by Alan Furst
The weasel came from behind the car and, with a hand like a claw, took Mercier roughly by the elbow. “Better get out of here, my friend, this doesn’t concern you.”
The man with the parcel tried to brush past him, but Mercier moved to block him. From the corner of his eye, he could see that a few people had stopped to see what was going on. Suddenly enraged, the red-faced man swung his free hand at Mercier and hit him under the eye. Not very hard. Mercier was knocked backward, recovered, and punched the man in the mouth. From behind, the weasel hit him with a blackjack.
Mercier’s legs collapsed and he fell to his knees. But the blackjack had been a mistake. Mercier heard a loud clang-the coalman had dropped his shovel-and now, like an avenging giant, face black with coal dust, he grabbed the red-faced man by the back of the collar. When he growled something in Polish, the weasel ran away, jummped into the car, and gunned the engine. The red-faced man broke free, tried to keep his balance, lost it, and, as he fell, the parcel slid off his shoulder and landed on the sidewalk with a soft thump. The red-faced man, now scarlet, rose to a sitting position and reached inside his jacket, but a shout from the car stopped him, and he scrambled to his feet as the coalman walked toward him. Then the passenger-side door flew open, the red-faced man got in and, with a look toward Mercier of pure and absolute hatred, slammed the door as, tires squealing, the Opel drove away.
Now the man that Mercier had seen striding down Gesia came sprinting out of the Orla, shrieked at the departing car, and chased after it. The Opel jerked to a stop, the pursuer got in the back and the car sped off, trunk lid flapping as the wheels bounced over the cobblestones.
Mercier tried to get to his feet, somebody helped him, and the coalman handed him his hat. Fearing the worst, he knelt over the parcel, discovered a strong chemical smell, and saw that the coverlet, yellow daisies on a red field, had been tied shut with two lengths of cord. He worked at the first knot as the crowd closed in around him. Somebody said, “Get a scissors.” Finally, Mercier managed to undo the first knot, then the coalman, impatient, reached down and broke the second cord with his hands. As Mercier unfolded the coverlet, the chemical smell grew stronger. Chloroform, he thought. Something like that.
Uhl was dead. Eyes closed, mouth slack, snowflakes falling on his face. A voice in the crowd said, “Finished,” and several people hurried away. Mercier put his fingers on Uhl’s neck and probed for a pulse. Nothing. A woman knelt beside him and said, “Excuse me, please,” gently removing Mercier’s fingers and replacing them with her own. “No,” she said. “It’s faint, but it’s there. Better get the ambulance.”
“Brazen,” Jourdain said. “Unbelievable. In broad daylight.” They were in the chancery, in Jourdain’s office; photographs of diplomats shaking hands lined the walls. “Does it hurt?”
“Yes.”
“You’re dripping on your collar.”
Mercier held a towel filled with ice to the back of his head, which ached so badly it made him squint. “I don’t care,” he said.
It was Jourdain who had, after a telephone call, retrieved him from the police station, where they didn’t care if he said he was the French military attache: they had reports to fill out, he would be there for a while. Uhl was in the hospital, with a policeman standing in the hall outside his door.
Mercier sat back in the chair, closed his eyes, and pressed the towel to the alarming lump on the back of his head. “Goddamn that little bastard,” he said.
There were two sharp raps on the door, which swung open to reveal the ambassador: tall, white-haired, and angry. Mercier began to rise, but the ambassador waved him back down. “Colonel Mercier,” he said. Then, “Are you injured?”
“No, sir, not really, just sore.”
That out of the way, the ambassador said, “Can we expect more of this, colonel? Gun battles? Brawling in the street? Yes, I know why, and you had to intervene, but still …”
“I apologize, sir,” Mercier said. “Circumstance.”
The ambassador nodded, as though that explanation meant something. “Mmm. Sorry I won’t be there when you tell them that in Paris. Because you’ll surely be-ah, summoned.”
Mercier took a breath, then said nothing.
“You’ll take care of that-that situation-in the hospital?”
“This afternoon, sir.”
