The Polish Officer ns-3

by Alan Furst

  The fishing boat that took de Milja from Marseilles landed on the coast of Spain at night, aided by Sixth Bureau operatives who signaled with flashlights from the beach. Yes, Spain was neutral, but not all that neutral. He was hustled into a shiny black sedan and driven at speed to the outskirts of Barcelona. There, in a bedroom on the third floor of a villa with heavy drapes drawn across the window, he was served a chicken and a bottle of wine. His keepers were young Poles—freshfaced, earnest, well conditioned, and cheerfully homicidal. There was a pile of books on the table—put a pile of books on his table, damn it. He read one of them for an hour; In spring, the Alpine lakes of Slovenia are a miracle of red sunsets and leaping trout—then fell asleep.

  Various terrors he had avoided feeling now returned in force, and he woke up eighteen hours later having sweated through a wool blanket. He remembered only a few fragments of those dreams and forgot them as soon as he could. He staggered into the bathroom, shaved, showered, had a good long look at himself in the mirror. So, this was who he was now, well, that was interesting to know. Older, leaner, marked with fatigue, rather remote, and very watchful. On a chair he found clean slacks, a shirt, and a sweater. He put them on. Shifted the drape an inch aside from the window and stared out at the brown autumn hills. Just the motion of the drape apparently caused a restless footstep or two on the gravel path below his room, so he let it fall back into place. Why didn’t they just bar the window and put him in stripes and stop all the pretense?

  Vyborg showed up that morning. In a good brown suit and a striped British tie. Had there always been a gentleman under that uniform, or was it just a trick that London tailors did? They could do nothing, however, about the face: the Baltic knight, squinting into a blizzard and ready to cut down a company of Russian pikemen, was still very much in evidence. He suggested a walk in the hills and they did that, with guards following a little way down the path. November, de Milja thought, was a strange time in dry countries; faded colors, sky gray and listless. Vyborg told de Milja that his wife had died. They walked in silence for a long time after that. Finally de Milja was able to say, “Where is she?”

  “A small cemetery in the town where the spa is. A mass was said for her. It had to be done quietly, but it was done.” They walked for a moment, through a stand of low pines. “My sympathies, Alexander,” Vyborg said softly. “It comes from all of us, from everyone who knows you.”

  “How, please.”

  “Influenza.”

  De Milja was again unable to speak.

  “She was working in the kitchen,” Vyborg went on. “Some of us do best in bad times, and that was true of her. She had a high fever for three days, and then she died in her sleep.”

  “I think I would like to go back to the house,” de Milja said.

  He visited Barcelona once or twice, but it was just another conquered city. It had the silence that passed for peace, the courtesy of fear. The police state was in place, people in the street avoided his eyes. There were still bullet chips and shell holes in the buildings, but the masons were at work, and there were glaziers, their glass sheets balanced on the sides of their mules, shouting up the sides of apartment houses to announce their presence.

  He spent a lot of time walking in the hills, sometimes with two men from the Sixth Bureau; one clerkish, a man who sat behind a desk, the other with a hard, bald head, a well-groomed mustache, and small, angry eyes. They needed to know about various things in France and de Milja told them what he could. The bald-headed man, though he did not come out and say it, was clearly concerned with the construction of new and better wireless/telegraphy sets, and de Milja didn’t feel he was able to help much. The other man asked questions about French political life under the Germans and de Milja helped him, if possible, even less. But they were decent men who tried to make things easy for him—as long as we all happen to find ourselves in Spain, why not spend a moment chatting about the views of the French communist party—and de Milja did the best he could for them.

  Again and again, he thought about his wife. He had, in October of 1939, said good-bye to her, left her in charge of her destiny, as she’d asked. Maybe he shouldn’t have done that. But then he had never once been able to make her, crazy or sane, do anything she did not want to do.

  Down the road from the villa was a tiny café in the garden of an old woman’s house. She had a granddaughter who said gracias when she served coffee, and when it wasn’t raining de Milja and Vyborg would sit at a rusty iron table and talk about the war.

  “Operation Sealion has failed,” Vyborg said. “The first time Hitler’s been beaten.”

