The spies of warsaw (6 page)

journeys to Warsaw are the high points of his life. Otherwise, he

labors away, the good family man."

"And you, Hana?"

From Hana, a half smile and a certain sparkle in her eyes--she

always flirted with him, he never minded. "The Countess Sczelenska

never changes. She can be difficult, at times, but is captive to her

heart's desires." She laughed and said, "I rather like her, actually."

The waiter appeared with coffee and hot chocolate; someone,

probably the waiter himself, had added a particularly generous gobbet

of whipped cream atop the chocolate. Hana pressed her hands

together and said, "Oh my!" How not to reward such a waiter? She

spooned up almost all of the cream, then stirred in the rest.

"We are appreciative," Mercier said, "of what you do for us."

"Yes?" She liked the compliment. "I suppose there are legions of

us."

"No, countess, there's only you."

"Oh I bet," she said, teasing him. "Anyhow, I think I was born to

be a spy. Wouldn't you agree?"

"Born? I couldn't say. Perhaps more the times one lives in. Circumstance. There's a French saying, '
Ou le Dieu a vous seme, il faut

savoir fleurir.
' Let's see, 'Wherever God has planted you, you must

know how to flower,' " he said in German.

"That's good," she said.

"I've never forgotten it."

She paused, then said, "If you knew what came before, you'd see

that being a countess is much of an improvement. Have you ever been

hungry, Andre? Really hungry?"

"During the war, sometimes."

"But dinner was coming, sooner or later."

He nodded.

"So," she said. "Anyhow, I wanted to say, if Herr Uhl should--

well, if he goes away, or whatever happens to such people, perhaps I

Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 3/26/08 9:29 AM Page 32

3 2 * T H E S P I E S O F WA R S AW

could continue. Perhaps you would want something--something different."

"We might," he said. "One never knows the future."

"No," she said. "Probably it's better that way."

"Speaking of the future, your next meeting with Herr Uhl will

take place on the fifteenth of November. He doesn't say anything

about me, does he?"

"No, never. He comes to Warsaw on business."

Would she tell him if he did?

"In a week or two he will telephone," she said. "From the Breslau

railway station. That much he does tell me."

"A different kind of secret," Mercier said.

"Yes," she said. "The secret of a love affair." Again the smile, and

her eyes meeting his.

18 October, 4:20 p.m. On the 2:10 train from Warsaw, the first-class

compartment was full, but Herr Edvard Uhl had been early and taken

the seat by the window. The gray afternoon had at last produced a

slow rain over the October countryside, where narrow sandy roads led

away into the forest.

As the train clattered across central Poland, Uhl was not at ease.

He stared at the droplets sliding across the window, or at the brown

fields beyond, but his mind was too much occupied by going home,

going back to Breslau, to work and family. The unease was not unlike that of a schoolboy's Sunday night; the weekend teased you with

freedom, then the looming Monday morning took it away. The

woman in the seat across from him occupied herself with the consumption of an apple. She'd spread a newspaper over her lap, cut slices

with a paring knife, then chewed them, slowly, deliberately, and Uhl

couldn't wait for her to be done with the thing. The man sitting next

to her was German, he thought, with a long, gloomy Scandinavian

face, and wore a black leather coat, much favored by the Gestapo. But

that, Uhl told himself, was just nerves. The man stared out into space,

Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 3/26/08 9:29 AM Page 33

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

in a kind of traveler's trance, and, if he looked at Uhl, Uhl never

caught him at it.

The train stopped at Lodz, then at Kalisz, where it stood a long

time in the station, the locomotive's beat steady and slow. On the platform, the stationmaster stood by the first-class carriage and smoked a

cigarette until, at last, he drew a pocket watch from his vest and

waited as the second hand swept around the dial. Then, as he started

to raise his flag, two businessmen, both with briefcases, came trotting

along the platform and climbed aboard just as the stationmaster signaled to the engineer, and, with a jerk, the train began to move. The

two businessmen, one of them wiping the rain from his eyeglasses

with a handkerchief, came down the corridor and peered through the

window into Uhl's compartment. There was no room for them. They

took a moment, satisfying themselves that the compartment was full,

then went off to find seats elsewhere.

Uhl didn't like them.
Calm down,
he told himself,
think pleasant

thoughts.
His night with Countess Sczelenska. In detail. He'd woken

in the darkness and begun to touch her until, sleepily, with a soft, compliant sigh, she started to make love to him.
Make love.
Was she in

love with him? No, it was an "arrangement." But she did seem to enjoy

it, every sign he knew about said she did, and, as for himself, it was

better than anything else in his life. What if they ran away together?

This happened only in the movies, at least in his experience, but people surely did it, just not the people he knew. And then, if you ran

away, you had to run away
to
someplace. What place would that be?

Some years earlier, he had encountered an old school friend in

Breslau, who'd left Germany in the early 1930s and gone off to South

Africa, where he'd become, evidently, quite prosperous as the proprietor of a commercial laundry. "It's a fine country," his friend had

said. "The people, the Dutch and the English, are friendly." But, he

thought, would a countess, even a pretend countess, want to go to

such a place? He doubted it. He tried to imagine her there, in some little bungalow with a picket fence, cooking dinner. Baking a cake.

Uhl looked at his watch. Was the train slow today? He returned to

Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 3/26/08 9:29 AM Page 34

3 4 * T H E S P I E S O F WA R S AW

his reverie, soothing himself with daydreams of some sweet moment

in the future, happy and carefree in a far-off land. The man in the

black coat suddenly stood up--he was tall, with military posture--

unclicked the latch on the compartment door, and turned left down

the corridor. Left? The first-class WC was to the right--Uhl knew this;

he'd used it often on his trips between Breslau and Warsaw. So then,

why left? That led only to the second-class carriages, why would he go

there? Was there another WC down that way which, for some eccentric personal reason, he preferred? Uhl didn't know. He could, of

course, go and find out for himself, but that would mean following the

man down the corridor. This he didn't care to do. Why not? He didn't

care to, period.

