by Alan Furst
two hundred American dollars--some of his experts liked having dollars. The money to be paid in cash or deposited in any bank account,
in any name, that Uhl might suggest.
The word spy was never used, and Henri was very casual about
the whole business. Very common, such transactions, his German
counterparts did the same thing; everybody wanted to know what was
what, on the other side of the border. And, he should add, nobody got
caught, as long as they were discreet. What was done privately stayed
private. These days, he said, in such chaotic times, smart people
understood that their first loyalty was to themselves and their families.
The world of governments and shifty diplomats could go to hell, if it
wished, but Uhl was obviously a man who was shrewd enough to take
care of his own future. And, if he ever found the arrangement uncomfortable, well, that was that. So, think it over, there's no hurry, get back
in touch, or just forget you ever met me.
And the countess? Was she, perhaps, also an, umm, "expert"?
From Henri, a sophisticated laugh. "My dear fellow! Please! That
sort of thing, well, maybe in the movies."
So, at least the worm wasn't in on it.
Back at the Europejski--a visit to the new apartment lay still in
the future--the countess exceeded herself. Led him to a delight or two
that Uhl knew about but had never experienced; her turn to kneel on
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the carpet. Rapture. Another glass of champagne and further novelty.
In time he fell back on the pillow and gazed up at the ceiling, elated
and sore. And brave as a lion. He was a shrewd fellow--a single
exchange with Henri, and that thousand zloty would see the countess
through her difficulties for the next few months. But life never went
quite as planned, did it, because Henri, not nearly so cheerful as the
first time they'd met, insisted, really did insist, that the arrangement
continue.
And then, in August, instead of Henri, a tall Frenchman called
Andre, quiet and reserved, and much less pleased with himself, and
the work he did, than Henri. Wounded, Uhl guessed, in the Great War,
he leaned on a fine ebony stick, with a silver wolf's head for a grip.
At the Hotel Europejski, in the early evening of an autumn day, Herr
Edvard Uhl finished with his bath and dressed, in order to undress, in
what he hoped would be a little while. The room-service waiter had
delivered a bottle of champagne in a silver bucket, one small lamp was
lit, the drapes were drawn. Uhl moved one of them aside, enough to
see out the window, down to the entry of the hotel, where taxis pulled
up to the curb and the giant doorman swept the doors open with a
genteel bow as the passengers emerged. Fine folks indeed, an army
officer and his lavish girlfriend, a gentleman in top hat and tails, a
merry fellow with a beard and a monocle. Uhl liked this life very well,
this Warsaw life, his dream world away from the brown soot and
lumpy potatoes of Breslau. He would pay for that with a meeting in
the morning; then, home again.
Ah, here she was.
The Milanowek Tennis Club had been founded late one June night in
1937. Something of a lark, at that moment. "Let's have a tennis club!
Why not? The Milanowek Tennis Club--isn't it fabulous?" The village of Milanowek was a garden in a pine forest, twenty miles from
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Warsaw, famous for its resin-scented air--"mahogany air," the joke
went, because it was expensive to live there and breathe it--famous for
its glorious manor houses surrounded by English lawns, Greek statues, pools, and tennis courts. Famous as well for its residents, the
so-called "heart of the Polish nation," every sort of nobility in the
Alamanach de Gotha, every sort of wealthy Jewish merchant. If one's
driver happened to be unavailable, a narrow-gauge railway ran out
from the city, stopping first at the village of Podkowa. Podkowa was
the Polish word for horseshoe, which led the unknowing to visions of
a tiny ancient village, where a peasant blacksmith labored at his forge,
but they would soon enough learn that Podkowa had been designed, at
the turn of the century, by the English architect Arthur Howard, with
houses situated in the pattern of a horseshoe and a common garden at
the center.
The manor house--owned by Prince Kaz, formally Kazimierz,
and Princess Toni, Antowina--had three tennis courts, for the noble
Brosowicz couple, with family connections to various branches of the
Radziwills and Poniatowskis, didn't have one of anything. This taste
for variety, long a tradition on both sides of the family, included
manor houses--their other country estate had six miles of property
but lay far from Warsaw--as well as apartments in Paris and London
and vacation homes--the chalet in Saint Moritz, the palazzo in
Venice--and extended to servants, secretaries, horses, dogs, and lovers.
But for Prince Kaz and Princess Toni, the best thing in the world was
to have, wherever they happened to be at the moment, lots of friends.
The annual production of Christmas cards went on for days.
At the Milanowek house, their friends came to play tennis. The
entire nation was passionate for the game; in Poland, only a single golf
course was to be found but, following the re-emergence of the country,
there were tennis courts everywhere. And so they decided, late that
June night, to make it official. "It's the Milanowek Tennis Club now,"
they would tell their friends, who were honored to be included.
"Come and play whenever you like; if we're not here, Janusz will let
you in." What a good idea, the friends thought. They scheduled their
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matches by telephone and stopped by at all hours of the day and early
evening: the baron of this and the marchioness of that, the nice Jewish dentist and his clever wife, a general of the army and a captain of
industry, a socialist member of the Sejm, the Polish parliament, the
royalist Minister of Posts and Telegraph, various elegant young people who didn't do much of anything, and the newly arrived French
military attache, the dashing Colonel Mercier.
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 similar
ity was striking.
"Good try, Jean-Francois," 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,"
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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-Francois."
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-Francois 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 attache 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.
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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 cheva-
liere, 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 attache
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-Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 3/26/08 9:29 AM Page 15
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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 Drome, 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,
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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-Francois?"
"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."
