by Alan Furst
De Milja’s heart hammered in his chest, he felt prickly sweat break out under his arms, he did not even dare a glance to see if the man had accepted his “surrender”: breaking off eye contact. Could not put a hand on the VIS, just tried to shrink down into the seat without a single sign of bravado. He was strong. And unafraid. And the way he carried himself, people knew that, and it would bury him in a hurry if he didn’t learn some other way to be in public.
The two men got off the train one station before Brzesc. From the platform, his enemy squinted at him through the window. De Milja stared at his shoes, a proud man subdued. The Russian didn’t buy it; with a certain casual violence he turned to get back on the train and, de Milja was sure, haul him off. But his partner stopped him and grabbed the shoulder of his coat, pulling him, with a joke and a laugh, along the platform—they had more important things to do. From the corner of his eye, de Milja could see the Russian as he glanced back one last time. He was red in the face. The man, de Milja knew beyond a doubt, had intended to kill him.
In the German sector it was different. Much easier. The black-uniformed border police did not hate Poles as the Russians did. Poles to them were truly untermenschen, subhuman, beneath contempt. They were to be treated, like all Slavs, as beasts, controlled by “zuckerbrot und peitsche”—sweets and the whip. They checked his identity card, then waved him on. He was nothing, they never even saw him.
Of equal interest to de Milja was a siding some fifty miles south of Warsaw: eight German tank cars, pointed east, clearly going to the Soviet ally, marked naphthalene.
Yes, well, what couldn’t one do with that.
23 October, Warsaw. Saint Stanislaus Hospital.
An excellent safe house: all sorts of people went in and out at all hours of the day and night. There were cots for sleeping, meals were served, yet it was far safer than any hotel ever could be.
Room 9 was in the basement, adjacent to the boilers that heated the hospital water. It had a bed, a steel sink, and plaster walls painted pale green in 1903. It had a military map of Poland, a street map— Baedeker—of Warsaw, two steel filing cabinets, a power-boosted radio receiver with an aerial disappearing through a drainpipe entry in an upper corner, three telephones, several tin ashtrays, a scarred wood table with three chairs on one side and one chair on the other. Illumination was provided by a fifteen-watt bulb in a socket in the middle of the ceiling.
Of the three people facing him, de Milja knew one by acquaintance: a Warsaw hellion called Grodewicz who was not, as far as he knew, in the military and who should have been, as far as most of his friends were concerned, in prison. One by reputation: Colonel Jozef Broza, the former military attaché to Belgium. And one not at all, a woman who introduced herself only as “Agata.” She was in her late fifties, with a square jaw, a tip-tilted nose, and thick, dark-blond hair shot with gray, pulled back in a tortoiseshell clip. She had the fine skin of a nun, a filigreed gold wedding band, nicotine stains on the fingers of both hands, and unpolished but well-buffed fingernails. De Milja could easily see her in a country house or on horseback, obviously a member of the upper gentry.
She lit a cigarette, blew smoke through her nostrils, and gave him a good long stare before she started to speak. What she told him was brief but to the point: an underground organization had been formed to fight the Germans and the Russians—it would operate independently in each of the occupied zones. His job would be in the western half of the country, the German half.
The underground was to be called the ZWZ, Zwiazek Walki Zbrojnej—the Union for Armed Struggle. The highest level of command, known as the Sixth Bureau, was based in Paris, part of the Polish government-in-exile now led by General Sikorski. In German-occupied Poland, the ZWZ was headquartered in Warsaw, with regional stations in Cracow, Lodz, Poznan—all the major cities. Operational sections included sabotage, propaganda, communications— couriers and secret mail—and an intelligence service. “You,” she said to de Milja, “are being considered for a senior position in the latter.” She stubbed out her cigarette, lit a fresh one.
