The Spies of Warsaw

HOTEL EUROPEJSKI

In the dying light of an Autumn day in 1937, a certain herr Edvard Uhl, a secret agent, descended from a first-class railway carriage in the city of Warsaw. Above the city, the sky was at war; the last of the sun struck blood-red embers off massed black cloud, while the clear horizon to the west was the color of blue ice. Herr Uhl suppressed a shiver; the sharp air of the evening, he told himself. But this was Poland, the border of the Russian steppe, and what had reached him was well beyond the chill of an October twilight.

A taxi waited on Jerozolimskie street, in front of the station. The driver, an old man with a seamed face, sat patiently, knotted hands at rest on the steering wheel. “Hotel Europejski,” Uhl told the driver. He wanted to add, and be quick about it, but the words would have been in German, and it was not so good to speak German in this city. Germany had absorbed the western part of Poland in 1795-Russia ruled the east, Austria-Hungary the southwest corner-for a hundred and twenty-three years, a period the Poles called “the Partition,” a time of national conspiracy and defeated insurrection, leaving ample bad blood on all sides. With the rebirth of Poland in 1918, the new borders left a million Germans in Poland and two million Poles in Germany, which guaranteed that the bad blood would stay bad. So, for a German visiting Warsaw, a current of silent hostility, closed faces, small slights: we don’t want you here.

Nonetheless, Edvard Uhl had looked forward to this trip for weeks. In his late forties, he combed what remained of his hair in strands across his scalp and cultivated a heavy dark mustache, meant to deflect attention from a prominent bulbous nose, the bulb divided at the tip. A feature one saw in Poland, often enough. So, an ordinary-looking man, who led a rather ordinary life, a more-than-decent life, in the small city of Breslau: a wife and three children, a good job-as a senior engineer at an ironworks and foundry, a subcontractor to the giant Rheinmetall firm in Dusseldorf-a few friends, memberships in a church and a singing society. Oh, maybe the political situation-that wretched Hitler and his wretched Nazis strutting about-could have been better, but one abided, lived quietly, kept one’s opinions to oneself; it wasn’t so difficult. And the paycheck came every week. What more could a man want?

Instinctively, his hand made sure of the leather satchel on the seat by his side. A tiny stab of regret touched his heart. Foolish, Edvard, truly it is. For the satchel, a gift from his first contact at the French embassy in Warsaw, had a false bottom, beneath which lay a sheaf of engineering diagrams. Well, he thought, one did what one had to do, so life went. No, one did what one had to do in order to do what one wanted to do-so life really went. He wasn’t supposed to be in Warsaw; he was supposed, by his family and his employer, to be in Gleiwitz-just on the German side of the frontier dividing German Lower Silesia from Polish Upper Silesia-where his firm employed a large metal shop for the work that exceeded their capacity in Breslau. With the Reich rearming, they could not keep up with the orders that flowed from the Wehrmacht. The Gleiwitz works functioned well enough, but that wasn’t what Uhl told his bosses. “A bunch of lazy idiots down there,” he said, with a grim shake of the head, and found it necessary to take the train down to Gleiwitz once a month to straighten things out.

And he did go to Gleiwitz-that pest from Breslau, back again! — but he didn’t stay there. When he was done bothering the local management he took the train up to Warsaw where, in a manner of speaking, one very particular thing got straightened out. For Uhl, a blissful night of lovemaking, followed by a brief meeting at dawn, a secret meeting, then back to Breslau, back to Frau Uhl and his more-than-decent life. Refreshed. Reborn. Too much, that word? No. Just right.

Uhl glanced at his watch. Drive faster, you peasant! This is an automobile, not a plow. The taxi crawled along Nowy Swiat, the grand avenue of Warsaw, deserted at this hour-the Poles went home for dinner at four. As the taxi passed a church, the driver slowed for a moment, then lifted his cap. It was not especially reverent, Uhl thought, simply something the man did every time he passed a church.

At last, the imposing Hotel Europejski, with its giant of a doorman in visored cap and uniform worthy of a Napoleonic marshal. Uhl handed the driver his fare-he kept a reserve of Polish zloty in his desk at the office-and added a small, proper gratuity, then said “Dankeschon.” It didn’t matter now, he was where he wanted to be. In the room, he hung up his suit, shirt, and tie, laid out fresh socks and underwear on the bed, and went into the bathroom to have a thorough wash. He had just enough time; the Countess Sczelenska would arrive in thirty minutes. Or, rather, that was the time set for the rendezvous; she would of course be late, would make him wait for her, let him think, let him anticipate, let him steam.

And was she a countess? A real Polish countess? Probably not, he thought. But so she called herself, and she was, to him, like a countess: imperious, haughty, and demanding. Oh how this provoked him, as the evening lengthened and they drank champagne, as her mood slid, subtly, from courteous disdain to sly submission, then on to breathless urgency. It was the same always, their private melodrama, with an ending that never changed. Uhl the stallion-despite the image in the mirrored armoire, a middle-aged gentleman with thin legs and potbelly and pale chest home to a few wisps of hair-demonstrably excited as he knelt on the hotel carpet, while the countess, looking down at him over her shoulder, eyebrows raised in mock surprise, deigned to let him roll her silk underpants down her great, saucy, fat bottom. Noblesse oblige. You may have your little pleasure, she seemed to say, if you are so inspired by what the noble Sczelenska bloodline has wrought. Uhl would embrace her middle and honor the noble heritage with tender kisses. In time very effective, such honor, and she would raise him up, eager for what came next.

He’d met her a year and a half earlier, in Breslau, at a Weinstube where the office employees of the foundry would stop for a little something after work. The Weinstube had a small terrace in back, three tables and a vine, and there she sat, alone at one of the tables on the deserted terrace: morose and preoccupied. He’d sat at the next table, found her attractive-not young, not old, on the buxom side, with brassy hair pinned up high and an appealing face-and said good evening. And why so glum, on such a pleasant night?

She’d come down from Warsaw, she explained, to see her sister, a family crisis, a catastrophe. The family had owned, for several generations, a small but profitable lumber mill in the forest along the eastern border. But they had suffered financial reverses, and then the storage sheds had been burned down by a Ukrainian nationalist gang, and they’d had to borrow money from a Jewish speculator. But the problems wouldn’t stop, they could not repay the loans, and now that dreadful man had gone to court and taken the mill. Just like them, wasn’t it.

After a few minutes, Uhl moved to her table. Well, that was life for you, he’d said. Fate turned evil, often for those who least deserved it. But, don’t feel so bad, luck had gone wrong, but it could go right, it always did, given time. Ah but he was sympathique, she’d said, an aristocratic reflex to use the French word in the midst of her fluent German. They went on for a while, back and forth. Perhaps some day, she’d said, if he should find himself in Warsaw, he might telephone; there was the loveliest cafe near her apartment. Perhaps he would, yes, business took him to Warsaw now and again; he guessed he might be there soon. Now, would she permit him to order another glass of wine? Later, she took his hand beneath the table and he was, by the time they parted, on fire.

Ten days later, from a public telephone at the Breslau railway station, he’d called her. He planned to be in Warsaw next week, at the Europejski, would she care to join him for dinner? Why yes, yes she would. Her tone of voice, on the other end of the line, told him all he needed to know, and by the following Wednesday-those idiots in Gleiwitz had done it again! — he was on his way to Warsaw. At dinner, champagne and langoustines, he suggested that they go on to a nightclub after dessert, but first he wanted to visit the room, to change his tie.

And so, after the cream cake, up they went.

For two subsequent, monthly, visits, all was paradise, but, it turned out, she was the unluckiest of countesses. In his room at the hotel, brassy hair tumbled on the pillow, she told him of her latest misfortune. Now it was her landlord, a hulking beast who leered at her, made chk-chk noises with his mouth when she climbed the stairs, who’d told her that she had to leave, his latest girlfriend to be installed in her place. Unless … Her misty eyes told him the rest.

Never! Where Uhl had just been, this swine would not go! He stroked her shoulder, damp from recent exertions, and said, “Now, now, my dearest, calm yourself.” She would just have to find another apartment. Well, in fact she’d already done that, found one even nicer than the one she had now, and very private, owned by a man in Cracow, so nobody would be watching her if, for example, her sweet Edvard wanted to come for a visit. But the rent was two hundred zloty more than she paid now. And she didn’t have it.

A hundred reichsmark, he thought. “Perhaps I can help,” he said. And he could, but not for long. Two months, maybe three-beyond that, there really weren’t any corners he could cut. He tried to save a little, but almost all of his salary went to support his family. Still, he couldn’t get the “hulking beast” out of his mind. Chk-chk.

The blow fell a month later, the man in Cracow had to raise the rent. What would she do? What was she to do? She would have to stay with relatives or be out in the street. Now Uhl had no answers. But the countess did. She had a cousin who was seeing a Frenchman, an army officer who worked at the French embassy, a cheerful, generous fellow who, she said, sometimes hired “industrial experts.” Was her sweet Edvard not an engineer? Perhaps he ought to meet this man and see what he had to offer. Otherwise, the only hope for the poor countess was to go and stay with her aunt.

And where was the aunt?

Chicago.

Now Uhl wasn’t stupid. Or, as he put it to himself, not that stupid. He had a strong suspicion about what was going on. But-and here he surprised himself-he didn’t care. The fish saw the worm and wondered if maybe there might just be a hook in there, but, what a delicious worm! Look at it, the most succulent and tasty worm he’d ever seen; never would there be such a worm again, not in this ocean. So …

He first telephoned-to, apparently, a private apartment, because a maid answered in Polish, then switched to German. And, twenty minutes later, Uhl called again and a meeting was arranged. In an hour. At a bar in the Praga district, the workers’ quarter across the Vistula from the elegant part of Warsaw. And the Frenchman was, as promised, as cheerful as could be. Likely Alsatian, from the way he spoke German, he was short and tubby, with a soft face that glowed with self-esteem and a certain tilt to the chin and tension in the upper lip that suggested an imminent sneer, while a dapper little mustache did nothing to soften the effect. He was, of course, not in uniform, but wore an expensive sweater and a blue blazer with brass buttons down the front.

“Henri,” he called himself and, yes, he did sometimes employ “industrial experts.” His job called for him to stay abreast of developments in particular areas of German industry, and he would pay well for drawings or schematics, any specifications relating to, say, armament or armour. How well? Oh, perhaps five hundred reichsmark a month, for the right papers. Or, if Uhl preferred, a thousand zloty, or two hundred American dollars-some of his experts liked having dollars. The money to be paid in cash or deposited in any bank account, in any name, that Uhl might suggest.

The word spy was never used, and Henri was very casual about the whole business. Very common, such transactions, his German counterparts did the same thing; everybody wanted to know what was what, on the other side of the border. And, he should add, nobody got caught, as long as they were discreet. What was done privately stayed private. These days, he said, in such chaotic times, smart people understood that their first loyalty was to themselves and their families. The world of governments and shifty diplomats could go to hell, if it wished, but Uhl was obviously a man who was shrewd enough to take care of his own future. And, if he ever found the arrangement uncomfortable, well, that was that. So, think it over, there’s no hurry, get back in touch, or just forget you ever met me.

And the countess? Was she, perhaps, also an, umm, “expert”?

From Henri, a sophisticated laugh. “My dear fellow! Please! That sort of thing, well, maybe in the movies.”

So, at least the worm wasn’t in on it.

Back at the Europejski-a visit to the new apartment lay still in the future-the countess exceeded herself. Led him to a delight or two that Uhl knew about but had never experienced; her turn to kneel on the carpet. Rapture. Another glass of champagne and further novelty. In time he fell back on the pillow and gazed up at the ceiling, elated and sore. And brave as a lion. He was a shrewd fellow-a single exchange with Henri, and that thousand zloty would see the countess through her difficulties for the next few months. But life never went quite as planned, did it, because Henri, not nearly so cheerful as the first time they’d met, insisted, really did insist, that the arrangement continue.

And then, in August, instead of Henri, a tall Frenchman called Andre, quiet and reserved, and much less pleased with himself, and the work he did, than Henri. Wounded, Uhl guessed, in the Great War, he leaned on a fine ebony stick, with a silver wolf’s head for a grip.

At the Hotel Europejski, in the early evening of an autumn day, Herr Edvard Uhl finished with his bath and dressed, in order to undress, in what he hoped would be a little while. The room-service waiter had delivered a bottle of champagne in a silver bucket, one small lamp was lit, the drapes were drawn. Uhl moved one of them aside, enough to see out the window, down to the entry of the hotel, where taxis pulled up to the curb and the giant doorman swept the doors open with a genteel bow as the passengers emerged. Fine folks indeed, an army officer and his lavish girlfriend, a gentleman in top hat and tails, a merry fellow with a beard and a monocle. Uhl liked this life very well, this Warsaw life, his dream world away from the brown soot and lumpy potatoes of Breslau. He would pay for that with a meeting in the morning; then, home again.

Ah, here she was.

The Milanowek Tennis Club had been founded late one June night in 1937. Something of a lark, at that moment. “Let’s have a tennis club! Why not? The Milanowek Tennis Club-isn’t it fabulous?” The village of Milanowek was a garden in a pine forest, twenty miles from Warsaw, famous for its resin-scented air-“mahogany air,” the joke went, because it was expensive to live there and breathe it-famous for its glorious manor houses surrounded by English lawns, Greek statues, pools, and tennis courts. Famous as well for its residents, the so-called “heart of the Polish nation,” every sort of nobility in the Alamanach de Gotha, every sort of wealthy Jewish merchant. If one’s driver happened to be unavailable, a narrow-gauge railway ran out from the city, stopping first at the village of Podkowa. Podkowa was the Polish word for horseshoe, which led the unknowing to visions of a tiny ancient village, where a peasant blacksmith labored at his forge, but they would soon enough learn that Podkowa had been designed, at the turn of the century, by the English architect Arthur Howard, with houses situated in the pattern of a horseshoe and a common garden at the center.

The manor house-owned by Prince Kaz, formally Kazimierz, and Princess Toni, Antowina-had three tennis courts, for the noble Brosowicz couple, with family connections to various branches of the Radziwills and Poniatowskis, didn’t have one of anything. This taste for variety, long a tradition on both sides of the family, included manor houses-their other country estate had six miles of property but lay far from Warsaw-as well as apartments in Paris and London and vacation homes-the chalet in Saint Moritz, the palazzo in Venice-and extended to servants, secretaries, horses, dogs, and lovers. But for Prince Kaz and Princess Toni, the best thing in the world was to have, wherever they happened to be at the moment, lots of friends. The annual production of Christmas cards went on for days.

