Alan Furst - Dark Star: A Novel

The time-frame of the late 1930s on the Continent was once the special property of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene; Furst has ventured into their fictional territory and brought out a story that is equally original and engaging.

Herbert Mitgang, The New York Times

Dark Star is as fine an evocation of prewar Europe as anything I've ever read. An extremely well written and literate novel that practically creates a new genre: historical espionage.

Nelson DeMille, author of The Gold Coast

Outclasses any spy novel I have ever read.

Richard Condon, author of The Manchurian Candidate

Captures the murky allegiances and moral ambiguity of Europe on the brink of war. Nothing can be like watching Casablanca for the first time. But Furst comes closer than anyone has in years.

Walter Shapiro, Time

[Dark Star] explores the ambiguous moral ground familiar to readers of Graham Greene, Robert Stone, and le Carr. Terrific stuffpoignant, moving, provocative.

Adam Woog, The Seattle Times

Gripping [Furst's] details of the period give the book a forceful and sometimes terrifyingreality.

New York Newsday

A page-churner of the best sort Brilliant detail and sure sweep Here is a thriller more deeply satisfying than much of the nonthrilling serious fiction' around today.

New York Newsday

One of the best spy novels I've read in years. The novel is impeccably researched. It's as much historical fiction as it is spy fiction, and the atmosphere of danger and doom it creates by means of deftly employed historical details is matched only by the vividness of its mostly fictional characters. Dark Star doesn't merely evoke the period. Because of its engaging plot and appealing hero, it makes you live there, suffer there, and hope.

Alan Cheuse, All Things Considered

Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and le Carr sit up all night and talk to each other and this is what you get. It is absolutely wonderful.

Kirkus Reviews

Intelligent, provocative, and gripping Beautifully and compellingly told.

Publishers Weekly

A LAN F URST is widely recognized as the master of the historical spy novel. He is the author of Night Soldiers, The Polish Officer, The World at Night, Red Gold, Kingdom of Shadows, Blood of Victory, Dark Voyage, and The Foreign Correspondent, and his novels have been translated into fifteen languages. Born in New York, he has lived for long periods in France, especially Paris. He now lives on Long Island, New York.

Visit the author's website at
www.alanfurst.net

ALSO BY ALAN FURST

Night Soldiers

The Polish Officer

The World at Night

Red Gold

Kingdom of Shadows

Blood of Victory

Dark Voyage

The Foreign Correspondent

You may not be interested in war,
but war is interested in you.

Lev Bronshtein,
known as Leon Trotsky
June 1919

I N THE LATE AUTUMN OF 1937, IN THE STEADY BEAT OF North Sea rain that comes with dawn in that season, the tramp freighter Nicaea stood at anchor off the Belgian city of Ostend. In the distance, a berthing tug made slow progress through the harbor swell, the rhythm of its engine distinct over the water, its amber running lights twin blurs in the darkness.

The Nicaea, 6,320 gross tonnes, of Maltese registry, had spent her first thirty years as a coastal steamer in the eastern Mediterranean, hauling every imaginable cargo from Latakia to Famagusta, back to Iskenderun, down to Beirut, north to Smyrna, then south to Sidon and Jaffathirty years of blistering summers and drizzling winters, trading and smuggling in equal proportion, occasionally enriching, more typically ruining, a succession of owner syndicates as she herself was slowly ruined by salt, rust, and a long line of engineers whose enthusiasm far exceeded their skill. Now, in her final years, she was chartered to Exportkhleb, the Soviet Union's grain-trading bureau, and she creaked and groaned sorrowfully to lie at anchor in such cold, northern seas.

Riding low in the water, she bore her cargo gracelessly principally Anatolian wheat bound for the Black Sea port of Odessa, a city that had not seen imported grains for more than a century. She carried, as well, several small consignments: flaxseed loaded in Istanbul, dried figs from Limassol, a steel drum of Ammonala mining explosive made of TNT and powdered aluminumen route to a sabotage cell in Hamburg, a metal trunk of engineering blueprints for an Italian submarine torpedo, deftly copied at a naval research station in Brindisi, and two passengers: a senior Comintern official using a Dutch passport with the alias Van Doorn, and a foreign correspondent of the newspaper Pravda traveling under his true name, Andr Szara.

Szara, hands thrust deep in pockets, hair blown about by the offshore gale, stood in the shelter of a passageway and silently cursed the Belgian tug captain who, from the methodical chug of the engine, was taking his own sweet time attending to the Nicaea. Szara knew harbormen in this part of the world; stolid, reflective pipe smokers who were never far from the coffeepot and the evening paper. Unshakable in crisis, they spent the rest of their days making the world wait on their pleasure. Szara shifted his weight with the roll of the ship, turned his back to the wind, and lit a cigarette.

He had boarded the freighter nineteen days earlier, in Piraeus, having been assigned a story on the struggle of the Belgian dock-workers. That was one assignment; there was another. Killing time in a dockside tavern as the Nicaea was eased into moorage, he had been approached by the World's Plainest Man. Where, he wondered, did they find them? Russia marked people: deformed most, made some exquisite, at the very least burned itself deep into the eyes. But not this one. His mother was water, his father a wall. A small favor, said the world's plainest man. You'll have a fellow passenger, he is traveling on Comintern business. Perhaps you will find out where he is stopping in Ostend.

If I can, Szara had said. The word if could not really be used between them, but Szara pretended it could be and the NKVD operativeor GRU or whatever he wasgraciously conceded his right to suggest he had a choice in the matter. Szara, after all, was an important correspondent.

Yes. If you can, he'd said. Then added, Leave us a little note at the desk of your hotel. To Monsieur Brun.