Alan Furst - The Spies of Warsaw

As Mercier seated himself, she looked up, took her spectacles off, smiled at him, and said, “Good afternoon,” in German.

“And to you,” Mercier said. “All goes well?”

“Quite well, thank-you. And yourself?”

“Not so bad,” Mercier said. A waiter appeared, Mercier ordered coffee. “May I get you something?”

“Another chocolate, please.”

When the waiter left, Mercier said, “We’ve made our usual deposit.”

“Yes, I know, thank you, as always.”

“How do you find your friend, these days?”

“Much as usual. Herr Uhl is a very straightforward fellow. His journeys to Warsaw are the high points of his life. Otherwise, he labors away, the good family man.”

“And you, Hana?”

From Hana, a half smile and a certain sparkle in her eyes-she always flirted with him, he never minded. “The Countess Sczelenska never changes. She can be difficult, at times, but is captive to her heart’s desires.” She laughed and said, “I rather like her, actually.”

The waiter appeared with coffee and hot chocolate; someone, probably the waiter himself, had added a particularly generous gobbet of whipped cream atop the chocolate. Hana pressed her hands together and said, “Oh my!” How not to reward such a waiter? She spooned up almost all of the cream, then stirred in the rest.

“We are appreciative,” Mercier said, “of what you do for us.”

“Yes?” She liked the compliment. “I suppose there are legions of us.”

“No, countess, there’s only you.”

“Oh I bet,” she said, teasing him. “Anyhow, I think I was born to be a spy. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Born? I couldn’t say. Perhaps more the times one lives in. Circumstance. There’s a French saying, ‘ Ou le Dieu a vous seme, il faut savoir fleurir. ‘ Let’s see, ‘Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower,’ ” he said in German.

“That’s good,” she said.

“I’ve never forgotten it.”

She paused, then said, “If you knew what came before, you’d see that being a countess is much of an improvement. Have you ever been hungry, Andre? Really hungry?”

“During the war, sometimes.”

“But dinner was coming, sooner or later.”

He nodded.

“So,” she said. “Anyhow, I wanted to say, if Herr Uhl should-well, if he goes away, or whatever happens to such people, perhaps I could continue. Perhaps you would want something-something different.”

“We might,” he said. “One never knows the future.”

“No,” she said. “Probably it’s better that way.”

“Speaking of the future, your next meeting with Herr Uhl will take place on the fifteenth of November. He doesn’t say anything about me, does he?”

“No, never. He comes to Warsaw on business.”

Would she tell him if he did?

“In a week or two he will telephone,” she said. “From the Breslau railway station. That much he does tell me.”

“A different kind of secret,” Mercier said.

“Yes,” she said. “The secret of a love affair.” Again the smile, and her eyes meeting his.

18 October, 4:20 P.M. On the 2:10 train from Warsaw, the first-class compartment was full, but Herr Edvard Uhl had been early and taken the seat by the window. The gray afternoon had at last produced a slow rain over the October countryside, where narrow sandy roads led away into the forest.

As the train clattered across central Poland, Uhl was not at ease. He stared at the droplets sliding across the window, or at the brown fields beyond, but his mind was too much occupied by going home, going back to Breslau, to work and family. The unease was not unlike that of a schoolboy’s Sunday night; the weekend teased you with freedom, then the looming Monday morning took it away. The woman in the seat across from him occupied herself with the consumption of an apple. She’d spread a newspaper over her lap, cut slices with a paring knife, then chewed them, slowly, deliberately, and Uhl couldn’t wait for her to be done with the thing. The man sitting next to her was German, he thought, with a long, gloomy Scandinavian face, and wore a black leather coat, much favored by the Gestapo. But that, Uhl told himself, was just nerves. The man stared out into space, in a kind of traveler’s trance, and, if he looked at Uhl, Uhl never caught him at it.

The train stopped at Lodz, then at Kalisz, where it stood a long time in the station, the locomotive’s beat steady and slow. On the platform, the stationmaster stood by the first-class carriage and smoked a cigarette until, at last, he drew a pocket watch from his vest and waited as the second hand swept around the dial. Then, as he started to raise his flag, two businessmen, both with briefcases, came trotting along the platform and climbed aboard just as the stationmaster signaled to the engineer, and, with a jerk, the train began to move. The two businessmen, one of them wiping the rain from his eyeglasses with a handkerchief, came down the corridor and peered through the window into Uhl’s compartment. There was no room for them. They took a moment, satisfying themselves that the compartment was full, then went off to find seats elsewhere.

Uhl didn’t like them. Calm down, he told himself, think pleasant thoughts. His night with Countess Sczelenska. In detail. He’d woken in the darkness and begun to touch her until, sleepily, with a soft, compliant sigh, she started to make love to him. Make love. Was she in love with him? No, it was an “arrangement.” But she did seem to enjoy it, every sign he knew about said she did, and, as for himself, it was better than anything else in his life. What if they ran away together? This happened only in the movies, at least in his experience, but people surely did it, just not the people he knew. And then, if you ran away, you had to run away to someplace. What place would that be?

Some years earlier, he had encountered an old school friend in Breslau, who’d left Germany in the early 1930s and gone off to South Africa, where he’d become, evidently, quite prosperous as the proprietor of a commercial laundry. “It’s a fine country,” his friend had said. “The people, the Dutch and the English, are friendly.” But, he thought, would a countess, even a pretend countess, want to go to such a place? He doubted it. He tried to imagine her there, in some little bungalow with a picket fence, cooking dinner. Baking a cake.

Uhl looked at his watch. Was the train slow today? He returned to his reverie, soothing himself with daydreams of some sweet moment in the future, happy and carefree in a far-off land. The man in the black coat suddenly stood up-he was tall, with military posture-unclicked the latch on the compartment door, and turned left down the corridor. Left? The first-class WC was to the right-Uhl knew this; he’d used it often on his trips between Breslau and Warsaw. So then, why left? That led only to the second-class carriages, why would he go there? Was there another WC down that way which, for some eccentric personal reason, he preferred? Uhl didn’t know. He could, of course, go and find out for himself, but that would mean following the man down the corridor. This he didn’t care to do. Why not? He didn’t care to, period.

So he waited. The train slowed for the town of Krotoszyn, chugged past the small outdoor station. A group of passengers, stolid country people, sat on a bench, surrounded by boxes and suitcases. Waiting for some other train, a local train, to take them somewhere else. Outside Krotoszyn, a cluster of small shacks came to the edge of the railway. Uhl saw a dog in a window, watching the train go by, and somebody had left shirts on a wash line; now they were wet. Where was the man in the black coat? Were the two businessmen his friends? Had he gone to visit them? Impulsively, Uhl stood up. “Excuse me,” he said, as the other passengers drew their feet in so he could pass. Outside the door, he saw that the corridor was empty. He turned left, the sound of the wheels on the track deepened as the train crossed a railroad bridge over a river, then, on the other side, returned to its usual pitch. The carriage swayed, they were picking up speed now, as Uhl walked along the corridor. He was tempted to look in at each compartment, to see where the businessmen were, to see if the man in the black coat had joined them, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. It didn’t feel right, to Uhl, to do something like that. He was now certain that when he got off this train he would be arrested, beaten until he confessed, and, then, hanged.