At the Milanowek house, their friends came to play tennis. The entire nation was passionate for the game; in Poland, only a single golf course was to be found but, following the re-emergence of the country, there were tennis courts everywhere. And so they decided, late that June night, to make it official. “It’s the Milanowek Tennis Club now,” they would tell their friends, who were honored to be included. “Come and play whenever you like; if we’re not here, Janusz will let you in.” What a good idea, the friends thought. They scheduled their matches by telephone and stopped by at all hours of the day and early evening: the baron of this and the marchioness of that, the nice Jewish dentist and his clever wife, a general of the army and a captain of industry, a socialist member of the Sejm, the Polish parliament, the royalist Minister of Posts and Telegraph, various elegant young people who didn’t do much of anything, and the newly arrived French military attache, the dashing Colonel Mercier.

In fact a lieutenant colonel, and wounded in two wars, he didn’t dash very well. He did the best he could, usually playing doubles, but still, a passing shot down the line would often elude him-if it didn’t go out, the tennis gods punishing his opponent for taking advantage of the colonel’s limping stride.

That Thursday afternoon in October, the vast sky above the steppe dark and threatening, Colonel Mercier was partnered by Princess Toni herself, in her late thirties as perfect and pretty as a doll, an effect heightened by rouged cheeks and the same straw-colored hair as Prince Kaz. They did look, people said, like brother and sister. And, you know, sometimes in these noble families … No, it wasn’t true, but the similarity was striking.

“Good try, Jean-Francois,” she called out, as the ball bounced away, brushing her hair off her forehead and turning her racquet over a few times as she awaited service.

Across the net, a woman called Claudine, the wife of a Belgian diplomat, prepared to serve. Here one could see that the doubles teams were fairly constituted, for Claudine had only her right arm; the other-her tennis shirt sleeve pinned up below her shoulder-had been lost to a German shell in the Great War, when she’d served as a nurse. Standing at the back line, she held ball and racquet in one hand, tossed the ball up, regripped her racquet, and managed a fairly brisk serve. Princess Toni returned crosscourt, with perfect form but low velocity, and Dr. Goldszteyn, the Jewish dentist, sent it back toward the colonel, just close enough-he never, when they played together, hit balls that Mercier couldn’t reach. Mercier drove a low shot to center court; Claudine returned backhand, a high lob. “Oh damn,” Princess Toni said through clenched teeth, running backward. Her sweeping forehand sent the ball sailing over the fence on the far side of the court. “Sorry,” she said to Mercier.

“We’ll get it back,” Mercier said. He spoke French, the language of the Polish aristocracy, and thus the Milanowek Tennis Club.

“Forty-fifteen,” Claudine called out, as a passing servant tossed the ball back over the fence. Serving to Mercier, her first try ticked the net, the second was in. Mercier hit a sharp forehand, Dr. Goldszteyn swept it back, Princess Toni retrieved, Claudine ran to the net and tried a soft lob. Too high, and Mercier reached up and hit an overhand winner-that went into the net. “Game to us,” Claudine called out.

“My service,” Princess Toni answered, a challenge in her voice: we’ll see who takes this set. They almost did, winning the next game, but eventually going down six-four. Walking off the court, Princess Toni rested a hand on Mercier’s forearm; he could smell perfume mixed with sweat. “No matter,” she said. “You’re a good partner for me, Jean-Francois.”

What? No, she meant tennis. Didn’t she? At forty-six, Mercier had been a widower for three years, and was considered more than eligible by the smart set in the city. But, he thought, not the princess. “We’ll play again soon,” he said, the response courteous and properly amicable.

He managed almost always to hit the right note with these people because he was, technically, one of them-Jean-Francois Mercier de Boutillon, though the nobiliary particule de had been dropped by his democratically inclined grandfather, and the name of his ancestral demesne had disappeared along with it, except on official papers. But participation in the rites and rituals of this world was not at all something he cared about-membership in the tennis club, and other social activities, were requirements of his profession; otherwise he wouldn’t have bothered. A military attache was supposed to hear things and know things, so he made it his business to be around people who occasionally said things worth knowing. Not very often, he thought. But in truth-he had to admit-often enough.

In the house, he paused to pick up his white canvas bag, then headed down the hallway. The old boards creaked with every step, the scent of beeswax polish perfumed the air-nothing in the world smelled quite like a perfectly cleaned house. Past the drawing room, the billiard room, a small study lined with books, was one of the downstairs bathrooms made available to the tennis club members. How they live. On a travertine shelf by the sink, fresh lilies in a Japanese vase, fragrant soap in a gold-laced dish. A grid of heated copper towel bars held thick Turkish towels, the color of fresh cream, while the shower curtain was decorated with a surrealist half-head and squiggles-where on God’s green earth did they find such a thing?

He peeled off his tennis outfit, then opened the bag, took out a blue shirt, flannel trousers, and fresh linen, made a neat pile on a small antique table, stowed his tennis clothes in the bag, worked the chevaliere, the gold signet ring of the nobility, off his ring finger and set it atop his clothes, and stepped into the shower.

Ahhh.

An oversized showerhead poured forth a broad, powerful spray of hot water. Where he lived-the longtime French military attache apartment in Warsaw-there was only a bathtub and a diabolical gas water heater, which provided a tepid bath at best and might someday finish the job that his German and Russian enemies had failed to complete. What medal did they have for that? he wondered. The Croix de Bain, awarded posthumously.

Very quietly, so that someone passing by in the hall would not hear him, he began to sing.

Turning slowly in the shower, Mercier was tall-a little over six feet, with just the faintest suggestion of a slouch, an apology for height-and lean; well muscled in the legs and shoulders and well scarred all over. On the outside of his right knee, a patch of red, welted skin-some shrapnel still in there, they told him-and sometimes, on damp, cold days, he walked with a stick. On the left side of his chest, a three-inch white furrow; on the back of his left calf, a burn scar; running along the inside of his right wrist, a poorly sutured tear made by barbed wire; and, on his back, just below his left shoulder blade, the puckered wound of a sniper’s bullet. From the last, he should not have recovered, but he had, which left him better off than most of the class of 1912 at the Saint-Cyr military academy, who rested beneath white crosses in the fields of northeast France.

Well, he was done with war. He doubted he could face that again, he’d simply seen too much of it. With some effort, he forced his mind away from such thoughts, which, he believed, visited him more often than he should allow, and this sort of determination was easily read in his face. Not unhandsome, he had heavy, dark hair parted on the left, which lay too thick, too high, across the right side of his head. He had fair skin, pale, and refined features, all of which made him seem younger than he was, though these proportions, classic in the French aristocrat, were somehow contradicted by very deep, very thoughtful, gray-green eyes. Nonetheless, he was what he was, with the relaxed confidence of the breed and, when he smiled, a touch of the insouciant view of the world common to the southern half of France.

They’d been there a long, long time, the Mercier de Boutillons, in a lost corner of the Drome, just above Provence, with the title of chevalier-knight-originally bestowed in the twelfth century, which had given them the village of Boutillon and its surrounding countryside, and the right to die in France’s wars. Which they had done, again and again, as far back as the Knight Templars of Jerusalem-Mercier was also a thirty-sixth-generation Knight of Malta and Rhodes-and as recently as the 1914 war, which had claimed his brother, at the Marne, and an uncle, wounded, and drowned in a shellhole, at the second battle of Verdun.

In a muted baritone, Mercier sang an old French ballad, which had haunted him for years. A dumb thing, but it had a catchy melody, sad and sweet. Poor petite Jeanette, how she adored her departed lover, how she remembered him, “encore et encore.” Jeanette may have remembered, Mercier didn’t, so he sang the chorus and hummed the rest, turning slowly in the streaming water.

When he heard the bathroom door open, and close, he stopped. Through the heavy cotton of the shower curtain he could see a silhouette, which divested itself of shirt and shorts. Then, slowly, drew the curtain aside, its rings scraping along the metal bar. Standing there, in a cloud of steam, a lavender-colored cake of soap in one hand, was the Princess Antowina Brosowicz. Without clothes, she seemed small but, again like a doll, perfectly proportioned. With an impish smile, she reached a hand toward him and, using her fingernail, drew a line down the wet hair plastered to his chest. “That’s nice,” she said. “I can draw a picture on you.” Then, after a moment, “Are you going to invite me in, Jean-Francois?”

“Of course.” His laugh was not quite a nervous laugh, but close. “You surprised me.”

She entered the shower, closed the curtain, stepped toward him so that the tips of her breasts just barely touched his chest, stood on her toes, and kissed him lightly on the lips. “I meant to,” she said. Then she handed him the lavender soap. Only a princess, he thought, would join a man in the shower but disdain the use of the guest soap.

She turned once around beneath the spray, raised her face to the water, and finger-combed her hair back. Then she leaned on the tile wall with both hands and said, “Would you be kind enough to wash my back?”

“With pleasure,” he said.

“What was that you were singing?”

“An old French song. It stays with me, I don’t know why.”

“Oh, reasons,” she said, who knew why anything happened.

“Do you sing in the shower?”

She turned her head so that he could see that she was smiling. “Perhaps in a little while, I will.”

The skin of her back was still lightly tanned from the summer sun, then, below the curved line of her bathing suit, very white. He worked up a creamy lather, put the soap in a dish on the wall, and slid his hands up and down, sideways, round and round.

“Mmm,” she said. Then, “Don’t neglect my front, dear.”

He re-soaped his hands and reached around her. As the water drummed down on them, the white part of her, warm and slippery, gradually turned a rosy pink. And, in time, she did sing, or something like it, and, even though they were there for quite some time, the hot water never ran out.

17 October, 5:15 A.M. Crossing the Vistula in a crowded trolley car, Mercier leaned on a steel pole at the rear. He wore a battered hat, the front of the brim low on his forehead, and a grimy overcoat, purchased from a used-clothing pushcart in the poor Jewish district. He carried a cheap briefcase beneath his arm and looked, he thought, like some lost soul sentenced to live in a Russian novel. The workers packed inside the trolley, facing a long day in the Praga factories, were grim-faced and silent, staring out the windows at the gray dawn and the gray river below the railway bridge.

At the third stop in Praga, Mercier stepped down from the rear platform, just past the Wedel candy factory, the smell of burned sugar strong in the raw morning air. He walked the length of the factory, crossed to a street of brick tenements, then on to a row of workshops, machinery rattling and whining inside the clapboard sheds. At one of them, the high doors had been rolled apart, and he could see dark shapes shoveling coal into open furnaces, the fires flaring yellow and orange.

He turned down an alley to a nameless little bar, open at dawn, crowded with workers who needed a shot or two in order to get themselves into the factories. Here too it was silent. The men at the bar drank off their shots, left a few groszy by their empty glasses, and walked out. At a table on the opposite wall, Edvard Uhl, the engineer from Breslau, sat stolidly with a coffee and a Polish newspaper, folded on the table by his cup and saucer.

Mercier sat across from him and said good morning. He spoke German, badly and slowly, but he could manage. As the language of France’s traditional enemy, German had been a compulsory course at Saint-Cyr.

Uhl looked up at him and nodded.

“All goes well with you,” Mercier said. It wasn’t precisely a question.

“Best I can expect.” Poor me. He didn’t much like the business they did together. He was, Mercier could see it in his face, reluctant, and frightened. Maybe life had gone better with Mercier’s predecessor, “Henri,” Emile Bruner, now a full colonel and Mercier’s superior at the General Staff, but he doubted it. “Considering what I must do,” Uhl added.

Mercier shrugged. What did he care? For him, best to be cold and formal at agent meetings-they had a commercial arrangement; friendship was not required. “What have you brought?”

“We’re retooling for the Ausf B.” He meant the B version of the Panzerkampfwagen 1, the Wehrmacht‘s battle tank. “I have the first diagrams for the new turret.”

“What’s different?”

“It’s a new design, from the Krupp works; the turret will now be made to rotate, three hundred and sixty degrees, a hand traverse operated by the gunner.”

“And the armour?”

“The same. Thirteen millimeters on the sides, eight millimeters on the top of the turret, six millimeters on the top and bottom of the hull. But now the plates are to be face-hardened-that means carbon cementation, very expensive but the strength is greatly increased.”

“From stopping rifle and machine-gun fire to stopping antitank weapons.”

“So it would seem.”

Mercier thought for a moment. The Panzerkampfwagen 1A had not done well in Spain, where it had been used by Franco’s forces against the Soviet T-26. Armed only with a pair of 7.92-millimeter machine guns in the turret, it was effective against infantry but could not defeat an armoured enemy tank. Now, with the 1B, they were preparing for a different kind of combat. Finally he said, “All right, we’ll have a look at it. And next time we’d like to see the face-hardening process you’re using, the formula.”

“Next time,” Uhl said. “Well, I’m not sure I’ll be able …”

Mercier cut him off. “Fifteen November. If there’s an emergency, a real emergency, you have a telephone number.”

“What would happen if I just couldn’t be here?”

“We will reschedule.” Mercier paused. “But it’s not at all easy for us, if we have to do that.”

“Yes, but there’s always the possibility …”

“You will manage, Herr Uhl. We know you are resourceful, there are always problems in this sort of work; we expect you to deal with them.”

Uhl started to speak, but Mercier raised his hand. Then he opened his briefcase and withdrew a folded Polish newspaper and a slip of paper, typewritten and then copied on a roneo duplicator: a receipt form, with date, amount, and Uhl’s name typed on the appropriate lines, and a line for signature at the bottom. “Do you need a pen?” Mercier said.

Uhl reached into an inside pocket, withdrew a fountain pen, then signed his name at the bottom of the receipt. Mercier put the slip of paper in his briefcase and slid the newspaper toward Uhl. “A thousand zloty,” he said. He peeled up a corner of Uhl’s newspaper, revealing the edges of engineering diagrams.

Uhl took Mercier’s folded newspaper, secured it tightly beneath his arm, then rose to leave.

“Fifteen November,” Mercier said. “We’ll meet here, at the same time.”

A very subdued Herr Uhl nodded in agreement, mumbled a goodby, and left the bar.

Mercier looked at his watch-the rules said he had to give Uhl a twenty-minute head start. A pair of workers, in gray oil-stained jackets and trousers, entered the bar and ordered vodka and beer. One of them glanced over at Mercier, then looked away. Which meant nothing, Mercier thought. Officer A met Agent B in a country foreign to both, neutral ground, it wasn’t even against the law. So they’d told him, anyhow, when he’d taken the six-week course for new military attaches at the Ecole Superieure de Guerre, part of the Invalides complex in Paris.

