The Polish Officer

LEZHEV’S LAST DAY

Was the third of June, 1940.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My valise, dark-eyes. Quick.

It’s under your bed.

There’s nothing in there,

and nothing to pack,

but I take it along.

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

They were going to kill him.

But maybe not.

On his rounds that night, in Le Chasseur Vert and the Jean Bart out in the Russian seventeenth arrondissement and Petrukhov’s place up in Pigalle, he felt the life force surge inside him. He laid some little glovemaker’s assistant among the mops and brooms in Petrukhov’s storeroom. Tossed his last francs out on the zinc bars as a rich slice of émigré Paris got drunk on his money and told him what a fine fellow he was. Sometime near dawn he was with the acmeist playwright Yushin, too plastered to walk any farther, propped on a wall and staring down into the Seine by the Alexandre III bridge.

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

Lezhev belched, and nodded vigorously. Yushin was right.

“Remember the Cossacks chased you?”

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

“How you ran!”

“Mm!”

“Still, they didn’t catch you.”

“No.”

“Well, there it is.”

“You’re right.”

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

“Well said!”

“You think so?”

“Yes.”

“You’re kind to say that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7 June 1940. Boulogne-Billancourt cemetery.

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

Doz’vidanya, Boris Ivanovich.

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

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

“Madame Beilis, my sympathies.”

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

“A friend of Monsieur Lezhev?” she asked.

“Unfortunately, no.”

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

“An associate of Monsieur Pavel,” he said.

Oh.

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

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

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

“There’s a bench-” the man said.

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

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

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

“Yes. I like that church.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It is over, then.”

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

“But France will fight on.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Fucking German pigs,” Vyborg said quietly, with resignation. “The local bully-boys-come Friday night and they beat up the neighbors. Which is why, I guess, the French and the Poles have always been friends; they share the problem.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paris dying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes?” de Milja said.

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

“Where is that, please?”

“At the Prefecture of Police.”

“Could you identify yourself?”

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

“Come in,” de Milja said.

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

“I’m just a tenant,” de Milja said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Inside.”

“Let’s go.”

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

Au revoir.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What friend?”

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

“A priest? You?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Us?”

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

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

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

“Why do you say that?”

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

“That’s the recommended way.”

“But you don’t care.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And now the news. .”

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

When it was over, another symphony.

16 July 1940. Banque Nationale de Commerce, Orléans. 11:30 A.M.

Was he French?

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

Not French.

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

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

“Bonjour, Monsieur,” said the man.

Not French.

“And you are Monsieur-?”

“Lezhev. Boris Lezhev.”

“Very well, and you will require?”

“A safe-deposit box, Monsieur.”

“You’ve moved recently to Orléans?”

“Yes, sir.”

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

“The least thick, would be best.”

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

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

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

“Thank you, Monsieur,” said the Russian.

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

Barbarian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Wine and friendship?” the poet Lezhev offered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mine?” Lezhev’s smile was tart.

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

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

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

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

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

“No? Then what?”

“I, ah, put some things on canvas.”

“You paint.”

“I try, sometimes. .”

“Portraits? Nudes?”

“Country scenes.”

“Now that is difficult.”

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

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

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

“Please forgive the intrusion,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t,” Lezhev said.

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

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

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

“This week, perhaps?”

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

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

“Yes.”

“Careful with him, Alexander.”

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

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

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

“Ach yes, I suppose it is.”

“Every day something new?” Lezhev said.

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

“Well then, tomorrow it’s your turn.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You won’t notice.”

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

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

“My God,” Freddi Schoen whispered in awe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But, otherwise, what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A few weeks.”

“Perhaps the English planes can win.”

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

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

There was no answering that.

“It’s hot,” she said. “I smell.”

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

“Why does it do that?”

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

“What about these?”

“Silk.”

He slid her panties down.

“You like that?” she said.

“Yes.”

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

“Well, this French girl.”

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

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

“Yes.”

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

“Alexander?”

“Yes?”

“Should we go to Switzerland?”

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

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

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

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

“Really? You like those sorts of things?”

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

“Lezhev, you must help me.”

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

“Of course. What is it?”

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

“Bravo.”

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

“You are smitten.”

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

“She is French?”

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

“Problem?”

“Well, here is what happened. I arrived late, and very excited. I had just taken a country estate; a lovely place and, great good luck for me, an open lease, so I can have it as long as I like. The owner was most accommodating. So naturally I talked about it at the dinner-where it was, and how old, and the river-and she was delighted. ‘Ah, les collines d’Artois, mais qu’elles sont belles!’ she said. So I said, ‘But you must come and see it.’ And I could tell she wanted to but there was, how to say, a momentary sense of frost in the air. Then I realized! For me to ask her there alone would be most awkward, but with friends. . So quickly I added that a couple I knew was coming on Sunday, wouldn’t she join us for lunch? And Mama and Papa too, I insist! But no, as soon as they heard there was another couple, they were occupied. So, now. .”