  “Do we know what actually happened?” de Milja asked.

  “We know some of it. It wasn’t a total victory, of course, nothing like that. The RAF sank 21 out of 170 troop transports. That’s a loss, but not a crippling loss for people contemplating an invasion from the sea. Out of 1,900 barges, 214 were destroyed. Only five tugboats out of 368; only three motorboats out of more than a thousand.”

  “Three, did you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what made them quit?”

  Vyborg shrugged. “An invasion is more than ships. A five-hundredton ammunition dump was blown up at Den Helder, in Holland. On the sixth of September, a rations depot was burned out. In Belgium, an ammunition train was destroyed. Then down at Le Havre, where a number of German divisions were based, the waterworks were put out of commission. There was also the training exercise—you saw some of the results at Nieuwpoort, and German hospital trains crossed Belgium all that night. Therefore, if the RAF could hit a practice run through that hard, what would they do once the real thing got started? Funny thing about the German character, they’re very brave, not at all afraid to die, but they are afraid to fail. In some ways, our best hope for Germany is the Wehrmacht—the generals. If Germany loses again, and then again, perhaps they can be persuaded that honor lies in a change of government.”

  “Can that really happen?”

  Vyborg thought about it. “Maybe,” he said. “With time.”

  It drizzled, then stopped. The little girl came and put up a faded umbrella and wiped the table with a cloth and said, “Gracias.” She smiled at de Milja, then ran away.

  “One last time, the people who knew you as Lezhev?” Vyborg said.

  “Freddi Schoen.”

  “Dead.”

  “Jünger, the Wehrmacht staff officer.”

  “Transferred. In Germany at the OKW headquarters.”

  “Traudl von Behr.”

  “She’s in Lille, at the moment. Aide to a staff major running transports from northern France to Germany.”

  “There were more Germans, but they didn’t know who I was. Somebody they saw here and there, perhaps Russian.”

  “Be absolutely certain,” Vyborg said.

  De Milja nodded that he was.

  12 January 1941.

  In the cold, still air of the Paris winter, smoke spilled from the chimneys and hung lifeless above the tiled rooftops.

  Stein crunched along the snow-covered rue du Château-d’Eau, head down, hands jammed deep in the pockets of his overcoat. Cold in the 5:00 p.m. darkness, colder with the snow turned blue by the lamplight, colder with the wind that blew all the way from the Russian steppe. You can feel it, Parisians said, you can feel the bite. Eighteen degrees, the newspaper said that morning.

  Stein walked fast, breath visible. Here was 26,rue du Château-d’Eau. Was that right? He reached into an inside pocket, drew out the typewritten letter with the exquisite signature. Office of the notary LeGros, yes, this was the building. Notaries and lawyers and huissiers—officers of the court—all through this quarter. It wasn’t that it was pleasant, because it wasn’t. It was simply where they gathered. Probably, as usual, something to do with a Napoleonic decree—a patent, a license, a dispensation. A special privilege.

  The concierge was sweeping snow from the courtyard entry with a twig broom, two mufflers tied around her face, her hands wound i
n flannel cloths. “Notaire LeGros? Third floor, take the stairs to your left, Monsieur.”

  LeGros opened the door immediately. He was an old man with a finely made face and snow-white hair. He wore a cardigan sweater beneath his jacket and his hand was like ice when Stein shook it.

  The business was done in the dining room, at an enormous chestnut table covered with official papers. Huysmanns, a Belgian with broad shoulders and a thick neck, was waiting for him, stood and grunted in guttural French when they shook hands. Stein sat down, kept his coat on—the apartment was freezing and he could still see his breath. “Hard winter,” Huysmanns said.

  “Yes, that’s true,” Stein said.

  “Gentlemen,” said the notary.

  He gathered papers from the table, which he seemed to understand by geology: the Stein-Huysmanns matter buried just below the Duval matter. The two men signed and signed, writing read and approved, then dating each signature, their pens scratching over the paper, their breathing audible. Finally LeGros said, “I believe the agreed payment is forty thousand francs?”

