by Alan Furst
The Polish Officer
( Night Soldiers - 3 )
Alan Furst
September 1939. As Warsaw falls to Hitler’s Wehrmacht, Captain Alexander de Milja is recruited by the intelligence service of the Polish underground. His mission: to transport the national gold reserve to safety, hidden on a refugee train to Bucharest. Then, in the back alleys and black-market bistros of Paris, in the tenements of Warsaw, with partizan guerrillas in the frozen forests of the Ukraine, and at Calais Harbor during an attack by British bombers, de Milja fights in the war of the shadows in a world without rules, a world of danger, treachery, and betrayal.
“Epic . . . [The] characters seem utterly affecting and true. The historical data seems absolutely convincing. There’s suspense galore and not a touch of abrasive melodrama. All this goes to put this novel head and shoulders above any other recent fiction of its kind.”
—ALAN CHEUSE, All Things Considered
“[Furst’s] depictions of wartime Europe have the richness and complexity of the fiction of John le Carré and Somerset Maugham. . . . With the authority of solid research and a true fascination for his material, Mr. Furst makes idealism, heroism, and sacrifice believable and real, and what he has written here is a first-rate popular entertainment, terrifically plotted, absorbing on every page, and thoroughly satisfying.”
—DAVID WALTON, The Dallas Morning News
“The Polish Officer is the finest novel I’ve read in years, beautifully written, powerfully imagined, and riveting as pure story, yet so true to the historical facts and to the human realities of the tortured Europe of 1940–41 that it deserves to be regarded as an act of witness as well as an enthralling work of fiction. The book is a triumph with something to remember on every page: a thrilling event, a vivid character, a telling detail, a wise observation.”
—CHARLES MCCARRY, author of The Tears of Autumn
“Brilliantly imagined, vividly drawn, rich with incident and detail . . . among the most exciting and satisfying adventure stories I know. The Polish Officer portrays ordinary men and women caught out on the sharp edge of military intelligence operations in wartime: the partisans, saboteurs, resistance fighters and idealistic volunteers risking their lives in causes that seem lost.”
—ROBERT CHATAIN, Chicago Tribune
“Furst’s scrupulous attention to spycraft and period detail . . . evokes the mood of conquered cities like Warsaw, Paris, and Barcelona. . . . Language this lovely vaults the categories we lazily constrain literature with.”
—MAUREEN CORRIGAN, Fresh Air
“The best spy novel I’ve read in years. Perhaps the reason is that it is so much more than a spy novel: it is a moving love story; it is full of carefully observed and utterly unromanticized tradecraft; and the reader will learn more about the actual business of intelligence from this novel than from nearly all other ‘spy novelists’ combined. This is a riveting ‘pure’ story, rich with character, wonderfully exact. The Polish Officer transcends the spy novel while delivering everything any fan of le Carré could ask for.”
—ROBIN WINKS, The Boston Globe
“A splendid tale. The Polish Officer is a classic spy story replete with the moral ambiguities found in a world at war. I recommend it for its profound sense of history, its suspense and the quiet heroism of its characters.”
—CHARLES P. THOBAE, Houston Chronicle
“Alan Furst’s The Polish Officer . . . is one of the great novels of espionage. . . . The real protagonist is Europe itself, which comes to stunning life in Furst’s brilliant prose.”
—MARK JOHNSON, San Jose Mercury News
“Some books you read. Others you live. They seep into your dreams and haunt your waking hours until eventually they seem the stuff of memory and experience. Such are the novels of Alan Furst, who uses the shadowy world of espionage to illuminate history and politics with a gripping immediacy. . . . The Polish Officer stands on its own, an atmospheric, intelligent novel of intrigue that is also a rousing historical novel.”
—NANCY PATE, The Orlando Sentinel
“[Alan Furst’s] novels can be classed as espionage thrillers, but they are much more than that. In The Polish Officer, Furst presents his finest achievement yet: a subtle work of great quality and imaginative reach, written in some of the most delicate and understated prose it has been my pleasure to read in many a day.”
