The Polish Officer
by Alan Furst

  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.

De Milja tried to nod agreement as enthusiastically as he could, an importunate smile nailed to his mouth. The situation statique on the Somme was that the Tenth Army had been encircled and destroyed, and de Milja knew it. To Kercheval, however, the fate of an army was of secondary importance to the conversation he was having with de Milja. Of primary concern was that adverse and humiliating information could not be stated in front of a foreigner, of lesser rank and lower social position. As for “some of our files are being shifted,” de Milja passed through the sentry gates, turned right toward the métro, and passed sixty trucks lined up and waiting to enter the courtyard.

On the train he read The Daily Telegraph to see what the British were thinking about that morning. Asked if Paris would be declared an open city, a French spokesman replied, “Never. We are confident that Hitler’s mechanized hordes will never get to Paris. But should they come so far, you may tell your countrymen we shall defend every stone, every clod of earth, every lamppost, every building, for we would rather have our city razed to the ground than fall into the hands of the Germans.”

Emerging at the Pont de Neuilly métro stop, de Milja saw a group of white-haired garbagemen—veterans, wearing their decorations—working on a line of twelve garbage trucks. They were engrossed in mounting machine guns on the trucks and, by that afternoon, the Paris police were wearing tin-pot helmets and carrying rifles.

“The government’s going to Tours,” Vyborg said.

“From what I saw this morning they were certainly going somewhere,” de Milja said.

Late afternoon, an anonymous café on the rue Blanche. Amber walls tinted brown with Gauloises smoke, etched glass panels between booths. An old lady with a small dog sat at the bar, the bored owner scowled as he read one of the single-sheet newspapers that had replaced the usual editions.

Vyborg and de Milja sat facing each other in a booth and sipped at glasses of beer. The afternoon was hot and still, a fly buzzing around a motionless fan in the ceiling. Sometimes, from the refugee columns trudging down the boulevards a block away, the sound of an auto horn. Vyborg wore an old gray suit, with no tie and shirt collar open. He looked, de Milja thought, like a lawyer with unpaid office rent and no clients.

“Hard to believe that it’s over here. That the French army lasted one month,” Vyborg said.

“It is over, then.”

“Yes. Paris will be declared an open city today or tomorrow. The Germans will be in here in a week or less.”

“But France will fight on.”

“No, it won’t. Reynaud cabled Roosevelt and demanded American intervention, Roosevelt’s response was a speech that dithered and said nothing. Pétain appeared before the cabinet in Tours and said that an armistice is, in his view, ‘the necessary condition for the survival of eternal France.’ That’s that.”

De Milja was incredulous. France remained powerful, had a formidable navy, had army units in Morocco, Syria, Algeria, could have fought on for years. “In Warsaw—”

“This isn’t Warsaw,” Vyborg said. “In Tours, they lost a top-secret cable, turned the whole chateau upside down looking for it. Finally a maid found it, crumpled up in Reynaud’s mistress’s bed. Now, that’s not the first time in the history of the world that such a thing has happened, but you get the feeling it’s the way things are. It’s as though they’ve woken from a dream, discovered the house on fire, then shrugged and walked away rather than calling the fire department or looking for a bucket. If you read history, you know there are times when nations fail, that’s what happened here.”

Vyborg took a pack of Gitanes from his pocket, offered it to de Milja, took one for himself, then lit both with a silver lighter. In the rue Blanche, a refugee family had become separated from the stream moving south across Paris. A man pulled a cart with quilts tied over the top of a mound of furniture; here and there a chair leg poked through. His wife led two goats on a rope. The farm dog, panting hard in the afternoon heat, walked in the shadow of the cart. Behind the cart were three small children, the oldest girl holding the hands of two little boys. The family had been on the road a long time; their eyes, glazed with fatigue, saw nothing of their surroundings.

The proprietor put his paper down for a moment and stared at the family as they labored past. A tough Parisian, his only comment was to turn his head and make a spitting sound before going back to his newspaper with an almost imperceptible shake of the head. The old woman’s lapdog barked fiercely at the goats. The farm dog glanced up, then ignored it—some little woolly thing in Paris that thought it was a dog; the things you see when you travel. The old woman shushed her dog, muttering something about “unfortunates” that de Milja could barely make out.

“Fucking German pigs,” Vyborg said quietly, with resignation. “The local bully-boys—come Friday night and they beat up the neighbors. Which is why, I guess, the French and the Poles have always been friends; they share the problem.”

“I suppose,” de Milja said, “we’re going to London. Unless there’s a miracle.”

“There will be no miracle,” Vyborg said. “And, yes, it is London. We’ve got a destroyer berthed at the mouth of the Loire, in Nantes, not too far from the government in Tours. I’m going down there tomorrow, we have to be where official France is. You’re going to stay here—the last man out. Work on the reactivation program, whatever you can manage to get done. Just don’t stray too far from base, meaning Neuilly. That villa is now the French station of the Polish army’s intelligence service. As for a time of departure, it’s hard to predict exactly. It will be at the final hour—Polish honor demands at least that, with shells falling on the harbor and our fantail on fire. You’ll be contacted when we know a little more, by telephone or courier. Given a cipher, probably. The BBC has agreed to broadcast signals for us—we’re likely to do it that way, in the Messages Personnels, so get yourself a working radio and listen to it—ten, four, and midnight. Myself, I like the garden programs. Did you know that periwinkle can be used as a ground cover on a shady hillside?”

