The Polish Officer ns-3

by Alan Furst

  Though she had never seen her correspondent she felt sad, enough a veteran of the business to know what uncollected mail implied. Then too, she had walked past the spontaneous renovation at the Hôtel Bretagne, noted newspaper readers in the vicinity, noted the absolute silence of the Parisian press on the subject of local explosions, and wondered if it all might not somehow fit together.

  But hers not to reason why. Hers to travel down to the Banque de Commerce Nationale in Orléans, humiliate the most vulgar, oily little bank man that God ever made, and collect a new set of procedures.

  Now it was the sixteenth arrondissement.

  Now it was the Café du Jardin.

  Now the adjacent cemetery was in Passy.

  Ghouls, she thought.

  Starry night in the village of Aire. In 1430, the Roman bridge over the river Lys had been replaced and the Martagne family had built a fine house at the end of it, so the cool air that hung above the water made the stone rooms pleasant on summer evenings.

  Martagne, the port supervisor from Calais, had a red face and black hair, a big cleft nose and a big mustache. He sat in the dark kitchen with de Milja—Fedin was waiting at the edge of the village— drinking farmer-made Calvados from a stone crock. “Take another Calva,” he said. “Uncle made that in 1903.” Martagne liked to spend his time in the bars with the Polish dockyard workers, and they put him on to Fedin and de Milja when he got frustrated with the Germans and threatened to talk to somebody.

  Now he was drunk. He stared down at the scarred old table and brooded. Finally he said, “You a spy?”

  “Yes.”

  Martagne made a face. “I’m a Norman,” he said. “Not French— whatever that means. But we fight their damn battles. They’re good at insults, not so good at fighting. Bad combination, you’ll agree.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s fighting—you’ll find a Martagne. Crècy, Agincourt, Sedan, Poitiers, the Marne, Jena, Marengo. Probably went over the Channel with William the Conqueror—last time anybody managed to do that, by the way. Probably somebody looked like me, with my ugly face.” Martagne laughed at the idea. “Can’t stand the English,” he said. “You care?”

  “No,” de Milja said.

  “They care?”

  “No.”

  Martagne laughed again. “Me neither,” he said. He stood, swayed a moment, then left the room. Through a crack in the closed shutter de Milja could see that moon and starlight lit the old village and he could hear splashing water where the Lys ran over a small weir. Somewhere in the house Martagne was banging drawers open and shut. Finally he reappeared and handed de Milja three sheets of used carbon paper.

  “Sorry I didn’t bring the originals,” he said. “We’ll take one more Calva.” He poured generously, the fragrance of distant apples drifted up to de Milja. “Now, Monsieur Spy, one little story before you go.”

  De Milja sipped the Calvados.

  “The last week in June, on the day of the surrender, when Pétain got on the radio about how he was preserving the honor of France, my grandfather put on a nightshirt he’d never worn in his life and got into his bed. He was a healthy old bird, pissed like a fountain. But now he stayed in bed, he didn’t speak, he didn’t smile, he just stared at the wall. The doctor came, a childhood friend. Didn’t help. He made the old jokes, said the old things, left a tonic on the nightstand. But a week later, my grandfather was gone. ‘He has died of shame,’ the doctor said. So now, what you have in your hand, that is his revenge—and mine. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, I understand,” de Milja said. He proved it by standing up to leave. Martagne looked away; angry at what he’d done, angry at the world for having made him do it. De Milja said good night and slipped out the door.

  Gold in hand, it turned out.

  12 September. In Nieuwpoort, just across the Belgian border, dust from the wheat harvest hung in the warm air and the fields shimmered in golden light; the docks were burning, the harbor smelled of dead fish, an RAF Blenheim-IVF came tearing over the jetty at fifty feet with its gunports twinkling. The windows of the Café Nieuwpoort fell in on a dead fisherman and a dead waiter and a German corporal came running out of the toilet with his pants around his ankles. A mackerel boat caught fire and the cook jumped into the harbor. Eight rounds from the .303 guns, including an incendiary tracer, stitched up the side of the harbor gasoline tank, thirty feet high, and absolutely nothing happened. The cook yelled he couldn’t swim; a couple of taxi drivers ran to the edge of the pier, but when the Blenheim screamed around the town in a banked turn they threw themselves on their bellies and by the time they looked out at the water again there was nobody there.

