The Polish Officer: A Novel Page 2

  “Or?”

  “Or come to work for us. Over on the west side of the building—at least that’s where we used to be. It’s no small decision, but time’s the one thing we don’t have. The city’s almost completely cut off, and by tomorrow there’ll be no getting out. The Germans won’t try to break in, they know they’ll pay in blood for that and they aren’t quite so brave as their reputation makes them out. They’ll continue to send the bomber flights, unopposed, and they’ll sit out there where we can’t get at them and shell the city. We’ll take it as long as we can, then we’ll sign something to get it stopped.”

  “And then?”

  “And then the war will begin.”

  A horse leaned over the gate of its stall and the colonel stopped to run his hand through its mane. “Wish I had an apple for you,” Vyborg said. “What about it, Captain, shall we shoot these beasts? Or let the Germans have them?”

  “Can they be hidden? In stables with cart horses, perhaps?”

  “It’s hard to hide valuable things from Germans, Captain. Very hard.”

  They walked in silence for a time. A flight of Heinkel bombers passed overhead; both officers looked up, then waited. The bombs fell on the southern part of the city, a noise like rapid peals of thunder, then the planes turned away, a few antiaircraft rounds burst well below and behind them, and the silence returned as the sound of engines faded.

  “Well?” Vyborg said.

  “The west side of the building, Colonel.”

  “You know the sorts of things that go on if the Germans get hold of people like us, Captain.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “A dossier has been prepared for you—we assumed that you would accept the offer. It will be delivered to your office when you return. It assigns a nom de guerre—we don’t want anyone to know who you are. It has also some memoranda written over the last forty-eight hours, you will want to review that for a nine-fifteen meeting in my office. Questions?”

  “No questions, sir.”

  “There’s a great deal of improvisation at the moment, but we’re not going into the chaos business anytime soon. We’re going to lose a war, not our minds. And not our souls.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  “Anything you want to say?”

  “With regard to my wife—”

  “Yes?”

  “She’s in a private clinic. In the countryside, near Tarnopol.”

  “An illness?”

  “She is—the doctor puts it that she has entered a private world.”

  Vyborg shook his head in sympathy and scowled at the idea of illness attacking people he knew.

  “Can she be rescued?”

  Vyborg thought it over. Senior intelligence officers became almost intuitive about possibility—some miracles could be done, some couldn’t. Once initiated, above a certain rank, you knew.

  “I’m sorry,” the colonel said.

  The captain inclined his head; he understood, it need not be further discussed. They walked in silence for a time, then the colonel said, “We’ll see you at nine-fifteen, then.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Officially, we’re glad to have you with us.” They shook hands. The captain saluted, the colonel returned the salute.

  A quarter moon, red with fire, over the Vilna station railyards.

  The yard supervisor wore a bandage over one eye, his suit and shirt had not been changed for days, days of crawling under freight cars, of floating soot and oily smoke, and his hands were trembling. He was ashamed of that, so had wedged them in his pockets as though he were a street-corner tough who whistled at girls.

  “This was our best,” he said sadly. Captain de Milja flicked the beam of his flashlight over a passenger car with its roof peeled back. A woman’s scarf, light enough to float in the wind, was snagged on a shard of iron. “Bolen Coachworks,” the supervisor said. “Leaded-glass lamps in the first-class compartments. Now look.”

  “What’s back there?” de Milja asked.

  “Nothing much. Just some old stock we pulled in from the local runs—the Pruszkow line, Wolomin.”

  Cinders crunched under their feet as they walked. Yard workers with iron bars and acetylene torches were trying to repair the track. There were showers of blue sparks and the smell of scorched metal as they cut through the twisted rail.

  “And this?”

  The supervisor shrugged. “We run little trains to the villages, on market days. This is what’s left of the Solchow local. It was caught by a bombing raid on Thursday, just past the power station. The engineer panicked, he had his fireman uncouple the engine and they made a run for Vilna station. Maybe he thought he’d be safe under the roof, though I can’t imagine why, because it’s a glass roof, or it used to be. When the all clear sounded, the engine had been blown to pieces but the rest of the train was just left sitting out there on the track, full of angry old farm ladies and crates of chickens.”

