The Polish Officer

“You’re confident of your numbers?”

“Oh yes, Monsieur. One hundred and seven of the beastly things. It took four expeditions to find them all.”

“Well then, keep up the good work. This may go on for months.”

“Mmm? Poor Roquette.” The poodle’s tail managed a single listless thump against the floorboards when she heard her name. Perhaps, de Milja thought, Rocket had been the right name for her at one time, but that was long ago. “Having to walk all those miles on that cinder path,” the woman added.

“Buy her a lamb chop,” de Milja said, counting out some extra francs into the attentive hand.

Fedin was exactly right, de Milja thought, as a German sentry waved them away from a turnoff for the coastal road—the pleasure of venality was that Madame would be faithful as long as the francs held out.

The van rolled to a stop. De Milja climbed out and approached the sentry. “Excuse, kind sir. This place?” He showed the soldier, who smiled involuntarily at de Milja’s eccentric German, a commissary form. On the bottom, an inventory of Vienna sausage and tinned sardines; on top, an address.

“The airfield,” the sentry said. “You must go down this road, but mind your own business.”

The Germans were of two minds, it seemed to him. Down the beach road, all preparations were defensive. Engineered—concrete— positions with heavy machine guns pointing out into the Channel. Rows of concrete teeth sunk into the sand at the low-tide mark, strung with generous coils of barbed wire. French POWs were digging trenches and building antiaircraft gun emplacements, and clusters of artillery had been positioned just behind the sand dunes. This was nothing to do with an invasion of England: this was somebody worried that the British were coming back, unlikely as that seemed. But then somebody, somebody had screamed “We will invade!” and so Freddi Schoen and all the rest of the Kriegsmarine, the German navy, had started moving barges up and down the canals of Europe. They must have stripped every river in northern Europe, de Milja thought. Stopped commerce dead. On the Danube and the Rhine, the Weser and the Mosel, the Yser, Escaut, Canche, and Somme, nothing moved.

Fedin laid it out for him. Quite a number of the Russian generals in Paris had never been in anyone’s army, but Fedin was a real general who’d commanded real troops in battle and done well at it. De Milja watched with admiration as he planned the invasion of Britain on a café napkin.

“Twelve divisions,” he said. “Hand-picked. With a hundred thousand men in the first wave, all along the English coastline for, say, two hundred miles. That’s the Wehrmacht thinking—spread the invasion, thin down the British defense forces, dissipate energy, resources, everything. Lots of refugees moving on the roads, miles and miles for the ammunition trucks to cover, honking all the time to get Mrs. Jones and her baby carriage out of the way.

“For the German navy, on the other hand, the two-hundred-mile spread is a nightmare, precisely what they don’t want. They need a concentrated beachhead, ships hurrying back and forth across the Channel, multiplying their load capabilities by the hour, with airplanes overhead to keep the British bombers away.”

“That’s the key.”

“Yes, that’s the key. If they can keep the RAF out of their business, the Germans can secure the beaches. That will do it. They hold out seventy-two hours, twenty-five divisions make the crossing, with the tanks, the big guns, all the stuff that wins wars. Churchill will demand that Roosevelt send clouds of warplanes, Roosevelt will give an uplifting speech and do nothing, the governments-in-exile will make a run for Canada, and that will be that. The New Europe will be in place; a sort of hardheaded trade association with German consultants making sure it all goes the way they want.”

“What will it take to get across the Channel?”

The café was on the seafront in Veulettes. General Fedin stared out at the calm sea for a moment, then started a new napkin. “Well, let’s say . . . about two thousand barges should do it. With their bows refitted with ramps that can be raised and lowered. They’ll want motor launches, for speed, to get the beach-masters and the medical people and staff officers moved around. About twelve hundred of those. To move the barges back and forth—five hundred tugboats, seagoing or adapted for it. And two hundred transport ships. That’s for the big stuff, tanks and heavy guns and repair shops—and for the horses, which still do eighty percent of the army’s haulage.”

“Four thousand ships. That’s it?”

Fedin shrugged. War was logistics. You got your infantry extra socks, they marched another thirty miles.

“They’ll need decent weather. They can’t afford to wait for autumn, the Channel will swamp the barges. So, end of summer is the time.”

“And the date?”

Fedin smiled to himself. Flipped the pages of a French newspaper someone had left on a chair, then ran his finger down a column. “Seventeen September,” he announced. “Full moon.”

They drove into Belgium, into Holland. German occupation made it easier—northern Europe was more or less under a single government. In the Belgian ports, Ostend and Blankenberge and Knokke-Le-Zoute, and up as far as Rotterdam, they talked to the dockyard workers, because the dockyard workers were the ones who knew what went on. The ordinary civilian saw “invasion fleet” as something tied up on a beach, stretched out for miles, all in a row. But ports didn’t work that way.

Ports wandered inland from the sea; secondary harbors and river docks, canals dug out a hundred years ago for something supremely important that nobody remembered anymore. Waterways for this or that, rank weeds and dead, black water, where cats came for courtship in the moonlight and men got laid standing up. You could hide an invasion fleet in such places, in Zeebrugge and Breskens, and that’s what the Germans had tried to do.

“Four tugboats,” said a Dutchman with a little pipe. “Well fitted out and ready for the sea.”

“How do you know?” Fedin asked.

“We built them, is how.”

Back to Paris. Back to Janina.

In the sweltering room on the top floor of the Hôtel Bretagne, she enciphered the data, then settled in to wait for the night, the best time for radio waves. When it was dark, she climbed up on a chair and fed the aerial through a hole in the top of the armoire to a pipe that crossed the ceiling on its way from the roof to the toilet.

She stopped for a moment and, as they’d trained her to do, ran through a mental checklist, a kind of catechism, until she was satisfied that everything was right. Then she plugged the radio into the wall, turned it on, and settled the heavy earphones on her head. Using a delicate thumb and forefinger, she explored the width of her frequency. Her neighbor to the left was very far away, very faint, and keyed at a slower and more deliberate pace than she did. But always there, this neighbor, and still transmitting when she signed off. On her right, a deep bass hum, unchanging, some piece of equipment that ran all night long. A radio beam, she thought, used by the Germans or the English for some esoteric purpose—not her destiny to know about it. An electronic stratagem; a beacon that guided, or a beacon that deceived. She wondered if whoever depended on it, to their triumph or their sorrow, listened to her transmission. Submariners, perhaps. Or pilots. All of them moving around in the dark ocean or the night sky.

119 675 she began. Her call sign. Janina in Paris.

In London, at the Sixth Bureau headquarters in the Rubens Hotel on Buckingham Palace Road, four officers and a radio operator waited in a dark room, cigarette smoke hanging thick in the air. They looked at their watches long before the minute hand advanced. 8:22 p.m. Paris time was one hour later; by now the August dusk had faded away into darkness. 8:24. One minute after the scheduled time of transmission. Of course, life was uncertain, they told themselves. Watches ran slow or fast, even Wireless/Telegraph operators missed trains or heard suspicious sounds, and sometimes equipment failed. 8:27. The operator wearing the headset had an annoying habit of biting his lower lip when he concentrated. 8:28. He fussed with his dial, eyes blank with concentration. Colonel Vyborg took the deep breath that steadied him for bad news. So soon? How could they have her this soon?

Then the operator’s face relaxed, and they knew what had happened before he got around to saying “Here she is.” He said it as though the worrying were beside the point—he had trained her, she could do no wrong.

The Sixth Bureau operator sent 202 855. I know you have important things to say, my darling, let’s go someplace where we can be alone. He moved his dial from 43 meters down to 39 meters.

Sent 807 449. Hello, Janina. But not here. In the Hôtel Bretagne, the dial moved up to 49 meters. Sent 264 962—sent it several times, the way operators transmitted

call signs until their base acknowledged. A false call sign, in essence,

that actually said: now we can talk.

551 223. London agreed.

It wasn’t a perfect night, the wet August evening brewed thunderstorms and the interference crackled as the Sixth Bureau operator bit his lip. The Germans didn’t jam her frequency, but that might mean they were listening silently. That might mean a thousand things.

Meanwhile Janina, dependable, stolid Janina, sent her groups. The sweat ran down her sides and darkened the back of her shirt, the boards creaked as a large man walked down the hall to the toilet, a woman cried out. But for Janina there were only the numbers.

So many numbers. Canals, barges, towns, roads. Three freighters at anchor in Boulogne harbor with no cargo, ammunition train into Middlekerke, Wehrmacht Pioneer insignia seen at Point Gris Nez, phrase Operation Sealion reported by prostitute in Antwerp.

Fifteen minutes, Janina. Remember, I told you that.

But then: what to leave out? Which rivers, for example, did the RAF not really care to know about? No, Captain Alexander de Milja’s improvised information machine shuddered and clanked, steam whistled from a rag knotted around a broken pipe, but somehow it worked, and it needed far more than fifteen minutes to report what it had found out.

The Funkabwehr—the signals intelligence unit of the Gestapo— maintained offices in the army barracks on the boulevard Suchet. They too had darkened rooms, and operators with headsets wandering among the nighttime frequencies.

“What’s this up at 49?” one of them said, making a note of the time, 9:42 p.m., in his log.

“They were there last night,” his colleague said.

They listened for thirty seconds. “Same one,” he continued. “Slow and steady—refuses to make a mistake, nothing bothers him.”

The first operator threw a switch that played the telegraphy through a speaker, listened a moment, then he picked up a telephone and dialed a single digit. A moment later, Sturmbannführer Grahnweis came through the door.

Grahnweis was a legend, and he didn’t mind that. He was enormously fat—the shape of a renaissance cherub grotesquely overblown—and moved with heavy dignity. He had been at dinner when the call came, a white damask napkin still tucked into the collar of his black Gestapo uniform, and a waiter followed him into the office carrying a plate of venison sausages and a half stein of beer. Grahnweis nodded to his operators and smiled benevolently. He forgave them the interrupted dinner.

Then he listened.

Perhaps he made a little more of it than necessary, but who was going to blame him for a touch of theater? As the numbers tapped out, in the foreground of the atmospheric sighs and crackles, Grahnweis tilted his head to one side and puckered his mouth, then, slowly, nodded in confirmation. Yes, yes. No question about it. The diagnosis is as you suspected, gentlemen. Herr Doktor Grahnweis will take the case.

“Be so good as to serve the dinner in my office,” he said to the waiter.

The desk was vast, and contained his weapons.

