The Polish Officer ns-3

by Alan Furst

  “How do you know these things?”

  “I know. I’m a Pole—it came to me in my mother’s milk. Will you help?”

  “If I can, I will,” he said. “In the meantime, stop. Don’t do anything—and don’t permit her to do anything—that could lead to exposure. The most important thing now is that nobody finds out what was discovered.”

  It rained in Paris. Slowly, endlessly. The bare branches of the chestnut trees dripped water in the gray light. At five in the afternoon, Anton Stein stared out the window above his coal yard. A freight train moved slowly along the track. Its couplings rattled and banged as it maneuvered—stopped, jerked ahead a few feet, stopped, backed up. The board siding of the freight cars and the cast-iron wheels glistened in the rain.

  On his desk, March earnings. They were doing well—Zimmer was implacable. All day long, in his clean gray smock, he tended the business. Spillage. Theft. Truck fuel. Suppliers’ invoices with added charges. Defaulting customers. Margin of profit, date of delivery. Anton Stein made money.

  And Captain Alexander de Milja spent it.

  Rental of the apartment on the rue A, where a W/T operator enciphered and transmitted, moving like a butterfly among a hundred different bands to elude the Funkabwehr technicians. Rental of the apartment on the rue B, where an alternate W/T operator was based. Rental of the villa in the suburb of C, where a wounded British pilot was in hiding. Not to mention the apartment on the avenue Hoche, each window dressed with jabot and festoon.

  He was tired now. Spirit worn away by the tide. Clandestine war since September of 1939—it had gone on too long, there’d been too much of it.

  He forced his eyes away from the freight cars, back to a sheet of cheap paper on the desk. Huysmanns’s desk. Scarred oak, burns on the edge where somebody had rested a cigarette, little drawers full of used rubber bands and thumbtacks and dried-out inkpads for stamps.

  On the paper, in his own informal code, the first draft of a report to London: at the Luftwaffe base at Vannes was Kampfgeschwader 100, a unit of Pathfinders—pilots who flew along a radio beam, called a Knickbein beam because it had the shape of a dog leg. The job of these Pathfinders was to lead flights of bombers to the target, then drop incendiaries, to light fires for the guidance of the planes behind them.

  What Veronique the shop clerk had found out was this: the pilots of Kampfgeschwader 100 did not live on the base in barracks, they lived in various billets in the town of Vannes, and on the afternoon before a mission they traveled to the field by bus. All together, maybe thirty of them, slated to lead various night attacks against British targets. De Milja knew what happened next. He went to the movie theaters on the Champs-Élysées where they showed German newsreels—always with the lights on, because in darkness the French audience made rude noises—of the bombing raids. So he had seen the burning factories, and the bridges down in the rivers, and the firemen weeping with exhaustion.

  All together, maybe thirty of them, traveled to the field by bus.

  On the Route Nationale—the RN18—that traced the coast of Brittany: from Brest south to Quimper, L’Orient, then Vannes. The airfield was twelve miles from the outskirts of Vannes, and there were several points of interest along the way. A curve with a rock outcropping to the east, a grove of stunted beach pine to the west, between the road and the sea. Or perhaps the old fish cannery, abandoned in ’38, with rows of dark windows, the glass long ago broken out.

  Block the road. A coal truck—somebody else’s coal truck—would do that nicely. You’d want six—no eight—operatives. Take the driver and the tires. Then you had leisure for the pilots. Fragmentation grenades in the windows, then someone with a carbine in the bus. Short range, multiple rounds.

  Thirty Pathfinder pilots. All that training, experience, talent. Hard to replace. The ratio of bravado to skill was nearly one to one. Flying an aeroplane along a transmitted beam meant constant correction as you drifted and the signal tone faded. Flying at the apex of the attack meant searchlights and flak—you had to have a real demon in you to want to do that.

  “Monsieur Stein?”

  He looked up from the wood-flecked paper, initials and numbers, a curving line for a road, a rectangle for a blocking truck. Helene was holding a large leatherbound book. “Monsieur Zimmer asked that these be sent out today, Monsieur.” She left the book on Stein’s desk and returned to work.