  De Milja and the supervisor climbed the steps into the coach. The captain’s flashlight lit up the aisle; wooden floorboards, buckled and gray with age, frayed wicker seats—once yellow, now brown—chicken feathers, a forgotten basket. From the other end of the car came a deep, heavy growl. What are you doing here? de Milja thought. “Come,” he said.

  There was a moment of silence, then another growl. This time it didn’t mean prepare to die—more like not yet.

  “Come here.” You know you have to.

  A huge head appeared in the aisle, thrust cautiously from a hiding place behind a collapsed seat. De Milja masked the flashlight beam and the dog came reluctantly, head down, to accept its punishment. To have deserved what had happened to it the last few days, it reasoned, it must have been very, very bad. De Milja went down on one knee and said, “Yes, it’s all right, it’s all right.”

  It was a male Tatra, a sheepdog related to the Great Pyrenees. De Milja sank his hands into the deep hair around the neck, gripped it hard and tugged the head toward him. The dog knew this game and twisted back against de Milja, but the man’s hands were too strong. Finally the dog butted his head against the captain’s chest, took a huge breath and sighed so deeply it was almost a growl.

  “Perhaps you could find some water,” de Milja said to the supervisor.

  His family had always had dogs, kept at the manor house of the estate in the Volhynia, in eastern Poland. They hunted with them, taking a wild boar every autumn in the great forest, a scene from a medieval tapestry. The Tatra was an off-white, like most mountain breeds, a preferred color that kept the shepherd from clubbing his own dog when they fought night-raiding wolves. De Milja put his face into the animal’s fur and inhaled the sweet smell.

  The yard supervisor returned, a bowl filled to the brim with milk held carefully in his hands. This was a small miracle, but “he must be hungry” was all he had to say about it.

  “What’s your name?” de Milja asked.

  “Koski.”

  “Can you keep a big dog, Mr. Koski?”

  The yard supervisor thought a moment, then shrugged and said, “I guess so.”

  “It will take some feeding.”

  “We’ll manage.”

  “And this kind of coach?” The captain nodded at it. “Have you got six or so?”

  “All you want.”

  “Same color. Yellow, with red around the windows.”

  Koski tried to conceal his reaction. The middle of a war, Germans at the outskirts of the city, and this man wanted “the same color.” Well, you did what you had to do. “If you can wait for daylight, we’ll freshen up the paint.”

  “No, it’s good just like that. We’ll need a coal tender, of course, and a locomotive. A freight locomotive.”

  Koski stared at his shoes. They had improvised, borrowed parts, kept running all sorts of stock that had no business running—but freight locomotives were a sore subject. Nobody had those. Well, he had one. Well and truly hidden. Was this the moment? “Six red-and-yellow coaches,” he said at last. “Tender,
freight locomotive. That it?”

  De Milja nodded. “In about, say, an hour.”

  Koski started to shout, something like can’t you see I’m doing the best I can? But a covert glance at de Milja changed his mind—he wasn’t someone you would say that to, much less shout it.

  De Milja looked to be in his late thirties, but there was something about him, some air of authority, that was much older than that. He had dark hair, cut short and cut very well, and a pale forehead that people noticed. Eyes the color—according to his wife—of a February sea, shifting somewhere between gray and green. His face was delicate, arrogant, hard; people said different things. In any event, he was a very serious man, that was obvious, with hands bigger than they ought to have been, and blunt fingers. He wore no insignia, just a brown raincoat over a gray wool sweater. There was a gun, somewhere. He stood, relaxed but faintly military, waiting for the yard supervisor to agree to make up his train in an hour. This man came, Koski thought, from the war, and when the war went away, if it ever did, so would he and all the others like him.

