The Polish Officer

“Be absolutely certain,” Vyborg said.

De Milja nodded that he was.

12 January 1941.

In the cold, still air of the Paris winter, smoke spilled from the chimneys and hung lifeless above the tiled rooftops.

Stein crunched along the snow-covered rue du Château-d’Eau, head down, hands jammed deep in the pockets of his overcoat. Cold in the 5:00 p.m. darkness, colder with the snow turned blue by the lamplight, colder with the wind that blew all the way from the Russian steppe. You can feel it, Parisians said, you can feel the bite. Eighteen degrees, the newspaper said that morning.

Stein walked fast, breath visible. Here was 26,rue du Château-d’Eau. Was that right? He reached into an inside pocket, drew out the typewritten letter with the exquisite signature. Office of the notary LeGros, yes, this was the building. Notaries and lawyers and huissiers—officers of the court—all through this quarter. It wasn’t that it was pleasant, because it wasn’t. It was simply where they gathered. Probably, as usual, something to do with a Napoleonic decree—a patent, a license, a dispensation. A special privilege.

The concierge was sweeping snow from the courtyard entry with a twig broom, two mufflers tied around her face, her hands wound in flannel cloths. “Notaire LeGros? Third floor, take the stairs to your left, Monsieur.”

LeGros opened the door immediately. He was an old man with a finely made face and snow-white hair. He wore a cardigan sweater beneath his jacket and his hand was like ice when Stein shook it.

The business was done in the dining room, at an enormous chestnut table covered with official papers. Huysmanns, a Belgian with broad shoulders and a thick neck, was waiting for him, stood and grunted in guttural French when they shook hands. Stein sat down, kept his coat on—the apartment was freezing and he could still see his breath. “Hard winter,” Huysmanns said.

“Yes, that’s true,” Stein said.

“Gentlemen,” said the notary.

He gathered papers from the table, which he seemed to understand by geology: the Stein-Huysmanns matter buried just below the Duval matter. The two men signed and signed, writing read and approved, then dating each signature, their pens scratching over the paper, their breathing audible. Finally LeGros said, “I believe the agreed payment is forty thousand francs?”

Stein reached into the inner pocket of his overcoat and withdrew a sheaf of five-hundred-franc notes. He counted out eighty, passed them to the notary, who counted and gave them to Huysmanns, who wet his thumb in order to count and said the numbers in a whisper. LeGros then coughed—a cough of delicacy—and said, “A call of nature, gentlemen. You will excuse me for a moment.”

He left the room, as notaries had been leaving rooms, Stein imagined, since the days of Richelieu. The remainder of the money would now be paid, theoretically out of sight of the honest notary, theoretically out of sight of the tax authorities. Stein counted out an additional hundred and twenty-five thousand francs. Huysmanns wet his thumb and made sure.

The notary returned, efficiently, just as Huysmanns stuffed the money in his pocket. “Shall we continue?” he chirped. They signed more papers, the notary produced his official stamp, made an impression in wax, then certified the documents with his magnificent signature.

“I would like,” Stein said, “to make certain of the provision that specifies the name of the business is to continue as Huysmanns. To assure that the goodwill of established customers is not lost to me.”

As the notary rattled papers, Huysmanns stared at him. Goodwill? He had an opaque face, spots of bright color in his cheeks, a face from a Flemish military painting. LeGros found the relevant paragraph and pointed it out; the two men read it with their index fingers and grunted to confirm their understanding.

Then the notary said, “Congratulations, gentlemen.” And wished them success and good fortune. In other times, they might have adjourned to a café, but those days were gone.

Stein walked back to the métro, paid his fourteen centimes for a ticket, and rode the train back to the avenue Hoche, where he had a grand apartment, just around the corner from Gestapo headquarters on the rue de Courcelles. He was now the owner of a business, a dépôt de charbon—coal yard—out by the freight tracks near the Porte de la Chapelle. The train was crowded with Parisians, their expressions empty, eyes blank as their minds turned away from the world.

It was seven; Stein had an appointment in an hour. He took off the disguise: the dark overcoat, the black suit, the olive silk tie, the white shirt, the diamond ring, the gold watch. De Milja sighed with exhaustion and put the Stein costume on a chair. Except for the Clark Gable mustache, he was rid of the disguise. He lay down on a big featherbed in a pale-blue bedstead flecked with gold. The walls were covered in silk fabric, somber red, burgundy, with a raised pattern. Facing the bed, a marble fireplace. On the wall by the doorway, a large oil painting in the manner of Watteau—school of Watteau. An eighteenth-century swain in a white wig, a lady with gown lowered to reveal powdered bosoms and pink nipples, a King Charles spaniel playing on the couch between them. The swain has in hand a little ball; when he tosses it, the dog will leap off the couch, the space between the lovers will be clear. Both are at that instant when the stratagem has occurred to them; they are delighted with the idea of it, and with what will inevitably follow. Below the painting, a Louis XVI chiffonier in pale blue flecked with gold, its drawers lined with silk, its top drawer holding mother-of-pearl tuxedo studs in a leather box and a French army 7.65 automatic—in fact a Colt .45 rechambered for French military ammunition. De Milja didn’t expect to last out the winter.

He hated Anton Stein, but Anton Stein made for a useful disguise in the winter of 1941. A Volksdeutsch, ethnic German, from Czechoslovakia, the Slovakian capital of Bratislava. So he spoke, in the natural way of things, de Milja’s rough German and de Milja’s bad but effective French. He had even, according to Vyborg, existed. The records were there in case anybody looked—the tack on the teacher’s chair and the punch on the policeman’s nose lived on, in filing cabinets somewhere in Bratislava. But that was all, that was the legacy of Stein. “He’s no longer with us,” Vyborg had said.

Anton Stein came to Paris in the wake of the German occupation. A minor predator, he knew an opportunity when he saw one. The Nazis had a sweet way with the Anton Steins of the world, they’d had it since 1925: too bad nobody ever gave you a chance. A kind of ferocious, law-of-the-jungle loyalty was, once that took hold, theirs to command.

De Milja slept. The apartment was warm, the quilt soft against his skin. There was, in his dreams, no war. An Ostrow uncle carved a boat in a soft piece of wood, Alexander’s eyes followed every move. Then he woke up. What was, was. Every Thursday, Madame Roubier made love at twilight.

“Take a mistress,” Vyborg had said. After he’d rented the apartment on the avenue Hoche, the woman at the rental agency had suggested one Madame Roubier to see to the decoration and furnishing. The money made de Milja’s heart ache—in Warsaw they were starving and freezing, heating apartments with sticks of wood torn from crates, working all day, then spending the night making explosives or loading bullets. And here he was, amid pale blue flecked with gold.

“Pale blue, flecked with gold.”

Madame Roubier was a redhead, with thin lips, pale skin, a savage temper, and a daintily obscure history that changed with her mood. She was that indeterminate age where French women pause for many years—between virginal girlhood (about thirty-five) and wicked-oldladyhood—a good long run of life. Yes, she was a natural redhead, but she was most certainly not a Breton, that impossibly rude class of people. She was, at times, from Maçon. Or perhaps Angers.

To supervise the furnishings, she had visited the apartment. Made little notes with a little gold pen on a little gold pad. “And this window will take a jabot and festoon,” she said.

Suddenly, their eyes met. And met.

“. . . a jabot . . . and . . . festoon . . .”

Her voice faded away to a long Hollywood silence—they suddenly understand they are fated to become lovers. They stood close to each other by the window, snow falling softly on the gray stone of the avenue Hoche. Madame Roubier looked deep into his eyes, a strange magnetism drawing her to him as the consultation slowly quivered to a halt: “. . . jabot . . . and . . . festoon . . .”

She had a soft, creamy body that flowed into its natural contours as her corsets were removed. “Oh, oh,” she cried. She was exquisitely tended, the skin of her ample behind kept smooth by spinning sessions on a chamois-covered stool, the light of her apartment never more than a pink bulb in a little lamp. “I know what you like,” she would say. “You are a dirty-minded little boy.” Well, he thought, if nothing else I know what dirty-minded little boys like.

They would make love through the long Paris dusk—l’heure bleu— then Stein would be banished from the chamber, replaced by Maria, the maid. Sometime later, Madame Roubier would appear, in emerald-green taffeta, for example—whatever made her red hair blaze redder and her skin whiter, and Stein would say Oh, mais c’est Hedy Lamarr! and she would shush him and pooh-pooh him as he helped her wrestle into a white ermine coat.

Then dinner. Then a tour of the night. Then business.

Thursday night. Chez Tolo.

All the black-market restaurants were in obscure streets, down alleys, you had to know somebody in order to find them. Chez Tolo was at the end of a narrow lane—nineteenth-century France—reached through fourteen-foot-high wooden doors that appeared to lead into the courtyard of a large building. The lane had been home to tanneries in an earlier age, but the workshops had long since been converted to workers’ housing and now, thanks to war and scarcity, and the vibrant new life that bobbed to the surface in such times, it found itself at the dawn of a new age.

Wood-burning taxicabs pulled up to the door, then a De Bouton with its tulipwood body, a Citroen traction-avant—the favored car of the Gestapo—a Lagonda, a black Daimler. Madame Roubier took note of the last. “The Comte de Rieu,” she said.

Inside it was dark and crowded. Stein and Madame Roubier moved among the diners; a wave, a nod, a smile, acknowledging the new aristocracy—the ones who, like Anton Stein, had never been given a chance. A fistful of francs to the headwaiter—formerly a city clerk— and they were seated at a good table.

Madame Roubier ate prodigiously. Stein could never quite catch her doing it, but somehow she made the food disappear. Oysters on shaved ice, veal chops in the shape of a crown, sauced with Madeira and heavy cream and served with walnut puree, a salad of baby cabbage, red and green, with raisins and vinegar and honey. Then a cascade of Spanish orange sections soaked in Cointreau and glistening in the candlelight. Stein selected a vintage Moët & Chandon champagne to accompany the dinner.

With the cognac, came visitors. The Comte de Rieu, and his seventeen-year-old Romanian mistress, Isia, fragile and lovely, who peered out at the world through curtains of long black hair. The count, said to be staggeringly rich, dealt in morphine, diamonds, and milk.

“You must take a cognac with us,” Stein said.

A waiter brought small gilt chairs. Jammed together at the table they were pleasantly crowded, breathing an atmosphere of cigarette smoke and perfume and body heat and breaths of oranges and mints and wine. The count’s white-and-black hair was combed back smoothly and rested lightly atop his ears.

“A celebration tonight,” Stein said.

“Oh?” said the count.

“I became, today, a charbonnier.”

“You did?”

“Yes.”

“A coal merchant, eh? Well, you must permit us to be your customers. Shall you haul the sacks down the cellar stairs?”

“Absolutely, you may depend on it.”

“A Polack!”

“Exactly!”

“Stein?”

“Yes?”

“You’re an amusing fellow.”

They sipped at their balloon glasses of cognac. “What year?” said the count.

“Nineteen ten.”

“Alas, before your time,” the count said to Madame Roubier.

“Yes? It’s your guess?”

“My certain knowledge!”

“Dear me, how is one to repay such a compliment?”

The taxi that served as limousine took them home from a nightclub at dawn, the snow turned gray in the January light. Madame Roubier snored by his side in the backseat. She slept snuggled up to him, the ermine warm against his cheek.

Success purchased investment. Perhaps you fought, with luck you won, then came the little men with the money. Vyborg had made a point of telling him that, because Vyborg knew exactly who de Milja really was. Vyborg knew how happy he’d been fussing over his maps, knew about his academic papers, worked over endlessly, on the signalization of braiding, or aggrading, rivers. He’d spent his daily life occupied with the Lehman system of hachuring, the way in which the angle of slope is shown on military surveys—important knowledge for artillery people—contour intervals, hydrographic symbolism. He was, in Vyborg’s words to Sixth Bureau staff meetings, “his father’s very own son.” He was, in fact, a man whose physical presence to some degree betrayed his personality. He wanted to be a mole who lived in libraries, but he didn’t look like that, and the world didn’t take him that way.

His mother, de Milja thought, would have made a good spy. She was deceptive, manipulative, attractive—people wanted to talk to her. The world she lived in was a corrupt and cynical place where one had to keep one’s guard up at all times, and the probable truth of her opinions had often been the subject of a sort of communal sigh privately shared by de Milja and his father.

But the chief resident intelligence officer for France had to be an executive, not a cartographer. De Milja’s quarterly budget was 600,000 francs; rental of safe houses, agents’ pay, railroad tickets, hotels, endless expenses. Bribes were extra. The money for Huysmanns was extra—and it had been made clear to de Milja that the company had to succeed and profit.

Instinctively, de Milja knew what he would find at Huysmanns Coal. He knew Huysmanns—phlegmatic, northern, Belgian. Profit earned a franc at a time, dogged patience, do we really need all these lights on? Would such a man employ a troupe of merry philosophers?

Never. Thus the man de Milja needed was already in place, right there in Huysmanns’s office overlooking the coal yard by the railroad tracks. Monsieur Zim-maire it was said. Zimmer, an Alsatian, fifty or so, who wore a clean, gray dustcoat every day, buttoned all the way to the knees. At one time or another he’d taken a hand in everything the company did. He’d driven the trucks, hauled sacks of coal, a job that turned the deliveryman black by the second or third call. He talked to the suppliers, the mines in northern France, and he knew the important customers: hospitals and office buildings and workshops. There were two secretaries who kept the books and sent out the bills, Helene and Cybeline. At Zimmer’s suggestion, they fired Cybeline. She was a distant relation of Huysmanns—that didn’t matter to Zimmer or de Milja but she insisted it meant she didn’t have to work. She filed her nails, sipped coffee, gossiped on the phone and flirted with the drivers. As for Helene, who actually did the work, she got a raise.

Zimmer, too, got a raise. He would, in fact, be running the company. “I’ll be seeking out new customers,” was the way de Milja put it. “So I expect to be traveling a good part of the time.”

That was true. The Sixth Bureau had directed him to assist in certain British operations against Luftwaffe units based in France. The nightly bombing was relentless. Something had to be done.

8 March 1941.

West of Bourges, de Milja pedaled a bicycle down a cow path. Early spring morning, raw and chilly, the ground mist lying thick on the fields. Leading the way, a Frenchman called Bonneau. Perhaps thirty, a tank officer wounded and captured in late May of 1940. Sent to a POW camp, a munitions factory near Aachen. Escaped. Recaptured. Escaped again, this time reached France and made it stick.

Riding just ahead of de Milja, Bonneau’s sister Jeanne-Marie, perhaps twenty, thin and intense and avid to fight the Germans. Through a prewar association—something commercial, Bonneau had sold British agricultural equipment in central France—he’d gotten in touch with somebody in London, and his name had been passed to the special services.

De Milja liked him. Forthright, handsome, with a scrupulous sense of honor. The best of the French, de Milja thought, were the incarnations of heroes in boys’ books. Or girls’ books—because the principle was twice as true for the French women. De Milja had seen them face down the Germans more than once; iron-willed idealists, proud and free, and quite prepared to die to keep it that way.

“Bonjour, Monsieur Gache,” Bonneau called out, coasting on his bicycle. Jeanne-Marie echoed the greeting.

Monsieur Gache was a fourteenth-century peasant. He’d loomed up through the milky-gray mist holding a long switch, surrounded by a half-dozen cows, their breaths steaming, bells clanking. He squinted at de Milja from beneath a heavy brow, his glance suspicious and hostile. He knew every pebble and cowpie in these fields—perhaps this stranger was aiming to help himself to a few. Well, he’d know about it soon enough.

It’s spring, start of the war season in Europe, de Milja thought. And Monsieur Gache knew, in some ancient, intuitive sense, exactly who he was and what his appearance meant. Nothing good, certainly. Caesar likely sent somebody up here in the spring of 56 b.c. to take a look at the Gauls—and there was Monsieur Gache and his six cows.

“That’s old Gache,” Bonneau called back to him. “It’s his uncle’s land we’ll be using.”

De Milja grunted assent, implying that it seemed a good idea. He hoped it was. This was something worked out between people in the countryside, such rural arrangements being typically far too complicated to be successfully explained to outsiders.

They pedaled on for fifteen minutes, threading their way among great expanses of plowed black earth separated by patches of old-growth forest, oak and beech, left standing as windbreak. The cow path ended at a small stream and Bonneau dismounted like a ten-yearold, riding a little way on one pedal, then hopping off.

“Oop-la!” he said with a laugh. He grinned cheerfully, a man who meant to like whatever life brought him that day. Wounded during the German attack, he had fought on for twelve hours with only a gunner left alive in his tank.

“Now, sir, we shall have to walk,” Jeanne-Marie said. “For, perhaps, twenty-five minutes.”

“Exactly?” de Milja said.

“In good weather, close to it.”

“If she says it, it’s probably true,” Bonneau said wearily, admiring his sister and teasing her in the same breath.

“Here is the Creuse,” she said, pointing across a field.

They could see it from the hill, a ribbon of quiet water that flowed through brush-lined banks and joined, a few miles downstream near the town of Tournon, the Gartempe. This in turn became part of the Loire, and all of it eventually emptied into the Atlantic at the port of Saint-Nazaire.

What mattered was the confluence of the rivers—a geographical feature visible from an airplane flying on a moonlit night. They walked on in silence. The field was a good distance from any road, and therefore a good distance from German motorized transport. If the Germans saw parachutes floating from the sky, they were going to have to organize an overland expedition to go see about the problem.

The field itself had been chosen, de Milja thought, with great care. “It’s Jeanne-Marie’s choice,” Bonneau explained. “She is a serious naturalist—turns up everywhere in the countryside, so nobody notices what she does.”

“I’ve paced it more than once,” Jeanne-Marie said. “It is as suggested, about 650 by 250 yards.”

They walked its perimeter. “There were stumps, but I had our workmen haul them out with the plow horses.” Silently, on behalf of a descending parachutist, de Milja was grateful for her forethought. He saw also that somebody had moved big stones to one side of the field.

“How many people will you have?” de Milja asked.

“Four, perhaps. Six altogether.”

“You’ll need brushwood for your fires. It’s best to store it under canvas to keep it dry. Then the fires should be set in the shape of an arrow, giving wind direction.”

“Yes,” Jeanne-Marie said. “We know that.”

De Milja smiled at her. The mysterious foreigner who came from nowhere and told them things they already knew. She stood, holding her bicycle by the handlebars, in front of a huge French spring sky; a few strands of hair had escaped from the front of her kerchief and she brushed them back impatiently.

“Shall we have something before we go back?” Bonneau said.

Jeanne-Marie grinned to herself and nodded yes. She untied a cloth-wrapped packet from the back of her bicycle. They sat on the rim of the field—true to the suggested standard, Jeanne-Marie had located a slightly concave area—and ate bread and crumbly farm cheese and last fall’s apples, dried-out and sweet.

“Something must be done, and we hope it is soon,” Bonneau said. “The people here don’t like the Germans, but they are drifting. Pétain speaks on the radio and says that all this has happened to us because France was immoral and self-indulgent. A number of people believe that, others will do whatever makes them comfortable at that moment. One lately hears the word attentisme—the philosophy of waiting. Do nothing, we’ll see what happens next. This is dangerous for France, because here we don’t really live in a country, you know. We live in our houses with our families, that’s our true nationality, and what’s best is determined from that point of view.”

It was Jeanne-Marie who answered her brother. “The English will do what they can,” she said, a snap in her voice. “But not from any tender feeling for the French. We’re allies, not friends.”

“Again she’s right,” de Milja said.

A local train west, then to Nantes, then north on a series of locals. Very, very careful now, he told himself. Where he was going the Germans were sensitive, because they had a secret.

As the train rolled to a stop at each little town, de Milja could see he was in the country of Madame Roubier. Brittany. Tall redheads with fair, freckled skin. Sharp-eyed—not easily fooled. Often venal, because it was them against the world, had always been so, and this unending war was fought with wealth.