There were five: a very good radio receiver, a street map of Paris, two celluloid discs calibrated zero to 360°, with silk threads attached to their precise centers, and a telephone.

Grahnweis had spent his life in radio: as a childhood ham operator in Munich, he’d built his own crystal sets. He had worked for the Marconi company, then enlisted in the army in 1914 and served as a signals NCO on the eastern front. That was followed by unemployment, then the Nazi party—which made great use of radio—in 1927, and finally the Gestapo as a major. “Send the trucks, please,” he said into the phone, cut a piece of venison sausage, swirled it in the chestnut puree, used his knife to top it with a dab of gooseberry jelly. As he chewed, his eyes closed with pleasure, a sigh rumbled deep in his chest, beads of sweat stood on his forehead.

Casually, without putting down his fork, he flicked on his radio receiver, then turned the dial with the side of his hand until he found the transmission on 49 meters.

236 775 109 805 429

“Take your time, my friend,” he said under his breath. “No reason to rush on this warm summer night.”

The trucks drove out of the boulevard Suchet garage within seconds of Grahnweis’ call. They were RDF—radio direction finding— vans built by the Loewe-Opta Radio Company for the practice of what was technically known as goniometry. They sped through the empty streets to their prearranged positions: one at place de la Concorde, the other in front of the Gare de l’Est railroad station. Almost as soon as they arrived, they were on the radio to Grahnweis’ office:

Place de la Concorde reports a radio beam at 66 degrees.

Gare de l’Est reports a radio beam at 131 degrees.

Grahnweis put down his fork, rubbed his hands on the napkin, took a sip of beer. He placed the celluloid discs on the street map of Paris, one at each of the truck locations. Then he ran the two silk threads along the reported angles. They crossed at Montmartre.

4 September, 6:30 p.m., Calais railroad station.

De Milja and Genya Beilis said good-bye on the platform. She had been drafted as a courier, from the Channel ports to the Hôtel Bretagne, because de Milja and Fedin could no longer go back and forth. The full moon in September was too close, the fuel for the van took so many black-market ration coupons it potentially exposed the operation to the French police, and, as the German invasion plan gathered momentum, information began to flow so fast they could barely deal with it.

Genya’s summery print dress stirred as the locomotive chugged into the station; she moved toward de Milja so that her breasts touched him. “Do you know,” she said, her voice just above the noise of the train, “you can ride with me to Amiens, and then come back here.”

“It’s direct,” de Milja said. “Express to Paris.”

“No, no,” Genya said. “This train stops in Amiens. I’m certain of it.”

De Milja smiled ruefully.

Genya studied him. “On second thought,” she said, looking down.

He stared at her, at first took what she said for a lover’s joke. But she wasn’t smiling. Her eyes shone in the dim light of the station platform, and her lips seemed swollen. He took her by the shoulders, gripped her hard for a moment. To tell her, without trying to have a conversation while a train waited to leave a station, that he had to do what he was doing, that he was exhausted and scared, that he loved her.

But she shrugged. “Oh well,” she said. Picked up a string-tied bundle as the loudspeakers announced the departure of the train. The way Parisians survived the rationing system was to get food in the countryside—everybody on the crowded platform had a large suitcase or a package.

“A few days,” de Milja said.

She pushed him away and fled to the step of the coach just before it began to move. When she turned to him, her face had changed to a brainless, bourgeois mask, and she waved at him—the dumb ox, her poor excuse for a husband—and called out, “Au revoir! Au revoir! À bientôt, chéri!”

In silence Fedin and de Milja drove out of Calais on a little country road, the E2, headed for the village of Aire, where the Lys River met the Calais canal. They were to meet with a man called Martagne— formerly the director of the port of Calais, now an assistant to a German naval officer—at his grandfather’s house in the village.

A few miles down the E2, a camouflage-painted Wehrmacht armored car blocked the road. A soldier with a machine pistol slung over his shoulder held up a hand. “Out of the car,” he said.

As Fedin moved to open the door he asked quietly, “Who are they?”

“Feldengendarmerie,” de Milja said. “Field police units. It means they’re starting to secure the staging areas for the invasion.” He wondered where Fedin’s Lüger was. Normally he hid it in the springs beneath the driver’s seat.

“Papers, please.”

They handed them over.

“Ruzicki,” he said to de Milja. “You’re Polish?”

“French citizen.”

“Your work pass runs only to November, you know.”

“Yes. I know. I’m getting it renewed.”

He glanced at Fedin’s papers, then gestured for them to open the back of the truck. He studied the crates of Vienna sausage and sardines, the name of the distributor stenciled on the rough wood. “Unload it,” he said.

“All of it?”

“You heard me.”

He lit a cigarette as they worked, and another soldier joined him, watching them haul the crates out and stack them on the warm tarred gravel of the road. “Did I see this truck up in Le Touquet last week?” the second soldier asked.

“Might have,” de Milja said. “Sometimes we go up there.”

“Where do you go there?”

“Oh, Sainte Cecile’s—you know, the orphanage.”

“French orphans eat Vienna sausage?”

“For the sisters, I think. The nuns.”

When they were done they stood aside. The first soldier slid a bayonet out of a case on his belt and neatly popped a slat loose from a crate of sardines. He speared one of the tins, held it away from his uniform to avoid the dripping oil, sniffed it, then flung it away, cleaning his bayonet on the weeds beside the road.

“Load it up,” he said.

While they worked, the soldier wandered around the van. Something displeased him, something wasn’t right. He opened the passenger-side door, squatted on the road, stared into the cab. De Milja sensed he was a moment away from putting his hand beneath the front seat and finding Fedin’s pistol.

“Do you know, sir, we took an extra crate of sausage from the storeroom? There’s one more than we’re supposed to have.”

The soldier stood and walked to the back of the truck. His face was dark with anger. “What does that mean? Why do you tell me that?”

De Milja was completely flustered. “Why, ah, I don’t know, I didn’t mean . . .”

His voice hung in the air, the soldier leaned close, saw the fear in his eyes. “You do not offer bribes to German soldiers,” he said very softly. “It is something you do not do.”

“Of course, I know, I didn’t—” de Milja sputtered.

The soldier jerked his head toward the road: it meant get moving. Fedin grabbed the last two crates, carried them into the front seat with him. When he tried to start the car it stalled. The engine caught, Fedin made a grinding shift, the car lurched forward, almost stalled again. The soldier turned away from them, clasped his hands behind his back and stared down the road in the direction they’d come from.

4 September, 9:26 p.m.

In the Funkabwehr bureau on the boulevard Suchet, at the end of the hall where Sturmbannführer Grahnweis’ personal office was located, there was a mood of great anticipation. Grahnweis was cool and businesslike in the summer heat. He could be seen through the open door doing a little late paperwork; studying reports, sometimes writing a comment in the margin. Work went on, he seemed to suggest, the glory and the drudge in turn, such was life.

A few senior officers had found it necessary to be in the Funkabwehr office that night, chatting in low voices with attentive junior staff, who busied themselves with the thousand little jobs that must be done every day in a military office. The devil is in the details, the Germans say.

Klaus was hunting for the carnet file, Helmut needed a look at the July pay vouchers for the Strasbourg station, Walter asked Helmut if the Lyons relay tower plan was still locked up in committee in Berlin. Heinrich, at 9:27, nodded sharply to himself, held the headphones tightly to his ears for a moment to make absolutely sure, then dialed a single digit on his telephone. The crowd in the Funkabwehr office knew immediately that what had been a strong possibility was now confirmed: Grahnweis had caught a spy.

But the Sturmbannführer let the receiver rest on its cradle. He finished the final paragraph of his report, initialed the lower corner, and then answered the phone. The frequency was the same as last night, Heinrich reported. Grahnweis thanked him, turned on his receiver, fiddled with the dial until the transmitted numbers came through crisp and clear. Several of the senior officers and a few people on his own staff drifted into the large office, close enough to Grahnweis’ desk to hear what went on.

The two Loewe-Opta radio trucks had been in position since early evening, strategically placed on either side of the Montmartre hill. Grahnweis gave them a few minutes to get a fix on the transmission, then called Truck Number One to come in on his communications

radio.

“I can confirm the forty-nine meters—are you getting it?”

“We hear him, but the direction is a little blurred. The way we’re receiving, he’s bouncing between eighteen and twenty-three degrees.”

“I see.” Grahnweis studied his city map for a moment. “Then go up to the rue Caulaincourt, try for a reading there and call me back.”

From the second truck, on the boulevard Barbès side of Montmartre, the news was better. Their signal was clear, just about precisely on 178.4 degrees. Grahnweis made certain the celluloid disc was perfectly centered, then ran the silk thread out along the degree line. “Could be in Sacré-Coeur,” he said. “Perhaps in the belfry. I wonder— have they also a hunchback, like Notre-Dame?”

The first RDF truck came over the radio a few minutes later. “Not much better, Herr Sturmbannführer. Maybe it’s the elevation—but something’s deflecting here, something’s hurting the reception.”

“But not in London, we hope.”

There was a pause as the radio technician tried to decide how to answer this. Grahnweis saved him the trouble. “We’re doing just fine. Stay where you are, I’ll be back in a moment.”

The technician said Yes sir briskly and signed off in a hurry. This working for a legend required a steady nerve.

Grahnweis reached into his desk drawer and retrieved a special map of Paris, in book form, printed on heavy paper, showing every street, every alley, the number of every building. He then dialed his intercom and instructed his chief clerk to telephone the northern electrical power substation. Moments later he was talking to the French night supervisor, asking to be connected with the office of Leftenant Schillich.

As he waited, he could hear the deep hum of the station’s giant turbines. Leftenant Schillich, he thought to himself, you had best be available for this call, and don’t make a fool of Grahnweis.

“Leftenant Schillich,” said a youthful voice.

Grahnweis explained what he needed, starting at the rue Caulaincourt side of Montmartre and working along a certain line toward the east, street by street. Then he turned up the volume on his receiver and silently begged the W/T operator to keep on transmitting.

“Starting at Caulaincourt, now,” Schillich announced.

From the speaker: 562 511

“Next on the list is the avenue Junot, from number thirty to the end.” Grahnweis’ audience was hushed and anticipatory, sensing that the moment of the kill was near. At the leftenant’s direction, the substation engineers worked their way east, across the grid of steep, crooked streets that made up the old village high above Paris.

“Next we have,” said Schillich, following his own edition of Grahnweis’ map, “the rue Lepic.”

