by Alan Furst
28 March, 3:40 a.m. De Milja woke suddenly. He listened, concentrated. First the strange, whispery silence of a city under curfew. Then a board creaked in the hallway.
So, 9 mm from the nightstand, safety thumbed off. He sat up slowly, sighted on the crack where the door met the jamb. The knob turned delicately, a cautious hand on the other side. De Milja took a breath and held it.
Madame Kuester. In a silk robe, hair in a long braid. “Don’t kill me, please,” she said. He understood only by watching her mouth move, her voice barely made a sound. He lowered the gun. “Germans,” she said. Gestured with her eyes. She walked down the hall to her room, he followed, in undershirt and shorts. He stood close to her in the small room, could smell the laundry soap she washed with. The shade moved slightly in the air, the window behind it open an inch. From the roof across the narrow street, a hushed “Ocht-svansig, Ocht-svansig,” then a brief hiss of radio static. Eight-twenty, then, he thought. Meaning I’m in place, or proceed to apartment, or they’re all asleep, or whatever it meant. Now de Milja’s decision had been made for him: orders were specific, the response detailed; and he was not to permit himself to be taken alive. “Get dressed, please,” he said.
He walked down the hallway, tapped lightly at the door of the master bedroom. He heard the man and his wife breathing deeply inside, opened the door, had finally to lean over and touch the man on his bare shoulder. They made love tonight, he thought. The man was immediately awake, saw de Milja and the 9 mm and understood everything.
He went back to Madame Kuester’s room. When he opened the door she was naked, standing in front of an open bureau drawer. He knew this profile—the curve of her abdomen, flat bottom, heavy thighs. Her head turned toward him. She didn’t exactly pause, skipped a single beat perhaps, then took underwear from the drawer and stepped into it. He wanted to hold her against him, something he had never done before. There were family noises in the hall; the children, the parents, an angry word. “Best to say good-bye,” she said.
“Good-bye,” he said. He couldn’t see her eyes in the darkened room.
He hurried back to his room, put on a sweater, wool pants, heavy shoes, and a raincoat. The gun fit in the raincoat pocket. From inside a book he selected an ausweis—German work pass—and other identification meant for emergencies, as well as a packet of zloty notes and some gold coins. The family and Madame Kuester were waiting for him at the front door.
The bolt and lock mechanisms were heavily oiled, just a soft click and de Milja was looking out at the landing. A current of chilly air from the staircase meant that the street door was standing open. This was not normal. De Milja turned, silently let the others know what had happened. The reaction was calm; the father held a large military revolver, his thirteen-year-old son had its twin. The man smiled and nodded gravely. I understand.
Three flights below, somebody tried to walk silently through the lobby. Others followed, one of them stifled a cough. They could have climbed the stairs quietly if they’d taken off their boots, but the SS didn’t do things like that, so de Milja and the family could hear them coming. When they came around the curve of the staircase onto the second floor, de Milja took the 9 mm out of his pocket and climbed the iron rungs of a ladder that led to a hatch that opened onto the roof. He tested the hatch with his gun hand, moving it only enough to make sure it wasn’t secured from the other side. He was reasonably sure there were German police on the roof.
They reached the floor below. They weren’t very careful about noise now, de Milja could hear the heels of their boots and the sound of leather belts and holster grommets and breathing deepened by excitement and anticipation. Then they pounded their fists on a door and yelled for somebody to open up, the guttural German rolled and echoed up the open staircase and rang on the tile landings. The door was flung open, knob hammering the wall, then there were shouts and running footsteps and a wail of terror as the downstairs neighbor was arrested.
They had, de Milja calculated, at most an hour.
The middle-aged couple who lived below would be taken to Szucha Avenue headquarters, a sergeant would put down basic information and fill out forms, and when the interrogators finally got busy they would realize that this was not Captain Alexander de Milja or the man in the brown raincoat or whatever description they had. Then they would come back.