  Inside the leather cover were checks for him to sign—a typical practice in a French office. He made sure his pen had ink and went to work—Anton Stein, Anton Stein. The payees were coal mines up in Metz, mostly. He was permitted to buy what was left over after the Germans, paying with absurdly inflated currency, took what they wanted and shipped it east. Just after the New Year the Germans had returned the ashes of Napoleon’s son, L’Aiglon, to France. Thus the joke of the week: they take our coal and send us back ashes.

  Two more to sign. One a donation, to the Comité FranceAllemagne, in business since 1933 to foster Franco-German harmony and understanding. Well, they’d fostered it all right—now the French had just about all the harmony and understanding anybody could want. The other check was made out to Anton Stein for ten thousand francs. His night money.

  At the avenue Matignon, the evening performance with Madame Roubier. “Oh, oh,” she cried out. Under the guise of nuzzling her pale neck he got a view of his watch. 8:25. Outside, the air-raid sirens began. Gently, he unwound himself from her, stood by the bed and turned off the pink bed-table lamp that made her skin glow. Opened the window, then the shutter, just a crack.

  Circles of light against the clouds, then arching yellow flames and golden fire that seemed to drip back down toward the dark earth. Kids would be in the parks tomorrow, he thought, adding to their shrapnel collections. A sharp fingernail traveled across his bare backside.

  “Bonjour, Monsieur,” Madame Roubier said. It amused her to pretend to be his language teacher. “Comment allez-vous?” The fingernail headed back in the other direction.

  He turned away from the fiery lights, looked over his shoulder. She was sprawled on her stomach, reaching out to touch him. “He ignores me,” she pouted like a little girl. “Yes he does.” He turned back to the sky. A sudden stutter, bright yellow. Then a slow, red trail, curving down toward the earth. It made his heart sick to see that. “Yes he does.”

  Brasserie Heininger. 11:30.

  At table, a party of seven: the Comte de Rieu and his little friend Isia. Isia had paid a visit that afternoon to the milliner Karachine, who had fashioned, for her exclusively, a hat of bright cherries and pears with a red veil that just brushed the cheekbones.

  At her left, the coal dealer Stein, his mood heavy and quiet, his cigar omnipresent. His companion, the fashionable Lisette Roubier, wore emerald silk. Next to her, the art dealer Labarthe, hair shiny with brilliantine, who specialized in Dutch and Flemish masters and jailed relatives. He could, for a price, produce any loved one from any prison in France. His companion was called Bella, a circus acrobat of Balkan origins.

  At her side, the amusing Willy—w pronounced v—Kappler. The silliest-looking man: a fringe of colorless hair, a long, pointed nose like a comic witch, ears to catch the wind; a face lit up by a huge melon slice of a smile, as though to say well then what can I do about it?

  “Coal!” he said to Stein. “Well, that’s a lucky job these days.” Then he laughed—melodious, infectious. You couldn’t resist joining in; if you didn’t get the joke, maybe you would later.

  “I can sell as much as they’ll let me have,” Stein admitted. “But,” he added, “the stocks are often low.”

  “Yes, it’s true. This ridiculous war drags on—but go talk sense to the English. Then too, Herr Stein, those rascals up there in the mines don’t like to work.” With fist and extended thumb he imitated a bottle, tilted it up to his mouth and made glug-glug sounds. Stein laughed. “Oh but it’s true, you know,” Kappler said.

  “And you, Herr Kappler,” Stein said. “What is it that keeps you in
Paris?”

  “Hah! What a way to put it. I hardly need anything to keep me here.”

  “In business?”

  “Jah, jah. Business, all right.”

  Across the table, the Comte de Rieu could barely suppress a laugh—he knew what Kappler did.

  “The truth is,” Kappler said, “I’m just an old cop from Hamburg— like my poppa was before me. I was born to it. A cop under the kaiser, a cop during the Weimar time. So now I work for Heini and Reini, but believe me, Herr Stein, it’s the same old thing.”

  Heini and Reini meant Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. Which put Kappler somewhere in the RSHA empire—most likely the Gestapo or one of the SD intelligence units. Stein puffed at his cigar but it had gone out.

  “Here, let me,” Kappler said. He snapped a silver lighter and Stein turned the cigar in the flame before inhaling.