It was late afternoon when he reached the town of Vannes, down the coast of Brittany from L’Orient, one of the bomber fields used in the Luftwaffe campaign against Britain. North from Vannes was Brest—on the south shore of the widening English Channel, across from Plymouth, on the Cornish coast. No doubt about the bomber field, Vannes railroad station was full of German airmen, returning from leave or heading off to sinful Paris for ten days.

De Milja kept his eyes down. Cheap leather briefcase in hand, felt hat with brim turned down, well-worn blue suit. A provincial lawyer, perhaps, snuffling out a living from feuding heirs and stubborn property owners and the tax indiscretions of petits commerçants. He walked for a long time, toward the edge of town. No more Germans. Sidewalks that narrowed, then vanished. Old women with string bags, a few cats. The neighborhood darkened—buildings crumbling softly into genteel poverty, a grocery store with a sign on the boarded window: fermé.

Finally, a confiserie—a candy shop, the miniature gold-foil packets of chocolates in the window covered with a layer of fine dust. A bell jangled above the door as he entered and a young girl stood to attention behind the counter. She was very plain, skin and hair the same washed-out color, and wore a tight sweater that was more hopeful than seductive. The smell of candied violets and burnt sugar was intense in the dark interior of the shop. It made de Milja feel slightly queasy.

“Mademoiselle Herault?” he asked the clerk.

“In back, Monsieur.” Her voice was tiny.

Mademoiselle Herault sat at a desk in the office. She was in her forties, he guessed. But older than her years. A hard face, lined and severe. As though she dealt in candy from contempt for human appetite, not a desire to sell the world something sweet. Or maybe it was the silent store, the trays of stale orange drops, a small business failing by slow, agonizing degrees.

He identified himself—Guillaume for this meeting, and her eyes searched his, to see if he could be trusted. She was, he thought, not a particularly attractive woman, but she had probably never lacked for lovers, being one of those women who understands that attraction hasn’t much to do with it.

“May I take a minute of your time?” he asked.

She looked at him a little sideways—minutes, hours, she had nothing but time. Very slowly she worked a Gauloise free of its pack, tapped one end against her thumbnail, held it in her mouth with thumb and forefinger, handed de Milja a box of matches and leaned toward him so he could light it. “Thank you,” she said.

She opened a drawer in the desk, searched through papers, found an unsealed envelope and handed it to him. “Here it is,” she said.

He took out what looked like a polite note, written in purple ink on bordered paper sold in stationery stores. His eyes ran along the lines, trying to decipher the penmanship. Then, when he realized what he had, he read it through again.

“This is—this is extremely important,” he said.

She nodded in a sort of vague agreement—yes, so it seemed to her. She drew on her Gauloise and blew a plume of smoke at the ceiling.

“Was there a reason you did so much? The occupation?”

“No,” she said. “I am not French,” she added.

“What then?”

“I’m a Pole, though I’ve lived here a long time.”

De Milja came close to responding in Polish. He wanted to—then raged at himself for being so stupid. Guillaume was Guillaume— nobody. “Herault?” he said.

She shrugged. “That was my father’s attempt to fit in.”

“Did he fit in?”

“No,” she said. They were silent for a moment. “I don’t think I’ll tell you any reasons,” she said. “For what I’ve done, that is. I don’t especially believe in reasons.”

De Milja ran his eyes back over the paper. Kampfgeschwader 100, Pathfinder, Knickbein beam. De Milja was stunned at the quality of what he had in hand. He’d gotten the woman’s name from Fedin—an old contact from the late ’30s, nothing very productive, but an address that placed her, quite by accident, on the front line of the German offensive against Britain. Fedin had made the initial contact, then a signal from Vannes reached Paris that meant I have something for you. But this was well beyond anything de Milja had expected.

“Please, Mademoiselle. I must ask you to tell me how you managed this.”

A ghost of a smile passed over the woman’s face. She found his urgency a little bit pleasing. She nodded her head toward the front of the shop. “Veronique,” she said.

“Who?”

“My little clerk.”

She almost laughed out loud, so stupid and lost did he look. Then, when she saw the mist clear, she said, “Yes, that.”

“By design?”

She made a face: who could say? Paused a moment, leaned closer, lowered her voice. “Ugly as sin, poor thing. But for everyone there is someone, and for poor Veronique there is poor Kurt. Eighteen, away from home for the first time, short, homely, with bad teeth and bad eyes. In his unit the lowest of the low: he helps the mechanics who fix the aircraft. I believe engine parts are washed in gasoline. Is that so?”

“Yes.”

“He does mostly that. Red hands the result. But he is a conqueror, Monsieur Whatever-you-call-yourself. And he has discovered, in this shapeless lump of a child, le vrai passion. He drives her, I assure you, to the very edge of sanity. No, beyond.”

“And in bed, he tells her things?”

“No, Monsieur. Men don’t tell women things in bed. Men tell women things when they are trying to get them into bed. To let women know how important they are. Once in bed, the time for telling things is over.”

“But Veronique continues.”

“Yes. She loves Kurt. He is her man, hers alone. National borders are here transcended. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“Of course they do chatter, in the way people do, and she tells me things—just to gossip, just to have something to say. They are innocent, Monsieur.”

De Milja nodded sympathetically.

“Someday, you might be asked to do something for Veronique.”

“What is that?”

“Well, national borders are never transcended. Love doesn’t conquer all. In Veronique’s mind, the Germans will be here for forty years. Should she wait until she’s fifty-nine to go on with life? Of course not. Unfortunately for her, I suspect the end of this war may come sooner than forty years. And then, the women who have made love with the enemy will not fare well. The people here who have collaborated silently, skillfully, the ones who talk but do nothing, they will take it out on the poor Veroniques of the world. And they can be very cruel. When this happens, perhaps I will find you, or somebody like you, and you will try to do something for poor Veronique.”

“How do you know these things?”

“I know. I’m a Pole—it came to me in my mother’s milk. Will you help?”

“If I can, I will,” he said. “In the meantime, stop. Don’t do anything—and don’t permit her to do anything—that could lead to exposure. The most important thing now is that nobody finds out what was discovered.”

It rained in Paris. Slowly, endlessly. The bare branches of the chestnut trees dripped water in the gray light. At five in the afternoon, Anton Stein stared out the window above his coal yard. A freight train moved slowly along the track. Its couplings rattled and banged as it maneuvered—stopped, jerked ahead a few feet, stopped, backed up. The board siding of the freight cars and the cast-iron wheels glistened in the rain.

On his desk, March earnings. They were doing well—Zimmer was implacable. All day long, in his clean gray smock, he tended the business. Spillage. Theft. Truck fuel. Suppliers’ invoices with added charges. Defaulting customers. Margin of profit, date of delivery. Anton Stein made money.

And Captain Alexander de Milja spent it.

Rental of the apartment on the rue A, where a W/T operator enciphered and transmitted, moving like a butterfly among a hundred different bands to elude the Funkabwehr technicians. Rental of the apartment on the rue B, where an alternate W/T operator was based. Rental of the villa in the suburb of C, where a wounded British pilot was in hiding. Not to mention the apartment on the avenue Hoche, each window dressed with jabot and festoon.

He was tired now. Spirit worn away by the tide. Clandestine war since September of 1939—it had gone on too long, there’d been too much of it.

He forced his eyes away from the freight cars, back to a sheet of cheap paper on the desk. Huysmanns’s desk. Scarred oak, burns on the edge where somebody had rested a cigarette, little drawers full of used rubber bands and thumbtacks and dried-out inkpads for stamps.

On the paper, in his own informal code, the first draft of a report to London: at the Luftwaffe base at Vannes was Kampfgeschwader 100, a unit of Pathfinders—pilots who flew along a radio beam, called a Knickbein beam because it had the shape of a dog leg. The job of these Pathfinders was to lead flights of bombers to the target, then drop incendiaries, to light fires for the guidance of the planes behind them.

What Veronique the shop clerk had found out was this: the pilots of Kampfgeschwader 100 did not live on the base in barracks, they lived in various billets in the town of Vannes, and on the afternoon before a mission they traveled to the field by bus. All together, maybe thirty of them, slated to lead various night attacks against British targets. De Milja knew what happened next. He went to the movie theaters on the Champs-Élysées where they showed German newsreels—always with the lights on, because in darkness the French audience made rude noises—of the bombing raids. So he had seen the burning factories, and the bridges down in the rivers, and the firemen weeping with exhaustion.

All together, maybe thirty of them, traveled to the field by bus.

On the Route Nationale—the RN18—that traced the coast of Brittany: from Brest south to Quimper, L’Orient, then Vannes. The airfield was twelve miles from the outskirts of Vannes, and there were several points of interest along the way. A curve with a rock outcropping to the east, a grove of stunted beach pine to the west, between the road and the sea. Or perhaps the old fish cannery, abandoned in ’38, with rows of dark windows, the glass long ago broken out.

Block the road. A coal truck—somebody else’s coal truck—would do that nicely. You’d want six—no eight—operatives. Take the driver and the tires. Then you had leisure for the pilots. Fragmentation grenades in the windows, then someone with a carbine in the bus. Short range, multiple rounds.

Thirty Pathfinder pilots. All that training, experience, talent. Hard to replace. The ratio of bravado to skill was nearly one to one. Flying an aeroplane along a transmitted beam meant constant correction as you drifted and the signal tone faded. Flying at the apex of the attack meant searchlights and flak—you had to have a real demon in you to want to do that.

“Monsieur Stein?”

He looked up from the wood-flecked paper, initials and numbers, a curving line for a road, a rectangle for a blocking truck. Helene was holding a large leatherbound book. “Monsieur Zimmer asked that these be sent out today, Monsieur.” She left the book on Stein’s desk and returned to work.

Inside the leather cover were checks for him to sign—a typical practice in a French office. He made sure his pen had ink and went to work—Anton Stein, Anton Stein. The payees were coal mines up in Metz, mostly. He was permitted to buy what was left over after the Germans, paying with absurdly inflated currency, took what they wanted and shipped it east. Just after the New Year the Germans had returned the ashes of Napoleon’s son, L’Aiglon, to France. Thus the joke of the week: they take our coal and send us back ashes.

Two more to sign. One a donation, to the Comité FranceAllemagne, in business since 1933 to foster Franco-German harmony and understanding. Well, they’d fostered it all right—now the French had just about all the harmony and understanding anybody could want. The other check was made out to Anton Stein for ten thousand francs. His night money.

At the avenue Matignon, the evening performance with Madame Roubier. “Oh, oh,” she cried out. Under the guise of nuzzling her pale neck he got a view of his watch. 8:25. Outside, the air-raid sirens began. Gently, he unwound himself from her, stood by the bed and turned off the pink bed-table lamp that made her skin glow. Opened the window, then the shutter, just a crack.

Circles of light against the clouds, then arching yellow flames and golden fire that seemed to drip back down toward the dark earth. Kids would be in the parks tomorrow, he thought, adding to their shrapnel collections. A sharp fingernail traveled across his bare backside.

“Bonjour, Monsieur,” Madame Roubier said. It amused her to pretend to be his language teacher. “Comment allez-vous?” The fingernail headed back in the other direction.

He turned away from the fiery lights, looked over his shoulder. She was sprawled on her stomach, reaching out to touch him. “He ignores me,” she pouted like a little girl. “Yes he does.” He turned back to the sky. A sudden stutter, bright yellow. Then a slow, red trail, curving down toward the earth. It made his heart sick to see that. “Yes he does.”

Brasserie Heininger. 11:30.

At table, a party of seven: the Comte de Rieu and his little friend Isia. Isia had paid a visit that afternoon to the milliner Karachine, who had fashioned, for her exclusively, a hat of bright cherries and pears with a red veil that just brushed the cheekbones.

At her left, the coal dealer Stein, his mood heavy and quiet, his cigar omnipresent. His companion, the fashionable Lisette Roubier, wore emerald silk. Next to her, the art dealer Labarthe, hair shiny with brilliantine, who specialized in Dutch and Flemish masters and jailed relatives. He could, for a price, produce any loved one from any prison in France. His companion was called Bella, a circus acrobat of Balkan origins.

At her side, the amusing Willy—w pronounced v—Kappler. The silliest-looking man: a fringe of colorless hair, a long, pointed nose like a comic witch, ears to catch the wind; a face lit up by a huge melon slice of a smile, as though to say well then what can I do about it?

“Coal!” he said to Stein. “Well, that’s a lucky job these days.” Then he laughed—melodious, infectious. You couldn’t resist joining in; if you didn’t get the joke, maybe you would later.

“I can sell as much as they’ll let me have,” Stein admitted. “But,” he added, “the stocks are often low.”

“Yes, it’s true. This ridiculous war drags on—but go talk sense to the English. Then too, Herr Stein, those rascals up there in the mines don’t like to work.” With fist and extended thumb he imitated a bottle, tilted it up to his mouth and made glug-glug sounds. Stein laughed. “Oh but it’s true, you know,” Kappler said.

“And you, Herr Kappler,” Stein said. “What is it that keeps you in Paris?”

“Hah! What a way to put it. I hardly need anything to keep me here.”

“In business?”

“Jah, jah. Business, all right.”

Across the table, the Comte de Rieu could barely suppress a laugh—he knew what Kappler did.

“The truth is,” Kappler said, “I’m just an old cop from Hamburg— like my poppa was before me. I was born to it. A cop under the kaiser, a cop during the Weimar time. So now I work for Heini and Reini, but believe me, Herr Stein, it’s the same old thing.”

Heini and Reini meant Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. Which put Kappler somewhere in the RSHA empire—most likely the Gestapo or one of the SD intelligence units. Stein puffed at his cigar but it had gone out.

“Here, let me,” Kappler said. He snapped a silver lighter and Stein turned the cigar in the flame before inhaling.

“Tell them what you heard today, darling,” Labarthe said to his friend Bella.

She looked confused. “In beauty salon?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

She nodded and smiled—now she knew what was wanted. She wore a military-style soft cap with a black feather arching back from one side, and theatrical circles of rouge on her cheeks.

“It was, it was . . .” She turned to Labarthe for help, whispered in his ear, he spoke a phrase or two behind his hand and she nodded with relief. “Hairdresser was telling me about death ray,” she said brightly.

“Death ray?” Madame Roubier said.

“Yes. Was made by man who invented telegraph.”

“Marconi,” Labarthe prompted.

“Yes, Marconi. Now for Mussolini he build death ray. So, war is over.” She smiled enthusiastically.

Willy Kappler shook with silent laughter, then pressed a hand against the side of his face. “People love a rumor,” he said. “The stranger it is, the better they like it. Did you hear last week? How de Gaulle was killed in an air raid in London and British spies smuggled his ashes into Paris and buried them in Napoleon’s tomb?”

“I did hear that,” said the comte. “From my dentist. And on the last visit he’d told me the British had invented a powder that set water on fire. Told me in strictest confidence, mind you.”

“Mesdames . . . et . . . monsieurs!”

The waiter made sure he had their attention, then, with a flourish, he presented a foie gras blond en bloc, at least two pounds of it. In a basket, a mountain of toast triangles, crusts trimmed off. For each person at the table a tiny chilled dish of Charentais butter. The champagne-colored aspic quivered as the waiter carved slabs off the block and slid them deftly onto monogrammed plates. “Et alors!” said the comte, when the first cut was made and the size of the black truffle within revealed. Then the table was quiet as knives worked foie gras on toast and little sips of Beaune were taken to wash it down. “I tell you,” said Willy Kappler, eyes glazed with rapture, “the best is really very good.”

The headwaiter appeared at Stein’s chair.

“Yes?” Stein said.

“A telephone call for you, Monsieur.”

The phone was on a marble table in an alcove by the men’s toilet.

“Stein,” he said into the receiver. But the line just hissed, there was nobody on the other end.

The men’s room attendant opened the door a few inches and said, “Monsieur Stein?” Stein went into the small tiled foyer that led to the urinals. The attendant’s table held a stack of white towels, scented soaps, and combs. A little dish of coins stood to one side. The white-jacketed attendant was called Voyschinkowsky, a man in his sixties, with the red-rimmed, pouchy eyes and hollow cheeks of the lifelong insomniac. Rumor had it that he had, at one time, been one of the richest men in Paris, a brilliant speculator, known as the Lion of the Bourse. But now, with his gravel-voiced Hungarian accent and white jacket, he was just an amusing character.

“I have your message, Monsieur Stein,” Voyschinkowsky said. “A young man is waiting downstairs, looking at newspapers at the stand just east of the restaurant. He needs to see you urgently.”

De Milja peeled a hundred-franc note from a roll in his pocket and laid it in Voyschinkowsky’s dish. “What next, I wonder,” he grumbled under his breath.

Voyschinkowsky’s face remained opaque. “Thank you, Monsieur,” he said. De Milja went downstairs. It was a warmish April night, the street smelled like fish—a waiter in a rubber apron was shucking oysters over a hill of chipped ice. The young man reading the headlines at the newspaper stand wore a thin jacket and a scarf. “Yes? You’re waiting for me?” de Milja said.

The young man looked him over. “Fedin needs to see you right away,” he said.

“Where?”

“Up at Boulogne-Billancourt.” Boulogne meant the factory district at the edge of Paris, not the seaside town.

De Milja stared at the young man. It could be anything—an emergency, a trap. There was nothing he could do about it. “All right,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

The young man looked at his watch. “Twenty minutes to curfew.”

“I’ll hurry,” de Milja said. He had a pass that allowed him to be out any time he wished, but he didn’t want to go into that now.

Back at the table he said, “An emergency.”

“What happened?” Madame Roubier said.

“An accident at the yard. A man is injured.” He turned to the comte. “Would you see Madame home?”

“Yes, of course.”

“May I help?” said Willy Kappler, very concerned. “Not much I can’t do in this city.” De Milja seemed to consider. “Thank you,” he said. “I think the best thing is for me to go, but I appreciate the offer.”

Kappler nodded sympathetically. “Another time,” he said.

They rode the métro to the Quai d’Issy station. The train stopped there because the tunnel up ahead had flooded but the police wouldn’t let anybody exit to the street. So they crossed over, took a train back one stop, and walked. The quarter was a snarl of freight tracks and old factories surrounding the Renault plant and the large docks on the Seine. On the other side of the river was a Russian neighborhood— émigrés packed into brick tenements and working on the automobile assembly lines.

Under German occupation, Renault manufactured military vehicles for the Wehrmacht, so the British bombed the plant. De Milja and Fedin’s messenger crunched broken glass underfoot as they walked. Water flooded from broken mains, black smoke that smelled like burning rubber made de Milja’s eyes run and he kept wiping at them with his hand. An ambulance drove by, siren wailing. Where a building had collapsed into the street, de Milja stepped over a smoldering mattress, picking his way among scattered pans and shoes and sheet music.

At the Eastern Orthodox Church of Saint Basil, the young man stood back. Tears ran from his eyes and cut tracks in the soot on his face. “He’s in there,” he said to de Milja.

“The church?”

The young man nodded and walked away quickly.

The church was being used as an emergency room. General Fedin was lying on a blanket on the stone floor, a second blanket was drawn up to his chin. When de Milja stood over him he opened his eyes. “Good,” he said. “I hoped they’d find you.”

De Milja knelt by his side. Fedin’s face, once fierce and skull-like, had collapsed, and his skin was the color of wax. Suddenly, an old man. He lowered the blanket a little—gauze bandage was taped across his chest—and made a sour face that meant no good.

“Better for you to be in the hospital,” de Milja said. “Fastest way is a taxi, you’ll lie on the backseat.”

“Let’s not be stupid,” Fedin said gently. “I know this wound very well, I’ve seen it many times.”

“Vassily Alexandrovich . . .”

Fedin gripped his arm, he meant to grip it hard, but he couldn’t. “Stop it,” he said.

De Milja was silent for a time. “How did this happen?”

“I was at the Double Eagle, a Russian club, people playing chess and drinking tea. The sirens went off, like always. We shrugged and ignored them, like always. The next thing, somebody pulled me out from under some boards. Then I woke up here.”

He paused a moment, lips pressed tight. “I’m sixty-three years old,” he said.

