by Alan Furst
“You’re watching the two over there?” Kasia said.
“I was trying to do it covertly.”
“You weren’t succeeding, and in a minute they’re going to come over here and say hello.”
Ricard looked down at his shoes. “How’s this?”
“Much smarter. You were staring at secret police, and secret police don’t like to be stared at.”
On a chalkboard at the front of the waiting room, a station worker wrote that the train for Kiel would be delayed. “Merde,” Kasia said. “Maybe it’s been bombed.”
“Some train will show up,” Ricard said. “They have to keep the railways running.”
“Excuse me, sir.” In the aisle that ran past the bench where Ricard was sitting, a young man with carefully combed reddish-blond hair and a bright smile held an unlit cigarette in his lips. “Have you a light?” he said.
Ricard took a small box of wooden matches from his pocket and lit the man’s cigarette. “Thank you,” he said. “Going up to Kiel together, are we?” He wasn’t precisely rude; more overfamiliar, his tone knowing and smug.
“We are,” Ricard said. “We were in Lübeck, for a story about the Trave River bridge, and we thought we’d walk around Kiel for a while. Maybe have lunch.”
“It’s an interesting city, Kiel; our Baltic fleet is based there, as it’s at the foot of a long canal, merchant shipping can steam down from the sea, but the storms stay where they belong, over the open water. Do you have friends there? If you tell me their names, I might know them, I know so many nice people in Kiel.”
After a moment, Ricard said, “I don’t believe we know anybody in Kiel,” his tone softly defiant. Agent provocateur, he thought.
“And what about you, young lady, perhaps you have a friend or two.”
“I don’t,” Kasia said shortly. This intrusive man was getting on her nerves, and, she sensed, he was threatening her behind his bright smile.
“Well, maybe we’ll run into each other. It’s a small world, as they say.”
“It is,” Ricard said. Go away.
“Then I wish you a good afternoon,” the man said, and walked toward the back of the waiting room.
“One more secret agent,” Kasia said. “This place is crawling with them.”
“He surely wanted us to know what he was.”
“Oh, yes, he’s all technique,” Kasia said sourly. “I am done with this country, Ricard, I want to go back to Paris, where I belong.”
Just then, their train was announced, and the two found an empty compartment. As they waited for the train to depart, there was a tap-tap on the window, and Kasia looked out to see the young man with reddish hair waving to them. He then moved away, up the platform, headed for a different carriage.
* * *
—
Two hours later they were in Kiel. At the station, the usual border guards had been replaced by SS men, in their black uniforms and silver skull insignia. It was their presence itself that was threatening, they wanted to get you alone somewhere. Just at that moment they had to serve as border guards, but they had business with you and they would finish it. Ricard and Kasia parried them with courtesy until the guards produced their document stamp. Ricard and Kasia left the station, relieved that they hadn’t been arrested, but then, two blocks further on, they were stopped at another control, this one supervised by detectives in civilian suits. No stamp this time, only long and careful looks. A few poor souls were taken out of line and searched, but Ricard and Kasia were not among them. After the two had been permitted to pass, Kasia said, “I have a bad feeling, Ricard, let’s go home.”
“Not yet, we have a job to do here. We should at least have a look at the port.”
They followed Feldstrasse until the tall cranes of the port came into view, then turned right and found themselves on the broad street that ran along the waterfront. Here and there a wharf had burned to blackened timbers, while two cargo ships, half sunk and floating on their sides, rose and fell with the current. Across the street, some of the warehouses had been bombed out, their brick façades spilled out into the street.
Even so, the port was busy. Freighters were docked in a long row, some of their names were Scandinavian, some Spanish, some Portuguese—ships of neutral countries. Along the wharf, tall cranes bearing nets, worked by stevedores, were loading and unloading cargo. On the tops of the buildings across the street from the wharves, anti-aircraft positions, Bofors guns, manned by gunners and servers in circular tin helmets.
At the far end of the street was a row of bars, ready for the workers when they got off shift. “Let’s try one of the bars,” Ricard said. “Maybe somebody knows where the Poles are kept.” As they headed for the bars, they saw a small ferry landing with a sign bolted to a piling. Here, departure times for ferries to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. Occupied Denmark, Ricard thought. Occupied Norway. Neutral Sweden.
Walking past the bars, Ricard said, “Look, here’s one for the dockworkers.” The bar was called Das Haken, the Hook, and painted on a wooden sign above the door was a longshoreman’s steel hook with a wooden handle. As the two entered, conversation stopped while the patrons, in workmen’s clothes with tweed caps, stared at them. Strangers.
Ricard and Kasia stood by the end of the bar near the door. In time, the barman had to acknowledge them. “Yes?” he said. “What can I get for you?”
“Beer,” Ricard said. “For my friend as well.”
The barman drew two beers from a tap, then brushed the foam off the top with a wooden stick. As he finished, Ricard said, “Any Polish bars around here?”
The barman stared at him.
“My friend here is Polish, and looking for her brother, who was working as a stevedore.”
“Can’t help you,” the barman said. Clearly, strangers asking questions weren’t welcome at Das Haken.