  “Tell them what you heard today, darling,” Labarthe said to his friend Bella.

  She looked confused. “In beauty salon?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  She nodded and smiled—now she knew what was wanted. She wore a military-style soft cap with a black feather arching back from one side, and theatrical circles of rouge on her cheeks.

  “It was, it was . . .” She turned to Labarthe for help, whispered in his ear, he spoke a phrase or two behind his hand and she nodded with relief. “Hairdresser was telling me about death ray,” she said brightly.

  “Death ray?” Madame Roubier said.

  “Yes. Was made by man who invented telegraph.”

  “Marconi,” Labarthe prompted.

  “Yes, Marconi. Now for Mussolini he build death ray. So, war is over.” She smiled enthusiastically.

  Willy Kappler shook with silent laughter, then pressed a hand against the side of his face. “People love a rumor,” he said. “The stranger it is, the better they like it. Did you hear last week? How de Gaulle was killed in an air raid in London and British spies smuggled his ashes into Paris and buried them in Napoleon’s tomb?”

  “I did hear that,” said the comte. “From my dentist. And on the last visit he’d told me the British had invented a powder that set water on fire. Told me in strictest confidence, mind you.”

  “Mesdames . . . et . . . monsieurs!”

  The waiter made sure he had their attention, then, with a flourish, he presented a foie gras blond en bloc, at least two pounds of it. In a basket, a mountain of toast triangles, crusts trimmed off. For each person at the table a tiny chilled dish of Charentais butter. The champagne-colored aspic quivered as the waiter carved slabs off the block and slid them deftly onto monogrammed plates. “Et alors!” said the comte, when the first cut was made and the size of the black truffle within revealed. Then the table was quiet as knives worked foie gras on toast and little sips of Beaune were taken to wash it down. “I tell you,” said Willy Kappler, eyes glazed with rapture, “the best is really very good.”

  The headwaiter appeared at Stein’s chair.

  “Yes?” Stein said.

  “A telephone call for you, Monsieur.”

  The phone was on a marble table in an alcove by the men’s toilet.

  “Stein,” he said into the receiver. But the line just hissed, there was nobody on the other end.

  The men’s room attendant opened the door a few inches and said, “Monsieur Stein?” Stein went into the small tiled foyer that led to the urinals. The attendant’s table held a stack of white towels, scented soaps, and combs. A little dish of coins stood to one side. The white-jacketed attendant was called Voyschinkowsky, a man in his sixties, with the red-rimmed, pouchy eyes and hollow cheeks of the lifelong insomniac. Rumor had it that he had, at one time, been one of the richest men in Paris, a brilliant speculator, known as the Lion of the Bourse. But now, with his gravel-voiced Hungarian accent and white jacket, he was just an amusing character.

  “I have your message, Monsieur Stein,” Voyschinkowsky said. “A young man is waiting downstairs, looking at newspapers at the stand just east of the restaurant. He needs to see you urgently.”

  De Milja peeled a hundred-franc note from a roll in his pocket and laid it in Voyschinkowsky’s dish. “What next, I wonder,” he grumbled under his breath.

  Voyschinkowsky’s face remained opaque. “Thank you, Monsieur,” he said. De Milja went downstairs. It was a warmish April night, the street smelled like fish—a waiter in a rubber apron was shucking oysters over a hill of chipped ice. The young man reading the headlines at the newspaper stand wore a thin jacket and a scarf. “Yes? You’re waiting for me?” de Milja said.

  The young man looked him over. “Fedin needs to see you right away,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Up at Boulogne-Billancourt.” Boulogne meant the factory district at the edge of Paris, not the seaside town.

  De Milja stared at the young man. It could be anything—an emergency, a trap. There was nothing he could do about it. “All right,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

  The young man looked at his watch. “Twenty minutes to curfew.”

  “I’ll hurry,” de Milja said. He had a pass that allowed him to be out any time he wished, but he didn’t want to go into that now.

  Back at the table he said, “An emergency.”

  “What happened?” Madame Roubier said.

  “An accident at the yard. A man is injured.” He turned to the comte. “Would you see Madame home?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “May I help?” said Willy Kappler, very concerned. “Not much I can’t do in this city.” De Milja seemed to consider. “Thank you,” he said. “I think the best thing is for me to go, but I appreciate the offer.”