With a one-week section on the management of espionage-thus the folded newspapers. And the cold exterior. This was no pretense for Mercier; he didn’t like Uhl, who betrayed his country for selfish reasons. In fact, he didn’t like any of it. “Witness the ingenuity of Monsieur D,” said the elfin captain from the Deuxieme Bureau who taught the course. “During the war, with a complex set of figures to be conveyed to his case officer, Monsieur D shaved a patch of hair on his dog’s back, wrote the numbers on the dog’s skin in indelible pen, waited for the dog’s coat to grow out, then easily crossed the frontier.” Yes, very clever, like Messieurs A, B, and C. Mercier could only imagine himself shaving his Braques Ariegeoises, his beloved pointers, Achille and Celeste. He could imagine their eyes: why are you doing this to me?

Stay. Good boy, good girl. Remember the ingenious Monsieur D.

In Mercier’s desk drawer, at his office on the second floor of the embassy, was a letter resigning his commission. Written at a bad moment, in the difficult early days of a new job, but not thrown away. He couldn’t imagine actually sending it, but the three-year appointment felt like a lifetime, and he might be reappointed. Perhaps he would try, the next time he was at the General Staff headquarters in Paris, to request a transfer, to field command. His first request, using the prescribed channels, had been denied, but he would try again, he decided, this time in person. It might work, though, if it didn’t, he couldn’t ask again. That was the unofficial rule, set in stone: two attempts, no more.

Riding the trolley back to central Warsaw, he wondered where he’d gone wrong, why he’d been reassigned, six months earlier, from a staff position in the Army of the Levant, headquartered in Beirut, to the embassy in Warsaw. The reason, he suspected, had most of all to do with Bruner, who wanted to move up, wanted to be at the center of power in Paris. This he’d managed to do, but they had to replace him, and replace him with someone that the Polish General Staff would find an appealing substitute.

And for Mercier, it should have been a plum, a career victory. An appointment in Warsaw, to any French officer or diplomat, was considered an honor, for Poland and France had a special relationship, a long, steady history of political friendship. In the time of the French kings, the French and Polish royal families had intermarried, French had become, and remained, the polite language of the Polish aristocracy, and the Poles, especially Polish intellectuals, had been passionate for the ideals of the Enlightenment and the Revolution of 1789. Napoleon had supported the Polish quest to re-establish itself as a free nation, and French governments had, since the eighteenth century, welcomed Polish exiles and supported their struggle against partition.

Thus, in the summer of 1920, after fighting broke out in the Ukraine between Polish army units and Ukrainian partisan bands, and the Red Army had attacked Polish forces around Kiev, it was France that came to Poland’s aid, in what had come to be known as the Russo-Polish War. In July, France sent a military mission to Poland, commanded by no less than one of the heroes of the Great War, General Maxime Weygand. The mission staff included Mercier’s fellow officer, more colleague than friend, Captain Charles de Gaulle-they had graduated from Saint-Cyr together with the class of 1912-and Mercier as well. Both had returned from German prison camps in 1918, after unsuccessful attempts to escape. Both had been decorated for service in the Great War. Now both went to Poland, in July of 1920, to serve as instructors to the Polish army officer corps.

But, in mid-August, when the Red Army, having broken through Polish defense lines in the Ukraine, reached the outskirts of Warsaw, Mercier had become involved in the fighting. The Russians were poised for conquest, foreign diplomats had fled Warsaw, the Red Army was just a few miles east of the Vistula, and the Red Army was unstoppable. Captain Mercier was ordered to join a Polish cavalry squadron as an observer but had then, after the deaths of several officers and with the aid of an interpreter, taken command of the squadron. And so took part in the now-famous flank attack led by Marshal Pilsudski, cutting across the Red Army line of advance in what was later called “the Miracle of the Vistula.”

At five in the afternoon, on the thirteenth of August, 1920, the final assault on Warsaw began in the town of Radzymin, fifteen miles east of the city. As Pilsudski’s counterattack was set in motion, the 207th Uhlan Regiment, with Mercier leading his squadron, was ordered to take the Radzymin railway station. A local fourteen-year-old was hauled up to sit behind a Uhlan’s saddle and guide them to the station. It was almost eight o’clock, but the summer evening light was just beginning to darken, and, when Mercier saw the station at the foot of a long, narrow street, he raised his revolver, waved it forward, and spurred his horse. The Uhlans shouted as they charged, people in the apartments above the street leaned out their windows and cheered, and the thunder of hooves galloping over cobblestones echoed off the sides of the buildings.

As they rode down the street, the Uhlans began to fire at the station, and rifle rounds snapped past Mercier’s head. The answering Russian fire blew spurts of brick dust off building walls, glass showered onto the cobblestones, a horse went down, and the rider to Mercier’s left cried out, dropped his rifle, tumbled sideways, and was dragged by a stirrup until another rider grabbed the horse’s bridle.

They poured out of the street at full gallop and then, at a call from Mercier’s interpreter, split left and right, as drivers ran from the Radzymin taxis, and passengers dropped their baggage and dove full length, huddling by the curb for protection. Only a small unit, a platoon or so, of Russian troops protected the station, and they were quickly overcome, one of them, an officer with a red star on his cap, speared with a Uhlan’s lance.

For a few minutes, all was quiet. Mercier’s horse, flanks heaving, whickered as Mercier trotted him a little way up the track, just to see what he could see. Where was the Red Army? Somewhere in Radzymin, for now the first artillery shell landed in the square surrounding the station, a loud explosion, a column of black dirt blown into the air, a plane tree split in half. Mercier hauled his horse around and galloped back toward the station house. He saw the rest of the squadron leaving the square, headed for the cover of an adjoining street.

The next thing he knew, he was on the ground, vision blurred, ears ringing, blood running from his knee, the horse galloping off with the rest of the squadron. For a time, he lay there; then a Uhlan and a shopkeeper ran through the shell bursts and carried him into a drygoods store. They set him down carefully on the counter, tore long strips of upholstery fabric from a bolt-cotton toile with lords and ladies, he would remember it as long as he lived-and managed to stop the bleeding.

The following morning found him in a horse-drawn cart with other wounded Uhlans, heading back toward Warsaw on a road lined with Poles of every sort, who raised their caps as the wagon rolled past. Back in the city, he learned that Pilsudski’s daring gamble had been successful, the Red Army, in confusion, was in full flight back toward the Ukraine: thus, “the Miracle of the Vistula.” Though, in certain sectors of the Polish leadership, it was not considered a miracle at all. The Polish army had beaten the Russians, outmaneuvered them, and outfought them. In crisis, they’d been strong-strong enough to overcome a great power, and, therefore, strong enough to stand alone in Europe.

A few months later, Captain Mercier and Captain de Gaulle were awarded Polish military honors, the Cross of Virtuti Militari.

After that, the two careers did, for a time, continue to run parallel, as they served with French colonial forces in the Lebanon, fighting bandit groups, known as the Dandaches, in the Bekaa valley. Divergence came in the 1930s when de Gaulle, by then the most prestigious intellectual in France’s military-known, because of his books and monographs, as the “pen officer” of the French army-won assignment to teach at the Ecole Superieure de Guerre. He was, by then, well known in the military, and oft-quoted. For a number of memorable statements, particularly a line delivered during the Great War when, under sudden machine-gun fire, his fellow officers had thrown themselves to the ground, and de Gaulle called out, “Come, gentlemen, behave yourselves.”

For Mercier there was no such notoriety, but he had continued, quite content, with a series of General Staff assignments in the Lebanon. Until, as a French officer decorated by both France and Poland, he’d been ordered, a perfect and appealing substitute for Colonel Emile Bruner, to serve as military attache in Warsaw.

At the central Warsaw tram stop, Mercier got off the trolley. The gray dawn had now given way to a gray morning, with a damp, cold wind, and Mercier’s knee hurt like hell. But in truth, he told himself, not unamused, the ache was in both knees, so not so much the condition of the wounded warrior as that of a tall man who, the previous evening, had been making love with a short woman in the shower.

Mercier went first to his apartment, changed quickly into uniform, then walked back to the embassy, a handsome building on Nowy Swiat, a few doors from the British embassy, on a tree-lined square with a statue. In his office, he typed out a brief report of his contact with Uhl. Very terse: the date and time and location, the delivery of diagrams for the production of the new-1B-version of the Panzer tank, the payment made, establishment of the next meeting.

Should he include the fact that Uhl was wriggling? No, nothing had really happened; surely they didn’t care, in Paris, to be bothered with such trivia. He had a long, careful look at the diagrams to make sure they were as described-there was potential here for real disaster; it had happened more than once, they’d told him; plans for a public lavatory or a design for a mechanical can opener-then gave the report, the diagrams, and the signed receipt to one of the embassy clerks for transmission back to the General Staff in Paris, with a copy of the report to the ambassador’s office and another for the safe that held his office files.

Next he took a taxi-he had an embassy car and driver available to him, but he didn’t want to bother-out to the neighborhood of the Citadel, where the Polish General Staff had its offices, to a small cafe where he was to meet with his Polish counterpart, Colonel Anton Vyborg. He was first to arrive. They came to this cafe not precisely for secrecy, rather for privacy-it was more comfortable to speak openly away from their respective offices. That was one reason, there was another.

As soon as Mercier was seated at their usual table, the proprietor produced a large platter of ponczkis, a kind of small jelly dough-nut, dusted with granulated sugar, light and fluffy, to which Mercier was gravely addicted. The proprietor, chubby and smiling, in a well-spattered apron, produced also a silver carafe of coffee. It required all of Mercier’s aristocratic courtesy and diplomatic reserve to leave the warm, damnably fragrant ponczkis on the platter.

Vyborg, thank heaven, was precisely on time, and together they set upon the pastries. There was something of the Baltic knight in Colonel Vyborg. In his forties, he was tall and well-built and thin-lipped, with webbed lines at the corners of eyes made to squint into blizzards, and stiff, colorless hair cut short in the cavalry officer fashion. He wore high leather boots, supple and dark, well rubbed with saddle soap-Mercier always caught a whiff of it in Vyborg’s presence, mixed with the smell of the little cigars he smoked.

Vyborg was a senior officer in the intelligence service, the Oddzial II-the Deuxieme Bureau, named in the French tradition-of the Polish Army General Staff, known as the Dwojka, which meant “the two.” Vyborg worked in Section IIb, where they dealt with Austria, Germany, and France; Section IIa occupied itself with the country’s primary enemies-thus the a-Russia, Lithuania, Byelorussia, and the Ukraine. Did Vyborg’s section run agents on French territory? Likely they did. Did France do the same thing? Mercier thought so, but was kept ignorant of such operations, at any rate officially ignorant, but it was more than probable that the French SR, the Service des Renseignements, the clandestine service of the Deuxieme Bureau, did precisely that. Know your enemies, know your friends, avoid surprise at all costs. But the discovery of such operations, when they came to light, was always an unhappy moment. Allies were, for reasons of the heart more than the brain, supposed to trust each other. And when they demonstrably didn’t, it was as though the state of the human condition had slipped a notch.

“Have the last one,” Vyborg said, refilling Mercier’s coffee cup.

“For you, Anton.”

“No, I must insist.”

Gracefully, Mercier acceded to diplomacy.

Breakfast over, Vyborg lit one of his miniature cigars, and Mercier a Mewa-a Seagull-one of the better Polish cigarettes.

“So,” Vyborg said, “the Renault people will be here the day after tomorrow.” A delegation of executives and engineers was scheduled to visit Warsaw, a step in the process of selling Renault tanks to the Polish army.

“Yes,” Mercier said, “we are ready for them. They’re bringing a senator.”

“You’ll be at the dinner?”

From Mercier, a rather grim smile: no escape.

Their eyes met, they had in common a distaste for the obligatory social engagements required for their work. “It will be very boring,” Vyborg said. “In case you were concerned.”

“I was counting on it.”

“You’ll be accompanied?”

Mercier nodded. With no wife or fiancee, he would be with the deputy director of protocol at the embassy, who served as table partner to Mercier, and one other bachelor diplomat, when the need arose. “You’ve met Madame Dupin?”

“I’ve had the pleasure,” Vyborg said.

“Where is it?”

“We sent a note to your office,” Vyborg said, one eyebrow arched. Don’t you read your mail? “A private dining room at the Europejski,” Vyborg said. “They’re going to watch a field maneuver earlier in the day, so they’re sure to be exhausted, which will make the evening even more amusing. Then we’re going on to a nightclub-the Adria, of course-for dancing until dawn.”

“I can’t wait,” Mercier said.

“It’s obligatory. When the purchasing delegation went to Renault in Paris, they were taken to some naughty cancan place-they’re still talking about it-so …”

“Will you buy anything?”

“We shouldn’t, but there’s always a possibility. They want to sell us the R Thirty-five, which was demonstrated when the delegation visited the factory. This visit is supposed to close the deal.”

“The R Thirty-five isn’t so bad.” Mercier, officially loyal to the national industries, had to say that and Vyborg knew it. “For infantry support.”

Vyborg shrugged. “A thirty-seven-millimeter cannon, one machine gun. And they only go twelve miles an hour, with a range of eighty miles. The armour’s thick enough, but you don’t get much machine for the money. Truthfully, if it wasn’t French, we wouldn’t bother, but this is up to Smigly-Rydz’s office.” He meant the inspector general of the Polish army. “And they may have to bow to political pressure, so, potentially, our tank crews will die for the cancan.”

“What do you have now? The last figure I heard was two hundred.”

“That’s about right, unfortunately. The Russians have two thousand, best we know, and the same for the Germans. The Ursus factory is working on the Seven TP, our own model, under license from Vickers, but Ursus has to make farm tractors as well, and we need those. In the end, it’s always the same problem: money. You’ve been out to the Ursus factory?”

“I was. At the end of the summer.”

“Maybe that’s the answer, maybe not. It really depends on how much time we have until the next war starts.”

Mercier finished his coffee, then refilled both their cups. “Hitler loves his tanks,” he said.

“Yes, we heard that story. ‘These are wonderful! Make more of them!’ An infantry soldier in the war, he knows what the British did at Cambrai, a hundred tanks, all at once. The Germans broke and ran.”

“Not like them.”

“No, but they did that day.”