Ricard and Kasia left the bar and headed up the street. They hadn’t gone far when one of the bar’s patrons, an older man with a seamed face and hands knotted by a lifetime of handling cargo, came trotting after them. As he caught up he said, “Keep walking.” They took a few steps, then he said, “That sonofabitch wouldn’t help you if you were on fire. There are Poles here, the Nazis rounded them up and brought them to Kiel and forced them to work. They’re machinists, tool-and-die men, welders, electricians, and there is a place where they gather, a sort of bar, in an old workshop down an alley behind a warehouse on Kieler Schloss street. It’s owned by a man called Jozef, but there’s no name on the door.” After Ricard thanked him, the old man said, “Be careful, comrades, this isn’t a good place to ask questions.” He took a step back toward the bar, then turned and raised a stiff arm with a closed fist—the international communist salute.
By now, the sun had set and dusk was closing in. On the wharves work continued, winches straining and grinding, warning whistles sharp in the air as cargo nets swung between the freighters and the dock. A splintering crash caught Ricard’s attention: a crate had slipped from its net and fallen to the dock, spilling out newly manufactured rifles wrapped in oiled paper. “They feed the war here,” Ricard said.
Kasia nodded and said, “They do, and, if it ever ends, they will start another.”
They walked for a time, both of them squinting up at the street signs in the twilight. Finally, the Kieler Schloss. The warehouse here had been hit in the bombing; some of its windows had been blown out, there were scorch marks flared out on the wall below them, and the air smelled of old fire. The building’s door was boarded up, and there was a handwritten sign on a piece of cardboard nailed to a board:
HOFMANN UND SCHULTZ
CUSTOMS BROKERAGE
IMPORT / EXPORT
(FORMERLY SZAPERA AND GOLDMANN)
Behind the warehouse, a narrow alley where a tar-paved walkway led to an abandoned machine shop, a shack with a rus
ted tin roof. Ricard knocked and the door opened to reveal a room lit by two candles, with a dirt floor, and six rough-carpentered tables with benches. Along with the smell of stale cigarette smoke, a faint scent of burned metal. Two men sat on one of the benches holding shot glasses of vodka, a third stood, serving as bartender. Jozef’s Bar.
Kasia greeted them in Polish, and they responded. Then the man behind the table said, “Would you care for a vodka?”
“We would, thank you,” Kasia said.
“You come here from Poland?”
“From France, up in Lille, where the Polish miners work.”
Jozef nodded and poured out two shot glasses of vodka. Kasia raised her glass and said, “Na zdrowie!” To your health. The men repeated the toast, as did Ricard.
“Very good. What shall we pay you?”
“Two sous a glass.”
“Very reasonable, my friend.”
“Well, I make it myself.”
When Ricard drank off his vodka, it burned like fire, all the way down.
“Have one with us?” Kasia said.
“Don’t mind if I do.”
Jozef poured the shots from a thick glass bottle with no label. Once again, “Na zdrowie!” Kasia spoke French to Ricard, and he paid for the drinks.
“I was wondering…,” Kasia said in Polish. “A friend of mine got a letter, it came by hand, all the way to Paris. We’re not sure who wrote it, maybe someone who works over here, but it made us curious.”
“Us?”
“My friend Ricard here, and me. I’m called Kasia.”
“He’s maybe an…official?” By way of not saying policeman.
Kasia laughed. “Him? No, no. He’s just a friend of mine from Paris. He writes books.”
She knew this would hit home; Poles greatly admired intellectuals. “Then you’re welcome here,” Jozef said in French.
Kasia said in Polish: “This letter was about his work, whoever wrote the letter, his work building submarines.”
Jozef turned to his friends. “Do we know anybody like that?”
The men shook their heads, but Jozef met Ricard’s eyes, and Ricard immediately understood that it had been he who had copied the schematic.
“Perhaps,” Ricard said, “if you discover who it was, you can find a way to let me know.” He produced a small pad, tore out a page, and wrote down his address on the Rue de la Huchette. From somewhere outside, the mournful call of a ship’s horn sounded three times.
“What’s that?” Ricard said.
“Come outside, you can hear it better.”
When the three stood in the walkway, the sound was repeated.
“Kriegsmarine ships,” Jozef said, “putting out to sea.”
“Jozef,” Ricard said, “how do you come to be here?”
In the moonlight, they could see a rueful smile. Jozef was of medium height, wore a tight beard, his wire-frame spectacles bent slightly out of shape. He had a strong, thereby handsome, face, with a determined forehead beneath a receding hairline. He could have been, Ricard thought, an intellectual, something of the professor in the way he looked—a professor in a former life. Ricard lit a cigarette and gave one to Jozef.
“There are about thirty of us here, we were all taken prisoner during the invasion of France. The Germans shot the intellectuals—potential leaders—but they missed me, for some reason. I told them I was an electrician. Actually I had taught economics at the University of Cracow.”
“Yet you persuaded them that you were a real electrician.”
“I worked next to a real one, he showed me how to do the wiring. Anyhow, in time they took the technicians and put us to work out here. In the beginning, they treated us badly, but the work slowed down, so they gave us some freedom—that’s how I came to have the bar.”
