by Alan Furst
“Yes,” he said. “Au revoir.” I’ll see you again.
“Adieu,” she said. Not in this life.
Later he stood at the door of the apartment on the avenue Hoche. Dawn just breaking, the sky in the window a dozen shades of blue.
He had to ride the trains for long days across the springtime fields. He tried, again and again, to find a reason for what had happened, and was shocked at how broken his heart was. Over the months in Paris he had thought he hated what he did. Maybe not. Out the train window: spring earth, flowering apple trees, villages with bakeries and town halls. He had lost a lot of people, he realized. The obvious ones; Janina the telegraphist, Mademoiselle Herault, Veronique. And the not-so-obvious ones; Genya Beilis, and Fedin. Could someone else do better? Is that what the Sixth Bureau thought? You should be happy to be alive, he told himself savagely. But he wasn’t.
Four nights on the beach at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, just north of the Spanish border, where the last Polish ship, the Batory, had departed in June of 1940, twelve months earlier. He pretended to be a tourist, a specter from another time, strolled down to the beach at night, then uncovered a hidden bicycle and worked his way north, to a deserted stretch of rocky shore miles from a road. There he sat amid the dune grass, waiting, as the ocean crashed against the beach, but no light signaled. He stayed at a boardinghouse run by a Portuguese couple who had lived in France for thirty years and barely acknowledged that a war was in progress. There were other guests, but they averted their eyes, and there were no conversations. Everybody on the run now, he thought, in every possible direction.
Then at last, on 28 May, a light.
A rubber boat gliding over a calm sea. Two sailors with their faces lamp-blacked, and a man he’d never seen before, perhaps his replacement, brought into shore. Older, heavyset, distinguished, with thick eyebrows. They shook hands and wished each other well.
The sailors worked hard, digging their paddles into the water. The land fell away, France disappeared into the darkness. De Milja knelt in the stern of the little boat. Above the sound of the waves lapping against the beach he could hear a dog barking somewhere on the shore. Two barks, deep and urgent, repeated over and over again.
In London, people seemed pale, cold and polite, bright-eyed with fatigue. They spent their days running a war, which meant questions with no answers and ferocious, bureaucratic infighting. Then at night the bombs whistled down and the city burned.
De Milja was quartered in a small hotel just north of Euston Station. He had braced himself for criticism, or chilly disapproval, even accusations, but none of that happened. Some of the British liaison staff seemed not entirely sure why he’d shown up. Colonel Vyborg was “away.” The Polish officers he reported to that May and early June he had never met before. The ZWZ, he realized, had grown up. Had become an institution, with a bottom, a middle and a top. Poles had found their way to England by every conceivable means, ordinary and miraculous. And they all wanted to shoot at somebody. But getting them to that point—fed, dressed, assigned, transported— took an extraordinary effort, a price paid in meetings and memoranda.
This was the war they wanted de Milja to fight. In the course of his debriefing he was told, in a very undramatic way, why he’d been relieved. Somebody somewhere, in the infrastructure that had grown up around the government-in-exile, had decided he’d lost too many people. The senior staff had taken his part, particularly Vyborg and his allies, but that battle had eventually been lost and there were others that had to be fought.
De Milja didn’t say a word. The people around the table looked down, cleared their throats, squared the papers in front of them. Of course he’d done well, they said, nobody disputed that. Perhaps he’d just been unlucky. Perhaps it had become accepted doctrine in some quarters that his stars were bad. De Milja was silent, his face was still. Somebody lit a cigarette. Somebody else polished his spectacles. Silence, silence. “What we need you to do now,” they said, “is help to run things.”
He tried. Sat behind a desk, read reports, wrote notes in the margins, and sent them away. Some came back. Others appeared. A very pleasant colonel, formerly a lawyer in Cracow, took him to an English pub and let him know, very politely, that he wasn’t doing all that well. Was something wrong? He tried harder. Then, one late afternoon, he looked up from A’s analysis of XYZ and there was Vyborg, framed in the doorway.
