Alan Furst: The Polish Officer

“Yes?”

“She’s in a private clinic. In the countryside, near Tarnopol.”

“An illness?”

“She is-the doctor puts it that she has entered a private world.”

Vyborg shook his head in sympathy and scowled at the idea of illness attacking people he knew.

“Can she be rescued?”

Vyborg thought it over. Senior intelligence officers became almost intuitive about possibility-some miracles could be done, some couldn’t. Once initiated, above a certain rank, you knew.

“I’m sorry,” the colonel said.

The captain inclined his head; he understood, it need not be further discussed. They walked in silence for a time, then the colonel said, “We’ll see you at nine-fifteen, then.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Officially, we’re glad to have you with us.” They shook hands. The captain saluted, the colonel returned the salute.

A quarter moon, red with fire, over the Vilna station railyards.

The yard supervisor wore a bandage over one eye, his suit and shirt had not been changed for days, days of crawling under freight cars, of floating soot and oily smoke, and his hands were trembling. He was ashamed of that, so had wedged them in his pockets as though he were a street-corner tough who whistled at girls.

“This was our best,” he said sadly. Captain de Milja flicked the beam of his flashlight over a passenger car with its roof peeled back. A woman’s scarf, light enough to float in the wind, was snagged on a shard of iron. “Bolen Coachworks,” the supervisor said. “Leaded-glass lamps in the first-class compartments. Now look.”

“What’s back there?” de Milja asked.

“Nothing much. Just some old stock we pulled in from the local runs-the Pruszkow line, Wolomin.”

Cinders crunched under their feet as they walked. Yard workers with iron bars and acetylene torches were trying to repair the track. There were showers of blue sparks and the smell of scorched metal as they cut through the twisted rail.

“And this?”

The supervisor shrugged. “We run little trains to the villages, on market days. This is what’s left of the Solchow local. It was caught by a bombing raid on Thursday, just past the power station. The engineer panicked, he had his fireman uncouple the engine and they made a run for Vilna station. Maybe he thought he’d be safe under the roof, though I can’t imagine why, because it’s a glass roof, or it used to be. When the all clear sounded, the engine had been blown to pieces but the rest of the train was just left sitting out there on the track, full of angry old farm ladies and crates of chickens.”

De Milja and the supervisor climbed the steps into the coach. The captain’s flashlight lit up the aisle; wooden floorboards, buckled and gray with age, frayed wicker seats-once yellow, now brown-chicken feathers, a forgotten basket. From the other end of the car came a deep, heavy growl. What are you doing here? de Milja thought. “Come,” he said.

There was a moment of silence, then another growl. This time it didn’t mean prepare to die- more like not yet.

“Come here.” You know you have to.

A huge head appeared in the aisle, thrust cautiously from a hiding place behind a collapsed seat. De Milja masked the flashlight beam and the dog came reluctantly, head down, to accept its punishment. To have deserved what had happened to it the last few days, it reasoned, it must have been very, very bad. De Milja went down on one knee and said, “Yes, it’s all right, it’s all right.”

It was a male Tatra, a sheepdog related to the Great Pyrenees. De Milja sank his hands into the deep hair around the neck, gripped it hard and tugged the head toward him. The dog knew this game and twisted back against de Milja, but the man’s hands were too strong. Finally the dog butted his head against the captain’s chest, took a huge breath and sighed so deeply it was almost a growl.

“Perhaps you could find some water,” de Milja said to the supervisor.

His family had always had dogs, kept at the manor house of the estate in the Volhynia, in eastern Poland. They hunted with them, taking a wild boar every autumn in the great forest, a scene from a medieval tapestry. The Tatra was an off-white, like most mountain breeds, a preferred color that kept the shepherd from clubbing his own dog when they fought night-raiding wolves. De Milja put his face into the animal’s fur and inhaled the sweet smell.

The yard supervisor returned, a bowl filled to the brim with milk held carefully in his hands. This was a small miracle, but “he must be hungry” was all he had to say about it.

“What’s your name?” de Milja asked.

“Koski.”

“Can you keep a big dog, Mr. Koski?”

The yard supervisor thought a moment, then shrugged and said, “I guess so.”

“It will take some feeding.”

“We’ll manage.”

“And this kind of coach?” The captain nodded at it. “Have you got six or so?”

“All you want.”

“Same color. Yellow, with red around the windows.”

Koski tried to conceal his reaction. The middle of a war, Germans at the outskirts of the city, and this man wanted “the same color.” Well, you did what you had to do. “If you can wait for daylight, we’ll freshen up the paint.”

“No, it’s good just like that. We’ll need a coal tender, of course, and a locomotive. A freight locomotive.”

Koski stared at his shoes. They had improvised, borrowed parts, kept running all sorts of stock that had no business running-but freight locomotives were a sore subject. Nobody had those. Well, he had one. Well and truly hidden. Was this the moment? “Six red-and-yellow coaches,” he said at last. “Tender, freight locomotive. That it?”

De Milja nodded. “In about, say, an hour.”

Koski started to shout, something like can’t you see I’m doing the best I can? But a covert glance at de Milja changed his mind-he wasn’t someone you would say that to, much less shout it.

De Milja looked to be in his late thirties, but there was something about him, some air of authority, that was much older than that. He had dark hair, cut short and cut very well, and a pale forehead that people noticed. Eyes the color-according to his wife-of a February sea, shifting somewhere between gray and green. His face was delicate, arrogant, hard; people said different things. In any event, he was a very serious man, that was obvious, with hands bigger than they ought to have been, and blunt fingers. He wore no insignia, just a brown raincoat over a gray wool sweater. There was a gun, somewhere. He stood, relaxed but faintly military, waiting for the yard supervisor to agree to make up his train in an hour. This man came, Koski thought, from the war, and when the war went away, if it ever did, so would he and all the others like him.

The supervisor nodded yes, of course he could have his train. The dog stopped lapping at the bowl, looked up and whined, a drop of milk falling from his beard. A yellow flame burst from the hillside above the yards and the flat crump of an explosion followed. The brush burned for a few seconds, then the fire died out as smoke and dust drifted down the hill.

Koski had flinched at the explosion, now he jammed his shaking hands deeper into his pockets. “Not much left to bomb here,” he said.

“That wasn’t a bomb,” de Milja said. “It was a shell.”

17 September, 3:50 A.M. Freight locomotive, coal tender, six passenger cars from a market-day local. The yard supervisor, the Tatra by his side, watched as it left the railyards. Then it crossed Praga, a workers’ suburb across the Vistula from Warsaw, and headed for the city on the single remaining railroad bridge. Captain de Milja stood in the cab of the locomotive and stared down into the black water as the train clattered across the ties.