Alan Furst: The Spies of Warsaw

They stopped only briefly at the German border kontrol, two Swiss salesmen traveling on business, but Halbach stiffened as the guard had a look at his passport. “So now we spend an afternoon looking at the scenery,” Mercier said, as the striped crossarm was lowered behind them. But Halbach was not to be distracted, he sat rigid in the passenger seat, and Mercier could hear him breathing.

A good road, heading north to Berlin; all the roads in Germany were good now, a military necessity for a country with enemies east and west. Mercier drove at normal speed; it would take some six hours to reach Berlin, and he did not want to arrive in daylight. Halbach maintained his brooding silence, lost in his own world. Earlier, with a new life ahead of him and one last mission to be accomplished, he’d been expansive and relaxed, but now came the reality of Germany, and it had reached him. For Mercier, it was not so different from the drive to Schramberg-town after town with signs forbidding Jews, swastika flags, uniformed men on every street. The symbols of power, raw power, the state transcendent. Halbach ought to be used to it, he thought-he was, after all, a member of the Nazi party, a left Nazi but a Nazi nonetheless-but now it meant danger, and the possibility, the likelihood, that his new life would be destroyed before it had barely begun. Once again, he would lose everything.

A typical April day for Central Europe, changeable and windy. The skies darkened, raindrops appeared on the windshield, the wipers squeaked as they rubbed across the glass. From Gleiwitz they traveled north to Breslau, a three-hour drive. As they crossed the Oder, the sun broke through the clouds and sparkled on the dark current. On to Glogau, where Mercier stopped at a cafe, bought liverwurst sandwiches and bottles of lemonade, and they had lunch in the car. When they stopped for gas in Krossen, the teenager who worked the pump stared at Halbach, who turned away and pretended to look for something in the glove compartment. At dusk: Frankfurt. Mercier’s knee began to throb-too long in one position-but Halbach, it turned out, had never learned to drive. Mercier got out and walked around the car, which helped not at all. In the center of Frankfurt, a policeman directing traffic glowered at them and waved angrily: move! Halbach swore under his breath. A coal delivery truck broke down in front of them, the driver signaling for them to go around, and Mercier almost hit a car coming the other way. He was sweating by the time they reached the western edge of the city. Then, finally, at 7:30, the eastern suburbs of Berlin.

“Where do we stay?” Halbach said. “The Adlon?”

Berlin’s best, and just the sort of place where Halbach might encounter somebody from his past. Dangerous, so de Beauvilliers, or his trusted ally at 2, bis, had specified Der Singvogel, the Hotel Blue-bird, out in the slum district of Marianfelde. Mercier had never been in Berlin. Halbach had visited a few times, but the Tubingen professor of Old Norse was useless when it came to directions. They stopped, asked for help, got lost, but finally found their way to Ostender Strasse, parked the car, and, baggage in hand, entered the Singvogel.

“My God,” Halbach said. “It’s a brothel.”

It was. To one side of the reception desk, a blond Valkyrie with rouged cheeks, wrapped tight in the streetwalker’s version of an evening gown, was flirting with two SS sergeants, splendid in their black uniforms and death’s-head insignia. One of them whispered in her ear and she punched him in the shoulder and they both had a merry laugh. The other SS man took a long look at Mercier and Halbach. Drunk, he swayed back and forth, steadying himself with a meaty hand on the counter. He turned to the woman behind the desk and said, “Such fancy gents, Traudl. Better see what they want.”

Traudl was big and flabby, with immense upper arms that trembled when she moved and chopped-off hair dyed jet black. “Staying the night, boys?”

“That’s right,” Mercier said. “Maybe a few days.”

The SS men whooped. “That’s the thing!” the drunken one said. “Get your prick good and red!” He caught Halbach staring at him and said, “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing.”

“The girls are in the bar,” Traudl said, before this went any further. “When you’re in the mood.”

“Watch out for the skinny one,” the Valkyrie said. “I know that type.”

Traudl looked at the keys on the board behind her. “I give you thirty-one and thirty-seven …”

“Maybe they want to share,” the SS man said, his voice suggestive.

“… five reichsmark a night, pay now and I’ll show you upstairs.”

Mercier paid for three nights and Traudl led them to the staircase. She more skated than walked, her carpet slippers sliding over the scuffed linoleum floor.

The rooms were cubicles, partitions ending a foot below the ceiling, with chicken wire nailed over the open space. “Toilet down there,” Traudl said. “Enjoy yourselves, don’t be shy.” She gave Halbach a big wink and pinched his cheek. “We’re all friends here.”

Mercier had worked in worse places-by candlelight in muddy trenches-but the Singvogel was well up the list. It was the SS men, Mercier suspected, who led the songfest in the bar below, starting with the Horst Wessel song, the classic Nazi anthem, and moving on to the SS favorite, the tender “If Your Mother Is Still Alive….” Only a prelude. As the night wore on, the bordello opera was to lack none of its most memorable moments: the breaking glass, the roaring laughter, the female screams-of mock horror and, once, the real thing, God only knew why-as well as the beloved duet for grunts and bedsprings, and the artful cries of the diva’s finale.

Still, they had to work. It helped that Halbach knew where Elter lived, in a tenement in the Kreuzberg district. It was also time, at last, to tell Halbach what he needed from the I.N. 6 office. “But only two contacts, between you and Elter,” he said. “Of course we must be especially careful the second time, when documents will be delivered. If you are betrayed, that’s when it will happen.” Downstairs, the shouts and crashing furniture of a good fight.

“That will bring the police,” Halbach said.

“Not here. They’ll take care of it.”

They listened for the high-low siren, but it never came. “Remember this,” Mercier said. “It is Hitler and his clique who want to take the country into war, but there could be nothing worse for Germany. Remind Elter of that. His work on our behalf will provide information that can impede their plans, which would be the highest possible service to the German people. If war comes here, they are the ones who will suffer.”

“Yes, the moral argument,” Halbach said sourly, not at all convinced.

“You know what to do if it doesn’t work.”

And, to that end, the following afternoon, Mercier and Halbach left the hotel and drove to the central area of the city, where the former bought a camera, and the latter made a telephone call.

24 April, 6:20 P.M.

In darkness, but for the lights twinkling on the station platform, the train clattered down the track. A freight train, eight cars long: two flatcars bearing tanks, an oil tanker, a mail car, its lit windows revealing canvas bags and a brakeman smoking a cigar, and finally a caboose. The train sped past the station-the stationmaster held a green flag-slowed for a curve, then accelerated down a long straightaway, through a field with grazing cows. Smoke rose from the stack of the locomotive, which blew its whistle, two mournful cries in the night. Ah, the railway crossing. The bar came down; a produce truck waited on the road. Then a sharp grade, climbing to a bridge that crossed a stream, a descent, and a long curve, which led to another station. The train slowed and rolled to a perfect stop beneath a water tower.