by Alan Furst
In fact a lieutenant colonel, and wounded in two wars, he didn’t dash very well. He did the best he could, usually playing doubles, but still, a passing shot down the line would often elude him—if it didn’t go out, the tennis gods punishing his opponent for taking advantage of the colonel’s limping stride.
That Thursday afternoon in October, the vast sky above the steppe dark and threatening, Colonel Mercier was partnered by Princess Toni herself, in her late thirties as perfect and pretty as a doll, an effect heightened by rouged cheeks and the same straw-colored hair as Prince Kaz. They did look, people said, like brother and sister. And, you know, sometimes in these noble families . . . No, it wasn’t true, but the similarity was striking.
“Good try, Jean-François,” she called out, as the ball bounced away, brushing her hair off her forehead and turning her racquet over a few times as she awaited service.
Across the net, a woman called Claudine, the wife of a Belgian diplomat, prepared to serve. Here one could see that the doubles teams were fairly constituted, for Claudine had only her right arm; the other—her tennis shirt sleeve pinned up below her shoulder—had been lost to a German shell in the Great War, when she’d served as a nurse. Standing at the back line, she held ball and racquet in one hand, tossed the ball up, regripped her racquet, and managed a fairly brisk serve. Princess Toni returned crosscourt, with perfect form but low velocity, and Dr. Goldszteyn, the Jewish dentist, sent it back toward the colonel, just close enough—he never, when they played together, hit balls that Mercier couldn’t reach. Mercier drove a low shot to center court; Claudine returned backhand, a high lob. “Oh damn,” Princess Toni said through clenched teeth, running backward. Her sweeping forehand sent the ball sailing over the fence on the far side of the court. “Sorry,” she said to Mercier.
“We’ll get it back,” Mercier said. He spoke French, the language of the Polish aristocracy, and thus the Milanowek Tennis Club.
“Forty–fifteen,” Claudine called out, as a passing servant tossed the ball back over the fence. Serving to Mercier, her first try ticked the net, the second was in. Mercier hit a sharp forehand, Dr. Goldszteyn swept it back, Princess Toni retrieved, Claudine ran to the net and tried a soft lob. Too high, and Mercier reached up and hit an overhand winner—that went into the net. “Game to us,” Claudine called out.
“My service,” Princess Toni answered, a challenge in her voice: we’ll see who takes this set. They almost did, winning the next game, but eventually going down six–four. Walking off the court, Princess Toni rested a hand on Mercier’s forearm; he could smell perfume mixed with sweat. “No matter,” she said. “You’re a good partner for me, Jean-François.”
What? No, she meant tennis. Didn’t she? At forty-six, Mercier had been a widower for three years, and was considered more than eligible by the smart set in the city. But, he thought, not the princess. “We’ll play again soon,” he said, the response courteous and properly amicable.
He managed almost always to hit the right note with these people because he was, technically, one of them—Jean-François Mercier de Boutillon, though the nobiliary particule de had been dropped by his democratically inclined grandfather, and the name of his ancestral demesne had disappeared along with it, except on official papers. But participation in the rites and rituals of this world was not at all something he cared about—membership in the tennis club, and other social activities, were requirements of his profession; otherwise he wouldn’t have bothered. A military attaché was supposed to hear things and know things, so he made it his business to be around people who occasionally said things worth knowing. Not very often, he thought. But in truth—he had to admit—often enough.
In the house, he paused to pick up his white canvas bag, then headed down the hallway. The old boards creaked with every step, the scent of beeswax polish perfumed the air—nothing in the world smelled quite like a perfectly cleaned house. Past the drawing room, the billiard room, a small study lined with books, was one of the downstairs bathrooms made available to the tennis club members. How they live. On a travertine shelf by the sink, fresh lilies in a Japanese vase, fragrant soap in a gold-laced dish. A grid of heated copper towel bars held thick Turkish towels, the color of fresh cream, while the shower curtain was decorated with a surrealist half-head and squiggles—where on God’s green earth did they find such a thing?
