by Alan Furst
By the time Mercier was back to his cover position behind the shrub, the tanks were spread out across the hill, a few hundred feet above the road, but the exercise was not going well. He could see at least six of them, the light model Uhl had been working on. Down by the road, one of the tanks had failed immediately; the crew had the rear hatch cover off and were kneeling on the deck in order to work on the engine. A second had climbed thirty feet, then stopped, blue exhaust streaming from its vent as the commander crawled between the treads to check on ground clearance. A third had tried to mow down a pine, had broken it off, then got hung up on the stump and thrown a tread. The other three had reached the crest of the hill and were now out of sight. But Mercier could see that all was not well for one tank at least, because, in the distance to the north, a column of black smoke rose slowly above the forest.
They worked at it all morning, and for most of the afternoon. Now and again, the Fieseler Storch returned for thirty minutes, and Mercier had to hide beneath the shrub. Then, late in the afternoon, the weak December sun low in the sky, they tried something new. From the north, a blue Opel sedan drove up and parked next to the staff cars. This was, clearly, somebody’s personal car: a few years old, its paint job faded and dusty, a dent on the door panel. The driver, a young Wehrmacht officer-a lieutenant; Mercier could see the insignia with his field glasses-talked to the senior officers for a time, then took a length of iron pipe, long enough so that its end stuck out the rolleddown rear window, from the car. While the others watched, hands clasped behind their backs in a classic officer pose, he knelt by the front of the Opel and wired the pipe to the bumper. Mercier adjusted the field glasses and focused on the lieutenant’s face as he chatted away while he worked at twisting the ends of the wire until it was secure. Oh well, likely it won’t work, but you never know…. For a moment, Mercier wasn’t sure what he was looking at, but then, when the lieutenant produced a measuring tape, he understood perfectly: the pipe was the width of a light tank. The lieutenant slid behind the wheel and drove cautiously up the hill. More than once he misjudged distance, one end of the pipe banging into a tree, and had to reverse the Opel and try a different path. But the idea was simple and effective.
If you contemplated a tank attack through a forest, all you needed was a car and a length of pipe. If the pipe on the car fit through the trees, so would a tank.
In the town of Schramberg, the anniversary couple was enjoying the fourth day of their vacation. On the morning of the fourteenth, after a copious breakfast, as the lady who’d rented them a room waved from the doorway, they set off for their daily walk in the Black Forest. Such a sweet couple, in their loden-green walking shorts, high stockings, and alpine hats. They headed south out of town, as their kind hostess had recommended, but then turned north, using a compass to make sure they weren’t going around in circles. After an hour’s walk, they took a radio receiver from a knapsack and ran its aerial up a tree, fixing it in place with a piece of string. No result, so they kept walking. On the fourth attempt, it worked. Holding a pair of headphones to his ear, the elderly gentleman smiled with satisfaction: a babble of voices-commands, curses, yes, sirs and no, sirs, the radio traffic of a tank formation moving over difficult terrain. The anniversary couple were now within range of shortwave tank radios, about five miles. They connected a wire recorder to the receiver and settled in for the day. Likely the people they worked with would make sense of it; certainly the couple hoped they would.
Not worked for, the way they thought about it, but worked with. They had refused payment, their spying was an act of conscience. Sincere Christians, German Lutherans, they had watched with horror as the Nazis violated every precept sacred to them. But then, what to do about it? They could not leave Germany, for a list of commonplace domestic reasons, so they had traveled up to Paris, a year earlier, taken a room at an inexpensive hotel, written a note to the General Staff headquarters, and settled in to wait. It took a week, then two men appeared at the hotel, and the couple offered their services. No, they didn’t care to be paid. They had prayed together for hours, they explained, down on their knees, trying to make this decision, but now it was made. The people who led Germany were evil, and they were obliged, by their faith, to act against them. “Very well,” said one of the men. “Give us your address in Germany. We’ll see about who you are and then, in time, someone will get in touch with you.”