For a moment, they were both in the past.

“Who else is coming to the dinner?” Mercier said.

“Well, they have a senator, so we’ll have somebody from the Sejm. Then a few people from the French community: the ubiquitous Monsieur Travas, the Pathe agency manager, is coming, with some gorgeous girlfriend, no doubt, and we’ve asked your ambassador, of course, but he’s declined. We may get the charge d’affaires.”

“Who’s the senator?”

“Bernand? Bertrand? Something like that. I have it back at the office. One of the Popular Front politicians. Somebody from Beck’s office will talk with him, though we doubt he’ll have anything new to say.”

Josef Beck was the Polish foreign minister, and Vyborg now referred to the issue that stood between him and Mercier, between France and Poland. Treaties aside, would France come to Poland’s aid if Poland were attacked?

“Likely he won’t,” Mercier said.

“We think not,” Vyborg agreed. “But we must try.”

France’s political condition-strikes, communist pressure, a right wing divided into fascists and conservatives, failure to aid the Spanish Republic-continued to deteriorate. The most absurd views were held sacred, and there was too much deal-making, though all of this was seen by a tolerant world as a kind of amiable chaos-a British politician had said that a map of French political opinion would look like Einstein’s hair. But, to Mercier, it wasn’t so amusing. “You know what I think, Anton. If the worst happens, and it starts again, you must be prepared to stand alone. A map of Europe tells the story. It’s that, or alliance with Russia-which we favor but Poland will never do-or alliance with Germany, which we certainly don’t favor, and you won’t do that either.”

“I know,” Vyborg said. “We all know.” He paused, then brightened. “But, nevertheless, we’ll see you at the Renault dinner.”

“And then at the Adria.”

“You will ask my wife to dance?”

“I shall. And you, Madame Dupin.”

“Naturally,” Vyborg said. “More coffee?”

At eleven, Mercier was back at the embassy for the daily political meeting. The ambassador presided, touched on political events of the last twenty-four hours, and looked ahead to the Renault visit-special care here, don’t bother there. Then LeBeau, the charge d’affaires and first officer, reported on unrest, potential anti-Jewish demonstrations in Danzig, and a border incident in Silesia. Then the ambassador moved on to the topic of electricity consumption at the embassy. How difficult was it, really, to turn off the lights when not in use?

Mercier had a bowl of soup for lunch at a nearby restaurant; half a bowl-Polish chicken soup was rich and powerful, laden with heavy, twisted noodles-because the ponczkis had finished his appetite for the day. He did paperwork in his office until two-thirty, then returned to his apartment, changed from uniform back into civilian clothes-gray flannel trousers, dark wool jacket, subdued striped tie-and set out for his third cafe of the day. This time on Marszalkowska avenue, a lively and elegant street with trees, awnings, nightclubs, and smart shops.

At midafternoon, the Cafe Cleo was a perfect sanctuary: marble tables, black-and-white tiled floor, a bow window looking out on the avenue, where a less-favored world hurried by. The small room was almost full; the customers chattered away, read the papers, played chess, drank foamy cups of hot chocolate with whipped cream; their dogs, mostly beagles, lay attentive under the tables, waiting for cake crumbs. In a corner at the back, Hana Musser, spectacles pushed down on her pert nose, worked at a crossword puzzle, lost in concentration, tapping her teeth with a pencil.

Mercier liked Hana Musser, a half-Czech, half-German woman of uncertain age, who, two years earlier, had fled the fulminous Nazi politics of the Sudetenland and settled in Warsaw, where she worked at whatever she could but found the economic life of the city more than difficult. She had fine skin and fine features, a mass of brass-colored hair drawn back in a clip, and wore a bulky, home-knit cardigan sweater of a dreadful pea-green shade. How Colonel Bruner had discovered her-to play the part of Countess Sczelenska-Mercier did not know, but he had his suspicions. Was she a prostitute? Never a true professional, he guessed, but perhaps a woman who, from time to time, might meet a man at a cafe, with some kind of gift to follow an afternoon spent in a hotel room. And, if the man had money, the affair might continue.

As Mercier seated himself, she looked up, took her spectacles off, smiled at him, and said, “Good afternoon,” in German.

“And to you,” Mercier said. “All goes well?”

“Quite well, thank-you. And yourself?”

“Not so bad,” Mercier said. A waiter appeared, Mercier ordered coffee. “May I get you something?”

“Another chocolate, please.”

When the waiter left, Mercier said, “We’ve made our usual deposit.”

“Yes, I know, thank you, as always.”

“How do you find your friend, these days?”

“Much as usual. Herr Uhl is a very straightforward fellow. His journeys to Warsaw are the high points of his life. Otherwise, he labors away, the good family man.”

“And you, Hana?”

From Hana, a half smile and a certain sparkle in her eyes-she always flirted with him, he never minded. “The Countess Sczelenska never changes. She can be difficult, at times, but is captive to her heart’s desires.” She laughed and said, “I rather like her, actually.”

The waiter appeared with coffee and hot chocolate; someone, probably the waiter himself, had added a particularly generous gobbet of whipped cream atop the chocolate. Hana pressed her hands together and said, “Oh my!” How not to reward such a waiter? She spooned up almost all of the cream, then stirred in the rest.

“We are appreciative,” Mercier said, “of what you do for us.”

“Yes?” She liked the compliment. “I suppose there are legions of us.”

“No, countess, there’s only you.”

“Oh I bet,” she said, teasing him. “Anyhow, I think I was born to be a spy. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Born? I couldn’t say. Perhaps more the times one lives in. Circumstance. There’s a French saying, ‘Ou le Dieu a vous seme, il faut savoir fleurir.‘ Let’s see, ‘Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower,’ ” he said in German.

“That’s good,” she said.

“I’ve never forgotten it.”

She paused, then said, “If you knew what came before, you’d see that being a countess is much of an improvement. Have you ever been hungry, Andre? Really hungry?”

“During the war, sometimes.”

“But dinner was coming, sooner or later.”

He nodded.

“So,” she said. “Anyhow, I wanted to say, if Herr Uhl should-well, if he goes away, or whatever happens to such people, perhaps I could continue. Perhaps you would want something-something different.”

“We might,” he said. “One never knows the future.”

“No,” she said. “Probably it’s better that way.”

“Speaking of the future, your next meeting with Herr Uhl will take place on the fifteenth of November. He doesn’t say anything about me, does he?”

“No, never. He comes to Warsaw on business.”

Would she tell him if he did?

“In a week or two he will telephone,” she said. “From the Breslau railway station. That much he does tell me.”

“A different kind of secret,” Mercier said.

“Yes,” she said. “The secret of a love affair.” Again the smile, and her eyes meeting his.

18 October, 4:20 P.M. On the 2:10 train from Warsaw, the first-class compartment was full, but Herr Edvard Uhl had been early and taken the seat by the window. The gray afternoon had at last produced a slow rain over the October countryside, where narrow sandy roads led away into the forest.

As the train clattered across central Poland, Uhl was not at ease. He stared at the droplets sliding across the window, or at the brown fields beyond, but his mind was too much occupied by going home, going back to Breslau, to work and family. The unease was not unlike that of a schoolboy’s Sunday night; the weekend teased you with freedom, then the looming Monday morning took it away. The woman in the seat across from him occupied herself with the consumption of an apple. She’d spread a newspaper over her lap, cut slices with a paring knife, then chewed them, slowly, deliberately, and Uhl couldn’t wait for her to be done with the thing. The man sitting next to her was German, he thought, with a long, gloomy Scandinavian face, and wore a black leather coat, much favored by the Gestapo. But that, Uhl told himself, was just nerves. The man stared out into space, in a kind of traveler’s trance, and, if he looked at Uhl, Uhl never caught him at it.

The train stopped at Lodz, then at Kalisz, where it stood a long time in the station, the locomotive’s beat steady and slow. On the platform, the stationmaster stood by the first-class carriage and smoked a cigarette until, at last, he drew a pocket watch from his vest and waited as the second hand swept around the dial. Then, as he started to raise his flag, two businessmen, both with briefcases, came trotting along the platform and climbed aboard just as the stationmaster signaled to the engineer, and, with a jerk, the train began to move. The two businessmen, one of them wiping the rain from his eyeglasses with a handkerchief, came down the corridor and peered through the window into Uhl’s compartment. There was no room for them. They took a moment, satisfying themselves that the compartment was full, then went off to find seats elsewhere.

Uhl didn’t like them. Calm down, he told himself, think pleasant thoughts. His night with Countess Sczelenska. In detail. He’d woken in the darkness and begun to touch her until, sleepily, with a soft, compliant sigh, she started to make love to him. Make love. Was she in love with him? No, it was an “arrangement.” But she did seem to enjoy it, every sign he knew about said she did, and, as for himself, it was better than anything else in his life. What if they ran away together? This happened only in the movies, at least in his experience, but people surely did it, just not the people he knew. And then, if you ran away, you had to run away to someplace. What place would that be?

Some years earlier, he had encountered an old school friend in Breslau, who’d left Germany in the early 1930s and gone off to South Africa, where he’d become, evidently, quite prosperous as the proprietor of a commercial laundry. “It’s a fine country,” his friend had said. “The people, the Dutch and the English, are friendly.” But, he thought, would a countess, even a pretend countess, want to go to such a place? He doubted it. He tried to imagine her there, in some little bungalow with a picket fence, cooking dinner. Baking a cake.

Uhl looked at his watch. Was the train slow today? He returned to his reverie, soothing himself with daydreams of some sweet moment in the future, happy and carefree in a far-off land. The man in the black coat suddenly stood up-he was tall, with military posture-unclicked the latch on the compartment door, and turned left down the corridor. Left? The first-class WC was to the right-Uhl knew this; he’d used it often on his trips between Breslau and Warsaw. So then, why left? That led only to the second-class carriages, why would he go there? Was there another WC down that way which, for some eccentric personal reason, he preferred? Uhl didn’t know. He could, of course, go and find out for himself, but that would mean following the man down the corridor. This he didn’t care to do. Why not? He didn’t care to, period.

So he waited. The train slowed for the town of Krotoszyn, chugged past the small outdoor station. A group of passengers, stolid country people, sat on a bench, surrounded by boxes and suitcases. Waiting for some other train, a local train, to take them somewhere else. Outside Krotoszyn, a cluster of small shacks came to the edge of the railway. Uhl saw a dog in a window, watching the train go by, and somebody had left shirts on a wash line; now they were wet. Where was the man in the black coat? Were the two businessmen his friends? Had he gone to visit them? Impulsively, Uhl stood up. “Excuse me,” he said, as the other passengers drew their feet in so he could pass. Outside the door, he saw that the corridor was empty. He turned left, the sound of the wheels on the track deepened as the train crossed a railroad bridge over a river, then, on the other side, returned to its usual pitch. The carriage swayed, they were picking up speed now, as Uhl walked along the corridor. He was tempted to look in at each compartment, to see where the businessmen were, to see if the man in the black coat had joined them, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. It didn’t feel right, to Uhl, to do something like that. He was now certain that when he got off this train he would be arrested, beaten until he confessed, and, then, hanged.

There was no WC at the end of the carriage. Only a door that would open to the metal plate above the coupling, then another door, and a second-class carriage. Above the seats, arranged in rows divided by an aisle, a haze of smoke. In the first seat, a man and a woman were asleep; the woman’s mouth was wide open, which made her face seem worried and tense. As Uhl turned, he discovered that the first-class conductor had come down the corridor behind him. Gesturing with his thumb, back and forth above his shoulder, he said something in Polish. Then, when he saw that Uhl didn’t understand, he said in German, “It’s back there, sir. What you’re looking for.”

“How long until we reach Leszno?”

The conductor looked at his watch. “About an hour, not much more.”

Uhl returned to the compartment. At Leszno, after Polish border guards checked the first-class passports, the train would continue to Glogau, where the passengers had to get off for German frontier kontrol; then he would change trains, for a local that went south to Breslau. Back in his compartment, Uhl kept looking at his watch. Diagonally across from him, an empty seat. The man in the black coat had not returned. Had the train stopped? No. He was simply somewhere else.

It was almost six when they reached the Polish border at Leszno. Uhl decided to get off the train and wait for the next one, but the conductor had stationed himself to block the door. Broad and stocky, feet spread wide, he stood like an official wall. “You must wait for the passport officers, sir,” he said. He wasn’t polite. Did he think Uhl wanted to run away? No, he knew that Uhl wanted to run away. Six days a week he worked on this train, what hadn’t he seen? Fugitives, certainly, who’d lost their nerve and couldn’t face the authorities.

“Of course,” Uhl said, returning to his compartment.

What a fool he was! He was an ordinary man, not cut out for a life like this. He’d been born to put on his carpet slippers after dinner, to sit in his easy chair, read his newspaper, and listen to music on the radio. In the compartment, the other passengers were restive. They didn’t speak but shifted about, cleared their throats, touched their faces. And there they sat, as twenty minutes crawled by. Then, at last, at the end of the car, the sound of boots on the steel platform, a little joke, a laugh. The two officers entered the compartment, took each passport in turn, glanced at the owner, found the proper page, and stamped it: Odjazd Polska-18 Pazdziernik 1937.

Well, that wasn’t so bad. The passengers relaxed. The woman across from Uhl searched in her purse, found a hard candy, unwrapped it, and popped it in her mouth-so much for the Polish frontier! Then she noticed that Uhl was watching her. “Would you care for a candy?” she said.

“No, thank you.”

“Sometimes, the motion of the train …” she said. There was sympathy in her eyes.

Did he look ill? What did she see, in his face? He turned away and stared out the window. The train had left the lights of Leszno; outside it was dark, outside it was Germany. Now what Uhl saw in the window was his own reflection, but if he pressed his forehead against the cold glass he could just make out a forest, a one-street village, a black car, shiny in the rain, waiting at the lowered bar of a railway crossing. What if, he wondered, the next time he went to Warsaw, he simply didn’t show up for Andre’s meeting? What would they do? Would they betray him? Or just let him go? The former, he thought. He was trapped, and they would not set him free; the world didn’t work that way, not their world. His mind was working like a machine gone wild; fantasies of escape, fantasies of capture, a dozen alibis, all of them absurd, the possibility that he was afraid of shadows, that none of it was real.

“Glo-gau!”

The conductor’s voice was loud in the corridor. Then, from further away, “Glogau!”