Grahnweis found the street and marked it with his index finger.

From the receiver: 335.

Then 428.

Then silence.

In the Hôtel Bretagne, the room went dark. Janina’s hand froze on the dead key and she tore the earphones from her head. But there was nothing, other than the evening hush of an occupied city, for her to hear. For a few seconds she sat there, then, before she could do anything, the lights came on, the red filaments in her radio tubes glowed back to life.

It was just a brief outage, she realized, some problem with the electricity.

A few miles south of the roadblock, Fedin pulled off the E2 and drove a little way down a farmer’s dirt path. There was no need to discuss what had to be done—he simply took the weapon from beneath the seat and walked out into the strip of forest that separated two fields. Theoretically they would note where it had been dumped and, some day, return to collect it.

De Milja smoked pensively and stared out over the countryside. The peasants, working in the last light of the late summer dusk, were harvesting wheat with horse-drawn mowing machines. There was a haze of dust in the air, cicadas whirred madly, the mowing machines swayed as they cut through the ripe grain. He got out of the truck to stretch his legs and felt a slight vibration in the ground. For a moment, there was no sound. Then there was just the beginning of it, thunder in the distance. Fedin returned, stood by the side of the truck, and squinted up into the darkening sky.

The ground trembled, then shook. The sound swelled, then seemed to explode the air, growing louder and louder until de Milja could feel the waves of it hammering against his heart. In self-defense he knelt down, then tried to count the dark shapes that moved slowly across the sky, returning from London, or Liverpool. Perhaps fifty Heinkel-IIIs and maybe the same number of Ju-88s, the best of the German bombers, and their escort, possibly thirty Messerschmitt-110s.

He had seen it in Warsaw, how the fronts of the buildings slid into the street in a cloud of dust, the silhouette of a fireman on a roof— arms and legs thrown wide like a gingerbread man by the blast, white fire and blue fire, the young woman a block away from harm who sits down and dies without a mark on her. He knew the Germans for the fine engineers they were.

Above him, one of the bombers trailed a delicate strand of white smoke from beneath its wing. Another flew very low and far behind the formation, de Milja could hear its engine; ignition, then silence, ignition, silence. It seemed restless; a wing dipped, the nose of the plane lowered, then righted itself. Perhaps the plane and the pilot were both damaged, de Milja thought. But, two planes among a hundred—only two planes. Others in the sea, maybe. One in poor Mrs. Brown’s kitchen. But most of the bombers would be back at it the following day. Even fire hoses wore out eventually, de Milja knew, the white, frayed threads visible through the broken rubber.

The sound faded slowly to the south, toward the Luftwaffe base near Merville. The cicadas started up again, the huge horses plodded along and the mowers creaked as they rolled through the wheat. A Norman peasant walked beside his plow horse—walked slowly, head down, like an old man—one hand riding on the horse’s shoulder.

It worked. Once you determined the street by turning off the electricity until the transmission stopped, your sound trucks could identify the building by strength of signal. They radioed back to Grahnweis: Hôtel Bretagne. The hunting party was hastily organized; two Gestapo detectives—thick-bodied types—a few senior officers with their side arms, and Walter and Helmut, who squeezed into the second car, encouraged by Grahnweis’ wink. The two cars sped through the Paris night, arriving at the rue Lepic in good time—the W/T operator was still at it, according to the technicians in the Loewe-Opta trucks.

The actual entry into the hotel was restricted to the two detectives, along with two of the senior officers who could not be told no, as well as Walter—representing Grahnweis’ faithful staff—and Grahnweis himself.

The night clerk, an old man with a white eye, trembled with fear when the Gestapo uniforms swept through the door. He showed them the registration book; they picked out, immediately, the woman “Marie Ladoux,” who for ten days had occupied a top-floor room. Rented for her by a cousin, the man said, a week before she arrived. “She doesn’t sleep here at night,” he confided to one of the detectives. “God only knows where she goes.”

They acknowledged later, quietly, among themselves, that she had been very brave. The young French girl or English girl or whoever she was—really very brave. When they kicked the door open she simply turned and stared at them as though they’d been impolite, her hand poised on the telegraph key. “Strange she had no watchers,” Walter said later to the others in the Funkabwehr office on the boulevard Suchet.

“A patched-together business, I think,” Helmut said. “Extemporized.” A sad little smile, and the shrug that went with it: the British were losing now, knocked silly by German bombs, waiting for the blow to fall as a tough, predatory army waited on the chalk cliffs at Boulogne. The same cliffs where Napoleon’s Grande Armée had waited. And waited. But this wasn’t Napoleon. And the junior officers quite properly read desperation in the girl’s mission—one could say sacrifice. Clearly nobody had expected her to survive for very long.

She shocked them, though. The rules of the game specified that the W/T operator give up, accept interrogation, accept the consequences of spying, which hadn’t changed in a hundred years—the courtyard, the blindfold. But though she did not struggle when they took her, they got her only as far as the backseat of the Gestapo Mercedes, securely handcuffed, with a detective on either side. Yet she managed to do what she had to do; they heard the crunch of bitten glass and a few seconds later her head fell over like a broken doll and that was the end of “Marie Ladoux.”

Grahnweis stayed behind with one of the senior officers to examine the real prize—the clandestine radio. Which turned out to be the good old Mark XV transceiver—actually its first cousin, the Paraset—but, Grahnweis thought, standard MI-6 equipment. He nodded to himself with satisfaction and relief. The British scientists made him nervous— sometimes great bumblers, sometimes not. He feared that under pressure of war they might outperform themselves and conjure up some diabolical apparatus that would make his life a hell. But, so far, nothing like that, as far as he could tell, in the Hôtel Bretagne.

Standard stuff. Two transmission frequencies—from 3.3 to 4.5 megacycles and from 4.5 to 7.6 megacycles. Four to five watts of power—enough to get to London. Three American metal tubes, a 6V6 crystal-controlled pilot, cadmium steel box, silver finish. A calibration curve, to assist the operator, was mounted in the upper-left-hand corner, essentially a graph chart with a diagonal line. Grahnweis took a soft leather tool pouch from the pocket of his uniform jacket and selected a screwdriver for the task of getting behind the control panel. To the senior officer looking over his shoulder he said, “Maybe something new inside.”

There was.

Grahnweis left the hotel by the Saint-Rustique side of the building; meanwhile, the senior officer exited on the rue Lepic—this parting company a mysterious event that nobody ever really explained. For a time it wasn’t clear that Grahnweis was ever going to be found, but, with persistence and painstaking attention to detail, he was. Crown on the second bicuspid molar, fillings in upper and lower canines, a chipped incisor. Yes, that was Grahnweis, if a tattered charcoal log under a jumble of brick and tile could be called any name at all.

The junior officers of the Funkabwehr were extremely put out by this turn of events. It was, at its heart, rude. And rudeness of this sort they would never have ascribed to the British character. Had they known, of course, that it was the Poles who’d sent their leader from the room they would have thrown up their hands in angry recognition. What could you expect? But the British were different: Aryan, northern, civilized, and blessed with certain German virtues—honor in friendship, and love of learning.

The British were, in fact, perhaps a little worse than the Poles, but the Germans wouldn’t come to understand that for some time. “Personally,” said Heinrich, “it is the very sort of thing I find I cannot forgive.”

7 September, 2:30 p.m.

Genya Beilis seated herself by a window in the Café Trois Reines, next to the St. Pierre cemetery in Montmartre. She was a vision, even in the end-of-summer heat. A little white hat with a bow, set just to one side of her head, a little white suit, three dashes of Guerlain. Not the usual for this neighborhood, but who knew what business royalty might have up here—maybe a call on a poor relative, or a bouquet for a former lover, who somehow wound up in the local boneyard. Whatever the truth, she shone, and her tea was served with every courtesy, and every drop still in the cup.

Very damn inspiring, the way she walked. Maybe you didn’t believe in heaven but you certainly could believe in that. Chin and shoulders elevated, back like fine steel, the emphatic ring of high heels on the tile floor of a café. In the cabinet de toilette, Madame whipped off a lambskin glove and slipped a brown envelope behind a radiator. Then she returned to her tea.

A few blocks away, a number of Gestapo gentlemen read newspapers in cars and doorways all the livelong day as the mess in the rue Lepic was cleaned up, but that was hopeless and they knew it. Nobody was going to be coming around to see what happened to X. The abrupt halt in transmission, the absence of coded start-up signals— missent call sign, incorrect date—and the London people would know their network communication had been cut. One sent the newspaper readers out to the cars and doorways, but one knew better.

The lovely lady in white returned to the quartier of the Café Trois Reines on two occasions, but she found no chalk mark on M. Laval’s gravestone and the letter in the toilette mailbox went uncollected, so that, in the end, the latest news on canals and barges in the Channel ports went unread.

Though she had never seen her correspondent she felt sad, enough a veteran of the business to know what uncollected mail implied. Then too, she had walked past the spontaneous renovation at the Hôtel Bretagne, noted newspaper readers in the vicinity, noted the absolute silence of the Parisian press on the subject of local explosions, and wondered if it all might not somehow fit together.

But hers not to reason why. Hers to travel down to the Banque de Commerce Nationale in Orléans, humiliate the most vulgar, oily little bank man that God ever made, and collect a new set of procedures.

Now it was the sixteenth arrondissement.

Now it was the Café du Jardin.

Now the adjacent cemetery was in Passy.

Ghouls, she thought.

Starry night in the village of Aire. In 1430, the Roman bridge over the river Lys had been replaced and the Martagne family had built a fine house at the end of it, so the cool air that hung above the water made the stone rooms pleasant on summer evenings.

Martagne, the port supervisor from Calais, had a red face and black hair, a big cleft nose and a big mustache. He sat in the dark kitchen with de Milja—Fedin was waiting at the edge of the village— drinking farmer-made Calvados from a stone crock. “Take another Calva,” he said. “Uncle made that in 1903.” Martagne liked to spend his time in the bars with the Polish dockyard workers, and they put him on to Fedin and de Milja when he got frustrated with the Germans and threatened to talk to somebody.

Now he was drunk. He stared down at the scarred old table and brooded. Finally he said, “You a spy?”

“Yes.”

Martagne made a face. “I’m a Norman,” he said. “Not French— whatever that means. But we fight their damn battles. They’re good at insults, not so good at fighting. Bad combination, you’ll agree.”

“Yes.”