  Stein reached into the inner pocket of his overcoat and withdrew a sheaf of five-hundred-franc notes. He counted out eighty, passed them to the notary, who counted and gave them to Huysmanns, who wet his thumb in order to count and said the numbers in a whisper. LeGros then coughed—a cough of delicacy—and said, “A call of nature, gentlemen. You will excuse me for a moment.”

  He left the room, as notaries had been leaving rooms, Stein imagined, since the days of Richelieu. The remainder of the money would now be paid, theoretically out of sight of the honest notary, theoretically out of sight of the tax authorities. Stein counted out an additional hundred and twenty-five thousand francs. Huysmanns wet his thumb and made sure.

  The notary returned, efficiently, just as Huysmanns stuffed the money in his pocket. “Shall we continue?” he chirped. They signed more papers, the notary produced his official stamp, made an impression in wax, then certified the documents with his magnificent signature.

  “I would like,” Stein said, “to make certain of the provision that specifies the name of the business is to continue as Huysmanns. To assure that the goodwill of established customers is not lost to me.”

  As the notary rattled papers, Huysmanns stared at him. Goodwill? He had an opaque face, spots of bright color in his cheeks, a face from a Flemish military painting. LeGros found the relevant paragraph and pointed it out; the two men read it with their index fingers and grunted to confirm their understanding.

  Then the notary said, “Congratulations, gentlemen.” And wished them success and good fortune. In other times, they might have adjourned to a café, but those days were gone.

  Stein walked back to the métro, paid his fourteen centimes for a ticket, and rode the train back to the avenue Hoche, where he had a grand apartment, just around the corner from Gestapo headquarters on the rue de Courcelles. He was now the owner of a business, a dépôt de charbon—coal yard—out by the freight tracks near the Porte de la Chapelle. The train was crowded with Parisians, their expressions empty, eyes blank as their minds turned away from the world.

  It was seven; Stein had an appointment in an hour. He took off the disguise: the dark overcoat, the black suit, the olive silk tie, the white shirt, the diamond ring, the gold watch. De Milja sighed with exhaustion and put the Stein costume on a chair. Except for the Clark Gable mustache, he was rid of the disguise. He lay down on a big featherbed in a pale-blue bedstead flecked with gold. The walls were covered in silk fabric, somber red, burgundy, with a raised pattern. Facing the bed, a marble fireplace. On the wall by the doorway, a large oil painting in the manner of Watteau—school of Watteau. An eighteenth-century swain in a white wig, a lady with gown lowered to reveal powdered bosoms and pink nipples, a King Charles spaniel playing on the couch between them. The swain has in hand a little ball; when he tosses it, the dog will leap off the couch, the space between the lovers will be clear. Both are at that instant when the stratagem has occurred to them; they are delighted with the idea of it, and with what will inevitably follow. Below the painting, a Louis XVI chiffonier in pale blue flecked with gold, its drawers lined with silk, its top drawer holding mother-of-pearl tuxedo studs in a leather box and a French army 7.65 automatic—in fact a Colt .45 rechambered for French military ammunition. De Milja didn’t expect to last out the winter.

  He hated Anton Stein, but Anton Stein made for a useful disguise in the winter of 1941. A Volksdeutsch, ethnic German, from Czechoslovakia, the Slovakian capital of Bratislava. So he spoke, in the natural way of things, de Milja’s rough German and de Milja’s bad but effective French. He had even, according to Vyborg, existed. The records were there in case anybody looked—the tack on the teacher’s chair and the punch on the policeman’s nose lived on, in filing cabinets somewhere in Bratislava. But that was all, that was the legacy of Stein. “He’s no longer with us,” Vyborg had said.

  Anton Stein came to Paris in the wake of the German occupation. A minor predator, he knew an opportunity when he saw one. The Nazis had a sweet way with the Anton Steins of the world, they’d had it since 1925: too bad nobody ever gave you a chance. A kind of ferocious, law-of-the-jungle loyalty was, once that took hold, theirs to command.

  De Milja slept. The apartment was warm, the quilt soft against his skin. There was, in his dreams, no war. An Ostrow uncle carved a boat in a soft piece of wood, Alexander’s eyes followed every move. Then he woke up. What was, was. Every Thursday, Madame Roubier made love at twilight.

