The Polish Officer

ROOM 9

20 October 1939. Bucharest, Romania.

Now the war was over, a pleasant autumn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Helena,” he said.

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

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

A little shrug, a wry smile.

“Have you seen soldiers? Russian soldiers?”

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

“Was anyone. . hurt?”

“No.”

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

“Enough to eat?”

She nodded yes.

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

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

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

Her eyes wandered. What did he want?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He shook his head, defeated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But you always. .”

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

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

On the train back to Warsaw he made a mistake.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

23 October, Warsaw. Saint Stanislaus Hospital.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No questions,” de Milja said.

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

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

“Aren’t you something to Eugeniusz Ostrow?”

“Nephew, sir.”

“Which side?”

“My mother’s family.”

“Ah. The countess.”

“Yes, sir.”

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

“A sheep, I believe it was, sir.”

“In diplomatic sash.”

“Yes, sir.”

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

“A laundress, sir.”

“My God, yes! He married her.”

“A large, formal wedding, sir.”

The woman called Agata cleared her throat.

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

“I was.”

“In mathematics?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How’d you do?”

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

“Tossed out?”

“Not quite. Almost.”

“And then?”

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

“Where was that?”

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

“Three years, it says here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So you speak the language.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And German?”

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

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

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you know Captain Grodewicz?”

“Yes, sir.”

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

“Sir?”

“Zwiazek Odwety. Reprisal. You understand?”

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

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

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

“What is he doing?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To the Brave People of Poland

Greetings from your British allies. We are

flying over your troubled land tonight to

let you know that you are not forgotten.

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

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

leaflets. Until then, keep your chin up, and

give the Germans hell any way you can.

Long live Poland!

Tenth Bomber Wing

RAF

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

Yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

De Milja smiled. “Not so bad. You?”

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

“I think you should join them.”

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

“But Hungary is safe, you think.”

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

“And the house?”

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

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

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

De Milja nodded yes.

“Are you anything important?”

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

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

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

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

“What is it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Through Sonya.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What about the neighbors?”

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

He believed her. “And him?”

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

“What did you imagine?”

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

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

“Are you in touch with the Gestapo?”

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

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

“We can stop the interrogation,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chomak shrugged. “Inevitable,” he said.

“Why do you say that?”

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

“Really? How do you know?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What did you say?”

“Face the wall.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it was cold, always cold.

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

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

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

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

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

What?

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

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

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

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

Wizna, on the Narew River, 7 March 1940. Encampment of the Nineteenth Infantry Division, Grenadierregiment, Wehrkreis XIV, Kassel. 5:30 A.M. The floodlights were turned out and the dawn fog pooled at the bases of the barbed-wire stanchions. The Russian troops were camped on the other side of the river; when they ran the engines of their tanks, the Wehrmacht soldiers could hear them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The chemist and the commodity analyst.

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

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

No change.

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

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

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

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

No change.

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

“Hard to believe that,” Broza said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And this spring?”

“France.”

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

“Yes,” de Milja said.

Broza shook his head. It wasn’t possible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Germans didn’t like it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

De Milja leaped up and ran for his life.

He almost got away with it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not much.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I didn’t, no.”

“Biochemist. One of the best in Europe.”

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

“Yes. 1923 to 1926.”

“And your French is fluent?”

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

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

“The answer is yes,” de Milja said.

The major acknowledged his response with a polite nod.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“New man?” the sergeant said.

“Unh-huh,” said the teenager.

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

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

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

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

“Thank you,” de Milja said.

“Are those glasses false?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nothing.”

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

“Where do you think?”

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

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

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

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

“When do I go out?” de Milja asked.

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

Two men in working clothes arrived before dawn. They handed de Milja an old greasy shirt, overalls, and cap. De Milja shivered when he put them on. One of the men took coal dust from a paper bag, mixed it with water, and rubbed it into de Milja’s face and hands. Then they gave him a shovel to carry and walked him through the wire gates to the dock area. A German customs official, glancing at de Milja’s pass to the port, held himself as far away as possible, his lip curled with distaste.

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

“Yes.”

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

It was seventy hours to Stockholm.

The deck plates sweated with condensation and acid coal-water dripped steadily and soaked him to the skin. At first, discomfort kept him alert-he turned and twisted, wet, miserable, and mad. But that didn’t last. With the steady motion of the ship and the beat of the engines, the black darkness and the cold, dead air, de Milja fell into a kind of stupor. It was not unpleasant. Rather the reverse. He drifted down through his life, watched certain moments as they floated by. He saw dead leaves on a path in the forest in the Volhynia, his feet kicking them as he walked along, a little girl who’d come to stay with a neighbor that summer, a kiss, more than that. It made them giggle. This silly stuff-what did adults see in it? He had no idea he was dying, not for the longest time. Heavy snow fell past a window in Warsaw, Madame Kuester looked over her shoulder into a mirror, a red mark where he’d held her too tightly. He said he was sorry, she shrugged, her expression reflective, bittersweet. It must be time to sleep, he thought, because at last he did not feel the cold. He was relieved. His wife jammed her hands in the pockets of her coat, stood at the shore of the lake as evening came on. She looked a little rueful, that was all. If you stood far enough back, the world wasn’t frightening. It wasn’t anything. In the end, you were a little sad at what went on. Really, it ought to be better. Casement window at the manor house, the first gleam of the sun at the rim of a hill, two dogs trotting out of the forest onto the wet grass of the lawn. Finally, he became aware, for a moment, of what was happening. He did what he could-took long, deep breaths. Coal, he thought. Sulfur, carbon monoxide, confined space, red blood cells. It was all very confusing. One painful stab of regret: a crumpled body, Polish stowaway found on a mound of coal in a Swedish freighter. Captain Alexander de Milja hated that idea, simply one more senseless, muted death in time of war. He lay on his back at the foot of a poplar tree and looked up as the wind rattled the little leaves.

Every summer had one perfect day.

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