Now at least he would have the truth, names and faces filled in. But it wasn’t so very different from what he’d been told. This was, he came to realize, not the same world he’d lived in. The Kampfgeschwader 100 operation, for instance, had been canceled. The RAF leadership felt that such guerrilla tactics would lead the Germans to brutalize downed and captured British airmen—the game wasn’t worth the candle.
“You’re lucky to be out of it,” Vyborg said one day at lunch. They ate in a military canteen in Bayswater Road. Women in hairnets served potatoes and cauliflower and canned sausage.
De Milja nodded. Yes, lucky.
Vyborg looked at him closely. “It takes time to get used to a new job.”
De Milja nodded again. “I hate it,” he said quietly.
Vyborg shrugged. Too bad. “Two things, Alexander. This is an army—we tell people what to do and they do it the best they know how. The other thing is that the good jobs are taken. You are not going to Madrid or to Geneva.”
Vyborg paused a moment, then continued. “The only person who’s hiring right now runs the eastern sector. We have four thousand panzer tanks on the border and prevailing opinion in the bureau says they will be leaving for Moscow on 21 June. Certainly there will be work in Russia, a great deal of work. Because those operatives will not survive. They will be replaced, then replaced again.”
“I know,” de Milja said.
On 21 June 1941, by the Koden bridge over the river Bug, Russian guards—of the Main Directorate of Border Troops under the NKVD—were ordered to execute a spy who had infiltrated Soviet territory three days earlier as part of a provocation intended to cause war. The man, a Wehrmacht trooper, had left German lines a few miles to the west, swum the river just after dark, and asked to see the officer in charge. Through an interpreter he explained he was from Munich, a worker and a lifelong communist. He wished to join the Soviet fighting forces, and he had important information: his unit had orders to attack the Soviet Union at 0300 hours on the morning of 22 June.
The Russian officer telephoned superiors, and the information rose quickly to very senior levels of the counterespionage apparat. Likely the Kremlin itself was consulted, likely at very high, the highest, levels. Meanwhile, the deserter was kept in a barracks jail on the Soviet side of the river. The guards tried to communicate with him—sign language, a few words of German. He was one of them, he let them know, and they shared their cigarettes with him and made sure he had a bowl of barley and fat at mealtime.
Late in the afternoon of 21 June, an answer came down from the top: the German deserter is a spy and his mission is provocation: shoot him. The officer in charge was surprised but the order was clear, and he’d been told confidentially that the British Secret Service had orchestrated similar incidents all along the Soviet/German border— formerly eastern Poland—to foster suspicion, and worse, between the two nations.
The sergeant assigned to take care of the business sighed when he came to collect the deserter. He’d felt some sympathy for the man, but, it seemed, he’d been tricked. Well, that was the world for you. “Podnimaisa zvieshchami,” he said to the German. This was formula, part of a ritual language that predated the Revolution and went back to czarist times. Get going, with things, it meant. You are going to be executed. If he’d said Get going, with overcoat, without things, for example, it would have meant the man was going to be deported, and his blanket and plate should be left behind.
The German didn’t understand the words, but he could read the sergeant’s expression and could easily enough interpret the significance of the Makarov pistol thrust in his belt.
At least I tried, he thought. He’d known where this all might lead, now it had led there, now he had to make peace with his gods and say good-bye, and that was that.
They walked, with a guard of three soldiers, to the edge of the river. It was a warm evening, very still, thousands of crickets racketing away, flickers of summer lightning on the horizon. The deserter glanced back over his shoulder as they walked—anything possible? The sergeant just shook his head and gave him a fraternal little push in the back—be a man. The German took a deep breath, headed where the sergeant pointed and the sergeant shot him in the back of the head.
And again, a coup de grâce in the temple. Then the sergeant signaled to the troopers and they came and took the body away. The sergeant found a stub of cigarette deep in his pocket and lit it in cupped hands, staring across the river. What the hell were they doing over there? This was the third night in a row they’d fired up the panzer tank engines—a huge roar that drowned out the crickets—then changed positions, treads clanking away as the iron plates rolled over the dirt.
The sergeant finished his cigarette, then headed back to his barracks. Too bad about the German. That was fate, however, and there was no sense trying to get in its way. But the sergeant was in its way anyhow, some instinct—the rumbling of German tanks—may have been telling him that, and he himself had less than seven hours to live.