  “Take a mistress,” Vyborg had said. After he’d rented the apartment on the avenue Hoche, the woman at the rental agency had suggested one Madame Roubier to see to the decoration and furnishing. The money made de Milja’s heart ache—in Warsaw they were starving and freezing, heating apartments with sticks of wood torn from crates, working all day, then spending the night making explosives or loading bullets. And here he was, amid pale blue flecked with gold.

  “Pale blue, flecked with gold.”

  Madame Roubier was a redhead, with thin lips, pale skin, a savage temper, and a daintily obscure history that changed with her mood. She was that indeterminate age where French women pause for many years—between virginal girlhood (about thirty-five) and wicked-oldladyhood—a good long run of life. Yes, she was a natural redhead, but she was most certainly not a Breton, that impossibly rude class of people. She was, at times, from Maçon. Or perhaps Angers.

  To supervise the furnishings, she had visited the apartment. Made little notes with a little gold pen on a little gold pad. “And this window will take a jabot and festoon,” she said.

  Suddenly, their eyes met. And met.

  “. . . a jabot . . . and . . . festoon . . .”

  Her voice faded away to a long Hollywood silence—they suddenly understand they are fated to become lovers. They stood close to each other by the window, snow falling softly on the gray stone of the avenue Hoche. Madame Roubier looked deep into his eyes, a strange magnetism drawing her to him as the consultation slowly quivered to a halt: “. . . jabot . . . and . . . festoon . . .”

  She had a soft, creamy body that flowed into its natural contours as her corsets were removed. “Oh, oh,” she cried. She was exquisitely tended, the skin of her ample behind kept smooth by spinning sessions on a chamois-covered stool, the light of her apartment never more than a pink bulb in a little lamp. “I know what you like,” she would say. “You are a dirty-minded little boy.” Well, he thought, if nothing else I know what dirty-minded little boys like.

  They would make love through the long Paris dusk—l’heure bleu— then Stein would be banished from the chamber, replaced by Maria, the maid. Sometime later, Madame Roubier would appear, in emerald-green taffeta, for example—whatever made her red hair blaze redder and her skin whiter, and Stein would say Oh, mais c’est Hedy Lamarr! and she would shush him and pooh-pooh him as he helped her wrestle into a white ermine coat.

  Then dinner. Then a tour of the night. Then business.

/>   Thursday night. Chez Tolo.

  All the black-market restaurants were in obscure streets, down alleys, you had to know somebody in order to find them. Chez Tolo was at the end of a narrow lane—nineteenth-century France—reached through fourteen-foot-high wooden doors that appeared to lead into the courtyard of a large building. The lane had been home to tanneries in an earlier age, but the workshops had long since been converted to workers’ housing and now, thanks to war and scarcity, and the vibrant new life that bobbed to the surface in such times, it found itself at the dawn of a new age.

  Wood-burning taxicabs pulled up to the door, then a De Bouton with its tulipwood body, a Citroen traction-avant—the favored car of the Gestapo—a Lagonda, a black Daimler. Madame Roubier took note of the last. “The Comte de Rieu,” she said.

  Inside it was dark and crowded. Stein and Madame Roubier moved among the diners; a wave, a nod, a smile, acknowledging the new aristocracy—the ones who, like Anton Stein, had never been given a chance. A fistful of francs to the headwaiter—formerly a city clerk— and they were seated at a good table.

  Madame Roubier ate prodigiously. Stein could never quite catch her doing it, but somehow she made the food disappear. Oysters on shaved ice, veal chops in the shape of a crown, sauced with Madeira and heavy cream and served with walnut puree, a salad of baby cabbage, red and green, with raisins and vinegar and honey. Then a cascade of Spanish orange sections soaked in Cointreau and glistening in the candlelight. Stein selected a vintage Moët & Chandon champagne to accompany the dinner.

  With the cognac, came visitors. The Comte de Rieu, and his seventeen-year-old Romanian mistress, Isia, fragile and lovely, who peered out at the world through curtains of long black hair. The count, said to be staggeringly rich, dealt in morphine, diamonds, and milk.