by Alan Furst
The song ended, they returned to the table.
Driving back after midnight, Anna had another cigarette, and this time Mercier joined her. They were silent, having talked themselves out during the evening, simply sat and watched the streets go by, a few lights on in the darkened city. As the Buick rolled up to the street door, she said, “You needn’t see me upstairs.”
“You’re sure?” he said, reaching for the door handle. He assumed that fiancé Maxim would be up and waiting.
“I am. Thank you, colonel. An evening to remember.”
“It’s for me to thank you, Mademoiselle Szarbek.” And me to remember.
Marek opened the door. Anna left the car, then turned and waved goodby. When she was safely inside, they drove away.
23 October. In Glogau, a wet morning, a cold front had arrived with the dawn and strands of white mist rose from the river. In the center of the city, not far from the railroad bridge, a toy shop occupied the street floor of the brick building at 35 Heimerstrasse, its windows crowded with trains and dolls and soldiers. A local institution, the toy shop, it had stood there for years, closing only briefly, when the Jewish owner abruptly left the city, then reopening in a day or two, the glass in the windows replaced by the new owner, and the shop again selling toys as it always had.
The former owner, having prospered and bought the building, had installed his family on the second floor, in a large apartment of eight rooms. After he left, the furniture had been sold, and the apartment had become an office. It was now the Glogau station of the SD, the Sicherheitsdienst, the intelligence service of the SS, originally part of the security section of the early National Socialist party, now grown up to stand beside the Abwehr, the military intelligence section of the General Staff. The Nazi party, having come to power in 1933, required a service more responsive to its particular political objectives, so the SD became an official department, concerning itself with foreign counterintelligence, while its brother Gestapo functioned as the state security police. The Glogau office, an outstation of the SD Breslau office, worked against Poland and was staffed by two secretaries, two filing clerks, three lieutenants, and a supervisor, an SS Sturmbannführer—major—named August Voss, known by his underlings as Frogface.
Why? What was so froglike about him? Really, not that much. He did have pouchy cheeks and slightly bulging eyes, which stared out at the world from behind thick eyeglasses, but there was more, a certain predatory fury in the set of his mouth, as though he were eager to snap up a bug but could find no bugs in the water that flowed past his rock. Well, he found one every now and again, but never enough and, if he didn’t find more, he’d remain on this Glogau rock forever. In his youth, as an economics instructor in Dresden, he’d joined the ambitious young lawyers, engineers, and journalists in the fledgling Nazi party, which was determined, after a lost war, to raise the nation to supremacy in Europe. They joined the SS, the Black Order, pledged to secrecy, pledged to obedience, and to whatever violence and terror might be required to bring them to power. And, in time, it did.
For August Voss, that meant a position in the SD and, on a wet October morning in Glogau, news of a potential bug. His office door stood open, but his senior lieutenant, making sure of the knot in his sober tie—the SD, a secret organization, wore civilian clothing—knocked politely on the jamb.
“Yes?” Voss said. Born angry, August Voss, even a single word from his mouth threatened consequence.
“We are in receipt, sir, of a report from the Glogau police.”
“Which says?”
The lieutenant glanced over the form, making very sure he got it right. “Which says, that a woman from Glogau has observed suspicious behavior by a German citizen. On the Warsaw/Glogau Express.”
“What did he do?”
“Acted in a suspicious manner, not described, and possibly evaded the passport kontrol at Glogau station.”
Voss extended a hand and snapped his fingers. He read over the form and said, “It doesn’t say how. Just that one minute he was on the line, and the next he disappeared.”
“Yes, sir.”
Voss read it again. The lieutenant stood silent. In the quiet office, with only the clacking of typewriters and the hiss of the steam radiators, the sound of Voss drumming his fingers on the metal desktop was sharp and loud. “Mm,” he said. “The Gestapo has this?”
“No, sir. Only us.”
“Why?”
“Because the police supervisor is persuaded that, for him, it’s better so.”