3:00 a.m. The sergeant asleep. The sound of German boots thumping across the wooden bridge, calls of “Important business! Important business!” in Russian. The Soviet sentry signaled to the German messengers to wait one moment, and shook the sergeant awake. Grumbling, he worked his feet into his boots and, rubbing his eyes, walked onto the bridge. A brief drumming, orange muzzle flares—the force of the bullets took him and the sentry back through a wooden railing and down into the river.
The sergeant didn’t die right away. He lay where he’d fallen, on a gravel bank in the slow, warm river. So he heard running on the bridge, heard the explosions as the barracks were blown apart by hand grenades, heard machine-gun fire and shouts in German as the commandos finished up with the border guards. Dim shapes—German combat engineers—swung themselves beneath the bridge and crawled among the struts, pulling wires out of the explosive charges. Tell headquarters, the sergeant thought. A soldier’s instinct—I’m finished but command must know what’s happened. It had, in fact, been tried. A young soldier bleeding on the floor of the guardhouse had managed to get hold of the telephone, but the line was dead. Other units of Regiment 800, the Brandenburgers—the Wehrmacht special-action force— some of them Russian-speaking, had been at work for hours, and telegraph and telephone wires had been cut all along the front lines.
The sergeant lost consciousness, then was brought back one last time. By a thousand artillery pieces fired in unison; the riverbed shook with the force of it. Overhead, hundreds of Luftwaffe fighters and bombers streaked east to destroy the Soviet air force on its airfields. Three million German troops crossed the border, thousands of Soviet troops, tens of thousands, would join the sergeant in the river by morning.
Soviet radio transmissions continued. The German Funkabwehr recorded an exchange near the city of Minsk. To headquarters: “We are being fired on. What should we do?” The response: “You must be insane. And why is this message not in code?”
The sergeant died sometime after dawn. By then, hundreds of tanks had rolled across the Koden bridge because it was the Schwerpunkt— the spearpoint—of the blitzkrieg in the region of the Brest fortress. Just to the south, the Koden railroad bridge, also secured by the Brandenburgers, was made ready to serve in an immense resupply effort to fighting units advancing at an extraordinary rate. By the following evening young Russian reservists were boarding trains, cardboard suitcases in hand, heading off to report to mobilization centers already occupied by Wehrmacht troops.
Days of glory. The Germans advanced against Soviet armies completely in confusion. Hitler had been right—“Just kick in the door and the whole thing will come tumbling down.” Soviet air cover was blown up, ammunition used up, no food, tanks destroyed. Russians attacked into enfilading machine-gun fire and were mown down by the thousands. Nothing stopped the panzer tanks, great engines rumbling across the steppe. Some peasants came out of their huts and stared. Others, Ukrainians, offered bread and salt to the conquerors who had come to free them from the Bolshevik yoke.
Yet, here and there, every now and again, there were strange and troublesome events. Five commissars firing pistols from a schoolhouse until they were killed. A single rifleman holding up an advance for ten minutes. When they found his body, his dog was tied to a nearby tree with a rope, as though he had, somehow, expected to live through the assault. A man came out of a house and threw two hand grenades. Somehow this wasn’t like the blitzkriegs in western Europe. They found a note folded into an empty cartridge case and hidden in a tree by the highway to Minsk. “Now there are only three of us left. We shall stand firm as long as there’s any life left in us. Now I am alone, wounded in my arm and my head. The number of tanks has increased. There are twenty-three. I shall probably die. Somebody may find my note and remember me: I am a Russian from Frunze. I have no parents. Good-bye, dear friends. Your Alexander Vinogradov.”
The German advance continued, nothing could stop it, whole armies were encircled. Yet, still, there was resistance, and something in its nature was deeply disturbing. They had attacked the U.S.S.R. But it was Russia that fought back.
