The Polish Officer
by Alan Furst

  “I always thought I’d die on a horse, on a battlefield,” Fedin said. “Not in a chess club in Paris. You know I fought at Tannenberg, in 1914? Then with Brusilov, in Galicia. Against the Japanese, in 1905. In the Balkans, 1912 that was, I was on the staff of the Russian military attaché to Serbia. 1912. I was in love.”

He smiled at that. Thought for a time, with his eyes closed. Then looked directly at de Milja and said, “Jesus, the world’s a slaughterhouse. Really it is. If you’re weak they’re going to cut your throat—ask the Armenians, ask the Jews. The bad people want it their way, my friend. And how badly they want it is the study of a lifetime.”

He shook his head with sorrow. “So,” he said, “so then what. You step into it, if you’re a certain sort. But then you’re taking sides, and you’ve written yourself down for an appointment with the butchers. There’s a waiting list—but they’ll get around to you, never fear. Christ, look at me, killed by my own side.” He paused a moment, then said, “Damn fine bomb, though, even so. Made in Birmingham or somewhere. Didn’t hit any factories, this one didn’t. But it settled with the Double Eagle club once and for all. And it settled with General Fedin.”

Fedin laughed, then his mood changed. “Listen, I know all about what you did on the docks that night. Running off to die because you couldn’t stand to live in a bad world. What the hell did you think you were doing? You can’t do that, you can’t resign.” He thought a moment, then said sternly, “That’s not for you, boy. Not for you.”

He sighed, wandered a little, said something, but too quietly for de Milja to hear. De Milja leaned closer. “What did you say?”

“I want to rest for a minute, but don’t let me go yet,” Fedin said.

De Milja sat back, hands on knees, in the gloom of the darkened church. He looked at his watch: just after one in the morning. Now the night was very quiet. He sensed somebody nearby, turned to see a woman standing next to him. She had gray hair, hastily pinned up, wore a dark, ill-fitting suit, had a stethoscope around her neck. She stared at Fedin for a long moment, knelt by his side and drew the blanket up over his face.

“Wait,” de Milja said. “What are you doing?” She stood, then put a hand on his shoulder. He felt warmth enter him, as though the woman had done this so often she had contrived a single gesture to say everything that could be said. Then, after a moment, she took her hand off and walked away.

17 April. 3:20 A.M. West of Bourges.

Bonneau drove the rattletrap farm truck, Jeanne-Marie sat in the middle, de Milja by the window. They drove with the headlights off, no more than twenty miles an hour over the dirt farm roads. The truck bounced and bucked so hard de Milja shut his mouth tight to keep from cracking a tooth.

Three-quarter moon, the fields visible once the eyes adjusted. With airplanes on clandestine missions, you fought the war by the phases of the moon. “The Soulier farm,” Jeanne-Marie said in a whisper. Bonneau hauled the wheel over and the old truck shuddered and swayed into a farmyard. The dogs were on them immediately, barking and yelping and jumping up to leave muddy paw marks on the windows.

A huge silhouette appeared in the yard, the shadows of dogs dancing away from its kicking feet as the barking turned to whining. A shutter banged open and a kerosene lamp was lit in the window of the farmhouse. The silhouette approached the truck. “Bonneau?”

“Yes.”

“We’re all ready to go, here. Come and take a coffee.”

“Perhaps later. The rendezvous is in forty minutes and we’ve got to walk across the fields.”

The silhouette sighed. “Don’t offend my wife, Bonneau. If you do, I can reasonably well guarantee you that the Germans will be here for generations.”

Jeanne-Marie whispered a curse beneath her breath.

“What? Who is that? Jeanne-Marie? Ma biche—my jewel! Are you going to war?” The silhouette laughed, Bonneau put his forehead on his hands holding the steering wheel. To de Milja he said, “Soulier was my sergeant in the tank corps.” Then, to the silhouette at the truck window, “You’re right, of course, a coffee will be just the thing.”

They entered the farmhouse. The stove had been lit to drive off the night chill. On a plank table there was a loaf of bread and a sawtooth knife on a board, butter wrapped in a damp cloth, and a bottle of red wine. Madame Soulier stood at the stove and heated milk in a black iron pot. “We just got this from Violet,” she said.

De Milja teetered dangerously on the edge of asking who Violet was—then from the corner of his eye caught Jeanne-Marie’s discreet signal, a two-handed teat-pulling gesture.

Madame Soulier gathered the skin off the top of the milk with a wooden spoon, then whacked the spoon on the rim of the zinc-lined kitchen sink to send it flying. “That’s for the devil,” she muttered to herself.

