Alan Furst - The Polish Officer

“So, the construction companies get all these contracts, but when they finished rubbing their hands and winking at each other, it begins to dawn on them that they’re going to have to find somebody to do the work. Ah, not so easy. Can’t bring in people from Germany, either they’re building airplanes and submarines back in Essen, or they’re shooting more Russians, six hundred miles east of here. See, when you shoot a Russian, somebody puts another one down, but they haven’t figured that out yet.

“Anyhow, they’re going to have to use local labor. We started by getting one guy hired. Every German’s dream of what a Pole should be-cooperative, friendly, religious, trustworthy. A fifty-five-year-old man, a machinist all his life, Henryk. So all the Germans loved Henryk. They could count on him, he never drank, he never stole, he never answered back, and you said be at the job site at five-thirty in the morning, and there he was.”

Vlach blew out his cheeks to make a fat German face. “ ‘Henryk, mein friend, maybe you haff a cousin?’ Well, guess what, he does. He has also an uncle, an aunt, a long-lost friend, a nephew-that’s me-and about eighteen more, one way and another. We go anywhere we like, we have company trucks, two Opel automobiles. If we want to carry something that’s-unusual, you understand, we can request a Wehrmacht driver. When they’re behind the wheel, nobody even pretends to look.”

Respectable little man, tortoiseshell spectacles gave him a slight resemblance to the American comedian Harold Lloyd. Except that Harold Lloyd would have bought new glasses if he’d cracked a lens.

“The Russians put him in a camp in ’39,” Vlach said.

“How did you get out?” de Milja asked.

“I escaped,” the man said.

He sat with de Milja and Vlach in the apartment, a map of Rovno unfolded on the kitchen table. “From the central telephone exchange, which is here, there are three lines that leave Rovno.” He pointed, his hands cracked and peeling from working as a dishwasher in a restaurant. “The main line goes west, to Lutsk. Then we had a branch north, to Klesow, and one south, to Ostrog. From there a line went to Kiev-but it was often cut, or blocked. The Russians interfered any way they could.”

“And the wireless telegraph-is that something you knew about?” The man had been the regional accounting supervisor for the telephone system before the war.

“There were five stations,” he said.

“So if we disabled those, and cut the telephone lines-”

“They would use the military wireless. I don’t think you can silence them, sir.”

The prison guard had never liked his work. They paid him slave wages to sit on the lid of a garbage can, the way he saw it. But it was better than nothing, so he did what he had to do. A mean existence; everything had to be watched, saved, rationed: lightbulbs, soap, coal, meat. He’d never, not once, had a lot of something he liked. His kids were gone, had their own sorry lives. His wife was still with him, mostly the Church to thank for that, but whatever had once been inside her had died years ago. For himself, he sat in a bar after work and soaked up vodka until he was numb enough to go home. He would have liked, once he got older, to go back to the countryside where he’d been raised. Since the war you could buy a small farm, it didn’t take much, just more than he’d ever had.

So when the offer came, he didn’t say no. They’d probably watched him, the way he looked, the misery in his step. The old man who made the offer wasn’t such a bad sort. Polish, with the sharp cheekbones like they had sometimes. And educated, maybe very educated. “You’ve had enough bad weather,” the old man said. “Time to take a walk in the sunshine.” Then he mentioned an amount of money, and the guard just nodded.

“You don’t have to do anything,” the old man said. “Just draw what’s inside, the corridors and the offices and the cells, and show me how it’s numbered.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“They don’t tell me. It’s the Russians gave me this job.”

“Bandits. We have some of them locked up.”

“Just draw and number.”

“I’ll take care of it at home,” the guard said.

The old man put a sheet of paper and a pencil in front of him. “Why not right now? There’s nobody here.”

So the guard did it. And when his mind raced as he lay in bed that night-should he tell, could he sell the old man to the Germans, should he have demanded more money? — he realized that his childish drawing was as good as a signed confession. That scared him. So he hid the money under the mattress and kept quiet.

Vlach and de Milja shivered in the cold of the unheated garage. Outside the snow whispered down, the air frozen and still. Henryk was exactly as Vlach had described him, square-jawed and square-shouldered, sleeves and collar buttoned up. An honest man, not a crooked bone in his body. It just happened that he was a patriot, and the construction executives hadn’t really thought that through.

Henryk was lying on his back under a large German truck, working with a wrench. His face reddened as one of the rusty bolts refused to give, then squeaked, and turned. He pulled the muffler, laid it on the floor, and slid from beneath the truck, wiping his hands on a rag. “Start it up,” he said.

De Milja climbed into the cab and turned the key. The roar was deafening, it shook the windowpanes in the garage. Vlach appeared at the truck window, hands pressed against his ears, and de Milja had to read his lips even though he appeared to be shouting. “Turn, that, fucking, thing, off.”

In the silent apartment with the ticking clock, the sofas had been pushed back to the walls to make room on the floor. The doilies on the backs of the chairs were creased and stained where too many people had rested their heads, and the carpet, pale blue with a pattern of roses and vines, was also ruined, spotted with cosmoline and oil.

The armory was laid out on the rug: three Simonovs, three Rus-sian PPD submachine guns-the pepecha, crude and lethal, named after the rhythm of its fire. Two German machine pistols, all-steel MP34s. Known as the Bergmann, the weapon had been manufactured outside German borders to evade the armament limits of the Treaty of Versailles. There were the two VIS automatics that accompanied de Milja from London, the ones with the Polish eagle on the slide, and four VIS automatics made since the German occupation-no eagle. There were two American Colt.45s. A Hungarian Gepisztoly 39M, a very fast machine pistol that fired Mauser Export cartridges. For hand grenades, they had the variety called Sidolowki-manufactured in clandestine ZWZ workshops and named after the cans of Sidol polish they resembled-logically, since the workshops were hidden in the Sidol factory.

The brothers were nineteen and seventeen, big and broad-shouldered and towheaded. They walked around Rovno all day looking for a candidate. They saw an SS major outside the movie theater-German romantic films and newsreels of the victorious Wehrmacht on the Russian front. An SS sergeant, extremely tall and thin, leaving a restaurant. Two SS corporals, ogling girls on the bridge over the small stream that ran through Rovno.

Then, late in the afternoon, they found another SS sergeant, of medium build, looking at the stills posted on the outside of the movie theater. After some consideration, he paid and went inside. They did too. He wandered down the aisle, they took seats near the back. Not much of an audience, mostly German soldiers on their off-duty hours. On the screen, a man in a tuxedo sitting in an elegant nightclub, speaking rapid German to a blond woman with tight curls and a black dress with a white bib collar. She looked down and bit her lip, he had smooth black hair and a thin mustache. The brothers didn’t speak much German but they could tell the man was apologizing.