The Polish Officer
by Alan Furst

  12 January 1941.

In the cold, still air of the Paris winter, smoke spilled from the chimneys and hung lifeless above the tiled rooftops.

Stein crunched along the snow-covered rue du Château-d’Eau, head down, hands jammed deep in the pockets of his overcoat. Cold in the 5:00 P.M. darkness, colder with the snow turned blue by the lamplight, colder with the wind that blew all the way from the Russian steppe. You can feel it, Parisians said, you can feel the bite. Eighteen degrees, the newspaper said that morning.

Stein walked fast, breath visible. Here was 26, rue du Château-d’Eau. Was that right? He reached into an inside pocket, drew out the typewritten letter with the exquisite signature. Office of the notary LeGros, yes, this was the building. Notaries and lawyers and huissiers—officers of the court—all through this quarter. It wasn’t that it was pleasant, because it wasn’t. It was simply where they gathered. Probably, as usual, something to do with a Napoleonic decree—a patent, a license, a dispensation. A special privilege.

The concierge was sweeping snow from the courtyard entry with a twig broom, two mufflers tied around her face, her hands wound in flannel cloths. “Notaire LeGros? Third floor, take the stairs to your left, Monsieur.”

LeGros opened the door immediately. He was an old man with a finely made face and snow-white hair. He wore a cardigan sweater beneath his jacket and his hand was like ice when Stein shook it.

The business was done in the dining room, at an enormous chestnut table covered with official papers. Huysmanns, a Belgian with broad shoulders and a thick neck, was waiting for him, stood and grunted in guttural French when they shook hands. Stein sat down, kept his coat on—the apartment was freezing and he could still see his breath. “Hard winter,” Huysmanns said.

“Yes, that’s true,” Stein said.

“Gentlemen,” said the notary.

He gathered papers from the table, which he seemed to understand by geology: the Stein-Huysmanns matter buried just below the Duval matter. The two men signed and signed, writing read and approved, then dating each signature, their pens scratching over the paper, their breathing audible. Finally LeGros said, “I believe the agreed payment is forty thousand francs?”

Stein reached into the inner pocket of his overcoat and withdrew a sheaf of five-hundred-franc notes. He counted out eighty, passed them to the notary, who counted and gave them to Huysmanns, who wet his thumb in order to count and said the numbers in a whisper. LeGros then coughed—a cough of delicacy—and said, “A call of nature, gentlemen. You will excuse me for a moment.”

He left the room, as notaries had been leaving rooms, Stein imagined, since the days of Richelieu. The remainder of the money would now be paid, theoretically out of sight of the honest notary, theoretically out of sight of the tax authorities. Stein counted out an additional hundred and twenty-five thousand francs. Huysmanns wet his thumb and made sure.

The notary returned, efficiently, just as Huysmanns stuffed the money in his pocket. “Shall we continue?” he chirped. They signed more papers, the notary produced his official stamp, made an impression in wax, then certified the documents with his magnificent signature.

“I would like,” Stein said, “to make certain of the provision that specifies the name of the business is to continue as Huysmanns. To assure that the goodwill of established customers is not lost to me.”

As the notary rattled papers, Huysmanns stared at him. Goodwill? He had an opaque face, spots of bright color in his cheeks, a face from a Flemish military painting. LeGros found the relevant paragraph and pointed it out; the two men read it with their index fingers and grunted to confirm their understanding.

Then the notary said, “Congratulations, gentlemen.” And wished them success and good fortune. In other times, they might have adjourned to a café, but those days were gone.

Stein walked back to the métro, paid his fourteen centimes for a ticket, and rode the train back to the avenue Hoche, where he had a grand apartment, just around the corner from Gestapo headquarters on the rue de Courcelles. He was now the owner of a business, a dépôt de charbon—coal yard—out by the freight tracks near the Porte de la Chapelle. The train was crowded with Parisians, their expressions empty, eyes blank as their minds turned away from the world.

It was seven; Stein had an appointment in an hour. He took off the disguise: the dark overcoat, the black suit, the olive silk tie, the white shirt, the diamond ring, the gold watch. De Milja sighed with exhaustion and put the Stein costume on a chair. Except for the Clark Gable mustache, he was rid of the disguise. He lay down on a big featherbed in a pale-blue bedstead flecked with gold. The walls were covered in silk fabric, somber red, burgundy, with a raised pattern. Facing the bed, a marble fireplace. On the wall by the doorway, a large oil painting in the manner of Watteau—school of Watteau. An eighteenth-century swain in a white wig, a lady with gown lowered to reveal powdered bosoms and pink nipples, a King Charles spaniel playing on the couch between them. The swain has in hand a little ball; when he tosses it, the dog will leap off the couch, the space between the lovers will be clear. Both are at that instant when the stratagem has occurred to them; they are delighted with the idea of it, and with what will inevitably follow. Below the painting, a Louis XVI chiffonier in pale blue flecked with gold, its drawers lined with silk, its top drawer holding mother-of-pearl tuxedo studs in a leather box and a French army 7.65 automatic—in fact a Colt .45 rechambered for French military ammunition. De Milja didn’t expect to last out the winter.

