The Polish Officer (14 page)

She hesitated a moment, then said, “Yes, it’s acceptable.” Suddenly she was dizzy, thought she might faint. She stopped walking and put a hand on the man’s forearm to steady herself. The thunder rumbled again and she pressed her lips together hard—she did not want to cry.

“There’s a bench—” the man said.

She shook her head no, fumbled in her purse for a handkerchief. The other mourners circled around them. Yushin the playwright tipped his hat. “So sorry, Genya Maximova, so sorry. Just the other night, he . . . my regrets.” He walked backward for a step or two, tipped his hat again, then turned around and scurried away.

The man at her side handed her a clean white handkerchief and she held it to her eyes. It smelled faintly of bay rum cologne. “Thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome.” They started walking again. “The protocol will mention the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, and the view from the rue de la Montagne. Can you remember it?”

“Yes. I like that church.”

“The contact may come by mail, or in person. But it will come—sooner or later. As I said, we are grateful.”

His voice trailed away. She nodded yes, she understood; yes, she’d help; yes, it had to be done; whatever yes they needed to hear that day. He understood immediately. “Again, our sympathies,” he said. Then: “I’ll leave you here—there are French security agents in a car at the bottom of the hill.”

He moved ahead of her, down the path. He wasn’t so bad, she thought. It just happened that information flowed to her like waves on a beach, and he was an intelligence officer in time of war. Big drops of rain began to fall on the gravel path and one of the men in dark suits with medals on the breast pocket appeared at her side and opened a black umbrella above her head.

It was a long way from the Russian neighborhoods in Boulogne to Neuilly—where he was staying in the villa of an industrialist who’d fled to Canada—and a storm was coming, but Captain Alexander de Milja decided to walk, and spent the evening headed north along the curve of the Seine, past factories and docks and rail sidings, past workers’ neighborhoods and little cafés where bargemen came in to drink at night.

They had dragged him, black with coal dust and more dead than alive, from the hold of the freighter
Enköping,
laid him on the backseat of a Polish diplomatic car and sped off to the embassy. A strange time. Not connected with the real world at all, drifting among dim lights and hollow sounds, a sort of mystic’s paradise, and when people said “Stockholm” he could only wonder what they meant. Wherever he’d been, it hadn’t been Stockholm.

And where was he now? A place called
poor Paris,
he thought. In
poor France.
He saw the posters on his walk, half torn, flapping aimlessly on the brick factory walls: NOUS VAINCRONS CAR NOUS SOMMES LES PLUS FORTS. Signed by the new prime minister, Paul Reynaud. “We will win because we are the strongest.”
Yes, well,
was all de Milja could think. What could you say, even to yourself, about such empty huffing and puffing? Paris had been bombed twice, not heavily. But, while the Wehrmacht was still north of the Belgian border, France had quit. He knew it—it was what he and Colonel Broza had fought against in Warsaw—and he’d felt it happen here.

De Milja had arrived in Paris in late April and gone to work for Colonel Vyborg, the “Baltic knight” who had recruited him into the ZWZ as the Germans began the siege of Warsaw. At first it was as though he’d returned to his old job—staff work in military intelligence. There were meetings, dinners, papers written and read, serious and urgent business but essentially the life of the military attaché. He had assisted in some of the intelligence collection, developed assets, liaised with French officers.

They were sympathetic—
poor Poland.
Clandestine flights with money and explosives for the underground would be starting any day now, any day now. There were technical problems, you needed a full moon, calm weather, extra gas tanks on the airplanes. That was true, de Milja knew, yet somehow he sensed it wouldn’t happen even when conditions were right. “Steady pressure,” Vyborg said. “Representatives of governments-in-exile are patient, courteous men who do not lose their tempers.” De Milja understood, and smiled.