The train rumbled through the outlying districts of the city, then slowed for the bridge that crossed the river Oder, a long span of arches, the current churning white as it curled around the stone block. An ancient border, no matter where the diplomats drew their lines, “east of the Oder” meant Slavic Europe, the other Europe.

“All out for Glogau.”

The passport kontrol was set up at the door to the station, beneath a large swastika flag. Uhl counted five men, one of them seated at a small table, another with an Alsatian shepherd on a braided leash. Three were in uniform, their holstered sidearms worn high, and two were civilians, standing so they could see a sheaf of papers on the table. A list.

Uhl’s heart was pounding as he stepped down onto the platform. You have nothing to fear, he told himself. If they searched him they would find only a thousand zloty. So what? Everyone carried money. But they have a list. What if his name was on it? A few months earlier he’d seen it happen, right here, at Glogau station. A heavy man, with a red face, led quietly away, a guiding hand above his elbow. Now he saw the two businessmen; they were ahead of him on the line that led to the passport kontrol. One of them looked over his shoulder, then said something, something private, to his friend. Yes, he’s just back there, behind us. And then Uhl discovered the man in the black leather coat. He was not on the line, he was sitting on a bench by the wall of the station, hands in pockets, legs crossed, very much at ease. Because he did not have to go through passport kontrol, because he was one of them, a Gestapo man, who’d followed him down from Warsaw, making sure he didn’t get off the train. And now his job was done, work over for the day. Tomorrow, a new assignment. Uhl felt beads of sweat break out at his hairline, took off his hat, and wiped them away. Run. “Ach,” he said, to the man behind him in the line, “I have forgotten my valise.”

He left the line and walked back toward the train, his briefcase clamped tightly beneath his arm. At the door to the train, where second-class passengers were gathering, waiting in a crowd to join the line, the conductor was smoking a cigarette. “Excuse me,” Uhl said, “but I have forgotten my suitcase.”

No you haven’t. The conductor’s face showed perfectly what he knew: there was no suitcase. And Uhl saw it. So now my life ends, he thought. Then, quietly, he said, “Please.”

The conductor shifted his eyes, looking over Uhl’s shoulder toward the SS troopers, the civilians, the flag, the dog, the list. His expression changed, and then he stepped aside, just enough to let Uhl pass. When he spoke, his voice was barely audible. “Ahh, fuck these people.” Uhl took a tentative step toward the iron stair that led up to the carriage. The conductor, still watching the Germans and their table, said, “Not yet.” Uhl felt a drop of sweat break free of his hatband and work its way down his forehead; he wanted to wipe it away but his arm wouldn’t move.

“Now,” the conductor said.

19 October, 3:30 P.M. The weekly intelligence meeting was held in the conference room of the chancery-the political section of the embassy-secured from public areas, away from the seekers of travel documents, replacements for lost passports, commercial licenses, and all other business that brought the civilian world to the building. The code clerks were in the basement-which they didn’t like, claiming the dampness was hard on their equipment-along with the mailroom that handled sealed embassy pouches, while Mercier’s office was on the top floor.

The meeting was chaired by Jourdain, the second secretary and political officer-which meant he too scurried about the city to dark corners for secret contacts-and Mercier’s best friend at the embassy. Sandy-haired and sunny, in his mid-thirties, Jourdain was a third-generation diplomat-his father due to become ambassador to Singapore-with three young children in private academies in Warsaw. Across the table from Mercier was the air attache, at one end the naval attache, at the other, Jourdain’s secretary, who took shorthand notes, which Jourdain would turn into a report for the Quai d’Orsay, the foreign ministry in Paris.

“Not much new,” the air attache said. He was in his fifties, corpulent and sour-faced. “The production of the Pezetelkis is going full steam ahead.” Pezetelki was the nickname, taken from initials, of the PZT-24F, Poland’s best fighter plane, four years earlier the most advanced pursuit monoplane in Europe. “But the air force won’t get near them; that hasn’t changed either. For export only.”

“The same orders?” Jourdain said.

“Yes. Turkey, Greece, and Yugoslavia.”

“They’ll regret that, one of these days,” the naval attache said.

The air attache shrugged. “They’re trying to balance the budget, the country’s damn close to broke. So they sell what people will buy.”

“I guess they know best,” said Jourdain, who clearly didn’t believe that at all.

“Otherwise, very little new.” The air attache studied his notes. “They had an accident, last Wednesday, over Okecie field. One of their P-Sevens clipped the tail of another. Both pilots safe, both planes badly banged up, one a loss-he parachuted-the other landed.” Again he shrugged. “So we can say”-the air attache looked toward the secretary-“that their numbers are reduced by one, anyhow.”

“Just note,” Jourdain said to the secretary, “that we should repeat the fact that the relation of the Polish air force to the Luftwaffe remains twenty-five to one in favor of the Germans.” Then he turned to the naval attache and said, “Jean-Paul?”

As the naval attache lit a cigarette and shuffled through his papers, there were two sharp knocks at the door, which opened to reveal one of the women who worked the embassy switchboard. “Colonel Mercier? May I speak with you for a moment?”

“Excuse me,” Mercier said. He went out into the corridor and closed the door behind him. The operator, a middle-aged French-woman, was, like many who worked at the embassy, the widow of an officer killed in the 1914 war. “A Monsieur Uhl has telephoned your apartment,” she said. “He left a number with your maid. I hope it’s correct, sir, she was very nervous.”

“Poor Wlada,” Mercier said. Now what? The operator handed him a slip of paper, and Mercier went up the stairs to his office. Looking in his drawer, he found a list of German telephone exchanges, dialed the switchboard, and asked for a foreign operator. When she came on the line he gave her the number. “Can you put it through right away?” he said, his Polish slow but correct.

“I can, sir, it’s quiet this afternoon.”

As Mercier waited, he stared out his window onto the square in front of the embassy. Beneath the bare branches of a chestnut tree, a man with a wagon was selling a sausage on a roll to a father with a small child. Far away, a telephone rang once. “Hello? Hello?” Uhl’s voice was tense and high.

“Yes, I’m here. Herr Uhl?”

“Hello? Andre?”

“Yes. What’s wrong?”

“I’m at the railway station.” Mercier could hear a train. “I had a problem yesterday, on the way back. In Glogau.”

“What problem?”

“I was being watched, on the train.”

“How do you know?”

“I-ah, I sensed it. Two businessmen, and a Gestapo man.”

“Did they question you? Search you?” Mercier had to make himself relax the grip of his hand on the phone.

“Oh no. I eluded them.”

“Really. How did you do that?”

“At the border kontrol, in Glogau station, I left the line and went back into the Warsaw train, climbed down between carriages, and crawled. Along the track. At the end of the train there is Glogau bridge, but I found a stairway that led down to the bank of the river. I walked back toward the city and took a taxi to the next station on the line, where I got on the local train to Breslau.”

“Good work,” Mercier said.

“What?”

“I said, good work.”

“It was very close. They almost had me, in the station.”

“Perhaps they did. Tell me, Herr Uhl, what happened this morning?”

“This morning? I went to the office.”

“Did someone question you? Were you confronted?”

“No. All was normal.”

“Then you’re in the clear. Did the people on the train say anything to you?”

“No. But they looked at me. They behaved, in a furtive manner.”

“I would doubt that German surveillance operatives would be furtive, Herr Uhl. Perhaps your imagination … misled you.”

“Well, maybe. But maybe not. In any event, I think I shouldn’t continue our meetings.”

“Oh, let’s not be scared off so easily. Believe me, if the Gestapo had any reason to suspect you, you wouldn’t be talking to me on the telephone. By the way, you mentioned a Gestapo man. How did you know that? I presume he was in uniform.”

“He wasn’t. He wore a leather coat. It was the way he looked.”

Mercier laughed. “The way he looked?”

“Well …”

“Your work is important, Herr Uhl, and we don’t lose people who help us; we can’t afford that. Would you like me to do some checking? To see if you’re being watched?”

After a silence, Uhl said, “You’re able to do that?”

“We are a resourceful service,” Mercier said. “We’re able to do all sorts of things. Why don’t I ask some people to see what’s going on; then I’ll send you a postal card, if everything is normal.”

“And what if it isn’t?”

“I’ll find a way to let you know. What time do you leave your office?”

“At six, generally.”

“Every night?”

“Yes, almost every night.”

“Then we’ll know how to find you. For the moment, I expect to see you in November. You recall the information I requested.”

“Yes.”

“Just remember, it’s in our interest to keep you safe, and it’s in your interest to continue your work.”

After a time, Uhl said, “Very well, we’ll see. If everything is-as it was….”

“You did very well, Herr Uhl. If nothing else, you erred on the side of caution, and we admire that. Clearly, you have a gift for this sort of business.”

Uhl didn’t answer.

“On the fifteenth,” Mercier said, “we can talk it over, if you like. We want you safe and sound, do keep that in mind. And, after all, you do have other interests that bring you to Warsaw-would you simply remain in Germany?”

“No, but-”

“Then it’s settled. I’ll be waiting for you. Or, if there’s a problem, I’ll make sure you know about it.”

“All right,” Uhl said. He wasn’t happy but he would, Mercier thought, hold up. For a while, anyhow.

Mercier said goodby, hung up the phone, and wrote himself a note: Send Uhl a postcard. “All going well here, hope to see you soon, Aunt Frieda.” There was no possibility of finding out if Uhl was under Gestapo surveillance-maybe the Deuxieme Bureau had spies inside the German security apparatus, but Uhl was not important enough for such an effort. The lie had been recommended at his training class and it had evidently worked the way they’d said it would. From the telephone call, Mercier sensed that Uhl had frightened himself.

He returned to the conference room, where the meeting continued, in a fog of cigarette smoke. “Everything all right?” Jourdain said, concern in his voice.

“A problem with an agent,” Mercier said.

“Not going to lose him, are we?”

“I don’t think so. I suspect he saw phantoms.”

“They like what he’s bringing, at deux bis,” Jourdain said. He referred to the Deuxieme Bureau by its Paris address, 2 bis, rue de Tourville.

Mercier nodded. Perhaps they liked it at the General Staff as well-they never said, simply took what there was, then asked for more. Nevertheless, you didn’t want to lose agents, you’d find yourself transferred to some fever-ridden island in a distant ocean-far-flung barely described the remote outposts of the French colonial empire.

“I’m just finishing up,” the naval attache said. “Baltic maneuvers off the Gdynia coast. A destroyer squadron.”

“They hit their targets?” Mercier said.

“Now and then. They almost hit the towing ship, but we all do that.”

Mercier finished his paperwork at six, then headed back to his apartment. He had the Renault dinner at eight-thirty, with Madame Dupin, the deputy director of protocol at the embassy. He sighed, inside, at the prospect of a long, boring, political dinner, where one said nothing much and could only hope it was the right nothing much. As for Madame Dupin, she was a noble soul, able to sparkle and chatter endlessly at social functions, an ability that some might find frivolous, until they joined the diplomatic service.

He appreciated her efforts, but the evening reminded him of what had been-of Annemarie, his wife, who’d died three years earlier. He recalled how, as they’d dressed for the evening, they would banter about the awful people they would meet, would have to entertain. That made it easier, theatre for husband and wife, shared misery and the instinct to find it some way, somehow, amusing.

The apartment provided for the military attache was on the second floor of 22, aleja Ujazdowska-Ujazdowska avenue-the Champs-Elysees of Warsaw, though not so broad, a street of elegant five-story buildings, exteriors lavishly wrought with every sort of decorative stonework, set well back behind trees and shrubbery, which was fronted by ornamental iron palings that ran the length of the block. The French embassy had for a long time been on Ujazdowska but had moved, two years earlier, to Nowy Swiat. Still, it was only a fifteen-minute walk from his apartment, just enough to clear the fog of work from his mind.

The apartment came with a maid, Wlada, thin and nervous, who lived in the maid’s room, a cook, heavy and silent, who came every day but Sunday, and a driver, Marek, a tough old bird who’d served as a sergeant in Pilsudski’s Polish Legion and drove Mercier around in what he persisted in calling the “Biook,” in fact a 1936 S41 Buick sedan. The choice of the French and several other embassies, it was a heavily sprung eight-cylinder bear of an automobile, with a bulbous trunk, that negotiated Polish roads as long as you kept at least two spare tires with you, though nobody went anywhere in the spring and autumn rains-Poland’s seasonal barrier against German expansion.

Entering the apartment, Mercier glanced at the mail on the foyer table, then headed for his dressing room. This took time. The place was enormous; ten vast rooms with high ceilings, plaster medallions at every corner, and, thanks to the inordinately wealthy wife of a previous tenant, sumptuously furnished. Better to have private means if you were a diplomat of higher rank, the salary didn’t begin to pay for the necessary show. Thus the heavy floor-to-ceiling drapes at the windows, couches covered in damask, ebony drum tables, exotic oriental lamps with creamy silk shades, and a silver service to sink a small ship. In the apartment, Mercier felt forever a temporary guest. The rough, weary, mostly ancient furnishings of his country house in central France-dog hair everywhere, how did they still have coats? — the only style that felt, to him, comfortable.

In the dressing room, Wlada had laid out his best uniform, perfectly cleaned and ironed, and his kepi, visored military hat, which she’d ruthlessly brushed. The damn thing was expensive, but there was, in such matters, no interfering with Wlada. The more she thought it important, the harder she punished it. Opening the bottom drawer of his dresser, he brought out a square of blue felt with cardboard backing, which bore his service decorations, pinned in neat rows. There were a lot of them; twenty-eight years in the military brought medals. For the Renault crowd, much the best to go top class, so Mercier unpinned his Croix de Guerre and Virtuti Militari and set them on the dresser. A bath? No, it could wait. He took off his work uniform, shoes, and socks, put on a wool bathrobe, walked into the adjoining bedroom, and stretched out on a settee by the window. Twenty minutes, no more. Outside, the avenue was quiet under the streetlamps, a horse-drawn cab went clopping past, a dog barked, a couple spoke in gentle voices as they walked by. Peace. Another nineteenth-century evening on the Ujazdowska.

