by Alan Furst
“Francs is what we have.”
“Fourteen five—don’t say we didn’t give you a break. Have it with you?”
De Milja showed a packet of notes, the man nodded and grunted with satisfaction. When he leaned close, de Milja could smell the wine in his sweat. “What country do you come from?” he asked. “I want to hear about it.” The second brother had left the shack abruptly after the money was shown—de Milja had barely noticed that he’d gone. Now Fedin stood at the door, shaking his head in mock disillusion and pointing a Lüger out into the yard. “Put that down,” he said.
The response was a whine. “I was just going to cut up some firewood. To cook the lunch.”
They used what they had:
Whatever remained of the old Polish networks, sturdy White Russian operatives who’d put in their time for a variety of services, friends, friends of friends. They were not so concerned about being betrayed to the Germans. That would happen—it was just a question of when, and whether or not they would be surprised when they figured out who’d done it.
“As you get older, you accept venality. Then you learn to like it—a certainty in an uncertain world.” Fedin the skull, the Lüger under his worker’s apron, cigarette holder clenched in his teeth as though he were a Chinese warlord in a Fu Manchu film.
Wearing workmen’s smocks, they drove their little delivery van slowly through what remained of the streets of Dunkirk. Two hundred thousand weapons had been left on the oil-stained beaches, abandoned by the British Expeditionary Force and several French divisions making their escape across the Channel. All along the shore, German soldiers were trying to deal with the mess, stripping tires from shot-up trucks, emptying ammunition from machine-gun belts.
In the back streets they found a heavy woman who walked with a cane and kept a dollmaker’s shop not far from the canals that ran out into the countryside. She painted eyebrows on tiny doll heads with a cat’s whisker, and counted barges when she walked her elderly poodle. She was a Frenchwoman; her Polish coal-miner husband had gone off to fight in Spain in the Dabrowsky Brigade, and that was the last she’d heard of him. De Milja’s predecessor had found her through a relief organization, and now the Polish service was her petit boulot, her little job. Before the Germans had come she’d been a postbox on a secret mail route, a courier, the owner of a discreet upstairs bedroom where one could get away from the world for a night or two without hotel— and therefore police—registration.
“A hard week, Monsieur,” she said as de Milja counted out francs.
“You’re confident of your numbers?”
“Oh yes, Monsieur. One hundred and seven of the beastly things. It took four expeditions to find them all.”
“Well then, keep up the good work. This may go on for months.”
“Mmm? Poor Roquette.” The poodle’s tail managed a single listless thump against the floorboards when she heard her name. Perhaps, de Milja thought, Rocket had been the right name for her at one time, but that was long ago. “Having to walk all those miles on that cinder path,” the woman added.
“Buy her a lamb chop,” de Milja said, counting out some extra francs into the attentive hand.
Fedin was exactly right, de Milja thought, as a German sentry waved them away from a turnoff for the coastal road—the pleasure of venality was that Madame would be faithful as long as the francs held out.
The van rolled to a stop. De Milja climbed out and approached the sentry. “Excuse, kind sir. This place?” He showed the soldier, who smiled involuntarily at de Milja’s eccentric German, a commissary form. On the bottom, an inventory of Vienna sausage and tinned sardines; on top, an address.
“The airfield,” the sentry said. “You must go down this road, but mind your own business.”
The Germans were of two minds, it seemed to him. Down the beach road, all preparations were defensive. Engineered—concrete— positions with heavy machine guns pointing out into the Channel. Rows of concrete teeth sunk into the sand at the low-tide mark, strung with generous coils of barbed wire. French POWs were digging trenches and building antiaircraft gun emplacements, and clusters of artillery had been positioned just behind the sand dunes. This was nothing to do with an invasion of England: this was somebody worried that the British were coming back, unlikely as that seemed. But then somebody, somebody had screamed “We will invade!” and so Freddi Schoen and all the rest of the Kriegsmarine, the German navy, had started moving barges up and down the canals of Europe. They must have stripped every river in northern Europe, de Milja thought. Stopped commerce dead. On the Danube and the Rhine, the Weser and the Mosel, the Yser, Escaut, Canche, and Somme, nothing moved.
