Alan Furst - The Polish Officer

No more than a minute inside the shop, but too long.

Jeanne-Marie called in a whisper, de Milja was up and out in one motion. A flashlight bobbed at the other end of the alley. He kicked the door shut with his foot and embraced Jeanne-Marie in the same instant. Passionately, pressing his mouth against hers. She made a small sound of distaste, stiffened, tried to pull away from him just as the flashlight pinned them both.

The voice was a growl. “What’s this?”

It was the eternal voice of the flic, the cop, tired and sour beyond redemption. “Romance?” it wondered.

De Milja shielded his eyes from the light, squinting helplessly as he did so, a profoundly virtuous gesture. “We have no place to meet,” he said.

A moment while that was considered. “Well, you can’t meet here.”

The light was lowered. De Milja heard the little pop of a holster flap snapped back into place. “Take a walk,” the cop said. He sensed something, but he wished not to know about it. He simply made it vanish so it no longer troubled him.

They took local trains out of Vannes that night. Jeanne-Marie back to the country house, de Milja to the avenue Hoche.

It was, inevitably, spring in Paris. The first chestnut trees bloomed at the entrances to the métro, where warm air flowed up the staircases. Greece was taken in April, so was Yugoslavia. Belgrade, pressured by tank columns on three sides, was surrendered to a German captain and nine enlisted men who had bluffed their way through the defense lines. The United States had frozen German and Italian assets held in American banks.

For Parisians, daily existence was a struggle, and people simply tried to stay out of the way of the Germans. There had, in the first year of occupation, been one execution-Jacques Bonsergent, shot for jostling a German officer in the Gare Saint-Lazare.

The mood in the cafés was now resignation, the defeat by the Germans called the debacle. De Milja found this a curious expression once he thought about it-just the sort of linguistic trap that the French liked to construct. It meant a complete rout, a total collapse. But somewhere in the spirit of the word was a touch of the absurd, the comic: it wasn’t anyone’s fault, no point in assigning blame, it was just that everything went wrong all at once-a moment of Divine slapstick and poof, we lost the country.

For de Milja, contacts in the Polish community had finally begun to pay off. He had enlisted a railroad clerk and a miner’s daughter from Alsace-both contacts made through Polish clergy at local churches. The value of priests now became particularly apparent. They had political views, strong ones often enough, and were the keepers of community secrets. They knew who drank, who made money, and who lost it. They knew who the collaborators were, and who the patriots were. People, perhaps resisting an urge to gossip over the back fence, told the priest everything. Sometimes in church, more often in the parlor or at the vegetable stall. That couldn’t be wrong, could it? Heaven knew all your secrets anyhow.

The Alsatian girl, very studious and shy, in her early twenties, came to live in Paris at de Milja’s request. He assigned her the code name Vera, then, in a slow and curiously difficult effort, tried to place her in a job in a German bureau. She spoke excellent German, perfect French, it should have been easy. “I have never felt French, exactly,” she told her interviewers. “Always we spoke German in my house.” She was offered two jobs, both clerical and meaningless, in the office that handled payments flowing from France to Germany-400 million francs a day, the cost of the German military and civilian administration. After all, one couldn’t expect one’s country to be occupied for free.

With de Milja’s coaching, Vera extracted herself from those offers, moved to a pension, and waited patiently.

26 April 1941. 3:20 A.M. Le Chabanais.

Paris’s finest brothel. Draperies, brocades, velvets, and cut crystal-such weight as to suggest a thick and impenetrable wall of discretion. Waitresses in golden slippers served osetra caviar. In one of the private rooms, the Slovakian coal dealer Anton Stein had invited the Comte de Rieu and the art dealer Labarthe to be his guests for a late supper and whatever other diversions they might enjoy. They had a peaceful, relaxed, gentlemen’s evening of it.

The count had been entertained, in one of the upstairs bedrooms, by a “Hungarian countess” and her “Spanish maid”-the glass of wine tipped over, the slipper applied, then forgiveness, at length and in many ways. The count returned, shaking his head in wonder at what the world had to offer him. Lit a Camel cigarette, drank a sip of champagne, rested his head on the back of a chair and blew two seemingly endless plumes of smoke at the chandelier.

No need to talk, a grand silence-a moment to contemplate human desire and the masks it wore. De Milja had seen the countess; hair dark red, Magyar cheekbones, long, delicate fingers. But a temper, as you might expect. Not the one to stand for a maid’s clumsy behavior.

The count smiled at his host by way of saying thank you. “The pleasures of excess,” he said quietly. Labarthe snored lightly on a settee, head fallen to one side.

Stein raised his glass in a silent toast to the count’s words. He drank, then after a moment said, “I was in Alsace recently. Stumbled on treasure.”

“Let me guess: a Rhine maiden?”

“Oh no. Completely the opposite.”

“Really?”

Stein nodded yes. Opened a tortoiseshell case and selected a small, pale-leafed cigar. He rolled it between his fingers, then snapped a silver lighter until a flame appeared. “Mmm,” he said, putting the lighter away. “Spinster type-to look at her you’d never imagine.”

“Oh, I can imagine.”

“Little more champagne?”

“Not just yet, thanks.”

“Anyhow, I have her here. In a pension. ”

“Can’t get enough?”

“That’s it.” He paused a moment. “Thing is, she’s bored. Nothing to do all day.”

“Why not a job? Coming from there, she must speak German.”

“She does, she does. Wants to work for Jeder Einmal. ”

“Why there?”

“I think she worked at Eszterhazy, the travel agency, before the war.”

“Well, that shouldn’t be a problem. I don’t know anyone there, exactly, but Kappler can do it in a minute. I’ll call him Monday, if you like.”

“Would you? That would certainly help me out.”

“Consider it done.”

From somewhere in the vast building came the sound of a violin. It was playing a folk melody, slow and melancholy, something eastern, perhaps Russian. Both men listened attentively. Labarthe stopped snoring, mumbled something, then fell back asleep. “Remarkable, the way life is now,” the count said. “Untold stories.” Then, after a moment, he said, “A spinster?” He meant, in a rather delicate way, that such an appetite in Stein was unexpected.

Stein shrugged. “Quite religious,” he said. “She is like a storm.”

Transmission of 12 May. 1:25 A.M.

To Director. Source: Albert

Railway Bureau designates departures 21 May/26 May. 3rd class and livestock cars making up at Reims yards. Route: Reims/Metz/ Trier/Würzburg/Prague/Breslau/Cracow/Tarnow. Including: Artillery regiment 181, Fusilier Regiment 202 (Stettin), Grenadier Regiments 80, 107, 253 (Wiesbaden). Grenadier regiments 151, 162, and 176 (Wehrkreis X, Hamburg).

Of 21 Divisions in France as of 4/22/41, total of 9 (135,000 men) now moved east.

De Milja’s railroad clerk. Fussy little man, fierce patriot. Dead drop at the Église Sainte Thérèse-Albert to the six o’clock mass, de Milja at ten. The take from Wehrmacht rail scheduling made de Milja’s heart lift. Great numbers of troops-and their vehicles, weapons, files, and draft horses-on the move from conquered France and Belgium to conquered Poland. That meant Russia. And that meant the end. There was in Wilno a historical marker, alongside the Moscow road, that read “On 28 June, 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte passed this way with 450,000 men.” Then, on the other side, approached from the east, was a different message: “On 9 December, 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte passed this way with 900 men.”