Alan Furst: The Spies of Warsaw

Ahhh.

An oversized showerhead poured forth a broad, powerful spray of hot water. Where he lived-the longtime French military attache apartment in Warsaw-there was only a bathtub and a diabolical gas water heater, which provided a tepid bath at best and might someday finish the job that his German and Russian enemies had failed to complete. What medal did they have for that? he wondered. The Croix de Bain , awarded posthumously.

Very quietly, so that someone passing by in the hall would not hear him, he began to sing.

Turning slowly in the shower, Mercier was tall-a little over six feet, with just the faintest suggestion of a slouch, an apology for height-and lean; well muscled in the legs and shoulders and well scarred all over. On the outside of his right knee, a patch of red, welted skin-some shrapnel still in there, they told him-and sometimes, on damp, cold days, he walked with a stick. On the left side of his chest, a three-inch white furrow; on the back of his left calf, a burn scar; running along the inside of his right wrist, a poorly sutured tear made by barbed wire; and, on his back, just below his left shoulder blade, the puckered wound of a sniper’s bullet. From the last, he should not have recovered, but he had, which left him better off than most of the class of 1912 at the Saint-Cyr military academy, who rested beneath white crosses in the fields of northeast France.

Well, he was done with war. He doubted he could face that again, he’d simply seen too much of it. With some effort, he forced his mind away from such thoughts, which, he believed, visited him more often than he should allow, and this sort of determination was easily read in his face. Not unhandsome, he had heavy, dark hair parted on the left, which lay too thick, too high, across the right side of his head. He had fair skin, pale, and refined features, all of which made him seem younger than he was, though these proportions, classic in the French aristocrat, were somehow contradicted by very deep, very thoughtful, gray-green eyes. Nonetheless, he was what he was, with the relaxed confidence of the breed and, when he smiled, a touch of the insouciant view of the world common to the southern half of France.

They’d been there a long, long time, the Mercier de Boutillons, in a lost corner of the Drome, just above Provence, with the title of chevalier -knight-originally bestowed in the twelfth century, which had given them the village of Boutillon and its surrounding countryside, and the right to die in France’s wars. Which they had done, again and again, as far back as the Knight Templars of Jerusalem-Mercier was also a thirty-sixth-generation Knight of Malta and Rhodes-and as recently as the 1914 war, which had claimed his brother, at the Marne, and an uncle, wounded, and drowned in a shellhole, at the second battle of Verdun.

In a muted baritone, Mercier sang an old French ballad, which had haunted him for years. A dumb thing, but it had a catchy melody, sad and sweet. Poor petite Jeanette, how she adored her departed lover, how she remembered him, “ encore et encore. ” Jeanette may have remembered, Mercier didn’t, so he sang the chorus and hummed the rest, turning slowly in the streaming water.

When he heard the bathroom door open, and close, he stopped. Through the heavy cotton of the shower curtain he could see a silhouette, which divested itself of shirt and shorts. Then, slowly, drew the curtain aside, its rings scraping along the metal bar. Standing there, in a cloud of steam, a lavender-colored cake of soap in one hand, was the Princess Antowina Brosowicz. Without clothes, she seemed small but, again like a doll, perfectly proportioned. With an impish smile, she reached a hand toward him and, using her fingernail, drew a line down the wet hair plastered to his chest. “That’s nice,” she said. “I can draw a picture on you.” Then, after a moment, “Are you going to invite me in, Jean-Francois?”

“Of course.” His laugh was not quite a nervous laugh, but close. “You surprised me.”

She entered the shower, closed the curtain, stepped toward him so that the tips of her breasts just barely touched his chest, stood on her toes, and kissed him lightly on the lips. “I meant to,” she said. Then she handed him the lavender soap. Only a princess, he thought, would join a man in the shower but disdain the use of the guest soap.

She turned once around beneath the spray, raised her face to the water, and finger-combed her hair back. Then she leaned on the tile wall with both hands and said, “Would you be kind enough to wash my back?”

“With pleasure,” he said.

“What was that you were singing?”

“An old French song. It stays with me, I don’t know why.”

“Oh, reasons,” she said, who knew why anything happened.

“Do you sing in the shower?”

She turned her head so that he could see that she was smiling. “Perhaps in a little while, I will.”

The skin of her back was still lightly tanned from the summer sun, then, below the curved line of her bathing suit, very white. He worked up a creamy lather, put the soap in a dish on the wall, and slid his hands up and down, sideways, round and round.

“Mmm,” she said. Then, “Don’t neglect my front, dear.”

He re-soaped his hands and reached around her. As the water drummed down on them, the white part of her, warm and slippery, gradually turned a rosy pink. And, in time, she did sing, or something like it, and, even though they were there for quite some time, the hot water never ran out.

17 October, 5:15 A.M. Crossing the Vistula in a crowded trolley car, Mercier leaned on a steel pole at the rear. He wore a battered hat, the front of the brim low on his forehead, and a grimy overcoat, purchased from a used-clothing pushcart in the poor Jewish district. He carried a cheap briefcase beneath his arm and looked, he thought, like some lost soul sentenced to live in a Russian novel. The workers packed inside the trolley, facing a long day in the Praga factories, were grim-faced and silent, staring out the windows at the gray dawn and the gray river below the railway bridge.

At the third stop in Praga, Mercier stepped down from the rear platform, just past the Wedel candy factory, the smell of burned sugar strong in the raw morning air. He walked the length of the factory, crossed to a street of brick tenements, then on to a row of workshops, machinery rattling and whining inside the clapboard sheds. At one of them, the high doors had been rolled apart, and he could see dark shapes shoveling coal into open furnaces, the fires flaring yellow and orange.

He turned down an alley to a nameless little bar, open at dawn, crowded with workers who needed a shot or two in order to get themselves into the factories. Here too it was silent. The men at the bar drank off their shots, left a few groszy by their empty glasses, and walked out. At a table on the opposite wall, Edvard Uhl, the engineer from Breslau, sat stolidly with a coffee and a Polish newspaper, folded on the table by his cup and saucer.

Mercier sat across from him and said good morning. He spoke German, badly and slowly, but he could manage. As the language of France’s traditional enemy, German had been a compulsory course at Saint-Cyr.

Uhl looked up at him and nodded.

“All goes well with you,” Mercier said. It wasn’t precisely a question.

“Best I can expect.” Poor me. He didn’t much like the business they did together. He was, Mercier could see it in his face, reluctant, and frightened. Maybe life had gone better with Mercier’s predecessor, “Henri,” Emile Bruner, now a full colonel and Mercier’s superior at the General Staff, but he doubted it. “Considering what I must do,” Uhl added.

Mercier shrugged. What did he care? For him, best to be cold and formal at agent meetings-they had a commercial arrangement; friendship was not required. “What have you brought?”