De Milja knew this coffee—it was the same coffee, black, bitter, searing hot, he’d drunk in the Volhynia before going hunting on autumn mornings. He held the chipped cup in both hands. The cities were different in Europe; the countryside was very much the same.

“And the Clarais cousins? They’re coming?” Bonneau said.

Soulier shrugged. It scared de Milja a little, the quality of that shrug. He understood it, he feared, all too well—the Clarais cousins hadn’t shown up where they’d promised to be since the spring of 1285, likely tonight would be no different. Jeanne-Marie’s face remained immobile, perhaps the Clarais cousins were not crucial to the enterprise but had been asked for other reasons.

“Townspeople,” Soulier said to him, a confidential aside that explained everything.

“Better without them?” de Milja asked.

“Oh yes, no question of that.”

Soulier sucked up the last of his coffee and emitted a steamy sigh of pleasure. He rose from the table, pushing with his hands on the plank surface, then said, “Must have a word with the pig.”

When he returned, the aroma came with him. He stopped at the open door, wiped the muck off his boots, then entered, his arms full of rifles. He laid them out on the kitchen table and proceeded to strip off the oiled paper that had protected them. He dumped an old tin can on the table, moving bullets with a thick forefinger, and counted to eighteen. “Souvenirs of the war,” he said to de Milja.

There were four rifles, Soulier and Bonneau each took one. Jeanne-Marie wasn’t expected to use such things, and de Milja declined. He carried a 9 mm Italian automatic that had found its way to him, part of the Anton Stein persona, but he had no intention of shooting at anybody.

Soulier examined one of the rifles. “We kept these with us in the tank just in case,” he said.

Just in case, de Milja thought, the 1914 war started up again. They were bolt-action rifles, with five-round magazines, and far too many soldiers in the French infantry had carried them in 1940.

De Milja looked meaningfully at his watch. Soulier said fondly, “Ah my friend, do not concern yourself too much. We’re not in the city now, you know. Life here happens in its own time.”

“We’ll have to explain that to the pilot,” de Milja said.

Soulier laughed heartily—sarcasm was of absolutely no use with him. “There’s no point in worrying about that,” he said. “These contraptions have never yet been on time.”

The BBC Message Personnel—delivered in a cluster of meaningless phrases to deny the Germans analysis of traffic volume—had been broadcast forty-eight hours earlier. In the afternoon, visit the cathedral at Rouen. Then confirmed, a day later, by the BBC’s playing Django Reinhardt’s “In a Sentimental Mood” at a specified time.

They had avoided offending the hospitality of Madame Soulier, but the Bonneau reception committee was now behind schedule. They tried riding their bicycles across the countryside, but it was too dark, and most of the time they had to walk, following cattle paths that wound around the low hills, soaking their feet when the land turned to marsh, sweating with effort in the cold night air.

De Milja had been right, they were late getting to the field Jeanne-Marie had chosen. But Soulier was right too—the contraption had not been on time. A triumph of what was called System D, D for the verb débrouiller, to muddle through, to manage somehow. First used to describe the French railway system’s response to supply obligations in the war of 1914, it explained, in a few syllables, the French method of managing life.

They got to the field late, four instead of the expected six, and had to hurry to arrange the brush piles. Somehow they managed, although the head of the arrow that indicated wind direction was missing one side. Then Bonneau stopped dead, looked up, signaled for quiet. A low, distant hum. Getting louder, a drone. Then, clearly, the sound of airplane engines. “Les flambeaux!” Soulier cried.

It was Jeanne-Marie who actually had matches. The torches were lit. Rags, smeared thickly with pitch-pine resin and knotted at the ends of branches, they crackled and sputtered and threw wild shadows across the meadow as the reception party ran from brush pile to brush pile. Jeanne-Marie and de Milja raced past each other on the dead run—by firelight he saw her face, close to tears with anger and pride, with fierce joy.

In the clouds above them, a Whitley bomber, slow and cumbersome.

The pilot banked gently to get a better view of the land below him. He had sifted through the air defenses on the Brittany coast—a few desultory rounds of ack-ack, nothing more, the gunners not sorry to hear him droning off to somebody else’s sector. Then he’d followed the Loire, just about due east, the shadow of his plane cast by moonlight running next to the river. He picked up the Vienne—he hoped—branching south, then found the confluence of the Creuse and the Gartempe. Here he adjusted his bearing, a few degrees south of east, and watched the seconds tick away. Now, he thought.