“Of course it is folly to say anything in this country in the singular form—we are God’s most plural people and losing wars doesn’t change that. There are, in fact, undergrounds, run by the entire spectrum of political parties: the Communists, the Nationalists, the Catholic Nationalists, the Peasant Party, and so on. The Jews are attempting to organize in their own communities, also subject to political division. Still, the ZWZ is more than ninety percent of the effort and will likely remain so.
“But, whatever name it’s done under, we have several months of hard, dirty fighting ahead of us. We now estimate that the French, with England’s help, are going to need six months to overrun Germany. It’s our job to survive in the interim, and keep the national damage at the lowest possible level. When Germany’s finished off, it will be up to the League of Nations to pry the U.S.S.R. out of Poland and push it back to the August ’39 borders. This will require diplomacy, patience, and perhaps divine intervention—Stalin cares for nothing but brute force. There will be claims for Ukrainian, Byelorussian, and Lithuanian sovereignty, the Jews will want restrictive laws repealed—it won’t ever be what it was before, but that’s maybe not such a bad thing as far as the people in this room are concerned. Any questions?”
“No questions,” de Milja said.
“Right now,” she continued, “we have two problems: the Polish people are in a state of mourning—how could the country be beaten so badly? And we lack explosives, incendiaries, and medicines for the partisan effort. We’re waiting to be supplied by air from Paris, but nothing’s happened yet. They make promises, then more promises. Meanwhile all we can do is insist, and not lose faith.”
Colonel Broza opened a dossier and glanced through it. He was barely five and a half feet tall, with massive shoulders, receding curly hair, and a pugnacious face. When he put on reading glasses, he looked like a peasant turned into a chess master which, the way de Milja heard it, wasn’t so far from the truth.
“Aren’t you something to Eugeniusz Ostrow?”
“Nephew, sir.”
“Which side?”
“My mother’s family.”
“Ah. The countess.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Your uncle . . .” The colonel tried not to laugh. “You must forgive me, I shouldn’t . . . Wasn’t there a formal dinner? A trade minister’s wife, something about a goat?”
“A sheep, I believe it was, sir.”
“In diplomatic sash.”
“Yes, sir.”
The colonel pinched the bridge of his nose. “And then . . . a cook, wasn’t she?”
“A laundress, sir.”
“My God, yes! He married her.”
“A large, formal wedding, sir.”
The woman called Agata cleared her throat.
“Yes, of course, you’re right. You were at Jagiello university?”
“I was.”
“In mathematics?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How’d you do?”
“Very poorly. Tried to follow in my father’s footsteps, but—”
“Tossed out?”
“Not quite. Almost.”
“And then?”
“My uncles helped me get a commission in the army, and an assignment to the military intelligence service, and they sent me off to study cartography.”
“Where was that?”
“First at staff college, then at the French military academy, Saint-Cyr.”
“Three years, it says here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So you speak the language.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And German?”
“My father’s from Silesia, I spent time there when I was growing up. My German’s not too bad, I would say.”
Colonel Broza turned over a page, read for a moment. “Vyborg recommends you,” he said. “I’m going to run the ZWZ intelligence service, I need somebody to handle spec
ial operations—to work with all the sections. You’ll report directly to me, but not too often. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you know Captain Grodewicz?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Spend a little while with him. He’s going to run the ZO unit.”
“Sir?”
“Zwiazek Odwety. Reprisal. You understand?”
It snowed, early in November, and those who read signs and portents in the weather saw malevolence in it. The Germans had lost no time stealing Polish coal, the open railcars rattled ceaselessly across the Oder bridges into ancient, warlike Prussia. The men who ran the coal companies in ancient, warlike Prussia were astonished at how much money they made in this way—commercial logic had always been based on buying a little lower, selling a little higher. But buying for virtually nothing, well, perhaps the wife ought to have the diamond leaf-pin after all. Hitler was scary, he gave these huge, towering, patriotic speeches on the radio, that meant war for God’s sake, and war ruined business, in the long run, and worse. But this, this wasn’t exactly war—this was a form of mercantile heaven, and who got hurt? A few Poles?
