The Polish Officer
by Alan Furst

  15 September.

Martagne had stolen three carbons from the Port of Calais office; the German landing exercise was one of them.

De Milja made his way south to the village of Sangatte, on the road that ran by the sea from Boulogne to Calais. Fedin was waiting for him in a closed-up villa owned by a Russian baron—lately a toy manufacturer, formerly one of the czar’s riding masters—in Paris. De Milja arrived a little after one in the afternoon, Genya Beilis came by taxi from the resort town of Le Touquet an hour later. All trains from Paris to Boulogne and Calais had been suspended, she said. Military traffic only. Railroad guns. Field hospitals.

The time had come.

The roads were jammed with panzer tanks and 88 artillery pieces on carriers and fuel tankers with red crosses painted on them to fool the British attack aircraft. Wehrmacht invasion planners were playing chess now—big guns at Calais had engaged British artillery across the Channel, communications frequencies were being jammed, radio towers and radars attacked. We’re coming, it meant.

“The enemy’s ports are our first line of defense.” Lord Nelson, in 1805, and nothing had changed. Britain had its little piece of water that it hid behind. The princes of Europe could field huge land armies. But when they reached the coast of France, they stopped.

A Russian general, a publisher’s daughter, a Polish cartographer. At the villa they sat on sheets that covered the furniture, in a dark room behind closed shutters. Finished, and they knew it. Fedin, at sixty, perhaps the strongest of them, de Milja thought. To survive Russia you had to fight for life—fight the cold, fight the sadness and its vodka. Those who lived were like iron. Genya, de Milja saw, had covered the dark circles beneath her eyes with powder. He thought the shadows decadent, sexy, but the attempted disguise made her look old, a woman attempting to deceive the world. As for himself, he felt numb, as though a nerve, pounded on by the hour, had gone dead.

The three of them smoked. It made up for food, for sleep.

“They’ve arrested Rijndal,” Fedin said. “The Dutch barge captain. His wife let another friend of ours know about it.”

“Do they know why?” de Milja asked.

“No.”

“What can he tell them?”

“That he talked to émigrés—Russians, Poles, Czechs—working against the Germans.”

“I’m going to sleep,” Genya said. She assumed there was a bedroom on the second floor, so climbed the stairs. Fedin and de Milja could hear her up there, walking around in different rooms.

Fedin and de Milja left the house, walked to a café, telephoned another café. In silence, they drank coffee for an hour, then an ambulance pulled up outside. The driver joined them, ordered a marc, opened a newspaper. GERMAN STRENGTH AND FRENCH CULTURE TO INSPIRE NEW EUROPE, read the headline, quoting a French minister.

“How can you read that garbage?” Fedin asked.

The ambulance driver shrugged. “I used to prefer PIG BORN WITH TWO HEADS, but this is all you get now.” He looked at his watch. “I can let you have two hours, so if you’re going you better go.”

Fedin handed over a stack of franc notes.

“What are you moving?” the driver asked.

“Hams,” Fedin said.

The driver raised his eyebrows in a way which meant I wouldn’t mind having one. Fedin smiled a knave’s smile and patted him on the arm. Business is business, he meant.

Fedin drove the ambulance, de Milja lay down on the stretcher in the back. The days when they could use the van were now over, only French emergency vehicles were allowed on the roads in the coastal region. Keeping to the farm routes, they reached the village of Colombert, on the D6. In the main square, a military policeman wearing white gloves was directing traffic. Fedin pointed at the road he wanted, the policeman waved him violently in that direction—yes, go on, hurry! An army truck in the square had a flat tire; soldiers were standing around waiting for the driver to fix it. They wore the same uniform as the soldiers on the beach at Nieuwpoort, but their shoulder insignia was different. “Commandos,” Fedin said, squinting to see the patches. “To climb ropes up cliffs.”

“If they can get to the cliffs,” de Milja said.

Fedin nosed the wheel over gingerly and drove down a lane between two rows of linden trees. The trunks had grown for too many years, there was barely room for a vehicle. The road divided at a canal. Fedin turned off the ignition. Another lost, exquisite little place—still water, soft sky, leaves barely moving in the breeze. De Milja clambered out of the back of the ambulance. “I hope nobody asks us what we’re doing down here.”

Fedin shrugged. “We’ll say Van Gogh had a fainting spell.”

