The Polish Officer (28 page)

“I’ve paced it more than once,” Jeanne-Marie said. “It is as suggested, about 650 by 250 yards.”

They walked its perimeter. “There were stumps, but I had our workmen haul them out with the plow horses.” Silently, on behalf of a descending parachutist, de Milja was grateful for her forethought. He saw also that somebody had moved big stones to one side of the field.

“How many people will you have?” de Milja asked.

“Four, perhaps. Six altogether.”

“You’ll need brushwood for your fires. It’s best to store it under canvas to keep it dry. Then the fires should be set in the shape of an arrow, giving wind direction.”

“Yes,” Jeanne-Marie said. “We know that.”

De Milja smiled at her. The mysterious foreigner who came from nowhere and told them things they already knew. She stood, holding her bicycle by the handlebars, in front of a huge French spring sky; a few strands of hair had escaped from the front of her kerchief and she brushed them back impatiently.

“Shall we have something before we go back?” Bonneau said.

Jeanne-Marie grinned to herself and nodded yes. She untied a cloth-wrapped packet from the back of her bicycle. They sat on the rim of the field—true to the suggested standard, Jeanne-Marie had located a slightly concave area—and ate bread and crumbly farm cheese and last fall’s apples, dried-out and sweet.

“Something must be done, and we hope it is soon,” Bonneau said. “The people here don’t like the Germans, but they are drifting. Pétain speaks on the radio and says that all this has happened to us because France was immoral and self-indulgent. A number of people believe that, others will do whatever makes them comfortable at that moment. One lately hears the word
attentisme—
the philosophy of waiting. Do nothing, we’ll see what happens next. This is dangerous for France, because here we don’t really live in a country, you know. We live in our houses with our families, that’s our true nationality, and what’s best is determined from that point of view.”

It was Jeanne-Marie who answered her brother. “The English will do what they can,” she said, a snap in her voice. “But not from any tender feeling for the French. We’re allies, not friends.”

“Again she’s right,” de Milja said.

A local train west, then to Nantes, then north on a series of locals.
Very, very careful now,
he told himself. Where he was going the Germans were sensitive, because they had a secret.

As the train rolled to a stop at each little town, de Milja could see he was in the country of Madame Roubier. Brittany. Tall redheads with fair, freckled skin. Sharp-eyed—not easily fooled. Often venal, because it was them against the world, had always been so, and this unending war was fought with wealth.

It was late afternoon when he reached the town of Vannes, down the coast of Brittany from L’Orient, one of the bomber fields used in the Luftwaffe campaign against Britain. North from Vannes was Brest—on the south shore of the widening English Channel, across from Plymouth, on the Cornish coast. No doubt about the bomber field, Vannes railroad station was full of German airmen, returning from leave or heading off to sinful Paris for ten days.

De Milja kept his eyes down. Cheap leather briefcase in hand, felt hat with brim turned down, well-worn blue suit. A provincial lawyer, perhaps, snuffling out a living from feuding heirs and stubborn property owners and the tax indiscretions of
petits commerçants.
He walked for a long time, toward the edge of town. No more Germans. Sidewalks that narrowed, then vanished. Old women with string bags, a few cats. The neighborhood darkened—buildings crumbling softly into genteel poverty, a grocery store with a sign on the boarded window: FERMÉ.

Finally, a
confiserie—
a candy shop, the miniature gold-foil packets of chocolates in the window covered with a layer of fine dust. A bell jangled above the door as he entered and a young girl stood to attention behind the counter. She was very plain, skin and hair the same washed-out color, and wore a tight sweater that was more hopeful than seductive. The smell of candied violets and burnt sugar was intense in the dark interior of the shop. It made de Milja feel slightly queasy.

“Mademoiselle Herault?” he asked the clerk.

“In back, Monsieur.” Her voice was tiny.

Mademoiselle Herault sat at a desk in the office. She was in her forties, he guessed. But older than her years. A hard face, lined and severe. As though she dealt in candy from contempt for human appetite, not a desire to sell the world something sweet. Or maybe it was the silent store, the trays of stale orange drops, a small business failing by slow, agonizing degrees.

He identified himself—
Guillaume
for this meeting, and her eyes searched his, to see if he could be trusted. She was, he thought, not a particularly attractive woman, but she had probably never lacked for lovers, being one of those women who understands that attraction hasn’t much to do with it.