As he often did, Mercier thought of Annemarie as he drifted off. He was lonely for her, three years gone with influenza-thought at first, and for too long, to be a winter grippe. Despite all the time he’d spent away from her, they’d been a close couple, given to the small, continual affections of married life. They’d had two daughters, both now in their early twenties, one married to an archaeologist and living in Cairo, the other working at a museum in Copenhagen: adventurers like their father and, alas, like him, terribly independent. It was what he’d wished for, and what he got-so life went. Every now and then, a newsy letter, but it had been a long time since he’d seen either one of them. They were attractive, not beautiful, and moderately celestial, floating just above the daily world, not unlike Annemarie. Annemarie. Now and then, with a late supper for two planned, after the girls left home, they would make love at this time-that seductive hour between afternoon and night, l’heure bleu, in the French tradition, named for its deepening shadow. Sometimes she would …

From the study, several rooms away, the rattling bell of the telephone. He heard Wlada scurrying across the chestnut parquet, a breathless “Rezydencja panstwa Mercier,” a few more words of Polish, then the footsteps headed his way. “Colonel?” she said. “Are you awake?”

“Yes?”

“It is Madame Du-peen.”

“All right. I’m coming.”

He tied the belt of his bathrobe as he journeyed toward the study. “Madame Dupin?”

“Good evening, Colonel Mercier. Forgive me, please, for calling so late.”

“Of course, no problem.”

“I’m afraid there is, I’m unwell. Something”-she paused; how to say it? — “something I ate.”

“I am sorry. Do you need anything? I can send Marek to the pharmacy.”

“That is very kind of you, but no, thank you. What it means is that I can’t attend the dinner tonight.”

“It’s nothing to worry about, I can go alone.”

“Oh no, that won’t do at all. I’ve found a substitute, a friend of mine. She lives with some Russian, a journalist, but he won’t care. Anyhow, she’s agreed to go, my dear friend. Otherwise, an empty place, an unbalanced table, it simply can’t be done. Do you have something to write on?”

“A moment,” he said, then found a tablet and a pen on the antique desk. “Yes?”

She gave him a name, Anna Szarbek, and an address. “Your driver will know where it is,” she said.

“Just feel better, Madame Dupin, I’m sure we’ll manage.”

“You’ll like my friend,” she said. “She’s terribly bright.”

“I’m sure I will,” he said.

Promptly at eight, he climbed into the back of the “Biook” and gave Marek the address. “Yes,” Marek said, “I’ll find it.”

But it wasn’t so easy. Mumbling curses to himself, Marek worked back and forth through tiny streets north of the central city. Mercier had a street map-in his desk at the office, naturally. He looked at his watch, trying to keep it below the back of the front seat, but Marek caught him at it and mumbled louder. Finally, at twenty minutes past eight, they found the building. Now they would be late-which might, for some, be fashionable, but Mercier wasn’t fashionable.

The building was two stories high, and the janitor, when it suited him, answered his knock at the street door and swung an ill-tempered hand toward the staircase. On the second floor, two doors, and a powerful fragrance of boiled cabbage. He knocked at the first door, waited thirty seconds, then, as he knocked at the second door, the first one opened.

“Good evening,” Mercier said. “Madame Szarbek? I’m Madame Dupin’s friend, Lieutenant Colonel Mercier.”

“That’s me. Sorry to have kept you. Please, come inside.”

Mercier was immediately relieved-this was not to be an evening spent in his undependable Polish; her French was rapid and fluent, with the barest hitch of an accent at the edges, her voice slightly husky and rough. She was, he guessed, in her late thirties, and very striking: thick hair, the color called dirty blond, swept low across her forehead, then pinned up in back, and a face that suggested, somehow, sensuality-a slight downward curve of the nose, full-lipped mouth, pallid skin, sharp jawline, and deep green eyes, wary and restless, not quite the night animal, but close. For a formal evening, she wore a black silk dress with matching jacket, then, more her true style, added a dark red scarf wound around her throat, pendant earrings with green gemstones, and a cloud of strong perfume, more spice than sugar. For a moment she stared at him, her mouth set in a hesitant smile: will this do? Then said, “I’ll be ready right away,” led him into the apartment, and fled down the hall, calling out, “Please introduce yourselves.”

On the sofa, a burly man with gray hair curling out of the vee of his open shirt rose from a nest of newspapers. “Good evening, general,” he said with a grin and a meaty handshake. “I’m Maxim.” From the grin, Mercier could tell that Maxim knew he wasn’t a general, this was just his way of being lovable. They stood there for a moment, not comfortable, then Anna Szarbek came hurrying out of the hallway, now clutching a small evening purse. “Are we awfully late?” she said.

“No, we’ll be fine,” Mercier said.

Anna kissed Maxim on the cheek and said something private by his ear.

“Not too late, general,” Maxim said, and winked at Mercier. Some dish, hey? Don’t get any ideas.

He followed her down the stairs-she was a little wobbly in very high heels, sliding one hand along the banister-and out onto the sidewalk. As Marek held the door open for Anna, he gave Mercier a conspiratorial lift of the eyebrows. “We’re going to the Europejski,” Mercier said, glancing at his watch.

That gesture was all Marek needed to see-the Buick took off with a squeal of the tires and went hurtling down the narrow street. Anna settled herself in the corner of the backseat, bent over to peer into her purse, brought out a slim tortoiseshell cigarette case, and offered it to Mercier. On the lid, a laughing Bacchus and two pink nymphs were wearing only a grapevine. “Do you smoke?” she said.

“I do, but not right now.”

She took out a cigarette, and Mercier lit it for her with a steel lighter. This she needed-took a deep draw, exhaled two long plumes of smoke from her nose, and sat back in the seat. “Marie didn’t tell me much,” she said, referring to Madame Dupin.

“It’s very kind of you, to do this on short notice.”

“For Saint Marie, anything. She does favors for everybody, so …”

“It’s a dinner given by the Polish General Staff for a delegation from the Renault company; they’ve come in from Paris. Then, after that, a nightclub.”

“A nightclub?”

“Yes, the Adria.”

“Very fancy. I’ve never been there.”

Mercier’s expression said that it was what it was. “A floor show, likely dancing.”

Her nod was grim, but determined-she would handle anything that came her way. “So, you’re at the embassy.”

“I am. The military attache.”

“Yes, that’s what Marie said.” She knew what military attaches did-at least some secret intelligence work-but apparently took it for an inevitable part of life in foreign service.

“A lot of paperwork is what it amounts to. Sometimes attendance at field maneuvers. And, as you would imagine, endless meetings.” She didn’t comment, so he said, “Have you always lived here, in Warsaw?” Marek was driving fast, the Buick’s big engine a heavy purr. They came up close to a trolley and swung boldly around it, skidding on the track.

“No, I’ve been based here for, oh, maybe a year and a half, and I spend a lot of time traveling, mostly down south, and up to Gdansk. I’m a lawyer with the League of Nations, so sometimes I’m in Geneva. Talk about endless meetings.”

“Where’s home, then?”

“I’m Parisian by birth, Polish by heritage.”

“An emigre family.”

“Yes, I grew up speaking Polish at home, French everywhere else.”

“What do you do for the League?”

“Report on legal claims, mostly, a form of arbitration. When the League redrew the Silesian border in 1921, after the third uprising, tens of thousands of Poles and Germans were in a new country, and private citizens continued to submit claims to the League, seeking satisfaction they couldn’t get from local courts. It’s the same up in Danzig, declared by the League a Free City, but what you have is a German population governed by Poles. All this led to local disputes-land ownership, unfair administration, tax problems. We don’t have legal standing, but we try to arbitrate, and sometimes the local courts are responsive. Anyhow it’s a last resort, for Poles and Germans, even though Germany left the League when Hitler came to power. The League is, if nothing else, persistent: war doesn’t work, try the courts.”

“Try anything,” Mercier said.

That caught her attention, and she looked at him. “Not the usual sentiment,” she said, “from someone in uniform.”

“You’d be surprised,” Mercier said. “Once you’ve been in the middle of it …”

She turned away and stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray on the arm of the backseat. “Well, now you’ll be in it again. Spain is just the beginning, it’ll spread from there.”

“Inevitable, you believe?”

“From the people I talk to, yes. Eaten up with grievance, especially the Germans. Getting even is what they think about.”

“You have a difficult job, Madame Szarbek.”

“Anna, please. And it’s mademoiselle, for a while anyhow. Is your job easier than mine?”

“No, not really.”

At the Europejski, they were led up a marble stairway to a private dining room, all wood-paneled walls and polished floor. Beneath crystal chandeliers, a long table was set for thirty; the sheen of the damask tablecloth, the heavy silver, and the gold-rimmed china glowed in the light of a dozen candelabra. They were greeted at the door by an officer of the Polish General Staff and his splendidly bejeweled wife. “We are so very pleased you could join us,” she said, her smile gracious and warm. The room hummed with conversation; officers in uniform, most of the other men in evening wear, most of the women in formal gowns. Anna, perhaps momentarily taken aback by all the glitter, took Mercier’s arm. He was instantly aware of the touch of her hand, resting lightly on his sleeve.

From some distant century, an ancient waiter in a swallowtail coat moved toward them, parchment face lit by a beatific smile, parchment hands holding a silver tray, which trembled slightly, bearing two glasses of champagne. Drinks in hand, they watched him shuffle back toward the kitchen. Anna started to say something, but another officer wife descended on them, leading a small fellow in a dark suit, one of the men from Renault. After the introductions, she swept away, in search of other strays.

“So, Monsieur Blanc,” Mercier said, “a worthwhile visit, so far?”

“Yes, I would say it is; we are making our case. The R-Thirty-five tank is a magnificent machine.”

“And what do you do for the Renault company?”

“I am one of the senior engineers-I concern myself mostly with treads.”

From Anna, an appreciative, encouraging nod. Treads!

“Yes, that’s me. And you, colonel?”

“I’m the military attache, at the embassy.”

“Ah, then you must support us-these Poles can be stubborn. Don’t you think, Madame Mercier?”

“Oh yes, indeed, terribly stubborn.”

“Tell me, Major Kulski,” Anna said, “do you favor the Renault machine?”

“Mmm, well …”

“Oh, perhaps you are unpersuaded.”

“Mm. And how do you come to be here tonight, Pana Szarbek?”

“I’m accompanying Colonel Mercier. He’s over there, by the pillar.”

“Then you must live in the city.”

“Yes, I do, major.”

“I wondered. You see, when I’m done with the army for the day, I’m something of an artist; that’s my real passion in life. So, allow me to say that you would make a superb model, for a life drawing. Truly, superb.”

Mercier shook hands with Colonel Vyborg and said, “How goes the visit?”

“Not too badly. This afternoon I had a talk with Habich’s assistant-you know Habich?”

“I’ve met him.”

“The best armaments designer in Europe. Anyhow, his assistant believes that if we buy this worm of an R-Thirty-five, the engineers can do something to improve it.”

“That’s encouraging. Are they thinking about numbers?”

“No, not yet. We need to get our hands on one of them and Habich’s people will tear it to pieces, then we’ll see what can be done, and then we’ll talk about numbers.”

“So, you’re with the League of Nations.” The woman was in her seventies, Anna thought; her husband, with grand white cavalry mustaches, at least in his eighties. “Such a hopeful notion, my dear, really. A league, of nations! How far we’ve come, in this dreadful world. My husband here, the general, was the late-life son of a colonel in the Hussars. In 1852, that was. A great hero, my husband’s father, he fought in the Battle of Leipzig and was decorated for bravery-we still have the medal.”

“At Leipzig, really.”

“That’s right, my dear, with Napoleon.”

“At last,” Mercier said, appearing at Anna’s side. “It’s time for dinner. Are you hungry?”

“Yes. I had a little caviar.”

“You seem to have found people to talk to, I kept an eye on you.”

“All sorts of people. I met a major who asked me to pose for a life drawing.”

“The hound. And will you?”

“Oh certainly, wouldn’t miss it. I think I’ll need a feather boa. Or maybe not.”

From the table, a woman called out, “Colonel Mercier? You’re over here.”

“Thank you.” Mercier drew back a gilded chair and Anna seated herself, brushing her dress forward as she sat. “Here’s the menu,” he said.

Anna hunted around in her evening bag and came up with a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. “At last, I can see.”

The grand menu-both hands required-was printed in spidery italic, with gold cord and tassel down the middle, and simply named the courses to be served. As he watched her reading, it occurred to Mercier that Anna’s long, searching glances were precisely that-not personality, myopia. “There’s sole meuniere,” he said. “I’ve had that here, and it’s good. Then a roast. Abundant, the roast.”

“Abundant is the word,” she said. “Six courses.”

“That’s the Europejski. And you should at least taste the wines, the cellar is famous.”

From Anna, a wry smile. Champagne, three wines-imagine.

“Yes,” Mercier said, falling in with her mood, “all of it rich and elaborate. And be sure to leave room for the tangerine flan.”

On Mercier’s right, the placement card said Madame de Michaux: a formidable woman, with low-cut neckline and a circle of rubies at her heavy throat. Evidently, she’d also read his card. “Mercier de Boutillon,” she mused. “And your home, where is that?”

“Down in the Drome, about an hour from Montelimar.”

“I believe there’s an Albertine, Mercier de Boutillon, in Paris. Is that the same family?”

“My cousin. A friend of yours?”

“Well, we’ve met. My husband is on the Renault board of directors, also the opera. I believe that’s how I know her. A very engaging woman, a collector of certain antiquities-is that so?”

“It is. Objets, in onyx. Mostly cameos, I believe.”

“You must tell her we sat together, at a dinner in Warsaw. Amusing, no?”

“Certainly I will, the next time I’m in Paris.”

“Do you come often, colonel?”

After the duck pate, the consomme, and the sole, as plates were brought with great red slices of roasted beef, the rules of the formal dinner dictated a turn to the other partner. For Mercier, a welcome turn, Anna Szarbek seemed easy and comfortable after the determined Madame de Michaux-one of those upper-class women who, polite as could be, worked like a beaver at discovering one’s personal life. Anna reported that the man on her left, Julien Travas, the manager of the Pathe newsreel agency in Warsaw, had been extremely entertaining. Something of an adventurer, he’d traveled, as a young man, from Shanghai to Siam by foot and oxcart, and told a good story.

Mercier and Anna worked their way through the roast, then the macedoine of vegetables, left the quivering tangerine flan on their plates, drank the coffee, and tasted the cognac. Then it was time for the nightclub. The Adria was not far from the Europejski, but one had to arrive in one’s automobile. As they drove away from the hotel, Anna said, “Is this something you do often?”

“Now and then, it’s part of the job.”

“Good lord.”

“Sip the wine, taste the food, find everyone fascinating-a good motto for diplomacy.”

She shook her head. “I guess that’s one way to save the world.”

“Yes, one way,” he said. “After the fish.”

