by Alan Furst
“Just note,” Jourdain said to the secretary, “that we should repeat the fact that the relation of the Polish air force to the Luftwaffe remains twenty-five to one in favor of the Germans.” Then he turned to the naval attaché and said, “Jean-Paul?”
As the naval attaché lit a cigarette and shuffled through his papers, there were two sharp knocks at the door, which opened to reveal one of the women who worked the embassy switchboard. “Colonel Mercier? May I speak with you for a moment?”
“Excuse me,” Mercier said. He went out into the corridor and closed the door behind him. The operator, a middle-aged French-woman, was, like many who worked at the embassy, the widow of an officer killed in the 1914 war. “A Monsieur Uhl has telephoned your apartment,” she said. “He left a number with your maid. I hope it’s correct, sir, she was very nervous.”
“Poor Wlada,” Mercier said. Now what? The operator handed him a slip of paper, and Mercier went up the stairs to his office. Looking in his drawer, he found a list of German telephone exchanges, dialed the switchboard, and asked for a foreign operator. When she came on the line he gave her the number. “Can you put it through right away?” he said, his Polish slow but correct.
“I can, sir, it’s quiet this afternoon.”
As Mercier waited, he stared out his window onto the square in front of the embassy. Beneath the bare branches of a chestnut tree, a man with a wagon was selling a sausage on a roll to a father with a small child. Far away, a telephone rang once. “Hello? Hello?” Uhl’s voice was tense and high.
“Yes, I’m here. Herr Uhl?”
“Hello? André?”
“Yes. What’s wrong?”
“I’m at the railway station.” Mercier could hear a train. “I had a problem yesterday, on the way back. In Glogau.”
“What problem?”
“I was being watched, on the train.”
“How do you know?”
“I—ah, I sensed it. Two businessmen, and a Gestapo man.”
“Did they question you? Search you?” Mercier had to make himself relax the grip of his hand on the phone.
“Oh no. I eluded them.”
“Really. How did you do that?”
“At the border kontrol, in Glogau station, I left the line and went back into the Warsaw train, climbed down between carriages, and crawled. Along the track. At the end of the train there is Glogau bridge, but I found a stairway that led down to the bank of the river. I walked back toward the city and took a taxi to the next station on the line, where I got on the local train to Breslau.”
“Good work,” Mercier said.
“What?”
“I said, good work.”
“It was very close. They almost had me, in the station.”
“Perhaps they did. Tell me, Herr Uhl, what happened this morning?”
“This morning? I went to the office.”
“Did someone question you? Were you confronted?”
“No. All was normal.”
“Then you’re in the clear. Did the people on the train say anything to you?”
“No. But they looked at me. They behaved, in a furtive manner.”
“I would doubt that German surveillance operatives would be furtive, Herr Uhl. Perhaps your imagination . . . misled you.”
“Well, maybe. But maybe not. In any event, I think I shouldn’t continue our meetings.”
“Oh, let’s not be scared off so easily. Believe me, if the Gestapo had any reason to suspect you, you wouldn’t be talking to me on the telephone. By the way, you mentioned a Gestapo man. How did you know that? I presume he was in uniform.”
“He wasn’t. He wore a leather coat. It was the way he looked.”
Mercier laughed. “The way he looked?”
“Well . . .”
“Your work is important, Herr Uhl, and we don’t lose people who help us; we can’t afford that. Would you like me to do some checking? To see if you’re being watched?”
After a silence, Uhl said, “You’re able to do that?”
“We are a resourceful service,” Mercier said. “We’re able to do all sorts of things. Why don’t I ask some people to see what’s going on; then I’ll send you a postal card, if everything is normal.”
“And what if it isn’t?”
“I’ll find a way to let you know. What time do you leave your office?”
“At six, generally.”
“Every night?”
“Yes, almost every night.”
“Then we’ll know how to find you. For the moment, I expect to see you in November. You recall the information I requested.”
“Yes.”
“Just remember, it’s in our interest to keep you safe, and it’s in your interest to continue your work.”
After a time, Uhl said, “Very well, we’ll see. If everything is—as it was. . . .”