The wind blew down from Russia, howled at the windows, piled snow against the door, found every crack, every chip and flaw, and came looking for you in your house. The old people started to die. “This is war!” they shouted in France, but no planes came. Perhaps next week.
Cautiously, from a distance, Captain de Milja tried to keep an eye on his family. He knew where one of the maids lived, and waited for her at night. “Your father is a saint,” the woman said at her kitchen table. “Your mother and your sister are in Hungary, safe, away from the murderers. Your father managed it—I can guess how, there’s barely a zloty in the house these days.”
“What is he doing?”
“He will not leave, he will not go to the country, he will not admit that anything has changed,” the woman said. “Will not.” She shook her head, respect and apprehension mixed together. “He reads and writes, teaches his classes. He is a rock—” She called de Milja by a childhood pet name and the captain looked at his knees. He took a sheaf of zloty notes out of his pocket and laid it on the table. The maid gave him a wry look: How do I explain this?
“Don’t talk about it. Just go to the black market, put something extra on the table, he won’t notice.”
He had the woman turn out her oil lamp, they sat in the dark for a time, listening to the wind whine against the old brick, then he whispered good-bye and slid out the door into the night. Because of the curfew he went doorway to doorway, alert for the sound of German patrol cars. It could be done—anything could be done—but you had to think it through, you had to concentrate. A life lived in flight from the police, a life of evasion, had the same given as always, it hadn’t changed in centuries: they could make a thousand mistakes, you couldn’t make one. Once upon a time, only criminals figured that out. By November 1939, every man, woman, and child in Poland knew it.
Something had to be done. De Milja met with his directorate in Room 9—he was living in a servant’s garret in Mokotow that week and the sudden warmth of the hospital basement made him giddy. He sat in the chair and presented his case: the heart was going out of the people, he could sense it. Colonel Broza agreed, Agata wasn’t sure, Grodewicz thought maybe it didn’t, for the moment, matter. Broza prevailed. All sorts of actions were considered; some violent, some spectacular. Should they humiliate the Germans? What, for an underground army, constituted a resounding success? How would people find out about it? Cigarette smoke hung in the still air, the perpetual dusk in the room grew darker, one of the hospital nuns brought them tea. They made a decision, Agata suggested a name, the rest was up to him.
The name was a retired Warsaw detective called Chomak. De Milja went to see him; found a man with stiff posture, shirt buttoned at the throat but no tie, dark hair combed straight back. Young to be retired, de Milja thought, but the prewar politics of the Warsaw police department could hardly concern him now. Chomak accepted the assignment, a worried wife at his side, a dachshund with a white muzzle sitting alertly by his chair. “Everybody thinks it’s easy to steal,” Chomak said. “But that isn’t true.”
He seemed to take great pleasure in the daily repetitive grind of the work, and always had a certain gleam in his eye: not so easy, is it, this kind of job? They rode trains together, bicycled down snowy roads at the distant edges of Warsaw; following leads, checking stories, seeing for themselves. They needed to steal a plane. Not a warplane, that would have required a massive use of the ZWZ resources. Just a little plane. Working through a list of mechanics and fuel-truck drivers— these names coming from prewar tax records secreted by the intelligence services before the Germans took over—they discovered that the great majority of small aircraft, Fiesler-Storch reconnaissance planes for example, were well guarded by Luftwaffe security forces.
But the Germans did have a gentlemen’s flying club.
Flying clubs had gained great popularity at the time of the record-setting flights of the 1920s and 1930s, and served as training grounds for future fighter pilots who had come to aviation as airplane-crazy teenagers. And so, a few days after German victory, the flying club had taken over a small airfield at Pruszkow, about ten miles west of Warsaw. De Milja and Chomak bicycled slowly along the little road past the field. There wasn’t much to see; an expanse of brown grass, a nylon wind sock on a pole, a hut with a swastika flag, and six single-engine planes, of which two had had their engines taken down to small pieces in the lone hangar.
