When I left the Embassy — it was situated, as you all know, in one of the most fashionable streets, together with several other embassies — I looked out for a bistro. For I belong to that numerous class which finds some measure of mental clarity, not in action, but in sitting down in front of a glass. So I looked out for a bistro. There was one about forty yards down a side street to the right; it was a so-called tabac. And not more than twenty yards farther on was another. I did not want to go into the tabac, I wanted to go into the other. So I walked past. But just as I reached the second, I turned around, for no explicable reason, and went back into the tabac. I sat down at one of the tiny little tables in the back portion of the shop. Through the glass door which separated me from the buffet I could see cigarette purchasers coming and going. I sat facing the glass door, and so never noticed that behind my back there was another door, an ordinary wooden one. I ordered a brandy and decided to consider my position.
“There you are, old friend,” I heard a voice say behind me. I turned around. You will have guessed who it was. It was my friend Lakatos.
I offered him only two fingers, but he squeezed them as though it were my whole hand.
He sat down immediately. He was gay, spruce; his white teeth glistened; his black mustache shimmered bluely; his straw hat was pushed on to one side, over the left ear. I noticed that he was carrying no cane today; for the first time I saw him without his stick. But the thing that caught my attention was his dispatch case, made of red Saffian leather.
“Good news,” he said and pointed to the case. “The prizes have been increased.”
“What sort of prizes.
“Prizes for enemies of the State,” he said, as though it were a question of prizes for runners or bicyclists — as was common at that time.
“I have just come from Monsieur Charron,” continued Lakatos. “He is expecting you.”
“He can wait!” I said. But I was uneasy.
While Lakatos dipped his pastry in the coffee — I can still remember, it was a French roll, what they call a croissant—he added casually: “Á propos, you have friends here. The Rifkins.”
“Yes,” I said brazenly.
“I know,” said Lakatos. “The girl must go back to Russia. Hard, very hard, to deliver up such a brave girl.” He fell silent and dipped the croissant into his coffee again. As he swallowed the soddened pastry, he said: “Two thousand—”and then, after a longer pause—“rubles!”
We said nothing for a few minutes. Suddenly Lakatos stood up, opened the glass door, glanced at the clock over the buffet, and said: “I must go. I’ll leave my hat and case here. In ten, at the most fifteen, minutes, I shall be back.”
And he was already out of the door.
Opposite me leaned Lakatos’s fiery red case. The straw hat lay beside it, like a satellite. The lock on the case glistened like a tightly closed golden mouth. A greedy, covetous mouth.
A professional, but not only a professional, also a sort of supernatural, devilish curiosity compelled me continuously to glance across the table and stare at the dispatch case. I could easily open it before Lakatos returned. Ten minutes, he had said. Through the glass door I could hear the harsh ticking of the clock over the buffet. I was afraid of the case. On either side of the middle lock, which, as I have said, resembled a mouth, there were two smaller locks, and these now looked to me like eyes. I drank two more double brandies, and already the eyes on the case were beginning to wink at me. Still the clock ticked, and time passed, and I believed I suddenly knew how precious time was.
At moments it seemed to me that Lakatos’s red case was bowing to me from the chair on which it was propped. At last, when I thought it was about to offer itself to me completely, I stretched out for it. I opened it. Since I could still hear the hard and relentless ticking of the clock, it occurred to me that Lakatos might return any moment, so I went with the case into the lavatory. Should Lakatos come back in the meanwhile, I could always say that I had taken it with me as a precaution. It seemed to me as though I were not just taking it, but actually abducting it.
I opened it with feverish fingers. I should have already known what it contained — how could I not have known, I who knew so well the Devil and his relationship to me. But we often know things — as was the case with me — by quite other means than through our senses or understanding; and from laziness, cowardice, habit, we guard ourselves against such knowledge. Such were my feelings, too, at that moment. I mistrusted my own knowledge; or rather, I was making a desperate effort to mistrust it.
Some among you, my friends, may perhaps guess what were the papers I found in Lakatos’s dispatch case. Those that concerned me I knew well; I knew them from past experience in my profession. They were the stamped and signed passport papers which our people used to give to wretched emigrants in order to lure them back to Russia. By such means, countless people had been delivered up by us to the authorities. The unsuspecting victims journeyed happily home, safe, so they thought, with legal passports. But on the frontier they were arrested, and only after weeks and months of agonizing suspense were they brought before a court, removed to prison, and finally sent to Siberia. The unhappy fools had trusted us — put their faith in people of my type. The stamps were genuine, the signatures were genuine, the photographs were genuine — how could they suspect? Not even the official authorities knew of our shameful methods. On each passport there was a tiny sign which enabled our people at the frontier to distinguish those of the suspected from those of the unsuspected. Of course, those signs escaped the eye of a casual observer. And they were also changed frequently. Sometimes it was a minute pinprick through the passport owner’s photograph; then again, half a letter might be missing from the imprint of the round stamp; or else the owner’s name would be written in script instead of in ordinary handwriting. Of all these ruses the official authorities knew as little as the victims themselves. Only our people at the frontier knew the fiendish signs. In Lakatos’s dispatch case I found a complete set of stamps and ink pads, red and blue and black and violet. I returned to my table and waited.
A few minutes later Lakatos came in and sat down. With some solemnity he drew an envelope from out of his coat pocket and handed it to me without a word. While I was engaged in opening this, which bore the seal of our Embassy, I saw how he took one of the passport papers out of his red leather case, and I heard him order pen and ink. In the document which I read, the Imperial Embassy informed. Prince Krapotkin that, by the special clemency of the Czar, the brothers Rifkin had been released, and the sister — Channa Lea Rifkin — had no longer any danger to fear, should she choose to return to Russia. I was horrified, my friends, I was filled with a deep, sickening horror. But I did not stand up to go away. I did not even push the document back to Lakatos. I only watched how Lakatos, who took not the slightest notice of me, slowly, carefully, comfortably, in his beautiful, copperplate, official handwriting, made out a passport for the Jewess Rifkin.
My friends! Even as I tell you this, I tremble with self-hatred and contempt. But at the time I was as dumb as a fish and as indifferent as a hangman before his hundredth execution. I believe that a virtuous man would be as little able to explain his noblest act as a scoundrel of my type his foulest. I knew that it was a question of destroying the noblest woman I had ever met. I saw already, with my practiced eye, the secret, devilish pinprick over the name. I did not tremble, I did not move. I thought of the unhappy Lutetia. And, as true as I am a scoundrel, I was only afraid of one thing: I would have to go myself to the Rifkins and tell the girl and her brother the happy, fatal news. I was so terrified at the thought of this that, curiously enough — or rather, shamefully enough — I felt free of any guilt when Lakatos, after he had carefully blotted his signature in the passport, stood up and said: “I am going to her myself. You need only write two lines: ‘The bearer of this is a friend. Farewell, and auf Wiedersehen in Russia. Krapotkin.”’ At the same time he pushed the ink pot and paper across to me and pressed the pen into my hand. And, my friends — do you still permit me to call you “friends”?—I signed. My hand wrote. Never before had it written so quickly.