“Jourdain will help you; you don’t look all that well, to me.”
“Count on it, sir,” Jourdain said. “And please don’t be concerned.”
“No, you’re right, I shouldn’t be concerned,” the ambassador said, meaning very much the opposite. “And I so look forward to the evening papers. Photographs, colonel? Will we have to look at it?”
“No, sir. The police were faster than the journalists.”
The ambassador sighed. “The press attache will do the best he can, and I’ve already made a few telephone calls.” Stepping back into the hall, he said, “And colonel? Let it rest there. Please? I don’t want to lose you.”
Mercier nodded, not ungrateful, and said, “Yes, sir.”
As the ambassador prepared to close the door, he met Mercier’s eyes and his face changed: subtly, but enough so that Mercier understood that he was perhaps more than a little proud of his military attache.
At dusk, back in the apartment, Mercier sent Wlada out for the evening papers and saw that the affair had been nicely smoothed over. An altercation at the Hotel Orla, an attempted abduction, foiled by a passerby. One Hermann Schmitt had been drugged by unknown assailants, political motives were suspected, the police were investigating.
Wlada, having left Mercier to his reading, now returned to the study, Mercier’s battered old hat held firmly in both hands. “Colonel, I can do nothing with this, it’s ruined,” she said, extending the hat so that he could see what she meant. On the brim, the black print of the coalman’s thumb.
“Please don’t worry so, Wlada,” Mercier said gently. “It’s not ruined. Not at all.”
28 November.
The eight-fifteen LOT flight, Warsaw to Paris, was only a third full, and Mercier sat alone toward the rear of the airplane. Out the window, the fields of Poland were white with snow, and the plane bumped and jerked as it fought through the winds and climbed into the blue sky above the clouds.
Bruner and his superiors had, as predicted by the ambassador, recalled him to Paris for consultations, so he could look forward to a few disagreeable meetings and at least the possibility that he would be transferred from his assignment in Warsaw. On the other hand, he’d been guilty of fighting Germans, and the Poles would not be pleased if Paris pulled him back to the General Staff for doing that.
On the afternoon following the attempted abduction, he’d visited Uhl in the hospital, where he’d come to realize that the engineer was, whatever else he may have been, a lucky man. How he’d been discovered Mercier didn’t know, though he had spent a long time taking Uhl through the details of his home and office life. The luck came into play because Uhl had been issued a visa for travel to South Africa. Yes, he’d planned to run away-from Breslau, from “Andre,” from work and family. With his countess, or alone if necessary. The SD or the Gestapo, Mercier believed, had learned of the visa and, fearing his imminent flight, had determined they’d better snatch Uhl while they could still get their hands on him. Otherwise, they would simply have allowed him to return to Germany, watched him there, and arrested him at their leisure.
Somebody, most likely the officer in charge of the case, had panicked and ordered an almost spur-of-the-moment abduction by German operatives in Poland. Which had almost succeeded, then come to grief, but, even so, better than having a suspected spy vanish into thin air. Now Uhl was Mercier’s problem-what to do with him? In the short term, Mercier and Jourdain had to assume the hospital was being watched and so, after three days there, Uhl left the building on a stretcher, covered by a sheet, which was slid into the back of a hearse. Then, at the funeral home, out the back door and into a rented room on the outskirts o
f the city. “Now,” Jourdain had said, “we just have to keep him away from the ladies.”
“I suspect he’s learned his lesson,” Mercier answered. “He’ll never again meet a seductive woman without wondering.”
For the long term, the problem was harder, and Mercier and Jourdain spent hours on possible solutions. Mercier was surprised to discover how much he cared, but, like all the best military officers, he felt a great depth of responsibility for those under his command, and injury to one of them, no matter his opinion of that individual, affected him far more than the civilian world would ever understand.