Part Two: The printer across the river in Praga had all the work he could handle. The Germans loved print; every sort of decree and form and official paper, signs and manuals and instruction sheets and directives, they couldn’t get enough of it. Especially that Gothic typeface. The Wehrmacht, as far as the printer could see, would rather publish than fight. Hell, he didn’t mind. What with four kids and the wife pregnant and his old mother and her old mother and coal a hundred zlotys a sack on the black market, he had to do something. Don’t misunderstand, he was a patriot, had served in the army, but there were mouths to feed.
This book? Yeah, he’d printed that. Where the hell had they ever found it? Look at that. Doesn’t look too bad, does it? Quite a problem at first, didn’t get a call for that sort of thing very often and he and his chief compositor—poor Wladek, killed in the war, rest in peace—had had to work it out together, combining different letters from a variety of fonts. Mostly it was just the usual thing but now and then you got a chance to be creative in this business and that made it all worthwhile did they know what he meant?
Do it again? Well, yes, shouldn’t be a problem. He still had all, well almost all the letters he’d used for this book. He’d have to work at night, probably best to do the typesetting himself—if he remembered how. No, that was a joke. He remembered. What exactly did they need? Single sheet? A snap. Had to have it last week, he supposed. Wednesday soon enough? How many copies? How many? Jesus, the Germans kept him on a paper ration, there was no way he could—oh, well, if that was the way it was, no problem. As for the ink, he’d just add that into the German charges over the next few months, they’d never notice. Not that he habitually did that sort of thing, but, well . . .
It was December before all the other details could be sorted through and taken care of. Chomak spent two nights in the forest bordering the airfield, binoculars trained on the little hut. The light stayed on all night, a glow at the edges of the blackout curtain, and the watchman, a big, brawny fellow with white hair and a beer belly, was conscientious; made a tour of the field and the hangar twice a night.
They found a pilot—not so easy because Polish airmen who survived the war had gone to London and Paris to fight for the Allies. The man they located had flown mail and freight all around the Baltic, but poor eyesight had disqualified him for combat flying. When approached, he was anxious to take on the mission.
They picked up the print
ing in a taxi, storing the string-tied bundles in Chomak’s apartment. The mission was then scheduled for the ninth of December, but that night turned out cold and crisp, with a sky full of twinkling stars. Likewise the tenth and eleventh. The night of the twelfth, the weather turned bad, and the mission was on until an icy snow closed down every road out of Warsaw.
December fourteenth dawned warm and still, the snow turned to slush, and the sky was all fog and thick cloud. A wagon full of turnips transported the leaflets to a forest clearing near the airfield, then de Milja and the pilot arrived by bicycle an hour later. By 5:20 p.m. the field manager and the mechanic had gone home, and the night watchman had arrived. De Milja and his crew knocked on the door around seven. At first the watchman—a German it turned out—struggled and swore when they grabbed him and pulled a pillowcase over his head. Then he decided to cooperate and Chomak started to tie him up, but he changed his mind and got one hand loose and they had to hit him a few times before he’d calm down. Chomak and de Milja then rolled a plane to the gas pump and filled the tank. The pilot clambered in and studied the controls with a flashlight, while de Milja and Chomak pushed the plane to the edge of the grass runway.
At 8:20, Captain de Milja cranked the engine to life, the pilot made the thumbs-up sign, the plane bumped over the rocky field, picked up speed, then staggered up into the sky—airborne and flying a mission for free Poland.
The trick for the pilot was to get the plane down—quickly.
There certainly was hell to pay in the Warsaw air-defense sector— the Germans could hear something buzzing around up there in the clouds but they couldn’t see it, the searchlight beams swept back and forth but all they found was gray mist. The antiaircraft batteries let loose, the drone of the plane vanished to the west, the pilot headed around east on his compass until he picked up two gasoline-in-a-barrel fires lit off by de Milja and Chomak, then wasted no time getting down on the lumpy field, since Luftwaffe nightfighters were just that moment slicing through the sky over Warsaw looking for something to shoot at.