The Spies of Warsaw: A Novel Read online

  And for Mercier, it should have been a plum, a career victory. An appointment in Warsaw, to any French officer or diplomat, was considered an honor, for Poland and France had a special relationship, a long, steady history of political friendship. In the time of the French kings, the French and Polish royal families had intermarried, French had become, and remained, the polite language of the Polish aristocracy, and the Poles, especially Polish intellectuals, had been passionate for the ideals of the Enlightenment and the Revolution of 1789. Napoleon had supported the Polish quest to re-establish itself as a free nation, and French governments had, since the eighteenth century, welcomed Polish exiles and supported their struggle against partition.

  Thus, in the summer of 1920, after fighting broke out in the Ukraine between Polish army units and Ukrainian partisan bands, and the Red Army had attacked Polish forces around Kiev, it was France that came to Poland’s aid, in what had come to be known as the Russo-Polish War. In July, France sent a military mission to Poland, commanded by no less than one of the heroes of the Great War, General Maxime Weygand. The mission staff included Mercier’s fellow officer, more colleague than friend, Captain Charles de Gaulle—they had graduated from Saint-Cyr together with the class of 1912—and Mercier as well. Both had returned from German prison camps in 1918, after unsuccessful attempts to escape. Both had been decorated for service in the Great War. Now both went to Poland, in July of 1920, to serve as instructors to the Polish army officer corps.

  But, in mid-August, when the Red Army, having broken through Polish defense lines in the Ukraine, reached the outskirts of Warsaw, Mercier had become involved in the fighting. The Russians were poised for conquest, foreign diplomats had fled Warsaw, the Red Army was just a few miles east of the Vistula, and the Red Army was unstoppable. Captain Mercier was ordered to join a Polish cavalry squadron as an observer but had then, after the deaths of several officers and with the aid of an interpreter, taken command of the squadron. And so took part in the now-famous flank attack led by Marshal Pilsudski, cutting across the Red Army line of advance in what was later called “the Miracle of the Vistula.”

  At five in the afternoon, on the thirteenth of August, 1920, the final assault on Warsaw began in the town of Radzymin, fifteen miles east of the city. As Pilsudski’s counterattack was set in motion, the 207th Uhlan Regiment, with Mercier leading his squadron, was ordered to take the Radzymin railway station. A local fourteen-year-old was hauled up to sit behind a Uhlan’s saddle and guide them to the station. It was almost eight o’clock, but the summer evening light was just beginning to darken, and, when Mercier saw the station at the foot of a long, narrow street, he raised his revolver, waved it forward, and spurred his horse. The Uhlans shouted as they charged, people in the apartments above the street leaned out their windows and cheered, and the thunder of hooves galloping over cobblestones echoed off the sides of the buildings.

  As they rode down the street, the Uhlans began to fire at the station, and rifle rounds snapped past Mercier’s head. The answering Russian fire blew spurts of brick dust off building walls, glass showered onto the cobblestones, a horse went down, and the rider to Mercier’s left cried out, dropped his rifle, tumbled sideways, and was dragged by a stirrup until another rider grabbed the horse’s bridle.

  They poured out of the street at full gallop and then, at a call from Mercier’s interpreter, split left and right, as drivers ran from the Radzymin taxis, and passengers dropped their baggage and dove full length, huddling by the curb for protection. Only a small unit, a platoon or so, of Russian troops protected the station, and they were quickly overcome, one of them, an officer with a red star on his cap, speared with a Uhlan’s lance.

  For a few minutes, all was quiet. Mercier’s horse, flanks heaving, whickered as Mercier trotted him a little way up the track, just to see what he could see. Where was the Red Army? Somewhere in Radzymin, for now the first artillery shell landed in the square surrounding the station, a loud explosion, a column of black dirt blown into the air, a plane tree split in half. Mercier hauled his horse around and galloped back toward the station house. He saw the rest of the squadron leaving the square, headed for the cover of an adjoining street.