There were tables reserved for them at the Adria, and more place cards, which led to a lighthearted interval of confusion and commentary in the dark, smoky nightclub. Mercier found that Colonel Vyborg had had them seated at his own table, with the director of Renault’s armaments division and a major in the purchasing section of the Polish General Staff, an owlish, balding fellow, and their wives.

After they were settled, Vyborg ordered champagne, three bottles of Veuve Clicquot, and, as the waiter opened the first, a blue spotlight pierced the darkness to reveal, on the small platform that served as a stage, Marko the Magician-so said a card on an easel-in top hat and tails, his face stark white with makeup. And his assistant, a girl in a very brief spangled costume, who opened her mouth, from which Marko began to extract, with immaculate white gloves, a series of red balls. Another, then another, each one producing horrified glances at the audience as she discovered yet one more red ball inside her. The major’s wife, on Mercier’s left, began to giggle, and Mercier guessed she’d more than sampled the dinner wines. The wife of the Renault director whispered, “Next time, darling, don’t eat so many balls.”

“How was your dinner?” Vyborg asked Anna.

“Very good.”

“And the wine?”

“That too, very good.”

Leaning across his wife, the Renault director said to the major, “What did you think of our presentation, in Paris? You were with the purchasing delegation, as I recall.”

“Yes, I was,” said the major. “A strong field trial, I thought. Of course, the ground was dry.”

“Yes, one’s always at the mercy of the weather.”

“As are we,” the major said. “Our infamous roads, you know.”

“It’s very difficult for us,” the major’s wife said. “In this country, we stay home in the bad seasons.”

“That’s changing, is it not?” the director said.

“True,” Vyborg said. “We’re paving some of the roads, but it’s a long process.”

“Better roads in Germany,” the director said, a tease in his voice.

“So I’m told,” the major said. “We hope we don’t have to find that out for ourselves.”

“It’s something they’ve been making bets on,” Vyborg said, “our young tank captains and lieutenants. How many hours to Berlin.”

“To be encouraged, I guess, that sort of spirit,” said the major. “But much better if everyone stays on their side of the frontier.”

“Quite a number of people think the Germans might not,” the director said. “What then?”

On stage, Marko had finished with the red balls, but then, to his surprise, he discovered that his assistant had swallowed a canary, greedy girl. This produced a scattering of applause from the audience and a chirp from the canary. Marko, with a flourish, then wheeled a coffinlike box into the spotlight. The assistant’s eyes widened: oh no, not this.

“I believe she’s to be sawn in half,” Mercier said.

“She does seem pretty frightened,” Anna said. “Acting, I hope.”

Vyborg’s wife laughed. “A new assistant for every performance.”

The director’s wife said, “I’ve heard they do that with birds, sacrifice one for each trick.”

“No, really?” Mercier said.

“It’s true, I’ve heard the same thing,” the major’s wife said.

“As I was saying”-the director’s voice was quiet but firm-“what then? You’ll need all the armoured forces you can deploy.”

“Of course you’re right, monsieur,” the major said, “but our resources are limited. Germany’s industry recovered from the war faster than ours, and they outnumber us in tanks by thirty to one.”

Mercier recalled Jourdain’s meeting at the embassy. “Twenty-five to one,” he’d said, unless Mercier’s memory was failing him, but he didn’t think it was.

“We know Poland isn’t a rich country,” the director said, “but that’s what banks are for.”

The major’s assent was a grim nod. Rather gently he said, “They do expect to be paid back.”

“Of course. But I’ll tell you something, they won’t be so finicky about it if German divisions come across your border.”

“They’ll regret it if they do,” Vyborg’s wife said. “They may overwhelm us, at first, but in time they’ll be sorry. And, while we’re working on that here, they’ll have the French army coming across their other border.”

“That could,” the director said, “take a few weeks, you know. In all fairness. Apologies to Colonel Mercier.”

“You needn’t,” Mercier said. “It took us time to organize ourselves in 1914, and it will again.” No, we’re not coming, we’re going to sit on the Maginot Line.

“I suspect Hitler knows that,” the director said.

Marko’s assistant had now climbed into the coffin, bare feet protruding from one end, head from the other. With a lethal-looking saw in hand, Marko bent over the box and, on the side away from the audience, began to cut. The blade was obviously set between two metal bands that circled the coffin, but the progress of the saw was loud and realistic. Suddenly, the girl squeaked with real terror. Had the trick gone wrong? From the audience, a chorus of gasps. The director’s wife raised her hand to her mouth and said, “Good heavens!”

The magician returned to work, sawing away, while the assistant raised her head and peered over the edge of the coffin. Finally, Marko raised the saw, turned to the audience and then, the grand finale, separated the box. The audience applauded, and the magician wheeled the two halves of his assistant offstage.

“False feet,” Vyborg said.

“Or a second assistant, curled up in the other half,” Anna said.

“And you’ll notice,” said the director’s wife, triumphantly, “not a speck of sawdust.”

The magician was followed by a chanteuse, who sang romantic songs, then three bearded acrobats in saggy tights who turned somersaults through a fiery hoop. Each time they landed they shouted “Hup!” and the Adria’s floor shook. Then a trio-saxophone, drums, and guitar-appeared and began to play dance music. Vyborg stood and offered a hand to his wife, the director and the major followed his example. Mercier was the last to stand. “Shall we?” he said to Anna, his voice tentative, it wasn’t really obligatory.

If I must. “I think we should.”

A slow foxtrot. Mercier, stiff and mechanical, had never advanced much beyond lessons taken as a ten-year-old, girls and boys in white gloves. Anna was not much better, but they managed, going round and round in their private square to the slow beat. Mercier, his arm circled lightly about her, found her back firm, then soft above the hips. And the way she moved, lithe and supple beneath the thin silk of her dress, more than interesting-his arm wanting, almost by itself, to tighten around her waist. As she danced, she smiled up at him, her perfume intense. Was the smile complicit? Knowing? Inviting? He wanted it to be, and smiled back at her. Finally she said, returning to polite conversation, “That man from Renault is something of a bully.”

“Titles and prerogatives aside, he’s a merchant. Selling his wares.”

“Still …” Anna said. The bridge of the song was slow. Anna’s hand, slightly damp, tightened on his. “You’d think he’d be more, oh, subtle about it.”

“Yes, but the major held his own,” Mercier said. As they turned, a woman behind Anna took a dramatic step backward, bumping against her and forcing her forward, so that she and Mercier were pressed together. “Sorry,” she said, “I’m not very good at this.” After a moment, she moved away.

“Nor am I,” he said.

She looked up at him; she did have lovely eyes, he thought, green eyes. “Oh well,” she said, laughing, “something I never expected, this evening.”

“Not so bad?” Mercier smiled hopefully.

“No,” she said. “Not so bad.”

The song ended, they returned to the table.

Driving back after midnight, Anna had another cigarette, and this time Mercier joined her. They were silent, having talked themselves out during the evening, simply sat and watched the streets go by, a few lights on in the darkened city. As the Buick rolled up to the street door, she said, “You needn’t see me upstairs.”

“You’re sure?” he said, reaching for the door handle. He assumed that fiance Maxim would be up and waiting.

“I am. Thank you, colonel. An evening to remember.”

“It’s for me to thank you, Mademoiselle Szarbek.” And me to remember.

Marek opened the door. Anna left the car, then turned and waved goodby. When she was safely inside, they drove away.

23 October.

In Glogau, a wet morning, a cold front had arrived with the dawn and strands of white mist rose from the river. In the center of the city, not far from the railroad bridge, a toy shop occupied the street floor of the brick building at 35 Heimerstrasse, its windows crowded with trains and dolls and soldiers. A local institution, the toy shop, it had stood there for years, closing only briefly, when the Jewish owner abruptly left the city, then reopening in a day or two, the glass in the windows replaced by the new owner, and the shop again selling toys as it always had.

The former owner, having prospered and bought the building, had installed his family on the second floor, in a large apartment of eight rooms. After he left, the furniture had been sold, and the apartment had become an office. It was now the Glogau station of the SD, the Sicherheitsdienst, the intelligence service of the SS, originally part of the security section of the early National Socialist party, now grown up to stand beside the Abwehr, the military intelligence section of the General Staff. The Nazi party, having come to power in 1933, required a service more responsive to its particular political objectives, so the SD became an official department, concerning itself with foreign counterintelligence, while its brother Gestapo functioned as the state security police. The Glogau office, an outstation of the SD Breslau office, worked against Poland and was staffed by two secretaries, two filing clerks, three lieutenants, and a supervisor, an SS Sturmbannfuhrer-major-named August Voss, known by his underlings as Frogface.

Why? What was so froglike about him? Really, not that much. He did have pouchy cheeks and slightly bulging eyes, which stared out at the world from behind thick eyeglasses, but there was more, a certain predatory fury in the set of his mouth, as though he were eager to snap up a bug but could find no bugs in the water that flowed past his rock. Well, he found one every now and again, but never enough and, if he didn’t find more, he’d remain on this Glogau rock forever. In his youth, as an economics instructor in Dresden, he’d joined the ambitious young lawyers, engineers, and journalists in the fledgling Nazi party, which was determined, after a lost war, to raise the nation to supremacy in Europe. They joined the SS, the Black Order, pledged to secrecy, pledged to obedience, and to whatever violence and terror might be required to bring them to power. And, in time, it did.

For August Voss, that meant a position in the SD and, on a wet October morning in Glogau, news of a potential bug. His office door stood open, but his senior lieutenant, making sure of the knot in his sober tie-the SD, a secret organization, wore civilian clothing-knocked politely on the jamb.

“Yes?” Voss said. Born angry, August Voss, even a single word from his mouth threatened consequence.

“We are in receipt, sir, of a report from the Glogau police.”

“Which says?”

The lieutenant glanced over the form, making very sure he got it right. “Which says, that a woman from Glogau has observed suspicious behavior by a German citizen. On the Warsaw/Glogau Express.”

“What did he do?”

“Acted in a suspicious manner, not described, and possibly evaded the passport kontrol at Glogau station.”

Voss extended a hand and snapped his fingers. He read over the form and said, “It doesn’t say how. Just that one minute he was on the line, and the next he disappeared.”

“Yes, sir.”

Voss read it again. The lieutenant stood silent. In the quiet office, with only the clacking of typewriters and the hiss of the steam radiators, the sound of Voss drumming his fingers on the metal desktop was sharp and loud. “Mm,” he said. “The Gestapo has this?”

“No, sir. Only us.”

“Why?”

“Because the police supervisor is persuaded that, for him, it’s better so.”

From Voss, a faint tightening at the corners of the mouth, which the people around him had learned to understand as a smile. “Very good.” He paused, placed the report flat on his desk, and read it yet again. Perhaps next he will roll around on it, the lieutenant thought. “Let him know,” Voss said, “that we appreciate his good sense.”

“I will, sir.”

“And get her in here, this Frau Schimmel. She knows more than what’s written in this report.”

“Yes, sir. This afternoon, sir?”

“Now.”

“Yes, sir. A bulletin to the Glogau kontrol office?”

“No, not yet.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Dismissed, lieutenant.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The two lieutenants did not leave immediately; they first checked the registries-suspected communists, socialists, homosexuals, free-masons, and persons of interest-to make certain that Frau Schimmel’s name did not appear there. Then they drove to the shabbier part of Glogau: sad old three-story tenements from the last century.

Frau Schimmel, when she heard the knock on the door, an official knock, was in housedress and hairnet. A widow with grown children, she preserved her good dress by leaving it in the closet until it was time to go outside. She’d been in the midst of preparing breakfast for her dachshund-meat scraps, a dab of precious lard to improve the shine on the dog’s coat-when she heard the knock. She dropped what she was doing and hurried from the kitchen, her heart beating hard. It beat harder still when she opened the door, to reveal two young men in hats and coats, because they looked exactly like what they were. “Yes?”

“Frau Berta Schimmel?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your identity papers, Frau Schimmel.”

She went to her purse and, hands trembling, retrieved the card.

The lieutenant handed it back to her and said, “We are from the security services, Frau Schimmel, you will please accompany us to our office.”

She now suspected this had to do with the report she’d made to the police, the police in the person of a fat, paternal sergeant at the Glogau police station, a report she’d been forced to make. Innocently enough, she’d mentioned the man on the train to a neighbor, who had first suggested, then insisted, in a delicately threatening way, that she inform the authorities. Well, now see what that had brought down on her head. The dog, at her ankles, whined for her breakfast. “Later, Schatzi,” she said. “Be good, now.” She knew these men were not going to stand there while she fed a dog. She threw her coat over her housedress and pulled the net off her hair-she looked frightful, she thought, but when men like these came to the door, one did what one was told.

A new Glogau, for Frau Schimmel, who’d lived there all her life, the wet streets seen from the backseat of a Grosser Mercedes automobile. She had to resist the urge to make conversation, wanting to persuade them that she was a good, decent citizen who obeyed every law, but she knew to keep her mouth shut. A few minutes later, the car rolled to a stop in front of the toy shop on Heimerstrasse. Then she was taken up to the second floor.

In the office, she perched on a chair by a secretary’s desk, and there she waited. The secretary was the youngest daughter of a local seamstress, and Frau Schimmel, occasionally employed for needle-work when the woman had too much to do, had met her more than once, but neither woman acknowledged the other. At last, she was led into another office, where one of the men who had arrested her-so she thought of it-sat behind a bare desk. He was almost immediately joined by a second man, a frightening man with heavy glasses, who drew a chair to a position just to one side and behind her, so that she couldn’t quite see him.

Questions, and more questions. She did her best to answer, her voice breathless with anxiety. “Speak up, Frau Schimmel,” said the man sitting behind her. First of all, who was she? Who had her husband been, what work had he done, and her children: where were they, what did they do? How long had she lived at her present address? And, before that, where? And before that? Next, what had she been doing in Warsaw? A visit to her sister, married to a German Pole, who she saw twice a year, the only times she traveled anywhere-her pension did not permit her more than that, and her sister helped with the money. So then, her Polish brother-in-law, what did he do? On and on it went.

Finally, after forty-five minutes, they took her through the train trip from Warsaw: the man who’d sat across from her, pale and fidgety. How he stood quickly and left the compartment, then how he’d tried to leave the train before the passport kontrol in Poland. There was something in his manner that made her uncomfortable; he was frightened, she thought, as though he had something to hide: looking around, watching the other passengers. Then, at Glogau station, she’d seen him join the line that led to the passport kontrol, and then, when she was almost at the desk, she turned around and couldn’t see him anywhere, he’d vanished. A day later, she’d informed the authorities at the police station.