It was dark in the church, a few candles the only light. People were talking in low voices, taking care to walk quietly on the stone floors. Like actors in a play, de Milja thought. Some still wore the costumes— cabdrivers, cleaning women—that exile had assigned them, but in this church they were themselves, and spoke and gestured like the people they had once been. Outside, the last sirens of police cars and ambulances faded away and it was quiet again.

“I always thought I’d die on a horse, on a battlefield,” Fedin said. “Not in a chess club in Paris. You know I fought at Tannenberg, in 1914? Then with Brusilov, in Galicia. Against the Japanese, in 1905. In the Balkans, 1912 that was, I was on the staff of the Russian military attaché to Serbia. 1912. I was in love.”

He smiled at that. Thought for a time, with his eyes closed. Then looked directly at de Milja and said, “Jesus, the world’s a slaughterhouse. Really it is. If you’re weak they’re going to cut your throat— ask the Armenians, ask the Jews. The bad people want it their way, my friend. And how badly they want it is the study of a lifetime.”

He shook his head with sorrow. “So,” he said, “so then what. You step into it, if you’re a certain sort. But then you’re taking sides, and you’ve written yourself down for an appointment with the butchers. There’s a waiting list—but they’ll get around to you, never fear. Christ, look at me, killed by my own side.” He paused a moment, then said, “Damn fine bomb, though, even so. Made in Birmingham or somewhere. Didn’t hit any factories, this one didn’t. But it settled with the Double Eagle club once and for all. And it settled with General Fedin.”

Fedin laughed, then his mood changed. “Listen, I know all about what you did on the docks that night. Running off to die because you couldn’t stand to live in a bad world. What the hell did you think you were doing? You can’t do that, you can’t resign.” He thought a moment, then said sternly, “That’s not for you, boy. Not for you.”

He sighed, wandered a little, said something, but too quietly for de Milja to hear. De Milja leaned closer. “What did you say?”

“I want to rest for a minute, but don’t let me go yet,” Fedin said.

De Milja sat back, hands on knees, in the gloom of the darkened church. He looked at his watch: just after one in the morning. Now the night was very quiet. He sensed somebody nearby, turned to see a woman standing next to him. She had gray hair, hastily pinned up, wore a dark, ill-fitting suit, had a stethoscope around her neck. She stared at Fedin for a long moment, knelt by his side and drew the blanket up over his face.

“Wait,” de Milja said. “What are you doing?” She stood, then put a hand on his shoulder. He felt warmth enter him, as though the woman had done this so often she had contrived a single gesture to say everything that could be said. Then, after a moment, she took her hand off and walked away.

17 April. 3:20 a.m. West of Bourges.

Bonneau drove the rattletrap farm truck, Jeanne-Marie sat in the middle, de Milja by the window. They drove with the headlights off, no more than twenty miles an hour over the dirt farm roads. The truck bounced and bucked so hard de Milja shut his mouth tight to keep from cracking a tooth.

Three-quarter moon, the fields visible once the eyes adjusted. With airplanes on clandestine missions, you fought the war by the phases of the moon. “The Soulier farm,” Jeanne-Marie said in a whisper. Bonneau hauled the wheel over and the old truck shuddered and swayed into a farmyard. The dogs were on them immediately, barking and yelping and jumping up to leave muddy paw marks on the windows.

A huge silhouette appeared in the yard, the shadows of dogs dancing away from its kicking feet as the barking turned to whining. A shutter banged open and a kerosene lamp was lit in the window of the farmhouse. The silhouette approached the truck. “Bonneau?”

“Yes.”

“We’re all ready to go, here. Come and take a coffee.”

“Perhaps later. The rendezvous is in forty minutes and we’ve got to walk across the fields.”

The silhouette sighed. “Don’t offend my wife, Bonneau. If you do, I can reasonably well guarantee you that the Germans will be here for generations.”

Jeanne-Marie whispered a curse beneath her breath.

“What? Who is that? Jeanne-Marie? Ma biche—my jewel! Are you going to war?” The silhouette laughed, Bonneau put his forehead on his hands holding the steering wheel. To de Milja he said, “Soulier was my sergeant in the tank corps.” Then, to the silhouette at the truck window, “You’re right, of course, a coffee will be just the thing.”

They entered the farmhouse. The stove had been lit to drive off the night chill. On a plank table there was a loaf of bread and a sawtooth knife on a board, butter wrapped in a damp cloth, and a bottle of red wine. Madame Soulier stood at the stove and heated milk in a black iron pot. “We just got this from Violet,” she said.

De Milja teetered dangerously on the edge of asking who Violet was—then from the corner of his eye caught Jeanne-Marie’s discreet signal, a two-handed teat-pulling gesture.

Madame Soulier gathered the skin off the top of the milk with a wooden spoon, then whacked the spoon on the rim of the zinc-lined kitchen sink to send it flying. “That’s for the devil,” she muttered to herself.

De Milja knew this coffee—it was the same coffee, black, bitter, searing hot, he’d drunk in the Volhynia before going hunting on autumn mornings. He held the chipped cup in both hands. The cities were different in Europe; the countryside was very much the same.

“And the Clarais cousins? They’re coming?” Bonneau said.

Soulier shrugged. It scared de Milja a little, the quality of that shrug. He understood it, he feared, all too well—the Clarais cousins hadn’t shown up where they’d promised to be since the spring of 1285, likely tonight would be no different. Jeanne-Marie’s face remained immobile, perhaps the Clarais cousins were not crucial to the enterprise but had been asked for other reasons.

“Townspeople,” Soulier said to him, a confidential aside that explained everything.

“Better without them?” de Milja asked.

“Oh yes, no question of that.”

Soulier sucked up the last of his coffee and emitted a steamy sigh of pleasure. He rose from the table, pushing with his hands on the plank surface, then said, “Must have a word with the pig.”

When he returned, the aroma came with him. He stopped at the open door, wiped the muck off his boots, then entered, his arms full of rifles. He laid them out on the kitchen table and proceeded to strip off the oiled paper that had protected them. He dumped an old tin can on the table, moving bullets with a thick forefinger, and counted to eighteen. “Souvenirs of the war,” he said to de Milja.

There were four rifles, Soulier and Bonneau each took one. Jeanne-Marie wasn’t expected to use such things, and de Milja declined. He carried a 9 mm Italian automatic that had found its way to him, part of the Anton Stein persona, but he had no intention of shooting at anybody.

Soulier examined one of the rifles. “We kept these with us in the tank just in case,” he said.

Just in case, de Milja thought, the 1914 war started up again. They were bolt-action rifles, with five-round magazines, and far too many soldiers in the French infantry had carried them in 1940.

De Milja looked meaningfully at his watch. Soulier said fondly, “Ah my friend, do not concern yourself too much. We’re not in the city now, you know. Life here happens in its own time.”

“We’ll have to explain that to the pilot,” de Milja said.

Soulier laughed heartily—sarcasm was of absolutely no use with him. “There’s no point in worrying about that,” he said. “These contraptions have never yet been on time.”

The BBC Message Personnel—delivered in a cluster of meaningless phrases to deny the Germans analysis of traffic volume—had been broadcast forty-eight hours earlier. In the afternoon, visit the cathedral at Rouen. Then confirmed, a day later, by the BBC’s playing Django Reinhardt’s “In a Sentimental Mood” at a specified time.

They had avoided offending the hospitality of Madame Soulier, but the Bonneau reception committee was now behind schedule. They tried riding their bicycles across the countryside, but it was too dark, and most of the time they had to walk, following cattle paths that wound around the low hills, soaking their feet when the land turned to marsh, sweating with effort in the cold night air.

De Milja had been right, they were late getting to the field Jeanne-Marie had chosen. But Soulier was right too—the contraption had not been on time. A triumph of what was called System D, D for the verb débrouiller, to muddle through, to manage somehow. First used to describe the French railway system’s response to supply obligations in the war of 1914, it explained, in a few syllables, the French method of managing life.

They got to the field late, four instead of the expected six, and had to hurry to arrange the brush piles. Somehow they managed, although the head of the arrow that indicated wind direction was missing one side. Then Bonneau stopped dead, looked up, signaled for quiet. A low, distant hum. Getting louder, a drone. Then, clearly, the sound of airplane engines. “Les flambeaux!” Soulier cried.

It was Jeanne-Marie who actually had matches. The torches were lit. Rags, smeared thickly with pitch-pine resin and knotted at the ends of branches, they crackled and sputtered and threw wild shadows across the meadow as the reception party ran from brush pile to brush pile. Jeanne-Marie and de Milja raced past each other on the dead run—by firelight he saw her face, close to tears with anger and pride, with fierce joy.

In the clouds above them, a Whitley bomber, slow and cumbersome.

The pilot banked gently to get a better view of the land below him. He had sifted through the air defenses on the Brittany coast—a few desultory rounds of ack-ack, nothing more, the gunners not sorry to hear him droning off to somebody else’s sector. Then he’d followed the Loire, just about due east, the shadow of his plane cast by moonlight running next to the river. He picked up the Vienne—he hoped— branching south, then found the confluence of the Creuse and the Gartempe. Here he adjusted his bearing, a few degrees south of east, and watched the seconds tick away. Now, he thought.

Nothing there, dark and peaceful fields. Then came the voice of his navigator, “Here we are. Just a little north of us, sir.”

An orange fire appeared below—then another and another as the pilot watched. He pushed a button, a green light went on in the cargo hold but the drop-master could see as well as he could. First the crates, shoved out the door, white parachutes flaring off into the darkness before they caught the wind and jerked upright, swaying down toward the fires in the field below.

“Best of luck to you, gentlemen,” said the drop-master and the four French paratroopers jumped in rapid succession. They had been given little paper French flags to take down with them and one of them, Lucien, the leader, actually managed to hold one aloft as he floated to earth. He had left France from the port of Dunkirk, not quite a year earlier, by swimming toward a British fishing boat. His pants and shirt and officer’s cap were left on the beach, his pistol was at the bottom of the Channel. He thought, as the wind rushed past him, he heard someone cry out down below.

That was Soulier, crazed with excitement. “It worked! By God it worked!” He might have said Vive la France—the paratroopers would certainly have appreciated the sentiment—but, for the moment, surprise had exceeded patriotism. The paratroopers wrestled free of their harness, then menaced the night with their Sten guns, but there was only the reception committee in the field, so they greeted each other formally, embraced, and talked in whispers. Then the officer excused himself to Jeanne-Marie, turned away, undid his fly, watered a rock, and mumbled something relieved and grateful under his breath—thus, at last, was Vive la France said on that occasion.

As the fires burned themselves out, they took Soulier’s pry bar and tore open the crates. Unpacked two dozen Sten guns—rapid-firing carbines of no particular range but brutal effect up close, the British solution to the problem of a weapon for clandestine war. There were W/T sets, maps printed on silk, cans of a nasty green jelly that British scientists had concocted to burn down Europe.

Everything took longer than they’d calculated. With dawn came a cold, dirty drizzle, the wind blowing the smell of raw spring earth off the fields. Using the bicycles as carts they hauled the shipment off to Soulier’s farm. Were suitably impressed when Soulier reached down through the pig shit and opened a trapdoor in the earth, as the tenant of the sty looked on, slit-eyed and suspicious, from the fence where he’d been tied up.

Once again, on local trains to Vannes.

De Milja had appointed Jeanne-Marie liaison officer for the Kampfgeschwader 100 attack. Bonneau and Soulier to handle logistics and supply, the paratroopers to do the actual shooting.

They rode together in the first-class compartment. Jeanne-Marie, with open shirt collar spread across the lapels of a dark suit and mannish hat with feather, looked exactly like what she was—a part of the high bourgeois or petit nobility—the French land-owning class. De Milja, briefcase in hand, hat with brim snapped down—her provincial lawyer.

Two German officers entered their compartment at Poitiers, very polite and correct. From their insignia, they were involved with engineering—perhaps construction. Essentially they were German businessmen, on leave from daily life in Frankfurt or Dusseldorf or wherever it was in order to fight a war. Still, a great deal of silence in the compartment. Jeanne-Marie, living just below the Vichy line, had not seen many Germans and wasn’t really used to moving around among them. For their part, the Germans found French women irresistible, and Jeanne-Marie, pale and reserved with small, fine features and aristocratic bearing, was of a type particularly attractive to the officer class.

“Would Madame care to have the window open?” one of them said, using vacation French.

“No, thank you.”

“Not too warm for you, in here?”

“Quite comfortable, thank you.”

“Well then . . .”

The train chugged along, the fields of the Poitou plain falling away slowly behind them.

“I wonder, sir, if you can tell me what time we arrive in Nantes?”

“I’m not really certain,” de Milja said.

“Just after two, perhaps?”

“I believe that’s right.”

The man smiled at Jeanne-Marie: isn’t it satisfying, in some deliciously mysterious way, for us all to be rolling through the French countryside together? Not actually an adventure, not quite that. But, surely, not the usual thing either. Wouldn’t you agree?

In this rising tide of banality, de Milja sensed danger. Just such moments, he knew, could turn fatal. You did not see it coming.

With a sigh, a sigh of apology, he set to unbuckling the briefcase that lay across his knees. Providently, he had fitted it out with its own false identity in case it was searched: mostly land deeds, obtained from clerks in an office of registry just outside Paris.

“What have you there, Duval?” Jeanne-Marie said.

De Milja found a name on the deed. “The Bredon papers. I’m afraid we’ll have to go over them together sometime before tomorrow.”

Jeanne-Marie took the deed and began to read it.

The German folded his hands across his middle and turned toward the window—an admission of defeat.

In Vannes, Jeanne-Marie was checked in at the better hotel by the railroad station. De Milja set off toward the street where Mademoiselle Herault kept a confiserie. The mood of the neighborhood hadn’t changed, perhaps it had grown darker, quieter. Five o’clock on a spring afternoon, it should have been hopeful. Paris, hungry and cold and beginning to fray badly after a year of occupation, somehow kept its hopes up. But not here.

Then he came around the corner, saw what had happened, and just kept walking. There wasn’t much to see—a lowered shutter, a chain, and a padlock.

It was what he would have seen at eight that evening, when Mademoiselle herself had locked up the money and locked up the office and sent her clerk home. Her final act of the day would have been to lower the shutter and chain it to a ring set in the sill. But she had not done this.

De Milja couldn’t defend his intuition. Perhaps the padlock was slightly better, slightly newer than the one she had used, but otherwise there was nothing. Absence. Five on a spring afternoon, even in a sad little town, even in a shadowy street, somebody buys candy. But Mademoiselle Herault was closed. And she wouldn’t, de Milja knew in his heart, be reopening.

He didn’t stop walking, he didn’t slow down. Just glanced at the rolled-down shutter, then made certain he was in the right street. That was all. Somebody might be watching the street, but he thought not. There wouldn’t be anything here for them now, they would simply lock it up and think about it for a time—here a spy worked. That was an instinct of policemen. Perhaps evidence could be retrieved, perhaps something had been forgotten.

So de Milja knew what had happened—but of course that kind of knowing wasn’t acceptable. He could not return to Paris and have his operator cipher up some bedtime story for the Sixth Bureau: Officer instinctively sensed . . . He returned to the hotel, made sure Jeanne-Marie was where he’d left her. Normally he would not have said anything to her, would have kept her where she belonged, with a high brick wall between her and Mademoiselle Herault. In one of the first French attempts at an underground network, earlier that year, a single arrested individual had compromised a hundred and sixty-five people. So, you compartmentalized. And if they didn’t know about that over here, they sure as hell knew it in the eastern part of Europe, where nobody had any illusions about what went on in the basements of police stations. What people knew, they told.

No, that was wrong. Some people never told. Some people, only the bravest, or perhaps the angriest, let the interrogation run its course, and died in silence. He suspected, again an intuition, that Mademoiselle Herault had not given the operation away. What she was, she was—a soured sort of life, he believed. Ignoring the spiteful neighbors, squeezing every sou, hating the world, but strong. Stronger than the people who would try to dominate her. That was it, he realized, that was what he knew about her. She would not be dominated, no matter how they made her suffer.

He went to the not-so-good hotel at the railroad station, across the square from Jeanne-Marie, and checked in. The lawyer Benoit from Nantes, a boring little man on a boring little errand—please God let them believe that. Below his window, freight cars rolled past all night. The Germans were building here: massive defenses to repel an invasion, and submarine pens to attack British shipping.

De Milja couldn’t sleep. He smoked, sat in a chair by the window, and stared out into the darkened square. Some nights he could travel like a ghost, skimming over the landmass of Europe, the bloody cellars and the silent streets, the castles and the princes and the assassins who waited for them. Wolves in the snow—at the edge of town, where the butchers made sausage.

At seven he stood in front of the sink, bare-chested, suspenders dangling from the waistband of his trousers. He washed himself with cold water, then rubbed his skin with a towel.

In the lobby of the hotel, an old man was sweeping the tile floor, moving slowly among the ancient velvet chairs and sofas. De Milja went out in the street. Better there—the sun just up, the cobblestones of the square sluiced down with water. Around the corner he found an open café, ordered a coffee, stood at the bar and chatted with the patron.

The patron had a friend called Henri, who could get him anything he wanted. A pair of bicycles? No problem. An arching eyebrow indicated that the resources available to Henri went much deeper than that. Henri himself appeared an hour later, pushing the bicycles. De Milja paid him handsomely, then mentioned truck tires, price no object, perhaps at the end of the week? No problem! Henri nodded, gestured, winked. What de Milja really wanted was seventy-two hours during which Henri would refrain from selling him to the police, and he thought he’d accomplished that. First tires, then betrayal, so read the heart of Henri.

The following day, at five in the morning, in a patter of spring rain, they were on the road. They pedaled out of Vannes with some forty other cyclists, all headed to work at the fish-oil plant, at the small machine shops and boat-repair yards found in every port, some of them no doubt going the twelve miles to the air base, where the pilots of the Kampfgeschwader 100 also worked. The riders were silent—it was too early in the morning to be among strangers. Now and then a bicycle bell rang, two or three times an automobile, no doubt carrying somebody important and German, went roaring past.

De Milja let the crowd get ahead of them so they could talk. “Now this curve,” he said, “is a possibility. To the right, the pine forest provides some cover. To the left, the rock makes it impossible for the bus to swerve, to simply drive away from the attack.”

They rode on, Jeanne-Marie making mental notes about the road, the terrain, the time of day—everything that would have to be factored into an assault plan. “Of course,” de Milja said, “it will be up to the officer leading the attack to make the decision—exactly where to conceal his firing points and everything else. But there are locations along the route that he ought to at least consider.”

Up ahead, a warning bell rang and a railwayman lowered a safety gate. Then a locomotive sounded its whistle and a slow freight came rumbling across the road. De Milja and Jeanne-Marie pulled up to the crowd of cyclists, standing patiently on one foot while the boxcars rolled past. A dark green sports car, its hood secured by a leather strap, stopped next to de Milja. The driver and his companion were young men, wearing good tweed jackets and pigskin gloves. “Ach du lieber!” the driver said, his hand clapped over his eyes. What had struck him blind was a girl in a tight skirt astride a bicycle seat. The other man shook his head in wonder, said in German, “Sweet sugar—come fly through the clouds with me.” The girl ignored them.

The freight train moved off into the distance, the railwayman raised the gate. The driver of the sports car gunned his engine, the cyclists scurried out of the way, and the two Germans went tearing down the road, an echo of speed shifts and screaming engine lingering after them.

5:30 p.m. The first minutes of darkness. Outlines blurred, faces indistinct. People were out; coming home from work, going visiting, shopping. A couple, even strangers, moved easily along the street, unremarkable, nobody really saw them.

De Milja took Jeanne-Marie by the arm for a moment, guided her into a long alley, a crooked lane no more than three feet wide with lead-sheathed drain tiles running down both sides and crumbling stone arches above. It was chaos back here; stake fences concealing garden plots, leaning sheds and rusty tin roofs, curved tiles stacked against walls, dripping pipes, sheets hung to dry on lines spanning the alley—a thousand years of village life concealed from the public street.