Given: Uhl could never go back to Germany. And he couldn’t go to South Africa either; German agents would be waiting for him. Also given: the Deuxieme Bureau of the General Staff wasn’t going to provide a lifetime of support for their former spy-Uhl would have to work. Under a new identity, his life history rewritten in an office at 2, bis, in Paris. Work where? Martinique and French Guyana were no more than brief candidates, Canada was the logical choice-Quebec, where the French General Staff had friends who could help them out, and make sure that Uhl lived a quiet, and very private, life. This project was being worked on in Paris, and Mercier expected to hear about it when he reached the city. Ordered to go to Paris, he thought, smiling to himself. How life is hard! He’d written to his cousin Albertine, so his rooms in the vast Mercier de Boutillon apartment in the Seventh Arrondissement would be made up and waiting for him. The steady drone of the engines made him sleepy; he stared out at Cloudland below him, a kingdom of children’s books, and dozed off.
When he woke, they were flying over Germany: crisp little towns, then crisp little farm fields. Beneath him, the snow thinned out, then stopped, leaving the woodlands dark and bare as winter came. From his briefcase he took a popular new book, currently a bestseller in Germany, called Achtung-Panzer! by Colonel Heinz Guderian, commander of Germany’s 2nd Panzer Division. With a French/German dictionary on his lap, Mercier went to work.
We live in a world that is ringing with the clangor of weapons. Mankind is arming on all sides, and it will go ill with a state that is unable or unwilling to rely on its own strength. Some nations are fortunate enough to be favored by nature. Their borders are strong, affording them complete or partial protection against hostile invasion, through chains of mountains or wide expanses of sea. By way of contrast, the existence of other nations is inherently insecure. Their living space is small and in all likelihood ringed by borders that are inherently open, and lie under constant threat from an accumulation of neighbors who combine an unstable temperament with armed superiority.
Well, surely he’s read de Gaulle’s book-and produced a similar opening paragraph. Mercier turned pages-skimmed through a history of British and French tank attacks in the latter half of the Great War-then came upon Guderian’s description of the situation in the first months of 1937.
At the beginning of 1937 the French possessed … more than 4,500 tanks, which means that the number of tanks exceeds by a wide margin the number of artillery pieces, even in the peace-time army. No other country shows such a disproportion between armour and artillery. Figures like these give us food for thought!
True, Mercier thought, the numbers were known, but what to do with these machines? Ah, that was the dessert of the food for thought.
Toward the end of the book, Mercier found the tactical conclusions: the successful use of tanks depended on surprise, deployment en masse, and suitable terrain. These were, Mercier knew, precisely de Gaulle’s conclusions, in his book and in successive monographs, urging the formation of tank units which he called Brigades du Choc. Shock formations-to break the stalemate of a static trench war. Tanks should fight together, in numbers, not be scattered to support companies of infantry. As for terrain, Mercier would have to read fully, but Guderian seemed to concentrate mostly on the subject of national road systems to bring tanks to the front, and avoidance of ground broken by shellholes-natural tank traps-or churned to liquid mud by preparatory artillery barrages. These, in the Great War, sometimes went on for days, as massed field guns fired as many as five million shells.
And forests? Not specifically mentioned, though perhaps more lay buried in the text. And, Mercier thought, now that Uhl was lost, he would have to find some other way to observe the planned Wehrmacht maneuvers at Schramberg.
At five-thirty, leaving a taxi in the rue Saint-Simon, Mercier felt the Parisian mystique take hold of his heart: a sudden nameless ecstasy in the damp air-air scented by black tobacco and fried potatoes and charged with the restless melancholy of the city at the end of its day. Oh, this was home all right, he knew it in his soul-not the autumn mists of the Drome, not his pointers running free in a field, but home nonetheless, which some part of him never left.
Here, in the depths of the Seventh Arrondissement, the residents were rich, quiet, and cold, stewards of the inner chamber. A walled city, its walls hiding formal gardens and silent monasteries, Napoleonic barracks and foreign embassies. One saw the residents only now and again: retired army officers in dark suits, women of the nobility, perfect in afternoon Chanel.
