The Polish Officer ns-3

by Alan Furst

  “Not at all.” Lezhev saw that the compliment had put Yushin to sleep, still standing, propped against the stone wall.

  But then, on the morning of 4 June, he had to report to the Prefecture of Police and slid, like a man who cannot get a grip on an icy hillside, down into a black depression. The Parisian police, responsible for immigration, had placed him on what they called a Régime des Sursis. Sursis meant reprieves, but régime was a little harder to define. The authorities would have said system, but the word was used for a diet, implying control, and some discomfort. Lezhev would describe it as “a very refined cruelty.”

  In March, the French had declared Lezhev an undesirable alien, subject to deportation back to Germany—his last country of legal residence, since he’d entered Belgium, Spain, and France illegally. Of course all sorts of judicial nightmares awaited him in Berlin; he could expect concentration camp, beating, and probably execution. The French perfectly understood his predicament. You may, they told him, appeal the order of deportation.

  This he did, and was granted a stay—for twenty-four hours. Since the stay would lapse at 5:00 p.m. the following afternoon, he had to go to the Prefecture at 1:00 p.m. to stand on the lines. At 4:20, they stamped his papers—this enabled him to stay in France an additional twenty-four hours. And so forth, and so on. For four months.

  The lines at the Prefecture—across from Notre-Dame cathedral on the Île de la Cité—had a life of their own, and Lezhev grimly joined in. He’d been hit on the head in his life, missed plenty of meals, been tumbled about by fate. Standing in line every day held no terrors for him. He couldn’t earn any money, but Genya Beilis had a little and she helped him out; so did others. He’d written behind barbed wire, on a sandbag, under a bridge, now he’d write while standing on line.

  This defiance held for March and April, but in May he began to slip. The ronds-de-cuir, on the other side of their wire-grille partitions, did not become friendly over time—that astonished, then horrified, finally sickened Lezhev. What sort of human, he wondered, behaved this way? What sort of reptilian heart remained so cold to somebody in trouble? The sort that, evidently, lived in the hollow chest of the little man with the little man’s mustache. That lived within the mountainous bosom of the woman with the lacquer hairdo and scarlet lips, or behind the three-point handkerchief of Coquelet the Rooster, with his cockscomb of wild hair and the triumphant crow of the dunghill. “Tomorrow, then, Monsieur Lezhev. Bright and early, eh?” Stamp— kachuck—sign, blot, admire, hand over, and smile.

  The line itself, snaking around the building, then heading up the quay, was a madhouse: Jews, Republican Spaniards, Gypsies, Hungarian artists, the lost and the dispossessed, criminals who hadn’t yet gotten around to committing crimes, the full riptide of unwanted humanity—spring of 1940. They whispered and argued and bartered and conspired, laughed and cried, stole and shared, extemporized life from one hour to the next.

  But slowly, inevitably, the Régime de Sursis gnawed away until it ate a life, took one victim, then another. Zoltan in the river, Petra with cyanide, Sygelbohm under a train.

  Boris Lezhev, papers stamped for one more day of existence, returned to his room late at night on the fourth of June. He’d stopped at a café, listened to a report on the radio of the British Expeditionary Force’s departure, in small boats, from the beaches of Dunkirk. But the population was to remain calm at all costs—Prime Minister Reynaud had demanded that President Roosevelt send “clouds of warplanes.” Victory was a certainty.

  Lezhev was temporarily distracted from writing by a drunken altercation in the tiny street below his window. One old man wanted to defend Paris, the other favored the declaration of an open city—the treasures of the capital, its bridges, arcades, and museums, would be spared. Trading arguments, then insults, the old men worked themselves up into a fulminous rage. They slapped each other in the face— which made them both wildly indignant—they swore complicated oaths, threatened to kick each other, snarled and turned red, then strode off in opposite directions, threatening vengeance and shaking their fists.

  When this was over, Lezhev sat on a broken chair in front of an upturned crate and wrote, on paper torn from a notebook, a long letter to Genya Beilis. He wanted her to be the custodian of his poetry. Over the years, he’d tinkered endlessly with his work, back and forth, this way and that. Now, tonight, he had to decide, so: here a birch was a poplar. The sea shattered, it didn’t melt. Tania did not smell of cows or spring earth—she simply walked along the path where the ivy had pulled down the stake fence.

  “I don’t exactly thank you, Genya—my feelings for you are warmer than courtesy. I will say that I remember you. That I have spent considerable time and remembered you very carefully. It is a compliment, my love, the way you live in my imagination. The world should be that perfect.”

  7 June 1940. Boulogne-Billancourt cemetery.

  A few mourners for Lezhev: he’d made the enemies émigré poets make, some of the regulars had already fled south, and it was a warm, humid evening with the threat of a thunderstorm in the air. Those who did attend were those who, if they kept nothing else, kept faith with community: a dozen men with military posture, in dark suits, medals pinned to their breast pockets. There was a scattering of beards—Lezhev’s colleagues, gloomy men with too much character in their faces. And the old women, well practiced at standing before open graves, you could not be buried without them. The priest was, as always, Father Ilarion, forced once again to pray over some agnostic/atheist/anarchist—who really knew?—by the exigencies of expatriate life.

  Doz’vidanya, Boris Ivanovich.

  There wasn’t much in the way of flowers, but a generous spread awaited the funeral party in an upstairs room at the Balalaika— Efrimov’s restaurant in St. Petersburg had also been steps away from the cemetery—vodka, little sandwiches of sturgeon or cucumber, cookies decorated with half a candied cherry. Genya Beilis, lover, muse, nurse, editor, and practical goddess to the deceased, had, once again, been generous and openhanded. “God bless you,” an old woman said to her as they walked down the gravel path toward the restaurant.

  Genya acknowledged the blessing with a smile, and the old woman limped ahead to catch up with a friend.

  “Madame Beilis, my sympathies.”

  He crunched along the path beside her, and her first view of him was blurred by the black veil she wore. His French wasn’t native, yet he did not speak to her in Russian.

  “A friend of Monsieur Lezhev?” she asked.

  “Unfortunately, no.”

  Polite, she thought. Through the veil, she could see a strong, pale forehead. He was in his late thirties, hair expensively cut, faintly military bearing. Aristocrat, she thought. But not from here.

  “An associate of Monsieur Pavel,” he said.

  Oh.

  She was, just for a moment, very angry. Boris was gone, she would never hear his voice again. For all his drinking and brawling he’d been a tender soul, accidentally caught up in flags and blood and honor and history, now dead of it. And here by her side was a man whose work lay in such things. I am sick of countries, she wanted to say to him. But she did not say it. They walked together on the gravel path as the first thunder of the storm grumbled in the distance.

  “The help you’ve provided is very much appreciated,” he said quietly. She sensed he knew what she’d been thinking. “The government has to leave Paris—but we wanted to set up a contact protocol for the future, if that is acceptable to you.”

  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. Ju
st 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: ils ne passeront pas—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-andgold 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.