Finding the back entrance to a particular shop should have been a nightmare, but no, in fact the Germans had done him a favor. The back door of the confiserie was chained and padlocked—the same equipment they’d used for the front door.

The chain ran from a rusty cleat in the wall to the iron door handle. It wasn’t a system Mademoiselle Herault had ever used, and it didn’t work now. De Milja took an iron bar from under his coat, slotted one end next to the chain in the wall cleat, used a piece of broken brick as a fulcrum, and put his weight against it. Out came the cleat with a puff of dust, a chunk of old masonry still attached to it. Next the door lock. He threw a shoulder into the door, but nothing happened. Drew a foot up and drove his heel against the lock plate—same result. Finally he worked the sharp end of the bar into the dried-out wood between the door and the jamb, levered it apart until he could get the end of the bar past the inside edge of the door, used every bit of strength he had. Nothing at first, then it gave a little, finally there was a loud squeak and the sound of ripping wood as the lock tore free. He swung the door open, waited a beat, stepped inside.

What he needed to see he saw immediately—the dusk of closed spaces was broken up by shadowy light from the doorway, and the last two years had taught him to see in the dark. There was no malice or evil in the confiserie, just a professional job, cold and thorough.

They had searched: dumped the canisters of flour into the stone sink, then the sugar, the salt, the baking soda, whatever else had been on the shelf, stirring through each new addition. They would have used a thin metal rod, sifting, probing, hunting the spool of microfilm or the miniature camera, the book marked for ciphering or a set of crystals for a radio. De Milja walked into the office, every step a brittle crunch—they’d spilled a bin of hard candies on the floor, and their boots had ground them into powdery shards of red and green.

Mademoiselle Herault’s office was torn to pieces. Not a piece of paper to be seen, upholstery fabric sliced from the bottom of an upside-down chair, drawers pulled from the desk, then the desk flipped over, smashing the drawers beneath it. In the store itself, the glass had been kicked out of the counters and the wooden frame torn apart— spies were diabolical when it came to hiding things. The searchers had unwrapped the chocolates and squashed them—ants were at work on the result, tossed atop the shards of glass.

By the cash register, where Veronique the clerk had spent her days, de Milja smelled something strange. Even amid the orange essence and vanilla and peppermint and God knew what else—something strong and particular, like flowers. He knelt, the smell got stronger. A small glass bottle, in pieces, half-hidden by the leg of a counter. Candy clerk’s perfume, he thought. They had stood her against a wall, searched through her purse, and it had fallen out, or perhaps they’d thrown it on the floor.

No more than a minute inside the shop, but too long.

Jeanne-Marie called in a whisper, de Milja was up and out in one motion. A flashlight bobbed at the other end of the alley. He kicked the door shut with his foot and embraced Jeanne-Marie in the same instant. Passionately, pressing his mouth against hers. She made a small sound of distaste, stiffened, tried to pull away from him just as the flashlight pinned them both.

The voice was a growl. “What’s this?”

It was the eternal voice of the flic, the cop, tired and sour beyond redemption. “Romance?” it wondered.

De Milja shielded his eyes from the light, squinting helplessly as he did so, a profoundly virtuous gesture. “We have no place to meet,” he said.

A moment while that was considered. “Well, you can’t meet here.”

The light was lowered. De Milja heard the little pop of a holster flap snapped back into place. “Take a walk,” the cop said. He sensed something, but he wished not to know about it. He simply made it vanish so it no longer troubled him.

They took local trains out of Vannes that night. Jeanne-Marie back to the country house, de Milja to the avenue Hoche.

It was, inevitably, spring in Paris. The first chestnut trees bloomed at the entrances to the métro, where warm air flowed up the staircases. Greece was taken in April, so was Yugoslavia. Belgrade, pressured by tank columns on three sides, was surrendered to a German captain and nine enlisted men who had bluffed their way through the defense lines. The United States had frozen German and Italian assets held in American banks.

For Parisians, daily existence was a struggle, and people simply tried to stay out of the way of the Germans. There had, in the first year of occupation, been one execution—Jacques Bonsergent, shot for jostling a German officer in the Gare Saint-Lazare.

The mood in the cafés was now resignation, the defeat by the Germans called the debacle. De Milja found this a curious expression once he thought about it—just the sort of linguistic trap that the French liked to construct. It meant a complete rout, a total collapse. But somewhere in the spirit of the word was a touch of the absurd, the comic: it wasn’t anyone’s fault, no point in assigning blame, it was just that everything went wrong all at once—a moment of Divine slapstick and poof, we lost the country.

For de Milja, contacts in the Polish community had finally begun to pay off. He had enlisted a railroad clerk and a miner’s daughter from Alsace—both contacts made through Polish clergy at local churches. The value of priests now became particularly apparent. They had political views, strong ones often enough, and were the keepers of community secrets. They knew who drank, who made money, and who lost it. They knew who the collaborators were, and who the patriots were. People, perhaps resisting an urge to gossip over the back fence, told the priest everything. Sometimes in church, more often in the parlor or at the vegetable stall. That couldn’t be wrong, could it? Heaven knew all your secrets anyhow.

The Alsatian girl, very studious and shy, in her early twenties, came to live in Paris at de Milja’s request. He assigned her the code name Vera, then, in a slow and curiously difficult effort, tried to place her in a job in a German bureau. She spoke excellent German, perfect French, it should have been easy. “I have never felt French, exactly,” she told her interviewers. “Always we spoke German in my house.” She was offered two jobs, both clerical and meaningless, in the office that handled payments flowing from France to Germany—400 million francs a day, the cost of the German military and civilian administration. After all, one couldn’t expect one’s country to be occupied for free.

With de Milja’s coaching, Vera extracted herself from those offers, moved to a pension, and waited patiently.

26 April 1941. 3:20 a.m. Le Chabanais.

Paris’s finest brothel. Draperies, brocades, velvets, and cut crystal— such weight as to suggest a thick and impenetrable wall of discretion. Waitresses in golden slippers served osetra caviar. In one of the private rooms, the Slovakian coal dealer Anton Stein had invited the Comte de Rieu and the art dealer Labarthe to be his guests for a late supper and whatever other diversions they might enjoy. They had a peaceful, relaxed, gentlemen’s evening of it.

The count had been entertained, in one of the upstairs bedrooms, by a “Hungarian countess” and her “Spanish maid”—the glass of wine tipped over, the slipper applied, then forgiveness, at length and in many ways. The count returned, shaking his head in wonder at what the world had to offer him. Lit a Camel cigarette, drank a sip of champagne, rested his head on the back of a chair and blew two seemingly endless plumes of smoke at the chandelier.

No need to talk, a grand silence—a moment to contemplate human desire and the masks it wore. De Milja had seen the countess; hair dark red, Magyar cheekbones, long, delicate fingers. But a temper, as you might expect. Not the one to stand for a maid’s clumsy behavior.

The count smiled at his host by way of saying thank you. “The pleasures of excess,” he said quietly. Labarthe snored lightly on a settee, head fallen to one side.

Stein raised his glass in a silent toast to the count’s words. He drank, then after a moment said, “I was in Alsace recently. Stumbled on treasure.”

“Let me guess: a Rhine maiden?”

“Oh no. Completely the opposite.”

“Really?”

Stein nodded yes. Opened a tortoiseshell case and selected a small, pale-leafed cigar. He rolled it between his fingers, then snapped a silver lighter until a flame appeared. “Mmm,” he said, putting the lighter away. “Spinster type—to look at her you’d never imagine.”

“Oh, I can imagine.”

“Little more champagne?” “Not just yet, thanks.” “Anyhow, I have her here. In a pension.” “Can’t get enough?” “That’s it.” He paused a moment. “Thing is, she’s bored. Nothing

to do all day.” “Why not a job? Coming from there, she must speak German.” “She does, she does. Wants to work for Jeder Einmal.” “Why there?” “I think she worked at Eszterhazy, the travel agency, before the

war.”

“Well, that shouldn’t be a problem. I don’t know anyone there, exactly, but Kappler can do it in a minute. I’ll call him Monday, if you like.”

“Would you? That would certainly help me out.” “Consider it done.” From somewhere in the vast building came the sound of a violin. It

was playing a folk melody, slow and melancholy, something eastern, perhaps Russian. Both men listened attentively. Labarthe stopped snoring, mumbled something, then fell back asleep. “Remarkable, the way life is now,” the count said. “Untold stories.” Then, after a moment, he said, “A spinster?” He meant, in a rather delicate way, that such an appetite in Stein was unexpected.

Stein shrugged. “Quite religious,” he said. “She is like a storm.”

Transmission of 12 May. 1:25 a.m.

To Director. Source: Albert Railway Bureau designates departures 21 May/26 May. 3rd class and livestock cars making up at Reims yards. Route: Reims/Metz/ Trier/Würzburg/Prague/Breslau/Cracow/Tarnow. Including: Artillery regiment 181, Fusilier Regiment 202 (Stettin), Grenadier Regiments 80, 107, 253 (Wiesbaden). Grenadier regiments 151, 162, and 176 (Wehrkreis X, Hamburg).

Of 21 Divisions in France as of 4/22/41, total of 9 (135,000 men) now moved east.

De Milja’s railroad clerk. Fussy little man, fierce patriot. Dead drop at the Église Sainte Thérèse—Albert to the six o’clock mass, de Milja at ten. The take from Wehrmacht rail scheduling made de Milja’s heart lift. Great numbers of troops—and their vehicles, weapons, files, and draft horses—on the move from conquered France and Belgium to conquered Poland. That meant Russia. And that meant the end. There was in Wilno a historical marker, alongside the Moscow road, that read “On 28 June, 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte passed this way with 450,000 men.” Then, on the other side, approached from the east, was a different message: “On 9 December, 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte passed this way with 900 men.”

Could Adolf Hitler—shrewd, cunning—do such a foolish thing? Maybe not. De Milja had observed that the failed Operation Sealion had been undertaken without a feint, without deception. If the Germans were going to try again, June would be the time to lay a false trail, such as the shipment of men and arms to the east.

To find out, de Milja had Albert on the one hand, Vera on the other. The Comte de Rieu had been true to his word, Vera was hired as a clerk—“But in six months, we’ll see about something better”—by the Jeder Einmal in Paris organization. This was Goebbels at work, the phrase meant Paris for Everybody Once. A morale builder for the military, and a spy’s dream. Everybody meant just that—from privates to generals, two weeks’ leave in romantic, naughty Paris. The brothels and the nightclubs were fully staffed, the inflated Occupation Reichsmark would buy an astonishing mound of gifts for Momma and Poppa and the ever-faithful Helga.

The German empire now ran from Norway to North Africa, from Brest, France, to Brest Litovsk in Poland. Getting all those people in and out of Paris was a logistical nightmare, but not for the efficient Jeder organization, a vast travel agency coordinating hotels, barracks, and train reservations. They simply had to know—thus Vera had to know—where everybody was: the location of every unit in the German war machine. Where it was strong, and where it wasn’t.

French students still went to university—a privilege not enjoyed in Poland, where by Himmler’s order the slave population was to learn to count on its fingers and acknowledge orders with affirmative grunts. De Milja’s response was to hide one of his W/T operators in a tiny room in the student quarter of the fifth arrondissement. The agent seemed to belong there, with a beard tracing the outline of his jaw, a piercing student gaze, and hair he cut himself.

It was in the tiny room, with pictures of philosophers pinned to the walls, that de Milja learned, from a Sixth Bureau transmission on 17 May, that the operation in Vannes had to be completely reworked. The Pathfinder pilots of Kampfgeschwader 100 now drove their own cars to the airfield rather than going by bus.

And it was in the tiny room that de Milja learned, from a Sixth Bureau transmission of 19 May, that he’d been fired.

It wasn’t put that way—the word relieved was not used—but that was what it meant. De Milja’s reaction was first shock, then anguished disbelief. Why? How could this happen? What had he done wrong?

“Is this correct?” he asked the operator.

“I believe so,” the man said. He was embarrassed, did not meet de Milja’s eyes. “Of course I can request retransmission. Or clarification.”

But it was already quite clear. The reference to de Milja by his assigned cipher, rendezvous on a certain beach on a certain night, to be transported back to Sixth Bureau London headquarters for reassignment. Prepare all field agents and technical staff for a change of resident officer.

He did that. Vera didn’t like it. Albert nodded grimly, war was war. He could say nothing to Lisette Roubier, to Zimmer at the coal company, to the people who were simply there in his life as he was in theirs. The French placed great store by daily encounters, small friendships carried on a few minutes at a time, and he would have liked to have said good-bye.

Lost people, lost money. Huysmanns coal, probably the apartment on the avenue Hoche, gone. Abandoned. Intelligence services had to operate in that fashion, build and walk away, it was in the nature of their existence. But de Milja knew, in a hungry city, what that money would buy.

A certain night in June, sweet and sad, he chased Madame Roubier around the bed with real conviction. “Oh my,” she said, and scowled with pleasure. Then it was time to go and he kissed her on the lips and she put her arms around him and squeezed him tight. Pulling back a little to have a look at him, her eyes were shiny in the peach light that made her pretty. She knew, she knew. What, exactly? Could you fool a woman you made love to? Well, of course you could, he thought. Well, of course you couldn’t.

The tears never quite came. A French woman understood love. Its beginning, and its ending. “Shall I see you tomorrow?”

“Not quite sure,” he said. “I’ll telephone in the afternoon.”

“If not, then some other time,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Au revoir.” I’ll see you again.

“Adieu,” she said. Not in this life.

Later he stood at the door of the apartment on the avenue Hoche. Dawn just breaking, the sky in the window a dozen shades of blue.

He had to ride the trains for long days across the springtime fields. He tried, again and again, to find a reason for what had happened, and was shocked at how broken his heart was. Over the months in Paris he had thought he hated what he did. Maybe not. Out the train window: spring earth, flowering apple trees, villages with bakeries and town halls. He had lost a lot of people, he realized. The obvious ones; Janina the telegraphist, Mademoiselle Herault, Veronique. And the not-so-obvious ones; Genya Beilis, and Fedin. Could someone else do better? Is that what the Sixth Bureau thought? You should be happy to be alive, he told himself savagely. But he wasn’t.

Four nights on the beach at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, just north of the Spanish border, where the last Polish ship, the Batory, had departed in June of 1940, twelve months earlier. He pretended to be a tourist, a specter from another time, strolled down to the beach at night, then uncovered a hidden bicycle and worked his way north, to a deserted stretch of rocky shore miles from a road. There he sat amid the dune grass, waiting, as the ocean crashed against the beach, but no light signaled. He stayed at a boardinghouse run by a Portuguese couple who had lived in France for thirty years and barely acknowledged that a war was in progress. There were other guests, but they averted their eyes, and there were no conversations. Everybody on the run now, he thought, in every possible direction.

Then at last, on 28 May, a light.

A rubber boat gliding over a calm sea. Two sailors with their faces lamp-blacked, and a man he’d never seen before, perhaps his replacement, brought into shore. Older, heavyset, distinguished, with thick eyebrows. They shook hands and wished each other well.

The sailors worked hard, digging their paddles into the water. The land fell away, France disappeared into the darkness. De Milja knelt in the stern of the little boat. Above the sound of the waves lapping against the beach he could hear a dog barking somewhere on the shore. Two barks, deep and urgent, repeated over and over again.

In London, people seemed pale, cold and polite, bright-eyed with fatigue. They spent their days running a war, which meant questions with no answers and ferocious, bureaucratic infighting. Then at night the bombs whistled down and the city burned.

De Milja was quartered in a small hotel just north of Euston Station. He had braced himself for criticism, or chilly disapproval, even accusations, but none of that happened. Some of the British liaison staff seemed not entirely sure why he’d shown up. Colonel Vyborg was “away.” The Polish officers he reported to that May and early June he had never met before. The ZWZ, he realized, had grown up. Had become an institution, with a bottom, a middle and a top. Poles had found their way to England by every conceivable means, ordinary and miraculous. And they all wanted to shoot at somebody. But getting them to that point—fed, dressed, assigned, transported— took an extraordinary effort, a price paid in meetings and memoranda.

This was the war they wanted de Milja to fight. In the course of his debriefing he was told, in a very undramatic way, why he’d been relieved. Somebody somewhere, in the infrastructure that had grown up around the government-in-exile, had decided he’d lost too many people. The senior staff had taken his part, particularly Vyborg and his allies, but that battle had eventually been lost and there were others that had to be fought.

De Milja didn’t say a word. The people around the table looked down, cleared their throats, squared the papers in front of them. Of course he’d done well, they said, nobody disputed that. Perhaps he’d just been unlucky. Perhaps it had become accepted doctrine in some quarters that his stars were bad. De Milja was silent, his face was still. Somebody lit a cigarette. Somebody else polished his spectacles. Silence, silence. “What we need you to do now,” they said, “is help to run things.”

He tried. Sat behind a desk, read reports, wrote notes in the margins, and sent them away. Some came back. Others appeared. A very pleasant colonel, formerly a lawyer in Cracow, took him to an English pub and let him know, very politely, that he wasn’t doing all that well. Was something wrong? He tried harder. Then, one late afternoon, he looked up from A’s analysis of XYZ and there was Vyborg, framed in the doorway.

Now at least he would have the truth, names and faces filled in. But it wasn’t so very different from what he’d been told. This was, he came to realize, not the same world he’d lived in. The Kampfgeschwader 100 operation, for instance, had been canceled. The RAF leadership felt that such guerrilla tactics would lead the Germans to brutalize downed and captured British airmen—the game wasn’t worth the candle.

“You’re lucky to be out of it,” Vyborg said one day at lunch. They ate in a military canteen in Bayswater Road. Women in hairnets served potatoes and cauliflower and canned sausage.

De Milja nodded. Yes, lucky.

Vyborg looked at him closely. “It takes time to get used to a new job.”

De Milja nodded again. “I hate it,” he said quietly.

Vyborg shrugged. Too bad. “Two things, Alexander. This is an army—we tell people what to do and they do it the best they know how. The other thing is that the good jobs are taken. You are not going to Madrid or to Geneva.”

Vyborg paused a moment, then continued. “The only person who’s hiring right now runs the eastern sector. We have four thousand panzer tanks on the border and prevailing opinion in the bureau says they will be leaving for Moscow on 21 June. Certainly there will be work in Russia, a great deal of work. Because those operatives will not survive. They will be replaced, then replaced again.”

“I know,” de Milja said.

On 21 June 1941, by the Koden bridge over the river Bug, Russian guards—of the Main Directorate of Border Troops under the NKVD—were ordered to execute a spy who had infiltrated Soviet territory three days earlier as part of a provocation intended to cause war. The man, a Wehrmacht trooper, had left German lines a few miles to the west, swum the river just after dark, and asked to see the officer in charge. Through an interpreter he explained he was from Munich, a worker and a lifelong communist. He wished to join the Soviet fighting forces, and he had important information: his unit had orders to attack the Soviet Union at 0300 hours on the morning of 22 June.

The Russian officer telephoned superiors, and the information rose quickly to very senior levels of the counterespionage apparat. Likely the Kremlin itself was consulted, likely at very high, the highest, levels. Meanwhile, the deserter was kept in a barracks jail on the Soviet side of the river. The guards tried to communicate with him—sign language, a few words of German. He was one of them, he let them know, and they shared their cigarettes with him and made sure he had a bowl of barley and fat at mealtime.

Late in the afternoon of 21 June, an answer came down from the top: the German deserter is a spy and his mission is provocation: shoot him. The officer in charge was surprised but the order was clear, and he’d been told confidentially that the British Secret Service had orchestrated similar incidents all along the Soviet/German border— formerly eastern Poland—to foster suspicion, and worse, between the two nations.

The sergeant assigned to take care of the business sighed when he came to collect the deserter. He’d felt some sympathy for the man, but, it seemed, he’d been tricked. Well, that was the world for you. “Podnimaisa zvieshchami,” he said to the German. This was formula, part of a ritual language that predated the Revolution and went back to czarist times. Get going, with things, it meant. You are going to be executed. If he’d said Get going, with overcoat, without things, for example, it would have meant the man was going to be deported, and his blanket and plate should be left behind.

