The Polish Officer ns-3

by Alan Furst

  Then war came. And from the fourth of June to the twenty-eighth of June, the great brasserie slumbered in darkness behind its locked shutters.

  But such a place could not die any more than the city of Paris could; it had come alive again, and table fourteen once again took center stage at its nightly theater. Some of the regulars returned; Mario Thoeni was often there—though his friend Adelstein had not been seen lately—Count Iava still came by, as did Kiko Bettendorf, the racecar driver and Olympic fencer for Germany, now serving in the local administration.

  Kiko’s stylish friends, on arriving in Paris from Hamburg or Munich, had made the Brasserie Heininger a second home. On this particular summer night, Freddi Schoen was there, just turned twenty-eight, wearing a handsomely tailored naval officer’s uniform that set off his angular frame and pretty hazel eyes. Next to him sat his cousin, Traudl von Behr, quite scarlet with excitement, and her close friend, the Wehrmacht staff officer Paul Jünger. They had been joined at table fourteen by the White Russian general Vassily Fedin, who’d given the Red Army such a bad time outside Odessa in 1919; the general’s longtime fellow-émigré, the world-wandering poet Boris Lezhev; and the lovely Genya Beilis, of the Parthenon Press publishing family. Completing the party were M. Pertot—whose Boucheries Pertot provided beef to all German installations in the Lower Normandy region— tonight accompanied by his beautiful niece; and the Baron Baillot de Coutry, whose company provided cement for German construction projects along the northern coasts of France and Belgium; tonight accompanied by his beautiful niece.

  Just after midnight—the Brasserie Heininger was untroubled by the curfew, the occupation authorities had quickly seen to that—Freddi Schoen tapped a crystal vase with his knife, and held a glass of Pétrus up to the light. “A toast,” he said. “A toast.”

  The group took a moment to subside—not everybody spoke quite the same language, but enough people spoke enough of them—French, German, English—so that everybody more or less understood, with occasional help from a neighbor, most of what was going on. In this milieu one soon learned that a vague smile was appropriate to more than ninety percent of what went on in the world.

  “To this night,” Freddi said, turning the glass back and forth in front of the light. “To these times.” There was more, everybody waited. M. Pertot, all silver hair and pink skin, smiled encouragement. “To,” Freddi said. The niece of Baron Baillot de Coutry blinked twice.

  “Wine and friendship?” the poet Lezhev offered.

  Freddi Schoen stared at him a moment. This was his toast. But then, Lezhev was a man of words. “Yes,” Freddi said, just the bare edge of a sulk in his voice. “Wine and friendship.”

  “Hear, hear,” said M. Pertot, raising his glass in approval. “One must drink to such a wine.” He paused, then said, “And friendship. Well, these days, that means something.”

  Freddi Schoen smiled. That’s what he’d been getting at—unities, harmonies.

  “One Europe,” General Fedin said. “We’ve had too many wars, too much squabbling. We must go forward together.” He had a hard face, the bones sharply evident beneath the skin, and smoked a cigarette in an ivory holder clenched between his teeth.

  Jünger excused himself from the table, M. Pertot spoke confidentially to his niece, the waiter poured wine in Mademoiselle Beilis’s glass.

  “Is that what you meant, Herr Lezhev?” Freddi said quietly.

  “Yes. We’ll have one Europe now, with strong leadership. And strength is the only thing we Europeans understand.”

  Freddi Schoen nodded agreement. He was fairly drunk, and seemed preoccupied with some interior dialogue. “I envy you your craft,” he said after a moment.

  “Mine?” Lezhev’s smile was tart.

  “Yes, yours. It is difficult,” Freddi said.

  “It cannot be ‘easy’ to be a naval officer, Lieutenant Schoen.”

  “Pfft.” Freddi Schoen laughed to himself. “Sign a paper, give an order. The petty officers, clerks, you know, tell me what to do. It can be technical. But people like yourself, who can see a thing, and can make it come alive.” He shook his head.