  The Germans had an antiaircraft gun at the top of the hill, in the little garden behind the town hall, and red fireballs went whizzing through the port as they tried to hit the Blenheim. Flown by some species of madman—in fact a Rhodesian bush pilot—the Blenheim seemed enraged by the attack, tore out over the sea and came skimming back into Nieuwpoort, blazing away at the gun position and hitting two of the gunners and the mayor’s secretary.

  On the top floor of the dockside Hotel Vlaanderen, de Milja and a whore wearing a slip and a Turkish seaman wearing underpants watched the fight together through a cracked window. De Milja had come running in here when the attack started, but the whore and the sailor hardly seemed to notice him. The room quivered and a blast wave rang the window glass—high explosive going off on the other side of town. De Milja looked out the window to see, just over the town horizon, thick, curling smoke, black and ponderous, tumbling slowly upward, implying the death of an industrial something or other that had lived on heavy oil. Then the hotel was hit, the sailor squawked and grabbed the whore in terror, knocking her blond wig askew and revealing clipped dark hair beneath. “Shh,” she said, and stroked the man’s hair.

  De Milja pressed his palm against the worn linoleum, testing for heat in case the floor below them was on fire. For the moment, he decided, he was about as safe as he was going to get. The bombers seemed to be working north of Nieuwpoort, near the railroad yards. Puffs of dark smoke from spent ack-ack bursts drifted back over the town from that direction. Fedin should have been halfway down to Abbeville—de Milja could only hope he hadn’t been killed in the raid.

  The mackerel boat was fully ablaze now; a man ran up to it, threw a completely pointless bucket of water on the roof of the crackling wheelhouse, then ran away. “My poor town,” the whore said under her breath. The sailor said something in Turkish and the whore, responding to the tone of his voice, said, “Yes, that’s right.”

  As de Milja turned back to the window, the Blenheim flashed by, the wing tip no more than ten feet away, engines howling, rattling the window in its frame. The pilot circled low over the town and headed back out to sea, toward the Dover cliffs and home. The Germans had now gotten their antiaircraft gun working again and sent him on his way with a volley that may have nicked the tail of the airplane. The pilot responded; put his plane in a violent climb, foot on the floor, then a steep bank at the top of the climb, where he vanished into the low cloud. A little bell rang in the street: the Nieuwpoort fire truck, stopped for a moment while two firemen struggled with a large chunk of concrete, dragging it to the edge of the dock by the bent rods sticking out at odd angles.

  The men jumped back on the truck and it drove around the harbor to where the burning mackerel boat had now set the pier on fire. A Feldengendarmerie open car pulled up behind the truck and a soldier ran over to the driver’s window and pointed back the other way. The soldier climbed into his car and both vehicles began the long process of getting themselves turned around without dropping a wheel over the edge of the pier.

  Good, de Milja thought. Something’s really gone up somewhere and the Germans are very unhappy about it. But even so, de Milja the realist had been watching German equipment go up in flames since September of 1939 and he had to admit that it didn’t seem to slow them down. They patched and fixed and improvised and did with
out. War’s own children, he thought. They find a way to get the job done and go on to the next town.

  Another plane came tearing past the hotel, the clatter of gunfire echoing in the little room. No—the same Blenheim, de Milja realized. He’d been hiding out over the sea somewhere or a little way down the coast and this time, like magic, the huge gasoline storage tank erupted in a great whuff of orange flame and boiling black smoke. The pilot circled the town, getting a good eyeful for his gun cameras and obviously very proud of what he’d done. He then waggled his wings—the AA gunners did everything but throw their lunch at him—and sped out over the sea toward the English coast.

  A little rain that night. The Turkish seaman went off to sail away— if he still had a boat to sail away on—and de Milja paid the whore to stay with her in the room. Bernette, she was called. No longer young, short and sturdy, fiercely proud in the face of all the pranks that life had played her. She hung her blond wig on the post at the foot of the bed and fussed over it and combed it out, calling it her poor beaver, entirely unselfconscious in her slip and half-inch salt-and-pepper hair.