From Voss, a faint tightening at the corners of the mouth, which the people around him had learned to understand as a smile. “Very good.” He paused, placed the report flat on his desk, and read it yet again. Perhaps next he will roll around on it, the lieutenant thought. “Let him know,” Voss said, “that we appreciate his good sense.”
“I will, sir.”
“And get her in here, this Frau Schimmel. She knows more than what’s written in this report.”
“Yes, sir. This afternoon, sir?”
“Now.”
“Yes, sir. A bulletin to the Glogau kontrol office?”
“No, not yet.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Dismissed, lieutenant.”
“Thank you, sir.”
The two lieutenants did not leave immediately; they first checked the registries—suspected communists, socialists, homosexuals, free-masons, and persons of interest—to make certain that Frau Schimmel’s name did not appear there. Then they drove to the shabbier part of Glogau: sad old three-story tenements from the last century.
Frau Schimmel, when she heard the knock on the door, an official knock, was in housedress and hairnet. A widow with grown children, she preserved her good dress by leaving it in the closet until it was time to go outside. She’d been in the midst of preparing breakfast for her dachshund—meat scraps, a dab of precious lard to improve the shine on the dog’s coat—when she heard the knock. She dropped what she was doing and hurried from the kitchen, her heart beating hard. It beat harder still when she opened the door, to reveal two young men in hats and coats, because they looked exactly like what they were. “Yes?”
“Frau Berta Schimmel?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Your identity papers, Frau Schimmel.”
She went to her purse and, hands trembling, retrieved the card.
The lieutenant handed it back to her and said, “We are from the security services, Frau Schimmel, you will please accompany us to our office.”
She now suspected this had to do with the report she’d made to the police, the police in the person of a fat, paternal sergeant at the Glogau police station, a report she’d been forced to make. Innocently enough, she’d mentioned the man on the train to a neighbor, who had first suggested, then insisted, in a delicately threatening way, that she inform the authorities. Well, now see what that had brought down on her head. The dog, at her ankles, whined for her breakfast. “Later, Schatzi,” she said. “Be good, now.” She knew these men were not going to stand there while she fed a dog. She threw her coat over her housedress and pulled the net off her hair—she looked frightful, she thought, but when men like these came to the door, one did what one was told.
A new Glogau, for Frau Schimmel, who’d lived there all her life, the wet streets seen from the backseat of a Grosser Mercedes automobile. She had to resist the urge to make conversation, wanting to persuade them that she was a good, decent citizen who obeyed every law, but she knew to keep her mouth shut. A few minutes later, the car rolled to a stop in front of the toy shop on Heimerstrasse. Then she was taken up to the second floor.
In the office, she perched on a chair by a secretary’s desk, and there she waited. The secretary was the youngest daughter of a local seamstress, and Frau Schimmel, occasionally employed for needle-work when the woman had too much to do, had met her more than once, but neither woman acknowledged the other. At last, she was led into another office, where one of the men who had arrested her�
��so she thought of it—sat behind a bare desk. He was almost immediately joined by a second man, a frightening man with heavy glasses, who drew a chair to a position just to one side and behind her, so that she couldn’t quite see him.
Questions, and more questions. She did her best to answer, her voice breathless with anxiety. “Speak up, Frau Schimmel,” said the man sitting behind her. First of all, who was she? Who had her husband been, what work had he done, and her children: where were they, what did they do? How long had she lived at her present address? And, before that, where? And before that? Next, what had she been doing in Warsaw? A visit to her sister, married to a German Pole, who she saw twice a year, the only times she traveled anywhere—her pension did not permit her more than that, and her sister helped with the money. So then, her Polish brother-in-law, what did he do? On and on it went.
Finally, after forty-five minutes, they took her through the train trip from Warsaw: the man who’d sat across from her, pale and fidgety. How he stood quickly and left the compartment, then how he’d tried to leave the train before the passport kontrol in Poland. There was something in his manner that made her uncomfortable; he was frightened, she thought, as though he had something to hide: looking around, watching the other passengers. Then, at Glogau station, she’d seen him join the line that led to the passport kontrol, and then, when she was almost at the desk, she turned around and couldn’t see him anywhere, he’d vanished. A day later, she’d informed the authorities at the police station.