—VINCENT BANVILLE, The Irish Times
“[The Polish Officer] is a novel and a damned fine one at that. . . . [T]he book is extremely well written, beautifully paced, suspenseful throughout and psychologically acute. Furst knows; knows people, knows Europe, knows war. And he knows how to put us smack in the middle of it all.”
—ANTHONY BRANDT, Men’s Journal
“Furst has shown that he can produce an espionage tale that sloughs off the coil of genre. But his new book—hugely ambitious and masterfully written—ups the ante. . . . The author understands, with astounding breadth of vision . . . what WWII was all about. . . . A truly splendid novel of the wartime experience.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Alan Furst is widely recognized as the master of the atmospheric spy novel. He is the author of Night Soldiers, Dark Star, The Polish Officer, The World at Night, Red Gold, and Kingdom of Shadows. Born in New York, he has lived for long periods in France, especially Paris. He now lives on Long Island, New York.
THE POLISH OFFICER
In Poland, on the night of 11 September 1939, Wehrmacht scout and commando units—elements of Kuechler’s Third Army Corps—moved silently around the defenses of Novy Dvor, crossed the Vistula over the partly demolished Jablonka Bridge, and attempted to capture the Warsaw Telephone Exchange at the northern edge of the city. Meeting unexpected, and stubborn, resistance, they retreated along Sowacki Street and established positions on the roof and in the lobby of the Hotel Franconia, called for dive-bomber attacks on the exchange building, and settled in to wait for the light of dawn.
Mr. Felix Malek, proprietor of the Franconia, put on his best blue suit, and, accompanied by a room-service waiter, personally served cognac to the German soldiers at their mortar and machine-gun positions. He then descended to the wine cellar, opened the concealed door to an underground passage originally dug during the Prussian attack of 1795, hurried down Sowacki Street to the telephone exchange, and asked to see “the gentleman in charge.”
He was taken up a marble staircase to the director’s office on the fifth floor and there, beneath a somber portrait of the director—pincenez and brushed whiskers—presented to the officer in command, a captain. The captain was an excellent listener, and the questions he asked inspired Mr. Malek to talk for a long time. Arms, unit size, insignia, the location of positions—he was surprised at how much he knew.
When he was done, they gave him tea. He asked if he might remain at the exchange, it would be an honor to fight the Germans. No, they said, perhaps another day. So Mr. Malek made his way through the night to his sister’s apartment in the Ochota district. “And what,” she asked, “were they like?”
Mr. Malek thought a moment. “Educated,” he said. “Quite the better class of people.”
Mr. Malek had not been thirty years an innkeeper for nothing: the defenders of the Warsaw Telephone Exchange, hastily recruited amidst the chaos of the German invasion, were officers of Polish Military Intelligence, known, in imitation of the French custom, as the Deuxième Bureau. The Breda machine gun at the casement window was served by a lieutenant from the cryptographic service, a pair of spectacles folded carefully in his breast pocket. The spidery fellow reloading ammunition belts was, in vocational life, a connoisseur of the senior civil service of the U.S.S.R., while the commander of the machine gun, feet propped on th
e tripod, was Lieutenant Karlinski, heavy and pink, who in normal times concerned himself with the analysis of Baltic shipping.
The officer in charge, Captain Alexander de Milja, was professionally a cartographer; first a mapmaker, later assistant director of the bureau’s Geographical Section. But Poland was at war—no, Poland had lost her war, and it was clear to the captain that nobody was going to be assistant director of anything for a long time to come.
Still, you couldn’t just stop fighting. Captain de Milja stood at the open window; the night air, cool and damp, felt especially good on his hands. Idiot! He’d grabbed the overheated barrel of the machine gun to change it during the attack, and now he had red stripes on his palms that hurt like hell.
4:20 a.m. He swept the façade of the hotel with his binoculars, tried— based on the proprietor’s intelligence—counting up floors to focus on certain rooms, but the Germans had the windows shut and all he could see was black glass. In Sowacki Square, a burned-out trolley, and the body of a Wehrmacht trooper, like a bundle of rags accidentally left in a doorway, weapon and ammunition long gone. To somebody’s attic. De Milja let the binoculars hang on their strap and stared out into the city.
