The Spies of Warsaw: A Novel Read online

  Mercier liked Hana Musser, a half-Czech, half-German woman of uncertain age, who, two years earlier, had fled the fulminous Nazi politics of the Sudetenland and settled in Warsaw, where she worked at whatever she could but found the economic life of the city more than difficult. She had fine skin and fine features, a mass of brass-colored hair drawn back in a clip, and wore a bulky, home-knit cardigan sweater of a dreadful pea-green shade. How Colonel Bruner had discovered her—to play the part of Countess Sczelenska—Mercier did not know, but he had his suspicions. Was she a prostitute? Never a true professional, he guessed, but perhaps a woman who, from time to time, might meet a man at a café, with some kind of gift to follow an afternoon spent in a hotel room. And, if the man had money, the affair might continue.

  As Mercier seated himself, she looked up, took her spectacles off, smiled at him, and said, “Good afternoon,” in German.

  “And to you,” Mercier said. “All goes well?”

  “Quite well, thank-you. And yourself?”

  “Not so bad,” Mercier said. A waiter appeared, Mercier ordered coffee. “May I get you something?”

  “Another chocolate, please.”

  When the waiter left, Mercier said, “We’ve made our usual deposit.”

  “Yes, I know, thank you, as always.”

  “How do you find your friend, these days?”

  “Much as usual. Herr Uhl is a very straightforward fellow. His 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, ‘Où le Dieu a vous semé, 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, André? 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 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, 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 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, 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 kontrol; 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, 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 André’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.

  “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 seated at a small table, another with an Alsatian shepherd on a braided leash. Three were in uniform, their holstered sidearms worn high, and two were civilians, standing so they could see a sheaf of papers on the table. A list.

  Uhl’s heart was pounding as he stepped down onto the platform. You have nothing to fear, he told himself. If they searched him they would find only a thousand zloty. So what? Everyone carried money. But they have a list. What if his name was on it? A few months earlier he’d seen it happen, right here, at Glogau station. A heavy man, with a red face, led quietly away, a guiding hand above his elbow. Now he saw the two businessmen; they were ahead of him on the line that led to the passport kontrol. One of them looked over his shoulder, then said something, something private, to his friend. Yes, he’s just back there, behind us. And then Uhl discovered the man in the black leather coat. He was not on the line, he was sitting on a bench by the wall of the station, hands in pockets, legs crossed, very much at ease. Because he did not have to go through passport kontrol, because he was one of them, a Gestapo man, who’d followed him down from Warsaw, making sure he didn’t get off the train. And now his job was done, work over for the day. Tomorrow, a new assignment. Uhl felt beads of sweat break out at his hairline, took off his hat, and wiped them away. Run. “Ach,” he said, to the man behind him in the line, “I have forgotten my valise.”

  He left the line and walked back toward the train, his briefcase clamped tightly beneath his arm. At the door to the train, where second-class passengers were gathering, waiting in a crowd to join the line, the conductor was smoking a cigarette. “Excuse me,” Uhl said, “but I have forgotten my suitcase.”

  No you haven’t. The conductor’s face showed perfectly what he knew: there was no suitcase. And Uhl saw it. So now my life ends, he thought. Then, quietly, he said, “Please.”

  The conductor shifted his eyes, looking over Uhl’s shoulder toward the SS troopers, the civilians, the flag, the dog, the list. His expression changed, and then he stepped aside, just enough to let Uhl pass. When he spoke, his voice was barely audible. “Ahh, fuck these people.” Uhl took a tentative step toward the iron stair that led up to the carriage. The conductor, still watching the Germans and their table, said, “Not yet.” Uhl felt a drop of sweat break free of his hatband and work its way down his forehead; he wanted to wipe it away but his arm wouldn’t move.

  “Now,” the conductor said.

  19 October, 3:30 P.M. The weekly intelligence meeting was held in the conference room of the chancery—the political section of the embassy—secured from public areas, away from the seekers of travel documents, replacements for lost passports, commercial licenses, and all other business that brought the civilian world to the building. The code cle
rks were in the basement—which they didn’t like, claiming the dampness was hard on their equipment—along with the mailroom that handled sealed embassy pouches, while Mercier’s office was on the top floor.

  The meeting was chaired by Jourdain, the second secretary and political officer—which meant he too scurried about the city to dark corners for secret contacts—and Mercier’s best friend at the embassy. Sandy-haired and sunny, in his mid-thirties, Jourdain was a third-generation diplomat—his father due to become ambassador to Singapore—with three young children in private academies in Warsaw. Across the table from Mercier was the air attaché, at one end the naval attaché, at the other, Jourdain’s secretary, who took shorthand notes, which Jourdain would turn into a report for the Quai d’Orsay, the foreign ministry in Paris.

  “Not much new,” the air attaché said. He was in his fifties, corpulent and sour-faced. “The production of the Pezetelkis is going full steam ahead.” Pezetelki was the nickname, taken from initials, of the PZT-24F, Poland’s best fighter plane, four years earlier the most advanced pursuit monoplane in Europe. “But the air force won’t get near them; that hasn’t changed either. For export only.”

  “The same orders?” Jourdain said.

  “Yes. Turkey, Greece, and Yugoslavia.”

  “They’ll regret that, one of these days,” the naval attaché said.

  The air attaché shrugged. “They’re trying to balance the budget, the country’s damn close to broke. So they sell what people will buy.”

  “I guess they know best,” said Jourdain, who clearly didn’t believe that at all.

  “Otherwise, very little new.” The air attaché studied his notes. “They had an accident, last Wednesday, over Okecie field. One of their P-Sevens clipped the tail of another. Both pilots safe, both planes badly banged up, one a loss—he parachuted—the other landed.” Again he shrugged. “So we can say”—the air attaché looked toward the secretary—“that their numbers are reduced by one, anyhow.”