by Alan Furst
always worth stealing if you can. Ahh, but invasion plans, now you
have diamonds. And they only come from one mine, the same I.N. Six
that Sosnowski penetrated with his German girlfriends. But, alas, that
probably can't be done again."
"Probably not."
"Still, if by circumstance, the right person, the right moment . . ."
"In that case, it could be tried."
"Surely it could. Well worth it, I'd think. But I doubt seduction is
the answer, not anymore, not with the Gestapo and the SD. And old
von Sosnowski was one of a kind, wasn't he--a hundred women a
year, that was the rumor. Wouldn't work again, I'd say, reprise isn't the
answer. No, this time it would have to be money."
"Quite a lot of money," Mercier said.
From de Beauvilliers, a rather gloomy nod of agreement. How-Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 3/26/08 9:29 AM Page 116
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ever, all was not lost. As he leaned toward Mercier, his voice was quiet
but firm. "Of course, we do have a lot of money."
That said, he returned to his lunch. Mercier drank some champagne, then, suddenly, and for no reason he could think of, he was very
conscious of the life around him, the Parisian chatter and laughter
that filled the smoky air of the restaurant. A strange awareness; not
enjoyment, more apprehension. Like the dogs, he thought. Sometimes, at rest, they would raise their heads, alert to something distant,
then, after a moment, lie back down again, always with a kind of sigh.
What would happen to these people, he wondered, if war came here?
3 December, Warsaw. Now the winter snow began to fall. At night, it
melted into golden droplets on the Ujazdowska gas lamps and, by
morning, turned the street white and silent. Out in the countryside,
the first paw prints of wolves were seen near the villages.
Mercier's mail grew fat with Christmas cards; the Vyborgs sent a
manger with infant and sheep, similarly the Spanish naval attache.
From Prince Kaz and Princess Toni--postmarked Venice--a yule tree
dusted with bits of silver, and a Hope to see you in the spring, in girls'
academy handwriting below the printed greeting. From Albertine a
warm holiday letter, not so different from the one he'd sent her. By
now she would be in Aleppo, he imagined, and found himself remembering the darkened hall that led to her room and the faint music he'd
heard.
From the Rozens, a Chanukah card with a menorah, and another
from Dr. Goldszteyn, his sometime partner in the foursomes at the
Milanowek Tennis Club. Inside the card was a letter, on a sheet of
cream-colored stationery.
Dear Colonel Mercier,
We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Sadly, I must take this occasion to say goodby. My family and I
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will soon be in Cincinnahti, joining my brother who emigrated
a few years ago. This will be a better situation for us, I believe.
For your kindness and thoughtful consideration I thank you,
and wish you happiness of the season. Sincerely yours,
Judah Goldszteyn
Mercier read it more than once, thought about answering the letter,
then realized, a sadder thing than the letter itself, that there was nothing to be said. He was not able to throw the letter away, so put it in a
drawer.
The mail also included invitations, fancy ones--the Warsaw
printers thrived this time of year--to more official gatherings than
Mercier could ever hope to attend, and a few private parties. RSVP.
He declined most, and accepted a few. A handwritten note from
Madame Dupin, the deputy director of protocol at the embassy,
invited him to a vernissage "for one of Poland's finest young painters,
Marc Shublin." The vernissage--"varnishing," it meant, thus the
completion of an oil painting--was an old Paris tradition, the first
showing of an artist's new work, typically at his studio.
Mercier had added the note to his no pile, but Madame Dupin,
bright and forceful as always, had shown up at his office a day later.
"Oh really, you must come," she'd said. "Congenial people, you'll
have a good time. Marc's so popular, we're having it at an abandoned
greenhouse on Hortensya street. Please, Jean-Francois, say yes, the
young man's worth your evening, my friend Anna is invited, and
everything else this year will be so boring. Please?"
"Of course, Marie, I'll be there."
On the afternoon of the eleventh, in suit and tie, Mercier took a trolley to the outskirts of the city to meet a man called Verchak. This was
a favor done for him by Colonel Vyborg, thus an offer that could not
be turned down, though Mercier doubted it would be productive. Ver-Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 3/26/08 9:29 AM Page 118
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chak had served with the Dabrowsky battalion in the Spanish civil war
and, wounded in the fighting, had been allowed--"because of his family," Vyborg had said--to return to Poland. Most of the battalion had
been made up of Polish miners, from the Lille region of France, almost
all of them members of the communist labor union, who'd fought as
part of the XIth International Brigade, prominent in the defense of
Madrid. Emigre communists knew better than to try to re-enter
Poland, so Verchak was a valuable rarity, according to Vyborg.