Halfway up the narrow street: 23, rue Saint-Simon. Mercier rang the bell by the familiar door-built for the height of a carriage-and the concierge, who’d known him for twenty years, let him in. He crossed the interior courtyard, ignored by the twittering sparrows, his steps on the stone block loud in the thick silence of the building, and climbed to the second floor, unlocked the door, and entered the apartment: bought in the middle of the nineteenth century by his great-grandfather, only the plumbing updated, the rest as it had always been-leaded glass windows in small panes, vast, gloomy carpets, massive armoires and chests. Not elegant, the furnishings, but sturdy. The Merciers lived on country estates, and the women of the family had always treated the Paris apartment as a tiresome necessity-people of their class always had to go to Paris for one reason or another, and the alternative was hotels, and restaurants. Unthinkable. Thus they’d been economical in the purchase of slipcoverings and draperies, everything dark, not to show use and meant to last. The fabrics were protected by closed shutters and heavy drapes-the sun was not allowed in here.
Mercier dropped his briefcase and valise in the bedroom and found a note from his cousin Albertine on the night table.
Dearest Jean-Francois,
Welcome. I am out for the afternoon but I shall return at six-thirty, and we can go out for dinner, if you like, or I can cook something if you’re too tired. Looking forward to seeing you,
Albertine.
In Mercier’s past, Cousin Albertine occupied a very special niche. She was the youngest daughter of his father’s favorite brother, later to die in the war, and they’d grown up as neighbors-his uncle’s property a few miles away from their own-so together often: at Christmas and Easter, in summer when they were home from their respective boarding schools. Surely she’d always been the odd one out of the Mercier clan: tall, awkward, pale, serious, and curiously redheaded-auburn, really-with freckles scattered across her forehead. Where, the family wondered, had she come from? All the other Merciers were dark, like Jean-Francois, so, it was theorized, some ancient gene had surfaced in his cousin and made her different. The other possibility was never considered-or, rather, never spoken aloud….
One Saturday morning at the end of summer, when Mercier was fourteen and Albertine sixteen, Uncle Gerard and his family had come to visit. The adults and the other children had gone off somewhere-to a livestock auction in a distant village, as Mercier remembered it-and he and Albertine were left alone in the house. The servants downstairs were preparing midday dinner; they would be twelve at table, for various other family members would be joining them.
In his room, Mercier was dressing for dinner, in underpants and his best shirt, in front of a wall mirror, working at tying his tie. First the bottom part came out absurdly short, then too long. On his third attempt, the door opened and, in the mirror, Cousin Albertine appeared. She watched him for a moment
, then, with a strange look on her face, at once shy and determined, came up behind him. “Can I try it?” she said.
“I can do it,” he said.
“I want to try,” she said. “To see if I can.”
“How do you know about ties?”
“I watch my brothers do it.”
“Oh.”
This was intended to mean, oh, I see, but came out as more of an oh! because, as Albertine reached around him, her heavy breasts, in a thin summer dress, rested lightly against his back.
“Now,” she said, “we cross it around and loop it through.”
In the mirror, Albertine’s face was dreamy, her eyes half closed, mouth slightly open. Also in the mirror, the front of his underpants highly distended. For a few seconds, they stood like statues, then she whispered, “I want to see it,” hooked her thumbs in the waistband of his underpants, and pulled them down.
“Alber-tine!”
“What?”
She reached out and closed her hand around it, her skin warm and damp. He leaned back against her, then moved away. “We’re not supposed-”
“Oh foo,” she said. So much for family morals. “You like it,” she said firmly, and ran her finger along the underside, back and forth. “Don’t you?”
He could only nod.
She pressed against him, above and below, and he reached back, hands on her bottom, and pulled her closer. She now stroked him with index finger and thumb: where had she learned to do this? He was very excited and, a few seconds later, came the inevitable conclusion, accompanied, from deep within him, by a sound somewhere between a sigh and a gasp.
“There,” she said softly, taking her hand away.
“Well, that’s what happens.”
“I know that.”
He started to move away from her, but she wrapped her arms around his shoulders and held him tight. Close to his ear, she whispered, “Now it’s my turn.”