The German didn’t understand the words, but he could read the sergeant’s expression and could easily enough interpret the significance of the Makarov pistol thrust in his belt. At least I tried, he thought. He’d known where this all might lead, now it had led there, now he had to make peace with his gods and say good-bye, and that was that.

They walked, with a guard of three soldiers, to the edge of the river. It was a warm evening, very still, thousands of crickets racketing away, flickers of summer lightning on the horizon. The deserter glanced back over his shoulder as they walked—anything possible? The sergeant just shook his head and gave him a fraternal little push in the back—be a man. The German took a deep breath, headed where the sergeant pointed and the sergeant shot him in the back of the head.

And again, a coup de grâce in the temple. Then the sergeant signaled to the troopers and they came and took the body away. The sergeant found a stub of cigarette deep in his pocket and lit it in cupped hands, staring across the river. What the hell were they doing over there? This was the third night in a row they’d fired up the panzer tank engines—a huge roar that drowned out the crickets—then changed positions, treads clanking away as the iron plates rolled over the dirt.

The sergeant finished his cigarette, then headed back to his barracks. Too bad about the German. That was fate, however, and there was no sense trying to get in its way. But the sergeant was in its way anyhow, some instinct—the rumbling of German tanks—may have been telling him that, and he himself had less than seven hours to live.

3:00 a.m. The sergeant asleep. The sound of German boots thumping across the wooden bridge, calls of “Important business! Important business!” in Russian. The Soviet sentry signaled to the German messengers to wait one moment, and shook the sergeant awake. Grumbling, he worked his feet into his boots and, rubbing his eyes, walked onto the bridge. A brief drumming, orange muzzle flares—the force of the bullets took him and the sentry back through a wooden railing and down into the river.

The sergeant didn’t die right away. He lay where he’d fallen, on a gravel bank in the slow, warm river. So he heard running on the bridge, heard the explosions as the barracks were blown apart by hand grenades, heard machine-gun fire and shouts in German as the commandos finished up with the border guards. Dim shapes—German combat engineers—swung themselves beneath the bridge and crawled among the struts, pulling wires out of the explosive charges. Tell headquarters, the sergeant thought. A soldier’s instinct—I’m finished but command must know what’s happened. It had, in fact, been tried. A young soldier bleeding on the floor of the guardhouse had managed to get hold of the telephone, but the line was dead. Other units of Regiment 800, the Brandenburgers—the Wehrmacht special-action force— some of them Russian-speaking, had been at work for hours, and telegraph and telephone wires had been cut all along the front lines.

The sergeant lost consciousness, then was brought back one last time. By a thousand artillery pieces fired in unison; the riverbed shook with the force of it. Overhead, hundreds of Luftwaffe fighters and bombers streaked east to destroy the Soviet air force on its airfields. Three million German troops crossed the border, thousands of Soviet troops, tens of thousands, would join the sergeant in the river by morning.

Soviet radio transmissions continued. The German Funkabwehr recorded an exchange near the city of Minsk. To headquarters: “We are being fired on. What should we do?” The response: “You must be insane. And why is this message not in code?”

The sergeant died sometime after dawn. By then, hundreds of tanks had rolled across the Koden bridge because it was the Schwerpunkt— the spearpoint—of the blitzkrieg in the region of the Brest fortress. Just to the south, the Koden railroad bridge, also secured by the Brandenburgers, was made ready to serve in an immense resupply effort to fighting units advancing at an extraordinary rate. By the following evening young Russian reservists were boarding trains, cardboard suitcases in hand, heading off to report to mobilization centers already occupied by Wehrmacht troops.

Days of glory. The Germans advanced against Soviet armies completely in confusion. Hitler had been right—“Just kick in the door and the whole thing will come tumbling down.” Soviet air cover was blown up, ammunition used up, no food, tanks destroyed. Russians attacked into enfilading machine-gun fire and were mown down by the thousands. Nothing stopped the panzer tanks, great engines rumbling across the steppe. Some peasants came out of their huts and stared. Others, Ukrainians, offered bread and salt to the conquerors who had come to free them from the Bolshevik yoke.

Yet, here and there, every now and again, there were strange and troublesome events. Five commissars firing pistols from a schoolhouse until they were killed. A single rifleman holding up an advance for ten minutes. When they found his body, his dog was tied to a nearby tree with a rope, as though he had, somehow, expected to live through the assault. A man came out of a house and threw two hand grenades. Somehow this wasn’t like the blitzkriegs in western Europe. They found a note folded into an empty cartridge case and hidden in a tree by the highway to Minsk. “Now there are only three of us left. We shall stand firm as long as there’s any life left in us. Now I am alone, wounded in my arm and my head. The number of tanks has increased. There are twenty-three. I shall probably die. Somebody may find my note and remember me: I am a Russian from Frunze. I have no parents. Good-bye, dear friends. Your Alexander Vinogradov.”

The German advance continued, nothing could stop it, whole armies were encircled. Yet, still, there was resistance, and something in its nature was deeply disturbing. They had attacked the U.S.S.R. But it was Russia that fought back.

10 October 1941. 11:45 p.m. Near the Koden bridge.

The Wehrmacht was long gone now. They were busy fighting to the east, on the highway to Moscow. Now it was quiet again—quiet as any place where three nations mixed. The Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Poland. “Thank heaven,” Razakavia would say, “we are all such good friends.” People laughed when he said that—a little tentatively at first until they were sure he meant them to, then a big, loud, flattering laugh. He was tall and bony, with the blowing white hair and white beard of an Old Testament prophet. But the similarity ended there. A pucker scar marked the back of his neck—bullet in 1922—and a rifle was slung across his back. Razakavia was a leader—of outcasts, of free men and women, of bandits. It depended who you asked.

Razakavia pulled his sheepskin jacket tight around him and leaned closer to his horse’s neck. “Cold, Miszka. Hurry up a little.” The pony obliged, the rhythm of his trot a beat or two faster. It was cold— Razakavia could smell winter hiding in the autumn air, and the moonlight lay hard on the white-frosted fields. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a railroad watch. Getting toward midnight. Up ahead of him he could hear Frantek’s pony. Frantek was fourteen, Razakavia’s best scout. He carried no rifle, only a pistol buried in his clothing—so he could play the innocent traveler as long as possible, should they chance to meet a stranger on the trails they rode. Somewhere behind Razakavia was Kotior, his second-in-command, a machine gun resting across his saddle.

They had ridden these fields before. This operation had been attempted twice since the end of September. Razakavia didn’t like it, but he had no choice. The people who had arrived in the wake of the Wehrmacht—the SS, German administrators, murder squads hunting Jews, all sorts really, were not much to his taste. He was used to fighting the Polish gendarmerie, not themselves so very appealing, frankly, but a fact of life and something he’d got used to. These new lords and masters were worse. They were also temporary. They didn’t understand what was going to happen to them, and that made them more dangerous as allies than they were as enemies. So he needed some new allies.

Frantek appeared just ahead of him, his horse standing still with breath steaming from its nose and mouth. The river was visible from here, not frozen yet but very slow and thick. Razakavia pulled his pony up, twenty seconds later Kotior arrived. The three sat in a row but did not speak—voices carried a long way at night. The wind sighed here as it climbed the hillside above the river, and Razakavia listened carefully to it for a time until he could make out the whine of an airplane engine. So, perhaps this time it would work. Frantek pointed: a few degrees west of north, a mile or so from where the river Bug met the Lesna. A triangle of fires suddenly appeared, sparks flying up into the still air. Frantek looked at him expectantly, waiting for orders.

Razakavia didn’t move—always he weighed the world around him for a moment before he did anything—then chucked the reins and the three of them trotted off in the direction of the fires.

He had six men in the meadow, where the hay had been cut a month earlier. They stood with rifles slung, warming their hands over the signal fires, faces red in the flickering light. The sound of the plane’s engines grew louder and louder, then it faded and moved away into the distance. Above, three white flowers came floating to earth.

At Razakavia’s right hand, Frantek watched avidly. Such things intrigued him—airplanes, parachutes. The world had come here along with the war, and Frantek was being educated by both at once. Kotior just glanced up, then scanned the perimeter. He was not quick of mind, but he killed easily and good-naturedly, and he was remorselessly loyal.

The white flowers were just overhead now and Razakavia could see what they were. As he’d been promised, a Polish officer and two crates of explosives. It is a long life, Razakavia thought, one takes the bad with the good.

Captain Alexander de Milja was the last to leave the plane, the other two operatives—an explosives expert and a political courier—had jumped when they got to the outskirts of Warsaw. His body ached from the ride, six and a half hours in a four-engine Halifax, every bolt and screw vibrating, and the cold air ferocious as it flowed through the riveted panels. He hoped this was the right triangle of fires below him—and that the builders of these brush piles had not changed sides while the Halifax droned across Europe. He was, in truth, a rich prize: $18,000 in czarist gold rubles, $50,000 in American paper money. A fortune once converted to zlotys or Occupation currency. German cigarettes and German razor blades, warm clothing, two VIS pistols— WZ 35s with the Polish eagle engraved on the slide, and a hundred rounds of ammunition. He might very well do them more good simply murdered and stripped, he thought. No, he would do them more good that way, because he was not here to do them good.

He had been forced to wait four months to return to Poland, because the distance from London to Warsaw was 900 miles—in fact Route One, over Denmark, was 960 miles and de Milja had to go a hundred miles farther east. Route Two, over Göteberg, Sweden, was even longer. The normal range of the Halifax bomber was 1,500 miles, the normal load capacity, 4,180 pounds. With the addition of an extra fuel tank, the range increased to 2,100 miles—the bomber could now fly home after dropping its cargo—but the load capacity decreased to 2,420 pounds; of guns, ammunition, medical supplies, people: and the crew had to be reduced from nine to seven.

The airspeed of the Halifax was 150 miles an hour, thus a trip of 2,000 miles was going to take thirteen hours—discounting the wind as a factor. Those thirteen hours had to be hours of darkness, from

5:00 p.m. in London to 6:00 a.m. the following morning. And that was cutting it close. The flight could only be made when there was enough of a moon to see the confluence of rivers that would mark the drop zone. This period, the second and third phases of the moon, was code-named Tercet. So the first Tercet with sufficient darkness was 7 October—in fact it was 10 October before he actually took off. That was the moment when there was just enough autumn darkness and just enough moonlight to give the operation a chance of success.

They’d taken him by car to Newmarket racecourse, where the special services had built a secret airfield to house the 138th Squadron— British and Polish aircrews. A final check of his pockets: no London bus tickets, no matchboxes with English words. He was now Roman Brzeski, a horse breeder from Chelm. As he waited to board the plane, a jeep drove across the tarmac and stopped by his side. Vyborg climbed out, holding on to his uniform cap in the backwash from the Halifax’s propellers. The engines were very loud, and Vyborg had to shout as he shook hands. “You’ll be careful?”

“I will.”

“Need anything?”

“No.”

“Well . . . No end to it, is there?”

De Milja gave him a mock salute.

“Good luck,” Vyborg said. “Good luck.”

De Milja nodded that he understood.

One of the partisans came into the hut well before dawn, nudging de Milja and the others with his boot. “Work today. Work today,” he said. De Milja got one eye open. “Move your bones, dear friends. Prove you’re not dead.” He gave de Milja, the honored guest, an extra little kick in the ankle and left the hut.

De Milja shuddered in the cold as he worked himself free of the blanket. Through the open door he could see black night, a slice of moon. There would be a skim of ice on the water barrel, white mist hanging in the birch trees. Beside him, Kotior rolled over and sat up slowly, held his face in his hands, cursed the cold, the Russians, the Germans, what women had between their legs, the guard, the forest, and life itself. De Milja forced his swollen feet into his boots, sat up, touched his face—two weeks’ growth of beard, chapped skin—and scratched his ankles where he’d been bitten the night before.

There was a small iron stove in a hut where food was cooked. A young woman handed him a metal cup of powerful, scalding tea; it warmed him and woke him up when he drank it. The woman was dark, muffled in kerchiefs and layers of clothing. “Another cup, sir?”

Educated, he thought, from the pitch of the voice. Perhaps a Jew. “Please,” de Milja said. He held the cup in both hands and let the steam warm his face. Razakavia’s band, about forty men and fifteen women, came from everywhere: a few Russian soldiers, escaped from Wehrmacht encirclement; a few Jews, escaped from the German roundups; a few criminals, escaped from Ukrainian and Byelorussian jails; a few Poles, who’d fled from the Russian deportations of 1939; a few Byelorussians—army deserters, nationalists—who’d fled Polish administration before the Russian occupation. To de Milja it seemed as though half the world had nowhere to go but the forest. He finished the tea and handed the cup back to the young woman. “Thank you,” he said. “It was very good.”

Later he rode beside Razakavia—as always, Kotior somewhere behind them. They had given him, as the honored guest, a Russian panje horse to ride. She was small, with a thick mane and shaggy coat. When the band stopped for a moment, she grazed on whatever weeds happened to be there, apparently she could eat anything at all. They had also given him, as the honored guest who brought explosives and gold coins, one of the better weapons in their armory: a Simonov automatic rifle with a ten-shot magazine box forward of the trigger guard, and two hundred rounds of 7.62 ammunition.

As they rode two by two on a forest trail, Razakavia explained that a courier had reached them with intelligence from local railwaymen: a small train was due, late in the day, carrying soldiers being rotated back for leave in Germany, some of them walking wounded. There would also be flatcars of damaged equipment, scheduled for repair at the Pruszkow Tank Works outside Warsaw. The train was from the Sixth Panzer Division, fighting 400 miles east at Smolensk.

“We watched them brought up to the line in late summer,” Razakavia told him. “A hundred and sixty trains, we counted. About fifty cars each. Tanks and armored cars and ammunition and horses—and the men. Very splendid, the Germans. Nothing they don’t have, makes you wonder what they want from us.”

At noon they left the forest, and rode for a time along the open steppe. It was cold and gray and wet; they rode past smashed Russian tanks and trucks abandoned during the June retreat, then moved back into the forest for an hour, watered the horses at a stream, and emerged at a point where the railroad line passed about a hundred yards from the birch groves. The line was a single track that seemed to go from nowhere to nowhere, disappearing into the distance on either end. “This goes northwest to Baranovici,” Razakavia told him. “Then to Minsk, Orsha, Smolensk, and Viazma. Eventually to Mozhaisk, and Moscow. It is the lifeline of the Wehrmacht Army Group Center. Our Russians tell us that a German force cannot survive more than sixty miles from a railhead.”

A man called Bronstein assembled the bomb for the rails. A Soviet army ammunition box, made of zinc, was filled with cheddite. British, in this case, from the honored guest, though the ZWZ in Poland also manufactured the product. A compression fuse, made of a sulfuric-acid vial and paper impregnated with potassium chloride, was inserted beneath the lid of the box.

De Milja sat by Bronstein as the bomb was put together. “Where did you learn to do that?” he asked.

“I was a teacher of science,” Bronstein said, “in Brest Litovsk.” He took the cigarette from his mouth and set it on a stone while he packed cheddite into the box. “And this is science.”

They dug a hole beneath the rail and inserted the mine, the weight of the locomotive would do the rest. A scout—Frantek—came galloping up to Razakavia just as it began to get dark. “It comes now,” he said.

The band settled into positions at the edge of the forest. De Milja lay on his stomach, using a rotten log for cover, feeling the cold from the earth seeping up into his body. The train came slowly, ten miles an hour, in case the track was sabotaged. It was. Bronstein’s device worked—a dull bang, a cloud of dirt blown sideways from beneath the creeping locomotive, wheels ripping up the ties, then the locomotive heeling over slowly as a jet of white steam hissed from its boiler. A man screamed. A German machine-gun crew on a platform mounted toward the rear of the train began to traverse the forest.

De Milja sighted down the barrel of the Simonov. From the slats of a cattle car he could see pinpricks of rifle fire. He returned it, squeezing off ten rounds, then changing magazines as bullets rattled in the branches above his head. One of Razakavia’s men leaped from a depression in the earth on the other side of the track and threw a bomb into the last car on the train. The walls blew out and the wooden frame started to burn. German riflemen, some wearing white bandages, jumped out of the train on the side away from the gunfire and began to shoot from behind the wheels of the cars. De Milja heard a cry from his left, a bullet smacked into his log. He aimed carefully and fired off his magazine, then looked up. A figure in field gray had slumped beneath the train, the wind flapping a bandage that had come loose from his head. De Milja changed magazines again. Some of the German soldiers were shooting from behind a tank chained to a flatcar, de Milja could hear the ricochet as gunfire from the forest hit the iron armor.

Another group of Germans began firing from the coal tender, half on, half off the rails where the locomotive had dragged it, and the machine gun came back to life. De Milja heard the sharp whistle that meant it was time to break off the engagement and head back into the forest.

He ran with the others, his breath coming in harsh gasps, up a slight rise to where several young women were guarding the ponies. They left immediately on orders from Kotior, two wounded men slung sideways across the backs of the horses. A third man was shot too badly to move, and Razakavia had to finish him off with a pistol. The rest of the band rode off at a fast trot, vanishing into the forest as the railcar burned brightly in the gray evening.

“The Germans, they always counterattack,” Kotior told him. “Always.” He pointed up at several Fiesler-Storch reconnaissance planes, little two-seater things that buzzed back and forth above the forest. “This is how partisans die,” Kotior added.

They were up there all night, crisscrossing the dark sky. So there could be no fires, no smoking outside the huts. De Milja pulled the blanket tight around his shoulders and loaded box magazines. The cold made his fingers numb, and the springs, like everything Russian, were too strong, tended to snap the feeder bar back into place, ejecting the bullet two feet in the air and producing a snarl of laughter from Kotior. Four hundred miles to the east, on the line Smolensk/Roslavl/Bryansk, the Wehrmacht was fighting. How the hell did they manage in this kind of cold? he wondered. And it was only October. At night the temperature fell and the puddles froze and huge clouds gathered in the sky, but it did not snow. And in the morning it was blue and sunny: winter isn’t coming this year.

At dawn, an alert. De Milja in position on the camp perimeter, aiming into the forest gloom. Somewhere south, perhaps a mile away, he could hear the faint popping of riflery, then the chatter of a light machine gun. Two scouts arrived at midday—they’d had a brush with a Ukrainian SS unit. “They shot at us,” the scout said. “And we shot back. So they fired the machine gun.” He was about fifteen, grinned like a kid. “Frantek went around and he got one of them, we think. They were screaming and yelling ‘fucking Bolsheviks’ and every kind of thing like that. Calling for God.”

“Where is Frantek?” Razakavia said.

The boy shrugged. “He led them away into the marsh. He’ll be back.”

“Banderovsty.” Razakavia spat the word.

He meant Ukrainian nationalists under the command of the leader Bandera, absorbed into an SS regiment called the Nachtigall. Kotior turned to de Milja and explained. “They do what the SS won’t.”

With Razakavia and Kotior he went to a town on the outskirts of Brest Litovsk. The owner of a bakery sold them milled oats and rye flour for bread. “We pay for this,” Razakavia told him as they knocked at the back door. “Not everyone does.” There was an ancient relationship in these lands, de Milja knew, between groups of armed men and keepers of granaries. Both sides had to survive, together they defined where honor might lie.

The iron door swung open and a hot wind, heavy with the smell of baking bread, swept over de Milja. “Come in,” the baker said. He had a pink face, and a big belly in an undershirt. They sat at a marble-top table, there was flour everywhere. The baker wiped his hands on his shirt and accepted a cigarette from Razakavia. Behind him the brick ovens were at work, with sometimes a lick of flame where the furnace doors didn’t quite meet. A black bread was brought over and cut up with a sawtooth knife.

Razakavia and the baker talked about the weather. The baker shook his head grimly. “All the old babas have been reading the signs.

Caterpillars and geese and bear scat. Probably nonsense, but even if it is, they’re all saying the same thing: it’s going to freeze your balls off.”

