The Polish Officer

THE POLISH OFFICER

In Poland, on the night of 11 September 1939, Wehrmacht scout and commando units—elements of Kuechler’s Third Army Corps—moved silently around the defenses of Novy Dvor, crossed the Vistula over the partly demolished Jablonka Bridge, and attempted to capture the Warsaw Telephone Exchange at the northern edge of the city. Meeting unexpected, and stubborn, resistance, they retreated along Sowacki Street and established positions on the roof and in the lobby of the Hotel Franconia, called for dive-bomber attacks on the exchange building, and settled in to wait for the light of dawn.

Mr. Felix Malek, proprietor of the Franconia, put on his best blue suit, and, accompanied by a room-service waiter, personally served cognac to the German soldiers at their mortar and machine-gun positions. He then descended to the wine cellar, opened the concealed door to an underground passage originally dug during the Prussian attack of 1795, hurried down Sowacki Street to the telephone exchange, and asked to see “the gentleman in charge.”

He was taken up a marble staircase to the director’s office on the fifth floor and there, beneath a somber portrait of the director—pincenez and brushed whiskers—presented to the officer in command, a captain. The captain was an excellent listener, and the questions he asked inspired Mr. Malek to talk for a long time. Arms, unit size, insignia, the location of positions—he was surprised at how much he knew.

When he was done, they gave him tea. He asked if he might remain at the exchange, it would be an honor to fight the Germans. No, they said, perhaps another day. So Mr. Malek made his way through the night to his sister’s apartment in the Ochota district. “And what,” she asked, “were they like?”

Mr. Malek thought a moment. “Educated,” he said. “Quite the better class of people.”

Mr. Malek had not been thirty years an innkeeper for nothing: the defenders of the Warsaw Telephone Exchange, hastily recruited amidst the chaos of the German invasion, were officers of Polish Military Intelligence, known, in imitation of the French custom, as the Deuxième Bureau. The Breda machine gun at the casement window was served by a lieutenant from the cryptographic service, a pair of spectacles folded carefully in his breast pocket. The spidery fellow reloading ammunition belts was, in vocational life, a connoisseur of the senior civil service of the U.S.S.R., while the commander of the machine gun, feet propped on the tripod, was Lieutenant Karlinski, heavy and pink, who in normal times concerned himself with the analysis of Baltic shipping.

The officer in charge, Captain Alexander de Milja, was professionally a cartographer; first a mapmaker, later assistant director of the bureau’s Geographical Section. But Poland was at war—no, Poland had lost her war, and it was clear to the captain that nobody was going to be assistant director of anything for a long time to come.

Still, you couldn’t just stop fighting. Captain de Milja stood at the open window; the night air, cool and damp, felt especially good on his hands. Idiot! He’d grabbed the overheated barrel of the machine gun to change it during the attack, and now he had red stripes on his palms that hurt like hell.

4:20 a.m. He swept the façade of the hotel with his binoculars, tried— based on the proprietor’s intelligence—counting up floors to focus on certain rooms, but the Germans had the windows shut and all he could see was black glass. In Sowacki Square, a burned-out trolley, and the body of a Wehrmacht trooper, like a bundle of rags accidentally left in a doorway, weapon and ammunition long gone. To somebody’s attic. De Milja let the binoculars hang on their strap and stared out into the city.

A refinery had been set on fire; a tower of heavy smoke rolled majestically into the sky and the clouds glowed a faint orange. A machine gun tapped in the distance, a plane droned overhead, artillery rumbled across the river. War—fire and smoke—had made autumn come early, dead leaves rattled along the cobblestones and caught in the iron drain covers.

Captain de Milja was a soldier, he knew he didn’t have long to live. And, in truth, he didn’t care. He was not in love with life. One or two things had to be taken care of, then matters could run their course.

The director’s telephone was, naturally, of the very latest style; black, shiny, Bakelite plastic. De Milja dialed the military operator he had installed in the basement.

“Sir?”

“Sergeant, have you tried Tarnopol again?”

“Can’t get through, sir. I’ve been up to Wilno, and down to Zakopane, just about every routing there is, but the whole region’s down. We’re pretty sure the lines have been cut, sir.”

“You’ll keep trying.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you, Sergeant.”

He replaced the receiver carefully on its cradle. He had wanted to

say good-bye to his wife.

The Wehrmacht assault team got its air support at dawn; three Focke-Wulf 189s diving out of the clouds, engines screaming, cannon firing. But there was more drama than destruction; the 189 carried only one bomb. On the fifth floor of the telephone exchange, Lieutenant Karlinski swept the Breda across the sky and hammered off belt after belt of 7.35 ammunition. Grand streams of tracer, pale in the early light, showered up into the clouds, while hot casings ejected onto the director’s Persian carpet and the office smelled like smoldering wool—until a bullet fired from the ballroom of the Hotel Franconia hit Karlinski in the collarbone and he collapsed back onto the floor and died of shock.

The lieutenant from the cryptographic service took over, while Captain de Milja steadied the tripod with his burning hands and the Russian bureaucracy expert fed belts into the gun. But by then the Focke-Wulfs had run dry of ammunition and headed back to Germany. At which point the telephone rang and somebody on the first floor, voice flat and controlled, informed de Milja that the building was on fire.

For a moment he went blank, the solution much too obvious. Then he said, “Call the fire department.” Which they did and which, on 12 September, worked quite well because the city’s water mains hadn’t yet been destroyed. The firemen ran their hoses into the building on the side away from the fighting and pumped high-pressure streams on the flames, putting out the fire and, as water sluiced down into the switching stations, shutting down every telephone in Warsaw.

The Wehrmacht attack, from doorway to doorway up Sowacki Street, faltered, then collapsed. The support fire, machine-gun and mortar, from the roof of the hotel lasted less than a minute, then the positions were abandoned. Just before dawn de Milja had sent sniper teams to the roofs of adjacent buildings, and when the fighting started they’d knocked down first a mortar man, then an officer. It was improvised— the snipers were armed with hunting weapons and policemen’s automatic pistols—but it worked.

De Milja watched through binoculars as an analyst from the economic intelligence section—the captain thought he specialized in feed grains—a man in his fifties wearing suspenders and a shirt turned up at the sleeves, suddenly appeared at a parapet on the roof of an apartment building and fired both barrels of an old shotgun, the sort of thing one found in the back halls of country houses, along with leather game bags and warped tennis rackets.

The sniper broke the shotgun and withdrew the empty cartridges. Smoke seeped from the barrels as he thrust new shells into the breech. Get down, the captain thought. He saw two German troopers at an upper window, bringing their rifles to bear. Down. The sniper lurched backward, his face showed a moment of pain. But he kept his balance, braced one foot against the parapet and fired both barrels. His shoulder jerked with the recoil, then he fell to his knees, shaking his head grimly at whatever was going on inside him.

The Wehrmacht units retreated minutes later, trying to break through to German lines after dark. Most never made it, victims of small bands of soldiers, farmers, teenagers—Poles. And those who got as far as the Jablonka Bridge found that, on the second try, demolition had been complete. The ones who couldn’t swim were found on the bank the following morning.

16 September, 5:40 p.m. Military Intelligence headquarters, Savka barracks. Order 3135-c: With exception of special documents identified by department directors, all files to be destroyed by 1800 hours.

Captain de Milja watched, motionless, one foot on a chair, as this work was done, as the department clerks burned eight thousand maps. Watched, apparently, without feeling. Perhaps he didn’t care, or cared too much, or had gone off wherever he went when life was too cruel or too stupid. Whatever the truth, his eyes were cold, he could not be read.

The clerks had built a pinewood fire in the great hall, in a fireplace of heroic proportions with the date 1736 carved in the capstone, a fireplace built to roast spitted boar for a cavalry squadron. But this was a clerks’ fire, it smoked and sputtered, and the maps, printed on linen and mounted on wooden rollers, did not burn well.

The office wit had always claimed that the department’s chief clerk suffered from Talpidia, mole-face, a condition encountered in particularly subterranean bureaucracies. The man had been, certainly, a fierce obstructionist—everything had to be signed, and signed, and signed some more. Now, as his clerks ran by him with armloads of maps, he just seemed lost, poked dispiritedly at the ashes with a broom handle, the flames’ reflections flickering on his eyeglasses.

Drawer 4088: Istanbul by street. Istanbul harbor with wharf and warehouse numbers. Surveyor’s elevations of Üsküdar with shore batteries in scale. Bosphorus with depths indicated. Black Sea coast: coves, inlets, bridges, roads. Sea of Marmara coast: coves, inlets, bridges, roads.

In the fire.

Drawer 4098: Timber company surveys, 1935–1938; streams, logging paths, old and new growth trees, drainage, road access, river access. For forests in Poland, Byelorussia, and the Ukraine.

“That series aside, please,” de Milja said.

The clerk, startled, whirled and stared, then did as he was ordered. The timber surveys were stacked neatly atop maps, drawn in fine detail, of the Polish railway system.

16 September, 7:15 p.m. A message was brought by a young ensign, who saluted and stood stiffly at attention while the captain read it. Colonel Anton Vyborg requested his presence, in fifteen minutes, at the guardhouse by the east gate; another officer had been sent to supervise the destruction of the files. The captain initialed the message carefully, then made sure he was on time.

They walked in the stables of the cavalry barracks, added to the Savka fortress when the Tenth Polish Hussars rode with Bonaparte in the Napoleonic Wars. The indoor riding ring—a floor of raked dirt below ax-hewn beams—was by tradition the regimental champ d’honneur; not just pistols at thirty paces, but duels on horseback with cavalry sabers. Beyond the riding ring, the horse barns. The horses stamped their hooves and whickered softly as the officers approached. The air smelled good to de Milja; manure and straw, autumn evening and Vyborg’s cigar. Not the smell of burning buildings, not the smell of burning paper. A cloud of gnats hung in the still air, the light fading slowly from dusk into darkness.

There was something of the Baltic knight in Colonel Vyborg. In his forties, he was tall and lean 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. His job was to direct the work of intelligence officers—usually but not always military attachés in foreign postings—who operated secret agents.

“Have one of these,” Vyborg said.

Vyborg lit the captain’s small cigar, then spoke quietly as they walked. “As of tonight, our situation is this: there are fifty-two German divisions in Poland, about a million and a half soldiers, led by thousands of tanks. Our air force was blown up on the ground the first morning. Our allies, France and England, have declared war, and made gestures—of course, we had hoped for more. America is neutral, and disinterested. So, as usual, we find ourselves alone. Worse, Stalin has forty divisions on the eastern border and all our intelligence indicates an attack within hours. Meanwhile, we have half a million men in uniform—or, rather, had. Our communications have broken down, but we know of a hundred thousand casualties and a hundred thousand taken prisoner. Probably it’s worse than that. I suppose our view of the immediate future is implicit in the fact that we are burning the files. But it’s not the first time, and this is Poland, and, for us at least, all is not necessarily lost. You agree?”

“I do, sir.”

“Good. We want to offer you a job, but I’m to emphasize that you have a choice. You can go out to one of the regular combat divisions— we’re going to make a stand at the Bzura River, and, in addition, some units are going to try and hold out in the Pripet Marshes in the eastern provinces. The nation is defeated, but the idea of the nation mustn’t be. So, if that’s what you want to do, to die on the battlefield, I won’t stop you.”

“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. “Leadedglass 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-andyellow 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.

A war train. It had started raining, and water glistened on the iron plates in the twilight of the high-roofed station. The voice of the engine was deep and rhythmic, like a drum, and machine-gun barrels thrust through firing ports traversed the platform. This was a Russian-style armored train, a Bolshevik weapon, a peasant killer—it meant burnt villages and weeping women and everybody in Gdansk station knew it. The train, too heavy for its engine, moved at a crawl, so the crowd could see the faces, cold and attentive, of the antiaircraft gunners in their sand-bagged nests on the roofs of the cars.

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 would 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.

“Thank you,” said the little man. He was somewhere in his forties, de Milja thought, with the face of a Jewish imp. “I am Vladimir Herschensohn.” He extended his hand, and de Milja shook it. Herschensohn saw that de Milja was staring at his battered violin case. “I am,” he added, “the principal violinist of the Polish National Symphony Orchestra.”

De Milja inclined his head in acknowledgment.

“So,” Herschensohn said. “We are going to Pilava.” He had to raise his voice above the chuff of the locomotive, but he managed a tone of great politeness.

“South of there,” was all de Milja said.

At the 9:15 meeting with Colonel Vyborg, de Milja had brought up the issue: what to tell the passengers. “What you like, when you like, you decide,” Vyborg had said.

Vyborg’s room had been crowded—people sitting on desks, on the floor, everywhere. De Milja knew most of them, and what they had in common was a certain ruthless competence. Suddenly the days of office politics, family connections, the well-fed wink, were over. Now the issue was survival, and these officers, like de Milja, found themselves given command and assigned to emergency operations.

The agenda of the meeting was long and difficult and devoted to a single topic: the dispersion to safety of the national wealth. War cost money and Poland meant to keep fighting. And there wasn’t that much. A country like Great Britain had a national wealth of two hundred million dollars, but Poland had only been alive as an independent nation since 1918—this time around—and owned barely a tenth of that.

