The Polish Officer
by Alan Furst

  The flan was made with fresh eggs from a nearby farm, and de Milja and Genya cleaned the plate quite shamelessly, then lit cigarettes. The waiter—also the owner and the cook; his wife did the accounts and made the beds—came to the table and said, “Will Monsieur and Madame take a coffee?”

De Milja said they would.

While it was being made they looked out the window at the sea. Long, slow rollers ran into the shore, white spray flying off the crests in the driving wind. The dark water exploded as it hit the rocks at the base of the cliff, a pleasant thunder if you were warm and dry and having dinner.

“One wouldn’t want to be out there now,” Genya said. She was in a sadder-but-wiser mood that evening, and it made her voice melancholy. What she’d said was normal dinner conversation, but the reference was deeper; to German invasion fleets, to the victory won by the British.

“No,” de Milja said. “It’s no time of year for boating.”

She smiled at that. Canotage, he’d said. A word that summoned up the man in straw hat and woman in frock, her hand trailing idly in the river as they floated past a lily pad.

Genya’s cigarette glowed as she inhaled. She let the smoke drift from her nostrils. “Probably,” she said, “you haven’t heard about Freddi Schoen.”

“Freddi.” De Milja smiled.

“His friend Jünger was leaving Paris and he took me to lunch. Freddi won an Iron Cross. To do with a naval exercise off the Belgian coast somewhere. There was disaster and he took command and, and—did all sorts of things, Jünger’s French didn’t really last through the whole story. But he was very brave, and they gave him a medal. Posthumously.”

“I always wondered,” de Milja said, “why the Freddi Schoens of Germany didn’t do something about Hitler before he maneuvered them into war.”

“Honor,” Genya said. “If I’m allowed only one word.”

The waiter came with coffee, real coffee, very hard to get in Paris these days unless you bought on the black markets.

“We’re not serving sugar tonight,” the waiter explained.

“Oh, but we don’t take sugar,” Genya said.

The waiter nodded appreciatively—a gracious and dignified lie, well told, was a work of art to a man who understood life.

The coffee was very good. They closed their eyes when they drank it. “I’ve learned to like small things now,” de Milja said. “War did that, at least.”

When he looked up from his coffee the light of the candles caught the ocean color in his eyes and she took his hand on top of the table and held it tight.

“You are to be loved,” she said with a sigh. “No doubt of that.”

“And you,” he said.

She shook her head; he’d got it wrong there.

Late that night it rained hard, water streamed down the windows and the sound of the sea was muffled as it broke against the cliff. It was cold and damp in the room. De Milja opened an armoire and found an extra blanket, then they wrapped themselves up and began to make love. “We’re on a boat,” she whispered. “Just us. In the middle of the sea. And now it’s a storm.”

“Then we better hang on to what’s valuable,” he said.

She laughed. “I’ve got what I want.”

Some time later he woke up and saw that her eyes were shining. She caught him staring and said, “See what you did?” He got himself untangled from the coarse sheet and moved next to her. Her skin was very hot. Then she wiped at her eyes with her fingers. “I hope you love me, whatever happens,” she said.

The letter came a week later. He was sitting at a table in a tiny apartment. She had gone to Switzerland, she would be married when she got there. Please forgive her, she would love him forever.

He read the letter again, it didn’t say anything new the second time. He was changing his identity—once again—that week. Becoming someone else in order to do whatever they wanted him to do next, and papers were always a part of that. Still, poor old Lezhev might have lasted out another month if he’d been careful with him. But de Milja ached inside, so the passport and the work permit and all the rest of it went into the blackened little stove that sat in the corner of the room. There was no heat, it was snowing out, the papers burned in a few minutes, and that was the end of it.

 

 

PARIS

NIGHTS

NOW HE WAS valuable.