There was, of course, at least the mathematical possibility that the police had not made an error, but those who indulged themselves in that kind of thinking were no longer alive in Poland in the spring of 1940.
A few minutes after five in the morning, when the curfew ended, the wife, both children, and Madame Kuester left the apartment with false identity cards and a wicker basket on wheels they used for shopping. Moments later, they came to the side street and turned right. Which meant, to de Milja looking out the window, that German police remained on guard in the lobby, checking papers as the tenants left the building. Five minutes later, de Milja was alone—the former customs official had walked out the door of his apartment, probably never to see it again. He too turned right at the side street, which confirmed the earlier signal, and touched his hair, which meant the Germans were checking closely. At 5:15, de Milja climbed the ladder, cautiously raised the hatch, then hoisted himself out onto the roof.
The dawn was a shock after the close apartment—cold air, dark blue sky, shattered red cloud in streaks that curved to the horizon. He took a moment to get his bearings, smelled cigarette smoke nearby, then knelt behind a plaster wall at the foot of a chimney. Somebody was up here with him, possibly a German policeman. He held the 9 mm in his right hand, pressed the fingertips of his left hand against the tar surface of the roof. He could feel somebody pacing: one, two, three, four, five. Pause. Then back again. Everything de Milja knew suggested a police guard on the roof—the raid, the document control at the front door. Germans were thorough, this was the sort of thing they did. He wanted to see for himself, but resisted the temptation to rise up and look around—the roof was cluttered; sheets hung on clotheslines, chimneys, ventilation pipe outlets, two tarpaper-roofed housings that covered the entries to staircases.
A few feet away, across a low parapet and above a narrow alley, was a fire escape on the sixth floor of the building next door. From there, he had several choices: climb in an apartment window, descend to the alley, or go up to the roof, which abutted two neighboring buildings, one of them a factory with heavy truck traffic in and out. All he had to do was jump the space above the alley.
Down in the street, a tramcar arrived, ringing its bell, grinding to a stop, then starting up again. He heard the clop of hoofbeats—perhaps the wagon that delivered coal—and the high/low siren of German police wagons as they sped through the city streets. The air smelled of coal smoke and onions frying in fat, and he could see the morning star, still sharp, but fading in the gathering daylight. He heard the rasp of a window forced up, he heard a woman laugh—shrill, abandoned, it was so funny she didn’t care how she sounded.
Turning his head, he saw a woman appear at an open window in an adjacent building. Her apartment was one story above the roof, so he found himself looking up at her. She wore an old print dress with the sleeves rolled up, an apron, and a kerchief with the knot tied in the middle of her forehead. Her face was determined—here it was just after dawn and she was cleaning her house. She poked a dustmop out the window and gave it a good bang against the sill, then another, just so it remembered who was boss.
When she saw de Milja, she stared as though he were an animal in a zoo. Of course, he thought. What she sees is a man with an automatic pistol in his hand, kneeling behind the base of a chimney. Hiding behind the base of a chimney. Hmm. Probably a criminal. But he’s not alone on the roof. From where she stood—she gave the mop a desultory rap just to keep up appearances—she could see another man. This man was pacing, and smoking a cigarette. Perhaps, if God wills, de Milja thought, he’s wearing a uniform, or if he’s in civilian clothes maybe he has on one of those stupid
little hats with alpine brushes the Germans liked.
De Milja watched the woman, she stared back shamelessly, then looked away, probably at the pacing man. Then back at him. He sensed a motion behind her, and she was briefly distracted. She almost, he felt, turned away from the window and went back to cleaning the apartment—somebody in the room had told her to do that. Yes, de Milja thought, that was it. She turned her head and said something, something dismissive and sharp, then returned to watching the men on the roof below her. She had broad shoulders and big red hands— nobody told her what to do. De Milja now faced her directly and spread his arms, palms up in the universal interrogatory gesture: what’s going on?
