by Alan Furst
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 attaches 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 farmhouses, 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
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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 coun-
try'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
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pointed east to Cracow. Marek headed 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."
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"You made good time," Jozef said. "The next patrol comes
through at eleven-thirty-five."
"They're always prompt?" Mercier said.
"Like a clock," Jozef said.
"Dogs?"
"Sometimes. The last time I was out there I think they had them,
but they don't bark unless they smell something."
Mercier looked at his watch. "We ought to get moving," he said.
"You'll pass Rheinhart's place, about fifteen minutes north of
here. Better to swing wide around it. You understand?"
"Yes," Mercier said. "We'll be back in two hours. If we don't show
up, you'll have to do something with the car."
"We'll take care of it," Jozef said.
"Just be careful," the younger woman said.
When the lights of the farmhouse disappeared behind a hill, the night
was almost completely black, a thin slice of waning moon visible now
and then between shifting cloud. A sharp wind blew steadily from the
west and Mercier was cold for a time, but it was marshy
ground here
and hard going, so soon enough the effort warmed him up. He kept
the flashlight off--the German border patrol wasn't due for some
time, but you could never be sure. To Mercier, the night felt abandoned, cut off from the world, in deep silence but for the sigh of the
wind and, once, the cry of a night-hunting bird.
They kept their distance from the Rheinhart farm, a German
farm, then climbed a steep hill that led to the Polish wire. Mercier
had been shown the Polish defenses from the other side, an official
visit with an army captain as his guide. Not very deep: three lines
of barbed wire--tangled eight-foot widths of it--a few camouflaged
casemates, concrete pillboxes with firing slits. Death traps, he well
knew, designed to hold up an enemy for a few precious minutes.
Where the Polish wire ended at the hillside, they climbed to the other
side, bearing left, onto German soil.
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Mercier tapped Marek on the arm, Marek held his coat open, and
Mercier used the cover to run the flashlight beam over his map,
refreshing the memory work he'd done early that morning. The first
German wire was two hundred yards or so to the west, and they
headed directly for it. They slowed down, now, feeling their way, stopping every few minutes to freeze and concentrate on listening. Only
the wind. Once, as they resumed walking, Marek thought he heard
something and signaled for Mercier to stop. Mercier reached into his
pocket, feeling for the grip of his pistol. And Marek, he saw, did the
same thing. Voices? Footsteps? No, silence, then a grumble of distant
thunder far to the east. After a minute they moved again, and found
themselves at the German wire, a snarled mass of barbed concertina
rolls fixed to rusted iron stakes driven into the earth. Mercier and
Marek, using heavy wire cutters, worked their way through it, gingerly
holding the strands apart for each other until they were on the other
side. Thirty yards forward, a second line, which they negotiated as
they had the first.
A few yards beyond the wire, Mercier stumbled--the ground suddenly sank beneath him and he almost fell, catching himself with one
hand on the earth. Soft, loose soil. What the hell was this? By his side,
Marek was probing at the ground with his foot and Mercier, resisting
the urge to use the flashlight, got down on his knees and began feeling
around in the dirt, then digging with a cupped hand. Crawling ahead,
he dug again and this time, down a foot or so in the loose soil, his
hand encountered a rough edge of concrete, aggregate; he could feel
the pebbles in the hard cement. As he dug further, Marek came crawling up beside him and whispered by his ear, "What is it?"
Dragon's tooth, but Mercier couldn't say it in Polish. "Tank trap,"
he said.
"Covered over?"
"Yes, abandoned."
"Why?"
Mercier shook his head; no reason--or, rather, too many reasons.
They crawled forward, their knees sinking into the soft earth,
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until they reached solid ground, which made the tank trap much as all
the others Mercier had encountered: a ditch with steep sides about
twenty feet wide, with a row of sloped concrete bollards midway
across. If a tank commander didn't see it, his tank would slip over the
edge, tilted forward against the so-called dragon's teeth, unable to
move. Not an unexpected feature in border fortifications, but the Germans had built this, then filled it in, the disturbed soil settling with
rain and time.
And Mercier knew it was not on the map, which showed a third
line of wire. This they found a few minutes later and cut their way
through it. Just barely visible, about fifty yards ahead of them, was a
watchtower, a silhouette faint against the night sky. Suddenly, from
somewhere to the right of the tower, a light went on, its beam probing
the darkness, sweeping past them, then returning. By then, they were
both flat on the ground. From the direction of the light, a shout:
"Halt! " Then, in German, "Stand up!"