  De Milja gave her some money and she wriggled into a skirt and went off to a café she knew where they cooked on a wood-fired stove—the electricity in Nieuwpoort was out—and returned carrying a big plate of lentils and bacon with vinegar, still warm and covered with yesterday’s newspaper, and two bottles of dark beer. Excuse them for not sending the lady and gentleman a glass, but their glassware had not survived the afternoon.

  The rain pattered on the wharfside streets, cooling everything a little. In the distance the bells of the fire trucks never stopped. It smelled like Warsaw; charred plaster, burning oil, and cordite. Bernette wrinkled her nose and splashed herself with White Ginger perfume, so that the room smelled like bombs and gardenias. Would the gentleman, she wanted to know, care for a half-and-half when he’d finished his lentils? The money he’d given her entitled him to at least that. No, de Milja said. Somehow the events of the day had left him not much in the mood for such things. Strange, he thought, how much I like you. Like me a wanderer, somehow never home.

  That was, it happened, true. She’d had a home, a child, a family, but, well, what did it all matter? God meant her not to have them and now she didn’t. It wasn’t much of a story anyhow.

  Well the hell with everybody, he said. And he was getting tired of the four walls—could they go out for a walk? She agreed to go. Scared as she was, she agreed. Strange, he thought, how you stumble on the world’s secret nobility when you’re not even looking for them.

  When she went down the hall to the toilet de Milja poured half a bottle of beer down his shirt. She made a sour face about that when she returned—she could wash it out in the sink. No, he said, turned away from her so she wouldn’t smell that he’d washed his mouth with the rest of the beer and splashed some on his hair.

  Outside it was quiet at first, the rain hissing on a few small fires here and there. Some of the townspeople were poking through the burnt-out café, lifting a blackened timber then dropping it quickly when they saw what was under it. The patron, the toughest man in Nieuwpoort, was sitting on the curb and weeping into a dirty handkerchief, his shoulders shaking. “Ach,” Bernette said, fought back the tears, then steadied. Soot drifted down on them as they walked, walked carefully because the sea fog hung over the town. Quiet water that night, just lapping at the foot of the quai as the tide went out. Walking away from the center of Nieuwpoort they were stopped by a pair of Wehrmacht sentries. Nervy and angry now that they’d been on the wrong end of the war for a moment—they hadn’t liked that at all.

  But what could they do with a beer-smelling slob and a whore headed down the beach for a blow job? He was now Rosny, Belgian of Czech descent, a long story. In the end the Germans waved them along, but for half a pfennig they would have run a rifle butt under his chin just to see his heels fly up in the air. Because they had dead friends and half-dead friends and would-have-been-better-off-dead friends— de Milja knew what bombing did to people—and they were full of rage, and quite dangerous. Bernette, good Bernette, looked at them a certain way, and maybe that bled out the fury just enough to keep de Milja’s jaw from getting broken, but it was a close thing.

  The sirens went off about an hour past midnight, and de Milja and Bernette moved off the beach and back into the dunes. They were in the town’s shame pit—broken glass, old rags, a dead shoe—a hidden place for those Nieuwpoort citizens who had to do something private and couldn’t afford to do it indoors. De Milja moved into the lee of a dune, they sat down on the damp sand, he put an arm around her shoulders and she clung to him, her protector.

  Not much more than a gesture, with what came down on Nieuwpoort that night.

  The Blenheim, it turned out, was merely an opening act, a juggler on roller skates. Now the full troupe of comedians came running out of the wings. Lancaster bombers, de Milja guessed. The beach shuddered as the bombs hit, to long rolls of thunder and flashes of orange fire in the darkness. Once or twice it was close, sand showered down on them and Bernette whimpered like a poodle and burrowed into him. The antiaircraft people up at the mayor’s office got on the scoreboard just as the raid began, hit a Lancaster with a full bomb load a little way out to sea from the harbor and de Milja swore he could see the night cloud for twenty miles around by the light of the explosion. But most of the rest got through, hitting the town and the sea and the villages nearby and God only knew what else. Pretty soon Nieuwpoort was truly on fire, the Hotel Vlaanderen no more than a pile of smoking brick.