Stocks and bonds and letters of deposit on foreign banks were going to leave the port of Gdynia on a Danish passenger liner. British pounds, French francs, and American dollars were to be flown out at night by one of the last remaining air-force transports, while millions of Polish zlotys and German reichsmarks were being buried in secret vaults in Warsaw—they would be needed there. Senior code and cipher experts, the cream of Polish intelligence, had already left the country. And it was de Milja’s job to take out the gold reserve, carrying it by train to Romania, where another group would move it on to Paris, the time-honored host to Polish governments-in-exile.

From Gdansk station they traveled slowly through the central districts of the city, where crews were filling bomb craters and repairing rail by the light of fires in oil drums. They crossed the railroad bridge back into Praga, then turned south on the eastern bank of the Vistula. Soon the city was behind them, and the track left the river and curved gently southeast, toward the city of Lublin.

The conductor who’d gotten on the train at the Dimek Street bridge was a man of old-fashioned manners and grave demeanor, with a droopy mustache, a conductor’s hat one size too large, and a limp from wounds received when his train was dive-bombed in the first hours of the war. When he’d reported to de Milja at the bridge, he had stood at attention and produced from his belt a 9 mm Parabellum pistol—a 1914 cannon—and informed de Milja that he’d fought the Bolsheviks in 1921, and was prepared to send a significant number of Germans straight to hell if he got the opportunity.

As the train chugged through the Polish countryside, the conductor went from car to car and made a little speech. “Ladies and gentlemen, your attention, please. Soon we will be stopping at Pilava; those who wish to get off the train are invited to do so. However, this train will not be returning to Warsaw, it is going all the way to Lvov, with brief stops at Lublin and Tomaszow. The military situation in the south is unclear, but the railroad will take you as far as you wish to travel. Passage is without charge. Thank you.”

From the last car, de Milja watched the crowd carefully. But the reaction was subdued: a number of family conferences conducted in urgent whispers, an avalanche of questions that God himself, let alone a train conductor, couldn’t have answered, and more than a little head shaking and grim smiling at the bizarre twists and turns that life now seemed to take. The Polish people, de Milja realized, had already absorbed the first shock of war and dislocation; now it was a question of survival; ingenuity, improvisation, and the will to live through catastrophe and see the other side of it. So when the train stopped at Pilava, only a few people got off. The farther from Warsaw the better—what consensus there was among the passengers seemed to follow that line of reasoning.

For a time, the countryside itself proved them right. South of Pilava there was no war, only a rainy September morning, a strip of pale sky on the horizon, harvested fields, birch groves, and tiny streams. The air smelled of damp earth and the coming October. The leaves a little dry now, and rustling in the wind.

De Milja’s mother was the Countess Ostrowa, and her brothers, known always as “the Ostrow uncles,” had taken it upon themselves to teach him about life; about dogs and horses and guns, servants and mistresses. They were from another time—a vanished age, his father said—but his mother adored them and they lived hard, drunken, brutal, happy lives and never bothered to notice they were in the wrong century.

His father was an aristocrat of another sort: second son of a family occupied for generations with polite commerce, senior professor of economics at Jagiello university. He was an arid man, tall and spare, who had been old all his life and who, in his heart, didn’t really think very much of the human mammal. The vaguely noble name de Milja, pronounced de Milya, he shooed away with his hand, admitting there was a village in Silesia, some forty miles from where the family originated, called Milja, but the aristocratic formation he ascribed to “some Austro-Hungarian nonsense my grandfather meddled with” and would never say any more about it. Exiled to the top floor of the family house in Warsaw, he lived by the light of a green-glass lamp amid piles of German periodicals and stacks of woody paper covered with algebraic equations rendered in fountain pen.

So de Milja’s world, from its earliest days, had a cold north and a hot south, and he spent his time going back and forth; as a boy, as a young man, maybe, he thought, forever. The uncles laughing and roaring downstairs, throwing chicken bones in the fire, grabbing the maids’ bottoms, and passing out on the sofas with their boots on the pillows. Up two flights, a family of storks nested among the chimneys on the opposite roof and his father explained spiders and thunder.

They’d married de Milja off when he was nineteen. The families had known each other forever, he and Helena were introduced, left alone, and encouraged to fall in love. She probably saw the wisdom of all this much more clearly than he did—gazed at his belt buckle, kissed him with swollen lips and a hand on his jaw, and he was hers. Two weeks before the wedding, his favorite Ostrow uncle had taken him into a disused parlor, the furniture covered with sheets, where they fortified themselves with Armagnac, and his uncle—scarlet face, shaved head, glorious cavalry mustaches—had given him a premarital lovemaking lesson with the aid of a dressmaker’s dummy. “You’re not a bull, dammit!” he’d bellowed. “You don’t mount her when she’s at the kitchen stove.”

In the event, the problem did not arise: she never bent over to get the bread out of the oven because she never put it in—that was done by a series of country girls charitably called maids, more than one of whom had flipped the back of her skirt at him.

Over time, Helena changed. At first she would flirt, touch him accidentally with her breasts, and hold him between the legs with both hands. But something happened, she would only make love in the dark, sometimes cried, sometimes stopped. He learned to work his way through her defenses, but in the process discovered what she was defending. He began to realize that the membrane that separated her from the world was too thin, that she could not tolerate life.

She’d gotten pregnant, then lost the baby during an influenza epidemic in the winter of 1925. That was the end. In the deepest part of himself he’d known it, known it the day it happened. For three years, everyone pretended that everything would be all right, but when little fires were started in the house she had to go to the doctors and they prescribed a stay at a private clinic near Tarnopol “for a few weeks.”

Absence from the world cured her. He didn’t say that back in Warsaw, but it was true. Visiting once a month, bouquet in hand, he could feel the calm she’d found. In fact she pitied him, having to live amid anger and meanness. In good weather they walked in the forest. She, wrapped in a shawl, said little, lived in a self-evident world—there was nothing to explain. Once in a great while she would reach over and take his hand, her way of saying thank you.

He woke suddenly, snapping his head erect just as his chin grazed his chest. He stood braced against the doorway of the last coach, track falling away through rolling fields, wheels in a steady clatter. When had he slept? Not for a long time.

He cleared his throat. Sublieutenant Nowak was pointedly looking elsewhere—no commanding officer of his, de Milja realized, would ever be seen to drift off.

“Coming into Deblin, Captain.”

De Milja nodded. Nowak was too young—fresh-faced and eager. Out of uniform, in his Sunday suit, he looked like a student. “Map?”

Nowak unfolded it. Deblin was a river town, where the Wieprz flowed east into the Vistula. The route south continued into Pulawy, Krasnystaw, Zamosc, Tomaszow. Crossed the river Tanew into the Ukrainian districts of Poland at Rava-Russkaya. Then the major city of Lvov, down to Stryj, a sweep around the eastern tip of German-occupied Czechoslovakia—known as Little Ukraine—into Uzhgorod, and finally across the border into the Romanian town of Sighet in the Carpathian Mountains.

Four hundred and fifty miles, more or less. With the locomotive making a steady thirty-five miles an hour, about fourteen hours. Nowak heard the airplanes at the same time as he did, and together they looked up into the clouds. A flight of Heinkel bombers, in V formation, headed a little east of due north. That meant they’d been working on one of the industrial cities in the south, maybe Radom or Kielce, and were on their way home, bomb bays hopefully empty, to an airfield in East Prussia, probably Rastenburg.

“Nothing for you down here,” de Milja said quietly.

He’d done the best he could: it was just a little train, yellow coaches with red borders on the windows and a locomotive puffing through the wheat fields. Pastoral, harmless.

The Heinkels droned on. Below and behind them, a fighter escort of ME-109s. The pilots were bored. Sneak attacks on Polish airfields had blown up the opposition on the first day—and stolen their war. Now their job had little to do with skill or daring. They were nursemaids. From the wing position, a fighter plane sideslipped away from the formation, swooped down a sharp angle in a long, steep dive, flattened out in perfect strafing attitude, and fired its 20 mm cannon into the annoying little train chugging along below as though it hadn’t a care in the world. The pilot had just broken off the attack, soaring up through the smoke of the locomotive’s stack, when the radio crackled furiously and the flight leader gave a short, sharp order. The plane slipped back into formation, maintaining rigid spacing and perfect airspeed discipline all the way home to East Prussia.

The engineer remembered his orders and followed them: slowed down, rolled to a stop. Flight excites hunting dogs and fighter pilots, nothing standing still interests them for very long.

De Milja called out to Nowak as he swung off the platform: “Go through the cars, get the dead and wounded out, see if there’s anybody who can help.”

He ran along the track, then climbed into the cab of the locomotive. A column of steam was hissing from a hole in the firebox, the engineer was kneeling by the side of the fireman, who was lying on his back, his face the color of wood ash, a pale green shadow like a bruise already settled on his cheekbones. De Milja cursed to himself when he saw it.

The engineer was breathing hard; de Milja saw his chest rise and fall in the old cardigan. He went down on one knee and put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “That was done well,” he said. Then: “You’re all right.” More an order than a question, the of course unvoiced but clear.

The engineer pressed his lips together and shook his head—very close to tears. “My sister-in-law’s husband,” he said. “My wife said not to ask him.”

De Milja nodded in sympathy. He understood, patted the man’s shoulder twice, hard, before he took his hand away. The engineer said, “She—,” but there was nothing more. It was quiet in the fields, the only sound the slow beat of the locomotive’s pistons running with the engine at rest. A bird sang somewhere in the distance. The fireman raised his hands, palms up, like a shrug, then made a face. “Shit,” he said. As de Milja leaned over him, he died.

Nowak had the casualties laid out in a beet field; a dark woman with hair braided and pinned worked over them. When de Milja arrived, she put him to work tearing cotton underdrawers into strips for bandages and sent Nowak running up to the locomotive for hot water.

“This man has been shot through the foot,” she said, carefully removing the shoe. “Went in above the heel, came out the sole just here, behind the second toe.” She put the bloody shoe aside. “Foot scares me, I’m unfamiliar with it.”

“You’re a nurse?”

“Veterinarian. A paw or a hoof, there I can help. Grab his hand.” De Milja held the man’s hand as the veterinarian swabbed on antiseptic from a big brown-glass bottle.

“A little girl is dead,” she said. “She was about ten years old. And a man in his forties, over there. We looked and looked—there’s not a mark on him. An old woman jumped out a window and broke her ankle. And a few others—cuts and bruises. But the angle of the gunfire was lucky for us—no glass, no fire. It’s fire I hate.” She worked in silence a moment. “It hurts?” she asked the patient.

“Go ahead, Miss. Do whatever you have to. Did I understand you to say that you were a veterinarian?”

“That’s right.”

“Hah! My friends will certainly get a laugh when they hear that!” De Milja’s fingers throbbed from the pressure of the wounded man squeezing his hand.

A grave-digging crew was organized, which took turns using the fireman’s shovel, and a priest said prayers as the earth was piled on. The little girl had been alone on the train, and nobody could find her papers. A woman who’d talked to her said her name was Tana, so that name was carved on the wooden board that served as a gravestone.

De Milja ordered the train stopped at a village station between Pulawy and Lublin, then used the phone in the stationmaster’s office—he could barely hear through the static—to report the attack to Vyborg, and to revise the estimated time of arrival “in the southern city.”

“The Russian divisions have crossed the border,” Vyborg said. “They may not reach your area for a day or so, but it’s hard to predict. The Germans are headed west—giving up territory. We believe there’s a line of demarcation between Hitler and Stalin, and the Russians will move up to occupy the new border.”

“Does that change anything for us?”

“No. But German aircraft have been attacking the line south of you. The railroad people say they can keep it open another twenty-four hours, but that’s about it. Still, we think you ought to find cover, then continue after dark. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All the roads out of Warsaw are now cut. This office is closing down, so you’re on your own from now on. Consider that to have the status of a written order.”

“Understood, sir.”

“So, best of luck to you. To all of us.”

The connection was broken.

A corporal in the Geographical Section had made a specialty of hiding trains. Using his hand-drawn map, de Milja directed the engineer to a branch line south of Pulawy that wound up into the hills above the Vistula. There, twenty miles west of Lublin, a gypsum mining operation had gone bankrupt and been shut down some time in the 1920s. But the railroad spur that ran to the site, though wildly overgrown, was still usable, and a roofed shed built for loading open railcars was still standing. Under the shed, with the engine turned off, they were very close to invisible.

17 September, 8:25 p.m. Over the years, the abandoned quarry had filled with water, and after dark de Milja could see the reflection of the rising moon on the still surface.

The engineer had patched the hole in the firebox, using tin snips, a tea tray, and wire. A big kid, about fifteen, from a farm village volunteered to work as the fireman—what he lacked in skill he’d make up with raw strength. Nowak took the opportunity to sight-in four rifles, which, with a few boxes of ammunition, had been hidden behind a panel in the last coach. He chose four men: a mechanic, a retired policeman, a student, and a man who didn’t exactly want to say what he did, to be armed in case of emergency.

There wasn’t much else they could do. The engine moved cautiously over the old track, heading east for the ancient city of Lublin, the countryside dark and deserted. The passengers were quiet, some doubtless having second thoughts about being cast adrift in a country at war. Maybe they would have been better off staying in Warsaw.

They reached Lublin a little after ten. Warehouses along the railroad line had been blazing since that afternoon, and the city’s ruptured water mains meant that the fire department could do little more than watch. The train crawled through thick black coils of heavy smoke, the passengers had to wet handkerchiefs and put them over their noses and mouths in order to breathe. A brakeman flagged them down. De Milja went up to the locomotive.

