The Polish Officer (8 page)

“But Hungary is safe, you think.”

The professor hesitated. “Yes. They’re just now Germany’s great friends. Maybe later it will turn out they loved England all along. In their secret heart, you see.”

“And the house?”

“Cold as a donkey’s dick.” A sly smile bloomed for a moment—
shocked you, did I?
“I’ve got newspapers stuffed in every crack, but it doesn’t seem to help.”

“Look, why don’t you let me find you an apartment—”

The professor cut him short. “Really, you needn’t bother.” Then he leaned closer and lowered his voice. “But there is something I want you to do.” He paused, then said, “Am I correct in assuming you’ve been recruited into the underground? That you remain under military orders?”

De Milja nodded yes.

“Are you anything important?”

No reaction, at first, then a slight shrug:
important?

But the professor was not to be fended off. “Don’t be coy. Either you can talk to the leadership or you can’t.”

“I can.” De Milja felt his ears getting warm.

His father searched his face, then decided he was telling the truth—it really was some other boy who’d thrown the chalk—reached into his briefcase and surfaced with three pages of densely written pen-and-ink script. “For the right person, this would be of consequence,” he said.

“What is it?”

“A study.” His father stared at it a moment. “The research is thin. I merely talked to a few of my old students, had a coffee, a little gossip. But they’re smart—that I know for a certainty because I made them prove it more than once—and well placed. Not at the very top of the civil service but just below it, where they actually read the paper and make the decisions and tell the boss what to say. Anyhow, it’s the best that I could do, an outline, but useful to the right people.”

He paused for effect. “The point is, I’d like to be asked to do more.” He met de Milja’s eyes. “Is that clear? Because what I have in mind is far more ambitious, an ongoing study that—”

A sudden commotion interrupted him; two of the local princes had reversed their pool cues and were snarling at each other while friends held them back. When de Milja looked back at his father he caught him with a particular expression on his face: irritation, disappointment, why did he have to see his son in places like this? Why wasn’t it a faculty dining room or an intellectuals’ café? The response was irrational—he would have admitted that—but it was the truth of his heart and for a moment he’d forgotten to hide it.

De Milja took the papers from his father’s hand. “I can only promise that it will be read.”

“Well, naturally. I don’t expect more than that.”

De Milja glanced at his watch. “I’d like to spend more time, but if you’re going to get back home before curfew . . .”

His father stood quickly. “You’ll be in touch?” he said.

“Through Sonya.”

They said good-bye; it was awkward, as their time together always was. They shook hands, both started to say something, shook hands again, then parted. At the door, his father turned and looked back; de Milja started to wave but he was too late. The raincoat and briefcase disappeared through the doorway, and de Milja never saw him again.

It was cold in Warsaw that night, there was ice in Captain de Milja’s basement room; a rust-colored stalactite that hung from a connection in the water pipe that ran across his ceiling. A janitor had once lived here, his church calendar—little girls praying with folded hands—and his French movie star torn from a magazine, a Claudette Colbert look-alike, were still stuck on nails in the wall. Cold enough to die, the captain thought. Wondered how cold that actually had to be. He wore an army greatcoat, a scarf, and wool gloves as he sat on the edge of a cot and by the light of a candle read the report his father had written.

He read it twice, then again. The writing was plain enough, and the facts were not obscure—just a listing of things governments did on a daily basis; a few administrative procedures, some new policies and guidelines. Really, not very interesting. But look again, he told himself.
Principles of the German Occupation of Poland: 10 December 1939.
There wasn’t anything in the report that Colonel Broza and the directorate didn’t know—all his father and his informants had done was to gather up what was available and synthesize it. Three pages. Four principles:

1) Calculated devaluation of the currency. 2) Replacement of the judiciary. 3) Direction of labor. 4) Registration. That was all—the real, arid horror of the thing lay in its simplicity. The essential mechanics of slavery, it turned out, weren’t at all complicated. With registration you knew who and what and where everyone was—a Jew or a metallurgical engineer, it was all filed for future reference. With the direction of labor they worked where you wanted, and had to meet production norms you set. With your own judiciary, you controlled their behavior with their own police. And with devaluation of the currency you “bought” everything they owned or produced, and then you starved them to death.

