The Polish Officer

At the age of nineteen, though, it was a sad lesson. These women, fated to spend this early hour picking through the garbage of a German garrison in order to have something to eat—could they be so different from their own mothers and grandmothers? Kohler and Stentz were not barbarians, they were Wehrmacht riflemen, not so different from generations of infantry, Swedish or Prussian or Corsican or Austrian—the list was just too long—who had stood guard at camps on these Polish rivers back into the time of the Roman legions.

Kohler looked around, made sure there were no officers in the vicinity, then he tapped Stentz on the shoulder. Stentz whistled a certain clever way, and the crone showed up a few moments later like she always did. Her face, all seamed and gullied beneath wisps of thin, white hair, never stopped nodding, thank you, Excellency, thank you, Excellency, as she moved to the edge of the barbed wire. She reached out trembling hands and took the crusts of bread that Stentz got from a friend in the camp kitchen. These vanished into her clothing, kept separate from whatever was in the burlap sack she carried over her shoulder. She mumbled something—she had no teeth and was hard to understand, but it was certainly thankful. It wished God’s mercy on them. Heaven had seen, she was certain, this kindness to an old woman.

Later that morning she walked to the edge of her village to meet the man who bought rags. For him too she thanked God, because these were not very good rags, they were used, worn-out rags with very little rubbing and cleaning left in them. Still, he paid. She had gasoline-soaked rags from the motor pool, damp, foul rags that had been used to clean the kitchens, brown rags the soldiers used to polish their boots, a few shreds of yellow rag they used to shine brass with, and some of the oily little patches they used to clean their rifles.

The rag man bought everything, as he always did, and counted out a few coppers into her hand—just as he would for all the other old ladies who came to see him throughout the morning. Only a few coppers, but if you had enough of them they bought something. Everybody was in business now, she thought, it was always that way when the armies came. Too bad about the nice boys who gave her the bread. They would die, pretty soon, nice or not. Sad, she thought, how they never learned what waited for them in Poland.

7 March 1940, Budapest. The offices of Schlegel and Son, stock and commodity exchange brokers based in Zurich. Mr. Teleky, the brisk young transfer clerk, took the morning prices off the teletype just before noon and wrote them in chalk on a blackboard hung from the oak paneling in the customers’ room. Behind a wooden railing a few old men sat and smoked, bored and desultory. War was bad for the brokerage business, as far as Mr. Teleky could see. People put their money into gold coins and buried them in the basement—nobody believed in the futures market when nobody believed in the future.

Still, you acted as though everything would come out for the best— where would you go in the morning if you didn’t go to work? Mr. Teleky printed the morning numbers in a careful hand. A few customers were watching. Gottwald, the German Jew, trying to make the money he’d earned selling his wife’s jewelry go a little further. Standing next to him was Schaumer, the Austrian Nazi party functionary, who came here to speculate with money stolen from Viennese Jews. Then there was Varski, the old Polish diplomat who walked with a cane, proud and poor, earning a few francs one day and losing them the next. Mr. Teleky privately wondered why he bothered, but you couldn’t talk to the Poles, they were hardheaded and did what they wanted, you might as well argue with the sea.

So, what did he have for these august gentlemen? Cairo cotton was up a point, Brazilian coffee unchanged, London wool down a quarter and so was flax, iron ore had gained half a point, coal was off an eighth. Trading in manganese was suspended—the Germans meddling, no doubt. Mr. Teleky went on and on, rendering each symbol and number carefully, for whoever might want to come to the Schlegel offices and witness the fluctuations of world trade. Gottwald turned on his heel and left, then Schaumer. Varski the Pole stayed until the bitter end, then stood, nodded politely to Mr. Teleky, and went on about his daily business.

The chemist and the commodity analyst.

The chemist in Lodz—the traditional home of industrial chemistry in Poland, where dyes for the fabric mills had been produced since the nineteenth century—wrote the most careful, the most studied report of his professional life. If he’d been an indifferent patriot before September, ’39, before dead friends and vanished family, before his house was taken and his salary halved, he wasn’t one now.

Now he was a patriot of reports. He had tested, and retested, used infinite care, worked to the very limit of his technical abilities. And his conclusion was:

No change.

An analysis of seventy-five samples selected from a range of over five thousand cotton patches bearing traces of the oil used to clean and maintain weapons showed no meaningful variation in the viscosity of the oil. Samples were obtained from disposal areas abandoned by Wehrmacht units in September of 1939—in eastern, now Russian-occupied, Poland—and these were compared with samples from bases currently occupied in Silesia, East Prussia, and western Poland. The analyzed material, a lightly refined petroleum-based oil also used in machine shops for lubrication and protection of bored and rifled metal surfaces, had not been significantly altered during the seven-month period in question. The viscosity of the oil was consistent to a low temperature of -5° Fahrenheit, but below that point effectiveness was rapidly degraded. For the maintenance and cleaning of rifled weapons below -5° Fahrenheit, a lower viscosity, lighter-weight oil would be required.

The commodity analyst in Warsaw was a Jew, and suspected he hadn’t long to live. A few people he knew of had managed to leave Poland, but most hadn’t. The German Jews had been attacked by means of taxation and bureaucratic constraint since the ascension of the Nazi government in 1933—a six-year period. Two thirds of them, about four hundred thousand people, had gotten out of Germany before the borders closed. They had bribed South American consular officials, filled the British quotas in Palestine, deployed wealth and influence to evade immigration regulations in the United States and Great Britain. But in using those methods they had, in effect, worn out the administrative escape lines. For the three million Polish Jews, there was nothing.

So the commodity analyst, a yellow Star of David sewn to the breast pocket of a suit made by a London tailoring establishment in 1937, wrote what he believed to be his final report. Since the German occupation he had worked in a small factory that made needles and pins, sweeping up, running errands, whatever was needed, but even this little job was ending. And he had been told that he and his family would have to move into the old Polish ghetto just south of Gdansk station. The Germans meant to kill him, a forty-eight-year-old man with a wife and three children. If there was something he could do about that, some tactic of evasion, he had not been able to discover it. He had a good mind, trained in Talmud, trained in business, and recognized that some problems cannot be solved. What would happen next would happen next, it wasn’t up to him.

He would have liked to be, in this analysis written at the request of an old friend, brilliant, at least ingenious. He had specialized in the behavior of the wool markets for twenty years, and he thought he knew them just about as well as anyone could. But facts were facts, numbers worked a certain way, and after an intensive study of twelve months of buying and selling activity in the commodity exchanges of London, Chicago, and Geneva, there was only one, rather dull but plainly evident, conclusion to be drawn:

No change.

Captain de Milja met privately with Colonel Broza in Room 9. Outside, the evening streets were awash with spring rain. “There is no preparation to attack,” de Milja said.

“Hard to believe that,” Broza said.

“Yes. But that is what we found. Germany will have to deploy three million men to attack Russia, led by tanks as they were in Poland. Supplied by horse and wagon, and freight train. Attacking on a line from the Baltic to the Black Sea. As for the time of the attack, that too can be deduced. Today is the sixteenth of March. Russia must be invaded in the late spring, after the rivers crest and the floods recede, and it must be defeated by the middle of autumn, before the winter freeze. Napoleon learned that in 1812, and very little has changed since then. The temperature in Russia in December goes down, habitually and unremarkably, to minus thirty degrees Fahrenheit. It can go lower, and when the wind blows—which it does, for weeks on end—the cold is acutely intensified. You can’t send three million men into that kind of weather without preparation.

“So, we have the sixteenth of March and three million men. As of a week ago, not a drop of low-viscosity oil had been issued at any Wehrmacht base we know about. And there has been no change in the international wool markets—which means no warm coats for the Wehrmacht. The Germans have been clever all along about covert logistics—disguised orders for chemicals and rubber—but you can’t slaughter millions of sheep or buy up that much wool production without a reaction from the markets. So if the Wehrmacht goes east in April, they’ll go without wool coats, and by January they’ll freeze to death with useless rifles in their hands.”

Broza wasn’t so sure. “Perhaps. But Hitler thinks he’ll be in Moscow by late October—that’s the point of the blitzkrieg. They’ll take their wool coats from the cloakroom at the Kremlin. What’s to stop them? The Red Army is sick as a dog; officers shot in the purges, all the tactics they tried in Finland failed miserably.”

“The Russians won’t stop them. They’ll slow them down, bleed their strength—it will be some variation on defense-in-depth.”

Broza paused to consider that. Defense-in-depth was the ancient, traditional military doctrine of Russia. For a thousand years, they’d protected their cities by use of the abatis: trees cut down at the three-foot level, the logs hung up on the stumps and pointing out toward the enemy. Among the felled trees were pits camouflaged with cut brush— intended to break the ankle of a horse or a man. These defenses were eighty miles deep. With raiding parties harassing their flanks, an invasion force would find itself exhausted when it finally reached the site the Russians had chosen as a battleground.

By 1938, building what was called the Stalin Line on the U.S.S.R.’s western boundary, various refinements had been added: artificial lakes—five feet deep, to tempt an invader to try a crossing—artificial marsh, cornfields cut to accommodate enfilading machine-gun fire, concrete bunkers three feet thick, with barbed wire now tangled in the trunks of the fallen trees.

“Defense-in-depth doesn’t happen overnight,” Broza said, thinking out loud. “And the Stalin Line is being dismantled now that the Russians have moved up to the middle of Poland. That advance may cost them more than they suspect.”

“They will sacrifice lives,” de Milja said. “And land. Burn the villages, blow up the bridges.”

Broza thumbed through a sheaf of papers in a dossier. “Granted, they are not distributing light oil for the winter, and they are not buying sheepskins. But we know they are building large hospitals on the border. For who? Not for us, certainly. And we’ve seen important commanders and staff logistics people flown in to border camps for conferences.”

Both officers thought about that for a time. “It is coming,” de Milja said. “But not this spring. Perhaps in ’41.”

“And this spring?”

“France.”

“Nobody believes such a thing can happen,” Broza said. “You mean a major attack—tanks, assault planes, infantry, Paris in flames?”

“Yes,” de Milja said.

Broza shook his head. It wasn’t possible.

The first winter of German occupation turned slowly to the rain and mud of a long, slow spring. Perhaps the Poles lost heart a little. The first rage was spent—a few SS officers assassinated, several hundred hostages shot. But when the smoke cleared the Germans weren’t frightened and the Poles weren’t intimidated. And so they settled down to fight.

The recommendation of the ZWZ intelligence service—to hammer at the links between Russia and Germany—was endorsed by the Sixth Bureau administration in Paris, and the logical area of attack turned out to be the Hitler/Stalin Pact trade agreements. German technology needed Russian raw materials; a million tons of animal fodder, a million tons of crude oil, tons of cotton, coal, phosphates, chromium, and iron ore. The Russians had the matériel—it was simply a matter of shipping it to Germany. By rail. Across Poland.

From the first days of occupation it was clear that all labor would be performed by Polish workers, under German supervision. So the Germans, when they decided to enlarge Prezmysl railroad station, just on the German side of the border, hired ZWZ carpenters, ZWZ masons, and ZWZ helpers to hand them the proper tool. Broza, de Milja, and company knew everything before it happened. The railroad line Prezmysl/Cracow/Breslau, entirely under the view of Polish underground intelligence, was soon ready to carry the goods that would keep Germany rich and powerful, while the Poles were itching to blow it all to hell, a small first step on the road to making Germany poor and weak.

The battle started with Polish Boy Scouts, adept at crawling under freight cars, opposed by German sentries, who shot anything and justified nothing. But it did not remain on that level. The initial Polish thrust—we can blow up whatever we want—was answered by a German counterthrust—we can fix whatever you blow up. The Poles soon realized the magnitude of the job they had taken on: the Germans were good fixers, and the strategic sector of the German/Polish economy was no small thing—it was going to require one hell of an effort to blow it all up. Not only that, the means to blow it up had to be stolen from these very Germans; at least until the French and British Allies found a way to fly in the explosives they needed. Not at all daunted, the Poles created a special blowing-up–and–stealing organization to do the job. They called it Komenda Dyversji—Sabotage and Diversion—Kedyv for short.

Like any organization, Kedyv measured its success in numbers. In 1940, a disabled locomotive was out of service for fourteen hours. Later, the period would rise to fourteen days. The increase in productivity was achieved by Polish chemists and engineers, opposed by German chemists and engineers. At which point the conflict had reached the level on which it would be decided: national intelligentsia versus national intelligentsia.

The Polish scientists took the offensive and never let up: they built incendiary devices that were swiftly and easily attachable to tank cars loaded with Russian crude oil, they then timed the fuse by the rhythm of the rails: x number of thumps would set off the explosion, sometimes in Poland, sometimes in Germany. Unable to determine the venue of the sabotage, the Germans found it impossible to investigate. Petroleum storage tanks were set afire by the introduction of cylinders of compressed hydrogen with open valves. Locomotives were disabled by the addition of an abrasive to the lubricating system. Russian iron ore was seeded with bombs that exploded while the ore was traveling down chutes into German smelters. When railroad tracks were mined, the first mine blew up a train, the second a rescue train, the third a repair train.

The Germans didn’t like it.

These untermenschen were not to be permitted to interfere with the harmonization of German Europe. A message was sent to the Poles: the faculty of Cracow University was called to a meeting, then arrested en masse. It was thought to be the first time an entire university had been arrested. But a few nights later, on the Silesian border, a blue flash, a fiery spray of tank-car metal, five vats of flame towed through the darkness by a terrified engineer. Fuck you.

28 March, 3:40 a.m. De Milja woke suddenly. He listened, concentrated. First the strange, whispery silence of a city under curfew. Then a board creaked in the hallway.

So, 9 mm from the nightstand, safety thumbed off. He sat up slowly, sighted on the crack where the door met the jamb. The knob turned delicately, a cautious hand on the other side. De Milja took a breath and held it.

Madame Kuester. In a silk robe, hair in a long braid. “Don’t kill me, please,” she said. He understood only by watching her mouth move, her voice barely made a sound. He lowered the gun. “Germans,” she said. Gestured with her eyes. She walked down the hall to her room, he followed, in undershirt and shorts. He stood close to her in the small room, could smell the laundry soap she washed with. The shade moved slightly in the air, the window behind it open an inch. From the roof across the narrow street, a hushed “Ocht-svansig, Ocht-svansig,” then a brief hiss of radio static. Eight-twenty, then, he thought. Meaning I’m in place, or proceed to apartment, or they’re all asleep, or whatever it meant. Now de Milja’s decision had been made for him: orders were specific, the response detailed; and he was not to permit himself to be taken alive. “Get dressed, please,” he said.

He walked down the hallway, tapped lightly at the door of the master bedroom. He heard the man and his wife breathing deeply inside, opened the door, had finally to lean over and touch the man on his bare shoulder. They made love tonight, he thought. The man was immediately awake, saw de Milja and the 9 mm and understood everything.

He went back to Madame Kuester’s room. When he opened the door she was naked, standing in front of an open bureau drawer. He knew this profile—the curve of her abdomen, flat bottom, heavy thighs. Her head turned toward him. She didn’t exactly pause, skipped a single beat perhaps, then took underwear from the drawer and stepped into it. He wanted to hold her against him, something he had never done before. There were family noises in the hall; the children, the parents, an angry word. “Best to say good-bye,” she said.

“Good-bye,” he said. He couldn’t see her eyes in the darkened room.

He hurried back to his room, put on a sweater, wool pants, heavy shoes, and a raincoat. The gun fit in the raincoat pocket. From inside a book he selected an ausweis—German work pass—and other identification meant for emergencies, as well as a packet of zloty notes and some gold coins. The family and Madame Kuester were waiting for him at the front door.