  The second British attack came at 3:30 in the morning. It seemed very quiet when they left. De Milja and Bernette dozed, then woke up at dawn, stiff and chilled and miserable. The sea had come alive in first light; white combers rolling in a long way, crying gulls hanging in the air above the breaking surf. De Milja walked down to the tideline to splash his face and there, riding to and fro in a foot of water, a thin trail of yellow foam traced up the back of his uniform, was the first German. Facedown, arms above his head. As de Milja watched, a wave a little more powerful than the ones before picked him up, rushed him in a few extra feet, and dumped him on the wet sand.

  It wasn’t clear how he had died—he hadn’t burned, hadn’t been hit by shellfire. Probably he had drowned. He wore a field-gray combat uniform, waist encircled by a belt with ammunition pouches and a commando knife, prepared to fight. One of mine, de Milja thought. But it wasn’t one, it was three, no, a dozen. Hundreds. At first the gray of their uniforms blended with the color of the sea, but as the light changed he could see more and more of them. Most wearing heavy packs, bobbing silently in the surf. Now and then the sea would leave another one on the beach, then, so it seemed to de Milja, go back out in order to bring in a few more.

  Dependable port official reports security staff alerting coastal defense units to a landing exercise, to be carried out at division strength, using barges and seagoing tugs, at Westende on the Belgian coast on the night of 12 September.

  So this was his kill. It would have been suicide to try for Westende, so he’d settled for

  Nieuwpoort, to see what he could see. And here it was. Some of the dead were burned—perhaps a ship had been hit. Perhaps several ships. Invasion troops, from the packs and all the other equipment—the Germans had put on a dress rehearsal for a landing on the beaches of Britain.

  And the British had put on a dress rehearsal of their own.

  It was much too dangerous to stay where he was, there would be hell to pay on this beach once the Germans discovered what the tide was bringing in. But when he turned to look for Bernette he discovered she’d been standing by his side, bare feet splayed in the sand, arms crossed beneath her breasts.

  He put a hand on her shoulder, but she did not respond so he let it drop. Then he knelt down, took a little slip of paper and a stub of pencil from his pocket and sketched the shoulder-patch insignia of one of the dead soldiers: a knight raised a sword above his head, his shield a crusader’
s cross. The legend above the knight: Grenadierregiment 46. Legend below: 21 Infanteriedivision Dresden.

  He tucked the slip of paper into his pants cuff, then stood up. “I know you are a patriot,” he said.

  She had seen, and certainly understood, what he had just done. It was an act of war to learn who the dead were. “Yes,” she said. “I am.” Just one more secret, she thought. She kept them all.

  15 September.

  Martagne had stolen three carbons from the Port of Calais office; the German landing exercise was one of them.

  De Milja made his way south to the village of Sangatte, on the road that ran by the sea from Boulogne to Calais. Fedin was waiting for him in a closed-up villa owned by a Russian baron—lately a toy manufacturer, formerly one of the czar’s riding masters—in Paris. De Milja arrived a little after one in the afternoon, Genya Beilis came by taxi from the resort town of Le Touquet an hour later. All trains from Paris to Boulogne and Calais had been suspended, she said. Military traffic only. Railroad guns. Field hospitals.

  The time had come.

  The roads were jammed with panzer tanks and 88 artillery pieces on carriers and fuel tankers with red crosses painted on them to fool the British attack aircraft. Wehrmacht invasion planners were playing chess now—big guns at Calais had engaged British artillery across the Channel, communications frequencies were being jammed, radio towers and radars attacked. We’re coming, it meant.

  “The enemy’s ports are our first line of defense.” Lord Nelson, in 1805, and nothing had changed. Britain had its little piece of water that it hid behind. The princes of Europe could field huge land armies. But when they reached the coast of France, they stopped.

  A Russian general, a publisher’s daughter, a Polish cartographer. At the villa they sat on sheets that covered the furniture, in a dark room behind closed shutters. Finished, and they knew it. Fedin, at sixty, perhaps the strongest of them, de Milja thought. To survive Russia you had to fight for life—fight the cold, fight the sadness and its vodka. Those who lived were like iron. Genya, de Milja saw, had covered the dark circles beneath her eyes with powder. He thought the shadows decadent, sexy, but the attempted disguise made her look old, a woman attempting to deceive the world. As for himself, he felt numb, as though a nerve, pounded on by the hour, had gone dead.