He peeled off his tennis outfit, then opened the bag, took out a blue shirt, flannel trousers, and fresh linen, made a neat pile on a small antique table, stowed his tennis clothes in the bag, worked the chevalière, the gold signet ring of the nobility, off his ring finger and set it atop his clothes, and stepped into the shower.
Ahhh.
An oversized showerhead poured forth a broad, powerful spray of hot water. Where he lived—the longtime French military attaché apartment in Warsaw—there was only a bathtub and a diabolical gas water heater, which provided a tepid bath at best and might someday finish the job that his German and Russian enemies had failed to complete. What medal did they have for that? he wondered. The Croix de Bain, awarded posthumously.
Very quietly, so that someone passing by in the hall would not hear him, he began to sing.
Turning slowly in the shower, Mercier was tall—a little over six feet, with just the faintest suggestion of a slouch, an apology for height—and lean; well muscled in the legs and shoulders and well scarred all over. On the outside of his right knee, a patch of red, welted skin—some shrapnel still in there, they told him—and sometimes, on damp, cold days, he walked with a stick. On the left side of his chest, a three-inch white furrow; on the back of his left calf, a burn scar; running along the inside of his right wrist, a poorly sutured tear made by barbed wire; and, on his back, just below his left shoulder blade, the puckered wound of a sniper’s bullet. From the last, he should not have recovered, but he had, which left him better off than most of the class of 1912 at the Saint-Cyr military academy, who rested beneath white crosses in the fields of northeast France.
Well, he was done with war. He doubted he could face that again, he’d simply seen too much of it. With some effort, he forced his mind away from such thoughts, which, he believed, visited him more often than he should allow, and this sort of determination was easily read in his face. Not unhandsome, he had heavy, dark hair parted on the left, which lay too thick, too high, across the right side of his head. He had fair skin, pale, and refined features, all of which made him seem younger than he was, though these proportions, classic in the French aristocrat, were somehow contradicted by very deep, very thoughtful, gray-green eyes. Nonetheless, he was what he was, with the relaxed confidence of the breed and, when he smiled, a touch of the insouciant view of the world common to the southern half of France.
They’d been there a long, long time, the Mercier de Boutillons, in a lost corner of the Drôme, just above Provence, with the title of chevalier—knight—originally bestowed in the twelfth century, which had given them the village of Boutillon and its surrounding countryside, and the right to die in France’s wars. Which they had done, again and again, as far back as the Knight Templars of Jerusalem—Mercier was also a thirty-sixth-generation Knight of Malta and Rhodes—and as recently as the 1914 war, which had claimed his brother, at the Marne, and an uncle, wounded, and drowned in a shellhole, at the second battle of Verdun.
In a muted baritone, Mercier sang an old French ballad, which had haunted him for years. A dumb thing, but it had a catchy melody, sad and sweet. Poor petite Jeanette, how she adored her departed lover, how she remembered him, “encore et encore.” Jeanette may have remembered, Mercier didn’t, so he sang the chorus and hummed the rest, turning slowly in the streaming water.
When he heard the bathroom door open, and close, he stopped. Through the heavy cotton of the shower curtain he could see a silhouette, which divested itself of shirt and shorts. Then, slowly, drew the curtain aside, its rings scraping along the metal bar. Standing there, in a cloud of steam, a lavender-colored cake of soap in
one hand, was the Princess Antowina Brosowicz. Without clothes, she seemed small but, again like a doll, perfectly proportioned. With an impish smile, she reached a hand toward him and, using her fingernail, drew a line down the wet hair plastered to his chest. “That’s nice,” she said. “I can draw a picture on you.” Then, after a moment, “Are you going to invite me in, Jean-François?”
“Of course.” His laugh was not quite a nervous laugh, but close. “You surprised me.”
She entered the shower, closed the curtain, stepped toward him so that the tips of her breasts just barely touched his chest, stood on her toes, and kissed him lightly on the lips. “I meant to,” she said. Then she handed him the lavender soap. Only a princess, he thought, would join a man in the shower but disdain the use of the guest soap.
