by Alan Furst
woman in the seat across from him occupied herself with the consumption of an apple. She'd spread a newspaper over her lap, cut slices
with a paring knife, then chewed them, slowly, deliberately, and Uhl
couldn't wait for her to be done with the thing. The man sitting next
to her was German, he thought, with a long, gloomy Scandinavian
face, and wore a black leather coat, much favored by the Gestapo. But
that, Uhl told himself, was just nerves. The man stared out into space,
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in a kind of traveler's trance, and, if he looked at Uhl, Uhl never
caught him at it.
The train stopped at Lodz, then at Kalisz, where it stood a long
time in the station, the locomotive's beat steady and slow. On the platform, the stationmaster stood by the first-class carriage and smoked a
cigarette until, at last, he drew a pocket watch from his vest and
waited as the second hand swept around the dial. Then, as he started
to raise his flag, two businessmen, both with briefcases, came trotting
along the platform and climbed aboard just as the stationmaster signaled to the engineer, and, with a jerk, the train began to move. The
two businessmen, one of them wiping the rain from his eyeglasses
with a handkerchief, came down the corridor and peered through the
window into Uhl's compartment. There was no room for them. They
took a moment, satisfying themselves that the compartment was full,
then went off to find seats elsewhere.
Uhl didn't like them. Calm down, he told himself, think pleasant
thoughts. His night with Countess Sczelenska. In detail. He'd woken
in the darkness and begun to touch her until, sleepily, with a soft, compliant sigh, she started to make love to him. Make love. Was she in
love with him? No, it was an "arrangement." But she did seem to enjoy
it, every sign he knew about said she did, and, as for himself, it was
better than anything else in his life. What if they ran away together?
This happened only in the movies, at least in his experience, but people surely did it, just not the people he knew. And then, if you ran
away, you had to run away to someplace. What place would that be?
Some years earlier, he had encountered an old school friend in
Breslau, who'd left Germany in the early 1930s and gone off to South
Africa, where he'd become, evidently, quite prosperous as the proprietor of a commercial laundry. "It's a fine country," his friend had
said. "The people, the Dutch and the English, are friendly." But, he
thought, would a countess, even a pretend countess, want to go to
such a place? He doubted it. He tried to imagine her there, in some little bungalow with a picket fence, cooking dinner. Baking a cake.
Uhl looked at his watch. Was the train slow today? He returned to
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his reverie, soothing himself with daydreams of some sweet moment
in the future, happy and carefree in a far-off land. The man in the
black coat suddenly stood up--he was tall, with military posture--
unclicked the latch on the compartment door, and turned left down
the corridor. Left? The first-class WC was to the right--Uhl knew this;
he'd used it often on his trips between Breslau and Warsaw. So then,
why left? That led only to the second-class carriages, why would he go
there? Was there another WC down that way which, for some eccentric personal reason, he preferred? Uhl didn't know. He could, of
course, go and find out for himself, but that would mean following the
man down the corridor. This he didn't care to do. Why not? He didn't
care to, period.
So he waited. The train slowed for the town of Krotoszyn,
chugged past the small outdoor station. A group of passengers, stolid
country people, sat on a bench, surrounded by boxes and suitcases.
Waiting for some other train, a local train, to take them somewhere
else. Outside Krotoszyn, a cluster of small shacks came to the edge of
the railway. Uhl saw a dog in a window, watching the train go by, and
somebody had left shirts on a wash line; now they were wet. Where
was the man in the black coat? Were the two businessmen his friends?
Had he gone to visit them? Impulsively, Uhl stood up. "Excuse me," he
said, as the other passengers drew their feet in so he could pass. Outside the door, he saw that the corridor was empty. He turned left, the
sound of the wheels on the track deepened as the train crossed a railroad bridge over a river, then, on the other side, returned to its usual
pitch. The carriage swayed, they were picking up speed now, as Uhl
walked along the corridor. He was tempted to look in at each compartment, to see where the businessmen were, to see if the man in the
black coat had joined them, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. It
didn't feel right, to Uhl, to do something like that. He was now certain
that when he got off this train he would be arrested, beaten until he
confessed, and, then, hanged.
There was no WC at the end of the carriage. Only a door that
would open to the metal plate above the coupling, then another door,
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and a second-class carriage. Above the seats, arranged in rows divided
by an aisle, a haze of smoke. In the first seat, a man and a woman were
asleep; the woman's mouth was wide open, which made her face seem
worried and tense. As Uhl turned, he discovered that the first-class
conductor had come down the corridor behind him. Gesturing with
his thumb, back and forth above his shoulder, he said something in
Polish. Then, when he saw that Uhl didn't understand, he said in German, "It's back there, sir. What you're looking for."
