The Polish Officer
by Alan Furst

  “Lezhev, you must help me.”

It was just a manner of speaking, but when Freddi Schoen used the expression, even over the noisy line of a French telephone, the must had a way of lingering in the air.

“Of course. What is it?”

“First of all, please understand that I am in love.”

“Bravo.”

“No, Lezhev, I beg you, don’t make light of it. She is, it is, just don’t, all right?”

“You are smitten.”

“Yes. It’s true. Cupid’s arrow—it was an ambush, completely a surprise. A dinner in Passy, I didn’t want to go. The man’s in textiles, a vicomte he says, some sort of complicated business connection with my family. Expecting the worst, I went. And then . . .”

“She is French?”

“Very. And of the most elevated family—that’s the problem.”

“Problem?”

“Well, here is what happened. I arrived late, and very excited. I had just taken a country estate; a lovely place and, great good luck for me, an open lease, so I can have it as long as I like. The owner was most accommodating. So naturally I talked about it at the dinner—where it was, and how old, and the river—and she was delighted. ‘Ah, les collines d’Artois, mais qu’elles sont belles!’ she said. So I said, ‘But you must come and see it.’ And I could tell she wanted to but there was, how to say, a momentary sense of frost in the air. Then I realized! For me to ask her there alone would be most awkward, but with friends . . . So quickly I added that a couple I knew was coming on Sunday, wouldn’t she join us for lunch? And Mama and Papa too, I insist! But no, as soon as they heard there was another couple, they were occupied. So, now . . .”

“We’re the couple.”

“You must say yes!”

“Yes. And with pleasure.”

“Thank heaven. I’ll have Fauchon do the picnic, in wicker hampers, with Dom Pérignon, and monogrammed champagne flutes, and lobsters, and the napkins they have that fit in the little leather loops in the hamper. What do you think?”

“Perfect.”

“Now, here is my scheme. My driver will take the two of us up there—it’s a good morning’s drive from Paris—and that way we’ll be alone, but, of course, by happenstance, so all will be quite correct.”

“A natural situation.”

“Who could object? Meanwhile, you and Mademoiselle Beilis will take the train up to Boulogne—it gets in there from Paris about noon. And we’ll pick you up. Did I mention the day? Sunday.”

“Boulogne?”

Genya, paying bills in the Parthenon office, looked up in surprise. “Nobody’s been there since 1890. Deauville, yes. Cabourg, well, maybe. But Boulogne?”

“What’s it like?”

“It’s all those sur-la-plage paintings—the French flag fluttering in the breeze, miles of sand because the tide’s always out, little dogs, ladies with hats.”

“Actually, the way he spoke, it sounded as though the house was inland—‘the hills of Artois.’ ”

“Well I hope he doesn’t dig in his garden—because what he’ll find is bones and unexploded shells. That’s Flanders, is what that is.”

The goddess was, as advertised, a goddess. Fine porcelain, with china-blue eyes and spots of color in the cheeks, thick auburn hair with a flip that just touched the collar, and a porcelain heart. Freddi Schoen was lost—if he’d cantered about on his hands and knees and bayed it might, might, have been more obvious.

As for Lezhev and Genya, the porcelain doll wasted no time. She couldn’t have been sweeter but: one could understand that a foreign gentleman might not have the knack of social relations in a new country; however, if she took possession of this particular spaniel, they could be sure that he’d seen the last of émigré poets and publishers’ daughters. Rue de Rome publishers’ daughters especially.

Lezhev found it damned hard to be Lezhev. The toasts, the snippets of poems, and all that whooping and carrying-on—his version of a Russian poet loved and lived life to the hilt. Sometimes he silently apologized to poor Lezhev’s shade; clearly he hadn’t loved life all that much, but Freddi Schoen seemed responsive to the performance so that’s where he pitched it, with Genya loving life to the hilt right beside him.

De Milja, on the other hand, had an unforeseen reaction to the porcelain doll. To his considerable surprise, she offended the aristocrat in him, put him in mind of the Ostrow uncles, who would have made short work of such snobbery.

Still, whatever his taste in French aristocrats, Freddi Schoen had been right about the estate. A very old Norman farmhouse—how it had survived the unending wars in that part of the world God only knew, but there it was. Ancient timber and cracked plaster, leaning left and right at once, with tiny windows to keep the arrows out and thick walls to keep the dampness in. It sat in a valley just over a low hill from the river Authie, which just there was quite pretty, winding its course past a network of canals. Naturally August would be its most sumptuous month, the woods a thousand shades of gold and green in the tender light of the French countryside, the banks of the canals cut back to stands of willow, leaves dancing in the little sea breeze. For they were only a few miles from La Manche, the French name for what was called, on the opposite shore some thirty miles away, the English Channel.