“You did very well, Herr Uhl. If nothing else, you erred on the side of caution, and we admire that. Clearly, you have a gift for this sort of business.”
Uhl didn’t answer.
“On the fifteenth,” Mercier said, “we can talk it over, if you like. We want you safe and sound, do keep that in mind. And, after all, you do have other interests that bring you to Warsaw—would you simply remain in Germany?”
“No, but—”
“Then it’s settled. I’ll be waiting for you. Or, if there’s a problem, I’ll make sure you know about it.”
“All right,” Uhl said. He wasn’t happy but he would, Mercier thought, hold up. For a while, anyhow.
Mercier said goodby, hung up the phone, and wrote himself a note: Send Uhl a postcard. “All going well here, hope to see you soon, Aunt Frieda.” There was no possibility of finding out if Uhl was under Gestapo surveillance—maybe the Deuxième Bureau had spies inside the German security apparatus, but Uhl was not important enough for such an effort. The lie had been recommended at his training class and it had evidently worked the way they’d said it would. From the telephone call, Mercier sensed that Uhl had frightened himself.
He returned to the conference room, where the meeting continued, in a fog of cigarette smoke. “Everything all right?” Jourdain said, concern in his voice.
“A problem with an agent,” Mercier said.
“Not going to lose him, are we?”
“I don’t think so. I suspect he saw phantoms.”
“They like what he’s bringing, at deux bis,” Jourdain said. He referred to the Deuxième Bureau by its Paris address, 2 bis, rue de Tourville.
Mercier nodded. Perhaps they liked it at the General Staff as well—they never said, simply took what there was, then asked for more. Nevertheless, you didn’t want to lose agents, you’d find yourself transferred to some fever-ridden island in a distant ocean—far-flung barely described the remote outposts of the French colonial empire.
“I’m just finishing up,” the naval attaché said. “Baltic maneuvers off the Gdynia coast. A destroyer squadron.”
“They hit their targets?” Mercier said.
“Now and then. They almost hit the towing ship, but we all do that.”
Mercier finished his paperwork at six, then headed back to his apartment. He had the Renault dinner at eight-thirty, with Madame Dupin, the deputy director of protocol at the embassy. He sighed, inside, at the prospect of a long, boring, political dinner, where one said nothing much and could only hope it was the right nothing much. As for Madame Dupin, she was a noble soul, able to sparkle and chatter endlessly at social functions, an ability that some might find frivolous, until they joined the diplomatic service.
He appreciated her efforts, but the evening reminded him of what had been—of Annemarie, his wife, who’d died three years earlier. He recalled how, as they’d dressed for the evening, they would banter about the awful people they would meet, would have to entertain. That made it easier, theatre for husband and wife, shared misery and the instinct to find it some way, somehow, amusing.
The apartment provided for the military attac
hé was on the second floor of 22, aleja Ujazdowska—Ujazdowska avenue—the Champs-Elysées of Warsaw, though not so broad, a street of elegant five-story buildings, exteriors lavishly wrought with every sort of decorative stonework, set well back behind trees and shrubbery, which was fronted by ornamental iron palings that ran the length of the block. The French embassy had for a long time been on Ujazdowska but had moved, two years earlier, to Nowy Swiat. Still, it was only a fifteen-minute walk from his apartment, just enough to clear the fog of work from his mind.
The apartment came with a maid, Wlada, thin and nervous, who lived in the maid’s room, a cook, heavy and silent, who came every day but Sunday, and a driver, Marek, a tough old bird who’d served as a sergeant in Pilsudski’s Polish Legion and drove Mercier around in what he persisted in calling the “Biook,” in fact a 1936 S41 Buick sedan. The choice of the French and several other embassies, it was a heavily sprung eight-cylinder bear of an automobile, with a bulbous trunk, that negotiated Polish roads as long as you kept at least two spare tires with you, though nobody went anywhere in the spring and autumn rains—Poland’s seasonal barrier against German expansion.