  Lezhev squinted one eye. “You write, Lieutenant.” A good-humored accusation.

  A pink flush spread along Freddi Schoen’s jawline, and he shook his head.

  “No? Then what?”

  “I, ah, put some things on canvas.”

  “You paint.”

  “I try, sometimes . . .”

  “Portraits? Nudes?”

  “Country scenes.”

  “Now that is difficult.”

  “I try to take the countryside, and to express an emotion. To feel what emotion it has, and to bring that out. The melancholy of autumn. In spring, abandon.”

  Lezhev smiled, and nodded as though confirming something to himself—now this fellow makes sense, all night I wondered, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

  “Here is . . . guess who!” The wild shout came from Lieutenant Jünger, who had returned to the table with a tall, striking Frenchwoman in captivity. She was a redhead, fortyish, with a Cupid’s-bow mouth, carmine lipstick, and a pair of enormous breasts corseted to sharp points in a black silk evening dress. Jünger held her tightly above the elbow.

  “Please forgive the intrusion,” she said.

  “Tell them!” Jünger shouted. “You must!” He was a small-boned man with narrow shoulders and tortoiseshell eyeglasses. Very drunk and sweaty and pale at the moment, and swaying back and forth.

  “My name is Fifi,” she said. “My baptismal name is Françoise, but Fifi I am called.”

  Jünger doubled over and howled with laughter. Pertot and Baillot de Coutry and the two nieces wore the taut smiles of people who just know the punchline of the joke will be hilarious when it comes.

  Freddi Schoen said, “Paul?” but Jünger gasped for breath and, shaking the woman by jerking on her elbow, managed to whisper, “Say what you do! Say what you do!”

  Her smile was now perhaps just a degree forced. “I work in the cloakroom—take the customers’ coats and hats.”

  “The hatcheck girl! Fifi the French hatcheck girl!” Jünger whooped with laughter and grabbed at the table to steady himself; the cloth began to slide but Pertot—the cheerful, expectant smile on his face remaining absolutely fixed in place—shot out a hand and grabbed the bottle of Pétrus. A balloon glass of melon balls in kirsch tumbled off the edge of the table and several waiters came rushing over to clean up.

  “Bad Paul, bad Paul.” Traudl von Behr’s eyes glowed with admiration. She had square shoulders and straw hair and very white skin that had turned even redder at Lieutenant Jünger’s performance. “Well, sit down,” she said to the tall Frenchwoman. “You must tell us all about those hats, and how you check them.”

  Jünger shrieked with laughter. The corner of Fifi’s mouth trembled and a man with gray hair materialized at her side and led her away. “A problem in the cloakroom!” he called back over his shoulder, joining the mood just enough to make good their escape.

  “Those two! They were like that in school,” Freddi Schoen said to Lezhev. “We all were.” He smiled with amused recollection. “Such a sweet madness,” he added. “Such a special time. Do you know the University of Göttingen?”

  “I don’t,” Lezhev said.

  “If only I had your gift—it is not like other places, and the students are not like other students. Their world has,” he thought a moment, “a glow!” he said triumphantly.

  Lezhev understood. Freddi Schoen could see that he did. Strange to find such sympathy in a Russian, usually blunt and thick-skinned. A pea hit him in the temple. He covered his eyes with his hand—what could you do with such friends? He glanced over to see Traudl von Behr using a page torn from the carte des vins, rolled up into a blowpipe. She was bombarding a couple at another table, who pretended not to notice.

  “It’s hopeless,” Freddi Schoen said to Lezhev. “But I would like to continue this conversation some other time.”


  “This week, perhaps?”

  Freddi Schoen started to answer, then Jünger yelled his name so he shrugged and nodded yes and turned to see what his friend wanted.

  Lezhev excused himself and went to the palatial men’s room, all sage-colored marble and polished brass fixtures. He stared at his face in the mirror and took a deep breath. He seemed to be ten thousand miles away from everything. From one of the stalls came the voice of General Fedin, a rough-edged voice speaking Russian. “We’re alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Careful with him, Alexander.”