After lunch they went for a ride, Freddi Schoen’s driver dressed up in a chauffeur’s uniform for the day. The road ran through breathtaking countryside, forest to the left, meadow to the right. Surprising how the land had healed since 1918, but it had. The grass grew lush and deep green, and there was a cloud of orange butterflies at the edge of a canal where even the barges—some two hundred and forty of them at Lezhev’s count, it took several minutes to drive past—seemed part of the natural beauty of the place. Or, at least, not alien to it; big, square hulls, dark and tarry from a thousand journeys, with only the painted names, Dutch, Belgian, German, or French, to disrupt the harmony of the handsome old wood.

Freddi Schoen, holding court on the leather seat of the big Mercedes, was at his best, charming and voluble and witty as only he could be; the porcelain doll smiled with delight and it was all Lezhev and Genya could do to keep up. Sitting next to the driver, Freddi hung his elbow over the seat and entertained them. “Of course the admiral was a Prussian, with a big, red face like, oh, like . . . a ball!”

Ha ha, but was it eighteen tugboats tied in a row after the intersection of the Route Departmentale 34? No, twenty, Genya told him later.

“A deer!” Freddi Schoen cried out. Then, when the women turned to look at the forest side of the road, he winked at Lezhev. Wasn’t this fine? These two French lovelies riding with them along a road in a Pissarro painting? From Lezhev, a poet’s smile of vast sagacity, confirmed by a wise little shake of the head. No, life wasn’t all bad, it had its moments of great purity, say on a summer day near the sea, rolling past a particularly charming little canal, where some good old soul a generation ago had planted borders of Lombardy poplar, where thirty-one seagoing tugs, tied up to cleats, bobbed lazily when the wind ruffled the surface of the still water.

“I saw it!” Genya Beilis cried out.

Freddi Schoen’s eyes grew wide with amazement—his little joke had grown wings. Fate had put a real deer in the forest; even the gods of Chance were with them today.

19 August, Banque Nationale de Commerce, Orléans.

An old woman wearing a funeral hat had preceded him into one of the little rooms where one communed with one’s safe-deposit box. He could hear her through the wall, mumbling to herself, then counting, each number articulated with whispered ferocity. “Quatorze. Quinze. Seize. Dix-sept. Dix-huit.”

Lezhev had less to whisper about. Only a small slip of paper: “Hôtel Bretagne. 38, rue Lepic. Room 608. You are Monsieur Gris, from Lille.”

To hell and gone up an endless hill in the back streets of Montmartre, a hotel two windows wide and six floors tall, the smell of the toilet in the hall good and strong on the fiery August day.

He knocked.

“Yes?”

“Monsieur Gris. From Lille.”

She was five feet tall, blond hair cut back to a boyish cap above a round face and a snub nose. Scared to death, intrepid, Polish.

“How old are you?” he asked in French. She just stood there. He tried again in Polish.

“Seventeen,” she said.

She went to the peeling armoire and opened the door. The suitcase radio was open and ready to transmit. “You are not to be here when I send,” she explained. “An order.”

He indicated that he understood.

She went on, a carefully memorized speech. “Colonel Vyborg sends his regards. You are to occupy yourself with information pertinent to the German plan to attack Great Britain. Where, how, and when. He tells you that the English are the only hope now—airplane drops of ammunition and money and specialists are planned for Poland. For their part, they ask our help in France, in any way we are able. I am to transmit for you, whenever you like, as much as you like.”

“How did you come?”

“Fishing boat to the Brittany coast, from Scotland. Then on a train.”

“With the suitcase in hand.”

She shrugged. “There is no control on the trains. It’s very different here.”

“Where were you in Poland?”

“Lodz. I came to France as a courier, then we fled on the ship Batory, from Bordeaux. On the twenty-second of June, after the surrender. We were the last ship to leave France.”

“What name do I call you?” he asked.

“Janina,” she said. Her smile was radiant, they were comrades in arms, she was proud to serve at his side. She returned to the armoire, brought out a thick packet of French francs. “We will beat them, Monsieur Gris. We will certainly beat them.”

The two brothers owned a garage in Saclay, in the poor southern suburbs of Paris. This was Wednesday, another three days until the Saturday shave, the white bristle on their cheeks was shiny with motor oil and dark with grime. Hidden somewhere in the complex of fallen-down sheds was a pig they were fattening for market; de Milja and Fedin could hear it grunting and snuffling in the mud.

“When will the pig be ready?” de Milja said.

“October,” one of the brothers said. “ ‘Cannibal,’ we call him.”

“We need a little Citroen truck, a delivery truck.”

“Expensive, such things.”

“We know.”

“Could be fifteen thousand francs.”

“Maybe nine.”

“Fifteen, I think I said.”

“Eleven, then.”

“What money?”

“French francs.”

“We like those American dollars.”

“Francs is what we have.”

“Fourteen five—don’t say we didn’t give you a break. Have it with you?”

De Milja showed a packet of notes, the man nodded and grunted with satisfaction. When he leaned close, de Milja could smell the wine in his sweat. “What country do you come from?” he asked. “I want to hear about it.” The second brother had left the shack abruptly after the money was shown—de Milja had barely noticed that he’d gone. Now Fedin stood at the door, shaking his head in mock disillusion and pointing a Lüger out into the yard. “Put that down,” he said.