She didn’t react. She wasn’t going to help a thief—her expression was suspicious and hostile. But then, a moment later, she changed her mind. She held out a hand, fingers stiff: stop. De Milja put his hand back on the surface of the roof, three, four, five. Pause. The woman held her signal. Then, just as a new sequence of footsteps began, she beckoned abruptly, excitedly: yes, it’s all right now, he can’t see you. Three, four, five. Pause. No, stop, he’s facing your way. Three, four, five. Pause. Yes, it’s . . .
De Milja leaped up and ran for his life.
He almost got away with it.
But if he could feel the policeman pacing on the roof, the man could feel it when he ran. “Halt!”
As de Milja reached the parapet he could see the woman’s face with perfect clarity: her mouth rounded into an O, her hand came up and pressed the side of her face. She was horrified at what was about to happen. The first shot snapped the air next to his ear just as his foot hit the parapet. It was a long way across. Seven floors down, broken glass in the alley glittered up at him. And the parapet was capped with curved, slippery, ceramic tile. It was a bad jump, one foot slipped as he took off. He flailed at the empty air, and he almost cleared the railing, but then his left heel caught and that spilled him forward, his head hitting the iron floor of the fire escape as something pinged in the stairway above him and somebody shouted.
He had not felt the bullet, but he was on his knees, vision swimming, a rock in his chest that blocked his air. He went away. Came back. Looked down at a windowsill, worn and weathered gray. A big drop of blood fell on it, then another. His heart raced, he clawed at the iron fretwork, somehow stood up. The world spun around him; whistles, shouts—a brick exploded and he turned away from it. Saw the ladder to the floor below, made himself half slide, half tumble to the iron platform.
His escape—from everything, forever—was six stories down into the alley and he knew it, he just had to get one leg over the railing and then the other and then the terrors of Szucha Avenue no longer existed. Hide under the ground, they will never touch you. He was going to do it—then he didn’t. Instead, the window on the fire escape exploded into somebody’s kitchen—glass, blood, and de Milja all showing up for breakfast.
A family around a table; a still life, a spoon frozen in air between bowl and mouth, a woman at a stove, a man in suspenders. Then he was in a parlor; a canary tweeted, in a mirror above a buffet a man with bright blood spattered on his face. He fumbled at the family’s locks, somehow worked the right bolt the right way, the door opened, then closed behind him.
He froze. Then the door on the other side of the landing flew open and a man beckoned fiercely from the darkness of his hall. “This way,” he said, voice thick with excitement. De Milja couldn’t see— objects doubled, then faded into ghosts of themselves—then a bald man with a heavy face and small, restless eyes emerged from the fog. He wore an undershirt, and held his pants up with his hand.
When de Milja didn’t move, the man grabbed him—he had the strength of the mad, he may have been mad for all de Milja knew— and shoved him down a long, dark hallway. Once again de Milja started to fade out, he felt the wall sliding past on his right shoulder as the man half-carried him along. There was a sense of still air, the odor of closed rooms. A hallway made unlikely angles, sharp turns into blank walls, a wood panel swung wide, and he found himself in a box that smelled of freshly sawn planks. Then it was dark, with a heavy silence, and as he blacked out he realized that he had been entombed.
There was more. It went on from there, but he was less and less a part of it. Merely something of value. It was not so bad to be something of value, he discovered. He was fed into a Saving Machine—a mechanism that knew better than to expect anything of fugitives, the damaged and the hunted. It simply saved them. So all de Milja ever retained of the next few days were images, remnants, as he was moved here and there, an object in someone else’s operation, hidden and re-hidden, the treasure of an anxious miser.
He came to rest on a couch in a farmhouse, a place of palpable safety. It was drizzling, and he could smell wet earth and spring. It took him back to Tarnopol, to the Volhynia. There too they burned oak logs, wet dogs dried by the fire, somebody wore oilskins, and the smell of a stone house in the rain was cut by bay rum, which the Ostrow uncles always used after shaving.
His head ached, his mouth was dry as chalk. A young woman doctor sat on the edge of the couch, looked in his eyes with a penlight, then put a delicate finger on a place above his forehead. “Hurt?” she asked.