"How long until we reach Leszno?"
The conductor looked at his watch. "About an hour, not much
more."
Uhl returned to the compartment. At Leszno, after Polish border
guards checked the first-class passports, the train would continue to
Glogau, where the passengers had to get off for German frontier kon-
trol; then he would change trains, for a local that went south to Breslau. Back in his compartment, Uhl kept looking at his watch.
Diagonally across from him, an empty seat. The man in the black coat
had not returned. Had the train stopped? No. He was simply somewhere else.
It was almost six when they reached the Polish border at Leszno.
Uhl decided to get off the train and wait for the next one, but the conductor had stationed himself to block the door. Broad and stocky, feet
spread wide, he stood like an official wall. "You must wait for the
passport officers, sir," he said. He wasn't polite. Did he think Uhl
wanted to run away? No, he knew that Uhl wanted to run away. Six
days a week he worked on this train, what hadn't he seen? Fugitives,
certainly, who'd lost their nerve and couldn't face the authorities.
"Of course," Uhl said, returning to his compartment.
What a fool he was! He was an ordinary man, not cut out for a life
like this. He'd been born to put on his carpet slippers after dinner, to
sit in his easy chair, read his newspaper, and listen to music on the
&n
bsp; radio. In the compartment, the other passengers were restive. They
didn't speak but shifted about, cleared their throats, touched their
faces. And there they sat, as twenty minutes crawled by. Then, at last,
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at the end of the car, the sound of boots on the steel platform, a little
joke, a laugh. The two officers entered the compartment, took each
passport in turn, glanced at the owner, found the proper page, and
stamped it: Odjazd Polska-- 18 Pazdziernik 1937.
Well, that wasn't so bad. The passengers relaxed. The woman
across from Uhl searched in her purse, found a hard candy, unwrapped
it, and popped it in her mouth--so much for the Polish frontier! Then
she noticed that Uhl was watching her. "Would you care for a candy?"
she said.
"No, thank you."
"Sometimes, the motion of the train . . ." she said. There was
sympathy in her eyes.
Did he look ill? What did she see, in his face? He turned away and
stared out the window. The train had left the lights of Leszno; outside
it was dark, outside it was Germany. Now what Uhl saw in the window was his own reflection, but if he pressed his forehead against the
cold glass he could just make out a forest, a one-street village, a black
car, shiny in the rain, waiting at the lowered bar of a railway crossing. What if, he wondered, the next time he went to Warsaw, he simply
didn't show up for Andre's meeting? What would they do? Would they
betray him? Or just let him go? The former, he thought. He was
trapped, and they would not set him free; the world didn't work that
way, not their world. His mind was working like a machine gone wild;
fantasies of escape, fantasies of capture, a dozen alibis, all of them
absurd, the possibility that he was afraid of shadows, that none of it
was real.
"Glo-gau!"
The conductor's voice was loud in the corridor. Then, from further away, "Glogau!"
The train rumbled through the outlying districts of the city, then
slowed for the bridge that crossed the river Oder, a long span of
arches, the current churning white as it curled around the stone block.
An ancient border, no matter where the diplomats drew their lines,
"east of the Oder" meant Slavic Europe, the other Europe.
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"All out for Glogau."
The passport kontrol was set up at the door to the station,
beneath a large swastika flag. Uhl counted five men, one of them
seated at a small table, another with an Alsatian shepherd on a
braided leash. Three were in uniform, their holstered sidearms worn
high, and two were civilians, standing so they could see a sheaf of
papers on the table. A list.
Uhl's heart was pounding as he stepped down onto the platform.
You have nothing to fear, he told himself. If they searched him they
would find only a thousand zloty. So what? Everyone carried money.
But they have a list. What if his name was on it? A few months earlier
he'd seen it happen, right here, at Glogau station. A heavy man, with
a red face, led quietly away, a guiding hand above his elbow. Now he
saw the two businessmen; they were ahead of him on the line that led
to the passport kontrol. One of them looked over his shoulder, then
said something, something private, to his friend. Yes, he's just back
there, behind us. And then Uhl discovered the man in the black leather
coat. He was not on the line, he was sitting on a bench by the wall of
the station, hands in pockets, legs crossed, very much at ease. Because
he did not have to go through passport kontrol, because he was one of
them, a Gestapo man, who'd followed him down from Warsaw, making sure he didn't get off the train. And now his job was done, work
over for the day. Tomorrow, a new assignment. Uhl felt beads of sweat
break out at his hairline, took off his hat, and wiped them away. Run.