The bolt and lock mechanisms were heavily oiled, just a soft click and de Milja was looking out at the landing. A current of chilly air from the staircase meant that the street door was standing open. This was not normal. De Milja turned, silently let the others know what had happened. The reaction was calm; the father held a large military revolver, his thirteen-year-old son had its twin. The man smiled and nodded gravely. I understand.

Three flights below, somebody tried to walk silently through the lobby. Others followed, one of them stifled a cough. They could have climbed the stairs quietly if they’d taken off their boots, but the SS didn’t do things like that, so de Milja and the family could hear them coming. When they came around the curve of the staircase onto the second floor, de Milja took the 9 mm out of his pocket and climbed the iron rungs of a ladder that led to a hatch that opened onto the roof. He tested the hatch with his gun hand, moving it only enough to make sure it wasn’t secured from the other side. He was reasonably sure there were German police on the roof.

They reached the floor below. They weren’t very careful about noise now, de Milja could hear the heels of their boots and the sound of leather belts and holster grommets and breathing deepened by excitement and anticipation. Then they pounded their fists on a door and yelled for somebody to open up, the guttural German rolled and echoed up the open staircase and rang on the tile landings. The door was flung open, knob hammering the wall, then there were shouts and running footsteps and a wail of terror as the downstairs neighbor was arrested.

They had, de Milja calculated, at most an hour.

The middle-aged couple who lived below would be taken to Szucha Avenue headquarters, a sergeant would put down basic information and fill out forms, and when the interrogators finally got busy they would realize that this was not Captain Alexander de Milja or the man in the brown raincoat or whatever description they had. Then they would come back.

There was, of course, at least the mathematical possibility that the police had not made an error, but those who indulged themselves in that kind of thinking were no longer alive in Poland in the spring of 1940.

A few minutes after five in the morning, when the curfew ended, the wife, both children, and Madame Kuester left the apartment with false identity cards and a wicker basket on wheels they used for shopping. Moments later, they came to the side street and turned right. Which meant, to de Milja looking out the window, that German police remained on guard in the lobby, checking papers as the tenants left the building. Five minutes later, de Milja was alone—the former customs official had walked out the door of his apartment, probably never to see it again. He too turned right at the side street, which confirmed the earlier signal, and touched his hair, which meant the Germans were checking closely. At 5:15, de Milja climbed the ladder, cautiously raised the hatch, then hoisted himself out onto the roof.

The dawn was a shock after the close apartment—cold air, dark blue sky, shattered red cloud in streaks that curved to the horizon. He took a moment to get his bearings, smelled cigarette smoke nearby, then knelt behind a plaster wall at the foot of a chimney. Somebody was up here with him, possibly a German policeman. He held the 9 mm in his right hand, pressed the fingertips of his left hand against the tar surface of the roof. He could feel somebody pacing: one, two, three, four, five. Pause. Then back again. Everything de Milja knew suggested a police guard on the roof—the raid, the document control at the front door. Germans were thorough, this was the sort of thing they did. He wanted to see for himself, but resisted the temptation to rise up and look around—the roof was cluttered; sheets hung on clotheslines, chimneys, ventilation pipe outlets, two tarpaper-roofed housings that covered the entries to staircases.

A few feet away, across a low parapet and above a narrow alley, was a fire escape on the sixth floor of the building next door. From there, he had several choices: climb in an apartment window, descend to the alley, or go up to the roof, which abutted two neighboring buildings, one of them a factory with heavy truck traffic in and out. All he had to do was jump the space above the alley.

Down in the street, a tramcar arrived, ringing its bell, grinding to a stop, then starting up again. He heard the clop of hoofbeats—perhaps the wagon that delivered coal—and the high/low siren of German police wagons as they sped through the city streets. The air smelled of coal smoke and onions frying in fat, and he could see the morning star, still sharp, but fading in the gathering daylight. He heard the rasp of a window forced up, he heard a woman laugh—shrill, abandoned, it was so funny she didn’t care how she sounded.

Turning his head, he saw a woman appear at an open window in an adjacent building. Her apartment was one story above the roof, so he found himself looking up at her. She wore an old print dress with the sleeves rolled up, an apron, and a kerchief with the knot tied in the middle of her forehead. Her face was determined—here it was just after dawn and she was cleaning her house. She poked a dustmop out the window and gave it a good bang against the sill, then another, just so it remembered who was boss.

When she saw de Milja, she stared as though he were an animal in a zoo. Of course, he thought. What she sees is a man with an automatic pistol in his hand, kneeling behind the base of a chimney. Hiding behind the base of a chimney. Hmm. Probably a criminal. But he’s not alone on the roof. From where she stood—she gave the mop a desultory rap just to keep up appearances—she could see another man. This man was pacing, and smoking a cigarette. Perhaps, if God wills, de Milja thought, he’s wearing a uniform, or if he’s in civilian clothes maybe he has on one of those stupid little hats with alpine brushes the Germans liked.

De Milja watched the woman, she stared back shamelessly, then looked away, probably at the pacing man. Then back at him. He sensed a motion behind her, and she was briefly distracted. She almost, he felt, turned away from the window and went back to cleaning the apartment—somebody in the room had told her to do that. Yes, de Milja thought, that was it. She turned her head and said something, something dismissive and sharp, then returned to watching the men on the roof below her. She had broad shoulders and big red hands— nobody told her what to do. De Milja now faced her directly and spread his arms, palms up in the universal interrogatory gesture: what’s going on?

She didn’t react. She wasn’t going to help a thief—her expression was suspicious and hostile. But then, a moment later, she changed her mind. She held out a hand, fingers stiff: stop. De Milja put his hand back on the surface of the roof, three, four, five. Pause. The woman held her signal. Then, just as a new sequence of footsteps began, she beckoned abruptly, excitedly: yes, it’s all right now, he can’t see you. Three, four, five. Pause. No, stop, he’s facing your way. Three, four, five. Pause. Yes, it’s . . .

De Milja leaped up and ran for his life.

He almost got away with it.

But if he could feel the policeman pacing on the roof, the man could feel it when he ran. “Halt!”

As de Milja reached the parapet he could see the woman’s face with perfect clarity: her mouth rounded into an O, her hand came up and pressed the side of her face. She was horrified at what was about to happen. The first shot snapped the air next to his ear just as his foot hit the parapet. It was a long way across. Seven floors down, broken glass in the alley glittered up at him. And the parapet was capped with curved, slippery, ceramic tile. It was a bad jump, one foot slipped as he took off. He flailed at the empty air, and he almost cleared the railing, but then his left heel caught and that spilled him forward, his head hitting the iron floor of the fire escape as something pinged in the stairway above him and somebody shouted.

He had not felt the bullet, but he was on his knees, vision swimming, a rock in his chest that blocked his air. He went away. Came back. Looked down at a windowsill, worn and weathered gray. A big drop of blood fell on it, then another. His heart raced, he clawed at the iron fretwork, somehow stood up. The world spun around him; whistles, shouts—a brick exploded and he turned away from it. Saw the ladder to the floor below, made himself half slide, half tumble to the iron platform.

His escape—from everything, forever—was six stories down into the alley and he knew it, he just had to get one leg over the railing and then the other and then the terrors of Szucha Avenue no longer existed. Hide under the ground, they will never touch you. He was going to do it—then he didn’t. Instead, the window on the fire escape exploded into somebody’s kitchen—glass, blood, and de Milja all showing up for breakfast.

A family around a table; a still life, a spoon frozen in air between bowl and mouth, a woman at a stove, a man in suspenders. Then he was in a parlor; a canary tweeted, in a mirror above a buffet a man with bright blood spattered on his face. He fumbled at the family’s locks, somehow worked the right bolt the right way, the door opened, then closed behind him.

He froze. Then the door on the other side of the landing flew open and a man beckoned fiercely from the darkness of his hall. “This way,” he said, voice thick with excitement. De Milja couldn’t see— objects doubled, then faded into ghosts of themselves—then a bald man with a heavy face and small, restless eyes emerged from the fog. He wore an undershirt, and held his pants up with his hand.

When de Milja didn’t move, the man grabbed him—he had the strength of the mad, he may have been mad for all de Milja knew— and shoved him down a long, dark hallway. Once again de Milja started to fade out, he felt the wall sliding past on his right shoulder as the man half-carried him along. There was a sense of still air, the odor of closed rooms. A hallway made unlikely angles, sharp turns into blank walls, a wood panel swung wide, and he found himself in a box that smelled of freshly sawn planks. Then it was dark, with a heavy silence, and as he blacked out he realized that he had been entombed.

There was more. It went on from there, but he was less and less a part of it. Merely something of value. It was not so bad to be something of value, he discovered. He was fed into a Saving Machine—a mechanism that knew better than to expect anything of fugitives, the damaged and the hunted. It simply saved them. So all de Milja ever retained of the next few days were images, remnants, as he was moved here and there, an object in someone else’s operation, hidden and re-hidden, the treasure of an anxious miser.

He came to rest on a couch in a farmhouse, a place of palpable safety. It was drizzling, and he could smell wet earth and spring. It took him back to Tarnopol, to the Volhynia. There too they burned oak logs, wet dogs dried by the fire, somebody wore oilskins, and the smell of a stone house in the rain was cut by bay rum, which the Ostrow uncles always used after shaving.

His head ached, his mouth was dry as chalk. A young woman doctor sat on the edge of the couch, looked in his eyes with a penlight, then put a delicate finger on a place above his forehead. “Hurt?” she asked.

“Not much.”

“I’m the one who sewed you up,” she said. “In a few days we’ll take them out.”

He had six stitches in his hairline. He had not been hit by a bullet, but the fall on the fire escape had given him a concussion.

An hour later an adjutant took him upstairs, to an office in an old farm bedroom with a little fireplace. The man behind a long worktable had tousled gray hair and mustache and the pitted complexion of childhood smallpox. He wore a country jacket with narrow shoulders and a thick wool tie. When he stood to shake hands, de Milja saw that he was tall and thin. “Captain,” he said quietly, indicating a chair.

He was called Major Olenik, and he was de Milja’s new superior officer. “You might as well hear all the bad news at once,” he said. “The basement of Saint Stanislaus Hospital was raided by an SS unit, what files were there were taken. Colonel Broza was wounded, and captured. The woman you knew as Agata swallowed a cyanide capsule. You and Captain Grodewicz survived.”

For a moment, de Milja didn’t say anything. Then, “How did that happen?”

Olenik’s shrug was eloquent: let’s not waste our time with theories, we don’t know and it’s likely we won’t ever know. “Of course we are working on that,” Olenik said. “Did you know who Agata was?” he asked.

“I didn’t, no.”

“Biochemist. One of the best in Europe.”

Olenik cleared his throat. “The Sixth Bureau in Paris informed us, a few days ago, that our senior intelligence officer in France has been relieved of duty. We are going to send you as his replacement, Captain. You studied at Saint-Cyr for three years, is that correct?”

“Yes. 1923 to 1926.”

“And your French is fluent?”

“It’s acceptable. Good workable French spoken by a Pole. I’ve read in it, in order not to lose it, but conversation will take a few weeks.”

“We’re sending you out, with couriers. Up to Gdynia, then by freighter across the Baltic to Sweden. We’ve created an identity and a legend for you. Once in France, you’ll report to the Sixth Bureau Director of Intelligence in Paris. It’s your decision, of course, but I want to add, parenthetically, that you are known to the German security services in Poland.” He paused, waiting for de Milja to respond.

“The answer is yes,” de Milja said.

The major acknowledged his response with a polite nod.

Later they discussed de Milja’s escape from the Germans. He learned that the customs official, his family and Madame Kuester, had gotten away successfully and been taken to safety in the countryside.

As for the man who had hidden him in his apartment. He was not in the underground, according to Olenik. “But he did have an acquaintance who he believed to be in the ZWZ, he confided in her, and she knew who to talk to. Word was passed to us, and the escape-andevasion people picked you up, moved you around for a time, eventually brought you down here.”

“I owe that man my life,” de Milja said. “But he was—perhaps he was not entirely sane.”

“A strange man,” Olenik said. “Perhaps a casualty of war. But his hiding place, well, it’s common now. People turning their homes into magicians’ boxes, some of it is art, really. Double walls, false ceilings, secret stairways, sections of floorboard on hinges, drawer pulls that unlock hidden passageways to other buildings.”

Olenik paused and thought about it. “Yes, I suppose he was a little crazy. What he built was bizarre, I went to see it, and it was, byzantine. Still, you were lucky—your mad carpenter was a good carpenter. Because the Gestapo did search that apartment, every apartment in that building, in fact. But to find you they would have had to rip out the walls, and that day they didn’t bother. That’s not always the case— they’ve turned Jewish apartments into sawdust—but all they did was break up some furniture, and so here you are.”

Olenik smiled suddenly. “We must look at the bright side. At least the Kulturtrager”—it meant culture-bringer, a cherished German notion about themselves—“brought us ‘subhumans’ some new and adventurous ideas in architecture.”

3 April 1940. The “subhumans” turned out to be adept pupils, gathered attentively at the feet of the Kulturtrager. The Germans had, for example, a great passion for important paper. It was, all prettily stamped and signed and franked and checked, order and discipline made manifest. Such impressive German habits, the Poles thought, were worthy of imitation.

So they imitated them, scrupulously and to the letter. As de Milja was moved north through occupied Poland, he was provided with a splendid collection of official paper. Passierscheine, Durchlasscheine, Urlaubsscheine, and Dienstausweise—general passes, transit permits, furlough passes, and work permits. The Poles had them all— stolen, imitated, doubled-up (if you had one legitimate citizen, why not two?—it’s not unsanitary to share an identity), forged, secretly printed, altered, reused, and, every now and then, properly obtained. To the Germans, documentation was a fence; to the Poles, it was a ladder.

And they discovered a curious fact about the German security police: they had a slight aversion to combat soldiers. It wasn’t serious, or even particularly conscious, it was just that they felt powerful when elbowing Polish civilians out of their way in a passenger train. Among German soldiers, however, whose enemies tended to be armed, they experienced some contraction of self-esteem, so avoided, in a general way, those situations.

The lowly untermenschen caught on to that little quirk in their masters right away: the new ZWZ intelligence officer for France reached the port of Gdynia by using Sonderzuge—special night trains taking Wehrmacht soldiers home to leave in Germany. These “specials” were also used by railway workers, who rode them to and from trains making up in stations and railyards all over Poland. De Milja was one of them—according to his papers and permits a brakeman—headed to an assignment in Gdansk. Taken under the care of escape-route operators, he moved slowly north over a period of three nights.

Three April nights. Suddenly warm, then showery, crickets loud in the fields, apple trees in clouds of white blossom. It meant to de Milja that he would not see this country again—it was that strange habit of a thing to show you its loveliest face just before you lost it.

The trains clanked along slowly under the stars in the countryside. Across the river on the rebuilt bridge at Novy Dvor, back to the other side at Wyszogrod, then tracking the curves and bends of the Vistula as it headed for the sea. The railwaymen gathered in a few seats in the rear of the last car on the Sonderzuge trains, and the tired Wehrmacht soldiers left them alone. They were just working people, doing their jobs, not interested in politics. A heel of bread or a boiled potato wrapped in a piece of newspaper, a cigarette, a little quiet conversation with fellow workers—that was the disguise of the Polish train crews.

Captain de Milja rarely spoke, simply faded into the background. The escape-route operators were young—the boy who brought him to the town of Torun was sixteen. But the Germans had helped him to grow up quickly, and had sharpened his conspirative instincts to a fine edge. He’d never been an angel, but he should have been lying to some schoolteacher about homework, or bullshitting his girlfriend’s father about going to a dance. Instead, he was saying “Nice evening, Sergeant,” to the shkopy police Kontroll at the Wloclawek railroad station.

“New man?” the sergeant said.

“Unh-huh,” said the teenager.