If she’d expected them to be grateful, she was sadly disappointed. The man at the desk had no reaction whatsoever, and the man she couldn’t see was silent.
“Now tell us, Frau Schimmel, what did he look like, this nervous man on the Warsaw/Glogau Express?” She did her best—a rather ordinary man, she told them, his height and weight not unusual. They’d spoken briefly, she’d offered him a candy, and he’d declined politely, his German very much the local Silesian variety that everybody spoke. He had thinning hair, combed carefully over his head, a dark mustache, rather full, and a bulbous nose divided at the end. No, he wasn’t poor, and not rich either, from the way he dressed, perhaps a teacher, or a businessman. Next they took her back over it again, not once but twice, her interrogator rephrasing the questions, but the man on the train was the same. They might, he said, bring her in again, and, should she recall further details, it was her duty to get in touch with them; did she understand that? She did.
Finally, they let her go. She had a few groschen in her pocket, enough to take a tram back to her neighborhood. Safely home, she gave the dog her food, went to the kitchen cupboard, took down a bottle of potato schnapps, poured herself a little in a water glass, then a little more. Exhausted, she fell back on the couch, the dog clambering up to sit beside her—it had been a bad morning for both of them. “Poor Schatzi,” she said. The dog looked up and gave a single wag of its tail. “Your mama is such a goose, little girl, she talked too much. But never again, never again.” Another wag: here I am. “You’re a good girl, Schatzi. What if I hadn’t come home? What then?”
31 October. The last quarter of the waning moon, so it said on Mercier’s lunar calendar. It was just after eight in the morning, at the apartment on Ujazdowska, and very lively. Marek had arrived an hour earlier and was now reading his morning paper and chattering with Wlada and the silent cook. Mostly they ignored him, busy making sandwiches—ham and butter on thick slabs of fresh white bread from the bakery—boiling eggs until they were hard, baking a small egg-and-butter cake with raisins, all of it to be wrapped in brown paper and packed into a wicker basket, with six bottles of dark beer and a thermos of coffee.
Mercier was in the study, cleaning and oiling his service sidearm—a Le Français 9-millimeter Browning automatic, in looks not unlike the German Luger. When he was done, he loaded it carefully, then put the box of bullets in one pocket of his waxed Barbour field jacket and the pistol in the other. Did the flashlight work? Mercier switched it on, ran the beam up a silk drape, and decided to change the batteries. Next he retrieved a pair of lace-up boots from the dressing room, pulled them on over heavy wool socks, and laced them up tight. They felt good on his feet. He liked wearing them, and liked the Barbour as well, though he now wore such things rarely, since he no longer went hunting. He was invited now and then, to go after rogacz, the great stag of the Polish mountain forest, but always he declined, since he no longer wished to shoot anything.
He was also, but for a certain familiar tightness in the pit of the stomach, glad to get away from the city. He’d been busy, filing dispatches, writing reports, making contact with two of Bruner’s . . . well, one had to call them agents, both of whom worked in the armament industries. He learned all he needed to know from Vyborg and others, who were glad to keep him current. But it was traditional to talk to knowledgeable informants, and he suspected that Vyborg and the Dwojka knew exactly what he was doing and didn’t much care, since their attachés in France no doubt operated the same way.
So, for the past week, he’d been pretty much a prisoner of the office, though one afternoon, under a weak autumn sun, he’d worked in a set of tennis out in Milanowek. The foursome had included Princess Toni, as it happened, this time as opponent, but after the match they’d found themselves a moment for conversation. Warm and amiable, as always, with not the slightest suggestion that there had been an interlude in the guest bathroom. A man of the world, a woman of the world, a brief, pleasant adventure, all memory courteously erased. “We’re off to Paris next week, then Switzerland, but we’ll be back in the spring.” He said he envied her the Paris visit, say hello to the city for him. Of course she would.
