Alan Furst - The Spies of Warsaw

No, not that he could remember. Maybe once, a long time ago.

At that point, the two officers paused. One of them left the room and returned with a third, this one rather formidable, tall and thinlipped, with pale brush-cut hair, who wore the boots of a cavalry officer and was, from their deference toward him, senior to the interrogators. He stood to one side of Maxim, hands clasped behind his back.

“We will continue,” the lead interrogator said. “We want to ask you about your friends. People you know in the city. Later, we’ll ask you for a list, but for the moment we want to know if they helped you.”

“Helped me?”

“Told you things. Gossip, as you called it, about, for example, diplomats, or anyone serving in the Polish government-the kind of people you met at social events.”

“I suppose so. Of course they did-when you talk to your friends, they always tell you things: where they’ve been, who they’ve seen. It’s common human discourse. You have to talk about something besides the weather.”

“And did you pass any of this information on to the Rozens?”

“I might have. There’s so much…. I can’t think of anything specific, not anything … secret, not that I can recall.”

“Very well. Take, for example, your former friend Pana Szarbek, who I believe you intended to marry. She is employed by the League of Nations, did she tell you things about her work? Things about, say, contacts in foreign governments?”

Here Maxim paused. Evidently, the subject of his former fiancee was a painful one-he’d been hurt, was now likely angry about her leaving him for another. Which was, for Maxim, as for much of the world, quite normal, as it was also normal to feel that those who have hurt you should themselves be hurt in return, unless you were the sort of person who didn’t care for the idea of spite.

“Well?” the interrogator said. “Do you understand the question?”

“Yes.”

“And so?”

“I don’t remember her doing that. She didn’t often speak about her work, not in specific terms. If she had a troublesome case she might say it was difficult, or frustrating, but she never spoke of officials. They-for example, tax authorities-were simply part of her job.”

The interrogator looked past Maxim, at the tall officer standing to his left, then said, “Now, what contacts did you have with employees of the Polish government?”

In Warsaw, the endgame of the Rozen confessions went on for more than a week. Senior officers of a major on the Polish General Staff confronted him when he arrived for work-they were, at least technically, responsible for what he’d done, so the wretched job fell to them. They spent an hour with him, then placed a revolver on his desk, left the office, and closed the door. Fifteen minutes later he reappeared, weeping, and trying to explain . They sent him back inside and, soon enough, were rewarded with the sound of a shot. The hotel maids were visited at home-one didn’t want to go stirring up the guests-where the scenes varied: some tears, some defiance, some absolute silence, and one case where a young woman slipped out a back door and was never seen again. As for the rest, from factory workers to a company director, they were arrested, questioned, tried in secrecy, and sent to prison. Not all of them; some were actually not guilty-the Rozens, confessing for their lives, had been somewhat overzealous in the naming of informants. As for Maxim Mostov, he was, after lengthy discussions within the senior Dwojka administration, deported. Driven to the Russian frontier and put on a train.

21 March.

The vernal equinox arrived with a slow, steady rain. The grimy snow of winter began to wash away, and though Warsovians ruined their shoes and cursed the slush, they felt their spirits soar within them. Similarly, Colonel Mercier, who admitted to himself, the evening of the twenty-first, that he was as happy as he’d ever been. The apartment Anna Szarbek had found on Sienna street was not unlike an artist’s studio. One large room-with adjoining kitchen and bath-on the top floor, with grand windows slanted toward the sky. “Have you ever wanted to be a painter?” he said.

“Never.”

“Does this studio not inspire you?”

“Not to paint, it doesn’t.”

He saw her point. It had become their preference to make this place home to their love affair. Not that the Ujazdowska apartment wasn’t elegant and impressive, it was, but a private loft better suited their private hours. Sometimes they ate at the small restaurants of the quarter, but mostly they lived on cheese and ham-now and then Anna managed to produce an omelet-drank wine or vodka, smoked, talked, made love, and had some cheese and ham.

Mercier’s vocational existence had, thank heaven, returned to normalcy. He had reported the contact with Dr. Lapp to 2, bis, and the response had been … silence. “They’re frozen solid,” Jourdain had theorized. “Either that, or they’re fighting over the bone.” This was all well and good, Mercier thought, but somewhere down the road there would be a telephone call or a letter and he would have to bid or fold his cards-he couldn’t pass. But if 2, bis wasn’t in a hurry, neither was he.

Anna stood at the window, watching the raindrops slide down the glass, her mood pensive. “I did hear something disquieting,” she said. “I ran into the janitor’s wife at the market-the janitor who works where I used to live-and she said that Maxim had been taken away by some sort of civilian police, returned, with an escort, to pack whatever he could, and left. He told her he was being sent back to Russia.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” Mercier said.

“It can’t be true, I tell myself, that you had anything to do with this.”

Mercier was startled, but didn’t show it. It took only a few seconds for him to work out the sequence of events, beginning with the Rozens’ defection. “I have no need to do such things,” he said.

“No, it’s not like you,” she said slowly, as much to herself as to him.

“It sounds as though he’s been deported. Maybe he was selling information-to the wrong people, as it turned out.”

“Maxim? A spy? That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time. Foreign journalists will sometimes take money, from, as I said, the wrong people.”

She left the window and sat in an easy chair. “I suppose he might have done something like that. He never had enough money, felt he’d never reached his proper place in the world. He was desperate to be important-loved, respected-and he wasn’t.”

“What I can tell you is, if he’s been deported, he’s lucky not to be in prison.”

Anna nodded. “Still, I feel sorry for him,” she said. Then, looking back at the window, “Will this stop soon, do you think? I wanted to go for a walk.”

“We can take the umbrella.”

“It’s not very big.”

“It will do.” Mercier stood. “I think we left it by the door.”

The vernal equinox came to Glogau as well, but there, in the SD office above the toy shop, it rained bad news. That morning, Sturmbannfuhrer August Voss received a formal letter from his superior in Berlin. In the next room, the lieutenants heard a prodigious oath and, faces tense, looked up from their work and stared at each other. What now? On the other side of the wall, Frogface Voss tore the letter into strips, then had to piece them back together to make sure his eyes had not deceived him. They hadn’t. The axe had fallen; he was being transferred to Schweinfurt. Schweinfurt! What was in Schweinfurt ? Nothing. A ballbearing factory. Such an office would handle internal matters only. A visitor from Holland? Follow him! A complaint about the government, overheard in a tavern? Haul the traitor in! Filthy, silly, local nonsense-Gestapo country, the SD little more than a spectator. And, to drain his cup of humiliation down to the last miserable dreg, his chief lieutenant was to be promoted and would supervise the Glogau office. The reorganization to be completed in thirty days from this date .