“We’ve been ordered to get you people through,” the brakeman said, “and the crews are doing the best they can. But they bombed us just before sunset, and it’s very bad up ahead.” The brakeman coughed and spat. “We had all the worst things down here; wool, creosote, tarred rope. Now it’s just going to burn.”

“Any sign of Russian troops?” de Milja asked.

“Not sure. We had a freight train disappear this morning. Vanished. What’s your opinion about that?”

It took forever for them to work their way through Lublin. At one point, a shirtless work crew, bodies black with soot, laid twenty-five feet of track almost directly beneath their wheels. The passengers gagged on the smoke, tried to get away from it by taking turns lying flat in the aisle, rubbed at the oily film that clung to their hands and faces, but that only made it burn worse. Farther down the line an old wooden bridge had collapsed onto the track and the huge, charred timbers were being hauled away by blindfolded farm horses. A saboteur—identified as such by a sign hung around his neck—had been hanged from a signal stanchion above the track. A group of passengers came to the last coach and pleaded with de Milja to get off the train. Nowak got the engine stopped, and a small crowd of people scurried away down the firelit lanes of the old city.

And then, once again, the war was gone.

The train climbed gently into the uplands east of the Carpathians. Warsaw, a northern city, seemed a long way from here—this was the ragged edge of Europe, border land. They ran dark, the lamps turned off in the coaches, only the locomotive light sweeping along the rails where, as the night cooled, land mist drifted through the beam. Beyond that, the steppe. Treeless, empty, sometimes a few thatched huts around a well and a tiny dirt road that ran off into the endless distance, to Russia, to the Urals. Now and then a village—a log station house with a Ukrainian name—but down here it was mostly the track and the wind.

De Milja stood beside the engineer and stared out into the darkness. The boy who’d taken the fireman’s job fed coal to the firebox when the engineer told him to. His palms had blistered after an hour of shoveling, so he’d taken his shirt off and torn it in half and tied it around his hands. When he stepped away from the furnace he shivered in the night air, but he was a man that night and de Milja knew better than to say anything.

At some nameless settlement, the train stopped at a water tower, the engineer swung the spout into position and began to fill the tank. It was long after midnight, and deserted—only the sigh of the wind, moths fluttering in the engine light, and the splash of water. Then, suddenly, a girl was standing by the locomotive. She was perhaps sixteen, barefoot, wearing a soiled cotton shift, head scarf, and a thin shawl around her shoulders. She was the most beautiful girl that de Milja had ever seen. “Please, Your Excellency,” she said—the dialect was ancient and de Milja barely understood her—“may I be permitted to ride on the train?”

She raised her hand, opened her fingers to reveal a pair of tiny gold earrings resting on her palm.

De Milja was speechless. The engineer, standing atop the front of the locomotive, stared down at her, and the boy stopped shoveling coal. The hem of the shift was spattered with mud, her ankles thin above dirty feet. She is pregnant, de Milja thought. She stood patiently, her eyes not quite meeting his, a sign of submission, her other hand clutching the shawl at her throat. But when de Milja did not speak, she looked directly at him and, just for an instant, her eyes lit up green fire as they caught the light, then she hid them away.

“Please, Excellency?” The earrings must not be worth what she thought; her voice faded in defeat.

“You do not have to pay,” de Milja said.

Her face hid nothing, and it was plain how she had struggled, all her life, to understand things. She had never been on a train before, but she knew one or two people who had, and she had asked them about it, and one certainly had to pay. Atop the locomotive, the engineer swung the water spout away so that water splashed on the ground beside the tracks until he shut it off.

De Milja waited for her to ask where they were going, but she never did. “You may ride on the train,” he said.

Still hesitant, she closed the earrings in her fist and held them to her throat. Then turned toward the passenger coaches. Did he mean what he said? Or was he just making fun of her? No, he meant it. Before he could change his mind she ran like a deer, climbed cautiously onto the iron step of the first coach, peered inside, then vanished.

Past Lvov, then Uzhgorod.

Sublieutenant Nowak took the watch for an hour, then a little after four in the morning de Milja returned. Now the train was climbing a grade that ran through a pine forest, then past Kulikov, then deeper into the mountains that marked the southern border of Poland.

Captain de Milja and the engineer saw the dim shape ahead at the same moment. De Milja wondered what it was, and squinted to bring it into focus. The old man swore and hauled on the brake with both hands. The wheels locked and screeched as they slid on the iron rails, and the train finally shuddered to a halt just short of the barrier, tree trunks piled across the track.

The light was strange at that hour—not night, not yet dawn—so the shapes coming toward them from the forest had no color, and seemed to glide on mist, like phantoms in a dream, with white plumes steaming from the horses’ nostrils in the cold mountain air.

The bandit leader—or ataman, or headman, whatever he called himself—was not to be hurried. Rifle at rest across his saddle, he walked his horse to the cab of the locomotive and stared at de Milja. “Get out,” he said softly. This was Ukrainian, of which de Milja understood that much at least. The bandit was perhaps in his fifties, wore a peaked cap and a suit jacket. Two or three days’ white bristle covered a stubborn jaw below the small, shrewd eyes of the farmer’s most cherished pig.

De Milja jumped to the ground, the engineer followed, the boy did not. Hiding, de Milja thought. All along the train, passengers were filing out of the coaches, hands high above their heads, lining up at the direction of the bandits. The leader looked him over: where was the danger in him? Where the profit? De Milja met his gaze. Back by the coaches there was a rifle shot. The bandit watched to see what he would do, so he did not turn around to see what had happened.

“Who are you?” the leader asked.

“I work for the railroad.”

The bandit did not quite believe that. “You ready to die up in a tree?” Ukrainian executions lasted all day. De Milja did not react.

“Hardheaded, you people,” the leader said. “You’re finished,” he went on. “Now it’s the Germans and us.”

De Milja was silent.

“Carrying anything valuable on that train?”

“No. Just people heading for the border.”

The bandit glanced back at the passenger coaches, de Milja followed his eyes. The passengers had their hands on the sides of the railcars, their baggage was laid out on the ground so that the bandits could pick and choose what they wanted.

A bandit on a gray pony rode up beside the leader. “Any good?” the leader asked.

“Not bad.”

“Gold?”

“Some. Polish money. Jewelry.”

“And the women?”

“Good. Four or five of them.”

The bandit leader winked at de Milja. “You won’t be seeing them again.” He paused, something about de Milja fascinated him. “Come over here,” he said. De Milja stepped forward, stood beside the bandit’s boot in a stirrup. “Give me your watch. It would be a railroad watch, of course.”

De Milja undid the strap, handed up his watch, long ago a present from his wife. The bandit glanced at it, then dropped it in his pocket. “Not a railroad watch, is it.”

“No.”

The leader was getting bored. With one hand he raised his rifle until de Milja was looking down the barrel. “What do you see in there?” De Milja took a deep breath, the bandit was going to ask him to look closer. One of the passengers screamed, de Milja couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. The bandit on the gray pony trotted a little way toward the sound. A rifle fired, a flat, dull crack like the earlier shot; then another, deeper. The bandit leader puffed out his cheek so hard it burst in a red spray, his horse shied and whinnied. De Milja grabbed the harness and pulled himself close to the horse’s body. The barrel of the rifle probed frantically, looking for him. Somewhere above, the bandit was wailing and cursing like a child. De Milja hung on to the reins with one hand and snatched the rifle barrel with the other. The weapon fired but he didn’t let go. Then the boy came out from behind a locomotive wheel and hit the bandit on the head with the shovel, which rang like a bell as the rifle came free in de Milja’s hand and the horse tore away from him.

The other bandit danced his pony around and shot the boy again and again, de Milja could hear the bullets hit, and the boy grunted each time. He fumbled the rifle around to firing position but the bandit galloped away, jumped his horse over the coupling between cars and disappeared. De Milja flinched as something hissed by his ear. Then Nowak called to him from the coal car and he ran up the ladder mounted on the wall as a bullet struck a silver chip out of the iron and the locomotive’s light went dark. Two horses thundered past, then a cluster of rapid rifle shots, a yell of triumph.

Nowak was lying on the coal at one end of the car, firing a rifle into the darkness. De Milja threw himself down beside him. Between the train and the forest, dark shapes were sprawled amid clothing and suitcases. A yellow spark from the trees—both he and Nowak swung their weapons. Nowak fired, but de Milja’s clicked as the hammer fell on an empty chamber. He threw it aside and worked the pistol free from beneath his sweater. “Who has the other rifles?” de Milja asked, meaning the weapons they had hidden behind a panel.

“Don’t know, sir,” Nowak said. “It’s chaos.”

He couldn’t permit chaos. Rolled over the lip of the car, slid down the ladder on the other side, stood between cars for a moment, then jumped to the ground and ran along the length of the train. The conductor ran by him going the other way, eyes white, teeth clenched, pistol held up in the safe position. Combat-mad, he never even saw de Milja, who wondered who he was chasing. Passengers were climbing through the coach windows; some of them had gotten a horse off its feet and it kicked and whinnied in terror as they tried to kill its rider, who howled for mercy. De Milja stepped on a body, then through a tangle of clothing that reeked of cloves—hair tonic from a shattered bottle. He tripped as he leaped for an open doorway, then went sprawling into the last coach.

The smell of gunpowder and urine hit him like a wall. Someone moaned softly, but mostly it was very dark and very quiet—the people packed together on the floor were breathing audibly, as though winded. A bullet from the forest went through the car and a triangle of glass fell on a seat without breaking. A silhouette rose suddenly in the middle of the car and returned the fire.

As de Milja crawled along the aisle, the train moved. Barely, only just making way, but he thought he could feel the logs being slowly forced off the track. The engineer is alive, he thought, using the locomotive like a bulldozer. The rifleman knelt quickly, moved on his knees to a neighboring window, straightened up, and fired. It was Herschensohn, the violinist. The homburg was jammed down on his head, a muscle ticked in his jaw, and he was muttering under his breath—“Stay still, you”—as he took aim.

De Milja reached the far end of the car—the back of the train—just as something seemed to give way and, with the sound of splintering wood, the train moved a little faster.

“Wait!”

A running shape burst from the forest—the peasant girl who’d begged to be let on the train at the water tower. “She got away!” Herschensohn had appeared beside him. The girl ran in panic, tripped, went sprawling on her face, struggled back up again, limping now and much slower. She waved her hands and screamed as the train gradually picked up speed.

De Milja was abruptly shoved aside. A man in a gray suit, with carefully brushed hair, leaped off the train and ran toward the girl, circled an arm around her waist and tried to help her. No longer young, he could barely run fast enough to keep up with the injured girl. “For God’s sake don’t leave us!” he yelled.

The bandits, on horseback and in the woods, saw what was happening. De Milja pinpointed the muzzle flashes in the half-light. The range was absurd but he aimed with both hands, changed the action to single-shot, and squeezed off round after round from his automatic. Herschensohn muttered angrily under his breath, talking to the target, as he fired his rifle. A young woman in a sweater and skirt jumped from a window, stumbled, came up running, took the girl around the waist from the other side. De Milja heard footsteps pounding above him as Nowak ran down the roof of the car, firing into the trees. Somebody yelled “Save her, save her, save her,” like a chant, and others took up the cry. De Milja thrust his empty pistol into his pocket and stood on the lowest step as the three people gained on the car. Herschensohn was firing over his shoulder and Nowak was shouting something from the roof. The three faces were distorted with exhaustion, with tears of effort, mouths gasping for breath, hands clawing frantically at the railings beside the door. But as the last log rolled away, the locomotive accelerated, the three runners flailing and staggering as the platform moved away from them.

Then the train quivered—the shock slammed de Milja against the wall—and suddenly the runners were close. He reached out and grabbed handfuls of shirt, coat, hair, whatever he could get, and hung on desperately. Someone caught the back of his coat just as he started to fall onto the tracks, other hands reached over his shoulders, people yelled, shoes scraped on the boards as somebody fought for traction, and the two rescuers and the girl were hauled aboard with a cry of triumph.

De Milja ended up on hands and knees as the train—something wrong with the way it ran now—slowly ground through a long, gentle curve. At the bottom of the embankment lay what was left of a truck: cab torn in half, gasoline flames flickering over the radiator, a tire spinning, a mounted machine gun aimed at the sky, and a man, arms flung wide, half-buried in a pile of broken brick.

When de Milja worked his way forward to the cab of the locomotive, he found bullet marks everywhere—the Ukrainian gunners had had their moment—and a very pale engineer. They’d mounted a machine gun on a brick truck and parked it on the tracks behind the log barrier. Just in case.

For the last hundred miles they were well up in the Carpathians, some of the passes at seven thousand feet, and the train switched back over ridges and granite outcrops, through sparse grass and forests of stunted pine where hawks floated on the mountain thermals. The train barely went now, maybe ten miles an hour, crawled along a trestle over a thousand-foot gorge as the passengers prayed silently and not-sosilently, oil trickling from beneath the engine. The sun didn’t reach them until ten in the morning; they were cold, there was nothing to eat, and very little water.