The two-room apartment in a workers' district was scrupulously
clean--cleanliness being the Polish antidote to poverty--and smelled
of medicine. Mercier was taken to the second room, bare of decoration except for a small cedar tree set on a bench and hung with beautiful wooden Christmas ornaments, where he was shown to the good
chair, while Verchak sat on a handmade plank chair across from him.
Pana Verchak served tea, offered sugar, which Mercier knew not to
accept, then left the room.
A broken man, Mercier thought--no wound was physically
apparent, but Verchak was old and slumped well beyond his years. His
Polish was slow and precise, for which Mercier was grateful, and
someone, Vyborg no doubt, had urged him to be forthcoming.
Mercier said only that he was Vyborg's friend and wished to hear of
Verchak's experience of the war in Spain.
Verchak accepted this and began a recitation, clearly having told
his story more than once. "In the first week of November, it was cold,
and rained every day; we took the village of Boadilla, near the
Corunna road, that led from Madrid to Las Rozas. The Nationalists
wanted to cut that road and lay siege to the city and, after some hours,
while we prepared defensive positions, they attacked us. They surrounded the village."
"What sort of attack was it?"
Verchak looked out the window for a moment, lost in his memory, then turned back to Mercier. "We couldn't stop it, sir," he said.
"First the planes bombed us, then came tanks, then two waves of
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infantry, then more tanks. But we held on for a long time, though half
of our men were killed."
"You fired at the tanks."
"With machine guns, but it meant little. One of them we set on
fire, with a field gun, and we shot the crew as they came out of the
hatch. One or two others got stuck in a ravine, and we put hand
grenades under the engine in the back. But there were too many of
them."
"How many?"
Verchak slowly shook his head. "Too many to count. We were
next to the Thaelmann Battalion, German communists, mostly, and
they said it was called 'Lightning war.' "
"In Polish, they said that?"
"No, sir. In German."
"So then, Blitzkrieg?"
"It might've been that. I don't remember."
"It was their word? The Germans in the Thaelmann Battalion?"
"I think they said they'd heard it from the German advisors who
fought with the Nationalists."
"How did they come to hear it, Pan Verchak? From a prisoner?"
"They might've, sir, they didn't say. Perhaps they listened to the
Germans talking on their radios. They were very clever people."
"Did the planes return?"
"Not that day, but the following morning, as we moved back
toward Madrid. We were out of ammunition. They sent us blank cartridges, the officers in Madrid."
"Why would they do such a thing?"
"For courage, people said, so we wouldn't retreat."
"Did the men in the tanks talk to the planes, Pani?"
"I wouldn't know, sir. But I do know it can be done."
"Really? Why do you say that?"
"I saw it with my own eyes, later, when we fought at the Jarama
river. The tanks were on our side there, big Russian tanks, and I saw a
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tank commander, halfway out of the open hatch, using a radio and
watching the Russian war planes in the sky. He shouted at them--I
was only a few feet away--when the bombs began to fall on our own
trenches. Then, after he shouted, the bombing stopped. Not soon
enough, sir, some of the comrades were killed, but it did stop. Of
course, he shouldn't have been out of the tank, for the Moors shot
him." Verchak stopped for a moment, as though he could see the tank
commander. "It was a terrible war, sir," he said.
Verchak's wife returned to the room soon thereafter, a signal,
Mercier thought, that her husband could not continue much longer.
When Mercier rose to leave, he slid a thousand zloty into a piece of
folded paper from his notepad and put it under the Christmas tree.
The Verchaks looked at each other--should they accept such a gift?--
and Pana Verchak started to speak. But Mercier told her it was an old
French tradition, in this season, that entering a home with a Christmas tree, a gift must be left beneath it. "I have to follow my traditions," he said, and, as he'd well known, they would not argue with
that.
11 December. Ominous weather, as night fell, the air ice cold and
completely still. At eight-thirty, Mercier strolled over to the old greenhouse on Hortensya street, a facility long disused, that had once
served the parks and gardens of the city. It was, Mercier thought, typical of Madame Dupin to adopt some artist in the city where she
worked; she was forever doing things, involving herself in an endless
series of projects and pastimes. Shublin was at the door of the greenhouse, Madame Dupin at his side. He was young, with a roughneck's
good looks, and very intense. What other pleasure, beyond the satisfaction of patronage, he might have provided for Madame Dupin was
open to question--as, in fact, was her erotic life, a subject of some
speculation in the diplomatic community. That night she was effusive
and excited, taking Mercier's hand in both of hers and near joyful that
he'd actually shown up. Clearly, she'd feared he wouldn't.