“It’s fighting—you’ll find a Martagne. Crècy, Agincourt, Sedan, Poitiers, the Marne, Jena, Marengo. Probably went over the Channel with William the Conqueror—last time anybody managed to do that, by the way. Probably somebody looked like me, with my ugly face.” Martagne laughed at the idea. “Can’t stand the English,” he said. “You care?”

“No,” de Milja said.

“They care?”

“No.”

Martagne laughed again. “Me neither,” he said. He stood, swayed a moment, then left the room. Through a crack in the closed shutter de Milja could see that moon and starlight lit the old village and he could hear splashing water where the Lys ran over a small weir. Somewhere in the house Martagne was banging drawers open and shut. Finally he reappeared and handed de Milja three sheets of used carbon paper.

“Sorry I didn’t bring the originals,” he said. “We’ll take one more Calva.” He poured generously, the fragrance of distant apples drifted up to de Milja. “Now, Monsieur Spy, one little story before you go.”

De Milja sipped the Calvados.

“The last week in June, on the day of the surrender, when Pétain got on the radio about how he was preserving the honor of France, my grandfather put on a nightshirt he’d never worn in his life and got into his bed. He was a healthy old bird, pissed like a fountain. But now he stayed in bed, he didn’t speak, he didn’t smile, he just stared at the wall. The doctor came, a childhood friend. Didn’t help. He made the old jokes, said the old things, left a tonic on the nightstand. But a week later, my grandfather was gone. ‘He has died of shame,’ the doctor said. So now, what you have in your hand, that is his revenge—and mine. Do you understand?”

“Yes, I understand,” de Milja said. He proved it by standing up to leave. Martagne looked away; angry at what he’d done, angry at the world for having made him do it. De Milja said good night and slipped out the door.

Gold in hand, it turned out.

12 September. In Nieuwpoort, just across the Belgian border, dust from the wheat harvest hung in the warm air and the fields shimmered in golden light; the docks were burning, the harbor smelled of dead fish, an RAF Blenheim-IVF came tearing over the jetty at fifty feet with its gunports twinkling. The windows of the Café Nieuwpoort fell in on a dead fisherman and a dead waiter and a German corporal came running out of the toilet with his pants around his ankles. A mackerel boat caught fire and the cook jumped into the harbor. Eight rounds from the .303 guns, including an incendiary tracer, stitched up the side of the harbor gasoline tank, thirty feet high, and absolutely nothing happened. The cook yelled he couldn’t swim; a couple of taxi drivers ran to the edge of the pier, but when the Blenheim screamed around the town in a banked turn they threw themselves on their bellies and by the time they looked out at the water again there was nobody there.

The Germans had an antiaircraft gun at the top of the hill, in the little garden behind the town hall, and red fireballs went whizzing through the port as they tried to hit the Blenheim. Flown by some species of madman—in fact a Rhodesian bush pilot—the Blenheim seemed enraged by the attack, tore out over the sea and came skimming back into Nieuwpoort, blazing away at the gun position and hitting two of the gunners and the mayor’s secretary.

On the top floor of the dockside Hotel Vlaanderen, de Milja and a whore wearing a slip and a Turkish seaman wearing underpants watched the fight together through a cracked window. De Milja had come running in here when the attack started, but the whore and the sailor hardly seemed to notice him. The room quivered and a blast wave rang the window glass—high explosive going off on the other side of town. De Milja looked out the window to see, just over the town horizon, thick, curling smoke, black and ponderous, tumbling slowly upward, implying the death of an industrial something or other that had lived on heavy oil. Then the hotel was hit, the sailor squawked and grabbed the whore in terror, knocking her blond wig askew and revealing clipped dark hair beneath. “Shh,” she said, and stroked the man’s hair.

De Milja pressed his palm against the worn linoleum, testing for heat in case the floor below them was on fire. For the moment, he decided, he was about as safe as he was going to get. The bombers seemed to be working north of Nieuwpoort, near the railroad yards. Puffs of dark smoke from spent ack-ack bursts drifted back over the town from that direction. Fedin should have been halfway down to Abbeville—de Milja could only hope he hadn’t been killed in the raid.

The mackerel boat was fully ablaze now; a man ran up to it, threw a completely pointless bucket of water on the roof of the crackling wheelhouse, then ran away. “My poor town,” the whore said under her breath. The sailor said something in Turkish and the whore, responding to the tone of his voice, said, “Yes, that’s right.”

As de Milja turned back to the window, the Blenheim flashed by, the wing tip no more than ten feet away, engines howling, rattling the window in its frame. The pilot circled low over the town and headed back out to sea, toward the Dover cliffs and home. The Germans had now gotten their antiaircraft gun working again and sent him on his way with a volley that may have nicked the tail of the airplane. The pilot responded; put his plane in a violent climb, foot on the floor, then a steep bank at the top of the climb, where he vanished into the low cloud. A little bell rang in the street: the Nieuwpoort fire truck, stopped for a moment while two firemen struggled with a large chunk of concrete, dragging it to the edge of the dock by the bent rods sticking out at odd angles.

The men jumped back on the truck and it drove around the harbor to where the burning mackerel boat had now set the pier on fire. A Feldengendarmerie open car pulled up behind the truck and a soldier ran over to the driver’s window and pointed back the other way. The soldier climbed into his car and both vehicles began the long process of getting themselves turned around without dropping a wheel over the edge of the pier.

Good, de Milja thought. Something’s really gone up somewhere and the Germans are very unhappy about it. But even so, de Milja the realist had been watching German equipment go up in flames since September of 1939 and he had to admit that it didn’t seem to slow them down. They patched and fixed and improvised and did without. War’s own children, he thought. They find a way to get the job done and go on to the next town.

Another plane came tearing past the hotel, the clatter of gunfire echoing in the little room. No—the same Blenheim, de Milja realized. He’d been hiding out over the sea somewhere or a little way down the coast and this time, like magic, the huge gasoline storage tank erupted in a great whuff of orange flame and boiling black smoke. The pilot circled the town, getting a good eyeful for his gun cameras and obviously very proud of what he’d done. He then waggled his wings—the AA gunners did everything but throw their lunch at him—and sped out over the sea toward the English coast.

A little rain that night. The Turkish seaman went off to sail away— if he still had a boat to sail away on—and de Milja paid the whore to stay with her in the room. Bernette, she was called. No longer young, short and sturdy, fiercely proud in the face of all the pranks that life had played her. She hung her blond wig on the post at the foot of the bed and fussed over it and combed it out, calling it her poor beaver, entirely unselfconscious in her slip and half-inch salt-and-pepper hair.

De Milja gave her some money and she wriggled into a skirt and went off to a café she knew where they cooked on a wood-fired stove—the electricity in Nieuwpoort was out—and returned carrying a big plate of lentils and bacon with vinegar, still warm and covered with yesterday’s newspaper, and two bottles of dark beer. Excuse them for not sending the lady and gentleman a glass, but their glassware had not survived the afternoon.

The rain pattered on the wharfside streets, cooling everything a little. In the distance the bells of the fire trucks never stopped. It smelled like Warsaw; charred plaster, burning oil, and cordite. Bernette wrinkled her nose and splashed herself with White Ginger perfume, so that the room smelled like bombs and gardenias. Would the gentleman, she wanted to know, care for a half-and-half when he’d finished his lentils? The money he’d given her entitled him to at least that. No, de Milja said. Somehow the events of the day had left him not much in the mood for such things. Strange, he thought, how much I like you. Like me a wanderer, somehow never home.

That was, it happened, true. She’d had a home, a child, a family, but, well, what did it all matter? God meant her not to have them and now she didn’t. It wasn’t much of a story anyhow.

Well the hell with everybody, he said. And he was getting tired of the four walls—could they go out for a walk? She agreed to go. Scared as she was, she agreed. Strange, he thought, how you stumble on the world’s secret nobility when you’re not even looking for them.

When she went down the hall to the toilet de Milja poured half a bottle of beer down his shirt. She made a sour face about that when she returned—she could wash it out in the sink. No, he said, turned away from her so she wouldn’t smell that he’d washed his mouth with the rest of the beer and splashed some on his hair.

Outside it was quiet at first, the rain hissing on a few small fires here and there. Some of the townspeople were poking through the burnt-out café, lifting a blackened timber then dropping it quickly when they saw what was under it. The patron, the toughest man in Nieuwpoort, was sitting on the curb and weeping into a dirty handkerchief, his shoulders shaking. “Ach,” Bernette said, fought back the tears, then steadied. Soot drifted down on them as they walked, walked carefully because the sea fog hung over the town. Quiet water that night, just lapping at the foot of the quai as the tide went out. Walking away from the center of Nieuwpoort they were stopped by a pair of Wehrmacht sentries. Nervy and angry now that they’d been on the wrong end of the war for a moment—they hadn’t liked that at all.

But what could they do with a beer-smelling slob and a whore headed down the beach for a blow job? He was now Rosny, Belgian of Czech descent, a long story. In the end the Germans waved them along, but for half a pfennig they would have run a rifle butt under his chin just to see his heels fly up in the air. Because they had dead friends and half-dead friends and would-have-been-better-off-dead friends— de Milja knew what bombing did to people—and they were full of rage, and quite dangerous. Bernette, good Bernette, looked at them a certain way, and maybe that bled out the fury just enough to keep de Milja’s jaw from getting broken, but it was a close thing.

The sirens went off about an hour past midnight, and de Milja and Bernette moved off the beach and back into the dunes. They were in the town’s shame pit—broken glass, old rags, a dead shoe—a hidden place for those Nieuwpoort citizens who had to do something private and couldn’t afford to do it indoors. De Milja moved into the lee of a dune, they sat down on the damp sand, he put an arm around her shoulders and she clung to him, her protector.

Not much more than a gesture, with what came down on Nieuwpoort that night.

The Blenheim, it turned out, was merely an opening act, a juggler on roller skates. Now the full troupe of comedians came running out of the wings. Lancaster bombers, de Milja guessed. The beach shuddered as the bombs hit, to long rolls of thunder and flashes of orange fire in the darkness. Once or twice it was close, sand showered down on them and Bernette whimpered like a poodle and burrowed into him. The antiaircraft people up at the mayor’s office got on the scoreboard just as the raid began, hit a Lancaster with a full bomb load a little way out to sea from the harbor and de Milja swore he could see the night cloud for twenty miles around by the light of the explosion. But most of the rest got through, hitting the town and the sea and the villages nearby and God only knew what else. Pretty soon Nieuwpoort was truly on fire, the Hotel Vlaanderen no more than a pile of smoking brick.