Polite, but pointless to seek anything further. The sergeant had had a teaspoon of human warmth in this godforsaken country, he’d have to make do with that. Stamped de Milja’s papers, met his eyes for an instant, end of discussion.

In the daytime, he was hidden in apartments, and he’d grab a few hours sleep on a couch while young people talked quietly around him. The escape-route safe house in Torun was run by a girl no more than seventeen, snub-nosed, with cornsilk hair. De Milja felt tenderness and desire all mixed up together. Tough as a stick, this one. Made sure he had a place to sleep, a threadbare blanket, and a glass of beer. Christ, his heart ached for her, for them all because they wouldn’t live the year.

Germans too thought in numbers, and their counterespionage array was massive: Abwehr, KRIPO—criminal police, SIPO—security police, including the Gestapo—the SD intelligence units, Ukrainian gestapo, railway police, special detachments for roads, bridges, forests, river traffic, and factories. In Poland, it rained crossed leather belts and side arms. People got caught.

“There is soup for you,” Snub-nose said when he woke up.

“Thank you,” de Milja said.

“Are those glasses false?”

“Yes.” Because they had his photograph, he had grown a little mustache and wore clear glasses.

“You must not wear them in Torun. The Germans here know the trick—they stop people on the street and if their lenses are clear they arrest them.”

People came in and out all day; whispered, argued, left messages, envelopes, intelligence collection. Young as she was, Snub-nose had the local authority and nobody challenged her. That night, another railwayman arrived, this one eighteen, and de Milja’s journey continued.

Late in the evening, they left the train at Grudziaz. De Milja, wearing a railroadman’s blue shirt and trousers, metal lunchbox in hand, walked through the rain down a street in front of the station. A whore in a doorway blew him a kiss, a half-peeled German poster on a wall showed a Polish soldier in tattered uniform, Warsaw in flames in the background. The soldier shook his fist in anger at a picture of Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister. “England, this is your work!” said the caption. Along with their propaganda, the Germans had put up endless proclamations, “strictly forbidden” and “pain of death” in every sentence.

They were stopped briefly by the police, but nothing serious. They played their part, eternally patient Poles. The Germans knew that Russia had owned the country for a hundred and twenty-three years, until 1918. They certainly meant to do better than that. The policeman said in slow German, “Let’s see your papers, boys.” Hell, who cared what the politicians did. Weren’t they all just working folks, looking for a little peace in this life?

After midnight, the leave train slowly wound through the flat fields toward the coast, toward Gdynia and Gdansk. It kept on raining, the soldiers slept and smoked and stared out the windows of the darkened railcar.

The escape-route way station in Gdynia was an office over a bar down by the docks, run by the woman who owned the bar. Tough exterior—black, curly hair like wire, blood-red lipstick—but a heart like steel. “Something’s wrong here,” she grumbled. “Shkopy’s gota flea up his ass.”

In a room lit blue by a sign outside the window that said bar, the couriers ran in and out. Most carried information on German naval activity in the port.

“Look out the window,” said the woman. “What do you see?”

“Nothing.”

“Right. Eight German ships due in this week—two destroyers and the rest merchantmen. Where are they?”

“Where do you think?”

“Something’s up. Troops or war supplies—ammunition and so forth. That’s what they’re moving. Maybe to Norway, or Denmark. It means invasion, my friend.”

“I have to get to Stockholm,” de Milja said.

“Oh, you’ll be all right,” she said. An ironic little smile meant that he wouldn’t be, not in the long run, and neither would she. “The Swedes are neutral. And it’s no technicality—they’re making money hand over fist selling iron ore to the Germans, so they’ll keep Hitler sweet. And he’s not going to annoy them—no panzer tanks without Swedish iron.”

They were getting very rich indeed—de Milja had seen a report. Meanwhile they were righteous as parsons; issued ringing indictments at every opportunity and sat in judgment on the world. Pious hypocrites, he thought, yet they managed to get away with it.

“When do I go out?” de Milja asked.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “On the Enköping.”

Two men in working clothes arrived before dawn. They handed de Milja an old greasy shirt, overalls, and cap. De Milja shivered when he put them on. One of the men took coal dust from a paper bag, mixed it with water, and rubbed it into de Milja’s face and hands.

Then they gave him a shovel to carry and walked him through the wire gates to the dock area. A German customs official, glancing at de Milja’s pass to the port, held himself as far away as possible, his lip curled with distaste.

They joined other Polish stevedores working at two cranes loading coal into the hold of the Enköping. The Swedish seamen ignored them, smoking pipes and leaning on the rail. De Milja had a bag on a leather string around his neck, it held microfilm, a watch, some chocolate, and a small bottle of water. Casually, one of the workers climbed down a rope ladder into the hold. De Milja followed him. “We’re not going to fill this all the way up—we’ll leave you a little space,” said the man. “Just be sure you stay well to one side. All right?”

“Yes.”

Above them, a crane engine chugged and whined. “Good luck,” the man said. “Give the Swedish girls a kiss for me.” They shook hands and the man climbed back up the rope ladder. An avalanche of coal followed. De Milja pressed his back against the iron plates of the hold as it cascaded through the hatch and grew into a mountain. When it stopped, there were only three feet between de Milja and the decking above him as he lay on the lumpy coal. The hatch cover was fitted on, the screws squeaked as it was tightened down. Darkness was complete. Later in the morning he heard commands shouted in German and the barking of dogs as the ship was searched. Then the engines rumbled to life, and the freighter wallowed out into the Baltic.

It was seventy hours to Stockholm.

The deck plates sweated with condensation and acid coal-water dripped steadily and soaked him to the skin. At first, discomfort kept him alert—he turned and twisted, wet, miserable, and mad. But that didn’t last. With the steady motion of the ship and the beat of the engines, the black darkness and the cold, dead air, de Milja fell into a kind of stupor. It was not unpleasant. Rather the reverse. He drifted down through his life, watched certain moments as they floated by. He saw dead leaves on a path in the forest in the Volhynia, his feet kicking them as he walked along, a little girl who’d come to stay with a neighbor that summer, a kiss, more than that. It made them giggle.

This silly stuff—what did adults see in it? He had no idea he was dying, not for the longest time. Heavy snow fell past a window in Warsaw, Madame Kuester looked over her shoulder into a mirror, a red mark where he’d held her too tightly. He said he was sorry, she shrugged, her expression reflective, bittersweet. It must be time to sleep, he thought, because at last he did not feel the cold. He was relieved. His wife jammed her hands in the pockets of her coat, stood at the shore of the lake as evening came on. She looked a little rueful, that was all. If you stood far enough back, the world wasn’t frightening. It wasn’t anything. In the end, you were a little sad at what went on. Really, it ought to be better. Casement window at the manor house, the first gleam of the sun at the rim of a hill, two dogs trotting out of the forest onto the wet grass of the lawn. Finally, he became aware, for a moment, of what was happening. He did what he could—took long, deep breaths. Coal, he thought. Sulfur, carbon monoxide, confined space, red blood cells. It was all very confusing. One painful stab of regret: a crumpled body, Polish stowaway found on a mound of coal in a Swedish freighter. Captain Alexander de Milja hated that idea, simply one more senseless, muted death in time of war. He lay on his back at the foot of a poplar tree and looked up as the wind rattled the little leaves.

Every summer had one perfect day.

The green sea rose under the ship, held a moment, then fell away. Sometime later, the engines slowed, the iron walls shuddered, a tug tied on and nudged the Enköping against its pier. The rusty bolts squeaked as they were backed off, the hatch cover swung into the air, and a crane began to scoop the coal away. Later, under the dock lights, too bright against the pale evening sky of Sweden, a booming voice shouted recognition signals down into the echoing hold.

Was the third of June, 1940.

A springtime day in Paris and, last days being tricky this way, especially breezy and soft. No, Lezhev told himself, don’t be seduced. Le printemps, like every other spectacle of the French theater of life, was an illusion, a fraud. That was absurd, of course, and Lezhev knew it; spring was spring. But he chose to indulge himself in a little unjust spite, then smiled acidly at his intransigence. On this day above all he could say whatever he wanted—nobody contradicts a man writing a suicide note.

Stationed at the window of the smelly little garret room, he had watched spring come to the Parisian slums: to the tiny, dark street covered in horseshit and dire juices, to the fat women who stood with folded arms in doorways waiting to be insulted, and to the girls. Such girls. It would take the words of a Blok, a Bely, a Lezhev, to do them justice. “In Lights of a Lost Evening, the tenth volume from Boris Lezhev, this fierce apostle of Yesenin reveals a more tender, more lyric voice than usual. In the title work, for instance, Lezhev . . .”

Now, there you had girls. Lithe, momentary, a flash in the corner of your eye, then gone. Nothing good lasted in the world, Lezhev thought, that’s why you needed poets to grab it as it went flying by.

Well, now and then there was something good. For example, Genya Beilis. Genya. Yes, he thought, Genya. Lithe and momentary? Hah! You could never call her a girl. Girls had no such secret valleys and mysterious creases, girls did not contrive to occupy the nether mind quite as Genya did. He would miss her, up on his cloud or wherever he was going. Miss her terribly. She’d been his salvation—good thing in a bad life—the last few years of exile. Sometimes his lover, sometimes not, indomitable friend always, his brilliant bitch of a hundred breeds.

It was true, she was an extraordinary mixture. Her father, the publisher Max Beilis, was Russian, Jewish, and French. Her mother was Spanish, with some ancient Arab blood from Cordoba. Also an Irish grandmother on the maternal side. Lord, he thought, what wasn’t she? You could feel the racial rivers that flowed through her. She had strange skin; sallow, olive, smooth and taut. Hair thick, dark, with reddish tints in full sunlight, and long enough so that she twined and wound it in complicated ways. Strong eyebrows, supple waist, sexy hands, eyes sharp with intelligence, eyes that saw through people. —You were right to be a little afraid of Genya Beilis. The idea of some great, naked, flabby whale of a German hovering above her made Lezhev sick with rage, he would rise up and—

No, he wouldn’t. The German panzer divisions were racing south from Belgium, French troops surrendering or running away as they advanced, the police were on the verge of arresting him—the closer the Germans got, the worse for all the Lezhevs of Paris. So he wasn’t going to be anybody’s protector, not even his own.

Fact was, they had finally hounded him to the edge of the grave. The Bolsheviks had chased him out of St. Petersburg in 1922. He fled to Odessa. They ran him out of there in 1925. So he’d gone to Germany. Written for the émigré magazines, played some émigré politics. 1933, in came Hitler, out went Lezhev. So, off to sad Brussels; earnest, neutral Belgium. He hadn’t much left by then—every time he ran, things flew away: clothes, money, poems, friends. 1936, off to fight in Spain—the NKVD almost got him there, he had to walk over the Pyrenees at night, in snow up to his knees. He barely made it into LibertéEgalité-and-Fraternité, where they threw him in prison.

Amazing, Lezhev thought, the things he’d done. As a St. Petersburg teenager in 1917, he’d torn a czarist policeman’s club from his hands and cracked him on the nose. Stayed up all night, haunting the dark alleyways of the city and its women: talking to the whores, screwing the intellectuals. He saw a man executed with a leather cord as he sat in a kitchen chair at a busy intersection. He was a worker of the world. For a year or two, anyhow. Worked with a pen, which was mightier than the sword, he discovered, only when approximately the same size. He’d run from raging fires, crazed mobs, brawling Nazis, rumbling tanks, and the security police of at least six nations.

My valise, dark-eyes. Quick. It’s under your bed. There’s nothing in there, and nothing to pack, but I take it along.

So, at last, after all that, who got him? The ronds-de-cuir. French bureaucrats, laboring all day on wooden chairs, were prone to a shine on the seat of the pants. The antidote was a chair-sized round of leather—rond de cuir—carried daily to work, placed ever so precisely beneath the clerical behind. The makers of Parisian slang were not slow to see the possibilities in this. To Lezhev, the ronds-de-cuir seemed, at first, a doleful but inevitable feature of French life but, in time, he came to understand them in a different way. Fussy, niggling, insatiable, they had some kinship with the infamous winds of Catalonia, which will not blow out a candle but will put a man in his grave. And now, he realized, they were going to do what all the Okhrana agents and Chekists and Nazis and pimps and machine gunners and Spanish cooks had failed to do.

They were going to kill him.

But maybe not. On his rounds that night, in Le Chasseur Vert and the Jean Bart out in the Russian seventeenth arrondissement and Petrukhov’s place up in Pigalle, he felt the life force surge inside him. He laid some little glovemaker’s assistant among the mops and brooms in Petrukhov’s storeroom. Tossed his last francs out on the zinc bars as a rich slice of émigré Paris got drunk on his money and told him what a fine fellow he was. Sometime near dawn he was with the acmeist playwright Yushin, too plastered to walk any farther, propped on a wall and staring down into the Seine by the Alexandre III bridge.

“Don’t give up now,” Yushin said. “You’ve been through too much. We all have.”

Lezhev belched, and nodded vigorously. Yushin was right.

“Remember the Cossacks chased you?”

“Mm,” Lezhev said. Cossacks had never chased him, Yushin had him confused with some other émigré poet from St. Petersburg.

“How you ran!”

“Mm!”

“Still, they didn’t catch you.”

“No.”

“Well, there it is.”

“You’re right.”

“Don’t weaken, Boris Ivanovich. Don’t let these sanctimonious prigs stab your heart with their little quills.”

“Well said!”

“You think so?”

“Yes.”

“You’re kind to say that.”

“Not at all.” Lezhev saw that the compliment had put Yushin to sleep, still standing, propped against the stone wall.

But then, on the morning of 4 June, he had to report to the Prefecture of Police and slid, like a man who cannot get a grip on an icy hillside, down into a black depression. The Parisian police, responsible for immigration, had placed him on what they called a Régime des Sursis. Sursis meant reprieves, but régime was a little harder to define. The authorities would have said system, but the word was used for a diet, implying control, and some discomfort. Lezhev would describe it as “a very refined cruelty.”

In March, the French had declared Lezhev an undesirable alien, subject to deportation back to Germany—his last country of legal residence, since he’d entered Belgium, Spain, and France illegally. Of course all sorts of judicial nightmares awaited him in Berlin; he could expect concentration camp, beating, and probably execution. The French perfectly understood his predicament. You may, they told him, appeal the order of deportation.

This he did, and was granted a stay—for twenty-four hours. Since the stay would lapse at 5:00 p.m. the following afternoon, he had to go to the Prefecture at 1:00 p.m. to stand on the lines. At 4:20, they stamped his papers—this enabled him to stay in France an additional twenty-four hours. And so forth, and so on. For four months.

The lines at the Prefecture—across from Notre-Dame cathedral on the Île de la Cité—had a life of their own, and Lezhev grimly joined in. He’d been hit on the head in his life, missed plenty of meals, been tumbled about by fate. Standing in line every day held no terrors for him. He couldn’t earn any money, but Genya Beilis had a little and she helped him out; so did others. He’d written behind barbed wire, on a sandbag, under a bridge, now he’d write while standing on line.

This defiance held for March and April, but in May he began to slip. The ronds-de-cuir, on the other side of their wire-grille partitions, did not become friendly over time—that astonished, then horrified, finally sickened Lezhev. What sort of human, he wondered, behaved this way? What sort of reptilian heart remained so cold to somebody in trouble? The sort that, evidently, lived in the hollow chest of the little man with the little man’s mustache. That lived within the mountainous bosom of the woman with the lacquer hairdo and scarlet lips, or behind the three-point handkerchief of Coquelet the Rooster, with his cockscomb of wild hair and the triumphant crow of the dunghill. “Tomorrow, then, Monsieur Lezhev. Bright and early, eh?” Stamp— kachuck—sign, blot, admire, hand over, and smile.