“We’re the couple.”

“You must say yes!”

“Yes. And with pleasure.”

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

“Perfect.”

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

“A natural situation.”

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

“Boulogne?”

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

“What’s it like?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I saw it!” Genya Beilis cried out.

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

19 August, Banque Nationale de Commerce, Orléans.

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

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

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

He knocked.

“Yes?”

“Monsieur Gris. From Lille.”

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

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

“Seventeen,” she said.

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

He indicated that he understood.

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

“How did you come?”

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

“With the suitcase in hand.”

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

“Where were you in Poland?”

“Lodz. I came to France as a courier, then we fled on the ship Batory, from Bordeaux. On the twenty-second of June, after the surrender. We were the last ship to leave France.”

“What name do I call you?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

“Expensive, such things.”

“We know.”

“Could be fifteen thousand francs.”

“Maybe nine.”

“Fifteen, I think I said.”

“Eleven, then.”

“What money?”

“French francs.”

“We like those American dollars.”

“Francs is what we have.”

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

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

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

They used what they had:

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re confident of your numbers?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s the key.”

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

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

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

“Four thousand ships. That’s it?”

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

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

“And the date?”

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

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

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

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

“How do you know?” Fedin asked.

“We built them, is how.”

Back to Paris. Back to Janina.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sent 807 449.

Hello, Janina.

But not here. In the Hôtel Bretagne, the dial moved up to 49 meters.

Sent 264 962-sent it several times, the way operators transmitted call signs until their base acknowledged. A false call sign, in essence, that actually said: now we can talk.

551 223. London agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then he listened.

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

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

The desk was vast, and contained his weapons.

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

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

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

236 775 109 805 429

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

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

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

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

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

4 September, 6:30 P.M., Calais railroad station.

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

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

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

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

De Milja smiled ruefully.

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

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

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

“A few days,” de Milja said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Papers, please.”

They handed them over.

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

“French citizen.”

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

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

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

“All of it?”

“You heard me.”

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

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

“Where do you go there?”

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

“French orphans eat Vienna sausage?”

“For the sisters, I think. The nuns.”

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

“Load it up,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 September, 9:26 P.M.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But not in London, we hope.”

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

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

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

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

“Leftenant Schillich,” said a youthful voice.

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

“Starting at Caulaincourt, now,” Schillich announced.

From the speaker: 562 511

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

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

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

From the receiver: 335.

Then 428.

Then silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was.

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

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

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

7 September, 2:30 P.M.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now it was the sixteenth arrondissement.

Now it was the Café du Jardin.

Now the adjacent cemetery was in Passy.

Ghouls, she thought.

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

“Yes.”

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

“No,” de Milja said.

“They care?”

“No.”

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

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

De Milja sipped the Calvados.

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

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

Gold in hand, it turned out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So this was his kill.

It would have been suicide to try for Westende, so he’d settled for Nieuwpoort, to see what he could see. And here it was. Some of the dead were burned-perhaps a ship had been hit. Perhaps several ships. Invasion troops, from the packs and all the other equipment-the Germans had put on a dress rehearsal for a landing on the beaches of Britain.

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

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

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

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

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

15 September.

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

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

The time had come.

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

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

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

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

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

“Do they know why?” de Milja asked.

“No.”

“What can he tell them?”

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

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

Fedin and de Milja left the house, walked to a café, telephoned another café. In silence, they drank coffee for an hour, then an ambulance pulled up outside. The driver joined them, ordered a marc, opened a newspaper. GERMAN STRENGTH AND FRENCH CULTURE TO INSPIRE NEW EUROPE, read the headline, quoting a French minister.

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

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

Fedin handed over a stack of franc notes.

“What are you moving?” the driver asked.

“Hams,” Fedin said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

“How was it?”

“Not so good.”

“Really?”

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

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

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

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

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

And what was that warehouse across the street?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“If the water stays calm.”

“What about the Royal Navy?”

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

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

The first British attack came at 10:15.

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

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

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

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

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

“What. .?”

De Milja didn’t answer.

The second British attack came at 11:16.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then wait.

“Your things,” de Milja said.

“Sir?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good heavens!

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

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

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

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

Higbee had actually hit something.

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

Now you could see Calais.

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

25 October 1940.

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

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

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

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

De Milja said they would.

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

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

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

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

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

“Freddi.” De Milja smiled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And you,” he said.

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

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

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

She laughed. “I’ve got what I want.”

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

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

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