The second British attack came at 3:30 in the morning. It seemed very quiet when they left. De Milja and Bernette dozed, then woke up at dawn, stiff and chilled and miserable. The sea had come alive in first light; white combers rolling in a long way, crying gulls hanging in the air above the breaking surf. De Milja walked down to the tideline to splash his face and there, riding to and fro in a foot of water, a thin trail of yellow foam traced up the back of his uniform, was the first German. Facedown, arms above his head. As de Milja watched, a wave a little more powerful than the ones before picked him up, rushed him in a few extra feet, and dumped him on the wet sand.

It wasn’t clear how he had died—he hadn’t burned, hadn’t been hit by shellfire. Probably he had drowned. He wore a field-gray combat uniform, waist encircled by a belt with ammunition pouches and a commando knife, prepared to fight. One of mine, de Milja thought. But it wasn’t one, it was three, no, a dozen. Hundreds. At first the gray of their uniforms blended with the color of the sea, but as the light changed he could see more and more of them. Most wearing heavy packs, bobbing silently in the surf. Now and then the sea would leave another one on the beach, then, so it seemed to de Milja, go back out in order to bring in a few more.

Dependable port official reports security staff alerting coastal defense units to a landing exercise, to be carried out at division strength, using barges and seagoing tugs, at Westende on the Belgian coast on the night of 12 September.

So this was his kill. It would have been suicide to try for Westende, so he’d settled for

Nieuwpoort, to see what he could see. And here it was. Some of the dead were burned—perhaps a ship had been hit. Perhaps several ships. Invasion troops, from the packs and all the other equipment—the Germans had put on a dress rehearsal for a landing on the beaches of Britain.

And the British had put on a dress rehearsal of their own.

It was much too dangerous to stay where he was, there would be hell to pay on this beach once the Germans discovered what the tide was bringing in. But when he turned to look for Bernette he discovered she’d been standing by his side, bare feet splayed in the sand, arms crossed beneath her breasts.

He put a hand on her shoulder, but she did not respond so he let it drop. Then he knelt down, took a little slip of paper and a stub of pencil from his pocket and sketched the shoulder-patch insignia of one of the dead soldiers: a knight raised a sword above his head, his shield a crusader’s cross. The legend above the knight: Grenadierregiment 46. Legend below: 21 Infanteriedivision Dresden.

He tucked the slip of paper into his pants cuff, then stood up. “I know you are a patriot,” he said.

She had seen, and certainly understood, what he had just done. It was an act of war to learn who the dead were. “Yes,” she said. “I am.” Just one more secret, she thought. She kept them all.

15 September.

Martagne had stolen three carbons from the Port of Calais office; the German landing exercise was one of them.

De Milja made his way south to the village of Sangatte, on the road that ran by the sea from Boulogne to Calais. Fedin was waiting for him in a closed-up villa owned by a Russian baron—lately a toy manufacturer, formerly one of the czar’s riding masters—in Paris. De Milja arrived a little after one in the afternoon, Genya Beilis came by taxi from the resort town of Le Touquet an hour later. All trains from Paris to Boulogne and Calais had been suspended, she said. Military traffic only. Railroad guns. Field hospitals.

The time had come.

The roads were jammed with panzer tanks and 88 artillery pieces on carriers and fuel tankers with red crosses painted on them to fool the British attack aircraft. Wehrmacht invasion planners were playing chess now—big guns at Calais had engaged British artillery across the Channel, communications frequencies were being jammed, radio towers and radars attacked. We’re coming, it meant.

“The enemy’s ports are our first line of defense.” Lord Nelson, in 1805, and nothing had changed. Britain had its little piece of water that it hid behind. The princes of Europe could field huge land armies. But when they reached the coast of France, they stopped.

A Russian general, a publisher’s daughter, a Polish cartographer. At the villa they sat on sheets that covered the furniture, in a dark room behind closed shutters. Finished, and they knew it. Fedin, at sixty, perhaps the strongest of them, de Milja thought. To survive Russia you had to fight for life—fight the cold, fight the sadness and its vodka. Those who lived were like iron. Genya, de Milja saw, had covered the dark circles beneath her eyes with powder. He thought the shadows decadent, sexy, but the attempted disguise made her look old, a woman attempting to deceive the world. As for himself, he felt numb, as though a nerve, pounded on by the hour, had gone dead.

The three of them smoked. It made up for food, for sleep.

“They’ve arrested Rijndal,” Fedin said. “The Dutch barge captain. His wife let another friend of ours know about it.”

“Do they know why?” de Milja asked.

“No.”

“What can he tell them?”

“That he talked to émigrés—Russians, Poles, Czechs—working against the Germans.”

“I’m going to sleep,” Genya said. She assumed there was a bedroom on the second floor, so climbed the stairs. Fedin and de Milja could hear her up there, walking around in different rooms.

Fedin and de Milja left the house, walked to a café, telephoned another café. In silence, they drank coffee for an hour, then an ambulance pulled up outside. The driver joined them, ordered a marc, opened a newspaper. german strength and french culture to inspire new europe, read the headline, quoting a French minister.

“How can you read that garbage?” Fedin asked.

The ambulance driver shrugged. “I used to prefer pig born with two heads, but this is all you get now.” He looked at his watch. “I can let you have two hours, so if you’re going you better go.”

Fedin handed over a stack of franc notes.

“What are you moving?” the driver asked.

“Hams,” Fedin said.

The driver raised his eyebrows in a way which meant I wouldn’t mind having one. Fedin smiled a knave’s smile and patted him on the arm. Business is business, he meant.

Fedin drove the ambulance, de Milja lay down on the stretcher in the back. The days when they could use the van were now over, only French emergency vehicles were allowed on the roads in the coastal region. Keeping to the farm routes, they reached the village of Colombert, on the D6. In the main square, a military policeman wearing white gloves was directing traffic. Fedin pointed at the road he wanted, the policeman waved him violently in that direction—yes, go on, hurry! An army truck in the square had a flat tire; soldiers were standing around waiting for the driver to fix it. They wore the same uniform as the soldiers on the beach at Nieuwpoort, but their shoulder insignia was different. “Commandos,” Fedin said, squinting to see the patches. “To climb ropes up cliffs.”

“If they can get to the cliffs,” de Milja said.

Fedin nosed the wheel over gingerly and drove down a lane between two rows of linden trees. The trunks had grown for too many years, there was barely room for a vehicle. The road divided at a canal. Fedin turned off the ignition. Another lost, exquisite little place—still water, soft sky, leaves barely moving in the breeze. De Milja clambered out of the back of the ambulance. “I hope nobody asks us what we’re doing down here.”

Fedin shrugged. “We’ll say Van Gogh had a fainting spell.”

They walked along the canal for a time. Around a curve, fourteen barges were tied up end to end, roped to iron rings set at the edge of what had been, a century earlier, a towpath. By the water there were three blackened, splintered trunks of linden trees; several others had had their leaves blown off. A single sunken barge was lying halfway on its side in the still water. Fedin tapped a cigarette out of his pack, screwed it into his ivory holder, and lit it with a small silver lighter. “Well,” he said, “we did try.”

The villa at Sangatte, late afternoon. De Milja climbed the stairs, found the bedroom and opened the door quietly. Genya was sleeping in her underwear, hands beneath her head instead of a pillow, on top of a mattress covered with a sheet. He watched her for a time; she was dreaming. What she showed the world was hard and polished. But in her dream she was frightened, her breathing caught. Carefully, he lay down next to her, but she woke up. “You’re here,” she said.

“Yes.”

“How was it?”

“Not so good.”

“Really?”

“We managed to see three different places. There was one barge sunk, one transport damaged—the Germans had French shipfitters working on it. In Calais, an old man who fishes off the jetty said that a motor launch blew up the other night when the British came.”

Genya didn’t answer. De Milja was tired. It was hot and airless on the upper floor, dark behind the shutters. Yet he could feel, just at that moment, summer slipping away. He could hear the ocean breaking on the rocky beach. Two girls on bicycles, talking as they pedaled side by side. Some kind of bird that sang a single, low note in a tree outside. He moved closer to Genya, her skin brown against the white sheet, touched her shoulder with his lips. She moved a little away from him. “I’m asleep,” she said.

16 September. The invasion fleet began to assemble. It had been planned for Genya to make a courier run to the Passy W/T operator on the evening of the fifteenth. But the French police had blocked all the roads and the railroad stations were off-limits to civilians. The region had been closed.

The Calais waterfront was a maze of dark, cobbled streets winding among brick warehouses and cargo sheds, small tenements where the dockworkers lived, a few cafés where they drank, and a crumbling hotel with a blue neon sign—hôtel neptune—a whorehouse for foreign sailors.

De Milja and Fedin went into one of the bars, ordered ballons de rouge, glasses of red wine, and spent an hour gossiping with the owner and his fat blond wife. The owner wore a tweed cap, had his shirtsleeves rolled up above the elbows. Business was no good, he said, at this rate they wouldn’t last much longer. The English dropped bombs on their customers, the Germans paid like drunkards on a spree or they didn’t pay at all. One thought one had it tough before May of ’40, et alors, what one didn’t know! The wife had a rich laugh and red cheeks.

And what was that warehouse across the street?

Labard et Labard? Boarded up, now. They used to see the workers all day—first for an eye-opener, then lunch—a very nice plat du jour for a few francs and a coffee. Finally a little something at the end of the day when they gathered to get up their courage to go home and face their wives. So, life wasn’t perfect but it went along. But then, the war. The young Monsieur Labard an officer, now a prisoner of war in Germany. The elder Labard was eighty-seven. He’d tried, but it hadn’t worked out. Tant pis, too bad, oh well, that was life, what could one do, so it went. The owner shook his head grimly at the sorrow of it all while the wife winked at de Milja and rolled her hips when she walked down to the other end of the bar to refill their glasses.

They broke into the Labard warehouse just after dark. Used an old piece of iron to pry a padlock off a side entry, groped their way up an ancient wooden staircase to the top floor. Found a window with a space between the board and the frame, kicked it a little wider, and got a view of the Calais harbor.

Fedin had been right about the date—full moon on the seventeenth. They counted forty troop transports anchored out in the harbor, six more in position for boarding on the wharf. Trucks pulled in, piled high with wooden ammunition boxes. The first invasion wave would be loaded the following morning, then, that night, they would sail for England.