The response was a whine. “I was just going to cut up some firewood. To cook the lunch.”

They used what they had:

Whatever remained of the old Polish networks, sturdy White Rus-sian operatives who’d put in their time for a variety of services, friends, friends of friends. They were not so concerned about being betrayed to the Germans. That would happen—it was just a question of when, and whether or not they would be surprised when they figured out who’d done it.

“As you get older, you accept venality. Then you learn to like it—a certainty in an uncertain world.” Fedin the skull, the Lüger under his worker’s apron, cigarette holder clenched in his teeth as though he were a Chinese warlord in a Fu Manchu film.

Wearing workmen’s smocks, they drove their little delivery van slowly through what remained of the streets of Dunkirk. Two hundred thousand weapons had been left on the oil-stained beaches, abandoned by the British Expeditionary Force and several French divisions making their escape across the Channel. All along the shore, German soldiers were trying to deal with the mess, stripping tires from shot-up trucks, emptying ammunition from machine-gun belts.

In the back streets they found a heavy woman who walked with a cane and kept a dollmaker’s shop not far from the canals that ran out into the countryside. She painted eyebrows on tiny doll heads with a cat’s whisker, and counted barges when she walked her elderly poodle. She was a Frenchwoman; her Polish coal-miner husband had gone off to fight in Spain in the Dabrowsky Brigade, and that was the last she’d heard of him. De Milja’s predecessor had found her through a relief organization, and now the Polish service was her petit boulot, her little job. Before the Germans had come she’d been a postbox on a secret mail route, a courier, the owner of a discreet upstairs bedroom where one could get away from the world for a night or two without hotel—and therefore police—registration.

“A hard week, Monsieur,” she said as de Milja counted out francs.

“You’re confident of your numbers?”

“Oh yes, Monsieur. One hundred and seven of the beastly things. It took four expeditions to find them all.”

“Well then, keep up the good work. This may go on for months.”

“Mmm? Poor Roquette.” The poodle’s tail managed a single listless thump against the floorboards when she heard her name. Perhaps, de Milja thought, Rocket had been the right name for her at one time, but that was long ago. “Having to walk all those miles on that cinder path,” the woman added.

“Buy her a lamb chop,” de Milja said, counting out some extra francs into the attentive hand.

Fedin was exactly right, de Milja thought, as a German sentry waved them away from a turnoff for the coastal road—the pleasure of venality was that Madame would be faithful as long as the francs held out.

The van rolled to a stop. De Milja climbed out and approached the sentry. “Excuse, kind sir. This place?” He showed the soldier, who smiled involuntarily at de Milja’s eccentric German, a commissary form. On the bottom, an inventory of Vienna sausage and tinned sardines; on top, an address.

“The airfield,” the sentry said. “You must go down this road, but mind your own business.”

The Germans were of two minds, it seemed to him. Down the beach road, all preparations were defensive. Engineered—concrete—positions with heavy machine guns pointing out into the Channel. Rows of concrete teeth sunk into the sand at the low-tide mark, strung with generous coils of barbed wire. French POWs were digging trenches and building antiaircraft gun emplacements, and clusters of artillery had been positioned just behind the sand dunes. This was nothing to do with an invasion of England: this was somebody worried that the British were coming back, unlikely as that seemed. But then somebody, somebody had screamed “We will invade!” and so Freddi Schoen and all the rest of the Kriegsmarine, the German navy, had started moving barges up and down the canals of Europe. They must have stripped every river in northern Europe, de Milja thought. Stopped commerce dead. On the Danube and the Rhine, the Weser and the Mosel, the Yser, Escaut, Canche, and Somme, nothing moved.

Fedin laid it out for him. Quite a number of the Russian generals in Paris had never been in anyone’s army, but Fedin was a real general who’d commanded real troops in battle and done well at it. De Milja watched with admiration as he planned the invasion of Britain on a café napkin.

“Twelve divisions,” he said. “Hand-picked. With a hundred thousand men in the first wave, all along the English coastline for, say, two hundred miles. That’s the Wehrmacht thinking—spread the invasion, thin down the British defense forces, dissipate energy, resources, everything. Lots of refugees moving on the roads, miles and miles for the ammunition trucks to cover, honking all the time to get Mrs. Jones and her baby carriage out of the way.

“For the German navy, on the other hand, the two-hundred-mile spread is a nightmare, precisely what they don’t want. They need a concentrated beachhead, ships hurrying back and forth across the Channel, multiplying their load capabilities by the hour, with airplanes overhead to keep the British bombers away.”

“That’s the key.”

“Yes, that’s the key. If they can keep the RAF out of their business, the Germans can secure the beaches. That will do it. They hold out seventy-two hours, twenty-five divisions make the crossing, with the tanks, the big guns, all the stuff that wins wars. Churchill will demand that Roosevelt send clouds of warplanes, Roosevelt will give an uplifting speech and do nothing, the governments-in-exile will make a run for Canada, and that will be that. The New Europe will be in place; a sort of hardheaded trade association with German consultants making sure it all goes the way they want.”

“What will it take to get across the Channel?”