The spies of warsaw (11 page)

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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6 4 * T H E S P I E S O F WA R S AW

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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H OT E L E U RO P E J S K I * 6 5

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 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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6 6 * T H E S P I E S O F WA R S AW

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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H OT E L E U RO P E J S K I * 6 7

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,