Entering the apartment, Mercier glanced at the mail on the foyer table, then headed for his dressing room. This took time. The place was enormous; ten vast rooms with high ceilings, plaster medallions at every corner, and, thanks to the inordinately wealthy wife of a previous tenant, sumptuously furnished. Better to have private means if you were a diplomat of higher rank, the salary didn’t begin to pay for the necessary show. Thus the heavy floor-to-ceiling drapes at the windows, couches covered in damask, ebony drum tables, exotic oriental lamps with creamy silk shades, and a silver service to sink a small ship. In the apartment, Mercier felt forever a temporary guest. The rough, weary, mostly ancient furnishings of his country house in central France—dog hair everywhere, how did they still have coats?—the only style that felt, to him, comfortable.
In the dressing room, Wlada had laid out his best uniform, perfectly cleaned and ironed, and his kepi, visored military hat, which she’d ruthlessly brushed. The damn thing was expensive, but there was, in such matters, no interfering with Wlada. The more she thought it important, the harder she punished it. Opening the bottom drawer of his dresser, he brought out a square of blue felt with cardboard backing, which bore his service decorations, pinned in neat rows. There were a lot of them; twenty-eight years in the military brought medals. For the Renault crowd, much the best to go top class, so Mercier unpinned his Croix de Guerre and Virtuti Militari and set them on the dresser. A bath? No, it could wait. He took off his work uniform, shoes, and socks, put on a wool bathrobe, walked into the adjoining bedroom, and stretched out on a settee by the window. Twenty minutes, no more. Outside, the avenue was quiet under the streetlamps, a horse-drawn cab went clopping past, a dog barked, a couple spoke in gentle voices as they walked by. Peace. Another nineteenth-century evening on the Ujazdowska.
As he often did, Mercier thought of Annemarie as he drifted off. He was lonely for her, three years gone with influenza—thought at first, and for too long, to be a winter grippe. Despite all the time he’d spent away from her, they’d been a close couple, given to the small, continual affections of married life. They’d had two daughters, both now in their early twenties, one married to an archaeologist and living in Cairo, the other working at a museum in Copenhagen: adventurers like their father and, alas, like him, terribly independent. It was what he’d wished for, and what he got—so life went. Every now and then, a newsy letter, but it had been a long time since he’d seen either one of them. They were attractive, not beautiful, and moderately celestial, floating just above the daily world, not unlike Annemarie. Annemarie. Now and then, with a late supper for two planned, after the girls left home, they would make love at this time—that seductive hour between afternoon and night, l’heure bleu, in the French tradition, named for its deepening shadow. Sometimes she would . . .
From the study, several rooms away, the rattling bell of the telephone. He heard Wlada scurrying across the chestnut parquet, a breathless “Rezydencja panstwa Mercier,” a few more words of Polish, then the footsteps headed his way. “Colonel?” she said. “Are you awake?”
“Yes?”
“It is Madame Du-peen.”
“All right. I’m coming.”
He tied the belt of his bathrobe as he journeyed toward the study. “Madame Dupin?”
“Good evening, Colonel Mercier. Forgive me, please, for calling so late.”
“Of course, no problem.”
“I’m afraid there is, I’m unwell. Something”—she paused; how to say it?—“something I ate.”
“I am sorry. Do you need anything? I can send Marek to the pharmacy.”
“That is very kind of you, but no, thank you. What it means is that I can’t attend the dinner tonight.”
“It’s nothing to worry about, I can go alone.”
“Oh no, that won’t do at all. I’ve found a substitute, a friend of mine. She lives with some Russian, a journalist, but he won’t care. Anyhow, she’s agreed to go, my dear friend. Otherwise, an empty place, an unbalanced table, it simply can’t be done. Do you have something to write on?”
“A moment,” he said, then found a tablet and a pen on the antique desk. “Yes?”
She gave him a name, Anna Szarbek, and an address. “Your driver will know where it is,” she said.
“Just feel better, Madame Dupin, I’m sure we’ll manage.”
“You’ll like my friend,” she said. “She’s terribly bright.”
“I’m sure I will,” he said.
Promptly at eight, he climbed into the back of the “Biook” and gave Marek the address. “Yes,” Marek said, “I’ll find it.”
