Alan Furst - The Polish Officer

The woman wasn’t really sure how she felt. She kept giving the man shy glances from beneath her dark eyelashes. I’m supposed to love darling Helmut-what could be the matter with me? is what she seemed to be saying to herself. Then, a commotion at the entrance to the room, where a maître d’ stood guard over a velvet rope. A handsome fellow wearing a yachting cap wanted to go down the steps but the burly waiters wouldn’t let him, and they struggled in front of some potted palms.

The SS sergeant came up the aisle and the older brother nudged the younger. They let some time lapse, then went into the men’s room. The SS sergeant was buttoning his fly. Up close, he was bigger than they’d thought. He had several medals and ribbons, and a scar on his forehead, but the brothers were practiced and adept and they had him strangled in short order. They stripped off his uniform and left him on the floor with his mouth wide open against the stained tile, still wearing the old green tie they’d used.

The Czarny prison, on Zamkova Street. Quiet enough in the late afternoon. The weather had warmed up, leaving the cobbles awash in wet, dirty slush. The prison had been built in 1878, a series of courtyards behind a wall, ten feet high, with plaster peeling off the granite block. The neighborhood was deserted. Boarded-up clothing store, a burned-out tenement: people avoided Zamkova Street. De Milja walked along briskly, as though he had business nearby. The windows visible from the street were opaque green glass covered by steel mesh- dungeon was the word that came to mind. A sentry box with a big swastika flag stood to one side of the main gate. An old woman in black came through the door in the gate, pulling her shawl up over her head, then folding her arms around herself for warmth. A large brown truck with its canvas top closed in back came rumbling down the street and rolled to a stop in front of the sentry box. The driver joked with the guard. He was German, while the guard, they knew, was part of a Latvian SS unit used for duty outside the cell blocks. Day-to-day supervision inside the prison was managed by local Ukrainian warders.

“Hey, you, what are you staring at?”

De Milja turned to see who it was. Two Germans in black-and-silver uniforms. De Milja smiled hesitantly and started to move away when one of them kicked him in the back of the leg. He fell hard, comically, his feet flying up in the air, into the cold slush. The Germans laughed and walked off. De Milja got to his feet and limped in the opposite direction.

26 November, 4:30 P.M.

The assault commando gathered in the apartment. Group One had four men-de Milja, Vlach, and two he’d never met until that night; one with the nom de guerre Kolya, in his twenties, lean and hard-eyed, and the other called Bron, the armorer, heavier and older with a deceptively soft face. Group Two, six men, was led by a ZWZ officer who had parachuted into the Lodz area in late October, formerly an officer in a special reconnaissance unit of the Polish army. He had a full beard and was known as Jan.

They all smoked nervously, looking at their watches, talking in low voices, going over the penciled maps of the prison again and again. Bron said, “I had better get busy,” stood up and left the room. One of Jan’s men was working the mechanism of a Bergmann machine pistol, the sound of the slide and lock, oiled steel on steel, cutting through the quiet voices. “Hey, Bron,” the man called to the armorer.

Bron came out of the kitchen; he was wearing underpants, his bare legs red from the cold, had a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth, and was buttoning up an SS sergeant’s tunic. “What is it?” he said.

The man worked the Bergmann bolt and said, “Is this right?”

“I had it apart this morning. It works.”

The man tried it one last time, then laid the weapon across his knees. De Milja looked at his watch, the minute hand was where it had been the last time he’d looked. His side hurt from where he’d fallen in the street the day before. Strong, that German. They liked to kick, it added insult to injury, the way they saw it, and they were good at it, probably from all the soccer they played.

“So?” Vlach said, and raised his eyebrows. He smiled a wise-guy smile, but his face was very white.

“Eleven of,” de Milja said.

Vlach didn’t answer. Somebody was tapping his foot rhythmically against the leg of the sofa. Bron came back in the room. Now in SS uniform, he put out the stub of one cigarette and lit another. De Milja stood. “It’s time to go,” he said. “Good luck to you all.” Two of the men crossed themselves. Jan adjusted a fedora in front of the hall mirror. De Milja opened the apartment door and the men flowed out quickly, automatic weapons held beneath overcoats, hats pulled down over their eyes.

One of the men in Jan’s unit patted de Milja on the shoulder as he went past and said, “Good luck.” A neighbor heard people in the hallway, opened his door a crack, then closed it quickly.

De Milja turned to look back into the dark apartment, then shut the door. On the doorframe was a pen-sized outline with two empty screw holes where something had been removed. De Milja knew that Jews often kept a metal device by their front doors, though he couldn’t remember what it was called. The people who had lived in the apartment had apparently taken it off, thinking perhaps that nobody would notice the outline where it had once been fastened.

With Bron driving, they looked like three Gestapo executives with an SS chauffeur. The Opel turned into Zamkova Street, almost dark at 5:00 P.M., an hour before the Rovno curfew, a few people hurrying home with heads down. The second Opel and the truck, Jan’s unit, continued on, heading for the entrance that led to the prison offices.

The first Opel pulled up to the sentry box. Bron opened the door, stood half in, half out of the front seat so the guard got a good look at the SS uniform. He started yelling orders in very fast German, angry and impatient and dangerous. The guard had seen such behavior before, and hastened to open the gate. The car shot through, then one of the civilians rolled out of the back and headed for the sentry box on the run. The guard was puzzled. The running man, Kolya, put an automatic pistol against his temple. “Hand over your weapon,” he said.

The Latvian guard did as he was told. Kolya emptied the chamber and the magazine and returned the rifle. “Now stand guard, do everything as usual,” he said, sitting down in the sentry box below the level of the window. He pressed the VIS against the base of the man’s spine. “As usual,” he said. The guard nodded.

The second Opel and the truck pulled into the street that ran perpendicular to Zamkova. Two ladders were taken from the truck and placed against the wall. The prison had been built to keep people from getting out-very little thought had been given to keeping them from getting in. As Jan’s unit climbed the ladders, the truck was driven fifty yards farther down the street and parked, its engine idling loud enough to cover the sound of gunfire from behind the prison wall.

The street sentry box was visible from the interior guard station, so Bron drove the Opel at normal speed, then stopped and shouted angrily in German. The guard didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. “What’s the matter?” he asked the SS sergeant. Dimly, he could see two men in civilian suits in the car-that meant important security types. Evidently the poor bastard driving the car had been bullied by his superiors-but why take it out on him? The SS sergeant sputtered and turned red. The guard shrugged and opened the gate. The car sped through, one of the men in civilian clothes got out and ran toward him.