  The next thing he knew, he was on the ground, vision blurred, ears ringing, blood running from his knee, the horse galloping off with the rest of the squadron. For a time, he lay there; then a Uhlan and a shopkeeper ran through the shell bursts and carried him into a drygoods store. They set him down carefully on the counter, tore long strips of upholstery fabric from a bolt—cotton toile with lords and ladies, he would remember it as long as he lived—and managed to stop the bleeding.

  The following morning found him in a horse-drawn cart with other wounded Uhlans, heading back toward Warsaw on a road lined with Poles of every sort, who raised their caps as the wagon rolled past. Back in the city, he learned that Pilsudski’s daring gamble had been successful, the Red Army, in confusion, was in full flight back toward the Ukraine: thus, “the Miracle of the Vistula.” Though, in certain sectors of the Polish leadership, it was not considered a miracle at all. The Polish army had beaten the Russians, outmaneuvered them, and outfought them. In crisis, they’d been strong—strong enough to overcome a great power, and, therefore, strong enough to stand alone in Europe.

  A few months later, Captain Mercier and Captain de Gaulle were awarded Polish military honors, the Cross of Virtuti Militari.

  After that, the two careers did, for a time, continue to run parallel, as they served with French colonial forces in the Lebanon, fighting bandit groups, known as the Dandaches, in the Bekaa valley. Divergence came in the 1930s when de Gaulle, by then the most prestigious intellectual in France’s military—known, because of his books and monographs, as the “pen officer” of the French army—won assignment to teach at the École Supérieure de Guerre. He was, by then, well known in the military, and oft-quoted. For a number of memorable statements, particularly a line delivered during the Great War when, under sudden machine-gun fire, his fellow officers had thrown themselves to the ground, and de Gaulle called out, “Come, gentlemen, behave yourselves.”

  For Mercier there was no such notoriety, but he had continued, quite content, with a series of General Staff assignments in the Lebanon. Until, as a French officer decorated by both France and Poland, he’d been ordered, a perfect and appealing substitute for Colonel Emile Bruner, to serve as military attaché in Warsaw.

  At the central Warsaw tram stop, Mercier got off the trolley. The gray dawn had now given way to a gray morning, with a damp, cold wind, and Mercier’s knee hurt like hell. But in truth, he told himself, not unamused, the ache was in both knees, so not so much the condition of the wounded warrior as that of a tall man who, the previous evening, had been making love with a short woman in the shower.

  Mercier went first to his apartment, changed quickly into uniform, then walked back to the embassy, a handsome building on Nowy Swiat, a few doors from the British embassy, on a tree-lined square with a statue. In his office, he typed out a brief report of his contact with Uhl. Very terse: the date and time and location, the delivery of diagrams for the production of the new—1B—version of the Panzer tank, the payment made, establishment of the next meeting.

  Should he include the fact that Uhl was wriggling? No, nothing had really happened; surely they didn’t care, in Paris, to be bothered with such trivia. He had a long, careful look at the diagrams to make sure they were as described—there was potential here for real disaster; it had happened more than once, they’d told him; plans for a public lavatory or a design for a mechanical can opener—then gave the report, the diagrams, and the signed receipt to one of the embassy clerks for transmission back to the General Staff in Paris, with a copy of the report to the ambassador’s office and another for the safe that held his office files.

  Next he took a taxi—he had an embassy car and driver available to him, but he didn’t want to bother—out to the neighborhood of the Citadel, where the Polish General Sta
ff had its offices, to a small café where he was to meet with his Polish counterpart, Colonel Anton Vyborg. He was first to arrive. They came to this café not precisely for secrecy, rather for privacy—it was more comfortable to speak openly away from their respective offices. That was one reason, there was another.

  As soon as Mercier was seated at their usual table, the proprietor produced a large platter of ponczkis, a kind of small jelly dough-nut, dusted with granulated sugar, light and fluffy, to which Mercier was gravely addicted. The proprietor, chubby and smiling, in a well-spattered apron, produced also a silver carafe of coffee. It required all of Mercier’s aristocratic courtesy and diplomatic reserve to leave the warm, damnably fragrant ponczkis on the platter.

