by Alan Furst
realistic. Suddenly, the girl squeaked with real terror. Had the trick
gone wrong? From the audience, a chorus of gasps. The director's wife
raised her hand to her mouth and said, "Good heavens!"
The magician returned to work, sawing away, while the assistant
raised her head and peered over the edge of the coffin. Finally, Marko
raised the saw, turned to the audience and then, the grand finale, separated the box. The audience applauded, and the magician wheeled
the two halves of his assistant offstage.
"False feet," Vyborg said.
"Or a second assistant, curled up in the other half," Anna said.
"And you'll notice," said the director's wife, triumphantly, "not a
speck of sawdust."
The magician was followed by a chanteuse, who sang romantic songs,
then three bearded acrobats in saggy tights who turned somersaults
through a fiery hoop. Each time they landed they shouted "Hup!"
and the Adria's floor shook. Then a trio--saxophone, drums, and
guitar--appeared and began to play dance music. Vyborg stood and
offered a hand to his wife, the director and the major followed his
example. Mercier was the last to stand. "Shall we?" he said to Anna,
his voice tentative, it wasn't really obligatory.
If I must. "I think we should."
A slow foxtrot. Mercier, stiff and mechanical, had never advanced
much beyond lessons taken as a ten-year-old, girls and boys in white
gloves. Anna was not much better, but they managed, going round and
round in their private square to the slow beat. Mercier, his arm circled
lightly about her, found her back firm, then soft above the hips. And
the way she moved, lithe and supple beneath the thin silk of her dress,
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more than interesting--his arm wanting, almost by itself, to tighten
around her waist. As she danced, she smiled up at him, her perfume
intense. Was the smile complicit? Knowing? Inviting? He wanted it to
be, and smiled back at her. Finally she said, returning to polite conversation, "That man from Renault is something of a bully."
"Titles and prerogatives aside, he's a merchant. Selling his wares."
"Still . . ." Anna said. The bridge of the song was slow. Anna's
hand, slightly damp, tightened on his. "You'd think he'd be more, oh,
subtle about it."
"Yes, but the major held his own," Mercier said. As they turned,
a woman behind Anna took a dramatic step backward, bumping
against her and forcing her forward, so that she and Mercier were
pressed together. "Sorry," she said, "I'm not very good at this." After
a moment, she moved away.
"Nor am I," he said.
She looked up at him; she did have lovely eyes, he thought, green
eyes. "Oh well," she said, laughing, "something I never expected, this
evening."
"Not so bad?" Mercier smiled hopefully.
"No," she said. "Not so bad."
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 fiance 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.
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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 Sturmbannfuhrer--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
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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?"
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"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, freemasons, 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?"
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"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 needlework 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
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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
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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 eggand-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 Francais 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,
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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