Mercier and Marek looked at each other. In Marek's hands, a
Radom automatic, aimed toward the voice, and the light, which now
went out. Stand up? Mercier thought. Surrender? A sheepish admis-
sion of who they were? Phone calls to the French embassy in Berlin?
As Marek watched, Mercier drew the pistol from his pocket and
braced it in the crook of his elbow. The light went on again, moving as
its bearer came toward them. It was Marek who fired first, but Mercier
was only an instant behind him, aiming at the light, the pistol bucking
twice in his hand. Then he rolled--fast--away from Marek, away
from the location of the shots. Out in the darkness, the light went off,
a voice said, "Ach, " then swore, and a responding volley snapped the
air above his head. Something stung the side of his face, and, when he
tried to aim again, the afterimages of the muzzle flares, orange lights,
floated before his eyes. He ran a hand over the skin below his temple
and peered at it; no blood, just dirt.
Silence. Mercier counted sixty seconds, seventy, ninety. The light
came back on, only for a second or two, aimed not at them but at the
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ground beneath it, then went off. Mercier thought he heard whispers,
and the faint sounds of people moving about. Was it possible they
were going to get away with this? Very cautiously, he began to slide
backward and Marek, when he saw what Mercier was doing, did the
same thing. Again they waited, three minutes, four. Then Mercier signaled to Marek: move again. Another ten yards, and they stopped
once more.
One last minute, then they rose to their feet and, crouched over,
went running back to Poland.
Mercier had planned to spend the night at a hotel in Katowice but
never gave it a second thought. When they reached the farm, they
climbed into the Buick and drove at speed, bumping and bouncing
over the rutted surface, turning the lights on only when they reached
the main road. Once they left Katowice and were back in the countryside, Marek said, "A close thing."
"Yes. We were lucky, I think."
"I wasn't going to let them take me, colonel."
Mercier nodded. He knew that Marek had been captured by the
Russians when he'd fought in the Polish Legion, under Pilsudski. Ten
hours only, but Marek never forgot what they did to him.
"There is one thing I want to ask you," Marek said. "Why did they
cover up their tank trap?"
"Maybe they changed their minds. Maybe it wasn't where they
wanted it. Maybe there's another one a few hundred yards north, who
can say, but that's the likely explanation. Or, if you wanted to think
another way, an army that's going to attack, with a tank force, will
get rid of the static defenses between them and the enemy border.
Because, then, they're in the way." Mer
cier's technical description
barely suggested what he feared. This was nothing less than preparation for war; a classic, telltale sign of planned aggression. The journalists could wring their hands from morning edition to night--War
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is coming! War is coming!--but what he'd found in the darkness
wasn't opinion, it was an abandoned tank trap, defense put aside, and
what came next was offense, attack, houses burning in the night.
Marek didn't want to believe it. After a moment he said, "They
are coming this way, colonel, that is what you think, isn't it. German
tanks, moving onto Polish soil."
"God knows, I don't. Sometimes governments prepare to act, then
change their minds. The wire was still up."
"You'll report it, colonel?"
"Yes, Marek, that's what I do."
They drove all night long, Mercier taking a turn at the wheel for a
few hours. East of Koluszki, Marek driving again, a tire blew out and
they had to stop and change it, the iron wrench freezing their hands.
The sky was turning light as they drove into Warsaw, and when
Mercier let himself into the apartment, Wlada heard him walking
around and, frightened of a possible intruder, called out, "Colonel?"
"Yes, Wlada, it's me."
She opened the door of her room off the kitchen. "You are home
early," she said. "Thank God."
"Yes," he said. "I am. Go back to sleep."
He left his automatic pistol on the desk, now it would have to be
cleaned again. Then, as he took off his field clothing, he thought
about the letter in the drawer of his desk at the embassy, a letter
requesting transfer. That would have to be torn up.
The abandoned tank trap had worked on him--it wasn't much, as
evidence, would mean nothing to the lords of the General Staff, but it
had hit him a certain way and he could not let go of it. Then too, he
thought, settling the Barbour on its hanger, he might, if he stayed in
Warsaw, see Anna Szarbek again. See her alone, somewhere. An afternoon together. Surely he wanted to, maybe she did too.
From the other side of the apartment, Wlada called out to him.
"Good night, colonel."
Yes, dear Wlada, I am home and safe. "Good night, Wlada. Sleep
well."
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