His counterpart, a Major Kercheval of the SR—Service des renseignements, the foreign intelligence operation that supplied data to the Deuxième Bureau of the French General Staff—invited him to tour the Maginot Line. “Be impressed,” Vyborg told him. Well, he was, truly he was. A long drive through spring rains, past the Meuse, the Marne, the battlefields of the 1914 war. Then barbed wire, and an iron gate with a grille, opening into a tunnel dug deep in the side of a hill. Over the entrance, a sign: —They shall not pass. Three hundred feet down by elevator, then a cage of mice hung by the door as a warning—they’d keel over if gas were present—and a brilliantly lit tunnel traversed by a little train that rang a bell. In vast, concrete chambers there were offices, blackboards, and telephones—a huge fire-control center staffed by sharp young soldiers dressed in white coveralls. A general officiated, demanding that de Milja choose a German target from a selection of black-and-white photographs. All he could see were trees and brush, but his cartographer’s eye turned up a woodcutter’s hut by a stream and he pinned it with his finger. “
Voilá,
” said the general, and great activity ensued—bells rang, soldiers talked on telephones, maps were unrolled, numbers written hurriedly on blackboards. At last, a dial in the wall was turned and the deep gong of a bell sounded again and again. “The target has received full artillery fire. It is completely destroyed.” De Milja was impressed. He did wonder, briefly, why, since the French were officially at war with the Germans, they rang a bell instead of firing an actual gun, but that was, he supposed, a detail. In fact, the series of fortresses could direct enormous firepower at an enemy from underground bunkers. The Maginot Line went as far as the Belgian border. And there it stopped.

So on 10 May, when Hitler felt the time was ripe, the Wehrmacht went through Belgium. A French officer said to de Milja, “But don’t you see? They have violated Belgian neutrality! They have played into our hands!”

Just where the river rounded the Isle of Puteaux, de Milja came to a
tabac,
a
boulangerie,
and a cluster of cheap cafés: a little village. Because of the blackout the streetlamps of Paris had been painted blue, and now the city was suffused with strange, cold light. It made the street cinematic, surreal. Friday night, the cafés should have been jammed with Parisians—
to hell with the world, have a glass of wine!
Can I see you home?
Now they were triste, half-empty. But these were workers. Out in Passy, in Neuilly, in Saint-Germain and Palais-Royal there wasn’t anybody. They had all discovered a sudden need to go to the country; to Tante Giselle or their adored
grandmère
or their little house on the river whatever-it-was. Where they’d gone in 1914. Where they’d gone, for that matter, in 1789.

Meanwhile, in Poland, they were committing suicide. Vyborg had told him that, white lines of anger at the corners of his mouth. France was a kind of special heaven to the Poles, with its great depths of culture, its adept wit, and ancient, forgiving intelligence. To the Poles, it was simple: don’t give in, fight on, when Hitler tangles with the French that’ll be the end of him. But that wasn’t what happened and now they knew it—they risked their lives listening to the BBC and they heard what the announcer tried not to say. The French ran. They didn’t, wouldn’t, fight. A wave of suicides washed over Warsaw, Cracow, the manor houses in the mountains.

A girl at a café table looked at de Milja. Beret and raincoat, curly, copper-colored hair with a lock tumbled onto the forehead, a dark mole setting off the white skin on her cheek, lips a deep, solemn red. With her eyes she asked him some sort of question that could not quite be put into words. De Milja wanted her—he wanted all of them—but he kept walking and she turned back to her glass of wine. What was she after, he wondered. A little money? A husband for a little problem in her belly? A man to beat up the landlord? Something, something. Nothing was free here—he’d learned that in the 1920s when he was studying at Saint-Cyr. He turned and looked back at her; sad now, staring into her glass. She had a heavy upper lip with a soft curve to it, and he could imagine the weight of her breasts against her cotton blouse. Jesus, she was beautiful; they all were. They couldn’t help it, it wasn’t their fault. He stopped, half turned, then continued on his way. Probably she was a whore, and he didn’t want to pay to make love.

Yes, well.

The industrialist who’d fled to Canada had not had time, apparently, to clean out his things in Neuilly. He’d left behind mounds of women’s clothing, much of it still folded in soft tissue paper, a crate of twenty telephones, a stack of chic little boxes covered in slick gold paper, and dozens of etchings—animals of every sort; lions, zebras, camels—signed
Dovoz
in a fluid hand. De Milja had simply made a neat pile on the dining-room table and ignored it. The toothbrush left in the sink, the paste dried on it, he’d thrown away.

