Alan Furst - The Polish Officer

“Do you know Captain Grodewicz?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Spend a little while with him. He’s going to run the ZO unit.”

“Sir?”

“Zwiazek Odwety. Reprisal. You understand?”

It snowed, early in November, and those who read signs and portents in the weather saw malevolence in it. The Germans had lost no time stealing Polish coal, the open railcars rattled ceaselessly across the Oder bridges into ancient, warlike Prussia. The men who ran the coal companies in ancient, warlike Prussia were astonished at how much money they made in this way-commercial logic had always been based on buying a little lower, selling a little higher. But buying for virtually nothing, well, perhaps the wife ought to have the diamond leaf-pin after all. Hitler was scary, he gave these huge, towering, patriotic speeches on the radio, that meant war for God’s sake, and war ruined business, in the long run, and worse. But this, this wasn’t exactly war-this was a form of mercantile heaven, and who got hurt? A few Poles?

The wind blew down from Russia, howled at the windows, piled snow against the door, found every crack, every chip and flaw, and came looking for you in your house. The old people started to die. “This is war!” they shouted in France, but no planes came. Perhaps next week.

Cautiously, from a distance, Captain de Milja tried to keep an eye on his family. He knew where one of the maids lived, and waited for her at night. “Your father is a saint,” the woman said at her kitchen table. “Your mother and your sister are in Hungary, safe, away from the murderers. Your father managed it-I can guess how, there’s barely a zloty in the house these days.”

“What is he doing?”

“He will not leave, he will not go to the country, he will not admit that anything has changed,” the woman said. “Will not.” She shook her head, respect and apprehension mixed together. “He reads and writes, teaches his classes. He is a rock-” She called de Milja by a childhood pet name and the captain looked at his knees. He took a sheaf of zloty notes out of his pocket and laid it on the table. The maid gave him a wry look: How do I explain this?

“Don’t talk about it. Just go to the black market, put something extra on the table, he won’t notice.”

He had the woman turn out her oil lamp, they sat in the dark for a time, listening to the wind whine against the old brick, then he whispered good-bye and slid out the door into the night. Because of the curfew he went doorway to doorway, alert for the sound of German patrol cars. It could be done-anything could be done-but you had to think it through, you had to concentrate. A life lived in flight from the police, a life of evasion, had the same given as always, it hadn’t changed in centuries: they could make a thousand mistakes, you couldn’t make one. Once upon a time, only criminals figured that out. By November 1939, every man, woman, and child in Poland knew it.

Something had to be done. De Milja met with his directorate in Room 9-he was living in a servant’s garret in Mokotow that week and the sudden warmth of the hospital basement made him giddy. He sat in the chair and presented his case: the heart was going out of the people, he could sense it. Colonel Broza agreed, Agata wasn’t sure, Grodewicz thought maybe it didn’t, for the moment, matter. Broza prevailed. All sorts of actions were considered; some violent, some spectacular. Should they humiliate the Germans? What, for an underground army, constituted a resounding success? How would people find out about it? Cigarette smoke hung in the still air, the perpetual dusk in the room grew darker, one of the hospital nuns brought them tea. They made a decision, Agata suggested a name, the rest was up to him.

The name was a retired Warsaw detective called Chomak. De Milja went to see him; found a man with stiff posture, shirt buttoned at the throat but no tie, dark hair combed straight back. Young to be retired, de Milja thought, but the prewar politics of the Warsaw police department could hardly concern him now. Chomak accepted the assignment, a worried wife at his side, a dachshund with a white muzzle sitting alertly by his chair. “Everybody thinks it’s easy to steal,” Chomak said. “But that isn’t true.”

He seemed to take great pleasure in the daily repetitive grind of the work, and always had a certain gleam in his eye: not so easy, is it, this kind of job? They rode trains together, bicycled down snowy roads at the distant edges of Warsaw; following leads, checking stories, seeing for themselves. They needed to steal a plane. Not a warplane, that would have required a massive use of the ZWZ resources. Just a little plane. Working through a list of mechanics and fuel-truck drivers-these names coming from prewar tax records secreted by the intelligence services before the Germans took over-they discovered that the great majority of small aircraft, Fiesler-Storch reconnaissance planes for example, were well guarded by Luftwaffe security forces.

But the Germans did have a gentlemen’s flying club.

Flying clubs had gained great popularity at the time of the record-setting flights of the 1920s and 1930s, and served as training grounds for future fighter pilots who had come to aviation as airplane-crazy teenagers. And so, a few days after German victory, the flying club had taken over a small airfield at Pruszkow, about ten miles west of Warsaw. De Milja and Chomak bicycled slowly along the little road past the field. There wasn’t much to see; an expanse of brown grass, a nylon wind sock on a pole, a hut with a swastika flag, and six single-engine planes, of which two had had their engines taken down to small pieces in the lone hangar.

Part Two: The printer across the river in Praga had all the work he could handle. The Germans loved print; every sort of decree and form and official paper, signs and manuals and instruction sheets and directives, they couldn’t get enough of it. Especially that Gothic typeface. The Wehrmacht, as far as the printer could see, would rather publish than fight. Hell, he didn’t mind. What with four kids and the wife pregnant and his old mother and her old mother and coal a hundred zlotys a sack on the black market, he had to do something. Don’t misunderstand, he was a patriot, had served in the army, but there were mouths to feed.

This book? Yeah, he’d printed that. Where the hell had they ever found it? Look at that. Doesn’t look too bad, does it? Quite a problem at first, didn’t get a call for that sort of thing very often and he and his chief compositor-poor Wladek, killed in the war, rest in peace-had had to work it out together, combining different letters from a variety of fonts. Mostly it was just the usual thing but now and then you got a chance to be creative in this business and that made it all worthwhile did they know what he meant?

Do it again? Well, yes, shouldn’t be a problem. He still had all, well almost all the letters he’d used for this book. He’d have to work at night, probably best to do the typesetting himself-if he remembered how. No, that was a joke. He remembered. What exactly did they need? Single sheet? A snap. Had to have it last week, he supposed. Wednesday soon enough? How many copies? How many? Jesus, the Germans kept him on a paper ration, there was no way he could-oh, well, if that was the way it was, no problem. As for the ink, he’d just add that into the German charges over the next few months, they’d never notice. Not that he habitually did that sort of thing, but, well. .

It was December before all the other details could be sorted through and taken care of. Chomak spent two nights in the forest bordering the airfield, binoculars trained on the little hut. The light stayed on all night, a glow at the edges of the blackout curtain, and the watchman, a big, brawny fellow with white hair and a beer belly, was conscientious; made a tour of the field and the hangar twice a night.