The line itself, snaking around the building, then heading up the quay, was a madhouse: Jews, Republican Spaniards, Gypsies, Hungarian artists, the lost and the dispossessed, criminals who hadn’t yet gotten around to committing crimes, the full riptide of unwanted humanity—spring of 1940. They whispered and argued and bartered and conspired, laughed and cried, stole and shared, extemporized life from one hour to the next.

But slowly, inevitably, the Régime de Sursis gnawed away until it ate a life, took one victim, then another. Zoltan in the river, Petra with cyanide, Sygelbohm under a train.

Boris Lezhev, papers stamped for one more day of existence, returned to his room late at night on the fourth of June. He’d stopped at a café, listened to a report on the radio of the British Expeditionary Force’s departure, in small boats, from the beaches of Dunkirk. But the population was to remain calm at all costs—Prime Minister Reynaud had demanded that President Roosevelt send “clouds of warplanes.” Victory was a certainty.

Lezhev was temporarily distracted from writing by a drunken altercation in the tiny street below his window. One old man wanted to defend Paris, the other favored the declaration of an open city—the treasures of the capital, its bridges, arcades, and museums, would be spared. Trading arguments, then insults, the old men worked themselves up into a fulminous rage. They slapped each other in the face— which made them both wildly indignant—they swore complicated oaths, threatened to kick each other, snarled and turned red, then strode off in opposite directions, threatening vengeance and shaking their fists.

When this was over, Lezhev sat on a broken chair in front of an upturned crate and wrote, on paper torn from a notebook, a long letter to Genya Beilis. He wanted her to be the custodian of his poetry. Over the years, he’d tinkered endlessly with his work, back and forth, this way and that. Now, tonight, he had to decide, so: here a birch was a poplar. The sea shattered, it didn’t melt. Tania did not smell of cows or spring earth—she simply walked along the path where the ivy had pulled down the stake fence.

“I don’t exactly thank you, Genya—my feelings for you are warmer than courtesy. I will say that I remember you. That I have spent considerable time and remembered you very carefully. It is a compliment, my love, the way you live in my imagination. The world should be that perfect.”

7 June 1940. Boulogne-Billancourt cemetery.

A few mourners for Lezhev: he’d made the enemies émigré poets make, some of the regulars had already fled south, and it was a warm, humid evening with the threat of a thunderstorm in the air. Those who did attend were those who, if they kept nothing else, kept faith with community: a dozen men with military posture, in dark suits, medals pinned to their breast pockets. There was a scattering of beards—Lezhev’s colleagues, gloomy men with too much character in their faces. And the old women, well practiced at standing before open graves, you could not be buried without them. The priest was, as always, Father Ilarion, forced once again to pray over some agnostic/atheist/anarchist—who really knew?—by the exigencies of expatriate life.

Doz’vidanya, Boris Ivanovich.

There wasn’t much in the way of flowers, but a generous spread awaited the funeral party in an upstairs room at the Balalaika— Efrimov’s restaurant in St. Petersburg had also been steps away from the cemetery—vodka, little sandwiches of sturgeon or cucumber, cookies decorated with half a candied cherry. Genya Beilis, lover, muse, nurse, editor, and practical goddess to the deceased, had, once again, been generous and openhanded. “God bless you,” an old woman said to her as they walked down the gravel path toward the restaurant.

Genya acknowledged the blessing with a smile, and the old woman limped ahead to catch up with a friend.

“Madame Beilis, my sympathies.”

He crunched along the path beside her, and her first view of him was blurred by the black veil she wore. His French wasn’t native, yet he did not speak to her in Russian.

“A friend of Monsieur Lezhev?” she asked.

“Unfortunately, no.”

Polite, she thought. Through the veil, she could see a strong, pale forehead. He was in his late thirties, hair expensively cut, faintly military bearing. Aristocrat, she thought. But not from here.

“An associate of Monsieur Pavel,” he said.

Oh.

She was, just for a moment, very angry. Boris was gone, she would never hear his voice again. For all his drinking and brawling he’d been a tender soul, accidentally caught up in flags and blood and honor and history, now dead of it. And here by her side was a man whose work lay in such things. I am sick of countries, she wanted to say to him. But she did not say it. They walked together on the gravel path as the first thunder of the storm grumbled in the distance.

“The help you’ve provided is very much appreciated,” he said quietly. She sensed he knew what she’d been thinking. “The government has to leave Paris—but we wanted to set up a contact protocol for the future, if that is acceptable to you.”

She hesitated a moment, then said, “Yes, it’s acceptable.” Suddenly she was dizzy, thought she might faint. She stopped walking and put a hand on the man’s forearm to steady herself. The thunder rumbled again and she pressed her lips together hard—she did not want to cry.

“There’s a bench—” the man said.

She shook her head no, fumbled in her purse for a handkerchief. The other mourners circled around them. Yushin the playwright tipped his hat. “So sorry, Genya Maximova, so sorry. Just the other night, he . . . my regrets.” He walked backward for a step or two, tipped his hat again, then turned around and scurried away.

The man at her side handed her a clean white handkerchief and she held it to her eyes. It smelled faintly of bay rum cologne. “Thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome.” They started walking again. “The protocol will mention the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, and the view from the rue de la Montagne. Can you remember it?”

“Yes. I like that church.”

“The contact may come by mail, or in person. But it will come— sooner or later. As I said, we are grateful.”

His voice trailed away. She nodded yes, she understood; yes, she’d help; yes, it had to be done; whatever yes they needed to hear that day. He understood immediately. “Again, our sympathies,” he said. Then: “I’ll leave you here—there are French security agents in a car at the bottom of the hill.”

He moved ahead of her, down the path. He wasn’t so bad, she thought. It just happened that information flowed to her like waves on a beach, and he was an intelligence officer in time of war. Big drops of rain began to fall on the gravel path and one of the men in dark suits with medals on the breast pocket appeared at her side and opened a black umbrella above her head.

It was a long way from the Russian neighborhoods in Boulogne to Neuilly—where he was staying in the villa of an industrialist who’d fled to Canada—and a storm was coming, but Captain Alexander de Milja decided to walk, and spent the evening headed north along the curve of the Seine, past factories and docks and rail sidings, past workers’ neighborhoods and little cafés where bargemen came in to drink at night.

They had dragged him, black with coal dust and more dead than alive, from the hold of the freighter Enköping, laid him on the backseat of a Polish diplomatic car and sped off to the embassy. A strange time. Not connected with the real world at all, drifting among dim lights and hollow sounds, a sort of mystic’s paradise, and when people said “Stockholm” he could only wonder what they meant. Wherever he’d been, it hadn’t been Stockholm.

And where was he now? A place called poor Paris, he thought. In poor France. He saw the posters on his walk, half torn, flapping aimlessly on the brick factory walls: nous vaincrons car nous sommes les plus forts. Signed by the new prime minister, Paul Reynaud. “We will win because we are the strongest.” Yes, well, was all de Milja could think. What could you say, even to yourself, about such empty huffing and puffing? Paris had been bombed twice, not heavily. But, while the Wehrmacht was still north of the Belgian border, France had quit. He knew it—it was what he and Colonel Broza had fought against in Warsaw—and he’d felt it happen here.

De Milja had arrived in Paris in late April and gone to work for Colonel Vyborg, the “Baltic knight” who had recruited him into the ZWZ as the Germans began the siege of Warsaw. At first it was as though he’d returned to his old job—staff work in military intelligence. There were meetings, dinners, papers written and read, serious and urgent business but essentially the life of the military attaché. He had assisted in some of the intelligence collection, developed assets, liaised with French officers.

They were sympathetic—poor Poland. Clandestine flights with money and explosives for the underground would be starting any day now, any day now. There were technical problems, you needed a full moon, calm weather, extra gas tanks on the airplanes. That was true, de Milja knew, yet somehow he sensed it wouldn’t happen even when conditions were right. “Steady pressure,” Vyborg said. “Representatives of governments-in-exile are patient, courteous men who do not lose their tempers.” De Milja understood, and smiled.

His counterpart, a Major Kercheval of the SR—Service des renseignements, the foreign intelligence operation that supplied data to the Deuxième Bureau of the French General Staff—invited him to tour the Maginot Line. “Be impressed,” Vyborg told him. Well, he was, truly he was. A long drive through spring rains, past the Meuse, the Marne, the battlefields of the 1914 war. Then barbed wire, and an iron gate with a grille, opening into a tunnel dug deep in the side of a hill. Over the entrance, a sign: ils ne passeront pas—They shall not pass. Three hundred feet down by elevator, then a cage of mice hung by the door as a warning—they’d keel over if gas were present—and a brilliantly lit tunnel traversed by a little train that rang a bell. In vast, concrete chambers there were offices, blackboards, and telephones—a huge fire-control center staffed by sharp young soldiers dressed in white coveralls. A general officiated, demanding that de Milja choose a German target from a selection of black-and-white photographs. All he could see were trees and brush, but his cartographer’s eye turned up a woodcutter’s hut by a stream and he pinned it with his finger. “Voilá,” said the general, and great activity ensued—bells rang, soldiers talked on telephones, maps were unrolled, numbers written hurriedly on blackboards. At last, a dial in the wall was turned and the deep gong of a bell sounded again and again. “The target has received full artillery fire. It is completely destroyed.” De Milja was impressed. He did wonder, briefly, why, since the French were officially at war with the Germans, they rang a bell instead of firing an actual gun, but that was, he supposed, a detail. In fact, the series of fortresses could direct enormous firepower at an enemy from underground bunkers. The Maginot Line went as far as the Belgian border. And there it stopped.

So on 10 May, when Hitler felt the time was ripe, the Wehrmacht went through Belgium. A French officer said to de Milja, “But don’t you see? They have violated Belgian neutrality! They have played into our hands!”

Just where the river rounded the Isle of Puteaux, de Milja came to a tabac, a boulangerie, and a cluster of cheap cafés: a little village. Because of the blackout the streetlamps of Paris had been painted blue, and now the city was suffused with strange, cold light. It made the street cinematic, surreal. Friday night, the cafés should have been jammed with Parisians—to hell with the world, have a glass of wine! Can I see you home? Now they were triste, half-empty. But these were workers. Out in Passy, in Neuilly, in Saint-Germain and Palais-Royal there wasn’t anybody. They had all discovered a sudden need to go to the country; to Tante Giselle or their adored grandmère or their little house on the river whatever-it-was. Where they’d gone in 1914. Where they’d gone, for that matter, in 1789.

Meanwhile, in Poland, they were committing suicide. Vyborg had told him that, white lines of anger at the corners of his mouth. France was a kind of special heaven to the Poles, with its great depths of culture, its adept wit, and ancient, forgiving intelligence. To the Poles, it was simple: don’t give in, fight on, when Hitler tangles with the French that’ll be the end of him. But that wasn’t what happened and now they knew it—they risked their lives listening to the BBC and they heard what the announcer tried not to say. The French ran. They didn’t, wouldn’t, fight. A wave of suicides washed over Warsaw, Cracow, the manor houses in the mountains.

A girl at a café table looked at de Milja. Beret and raincoat, curly, copper-colored hair with a lock tumbled onto the forehead, a dark mole setting off the white skin on her cheek, lips a deep, solemn red. With her eyes she asked him some sort of question that could not quite be put into words. De Milja wanted her—he wanted all of them—but he kept walking and she turned back to her glass of wine. What was she after, he wondered. A little money? A husband for a little problem in her belly? A man to beat up the landlord? Something, something. Nothing was free here—he’d learned that in the 1920s when he was studying at Saint-Cyr. He turned and looked back at her; sad now, staring into her glass. She had a heavy upper lip with a soft curve to it, and he could imagine the weight of her breasts against her cotton blouse. Jesus, she was beautiful; they all were. They couldn’t help it, it wasn’t their fault. He stopped, half turned, then continued on his way. Probably she was a whore, and he didn’t want to pay to make love.

Yes, well.

The industrialist who’d fled to Canada had not had time, apparently, to clean out his things in Neuilly. He’d left behind mounds of women’s clothing, much of it still folded in soft tissue paper, a crate of twenty telephones, a stack of chic little boxes covered in slick gold paper, and dozens of etchings—animals of every sort; lions, zebras, camels— signed Dovoz in a fluid hand. De Milja had simply made a neat pile on the dining-room table and ignored it. The toothbrush left in the sink, the paste dried on it, he’d thrown away.

Hard to sleep in a city waiting for invaders. De Milja stared out the window into the garden of the neighboring villa. So, the barbarians were due to arrive; plans were being made, the angles of survival calculated. He read for a time, a little Joseph Roth, a book he’d found on the night table—The Radetzky March. Roth had been an émigré who’d killed himself in Paris a year earlier. It was slow going in German, but de Milja was patient and dawn was long hours away.

The Trottas were not an old family. Their founder’s title had been conferred on him after the battle of Solferino. He was a Slovene and chose the name of his native village, Sipolje. Though fate elected him to perform an outstanding deed, he himself saw to it that his memory became obscured to posterity.

An infantry lieutenant, he was in command of a platoon at Solferino. The fighting had been in progress for half an hour. He watched the white backs of his men three paces in front of him. The front line was kneeling, the rear standing. They were all cheerful and confident of victory. They had . . .

Now it rained. Hard. De Milja had been lying on a long red-andgold couch with a brocade pillow under his head. He got to his feet, walked to the French doors, index finger holding his place in the book, and stared out into the night. Someone had stored pieces of old statuary behind the villa, water glistened on the stone when the lightning flickered. The wind grew stronger, rain blew in sheets over the garden, then the air cooled suddenly and the sound of thunder rolled and echoed down the deserted streets.

9 June 1940. 2, avenue de Tourville, Hôtel des Invalides.

De Milja was prompt for his eleven o’clock meeting with Major Kercheval of the SR. The streets around the walled military complex at the center of the seventh arrondissement were quiet—the residents were away—but in the courtyard they were busy loading filing cabinets onto military trucks. It was hot, no air moved, the soldiers had their jackets off, sleeves rolled up, suspenders dangling, making them look like cannoneers from the Franco-Prussian war of 1870.

A fifteen-minute wait, then an elderly sergeant with plentiful decorations led him up long flights of stairs to Kercheval’s office. The major’s greeting was friendly but correct. They sat opposite each other in upholstered chairs. The office was impressive, a wall of leather-bound volumes, historic maps in elaborate frames were hung on the walnut boiserie.

“Not a happy moment,” Kercheval said, watching the trucks being loaded in the courtyard below.

“No,” de Milja agreed. “We went through it in Warsaw.”

Kercheval’s eyebrow twitched—this is not Warsaw. “We’re thinking,” he said, “it won’t be quite so difficult here. Some of our files are being shifted for temporary safekeeping.”

De Milja made a polite sound of agreement. “How is it up north?” he asked.

Kercheval steepled his fingers. “The Tenth Army’s situation on the Somme appears to have stabilized. At the river Oise we have a few problems still—mostly logistics, supply and whatnot. But we expect to clear that up in seventy-two hours. Our current appreciation of the position is this: we’ve got hell to pay for two or three days yet, we then achieve a static situation—une situation statique. We can maintain that indefinitely, of course, but I’d say give us two weeks of hard work and then, in the first heat of summer, look for us to be going the other way. Germans are Nordic—they don’t like hot weather.”

He shifted to the particular concerns they shared—the flow of information from open and clandestine sources, how much of it the Poles got to see. He spoke easily, at length, in confidential tones. The meaning of what he said, as far as de Milja could make out, was that the people above them, the diplomats and senior officers in the rarefied atmosphere of binational relations, had yet to complete work on a format of cooperation but they would soon do so, and at that time de Milja and his colleagues could look forward to a substantive increase of shared intelligence.