  The supervisor nodded yes, of course he could have his train. The dog stopped lapping at the bowl, looked up and whined, a drop of milk falling from his beard. A yellow flame burst from the hillside above the yards and the flat crump of an explosion followed. The brush burned for a few seconds, then the fire died out as smoke and dust drifted down the hill.

  Koski had flinched at the explosion, now he jammed his shaking hands deeper into his pockets. “Not much left to bomb here,” he said.

  “That wasn’t a bomb,” de Milja said. “It was a shell.”

  17 September, 3:50 A.M. Freight locomotive, coal tender, six passenger cars from a market-day local. The yard supervisor, the Tatra by his side, watched as it left the railyards. Then it crossed Praga, a workers’ suburb across the Vistula from Warsaw, and headed for the city on the single remaining railroad bridge. Captain de Milja stood in the cab of the locomotive and stared down into the black water as the train clattered across the ties.

  For a crew, Koski had done the best he could on short notice. A fireman, who would shovel coal into the steam engine’s furnace, and a conductor would be joining the train in Warsaw. The engineer, standing next to de Milja, had been, until that night, retired. He was a sour man, with a double chin and a lumpy nose, wearing an engineer’s cap, well oiled and grimed, and a pensioner’s blue cardigan sweater with white buttons.

  “Fucking shkopy,” he said, using the Polish word for Germans equivalent to the French boche. He peered upriver at the blackened skeleton of the Poniatowski Bridge. “I had all I wanted of them in ’17.”

  The Germans had marched into Warsaw in 1917, during the Great War. De Milja had been sixteen, about to enter university, and while his family had disliked the German entry into Poland, they’d seen one positive side to it: Russian occupiers driven back east where they belonged.

  The firebox of the locomotive glowed faintly in the dark, just enough light to jot down a few figures on the iron wall. He had to haul a total of 88,000 pounds: 360 people—43,000 pounds of them if you figured young and old, fat and thin, around 120 pounds a person. Sharing the train with 44,530 pounds of freight.

  So, 88,000 pounds equaled 44 tons. Figuring two tons to a normal freight car, a locomotive could easily pull twenty cars. His six passenger coaches would be heavy, but that didn’t matter—they had no suspension to speak of, they’d roll along if the locomotive could pull them.

  “What are you scribbling?” The irritation of an old man. To the engineer’s way of thinking, a locomotive cab wasn’t a place for writing.

  De Milja didn’t answer. He smeared the soft pencil jotting with his palm, put the stub of pencil back in his pocket. The sound of the wheels changed as the train came off the bridge and descended to a right-of-way cut below ground level and spanned by pedestrian and traffic bridges: a wasteland of tracks, signals, water towers, and switching stations. Was the 44,530 correct? He resisted the instinct to do the figures again. Seven hundred and twelve thousand ounces always made 44,530 pounds, which, divided into five-pound units, always made 8,906. It is mathematics, he told himself, it is always the same.

  “You said Dimek Street bridge?”

  “Yes.”

  The steam brake hissed and the train rolled to a stop. From a stairway that climbed the steep hillside to street level came a flashed signal. De Milja answered with his own flashlight. Then a long line of shadowy figures began to move down the stairs.

  17 September, 4:30 A.M. While the train was being loaded, the conductor and the fireman arrived and shook hands with the engineer. Efficiently, they uncoupled the locomotive and coal tender and used a switching spur to move them to the other end of the train, so it now pointed east.

  There were two people waiting for de Milja under the Dimek Street bridge: his former commander, a white-mustached major of impeccable manners and impeccable stupidity, serving out his time until retirement while his assistant did all the work, and de Milja’s former aide, Sublieutenant Nowak, who would serve as his adjutant on the journey south.

  The major shook de Milja’s hand hard, his voice taut with emotion. “I know you’ll do well,” he said. “As for me, I am returning to my unit. They are holding a line at the Bzura River.” It was a death sentence and they both knew it. “Good luck, sir,” de Milja said, and saluted formally. The major returned the salute and disappeared into a crowd of people on the train.

