Alan Furst - The Spies of Warsaw

Finally, they let her go. She had a few groschen in her pocket, enough to take a tram back to her neighborhood. Safely home, she gave the dog her food, went to the kitchen cupboard, took down a bottle of potato schnapps, poured herself a little in a water glass, then a little more. Exhausted, she fell back on the couch, the dog clambering up to sit beside her-it had been a bad morning for both of them. “Poor Schatzi,” she said. The dog looked up and gave a single wag of its tail. “Your mama is such a goose, little girl, she talked too much. But never again, never again.” Another wag: here I am. “You’re a good girl, Schatzi. What if I hadn’t come home? What then?”

31 October.

The last quarter of the waning moon, so it said on Mercier’s lunar calendar. It was just after eight in the morning, at the apartment on Ujazdowska, and very lively. Marek had arrived an hour earlier and was now reading his morning paper and chattering with Wlada and the silent cook. Mostly they ignored him, busy making sandwiches-ham and butter on thick slabs of fresh white bread from the bakery-boiling eggs until they were hard, baking a small egg-and-butter cake with raisins, all of it to be wrapped in brown paper and packed into a wicker basket, with six bottles of dark beer and a thermos of coffee.

Mercier was in the study, cleaning and oiling his service sidearm-a Le Francais 9-millimeter Browning automatic, in looks not unlike the German Luger. When he was done, he loaded it carefully, then put the box of bullets in one pocket of his waxed Barbour field jacket and the pistol in the other. Did the flashlight work? Mercier switched it on, ran the beam up a silk drape, and decided to change the batteries. Next he retrieved a pair of lace-up boots from the dressing room, pulled them on over heavy wool socks, and laced them up tight. They felt good on his feet. He liked wearing them, and liked the Barbour as well, though he now wore such things rarely, since he no longer went hunting. He was invited now and then, to go after rogacz, the great stag of the Polish mountain forest, but always he declined, since he no longer wished to shoot anything.

He was also, but for a certain familiar tightness in the pit of the stomach, glad to get away from the city. He’d been busy, filing dispatches, writing reports, making contact with two of Bruner’s … well, one had to call them agents, both of whom worked in the armament industries. He learned all he needed to know from Vyborg and others, who were glad to keep him current. But it was traditional to talk to knowledgeable informants, and he suspected that Vyborg and the Dwojka knew exactly what he was doing and didn’t much care, since their attaches in France no doubt operated the same way.

So, for the past week, he’d been pretty much a prisoner of the office, though one afternoon, under a weak autumn sun, he’d worked in a set of tennis out in Milanowek. The foursome had included Princess Toni, as it happened, this time as opponent, but after the match they’d found themselves a moment for conversation. Warm and amiable, as always, with not the slightest suggestion that there had been an interlude in the guest bathroom. A man of the world, a woman of the world, a brief, pleasant adventure, all memory courteously erased. “We’re off to Paris next week, then Switzerland, but we’ll be back in the spring.” He said he envied her the Paris visit, say hello to the city for him. Of course she would.

In the study, Mercier opened his briefcase and took out a map, which he’d brought home from the office. A very technical map, in small scale, with elevations, streams, and local features, such as farmhouses, precisely rendered. With this, a military map, he had to be very careful. Produced by General Staff cartographers in Paris, these maps were sent to Warsaw in the diplomatic pouch to replace those received earlier, though they rarely changed. He slid the map into an inside pocket of his jacket, put the flashlight where he wouldn’t forget it, and walked into the kitchen. The cake had come out of the oven and was cooling on a rack, Marek looked up from his newspaper, laid it aside, and put on a heavy wool coat. “The Biook has a full tank, sir,” he said.

“Thank you, Marek,” Mercier said.

A few minutes later, with Marek carrying the wicker basket, they went downstairs, where Mercier climbed into the passenger seat of the car. He happened to glance up at the apartment and saw that Wlada was looking out the window, seeing them off. She knew where they were going, her face unsmiling and worried as she watched them drive away.

It took all day to drive the roads from Warsaw to Katowice, in Polish Silesia. Through Skierniewice, Koluszki, Radomsko, and Czestochowa, where the road ran past the monastery that held the Black Madonna, Poland’s most sacred ikon. Under a gray sky, the market towns and villages seemed dark to Mercier, as did the deserted fields of the countryside. Too much fighting, he thought, the whole country’s a battlefield. The land was the land, it grew in spring and died in autumn, but Mercier could not unlock it from its past. Marek, his strong, bald head thrust forward as he squinted at the road ahead of them, was silent, no doubt thinking about what he had to do that night.

This was Mercier’s second visit to the Silesian border fortifications, but Marek had done it at least twice with Bruner. He drove fast when the road was smooth, swung past battered old sedans, an occasional horse-drawn cart, now and then a slow truck. Sometimes the pavement was broken, with deep potholes, and they had to move at a crawl for a long time-it was either that or stop and change tires. At noon, in the shadows of an oak forest, Marek pulled off into the weeds by the side of the road and they each had a sandwich and a bottle of beer. They slowed down at the end of the afternoon, often on dirt roads, but, by dusk, they came to the crossroads where a sign pointed east to Cracow. Marek headed southwest, under a darkening sky.

By eight in the evening they were somewhere-only Marek knew exactly where-on the northern edge of Katowice, virtually on the German frontier. The border had been redrawn here, again and again, and Poles and Germans lived side by side. A man would rise from his bed in Poland, then go into his kitchen for breakfast in Germany; the line ran through factories and down the center of villages. On the outskirts of Katowice, they drove past coal mines and iron foundries, the tall stacks pouring black smoke into the sky, the air heavy with dust and the smell of burning coal.

Marek drove north for a time, then turned onto a deeply rutted dirt road, swearing under his breath as the car rocked and bucked, and the wheels spun on mud beneath puddled water. The lights of Katowice fell away behind them, and the road was closed in by tall reeds. The Buick worked its way up a long, gentle slope, then a farmhouse, with dim lights in the windows, appeared, and Marek stopped the car. With the contented grunt of a job completed, he shifted into neutral and turned off the ignition. Two dogs came bounding toward the car, big mastiff types, barking and circling, then going silent when a man came out of the house, adjusting his suspenders over his shoulders. He said a sharp word to the dogs and they lay down, panting, on their bellies.

“You remember Jozef,” Marek said.

Mercier did-Marek’s relative, or maybe his wife’s. He shook hands with the man, who had a hand like a board covered with sandpaper.

“Good to see you again. Come inside.”

They walked past a small pen with two sleeping pigs, then into the farmhouse, where a pair of women rose from the table, one of them adjusting an oil lamp to make the room brighter. “You’ll have something to drink, gentlemen?” said the other.