“May I take a minute of your time?” he asked.

She looked at him a little sideways—minutes, hours, she had nothing but time. Very slowly she worked a Gauloise free of its pack, tapped one end against her thumbnail, held it in her mouth with thumb and forefinger, handed de Milja a box of matches and leaned toward him so he could light it. “Thank you,” she said.

She opened a drawer in the desk, searched through papers, found an unsealed envelope and handed it to him. “Here it is,” she said.

He took out what looked like a polite note, written in purple ink on bordered paper sold in stationery stores. His eyes ran along the lines, trying to decipher the penmanship. Then, when he realized what he had, he read it through again.

“This is—this is extremely important,” he said.

She nodded in a sort of vague agreement—
yes, so it seemed to her.
She drew on her Gauloise and blew a plume of smoke at the ceiling.

“Was there a reason you did so much? The occupation?”

“No,” she said. “I am not French,” she added.

“What then?”

“I’m a Pole, though I’ve lived here a long time.”

De Milja came close to responding in Polish. He wanted to—then raged at himself for being so stupid. Guillaume was Guillaume—nobody. “Herault?” he said.

She shrugged. “That was my father’s attempt to fit in.”

“Did he fit in?”

“No,” she said. They were silent for a moment. “I don’t think I’ll tell you any reasons,” she said. “For what I’ve done, that is. I don’t especially believe in reasons.”

De Milja ran his eyes back over the paper.
Kampfgeschwader 100, Pathfinder, Knickbein beam.
De Milja was stunned at the quality of what he had in hand. He’d gotten the woman’s name from Fedin—an old contact from the late ’30s, nothing very productive, but an address that placed her, quite by accident, on the front line of the German offensive against Britain. Fedin had made the initial contact, then a signal from Vannes reached Paris that meant
I have something for you.
But this was well beyond anything de Milja had expected.

“Please, Mademoiselle. I must ask you to tell me how you managed this.”

A ghost of a smile passed over the woman’s face. She found his urgency a little bit pleasing. She nodded her head toward the front of the shop. “Veronique,” she said.

“Who?”

“My little clerk.”

She almost laughed out loud, so stupid and lost did he look. Then, when she saw the mist clear, she said, “Yes, that.”

“By design?”

She made a face:
who could say?
Paused a moment, leaned closer, lowered her voice. “Ugly as sin, poor thing. But for everyone there is someone, and for poor Veronique there is poor Kurt. Eighteen, away from home for the first time, short, homely, with bad teeth and bad eyes. In his unit the lowest of the low: he helps the mechanics who fix the aircraft. I believe engine parts are washed in gasoline. Is that so?”

“Yes.”

“He does mostly that. Red hands the result. But he is a
conqueror,
Monsieur Whatever-you-call-yourself. And he has discovered, in this shapeless lump of a child,
le vrai passion.
He drives her, I assure you, to the very edge of sanity. No, beyond.”

“And in bed, he tells her things?”

“No, Monsieur. Men don’t tell women things in bed. Men tell women things when they are trying to get them into bed. To let women know how important they are. Once in bed, the time for telling things is over.”

“But Veronique continues.”

“Yes. She loves Kurt. He is her man, hers alone. National borders are here transcended. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“Of course they do chatter, in the way people do, and she tells me things—just to gossip, just to have something to say. They are innocent, Monsieur.”

De Milja nodded sympathetically.

“Someday, you might be asked to do something for Veronique.”

“What is that?”

“Well, national borders are never transcended. Love doesn’t conquer all. In Veronique’s mind, the Germans will be here for forty years. Should she wait until she’s fifty-nine to go on with life? Of course not. Unfortunately for her, I suspect the end of this war may come sooner than forty years. And then, the women who have made love with the enemy will not fare well. The people here who have collaborated silently,
skillfully,
the ones who talk but do nothing, they will take it out on the poor Veroniques of the world. And they can be very cruel. When this happens, perhaps I will find you, or somebody like you, and you will try to do something for poor Veronique.”

“How do you know these things?”

“I know. I’m a Pole—it came to me in my mother’s milk. Will you help?”

“If I can, I will,” he said. “In the meantime,
stop.
Don’t do anything—and don’t permit her to do anything—that could lead to exposure. The most important thing now is that nobody finds out what was discovered.”