  Guards with machine guns had positioned themselves along the track, while a dozen carpenters pried up the floorboards of the railroad coaches and workers from the state treasury building installed the Polish National Bullion Reserve—$11,400,000 in five-pound gold ingots packed ten to a crate—in the ten-inch space below. Then, working quickly, the carpenters hammered the boards back into place.

  At which point Nowak came running, his face red with anger. “You had better see this,” he said. The carpenters were just finishing up. Nowak pointed at the shiny nailheads they’d hammered into the old gray wood.

  “Couldn’t you use the old nails?” de Milja said.

  The head carpenter shrugged.

  “Is there any lampblack?”

  “Lampblack! No, of course not. We’re carpenters, we don’t have such things.”

  17 September, 6:48 A.M. Gdansk station. The platforms and waiting rooms were jammed with people, every age, every class, babbling in at least seven languages, only one thing in common: they were too late. Unlucky or unwise didn’t matter, the trains had stopped. A stationmaster’s voice crackled through the public-address system and tried to convince them of that, but nobody was willing to believe it. In Poland, things happened in mysterious ways—authority itself was often struck speechless at life’s sudden turns.

  For instance:

  The stationmaster’s voice, “Please, ladies and gentlemen, I entreat you, there will be no more service . . .,” was slowly drowned out by the rumble of an approaching train. People surged to the edges of the platforms, police struggled to hold them back.

  Then the crowd fell silent, and stopped pushing.

  Then someone cheered. And then someone else. And then everybody. Poland had been brutally stabbed in the back, and so she bled, bled fiercely, but here was proof that she lived, and could strike back at those who tormented her.

  But that was only part of the miracle. Because, only a few minutes later, another train appeared. And if the armored train was an image of war, here was a phantom from the time of peace, a little six-car train headed south for—or so the signs on the sides of the coaches said—Pilava. The Pilava train! Only thirty miles south, but at least not in besieged Warsaw. Everybody had an aunt in Pilava, you went there on a Sunday afternoon and came home with half a ham wrapped in a cloth. Vladimir Herschensohn, pressed by the crowd against a marble column, felt his heart rise with joy. Somehow, from somewhere, a manifestation of normal existence: a train arrives in a station, passengers ascend, life goes on.

  But Mr. Herschensohn w
ould not be ascending. He needed to, the Germans would make quick work of him and he knew it. But God had made him small, and as the crowd surged hungrily toward the empty train he actually found himself moving—helped along by a curse here, an elbow there—away from the track. After a moment or two of this, all he wanted to do was stay near enough to watch the train leave, to send some part of his spirit away to safety.

  Watching from the cab of the locomotive, de Milja felt his stomach turn. The crowd was now a mob: if they got on this train, they would live. Babies howled, suitcases sprang open, men and women clawed and fought, policemen swung their batons. De Milja could hear the thuds, but he willed his face not to show what he felt and it didn’t. A huge, brawny peasant shoved an old woman out of his way and started to climb onto the coupling between the engine and the coal car. The fireman waited until his weight hung on his hands, then kicked him full force under the chin. His head flew up and he went tumbling backward into the crowd. “Pig,” the fireman said quietly, as though to himself.

  But, in the end, the ones who pushed to the front were the ones who got on.

  When the train was good and full, people packed into the cars, when it looked like a refugee train should look, de Milja raised his hand. Then something stopped him. Out in the crowd, his eye found a little peanut of a man in a long black overcoat, with a black homburg hat knocked awry. He was holding some sort of a case and an old-fashioned valise in one hand, and pressing a handkerchief to his bloody nose with the other. The policeman standing next to de Milja was red in the face and breathing hard. “Get me that man,” de Milja said, pointing.

  The policeman whistled through his teeth, a couple of colleagues joined him, and the little man was quickly retrieved, virtually carried through the crowd by the elbows and hoisted up to de Milja in the locomotive cab.

  “Better go,” the policeman said.

  De Milja signaled to the conductor, who swung himself up onto the train. The engineer worked his levers and blew a long blast on the whistle as the heavily laden train moved slowly out of Gdansk station.