The Polish Officer

PARIS NIGHTS

Now he was valuable.

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

No improvisation now.

Now he was the Poles have someone in Paris, also known as I can’t tell you how I know this, or forgive me, Colonel, but I must ask you to leave the room. Or maybe he was Proteus or whatever code name they’d stuck on him-he was not to know. This kind of attention made him uncomfortable. First of all it was dangerous-he had learned, since 1939, how not to be noticed, so it had become second nature with him to fade away from attention, and he’d gotten so he could sense it feeling for him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How, please.”

“Influenza.”

De Milja was again unable to speak.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Three, did you say?”

“Yes.”

“Then what made them quit?”

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

“Can that really happen?”

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

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

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

“Freddi Schoen.”

“Dead.”

“Jünger, the Wehrmacht staff officer.”

“Transferred. In Germany at the OKW headquarters.”

“Traudl von Behr.”

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

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

“Be absolutely certain,” Vyborg said.

De Milja nodded that he was.

12 January 1941.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, that’s true,” Stein said.

“Gentlemen,” said the notary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Pale blue, flecked with gold.”

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

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

Suddenly, their eyes met. And met.

“. . a jabot. . and. . festoon. .”

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

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

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

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

Thursday night. Chez Tolo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A celebration tonight,” Stein said.

“Oh?” said the count.

“I became, today, a charbonnier.”

“You did?”

“Yes.”

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

“Absolutely, you may depend on it.”

“A Polack!”

“Exactly!”

“Stein?”

“Yes?”

“You’re an amusing fellow.”

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

“Nineteen ten.”

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

“Yes? It’s your guess?”

“My certain knowledge!”

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

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

Success purchased investment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8 March 1941.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Exactly?” de Milja said.

“In good weather, close to it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Four, perhaps. Six altogether.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Again she’s right,” de Milja said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Mademoiselle Herault?” he asked the clerk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What then?”

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

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

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

“Did he fit in?”

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

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

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

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

“Who?”

“My little clerk.”

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

“By design?”

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

“Yes.”

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

“And in bed, he tells her things?”

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

“But Veronique continues.”

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

“Yes.”

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

De Milja nodded sympathetically.

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

“What is that?”

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

“How do you know these things?”

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

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

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

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

And Captain Alexander de Milja spent it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Monsieur Stein?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brasserie Heininger. 11:30.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“In business?”

“Jah, jah. Business, all right.”

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

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

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

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

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

She looked confused. “In beauty salon?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

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

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

“Death ray?” Madame Roubier said.

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

“Marconi,” Labarthe prompted.

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

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

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

“Mesdames. . et. . monsieurs!”

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

The headwaiter appeared at Stein’s chair.

“Yes?” Stein said.

“A telephone call for you, Monsieur.”

The phone was on a marble table in an alcove by the men’s toilet. “Stein,” he said into the receiver. But the line just hissed, there was nobody on the other end.

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

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

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

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

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

“Where?”

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

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

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

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

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

“What happened?” Madame Roubier said.

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

“Yes, of course.”

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

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

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

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

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

“The church?”

The young man nodded and walked away quickly.

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

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

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

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

“Vassily Alexandrovich. .”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

17 April. 3:20 A.M. West of Bourges.

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

Jeanne-Marie whispered a curse beneath her breath.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Better without them?” de Milja asked.

“Oh yes, no question of that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once again, on local trains to Vannes.

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

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

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

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

“No, thank you.”

“Not too warm for you, in here?”

“Quite comfortable, thank you.”

“Well then. .”

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

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

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

“Just after two, perhaps?”

“I believe that’s right.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The voice was a growl. “What’s this?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

26 April 1941. 3:20 A.M. Le Chabanais.

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

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

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

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

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

“Let me guess: a Rhine maiden?”

“Oh no. Completely the opposite.”

“Really?”

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

“Oh, I can imagine.”

“Little more champagne?”

“Not just yet, thanks.”

“Anyhow, I have her here. In a pension.”

“Can’t get enough?”

“That’s it.” He paused a moment. “Thing is, she’s bored. Nothing to do all day.”

“Why not a job? Coming from there, she must speak German.”

“She does, she does. Wants to work for Jeder Einmal.”

“Why there?”

“I think she worked at Eszterhazy, the travel agency, before the war.”

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

“Would you? That would certainly help me out.”

“Consider it done.”

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

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

Transmission of 12 May. 1:25 A.M.

To Director. Source: Albert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is this correct?” he asked the operator.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Adieu,” she said. Not in this life.

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

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

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

Then at last, on 28 May, a light.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

De Milja nodded. Yes, lucky.

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

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

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

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

“I know,” de Milja said.