A refinery had been set on fire; a tower of heavy smoke rolled majestically into the sky and the clouds glowed a faint orange. A machine gun tapped in the distance, a plane droned overhead, artillery rumbled across the river. War—fire and smoke—had made autumn come early, dead leaves rattled along the cobblestones and caught in the iron drain covers.
Captain de Milja was a soldier, he knew he didn’t have long to live. And, in truth, he didn’t care. He was not in love with life. One or two things had to be taken care of, then matters could run their course.
The director’s telephone was, naturally, of the very latest style; black, shiny, Bakelite plastic. De Milja dialed the military operator he had installed in the basement.
“Sir?”
“Sergeant, have you tried Tarnopol again?”
“Can’t get through, sir. I’ve been up to Wilno, and down to Zakopane, just about every routing there is, but the whole region’s down. We’re pretty sure the lines have been cut, sir.”
“You’ll keep trying.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank you, Sergeant.”
He replaced the receiver carefully on its cradle. He had wanted to
say good-bye to his wife.
The Wehrmacht assault team got its air support at dawn; three Focke-Wulf 189s diving out of the clouds, engines screaming, cannon firing. But there was more drama than destruction; the 189 carried only one bomb. On the fifth floor of the telephone exchange, Lieutenant Karlinski swept the Breda across the sky and hammered off belt after belt of 7.35 ammunition. Grand streams of tracer, pale in the early light, showered up into the clouds, while hot casings ejected onto the director’s Persian carpet and the office smelled like smoldering wool—until a bullet fired from the ballroom of the Hotel Franconia hit Karlinski in the collarbone and he collapsed back onto the floor and died of shock.
The lieutenant from the cryptographic service took over, while Captain de Milja steadied the tripod with his burning hands and the Russian bureaucracy expert fed belts into the gun. But by then the Focke-Wulfs had run dry of ammunition and headed back to Germany. At which point the telephone rang and somebody on the first floor, voice flat and controlled, informed de Milja that the building was on fire.
For a moment he went blank, the solution much too obvious. Then he said, “Call the fire department.” Which they did and which, on 12 September, worked quite well because the city’s water mains hadn’t yet been destroyed. The firemen ran their hoses into the building on the side away from the fighting and pumped high-pressure streams on the flames, putting out the fire and, as water sluiced down into the switching stations, shutting down every telephone in Warsaw.
The Wehrmacht attack, from doorway to doorway up Sowacki Street, faltered, then collapsed. The support fire, machine-gun and mortar, from the roof of the hotel lasted less than a minute, then the positions were abandoned. Just before dawn de Milja had sent sniper teams to the roofs of adjacent buildings, and when the fighting started they’d knocked down first a mortar man, then an officer. It was improvised— the snipers were armed with hunting weapons and policemen’s automatic pistols—but it worked.
De Milja watched through binoculars as an analyst from the economic intelligence section—the captain thought he specialized in feed grains—a man in his fifties wearing suspenders and a shirt turned up at the sleeves, suddenly appeared at a parapet on the roof of an apartment building and fired both barrels of an old shotgun, the sort of thing one found in the back halls of country houses, along with leather game bags and warped tennis rackets.
The sniper broke the shotgun and withdrew the empty cartridges. Smoke seeped from the barrels as he thrust new shells into the breech. Get down, the captain thought. He saw two German troopers at an upper window, bringing their rifles to bear. Down. The sniper lurched backward, his face showed a moment of pain. But he kept his balance, braced one foot against the parapet and fired both barrels. His shoulder jerked with the recoil, then he fell to his knees, shaking his head grimly at whatever was going on inside him.
The Wehrmacht units retreated minutes later, trying to break through to German lines after dark. Most never made it, victims of small bands of soldiers, farmers, teenagers—Poles. And those who got as far as the Jablonka Bridge found that, on the second try, demolition had been complete. The ones who couldn’t swim were found on the bank the following morning.
16 September, 5:40 p.m. Military Intelligence headquarters, Savka barracks. Order 3135-c: With exception of special documents identified by department directors, all files to be destroyed by 1800 hours.