They walked along the canal for a time. Around a curve, fourteen barges were tied up end to end, roped to iron rings set at the edge of what had been, a century earlier, a towpath. By the water there were three blackened, splintered trunks of linden trees; several others had had their leaves blown off. A single sunken barge was lying halfway on its side in the still water. Fedin tapped a cigarette out of his pack, screwed it into his ivory holder, and lit it with a small silver lighter. “Well,” he said, “we did try.”

The villa at Sangatte, late afternoon. De Milja climbed the stairs, found the bedroom and opened the door quietly. Genya was sleeping in her underwear, hands beneath her head instead of a pillow, on top of a mattress covered with a sheet. He watched her for a time; she was dreaming. What she showed the world was hard and polished. But in her dream she was frightened, her breathing caught. Carefully, he lay down next to her, but she woke up. “You’re here,” she said.

“Yes.”

“How was it?”

“Not so good.”

“Really?”

“We managed to see three different places. There was one barge sunk, one transport damaged—the Germans had French shipfitters working on it. In Calais, an old man who fishes off the jetty said that a motor launch blew up the other night when the British came.”

Genya didn’t answer. De Milja was tired. It was hot and airless on the upper floor, dark behind the shutters. Yet he could feel, just at that moment, summer slipping away. He could hear the ocean breaking on the rocky beach. Two girls on bicycles, talking as they pedaled side by side. Some kind of bird that sang a single, low note in a tree outside. He moved closer to Genya, her skin brown against the white sheet, touched her shoulder with his lips. She moved a little away from him. “I’m asleep,” she said.

16 September. The invasion fleet began to assemble. It had been planned for Genya to make a courier run to the Passy W/T operator on the evening of the fifteenth. But the French police had blocked all the roads and the railroad stations were off-limits to civilians. The region had been closed.

The Calais waterfront was a maze of dark, cobbled streets winding among brick warehouses and cargo sheds, small tenements where the dockworkers lived, a few cafés where they drank, and a crumbling hotel with a blue neon sign—HÔTEL NEPTUNE—a whorehouse for foreign sailors.

De Milja and Fedin went into one of the bars, ordered ballons de rouge, glasses of red wine, and spent an hour gossiping with the owner and his fat blond wife. The owner wore a tweed cap, had his shirtsleeves rolled up above the elbows. Business was no good, he said, at this rate they wouldn’t last much longer. The English dropped bombs on their customers, the Germans paid like drunkards on a spree or they didn’t pay at all. One thought one had it tough before May of ’40, et alors, what one didn’t know! The wife had a rich laugh and red cheeks.

And what was that warehouse across the street?

Labard et Labard? Boarded up, now. They used to see the workers all day—first for an eye-opener, then lunch—a very nice plat du jour for a few francs and a coffee. Finally a little something at the end of the day when they gathered to get up their courage to go home and face their wives. So, life wasn’t perfect but it went along. But then, the war. The young Monsieur Labard an officer, now a prisoner of war in Germany. The elder Labard was eighty-seven. He’d tried, but it hadn’t worked out. Tant pis, too bad, oh well, that was life, what could one do, so it went. The owner shook his head grimly at the sorrow of it all while the wife winked at de Milja and rolled her hips when she walked down to the other end of the bar to refill their glasses.

They broke into the Labard warehouse just after dark. Used an old piece of iron to pry a padlock off a side entry, groped their way up an ancient wooden staircase to the top floor. Found a window with a space between the board and the frame, kicked it a little wider, and got a view of the Calais harbor.

Fedin had been right about the date—full moon on the seventeenth. They counted forty troop transports anchored out in the harbor, six more in position for boarding on the wharf. Trucks pulled in, piled high with wooden ammunition boxes. The first invasion wave would be loaded the following morning, then, that night, they would sail for England.

“This is it,” Fedin said, staring intently at the activity in the harbor. “I hope they have something ready on the other side.”

“The English abandoned a lot of weapons on the beach at Dunkirk,” de Milja said. “That was three months ago—I wonder how much of it they’ve been able to replace. Some, not all. Every farmer has his shotgun, of course. Which is just what they thought would happen in France, but farmers with shotguns can’t do much about artillery.”

A broad-beamed tugboat came chugging into the harbor from the direction of the Calais canals. It was pushing three barges from a position on the port side and almost to the stern of the last barge. The tug, built for moving bargeloads of coal among the Rhine ports, made rapid way into the harbor.

“They’re going across in that?” Fedin said.

“If the water stays calm.”