Three months later, someone did.
THE BLACK FRONT
22 December, 1937. The Schorfheide. Fifty miles northeast of Berlin, a region known for its deserted countryside, its marshland and forest, deep lakes, bountiful game, and splendid hunting lodges. Notably Hermann Goring’s Karinhall, where, some months earlier, at one of the field marshal’s infamous parties, he had appeared wearing a leather jerkin, grasping a spear, and leading a pair of bison on a chain. The bison had been induced to mate, while the guests fell to awed whispers, and the story was told everywhere.
For Sturmbannfuhrer August Voss, that evening, a party not to be missed, held at a Berlin banker’s hunting lodge not far from Karinhall. “I think he bought them,” said Voss’s friend Meino, referring to the wolf pelts, bearskins, and stag antlers that decorated the pine walls. The two men stood before a crackling fire in a fieldstone fireplace, drinking champagne, following a dinner of wild boar and potatoes in cream.
“Look at him,” Voss said. “I doubt he hunts anything.”
The banker, in eager conversation with an SS colonel, was a fat little elf who rubbed his hands and laughed no matter what anybody said. He looked like a man who’d never been outdoors, much less hunting.
“Maybe he hunts women,” said Willi, third in the trio of SS pals.
“Or boys, more likely,” Meino said.
Voss reached inside his black tunic, brought out a cigar, and lit it. “Care for one?” he said to his friends.
Meino declined. Willi produced one of his own and said, “I’ll have this.”
They’d met years earlier: Meino built like a gross cherub, with big belly and behind, and balding Willi, with a fake dueling scar, made by a kitchen knife, on his cheek, and a newly installed von in front of his name. He now worked in the administration office of the SD in Berlin, while Meino was second-in-command of the Regensburg headquarters. They’d joined the SS in the late twenties, together fought communist dockworkers in Hamburg, together beaten up their share of Jews, got drunk together, threw up together, were staunch friends and brothers-in-arms-that would never change.
“Where are the wives?” Willi said.
“In the parlor, gossiping,” Voss said.
Willi frowned. “No good will come of that,” he said.
“What about this Frenchman?” Meino said, returning to an earlier part of the conversation.
“He’s the military attache in Warsaw,” Voss said. “Made me look like a fool. Then Gluck hauled me up to Berlin and roasted my ass.”
“Gluck?” Willi said.
“Obersturmbannfuhrer, my boss.”
“Oh, that prick,” Willi said, expelling a long plume of cigar smoke.
“Lawyer prick,” Meino said. “No?”
“Yes, before he discovered the party. Opportunist.” Voss spat the word. “I said something about getting even, but that made him even madder.”
“So what? You can’t let it end there,” Willi said.
“Willi’s right,” Meino said. “I hate these French fairies-they think they own the world.”
“This one needs to be taught a lesson,” Voss said.
“That’s right, Augi,” Meino said. “You can’t let him get away with it.”
Voss thought for a moment. “Maybe we ought to pay him a visit, up in Warsaw. The three of us. Bring some friends along.”
“Jah,” Willi said. “Mucki Drimmer.” Then he laughed.
“Where’s old Mucki, these days?” Meino said.
“Dachau,” Willi said. “Just under the commandant. I once saw him tear a telephone book in half.”
“Isn’t that a trick?” Voss said.
“Drimmer does tricks, all right. But not with telephone books. Tricks with a pair of pliers, and handcuffs, that’s Mucki’s style.”
Voss laughed, then looked at his empty glass. “Back to the bar, for me.”
Willi gave Voss an affectionate smack on the shoulder, people nearby turned around at the sound of it. “Cheer up, Augi, we’ll put this right. Too long since I’ve been in Warsaw.”
Then they went off to the bar.