Razakavia nodded and chewed on a piece of bread. He reached into a pocket and counted out zlotys he’d bought with the gold rubles. The money lay in stacks on the marble table.

“It’s in the barn in the village of Krymno,” the baker said. “You know where I mean? The same as last spring. In wooden bins.”

“I remember,” Razakavia said.

“You want to take care on the roads, over there.”

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. Somebody goes out and doesn’t come back. Somebody else has to give up a horse. People moving around in the forest.”

“A partisan band?”

“Who knows? These days it could be anything.” He nodded at de Milja. “Who’s your friend?”

“One of us. He’s from down in the Volhynia.”

“Polish?”

“Yes,” de Milja said.

“One of my grandmothers was Polish,” the baker said. “Crazy, she was. All with spells and potions and times of the moon, but good to us. Always jam or a little cake.” The baker’s face softened as he remembered. He put out a hand and de Milja shook it. “Times change, maybe we can have something to drink,” he said.

De Milja smiled. “Better have it now,” he said.

The baker laughed. “Well,” he said.

The dirt track back to the forest went through a little settlement called Gradh. They smelled smoke a mile away, walked the horses in a wide circle around the village. Near the old Jewish cemetery was a great scar of newly packed earth, they saw a lost shoe and a bloody shirt. Above the village, ravens circled in a haze of dirty gray smoke.

“It was a Jewish town,” Razakavia said.

The weather. At first you didn’t notice. A leaf fell. You put on a jacket, took it off later. Then suddenly it tried to kill you, you hid from it as best you could but it seemed to search, to seek you out. In the swamps and woodlands there was mist, snow showers, a freeze, a thaw, heavy rain; then impossible, unimaginable mud. Like dull-minded peasants, de Milja and Frantek would stand by the road—the “road,” the “Moscow highway”—and stare at the German columns. Some days the equipment could move, some days it ground the lightly frozen earth into the mud below, and sank. At night they could hear the panzer tanks—every four hours the engines had to be run to a hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit, which took about fifteen minutes. Then they had to move the tanks around, to use the transmissions—because the oil was of too low a viscosity to protect the gears. Razakavia’s forest was well behind the front lines, a night attack was unlikely. But the Germans could not be sure, and the Soviet air force sent over a plane to harass them now and then, to stir up the defenses on icy nights.

The partisans attacked a repair train the following week. This time Bronstein’s bomb derailed all seven cars, and some of the railway workers tried to surrender, as did a Wehrmacht railroad officer. But every German was shot down, as well as most of the Poles and Ukrainians who worked on the track. The partisans looted the train, taking tools and coal and cigarettes and ammunition. One of the Polish laborers, lightly wounded, pleaded for mercy. Frantek worked the bolt on his rifle, but de Milja stepped between them. “Leave him to me,” he said.

The man fell on his knees and tried to wrap his arms around de Milja’s legs. “Mercy,” he said.

De Milja took him by the shoulder of his jacket and hauled him to his feet. “Stop it,” he hissed in Polish. The man wept. “I have children,” he said. “Four children, little girls.”

De Milja saw Razakavia staring at him coldly: take him as a gift, but don’t ask for another. “It’s all right,” de Milja said. “You can come with us.”

All around him, in the smoking wreckage of the repair train—a tangle of coaches with smashed windows, a flatcar with a crane bent at right angles—single shots rang out as the crew was finished off.

The man de Milja had saved was, by trade, a cobbler, and spent his first days in the encampment sewing boots and improvising repairs of all kinds. De Milja took him, late one afternoon, to a village near the forest, where a young widow sold vodka. If you paid a little extra you could drink it in a toolshed behind her house—she would even supply a few sticks of wood for the stove.

“My family is from Rovno, south of the Pripet marsh,” the man explained. “Life wasn’t so bad. The Poles had to watch it down there, but there was plenty of work, the police protected us, we had everything we needed. Maybe a little more.”

He took a pull from the vodka bottle, wiped his mustache with his fingers. Outside it was growing dark, and rain drummed on the roof of the shed. “Then, September of ’39. The Russians came and occupied the town. We were working people, didn’t put on airs, and we’d always been decent to the peasants, so when the commissars appointed a council of workers, they spared us, and let us go on with our lives. Very honestly, a lot of them had boots for the first time—it was the deportees who went barefoot—so they needed us and they knew it.

“Still, some of my family didn’t fare so well. One of my sisters was a nun, she disappeared. Another sister was married to a clerk in the district administration—they were sent east in freight cars. Gone. Door of the house banging in the wind, dinner rotting on the table. Make your heart sick to see it. My brother was a sergeant in the army. He’d been captured in the first days of the invasion, but maybe that was better for him. At least he wasn’t arrested, and he came from a unit that had laid down their guns when the Soviet troops said they’d arrived to fight the Germans.

“So him they sent to a prisoner-of-war camp, an NKVD camp called Ostashkov, not far from Smolensk. They really didn’t seem to know what they wanted to do with them. The officers—mostly reserve officers; engineers, teachers, doctors—they took them away, rumor was to a camp in the Katyn forest. Stefan, that’s my brother, and the other enlisted men, they just sat there and starved. Finally, they sent him to Moscow.”

“Moscow! It’s true?”

“It’s true, I swear it. What happened to Stefan was, the Russians thought he was one of them. Almost by accident—but then, that’s how he is. He’s not like me, doesn’t matter what I try it goes wrong. But Stefan’s not like that—if the world had gone on like it always did, he’d be doing very well now.”

The cobbler took another pull at the vodka. He looked off into the dusk, watching fondly as his brother did well.

“What happened?” de Milja said. “At the camp.”

“Oh. He befriended one of the NKVD men.”

“A political officer?”

“No! Nothing like that—a sergeant, just like him. This man had a hunting dog, a spaniel bitch, and his pleasure was to go into the marsh with this dog and perhaps shoot a duck or two and the dog would go into the reeds and bring them back. But the dog got hurt, and it wouldn’t eat, and it was dying. Stefan found out about it, and he told the NKVD man what to do, and the dog got better. And that was the end of it—except that it wasn’t. One day the man came to where he was kept and said, ‘You’re going to have a choice. Everybody here is going to a new camp, in the Katyn forest. For you, it’s better to tell them that you want to go to school, in Moscow.’ And that’s what Stefan did.”

“And then?”

“Well, he came home.”

“Just like that?”

The cobbler shrugged. “Yes.”

“A free man?”

“Well, yes. For a time, anyhow.”

“What happened?”

“Poor Stefan.”

“Another drink? There’s a little left.”

“Yes, all right, thank you. I owe you my life, you know.”

“Oh, anyone would have done what I did. But, ah, what happened to Stefan?”

“Too strong, Stefan. Sometimes it isn’t for the best. He went into the town, I don’t know why. And some German didn’t like his looks, and they asked for his papers, and Stefan hit him.”

“In Rovno, this was?”

“Yes. He managed to run away—a friend saw it and told us. But then they caught him. They beat him up and took him off in one of those black trucks, and now he’s in Czarny prison.” The cobbler looked away, his face angry and bitter. “They are going to hang him.”

“He has a family?”

“Oh yes. Just like me.”

“Name the same as yours?”

“Yes. Krewinski, just like mine. Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Don’t get angry.”

“Shameful thing. It’s the Russians’ fault, they won’t leave us alone.” He paused a moment, took another sip of vodka. “You think there’s hope? I mean, we’re told to pray for this and for that. We’re told there’s always hope. Do you think that’s true?”

De Milja thought it over. “Well,” he said at last, “there’s always hope. But I think you ought to pray for his soul. That might be the best thing.”

The cobbler shook his head in reluctant agreement. “Poor Stefan,” he said, wiping the tears from his eyes.

Kotior commanded the unit sent off to Krymno to retrieve the grain. He was accompanied by Frantek, his fellow scout Pavel, an older man called Korbin, de Milja, and two Ukrainian peasant girls who drove the farm wagons. The rifles were hidden under burlap sacks in the wagons.

They rode all morning, along a track that wound through water meadows, fields of reeds rustling as they swayed in the wind, the air chill and heavy. The village was no more than fifteen miles from Brest but it lay beyond the forest, some distance into the marshland along a tributary of the river Pripet. A few wooden huts, a farm with stone barns, then reeds again, pools of black, still water, and windswept sky to the horizon on every side.

The farm dogs snarled at them as they rode up and the peasant who tended the farm came out of his house with a battered shotgun riding the crook of his arm. The man spoke some form of local dialect de Milja could barely understand but Kotior told him to call the dogs off, dismounted, and explained slowly who they were and what they had come for. Then they all went into the barn—warmed by a cow, smelling of dung and damp straw, the dogs drinking eagerly at pools of water where grain stalks had fermented.

“Where is the rest?” Kotior asked, standing in front of empty wooden bins.

The peasant, agitated now, seemed to be telling Kotior a long and complicated story. Kotior nodded, a reasonable man who would accept whatever he was told, then suddenly barred a forearm across the peasant’s throat and forced him back against a wall. A Russian bayonet—four-edged, it made a cross-shaped wound—had appeared in his hand and he held the point under the man’s chin. The shotgun dropped to the floor. The dogs went wild, but Frantek kicked one and it ran away with the rest following.

The peasant didn’t struggle, his face went passive as he prepared to die. Then Kotior let him go. “He says the grain was taken away. By a detachment of partisans. He thinks they intend to come back for the rest of it.” After some discussion they decided to wait, at least until morning. They pulled the wagons into the barn, posted Frantek and Pavel at the two ends of the settlement, and took turns sleeping.

They came at dawn. Pavel sounded the alarm in time for them to set up an ambush. At Kotior’s direction, de Milja was in the hayloft of the barn, the Simonov covering the road below.

The column appeared from the gray mist, silent but for the sound of hooves on the muddy road. There were forty of them, well armed. He saw several automatic rifles, several pepechas—Russian submachine guns—a few weapons he could not identify. Otherwise they looked like the Razakavia band. They wore wool jackets and peaked caps and boots, sometimes a military coat or trousers. The leader, de Milja guessed he was the leader, had a pair of binoculars on a strap and a holstered pistol.

The peasant came out of the barn and raised his hand. The column stopped. The leader—de Milja had been right—climbed off his horse and led it forward. De Milja sighted on him. He was perhaps forty, a Slav, clean-shaven, something of the soldier in the way he held his shoulders. He talked with the peasant for a time. Then Kotior came out of the barn and joined the conversation, eventually signaling to de Milja that he should come down.

They were joined by another man, who the leader referred to as politruk. The conversation was very tense. “He has told me they are taking the grain,” Kotior said evenly. “Requisitioned,” the leader said in Russian. “For partisan operations.”

“We are also partisans,” Kotior said.

“Not bandits, perhaps?”

“Polish partisans.”

“Then we are friends,” the politruk said. “Poland and the Soviet Union. Allies.” He wore a leather coat, had cropped fair hair and albino coloring. His hands were deep in his pockets—de Milja could almost see the NKVD-issue Makarov in there. “This matter of the grain, a misunderstanding,” he said.

Kotior and de Milja were silent.

“Best to come back to our camp, we can sit down and talk this out.”

“Another time, perhaps,” de Milja said.

The politruk was angry. “War doesn’t wait,” he said.

De Milja saw no signal, but the mounted partisans shifted, some of them moving out of de Milja’s line of sight.

“I think it would be best . . .” The politruk stopped in midsentence. De Milja watched his eyes, then turned to see what he was looking at. One of the wagons was moving slowly out of the barn, the pair of shaggy horses trudging through the mud. The Ukrainian girl held the reins in the crook of her knee and was pointing a rifle at the two Russians. The leader made a gesture—enough, let it go. Frantek rode up, pistol in one hand, face pinched like an angry child. In his other hand, the reins of de Milja’s and Kotior’s horses. When he spat, meaningfully, down into the dirt, the politruk blinked.

De Milja put a foot in the stirrup and swung up on the pony. The politruk and the leader stared without expression as the unit rode off, walking the horses at wagon speed. The skies over the marsh were alive, broken gray cloud blown west, and a few dry flakes of snow drifting down.

“We’ll need a rear guard,” de Milja said to Kotior as the settlement fell behind them.

“Yes, I know. You stay, with Frantek.” He paused. “I can understand most Russians when they speak, we all can in this place. But what is a politruk?”

“It means political officer.”

Kotior shrugged—that was to raise life to a level where it only pretended to exist. “We’ll need an hour,” he said, gesturing at the wagons. “At least that.”

“You will have it,” de Milja said.

There wasn’t much cover. Frantek and de Milja rode at the back of the column until they found a low hill with a grove of pine trees that marked the edge of the forest east of Brest. There they waited, watching the dirt road below them, the cold working its way through their sheepskins.

Frantek seemed, to de Milja, to have been born to the life he lived. His parents had gone to market one Saturday morning and never come home. So, at the age of twelve, he had gone to the forest and found Razakavia. The forest bands always needed scouts, and Frantek and his friends knew it. Now he leaned back against a tree, folded his arms around his rifle and across his chest, and pulled his knees up, completely at rest except for his eyes, slitted against the snow, watching the approaches to the hilltop.

“Do you like the life in the forest?” de Milja asked him, tired of listening to the wind.

Frantek thought it over. “I miss my dog,” he said. “Her name was Chaya.”

The Russians came thirty minutes later, four scouts riding single file. One of them dismounted, squatted, determined that the horse droppings were fresh, and climbed back on his horse. They moved slowly, at wagon speed, waiting for the band to leave the steppe and enter the forest.

“Do not fire,” de Milja said to Frantek as they flattened out behind the pine trees. “That is an order,” he added.

Frantek acknowledged it—barely. To him, de Milja seemed cautious, even hesitant, and he’d killed enough to know how attentive it made people. But he’d also come across many inexplicable things in his short life and he’d decided that de Milja was just one more.

De Milja sighted down the Simonov at four hundred yards. Ping. That animated the Russians and drew an appreciative chuckle from Frantek. They leaped off their horses and went flat on the ground. Disciplined, they did not fire their rifles. They waited. Ten long minutes.

“Mine is on the far left,” Frantek said, squinting through his gun-sight.

“Not yet,” de Milja said.

One of the Russian scouts rose to one knee, rifle at his hip swinging back and forth across the axis of the road. Then he stood.

“Now?” said Frantek.

“No.”

The scout retrieved his horse. Climbed up in the saddle. Ping.

At first, de Milja was afraid he’d miscalculated and killed him, because he seemed to fly off the horse, which shied and galloped a few yards. And the other three scouts returned fire, including a long staccato rattle, at least half a drum of pepecha rounds. Some of it in their direction—a white mark chipped in a tree trunk, the sound of canvas ripping overhead—but not the sort of enthusiastic concentration that would mean the scouts knew where they were. Then the man de Milja had fired at moved, changed positions, scuttling along low to the ground and throwing himself flat.

De Milja’s greatest worry was Frantek, an excellent shot with young eyes. But discipline held. De Milja extended his left hand, palm flat, fingers slightly spread: hold on, do nothing. Frantek pressed himself against the earth, outraged he had to endure this insulting gunfire but, for the moment, under control.

The wind rose, snowflakes spun through the air, swirling like dust and whitening the dirt road. It saved their lives, Razakavia said later. “Russians read snow like priests read Bibles.” Or, perhaps, that day, nobody wanted to die.

The Russians mounted their horses, slow and deliberate under the eyes of the unseen riflemen, and rode back the way they came.

De Milja had been ice inside for a long time—there wasn’t any other way for him to do what he had to do—but Rovno scared him. The Germans had it all their own way in Rovno. The SS were everywhere, death’s-head insignia and lightning flashes, a certain walk, a certain smile. The Einsatzgruppen came through, on the way to murder Jews in another ghetto somewhere, there were Ukrainian SS, Latvian SS, and German criminals, alley killers the Nazi recruiters had quarried from the prisons since 1927. As well as those ordinary Germans, always liked by their neighbors, who, given the opportunity, turned out to be not so very mild-mannered after all. They were the worst, and one taste of blood was all it took.

De Milja met their eyes in Rovno. He dared not be furtive. So he returned the stares, trudged along in the snow, cold and absentminded and absorbed in his business. And armed. It went against the current wisdom—one street search and you were finished. But he would not be taken alive. The cyanide capsule sewn in the point of his shirt collar was the last resort, but the VIS snugged against the small of his back gave him at least the illusion of survival.

The ZWZ secret mail system operated all over Poland, mostly out of dress shops, with couriers carrying letters from city to city. De Milja had used it to report the Russian contact and that had produced a request—delivered in a park in Brest Litovsk—for a meeting in Rovno. With Major Olenik, his former superior in Warsaw and, now that he was no longer under the direct orders of the Sixth Bureau in London, his superior once again.

Rovno had always been a border city—a Polish possession, claimed by Russia, populated by Ukrainians. Narrow streets, brick buildings darkened by factory smoke, November ice, November fog, Gestapo cars with chains on the tires.

“They will yet take Moscow,” Olenik said. “Or maybe not. The Russians have introduced a weapon they call the Katyusha rocket, also known as the Stalin Organ—multiple rockets fired simultaneously from a launcher that can be towed by a truck. The Germans don’t like it. They are afraid of it—they ran away from it up in Smolensk. And the Russians have a new tank, the T-34. German shells bounce off. If they can produce enough of them, they’ll shut the panzer divisions down. There’s that, and the fact that our weather people predict December temperatures outside Moscow of sixty-five degrees below zero. We’ll see what that does to their Wehrwille.”

The word meant war will, a cherished German idea: who wants most to win, wins.

De Milja and Olenik sat in the parlor of a safe house in Rovno, a small apartment, old-fashioned, as though a couple had grown old there and never changed anything. It was all curtains and doilies and clocks with loud ticks—a certain musty smell, a certain silence. De Milja wondered what it would be like in the forest at sixty-five degrees below zero. Olenik apparently read his mind. “We expect you’ll finish up before then,” he said.

Olenik hadn’t changed. Narrow shoulders, tousled gray hair and mustache, pockmarked skin—triumphantly seedy in a worn gray cardigan, you’d walk past him and never see him on any street in the world. He rummaged in a briefcase, found a pipe, fussed with it until he got it lit, then searched again until he found a single sheet of yellowish newsprint. “Have a look,” he said.

The newspaper was called Miecz i Mlot—Sword and Hammer. It was published in Polish by the League of Friends of the Soviet Union and the PPR, the Polska Partia Robotnicza, the Polish Workers’ Party.

“It comes from Bialystok,” Olenik said. “From Stryj and Brody and Wilno. From Brest and Rovno. All over the eastern districts. Curious, with a hundred and sixty-five newspapers issued by underground presses in Poland, including every prewar party, socialist, and peasant and all the rest of it, we now see this. Reference to a communist underground in Poland. If it exists, we don’t know about it. If it exists, it does nothing but exist, but that may be just precisely to the point. Its existence will make it easier for them to say, later on, that the communist state of Poland was preceded by a communist underground.”

De Milja handed the newspaper back and Olenik returned it to his briefcase. “Of course,” Olenik said, “we’re not spending life and money to find out what the Russians think about us. They enslaved us for a hundred and twenty years. Attacked in 1920. Attacked again in 1939. And they’ll be coming back this way, pushing a wave of Wehrmacht gray in front of them. We have to decide what to do then.

“If they go all the way to the Oder, to the Rhine, we’re done for— they’ll occupy the country. It’s that simple. So what we may have to do is, at the right moment, throw the Germans out by ourselves and declare a free Polish state, recognition by the British and the Americans to follow. That means a rising, and a terrible price to pay in blood.

“The alternative: reveal Soviet intentions—stick a knife in Stalin before he can get to the conference table. Britain won’t give him Poland, but the Americans are blind to life beyond their oceans.” He stopped for a moment and seemed to drift, then spoke again in a softer voice. “If you’re a small country and you have a bully for a neighbor, God help you, because nobody else will. You’re alone. You’ll cry out in the night, but nobody will come.”

