by Alan Furst
“They’re always prompt?” Mercier said.
“Like a clock,” Jozef said.
“Dogs?”
“Sometimes. The last time I was out there I think they had them, but they don’t bark unless they smell something.”
Mercier looked at his watch. “We ought to get moving,” he said.
“You’ll pass Rheinhart’s place, about fifteen minutes north of here. Better to swing wide around it. You understand?”
“Yes,” Mercier said. “We’ll be back in two hours. If we don’t show up, you’ll have to do something with the car.”
“We’ll take care of it,” Jozef said.
“Just be careful,” the younger woman said.
When the lights of the farmhouse disappeared behind a hill, the night was almost completely black, a thin slice of waning moon visible now and then between shifting cloud. A sharp wind blew steadily from the west and Mercier was cold for a time, but it was marshy ground here and hard going, so soon enough the effort warmed him up. He kept the flashlight off—the German border patrol wasn’t due for some time, but you could never be sure. To Mercier, the night felt abandoned, cut off from the world, in deep silence but for the sigh of the wind and, once, the cry of a night-hunting bird.
They kept their distance from the Rheinhart farm, a German farm, then climbed a steep hill that led to the Polish wire. Mercier had been shown the Polish defenses from the other side, an official visit with an army captain as his guide. Not very deep: three lines of barbed wire—tangled eight-foot widths of it—a few camouflaged casemates, concrete pillboxes with firing slits. Death traps, he well knew, designed to hold up an enemy for a few precious minutes. Where the Polish wire ended at the hillside, they climbed to the other side, bearing left, onto German soil.
Mercier tapped Marek on the arm, Marek held his coat open, and Mercier used the cover to run the flashlight beam over his map, refreshing the memory work he’d done early that morning. The first German wire was two hundred yards or so to the west, and they headed directly for it. They slowed down, now, feeling their way, stopping every few minutes to freeze and concentrate on listening. Only the wind. Once, as they resumed walking, Marek thought he heard something and signaled for Mercier to stop. Mercier reached into his pocket, feeling for the grip of his pistol. And Marek, he saw, did the same thing. Voices? Footsteps? No, silence, then a grumble of distant thunder far to the east. After a minute they moved again, and found themselves at the German wire, a snarled mass of barbed concertina rolls fixed to rusted iron stakes driven into the earth. Mercier and Marek, using heavy wire cutters, worked their way through it, gingerly holding the strands apart for each other until they were on the other side. Thirty yards forward, a second line, which they negotiated as they had the first.
A few yards beyond the wire, Mercier stumbled—the ground suddenly sank beneath him and he almost fell, catching himself with one hand on the earth. Soft, loose soil. What the hell was this? By his side, Marek was probing at the ground with his foot and Mercier, resisting the urge to use the flashlight, got down on his knees and began feeling around in the dirt, then digging with a cupped hand. Crawling ahead, he dug again and this time, down a foot or so in the loose soil, his hand encountered a rough edge of concrete, aggregate; he could feel the pebbles in the hard cement. As he dug further, Marek came crawling up beside him and whispered by his ear, “What is it?”
Dragon’s tooth, but Mercier couldn’t say it in Polish. “Tank trap,” he said.
“Covered over?”
“Yes, abandoned.”
“Why?”
Mercier shook his head; no reason—or, rather, too many reasons.
They crawled forward, their knees sinking into the soft earth, until they reached solid ground, which made the tank trap much as all the others Mercier had encountered: a ditch with steep sides about twenty feet wide, with a row of sloped concrete bollards midway across. If a tank commander didn’t see it, his tank would slip over the edge, tilted forward against the so-called dragon’s teeth, unable to move. Not an unexpected feature in border fortifications, but the Germans had built this, then filled it in, the disturbed soil settling with rain and time.
And Mercier knew it was not on the map, which showed a third line of wire. This they found a few minutes later and cut their way through it. Just barely visible, about fifty yards ahead of them, was a watchtower, a silhouette faint against the night sky. Suddenly, from somewhere to the right of the tower, a light went on, its beam probing the darkness, sweeping past them, then returning. By then, they were both flat on the ground. From the direction of the light, a shout: “Halt!” Then, in German, “Stand up!”