  Vyborg, thank heaven, was precisely on time, and together they set upon the pastries. There was something of the Baltic knight in Colonel Vyborg. In his forties, he was tall and well-built and thin-lipped, with webbed lines at the corners of eyes made to squint into blizzards, and stiff, colorless hair cut short in the cavalry officer fashion. He wore high leather boots, supple and dark, well rubbed with saddle soap—Mercier always caught a whiff of it in Vyborg’s presence, mixed with the smell of the little cigars he smoked.

  Vyborg was a senior officer in the intelligence service, the Oddzial II—the Deuxième Bureau, named in the French tradition—of the Polish Army General Staff, known as the Dwojka, which meant “the two.” Vyborg worked in Section IIb, where they dealt with Austria, Germany, and France; Section IIa occupied itself with the country’s primary enemies—thus the a—Russia, Lithuania, Byelorussia, and the Ukraine. Did Vyborg’s section run agents on French territory? Likely they did. Did France do the same thing? Mercier thought so, but was kept ignorant of such operations, at any rate officially ignorant, but it was more than probable that the French SR, the Service des Renseignements, the clandestine service of the Deuxième Bureau, did precisely that. Know your enemies, know your friends, avoid surprise at all costs. But the discovery of such operations, when they came to light, was always an unhappy moment. Allies were, for reasons of the heart more than the brain, supposed to trust each other. And when they demonstrably didn’t, it was as though the state of the human condition had slipped a notch.

  “Have the last one,” Vyborg said, refilling Mercier’s coffee cup.

  “For you, Anton.”

  “No, I must insist.”

  Gracefully, Mercier acceded to diplomacy.

  Breakfast over, Vyborg lit one of his miniature cigars, and Mercier a Mewa—a Seagull—one of the better Polish cigarettes.

  “So,” Vyborg said, “the Renault people will be here the day after tomorrow.” A delegation of executives and engineers was scheduled to visit Warsaw, a step in the process of selling Renault tanks to the Polish army.

  “Yes,” Mercier said, “we are ready for them. They’re bringing a senator.”

  “You’ll be at the dinner?”

  From Mercier, a rather grim smile: no escape.

  Their eyes met, they had in common a distaste for the obligatory social engagements required for their work. “It will be very boring,” Vyborg said. “In case you were concerned.”

  “I was counting on it.”

  “You’ll be accompanied?”

  Mercier nodded. With no wife or fiancée, he would be with the deputy director of protocol at the embassy, who served as table partner to Mercier, and one other bachelor diplomat, when the need arose. “You’ve met Madame Dupin?”

  “I’ve had the pleasure,” Vyborg said.

  “Where is it?”

  “We sent a note to your office,” Vyborg said, one eyebrow arched. Don’t you read your mail? “A private dining room at the Europejski,” Vyborg said. “They’re going to watch a field maneuver earlier in the day, so they’re sure to be exhausted, which will make the evening even more amusing. Then we’re going on to a nightclub—the Adria, of course—for dancing until dawn.”

  “I can’t wait,” Mercier said.

  “It’s obligatory. When the purchasing delegation went to Renault in Paris, they were taken to some naughty cancan place—they’re still talking about it—so . . .”

  “Will you buy anything?”

  “We shouldn’t, but there’s always a possibility. They want to sell us the R Thirty-five, which was demonstrated when the delegation visited the factory. This visit is supposed to close the deal.”

  “The R Thirty-five isn’t so bad.” Mercier, officially loyal to the national industries, had to say that and Vyborg knew it. “For infantry support.”

  Vyborg shrugged. “A thirty-seven-millimeter cannon, one machine gun. And they only go twelve miles an hour, with a range of eighty miles. The armour’s thick enough, but you don’t get much machine for the money. Truthfully, if it wasn’t French, we wouldn’t bother, but this is up to Smigly-Rydz’s office.” He meant the inspector general of the Polish army. “And they may have to bow to political pressure, so, potentially, our tank crews will die for the cancan.”

  “What do you have now? The last figure I heard was two hundred.”