10 October 1941. 11:45 p.m. Near the Koden bridge.
The Wehrmacht was long gone now. They were busy fighting to the east, on the highway to Moscow. Now it was quiet again—quiet as any place where three nations mixed. The Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Poland. “Thank heaven,” Razakavia would say, “we are all such good friends.” People laughed when he said that—a little tentatively at first until they were sure he meant them to, then a big, loud, flattering laugh. He was tall and bony, with the blowing white hair and white beard of an Old Testament prophet. But the similarity ended there. A pucker scar marked the back of his neck—bullet in 1922—and a rifle was slung across his back. Razakavia was a leader—of outcasts, of free men and women, of bandits. It depended who you asked.
Razakavia pulled his sheepskin jacket tight around him and leaned closer to his horse’s neck. “Cold, Miszka. Hurry up a little.” The pony obliged, the rhythm of his trot a beat or two faster. It was cold— Razakavia could smell winter hiding in the autumn air, and the moonlight lay hard on the white-frosted fields. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a railroad watch. Getting toward midnight. Up ahead of him he could hear Frantek’s pony. Frantek was fourteen, Razakavia’s best scout. He carried no rifle, only a pistol buried in his clothing—so he could play the innocent traveler as long as possible, should they chance to meet a stranger on the trails they rode. Somewhere behind Razakavia was Kotior, his second-in-command, a machine gun resting across his saddle.
They had ridden these fields before. This operation had been attempted twice since the end of September. Razakavia didn’t like it, but he had no choice. The people who had arrived in the wake of the Wehrmacht—the SS, German administrators, murder squads hunting Jews, all sorts really, were not much to his taste. He was used to fighting the Polish gendarmerie, not themselves so very appealing, frankly, but a fact of life and something he’d got used to. These new lords and masters were worse. They were also temporary. They didn’t understand what was going to happen to them, and that made them more dangerous as allies than they were as enemies. So he needed some new allies.
Frantek appeared just ahead of him, his horse standing still with breath steaming from its nose and mouth. The river was visible from here, not frozen yet but very slow and thick. Razakavia pulled his pony up, twenty seconds later Kotior arrived. The three sat in a row but did not speak—voices carried a long way at night. The wind sighed here as it climbed the hillside above the river, and Razakavia listened carefully to it for a time until he could make out the whine of an air
plane engine. So, perhaps this time it would work. Frantek pointed: a few degrees west of north, a mile or so from where the river Bug met the Lesna. A triangle of fires suddenly appeared, sparks flying up into the still air. Frantek looked at him expectantly, waiting for orders.
Razakavia didn’t move—always he weighed the world around him for a moment before he did anything—then chucked the reins and the three of them trotted off in the direction of the fires.
He had six men in the meadow, where the hay had been cut a month earlier. They stood with rifles slung, warming their hands over the signal fires, faces red in the flickering light. The sound of the plane’s engines grew louder and louder, then it faded and moved away into the distance. Above, three white flowers came floating to earth.
At Razakavia’s right hand, Frantek watched avidly. Such things intrigued him—airplanes, parachutes. The world had come here along with the war, and Frantek was being educated by both at once. Kotior just glanced up, then scanned the perimeter. He was not quick of mind, but he killed easily and good-naturedly, and he was remorselessly loyal.
The white flowers were just overhead now and Razakavia could see what they were. As he’d been promised, a Polish officer and two crates of explosives. It is a long life, Razakavia thought, one takes the bad with the good.
Captain Alexander de Milja was the last to leave the plane, the other two operatives—an explosives expert and a political courier—had jumped when they got to the outskirts of Warsaw. His body ached from the ride, six and a half hours in a four-engine Halifax, every bolt and screw vibrating, and the cold air ferocious as it flowed through the riveted panels. He hoped this was the right triangle of fires below him—and that the builders of these brush piles had not changed sides while the Halifax droned across Europe. He was, in truth, a rich prize: $18,000 in czarist gold rubles, $50,000 in American paper money. A fortune once converted to zlotys or Occupation currency. German cigarettes and German razor blades, warm clothing, two VIS pistols— WZ 35s with the Polish eagle engraved on the slide, and a hundred rounds of ammunition. He might very well do them more good simply murdered and stripped, he thought. No, he would do them more good that way, because he was not here to do them good.