Mercier and Marek looked at each other. In Marek’s hands, a Radom automatic, aimed toward the voice, and the light, which now went out. Stand up? Mercier thought. Surrender? A sheepish admission of who they were? Phone calls to the French embassy in Berlin? As Marek watched, Mercier drew the pistol from his pocket and braced it in the crook of his elbow. The light went on again, moving as its bearer came toward them. It was Marek who fired first, but Mercier was only an instant behind him, aiming at the light, the pistol bucking twice in his hand. Then he rolled—fast—away from Marek, away from the location of the shots. Out in the darkness, the light went off, a voice said, “Ach,” then swore, and a responding volley snapped the air above his head. Something stung the side of his face, and, when he tried to aim again, the afterimages of the muzzle flares, orange lights, floated before his eyes. He ran a hand over the skin below his temple and peered at it; no blood, just dirt.
Silence. Mercier counted sixty seconds, seventy, ninety. The light came back on, only for a second or two, aimed not at them but at the ground beneath it, then went off. Mercier thought he heard whispers, and the faint sounds of people moving about. Was it possible they were going to get away with this? Very cautiously, he began to slide backward and Marek, when he saw what Mercier was doing, did the same thing. Again they waited, three minutes, four. Then Mercier signaled to Marek: move again. Another ten yards, and they stopped once more.
One last minute, then they rose to their feet and, crouched over, went running back to Poland.
Mercier had planned to spend the night at a hotel in Katowice but never gave it a second thought. When they reached the farm, they climbed into the Buick and drove at speed, bumping and bouncing over the rutted surface, turning the lights on only when they reached the main road. Once they left Katowice and were back in the countryside, Marek said, “A close thing.”
“Yes. We were lucky, I think.”
“I wasn’t going to let them take me, colonel.”
Mercier nodded. He knew that Marek had been captured by the Russians when he’d fought in the Polish Legion, under Pilsudski. Ten hours only, but Marek never forgot what they did to him.
“There is one thing I want to ask you,” Marek said. “Why did they cover up their tank trap?”
“Maybe they changed their minds. Maybe it wasn’t where they wanted it. Maybe there’s another one a few hundred yards north, who can say, but that’s the likely explanation. Or, if you wanted to think another way, an army that’s going to attack, with a tank force, will get rid of the static defenses between them and the enemy border. Because, then, they’re in the way.” Mercier’s technical description barely suggested what he feared. This was nothing less than preparation for war; a classic, telltale sign of planned aggression. The journalists could wring their hands from morning edition to night—War is coming! War is coming!—but what he’d found in the darkness wasn’t opinion, it was an abandoned tank trap, defense put aside, and what came next was offense, attack, houses burning in the night.
Marek didn’t want to believe it. After a moment he said, “They are coming this way, colonel, that is what you think, isn’t it. German tanks, moving onto Polish soil.”
“God knows, I don’t. Sometimes governments prepare to act, then change their minds. The wire was still up.”
“You’ll repor
t it, colonel?”
“Yes, Marek, that’s what I do.”
They drove all night long, Mercier taking a turn at the wheel for a few hours. East of Koluszki, Marek driving again, a tire blew out and they had to stop and change it, the iron wrench freezing their hands. The sky was turning light as they drove into Warsaw, and when Mercier let himself into the apartment, Wlada heard him walking around and, frightened of a possible intruder, called out, “Colonel?”
“Yes, Wlada, it’s me.”
She opened the door of her room off the kitchen. “You are home early,” she said. “Thank God.”
“Yes,” he said. “I am. Go back to sleep.”
He left his automatic pistol on the desk, now it would have to be cleaned again. Then, as he took off his field clothing, he thought about the letter in the drawer of his desk at the embassy, a letter requesting transfer. That would have to be torn up.
The abandoned tank trap had worked on him—it wasn’t much, as evidence, would mean nothing to the lords of the General Staff, but it had hit him a certain way and he could not let go of it. Then too, he thought, settling the Barbour on its hanger, he might, if he stayed in Warsaw, see Anna Szarbek again. See her alone, somewhere. An afternoon together. Surely he wanted to, maybe she did too.
From the other side of the apartment, Wlada called out to him. “Good night, colonel.”
Yes, dear Wlada, I am home and safe. “Good night, Wlada. Sleep well.”
