Alan Furst: The Spies of Warsaw

As they rode down the street, the Uhlans began to fire at the station, and rifle rounds snapped past Mercier’s head. The answering Russian fire blew spurts of brick dust off building walls, glass showered onto the cobblestones, a horse went down, and the rider to Mercier’s left cried out, dropped his rifle, tumbled sideways, and was dragged by a stirrup until another rider grabbed the horse’s bridle.

They poured out of the street at full gallop and then, at a call from Mercier’s interpreter, split left and right, as drivers ran from the Radzymin taxis, and passengers dropped their baggage and dove full length, huddling by the curb for protection. Only a small unit, a platoon or so, of Russian troops protected the station, and they were quickly overcome, one of them, an officer with a red star on his cap, speared with a Uhlan’s lance.

For a few minutes, all was quiet. Mercier’s horse, flanks heaving, whickered as Mercier trotted him a little way up the track, just to see what he could see. Where was the Red Army? Somewhere in Radzymin, for now the first artillery shell landed in the square surrounding the station, a loud explosion, a column of black dirt blown into the air, a plane tree split in half. Mercier hauled his horse around and galloped back toward the station house. He saw the rest of the squadron leaving the square, headed for the cover of an adjoining street.

The next thing he knew, he was on the ground, vision blurred, ears ringing, blood running from his knee, the horse galloping off with the rest of the squadron. For a time, he lay there; then a Uhlan and a shopkeeper ran through the shell bursts and carried him into a drygoods store. They set him down carefully on the counter, tore long strips of upholstery fabric from a bolt-cotton toile with lords and ladies, he would remember it as long as he lived-and managed to stop the bleeding.

The following morning found him in a horse-drawn cart with other wounded Uhlans, heading back toward Warsaw on a road lined with Poles of every sort, who raised their caps as the wagon rolled past. Back in the city, he learned that Pilsudski’s daring gamble had been successful, the Red Army, in confusion, was in full flight back toward the Ukraine: thus, “the Miracle of the Vistula.” Though, in certain sectors of the Polish leadership, it was not considered a miracle at all. The Polish army had beaten the Russians, outmaneuvered them, and outfought them. In crisis, they’d been strong-strong enough to overcome a great power, and, therefore, strong enough to stand alone in Europe.

A few months later, Captain Mercier and Captain de Gaulle were awarded Polish military honors, the Cross of Virtuti Militari .

After that, the two careers did, for a time, continue to run parallel, as they served with French colonial forces in the Lebanon, fighting bandit groups, known as the Dandaches, in the Bekaa valley. Divergence came in the 1930s when de Gaulle, by then the most prestigious intellectual in France’s military-known, because of his books and monographs, as the “pen officer” of the French army-won assignment to teach at the Ecole Superieure de Guerre . He was, by then, well known in the military, and oft-quoted. For a number of memorable statements, particularly a line delivered during the Great War when, under sudden machine-gun fire, his fellow officers had thrown themselves to the ground, and de Gaulle called out, “Come, gentlemen, behave yourselves.”

For Mercier there was no such notoriety, but he had continued, quite content, with a series of General Staff assignments in the Lebanon. Until, as a French officer decorated by both France and Poland, he’d been ordered, a perfect and appealing substitute for Colonel Emile Bruner, to serve as military attache in Warsaw.

At the central Warsaw tram stop, Mercier got off the trolley. The gray dawn had now given way to a gray morning, with a damp, cold wind, and Mercier’s knee hurt like hell. But in truth, he told himself, not unamused, the ache was in both knees, so not so much the condition of the wounded warrior as that of a tall man who, the previous evening, had been making love with a short woman in the shower.

Mercier went first to his apartment, changed quickly into uniform, then walked back to the embassy, a handsome building on Nowy Swiat, a few doors from the British embassy, on a tree-lined square with a statue. In his office, he typed out a brief report of his contact with Uhl. Very terse: the date and time and location, the delivery of diagrams for the production of the new-1B-version of the Panzer tank, the payment made, establishment of the next meeting.

Should he include the fact that Uhl was wriggling? No, nothing had really happened; surely they didn’t care, in Paris, to be bothered with such trivia. He had a long, careful look at the diagrams to make sure they were as described-there was potential here for real disaster; it had happened more than once, they’d told him; plans for a public lavatory or a design for a mechanical can opener-then gave the report, the diagrams, and the signed receipt to one of the embassy clerks for transmission back to the General Staff in Paris, with a copy of the report to the ambassador’s office and another for the safe that held his office files.

Next he took a taxi-he had an embassy car and driver available to him, but he didn’t want to bother-out to the neighborhood of the Citadel, where the Polish General Staff had its offices, to a small cafe where he was to meet with his Polish counterpart, Colonel Anton Vyborg. He was first to arrive. They came to this cafe not precisely for secrecy, rather for privacy-it was more comfortable to speak openly away from their respective offices. That was one reason, there was another.

As soon as Mercier was seated at their usual table, the proprietor produced a large platter of ponczkis, a kind of small jelly dough-nut, dusted with granulated sugar, light and fluffy, to which Mercier was gravely addicted. The proprietor, chubby and smiling, in a well-spattered apron, produced also a silver carafe of coffee. It required all of Mercier’s aristocratic courtesy and diplomatic reserve to leave the warm, damnably fragrant ponczkis on the platter.

Vyborg, thank heaven, was precisely on time, and together they set upon the pastries. There was something of the Baltic knight in Colonel Vyborg. In his forties, he was tall and well-built and thin-lipped, with webbed lines at the corners of eyes made to squint into blizzards, and stiff, colorless hair cut short in the cavalry officer fashion. He wore high leather boots, supple and dark, well rubbed with saddle soap-Mercier always caught a whiff of it in Vyborg’s presence, mixed with the smell of the little cigars he smoked.

Vyborg was a senior officer in the intelligence service, the Oddzial II-the Deuxieme Bureau, named in the French tradition-of the Polish Army General Staff, known as the Dwojka, which meant “the two.” Vyborg worked in Section IIb, where they dealt with Austria, Germany, and France; Section IIa occupied itself with the country’s primary enemies-thus the a -Russia, Lithuania, Byelorussia, and the Ukraine. Did Vyborg’s section run agents on French territory? Likely they did. Did France do the same thing? Mercier thought so, but was kept ignorant of such operations, at any rate officially ignorant, but it was more than probable that the French SR, the Service des Renseignements , the clandestine service of the Deuxieme Bureau, did precisely that. Know your enemies, know your friends, avoid surprise at all costs. But the discovery of such operations, when they came to light, was always an unhappy moment. Allies were, for reasons of the heart more than the brain, supposed to trust each other. And when they demonstrably didn’t, it was as though the state of the human condition had slipped a notch.