Alan Furst - The Polish Officer

But there was something much more troubling on the agenda that day: the man who had printed the RAF leaflets had been arrested in his shop by the Gestapo. “Find out about it,” Broza said. “Then see Grodewicz.”

He went to visit the printer’s wife. They lived in a quite good neighborhood-surprisingly good for a man with a small job shop-broad avenues with trees, solid apartment houses with fire-escape ladders on the alley side, toilets in the apartments instead of the usual privies in the courtyard, and a building superintendent, a heavy woman in a kerchief, polite and not a bit drunk. De Milja asked her about the family. She took notice of his warm coat, and heavy, well-made shoes and raised her palms to heaven: didn’t know, didn’t want to get involved.

The apartment was on the seventh floor, the top of the building. De Milja trudged up the endless staircase, the marble steps gray from years of scrubbing with Javel water. He stopped to get his breath at the door, then knocked. The wife was a small woman, tepid, harmless, in a faded apron. They sat at the kitchen table. “I don’t know what he did,” she said.

“What about the neighbors?”

“Mostly they only knew me. And I never made an enemy, Mister.”

He believed her. “And him?”

“He was away, you know. Here and there. Some wives, they know when their husband breathes in, when he breathes out. Not me. You couldn’t do that with him.”

“What did you imagine?”

“Imagine? I only know we had a lot-a lot for who he was and what he did. He was ambitious, my husband. And maybe rules weren’t made for him, you know? But nothing serious. I swear it. Whoever you are, wherever you come from, go back and tell them he didn’t do anything so wrong.”

She started to cry but she didn’t care, didn’t touch her face where the tears ran and didn’t seem to notice it; everybody cried these days, so what?

“Are you in touch with the Gestapo?”

She nodded that she was. “On Szucha Avenue.”

That wasn’t good-Szucha Avenue was the central Gestapo headquarters. “I go every week to get his laundry,” she continued. “Do the wash and bring it back.” Her eyes found his, just for an instant. “There’s blood on his underwear,” she said.

“We can stop the interrogation,” he said.

Just for a moment she believed him, and her eyes widened, then she realized it was a lie.

“He did something for us,” de Milja said. “For the underground. Will he tell them?”

She wiped the tears away from her face with her hand. “Not him,” she said. “If only he would-but he won’t.”

“A last question,” he said. “How did they catch him?”

She thought for a time, stared out the window at the gray sky over the winter city. “Betrayed,” she said. “He never gave himself away.”

She was right, de Milja thought. He sensed it wasn’t the jealous neighbor, or the business partner with a grudge. It wasn’t a denunciation in that sense. He went to see another detective, a man with a big stomach and white hair, who had a line into the Gestapo office on Szucha Avenue. A clerk, perhaps, or a janitor. Information was fragmentary, and uncertain-as though somebody saw an open register, or a list on a desk. Nonetheless, his question was answered: Chomak.

De Milja hadn’t expected that. “Why?” he asked.

The detective shrugged. “A man reaches a certain time in life, and a certain conclusion. He’s alone. For himself. At war with the world. So he’ll do this for that one, and that for this one-he’s a spider, this is his web. Everybody is corrupt, he thinks. So he’d better be the same.”

It wasn’t much, de Milja thought. But there might never be any more, and they were at war, so it had to be enough. As Broza had directed, he went to see Grodewicz. They met at night in the office of a broom factory.

He had known Grodewicz for a long time, they belonged to the same social class, were not quite the same age but had overlapped for a year or two at university. While de Milja had labored desperately-and, it turned out, fruitlessly-to be a mathematician, Grodewicz had thrown himself into drinking and fighting and whoring to such a degree that it had become an issue with the police, and eventually with the university authorities, who finally had to expel him. What bothered de Milja was that Grodewicz not only didn’t care, he didn’t suffer. He walked away from university life, served as a merchant seaman, was said to have smuggled emeralds into the Balkans from South America, killed a shipmate in a knife fight, screwed a movie star in Vienna. Too many rumors about Grodewicz were true, he thought.

De Milja watched Grodewicz as he spoke quietly into the telephone-making him wait, naturally. He had long, lank, yellow hair that hung over his forehead, was handsome in some indefinably unhealthy way, and arrogant in every bone in his body. Now Captain Grodewicz-perhaps a post-invasion commission. De Milja sensed he’d gone to war not because Poland had been attacked, but because Grodewicz had been insulted.

“We’ll paint the south wall first,” Grodewicz said, obviously using code, from memory and with great facility. “And extend the line of the roof over that window, the south window. Is it clear?”

Grodewicz met de Milja’s glance and winked at him. “Good,” he said. “Just exactly. Plumb line, chisel, ripsaw and so forth. Can you manage?” The answer evidently pleased Grodewicz, who smiled and made a galloping rhythm with three fingers on the desk. “I would think,” he said. “Maybe we’ll all move in.” He replaced the receiver on its cradle.

They talked for a few minutes. De Milja explained what he needed, Grodewicz said there would be no problem-he had people ready to do that sort of work. They smoked a cigarette, said nothing very important, and went off into the night. The following day de Milja went to a certain telephone booth, opened the directory to a prearranged page, underlined a word on the second line, which set the rendezvous two days in the future; circled a word on the eighteenth line: 6:00 P.M.; and crossed through the twenty-second letter: 6:22 P.M. Very quickly, and very painfully, the ZWZ had learned the vulnerability of personal contact. Telephone books were safer.

It worked. The operative was on time, appearing suddenly in a heavy snow of soft, wet flakes that muffled the streets and made it hard to see. God, he was young, de Milja thought. Moonfaced, which made him seem placid. Hands shoved in the pockets of a baggy overcoat.

Chomak’s dachshund knew right away who he was. It exploded in a fit of barking and skittered about at the detective’s feet until his wife gathered it up in her arms and went into another room.

They took the evening workers’ train across the Vistula. The snow was falling thickly now, and looking out the window, de Milja could just see the iron-colored river curling slowly around the piers of a bridge. Nobody talked on this train; it had been a long day in the factories and they didn’t have the strength for it. De Milja and Chomak and the operative stood together in the aisle, holding on to the tops of the seats as the train swayed through the turns, the steamy windows white with snow blown sideways by the wind. At the second stop, a neighborhood of red-brick tenements, they got off the train and found a small bar near the station. They sat at a table and drank home-brewed beer.

“We’re trying to find out about the printer,” de Milja said. “The Gestapo arrested him.”

Chomak shrugged. “Inevitable,” he said.

“Why do you say that?”

“He was a thief,” Chomak said. “A Jew thief.”

“Really? How do you know?”

“Everybody knew,” Chomak said. “He was clever, very clever, just in the way he went around, in the way he did things. He was always up to something-you only had to look at him to see it.”