Kercheval was in his late forties, with dry skin, a corded underside to his jaw, and smooth, glossy hair combed flat. A turtle’s head, de Milja thought. The small, mobile mouth, whether talking or eating, strengthened that impression. The exterior was flawless: courteous, confident, polished and hard as a diamond. If Kercheval lied, he lied, regrettably, for reasons of state—raisons d’état—and if you listened carefully you would hear a faint and deeply subtle signal inviting you to agree that deception was simply a part of life, as all very old cultures had learned, sadder but wiser, to acknowledge. Come now, you must admit it’s so.

“It’s an ordeal, and takes forever,” he went on, “but experience has shown that relations go much more smoothly, indeed much more productively, when the initial understandings are thoroughly formulated.”

He smiled warmly at de Milja, perhaps a hint of apology in his face—our friendship will surely survive all the nonsense I’m forced to tell you, you certainly won’t hold it against me. Life’s too short for resentment, my dear fellow.

De Milja tried to nod agreement as enthusiastically as he could, an importunate smile nailed to his mouth. The situation statique on the Somme was that the Tenth Army had been encircled and destroyed, and de Milja knew it. To Kercheval, however, the fate of an army was of secondary importance to the conversation he was having with de Milja. Of primary concern was that adverse and humiliating information could not be stated in front of a foreigner, of lesser rank and lower social position. As for “some of our files are being shifted,” de Milja passed through the sentry gates, turned right toward the métro, and passed sixty trucks lined up and waiting to enter the courtyard.

On the train he read The Daily Telegraph to see what the British were thinking about that morning. Asked if Paris would be declared an open city, a French spokesman replied, “Never. We are confident that Hitler’s mechanized hordes will never get to Paris. But should they come so far, you may tell your countrymen we shall defend every stone, every clod of earth, every lamppost, every building, for we would rather have our city razed to the ground than fall into the hands of the Germans.”

Emerging at the Pont de Neuilly métro stop, de Milja saw a group of white-haired garbagemen—veterans, wearing their decorations— working on a line of twelve garbage trucks. They were engrossed in mounting machine guns on the trucks and, by that afternoon, the Paris police were wearing tin-pot helmets and carrying rifles.

“The government’s going to Tours,” Vyborg said.

“From what I saw this morning they were certainly going somewhere,” de Milja said.

Late afternoon, an anonymous café on the rue Blanche. Amber walls tinted brown with Gauloises smoke, etched glass panels between booths. An old lady with a small dog sat at the bar, the bored owner scowled as he read one of the single-sheet newspapers that had replaced the usual editions.

Vyborg and de Milja sat facing each other in a booth and sipped at glasses of beer. The afternoon was hot and still, a fly buzzing around a motionless fan in the ceiling. Sometimes, from the refugee columns trudging down the boulevards a block away, the sound of an auto horn. Vyborg wore an old gray suit, with no tie and shirt collar open. He looked, de Milja thought, like a lawyer with unpaid office rent and no clients.

“Hard to believe that it’s over here. That the French army lasted one month,” Vyborg said.

“It is over, then.”

“Yes. Paris will be declared an open city today or tomorrow. The Germans will be in here in a week or less.”

“But France will fight on.”

“No, it won’t. Reynaud cabled Roosevelt and demanded American intervention, Roosevelt’s response was a speech that dithered and said nothing. Pétain appeared before the cabinet in Tours and said that an armistice is, in his view, ‘the necessary condition for the survival of eternal France.’ That’s that.”

De Milja was incredulous. France remained powerful, had a formidable navy, had army units in Morocco, Syria, Algeria, could have fought on for years. “In Warsaw—”

“This isn’t Warsaw,” Vyborg said. “In Tours, they lost a top-secret cable, turned the whole chateau upside down looking for it. Finally a maid found it, crumpled up in Reynaud’s mistress’s bed. Now, that’s not the first time in the history of the world that such a thing has happened, but you get the feeling it’s the way things are. It’s as though they’ve woken from a dream, discovered the house on fire, then shrugged and walked away rather than calling the fire department or looking for a bucket. If you read history, you know there are times when nations fail, that’s what happened here.”

Vyborg took a pack of Gitanes from his pocket, offered it to de Milja, took one for himself, then lit both with a silver lighter. In the rue Blanche, a refugee family had become separated from the stream moving south across Paris. A man pulled a cart with quilts tied over the top of a mound of furniture; here and there a chair leg poked through. His wife led two goats on a rope. The farm dog, panting hard in the afternoon heat, walked in the shadow of the cart. Behind the cart were three small children, the oldest girl holding the hands of two little boys. The family had been on the road a long time; their eyes, glazed with fatigue, saw nothing of their surroundings.

The proprietor put his paper down for a moment and stared at the family as they labored past. A tough Parisian, his only comment was to turn his head and make a spitting sound before going back to his newspaper with an almost imperceptible shake of the head. The old woman’s lapdog barked fiercely at the goats. The farm dog glanced up, then ignored it—some little woolly thing in Paris that thought it was a dog; the things you see when you travel. The old woman shushed her dog, muttering something about “unfortunates” that de Milja could barely make out.

“Fucking German pigs,” Vyborg said quietly, with resignation.

“The local bully-boys—come Friday night and they beat up the neighbors. Which is why, I guess, the French and the Poles have always been friends; they share the problem.”

“I suppose,” de Milja said, “we’re going to London. Unless there’s a miracle.”

“There will be no miracle,” Vyborg said. “And, yes, it is London. We’ve got a destroyer berthed at the mouth of the Loire, in Nantes, not too far from the government in Tours. I’m going down there tomorrow, we have to be where official France is. You’re going to stay here—the last man out. Work on the reactivation program, whatever you can manage to get done. Just don’t stray too far from base, meaning Neuilly. That villa is now the French station of the Polish army’s intelligence service. As for a time of departure, it’s hard to predict exactly. It will be at the final hour—Polish honor demands at least that, with shells falling on the harbor and our fantail on fire. You’ll be contacted when we know a little more, by telephone or courier. Given a cipher, probably. The BBC has agreed to broadcast signals for us— we’re likely to do it that way, in the Messages Personnels, so get yourself a working radio and listen to it—ten, four, and midnight. Myself, I like the garden programs. Did you know that periwinkle can be used as a ground cover on a shady hillside?”

It was dark when de Milja returned to Neuilly. He carried with him a battered briefcase stuffed with French francs and a new list, in code, of Polish agents in Paris. People on the Genya Beilis level had been contacted, now there remained the small-fry, a surprisingly long list. But Poland had always had an aggressive, busy intelligence service—a characteristic of small countries with big enemies.

De Milja made a successful contact at 11:20 that night at a dance hall in Clichy—an aging, embittered clerk in the French department of the Admiralty who was paid a small monthly stipend. Then he hurried to the Notre-Dame-de-Lorette métro stop, but the woman he expected, an ethnic Pole running a group of engineers in the Hungarian armament industry, did not appear.

The following morning he awoke to find the air dark, the leaves of the tree outside his window covered in oily grime, and the spring birds fled. Later that day a taxi driver confirmed his suspicion: the Germans had bombed the gasoline storage tanks at Levallois-Perret, the black cloud of soot had drifted down on the city.

At the fall-back meeting of 2:25 p.m.—Notre-Dame-de-Lorette station replaced by Abbesses—the ethnic Pole appeared: Chanel scarf, clouds of perfume, and a refusal to meet his eyes when he handed her a payment of five thousand francs. She was gone, he thought. But he was doubly gracious, thanked her profusely, and passed her the SaintEtienne-du-Mont protocol anyhow. The best he could do was to try to leave a positive impression—the world changed, luck went sour, he wanted her to feel that working for the Polish service was a life preserver in a stormy sea.

Paris dying.

Refugees streaming past, among them disarmed French soldiers, still in uniform. The city now silent, seemingly empty but for the shuffle of the refugee columns. The abandoned government offices had caused consternation—even the one-page newspapers were gone now, the kiosks were shut tight, and the garbage was no longer collected.

De Milja could not escape the sadness. Even when it rained death and fire, Warsaw had fought desperately to survive; improvising and improvising, ingenuity and courage set against iron and explosives. They’d had no chance, but they fought anyhow; brave, deluded, stubborn. Closing his eyes, he saw the passengers on the Pilava local, clothing dirty, here and there bloody, walking into Romania with the heavy little crates of bullion.

He tried to keep his spirits up. The fight against despair was, he told himself, just another way of fighting Germany. But as the life of the streets faded away, he began to wonder why anybody cared so much about flags and nations. An old, old city, everything had happened here, people loved and people died and none of it mattered very much. Or maybe it was just him—maybe he was just tired of life. Sometimes that happened.

He’d scheduled a dawn contact out in the nineteenth arrondissement, at the Canal de l’Ourcq, the home dock of a Dutch barge captain with knowledge of the production capacities of petroleum refining centers along the upper Seine. Not much point at the moment—every ounce of French gasoline was either in flames or pumped into government cars in full flight. But in the future it might be a useful thing to know.

At 2:00 a.m. he tossed and turned, unable to sleep. The silence of the little street was oppressive. He moved to an armchair, read The Radetzky March, dozed off, then woke suddenly—not knowing why until the fist hammered on the door a second time. He ran down the hall and looked out the judas hole. A Breton, he thought. Reddish hair clipped high on the sides, fair skin, a cold face, a silk tie, and a certain practiced patience in the way he stood. De Milja left him and walked silently to the back door. The one waiting there had his hands in his pockets, was looking aimlessly up at the stars.

He returned to the bedroom, struggled into pants, shirt, and shoes as the one in front knocked again. “Are you in there?” If a voice could be good at calling through doors, this one was: I’m being polite— don’t test my patience. “Allons, eh!” Let’s go! Last warning. De Milja opened the door.

The man made a soft grunt of satisfaction—at least we got that much done. “Captain de Milja,” he said, polite in an official way. “I am sorry to trouble you, but . . .”

But what? The Germans at the gates? The times we live in?

“Yes?” de Milja said.

“Perhaps you would get dressed, we’re ordered to escort you to our office.”

“Where is that, please?”

“At the Prefecture of Police.”

“Could you identify yourself?”

“Of course. Forgive me.” He produced a small leather case with an identity card of the DST—Direction de la Surveillance de la Territoire, the French FBI—and held it up for de Milja to see. “All right?” the man said.

“Come in,” de Milja said.

The man entered, whistling tunelessly, strolled through the villa and opened the back door. The one who’d waited there had a little mustache trimmed to the line of his upper lip. He looked around the villa curiously. “It’s quite a place here. Belong to you?”

“I’m just a tenant,” de Milja said.

“Ah.” A professional skeptic, it amused him to seem easily satisfied.

De Milja went into the bedroom; the man he thought of as the Breton stood in the doorway as he put on a tie, smoothed his hair to one side, put on a jacket. He had a weapon, he intended to use it, it was just a question of timing. “Now I’m ready,” he said to the Breton.

In the blue shadow of the street, de Milja could make out a blocky Citroen, black and well polished. The Breton opened the back door, then went around the car while the other waited by de Milja’s side. Now, he thought. The weaker one first.

“This is going to cause very serious difficulties,” de Milja said. The man looked at him sharply. Was he mad? “In scheduling,” he hastened to add. “I’m expected someplace else.”

“Well . . .” said the man, not unkindly. So the world went.

“The problem is, I’m supposed to deliver certain funds,” de Milja said. The Breton started the car, which rumbled to life, sputtering and missing. “It’s forty thousand francs—I’m reluctant to leave it here.”

The man was likely proud of his opacity—policemen don’t react if they don’t choose to—but de Milja saw it hit. At least two years’ salary. “I wonder,” he continued, “if you could keep that money for me, at the Prefecture. Then I’ll be along, later tonight, after my meeting.”

The man with the mustache opened the back door and said something to the driver. Then, to de Milja, “Where is it?”

“Inside.”

“Let’s go.”

He was on the streets for the rest of the night. They went out one door with a briefcase, he went out the other ten minutes later. He moved to cover, checked from a vantage point at 3:15, saw a car at each end of his street with silhouette of driver and passenger.

Au revoir.

He walked miles, headed east into Paris proper, and tried two hotels, but they were locked up tight, doors chained, windows shuttered. On the main thoroughfares, the stream of refugees flowed on; at the intersection of the boulevards Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel humanity collided and struggled as one column moved west, another south. On the north–south métro lines—Porte d’Orléans—Clignancourt— people fought their way onto trains that would never move. De Milja walked and walked, hiding in chaos.

At least they hadn’t killed him. But he had calculated they wouldn’t go that far. He was nothing to them, probably just somebody to lock up until the Germans arrived. Welcome to Paris—we couldn’t find any flowers but here’s a Polish spy. The Breton and Pencil-Mustache had gone back wherever they came from and reported, simply enough, that he wasn’t home, so the next shift came on and parked cars at either end of his street.

Dawn was warm, a little strange beneath a disordered sky of scudding purplish cloud. He saw a line of Flemish monks, faces bright red above their woolen robes, toiling along on women’s bicycles. A city bus from Lille packed with families, a fire truck from Caen, a tank—a few pathetic twigs tied to its turret in attempted camouflage—an ambulance, a chauffeured Daimler; all of it moving one mile an hour along the choked boulevard. Past an abandoned parrot in a cage, a barrel organ, a hearse with smoke drifting from its blown engine and a featherbed tied to its roof.

He was tired; sat at the base of a plane tree by a bench somewhere and held his head in his hands. Deep instinct, survival, got him on his feet and headed north, toward Clichy and Pigalle, toward whores, who had hotel rooms where nobody asked questions.

Then, a better idea. The neighborhood around the Gare Saint-Lazare railway station, deep in the ninth arrondissement, was a commercial stew of small, unrespectable enterprises of all kinds. A world of its own where the buildings, the streets, and the people were all a little crooked. You could get insurance from the Agence ABC at the top of the wooden stairway—who didn’t need every sort of official documentation in this complex, modern age?—but had you asked them to actually pay a claim they would have fainted with surprise and fallen over onto the packed suitcases that stood by the door. The leather in the Frères Brugger company’s chic belts and purses came, unquestionably, from an animal, and, frankly, who were you to demand that it be a cow? And probably you had no business being out in the rain in the first place. There was an agency for singing waiters, an import company for green bamboo, a union office for the drivers of wagons that hauled butchers’ bones.

Even a publisher of books—Parthenon Press. There, see the little drawing with the broken columns? That’s the Parthenon. They were proud, at the little suite of offices at 39 rue de Rome, to issue an extraordinarily wide and diverse list of books. The poetry of Fedyakov, Vainshtok, Sygelbohm, and Lezhev. The plays of Yushin and Var. And all sorts of novels, all sorts. October Wheat, which told of the nobility of peasant life in the Ukraine. The Sea, a saga which, through the lives of a family of fisherfolk in the eastern Crimea, suggested the ebb and flow of both oceanic and human tides. The Baronsky Pearls—a noble family loses its money and survives on love; Letter from Smolensk— experimental fiction about the machines in a tractor factory—no human character appears; Natasha—a girl of the streets rises to fame and fortune. There was Private Chamber, in English, by Henry Thomas; The Schoolmistress of Lausanne, about the need for discipline at a school for wealthy young women, by Thomas Henry; and Slender Birch, not, as you might imagine, about the romance of the Russian steppe, by Martin Payne. These novels in English had found an appreciative audience first among British and American soldiers after the Great War, then among tourists from those nations, pleased to find, during their trip to Paris, books in their own language about their own personal interests and hobbies.

The huge pair of ancient, ironbound doors at 39 rue de Rome was firmly locked, but de Milja knocked and refused to go away when nothing happened. Finally, in the first watery light of morning, a panel in the concierge’s station by the doorway slid open and a large eye peered out. Clearly he wasn’t the German army—just a man with his tie pulled down and sleepless eyes who’d been walking all night—and the door creaked open. The concierge, not a day under eighty, a Lebel rifle held in his trembling hands, said, “We’re closed. What do you want here?”