  Kappler nodded sympathetically. “Another time,” he said.

  They rode the métro to the Quai d’Issy station. The train stopped there because the tunnel up ahead had flooded but the police wouldn’t let anybody exit to the street. So they crossed over, took a train back one stop, and walked. The quarter was a snarl of freight tracks and old factories surrounding the Renault plant and the large docks on the Seine. On the other side of the river was a Russian neighborhood— émigrés packed into brick tenements and working on the automobile assembly lines.

  Under German occupation, Renault manufactured military vehicles for the Wehrmacht, so the British bombed the plant. De Milja and Fedin’s messenger crunched broken glass underfoot as they walked. Water flooded from broken mains, black smoke that smelled like burning rubber made de Milja’s eyes run and he kept wiping at them with his hand. An ambulance drove by, siren wailing. Where a building had collapsed into the street, de Milja stepped over a smoldering mattress, picking his way among scattered pans and shoes and sheet music.

  At the Eastern Orthodox Church of Saint Basil, the young man stood back. Tears ran from his eyes and cut tracks in the soot on his face. “He’s in there,” he said to de Milja.

  “The church?”

  The young man nodded and walked away quickly.

  The church was being used as an emergency room. General Fedin was lying on a blanket on the stone floor, a second blanket was drawn up to his chin. When de Milja stood over him he opened his eyes. “Good,” he said. “I hoped they’d find you.”

  De Milja knelt by his side. Fedin’s face, once fierce and skull-like, had collapsed, and his skin was the color of wax. Suddenly, an old man. He lowered the blanket a little—gauze bandage was taped across his chest—and made a sour face that meant no good.

  “Better for you to be in the hospital,” de Milja said. “Fastest way is a taxi, you’ll lie on the backseat.”

  “Let’s not be stupid,” Fedin said gently. “I know this wound very well, I’ve seen it many times.”

  “Vassily Alexandrovich . . .”

  Fedin gripped his arm, he meant to grip it hard, but he couldn’t. “Stop it,” he said.

  De Milja was silent for a time. “How did this happen?”

  “I was at the Double Eagle, a Russian club, people playing chess an
d drinking tea. The sirens went off, like always. We shrugged and ignored them, like always. The next thing, somebody pulled me out from under some boards. Then I woke up here.”

  He paused a moment, lips pressed tight. “I’m sixty-three years old,” he said.

  It was dark in the church, a few candles the only light. People were talking in low voices, taking care to walk quietly on the stone floors. Like actors in a play, de Milja thought. Some still wore the costumes— cabdrivers, cleaning women—that exile had assigned them, but in this church they were themselves, and spoke and gestured like the people they had once been. Outside, the last sirens of police cars and ambulances faded away and it was quiet again.

  “I always thought I’d die on a horse, on a battlefield,” Fedin said. “Not in a chess club in Paris. You know I fought at Tannenberg, in 1914? Then with Brusilov, in Galicia. Against the Japanese, in 1905. In the Balkans, 1912 that was, I was on the staff of the Russian military attaché to Serbia. 1912. I was in love.”

  He smiled at that. Thought for a time, with his eyes closed. Then looked directly at de Milja and said, “Jesus, the world’s a slaughterhouse. Really it is. If you’re weak they’re going to cut your throat— ask the Armenians, ask the Jews. The bad people want it their way, my friend. And how badly they want it is the study of a lifetime.”

  He shook his head with sorrow. “So,” he said, “so then what. You step into it, if you’re a certain sort. But then you’re taking sides, and you’ve written yourself down for an appointment with the butchers. There’s a waiting list—but they’ll get around to you, never fear. Christ, look at me, killed by my own side.” He paused a moment, then said, “Damn fine bomb, though, even so. Made in Birmingham or somewhere. Didn’t hit any factories, this one didn’t. But it settled with the Double Eagle club once and for all. And it settled with General Fedin.”

  Fedin laughed, then his mood changed. “Listen, I know all about what you did on the docks that night. Running off to die because you couldn’t stand to live in a bad world. What the hell did you think you were doing? You can’t do that, you can’t resign.” He thought a moment, then said sternly, “That’s not for you, boy. Not for you.”