They crossed the Tisza River; there’d been a fire on the bridge, but it still held. De Milja walked along in front of the engine, watching the track bow under the weight, trying not to hear the sounds the wooden girders made. They traveled for a time beside a deeply rutted dirt track, where stone mileposts gave the distance to Romania. A burnedout Polish army car had been shoved into a ditch, a wagon and a pair of horses hit by a dive bomber, a truck lay on its side in the middle of a mountain stream.

They worked at it all day, Nowak and de Milja taking turns standing with the engineer in the locomotive, sometimes running the train themselves since he was long past exhaustion. Slow as their progress was, there were no other trains. The stationmaster at Mukachevo told them the Germans had bombed the lines running south—the Polish railway system didn’t really exist any longer.

They were what was left. De Milja and Nowak changed into officers’ uniforms a few miles before they reached the frontier at Sighet. The train stopped at the Polish border station, but it had been abandoned: an empty hut, a bare flagpole. A mile farther on, at the Romanian customs post, a tank was parked with its cannon facing down the track. “So,” said the engineer, “we are expected.” De Milja took a set of papers, prepared in Warsaw, to the Romanian major who greeted him at the wooden barrier pole.

The two officers saluted, then shook hands. The major was dark, with a movie-hero mustache and excellent manners. Yes they were expected, yes everything was in order, yes they’d be processed through in a half-hour, yes, yes, yes. The sun dropped lower in the sky, the children cried because they were hungry, the truth was to be seen in the eyes of the passengers on the train: despair, boredom, fatigue—the refugee life had begun. Please be patient, the Romanian major said. Please.

Two Polish diplomats materialized; eyeglasses, Vandyke beards, and overcoats with velvet collars. Negotiations continued, they reported, but a diplomatic solution had been proposed: the Polish passengers could enter Romania—temporary immigrant status would be granted—the Polish train could not. A troublesome technicality, but . . . The hanging sentence meant what can be done? Poland could no longer insist on anything. It was a former nation now, a phantom of international law.

Meanwhile, de Milja used the diplomats to make contacts he’d been given in Warsaw, and with a few code words and secret signs, things started to happen, not the least of which was the delivery of hampers of bread and onions and wormy pears brought by Romanian soldiers.

And eventually, long after dark, another Polish Captain Nom de Guerre showed up. They recognized each other from the meeting in Vyborg’s office: shared a cigarette, a walk by the tracks, and the news of the day. Then a phone call was made and, an hour later, a train appeared at the Romanian frontier post: a few freight cars, a small but serviceable locomotive, and Polish regular army soldiers with submachine guns. This train was moved up to the edge of the barrier on the Romanian side, and the Antonescu government, an uncertain mistress to several lovers—England, Germany, Russia—agreed that the passengers could bring whatever baggage they had onto Romanian soil.

It was very dark at the border, so pitch-pine torches were brought. And several volunteers among the passengers were given prybars. The floorboards in the coaches were prized up and, by flickering torchlight, the Polish National Gold Reserve, more than eleven million dollars, was carried into Romania.

Standing with Nowak by the train, Captain de Milja felt his heart stir with pride. From the Pilava local, with its shattered windows and bullet gashes, its locomotive reeking of singed bearings and burnt oil, the passengers handed out crates stamped national bank of poland. Blood had been shed for this; by a locomotive fireman, a ten-year-old girl, a boy from a country village. By a conductor of the Polish National Railways who, teeth clenched, pistol in hand, had disappeared into the darkness. De Milja did not believe it had been shed in vain and stood very nearly to attention as his little army struggled past with the heavy boxes: Vladimir Herschensohn, his violin carried off by Ukrainian bandits, the veterinarian who had treated the wounded, the pensioned engineer, the peasant girl, the man and woman—from some comfortable professional class—who had run onto a battlefield to save a life, a few country people, a few workers, women and children. Poland had lost a war, this was what was left.

20 October 1939. Bucharest, Romania.

Now the war was over, a pleasant autumn.

Hitler had what he wanted. Maybe he did, after all, have a right to it, a case could be made, you had to accept the reality of politics in central Europe. The days were cool and sunny, the harvest in, a little fog in the morning and geese overhead. Germany had Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, and was, officially, officially, at war with England and France. But this was politics; eddies and swirls and tidal shifts in the affairs of diplomats. Slowly the sun warmed the squares and plazas, the boulevards and little winding streets and, by midmorning, all across Europe, it was just right for a coffee on the café terrace.

On the terrace of the Dragomir Niculescu restaurant, a man at leisure—or perhaps he simply has no place to go. A respectable gentleman, one would have to say. The suit not new, of course. The shirt a particular color, like wheat meal, that comes from washing in the sink and drying on a radiator. The posture proud, but maybe, if you looked carefully, just a little lost. Not defeated, nothing that drastic. Haven’t we all had a moment of difficulty, a temporary reversal? Haven’twe all, at some time or another, washed out a shirt in the sink?

Still, it must be said, the times are not so easy. The police are seen a good deal lately in the neighborhood of rooming houses that take in refugees, and the medical school does have all the, ah, subjects that its anatomy students might require, and the police launch on the nearby river almost always has a customer on the early-morning patrol, sometimes two. Difficult, these times. Discontent, dislocation, shifting power, uneasy alliance. The best way, nowadays, is to remain flexible, supple. Almost everybody would agree with that.

Speaking of the police: the gentleman on the terrace of the Niculescu is evidently of interest to at least three, one uniformed, two not, and they are in turn doubtless assisted by various barmen, drivers of horsedrawn trasuri cabs, and the rouge-cheeked girls left over from last night. Such a wealth of attention! But, frankly, whose fault is that? Poor Romania, the flood comes to its door—Jews and socialists and misfits and Poles and spies and just about any damn thing you care to name. It’s gotten so bad they’ve had to put little cards on the tables at the Plaza-Athénée. by order of the government, political discussion is forbidden.

The gentleman on the terrace of the Niculescu ordered a second coffee. When it came, he took a handful of leu coins out of his pocket, then hesitated a moment, uncertain what was worth what. The waiter, the natural curl of his lip tightening just a bit, deftly plucked out the right ones and dropped them in his waiter’s saucer. Here was the land of “saruta mina pe care nu o poti musca”—kiss the hand you cannot bite—inhabited solely by the contemptuous and the contemptible, and those who had some doubt as to where they belonged could find instruction in the eyes of any café waiter.

If the gentleman on the terrace of the Niculescu didn’t particularly care, it was, at least in part, because his head swam with hunger. Just behind him, lunchtime lobsters and crayfish were being set out on beds of shaved ice, the Niculescu’s kitchen was preparing its famous hotmeat-and-fried-mushroom patties. Two peddlers with packs and long beards had stopped nearby to eat slices of white cheese and garlic on cold corn polenta, even the Gypsies, just across the square, were cooking a rabbit over a pot of burning tar. The gentleman on the terrace took a measured sip of coffee. Discipline, he told himself. Make it last.

The woman was stylish, somewhere in middle age, wearing a little hat with a half-veil. She arrived in a trasuri, bid it wait with a wave of a gloved hand, and accepted the doorman’s arm to descend from the carriage. The gentleman on the terrace was pleased to see her. He stood politely while she settled herself on a chair. The waiter pushed the lank hair back from his forehead and said “Service” in French as he went for her coffee.

She drank only a sip. They spoke briefly, then she whispered by his ear, and they held hands for a moment beneath the table. He stood, she rose, he took her hand, she presented her veil for a brush of his lips, said a parting word behind the back of her hand, walked quickly to her trasuri and was gone, leaving a cloud of lilac scent. “God go with you, Captain,” was what she’d said.

The gentleman on the terrace touched the pocket of his jacket, making sure of the money she’d passed to him, then strolled slowly across the square, past the policemen, uniformed and not, and their helpers, past old women sweeping the cobblestones with twig brooms, past a flock of pigeons that rose into the air with beating wings.

Captain de Milja left that night. He’d had enough of Bucharest: the rooming house, the police, and the assorted ghosts and wolves who lived in the cafés. And more than enough of Romania. The country, under German diplomatic pressure, had started to intern Polish army units crossing the border—as they had interned most of the senior ministers of the Polish government. Time to go.

He traveled under a cover he’d created for himself, using a blank identity card they’d left in his dossier the night he went to work for Vyborg. Name: Jan Boden. That made him a Silesian Pole—like his father—with a good knowledge of German and likely some German blood. Profession: Buyer of wood for coffins. That made it normal for him to travel, yet wasn’t a profession that the Germans would want to draft—not, for example, like an expert machinist—for labor in Germany. He wore a leather coat so he wouldn’t freeze, and carried a VIS, the Polish army automatic pistol, so he wouldn’t be taken prisoner. If he had to drop it quickly somewhere, he could always get another. After six years of war, 1914–1918, then the 1920–1921 campaign against the Red Army, Poland was an armory. Every barn, every cellar, every attic had its weapons and ammunition. And the Poles were not Russian peasants; they cleaned and oiled and maintained, because they liked things that worked.

He had some time to spare—the message that the courier delivered along with the money was Room 9 at Saint Stanislaus Hospital on Grodny Street by 23 October—and that probably saved his life. He took a train from Bucharest up to Sighisoara in the Transylvanian Alps, then another, going west, that crossed into Hungary near Arad. Changed again, this time going north to Kisvarda, in the Carpathians. As it grew dark, he caught a ride on a truck into a border village by a stream that fed into the Tisza, close to one of several passes over the mountains.

He entered the local tavern, ordered beer and sausage, and was approached by the local passeurs—smugglers—within the hour. He said he wished to be guided into Poland, a price was set, everybody spit on their palms and shook hands.

But soon after they started out, he realized that, contractual spits notwithstanding, they meant to kill him and take his money. It was black dark. The two passeurs, reeking of taverns, goats, and rancid fat, squatted on either side of him. They whispered, and touched his arms. Too much, as though familiarizing themselves with his physical capacity, and dissipating his protective magic. One of them had a knife in his belt—a dull, rusty thing, the idea of being stabbed with it gave de Milja a chill.

“I have to go behind a tree,” he said in Polish. Then he faded away in the darkness and just kept going. He found what he believed to be the south bank of the Tisza, then a dirt track that someone might have intended as a road, then a bridge, where he could hear the unmistakable sounds of Russian soldiers getting drunk: singing, then arguing, then fighting, then weeping, then snoring. As one of the Ostrow uncles used to say, “Here is something a man can depend on—never mind some silly ball rolling down an inclined plane.”

De Milja crossed the bridge a little after two in the morning; he was then in Soviet-occupied Poland. He walked another hour, winter cold numbing his face at the high altitude, then came upon a deserted farm—no barking dogs—opened the milking shed, kicked together a straw bed for himself, and actually slept until dawn.

By midday on the twenty-first of October, he was in the town of Kosow, where the railroad went to Tarnopol. He bought a ticket and caught the next train; his night in the milk shed had left him rumpled, unshaven, a little smelly, and thoroughly acceptable—proletarian—to the Russian guards at the railroad station. He leaned his head against the cold glass of the window as the train crossed the Dniester: yes, he was under orders to go to Warsaw, but he meant to find his wife at the clinic, meant somehow to get her across the border into Romania. Let them intern her if they liked—it was better than being at the mercy of the Russians.

In Tarnopol, the taxis had disappeared from the railway station, so he walked through the winding streets in late afternoon, found the way out of town, and was soon headed for the clinic down a rutted dirt path. He knew this country, the Volhynia, it was home to his mother’s family estates, more than three thousand acres of rolling hills, part forest, part farmland, with bountiful hunting and poor harvests and no way to earn a zloty, a lost paradise where one could gently starve to death with a contented heart beneath a pale, lovely moon.

The birch trees shimmered in the wind as night came on, butterflies hovered over a still pond in a meadow, the shadowy woods ran on forever—a fine place to write a poem or be murdered or whatever fate might have in mind for you just then. The little boy in de Milja’s heart was every bit as scared of this forest as he’d always been, the VIS pistol in his pocket affording just about as much protection from the local spirits as the rock he used to carry.

It was near twilight when he reached the clinic. The wicker wheelchairs stood empty on the overgrown lawns, the white pebble paths were unraked; it was all slowly going back to nature.

He walked up a long path lined with Lombardy poplars, was not challenged as he entered the hundred-year-old gabled house, formerly the heart of a grand estate. There were no bearded doctors, no brisk nurses, no local girls in white aprons to bring tea and cake, and there seemed to be fewer patients about than he remembered. But, on some level, the clinic still functioned. He saw a few old village women making soup in the kitchen, the steam radiators were cold but a fire had been built in the main parlor and several patients, wrapped in mufflers and overcoats, were staring into it and talking quietly among themselves.

His wife was sitting a little apart from the group, hands held between her knees—something she did when she was cold—face hidden by long, sand-colored hair. When he touched her shoulder she looked startled, then recognized him and smiled for a moment. She had sharp features and generous, liquid eyes, the face of a person who could not hurt anything. Strange, he thought, how she doesn’t seem to age.

“Helena,” he said.

She searched for something, then looked down, hiding her eyes.

“Let’s sit over here,” he said. Often it was best just to go forward. He took her hand and led her to a sofa where they could be private. “Are you all right?” he asked.

A little shrug, a wry smile.

“Have you seen soldiers? Russian soldiers?”

That bore thinking about—she simply did not hear things the way others did, perhaps she heard much more, echos and echos of meaning until no question could have an answer. “Yes,” she said, hesitantly.

“Was anyone . . . hurt?”