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Shublin and his friends had gone to great lengths to turn the old
greenhouse into an artist's studio. The artist's props--skulls, statuettes of deformed people and imaginary beasts, easels bearing newspaper decoupages, a dressmaker's mannikin on a wire cage--had been
imported for the evening, and his largest canvas hung from an iron
beam on ropes, flanked by a pair of skeletons, their names on cardboard squares tied beneath their chins. Mercier immediately liked the
painting, as well as the others propped against the cloudy old glass
walls: fire. Fire in its every aspect--orange flames roaring into azure
skies, black smoke pouring from a brilliant yellow flash, fire, and more
fire.
Mercier, his costume for a bohemian soiree a bulky sweater and
corduroy trousers beneath a long overcoat, with a black wool scarf
looped insouciantly--he hoped--about his neck, was introduced here
and there. For a time, he spoke with a professor of art history and
brought up the subject of Polish war paintings, for him a particular
treasure he'd discovered in Warsaw--huge battlefield scenes laden
with cavalry and cannon, exquisitely detailed and compelling. But the
professor didn't much care for them, and, discovering that Mercier
was French, went on and on about Matisse. Mercier spoke also with
Shublin's girlfriend, who was very up-to-date on European politics--
perhaps the last thing in the world he wanted to talk about. But she
was smart and amusing, and Mercier discovered he was, as promised,
actually having a good time. The wine and vodka were plentiful, and
platters of hors d'oeuvres had been brought in from a good restaurant, generously provided by Madame Dupin. With secret embassy
funds? Lord, he hoped not.
It was nine-fifteen when Anna Szarbek appeared. The same Anna
Szarbek; dark-blond hair, swept across her forehead and pinned in
back, deep green eyes, wary and restless, the slight downward curve of
her nose and heavy lips suggesting sensuality. Suggesting it to him, certainly. His heart rose to look at her, he wanted to rush her through the
night in a taxi, off to his bedroom, there to relieve her of coat, boots,
sweater, skirt, and all the rest, there to see what he'd barely touched
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the night they danced together. And then . . . Well, his imagination
was in perfect order, and therein her desire, in their first moment
together, was the equal of his, and his desire was making him almost
dizzy. But not so much that he didn't search the room for Maxim, who
was nowhere to be seen, and Mercier, elated beyond reason, felt a
great smile appear on his face. His search of the room did reveal
Madame Dupin, turned partly away from a conversing group, a sharp,
inquisitive eye directly on him. Was this why she'd wanted him here?
Was she matchmaking? Could that be true? Back and forth he went.
Trapped, meanwhile, by the most boring man on earth--"But,
you understand, the laws of the city expressly forbid them to build a
wall there! Myself I find it almost impossible to believe"--Mercier
kept saying "Mm," and "Mm," his eyes wandering rudely over the
man's shoulder. Anna was easy to spot--her sweater was a deep red,
with a design in tiny pearls below a raised collar--as she navigated
through the crowded greenhouse. Stopped to have a look at the skeletons, peered nearsightedly at the cardboard nameplates, responded
with a wry smile, and moved on.
"We could go to court, serve them right, having to hire some
expensive lawyer. . . ."
"Mm. Mm."
Now she saw him. She had been looking for him. His heart leapt.
"Forgive me, I think I'll have another glass of wine."
"You don't have a glass of wine."
"Then I'll go and get one."
Mercier worked his way toward her, and they exchanged conspiratorial smiles-- oh what a crowd--at the difficulty of his progress. At
last they stood together and shook hands, her skin cold from the night
outside. "Very nice to see you again," he said.
"I think I saw you at the foreign office cocktail party," she said.
Her voice was slightly husky--he'd forgotten that, as well as the faint
accent.
"You did. I saw you too, but I couldn't get over to say hello."
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"You seemed busy," she said.
"An official reception. I had to be there. But this is much nicer."
"A Marie Dupin affair, they're always good parties. Poor Maxim
had to interview a politician, so I almost didn't come, but, I thought,
why not? And I'd promised."
"Something to drink?"
"Yes, good, I can use it. The cold tonight is awful, even for Warsaw."
They made their way to the bar in the far corner. "Two vodkas,
please," Mercier said. Then, to Anna, "Is that all right with you? Insulation against the weather."
"Yes, thanks. I knew it would be freezing in here, I mean, it's
glass."
"They have kerosene heaters."
Anna wasn't impressed. "Poor plants."
"Not anymore. What do you think of the paintings?"
"A little frightening--they're not cozy fires."
"War fires, you think?"
"Violent, anyhow. At least they don't show what's burning.
Houses, or ships."
"Maybe you're meant to imagine them."
She nodded, yes, could be, searched in her bag, found a cigarette
and a lighter, and handed the lighter to Mercier. He lit her cigarette
and said, "I'll go find you an ashtray, if you like."
"Let's go together, I don't know a soul in here."
As they began to move toward the hors d'oeuvres table, a heavy