“This is it,” Fedin said, staring intently at the activity in the harbor. “I hope they have something ready on the other side.”

“The English abandoned a lot of weapons on the beach at Dunkirk,” de Milja said. “That was three months ago—I wonder how much of it they’ve been able to replace. Some, not all. Every farmer has his shotgun, of course. Which is just what they thought would happen in France, but farmers with shotguns can’t do much about artillery.”

A broad-beamed tugboat came chugging into the harbor from the direction of the Calais canals. It was pushing three barges from a position on the port side and almost to the stern of the last barge. The tug, built for moving bargeloads of coal among the Rhine ports, made rapid way into the harbor.

“They’re going across in that?” Fedin said.

“If the water stays calm.”

“What about the Royal Navy?”

“The Germans must feel they can neutralize it for forty-eight hours—after that it doesn’t matter. And if the Luftwaffe can get the advantage in the air over the Channel, the Royal Navy can’t do a thing.”

De Milja watched the harbor in silence. The activity wasn’t frantic, but there were thirty operations going on at once, ships moving about, trucks arriving and departing—all of it steady and certain, nobody was smoking or standing around. All nonmilitary ships had been tied up in the small pleasure-boat harbor that adjoined the main dock areas of the city. The name of one of the ships was familiar—he had to think for a moment before he realized why. The rusty freighter with flaking black paint was, according to the letters fading away on her hull, the Malacca Princess. Grand name for an old tramp, de Milja thought. It had appeared on one of the carbons Martagne had given them—a schedule of commercial shipping traffic expected to enter or depart the port of Calais over the period 9/14/40 to 9/21/40, with a brief description of each cargo manifest.

The first British attack came at 10:15.

Assault aircraft—built to work near the ground—engines screaming as they flashed across the harbor. Beauforts, de Milja thought. Perhaps a dozen. One flew into the side of a warehouse, and by the yellow flash of that impact de Milja saw another, cartwheeling twice over the surface of the water. The Germans were waiting for this attack—the stutter of heavy machine guns and the deeper, two-stroke drumming of the antiaircraft cannon rang in de Milja’s ears, then deafened him. The Beauforts attacked at one hundred feet, carrying four five-hundredpound bombs apiece, four dives each if they lasted that long.

There were ME-109s above them, nightfighters, one of them followed a Beaufort right down the chute, guns blazing, in such hot pursuit it chased its quarry through a cloud of machine-gun tracer. Moments later, a pair of green flares came floating down, illuminating an airman hanging limp from a parachute, which settled gently on the calm sea then disappeared as the flares hit the water.

Two minutes, no more. The sound faded away, de Milja’s hearing came back in time to make out the low wail of an all-clear siren. In the moonlight a single barge settled slowly into the water, a single transport steamer burned, firefighters with hoses silhouetted in its flames.

“Do you have a gun?” de Milja said to Fedin.

“This,” Fedin said. A Walther P-38, a German officer’s side arm. De Milja extended his hand. Fedin, after a puzzled moment, gave him the pistol.

“What . . . ?”

De Milja didn’t answer.

The second British attack came at 11:16.

A chess game somewhere, in offices below ground, linked to radio towers, British air controllers moving a castle here, a knight there. Blind chess. With command-and-control sometimes functioning, sometimes not. Now and then everybody simply had to improvise, to do whatever seemed best. De Milja had seen plenty of that in Poland, where it hadn’t worked. A lot of dead, brave people is what you got from that.

The RAF pilots—British and South African, Canadian, Czech, and Polish—were something beyond brave. They flew into the firestorm a second time, and a number of them paid for it. Perhaps, this time out, the controllers had shifted a flight of Spitfires to keep the 109s away from the assault aircraft. Which left the docks in London unprotected when the Junkers and Heinkels flew over, and that was the chess game. The Calais docks on fire—the London docks on fire in exchange. As de Milja watched the raid play itself out, two searchlights nailed a wounded Beaufort trying to sneak home a few feet above the water. De Milja didn’t see the 109 that did the job; the Beaufort simply grew a blossom of white fire behind the cockpit, then hit the water in a cloud of steam and spray.

De Milja’s hands ached, he had to pull them free of the windowsill he’d been holding. Only a single siren now, a fire truck somewhere in Calais. Not needed at the docks because nothing was on fire. The transport had been saved—though the barge hit in the 10:15 attack had now apparently sunk into the harbor ooze. Probably it would be salvaged, raised and repaired, used to run ammunition across the Channel to the British beaches. Maybe in a week or so, de Milja thought, as London held out valiantly—as had Warsaw—while around the world people gathered close to their radios to hear, through the static and the sirens, the British pleading for help in their last hours.

De Milja stepped back from the window. “One last thing to try,” he said.

General Fedin understood him perfectly—he’d been at war, one way or another, for forty years. “I would be honored to accompany you,” he said.

“Better if you stay here,” de Milja said.

Fedin nodded stiffly. He might have saluted, but how—the salute of which country, which army? De Milja moved toward the door, for a moment a dim shape in the darkness of the warehouse, then gone. The last Fedin heard of him was footsteps descending the old wooden staircase.

Not long, maybe fifteen minutes, from the Labard warehouse to the docks. He moved quickly, low and tight to the buildings, a strange elation in his heart. He circled a burning garage, avoided a street where flames rolled black and orange from the upper windows of a workers’ tenement. Faded into a doorway when a German vehicle—a sinister armored car, some kind of SS troop in black uniforms hanging off it— came rumbling slowly around a corner.

In the distance, a low, muttering thunder. Weather or bombs. Probably the latter. The RAF hammering away at Boulogne, or Ostende, or Dunkirk. Staggering its attacks, in and out like a boxer. They would be at it all night on this coast, as long as the planes and pilots held out.

The port was a maze—a jumble of streets, then harbors with rock jetties, miles of them, drydocks and spillways, sagging wood fence and high, stone walls. At the main entry, under the port de calais sign, the security people had cut through their own barbed wire and shoved the stanchions back against the brick walls of the guardhouse. It wasn’t security they wanted that night, they wanted speed, fire trucks and ambulances in and out. Then, at first light, after the bomb damage was cleaned up, there were troops and ammunition and equipment to load up. As de Milja watched from cover, a truck sped through the gate, bouncing on the cobbles, never slowing down. Nonetheless, he waited. Saw the glint of a helmet through the window of the guardhouse. Moved off to try somewhere else.

He used the little streets, worked parallel to the harbor. A whore hissed at him from a doorway, swung her trench coat aside when she got his attention. He might need an assistant, he thought, and studied her for a moment. “So,” she said, a little uncomfortable with the sort of attention he was paying her, “something unusual we have in mind tonight?” De Milja grinned despite himself, let her live, just for a moment the choice was his. As he walked away she called after him, a sweet, husky French voice like a café singer—“You never know if you don’t ask, my love.”

Down the next street, he had what he needed. A Beaufort had opened the way for him. Arriving in France in flames and out of control, it had chosen to set up housekeeping on a street that bordered the harbor, had rolled up a hundred feet of wire fence, collected an empty bus and a little watchman’s hut that happened to be lying around, then piled it all up against an ancient stone wall and set it on fire. A few French firemen had attempted to interfere with the project, but, as the Beaufort burned, it cooked off several belts of ammunition and chased them away. Water foamed white from the hoses they’d dropped in the street and they called out to one another from the doorways where they’d taken cover. Somebody yelled at de Milja as he ran through the opening torn in the fence, that was the only challenge. That, and something that sputtered and whizzed past his ear, as though to say move along there.

An area of open workshops, stone bays as big as barns—they’d likely worked on Napoleon’s fleet here. “Give me six hours’ control of the Strait of Dover, and I will gain mastery of the world.” Napoleon had said that—de Milja had had to learn it when he’d studied at Saint-Cyr. The workshops were full of small engines, propeller shafts. De Milja’s eye fell on a tank of acetylene and he smiled as he trotted past.

It seemed to take a long time—after midnight on his watch—but he finally stood on the old jetty that protected the pleasure-boat harbor; massive slabs of granite piled up a century earlier against the seas of the Pas de Calais—angry North Sea water trapped between the cliffs of England and France. Now it was calm in the September moonlight, just a quiet swell running diagonally to the shore; a slow, lazy ocean like a cat waking up. De Milja trotted past staunch little sailboats— Atlantic Queen, Domino—until the hulls of the commercial ships came into view. Banished here to be kept out of the way of the invasion fleet, allowed to sail into Calais on schedule so as not to give away the date and location of the invasion.

He stopped, looked anxiously into the sky. Not yet. No, it was only a flight of German bombers, at high altitude, droning toward England. Perhaps two hundred of them, he thought, they seemed to take forever to pass above him. It was too exposed on the skyline so he half-ran, half-slid to the foot of the jetty where the water lapped at the rocks. The green seaweed reeked in the summer heat and clouds of flies hung above it. He knelt, took the Walther from the back of his waistband, and had a look. The 7.65 mm version, a heavy, dependable weapon, for use, not for show. Eight rounds in the magazine, one in the chamber. He worked the safety, noted the film of oil that glistened on the slide. Trust Fedin, he thought, to keep things in good order.

The foot of the jetty lay in moon-shadow, so de Milja, invisible, used it as a pathway. Past a pair of Greek tankers, empty from the way they rode high in the water, and a flaking hulk called the Nicaea, a sheen of leaked oil coating the water at its stern. Then, last in line, as far away as the harbormaster could berth it, the Malacca Princess. The smell! De Milja blinked and shook his head. How did the crew survive it, all the way from the port of Batavia?

He gripped the Walther firmly and thought no surprises, please. No stubborn captain who took the care and protection of his cargo as a sacred trust—no fanatics, no heroes. De Milja moved quickly, from the shadows of the jetty to the first step of an iron gangway covered with tattered canvas that climbed ten feet to the deck. On deck, he went down on one knee. Deserted, he thought. Only the creak of old iron plates as the ship rose and fell, and the grating of the hawser cable as it strained against its post on the jetty below. The smell was even stronger here, his eyes were tearing. De Milja listened intently, heard, no, didn’t hear. Yes, did. Bare feet on iron decking. Then a voice—a native of the Dutch East Indies speaking British English—very frightened and very determined. “Who is there?” A pause. “Please?”