23 December.
Mercier’s flight to Paris on the twenty-second had been delayed, and they’d landed at Le Bourget in darkness. He’d stayed at the apartment, cold and silent with Albertine off in Aleppo, decided he couldn’t face dinner in a restaurant, so went to bed hungry, and feeling very much alone. He was glad to be out of there, at six the following morning, taking the express to Lyon, then changing to the local for the trip down to Montelimar. And there stood Fernand, in his Sunday suit, by the battered old farm truck, smiling as Mercier walked toward him.
The truck, not much bigger than a car, had been a Renault back in the twenties but had become, over time, a collection of replacement parts cannibalized from every sort of machine. A handsome green, long ago, it had faded to the color of a gray cloud, the seat a horse blanket atop crushed springs, the two dials on the dashboard frozen in middle age, the gearshift sounding like a madman with a hammer. The engine managed a steady twenty miles an hour on a flat grade, but hills were an adventure meant only for the brave. It took them over two hours to reach Boutillon and then, twenty minutes later, at the end of a long allee of ancient lime trees, the house.
Still there, his heart rose at the sight of it. Not fallen into ruin, not quite, but surely dilapidated, the shutters askew, the earlier stonework laid bare in patches. Even so, a grand presence-foreign visitors wanted to call it a chateau, but it was just an old stone country house. Nevertheless, home. Home. Lisette stood before the door, alerted by the dogs, who’d heard the truck coming from a great distance down the road, as had most of the neighborhood. The dogs came galloping up the drive, barking like crazy, then ran alongside until the truck rolled to a halt, the ignition was turned off, and, a few beats later, the engine stopped.
They were excited to have him back, Achille and Celeste, a reserved excitement in the manner of the Braque Ariegeois: a muted whine or two, a lick on the cheek as he knelt and tousled their lovely floppy ears. Master greeted, they immediately wanted to go to field, anxious to work for him, their highest form of affection. “Not yet, sweethearts. Later on. Later.” For now, Lisette made him an omelet, which he ate at the zinc-topped table in the kitchen; there was fresh bread from the Boutillon bakery and a glass of wine from a bottle with no label. As Lisette cleared his plate, Fernand brought him a telegram that had arrived that morning: home the 27th. gabrielle. “Madame Gabrielle will arrive on Friday,” he said.
“I will make up her old room,” Lisette said simply. But Mercier could tell that she was very nearly as excited as he was.
It was getting late in the afternoon, so he changed into his country clothes, smelling of months in a damp armoire, and took the dogs for a run. They pointed on birds, were released, then flushed a hare, which zigzagged away and just barely managed to get down a hole. Balked, they stood there, heads canted in puzzlement-why does this happen? — then turned to him, awaiting an answer, but even he, master of all, could do nothing. He stood by them, gazing over the pale winter field toward the mountains in the east. Then he walked for a long time, as dusk came on, at least some of the way across his property, once a run of wheat fields but now, since the 1920s, given over to the commercial growth of lavender.
Lavender had always grown wild in the Drome, but the agronomists had learned how to grow it as a crop, and the perfume companies in Grasse paid well for whatever he could deliver. At harvest time, the air was heavy with the scent, as a few trucks, but mostly horse-drawn carts, piled high with purplish branches, moved slowly along the narrow roads. Enough money to live on, back when, but not now; life as a penurious country gentleman awaited him if he resigned his commission. The property-line lawsuit brought by his eastern neighbor had dragged on for years; bills from a lawyer in Montelimar arrived semiannually. Fernand and Lisette were paid for their service, wood and kerosene had to be bought in winter, straw and hay provided for Ambrose, the plow horse now living alone in a stable with eight stalls-a sad thing for a family with generations of cavalry officers-and Ambrose wasn’t getting any younger. Gasoline for the truck, field help at harvest time, and taxes-oh, the taxes-it all added up.
Full dusk now, in typical winter weather for the south, the chill, moist air sharpened by a steady wind from the east. Foreign visitors called it the mistral, but that was the northwesterly and went on for days, famously making people crazy-an old law excused crimes committed from madness brought on by the incessant moaning of the mistral wind. He didn’t want to go back to the house, not yet, he would turn for home at the end of the field, by a cluster of gnarled olive trees and a few cypress, tall and narrow. This land, like so much of the French countryside, was a painting, but Mercier felt his heart touched with melancholy and realized, not for the first time, that beautiful places were hard on lonely people.
