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cumin, and the damp air that hung over the river quais at dusk.
    Not so bad, he thought—the crowds, jostling and busy, the dark-eyed women. He wasn’t in a hurry to try the food, but that was him. Food wasn’t something he liked. He’d done his prison time east of the Oder: in Lodz—for pamphlets, in Esztergom—just because, and then, worst of all, the Lukishki, in Vilna. Abduction. The Lithuanian police had been waiting for them. Two years of that. And it could have been forever, but in August ’39 the Hitler-Stalin Pact was signed and the NKVD came into the city and let Ivanic and his friends out of jail. Two years of that had done something to his appetite. He wondered if maybe it was the lentil mash they’d fed him in prison. Or maybe not. Maybe it was the work he did. He looked at his watch again, where were they? He was in his late twenties, tall and pale, with sleepy eyes. He’d grown up in Salonika but he wasn’t Greek, he came from farther up the Balkans. It was a long story.
    In Vilna, he’d decided that he wasn’t going to prison again. But the people he worked for wouldn’t let him carry a weapon in Paris. Only for work. That scared Ivanic—even with the finest passports and Ausweis and all the other paper the Germans thought up, things could go wrong. He heard somebody coming up the stairs and hoped it was the man he was supposed to meet and not the Sûreté, or the Gestapo.
    A key turned in the lock, Ivanic backed against the wall. The door opened slowly. “Hello? Ivanic?” Heavily accented French.
    “Are you Serra?”
    “Yes.”
    They shook hands, both of them wary. Serra had dark hair, tousled and cut short, was perhaps in his thirties but he seemed much older than that. Ivanic knew he’d been a miner in Asturias—thus a specialist in dynamite—then, during the Spanish war, an operative for the Republican secret service. He had escaped over the Pyrenees, one of the last to get through after the fall of Barcelona in 1939, was arrested at the border, and spent the next year staring at an incomprehensible world through French barbed wire.
    Serra had a little bag of tobacco. They tore strips off a page of Le Jour and smoked while they waited.
    “Have you seen him?” Ivanic asked.
    “Yes, I watched him. For a few days.”
    “What is he like?”
    “An athlete, perhaps. He stands very straight.”
    “They all do.”
    “Most of them.” Serra paused a moment. “Were you in Spain?”
    “No.”
    “I thought perhaps I’d seen you.”
    “No. I wasn’t there.”
    8:20 P.M. The phone in the office rang three times and stopped. Ivanic looked at his watch. Thirty seconds later it rang again. Ivanic raised the receiver from the cradle and put it back down. Another five minutes and they heard somebody coming up the stairs.
    The man who stepped into the office was called Weiss. He had black and gray hair, combed back from the forehead, and wore a dark overcoat with the collar turned up. The world’s plainest man, Ivanic thought. A salesman? Teacher? Editor of a technical journal, something esoteric and difficult? Perhaps he’d once done something like that. Or maybe it was simply that Weiss became what other people thought he was. In a smoky Berlin union hall, he was a labor official. Later on, a Milanese intellectual, or a Dutch civil servant. Ivanic had once been on the edge of a conversation where a senior Comintern operative had said, “Of course Weiss is Hungarian—like all spies.”
    He said hello to them, put his scuffed leather briefcase on the desk, unbuckled the straps, and hunted around inside. “ Haupt mann Johannes Luecks,” he said. He handed Ivanic a photograph, a clandestine shot taken from a first-floor window, slightly blurred, the blacks and whites faded to gray. The officer, a captain, had his head turned toward the camera. He was hatless, fair-haired, in Wehrmacht uniform. “He commands a company of combat engineers,” Weiss said. “Joined the army in ’32, from