“No.”

She was thinner, her eyes seemed bruised, but they always did. She disliked the Veronal they gave her to calm down and sleep, and so hid it somewhere and paced away the nights.

“Enough to eat?”

She nodded yes.

“So then?” he said, pretending to be gruff.

This never failed to please her. “So then?” she said, imitating him.

He reached for her, resting his hand lightly on the soft hair that fell to her shoulder, it was something she allowed. “Helena,” he said.

Her eyes wandered. What did he want?

“The Russians,” he continued, “are here now, perhaps you know. I—”

“Please,” she said, eyes pleading. She would not stand for exegesis, could not bear it.

He sighed and took her hands. She took them back—gently, she didn’t want to hurt his feelings, she simply wanted the hands—folded them in her lap and gave him a puzzled look. Usually he was so courteous.

“I have been thinking that I ought to take you away from here,” he said.

She considered it—he could see a certain shadow touch her face as she reasoned. Then she shook her head no. The way she did it was not vague, or crazy, but sharp, completely in control. She’d thought through everything: soldiers, what they did, how bad it was, that she was not vulnerable to whatever he feared might happen to her.

He dropped his hands into his lap. He felt completely helpless. He considered taking her away by force, but he knew it wouldn’t work.

“To go where?” she asked, not unkindly.

He shook his head, defeated.

“Will you walk me to the lake house?” she asked. She could be soft and shy to a point where he came near tears—the ache in the back of the throat. He stood and offered her his arm.

What she called “the lake house” had once been a pavilion, where guests were served cream cakes, and tea from a silver urn, and the doctors could speak frankly in peaceful surroundings. Now it was dark and abandoned and some bird out in the reed marsh beyond the lake repeated a low, evening call.

She stood facing him, almost touching, reluctant to speak at first, and, even for her, very troubled. “I want you to make love to me as you used to,” she said. One last time—her unspoken words were clear as a musical note.

Looking around, he found a cane deckchair, gray with years of weather. He sat down, then invited her to sit on his lap with a flourish, as though it were a masterpiece of a bed, all silk and wool, in some grand hotel. She liked to play like this, raised her skirt just an inch, settled herself on his legs and laid her head against his shoulder. A little wind blew across the lake, the reeds bent, a few ducks flew over the marsh on the horizon. Idly, he stroked her dry lips with an index finger, she raised her face to it, and he saw that she had closed her eyes.

He took the hem of her sweater in his fingertips and lifted it to her shoulders, then lowered her slip, pulled her coat tight around her for warmth, wet his finger in her mouth and rubbed her breasts for a long time. They were heavier than he remembered but that had always been true of her, even when she was nineteen—her body full and round for a girl with a small face. She sighed, sentimental, yes, this was what she’d meant. Then she hummed softly and where her weight rested on him he could feel the V of her legs widen. When he slid his hand beneath her skirt, she smiled. Covertly, he watched her face, wondered what sort of dream she was having. Her lips moved, drew back slowly, then parted; her breathing became louder, shallow and rhythmic, until her weight suddenly pressed into him.

“Stand up,” he said. He stepped behind her, slid her coat down her arms and spread it on the broad, dry planks of the pavilion floor. She took her skirt off, then stepped out of her underpants. He knelt, embraced her hips, hard, as though something in the sky meant to sweep her away. She smoothed his hair—it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter. Then she settled herself on the coat, and swung her knees to one side, hands clasped beneath her head, a girl in a soap ad. He laughed.

They made love for a while; like strangers, like husband and wife, eventually like lovers. “I want to ask you,” she said quietly, almost to herself, as they lay curled around each other to keep warm. “You didn’t bring flowers, this time.” The words trailed off into the evening sounds by the lake.

“And you think, do I love you? Yes, I do.”

“But you always . . .”

“Left on the train,” he said. “You have to forgive me.”

She burrowed closer to him, he could feel the tears on her face.

On the train back to Warsaw he made a mistake.

He went north from Tarnopol, to Rovno. Stayed overnight in the railway station—technically illegal but tolerated, because people had to wait for trains, yet dangerous, because security police knew that railway stations attracted fugitives.

A uniformed NKVD guard looked through his documents, reading with a slow index finger on each word, then handed them back silently. He got out of Rovno on a dawn train to Brzesc, near the east bank of the river that formed the dividing line between German and Russian occupation forces. On this train, two men in overcoats; one of them stared at him, and, foolishly, he stared back. Then realized what he’d done and looked away. At the very last instant. He could see from the posture of the man—his age, his build—that he was somebody, likely civilian NKVD, and was about to make a point of it.

De Milja’s heart hammered in his chest, he felt prickly sweat break out under his arms, he did not even dare a glance to see if the man had accepted his “surrender”: breaking off eye contact. Could not put a hand on the VIS, just tried to shrink down into the seat without a single sign of bravado. He was strong. And unafraid. And the way he carried himself, people knew that, and it would bury him in a hurry if he didn’t learn some other way to be in public.

The two men got off the train one station before Brzesc. From the platform, his enemy squinted at him through the window. De Milja stared at his shoes, a proud man subdued. The Russian didn’t buy it; with a certain casual violence he turned to get back on the train and, de Milja was sure, haul him off. But his partner stopped him and grabbed the shoulder of his coat, pulling him, with a joke and a laugh, along the platform—they had more important things to do. From the corner of his eye, de Milja could see the Russian as he glanced back one last time. He was red in the face. The man, de Milja knew beyond a doubt, had intended to kill him.

In the German sector it was different. Much easier. The black-uniformed border police did not hate Poles as the Russians did. Poles to them were truly untermenschen, subhuman, beneath contempt. They were to be treated, like all Slavs, as beasts, controlled by “zuckerbrot und peitsche”—sweets and the whip. They checked his identity card, then waved him on. He was nothing, they never even saw him.

Of equal interest to de Milja was a siding some fifty miles south of Warsaw: eight German tank cars, pointed east, clearly going to the Soviet ally, marked naphthalene.

Yes, well, what couldn’t one do with that.

23 October, Warsaw. Saint Stanislaus Hospital.

An excellent safe house: all sorts of people went in and out at all hours of the day and night. There were cots for sleeping, meals were served, yet it was far safer than any hotel ever could be.

Room 9 was in the basement, adjacent to the boilers that heated the hospital water. It had a bed, a steel sink, and plaster walls painted pale green in 1903. It had a military map of Poland, a street map— Baedeker—of Warsaw, two steel filing cabinets, a power-boosted radio receiver with an aerial disappearing through a drainpipe entry in an upper corner, three telephones, several tin ashtrays, a scarred wood table with three chairs on one side and one chair on the other. Illumination was provided by a fifteen-watt bulb in a socket in the middle of the ceiling.

Of the three people facing him, de Milja knew one by acquaintance: a Warsaw hellion called Grodewicz who was not, as far as he knew, in the military and who should have been, as far as most of his friends were concerned, in prison. One by reputation: Colonel Jozef Broza, the former military attaché to Belgium. And one not at all, a woman who introduced herself only as “Agata.” She was in her late fifties, with a square jaw, a tip-tilted nose, and thick, dark-blond hair shot with gray, pulled back in a tortoiseshell clip. She had the fine skin of a nun, a filigreed gold wedding band, nicotine stains on the fingers of both hands, and unpolished but well-buffed fingernails. De Milja could easily see her in a country house or on horseback, obviously a member of the upper gentry.

She lit a cigarette, blew smoke through her nostrils, and gave him a good long stare before she started to speak. What she told him was brief but to the point: an underground organization had been formed to fight the Germans and the Russians—it would operate independently in each of the occupied zones. His job would be in the western half of the country, the German half.

The underground was to be called the ZWZ, Zwiazek Walki Zbrojnej—the Union for Armed Struggle. The highest level of command, known as the Sixth Bureau, was based in Paris, part of the Polish government-in-exile now led by General Sikorski. In German-occupied Poland, the ZWZ was headquartered in Warsaw, with regional stations in Cracow, Lodz, Poznan—all the major cities. Operational sections included sabotage, propaganda, communications— couriers and secret mail—and an intelligence service. “You,” she said to de Milja, “are being considered for a senior position in the latter.” She stubbed out her cigarette, lit a fresh one.

“Of course it is folly to say anything in this country in the singular form—we are God’s most plural people and losing wars doesn’t change that. There are, in fact, undergrounds, run by the entire spectrum of political parties: the Communists, the Nationalists, the Catholic Nationalists, the Peasant Party, and so on. The Jews are attempting to organize in their own communities, also subject to political division. Still, the ZWZ is more than ninety percent of the effort and will likely remain so.

“But, whatever name it’s done under, we have several months of hard, dirty fighting ahead of us. We now estimate that the French, with England’s help, are going to need six months to overrun Germany. It’s our job to survive in the interim, and keep the national damage at the lowest possible level. When Germany’s finished off, it will be up to the League of Nations to pry the U.S.S.R. out of Poland and push it back to the August ’39 borders. This will require diplomacy, patience, and perhaps divine intervention—Stalin cares for nothing but brute force. There will be claims for Ukrainian, Byelorussian, and Lithuanian sovereignty, the Jews will want restrictive laws repealed—it won’t ever be what it was before, but that’s maybe not such a bad thing as far as the people in this room are concerned. Any questions?”

“No questions,” de Milja said.

“Right now,” she continued, “we have two problems: the Polish people are in a state of mourning—how could the country be beaten so badly? And we lack explosives, incendiaries, and medicines for the partisan effort. We’re waiting to be supplied by air from Paris, but nothing’s happened yet. They make promises, then more promises. Meanwhile all we can do is insist, and not lose faith.”

Colonel Broza opened a dossier and glanced through it. He was barely five and a half feet tall, with massive shoulders, receding curly hair, and a pugnacious face. When he put on reading glasses, he looked like a peasant turned into a chess master which, the way de Milja heard it, wasn’t so far from the truth.

“Aren’t you something to Eugeniusz Ostrow?”

“Nephew, sir.”

“Which side?”

“My mother’s family.”

“Ah. The countess.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your uncle . . .” The colonel tried not to laugh. “You must forgive me, I shouldn’t . . . Wasn’t there a formal dinner? A trade minister’s wife, something about a goat?”

“A sheep, I believe it was, sir.”

“In diplomatic sash.”

“Yes, sir.”

The colonel pinched the bridge of his nose. “And then . . . a cook, wasn’t she?”

“A laundress, sir.”

“My God, yes! He married her.”

“A large, formal wedding, sir.”

The woman called Agata cleared her throat.

“Yes, of course, you’re right. You were at Jagiello university?”

“I was.”

“In mathematics?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How’d you do?”

“Very poorly. Tried to follow in my father’s footsteps, but—”

“Tossed out?”

“Not quite. Almost.”

“And then?”

“My uncles helped me get a commission in the army, and an assignment to the military intelligence service, and they sent me off to study cartography.”

“Where was that?”

“First at staff college, then at the French military academy, Saint-Cyr.”

“Three years, it says here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So you speak the language.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And German?”

“My father’s from Silesia, I spent time there when I was growing up. My German’s not too bad, I would say.”

Colonel Broza turned over a page, read for a moment. “Vyborg recommends you,” he said. “I’m going to run the ZWZ intelligence service, I need somebody to handle special operations—to work with all the sections. You’ll report directly to me, but not too often. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you know Captain Grodewicz?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Spend a little while with him. He’s going to run the ZO unit.”

“Sir?”

“Zwiazek Odwety. Reprisal. You understand?”

It snowed, early in November, and those who read signs and portents in the weather saw malevolence in it. The Germans had lost no time stealing Polish coal, the open railcars rattled ceaselessly across the Oder bridges into ancient, warlike Prussia. The men who ran the coal companies in ancient, warlike Prussia were astonished at how much money they made in this way—commercial logic had always been based on buying a little lower, selling a little higher. But buying for virtually nothing, well, perhaps the wife ought to have the diamond leaf-pin after all. Hitler was scary, he gave these huge, towering, patriotic speeches on the radio, that meant war for God’s sake, and war ruined business, in the long run, and worse. But this, this wasn’t exactly war—this was a form of mercantile heaven, and who got hurt? A few Poles?

The wind blew down from Russia, howled at the windows, piled snow against the door, found every crack, every chip and flaw, and came looking for you in your house. The old people started to die. “This is war!” they shouted in France, but no planes came. Perhaps next week.

Cautiously, from a distance, Captain de Milja tried to keep an eye on his family. He knew where one of the maids lived, and waited for her at night. “Your father is a saint,” the woman said at her kitchen table. “Your mother and your sister are in Hungary, safe, away from the murderers. Your father managed it—I can guess how, there’s barely a zloty in the house these days.”

“What is he doing?”

“He will not leave, he will not go to the country, he will not admit that anything has changed,” the woman said. “Will not.” She shook her head, respect and apprehension mixed together. “He reads and writes, teaches his classes. He is a rock—” She called de Milja by a childhood pet name and the captain looked at his knees. He took a sheaf of zloty notes out of his pocket and laid it on the table. The maid gave him a wry look: How do I explain this?

“Don’t talk about it. Just go to the black market, put something extra on the table, he won’t notice.”