Fedin laid it out for him. Quite a number of the Russian generals in Paris had never been in anyone’s army, but Fedin was a real general who’d commanded real troops in battle and done well at it. De Milja watched with admiration as he planned the invasion of Britain on a café napkin.
“Twelve divisions,” he said. “Hand-picked. With a hundred thousand men in the first wave, all along the English coastline for, say, two hundred miles. That’s the Wehrmacht thinking—spread the invasion, thin down the British defense forces, dissipate energy, resources, everything. Lots of refugees moving on the roads, miles and miles for the ammunition trucks to cover, honking all the time to get Mrs. Jones and her baby carriage out of the way.
“For the German navy, on the other hand, the two-hundred-mile spread is a nightmare, precisely what they don’t want. They need a concentrated beachhead, ships hurrying back and forth across the Channel, multiplying their load capabilities by the hour, with airplanes overhead to keep the British bombers away.”
“That’s the key.”
“Yes, that’s the key. If they can keep the RAF out of their business, the Germans can secure the beaches. That will do it. They hold out seventy-two hours, twenty-five divisions make the crossing, with the tanks, the big guns, all the stuff that wins wars. Churchill will demand that Roosevelt send clouds of warplanes, Roosevelt will give an uplifting speech and do nothing, the governments-in-exile will make a run for Canada, and that will be that. The New Europe will be in place; a sort of hardheaded trade association with German consultants making sure it all goes the way they want.”
“What will it take to get across the Channel?”
The café was on the seafront in Veulettes. General Fedin stared out at the calm sea for a moment, then started a new napkin. “Well, let’s say . . . about two thousand barges should do it. With their bows refitted with ramps that can be raised and lowered. They’ll want motor launches, for speed, to get the beach-masters and the medical people and staff officers moved around. About twelve hundred of those. To move the barges back and forth—five hundred tugboats, seagoing or adapted for it. And two hundred transport ships. That’s for the big stuff, tanks and heavy guns and repair shops—and for the horses, which still do eighty percent of the army’s haulage.”
“Four thousand ships. That’s it?”
Fedin shrugged. War was logistics. You got your infantry extra socks, they marched another thirty miles.
“They’ll need decent weather. They can’t afford to wait for autumn, the Channel will swamp the barges. So, end of summer is the time.”
“And the date?”
Fedin smiled to himself. Flipped the pages of a French newspaper someone had left on a chair, then ran his finger down a column. “Seventeen September,” he announced. “Full moon.”
They drove into Belgium, into Holland. German occupation made it easier—northern Europe was more or less under a single government. In the Belgian ports, Ostend and Blankenberge and Knokke-Le-Zoute, and up as far as Rotterdam, they talked to the dockyard workers, because the dockyard workers were the ones who knew what went on. The ordinary civilian saw “invasion fleet” as something tied up on a beach, stretched out for miles, all in a row. But ports didn’t work that way.
Ports wandered inland from the sea; secondary harbors and river docks, canals dug out a h
undred years ago for something supremely important that nobody remembered anymore. Waterways for this or that, rank weeds and dead, black water, where cats came for courtship in the moonlight and men got laid standing up. You could hide an invasion fleet in such places, in Zeebrugge and Breskens, and that’s what the Germans had tried to do.
“Four tugboats,” said a Dutchman with a little pipe. “Well fitted out and ready for the sea.”
“How do you know?” Fedin asked.
“We built them, is how.”
Back to Paris. Back to Janina.
In the sweltering room on the top floor of the Hôtel Bretagne, she enciphered the data, then settled in to wait for the night, the best time for radio waves. When it was dark, she climbed up on a chair and fed the aerial through a hole in the top of the armoire to a pipe that crossed the ceiling on its way from the roof to the toilet.