“Not much.”
“I’m the one who sewed you up,” she said. “In a few days we’ll take them out.”
He had six stitches in his hairline. He had not been hit by a bullet, but the fall on the fire escape had given him a concussion.
An hour later an adjutant took him upstairs, to an office in an old farm bedroom with a little fireplace. The man behind a long worktable had tousled gray hair and mustache and the pitted complexion of childhood smallpox. He wore a country jacket with narrow shoulders and a thick wool tie. When he stood to shake hands, de Milja saw that he was tall and thin. “Captain,” he said quietly, indicating a chair.
He was called Major Olenik, and he was de Milja’s new superior officer. “You might as well hear all the bad news at once,” he said. “The basement of Saint Stanislaus Hospital was raided by an SS unit, what files were there were taken. Colonel Broza was wounded, and captured. The woman you knew as Agata swallowed a cyanide capsule. You and Captain Grodewicz survived.”
For a moment, de Milja didn’t say anything. Then, “How did that happen?”
Olenik’s shrug was eloquent: let’s not waste our time with theories, we don’t know and it’s likely we won’t ever know. “Of course we are working on that,” Olenik said. “Did you know who Agata was?” he asked.
“I didn’t, no.”
“Biochemist. One of the best in Europe.”
Olenik cleared his throat. “The Sixth Bureau in Paris informed us, a few days ago, that our senior intelligence officer in France has been relieved of duty. We are going to send you as his replacement, Captain. You studied at Saint-Cyr for three years, is that correct?”
“Yes. 1923 to 1926.”
“And your French is fluent?”
“It’s acceptable. Good workable French spoken by a Pole. I’ve read in it, in order not to lose it, but conversation will take a few weeks.”
“We’re sending you out, with couriers. Up to Gdynia, then by freighter across the Baltic to Sweden. We’ve created an identity and a legend for you. Once in France, you’ll report to the Sixth Bureau Director of Intelligence in Paris. It’s your decision, of course, but I want to add, parenthetically, that you are known to the German security services in Poland.” He paused, waiting for de Milja to respond.
“The answer is yes,” de Milja said.
The major acknowledged his response with a polite nod.
Later they discussed de Milja’s escape from the Germans. He learned that the customs official, his family and Madame Kuester, had gotten away successfully and been taken to safety in the countryside.
As for the man who had hidden him in his apartment. He was not in the underground, according to Olenik. “But he did have an acquaintance who he believed to be in the ZWZ, he confided in her, and she
knew who to talk to. Word was passed to us, and the escape-andevasion people picked you up, moved you around for a time, eventually brought you down here.”
“I owe that man my life,” de Milja said. “But he was—perhaps he was not entirely sane.”
“A strange man,” Olenik said. “Perhaps a casualty of war. But his hiding place, well, it’s common now. People turning their homes into magicians’ boxes, some of it is art, really. Double walls, false ceilings, secret stairways, sections of floorboard on hinges, drawer pulls that unlock hidden passageways to other buildings.”
Olenik paused and thought about it. “Yes, I suppose he was a little crazy. What he built was bizarre, I went to see it, and it was, byzantine. Still, you were lucky—your mad carpenter was a good carpenter. Because the Gestapo did search that apartment, every apartment in that building, in fact. But to find you they would have had to rip out the walls, and that day they didn’t bother. That’s not always the case— they’ve turned Jewish apartments into sawdust—but all they did was break up some furniture, and so here you are.”
Olenik smiled suddenly. “We must look at the bright side. At least the Kulturtrager”—it meant culture-bringer, a cherished German notion about themselves—“brought us ‘subhumans’ some new and adventurous ideas in architecture.”
3 April 1940. The “subhumans” turned out to be adept pupils, gathered attentively at the feet of the Kulturtrager. The Germans had, for example, a great passion for important paper. It was, all prettily stamped and signed and franked and checked, order and discipline made manifest. Such impressive German habits, the Poles thought, were worthy of imitation.