“Please tell Madame Beilis that a friend has come to call.”

“What friend?”

“A friend from the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, tell her.”

“A priest? You?”

“No,” de Milja said. “Just an old friend.”

14 June 1940. Dawn. It rained. But then, it would. Not a human soul to be seen in Paris. Out at the Porte d’Auteuil, untended cattle had broken through the fence at the stockyard pens and were wandering about the empty streets mooing and looking for something to eat.

At the northern edge of the city, the sound of a German motorcycle, engine perfectly tuned, approached from the suburbs. A young Wehrmacht soldier sped across the place Voltaire, downshifted, revved the engine a little—here I am, girls—put the gear back where it belonged, and disappeared, in a rising whine, up the rue Grenoble.

From the northeast, from the direction of Belgium and Luxembourg and Germany, a series of canvas-covered trucks drove through the Porte de la Villette. One broke off from the file and moved slowly down the rue de Flandre, headed toward the railroad stations: the Gare de l’Est and the Gare du Nord and the Gare Saint-Lazare. The truck stopped every few blocks and a single German soldier jumped from the back. Like all the others, the one on the rue de Rome wore white gloves and a crossed white belt. A traffic policeman. When the armored cars and the troop transports rolled past an hour later, he waved them on.

At seven-thirty in the morning, the German army occupied the Hôtel Crillon and set up an office for local administration in the lobby. Two officers showed up at the military complex just abandoned by Major Kercheval and his colleagues at Invalides and demanded the return of German battle flags captured in 1918. France had lost a war but it was still France. The battle flags, an officer explained, had been mislaid. Of course the gentlemen were more than welcome to look for them.

The Germans hung a swastika flag from the Eiffel Tower, and one from the Arc de Triomphe.

Over on the rue de Rome, Genya Beilis pushed a sheer curtain aside and watched the Wehrmacht traffic policeman at the corner. She lit a Lucky Strike and blew long plumes of smoke from her nostrils. “What happens now?” she asked.

De Milja came and stood by her, gently pulled the fabric of the curtain from her fingers and let it fall closed. “The fighting changes,” he said. “And people hide. Hide in themselves, or hide from the war in enemy beds, or hide in the mountains. Sooner or later, they hide in the sewers. We learn, under occupation, that there’s more rat in us than we knew.”

“They’ll get rid of us, won’t they,” she said.

“Us?”

“All the—what? The little bits and pieces that always seem to wash up in Paris: Russians, Jews, the Spaniards on the run from Franco, Poles and whatnot. Castaways. People who dance naked in ateliers and wave scarfs, people who paste feathers and seashells on a board.”

“That ‘us,’” de Milja said. “The French, the real French, they’ll be safe if they mind their manners. But the others, better for them to disappear.”

She left the window, settled herself in a chair at the dining-room table. It was never clear where the office stopped and the residence began. The mahogany table was piled high with stacks of a slim volume in a pale-blue dustjacket—The Golden Shell. “You aren’t supposed to be here, are you?” she said.

“Why do you say that?”

“Monsieur Pavel, your, ah, predecessor. One saw him for just a moment. Here or there, in a museum or a big brasserie, someplace public.”

“That’s the recommended way.”

“But you don’t care.”

“I care,” he said. He started to qualify that, then shrugged.

She got up and went into a pantry off the dining room and started to make coffee, cigarette hanging from her lips. Her blouse was a very flat red and she wore little gold-hoop earrings. In profile, she spooned out coffee, liberally, then fiddled with a nickel-plated coffee urn. Smoke rose around her face and hung in drifts below the brass ceiling lamp. He couldn’t stop looking at her; the texture of her hair didn’t go with the color, he thought, so black it should have been coarse. But it hung loose and soft and moved as she did things with her hands.

He couldn’t stop looking at her. He had been in the apartment since the previous day, had slept in a spare room, had wanted her so badly it hurt. Anyone would, he thought; man, woman, or tree. It wasn’t that she was beautiful. More than that. Dark, and supple, with fingers that lingered on everything she touched for just a moment longer than they should. He wanted to carry her to the bed, put his hands in the waistbands of everything she was wearing and pull down. But then, at the same time, he was afraid to touch her.

On a wall above a desk hung a portrait of the publisher Max Beilis, her father, a small, handsome man with a sneer and angry, brilliant eyes. She would, of course, be his single weakness—anything she wanted.

She turned on the radio, let it warm up and tuned in the BBC. He moved closer, could smell a hint of perfume in the cigarette smoke. People who dance naked in ateliers, she’d said. Part of her world—the held breath of the audience, the brush of bare feet on cold floorboards. Her Parisian heart could not, of course, be shocked by such things.

On the BBC, modern music, atonal and discordant. Music for the fall of a city. It faded and returned, disappeared into the static, then came in strong. Not jammed, though, not yet—jamming came in rising and falling waves, they’d find that out soon enough. When the announcer came on, Genya leaned forward in concentration, lit a new cigarette, ran her hair back behind one ear.

“And now the news . . .”

The French government had left Tours and had set up shop in Bordeaux. Reynaud had stated that “France can continue the struggle only if American intervention reverses the situation by making Allied victory certain.” In the USA, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee suggested that, since it was hopeless for the British to fight on alone, they should surrender to Germany. Fighting continued sporadically in France, the Maginot Line was now being abandoned. German troops had crossed the Marne. German forces in Norway this, in Denmark that, in Belgium and Holland the other thing. This morning, German troops had entered Paris and occupied the city.

When it was over, another symphony.

16 July 1940. Banque Nationale de Commerce, Orléans. 11:30 a.m.

Was he French?

Monsieur LeBlanc had a second, covert, look at the man waiting behind the railing that separated bank officers from the cashiers’ windows. He was rather clever about people—who was who and what was what, as they said. Now this one had been, in his day, quite the fellow. An athlete or a soldier—a certain pride in the carriage of the shoulders indicated that. But lately, perhaps things weren’t going so well. Inexpensive glasses, hat held in both hands—an unconscious gesture of submission—scuffed shoes. A drinker? No, some wine, like all the world, but no more than his share. Death of a loved one? A strong possibility. By now, most of the refugees who’d taken the road south had found their way home, but many had died—the delicate ones, some of the strong as well.

Not French.

Monsieur LeBlanc didn’t know how he knew that, but he did. The set of the mouth or the angle of the head, a subtle gesture, revealed the foreigner, the stranger. Could he be a German? Hah! What an idea! No German would wait on the pleasure of Monsieur LeBlanc, he’d be served now, ahead of everyone else, and rightly so. Yes, you had to admire that. A shame about the war, a swastika flew over the Lycée where he’d gone to school, and German officers filled the better restaurants. On the other hand, one didn’t say so out loud but this might not turn out to be the worst possible thing for France. Hard work, discipline—the German virtues, coupled with the traditional French flair. A triumphant combination for both countries, Monsieur LeBlanc thought, in the New Europe.

“Monsieur.” He gestured toward a chair by the side of his desk.

“Bonjour, Monsieur,” said the man.

Not French.

“And you are Monsieur—?”

“Lezhev. Boris Lezhev.”

“Very well, and you will require?”

“A safe-deposit box, Monsieur.”

“You’ve moved recently to Orléans?”

“Yes, sir.”

Was that all? He waited. Evidently that was all. “And what size did you have in mind? We have three.”

“The least thick, would be best.”

Ignoramus. He meant the least large, but used the word gros, which meant thick, or heavy. Oh well, what could one do. He was tired of this shabby Russian. He reached in a drawer and took out a long sheet of yellow paper. He dipped his pen in the inkwell and began taking down Lezhev’s particulars; birth and parentage and police card number and residence and work permits and all the rest of it. When he was done, he scratched his initials on the page and went off to retrieve the list of available boxes.

At the assistant cashier’s office, a shock awaited him. This was a culturally interesting city but not a major one—Jeanne d’Arc was long gone from sleepy Orléans, now a regional business center for the farming community. But when Monsieur LeBlanc obtained the list of available boxes, there was exactly one that remained unrented. A number of local residents evidently expected good fortune to be coming their way.

As Lezhev signed forms and accepted the keys, Monsieur LeBlanc took a discreet look at his watch. Only a few minutes until noon. Excellent. What was today? Wednesday. At Tante Marie that meant, uh, blanquette de veau and baby carrots.

“Thank you, Monsieur,” said the Russian.

“You are very welcome, we’re pleased to have you, Monsieur, as our customer.”

Barbarian.

And Mildred Green wasn’t much better—Monsieur LeBlanc, had he ever encountered her, likely would have clapped his hat on his head and run the other way.

She was squat, homely, and Texan, with sparse hair, a pursed mouth, and a short temper. Her redeeming qualities were, on the other hand, only narrowly known—to American soldiers wounded in the Great War, when she’d been an army nurse, and to the American military attaché in France, for whom she now worked as secretary, administrative assistant, and bull terrier.

The military attaché’s office had moved down to Vichy on 5 July, panting hot on the tail of the mobile French government, which had pulled stakes in Bordeaux on the first of July and moved to Vichy on the river Allier, a stuffy old spa town with copious hotels and private houses to absorb the bureaucracy and those privileged souls allowed to kneel at its feet.

Life had not been easy for Mildred Green. The people running France now loathed the British and hated their American cousins. Better Germans, better anything, than Brits or Yanks. The assignment of housing space in Vichy rather reflected that point of view, so the villa would take, at least, some fixing up. Water bubbled from the pipes, the windows had last been opened in the heat wave of 1904, mice lived in one closet, squirrels in another, and God only knew what in the third because they could hear it in there but nobody could open the door.

Mildred Green did not lose her temper, staunch amid the hammering and banging, fits of artistic temperament and huge bills courteously presented for no known service or product. She had worked in France since 1937, she knew what to expect, how to deal with it, and how to maintain her own equilibrium in the process—some of the time, anyhow. She knew, for example, that all laborers stopped work around ten in the morning for casse-croûte, a piece of bread and some red wine to keep them going until lunchtime.

Thus she was surprised, sitting at her typewriter, when a man carrying a toolbox and wearing bleu de travail knocked at the door and asked if he could work on the wiring in her ceiling. She said yes, but had no intention of leaving the office—fearing not so much for the codebooks as for the typewriters. The electrician made a grand show of it, tapped on the wall with a screwdriver handle, then moved to her desk and handed her an envelope. Inside she could feel the outline of a key.

“I’m not an electrician,” the man said in French. “I’m a Polish army officer and I need to get this letter to the Polish government-in-exile in London.”

Mildred Green did not react, simply tapped a corner of the envelope thoughtfully against her desk. She knew that the French counterespionage services were aggressive, and fully versed in the uses of agents provocateurs. “I’m not sure I can help you,” she said in correct, one-word-at-a-time French.

“Please,” he said. “Please help me. Help us.”

She took a breath, let it out, face without expression. “Can’t promise you a thing, sir. I will speak to somebody, a decision will be made. If this isn’t right, in the garbage it goes. That’s the best I can do for you.”

“Read it,” he said. “It just says that they should contact me, and tells them how to go about it, through a safe-deposit box in Orléans. It can’t hurt you to give that information to the Poles in London. On the other hand if you give it to the French I’m probably finished.”

Mildred Green had a mean Texas eye, which now bored into the false electrician in bleu de travail. This was, perhaps, monkey business, but likely not. What the Pole didn’t know was that when she returned home that night, the hotel desk would have a fistful of messages for her, all of them delivered quietly. From Jews, intellectuals, all sorts of people on the run from Hitler. A few left names, others left instructions—for ads in personal columns, for notes hidden in abandoned workshops, for contact through third parties. Every single one of them was urgent, sometimes desperate. Europe had festered for a long time, now the wound was open and running, and suddenly it seemed as if everybody in the neighborhood wanted her to clean the damn thing up.

“We’ll just have to see,” she said. “Can’t promise anything.” She said that for whatever little ears might be listening. Her real response was to slide the envelope into her big leather shoulder bag—a gesture her lost Pole immediately understood. He inclined his head to thank her—almost a bow—then saluted. Then vanished.

The nights of July were especially soft that Paris summer. All cars, taxis, and buses had been requisitioned by the Germans, and with curfew at 11:00 p.m., windows masked by blackout curtains, and the streetlamps painted over, the city glowed a deep, luminous blue, like Hollywood moonlight, while the steps of a lone policeman echoed for blocks in the empty streets. Nightingales returned and sang in the shrubbery, and the nighttime breeze carried great clouds of scent from the flowers in the parks. Paris, like a princess in a folk tale, found itself ancient, enchanted, and chained.

Hidden away on a side street in the seventh arrondissement—the richest, and most aloof, of all Parisian neighborhoods—the Brasserie Heininger was an oasis of life on these silent evenings. Started by competing beer breweries at the turn of the century, the brasseries of Paris had never abandoned their fin-de-siècle glitter. At Heininger, a white marble staircase climbed to a room of red-plush banquettes, mirrors trimmed in gold, painted cupids, and lamps lowered to a soft glow. Waiters with muttonchop whiskers ran across the carpet carrying silver trays of langouste with mayonnaise, sausage grilled black, and whole poached salmon in golden aspic. The brasserie spirit was refined madness; you opened your heart, you laughed and shouted and told your best secrets—tonight was the last night on earth and here was the best place to spend it.

And if the Heininger cuisine was rich and aromatic, the history of the place was even more so. In 1937, as storm clouds gathered over Europe, the Bulgarian headwaiter Omaraeff had been shot to death in the ladies’ room by an NKVD assassin while two accomplices raked the mirrored walls with tommy-gun fire. A single mirror had survived the evening, its one bullet hole a monument, the table beneath it— number fourteen, seating ten—becoming almost immediately the favored venue of the restaurant’s preferred clientele. Lady Angela Hope, later exposed in Le Matin as an operative of the British Secret Intelligence Service, was said to have recruited the agent known as Curate— a Russian foreign correspondent—at that table. Ginger Pudakis, wife of the Chicago meat baron, had made it her evening headquarters, with Winnie and Dicky Beale, the American stove-pipe millionaires, the Polish Countess K——— and her deerhound, and the mysterious LaReine Haric-Overt. Fum, the beloved clown of the Cirque Dujardin was often seen there, with the tenor Mario Thoeni, the impresario Adelstein, and the dissolute British captain-of-the-night Roddy Fitzware. What times were had at table fourteen! Astonishing revelations, brilliant seductions, lost fortunes, found pleasures.

Then war came. And from the fourth of June to the twenty-eighth of June, the great brasserie slumbered in darkness behind its locked shutters.

But such a place could not die any more than the city of Paris could; it had come alive again, and table fourteen once again took center stage at its nightly theater. Some of the regulars returned; Mario Thoeni was often there—though his friend Adelstein had not been seen lately—Count Iava still came by, as did Kiko Bettendorf, the racecar driver and Olympic fencer for Germany, now serving in the local administration.

Kiko’s stylish friends, on arriving in Paris from Hamburg or Munich, had made the Brasserie Heininger a second home. On this particular summer night, Freddi Schoen was there, just turned twenty-eight, wearing a handsomely tailored naval officer’s uniform that set off his angular frame and pretty hazel eyes. Next to him sat his cousin, Traudl von Behr, quite scarlet with excitement, and her close friend, the Wehrmacht staff officer Paul Jünger. They had been joined at table fourteen by the White Russian general Vassily Fedin, who’d given the Red Army such a bad time outside Odessa in 1919; the general’s longtime fellow-émigré, the world-wandering poet Boris Lezhev; and the lovely Genya Beilis, of the Parthenon Press publishing family. Completing the party were M. Pertot—whose Boucheries Pertot provided beef to all German installations in the Lower Normandy region— tonight accompanied by his beautiful niece; and the Baron Baillot de Coutry, whose company provided cement for German construction projects along the northern coasts of France and Belgium; tonight accompanied by his beautiful niece.