But it wasn’t so easy. Mumbling curses to himself, Marek worked back and forth through tiny streets north of the central city. Mercier had a street map—in his desk at the office, naturally. He looked at his watch, trying to keep it below the back of the front seat, but Marek caught him at it and mumbled louder. Finally, at twenty minutes past eight, they found the building. Now they would be late—which might, for some, be fashionable, but Mercier wasn’t fashionable.
The building was two stories high, and the janitor, when it suited him, answered his knock at the street door and swung an ill-tempered hand toward the staircase. On the second floor, two doors, and a powerful fragrance of boiled cabbage. He knocked at the first door, waited thirty seconds, then, as he knocked at the second door, the first one opened.
“Good evening,” Mercier said. “Madame Szarbek? I’m Madame Dupin’s friend, Lieutenant Colonel Mercier.”
“That’s me. Sorry to have kept you. Please, come inside.”
Mercier was immediately relieved—this was not to be an evening spent in his undependable Polish; her French was rapid and fluent, with the barest hitch of an accent at the edges, her voice slightly husky and rough. She was, he guessed, in her late thirties, and very striking: thick hair, the color called dirty blond, swept low across her forehead, then pinned up in back, and a face that suggested, somehow, sensuality—a slight downward curve of the nose, full-lipped mouth, pallid skin, sharp jawline, and deep green eyes, wary and restless, not quite the night animal, but close. For a formal evening, she wore a black silk dress with matching jacket, then, more her true style, added a dark red scarf wound around her throat, pendant earrings with green gemstones, and a cloud of strong perfume, more spice than sugar. For a moment she stared at him, her mouth set in a hesitant smile: will this do? Then said, “I’ll be ready right away,” led him into the apartment, and fled down the hall, calling out, “Please introduce yourselves.”
On the sofa, a burly man with gray hair curling out of the vee of his open shirt rose from a nest of newspapers. “Good evening, general,” he said with a grin and a meaty handshake. “I’m Maxim.” From the grin, Mercier could tell that Maxim knew he wasn’t a general, this was just his way of being lovable. They stood there for a moment, not comfor
table, then Anna Szarbek came hurrying out of the hallway, now clutching a small evening purse. “Are we awfully late?” she said.
“No, we’ll be fine,” Mercier said.
Anna kissed Maxim on the cheek and said something private by his ear.
“Not too late, general,” Maxim said, and winked at Mercier. Some dish, hey? Don’t get any ideas.
He followed her down the stairs—she was a little wobbly in very high heels, sliding one hand along the banister—and out onto the sidewalk. As Marek held the door open for Anna, he gave Mercier a conspiratorial lift of the eyebrows. “We’re going to the Europejski,” Mercier said, glancing at his watch.
That gesture was all Marek needed to see—the Buick took off with a squeal of the tires and went hurtling down the narrow street. Anna settled herself in the corner of the backseat, bent over to peer into her purse, brought out a slim tortoiseshell cigarette case, and offered it to Mercier. On the lid, a laughing Bacchus and two pink nymphs were wearing only a grapevine. “Do you smoke?” she said.
“I do, but not right now.”
She took out a cigarette, and Mercier lit it for her with a steel lighter. This she needed—took a deep draw, exhaled two long plumes of smoke from her nose, and sat back in the seat. “Marie didn’t tell me much,” she said, referring to Madame Dupin.
“It’s very kind of you, to do this on short notice.”
“For Saint Marie, anything. She does favors for everybody, so . . .”
“It’s a dinner given by the Polish General Staff for a delegation from the Renault company; they’ve come in from Paris. Then, after that, a nightclub.”
“A nightclub?”
“Yes, the Adria.”
“Very fancy. I’ve never been there.”
Mercier’s expression said that it was what it was. “A floor show, likely dancing.”
Her nod was grim, but determined—she would handle anything that came her way. “So, you’re at the embassy.”
“I am. The military attaché.”
“Yes, that’s what Marie said.” She knew what military attachés did—at least some secret intelligence work—but apparently took it for an inevitable part of life in foreign service.