“Achille! Celeste! Let’s go, dogs, time for dinner.”
They came loping across the field, tongues out now because they were tired, and headed for home.
He stayed up late that night, reading in bed, wearing a sweater over his pajama top in order to stay warm. The kerosene heater had been turned on as darkness fell, and, when he went up to his room, found that Lisette had preceded him with a lidded copper pan on a long handle, filled with embers from the fireplace, and warmed the sheets, but the stone house breathed winter into every room, and you had to sleep with your nose beneath the covers.
The journals he’d brought with him from Warsaw should have put him to sleep, but they had the opposite effect. With smoke drifting up from a cigarette in the ashtray on the night table, he worked his way through an article in a journal called Deutsche Wehr-German War-one of several publications issued by the German General Staff. The writer made no secret of what Germany had in mind for the future: an army of three hundred divisions, sufficient fuel for ten thousand tanks and the same number of aircraft, and a prediction that medium and heavy tanks would be built to join the lighter models already in production. If the Deuxieme Bureau had been clever enough or lucky enough to steal such information, it would have caused a riptide of reaction-meetings held and papers written as French military doctrine was re-examined in light of German intentions, yet here it was, for all the world to see. Did they read this journal in Paris? And, if they did, did they believe it? Or did they think that because it wasn’t kept secret, it couldn’t be true? Woe to us if they do, Mercier thought, and took a drag on his cigarette.
Turning to the Militarwissenschaftliche Rundschau, the military science review, he found an article by the chief of staff of the German Armoured Corps that discussed an attack in the north, a massive tank thrust through the Ardennes into Belgium and down into France, the same route they’d followed in the 1914 war and more or less what he’d witnessed at the Schramberg tank maneuvers. He’d sent the film off to Paris, with a detailed report of his observation, including the coordinated operations of air and ground forces. He couldn’t say: this is important; he could only do his best to be descriptive, technical, and precise. What then? A note to General de Beauvilliers? No, not appropriate, simply: listen to me. And, really, why should they?
The German articles had, he thought, a companion piece, which he’d read earlier that year, a book by the French general Chauvineau called L’Invasion estelle encore possible? Is invasion still possible? With a foreword by none other than Marshal Petain. Back in Warsaw, in a file cabinet, was a hand copy of Petain’s words, which Mercier had thought worth saving:
If the entire theatre of operations is obstructed, there is no means on ear
th that can break the insurmountable barrier formed on the ground by automatic arms associated with barbed-wire entanglements.
And, same drawer, same folder, General Chauvineau himself:
By placing two million men with the proper number of machine guns and pillboxes along the 250-mile stretch through which the German armies must pass to enter France, we shall be able to hold them up for three years.
Thus the answer to the question Invasion, is it still possible? — was No.
Two-ten in the morning: he turned the light out and pulled the covers up to his eyes. Outside, the steady wind rattled his window and sighed at the corner of the house.
Christmas Eve. Fernand and Lisette had gone off to Grignan in the truck to spend Christmas Day with their son and daughter-in-law and grandchildren, so Mercier had the house to himself. Then, at seven in the evening, his Uncle Hercule, who lived on a Mercier property some ten miles south of his own, picked him up in the family Citroen, shiny and new, and took him home for the Christmas celebration. His father’s only surviving brother, and easily his least favorite, Hercule was a thin, fretful man who’d become wealthy by speculating in South American railroad stocks, turned violently political, and now absorbed himself in writing right-wing pamphlets and letters to newspapers, often on the subject of Bolshevik designs to corrupt public waterworks. Still, holidays were holidays, and assorted Merciers must be gathered under one roof, attend midnight mass, then sit down together to reveillon, the traditional Christmas meal of black and white sausages and goose stuffed with chestnuts.