She turned once around beneath the spray, raised her face to the water, and finger-combed her hair back. Then she leaned on the tile wall with both hands and said, “Would you be kind enough to wash my back?”
“With pleasure,” he said.
“What was that you were singing?”
“An old French song. It stays with me, I don’t know why.”
“Oh, reasons,” she said, who knew why anything happened.
“Do you sing in the shower?”
She turned her head so that he could see that she was smiling. “Perhaps in a little while, I will.”
The skin of her back was still lightly tanned from the summer sun, then, below the curved line of her bathing suit, very white. He worked up a creamy lather, put the soap in a dish on the wall, and slid his hands up and down, sideways, round and round.
“Mmm,” she said. Then, “Don’t neglect my front, dear.”
He re-soaped his hands and reached around her. As the water drummed down on them, the white part of her, warm and slippery, gradually turned a rosy pink. And, in time, she did sing, or something like it, and, even though they were there for quite some time, the hot water never ran out.
17 October, 5:15 A.M. Crossing the Vistula in a crowded trolley car, Mercier leaned on a steel pole at the rear. He wore a battered hat, the front of the brim low on his forehead, and a grimy overcoat, purchased from a used-clothing pushcart in the poor Jewish district. He carried a cheap briefcase beneath his arm and looked, he thought, like some lost soul sentenced to live in a Russian novel. The workers packed inside the trolley, facing a long day in the Praga factories, were grim-faced and silent, staring out the windows at the gray dawn and the gray river below the railway bridge.
At the third stop in Praga, Mercier stepped down from the rear platform, just past the Wedel candy factory, the smell of burned sugar strong in the raw morning air. He walked the length of the factory, crossed to a street of brick tenements, then on to a row of workshops, machinery rattling and whining inside the clapboard sheds. At one of them, the high doors had been rolled apart, and he could see dark shapes shoveling coal into open furnaces, the fires flaring yellow and orange.
He turned down an alley to a nameless little bar, open at dawn, crowded with workers who needed a shot or two in order to get themselves into the factories. Here too it was silent. The men at the bar drank off their shots, left a few groszy by their empty glasses, and walked out. At a table on the opposite wall, Edvard Uhl, the engineer from Breslau, sat stolidly with a coffee and a Polish newspaper, folded on the table by his cup and saucer.
Mercier sat across from him and said good morning. He spoke German, badly and slowly, but he could manage. As the language of France’s traditional enemy, German had been a compulsory course at Saint-Cyr.
Uhl looked up at him and nodded.
“All goes well with you,” Mercier said. It wasn’t precisely a question.
“Best I can expect.” Poor me. He didn’t much like the business they did together. He was, Mercier could see it in his face, reluctant, and frightened. Maybe life had gone better with Mercier’s predecessor, “Henri,” Emile Bruner, now a full colonel and Mercier’s superior at the General Staff, but he doubted it. “Considering what I must do,” Uhl added.
Mercier shrugged. What did he care? For him, best to be cold and formal at agent meetings—they had a commercial arrangement; friendship was not required. “What have you brought?”
“We’re retooling for the Ausf B.” He meant the B version of the Panzerkampfwagen 1, the Wehrmacht’s battle tank. “I have the first diagrams for the new turret.”
“What’s different?”
“It’s a new design, from the Krupp works; the turret will now be made to rotate, three hundred and sixty degrees, a hand traverse operated by the gunner.”
“And the armour?”
“The same. Thirteen millimeters on the sides, eight millimeters on the top of the turret, six millimeters on the top and bottom of the hull. But now the plates are to be face-hardened—that means carbon cementation, very expensive but the strength is greatly increased.”
“From stopping rifle and machine-gun fire to stopping antitank weapons.”
“So it would seem.”
