Alan Furst - The Polish Officer

For a crew, Koski had done the best he could on short notice. A fireman, who would shovel coal into the steam engine’s furnace, and a conductor would be joining the train in Warsaw. The engineer, standing next to de Milja, had been, until that night, retired. He was a sour man, with a double chin and a lumpy nose, wearing an engineer’s cap, well oiled and grimed, and a pensioner’s blue cardigan sweater with white buttons.

“Fucking shkopy, ” he said, using the Polish word for Germans equivalent to the French boche. He peered upriver at the blackened skeleton of the Poniatowski Bridge. “I had all I wanted of them in ’17.”

The Germans had marched into Warsaw in 1917, during the Great War. De Milja had been sixteen, about to enter university, and while his family had disliked the German entry into Poland, they’d seen one positive side to it: Russian occupiers driven back east where they belonged.

The firebox of the locomotive glowed faintly in the dark, just enough light to jot down a few figures on the iron wall. He had to haul a total of 88,000 pounds: 360 people-43,000 pounds of them if you figured young and old, fat and thin, around 120 pounds a person. Sharing the train with 44,530 pounds of freight.

So, 88,000 pounds equaled 44 tons. Figuring two tons to a normal freight car, a locomotive could easily pull twenty cars. His six passenger coaches would be heavy, but that didn’t matter-they had no suspension to speak of, they’d roll along if the locomotive could pull them.

“What are you scribbling?” The irritation of an old man. To the engineer’s way of thinking, a locomotive cab wasn’t a place for writing.

De Milja didn’t answer. He smeared the soft pencil jotting with his palm, put the stub of pencil back in his pocket. The sound of the wheels changed as the train came off the bridge and descended to a right-of-way cut below ground level and spanned by pedestrian and traffic bridges: a wasteland of tracks, signals, water towers, and switching stations. Was the 44,530 correct? He resisted the instinct to do the figures again. Seven hundred and twelve thousand ounces always made 44,530 pounds, which, divided into five-pound units, always made 8,906. It is mathematics, he told himself, it is always the same.

“You said Dimek Street bridge?”

“Yes.”

The steam brake hissed and the train rolled to a stop. From a stairway that climbed the steep hillside to street level came a flashed signal. De Milja answered with his own flashlight. Then a long line of shadowy figures began to move down the stairs.

17 September, 4:30 A.M.

While the train was being loaded, the conductor and the fireman arrived and shook hands with the engineer. Efficiently, they uncoupled the locomotive and coal tender and used a switching spur to move them to the other end of the train, so it now pointed east.

There were two people waiting for de Milja under the Dimek Street bridge: his former commander, a white-mustached major of impeccable manners and impeccable stupidity, serving out his time until retirement while his assistant did all the work, and de Milja’s former aide, Sublieutenant Nowak, who would serve as his adjutant on the journey south.

The major shook de Milja’s hand hard, his voice taut with emotion. “I know you’ll do well,” he said. “As for me, I am returning to my unit. They are holding a line at the Bzura River.” It was a death sentence and they both knew it. “Good luck, sir,” de Milja said, and saluted formally. The major returned the salute and disappeared into a crowd of people on the train.

Guards with machine guns had positioned themselves along the track, while a dozen carpenters pried up the floorboards of the railroad coaches and workers from the state treasury building installed the Polish National Bullion Reserve-$11,400,000 in five-pound gold ingots packed ten to a crate-in the ten-inch space below. Then, working quickly, the carpenters hammered the boards back into place.

At which point Nowak came running, his face red with anger. “You had better see this,” he said. The carpenters were just finishing up. Nowak pointed at the shiny nailheads they’d hammered into the old gray wood.

“Couldn’t you use the old nails?” de Milja said.

The head carpenter shrugged.

“Is there any lampblack?”

“Lampblack! No, of course not. We’re carpenters, we don’t have such things.”

17 September, 6:48 A.M. Gdansk station.

The platforms and waiting rooms were jammed with people, every age, every class, babbling in at least seven languages, only one thing in common: they were too late. Unlucky or unwise didn’t matter, the trains had stopped. A stationmaster’s voice crackled through the public-address system and tried to convince them of that, but nobody was willing to believe it. In Poland, things happened in mysterious ways-authority itself was often struck speechless at life’s sudden turns.

For instance:

The stationmaster’s voice, “Please, ladies and gentlemen, I entreat you, there will be no more service. .,” was slowly drowned out by the rumble of an approaching train. People surged to the edges of the platforms, police struggled to hold them back.

Then the crowd fell silent, and stopped pushing.

Then someone cheered. And then someone else. And then everybody. Poland had been brutally stabbed in the back, and so she bled, bled fiercely, but here was proof that she lived, and could strike back at those who tormented her.

But that was only part of the miracle. Because, only a few minutes later, another train appeared. And if the armored train was an image of war, here was a phantom from the time of peace, a little six-car train headed south for-or so the signs on the sides of the coaches said-Pilava. The Pilava train! Only thirty miles south, but at least not in besieged Warsaw. Everybody had an aunt in Pilava, you went there on a Sunday afternoon and came home with half a ham wrapped in a cloth. Vladimir Herschensohn, pressed by the crowd against a marble column, felt his heart rise with joy. Somehow, from somewhere, a manifestation of normal existence: a train arrives in a station, passengers ascend, life goes on.

But Mr. Herschensohn would not be ascending. He needed to, the Germans would make quick work of him and he knew it. But God had made him small, and as the crowd surged hungrily toward the empty train he actually found himself moving-helped along by a curse here, an elbow there-away from the track. After a moment or two of this, all he wanted to do was stay near enough to watch the train leave, to send some part of his spirit away to safety.

Watching from the cab of the locomotive, de Milja felt his stomach turn. The crowd was now a mob: if they got on this train, they would live. Babies howled, suitcases sprang open, men and women clawed and fought, policemen swung their batons. De Milja could hear the thuds, but he willed his face not to show what he felt and it didn’t. A huge, brawny peasant shoved an old woman out of his way and started to climb onto the coupling between the engine and the coal car. The fireman waited until his weight hung on his hands, then kicked him full force under the chin. His head flew up and he went tumbling backward into the crowd. “Pig,” the fireman said quietly, as though to himself.

But, in the end, the ones who pushed to the front were the ones who got on.

When the train was good and full, people packed into the cars, when it looked like a refugee train should look, de Milja raised his hand. Then something stopped him. Out in the crowd, his eye found a little peanut of a man in a long black overcoat, with a black homburg hat knocked awry. He was holding some sort of a case and an old-fashioned valise in one hand, and pressing a handkerchief to his bloody nose with the other. The policeman standing next to de Milja was red in the face and breathing hard. “Get me that man,” de Milja said, pointing.