He had the woman turn out her oil lamp, they sat in the dark for a time, listening to the wind whine against the old brick, then he whispered good-bye and slid out the door into the night. Because of the curfew he went doorway to doorway, alert for the sound of German patrol cars. It could be done—anything could be done—but you had to think it through, you had to concentrate. A life lived in flight from the police, a life of evasion, had the same given as always, it hadn’t changed in centuries: they could make a thousand mistakes, you couldn’t make one. Once upon a time, only criminals figured that out. By November 1939, every man, woman, and child in Poland knew it.

Something had to be done. De Milja met with his directorate in Room 9—he was living in a servant’s garret in Mokotow that week and the sudden warmth of the hospital basement made him giddy. He sat in the chair and presented his case: the heart was going out of the people, he could sense it. Colonel Broza agreed, Agata wasn’t sure, Grodewicz thought maybe it didn’t, for the moment, matter. Broza prevailed. All sorts of actions were considered; some violent, some spectacular. Should they humiliate the Germans? What, for an underground army, constituted a resounding success? How would people find out about it? Cigarette smoke hung in the still air, the perpetual dusk in the room grew darker, one of the hospital nuns brought them tea. They made a decision, Agata suggested a name, the rest was up to him.

The name was a retired Warsaw detective called Chomak. De Milja went to see him; found a man with stiff posture, shirt buttoned at the throat but no tie, dark hair combed straight back. Young to be retired, de Milja thought, but the prewar politics of the Warsaw police department could hardly concern him now. Chomak accepted the assignment, a worried wife at his side, a dachshund with a white muzzle sitting alertly by his chair. “Everybody thinks it’s easy to steal,” Chomak said. “But that isn’t true.”

He seemed to take great pleasure in the daily repetitive grind of the work, and always had a certain gleam in his eye: not so easy, is it, this kind of job? They rode trains together, bicycled down snowy roads at the distant edges of Warsaw; following leads, checking stories, seeing for themselves. They needed to steal a plane. Not a warplane, that would have required a massive use of the ZWZ resources. Just a little plane. Working through a list of mechanics and fuel-truck drivers— these names coming from prewar tax records secreted by the intelligence services before the Germans took over—they discovered that the great majority of small aircraft, Fiesler-Storch reconnaissance planes for example, were well guarded by Luftwaffe security forces.

But the Germans did have a gentlemen’s flying club.

Flying clubs had gained great popularity at the time of the record-setting flights of the 1920s and 1930s, and served as training grounds for future fighter pilots who had come to aviation as airplane-crazy teenagers. And so, a few days after German victory, the flying club had taken over a small airfield at Pruszkow, about ten miles west of Warsaw. De Milja and Chomak bicycled slowly along the little road past the field. There wasn’t much to see; an expanse of brown grass, a nylon wind sock on a pole, a hut with a swastika flag, and six single-engine planes, of which two had had their engines taken down to small pieces in the lone hangar.

Part Two: The printer across the river in Praga had all the work he could handle. The Germans loved print; every sort of decree and form and official paper, signs and manuals and instruction sheets and directives, they couldn’t get enough of it. Especially that Gothic typeface. The Wehrmacht, as far as the printer could see, would rather publish than fight. Hell, he didn’t mind. What with four kids and the wife pregnant and his old mother and her old mother and coal a hundred zlotys a sack on the black market, he had to do something. Don’t misunderstand, he was a patriot, had served in the army, but there were mouths to feed.

This book? Yeah, he’d printed that. Where the hell had they ever found it? Look at that. Doesn’t look too bad, does it? Quite a problem at first, didn’t get a call for that sort of thing very often and he and his chief compositor—poor Wladek, killed in the war, rest in peace—had had to work it out together, combining different letters from a variety of fonts. Mostly it was just the usual thing but now and then you got a chance to be creative in this business and that made it all worthwhile did they know what he meant?

Do it again? Well, yes, shouldn’t be a problem. He still had all, well almost all the letters he’d used for this book. He’d have to work at night, probably best to do the typesetting himself—if he remembered how. No, that was a joke. He remembered. What exactly did they need? Single sheet? A snap. Had to have it last week, he supposed. Wednesday soon enough? How many copies? How many? Jesus, the Germans kept him on a paper ration, there was no way he could—oh, well, if that was the way it was, no problem. As for the ink, he’d just add that into the German charges over the next few months, they’d never notice. Not that he habitually did that sort of thing, but, well . . .

It was December before all the other details could be sorted through and taken care of. Chomak spent two nights in the forest bordering the airfield, binoculars trained on the little hut. The light stayed on all night, a glow at the edges of the blackout curtain, and the watchman, a big, brawny fellow with white hair and a beer belly, was conscientious; made a tour of the field and the hangar twice a night.

They found a pilot—not so easy because Polish airmen who survived the war had gone to London and Paris to fight for the Allies. The man they located had flown mail and freight all around the Baltic, but poor eyesight had disqualified him for combat flying. When approached, he was anxious to take on the mission.

They picked up the printing in a taxi, storing the string-tied bundles in Chomak’s apartment. The mission was then scheduled for the ninth of December, but that night turned out cold and crisp, with a sky full of twinkling stars. Likewise the tenth and eleventh. The night of the twelfth, the weather turned bad, and the mission was on until an icy snow closed down every road out of Warsaw.

December fourteenth dawned warm and still, the snow turned to slush, and the sky was all fog and thick cloud. A wagon full of turnips transported the leaflets to a forest clearing near the airfield, then de Milja and the pilot arrived by bicycle an hour later. By 5:20 p.m. the field manager and the mechanic had gone home, and the night watchman had arrived. De Milja and his crew knocked on the door around seven. At first the watchman—a German it turned out—struggled and swore when they grabbed him and pulled a pillowcase over his head. Then he decided to cooperate and Chomak started to tie him up, but he changed his mind and got one hand loose and they had to hit him a few times before he’d calm down. Chomak and de Milja then rolled a plane to the gas pump and filled the tank. The pilot clambered in and studied the controls with a flashlight, while de Milja and Chomak pushed the plane to the edge of the grass runway.

At 8:20, Captain de Milja cranked the engine to life, the pilot made the thumbs-up sign, the plane bumped over the rocky field, picked up speed, then staggered up into the sky—airborne and flying a mission for free Poland.

The trick for the pilot was to get the plane down—quickly.

There certainly was hell to pay in the Warsaw air-defense sector— the Germans could hear something buzzing around up there in the clouds but they couldn’t see it, the searchlight beams swept back and forth but all they found was gray mist. The antiaircraft batteries let loose, the drone of the plane vanished to the west, the pilot headed around east on his compass until he picked up two gasoline-in-a-barrel fires lit off by de Milja and Chomak, then wasted no time getting down on the lumpy field, since Luftwaffe nightfighters were just that moment slicing through the sky over Warsaw looking for something to shoot at.

Down below, hundreds of people broke the curfew to run outside and snatch up a leaflet. These were, with the aid of friends and dictionaries, soon enough deciphered—the English-style printing, as opposed to the usual Polish letters, made it just a little more difficult to read—and by breakfast time everybody in Warsaw and much of occupied Poland felt good the way one did when a friend came around to say hello.

To the Brave People of Poland

Greetings from your British allies. We are

flying over your troubled land tonight to

let you know that you are not forgotten.

We’ll be back soon, there will be lots more

of us, and next time we won’t be dropping

leaflets. Until then, keep your chin up, and give the Germans hell any way you can. Long live Poland! Tenth Bomber Wing

RAF

“. . . but he changed his mind and they had to hit him a few times before he’d calm down.” Thus the night watchman at the Pruszkow airfield. But nothing more. De Milja had carried a small 9 mm automatic—there wasn’t any point in not having something, not for him. But Colonel Broza had said in their last meeting before the operation, “Don’t kill him, Captain. Let’s not start that yet.”

Yet.

But then, it wasn’t really up to them, of course it never had been, and the miracle was that fifty days or so of occupation had passed so— peacefully. Then it happened, out in Praga one Friday night, and that was that.

A workers’tavernin aworkers’part oftown. What wasa Wehrmacht noncom even doing in such a place? Probably a worker himself, back in Dusseldorf or Essen or wherever it was. Not the classic Nazi—some fine-boned little blond shit quivering with rage and overbreeding, cursing Jews in a squeaky voice with saliva on his chin. The breed existed, but it didn’t fight wars. Who fought wars was the guy in the Polish tavern: some big, blunt, slow-thinking German workingman, strong as an ox, common as dirt, and not such a bad type.

Here it was coming Christmas and he was stuck in Poland. He wasn’t making out with the Polish girls, everything was a little grimier than he liked, there was garlic in his food, and people either wouldn’t meet his eyes or glared with hatred. Hatred! Christ, he hadn’t done anything. They put him in the army and they said go here, go there, and he went here and there. Who wouldn’t? That was the way of the world; you did what the Wehrmacht told you to do, just like you did what Rheinmetall or Krupp told you to do.

And Friday night, like always, you went to a tavern, just to get out from underneath it a little. Ordered a beer, then another, and minded your own business.

But taverns were taverns, especially in working-class neighborhoods, and it was always the same: a word, a look, some little thing that just couldn’t be ignored. And people who couldn’t afford to lose their tempers brought them in here on Friday night in order to do exactly that. And then, some people didn’t like Germans. Never had, never would. Maybe they thought that Hansi or Willi or whatever his name was was spoiling a good night’s drinking. Just by being there. Maybe they told him to leave. Maybe Hansi or Willi had never been told to leave a tavern. Maybe he figured he was a conqueror. Maybe he refused.

Well, he wasn’t a conqueror that night. Somebody took out a knife and put it just the right place and that was that. The Gestapo came running, hanged the tavern keeper over his own door and next day executed a hundred and twenty neighborhood men. So there. The Germans were famous for reprisal long before they forced the Polish frontier. In 1914, stomping into Belgium, they encountered franctireurs—snipers—and responded with heavy reprisals, shooting hundreds of Belgians when they couldn’t get at the franc-tireurs. They didn’t invent it—revenge killing was right up at the front of the Bible—but they believed in it.

And it was just about that time when Hans Frank, named governor-general of the swath of Poland around Warsaw not directly incorporated into Germany, wrote in his diary that “the Poles will be the slaves of the German Reich.” Meanwhile they had the Jews sewing Stars of David on their breast pockets and hanging signs on the shops that said nicht arisch, not Aryan.

The ZWZ was besieged. Everybody wanted a piece of a German. De Milja didn’t exactly recruit, but he did look over candidates before passing the name on to a committee, and the first two weeks of December he barely had time to do anything else.

Two days before Christmas, de Milja went to see the maid who was taking care of his father, a newspaper-wrapped parcel in hand: sausage, aspirin, and sewing needles, the latest items that had become impossible-to-get treasures. “He wants to see you,” the woman said. “He told me to tell you that.”

De Milja thought a moment; he was staying in the basement of a large apartment house in central Warsaw, just off Jerozolimskie Avenue, one of the city’s main thoroughfares. “There’s a bar called Zofia, just by Solski Park, with a public room above it. Ten minutes after seven, tell him.” The maid nodded that she understood, but de Milja could see she disapproved of the idea that the professor would set foot in such a low place.

It was a low place, an after-curfew nightclub with a room upstairs that held three pool tables and an assortment of Warsaw lowlife— mostly black-market operators and pimps and their entourages. Tough guys; plenty of hair oil, overcoats with broad shoulders and ankle-length hems, a little bit of a cigarette stuck up in the corner of the mouth. They played pool, bet on the games, practiced three-bank wizard shots, sold a tire, bought a few pounds of sugar. De Milja liked it because someone was paying off the Germans to stay away, and that made it useful to people like him who’d had to learn one of the cardinal truths of secret life: anything clandestine is temporary. So the room above the Zofia was a welcome item on a list that could never be long enough.

Watching his father walk through the smoky poolroom, de Milja felt a pang in his heart. With hair combed faultlessly to one side, and round tortoiseshell spectacles, he looked like photographs of T.S. Eliot, the English banker/poet. His face was thinner and brighter than de Milja remembered, and he wore a raincoat, not his winter overcoat. Where was that? de Milja wondered. Sold? Clutching his professorial briefcase tightly, he excused his way through the crowd, ignoring the stares of the poolroom toughs. Some of them would have liked to humiliate him—he was an inviting target, a large ungainly bird who cried out for insult—but he was moving faster than they realized and before the right words could be said, he was gone. He paused while a boy with a huge pompadour and a royal-blue suit squinted down his cue to line up a shot, and winked suddenly at his son: there in a minute, must wait while Euclid here gets it all worked out. Thus had his father survived years of the Ostrow uncles: the more his sensibilities were offended, the more he twinkled.

They shook hands, his father settled himself at the table, noting the rough wood with hearts and initials carved in it, the water glass of vodka, wilted beet slices on a plate, and a saltshaker. “How’ve you been?” he asked.

De Milja smiled. “Not so bad. You?”

That was ignored. “Most thoughtful of you, that package. We ate the sausage, and sent the aspirin and the needles on to your mother and sister. They are in Hungary, I believe Sonya told you. Near Eger, in a sort of tumbledown castle—decrepit nobility wearing earmuffs at the dinner table, very Old World, I’m sure.”

“I think you should join them.”

“Me? What would I do for a library? Besides, I still have students, a few anyhow. As long as they show up, I will.”

“But Hungary is safe, you think.”

The professor hesitated. “Yes. They’re just now Germany’s great friends. Maybe later it will turn out they loved England all along. In their secret heart, you see.”