Captain de Milja watched, motionless, one foot on a chair, as this work was done, as the department clerks burned eight thousand maps. Watched, apparently, without feeling. Perhaps he didn’t care, or cared too much, or had gone off wherever he went when life was too cruel or too stupid. Whatever the truth, his eyes were cold, he could not be read.
The clerks had built a pinewood fire in the great hall, in a fireplace of heroic proportions with the date 1736 carved in the capstone, a fireplace built to roast spitted boar for a cavalry squadron. But this was a clerks’ fire, it smoked and sputtered, and the maps, printed on linen and mounted on wooden rollers, did not burn well.
The office wit had always claimed that the department’s chief clerk suffered from Talpidia, mole-face, a condition encountered in particularly subterranean bureaucracies. The man had been, certainly, a fierce obstructionist—everything had to be signed, and signed, and signed some more. Now, as his clerks ran by him with armloads of maps, he just seemed lost, poked dispiritedly at the ashes with a broom handle, the flames’ reflections flickering on his eyeglasses.
Drawer 4088: Istanbul by street. Istanbul harbor with wharf and warehouse numbers. Surveyor’s elevations of Üsküdar with shore batteries in scale. Bosphorus with depths indicated. Black Sea coast: coves, inlets, bridges, roads. Sea of Marmara coast: coves, inlets, bridges, roads.
In the fire.
Drawer 4098: Timber company surveys, 1935–1938; streams, logging paths, old and new growth trees, drainage, road access, river access. For forests in Poland, Byelorussia, and the Ukraine.
“That series aside, please,” de Milja said.
The clerk, startled, whirled and stared, then did as he was ordered. The timber surveys were stacked neatly atop maps, drawn in fine detail, of the Polish railway system.
16 September, 7:15 p.m. A message was brought by a young ensign, who saluted and stood stiffly at attention while the captain read it. Colonel Anton Vyborg requested his presence, in fifteen minutes, at the guardhouse by the east gate; another officer had been sent to supervise the destruction of the files. The captain initialed the message carefully, then made sure he was on time.
They walked in the stables of the cavalry barracks, added to
the Savka fortress when the Tenth Polish Hussars rode with Bonaparte in the Napoleonic Wars. The indoor riding ring—a floor of raked dirt below ax-hewn beams—was by tradition the regimental champ d’honneur; not just pistols at thirty paces, but duels on horseback with cavalry sabers. Beyond the riding ring, the horse barns. The horses stamped their hooves and whickered softly as the officers approached. The air smelled good to de Milja; manure and straw, autumn evening and Vyborg’s cigar. Not the smell of burning buildings, not the smell of burning paper. A cloud of gnats hung in the still air, the light fading slowly from dusk into darkness.
There was something of the Baltic knight in Colonel Vyborg. In his forties, he was tall and lean and thin-lipped, with webbed lines at the corners of eyes made to squint into blizzards, and stiff, colorless hair cut short in the cavalry-officer fashion. He wore high leather boots, supple and dark, well-rubbed with saddle soap. His job was to direct the work of intelligence officers—usually but not always military attachés in foreign postings—who operated secret agents.
“Have one of these,” Vyborg said.
Vyborg lit the captain’s small cigar, then spoke quietly as they walked. “As of tonight, our situation is this: there are fifty-two German divisions in Poland, about a million and a half soldiers, led by thousands of tanks. Our air force was blown up on the ground the first morning. Our allies, France and England, have declared war, and made gestures—of course, we had hoped for more. America is neutral, and disinterested. So, as usual, we find ourselves alone. Worse, Stalin has forty divisions on the eastern border and all our intelligence indicates an attack within hours. Meanwhile, we have half a million men in uniform—or, rather, had. Our communications have broken down, but we know of a hundred thousand casualties and a hundred thousand taken prisoner. Probably it’s worse than that. I suppose our view of the immediate future is implicit in the fact that we are burning the files. But it’s not the first time, and this is Poland, and, for us at least, all is not necessarily lost. You agree?”