De Milja ran, low to the deck, and flattened himself against the base of a cargo crane. From here he could see a silhouette, standing hunched over, a few feet from the open door of the deck cabin, peering about, head moving left, then right. In one hand, a long shape. What? A rifle? It occurred to de Milja to point the Walther at the man and blaze away but he knew two things—he wouldn’t hit him, and somebody, even in the tense, hushed interlude between bombing attacks, would hear a pistol shot and just have to stir up French or German security to go and see what it was all about.

De Milja stepped out where the man could see him, extended the pistol, and called, “Stand still.”

The silhouette froze. De Milja worked out the next phrase in his uncertain English. “Let fall.” He waggled the pistol once or twice, there followed the clatter of an object dropped on the iron deck. Whatever it was, it didn’t sound like a rifle. He approached the man. He was young, wearing only a pair of cotton pants cut off below the knee and a cloth tied around his forehead. De Milja stooped cautiously, retrieved what the man had dropped: a wooden club. “Others?” he said.

“There are none, sir. No others,” the man said. “Just me. To keep the watch.”

De Milja lowered the pistol. The watchman smiled, then made a certain motion with his hands and shoulders. Whatever you want, it meant, to me it’s not worth dying for.

De Milja nodded that he understood. The young man had a family, in Sumatra or Java somewhere, and if circumstance carried him to the ends of the earth where people had gone mad, well, it was their war, not his.

At first, he didn’t know how to do what de Milja needed but he knew where to look, and from there the solution to the problem was evident. Raise the large, metal arm beside the box to its up position, then move around the Malacca Princess, find its various equipment, for loading and anchorage and warning and identifying other ships and just about anything you could think of, and throw all those switches to the on position.

Then wait.

“Your things,” de Milja said.

“Sir?”

De Milja pointed to his own pants, shirt, wallet, pistol. The man nodded vigorously and together they went below while he collected a small bundle, then moved back to the main deck.

Where they waited. The ship rocked gently and creaked, the nearby harbor felt deserted. In the dock area, activity continued; trucks, visible even with taped headlights, moving invasion matériel to be loaded onto barges. By 1:30, de Milja began to worry. What if the British had taken too many losses and decided to halt operations for the night? No, it wasn’t possible.

It wasn’t. At 1:50, the air-raid sirens began to wail, all along the wharf and from the city of Calais. De Milja smiled at the watchman, and pointed at the sky. The man nodded, returned the smile, tight and conciliatory. He understood fighting very well, he understood that de Milja was in the act of fighting; a sort of noble privilege. He just wasn’t all that pleased to have been drawn into it—no insult intended, sir.

Poor Charles Grahame, not much success in life. Still young, but the pattern was set. Public school with a name that made people say “Where?” A year at the University of Edinburgh, a year at the Scottish Widows Assurance Society in the City of London. Then, war on the way, an attempt to join the RAF. Well, yes, of course, what they needed just then were meteorologists.

So he joined the Royal Navy, and with grit and determination worked his way into the naval aviator school. He got through it, assigned to the aircraft carrier HMS Avenger.

Not to fly fighter-bombers, oh no, not Charley. Tall and gangly, curly hair that wouldn’t stay, ears like jug handles, freckles everywhere, and a silly grin. The headmaster of his school used to say that God didn’t quite get around to finishing Charles.

The Royal Navy assigned him to fly the Swordfish torpedo plane.

The Swordfish was a biplane—top and bottom wing and a fixed wheel—that looked like a refugee from World War I. It carried a single torpedo, slung beneath the cockpit. “Quite serviceable, though,” the flight instructor said. Its airspeed was 150 miles an hour. “But it will get you there, eventually,” the flight instructor said. Saying to himself immediately thereafter now whether or not it will get you home is entirely another matter.

Not much talent as a pilot. Charles’s method of achievement was to learn the rules and follow them to the letter. Do this, then do this, then do that. A different age might have found this approach greatly to its liking but, bad luck, Charles lived at a moment when spontaneity, the daring solution, and the flash of genius were particularly in fashion.

The carrier HMS Avenger was steaming in circles in Aldeburgh Bay in the first hours of 17 September, just after midnight. Charles Grahame climbed into the open cockpit beneath the top wing and his gunner/torpedo-man, Sublieutenant Higbee, sat in the gunner’s cockpit behind him. They took off, then turned south, in a formation of six Swordfish assigned to attack Calais harbor.

The formation hugged the coastline, protected by coastal antiaircraft defenses. A single ME-109 might have done for all of them, so hiding, down at six thousand feet, was their best—in fact their only— defense. The night was warm and still, moonlight turned the clouds to silver and sparkled on the water below the planes. They flew past navigation beams at Shoeburyness and Sheerness, then turned east at Herne Bay, headed for Margate.

At Margate, a rendezvous with a flight of Hurricanes, well above them somewhere, godlike, lords of the high cloud. The Hurricane squadron leader came on his radio moments later. “Hullo Hector, hullo Hector. This is Jupiter, we’re above you right now, and we’re going to keep you company on the way to destination. Radio silence from here on, but we did want to wish you good hunting. Roger and out.”

Charles Grahame knew that voice, it had a mustache and it drove a Morgan and its friends called it Tony and it got the girl and, really, worst of all, it knew it. Oh well, he told himself. Just get on with it. Not everybody could be lord of the manor.

Coming into the Strait of Dover, the Germans started shooting at them. Puffs of antiaircraft burst that hung in the air like painted smoke. Something tossed the Swordfish’s port-side wings in the air, and something else flicked the plane’s tail. Charles worked the controls to see if they still responded, and they did, as much as they ever did.

The Swordfish flight attacked in a three-and-three configuration, Charles the wingman on the left in the first wave. Higbee yelled “Good luck, Charley,” above the singing of the wind in the struts, his voice at nineteen a high tenor. Then all hell broke loose—somebody down there took Charley Grahame pretty damn seriously after all because they tried to kill him. Tracer streamed past the cockpit, flak burst everywhere, a bullet hit the fuselage with an awful tinny rattle. “Easy does it,” Charles said to himself. Now he concentrated on doing what he’d been taught. Step One, the approach. Well, they’d managed that well enough. Step Two, acquire the target. By now Higbee should be ready to fire. But Charles couldn’t see a thing. Not a bloody thing. He was whipping along, three hundred feet above the water, below him, theoretically, the harbor at Calais. But what he could see was a dark, confused blur, the moon lit up water here and there, but it meant nothing to Charles. He’d been instructed to attack a troop transport, or, almost as good, a tugboat. A barge, which could carry eight hundred tons of supplies, was a very desirable third choice. But Charles couldn’t find a harbor, a city, or indeed anything at all. Probably it was France, probably . . .

Good heavens!

Right in the middle of the torpedo run, somewhere over on his left, a ship had lit up like a Christmas tree; cabin lights, searchlights, docking lights, navigation lights—and in the muddy darkness of the blacked-out coast it looked, somehow, celestial. Higbee and Charles both gasped. “Hold fire!” Charles yelled and threw the Swordfish into a tight left bank that made the plane shudder. Higbee had, just at that moment, been about to fire, a shot that would have sent a torpedo on its way to harrowing a mighty groove in the Protestant cemetery of Calais.

“Is it a trick?” Higbee’s voice was dangerously close to soprano now but Charles never noticed. A trick! No, damn it, it wasn’t a trick. That was a ship and he’d been reliably informed that this was Calais and his job was to shoot a ship in Calais and now that was exactly what he meant to do. To which end, he traversed the city of Calais, drawing the fire of every antiaircraft gun in the place but, somehow, the Swordfish was too big and slow to hit.

Charles did it right—one-two-three right. Got enough distance away from the target before circling back, and adjusting his altitude to one hundred feet. The ship grew, bigger and bigger as they plunged toward it, its lights twinkled, then glared brightly. At the end it seemed enormous, a vast, glowing city. “Torpedo away!” Higbee screamed, his voice wobbly with excitement. The plane bucked, then, freed of weight, accelerated. Charles pulled back on the stick, his training calling out climb, climb.

Emerging from a blizzard of lights and tracer and cannon fire, the clumsy Swordfish worked its way upward through the thin night air. Then, suddenly, Charles felt the plane quiver and he was, for an instant, blinded. A flash, so intense and white it lit the clouds, and seemed to flicker, like lightning. Now you’re shot, he thought. But he was wrong. The plane had been hammered, not by a shell but by a concussive blast.

Higbee had actually hit something.

He had hit the Malacca Princess, in its final moments a shining beacon in the harbor at Calais. The torpedo had done what it was supposed to do—run straight through the water, found its target, penetrated the rusty old plate amidships and, there, detonated. Causing the explosion, almost simultaneously, of the Malacca Princess’s cargo: a hundred thousand gallons of volatile naphtha.

Now you could see Calais.

The Malacca Princess burned to the waterline in a half-hour— actually it melted—burned like a dazzling white Roman candle, burned so bright it lit up every troop transport and tugboat and barge in the harbor.

25 October 1940.

Only one couple at the auberge by the sea at Cayeux. They used to come up here from Paris in the autumn, the secret couples, park their cars so the license plates couldn’t be seen from the road, register as Monsieur and Madame Duval.

But, with the war, only one couple this year. They didn’t seem to mind the barbed wire, and they didn’t try to walk on the cliffs—where the German sentries would have chased them away. This couple apparently didn’t care. They stayed in the room—though that quite often happened at the auberge at Cayeux—and what with all that staying in the room, they brought sharp appetites to the dinner table in the evening, and enough ration coupons so that no awkward explanations had to be made.

They made love, they ate dinner at the table in the bow window, they watched the sea, they paid cash. It made the owner feel sentimental. How nice life used to be, he thought.

The flan was made with fresh eggs from a nearby farm, and de Milja and Genya cleaned the plate quite shamelessly, then lit cigarettes. The waiter—also the owner and the cook; his wife did the accounts and made the beds—came to the table and said, “Will Monsieur and Madame take a coffee?”

De Milja said they would.

While it was being made they looked out the window at the sea. Long, slow rollers ran into the shore, white spray flying off the crests in the driving wind. The dark water exploded as it hit the rocks at the base of the cliff, a pleasant thunder if you were warm and dry and having dinner.

“One wouldn’t want to be out there now,” Genya said. She was in a sadder-but-wiser mood that evening, and it made her voice melancholy. What she’d said was normal dinner conversation, but the reference was deeper; to German invasion fleets, to the victory won by the British.

“No,” de Milja said. “It’s no time of year for boating.”

She smiled at that. Canotage, he’d said. A word that summoned up the man in straw hat and woman in frock, her hand trailing idly in the river as they floated past a lily pad.