He stopped abruptly, had said more of what was in his heart than he’d meant to. He cleared his throat. “What matters now,” he went on, “are the particular and demonstrable intentions of the Soviet state.

If their partisan units take food without paying for it—and they do. If those partisan units have political officers—and they do. If they are forcing Poles to fight in those units and burning down villages that resist, and we know they are doing that, too, then they are acting, according to their own rules, like people fighting in an enemy country among enemies.”

“It was certainly that way in Krymno,” de Milja said. “And we were asked—that’s not really the word for the way it was put—to follow them to their camp.”

“Two of our people, in the northern Polesian district, did just that. They believed they were going somewhere to sit down and work out an agreement. One is dead. The other, we’re told, is in the Lubianka. So we are both fighting the Germans, but we are not allies.”

He stopped a moment, considered what he would say next. “So,” he said. “We, I mean London and Warsaw, we are interested in the story of Sergeant Krewinski, the brother of the man captured in the attack on the repair train.”

“The man in Rovno prison?”

“Yes. What we want you to do now, Captain, is to force Rovno prison. Liberate Krewinski—and two ZWZ officers who are also being held there. All are going to be executed.”

De Milja met the major’s eyes, but his look was opaque and distant. There’d been three attempts on German prisons that de Milja knew about, all had failed. Then he understood: this was a committee at work, and if they assigned what was in effect a suicide mission, there was nothing Olenik could do about it.

“It’s right away, then?” de Milja said.

Olenik spread his hands: of course.

That completed Major Olenik’s work and he left the city by train the following evening. As a notional waterworks engineer, his papers allowed him to travel anywhere within German-occupied lands. He handed over to de Milja a group of code and contact procedures: ZWZ officers and operatives in the district were at his disposal. Explosives, weapons, whatever he needed was available.

De Milja returned to the forest, explaining to Razakavia what had to be done. The first step was to move the encampment, from huts in a clearing to an abandoned farm at the edge of a wood about ten miles from Rovno. The farm would serve as a reception base for the freed prisoners and some members of the attack commando. A doctor and nurse would set up an aid station at the farmhouse twenty-four hours before the attack.

Back in Rovno he made contact with a local ZWZ operative known as Vlach, a man in his late twenties, with tipped-up nose, carefully combed blond hair and a wise-guy curl to his lip. The ZWZ ran, in general, to more sober and stable personalities—Vlach had replaced one of those very gentlemen in late July. Had survived, had impressed Major Olenik; those were his credentials. At Vlach’s suggestion they met in a tearoom in Rovno’s central square, a very proper place, where German officials’ wives and girlfriends could drink tea with extended pinkies and nibble at mounds of pale-green petits fours. “Ha ha,” Vlach laughed. “Who would look for us here?”

Then he grew serious. “We can get you anything you like,” he said. “Cars, trucks, you say what.”

“How can you do that?”

“We all do the same thing here, everybody who you-know-what. See, the Luftwaffe and the panzer tanks, they can really do the job. Whatever the Russians had here is flat, gone. I never saw such a mess; staff cars on top of each other, railroad tracks peeled straight up into the air, airfields turned into junkyards. So now it’s conquered, so now it all has to be rebuilt.

“So, just about the time the Wehrmacht shot the last sniper and hanged the last commissar, the big German construction companies came in. Ho, ho—Ve gonna make money now, Fritz! The military authority told them what they needed—airfields, barracks, airplane hangars, oil-storage tanks—exactly what they just finished blowing up. Plus, as long as they were at it, roads, which they never had here.

“So, the construction companies get all these contracts, but when they finished rubbing their hands and winking at each other, it begins to dawn on them that they’re going to have to find somebody to do the work. Ah, not so easy. Can’t bring in people from Germany, either they’re building airplanes and submarines back in Essen, or they’re shooting more Russians, six hundred miles east of here. See, when you shoot a Russian, somebody puts another one down, but they haven’t figured that out yet.

“Anyhow, they’re going to have to use local labor. We started by getting one guy hired. Every German’s dream of what a Pole should be—cooperative, friendly, religious, trustworthy. A fifty-five-year-old man, a machinist all his life, Henryk. So all the Germans loved Henryk. They could count on him, he never drank, he never stole, he never answered back, and you said be at the job site at five-thirty in the morning, and there he was.”

Vlach blew out his cheeks to make a fat German face. “‘Henryk, mein friend, maybe you haff a cousin?’ Well, guess what, he does. He has also an uncle, an aunt, a long-lost friend, a nephew—that’s me— and about eighteen more, one way and another. We go anywhere we like, we have company trucks, two Opel automobiles. If we want to carry something that’s—unusual, you understand, we can request a Wehrmacht driver. When they’re behind the wheel, nobody even pretends to look.”

Respectable little man, tortoiseshell spectacles gave him a slight resemblance to the American comedian Harold Lloyd. Except that Harold Lloyd would have bought new glasses if he’d cracked a lens.

“The Russians put him in a camp in ’39,” Vlach said.

“How did you get out?” de Milja asked.

“I escaped,” the man said.

He sat with de Milja and Vlach in the apartment, a map of Rovno unfolded on the kitchen table. “From the central telephone exchange, which is here, there are three lines that leave Rovno.” He pointed, his hands cracked and peeling from working as a dishwasher in a restaurant. “The main line goes west, to Lutsk. Then we had a branch north, to Klesow, and one south, to Ostrog. From there a line went to Kiev— but it was often cut, or blocked. The Russians interfered any way they could.”

“And the wireless telegraph—is that something you knew about?” The man had been the regional accounting supervisor for the telephone system before the war.

“There were five stations,” he said.

“So if we disabled those, and cut the telephone lines—”

“They would use the military wireless. I don’t think you can silence them, sir.”

The prison guard had never liked his work. They paid him slave wages to sit on the lid of a garbage can, the way he saw it. But it was better than nothing, so he did what he had to do. A mean existence; everything had to be watched, saved, rationed: lightbulbs, soap, coal, meat. He’d never, not once, had a lot of something he liked. His kids were gone, had their own sorry lives. His wife was still with him, mostly the Church to thank for that, but whatever had once been inside her had died years ago. For himself, he sat in a bar after work and soaked up vodka until he was numb enough to go home. He would have liked, once he got older, to go back to the countryside where he’d been raised. Since the war you could buy a small farm, it didn’t take much, just more than he’d ever had.

So when the offer came, he didn’t say no. They’d probably watched him, the way he looked, the misery in his step. The old man who made the offer wasn’t such a bad sort. Polish, with the sharp cheekbones like they had sometimes. And educated, maybe very educated. “You’ve had enough bad weather,” the old man said. “Time to take a walk in the sunshine.” Then he mentioned an amount of money, and the guard just nodded.

“You don’t have to do anything,” the old man said. “Just draw what’s inside, the corridors and the offices and the cells, and show me how it’s numbered.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“They don’t tell me. It’s the Russians gave me this job.”

“Bandits. We have some of them locked up.”

“Just draw and number.”

“I’ll take care of it at home,” the guard said.

The old man put a sheet of paper and a pencil in front of him. “Why not right now? There’s nobody here.”

So the guard did it. And when his mind raced as he lay in bed that night—should he tell, could he sell the old man to the Germans, should he have demanded more money?—he realized that his childish drawing was as good as a signed confession. That scared him. So he hid the money under the mattress and kept quiet.

Vlach and de Milja shivered in the cold of the unheated garage. Outside the snow whispered down, the air frozen and still. Henryk was exactly as Vlach had described him, square-jawed and square-shouldered, sleeves and collar buttoned up. An honest man, not a crooked bone in his body. It just happened that he was a patriot, and the construction executives hadn’t really thought that through.

Henryk was lying on his back under a large German truck, working with a wrench. His face reddened as one of the rusty bolts refused to give, then squeaked, and turned. He pulled the muffler, laid it on the floor, and slid from beneath the truck, wiping his hands on a rag. “Start it up,” he said.

De Milja climbed into the cab and turned the key. The roar was deafening, it shook the windowpanes in the garage. Vlach appeared at the truck window, hands pressed against his ears, and de Milja had to read his lips even though he appeared to be shouting. “Turn, that, fucking, thing, off.”

In the silent apartment with the ticking clock, the sofas had been pushed back to the walls to make room on the floor. The doilies on the backs of the chairs were creased and stained where too many people had rested their heads, and the carpet, pale blue with a pattern of roses and vines, was also ruined, spotted with cosmoline and oil.

The armory was laid out on the rug: three Simonovs, three Russian PPD submachine guns—the pepecha, crude and lethal, named after the rhythm of its fire. Two German machine pistols, all-steel MP34s. Known as the Bergmann, the weapon had been manufactured outside German borders to evade the armament limits of the Treaty of Versailles. There were the two VIS automatics that accompanied de Milja from London, the ones with the Polish eagle on the slide, and four VIS automatics made since the German occupation— no eagle. There were two American Colt .45s. A Hungarian Gepisztoly 39M, a very fast machine pistol that fired Mauser Export cartridges. For hand grenades, they had the variety called Sidolowki— manufactured in clandestine ZWZ workshops and named after the cans of Sidol polish they resembled—logically, since the workshops were hidden in the Sidol factory.

The brothers were nineteen and seventeen, big and broad-shouldered and towheaded. They walked around Rovno all day looking for a candidate. They saw an SS major outside the movie theater—German romantic films and newsreels of the victorious Wehrmacht on the Russian front. An SS sergeant, extremely tall and thin, leaving a restaurant. Two SS corporals, ogling girls on the bridge over the small stream that ran through Rovno.

Then, late in the afternoon, they found another SS sergeant, of medium build, looking at the stills posted on the outside of the movie theater. After some consideration, he paid and went inside. They did too. He wandered down the aisle, they took seats near the back. Not much of an audience, mostly German soldiers on their off-duty hours. On the screen, a man in a tuxedo sitting in an elegant nightclub, speaking rapid German to a blond woman with tight curls and a black dress with a white bib collar. She looked down and bit her lip, he had smooth black hair and a thin mustache. The brothers didn’t speak much German but they could tell the man was apologizing.

The woman wasn’t really sure how she felt. She kept giving the man shy glances from beneath her dark eyelashes. I’m supposed to love darling Helmut—what could be the matter with me? is what she seemed to be saying to herself. Then, a commotion at the entrance to the room, where a maître d’ stood guard over a velvet rope. A handsome fellow wearing a yachting cap wanted to go down the steps but the burly waiters wouldn’t let him, and they struggled in front of some potted palms.

The SS sergeant came up the aisle and the older brother nudged the younger. They let some time lapse, then went into the men’s room. The SS sergeant was buttoning his fly. Up close, he was bigger than they’d thought. He had several medals and ribbons, and a scar on his forehead, but the brothers were practiced and adept and they had him strangled in short order. They stripped off his uniform and left him on the floor with his mouth wide open against the stained tile, still wearing the old green tie they’d used.

The Czarny prison, on Zamkova Street. Quiet enough in the late afternoon. The weather had warmed up, leaving the cobbles awash in wet, dirty slush. The prison had been built in 1878, a series of courtyards behind a wall, ten feet high, with plaster peeling off the granite block. The neighborhood was deserted. Boarded-up clothing store, a burned-out tenement: people avoided Zamkova Street. De Milja walked along briskly, as though he had business nearby. The windows visible from the street were opaque green glass covered by steel mesh— dungeon was the word that came to mind. A sentry box with a big swastika flag stood to one side of the main gate. An old woman in black came through the door in the gate, pulling her shawl up over her head, then folding her arms around herself for warmth. A large brown truck with its canvas top closed in back came rumbling down the street and rolled to a stop in front of the sentry box. The driver joked with the guard. He was German, while the guard, they knew, was part of a Latvian SS unit used for duty outside the cell blocks. Day-to-day supervision inside the prison was managed by local Ukrainian warders.

“Hey, you, what are you staring at?”

De Milja turned to see who it was. Two Germans in black-andsilver uniforms. De Milja smiled hesitantly and started to move away when one of them kicked him in the back of the leg. He fell hard, comically, his feet flying up in the air, into the cold slush. The Germans laughed and walked off. De Milja got to his feet and limped in the opposite direction.

26 November, 4:30 p.m.

The assault commando gathered in the apartment. Group One had four men—de Milja, Vlach, and two he’d never met until that night; one with the nom de guerre Kolya, in his twenties, lean and hard-eyed, and the other called Bron, the armorer, heavier and older with a deceptively soft face. Group Two, six men, was led by a ZWZ officer who had parachuted into the Lodz area in late October, formerly an officer in a special reconnaissance unit of the Polish army. He had a full beard and was known as Jan.

They all smoked nervously, looking at their watches, talking in low voices, going over the penciled maps of the prison again and again. Bron said, “I had better get busy,” stood up and left the room. One of Jan’s men was working the mechanism of a Bergmann machine pistol, the sound of the slide and lock, oiled steel on steel, cutting through the quiet voices. “Hey, Bron,” the man called to the armorer.

Bron came out of the kitchen; he was wearing underpants, his bare legs red from the cold, had a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth, and was buttoning up an SS sergeant’s tunic. “What is it?” he said.

The man worked the Bergmann bolt and said, “Is this right?”

“I had it apart this morning. It works.”

The man tried it one last time, then laid the weapon across his knees. De Milja looked at his watch, the minute hand was where it had been the last time he’d looked. His side hurt from where he’d fallen in the street the day before. Strong, that German. They liked to kick, it added insult to injury, the way they saw it, and they were good at it, probably from all the soccer they played.

“So?” Vlach said, and raised his eyebrows. He smiled a wise-guy smile, but his face was very white.

“Eleven of,” de Milja said.

Vlach didn’t answer. Somebody was tapping his foot rhythmically against the leg of the sofa. Bron came back in the room. Now in SS uniform, he put out the stub of one cigarette and lit another. De Milja stood. “It’s time to go,” he said. “Good luck to you all.” Two of the men crossed themselves. Jan adjusted a fedora in front of the hall mirror. De Milja opened the apartment door and the men flowed out quickly, automatic weapons held beneath overcoats, hats pulled down over their eyes.

One of the men in Jan’s unit patted de Milja on the shoulder as he went past and said, “Good luck.” A neighbor heard people in the hallway, opened his door a crack, then closed it quickly.

De Milja turned to look back into the dark apartment, then shut the door. On the doorframe was a pen-sized outline with two empty screw holes where something had been removed. De Milja knew that Jews often kept a metal device by their front doors, though he couldn’t remember what it was called. The people who had lived in the apartment had apparently taken it off, thinking perhaps that nobody would notice the outline where it had once been fastened.

With Bron driving, they looked like three Gestapo executives with an SS chauffeur. The Opel turned into Zamkova Street, almost dark at

5:00 p.m., an hour before the Rovno curfew, a few people hurrying home with heads down. The second Opel and the truck, Jan’s unit, continued on, heading for the entrance that led to the prison offices.

The first Opel pulled up to the sentry box. Bron opened the door, stood half in, half out of the front seat so the guard got a good look at the SS uniform. He started yelling orders in very fast German, angry and impatient and dangerous. The guard had seen such behavior before, and hastened to open the gate. The car shot through, then one of the civilians rolled out of the back and headed for the sentry box on the run. The guard was puzzled. The running man, Kolya, put an automatic pistol against his temple. “Hand over your weapon,” he said.

The Latvian guard did as he was told. Kolya emptied the chamber and the magazine and returned the rifle. “Now stand guard, do everything as usual,” he said, sitting down in the sentry box below the level of the window. He pressed the VIS against the base of the man’s spine. “As usual,” he said. The guard nodded.

The second Opel and the truck pulled into the street that ran perpendicular to Zamkova. Two ladders were taken from the truck and placed against the wall. The prison had been built to keep people from getting out—very little thought had been given to keeping them from getting in. As Jan’s unit climbed the ladders, the truck was driven fifty yards farther down the street and parked, its engine idling loud enough to cover the sound of gunfire from behind the prison wall.

The street sentry box was visible from the interior guard station, so Bron drove the Opel at normal speed, then stopped and shouted angrily in German. The guard didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. “What’s the matter?” he asked the SS sergeant. Dimly, he could see two men in civilian suits in the car—that meant important security types. Evidently the poor bastard driving the car had been bullied by his superiors—but why take it out on him? The SS sergeant sputtered and turned red. The guard shrugged and opened the gate. The car sped through, one of the men in civilian clothes got out and ran toward him.

Not right.

He went for his rifle.

De Milja readied himself, his fist tight on the door handle. The Opel jerked to a stop, he shoved the back door open and jumped out. All he could see of the Latvian guard was a pale face in the darkness. The face seemed puzzled, and faintly offended. Three paces from the sentry box their eyes locked, and everyone knew everything. The guard reacted, snatched for a rifle in the sentry box. De Milja brought the VIS up and pulled the trigger as he ran. It bent the guard in two, arms folded across his stomach. De Milja moved around him, took a moment to steady his hand, then shot him four times in the side of the head. The man dropped to his knees, then pitched forward on his face.

De Milja ran back to the car and climbed in. “All right, go to the next gate.”

Jan and three of his men climbed over the wall into the administrative courtyard of the prison. A trained commando, Jan had memorized every detail of the guard’s sketch. He looked around the courtyard and saw that each doorway and gate was where the map had said it was. A young clerk coming down the stairway from the prison office dropped an armload of files when he saw the machine pistols and the men in the hats with the brims pulled down. He choked off a yell, threw his hands in the air, stood absolutely still.

Jan opened a door at the top of the stairs. There were three more clerks—the German warden and his German assistant had separate offices at the end of the room. “Raise your hands,” Jan said. The clerks did as they were told. Two of Jan’s men pulled the Germans from their office chairs and stood them against a wall. The warden had been a Nazi streetfighter in the 1930s and the Rovno prison was his reward for faithful service. He’d put on weight since those days, and wore a fine suit, but he met Jan’s stare with defiance. “Are you Herr Kruger? The warden?” Jan asked.

“Yes.”

“Please give me the keys to blocks four and six.”

“I cannot.”

Jan raised the machine pistol so Kruger could look down the barrel. Kruger closed his eyes, pressed his lips closed, and drew himself up to his full height. The Hungarian weapon fired a heavy, high-velocity bullet; the warden was thrown back against the wall so hard the plaster cracked, and he left a long red smear as he slid to the floor.

Jan turned the weapon toward the assistant warden. “Please give me the keys to blocks four and six,” he said. The assistant trembled with fear but he would not give in. “Is that your answer?” Jan asked.

The man made a sound. Resistance? Assent? Jan shrugged and fired a long burst. The man screamed once before he died. One of the clerks yelled, “Here, here are keys. In this drawer. Take them, please.”

In a room down the corridor, a clerk hid behind a bank of filing cabinets. He heard gunfire, heard the assistant warden cry out, heard several minutes of silence, and carefully lifted the receiver off a telephone and held it to his ear, tapping the disconnect bar impatiently with his finger, but the line was dead.

A darkened courtyard bordered by cell blocks, cobblestones worn smooth by half a century of prisoners’ felt slippers. At the center, an iron grating sparkling with frost. De Milja and Vlach ran across the courtyard, bent low to the ground. They reached an entry marked South in Cyrillic and used the arched doorway as cover. Czarny prison was silent, the inmates forbidden to talk, so they could hear the jangle of keys as warders moved along the corridors, the idling truck on the other side of the wall, the high-low sirens of German and Ukrainian police in the streets of Rovno. A voice called, another answered, a third laughed—guards on one of the cell blocks. Then footsteps, three or four running men, and Jan and two others came out of the darkness.

“Everybody all right?” de Milja whispered.

Jan nodded. “We shot the wardens.”

“Keys?”

“Yes.”

Jan was breathing hard, he rummaged through a ring of keys, peering at the stamped markings. He removed two keys and handed them

to de Milja. “Block four,” he said.

“Good. We go out as planned.”

“No change. See you in better times.”

“Yes. See you then,” de Milja said.