De Milja passed the report to Colonel Broza in Room 9. The colonel put on his reading glasses and thumbed the pages over. “Yes,” he said, and “mmm,” and finally “thank you.” That was all.

But there was something much more troubling on the agenda that day: the man who had printed the RAF leaflets had been arrested in his shop by the Gestapo. “Find out about it,” Broza said. “Then see Grodewicz.”

He went to visit the printer’s wife. They lived in a quite good neighborhood—surprisingly good for a man with a small job shop—broad avenues with trees, solid apartment houses with fire-escape ladders on the alley side, toilets in the apartments instead of the usual privies in the courtyard, and a building superintendent, a heavy woman in a kerchief, polite and not a bit drunk. De Milja asked her about the family. She took notice of his warm coat, and heavy, well-made shoes and raised her palms to heaven: didn’t know, didn’t want to get involved.

The apartment was on the seventh floor, the top of the building. De Milja trudged up the endless staircase, the marble steps gray from years of scrubbing with Javel water. He stopped to get his breath at the door, then knocked. The wife was a small woman, tepid, harmless, in a faded apron. They sat at the kitchen table. “I don’t know what he did,” she said.

“What about the neighbors?”

“Mostly they only knew me. And I never made an enemy, Mister.”

He believed her. “And him?”

“He was away, you know. Here and there. Some wives, they know when their husband breathes in, when he breathes out. Not me. You couldn’t do that with him.”

“What did you imagine?”

“Imagine? I only know we had a lot—a lot for who he was and what he did. He was ambitious, my husband. And maybe rules weren’t made for him, you know? But nothing serious. I swear it. Whoever you are, wherever you come from, go back and tell them he didn’t do anything so wrong.”

She started to cry but she didn’t care, didn’t touch her face where the tears ran and didn’t seem to notice it; everybody cried these days, so what?

“Are you in touch with the Gestapo?”

She nodded that she was. “On Szucha Avenue.”

That wasn’t good—Szucha Avenue was the central Gestapo headquarters. “I go every week to get his laundry,” she continued. “Do the wash and bring it back.” Her eyes found his, just for an instant. “There’s blood on his underwear,” she said.

“We can stop the interrogation,” he said.

Just for a moment she believed him, and her eyes widened, then she realized it was a lie.

“He did something for us,” de Milja said. “For the underground. Will he tell them?”

She wiped the tears away from her face with her hand. “Not him,” she said. “If only he would—but he won’t.”

“A last question,” he said. “How did they catch him?”

She thought for a time, stared out the window at the gray sky over the winter city. “Betrayed,” she said. “He never gave himself away.”

She was right, de Milja thought. He sensed it wasn’t the jealous neighbor, or the business partner with a grudge. It wasn’t a denunciation in that sense. He went to see another detective, a man with a big stomach and white hair, who had a line into the Gestapo office on Szucha Avenue. A clerk, perhaps, or a janitor. Information was fragmentary, and uncertain—as though somebody saw an open register, or a list on a desk. Nonetheless, his question was answered: Chomak.

De Milja hadn’t expected that. “Why?” he asked.

The detective shrugged. “A man reaches a certain time in life, and a certain conclusion. He’s alone. For himself. At war with the world. So he’ll do this for that one, and that for this one—he’s a spider, this is his web.
Everybody
is corrupt, he thinks. So he’d better be the same.”

It wasn’t much, de Milja thought. But there might never be any more, and they were at war, so it had to be enough. As Broza had directed, he went to see Grodewicz. They met at night in the office of a broom factory.

He had known Grodewicz for a long time, they belonged to the same social class, were not quite the same age but had overlapped for a year or two at university. While de Milja had labored desperately—and, it turned out, fruitlessly—to be a mathematician, Grodewicz had thrown himself into drinking and fighting and whoring to such a degree that it had become an issue with the police, and eventually with the university authorities, who finally had to expel him. What bothered de Milja was that Grodewicz not only didn’t care, he didn’t suffer. He walked away from university life, served as a merchant seaman, was said to have smuggled emeralds into the Balkans from South America, killed a shipmate in a knife fight, screwed a movie star in Vienna. Too many rumors about Grodewicz were true, he thought.