Genya’s cigarette glowed as she inhaled. She let the smoke drift from her nostrils. “Probably,” she said, “you haven’t heard about Freddi Schoen.”

“Freddi.” De Milja smiled.

“His friend Jünger was leaving Paris and he took me to lunch. Freddi won an Iron Cross. To do with a naval exercise off the Belgian coast somewhere. There was disaster and he took command and, and—did all sorts of things, Jünger’s French didn’t really last through the whole story. But he was very brave, and they gave him a medal. Posthumously.”

“I always wondered,” de Milja said, “why the Freddi Schoens of Germany didn’t do something about Hitler before he maneuvered them into war.”

“Honor,” Genya said. “If I’m allowed only one word.”

The waiter came with coffee, real coffee, very hard to get in Paris these days unless you bought on the black markets.

“We’re not serving sugar tonight,” the waiter explained.

“Oh, but we don’t take sugar,” Genya said.

The waiter nodded appreciatively—a gracious and dignified lie, well told, was a work of art to a man who understood life.

The coffee was very good. They closed their eyes when they drank it. “I’ve learned to like small things now,” de Milja said. “War did that, at least.”

When he looked up from his coffee the light of the candles caught the ocean color in his eyes and she took his hand on top of the table and held it tight.

“You are to be loved,” she said with a sigh. “No doubt of that.”

“And you,” he said.

She shook her head; he’d got it wrong there.

Late that night it rained hard, water streamed down the windows and the sound of the sea was muffled as it broke against the cliff. It was cold and damp in the room. De Milja opened an armoire and found an extra blanket, then they wrapped themselves up and began to make love. “We’re on a boat,” she whispered. “Just us. In the middle of the sea. And now it’s a storm.”

“Then we better hang on to what’s valuable,” he said.

She laughed. “I’ve got what I want.”

Some time later he woke up and saw that her eyes were shining. She caught him staring and said, “See what you did?” He got himself untangled from the coarse sheet and moved next to her. Her skin was very hot. Then she wiped at her eyes with her fingers. “I hope you love me, whatever happens,” she said.

The letter came a week later. He was sitting at a table in a tiny apartment. She had gone to Switzerland, she would be married when she got there. Please forgive her, she would love him forever.

He read the letter again, it didn’t say anything new the second time. He was changing his identity—once again—that week. Becoming someone else in order to do whatever they wanted him to do next, and papers were always a part of that. Still, poor old Lezhev might have lasted out another month if he’d been careful with him. But de Milja ached inside, so the passport and the work permit and all the rest of it went into the blackened little stove that sat in the corner of the room. There was no heat, it was snowing out, the papers burned in a few minutes, and that was the end of it.

Now he was valuable.

And when they brought him out, to neutral Spain, he was handled very carefully. De Milja knew what it took—people and money and time—and stood off and marveled a little at what they thought him worth. The finest papers, delivered by courier. An invitation to dinner at the chateau of Chenonceaux, a castle that spanned the river Cher, which happened to be the boundary between German-occupied France and Vichy France. He arrived at eight, had a glass of champagne, strolled to the back of the grand house, and found a fisherman and a small boat on the other side of the river. Then a truck, then a car, then a silent, empty hotel in the hills above Marseilles, then a fishing boat after midnight.

No improvisation now.

Now he was the Poles have someone in Paris, also known as I can’t tell you how I know this, or forgive me, Colonel, but I must ask you

to leave the room. Or maybe he was Proteus or whatever code name they’d stuck on him—he was not to know. This kind of attention made him uncomfortable. First of all it was dangerous—he had learned, since 1939, how not to be noticed, so it had become second nature with him to fade away from attention, and he’d gotten so he could sense it feeling for him.

Second of all, he didn’t like to be managed, or controlled, and that, with some delicacy, was exactly what they were doing. And third, all this was based on the assumption that he was good, and that wasn’t quite the word for it. He was, perhaps, two things: unafraid to die, and lucky so far—if they had an unafraid-to-die-and-lucky-so-far medal, he would take it.

He and the watchman, for instance, sprinting for their lives down the slippery jetty, had survived by sheer, eccentric chance. Burning planes zooming over their heads, antiaircraft fallback, then a shattering explosion that cut the Malacca Princess’s neighbor, the Nicaea, in half and showered down burning metal. They jumped into the harbor, like reasonable men anywhere, where bits and pieces of tramp freighter steamed as they hit the water. When German and French police ran by, cursing and with guns drawn, they ducked below the water. Who wouldn’t? Later, in the jumble of streets around the docks, he and the watchman knew it was time for them to go their separate ways. De Milja shook his hand, and the man smiled, then ran like the wind. All this wasn’t, to de Milja’s way of thinking, definable by the word good.

The fishing boat that took de Milja from Marseilles landed on the coast of Spain at night, aided by Sixth Bureau operatives who signaled with flashlights from the beach. Yes, Spain was neutral, but not all that neutral. He was hustled into a shiny black sedan and driven at speed to the outskirts of Barcelona. There, in a bedroom on the third floor of a villa with heavy drapes drawn across the window, he was served a chicken and a bottle of wine. His keepers were young Poles—freshfaced, earnest, well conditioned, and cheerfully homicidal. There was a pile of books on the table—put a pile of books on his table, damn it. He read one of them for an hour; In spring, the Alpine lakes of Slovenia are a miracle of red sunsets and leaping trout—then fell asleep.

Various terrors he had avoided feeling now returned in force, and he woke up eighteen hours later having sweated through a wool blanket. He remembered only a few fragments of those dreams and forgot them as soon as he could. He staggered into the bathroom, shaved, showered, had a good long look at himself in the mirror. So, this was who he was now, well, that was interesting to know. Older, leaner, marked with fatigue, rather remote, and very watchful. On a chair he found clean slacks, a shirt, and a sweater. He put them on. Shifted the drape an inch aside from the window and stared out at the brown autumn hills. Just the motion of the drape apparently caused a restless footstep or two on the gravel path below his room, so he let it fall back into place. Why didn’t they just bar the window and put him in stripes and stop all the pretense?

Vyborg showed up that morning. In a good brown suit and a striped British tie. Had there always been a gentleman under that uniform, or was it just a trick that London tailors did? They could do nothing, however, about the face: the Baltic knight, squinting into a blizzard and ready to cut down a company of Russian pikemen, was still very much in evidence. He suggested a walk in the hills and they did that, with guards following a little way down the path. November, de Milja thought, was a strange time in dry countries; faded colors, sky gray and listless. Vyborg told de Milja that his wife had died. They walked in silence for a long time after that. Finally de Milja was able to say, “Where is she?”

“A small cemetery in the town where the spa is. A mass was said for her. It had to be done quietly, but it was done.” They walked for a moment, through a stand of low pines. “My sympathies, Alexander,” Vyborg said softly. “It comes from all of us, from everyone who knows you.”

“How, please.”

“Influenza.”

De Milja was again unable to speak.

“She was working in the kitchen,” Vyborg went on. “Some of us do best in bad times, and that was true of her. She had a high fever for three days, and then she died in her sleep.”

“I think I would like to go back to the house,” de Milja said.

He visited Barcelona once or twice, but it was just another conquered city. It had the silence that passed for peace, the courtesy of fear. The police state was in place, people in the street avoided his eyes. There were still bullet chips and shell holes in the buildings, but the masons were at work, and there were glaziers, their glass sheets balanced on the sides of their mules, shouting up the sides of apartment houses to announce their presence.

He spent a lot of time walking in the hills, sometimes with two men from the Sixth Bureau; one clerkish, a man who sat behind a desk, the other with a hard, bald head, a well-groomed mustache, and small, angry eyes. They needed to know about various things in France and de Milja told them what he could. The bald-headed man, though he did not come out and say it, was clearly concerned with the construction of new and better wireless/telegraphy sets, and de Milja didn’t feel he was able to help much. The other man asked questions about French political life under the Germans and de Milja helped him, if possible, even less. But they were decent men who tried to make things easy for him—as long as we all happen to find ourselves in Spain, why not spend a moment chatting about the views of the French communist party—and de Milja did the best he could for them.

Again and again, he thought about his wife. He had, in October of 1939, said good-bye to her, left her in charge of her destiny, as she’d asked. Maybe he shouldn’t have done that. But then he had never once been able to make her, crazy or sane, do anything she did not want to do.

Down the road from the villa was a tiny café in the garden of an old woman’s house. She had a granddaughter who said gracias when she served coffee, and when it wasn’t raining de Milja and Vyborg would sit at a rusty iron table and talk about the war.

“Operation Sealion has failed,” Vyborg said. “The first time Hitler’s been beaten.”

“Do we know what actually happened?” de Milja asked.

“We know some of it. It wasn’t a total victory, of course, nothing like that. The RAF sank 21 out of 170 troop transports. That’s a loss, but not a crippling loss for people contemplating an invasion from the sea. Out of 1,900 barges, 214 were destroyed. Only five tugboats out of 368; only three motorboats out of more than a thousand.”

“Three, did you say?”

“Yes.”

“Then what made them quit?”

Vyborg shrugged. “An invasion is more than ships. A five-hundredton ammunition dump was blown up at Den Helder, in Holland. On the sixth of September, a rations depot was burned out. In Belgium, an ammunition train was destroyed. Then down at Le Havre, where a number of German divisions were based, the waterworks were put out of commission. There was also the training exercise—you saw some of the results at Nieuwpoort, and German hospital trains crossed Belgium all that night. Therefore, if the RAF could hit a practice run through that hard, what would they do once the real thing got started? Funny thing about the German character, they’re very brave, not at all afraid to die, but they are afraid to fail. In some ways, our best hope for Germany is the Wehrmacht—the generals. If Germany loses again, and then again, perhaps they can be persuaded that honor lies in a change of government.”

“Can that really happen?”

Vyborg thought about it. “Maybe,” he said. “With time.”

It drizzled, then stopped. The little girl came and put up a faded umbrella and wiped the table with a cloth and said, “Gracias.” She smiled at de Milja, then ran away.

“One last time, the people who knew you as Lezhev?” Vyborg said.

“Freddi Schoen.”

“Dead.”

“Jünger, the Wehrmacht staff officer.”

“Transferred. In Germany at the OKW headquarters.”

“Traudl von Behr.”

“She’s in Lille, at the moment. Aide to a staff major running transports from northern France to Germany.”

“There were more Germans, but they didn’t know who I was. Somebody they saw here and there, perhaps Russian.”