And when they brought him out, to neutral Spain, he was handled very carefully. De Milja knew what it took—people and money and time—and stood off and marveled a little at what they thought him worth. The finest papers, delivered by courier. An invitation to dinner at the chateau of Chenonceaux, a castle that spanned the river Cher, which happened to be the boundary between German-occupied France and Vichy France. He arrived at eight, had a glass of champagne, strolled to the back of the grand house, and found a fisherman and a small boat on the other side of the river. Then a truck, then a car, then a silent, empty hotel in the hills above Marseilles, then a fishing boat after midnight.

No improvisation now.

Now he was the Poles have someone in Paris, also known as I can’t tell you how I know this, or forgive me, Colonel, but I must ask you to leave the room. Or maybe he was Proteus or whatever code name they’d stuck on him—he was not to know. This kind of attention made him uncomfortable. First of all it was dangerous—he had learned, since 1939, how not to be noticed, so it had become second nature with him to fade away from attention, and he’d gotten so he could sense it feeling for him.

Second of all, he didn’t like to be managed, or controlled, and that, with some delicacy, was exactly what they were doing. And third, all this was based on the assumption that he was good, and that wasn’t quite the word for it. He was, perhaps, two things: unafraid to die, and lucky so far—if they had an unafraid-to-die-and-lucky-so-far medal, he would take it.

He and the watchman, for instance, sprinting for their lives down the slippery jetty, had survived by sheer, eccentric chance. Burning planes zooming over their heads, antiaircraft fallback, then a shattering explosion that cut the Malacca Princess’s neighbor, the Nicaea, in half and showered down burning metal. They jumped into the harbor, like reasonable men anywhere, where bits and pieces of tramp freighter steamed as they hit the water. When German and French police ran by, cursing and with guns drawn, they ducked below the water. Who wouldn’t? Later, in the jumble of streets around the docks, he and the watchman knew it was time for them to go their separate ways. De Milja shook his hand, and the man smiled, then ran like the wind. All this wasn’t, to de Milja’s way of thinking, definable by the word good.

The fishing boat that took de Milja from Marseilles landed on the coast of Spain at night, aided by Sixth Bureau operatives who signaled with flashlights from the beach. Yes, Spain was neutral, but not all that neutral. He was hustled into a shiny black sedan and driven at speed to the outskirts of Barcelona. There, in a bedroom on the third floor of a villa with heavy drapes drawn across the window, he was served a chicken and a bottle of wine. His keepers were young Poles—fresh-faced, earnest, well conditioned, and cheerfully homicidal. There was a pile of books on the table—put a pile of books on his table, damn it. He read one of them for an hour; In spring, the Alpine lakes of Slovenia are a miracle of red sunsets and leaping trout—then fell asleep.

Various terrors he had avoided feeling now returned in force, and he woke up eighteen hours later having sweated through a wool blanket. He remembered only a few fragments of those dreams and forgot them as soon as he could. He staggered into the bathroom, shaved, showered, had a good long look at himself in the mirror. So, this was who he was now, well, that was interesting to know. Older, leaner, marked with fatigue, rather remote, and very watchful. On a chair he found clean slacks, a shirt, and a sweater. He put them on. Shifted the drape an inch aside from the window and stared out at the brown autumn hills. Just the motion of the drape apparently caused a restless footstep or two on the gravel path below his room, so he let it fall back into place. Why didn’t they just bar the window and put him in stripes and stop all the pretense?

Vyborg showed up that morning. In a good brown suit and a striped British tie. Had there always been a gentleman under that uniform, or was it just a trick that London tailors did? They could do nothing, however, about the face: the Baltic knight, squinting into a blizzard and ready to cut down a company of Russian pikemen, was still very much in evidence. He suggested a walk in the hills and they did that, with guards following a little way down the path. November, de Milja thought, was a strange time in dry countries; faded colors, sky gray and listless. Vyborg told de Milja that his wife had died. They walked in silence for a long time after that. Finally de Milja was able to say, “Where is she?”