Hard to sleep in a city waiting for invaders. De Milja stared out the window into the garden of the neighboring villa. So, the barbarians were due to arrive; plans were being made, the angles of survival calculated. He read for a time, a little Joseph Roth, a book he’d found on the night table—
The Radetzky March.
Roth had been an émigré who’d killed himself in Paris a year earlier. It was slow going in German, but de Milja was patient and dawn was long hours away.

The Trottas were not an old family. Their founder’s title had been conferred on him after the battle of Solferino. He was a Slovene and chose the name of his native village, Sipolje. Though fate elected him to perform an outstanding deed, he himself saw to it that his memory became obscured to posterity.

An infantry lieutenant, he was in command of a platoon at Solferino. The fighting had been in progress for half an hour. He watched the white backs of his men three paces in front of him. The front line was kneeling, the rear standing. They were all cheerful and confident of victory. They had . . .

Now it rained. Hard. De Milja had been lying on a long red-and-gold couch with a brocade pillow under his head. He got to his feet, walked to the French doors, index finger holding his place in the book, and stared out into the night. Someone had stored pieces of old statuary behind the villa, water glistened on the stone when the lightning flickered. The wind grew stronger, rain blew in sheets over the garden, then the air cooled suddenly and the sound of thunder rolled and echoed down the deserted streets.

9 June 1940. 2, avenue de Tourville, Hôtel des Invalides.

De Milja was prompt for his eleven o’clock meeting with Major Kercheval of the SR. The streets around the walled military complex at the center of the seventh arrondissement were quiet—the residents were away—but in the courtyard they were busy loading filing cabinets onto military trucks. It was hot, no air moved, the soldiers had their jackets off, sleeves rolled up, suspenders dangling, making them look like cannoneers from the Franco-Prussian war of 1870.

A fifteen-minute wait, then an elderly sergeant with plentiful decorations led him up long flights of stairs to Kercheval’s office. The major’s greeting was friendly but correct. They sat opposite each other in upholstered chairs. The office was impressive, a wall of leatherbound volumes, historic maps in elaborate frames were hung on the walnut boiserie.

“Not a happy moment,” Kercheval said, watching the trucks being loaded in the courtyard below.

“No,” de Milja agreed. “We went through it in Warsaw.”

Kercheval’s eyebrow twitched—
this is not Warsaw.
“We’re thinking,” he said, “it won’t be quite so difficult here. Some of our files are being shifted for temporary safekeeping.”

De Milja made a polite sound of agreement. “How is it up north?” he asked.

Kercheval steepled his fingers. “The Tenth Army’s situation on the Somme appears to have stabilized. At the river Oise we have a few problems still—mostly logistics, supply and whatnot. But we expect to clear that up in seventy-two hours. Our current appreciation of the position is this: we’ve got hell to pay for two or three days yet, we then achieve a static situation—
une situation statique.
We can maintain that indefinitely, of course, but I’d say give us two weeks of hard work and then, in the first heat of summer, look for us to be going the other way. Germans are Nordic—they don’t like hot weather.”

He shifted to the particular concerns they shared—the flow of information from open and clandestine sources, how much of it the Poles got to see. He spoke easily, at length, in confidential tones. The meaning of what he said, as far as de Milja could make out, was that the people above them, the diplomats and senior officers in the rarefied atmosphere of binational relations, had yet to complete work on a format of cooperation but they would soon do so, and at that time de Milja and his colleagues could look forward to a substantive increase of shared intelligence.

Kercheval was in his late forties, with dry skin, a corded underside to his jaw, and smooth, glossy hair combed flat. A turtle’s head, de Milja thought. The small, mobile mouth, whether talking or eating, strengthened that impression. The exterior was flawless: courteous, confident, polished and hard as a diamond. If Kercheval lied, he lied, regrettably, for reasons of state—
raisons d’état—
and if you listened carefully you would hear a faint and deeply subtle signal inviting you to agree that deception was simply a part of life, as all very old cultures had learned, sadder but wiser, to acknowledge.
Come now, you must admit it’s so.

“It’s an ordeal, and takes forever,” he went on, “but experience has shown that relations go much more smoothly, indeed much more productively, when the initial understandings are thoroughly formulated.”

He smiled warmly at de Milja, perhaps a hint of apology in his face—
our friendship will surely survive all the nonsense I’m forced to tell you, you certainly won’t hold it against me. Life’s too short for resentment, my dear fellow.