He hated Anton Stein, but Anton Stein made for a useful disguise in the winter of 1941. A Volksdeutsch, ethnic German, from Czechoslovakia, the Slovakian capital of Bratislava. So he spoke, in the natural way of things, de Milja’s rough German and de Milja’s bad but effective French. He had even, according to Vyborg, existed. The records were there in case anybody looked—the tack on the teacher’s chair and the punch on the policeman’s nose lived on, in filing cabinets somewhere in Bratislava. But that was all, that was the legacy of Stein. “He’s no longer with us,” Vyborg had said.

Anton Stein came to Paris in the wake of the German occupation. A minor predator, he knew an opportunity when he saw one. The Nazis had a sweet way with the Anton Steins of the world, they’d had it since 1925: too bad nobody ever gave you a chance. A kind of ferocious, law-of-the-jungle loyalty was, once that took hold, theirs to command.

De Milja slept. The apartment was warm, the quilt soft against his skin. There was, in his dreams, no war. An Ostrow uncle carved a boat in a soft piece of wood, Alexander’s eyes followed every move. Then he woke up. What was, was. Every Thursday, Madame Roubier made love at twilight.

“Take a mistress,” Vyborg had said. After he’d rented the apartment on the avenue Hoche, the woman at the rental agency had suggested one Madame Roubier to see to the decoration and furnishing. The money made de Milja’s heart ache—in Warsaw they were starving and freezing, heating apartments with sticks of wood torn from crates, working all day, then spending the night making explosives or loading bullets. And here he was, amid pale blue flecked with gold.

“Pale blue, flecked with gold.”

Madame Roubier was a redhead, with thin lips, pale skin, a savage temper, and a daintily obscure history that changed with her mood. She was that indeterminate age where French women pause for many years—between virginal girlhood (about thirty-five) and wicked-old-ladyhood—a good long run of life. Yes, she was a natural redhead, but she was most certainly not a Breton, that impossibly rude class of people. She was, at times, from Maçon. Or perhaps Angers.

To supervise the furnishings, she had visited the apartment. Made little notes with a little gold pen on a little gold pad. “And this window will take a jabot and festoon,” she said.

Suddenly, their eyes met. And met.

“. . . a jabot . . . and . . . festoon . . .”

Her voice faded away to a long Hollywood silence—they suddenly understand they are fated to become lovers. They stood close to each other by the window, snow falling softly on the gray stone of the avenue Hoche. Madame Roubier looked deep into his eyes, a strange magnetism drawing her to him as the consultation slowly quivered to a halt: “. . . jabot . . . and . . . festoon . . .”

She had a soft, creamy body that flowed into its natural contours as her corsets were removed. “Oh, oh,” she cried. She was exquisitely tended, the skin of her ample behind kept smooth by spinning sessions on a chamois-covered stool, the light of her apartment never more than a pink bulb in a little lamp. “I know what you like,” she would say. “You are a dirty-minded little boy.” Well, he thought, if nothing else I know what dirty-minded little boys like.

They would make love through the long Paris dusk—l’heure bleu—then Stein would be banished from the chamber, replaced by Maria, the maid. Sometime later, Madame Roubier would appear, in emerald-green taffeta, for example—whatever made her red hair blaze redder and her skin whiter, and Stein would say Oh, mais c’est Hedy Lamarr! and she would shush him and pooh-pooh him as he helped her wrestle into a white ermine coat.

Then dinner. Then a tour of the night. Then business.

Thursday night. Chez Tolo.

All the black-market restaurants were in obscure streets, down alleys, you had to know somebody in order to find them. Chez Tolo was at the end of a narrow lane—nineteenth-century France—reached through fourteen-foot-high wooden doors that appeared to lead into the courtyard of a large building. The lane had been home to tanneries in an earlier age, but the workshops had long since been converted to workers’ housing and now, thanks to war and scarcity, and the vibrant new life that bobbed to the surface in such times, it found itself at the dawn of a new age.

Wood-burning taxicabs pulled up to the door, then a De Bouton with its tulipwood body, a Citroen traction-avant—the favored car of the Gestapo—a Lagonda, a black Daimler. Madame Roubier took note of the last. “The Comte de Rieu,” she said.

Inside it was dark and crowded. Stein and Madame Roubier moved among the diners; a wave, a nod, a smile, acknowledging the new aristocracy—the ones who, like Anton Stein, had never been given a chance. A fistful of francs to the headwaiter—formerly a city clerk—and they were seated at a good table.