“I thought ‘forced labor’ meant barbed wire, guards with truncheons, prisoners worked to death,” Ricard said.
“It does mean that, but not here. Here there are skilled technicians, too important to the German war effort to control with such brutalities—they need us. So we don’t live in barracks behind barbed wire, they put us in an old school, abandoned a long time ago. We don’t have much heat, but we gather coal on the railroad tracks, some always falls off the coal cars.”
“What happened to the Germans who used to work here?”
“In Russia, freezing to death at Stalingrad. There are tens of thousands of Frenchmen working in Germany, taking their places, Belgians, Dutchmen, Poles—Europe is part of the German empire now. For how long I don’t know, but it’s like the last war, we wait for the Americans to show up.”
“Tell me, Jozef,” Ricard said, “is there someplace we can stay in Kiel?”
“You’ve seen the bars along the wharf, try there. They often have an empty room on the second floor, and they let people spend the night for a few reichsmarks.”
Walking back along the tar-paved path, Kasia said, “They must know here when the German ships sail, isn’t that valuable information?”
“It’s something,” Ricard answered. “But if somebody knew what ships they were, that would be very valuable. I’ll pass along the information.”
* * *
—
Jozef served a final vodka to his patrons, then, at ten in the evening, he closed the bar and locked the door. A sharp wind blew onshore from the canal, which meant rain would follow, but weather was not going to keep him from his evening retreat. As usual, he walked away from the waterfront and climbed a high hill. From the crest, beneath a near-full moon and a starlit, cloudless sky, the Kiel Canal was easily visible, its water calm and black. Glancing at a pocket watch he had bought from a friend, he saw that he had a few minutes before he had to return to the school. He didn’t want to be caught breaking curfew. The Polish workers were tightly guarded by a Ukrainian SS unit, teenagers, most of them, who were not interested in excuses and used their fists freely. Jozef didn’t want to be smacked about, so he checked the time once more.
It was quiet up on the hill, the only sound the whisper of the nighttime wind in the tall weeds. Here was where Jozef came to think about his former life, his wife and child, his apartment in Cracow, the office at the university where he’d prepared his lectures, and the coffee room down the hall. He’d liked to spend time there, gossiping with his fellow professors, avoiding university politics as much as possible, flirting with the secretaries.
All that was gone. He’d been separated from his family when, after being taken prisoner, they’d been put on different trains, sent to different camps. Were they alive or dead? He didn’t know. The University of Cracow had been closed, his apartment in Cracow was now occupied by a German officer and his mistress. This might change, he knew, when the war ended, but for now, what he could do was fight back. So, as soon as he went to Kiel to work building the U-boats, he began hand-copying the workings of a torpedo detonator—then gave the schematic to a fellow prisoner who claimed to have a way of communicating with the Polish émigrés in Paris. They would know what to do with it—get it, somehow, to the British.
Looking down the hill, he saw another U-boat, which sounded its horn as it left port. He knew where it was going, up the canal, out into the Baltic. Then through the Skagerrak—an arm of the North Sea between Norway and Sweden—then out into the sea. The U-boat would then head up the west coast of Norway and turn northeast, where it would hunt the convoys of British freighters and the shipping of other nations as well, that brought arms, food, and oil to ports of Russia, to Murmansk and Archangel, making it possible for Russia to continue fighting the Germans.
Jozef watched as down below, on the canal, the U-boat continued its slow progress toward the Baltic. In the darkness, he could just make out a number painted near the top of the conning tower, but he couldn’t read it. For that he would need some optical device. There was such a thing,
he’d heard, special binoculars, large and ungainly, known as night glasses. If he’d had those, he thought, he could have truly spied on the U-boats, sending the identification, the number, the time, and the date, to the British, who tracked every ship in the Kriegsmarine. Putting such information into British hands would be difficult and dangerous, he knew, but he could, if he had the night glasses, make war on his captors.
It began to rain, just a light rain that pattered down on the hillside, and now it really was time to leave his refuge, so, very reluctantly, he walked slowly down the hill toward the abandoned school where the Poles now lived.
* * *
—
Ricard and Kasia walked along the wharf, trying to decide which bar had a room it rented out. To the east, they could see a mowed strip of land that led to a chain-link fence with barbed wire woven through it, then, above the chain link, three separate strands of wire. On the fence, a weathered sign: a red skull-and-crossbones next to the word ACHTUNG! Below it, a warning: PASSAGE BEYOND THIS POINT IS FORBIDDEN ON PAIN OF DEATH. Beyond the wire, a high brick wall. “That’s the naval base,” Ricard said.
Finally, in the middle of the wharf, they chose a bar with a carefully hand-painted sign: a bearded sailor peering through a telescope. They started to show their papers to the barman, but he waved them off. “You have a bed for us?” Ricard said.
“Jah, there’s a room on the second floor, ten reichsmarks for the night.”
As Ricard paid, a black Opel pulled up to the door, paused, then crossed the wharf and parked, but the driver remained in the car. Ricard didn’t think much of it, he was very tired and he wanted to sleep. “Is there anything to eat?” Kasia asked the barman.