In the study, Mercier opened his briefcase and took out a map, which he’d brought home from the office. A very technical map, in small scale, with elevations, streams, and local features, such as farm-houses, precisely rendered. With this, a military map, he had to be very careful. Produced by General Staff cartographers in Paris, these maps were sent to Warsaw in the diplomatic pouch to replace those received earlier, though they rarely changed. He slid the map into an inside pocket of his jacket, put the flashlight where he wouldn’t forget it, and walked into the kitchen. The cake had come out of the oven and was cooling on a rack, Marek looked up from his newspaper, laid it aside, and put on a heavy wool coat. “The Biook has a full tank, sir,” he said.
“Thank you, Marek,” Mercier said.
A few minutes later, with Marek carrying the wicker basket, they went downstairs, where Mercier climbed into the passenger seat of the car. He happened to glance up at the apartment and saw that Wlada was looking out the window, seeing them off. She knew where they were going, her face unsmiling and worried as she watched them drive away.
It took all day to drive the roads from Warsaw to Katowice, in Polish Silesia. Through Skierniewice, Koluszki, Radomsko, and Czestochowa, where the road ran past the monastery that held the Black Madonna, Poland’s most sacred ikon. Under a gray sky, the market towns and villages seemed dark to Mercier, as did the deserted fields of the countryside. Too much fighting, he thought, the whole country’s a battlefield. The land was the land, it grew in spring and died in autumn, but Mercier could not unlock it from its past. Marek, his strong, bald head thrust forward as he squinted at the road ahead of them, was silent, no doubt thinking about what he had to do that night.
This was Mercier’s second visit to the Silesian border fortifications, but Marek had done it at least twice with Bruner. He drove fast when the road was smooth, swung past battered old sedans, an occasional horse-drawn cart, now and then a slow truck. Sometimes the pavement was broken, with deep potholes, and they had to move at a crawl for a long time—it was either that or stop and change tires. At noon, in the shadows of an oak forest, Marek pulled off into the weeds by the side of the road and they each had a sandwich and a bottle of beer. They slowed down at the end of the afternoon, often on dirt roads, but, by dusk, they came to the crossroads where a sign pointed east to Cracow. Marek he
aded southwest, under a darkening sky.
By eight in the evening they were somewhere—only Marek knew exactly where—on the northern edge of Katowice, virtually on the German frontier. The border had been redrawn here, again and again, and Poles and Germans lived side by side. A man would rise from his bed in Poland, then go into his kitchen for breakfast in Germany; the line ran through factories and down the center of villages. On the outskirts of Katowice, they drove past coal mines and iron foundries, the tall stacks pouring black smoke into the sky, the air heavy with dust and the smell of burning coal.
Marek drove north for a time, then turned onto a deeply rutted dirt road, swearing under his breath as the car rocked and bucked, and the wheels spun on mud beneath puddled water. The lights of Katowice fell away behind them, and the road was closed in by tall reeds. The Buick worked its way up a long, gentle slope, then a farmhouse, with dim lights in the windows, appeared, and Marek stopped the car. With the contented grunt of a job completed, he shifted into neutral and turned off the ignition. Two dogs came bounding toward the car, big mastiff types, barking and circling, then going silent when a man came out of the house, adjusting his suspenders over his shoulders. He said a sharp word to the dogs and they lay down, panting, on their bellies.
“You remember Jozef,” Marek said.
Mercier did—Marek’s relative, or maybe his wife’s. He shook hands with the man, who had a hand like a board covered with sandpaper.
“Good to see you again. Come inside.”
They walked past a small pen with two sleeping pigs, then into the farmhouse, where a pair of women rose from the table, one of them adjusting an oil lamp to make the room brighter. “You’ll have something to drink, gentlemen?” said the other.
“No, thanks,” Marek said. “We can’t stay long.”
“You made good time,” Jozef said. “The next patrol comes through at eleven-thirty-five.”