Mercier thought for a moment. The Panzerkampfwagen 1A had not done well in Spain, where it had been used by Franco’s forces against the Soviet T-26. Armed only with a pair of 7.92-millimeter machine guns in the turret, it was effective against infantry but could not defeat an armoured enemy tank. Now, with the 1B, they were preparing for a different kind of combat. Finally he said, “All right, we’ll have a look at it. And next time we’d like to see the face-hardening process you’re using, the formula.”
“Next time,” Uhl said. “Well, I’m not sure I’ll be able . . .”
Mercier cut him off. “Fifteen November. If there’s an emergency, a real emergency, you have a telephone number.”
“What would happen if I just couldn’t be here?”
“We will reschedule.” Mercier paused. “But it’s not at all easy for us, if we have to do that.”
“Yes, but there’s always the possibility . . .”
“You will manage, Herr Uhl. We know you are resourceful, there are always problems in this sort of work; we expect you to deal with them.”
Uhl started to speak, but Mercier raised his hand. Then he opened his briefcase and withdrew a folded Polish newspaper and a slip of paper, typewritten and then copied on a roneo duplicator: a receipt form, with date, amount, and Uhl’s name typed on the appropriate lines, and a line for signature at the bottom. “Do you need a pen?” Mercier said.
Uhl reached into an inside pocket, withdrew a fountain pen, then signed his name at the bottom of the receipt. Mercier put the slip of paper in his briefcase and slid the newspaper toward Uhl. “A thousand zloty,” he said. He peeled up a corner of Uhl’s newspaper, revealing the edges of engineering diagrams.
Uhl took Mercier’s folded newspaper, secured it tightly beneath his arm, then rose to leave.
“Fifteen November,” Mercier said. “We’ll meet here, at the same time.”
A very subdued Herr Uhl nodded in agreement, mumbled a goodby, and left the bar.
Mercier looked at his watch—the rules said he had to give Uhl a twenty-minute head start. A pair of workers, in gray oil-stained jackets and trousers, entered the bar and ordered vodka and beer. One of them glanced over at Mercier, then looked away. Which meant nothing, Mercier thought. Officer A met Agent B in a country foreign to both, neutral ground, it wasn’t even against the law. So they’d told him, anyhow, when he’d taken the six-week course for new military attachés at the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre, part of the Invalides complex in Paris.
With a one-week section on the management of espionage—thus the folded newspapers. And the cold exterior. This was no pretense for Mercier; he didn’t like Uhl, who betrayed his country for selfish reasons. In fact, he didn’t like any of it. “Witness the ingenuity of Monsieur D,” said the elfin captain from the Deuxième Bureau who taught the course. “During the war, with a complex set of figures to be conveyed to his case officer, Monsieur D shaved a patch of hair on his dog’s back, wrote the
numbers on the dog’s skin in indelible pen, waited for the dog’s coat to grow out, then easily crossed the frontier.” Yes, very clever, like Messieurs A, B, and C. Mercier could only imagine himself shaving his Braques Ariégeoises, his beloved pointers, Achille and Céleste. He could imagine their eyes: why are you doing this to me?
Stay. Good boy, good girl. Remember the ingenious Monsieur D.
In Mercier’s desk drawer, at his office on the second floor of the embassy, was a letter resigning his commission. Written at a bad moment, in the difficult early days of a new job, but not thrown away. He couldn’t imagine actually sending it, but the three-year appointment felt like a lifetime, and he might be reappointed. Perhaps he would try, the next time he was at the General Staff headquarters in Paris, to request a transfer, to field command. His first request, using the prescribed channels, had been denied, but he would try again, he decided, this time in person. It might work, though, if it didn’t, he couldn’t ask again. That was the unofficial rule, set in stone: two attempts, no more.
•
Riding the trolley back to central Warsaw, he wondered where he’d gone wrong, why he’d been reassigned, six months earlier, from a staff position in the Army of the Levant, headquartered in Beirut, to the embassy in Warsaw. The reason, he suspected, had most of all to do with Bruner, who wanted to move up, wanted to be at the center of power in Paris. This he’d managed to do, but they had to replace him, and replace him with someone that the Polish General Staff would find an appealing substitute.