Just after midnight—the Brasserie Heininger was untroubled by the curfew, the occupation authorities had quickly seen to that—Freddi Schoen tapped a crystal vase with his knife, and held a glass of Pétrus up to the light. “A toast,” he said. “A toast.”

The group took a moment to subside—not everybody spoke quite the same language, but enough people spoke enough of them—French, German, English—so that everybody more or less understood, with occasional help from a neighbor, most of what was going on. In this milieu one soon learned that a vague smile was appropriate to more than ninety percent of what went on in the world.

“To this night,” Freddi said, turning the glass back and forth in front of the light. “To these times.” There was more, everybody waited. M. Pertot, all silver hair and pink skin, smiled encouragement. “To,” Freddi said. The niece of Baron Baillot de Coutry blinked twice.

“Wine and friendship?” the poet Lezhev offered.

Freddi Schoen stared at him a moment. This was his toast. But then, Lezhev was a man of words. “Yes,” Freddi said, just the bare edge of a sulk in his voice. “Wine and friendship.”

“Hear, hear,” said M. Pertot, raising his glass in approval. “One must drink to such a wine.” He paused, then said, “And friendship. Well, these days, that means something.”

Freddi Schoen smiled. That’s what he’d been getting at—unities, harmonies.

“One Europe,” General Fedin said. “We’ve had too many wars, too much squabbling. We must go forward together.” He had a hard face, the bones sharply evident beneath the skin, and smoked a cigarette in an ivory holder clenched between his teeth.

Jünger excused himself from the table, M. Pertot spoke confidentially to his niece, the waiter poured wine in Mademoiselle Beilis’s glass.

“Is that what you meant, Herr Lezhev?” Freddi said quietly.

“Yes. We’ll have one Europe now, with strong leadership. And strength is the only thing we Europeans understand.”

Freddi Schoen nodded agreement. He was fairly drunk, and seemed preoccupied with some interior dialogue. “I envy you your craft,” he said after a moment.

“Mine?” Lezhev’s smile was tart.

“Yes, yours. It is difficult,” Freddi said.

“It cannot be ‘easy’ to be a naval officer, Lieutenant Schoen.”

“Pfft.” Freddi Schoen laughed to himself. “Sign a paper, give an order. The petty officers, clerks, you know, tell me what to do. It can be technical. But people like yourself, who can see a thing, and can make it come alive.” He shook his head.

Lezhev squinted one eye. “You write, Lieutenant.” A good-humored accusation.

A pink flush spread along Freddi Schoen’s jawline, and he shook his head.

“No? Then what?”

“I, ah, put some things on canvas.”

“You paint.”

“I try, sometimes . . .”

“Portraits? Nudes?”

“Country scenes.”

“Now that is difficult.”

“I try to take the countryside, and to express an emotion. To feel what emotion it has, and to bring that out. The melancholy of autumn. In spring, abandon.”

Lezhev smiled, and nodded as though confirming something to himself—now this fellow makes sense, all night I wondered, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

“Here is . . . guess who!” The wild shout came from Lieutenant Jünger, who had returned to the table with a tall, striking Frenchwoman in captivity. She was a redhead, fortyish, with a Cupid’s-bow mouth, carmine lipstick, and a pair of enormous breasts corseted to sharp points in a black silk evening dress. Jünger held her tightly above the elbow.

“Please forgive the intrusion,” she said.

“Tell them!” Jünger shouted. “You must!” He was a small-boned man with narrow shoulders and tortoiseshell eyeglasses. Very drunk and sweaty and pale at the moment, and swaying back and forth.

“My name is Fifi,” she said. “My baptismal name is Françoise, but Fifi I am called.”

Jünger doubled over and howled with laughter. Pertot and Baillot de Coutry and the two nieces wore the taut smiles of people who just know the punchline of the joke will be hilarious when it comes.

Freddi Schoen said, “Paul?” but Jünger gasped for breath and, shaking the woman by jerking on her elbow, managed to whisper, “Say what you do! Say what you do!”

Her smile was now perhaps just a degree forced. “I work in the cloakroom—take the customers’ coats and hats.”

“The hatcheck girl! Fifi the French hatcheck girl!” Jünger whooped with laughter and grabbed at the table to steady himself; the cloth began to slide but Pertot—the cheerful, expectant smile on his face remaining absolutely fixed in place—shot out a hand and grabbed the bottle of Pétrus. A balloon glass of melon balls in kirsch tumbled off the edge of the table and several waiters came rushing over to clean up.

“Bad Paul, bad Paul.” Traudl von Behr’s eyes glowed with admiration. She had square shoulders and straw hair and very white skin that had turned even redder at Lieutenant Jünger’s performance. “Well, sit down,” she said to the tall Frenchwoman. “You must tell us all about those hats, and how you check them.”

Jünger shrieked with laughter. The corner of Fifi’s mouth trembled and a man with gray hair materialized at her side and led her away. “A problem in the cloakroom!” he called back over his shoulder, joining the mood just enough to make good their escape.

“Those two! They were like that in school,” Freddi Schoen said to Lezhev. “We all were.” He smiled with amused recollection. “Such a sweet madness,” he added. “Such a special time. Do you know the University of Göttingen?”

“I don’t,” Lezhev said.

“If only I had your gift—it is not like other places, and the students are not like other students. Their world has,” he thought a moment, “a glow!” he said triumphantly.

Lezhev understood. Freddi Schoen could see that he did. Strange to find such sympathy in a Russian, usually blunt and thick-skinned. A pea hit him in the temple. He covered his eyes with his hand—what could you do with such friends? He glanced over to see Traudl von Behr using a page torn from the carte des vins, rolled up into a blowpipe. She was bombarding a couple at another table, who pretended not to notice.

“It’s hopeless,” Freddi Schoen said to Lezhev. “But I would like to continue this conversation some other time.”

“This week, perhaps?”

Freddi Schoen started to answer, then Jünger yelled his name so he shrugged and nodded yes and turned to see what his friend wanted.

Lezhev excused himself and went to the palatial men’s room, all sage-colored marble and polished brass fixtures. He stared at his face in the mirror and took a deep breath. He seemed to be ten thousand miles away from everything. From one of the stalls came the voice of General Fedin, a rough-edged voice speaking Russian. “We’re alone?”

“Yes.”

“Careful with him, Alexander.”

Noontime, the late July day hot and still. The German naval staff had chosen for its offices a financier’s mansion near the Hôtel Bristol, just a few steps off the elegant Faubourg St.-Honoré. Lezhev waited in a park across the street as naval officers in twos and threes trotted briskly down the steps of the building and walked around the cobbled carriage path on their way to lunch. When Freddi Schoen appeared outside the door of the mansion and peered around, Lezhev waved.

“You’re certain this will be acceptable?” Freddi Schoen asked, as they walked toward the river.

“I’m sure,” Lezhev said. “Everything’s going well?”

“Ach yes, I suppose it is.”

“Every day something new?” Lezhev said.

“No. You’d have to be in the military to understand. Sometimes a superior officer will really tell off a subordinate. It mustn’t be taken to heart—it’s just the way these things have always been done.”

“Well then, tomorrow it’s your turn.”

“Of course. You’re absolutely right to see it that way.”

They walked through the summer streets, crossed the Seine at the place de la Concorde. Parisians now rode about on bicycle-cart affairs, taxi-bicycles that advertised themselves as offering “Speed, comfort, safety!” The operators—only yesterday Parisian cabdrivers—had changed neither their manners nor their style; now they simply pedaled madly instead of stomping on the accelerator.

“Are you hard at work writing?” Schoen asked.

“Yes, when I can. I have a small job at Parthenon, it takes up most of my time.”

“We all face that.” They admired a pair of French girls in frocks so light they floated even on a windless day. “Good afternoon, ladies,” Schoen said with a charming smile, tipping his officer’s cap. They ignored him with tosses of the head, but not the really serious kind. It seemed to make him feel a little better. “May I ask what you are writing about these days?”

“Oh, all that old Russian stuff—passion for the land, Slavic melancholy, life and fate. You know.”

Schoen chuckled. “You keep a good perspective, that’s important, I think.”

They reached the Saint-Germain-des-Prés quarter, one of the centers of Parisian arts, and Parisian artiness as well. The cafés were busy; the customers played chess, read the collaborationist newspapers, argued, flirted, and conspired in a haze of pipe smoke. Freddi Schoen and Lezhev turned up a narrow street with three German staff cars parked half on the sidewalk. Schoen was nervous. “It won’t be crowded, will it?”

“You won’t notice.”

They climbed five flights of stairs to an unmarked door that stood open a few inches. Inside they found nine or ten German officers, hands clasped behind their backs or insouciantly thrust into pockets, very intent on what they were watching. One of them, a Wehrmacht colonel, turned briefly to see who’d come in. The message on his face was clear: do not make your presence evident here, no coughing or boot scraping or whispering or, God forbid, conversation.

At the far end of the room, lit by a vast skylight, Pablo Picasso, wearing wide trousers and rope-soled Basque espadrilles, was sketching with a charcoal stick on a large sheet of newsprint pinned to the wall. At first the shape seemed a pure abstraction, but then a horse emerged. One leg bent up, head turned sideways and pressed forward and down—it was not natural, not the way a horse’s body worked. Lezhev understood it as tension: an animal form forced into an alien position. Understood it all too well.

“My God,” Freddi Schoen whispered in awe.

The colonel’s head swiveled round, his ferocious eye turning them both to stone as Picasso’s charcoal scratched across the rough paper.

2 August. Occupation or no occupation, Parisians left Paris in August: streets empty, heat flowing in waves from the stone city. A telephone call from Freddi Schoen canceled lunch near the Parthenon Press office. Too busy.

4 August. Late-afternoon coffee. But not on the Faubourg St.-Honoré. The addition of extra staff, he apologized, had forced his department to find new, likely temporary, quarters: a former college of pharmacy not far from the wine warehouses at the eastern end of the city.

7 August. A soirée to celebrate Freddi Schoen’s new painting studio in the Latin Quarter. Cocktails at seven, supper to follow. Invitations had been sent out in late July, but now the arrival time was changed. Telephone calls from a German secretary set it for eight. Then nine-thirty. Freddi Schoen did not appear until eleven-fifteen, pale and sweaty and out of breath.

The paintings, hung around the room and displayed on three easels, weren’t so bad. They were muddy, and dense. The landscapes themselves, almost exclusively scenes of canals, might have been, probably were, luminous. But light and shadow were unknown to Freddi Schoen. Here you had woods. So. There you had water. So. The former was green. The latter was blue. So.

After a few glasses of wine, Freddi shook his head sadly. He could see. “In the countryside it is right there before you, right there,” he said to Lezhev. “But then you try to make it on the canvas, and look what happens.”

“Oh,” said Lezhev, “don’t carry on so. We’ve all been down this road.”

It was, Lezhev could tell, the we that thrilled Freddi Schoen—he was one of them. “It’s time that helps,” he added, the kindly poet.

“Time!” Freddi said. “I tell you I don’t have it—some of these I did when everybody else was eating lunch.”

“Let me fill your glass,” Genya said. Her kindness was practiced— she’d been soothing frantic writers since girlhood, by now it was second nature. She well knew the world where nothing was ever good enough. So, nothing was. So what?

Freddi Schoen smiled gratefully at her, then some German friends demanded his attention. Genya leaned close to Lezhev and said, “Can you take me home when this is over?”

Clothes off, laid on a chair along with Lezhev’s personality. A relief after a day that seemed a hundred hours long. De Milja stared at the ceiling above Genya’s bed, picked over the evening, decided that he hadn’t done all that well. I’m a mapmaker, he thought. I can’t do these other things, these deceptions. All he’d ever wanted was to show people the way home—now look what he’d become, the world’s most completely lost man.

Not his fault that he was cut off from the Sixth Bureau in London— he was improvising, doing the best he could, doing what he supposed they would have wanted done and waiting for them to reestablish contact. Yes, but even so, he said to himself. This wasn’t an operation, it was an, an adventure. And he suspected it wasn’t going to end well for anybody.

But, otherwise, what?

“Share this with me,” Genya said. He inhaled her breath and perfume mixed in the smoke. She had a dark shadow on her upper lip, and a dark line that ran from her naval to her triangle. Or at least that’s where it disappeared, like a seam. He traced it gently with his fingernail.

She put the cigarette out delicately, took the ashtray off the bed and put it on the night table. Then she settled back, took his hand and put it between her legs and held it there. Then she sighed. It wasn’t a passionate sigh, it simply meant she liked his hand between her legs, and not much else in the world made her happy, and the sigh was more for the second part of the thought than the first. “Yes,” she said, referring to the state of affairs down below, “that’s for you.”

Of course in a few hours she would spy for him, if that was what he wanted. The schleuh—the Germans—couldn’t just be allowed to, well, they couldn’t just be allowed. This was France, she was French, she’d sung the national anthem in school with her little hand on her little breast—excuse her, her little heart. If the world demanded fighting, she’d fight. Just the instant they got out of bed. What? Not quite yet?

“France spreads her legs” he’d once said in a moment of frustration. Yes, she supposed it rather did, everybody had always said so. They’d said so in Latin, for God’s sake, so it must be true. Did he not, after all, approve of spread legs? Did he not wish to spread her legs? Oh, pardon her, évidemment a mistake on her part. And did he also find France, like her, duck-assed? What did that mean? It meant this.

There was an English pilot, shot out of the sky in the early raids over France, they had heard about him. He’d been taken in by farmers up in Picardy, where they’d lost everything to the Germans in the last war. They knew that trained pilots were weapons, just like rifles or tanks. Not innocent up there. So they passed him along, from the curé to the schoolmistress to the countess to the postman, and he went to ground in Paris in late June, just after the surrender. Certainly he would be heading back to England, there to fight once more. How else could he arrange to be shot down and killed—a fate which had danced maddeningly out of reach on the previous try.

Only, he didn’t want to be put on the escape route down to the Pyrenees, guided across to freedom by patriots, or sold to the Spanish police by realists—it all depended these days on whom one happened to meet. Then he met Sylvie or Monique or Francette or whoever it was, and he decided that Paris might be, even hidden out, just the very place to spend the war. Because he’d learned a terrible truth about the Germans: unless you were a Jew they wouldn’t bother you if you didn’t bother them. The French understood that right away.

So the pilot stayed hidden, and he chanced to gamble, and he chanced to win a racehorse. And, the second week in July, the racetracks opened. Goebbels had ordered that France return to merriment and gaiety or he’d have them all hanged, so the racetracks joined the whorehouses and the movie theaters, which had closed for twenty-four long hours the day the Germans arrived. The pilot’s horse won. And won again. It ran like the wind—a good idea for a horse in a city with horsemeat butchers and rationed beef. And the English pilot was in no hurry at all to go home.

That was one answer to the question what should we do about the Germans. Genya Beilis stood naked at the window and pulled the blackout curtain aside so she could see the sky. “My God, the stars,” she said.

He rolled off the damp sheet and stood by her, their bare skin touching. He bent his knees in order to see above the roof across the street, a medieval clutter of chimneys and broken slates and flowerpots, and there was the sky. There was no city light, the summer heavens were satin black with a sweep of white stars. “Look,” she said.

15 August. Ninety-five degrees in the street. They had no idea what it was in the attic under the copper-sheeted roof, amid trunks and piles of gauze curtains, stacks of picture frames and a dressmaker’s dummy, all of it the color of dust. The BBC had a particular, very identifiable, sound to it, and they worried about neighbors, or people passing in the street. Some Parisians had seen right away that Germans should be treated like other visitors; groomed and fed and milked. The characteristic British voice, amid the static and hiss, meant there was a “terrorist” or a “Bolshevik” in the neighborhood, and you could get a damn good price for one of those if you knew who to talk to down at the local police station.

