Alan Furst - The Polish Officer

He went to the not-so-good hotel at the railroad station, across the square from Jeanne-Marie, and checked in. The lawyer Benoit from Nantes, a boring little man on a boring little errand-please God let them believe that. Below his window, freight cars rolled past all night. The Germans were building here: massive defenses to repel an invasion, and submarine pens to attack British shipping.

De Milja couldn’t sleep. He smoked, sat in a chair by the window, and stared out into the darkened square. Some nights he could travel like a ghost, skimming over the landmass of Europe, the bloody cellars and the silent streets, the castles and the princes and the assassins who waited for them. Wolves in the snow-at the edge of town, where the butchers made sausage.

At seven he stood in front of the sink, bare-chested, suspenders dangling from the waistband of his trousers. He washed himself with cold water, then rubbed his skin with a towel.

In the lobby of the hotel, an old man was sweeping the tile floor, moving slowly among the ancient velvet chairs and sofas. De Milja went out in the street. Better there-the sun just up, the cobblestones of the square sluiced down with water. Around the corner he found an open café, ordered a coffee, stood at the bar and chatted with the patron.

The patron had a friend called Henri, who could get him anything he wanted. A pair of bicycles? No problem. An arching eyebrow indicated that the resources available to Henri went much deeper than that. Henri himself appeared an hour later, pushing the bicycles. De Milja paid him handsomely, then mentioned truck tires, price no object, perhaps at the end of the week? No problem! Henri nodded, gestured, winked. What de Milja really wanted was seventy-two hours during which Henri would refrain from selling him to the police, and he thought he’d accomplished that. First tires, then betrayal, so read the heart of Henri.

The following day, at five in the morning, in a patter of spring rain, they were on the road. They pedaled out of Vannes with some forty other cyclists, all headed to work at the fish-oil plant, at the small machine shops and boat-repair yards found in every port, some of them no doubt going the twelve miles to the air base, where the pilots of the Kampfgeschwader 100 also worked. The riders were silent-it was too early in the morning to be among strangers. Now and then a bicycle bell rang, two or three times an automobile, no doubt carrying somebody important and German, went roaring past.

De Milja let the crowd get ahead of them so they could talk. “Now this curve,” he said, “is a possibility. To the right, the pine forest provides some cover. To the left, the rock makes it impossible for the bus to swerve, to simply drive away from the attack.”

They rode on, Jeanne-Marie making mental notes about the road, the terrain, the time of day-everything that would have to be factored into an assault plan. “Of course,” de Milja said, “it will be up to the officer leading the attack to make the decision-exactly where to conceal his firing points and everything else. But there are locations along the route that he ought to at least consider.”

Up ahead, a warning bell rang and a railwayman lowered a safety gate. Then a locomotive sounded its whistle and a slow freight came rumbling across the road. De Milja and Jeanne-Marie pulled up to the crowd of cyclists, standing patiently on one foot while the boxcars rolled past. A dark green sports car, its hood secured by a leather strap, stopped next to de Milja. The driver and his companion were young men, wearing good tweed jackets and pigskin gloves. “ Ach du lieber! ” the driver said, his hand clapped over his eyes. What had struck him blind was a girl in a tight skirt astride a bicycle seat. The other man shook his head in wonder, said in German, “Sweet sugar-come fly through the clouds with me.” The girl ignored them.

The freight train moved off into the distance, the railwayman raised the gate. The driver of the sports car gunned his engine, the cyclists scurried out of the way, and the two Germans went tearing down the road, an echo of speed shifts and screaming engine lingering after them.

5:30 P.M. The first minutes of darkness. Outlines blurred, faces indistinct. People were out; coming home from work, going visiting, shopping. A couple, even strangers, moved easily along the street, unremarkable, nobody really saw them.

De Milja took Jeanne-Marie by the arm for a moment, guided her into a long alley, a crooked lane no more than three feet wide with lead-sheathed drain tiles running down both sides and crumbling stone arches above. It was chaos back here; stake fences concealing garden plots, leaning sheds and rusty tin roofs, curved tiles stacked against walls, dripping pipes, sheets hung to dry on lines spanning the alley-a thousand years of village life concealed from the public street.

Finding the back entrance to a particular shop should have been a nightmare, but no, in fact the Germans had done him a favor. The back door of the confiserie was chained and padlocked-the same equipment they’d used for the front door.

The chain ran from a rusty cleat in the wall to the iron door handle. It wasn’t a system Mademoiselle Herault had ever used, and it didn’t work now. De Milja took an iron bar from under his coat, slotted one end next to the chain in the wall cleat, used a piece of broken brick as a fulcrum, and put his weight against it. Out came the cleat with a puff of dust, a chunk of old masonry still attached to it. Next the door lock. He threw a shoulder into the door, but nothing happened. Drew a foot up and drove his heel against the lock plate-same result. Finally he worked the sharp end of the bar into the dried-out wood between the door and the jamb, levered it apart until he could get the end of the bar past the inside edge of the door, used every bit of strength he had. Nothing at first, then it gave a little, finally there was a loud squeak and the sound of ripping wood as the lock tore free. He swung the door open, waited a beat, stepped inside.

What he needed to see he saw immediately-the dusk of closed spaces was broken up by shadowy light from the doorway, and the last two years had taught him to see in the dark. There was no malice or evil in the confiserie, just a professional job, cold and thorough.

They had searched: dumped the canisters of flour into the stone sink, then the sugar, the salt, the baking soda, whatever else had been on the shelf, stirring through each new addition. They would have used a thin metal rod, sifting, probing, hunting the spool of microfilm or the miniature camera, the book marked for ciphering or a set of crystals for a radio. De Milja walked into the office, every step a brittle crunch-they’d spilled a bin of hard candies on the floor, and their boots had ground them into powdery shards of red and green.

Mademoiselle Herault’s office was torn to pieces. Not a piece of paper to be seen, upholstery fabric sliced from the bottom of an upside-down chair, drawers pulled from the desk, then the desk flipped over, smashing the drawers beneath it. In the store itself, the glass had been kicked out of the counters and the wooden frame torn apart-spies were diabolical when it came to hiding things. The searchers had unwrapped the chocolates and squashed them-ants were at work on the result, tossed atop the shards of glass.

By the cash register, where Veronique the clerk had spent her days, de Milja smelled something strange. Even amid the orange essence and vanilla and peppermint and God knew what else-something strong and particular, like flowers. He knelt, the smell got stronger. A small glass bottle, in pieces, half-hidden by the leg of a counter. Candy clerk’s perfume, he thought. They had stood her against a wall, searched through her purse, and it had fallen out, or perhaps they’d thrown it on the floor.