De Milja watched Grodewicz as he spoke quietly into the telephone—making him wait, naturally. He had long, lank, yellow hair that hung over his forehead, was handsome in some indefinably unhealthy way, and arrogant in every bone in his body. Now
Captain
Grodewicz—perhaps a post-invasion commission. De Milja sensed he’d gone to war not because Poland had been attacked, but because Grodewicz had been insulted.

“We’ll paint the south wall first,” Grodewicz said, obviously using code, from memory and with great facility. “And extend the line of the roof over that window, the south window. Is it clear?”

Grodewicz met de Milja’s glance and winked at him. “Good,” he said. “Just exactly. Plumb line, chisel, ripsaw and so forth. Can you manage?” The answer evidently pleased Grodewicz, who smiled and made a galloping rhythm with three fingers on the desk. “I would think,” he said. “Maybe we’ll all move in.” He replaced the receiver on its cradle.

They talked for a few minutes. De Milja explained what he needed, Grodewicz said there would be no problem—he had people ready to do that sort of work. They smoked a cigarette, said nothing very important, and went off into the night. The following day de Milja went to a certain telephone booth, opened the directory to a prearranged page, underlined a word on the second line, which set the rendezvous two days in the future; circled a word on the eighteenth line: 6:00 P.M.; and crossed through the twenty-second letter: 6:22 P.M. Very quickly, and very painfully, the ZWZ had learned the vulnerability of personal contact. Telephone books were safer.

It worked. The operative was on time, appearing suddenly in a heavy snow of soft, wet flakes that muffled the streets and made it hard to see. God, he was young, de Milja thought. Moonfaced, which made him seem placid. Hands shoved in the pockets of a baggy overcoat.

Chomak’s dachshund knew right away who he was. It exploded in a fit of barking and skittered about at the detective’s feet until his wife gathered it up in her arms and went into another room.

They took the evening workers’ train across the Vistula. The snow was falling thickly now, and looking out the window, de Milja could just see the iron-colored river curling slowly around the piers of a bridge. Nobody talked on this train; it had been a long day in the factories and they didn’t have the strength for it. De Milja and Chomak and the operative stood together in the aisle, holding on to the tops of the seats as the train swayed through the turns, the steamy windows white with snow blown sideways by the wind. At the second stop, a neighborhood of red-brick tenements, they got off the train and found a small bar near the station. They sat at a table and drank home-brewed beer.

“We’re trying to find out about the printer,” de Milja said. “The Gestapo arrested him.”

Chomak shrugged. “Inevitable,” he said.

“Why do you say that?”

“He was a thief,” Chomak said. “A Jew thief.”

“Really? How do you know?”

“Everybody knew,” Chomak said. “He was clever, very clever, just in the way he went around, in the way he did things. He was always up to something—you only had to look at him to see it.”

“And the Gestapo, you think, acted on that?”

Chomak thought for a time, then shrugged and lit a cigarette. De Milja saw that his hand was shaking. “Types like that get into trouble,” he said after the silence had gone on a little too long. “Sooner or later. Then they get caught. It’s a flaw they have.”

De Milja nodded slowly, the dark side of human nature making him pensive. “Well,” he said, “we can’t be late for our meeting.”

“You don’t think
I
did anything, do you?”

“No.” Pause. “Did you? Maybe by accident?”

“Not me.”

“Time to go,” de Milja said. Then to Chomak: “You’re armed?”

“You didn’t tell me to bring anything, so I didn’t. I have to tell you, I don’t care for being suspected. That’s not right.”

De Milja stood up and left, Chomak following, the operative waving Chomak out the door ahead of him. “Don’t worry about it,” de Milja said.

Hunched over in the cold and the snow, they hurried along a narrow street that wound back toward the railroad. Chomak took a fast two steps and caught up with de Milja. “Why would you ask me a thing like that?” He had to raise his voice a little because of the wind and it made him sound querulous and insulted. “I served fourteen years in the detectives.” He was angry now. “We knew who did what. That type, you’re always on the short end of the deal—just once turn your back and then you’ll see.”