“And the house?”

“Cold as a donkey’s dick.” A sly smile bloomed for a moment— shocked you, did I? “I’ve got newspapers stuffed in every crack, but it doesn’t seem to help.”

“Look, why don’t you let me find you an apartment—”

The professor cut him short. “Really, you needn’t bother.” Then he leaned closer and lowered his voice. “But there is something I want you to do.” He paused, then said, “Am I correct in assuming you’ve been recruited into the underground? That you remain under military orders?”

De Milja nodded yes.

“Are you anything important?”

No reaction, at first, then a slight shrug: important?

But the professor was not to be fended off. “Don’t be coy. Either you can talk to the leadership or you can’t.”

“I can.” De Milja felt his ears getting warm.

His father searched his face, then decided he was telling the truth— it really was some other boy who’d thrown the chalk—reached into his briefcase and surfaced with three pages of densely written pen-andink script. “For the right person, this would be of consequence,” he said.

“What is it?”

“A study.” His father stared at it a moment. “The research is thin. I merely talked to a few of my old students, had a coffee, a little gossip. But they’re smart—that I know for a certainty because I made them prove it more than once—and well placed. Not at the very top of the civil service but just below it, where they actually read the paper and make the decisions and tell the boss what to say. Anyhow, it’s the best that I could do, an outline, but useful to the right people.”

He paused for effect. “The point is, I’d like to be asked to do more.” He met de Milja’s eyes. “Is that clear? Because what I have in mind is far more ambitious, an ongoing study that—”

A sudden commotion interrupted him; two of the local princes had reversed their pool cues and were snarling at each other while friends held them back. When de Milja looked back at his father he caught him with a particular expression on his face: irritation, disappointment, why did he have to see his son in places like this? Why wasn’t it a faculty dining room or an intellectuals’ café? The response was irrational—he would have admitted that—but it was the truth of his heart and for a moment he’d forgotten to hide it.

De Milja took the papers from his father’s hand. “I can only promise that it will be read.”

“Well, naturally. I don’t expect more than that.”

De Milja glanced at his watch. “I’d like to spend more time, but if you’re going to get back home before curfew . . .”

His father stood quickly. “You’ll be in touch?” he said.

“Through Sonya.”

They said good-bye; it was awkward, as their time together always was. They shook hands, both started to say something, shook hands again, then parted. At the door, his father turned and looked back; de Milja started to wave but he was too late. The raincoat and briefcase disappeared through the doorway, and de Milja never saw him again.

It was cold in Warsaw that night, there was ice in Captain de Milja’s basement room; a rust-colored stalactite that hung from a connection in the water pipe that ran across his ceiling. A janitor had once lived here, his church calendar—little girls praying with folded hands—and his French movie star torn from a magazine, a Claudette Colbert look-alike, were still stuck on nails in the wall. Cold enough to die, the captain thought. Wondered how cold that actually had to be. He wore an army greatcoat, a scarf, and wool gloves as he sat on the edge of a cot and by the light of a candle read the report his father had written.

He read it twice, then again. The writing was plain enough, and the facts were not obscure—just a listing of things governments did on a daily basis; a few administrative procedures, some new policies and guidelines. Really, not very interesting. But look again, he told himself. Principles of the German Occupation of Poland: 10 December 1939. There wasn’t anything in the report that Colonel Broza and the directorate didn’t know—all his father and his informants had done was to gather up what was available and synthesize it. Three pages. Four principles:

1) Calculated devaluation of the currency. 2) Replacement of the judiciary. 3) Direction of labor. 4) Registration. That was all—the real, arid horror of the thing lay in its simplicity. The essential mechanics of slavery, it turned out, weren’t at all complicated. With registration you knew who and what and where everyone was—a Jew or a metallurgical engineer, it was all filed for future reference. With the direction of labor they worked where you wanted, and had to meet production norms you set. With your own judiciary, you controlled their behavior with their own police. And with devaluation of the currency you “bought” everything they owned or produced, and then you starved them to death.

De Milja passed the report to Colonel Broza in Room 9. The colonel put on his reading glasses and thumbed the pages over. “Yes,” he said, and “mmm,” and finally “thank you.” That was all.

But there was something much more troubling on the agenda that day: the man who had printed the RAF leaflets had been arrested in his shop by the Gestapo. “Find out about it,” Broza said. “Then see Grodewicz.”

He went to visit the printer’s wife. They lived in a quite good neighborhood—surprisingly good for a man with a small job shop— broad avenues with trees, solid apartment houses with fire-escape ladders on the alley side, toilets in the apartments instead of the usual privies in the courtyard, and a building superintendent, a heavy woman in a kerchief, polite and not a bit drunk. De Milja asked her about the family. She took notice of his warm coat, and heavy, well-made shoes and raised her palms to heaven: didn’t know, didn’t want to get involved.

The apartment was on the seventh floor, the top of the building. De Milja trudged up the endless staircase, the marble steps gray from years of scrubbing with Javel water. He stopped to get his breath at the door, then knocked. The wife was a small woman, tepid, harmless, in a faded apron. They sat at the kitchen table. “I don’t know what he did,” she said.

“What about the neighbors?”

“Mostly they only knew me. And I never made an enemy, Mister.”

He believed her. “And him?”

“He was away, you know. Here and there. Some wives, they know when their husband breathes in, when he breathes out. Not me. You couldn’t do that with him.”

“What did you imagine?”

“Imagine? I only know we had a lot—a lot for who he was and what he did. He was ambitious, my husband. And maybe rules weren’t made for him, you know? But nothing serious. I swear it. Whoever you are, wherever you come from, go back and tell them he didn’t do anything so wrong.”

She started to cry but she didn’t care, didn’t touch her face where the tears ran and didn’t seem to notice it; everybody cried these days, so what?

“Are you in touch with the Gestapo?”

She nodded that she was. “On Szucha Avenue.”

That wasn’t good—Szucha Avenue was the central Gestapo headquarters. “I go every week to get his laundry,” she continued. “Do the wash and bring it back.” Her eyes found his, just for an instant. “There’s blood on his underwear,” she said.

“We can stop the interrogation,” he said.

Just for a moment she believed him, and her eyes widened, then she realized it was a lie.

“He did something for us,” de Milja said. “For the underground. Will he tell them?”

She wiped the tears away from her face with her hand. “Not him,” she said. “If only he would—but he won’t.”

“A last question,” he said. “How did they catch him?”

She thought for a time, stared out the window at the gray sky over the winter city. “Betrayed,” she said. “He never gave himself away.”

She was right, de Milja thought. He sensed it wasn’t the jealous neighbor, or the business partner with a grudge. It wasn’t a denunciation in that sense. He went to see another detective, a man with a big stomach and white hair, who had a line into the Gestapo office on Szucha Avenue. A clerk, perhaps, or a janitor. Information was fragmentary, and uncertain—as though somebody saw an open register, or a list on a desk. Nonetheless, his question was answered: Chomak.

De Milja hadn’t expected that. “Why?” he asked.

The detective shrugged. “A man reaches a certain time in life, and a certain conclusion. He’s alone. For himself. At war with the world. So he’ll do this for that one, and that for this one—he’s a spider, this is his web. Everybody is corrupt, he thinks. So he’d better be the same.”

It wasn’t much, de Milja thought. But there might never be any more, and they were at war, so it had to be enough. As Broza had directed, he went to see Grodewicz. They met at night in the office of a broom factory.

He had known Grodewicz for a long time, they belonged to the same social class, were not quite the same age but had overlapped for a year or two at university. While de Milja had labored desperately— and, it turned out, fruitlessly—to be a mathematician, Grodewicz had thrown himself into drinking and fighting and whoring to such a degree that it had become an issue with the police, and eventually with the university authorities, who finally had to expel him. What bothered de Milja was that Grodewicz not only didn’t care, he didn’t suffer. He walked away from university life, served as a merchant seaman, was said to have smuggled emeralds into the Balkans from South America, killed a shipmate in a knife fight, screwed a movie star in Vienna. Too many rumors about Grodewicz were true, he thought.

De Milja watched Grodewicz as he spoke quietly into the telephone—making him wait, naturally. He had long, lank, yellow hair that hung over his forehead, was handsome in some indefinably unhealthy way, and arrogant in every bone in his body. Now Captain Grodewicz—perhaps a post-invasion commission. De Milja sensed he’d gone to war not because Poland had been attacked, but because Grodewicz had been insulted.

“We’ll paint the south wall first,” Grodewicz said, obviously using code, from memory and with great facility. “And extend the line of the roof over that window, the south window. Is it clear?”

Grodewicz met de Milja’s glance and winked at him. “Good,” he said. “Just exactly. Plumb line, chisel, ripsaw and so forth. Can you manage?” The answer evidently pleased Grodewicz, who smiled and made a galloping rhythm with three fingers on the desk. “I would think,” he said. “Maybe we’ll all move in.” He replaced the receiver on its cradle.

They talked for a few minutes. De Milja explained what he needed, Grodewicz said there would be no problem—he had people ready to do that sort of work. They smoked a cigarette, said nothing very important, and went off into the night. The following day de Milja went to a certain telephone booth, opened the directory to a prearranged page, underlined a word on the second line, which set the rendezvous two days in the future; circled a word on the eighteenth line: 6:00 p.m.; and crossed through the twenty-second letter: 6:22 p.m. Very quickly, and very painfully, the ZWZ had learned the vulnerability of personal contact. Telephone books were safer.

It worked. The operative was on time, appearing suddenly in a heavy snow of soft, wet flakes that muffled the streets and made it hard to see. God, he was young, de Milja thought. Moonfaced, which made him seem placid. Hands shoved in the pockets of a baggy overcoat.

Chomak’s dachshund knew right away who he was. It exploded in a fit of barking and skittered about at the detective’s feet until his wife gathered it up in her arms and went into another room.

They took the evening workers’ train across the Vistula. The snow was falling thickly now, and looking out the window, de Milja could just see the iron-colored river curling slowly around the piers of a bridge. Nobody talked on this train; it had been a long day in the factories and they didn’t have the strength for it. De Milja and Chomak and the operative stood together in the aisle, holding on to the tops of the seats as the train swayed through the turns, the steamy windows white with snow blown sideways by the wind. At the second stop, a neighborhood of red-brick tenements, they got off the train and found a small bar near the station. They sat at a table and drank home-brewed beer.

“We’re trying to find out about the printer,” de Milja said. “The Gestapo arrested him.”

Chomak shrugged. “Inevitable,” he said.

“Why do you say that?”

“He was a thief,” Chomak said. “A Jew thief.”

“Really? How do you know?”

“Everybody knew,” Chomak said. “He was clever, very clever, just in the way he went around, in the way he did things. He was always up to something—you only had to look at him to see it.”

“And the Gestapo, you think, acted on that?”

Chomak thought for a time, then shrugged and lit a cigarette. De Milja saw that his hand was shaking. “Types like that get into trouble,” he said after the silence had gone on a little too long. “Sooner or later. Then they get caught. It’s a flaw they have.”

De Milja nodded slowly, the dark side of human nature making him pensive. “Well,” he said, “we can’t be late for our meeting.”

“You don’t think I did anything, do you?”

“No.” Pause. “Did you? Maybe by accident?”

“Not me.”

“Time to go,” de Milja said. Then to Chomak: “You’re armed?”

“You didn’t tell me to bring anything, so I didn’t. I have to tell you, I don’t care for being suspected. That’s not right.”

De Milja stood up and left, Chomak following, the operative waving Chomak out the door ahead of him. “Don’t worry about it,” de Milja said.

Hunched over in the cold and the snow, they hurried along a narrow street that wound back toward the railroad. Chomak took a fast two steps and caught up with de Milja. “Why would you ask me a thing like that?” He had to raise his voice a little because of the wind and it made him sound querulous and insulted. “I served fourteen years in the detectives.” He was angry now. “We knew who did what. That type, you’re always on the short end of the deal—just once turn your back and then you’ll see.”

A Gestapo car, a black Grosser Mercedes with headlights taped down to slits because of the blackout, honked at them to get out of the way. They stood with their backs against the wall, faces averted, as it bumped past, the red taillights disappearing into the swirling snow.

“You see?” Chomak said, when they were walking again. “I could have flagged them down. But I didn’t, did I?”

At an arched railroad bridge, where the street dipped below the track, de Milja signaled to stop, and the three men stood by the curved wall and stamped their feet to keep warm. It was dark under the bridge and the snow was blowing right through it.

“Hell of a night for a meeting,” Chomak said, a good-natured laugh in his voice.

De Milja heard the sound of a train approaching in the distance. Bending over to protect the match from the wind, he lit a cigarette, then cupped his palm to shield the glow. “Face the wall,” he said to Chomak.

“What did you say?”

“Face the wall.”

Chomak turned slowly and faced the wall. The approaching train was moving slowly because of the snowstorm. “It’s not right,” Chomak said. “For a Jew thief. Some little sneak from the gutter. Not right.”

“Why would you do a thing like that?” de Milja said. “Were you in trouble?”

De Milja could see that Chomak’s legs were trembling, and he thought he might collapse. He looked at the operative and their eyes met for a moment as the train came closer. The sound of the wheels thundered in the tunnel as it passed overhead, Chomak bounced off the wall, then sagged back against it, his hand groping for a hold on the smooth surface. Very slowly, he slid down to his knees, then toppled over on his side. The operative straddled him and fired once into his temple.

