The spies of warsaw (3 page)

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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H OT E L E U RO P E J S K I * 1 3

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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1 4 * T H E S P I E S O F WA R S AW

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

H OT E L E U RO P E J S K I * 1 5

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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1 6 * T H E S P I E S O F WA R S AW

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."

"Oh, reasons," she said, who knew why anything happened.

"Do you sing in the shower?"

She turned her head so that he could see that she was smiling.

"Perhaps in a little while, I will."

The skin of her back was still lightly tanned from the summer sun,

then, below the curved line of her bathing suit, very white. He worked

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H OT E L E U RO P E J S K I * 1 7

up a creamy lather, put the soap in a dish on the wall, and slid his

hands up and down, sideways, round and round.

"Mmm," she said. Then, "Don't neglect my front, dear."

He re-soaped his hands and reached around her. As the water

drummed down on them, the white part of her, warm and slippery,

gradually turned a rosy pink. And, in time, she did sing, or something

like it, and, even though they were there for quite some time, the hot

water never ran out.

17 October, 5:15 a.m. Crossing the Vistula in a crowded trolley car,

Mercier leaned on a steel pole at the rear. He wore a battered hat, the

front of the brim low on his forehead, and a grimy overcoat, purchased from a used-clothing pushcart in the poor Jewish district. He

carried a cheap briefcase beneath his arm and looked, he thought, like

some lost soul sentenced to live in a Russian novel. The workers

packed inside the trolley, facing a long day in the Praga factories, were

grim-faced and silent, staring out the windows at the gray dawn and

the gray river below the railway bridge.

At the third stop in Praga, Mercier stepped down from the rear

platform, just past the Wedel candy factory, the smell of burned sugar

strong in the raw morning air. He walked the length of the factory,

crossed to a street of brick tenements, then on to a row of workshops,

machinery rattling and whining inside the clapboard sheds. At one of

them, the high doors had been rolled apart, and he could see dark

shapes shoveling coal into open furnaces, the fires flaring yellow and

orange.

He turned down an alley to a nameless little bar, open at dawn,

crowded with workers who needed a shot or two in order to get themselves into the factories. Here too it was silent. The men at the bar

drank off their shots, left a few groszy by their empty glasses, and

walked out. At a table on the opposite wall, Edvard Uhl, the engineer

from Breslau, sat stolidly with a coffee and a Polish newspaper, folded

on the table by his cup and saucer.

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1 8 * T H E S P I E S O F WA R S AW

Mercier sat across from him and said good morning. He spoke

German, badly and slowly, but he could manage. As the language of

France's traditional enemy, German had been a compulsory course at

Saint-Cyr.

Uhl looked up at him and nodded.

"All goes well with you," Mercier said. It wasn't precisely a question.

"Best I can expect."
Poor me.
He didn't much like the business

they did together. He was, Mercier could see it in his face, reluctant,

and frightened. Maybe life had gone better with Mercier's predecessor, "Henri," Emile Bruner, now a full colonel and Mercier's superior

at the General Staff, but he doubted it. "Considering what I must do,"

Uhl added.

Mercier shrugged. What did he care? For him, best to be cold and

formal at agent meetings--they had a commercial arrangement;

friendship was not required. "What have you brought?"

"We're retooling for the
Ausf B
." He meant the B version of the

Panzerkampfwagen 1,
the
Wehrmacht
's battle tank. "I have the first

diagrams for the new turret."

"What's different?"

"It's a new design, from the Krupp works; the turret will now be

made to rotate, three hundred and sixty degrees, a hand traverse operated by the gunner."

"And the armour?"

"The same. Thirteen millimeters on the sides, eight millimeters on

the top of the turret, six millimeters on the top and bottom of the hull.

But now the plates are to be face-hardened--that means carbon