“A small cemetery in the town where the spa is. A mass was said for her. It had to be done quietly, but it was done.” They walked for a moment, through a stand of low pines. “My sympathies, Alexander,” Vyborg said softly. “It comes from all of us, from everyone who knows you.”

“How, please.”

“Influenza.”

De Milja was again unable to speak.

“She was working in the kitchen,” Vyborg went on. “Some of us do best in bad times, and that was true of her. She had a high fever for three days, and then she died in her sleep.”

“I think I would like to go back to the house,” de Milja said.

He visited Barcelona once or twice, but it was just another conquered city. It had the silence that passed for peace, the courtesy of fear. The police state was in place, people in the street avoided his eyes. There were still bullet chips and shell holes in the buildings, but the masons were at work, and there were glaziers, their glass sheets balanced on the sides of their mules, shouting up the sides of apartment houses to announce their presence.

He spent a lot of time walking in the hills, sometimes with two men from the Sixth Bureau; one clerkish, a man who sat behind a desk, the other with a hard, bald head, a well-groomed mustache, and small, angry eyes. They needed to know about various things in France and de Milja told them what he could. The bald-headed man, though he did not come out and say it, was clearly concerned with the construction of new and better wireless/telegraphy sets, and de Milja didn’t feel he was able to help much. The other man asked questions about French political life under the Germans and de Milja helped him, if possible, even less. But they were decent men who tried to make things easy for him—as long as we all happen to find ourselves in Spain, why not spend a moment chatting about the views of the French communist party—and de Milja did the best he could for them.

Again and again, he thought about his wife. He had, in October of 1939, said good-bye to her, left her in charge of her destiny, as she’d asked. Maybe he shouldn’t have done that. But then he had never once been able to make her, crazy or sane, do anything she did not want to do.

Down the road from the villa was a tiny café in the garden of an old woman’s house. She had a granddaughter who said gracias when she served coffee, and when it wasn’t raining de Milja and Vyborg would sit at a rusty iron table and talk about the war.

“Operation Sealion has failed,” Vyborg said. “The first time Hitler’s been beaten.”

“Do we know what actually happened?” de Milja asked.

“We know some of it. It wasn’t a total victory, of course, nothing like that. The RAF sank 21 out of 170 troop transports. That’s a loss, but not a crippling loss for people contemplating an invasion from the sea. Out of 1,900 barges, 214 were destroyed. Only five tugboats out of 368; only three motorboats out of more than a thousand.”

“Three, did you say?”

“Yes.”

“Then what made them quit?”

Vyborg shrugged. “An invasion is more than ships. A five-hundred-ton ammunition dump was blown up at Den Helder, in Holland. On the sixth of September, a rations depot was burned out. In Belgium, an ammunition train was destroyed. Then down at Le Havre, where a number of German divisions were based, the waterworks were put out of commission. There was also the training exercise—you saw some of the results at Nieuwpoort, and German hospital trains crossed Belgium all that night. Therefore, if the RAF could hit a practice run through that hard, what would they do once the real thing got started? Funny thing about the German character, they’re very brave, not at all afraid to die, but they are afraid to fail. In some ways, our best hope for Germany is the Wehrmacht—the generals. If Germany loses again, and then again, perhaps they can be persuaded that honor lies in a change of government.”

“Can that really happen?”

Vyborg thought about it. “Maybe,” he said. “With time.”

It drizzled, then stopped. The little girl came and put up a faded umbrella and wiped the table with a cloth and said, “Gracias.” She smiled at de Milja, then ran away.

“One last time, the people who knew you as Lezhev?” Vyborg said.

“Freddi Schoen.”

“Dead.”

“Jünger, the Wehrmacht staff officer.”

“Transferred. In Germany at the OKW headquarters.”

“Traudl von Behr.”

“She’s in Lille, at the moment. Aide to a staff major running transports from northern France to Germany.”

“There were more Germans, but they didn’t know who I was. Somebody they saw here and there, perhaps Russian.”

“Be absolutely certain,” Vyborg said.

De Milja nodded that he was.