  Noontime, the late July day hot and still. The German naval staff had chosen for its offices a financier’s mansion near the Hôtel Bristol, just a few steps off the elegant Faubourg St.-Honoré. Lezhev waited in a park across the street as naval officers in twos and threes trotted briskly down the steps of the building and walked around the cobbled carriage path on their way to lunch. When Freddi Schoen appeared outside the door of the mansion and peered around, Lezhev waved.

  “You’re certain this will be acceptable?” Freddi Schoen asked, as they walked toward the river.

  “I’m sure,” Lezhev said. “Everything’s going well?”

  “Ach yes, I suppose it is.”

  “Every day something new?” Lezhev said.

  “No. You’d have to be in the military to understand. Sometimes a superior officer will really tell off a subordinate. It mustn’t be taken to heart—it’s just the way these things have always been done.”

  “Well then, tomorrow it’s your turn.”

  “Of course. You’re absolutely right to see it that way.”

  They walked through the summer streets, crossed the Seine at the place de la Concorde. Parisians now rode about on bicycle-cart affairs, taxi-bicycles that advertised themselves as offering “Speed, comfort, safety!” The operators—only yesterday Parisian cabdrivers—had changed neither their manners nor their style; now they simply pedaled madly instead of stomping on the accelerator.

  “Are you hard at work writing?” Schoen asked.

  “Yes, when I can. I have a small job at Parthenon, it takes up most of my time.”

  “We all face that.” They admired a pair of French girls in frocks so light they floated even on a windless day. “Good afternoon, ladies,” Schoen said with a charming smile, tipping his officer’s cap. They ignored him with tosses of the head, but not the really serious kind. It seemed to make him feel a little better. “May I ask what you are writing about these days?”

  “Oh, all that old Russian stuff—passion for the land, Slavic melancholy, life and fate. You know.”

  Schoen chuckled. “You keep a good perspective, that’s important, I think.”

  They reached the Saint-Germain-des-Prés quarter, one of the centers of Parisian arts, and Parisian artiness as well. The cafés were busy; the customers played chess, read the collaborationist newspapers, argued, flirted, and conspired in a haze of pipe smoke. Freddi Schoen and Lezhev turned up a narrow street with three German staff cars parked half on the sidewalk. Schoen was nervous. “It won’t be crowded, will it?”

  “You won’t notice.”

  They climbed five flights of stairs to an unmarked door that stood open a few inches. Inside they found nine or ten German officers, hands clasped behind their backs or insouciantly thrust into pockets, very intent on what they were watching. One of them, a Wehrmacht colonel, turned briefly to see who’d come in. The message on his face was clear: do not make your presence evident here, no coughing or boot scraping or whispering or, God forbid, conversation.

  At the far end of the room, lit by a vast skylight, Pablo Picasso, wearing wide trousers and rope-soled Basque espadrilles, was sketching with a charcoal stick on a large sheet of newsprint pinned to the wall. At first the shape seemed a pure abstraction, but then a horse emerged. One leg bent up, head turned sideways and pressed forward and down—it was not natural, not the way a horse’s body worked. Lezhev understood it as tension: an animal form forced into an alien position. Understood it all too well.

  “My God,” Freddi Schoen whispered in awe.

  The colonel’s head swiveled round, his ferocious eye turning them both to stone as Picasso’s charcoal scratched across the rough paper.

  2 August. Occupation or no occupation, Parisians left Paris in August: streets empty, heat flowing in waves from the stone city. A telephone call from Freddi Schoen canceled lunch near the Parthenon Press office. Too busy.

  4 August. Late-afternoon coffee. But not on the Faubourg St.-Honoré. The addition of extra staff, he apologized, had forced his department to find new, likely temporary, quarters: a former college of pharmacy not far from the wine warehouses at the eastern end of the city.