De Milja turned the key and opened the grille that led to Block Four. It creaked when it opened, then clanged shut. A warder came around the corner and said, “Tomek?” Vlach had the machine pistol pressed against his chest before he knew what was happening. He gasped with surprise, dropped a wooden club with a clatter that echoed down the corridor. De Milja pulled the man’s arms behind him and wound a piece of wire around his wrists. He’d thought at first that the warder was a fat man, but he wasn’t. The muscles in his shoulders and back were massive, and the smell of him, like stale garlic, cut through the prison odor of open drains and crumbling stone.

“Prisoner Krewinski,” Vlach whispered.

“Which?”

“Krewinski.”

“Yes, wait. It’s that corridor. Second to the last, on the left. You see, I don’t give you a problem.”

“On the floor,” de Milja said.

The guard gave a nervous laugh, went to one knee, then both. “Like this? You see, sirs, no trouble from me.”

De Milja pushed him over on his side and began wiring his ankles together. “Sirs?” The guard’s voice was very high now. “You’re going to let men out of these cells, don’t leave me tied up here, I beg you.”

De Milja didn’t answer. He ripped the keys off the warder’s belt, held them in front of the man’s eyes, and began going through them. “Yes, there,” the man said. He was fading now—drifting toward death before anyone touched him, de Milja could see it.

The prisoners, in cells lining the twilit corridor, came to their barred doors and watched with curiosity: two men with weapons, moving quickly. No uniforms, no warder. For the moment, de Milja and Vlach ignored them. In the second cell from the end on the left, a man sat on a bed—a wood frame suspended from the wall by two chains. He was tall and wiry, with a mournful face and hair shaved to a colorless stubble—a hard head and soft eyes. He was clean-shaven, but a cavalry mustache would not have been out of place. Sergeant Krewinski, de Milja now saw. The man stared at de Milja and Vlach without much interest, they were only the most recent in a long line of men with guns who’d come for him.

“Are you Sergeant Krewinski?”

“Yes,” the man said—meaning if you like.

As the three left the cell block, the keys were passed to other prisoners. In Block Six, Jan and his group freed the two ZWZ officers, a group of Russian partisans, all the political prisoners, and the women in the adjoining wing. The pandemonium was just getting started when de Milja and Vlach and the sergeant reached the Opel. Ukrainian guards running for their lives, prisoners running out into the streets of Rovno. Some would escape, and police units would be busy for days. At the Zamkova Street intersection, they saw Jan’s truck, rocking from side to side as it sped away from the prison.

The Opel wound through the back alleys of Rovno—there were sirens now, as the attack on Czarny prison began to draw in security elements. They first dropped Kolya at a hideout, a room above a pharmacy. Then Vlach, on the outskirts of the city, at a lumberyard. A few miles down the road, the Opel stopped at the edge of a small village. Bron tapped the horn three times and an ancient farm truck rolled out of a snow-covered lane. The driver of the truck joined Bron in the Opel, they waved good-bye, and drove off in the direction of Rovno. De Milja and the sergeant sat in the cab of the truck, changed into sheepskin jackets, old boots, and new identity papers.

They waited until dawn, then in first light headed for the Razakavia band in the farmhouse at the edge of the forest. De Milja never went more than twenty miles an hour—the tires were old and battered, the road ice over frozen mud, and patches of ground fog turned the windshield white. As they drove along, Krewinski told his story. “The NKVD sergeant, the man whose dog had been sick, he came to the wire one day and told me, ‘You go to Moscow, to the training school, because if you stay here, well . . .’ I understood what he meant. I never saw him again, but he saved my life. The major who had run my regiment was still in the camp at that time, and he told me how to go about it. He was a reserve officer, a chemist from Lodz, an important man.

“Well, it was just like he said it would be. I asked for a book about communism, and I read it and I discussed it with a guard. A political type called me into his office, and he gave me another book. That went on for a month or two, then they moved me to a separate part of the camp, and they left a gate open.” Krewinski laughed. “I’d been told they would do that, and they did. I ignored it. Then, a week later, the provocateur. A little man that worked around the office. Came to me and said, ‘I know your game. Let’s you and me work together and get ourselves out of here.’”

“What did you do?”

“Went directly to the camp commandant and turned him in. And that really seemed to make a difference, that earned their trust. About two weeks later I went east.

“It was a kind of school. On Arbat Street, in an old mansion. And also at the university. A school for guerrilla fighting. Nothing like that in Poland—oh, maybe for officers, but not for an enlisted man like me. They had all kinds of people there, from everywhere in Europe—we could barely talk to one another. Estonians and Lithuanians and Hungarians, Frenchmen and Belgians. All kinds. They taught us how to blow up a train, how to ambush a column. But they also spent time on political matters—putting out a newspaper, and getting it into people’s hands; by leaving it on trains, or mailing it to addresses in the phone-book. They taught assassination. How to force peasants to fight for you, how to infiltrate organizations. Then, in August, after the German attack on Russia, they dropped me by parachute into the Tsuman forest. I was to search out a certain band, and work to bring them under the control of the Znamensky Street center—the GRU—in Moscow.”

“What happened?”

“I went home,” Krewinski said. “It wasn’t that simple or easy, and it took time and luck, but that’s what I did.”

They reached the farm at dusk, were given something to eat, the sergeant spent some time with his brother, then they were given blankets and taken to a hayloft on the second floor of an old stone stable. There they fell into a dead sleep, awakened at 5:00 a.m. when German antipartisan units and Ukrainian militia, acting on a tip from an informer, attacked the farm.

They got very close, killing the sentries silently as they came. Three hundred of them, Ukrainian militia led by a special SS unit—men imprisoned for poaching game in Germany recruited to hunt humans, partisans, in the forests of Poland.

It was a hand grenade that woke Captain de Milja.

It blew a hole in the corner of the stable and set the beams on fire. By the flickering light he saw militia running across a frozen pond. He kicked himself free of his blanket and ran to a window, Simonov in hand. Down below, on the ground floor of the stable, some of the partisans were shouting to one another, trying to organize a defense. But the guards out in the forest were lying in the leaves with their throats cut, and it was too late to organize much of anything.

The Germans had a heavy machine gun in the woods. They traversed window to window across the outbuildings, the main house, then the stable. Only Frantek’s final cry alerted de Milja to the gunfire and he dove below the sill just as it reached him. He crawled over to help, but Frantek simply stared at him upside down, eyes wide, a look of indignation frozen on his face.

Sergeant Krewinski knew how to do these things. He waited until the machine gun moved to the next building, then fired a long burst at its muzzle flare with a machine pistol. This occasioned a change of gunners—a few moments of reorganization, but nothing more. By then, the fire in the beams had taken hold and it was getting hard to see, and to breathe, on the upper floor. One of the defenders from down below rushed halfway up the stairway, yelled something, then tumbled, dead weight, back down. A moment later a rifle was poked up from the stairs and fired blind. A partisan reached down and pulled it up, a very surprised Ukrainian hanging on the other end. The sergeant shot him. Then Krewinski and de Milja exchanged a certain look—the time we always knew would come has come—and led the others on the second floor in running down the open stairway. Nobody really wanted to burn to death in a stable. Krewinski was shot, but the impulse turned out to have been a good one. There were only five or six militia gathered at the foot of the stairway. Triumphant— blood on the walls, dead militia, dead partisans—but undermanned, a successful attack that had spent its strength en route.

Two Ukrainians leaped on de Milja—partisans taken alive were worth gold to the Germans. He fell over backward under the weight but had had the foresight to jump with a VIS in his hand, so he shot each one in the abdomen and they rolled off him in a hurry. He struggled to his feet, saw Krewinski staggering around with blood on his shirt, grabbed him by the collar and pulled him outside.

Into a cloud of hot, black smoke from the burning farmhouse. They both went flat. The smoke made it hard to breathe, but it gave them a moment’s camouflage, a moment to think. De Milja, VIS in one hand, Krewinski’s collar in the other, decided to crawl into the farmhouse, hoping that Razakavia, or somebody, was holding out there.

It was deserted, except for Kotior. He had been wounded. Badly. He was sitting on a couch holding a light machine gun by its tripod, the feeder belt snaked around his shoulders, the barrel pointed at the front door. His face was white, he would not live much longer. “Out the back door,” he said. “They have retreated.”

“Good-bye, Kotior,” de Milja said.

“Good-bye,” Kotior said.

He dragged Krewinski toward the back door, was almost there when a shadow flew at him from behind an overturned table. He swung the VIS, then saw it was the Jewish woman who had given him tea one morning when he’d first arrived in the forest. “I ask you to shoot me,” she said formally.

He had no time to think about it. Krewinski’s weight was beginning to pull hard, not a good sign. The woman put her hands on his forearm. “Please,” she said. “I don’t want to be tortured.” She was right, the militia liked the screams of women. He pointed the VIS at her forehead, she looked at him, closed her eyes, then lifted her face.

But he couldn’t. His hand would not kill her. “No,” he said. “Come with me.” He dragged Krewinski forward and she followed, holding on to his shirt in the billowing smoke.

The truck.

De Milja had driven it a little way into the forest the night before, now it saved their lives.

The starter failed, four or five times, then he forced himself to a slow and determined effort, pulled the choke out where it belonged, and babied the truck to life. It sputtered and coughed, but it did not die. It took all his strength to ease the big clutch up slowly enough not to stall the engine, his teeth ground with effort and concentration, but he did it. The truck crawled forward, slow but steady, moving down a narrow path into the forest. Branches broke off against the windshield, the wheels climbed over downed logs and rocky outcrops. Occasionally the tires spun on the ice, de Milja let some air out and that enabled them to grip better, somehow finding traction on the frozen earth.

He saw Razakavia once more.

A few miles west of the farmhouse the forest divided—low hills rising from either bank of a small river. De Milja took the right fork, then, an hour after sunrise, found himself on a section of road where foresters had long ago built a corduroy track of cut logs. He stopped the truck to let the engine cool down and there, three hundred yards away, his horse moving at a brisk walk along the bank of the frozen river, was Razakavia.

A scout, riding well in advance of the main party, disappeared into the trees as de Milja watched. The main body of riders was strung out a long way, some of them riding double, many of them slumped over, perhaps wounded, certainly exhausted. Razakavia rode at the front, his white hair and beard stark against the gray-green forest, a rifle slung across his back.

They stopped at midday. There was still gasoline in the truck, and the corduroy track had continued without interruption. Perhaps they had happened on one of the vast estates owned by the Polish nobility in the nineteenth century, the road maintained by the count’s foresters for the use of wagons during the hunting season.

The woman he had saved had told him her name was Shura. She had, since they’d fled the burning farmhouse, tried to make Krewinski comfortable as best she could, but at last she said to de Milja, “I think now we must stop for a little time.”

He knew what she meant, and turned off the engine. “Thank you,” Krewinski whispered, grateful for a few moments of peace. The slow, jolting progress of the truck over the log road had been agony for him, though he had never once complained. When the ignition was turned off, the forest was immediately a very different place. Cold and clean, with a small wind; quiet except for the creak of frozen branches. With Shura’s help he settled Krewinski on the matted pine needles beneath a tree and covered him with an old blanket they’d found on the seat of the truck. When Shura tucked the blanket beneath his chin Krewinski closed his eyes and smiled. “Much better,” he said.

He went to sleep, and a half-hour later he was gone. There was no question of burial in the frozen ground, so they folded his hands on his chest and scratched his name on a rock and set it by his head as a gravestone.

Contrary to de Milja’s fears, the truck started, and moved forward along the corduroy road. The loss of Krewinski hurt—a life that should have continued. And de Milja wondered at the cost of the rescue when he considered the result. Nonetheless, in its own terms, the operation had succeeded. Olenik had been specific: they wanted the sergeant, but, if that proved impossible, they wanted the sergeant’s story. Well, that at least they would have, if he managed to get back to Warsaw. He was, he calculated, a hundred miles southeast of the town of Biala, and from there it was another hundred and twenty-five miles to Warsaw.

In a leather passport case he had two pairs of railroad tickets—for himself and Krewinski—along with the necessary documents for travel from the Rovno area to Biala, and from there on to Warsaw. His papers were good, and he had money in various forms. But he had no water, no food, and no gasoline. He had a pistol with three rounds, and no idea what he was going to do with the woman sitting next to him. He stared at her a moment. Wrapped in a long black coat and a black shawl, she sat up properly, back straight, bounced around by the motion of the truck.

Even wearing the shawl like a Ukrainian peasant—drawn across the brow so that it hid the hairline—she had a certain look; curved nose, dark eyes, thick eyebrows, and shadowy, somber skin. Someone who could have blended into the Byelorussian or Ukrainian population would not have been a problem, but Shura looked exactly like what she was, a Jew. And in that part of the world, people would see it. The forest bands preyed on Jews, especially on Jewish women. And the only alternative to the forest was a railway system crawling with SS guards and Gestapo. De Milja knew they would demand papers at every stop.

“Shura,” he said.

“Yes?” Her voice seemed resigned, she knew what this was about.

“What am I to do with you?”

“I do not know,” she said.

“Do you have identity papers?”

“I burned them. Better to be a phantom than a Jew.”

“A family?”

“They were forced into the ghetto, in Tarnopol. After that, I don’t know. By accident I wasn’t there the day the Germans came, and I fled to the forest with my cousin—he was seventeen. Razakavia agreed to take us in. I cooked, carried water, made myself useful any way I could. My cousin was killed a few weeks later, during an attack on a German train.”

“I’m sorry,” de Milja said. “And were you married, in Tarnopol?”

“No. And no prospects—though I suppose eventually something would have been arranged. They sent me away to study music when I was twelve years old. They thought I was a prodigy. But I wasn’t. So then, I had to do something respectable, and I became a piano teacher. A bad piano teacher, I should add. Children mostly didn’t like me, and I mostly didn’t like them.” They rode in silence for a time. “See?” she said. “I am everything you ever dreamed of.”

She let him know, without saying it directly, that he could have her if he liked, she would not resist. But that wasn’t what he wanted—a woman taken by some right of sanctuary. Still, by the time it was dark that night it was evident they they would have to sleep holding each other or die. They lay on the seat of the truck in each other’s arms, the blanket wrapped around them, the windows closed tight and clouded over with their breath. Outside, the November moon—the hunter’s moon—was full, a cold, pale light on the frozen river.

A clear night, the million stars were silver. She was warm to hold, her breath on his temple. When she dreamed, her hands moved. It brought him memories, the embrace with Shura. Long ago. The girls of his twenties. His wife. He missed love, he wondered if war had made it impossible for him. In the drift of his mind he paused on what it would be like to slide her skirt up to her waist. He sighed, shifted his weight, the springs creaked. Where the cold, sharp air touched his skin it actually hurt, and he pressed his face against her shoulder. Sometimes she slept, and sometimes he did.

The road ended.

They let the truck roll down the hill—a foot at a time, it took forever—and out onto the gray ice of the river. They managed five or six miles an hour that way, headed east of north by his calculations. They discovered a tiny settlement on the shore, pole-built docks coated with ice in the morning sun. They bought some black bread and salt from a woman who came down to the river to stare at them. From an old ferryman they bought a jar to melt ice in so they could have water. “Brzesc nad Bugiem” he said, pointing north. Brest Litovsk. He smiled and rubbed his whiskers. They were on, he told them, a tributary of the river Bug.

The gray clouds came in that afternoon and a white fog rose off the ice. Now they drove even slower, because it was hard to see. He worried about fuel, but the truck had a large tank, and a hundred miles wasn’t too much to ask of it when they could only go a few miles an hour.

Then there were no more settlements. The rise of the hills above them grew steep, the woods thicker, no trails to be seen. And the river narrowed with every mile. Finally, when it was only ten feet wide, the ice changed. The truck wouldn’t go anymore. The tires spun, the engine roared, and the back slid sideways, but that was all. Slipping on the ice, they tried to pile sticks beneath the back wheels. But the truck would not go forward. “So,” Shura said. She meant it was finished, but she was glad they had tried it. What awaited them was at least peaceful, no more than going to sleep. He agreed. For him it was enough that somebody was there, that he would not have to be alone.

He turned off the ignition. The sky was fading above the hills, night was an hour away. It was colder now, much colder. They lay down on the seat and held each other beneath the worn blanket. “I am so cold,” she said. The wind that night made it even colder, but the fog blew away, and a vast white moon rose above the hillside. A field of reeds sparkled with frost, and they saw a wolf, a gray shadow trotting along the river. It stopped and looked at them, then went on, pads silent on the ice. At last the world has frozen, he thought. A winter that would never end.

They tried in every way not to go to sleep, but they were very tired, and there was nothing more they could do. She fell asleep first, then him.

The truck stood silent on the ice. A few flakes of snow drifted down, then more. The cloud began to gather and the moon faded away until there was hardly any light at all. The snow fell heavier now, hissed down, a white blanket on the river, and the hills, and the truck.

He woke up suddenly. The window of the truck was opaque, and it was not so cold as it had been. He touched her, but she did not move. Then he held his hand against her face, and she stirred, actually managed a smile, putting her hand on top of his.

“We’re going,” he said.

She opened one eye.

He didn’t move his hand. “Shura, look at the window,” he said. “Sometimes you can’t drive on ice. But you can drive on snow.”

They drove through the war that night, but it didn’t want them just then.

They saw panzer tanks and armored cars positioned on a bridge. An SS officer, a dark silhouette leaning on the railing, watched the truck as it passed beneath him, but nothing happened. A few miles north of there a village had been burned down, smoke still rising from the charred beams. And twice they heard gunfire, machine gun answering machine gun, tracer rounds in the darkness like sparks blown across the sky.

Sometimes the snow fell in squalls; swirling, windblown. Then it cleared, the clouds rolling east, the frozen river shimmering in the moonlight. De Milja drove with both hands gripping the wheel, coaxing the truck along the ice, riding the snow that gave them traction. Shura pointed out a small road that led up a hill from the river; perhaps an abandoned ferry crossing. De Milja stopped the truck and climbed the hill. He found a well-used dirt road and an ancient milestone that pointed the way to Biala.

It took a long time to get the truck off the river. De Milja and Shura knelt by the tires and studied the surface like engineers, finally building a track of branches to the edge of the shore. It worked. Engine whining, wheels spinning, the truck lurched, swayed sideways, then climbed.

Once on the upper road, de Milja let the engine idle while he got his breath back. “Where are we?” Shura asked.

“Not far from Biala. A few hours, if nothing goes wrong.” He eased the clutch into first gear, moved off slowly on the rutted road.

Midnight passed, then 1:00 a.m. They drove through snow-covered forest, boughs heavy and white bent almost to the ground. Shura fell into an exhausted sleep, then woke suddenly as they bounced over a rock. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to abandon you.”

“I’m all right,” de Milja said.

“I should have helped to keep you awake. I can sing something, if you like.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I can discuss—oh, well certainly music. Chopin. Or Rachmaninoff.”

The engine steamed as the truck climbed a long hill. At the crest, de Milja braked gently to a stop. They were on a wooded height above Biala. Directly below, a poor neighborhood at the edge of town. Crooked one-story houses, crooked dirt streets, white with frost. Wisps of wood smoke hung above the chimneys in the still air. De Milja drove the truck to the side of the road and turned off the ignition. “Now we wait for dawn, for the end of the curfew. Then we can go into the open-air market with the produce trucks from the countryside. Once we get there we can make contact with the local ZWZ unit—our luck, it’s a good one. Very good. They’ll move us the rest of the way, into Warsaw. In a freight train, maybe. Or hidden in a vegetable wagon.”

They sat and stared out the window. It seemed very quiet with the engine off.

“Perhaps it would be best if I stayed here,” Shura said.

“You know somebody here?”

“No.”

“You wouldn’t last long.”

“No, probably not. But at least . . .”

“You’d have it over with?” De Milja shook his head angrily. “No, no. That isn’t right. We’ll hide you,” he said. “Not in the ghetto— somewhere in Warsaw, one of the working-class neighborhoods. With friends of ours. It won’t be easy, but if you’re able to stay in the apartment, if you avoid people, in other words if you can live in hiding, you’ll survive. You’ll need some luck, but you’ll see the end of the war.”