So he waited. The train slowed for the town of Krotoszyn,

chugged past the small outdoor station. A group of passengers, stolid

country people, sat on a bench, surrounded by boxes and suitcases.

Waiting for some other train, a local train, to take them somewhere

else. Outside Krotoszyn, a cluster of small shacks came to the edge of

the railway. Uhl saw a dog in a window, watching the train go by, and

somebody had left shirts on a wash line; now they were wet. Where

was the man in the black coat? Were the two businessmen his friends?

Had he gone to visit them? Impulsively, Uhl stood up. "Excuse me," he

said, as the other passengers drew their feet in so he could pass. Outside the door, he saw that the corridor was empty. He turned left, the

sound of the wheels on the track deepened as the train crossed a railroad bridge over a river, then, on the other side, returned to its usual

pitch. The carriage swayed, they were picking up speed now, as Uhl

walked along the corridor. He was tempted to look in at each compartment, to see where the businessmen were, to see if the man in the

black coat had joined them, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. It

didn't feel right, to Uhl, to do something like that. He was now certain

that when he got off this train he would be arrested, beaten until he

confessed, and, then, hanged.

There was no WC at the end of the carriage. Only a door that

would open to the metal plate above the coupling, then another door,

Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 3/26/08 9:29 AM Page 35

H OT E L E U RO P E J S K I * 3 5

and a second-class carriage. Above the seats, arranged in rows divided

by an aisle, a haze of smoke. In the first seat, a man and a woman were

asleep; the woman's mouth was wide open, which made her face seem

worried and tense. As Uhl turned, he discovered that the first-class

conductor had come down the corridor behind him. Gesturing with

his thumb, back and forth above his shoulder, he said something in

Polish. Then, when he saw that Uhl didn't understand, he said in German, "It's back there, sir. What you're looking for."

"How long until we reach Leszno?"

The conductor looked at his watch. "About an hour, not much

more."

Uhl returned to the compartment. At Leszno, after Polish border

guards checked the first-class passports, the train would continue to

Glogau, where the passengers had to get off for German frontier
kon-

trol
; then he would change trains, for a local that went south to Breslau. Back in his compartment, Uhl kept looking at his watch.

Diagonally across from him, an empty seat. The man in the black coat

had not returned. Had the train stopped? No. He was simply somewhere else.

It was almost six when they reached the Polish border at Leszno.

Uhl decided to get off the train and wait for the next one, but the conductor had stationed himself to block the door. Broad and stocky, feet

spread wide, he stood like an official wall. "You must wait for the

passport officers, sir," he said. He wasn't polite. Did he think Uhl

wanted to run away? No, he knew that Uhl wanted to run away. Six

days a week he worked on this train, what hadn't he seen? Fugitives,

certainly, who'd lost their nerve and couldn't face the authorities.

"Of course," Uhl said, returning to his compartment.

What a fool he was! He was an ordinary man, not cut out for a life

like this. He'd been born to put on his carpet slippers after dinner, to

sit in his easy chair, read his newspaper, and listen to music on the

radio. In the compartment, the other passengers were restive. They

didn't speak but shifted about, cleared their throats, touched their

faces. And there they sat, as twenty minutes crawled by. Then, at last,

Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 3/26/08 9:29 AM Page 36

3 6 * T H E S P I E S O F WA R S AW

at the end of the car, the sound of boots on the steel platform, a little

joke, a laugh. The two officers entered the compartment, took each

passport in turn, glanced at the owner, found the proper page, and

stamped it:
Odjazd Polska
--
18 Pazdziernik 1937.

Well, that wasn't so bad. The passengers relaxed. The woman

across from Uhl searched in her purse, found a hard candy, unwrapped

it, and popped it in her mouth--so much for the Polish frontier! Then

she noticed that Uhl was watching her. "Would you care for a candy?"

she said.

"No, thank you."

"Sometimes, the motion of the train . . ." she said. There was

sympathy in her eyes.

Did he look ill? What did she see, in his face? He turned away and

stared out the window. The train had left the lights of Leszno; outside

it was dark, outside it was Germany. Now what Uhl saw in the window was his own reflection, but if he pressed his forehead against the

cold glass he could just make out a forest, a one-street village, a black

car, shiny in the rain, waiting at the lowered bar of a railway crossing. What if, he wondered, the next time he went to Warsaw, he simply

didn't show up for Andre's meeting? What would they do? Would they

betray him? Or just let him go? The former, he thought. He was

trapped, and they would not set him free; the world didn't work that

way, not their world. His mind was working like a machine gone wild;

fantasies of escape, fantasies of capture, a dozen alibis, all of them

absurd, the possibility that he was afraid of shadows, that none of it

was real.

"Glo-gau!"

The conductor's voice was loud in the corridor. Then, from further away, "Glogau!"

The train rumbled through the outlying districts of the city, then

slowed for the bridge that crossed the river Oder, a long span of

arches, the current churning white as it curled around the stone block.

An ancient border, no matter where the diplomats drew their lines,

"east of the Oder" meant Slavic Europe, the other Europe.

Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 3/26/08 9:29 AM Page 37

H OT E L E U RO P E J S K I * 3 7

"All out for Glogau."

The passport
kontrol
was set up at the door to the station,

beneath a large swastika flag. Uhl counted five men, one of them