7 NOVEMBER, 1937. THE POLISH FOREIGN MINISTRY, HOUSED IN AN elegant building on Saxon Square, held its autumn cocktail party in the ministry library, removing the long polished tables, setting up a bar—Polish vodka, French champagne, a tribute to the eternal alliance—in front of the tall draped window at the end of the room. A magnificent library. Ancient texts in leather-bound rows to the ceiling, some of the works, in medieval Latin, on the national specialties, mathematics and astronomy—Copernicus was there, among others—at which their scholars had traditionally excelled. Always a crowd at this party, the library’s imposing gloom inducing serious, sometimes elevated, conversation between the guests. And the fresh herring in cream was exceptional. So transcendently good one might be mindful of the country’s right of access to the Baltic, up at Danzig.
The French contingent gathered at the embassy and departed in a phalanx of Buicks, led by the ambassador and his wife, followed by LeBeau, the chargé d’affaires, then Jourdain, joining Mercier in his car, with a splendid Marek in his most sober and official blue suit. Last in line, the naval and air attachés.
In the library, a glittering crowd: medals galore, the uniforms of at least eight armies and six navies. Mercier studied the faces of the women in the room, more than one of them finding such attention not unwelcome, but Anna Szarbek was nowhere to be found. The Biddles were there—he the American ambassador, the couple highly visible at the heights of the Warsovian social set—as well as the formidable Hungarian, Colonel de Vezenyi, doyen of the city’s military attachés, accompanied by his mistress, the stunning Polish film star known as Karenka. Mercier spent a few minutes with them, de Vezenyi infamous for his insight into the private lives of the diplomatic community. “And he was, I’m told, in the closet for two hours, trembling in his underwear.”
Mercier next found himself in the company of the Rozens, Viktor and Malka, the former a minor bureaucrat in the commercial section of the Soviet embassy. Communists were rare in Poland; the internal security was famously relentless in hunting them down, so no workers’ marches, no petitions crying out for justice in wherever it was that week. For a view of the world from that particular angle, Mercier had to chat with the Rozens, or other available comrades, whenever chance offered the opportunity. But he didn’t mind; he liked the Rozens.
How not? They were almost unbearably charming. Viktor Rozen, half stooped from some childhood malady in Odessa, looked up at his fellow humans, giving the fools among them the impression that they were somehow above him. His wife was irresistibly warm and maternal, with a smile that lingered just at the edge of a laugh. What a pair! At these affairs, always side by side—he with a monk’s fringe of gray hair, she much the taller and heavier of the two—twinkly-eyed Jewish intellectuals, always eager to hear about your life. GRU, people said, the Russian military intelligence service, not the thuggish NKVD, not the gentle Rozens. Was Malka Rozen the chief spy of the family, or was that Viktor? Among local diplomats, opinion was divided.
“Tell me, dear colonel, how has life been treating you?” Viktor Rozen said, his German softened by a Yiddish lilt.
“Very well, thank you. And yourselves?”
“Could be better, but I can’t complain. But we were having a little dispute just now, Malka and I.”
“You?”
Malka’s smile grew broader. “Only a little one.”
“Perhaps you can decide it for us. We were wondering whatever became of von Sosnowski.”
“In prison in Germany, I believe,” Mercier said. Von Sosnowski, the center of what became known as “the von Sosnowski affair,” a handsome aristocratic Polish cavalry officer living in Berlin, had recruited four or five beautiful German women, all of noble heritage. First as mistresses, stupefied with love for him, and then as agents, to spy on their employer, the German General Staff, where they, impoverished by the Great War, served as clerks.
“He was,” Viktor said. “He surely was in prison, for life, poor soul, but I’ve heard he’s been let out.”
“Of a German prison?” Malka said. “Never.”
“But a little bird told me he’d been traded, for a German woman spying on the Poles, at the behest of the SD people—Heydrich, that crowd.”
Slowly, Mercier shook his head. “No, not that I’ve heard, anyhow.”
“You see?” Rozen said to Malka. “The colonel is a great friend of the local administration, surely they would have mentioned it. Too good not to mention, no?”
“They don’t tell me all that much, Herr Rozen.” The seeming ingenuousness of the probe made Mercier smile.