"Ach, " he said, to the man behind him in the line, "I have forgotten
my valise."
He left the line and walked back toward the train, his briefcase
clamped tightly beneath his arm. At the door to the train, where
second-class passengers were gathering, waiting in a crowd to join the
line, the conductor was smoking a cigarette. "Excuse me," Uhl said,
"but I have forgotten my suitcase."
No you haven't. The conductor's face showed perfectly what he
knew: there was no suitcase. And Uhl saw it. So now my life ends, he
thought. Then, quietly, he said, "Please."
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The conductor shifted his eyes, looking over Uhl's shoulder
toward the SS troopers, the civilians, the flag, the dog, the list. His
expression changed, and then he stepped aside, just enough to let Uhl
pass. When he spoke, his voice was barely audible. "Ahh, fuck these
people." Uhl took a tentative step toward the iron stair that led up to
the carriage. The conductor, still watching the Germans and their
table, said, "Not yet." Uhl felt a drop of sweat break free of his hatband and work its way down his forehead; he wanted to wipe it away
but his arm wouldn't move.
"Now," the conductor said.
19 October, 3:30 p.m. The weekly intelligence meeting was held in the
conference room of the chancery--the political section of the
embassy--secured from public areas, away from the seekers of travel
documents, replacements for lost passports, commercial licenses, and
all other business that brought the civilian world to the building. The
code clerks were in the basement--which they didn't like, claiming the
dampness was hard on their equipment--along with the mailroom
that handled sealed embassy pouches, while Mercier's office was on
the top floor.
The meeting was chaired by Jourdain, the second secretary and
political officer--which meant he too scurried about the city to dark
corners for secret contacts--and Mercier's best friend at the embassy. Sandy-haired and sunny, in his mid-thirties, Jourdain was a
third-generation diplomat--his father due to become ambassador to
Singapore--with three young children in private academies in Warsaw. Across the table from Mercier was the air attache, at one end the
naval attache, at the other, Jourdain's secretary, who took shorthand
notes, which Jourdain would turn into a report for the Quai d'Orsay,
the foreign ministry in Paris.
"Not much new," the air attache said. He was in his fifties, corpulent and sour-faced. "The production of the Pezetelkis is going full
steam ahead." Pezetelki was the nickname, taken from initials, of the
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PZT-24F, Poland's best fighter plane, four years earlier the most
advanced pursuit monoplane in Europe. "But the air force won't get
near them; that hasn't changed either. For export only."
"The same orders?" Jourdain said.
"Yes. Turkey, Greece, and Yugoslavia."
"They'll regret that, one of these
days," the naval attache said.
The air attache shrugged. "They're trying to balance the budget,
the country's damn close to broke. So they sell what people will buy."
"I guess they know best," said Jourdain, who clearly didn't believe
that at all.
"Otherwise, very little new." The air attache studied his notes.
"They had an accident, last Wednesday, over Okecie field. One of their
P-Sevens clipped the tail of another. Both pilots safe, both planes
badly banged up, one a loss--he parachuted--the other landed."
Again he shrugged. "So we can say"--the air attache looked toward
the secretary--"that their numbers are reduced by one, anyhow."
"Just note," Jourdain said to the secretary, "that we should repeat
the fact that the relation of the Polish air force to the Luftwaffe
remains twenty-five to one in favor of the Germans." Then he turned
to the naval attache and said, "Jean-Paul?"
As the naval attache lit a cigarette and shuffled through his papers,
there were two sharp knocks at the door, which opened to reveal one
of the women who worked the embassy switchboard. "Colonel
Mercier? May I speak with you for a moment?"
"Excuse me," Mercier said. He went out into the corridor and
closed the door behind him. The operator, a middle-aged Frenchwoman, was, like many who worked at the embassy, the widow of an
officer killed in the 1914 war. "A Monsieur Uhl has telephoned your
apartment," she said. "He left a number with your maid. I hope it's
correct, sir, she was very nervous."
"Poor Wlada," Mercier said. Now what? The operator handed
him a slip of paper, and Mercier went up the stairs to his office. Looking in his drawer, he found a list of German telephone exchanges,
dialed the switchboard, and asked for a foreign operator. When she
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came on the line he gave her the number. "Can you put it through right
away?" he said, his Polish slow but correct.
"I can, sir, it's quiet this afternoon."
As Mercier waited, he stared out his window onto the square in
front of the embassy. Beneath the bare branches of a chestnut tree, a
man with a wagon was selling a sausage on a roll to a father with a
small child. Far away, a telephone rang once. "Hello? Hello?" Uhl's