“What about the Royal Navy?”

“The Germans must feel they can neutralize it for forty-eight hours—after that it doesn’t matter. And if the Luftwaffe can get the advantage in the air over the Channel, the Royal Navy can’t do a thing.”

De Milja watched the harbor in silence. The activity wasn’t frantic, but there were thirty operations going on at once, ships moving about, trucks arriving and departing—all of it steady and certain, nobody was smoking or standing around. All nonmilitary ships had been tied up in the small pleasure-boat harbor that adjoined the main dock areas of the city. The name of one of the ships was familiar—he had to think for a moment before he realized why. The rusty freighter with flaking black paint was, according to the letters fading away on her hull, the Malacca Princess. Grand name for an old tramp, de Milja thought. It had appeared on one of the carbons Martagne had given them—a schedule of commercial shipping traffic expected to enter or depart the port of Calais over the period 9/14/40 to 9/21/40, with a brief description of each cargo manifest.

The first British attack came at 10:15.

Assault aircraft—built to work near the ground—engines screaming as they flashed across the harbor. Beauforts, de Milja thought. Perhaps a dozen. One flew into the side of a warehouse, and by the yellow flash of that impact de Milja saw another, cartwheeling twice over the surface of the water. The Germans were waiting for this attack—the stutter of heavy machine guns and the deeper, two-stroke drumming of the antiaircraft cannon rang in de Milja’s ears, then deafened him. The Beauforts attacked at one hundred feet, carrying four five-hundred-pound bombs apiece, four dives each if they lasted that long.

There were ME-109s above them, nightfighters, one of them followed a Beaufort right down the chute, guns blazing, in such hot pursuit it chased its quarry through a cloud of machine-gun tracer. Moments later, a pair of green flares came floating down, illuminating an airman hanging limp from a parachute, which settled gently on the calm sea then disappeared as the flares hit the water.

Two minutes, no more. The sound faded away, de Milja’s hearing came back in time to make out the low wail of an all-clear siren. In the moonlight a single barge settled slowly into the water, a single transport steamer burned, firefighters with hoses silhouetted in its flames.

“Do you have a gun?” de Milja said to Fedin.

“This,” Fedin said. A Walther P-38, a German officer’s side arm. De Milja extended his hand. Fedin, after a puzzled moment, gave him the pistol.

“What . . .?”

De Milja didn’t answer.

The second British attack came at 11:16.

A chess game somewhere, in offices below ground, linked to radio towers, British air controllers moving a castle here, a knight there. Blind chess. With command-and-control sometimes functioning, sometimes not. Now and then everybody simply had to improvise, to do whatever seemed best. De Milja had seen plenty of that in Poland, where it hadn’t worked. A lot of dead, brave people is what you got from that.

The RAF pilots—British and South African, Canadian, Czech, and Polish—were something beyond brave. They flew into the firestorm a second time, and a number of them paid for it. Perhaps, this time out, the controllers had shifted a flight of Spitfires to keep the 109s away from the assault aircraft. Which left the docks in London unprotected when the Junkers and Heinkels flew over, and that was the chess game. The Calais docks on fire—the London docks on fire in exchange. As de Milja watched the raid play itself out, two searchlights nailed a wounded Beaufort trying to sneak home a few feet above the water. De Milja didn’t see the 109 that did the job; the Beaufort simply grew a blossom of white fire behind the cockpit, then hit the water in a cloud of steam and spray.

De Milja’s hands ached, he had to pull them free of the windowsill he’d been holding. Only a single siren now, a fire truck somewhere in Calais. Not needed at the docks because nothing was on fire. The transport had been saved—though the barge hit in the 10:15 attack had now apparently sunk into the harbor ooze. Probably it would be salvaged, raised and repaired, used to run ammunition across the Channel to the British beaches. Maybe in a week or so, de Milja thought, as London held out valiantly—as had Warsaw—while around the world people gathered close to their radios to hear, through the static and the sirens, the British pleading for help in their last hours.

De Milja stepped back from the window. “One last thing to try,” he said.

General Fedin understood him perfectly—he’d been at war, one way or another, for forty years. “I would be honored to accompany you,” he said.

“Better if you stay here,” de Milja said.

Fedin nodded stiffly. He might have saluted, but how—the salute of which country, which army? De Milja moved toward the door, for a moment a dim shape in the darkness of the warehouse, then gone. The last Fedin heard of him was footsteps descending the old wooden staircase.