She stopped for a moment and, as they’d trained her to do, ran through a mental checklist, a kind of catechism, until she was satisfied that everything was right. Then she plugged the radio into the wall, turned it on, and settled the heavy earphones on her head. Using a delicate thumb and forefinger, she explored the width of her frequency. Her neighbor to the left was very far away, very faint, and keyed at a slower and more deliberate pace than she did. But always there, this neighbor, and still transmitting when she signed off. On her right, a deep bass hum, unchanging, some piece of equipment that ran all night long. A radio beam, she thought, used by the Germans or the English for some esoteric purpose—not her destiny to know about it. An electronic stratagem; a beacon that guided, or a beacon that deceived. She wondered if whoever depended on it, to their triumph or their sorrow, listened to her transmission. Submariners, perhaps. Or pilots. All of them moving around in the dark ocean or the night sky.
119 675 she began. Her call sign. Janina in Paris.
In London, at the Sixth Bureau headquarters in the Rubens Hotel on Buckingham Palace Road, four officers and a radio operator waited in a dark room, cigarette smoke hanging thick in the air. They looked at their watches long before the minute hand advanced. 8:22 p.m. Paris time was one hour later; by now the August dusk had faded away into darkness. 8:24. One minute after the scheduled time of transmission. Of course, life was uncertain, they told themselves. Watches ran slow or fast, even Wireless/Telegraph operators missed trains or heard suspicious sounds, and sometimes equipment failed. 8:27. The operator wearing the headset had an annoying habit of biting his lower lip when he concentrated. 8:28. He fussed with his dial, eyes blank with concentration. Colonel Vyborg took the deep breath that steadied him for bad news. So soon? How could they have her this soon?
Then the operator’s face relaxed, and they knew what had happened before he got around to saying “Here she is.” He said it as though the worrying were beside the point—he had trained her, she could do no wrong.
The Sixth Bureau operator sent 202 855. I know you have important things to say, my darling, let’s go someplace where we can be alone. He moved his dial from 43 meters down to 39 meters.
Sent 807 449. Hello, Janina. But not here. In the Hôtel Bretagne, the dial moved up to 49 meters. Sent 264 962—sent it several times, the way operators transmitted
call signs until their base acknowledged. A false call sign, in essence,
that actually said: now we can talk.
551 223. London agreed.
It wasn’t a perfect night, the wet August evening brewed thunderstorms and the interference crackled as the Sixth Bureau operator bit his lip. The Germans didn’t jam her frequency, but that might mean they were listening silently. That might mean a thousand things.
Meanwhile Janina, dependable, stolid Janina, sent her groups. The sweat ran down her sides and darkened the back of her shirt, the boards creaked as a large man walked down the hall to the toilet, a woman cried out. But for Janina there were only the numbers.
So many numbers. Canals, barges, towns, roads. Three freighters at anchor in Boulogne harbor with no cargo, ammunition train into Middlekerke, Wehrmacht Pioneer insignia seen at Point Gris Nez, phrase Operation Sealion reported by prostitute in Antwerp.
Fifteen minutes, Janina. Remember, I told you that.
But then: what to leave out? Which rivers, for example, did the RAF not really care to know about? No, Captain Alexander de Milja’s improvised information machine shuddered and clanked, steam whistled from a rag knotted around a broken pipe, but somehow it worked, and it needed far more than fifteen minutes to report what it had found out.
The Funkabwehr—the signals intelligence unit of the Gestapo— maintained offices in the army barracks on the boulevard Suchet. They too had darkened rooms, and operators with headsets wandering among the nighttime frequencies.
“What’s this up at 49?” one of them said, making a note of the time, 9:42 p.m., in his log.
“They were there last night,” his colleague said.
They listened for thirty seconds. “Same one,” he continued. “Slow and steady—refuses to make a mistake, nothing bothers him.”
The first operator threw a switch that played the telegraphy through a speaker, listened a moment, then he picked up a telephone and dialed a single digit. A moment later, Sturmbannführer Grahnweis came through the door.
Grahnweis was a legend, and he didn’t mind that. He was enormously fat—the shape of a renaissance cherub grotesquely overblown—and moved with heavy dignity. He had been at dinner when the call came, a white damask napkin still tucked into the collar of his black Gestapo uniform, and a waiter followed him into the office carrying a plate of venison sausages and a half stein of beer. Grahnweis nodded to his operators and smiled benevolently. He forgave them the interrupted dinner.