  7 August. A soirée to celebrate Freddi Schoen’s new painting studio in the Latin Quarter. Cocktails at seven, supper to follow. Invitations had been sent out in late July, but now the arrival time was changed. Telephone calls from a German secretary set it for eight. Then nine-thirty. Freddi Schoen did not appear until eleven-fifteen, pale and sweaty and out of breath.

  The paintings, hung around the room and displayed on three easels, weren’t so bad. They were muddy, and dense. The landscapes themselves, almost exclusively scenes of canals, might have been, probably were, luminous. But light and shadow were unknown to Freddi Schoen. Here you had woods. So. There you had water. So. The former was green. The latter was blue. So.

  After a few glasses of wine, Freddi shook his head sadly. He could see. “In the countryside it is right there before you, right there,” he said to Lezhev. “But then you try to make it on the canvas, and look what happens.”

  “Oh,” said Lezhev, “don’t carry on so. We’ve all been down this road.”

  It was, Lezhev could tell, the we that thrilled Freddi Schoen—he was one of them. “It’s time that helps,” he added, the kindly poet.

  “Time!” Freddi said. “I tell you I don’t have it—some of these I did when everybody else was eating lunch.”

  “Let me fill your glass,” Genya said. Her kindness was practiced— she’d been soothing frantic writers since girlhood, by now it was second nature. She well knew the world where nothing was ever good enough. So, nothing was. So what?

  Freddi Schoen smiled gratefully at her, then some German friends demanded his attention. Genya leaned close to Lezhev and said, “Can you take me home when this is over?”

  Clothes off, laid on a chair along with Lezhev’s personality. A relief after a day that seemed a hundred hours long. De Milja stared at the ceiling above Genya’s bed, picked over the evening, decided that he hadn’t done all that well. I’m a mapmaker, he thought. I can’t do these other things, these deceptions. All he’d ever wanted was to show people the way home—now look what he’d become, the world’s most completely lost man.

  Not his fault that he was cut off from the Sixth Bureau in London— he was improvising, doing the best he could, doing what he supposed they would have wanted done and waiting for them to reestablish contact. Yes, but even so, he said to himself. This wasn’t an operation, it was an, an adventure. And he suspected it wasn’t going to end well for anybody.

  But, otherwise, what?

  “Share this with me,” Genya said. He inhaled her breath and perfume mixed in the smoke. She had a dark shadow on her upper lip, and a dark line that ran from her naval to her triangle. Or at least that’s where it disappeared, like a seam. He traced it gently with his fingernail.

  She put the cigarette out delicately, took the ashtray off the bed and put it on the night table. Then she settled back, took his hand and put it between her legs and held it there. Then she sighed. It wasn’t a passionate sigh, it simply meant she liked his hand between her legs, and not much else in the world made her happy, and the sigh was more for the second part of the thought than the first. “Yes,” she said, referring to the state of affairs down below, “that’s for you.”

  Of course in a few hours she would spy for him, if that was w
hat he wanted. The schleuh—the Germans—couldn’t just be allowed to, well, they couldn’t just be allowed. This was France, she was French, she’d sung the national anthem in school with her little hand on her little breast—excuse her, her little heart. If the world demanded fighting, she’d fight. Just the instant they got out of bed. What? Not quite yet?

  “France spreads her legs” he’d once said in a moment of frustration. Yes, she supposed it rather did, everybody had always said so. They’d said so in Latin, for God’s sake, so it must be true. Did he not, after all, approve of spread legs? Did he not wish to spread her legs? Oh, pardon her, évidemment a mistake on her part. And did he also find France, like her, duck-assed? What did that mean? It meant this.

  There was an English pilot, shot out of the sky in the early raids over France, they had heard about him. He’d been taken in by farmers up in Picardy, where they’d lost everything to the Germans in the last war. They knew that trained pilots were weapons, just like rifles or tanks. Not innocent up there. So they passed him along, from the curé to the schoolmistress to the countess to the postman, and he went to ground in Paris in late June, just after the surrender. Certainly he would be heading back to England, there to fight once more. How else could he arrange to be shot down and killed—a fate which had danced maddeningly out of reach on the previous try.