January 1940. The French planes did not come. Perhaps, people thought, they are not going to come. Not ever. In the streets of Paris, the Communist party and its supporters marched and chanted for peace, for dignity, for an end to war. Especially this unjust war against Germany—Russia’s ally. On the Maginot Line, quartered in a schoolhouse near Strasbourg, Private Jean-Paul Sartre of the artillery’s meteorological intelligence service sent balloons aloft, reported on the speed and direction of the wind to gunners who never fired a shot, and wrote in his journal that “Life is the transcendent, psychic object constructed by human reality in search of its own foundation.”

In Great Britain, German magnetic mines had taken a considerable toll of merchant shipping, and rationing had been established for butter, sugar, bacon, and ham. Winston Churchill spoke on the radio, and told the nations of Europe that “each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. All of them hope that the storm will pass before their turn comes to be devoured.”

As for the United States, it remained stern and unrelenting in the maintenance of a “moral embargo” it had declared against Germany.

Meanwhile, Warsaw lived in ice. The calendar froze—a winter of ten thousand days was at hand. And as the hope of help from friends slowly waned, it became the time of the prophecies. Sometimes typed, sometimes handwritten, they were everywhere and, whether casually dismissed or secretly believed, were passionately followed. A battlefield of contending specters: rune-casters and biblical kings, the Black Madonna of Czestochowa and Nostradamus, the fire at the center of the earth, the cycles of the moon, the springs of magic water, the Apocrypha—the fourteen known books and the fifteenth, only just now revealed. The day was coming, it couldn’t quite be said exactly when, but blood would flow from stones, the dead would rise from their graves, the lame would walk, the blind would see, and the fucking shkopy would get out of Poland.

At a time when national consolation was almost nonexistent, the prophecies helped, strange as some of them were, and the intelligence service of the Polish underground certainly wrote their share. Meanwhile, hiding in their apartments from winter and the Gestapo, the people of Warsaw listened—on pain of death if caught—to the BBC on illicit radios. And they also studied English. That winter in Warsaw, an English grammar couldn’t be had for love or money. Even so, the joke everybody was telling around town went like this: the pessimists are learning German, the optimists are learning English, while the realists, in January of 1940, were said to be learning Russian.

In Room 9, Agata leaned back from the committee table, ran long fingers through her chopped-off hair, blew savage plumes of smoke from her nostrils, and said, “Next. The eastern zone, and the need to do something about the Russians. As of yesterday, a courier reported six more arrests by the NKVD.”

It had been a long meeting, not a good one, with too many problems tabled for future consideration. Colonel Broza did not respond— he stared absently at a map of Poland tacked to the green wall, but there was certainly little comfort for him there.

“The efficiency of the NKVD,” Agata went on, “seems only to increase. They are everywhere, how to say, inside our lines. In the professions, the peasantry—there is no social class we can turn to. People in the Russian zone have simply stopped talking to their friends—and I can’t imagine anything that hurts us more than that. The fear is on the streets, in the air. Of our top echelon, political and military, nothing remains; those who are alive are in the Lubianka, and out of contact. From the officer camps in the Katyn forest it’s the same thing: no escapes, no letters, silence. So, since it is Poland’s great privilege to play host to both the NKVD and the Gestapo, it’s time to admit we are not doing all that badly with the Germans, but have not yet learned how to operate against the Russians.”

Broza thought about it for a time. “Why?” he said.

“Why are the Russians better at it?” Agata said.

“Yes.”

“Oh, tradition. A thousand years of espionage, the secret police of Ivan the Terrible—is that what you want to hear?”

Broza’s expression was grim, almost despairing—wasn’t there perhaps a little more to it? No? Maybe?

Agata tapped a pencil eraser against the open page of a notebook. “There is a difference,” she said slowly, “that interests me. Say that it is the difference between nationalism and, ah, what we might call social theory. For the Germans, nationalism is an issue of race, ethnicity. For example, they accept as their own the Volksdeutsch—descendents of German colonists, many of whom do not even speak German. But their blood is German blood—these Teutonic philosophers really believe in such things. Cut a vein, listen closely, you can hear the overture to Lohengrin—why, that’s a German you’ve got there! The Bolsheviks are just the opposite—they recruit the mind, or so they like to pretend. And all the world is invited to join them; you can be a communist any time you like—‘Good heavens! I just realized it’s all in the dictatorship of the working class.’

“Now as a practical matter, that difference serves the purposes of the NKVD very nicely. We all accept that every society has its opportunists—criminals, misfits, unrecognized geniuses, the pathologically disappointed—and when the conqueror comes, that’s the moment to even the score. But, here in western Poland, the only job open is collaborator—you can’t just get up in the morning and decide to be German. On the Soviet side, however, you can experience insight, then conversion, and you’ll be welcomed. Oh, you may have to tattle a little, tell the NKVD whatever you happen to know—and everybody knows something. You can invite your former friends to join you in conspiracies, you can inform on your enemies. And what are you then? A traitor? No, a friend of peace and the working class. And, if you turn out to have a bit of a flair for the work, you can be a commissar.”

Agata paused a moment, lit a new cigarette. “And if that’s not bad enough,” she said, shaking out the match, “the NKVD is very shrewd, and never in a hurry. They follow the spirit of resistance like a hidden current running through an ocean: they detain, interrogate, torture, turn a few to work for them, shoot the rest, and start over.”

Colonel Broza nodded slowly. “Tyranny,” he said, “has become a science.” He turned to de Milja. “What do you think we can do, Captain.”

De Milja was in no hurry to answer. “Perhaps, over time, we’ll prove to be stronger than they are. But right now, I would say the important thing for us is to hammer at the links between the Germans and the Russians. For us, in this room, the worst would be if NKVD methods were to spread to the Gestapo.”

“We know they’ve been meeting in Cracow,” Grodewicz said, “but the Russians aren’t sharing much. They cooperate by handing over German communists who fled to Moscow in the thirties, but they don’t talk about methods.”

“That is because,” Agata said, “they are going to fight.”

“Yes. They must, eventually,” Broza said. He thought a moment, then his eyes met de Milja’s. “Take some time and a few people, Captain. See if you can get a sense of when that might be.”

A week later, he left the freezing basement. Life immediately improved, was certainly warmer, better in a number of ways. He moved to a room in the Mokotow district, down a long hallway in the apartment of a former customs official, now a clerk in a factory office and a great friend to the resistance. Since the occupation authority had closed the schools—Poles, as a slave race, needed only to understand simple directions and to count to twenty—the official’s wife taught at a secret school in a church basement while the children attended classes.

That left de Milja alone in the apartment for much of the day. Alone, except for Madame Kuester. Fortyish, probably a little older, a distant cousin of one side of the family or the other, she had met and married a Dutch engineer—Herr Kuester—who had gone off to work on a bridge in Kuala Lumpur in 1938, then vanished. Madame Kuester, childless, had then come to stay with the family. Not quite a servant, not quite an equal, she had worked in fashionable women’s shops before the war, lived quietly in her room, proud of not being a burden to anyone. The title “madame” was a survival of the world of the shops, where she had been, evidently, a bad-tempered and difficult supervisor to a generation of young assistants.

Given the hours of proximity, a love affair seemed inevitable. But the captain resisted. A deep, almost haunted longing for the wife who wasn’t there, a nominal—and sometimes not so nominal— Catholicism, and ZWZ security procedures: everything was against it. Including the attitude of Madame Kuester, haughty and cold, clearly meant to discourage familiarity between two people forced by war into the accidental intimacies of apartment life.

She was, de Milja came to understand, a snob to her very marrow. She set herself above the world, looking down on its unrefined excesses with small, angry eyes set in a great expanse of white brow. Her mouth was mean, down-curved, she wore her coarse hair elaborately pinned up, went about the apartment in gray blouse and long wool skirt—the prewar uniform of some of the better shops—that hung shapeless over a thick, heavy figure, and her walk, hard and definitive, told the world all it needed to know: you have left me alone, now leave me alone.

But it was cold, always cold.

The February snow hissed against the window, the afternoons were silent, and dark, and endless. Captain de Milja was now subject to increased ZWZ security constraints; stay out of the center of Warsaw, where police patrols were abundant, try not to be on the streets during working hours—use the morning and evening travel periods as cover for getting around the city. He had to hold agent meetings as he probed for German intentions toward the U.S.S.R., but he scheduled them early in the morning and late in the afternoon, always in public places—libraries, railway stations, the thicker the crowd the better he liked it. But for much of the day he was a prisoner in the Mokotow apartment.

Where he discovered that he was keeping track of Madame Kuester by the sound of her presence: the scrape of the match as she lit the stove for midmorning tea, the rhythm of a carpet sweeper rolled relentlessly back and forth, the polite slam of a firmly closed door as she retired to her room for a midday rest, the creak of the bedspring as she lay down to nap.

Every afternoon at about 2:35, that was. She rather believed, he sensed, in the idea of routine, consistency. It was the way her sort of people—never defined, yet always with her—chose to live. After lunch she would sit primly in the corner of the sofa, then, after forty-five minutes of reading, rise majestically and disappear into her room. On Sunday, with the family present, everything was different, but six days a week her habit never varied, never changed.

Well, perhaps just once it did. On an otherwise unremarkable day in the middle of the week, she forgot her book. Ha! What absurdly spiteful joy he felt at such a lapse. He was immediately ashamed of himself, but there it lay, open, facedown on the arm of the sofa, protected by the blue paper cover she fussily wrapped her books in. Curious, he had a look. French. Well, of course, he should have known. A French novel, the very thing her sort of people would amuse themselves with.

De Milja scanned the page to see what kept Madame so occupied that she hadn’t a thought for the rest of the world. “. . . dans une position en lequel ses places ombrées étaient, comme on dit, disponibles, mais c’était le sens de la caresse de l’aire sur elles, ces ouvertures, qui faisait battre fort son coeur . . .”

What?

In pure astonishment and disbelief he slipped the cover off the novel: La Belle Dominique. Written by that well-known and time-honored author, Vaguely Saucy Nom de Plume. The French novel was a French novel! He flipped the pages, and read some more, and flipped the pages, and read some more. It was the sheer contrast of the moment that struck his heart. The dying, ice-bound city, heavy with fear and misery and the exhaustion of daily life, set against these brittle pages of print, where gold passementerie was untied and heavy drapes flowed together, where pale skin flushed rose with excitement, where silk rustled to the floors of moonlit chambers.

De Milja’s eyes sought the door to Madame Kuester’s room, which, in defiance of her cherished routine, stood open a suggestive inch. He opened it the rest of the way and stepped inside. A small room in a Warsaw apartment, winter light yellow behind the drawn shade, an old steamer trunk used as a wardrobe, a shape curled up on a cot beneath a wool army blanket.

As in a dream, she drew her knees up, arched her back like a yawning cat, then rolled slowly onto her stomach and nestled against the bed. One hand snaked out of the covers and smoothed the loose hair off the side of her face. Now he could see that her eyes were closed, but she smiled a little smile for him; greedy and bittersweet and sure of itself all at once. And if, somehow, he still didn’t get the point, she breathed a soft, interrogatory sigh. He stepped to the side of the bed and lowered the blanket to her bare heels. She moved a little, just the signature on an invitation, took the pillow in both hands, and slid it under her body until it rested beneath her hips. Which elevated her, he thought as he undid his belt, “to such a position that her shadowed places were, as it is said, available, but it was the feeling of the touch of the air upon them, these openings, that made her heart beat hard.”

They never spoke of it, not ever. One doesn’t—that was her unspoken law and he obeyed it. So she remained, in the daily life of the apartment, as remote and distant as she had always been. He spent the middle part of the day with his notes and papers, mostly numbers and coded place names, while she, nose in the air, dusted, and ran the carpet sweeper over the rugs. She read every day after lunch, sitting properly in the corner of the sofa. Then, at 2:35, she went to her room. He followed a few minutes later, and found each time a different woman. In this bed, for this hour, everything was possible. It was as though, he thought, they owned in common a theater under a blanket where, every afternoon, they rehearsed and performed for an audience of themselves. Only themselves. The city would not know of it—at the conclusion of each scene she stuffed the blanket into her down-curved mouth and screamed like a Fury.

Wizna, on the Narew River, 7 March 1940. Encampment of the Nineteenth Infantry Division, Grenadierregiment, Wehrkreis XIV, Kassel.

5:30 a.m. The floodlights were turned out and the dawn fog pooled at the bases of the barbed-wire stanchions. The Russian troops were camped on the other side of the river; when they ran the engines of their tanks, the Wehrmacht soldiers could hear them.

Each day at dawn the garbage cans were brought out to the regimental dump on hand trucks; the contents spilled out with a spirited banging, the garbage detail working in shirtsleeves despite the bitter cold, cigarettes stuck in their mouths to mask the smell. First the dogs came, trotting, heads down, silent—precedence had been established in the first days of occupation and there were no more fights. Next came the old Polish women in their black shawls and dresses, each holding a stick to beat the dogs if they got too insistent.

Oberschützen Kohler and Stentz, the two privates first-class on guard duty, stood and watched the Polish women, dark figures in the morning fog, as they picked through the mounds of garbage. This guard duty was permanent, and they did it every morning. They didn’t like it, but they knew nobody cared about that, so they didn’t, either.