It was too hot and dirty for clothes, so they stripped at the foot of the narrow staircase and climbed up in their underwear. They sat on a sprung old sofa that somebody had covered with a sheet, and put the radio on the floor, with picture wire run up into the eaves as an aerial. In the evening, when reception was marginally better, Genya would stare into space as she concentrated on the radio voice; bare brown arms clasping her knees, hair limp in the humid summer air, sweat glistening between her breasts.

Midnight in the century, someone called that time, and she was the perfect companion for it. He was lucky, he thought, that at the end he had a woman to be with. Because the end had pretty clearly come. First Czechoslovakia, then Poland, then Norway, Denmark, Belgium, and Holland. Then France. Now England. It wasn’t a question of if, only how. And then a matter—not uncomplicated—of working out your personal arrangements with what was called the New Europe.

On the subject of the immediate future, two French generals had recently been heard from. Weygand, who’d helped the Poles beat the Russians in 1920, had said that the Germans would “wring England’s neck like a chicken.” De Gaulle, a former defense minister, had surfaced in London and was trying to sell the French the idea of resistance, while L’Humanité, the communist newspaper, called him a British agent, and advised French workers to welcome German soldiers and to make them feel at home.

On the sweltering evening of 15 August, the BBC had “music for dancing, with the Harry Thorndyke Society Orchestra from Brighton,” then the news: “In the skies over Britain today, more than one thousand five hundred sorties were flown against various targets, met by hundreds of RAF fighter planes and turned back.”

Then, Harry Thorndyke himself: “Good evening, everybody. Good evening, good evening. Tonight, we thought it might be just the thing to pay a call on Mr. Cole Porter—thank you, thank you—and so now, without further ado, why don’t we just . . . ‘Begin the Beguine’?”

Genya flopped over on her stomach, hands beneath her chin. They listened to the music in silence for a while, then she said, “How long will it take?”

“A few weeks.”

“Perhaps the English planes can win.”

“Perhaps. But the German planes are probably better.”

“We French had fighter planes, you know. Made by a certain Monsieur Bloch—and very rich he got, too. They were known as ‘cerceuils volants,’ flying coffins, but nobody thought it mattered. An opportunity for the French pilots to show how much more skillful and courageous they were than their German opponents, who had superior machines.”

There was no answering that.

“It’s hot,” she said. “I smell.”

There was no answering that either. The music played, through the crackling night air, and they listened, preoccupied and silent. He unhooked her bra, and she pushed herself up so he could get it free of her. He rubbed his finger across the welt it had made on the skin of her back.

“Why does it do that?”

“Too tight,” she said. “And cheap. I buy them from the Arab carts up on the boulevard Clichy.”

“What about these?”

“Silk.”

He slid her panties down.

“You like that?” she said.

“Yes.”

“French girls have the most beautiful asses in Europe.”

“Well, this French girl.”

“No, Alexander, I am serious. Women are cold on this point, there’s no illusion. And we are just built the way we are. What I wonder is, do you suppose that it’s why they always come here?”

“You mean this is what the conquerors are after?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps they are. And the gold. Steel mills, castles. Bloodstock and paintings. Your watch.” He traced his finger along her curves.

“Alexander?”

“Yes?”

“Should we go to Switzerland?”

He thought for a time. “They’d just kick us out. And everybody in Europe can’t go to Switzerland.”

“Yes, but we can, I think. There’s time to do that, for the moment. And if we stay here, I feel in my heart that they will kill us. We don’t matter to anybody, my sweet boy, not to anybody at all.”

“I don’t think,” he said slowly, “that it’s time to run.”

She closed her eyes, moved her hips a little, took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, a sorrowful sound. “You know what it is, Alexander? I like to fuck. It’s that simple. To drink a glass of wine. Just to watch the day go by in the most pointless way.”

“Really? You like those sorts of things?”

“All right, I give up. Go ahead and get me killed. But you know what will be my revenge? I’ll leave a will and have a statue built in a public square: it will be you and I, just exactly as we are now, in polished stone. Patriots in 1940 it will be called. A true-life monument for the tourists to visit. Ow! Yes, good, that’s exactly what you’ll be doing on the statue.”

“Lezhev, you must help me.”

It was just a manner of speaking, but when Freddi Schoen used the expression, even over the noisy line of a French telephone, the must had a way of lingering in the air.

“Of course. What is it?”

“First of all, please understand that I am in love.”

“Bravo.”

“No, Lezhev, I beg you, don’t make light of it. She is, it is, just don’t, all right?”

“You are smitten.”

“Yes. It’s true. Cupid’s arrow—it was an ambush, completely a surprise. A dinner in Passy, I didn’t want to go. The man’s in textiles, a vicomte he says, some sort of complicated business connection with my family. Expecting the worst, I went. And then . . .”

“She is French?”

“Very. And of the most elevated family—that’s the problem.”

“Problem?”

“Well, here is what happened. I arrived late, and very excited. I had just taken a country estate; a lovely place and, great good luck for me, an open lease, so I can have it as long as I like. The owner was most accommodating. So naturally I talked about it at the dinner—where it was, and how old, and the river—and she was delighted. ‘Ah, les collines d’Artois, mais qu’elles sont belles!’ she said. So I said, ‘But you must come and see it.’ And I could tell she wanted to but there was, how to say, a momentary sense of frost in the air. Then I realized!

For me to ask her there alone would be most awkward, but with friends ...So quickly I added that a couple I knew was coming on Sunday, wouldn’t she join us for lunch? And Mama and Papa too, I insist! But no, as soon as they heard there was another couple, they were occupied. So, now . . .”

“We’re the couple.”

“You must say yes!”

“Yes. And with pleasure.”

“Thank heaven. I’ll have Fauchon do the picnic, in wicker hampers, with Dom Pérignon, and monogrammed champagne flutes, and lobsters, and the napkins they have that fit in the little leather loops in the hamper. What do you think?”

“Perfect.”

“Now, here is my scheme. My driver will take the two of us up there—it’s a good morning’s drive from Paris—and that way we’ll be alone, but, of course, by happenstance, so all will be quite correct.”

“A natural situation.”

“Who could object? Meanwhile, you and Mademoiselle Beilis will take the train up to Boulogne—it gets in there from Paris about noon. And we’ll pick you up. Did I mention the day? Sunday.”

“Boulogne?”

Genya, paying bills in the Parthenon office, looked up in surprise. “Nobody’s been there since 1890. Deauville, yes. Cabourg, well, maybe. But Boulogne?”

“What’s it like?”

“It’s all those sur-la-plage paintings—the French flag fluttering in the breeze, miles of sand because the tide’s always out, little dogs, ladies with hats.”

“Actually, the way he spoke, it sounded as though the house was inland—‘the hills of Artois.’”

“Well I hope he doesn’t dig in his garden—because what he’ll find is bones and unexploded shells. That’s Flanders, is what that is.”

The goddess was, as advertised, a goddess. Fine porcelain, with china-blue eyes and spots of color in the cheeks, thick auburn hair with a flip that just touched the collar, and a porcelain heart. Freddi Schoen was lost—if he’d cantered about on his hands and knees and bayed it might, might, have been more obvious.

As for Lezhev and Genya, the porcelain doll wasted no time. She couldn’t have been sweeter but: one could understand that a foreign gentleman might not have the knack of social relations in a new country; however, if she took possession of this particular spaniel, they could be sure that he’d seen the last of émigré poets and publishers’ daughters. Rue de Rome publishers’ daughters especially.

Lezhev found it damned hard to be Lezhev. The toasts, the snippets of poems, and all that whooping and carrying-on—his version of a Russian poet loved and lived life to the hilt. Sometimes he silently apologized to poor Lezhev’s shade; clearly he hadn’t loved life all that much, but Freddi Schoen seemed responsive to the performance so that’s where he pitched it, with Genya loving life to the hilt right beside him.

De Milja, on the other hand, had an unforeseen reaction to the porcelain doll. To his considerable surprise, she offended the aristocrat in him, put him in mind of the Ostrow uncles, who would have made short work of such snobbery.

Still, whatever his taste in French aristocrats, Freddi Schoen had been right about the estate. A very old Norman farmhouse—how it had survived the unending wars in that part of the world God only knew, but there it was. Ancient timber and cracked plaster, leaning left and right at once, with tiny windows to keep the arrows out and thick walls to keep the dampness in. It sat in a valley just over a low hill from the river Authie, which just there was quite pretty, winding its course past a network of canals. Naturally August would be its most sumptuous month, the woods a thousand shades of gold and green in the tender light of the French countryside, the banks of the canals cut back to stands of willow, leaves dancing in the little sea breeze. For they were only a few miles from La Manche, the French name for what was called, on the opposite shore some thirty miles away, the English Channel.

After lunch they went for a ride, Freddi Schoen’s driver dressed up in a chauffeur’s uniform for the day. The road ran through breathtaking countryside, forest to the left, meadow to the right. Surprising how the land had healed since 1918, but it had. The grass grew lush and deep green, and there was a cloud of orange butterflies at the edge of a canal where even the barges—some two hundred and forty of them at Lezhev’s count, it took several minutes to drive past—seemed part of the natural beauty of the place. Or, at least, not alien to it; big, square hulls, dark and tarry from a thousand journeys, with only the painted names, Dutch, Belgian, German, or French, to disrupt the harmony of the handsome old wood.

Freddi Schoen, holding court on the leather seat of the big Mercedes, was at his best, charming and voluble and witty as only he could be; the porcelain doll smiled with delight and it was all Lezhev and Genya could do to keep up. Sitting next to the driver, Freddi hung his elbow over the seat and entertained them. “Of course the admiral was a Prussian, with a big, red face like, oh, like . . . a ball!”

Ha ha, but was it eighteen tugboats tied in a row after the intersection of the Route Departmentale 34? No, twenty, Genya told him later.

“A deer!” Freddi Schoen cried out. Then, when the women turned to look at the forest side of the road, he winked at Lezhev. Wasn’t this fine? These two French lovelies riding with them along a road in a Pissarro painting? From Lezhev, a poet’s smile of vast sagacity, confirmed by a wise little shake of the head. No, life wasn’t all bad, it had its moments of great purity, say on a summer day near the sea, rolling past a particularly charming little canal, where some good old soul a generation ago had planted borders of Lombardy poplar, where thirty-one seagoing tugs, tied up to cleats, bobbed lazily when the wind ruffled the surface of the still water.

“I saw it!” Genya Beilis cried out.

Freddi Schoen’s eyes grew wide with amazement—his little joke had grown wings. Fate had put a real deer in the forest; even the gods of Chance were with them today.

19 August, Banque Nationale de Commerce, Orléans.

An old woman wearing a funeral hat had preceded him into one of the little rooms where one communed with one’s safe-deposit box. He could hear her through the wall, mumbling to herself, then counting, each number articulated with whispered ferocity. “Quatorze. Quinze. Seize. Dix-sept. Dix-huit.”

Lezhev had less to whisper about. Only a small slip of paper: “Hôtel Bretagne. 38, rue Lepic. Room 608. You are Monsieur Gris, from Lille.”

To hell and gone up an endless hill in the back streets of Montmartre, a hotel two windows wide and six floors tall, the smell of the toilet in the hall good and strong on the fiery August day.

He knocked.

“Yes?”

“Monsieur Gris. From Lille.”

She was five feet tall, blond hair cut back to a boyish cap above a round face and a snub nose. Scared to death, intrepid, Polish.

“How old are you?” he asked in French. She just stood there. He tried again in Polish.

“Seventeen,” she said.

She went to the peeling armoire and opened the door. The suitcase radio was open and ready to transmit. “You are not to be here when I send,” she explained. “An order.”

He indicated that he understood.

She went on, a carefully memorized speech. “Colonel Vyborg sends his regards. You are to occupy yourself with information pertinent to the German plan to attack Great Britain. Where, how, and when. He tells you that the English are the only hope now—airplane drops of ammunition and money and specialists are planned for Poland. For their part, they ask our help in France, in any way we are able. I am to transmit for you, whenever you like, as much as you like.”

“How did you come?”

“Fishing boat to the Brittany coast, from Scotland. Then on a train.”

“With the suitcase in hand.”

She shrugged. “There is no control on the trains. It’s very different here.”

“Where were you in Poland?”

“Lodz. I came to France as a courier, then we fled on the ship Batory, from Bordeaux. On the twenty-second of June, after the surren

der. We were the last ship to leave France.”

“What name do I call you?” he asked.

“Janina,” she said. Her smile was radiant, they were comrades in arms, she was proud to serve at his side. She returned to the armoire, brought out a thick packet of French francs. “We will beat them, Monsieur Gris. We will certainly beat them.”

The two brothers owned a garage in Saclay, in the poor southern suburbs of Paris. This was Wednesday, another three days until the Saturday shave, the white bristle on their cheeks was shiny with motor oil and dark with grime. Hidden somewhere in the complex of fallen-down sheds was a pig they were fattening for market; de Milja and Fedin could hear it grunting and snuffling in the mud.

“When will the pig be ready?” de Milja said.

“October,” one of the brothers said. “‘Cannibal,’ we call him.”

“We need a little Citroen truck, a delivery truck.”

“Expensive, such things.”

“We know.”

“Could be fifteen thousand francs.”

“Maybe nine.”

“Fifteen, I think I said.”

“Eleven, then.”

“What money?”

“French francs.”

“We like those American dollars.”

“Francs is what we have.”

“Fourteen five—don’t say we didn’t give you a break. Have it with you?”

De Milja showed a packet of notes, the man nodded and grunted with satisfaction. When he leaned close, de Milja could smell the wine in his sweat. “What country do you come from?” he asked. “I want to hear about it.” The second brother had left the shack abruptly after the money was shown—de Milja had barely noticed that he’d gone. Now Fedin stood at the door, shaking his head in mock disillusion and pointing a Lüger out into the yard. “Put that down,” he said.

The response was a whine. “I was just going to cut up some firewood. To cook the lunch.”

They used what they had:

Whatever remained of the old Polish networks, sturdy White Russian operatives who’d put in their time for a variety of services, friends, friends of friends. They were not so concerned about being betrayed to the Germans. That would happen—it was just a question of when, and whether or not they would be surprised when they figured out who’d done it.

“As you get older, you accept venality. Then you learn to like it—a certainty in an uncertain world.” Fedin the skull, the Lüger under his worker’s apron, cigarette holder clenched in his teeth as though he were a Chinese warlord in a Fu Manchu film.

Wearing workmen’s smocks, they drove their little delivery van slowly through what remained of the streets of Dunkirk. Two hundred thousand weapons had been left on the oil-stained beaches, abandoned by the British Expeditionary Force and several French divisions making their escape across the Channel. All along the shore, German soldiers were trying to deal with the mess, stripping tires from shot-up trucks, emptying ammunition from machine-gun belts.

In the back streets they found a heavy woman who walked with a cane and kept a dollmaker’s shop not far from the canals that ran out into the countryside. She painted eyebrows on tiny doll heads with a cat’s whisker, and counted barges when she walked her elderly poodle. She was a Frenchwoman; her Polish coal-miner husband had gone off to fight in Spain in the Dabrowsky Brigade, and that was the last she’d heard of him. De Milja’s predecessor had found her through a relief organization, and now the Polish service was her petit boulot, her little job. Before the Germans had come she’d been a postbox on a secret mail route, a courier, the owner of a discreet upstairs bedroom where one could get away from the world for a night or two without hotel— and therefore police—registration.

“A hard week, Monsieur,” she said as de Milja counted out francs.