“No? So maybe they don’t. But I heard von Sosnowski was here in Warsaw, a broken man, his hair gone white in prison, drinking, living in penury in a room somewhere.”
Mercier, about to respond, was distracted by a loud guffaw from a nearby guest and looked over Malka’s shoulder to discover the man at Anna Szarbek’s apartment, Maxim, in conversation with a gentleman wearing a monocle and an official sash. At Maxim’s side, Anna Szarbek, dressed pretty much as she’d been for the night at the Europejski, looking up at Maxim, acknowledging his joke with a smile. A rather tolerant smile, Mercier thought; or was it, perhaps, a forced smile?
The Rozens followed his eyes. “Friends of yours?” Viktor said.
“No, not really.”
“That’s Maxim Mostov,” Viktor said, “the Russian émigré. He writes for one of the local newspapers.” A shadow crossed his face. “So sad, how some people abandon us, some of the brightest.” He shook his head in sorrow.
“How does he come to be here?” Mercier said.
“Oh, he knows everybody, goes everywhere,” Viktor said. “People love to see their names in the newspapers.”
“He writes gossip?”
“No, dear colonel, not quite. Feuilletons, observations on the passing scene, an elevated form of gossip, perhaps. In the Soviet Union, before he emigrated, he did much the same thing, I believe.”
“So why leave?” Malka said. “He was a well-known journalist, in Moscow.”
“Not everybody wants to build socialism, my love,” Viktor said, half joking. Turning to Mercier, he said, “He was replaced, they’re all replaced, those who abandon us. It isn’t an easy life, where we come from: chaotic, dreadful in winter, at times disappointing—why not admit it? But, colonel, better than what we had before. Do you see it that way?”
“More or less,” Mercier said. “Every country has its difficult side.”
“So true, that’s so true,” Malka Rozen said, touching Mercier’s
arm. “And we all must help each other, otherwise . . .”
“Oh, I suppose we can go it alone,” Viktor said, “if we have to, but friends are always welcome. That’s just human nature.”
“Very welcome,” Malka said. “It’s in the Russian soul to appreciate friendship.”
That’s enough of that. Mercier finished his vodka. “I believe I may have a little more of this,” he said, preparing his escape.
Viktor nodded. Yes, yes, run away. “Call us sometime, dear colonel. A home-cooked dinner makes for a nice change, in the diplomatic merry-go-round.” He moved closer to Mercier and lowered his voice. “We know what the world thinks of us, colonel, but, every now and then, when trouble comes knocking at the door, we’re good people to know. Yes?”
Mercier smiled, and bowed his head to indicate that he understood.
In the Buick, headed back to the embassy, Jourdain seemed distracted, not his usual self. “Did you have the vodka,” Mercier said, “or the champagne?”
“Champagne. But I just held the glass in my hand. You?”
“The vodka. Maybe a little more than I should’ve.”
“I saw you conspiring with the Rozens. Did they make advances? Try to recruit you?”
“Yes, as always.”
“They’re incorrigible,” Jourdain said fondly. “I expect they have a monthly quota, like everyone else in that accursed country. That’s the way Moscow thinks—x number of solicitations equals y number of recruits. I know bachelors who swear by it.”
“I don’t think I’ll change sides, Armand, not just yet.”
“Were they after anything in particular?”
“They asked about von Sosnowski. Supposedly traded by the Germans and now back in Warsaw.”
“That’s good to know about, if it’s true. The German propaganda put his story about as lurid nonsense, sex and espionage, but that’s not the whole story. Sosnowski used the darkroom in the cellar of the Polish embassy to develop negatives of photographs of Wehrmacht documents. Then one day another Polish agent, this one secretly working for the Germans, went to hang up his negatives—phony product—and discovered the real thing: elements of the German battle plans for France and Poland. Not comprehensive—memoranda, first drafts, sketches. One of Sosnowski’s girlfriends was in charge of burning the wastepaper at the end of the day, but she photographed it for Sosnowski. The gorgeous Benita von something. She was beheaded, eventually, and so was her friend. Barbaric, the hooded executioner with the axe, but I suppose not much worse than the guillotine. One of the other women disappeared, probably right into the SD. As for Sosnowski, the Poles might well have traded to get him back.”