Nothing there, dark and peaceful fields. Then came the voice of his navigator, “Here we are. Just a little north of us, sir.”

An orange fire appeared below—then another and another as the pilot watched. He pushed a button, a green light went on in the cargo hold but the drop-master could see as well as he could. First the crates, shoved out the door, white parachutes flaring off into the darkness before they caught the wind and jerked upright, swaying down toward the fires in the field below.

“Best of luck to you, gentlemen,” said the drop-master and the four French paratroopers jumped in rapid succession. They had been given little paper French flags to take down with them and one of them, Lucien, the leader, actually managed to hold one aloft as he floated to earth. He had left France from the port of Dunkirk, not quite a year earlier, by swimming toward a British fishing boat. His pants and shirt and officer’s cap were left on the beach, his pistol was at the bottom of the Channel. He thought, as the wind rushed past him, he heard someone cry out down below.

That was Soulier, crazed with excitement. “It worked! By God it worked!” He might have said Vive la France—the paratroopers would certainly have appreciated the sentiment—but, for the moment, surprise had exceeded patriotism. The paratroopers wrestled free of their harness, then menaced the night with their Sten guns, but there was only the reception committee in the field, so they greeted each other formally, embraced, and talked in whispers. Then the officer excused himself to Jeanne-Marie, turned away, undid his fly, watered a rock, and mumbled something relieved and grateful under his breath—thus, at last, was Vive la France said on that occasion.

As the fires burned themselves out, they took Soulier’s pry bar and tore open the crates. Unpacked two dozen Sten guns—rapid-firing carbines of no particular range but brutal effect up close, the British solution to the problem of a weapon for clandestine war. There were W/T sets, maps printed on silk, cans of a nasty green jelly that British scientists had concocted to burn down Europe.

Everything took longer than they’d calculated. With dawn came a cold, dirty drizzle, the wind blowing the smell of raw spring earth off the fields. Using the bicycles as carts they hauled the shipment off to Soulier’s farm. Were suitably impressed when Soulier reached down through the pig shit and opened a trapdoor in the earth, as the tenant of the sty looked on, slit-eyed and suspicious, from the fence where he’d been tied up.

Once again, on local trains to Vannes.

De Milja had appointed Jeanne-Marie liaison officer for the Kampfgeschwader 100 attack. Bonneau and Soulier to handle logistics and supply, the paratroopers to do the actual shooting.

They rode together in the first-class compartment. Jeanne-Marie, with open shirt collar spread across the lapels of a dark suit and mannish hat with feather, looked exactly like what she was—a part of the high bourgeois or petit nobility—the French land-owning class. De Milja, briefcase in hand, hat with brim snapped down—her provincial lawyer.

Two German officers entered their compartment at Poitiers, very polite and correct. From their insignia, they were involved with engineering—perhaps construction. Essentially they were German businessmen, on leave from daily life in Frankfurt or Dusseldorf or wherever it was in order to fight a war. Still, a great deal of silence in the compartment. Jeanne-Marie, living just below the Vichy line, had not seen many Germans and wasn’t really used to moving around among them. For their part, the Germans found French women irresistible, and Jeanne-Marie, pale and reserved with small, fine features and aristocratic bearing, was of a type particularly attractive to the officer class.

“Would Madame care to have the window open?” one of them said, using vacation French.

“No, thank you.”

“Not too warm for you, in here?”

“Quite comfortable, thank you.”

“Well then . . .”

The train chugged along, the fields of the Poitou plain falling away slowly behind them.

“I wonder, sir, if you can tell me what time we arrive in Nantes?”

“I’m not really certain,” de Milja said.

“Just after two, perhaps?”

“I believe that’s right.”

The man smiled at Jeanne-Marie: isn’t it satisfying, in some deliciously mysterious way, for us all to be rolling through the French countryside together? Not actually an adventure, not quite that. But, surely, not the usual thing either. Wouldn’t you agree?

In this rising tide of banality, de Milja sensed danger. Just such moments, he knew, could turn fatal. You did not see it coming.

With a sigh, a sigh of apology, he set to unbuckling the briefcase that lay across his knees. Providently, he had fitted it out with its own false identity in case it was searched: mostly land deeds, obtained from clerks in an office of registry just outside Paris.

“What have you there, Duval?” Jeanne-Marie said.

De Milja found a name on the deed. “The Bredon papers. I’m afraid we’ll have to go over them together sometime before tomorrow.”

Jeanne-Marie took the deed and began to read it.

The German folded his hands across his middle and turned toward the window—an admission of defeat.