Then he listened.
Perhaps he made a little more of it than necessary, but who was going to blame him for a touch of theater? As the numbers tapped out, in the foreground of the atmospheric sighs and crackles, Grahnweis tilted his head to one side and puckered his mouth, then, slowly, nodded in confirmation. Yes, yes. No question about it. The diagnosis is as you suspected, gentlemen. Herr Doktor Grahnweis will take the case.
“Be so good as to serve the dinner in my office,” he said to the waiter.
The desk was vast, and contained his weapons.
There were five: a very good radio receiver, a street map of Paris, two celluloid discs calibrated zero to 360°, with silk threads attached to their precise centers, and a telephone.
Grahnweis had spent his life in radio: as a childhood ham operator in Munich, he’d built his own crystal sets. He had worked for the Marconi company, then enlisted in the army in 1914 and served as a signals NCO on the eastern front. That was followed by unemployment, then the Nazi party—which made great use of radio—in 1927, and finally the Gestapo as a major. “Send the trucks, please,” he said into the phone, cut a piece of venison sausage, swirled it in the chestnut puree, used his knife to top it with a dab of gooseberry jelly. As he chewed, his eyes closed with pleasure, a sigh rumbled deep in his chest, beads of sweat stood on his forehead.
Casually, without putting down his fork, he flicked on his radio receiver, then turned the dial with the side of his hand until he found the transmission on 49 meters.
236 775 109 805 429
“Take your time, my friend,” he said under his breath. “No reason to rush on this warm summer night.”
The trucks drove out of the boulevard Suchet garage within seconds of Grahnweis’ call. They were RDF—radio direction finding— vans built by the Loewe-Opta Radio Company for the practice of what was technically known as goniometry. They sped through the empty streets to their prearranged positions: one at place de la Concorde, the other in front of the Gare de l’Est railroad station. Almost as soon as they arrived, they were on the radio to Grahnweis’ office:
Place de la Concorde reports a radio beam at 66 degrees.
Gare de l’Est reports a radio beam at 131 degrees.
Grahnweis put down his fork, rubbed h
is hands on the napkin, took a sip of beer. He placed the celluloid discs on the street map of Paris, one at each of the truck locations. Then he ran the two silk threads along the reported angles. They crossed at Montmartre.
4 September, 6:30 p.m., Calais railroad station.
De Milja and Genya Beilis said good-bye on the platform. She had been drafted as a courier, from the Channel ports to the Hôtel Bretagne, because de Milja and Fedin could no longer go back and forth. The full moon in September was too close, the fuel for the van took so many black-market ration coupons it potentially exposed the operation to the French police, and, as the German invasion plan gathered momentum, information began to flow so fast they could barely deal with it.
Genya’s summery print dress stirred as the locomotive chugged into the station; she moved toward de Milja so that her breasts touched him. “Do you know,” she said, her voice just above the noise of the train, “you can ride with me to Amiens, and then come back here.”
“It’s direct,” de Milja said. “Express to Paris.”
“No, no,” Genya said. “This train stops in Amiens. I’m certain of it.”
De Milja smiled ruefully.
Genya studied him. “On second thought,” she said, looking down.
He stared at her, at first took what she said for a lover’s joke. But she wasn’t smiling. Her eyes shone in the dim light of the station platform, and her lips seemed swollen. He took her by the shoulders, gripped her hard for a moment. To tell her, without trying to have a conversation while a train waited to leave a station, that he had to do what he was doing, that he was exhausted and scared, that he loved her.
But she shrugged. “Oh well,” she said. Picked up a string-tied bundle as the loudspeakers announced the departure of the train. The way Parisians survived the rationing system was to get food in the countryside—everybody on the crowded platform had a large suitcase or a package.
“A few days,” de Milja said.
She pushed him away and fled to the step of the coach just before it began to move. When she turned to him, her face had changed to a brainless, bourgeois mask, and she waved at him—the dumb ox, her poor excuse for a husband—and called out, “Au revoir! Au revoir! À bientôt, chéri!”
