times. “I became a fine swordsman. Can you imagine such a thing, Herr Szara? But we were obsessed with honor, and so we practiced until we could barely stand up, but at least one could then answer an insult by challenging the offender to a match, as all the other students did. I was tall, so our president—he is now in Argentina, living God only knows how—prevailed on me to take up the saber. This I declined. I most certainly did not want one of these!” He drew the traditional saber scar down his cheek. “No, I wore the padded vest and the full mask—not the one that bares the cheek—and practiced the art of the épée. Lunge! Guard. Lunge! Guard. One winter's day I scored two touches on the mighty Kiko Bettendorf himself, who went to the Olympic games the following year! Ach, those were wonderful days.”
    Baumann told also of how he'd studied, often from midnight todawn, to maintain the family honor and to prepare himself to accept the responsibility that would be passed down to him by his father, who owned the Baumann Ironworks. Graduating with a degree in metallurgical engineering, he'd gone on to convert the family business, once his father retired, to a wire mill. “I believed that German industry had to specialize in order to compete, and so I took up that challenge.”
    He had always seen his life in terms of challenge, Szara realized. First at Tübingen, then as an artillery lieutenant fighting on the western front, wounded near Ypres and decorated for bravery, next in the conversion of the Baumann business, then survival during the frightful inflations of the Weimar period—“We paid our workers with potatoes; my chief engineer and I drove trucks to Holland to buy them!”—and now he found himself meeting the challenge of remaining in Germany when so many, 150,000 of the Jewish population of 500,000, had abandoned everything and started all over as immigrants in distant lands. “So many of our friends gone away,” he said sorrowfully. “We are so isolated now.”
    Frau Baumann sat attentively silent during the discourse, her smile, in time, becoming a bit frozen— Julius, my dearest husband, how I love and honor you but how you do go on.
    But Szara heard what she did not. He listened with great care and studied every gesture, every tone of voice. And a certain profile emerged, like secret writing when blank paper is treated with chemicals:
    A courageous and independent man, a man of position and influence, and a patriot, suddenly finds himself bitterly opposed to his government in a time of political crisis; a man whose business, whatever it really was, has been officially designated a strategically necessary enterprise, who now declares himself, to a semiofficial individual of his nation's avowed enemy, to be so isolated.
    This added up to only one thing, Szara knew, and the rather dubious assignment telegram from Nezhenko began to make sense. What he'd written off as a manifestation of some new, hopelessly convoluted political line being pursued in Moscow now told another story. The moment of revelation would come, he was virtually certain, during his “grand tour” of the Baumann wire mill.
    The dance of departure began at ten o'clock precisely, as Frau Baumann accepted with courteous despair the inevitability of Szara's return to his lodgings and instructed