It was dark when de Milja returned to Neuilly. He carried with him a battered briefcase stuffed with French francs and a new list, in code, of Polish agents in Paris. People on the Genya Beilis level had been contacted, now there remained the small-fry, a surprisingly long list. But Poland had always had an aggressive, busy intelligence service—a characteristic of small countries with big enemies.

De Milja made a successful contact at 11:20 that night at a dance hall in Clichy—an aging, embittered clerk in the French department of the Admiralty who was paid a small monthly stipend. Then he hurried to the Notre-Dame-de-Lorette métro stop, but the woman he expected, an ethnic Pole running a group of engineers in the Hungarian armament industry, did not appear.

The following morning he awoke to find the air dark, the leaves of the tree outside his window covered in oily grime, and the spring birds fled. Later that day a taxi driver confirmed his suspicion: the Germans had bombed the gasoline storage tanks at Levallois-Perret, the black cloud of soot had drifted down on the city.

At the fall-back meeting of 2:25 P.M.—Notre-Dame-de-Lorette station replaced by Abbesses—the ethnic Pole appeared: Chanel scarf, clouds of perfume, and a refusal to meet his eyes when he handed her a payment of five thousand francs. She was gone, he thought. But he was doubly gracious, thanked her profusely, and passed her the Saint-Etienne-du-Mont protocol anyhow. The best he could do was to try to leave a positive impression—the world changed, luck went sour, he wanted her to feel that working for the Polish service was a life preserver in a stormy sea.

Paris dying.

Refugees streaming past, among them disarmed French soldiers, still in uniform. The city now silent, seemingly empty but for the shuffle of the refugee columns. The abandoned government offices had caused consternation—even the one-page newspapers were gone now, the kiosks were shut tight, and the garbage was no longer collected.

De Milja could not escape the sadness. Even when it rained death and fire, Warsaw had fought desperately to survive; improvising and improvising, ingenuity and courage set against iron and explosives. They’d had no chance, but they fought anyhow; brave, deluded, stubborn. Closing his eyes, he saw the passengers on the Pilava local, clothing dirty, here and there bloody, walking into Romania with the heavy little crates of bullion.

He tried to keep his spirits up. The fight against despair was, he told himself, just another way of fighting Germany. But as the life of the streets faded away, he began to wonder why anybody cared so much about flags and nations. An old, old city, everything had happened here, people loved and people died and none of it mattered very much. Or maybe it was just him—maybe he was just tired of life. Sometimes that happened.

He’d scheduled a dawn contact out in the nineteenth arrondissement, at the Canal de l’Ourcq, the home dock of a Dutch barge captain with knowledge of the production capacities of petroleum refining centers along the upper Seine. Not much point at the moment—every ounce of French gasoline was either in flames or pumped into government cars in full flight. But in the future it might be a useful thing to know.

At 2:00 A.M. he tossed and turned, unable to sleep. The silence of the little street was oppressive. He moved to an armchair, read The Radetzky March, dozed off, then woke suddenly—not knowing why until the fist hammered on the door a second time. He ran down the hall and looked out the judas hole. A Breton, he thought. Reddish hair clipped high on the sides, fair skin, a cold face, a silk tie, and a certain practiced patience in the way he stood. De Milja left him and walked silently to the back door. The one waiting there had his hands in his pockets, was looking aimlessly up at the stars.

He returned to the bedroom, struggled into pants, shirt, and shoes as the one in front knocked again. “Are you in there?” If a voice could be good at calling through doors, this one was: I’m being polite—don’t test my patience. “Allons, eh!” Let’s go! Last warning. De Milja opened the door.

The man made a soft grunt of satisfaction—at least we got that much done. “Captain de Milja,” he said, polite in an official way. “I am sorry to trouble you, but . . .”

But what? The Germans at the gates? The times we live in?

“Yes?” de Milja said.

“Perhaps you would get dressed, we’re ordered to escort you to our office.”

“Where is that, please?”

“At the Prefecture of Police.”

“Could you identify yourself?”

“Of course. Forgive me.” He produced a small leather case with an identity card of the DST—Direction de la Surveillance de la Territoire, the French FBI—and held it up for de Milja to see. “All right?” the man said.

“Come in,” de Milja said.

The man entered, whistling tunelessly, strolled through the villa and opened the back door. The one who’d waited there had a little mustache trimmed to the line of his upper lip. He looked around the villa curiously. “It’s quite a place here. Belong to you?”

“I’m just a tenant,” de Milja said.

“Ah.” A professional skeptic, it amused him to seem easily satisfied.