  “That’s about right, unfortunately. The Russians have two thousand, best we know, and the same for the Germans. The Ursus factory is working on the Seven TP, our own model, under license from Vickers, but Ursus has to make farm tractors as well, and we need those. In the end, it’s always the same problem: money. You’ve been out to the Ursus factory?”

  “I was. At the end of the summer.”

  “Maybe that’s the answer, maybe not. It really depends on how much time we have until the next war starts.”

  Mercier finished his coffee, then refilled both their cups. “Hitler loves his tanks,” he said.

  “Yes, we heard that story. ‘These are wonderful! Make more of them!’ An infantry soldier in the war, he knows what the British did at Cambrai, a hundred tanks, all at once. The Germans broke and ran.”

  “Not like them.”

  “No, but they did that day.”

  For a moment, they were both in the past.

  “Who else is coming to the dinner?” Mercier said.

  “Well, they have a senator, so we’ll have somebody from the Sejm. Then a few people from the French community: the ubiquitous Monsieur Travas, the Pathé agency manager, is coming, with some gorgeous girlfriend, no doubt, and we’ve asked your ambassador, of course, but he’s declined. We may get the chargé d’affaires.”

  “Who’s the senator?”

  “Bernand? Bertrand? Something like that. I have it back at the office. One of the Popular Front politicians. Somebody from Beck’s office will talk with him, though we doubt he’ll have anything new to say.”

  Josef Beck was the Polish foreign minister, and Vyborg now referred to the issue that stood between him and Mercier, between France and Poland. Treaties aside, would France come to Poland’s aid if Poland were attacked?

  “Likely he won’t,” Mercier said.

  “We think not,” Vyborg agreed. “But we must try.”

  France’s political condition—strikes, communist pressure, a right wing divided into fascists and conservatives, failure to aid the Spanish Republic—continued to deteriorate. The most absurd views were held sacred, and there was too much deal-making, though all of this was seen by a tolerant world as a kind of amiable chaos—a British politician had said that a map of French political opinion would look like Einstein’s hair. But, to Mercier, it wasn’t so amusing. “You know what I think, Anton. If the worst happens, and it starts again, you must be prepared to stand alone. A map of Europe tells the story. It’s that, or alliance with Russia—which we favor but Poland will never do—or alliance with Germany, which we certainly don’t favor, and you won’t do that either.”

  “I know,” Vyborg said. “We all know.” He paused, then brightened. “But, nevertheless, we’ll see you at the Renault dinner.”

  “And then at the Adria.”

  “You will ask my wife to dance?”

  “I shall. And you, Madame Dupin.”

/>   “Naturally,” Vyborg said. “More coffee?”

  At eleven, Mercier was back at the embassy for the daily political meeting. The ambassador presided, touched on political events of the last twenty-four hours, and looked ahead to the Renault visit—special care here, don’t bother there. Then LeBeau, the chargé d’affaires and first officer, reported on unrest, potential anti-Jewish demonstrations in Danzig, and a border incident in Silesia. Then the ambassador moved on to the topic of electricity consumption at the embassy. How difficult was it, really, to turn off the lights when not in use?

  Mercier had a bowl of soup for lunch at a nearby restaurant; half a bowl—Polish chicken soup was rich and powerful, laden with heavy, twisted noodles—because the ponczkis had finished his appetite for the day. He did paperwork in his office until two-thirty, then returned to his apartment, changed from uniform back into civilian clothes—gray flannel trousers, dark wool jacket, subdued striped tie—and set out for his third café of the day. This time on Marszalkowska avenue, a lively and elegant street with trees, awnings, nightclubs, and smart shops.

  At midafternoon, the Café Cleo was a perfect sanctuary: marble tables, black-and-white tiled floor, a bow window looking out on the avenue, where a less-favored world hurried by. The small room was almost full; the customers chattered away, read the papers, played chess, drank foamy cups of hot chocolate with whipped cream; their dogs, mostly beagles, lay attentive under the tables, waiting for cake crumbs. In a corner at the back, Hana Musser, spectacles pushed down on her pert nose, worked at a crossword puzzle, lost in concentration, tapping her teeth with a pencil.