Madame Roubier ate prodigiously. Stein could never quite catch her doing it, but somehow she made the food disappear. Oysters on shaved ice, veal chops in the shape of a crown, sauced with Madeira and heavy cream and served with walnut puree, a salad of baby cabbage, red and green, with raisins and vinegar and honey. Then a cascade of Spanish orange sections soaked in Cointreau and glistening in the candlelight. Stein selected a vintage Moët & Chandon champagne to accompany the dinner.

With the cognac, came visitors. The Comte de Rieu, and his seventeen-year-old Romanian mistress, Isia, fragile and lovely, who peered out at the world through curtains of long black hair. The count, said to be staggeringly rich, dealt in morphine, diamonds, and milk.

“You must take a cognac with us,” Stein said.

A waiter brought small gilt chairs. Jammed together at the table they were pleasantly crowded, breathing an atmosphere of cigarette smoke and perfume and body heat and breaths of oranges and mints and wine. The count’s white-and-black hair was combed back smoothly and rested lightly atop his ears.

“A celebration tonight,” Stein said.

“Oh?” said the count.

“I became, today, a charbonnier.”

“You did?”

“Yes.”

“A coal merchant, eh? Well, you must permit us to be your customers. Shall you haul the sacks down the cellar stairs?”

“Absolutely, you may depend on it.”

“A Polack!”

“Exactly!”

“Stein?”

“Yes?”

“You’re an amusing fellow.”

They sipped at their balloon glasses of cognac. “What year?” said the count.

“Nineteen ten.”

“Alas, before your time,” the count said to Madame Roubier.

“Yes? It’s your guess?”

“My certain knowledge!”

“Dear me, how is one to repay such a compliment?”

The taxi that served as limousine took them home from a nightclub at dawn, the snow turned gray in the January light. Madame Roubier snored by his side in the backseat. She slept snuggled up to him, the ermine warm against his cheek.

Success purchased investment.

Perhaps you fought, with luck you won, then came the little men with the money. Vyborg had made a point of telling him that, because Vyborg knew exactly who de Milja really was. Vyborg knew how happy he’d been fussing over his maps, knew about his academic papers, worked over endlessly, on the signalization of braiding, or aggrading, rivers. He’d spent his daily life occupied with the Lehman system of hachuring, the way in which the angle of slope is shown on military surveys—important knowledge for artillery people—contour intervals, hydrographic symbolism. He was, in Vyborg’s words to Sixth Bureau staff meetings, “his father’s very own son.” He was, in fact, a man whose physical presence to some degree betrayed his personality. He wanted to be a mole who lived in libraries, but he didn’t look like that, and the world didn’t take him that way.

His mother, de Milja thought, would have made a good spy. She was deceptive, manipulative, attractive—people wanted to talk to her. The world she lived in was a corrupt and cynical place where one had to keep one’s guard up at all times, and the probable truth of her opinions had often been the subject of a sort of communal sigh privately shared by de Milja and his father.

But the chief resident intelligence officer for France had to be an executive, not a cartographer. De Milja’s quarterly budget was 600,000 francs; rental of safe houses, agents’ pay, railroad tickets, hotels, endless expenses. Bribes were extra. The money for Huysmanns was extra—and it had been made clear to de Milja that the company had to succeed and profit.

Instinctively, de Milja knew what he would find at Huysmanns Coal. He knew Huysmanns—phlegmatic, northern, Belgian. Profit earned a franc at a time, dogged patience, do we really need all these lights on? Would such a man employ a troupe of merry philosophers?

Never. Thus the man de Milja needed was already in place, right there in Huysmanns’s office overlooking the coal yard by the railroad tracks. Monsieur Zim-maire it was said. Zimmer, an Alsatian, fifty or so, who wore a clean, gray dustcoat every day, buttoned all the way to the knees. At one time or another he’d taken a hand in everything the company did. He’d driven the trucks, hauled sacks of coal, a job that turned the deliveryman black by the second or third call. He talked to the suppliers, the mines in northern France, and he knew the important customers: hospitals and office buildings and workshops. There were two secretaries who kept the books and sent out the bills, Helene and Cybeline. At Zimmer’s suggestion, they fired Cybeline. She was a distant relation of Huysmanns—that didn’t matter to Zimmer or de Milja but she insisted it meant she didn’t have to work. She filed her nails, sipped coffee, gossiped on the phone and flirted with the drivers. As for Helene, who actually did the work, she got a raise.

Zimmer, too, got a raise. He would, in fact, be running the company. “I’ll be seeking out new customers,” was the way de Milja put it. “So I expect to be traveling a good part of the time.”

That was true. The Sixth Bureau had directed him to assist in certain British operations against Luftwaffe units based in France. The nightly bombing was relentless. Something had to be done.