It rained in Paris. Slowly, endlessly. The bare branches of the chestnut trees dripped water in the gray light. At five in the afternoon, Anton Stein stared out the window above his coal yard. A freight train moved slowly along the track. Its couplings rattled and banged as it maneuvered—stopped, jerked ahead a few feet, stopped, backed up. The board siding of the freight cars and the cast-iron wheels glistened in the rain.

On his desk, March earnings. They were doing well—Zimmer was implacable. All day long, in his clean gray smock, he tended the business. Spillage. Theft. Truck fuel. Suppliers’ invoices with added charges. Defaulting customers. Margin of profit, date of delivery. Anton Stein made money.

And Captain Alexander de Milja spent it.

Rental of the apartment on the rue A, where a W/T operator enciphered and transmitted, moving like a butterfly among a hundred different bands to elude the Funkabwehr technicians. Rental of the apartment on the rue B, where an alternate W/T operator was based. Rental of the villa in the suburb of C, where a wounded British pilot was in hiding. Not to mention the apartment on the avenue Hoche, each window dressed with jabot and festoon.

He was tired now. Spirit worn away by the tide. Clandestine war since September of 1939—it had gone on too long, there’d been too much of it.

He forced his eyes away from the freight cars, back to a sheet of cheap paper on the desk. Huysmanns’s desk. Scarred oak, burns on the edge where somebody had rested a cigarette, little drawers full of used rubber bands and thumbtacks and dried-out inkpads for stamps.

On the paper, in his own informal code, the first draft of a report to London: at the Luftwaffe base at Vannes was
Kampfgeschwader 100,
a unit of Pathfinders—pilots who flew along a radio beam, called a
Knickbein beam
because it had the shape of a dog leg. The job of these Pathfinders was to lead flights of bombers to the target, then drop incendiaries, to light fires for the guidance of the planes behind them.

What Veronique the shop clerk had found out was this: the pilots of
Kampfgeschwader 100
did not live on the base in barracks, they lived in various billets in the town of Vannes, and on the afternoon before a mission they traveled to the field by bus. All together, maybe thirty of them, slated to lead various night attacks against British targets. De Milja knew what happened next. He went to the movie theaters on the Champs-Élysées where they showed German newsreels—always with the lights on, because in darkness the French audience made rude noises—of the bombing raids. So he had seen the burning factories, and the bridges down in the rivers, and the firemen weeping with exhaustion.

All together, maybe thirty of them, traveled to the field by bus.

On the Route Nationale—the RN18—that traced the coast of Brittany: from Brest south to Quimper, L’Orient, then Vannes. The airfield was twelve miles from the outskirts of Vannes, and there were several points of interest along the way. A curve with a rock outcropping to the east, a grove of stunted beach pine to the west, between the road and the sea. Or perhaps the old fish cannery, abandoned in ’38, with rows of dark windows, the glass long ago broken out.

Block the road. A coal truck—somebody else’s coal truck—would do that nicely. You’d want six—no eight—operatives. Take the driver and the tires. Then you had leisure for the pilots. Fragmentation grenades in the windows, then someone with a carbine in the bus. Short range, multiple rounds.

Thirty Pathfinder pilots. All that training, experience, talent. Hard to replace. The ratio of bravado to skill was nearly one to one. Flying an aeroplane along a transmitted beam meant constant correction as you drifted and the signal tone faded. Flying at the apex of the attack meant searchlights and flak—you had to have a real demon in you to want to do that.

“Monsieur Stein?”

He looked up from the wood-flecked paper, initials and numbers, a curving line for a road, a rectangle for a blocking truck. Helene was holding a large leatherbound book. “Monsieur Zimmer asked that these be sent out today, Monsieur.” She left the book on Stein’s desk and returned to work.

Inside the leather cover were checks for him to sign—a typical practice in a French office. He made sure his pen had ink and went to work—
Anton Stein, Anton Stein.
The payees were coal mines up in Metz, mostly. He was permitted to buy what was left over after the Germans, paying with absurdly inflated currency, took what they wanted and shipped it east. Just after the New Year the Germans had returned the ashes of Napoleon’s son, L’Aiglon, to France. Thus the joke of the week: they take our coal and send us back ashes.