If she’d expected them to be grateful, she was sadly disappointed. The man at the desk had no reaction whatsoever, and the man she couldn’t see was silent.

“Now tell us, Frau Schimmel, what did he look like, this nervous man on the Warsaw/Glogau Express?” She did her best-a rather ordinary man, she told them, his height and weight not unusual. They’d spoken briefly, she’d offered him a candy, and he’d declined politely, his German very much the local Silesian variety that everybody spoke. He had thinning hair, combed carefully over his head, a dark mustache, rather full, and a bulbous nose divided at the end. No, he wasn’t poor, and not rich either, from the way he dressed, perhaps a teacher, or a businessman. Next they took her back over it again, not once but twice, her interrogator rephrasing the questions, but the man on the train was the same. They might, he said, bring her in again, and, should she recall further details, it was her duty to get in touch with them; did she understand that? She did.

Finally, they let her go. She had a few groschen in her pocket, enough to take a tram back to her neighborhood. Safely home, she gave the dog her food, went to the kitchen cupboard, took down a bottle of potato schnapps, poured herself a little in a water glass, then a little more. Exhausted, she fell back on the couch, the dog clambering up to sit beside her-it had been a bad morning for both of them. “Poor Schatzi,” she said. The dog looked up and gave a single wag of its tail. “Your mama is such a goose, little girl, she talked too much. But never again, never again.” Another wag: here I am. “You’re a good girl, Schatzi. What if I hadn’t come home? What then?”

31 October.

The last quarter of the waning moon, so it said on Mercier’s lunar calendar. It was just after eight in the morning, at the apartment on Ujazdowska, and very lively. Marek had arrived an hour earlier and was now reading his morning paper and chattering with Wlada and the silent cook. Mostly they ignored him, busy making sandwiches-ham and butter on thick slabs of fresh white bread from the bakery-boiling eggs until they were hard, baking a small egg-and-butter cake with raisins, all of it to be wrapped in brown paper and packed into a wicker basket, with six bottles of dark beer and a thermos of coffee.

Mercier was in the study, cleaning and oiling his service sidearm-a Le Francais 9-millimeter Browning automatic, in looks not unlike the German Luger. When he was done, he loaded it carefully, then put the box of bullets in one pocket of his waxed Barbour field jacket and the pistol in the other. Did the flashlight work? Mercier switched it on, ran the beam up a silk drape, and decided to change the batteries. Next he retrieved a pair of lace-up boots from the dressing room, pulled them on over heavy wool socks, and laced them up tight. They felt good on his feet. He liked wearing them, and liked the Barbour as well, though he now wore such things rarely, since he no longer went hunting. He was invited now and then, to go after rogacz, the great stag of the Polish mountain forest, but always he declined, since he no longer wished to shoot anything.

He was also, but for a certain familiar tightness in the pit of the stomach, glad to get away from the city. He’d been busy, filing dispatches, writing reports, making contact with two of Bruner’s … well, one had to call them agents, both of whom worked in the armament industries. He learned all he needed to know from Vyborg and others, who were glad to keep him current. But it was traditional to talk to knowledgeable informants, and he suspected that Vyborg and the Dwojka knew exactly what he was doing and didn’t much care, since their attaches in France no doubt operated the same way.

So, for the past week, he’d been pretty much a prisoner of the office, though one afternoon, under a weak autumn sun, he’d worked in a set of tennis out in Milanowek. The foursome had included Princess Toni, as it happened, this time as opponent, but after the match they’d found themselves a moment for conversation. Warm and amiable, as always, with not the slightest suggestion that there had been an interlude in the guest bathroom. A man of the world, a woman of the world, a brief, pleasant adventure, all memory courteously erased. “We’re off to Paris next week, then Switzerland, but we’ll be back in the spring.” He said he envied her the Paris visit, say hello to the city for him. Of course she would.

In the study, Mercier opened his briefcase and took out a map, which he’d brought home from the office. A very technical map, in small scale, with elevations, streams, and local features, such as farmhouses, precisely rendered. With this, a military map, he had to be very careful. Produced by General Staff cartographers in Paris, these maps were sent to Warsaw in the diplomatic pouch to replace those received earlier, though they rarely changed. He slid the map into an inside pocket of his jacket, put the flashlight where he wouldn’t forget it, and walked into the kitchen. The cake had come out of the oven and was cooling on a rack, Marek looked up from his newspaper, laid it aside, and put on a heavy wool coat. “The Biook has a full tank, sir,” he said.

“Thank you, Marek,” Mercier said.

A few minutes later, with Marek carrying the wicker basket, they went downstairs, where Mercier climbed into the passenger seat of the car. He happened to glance up at the apartment and saw that Wlada was looking out the window, seeing them off. She knew where they were going, her face unsmiling and worried as she watched them drive away.

It took all day to drive the roads from Warsaw to Katowice, in Polish Silesia. Through Skierniewice, Koluszki, Radomsko, and Czestochowa, where the road ran past the monastery that held the Black Madonna, Poland’s most sacred ikon. Under a gray sky, the market towns and villages seemed dark to Mercier, as did the deserted fields of the countryside. Too much fighting, he thought, the whole country’s a battlefield. The land was the land, it grew in spring and died in autumn, but Mercier could not unlock it from its past. Marek, his strong, bald head thrust forward as he squinted at the road ahead of them, was silent, no doubt thinking about what he had to do that night.

This was Mercier’s second visit to the Silesian border fortifications, but Marek had done it at least twice with Bruner. He drove fast when the road was smooth, swung past battered old sedans, an occasional horse-drawn cart, now and then a slow truck. Sometimes the pavement was broken, with deep potholes, and they had to move at a crawl for a long time-it was either that or stop and change tires. At noon, in the shadows of an oak forest, Marek pulled off into the weeds by the side of the road and they each had a sandwich and a bottle of beer. They slowed down at the end of the afternoon, often on dirt roads, but, by dusk, they came to the crossroads where a sign pointed east to Cracow. Marek headed southwest, under a darkening sky.

By eight in the evening they were somewhere-only Marek knew exactly where-on the northern edge of Katowice, virtually on the German frontier. The border had been redrawn here, again and again, and Poles and Germans lived side by side. A man would rise from his bed in Poland, then go into his kitchen for breakfast in Germany; the line ran through factories and down the center of villages. On the outskirts of Katowice, they drove past coal mines and iron foundries, the tall stacks pouring black smoke into the sky, the air heavy with dust and the smell of burning coal.

Marek drove north for a time, then turned onto a deeply rutted dirt road, swearing under his breath as the car rocked and bucked, and the wheels spun on mud beneath puddled water. The lights of Katowice fell away behind them, and the road was closed in by tall reeds. The Buick worked its way up a long, gentle slope, then a farmhouse, with dim lights in the windows, appeared, and Marek stopped the car. With the contented grunt of a job completed, he shifted into neutral and turned off the ignition. Two dogs came bounding toward the car, big mastiff types, barking and circling, then going silent when a man came out of the house, adjusting his suspenders over his shoulders. He said a sharp word to the dogs and they lay down, panting, on their bellies.

“You remember Jozef,” Marek said.

Mercier did-Marek’s relative, or maybe his wife’s. He shook hands with the man, who had a hand like a board covered with sandpaper.

“Good to see you again. Come inside.”

They walked past a small pen with two sleeping pigs, then into the farmhouse, where a pair of women rose from the table, one of them adjusting an oil lamp to make the room brighter. “You’ll have something to drink, gentlemen?” said the other.

“No, thanks,” Marek said. “We can’t stay long.”

“You made good time,” Jozef said. “The next patrol comes through at eleven-thirty-five.”

“They’re always prompt?” Mercier said.

“Like a clock,” Jozef said.

“Dogs?”

“Sometimes. The last time I was out there I think they had them, but they don’t bark unless they smell something.”

Mercier looked at his watch. “We ought to get moving,” he said.

“You’ll pass Rheinhart’s place, about fifteen minutes north of here. Better to swing wide around it. You understand?”

“Yes,” Mercier said. “We’ll be back in two hours. If we don’t show up, you’ll have to do something with the car.”

“We’ll take care of it,” Jozef said.

“Just be careful,” the younger woman said.

When the lights of the farmhouse disappeared behind a hill, the night was almost completely black, a thin slice of waning moon visible now and then between shifting cloud. A sharp wind blew steadily from the west and Mercier was cold for a time, but it was marshy ground here and hard going, so soon enough the effort warmed him up. He kept the flashlight off-the German border patrol wasn’t due for some time, but you could never be sure. To Mercier, the night felt abandoned, cut off from the world, in deep silence but for the sigh of the wind and, once, the cry of a night-hunting bird.

They kept their distance from the Rheinhart farm, a German farm, then climbed a steep hill that led to the Polish wire. Mercier had been shown the Polish defenses from the other side, an official visit with an army captain as his guide. Not very deep: three lines of barbed wire-tangled eight-foot widths of it-a few camouflaged casemates, concrete pillboxes with firing slits. Death traps, he well knew, designed to hold up an enemy for a few precious minutes. Where the Polish wire ended at the hillside, they climbed to the other side, bearing left, onto German soil.

Mercier tapped Marek on the arm, Marek held his coat open, and Mercier used the cover to run the flashlight beam over his map, refreshing the memory work he’d done early that morning. The first German wire was two hundred yards or so to the west, and they headed directly for it. They slowed down, now, feeling their way, stopping every few minutes to freeze and concentrate on listening. Only the wind. Once, as they resumed walking, Marek thought he heard something and signaled for Mercier to stop. Mercier reached into his pocket, feeling for the grip of his pistol. And Marek, he saw, did the same thing. Voices? Footsteps? No, silence, then a grumble of distant thunder far to the east. After a minute they moved again, and found themselves at the German wire, a snarled mass of barbed concertina rolls fixed to rusted iron stakes driven into the earth. Mercier and Marek, using heavy wire cutters, worked their way through it, gingerly holding the strands apart for each other until they were on the other side. Thirty yards forward, a second line, which they negotiated as they had the first.

A few yards beyond the wire, Mercier stumbled-the ground suddenly sank beneath him and he almost fell, catching himself with one hand on the earth. Soft, loose soil. What the hell was this? By his side, Marek was probing at the ground with his foot and Mercier, resisting the urge to use the flashlight, got down on his knees and began feeling around in the dirt, then digging with a cupped hand. Crawling ahead, he dug again and this time, down a foot or so in the loose soil, his hand encountered a rough edge of concrete, aggregate; he could feel the pebbles in the hard cement. As he dug further, Marek came crawling up beside him and whispered by his ear, “What is it?”

Dragon’s tooth, but Mercier couldn’t say it in Polish. “Tank trap,” he said.

“Covered over?”

“Yes, abandoned.”

“Why?”

Mercier shook his head; no reason-or, rather, too many reasons.

They crawled forward, their knees sinking into the soft earth, until they reached solid ground, which made the tank trap much as all the others Mercier had encountered: a ditch with steep sides about twenty feet wide, with a row of sloped concrete bollards midway across. If a tank commander didn’t see it, his tank would slip over the edge, tilted forward against the so-called dragon’s teeth, unable to move. Not an unexpected feature in border fortifications, but the Germans had built this, then filled it in, the disturbed soil settling with rain and time.

And Mercier knew it was not on the map, which showed a third line of wire. This they found a few minutes later and cut their way through it. Just barely visible, about fifty yards ahead of them, was a watchtower, a silhouette faint against the night sky. Suddenly, from somewhere to the right of the tower, a light went on, its beam probing the darkness, sweeping past them, then returning. By then, they were both flat on the ground. From the direction of the light, a shout: “Halt!” Then, in German, “Stand up!”

Mercier and Marek looked at each other. In Marek’s hands, a Radom automatic, aimed toward the voice, and the light, which now went out. Stand up? Mercier thought. Surrender? A sheepish admission of who they were? Phone calls to the French embassy in Berlin? As Marek watched, Mercier drew the pistol from his pocket and braced it in the crook of his elbow. The light went on again, moving as its bearer came toward them. It was Marek who fired first, but Mercier was only an instant behind him, aiming at the light, the pistol bucking twice in his hand. Then he rolled-fast-away from Marek, away from the location of the shots. Out in the darkness, the light went off, a voice said, “Ach,” then swore, and a responding volley snapped the air above his head. Something stung the side of his face, and, when he tried to aim again, the afterimages of the muzzle flares, orange lights, floated before his eyes. He ran a hand over the skin below his temple and peered at it; no blood, just dirt.

Silence. Mercier counted sixty seconds, seventy, ninety. The light came back on, only for a second or two, aimed not at them but at the ground beneath it, then went off. Mercier thought he heard whispers, and the faint sounds of people moving about. Was it possible they were going to get away with this? Very cautiously, he began to slide backward and Marek, when he saw what Mercier was doing, did the same thing. Again they waited, three minutes, four. Then Mercier signaled to Marek: move again. Another ten yards, and they stopped once more.

One last minute, then they rose to their feet and, crouched over, went running back to Poland.

Mercier had planned to spend the night at a hotel in Katowice but never gave it a second thought. When they reached the farm, they climbed into the Buick and drove at speed, bumping and bouncing over the rutted surface, turning the lights on only when they reached the main road. Once they left Katowice and were back in the countryside, Marek said, “A close thing.”

“Yes. We were lucky, I think.”

“I wasn’t going to let them take me, colonel.”

Mercier nodded. He knew that Marek had been captured by the Russians when he’d fought in the Polish Legion, under Pilsudski. Ten hours only, but Marek never forgot what they did to him.

“There is one thing I want to ask you,” Marek said. “Why did they cover up their tank trap?”

“Maybe they changed their minds. Maybe it wasn’t where they wanted it. Maybe there’s another one a few hundred yards north, who can say, but that’s the likely explanation. Or, if you wanted to think another way, an army that’s going to attack, with a tank force, will get rid of the static defenses between them and the enemy border. Because, then, they’re in the way.” Mercier’s technical description barely suggested what he feared. This was nothing less than preparation for war; a classic, telltale sign of planned aggression. The journalists could wring their hands from morning edition to night-War is coming! War is coming! — but what he’d found in the darkness wasn’t opinion, it was an abandoned tank trap, defense put aside, and what came next was offense, attack, houses burning in the night.

Marek didn’t want to believe it. After a moment he said, “They are coming this way, colonel, that is what you think, isn’t it. German tanks, moving onto Polish soil.”

“God knows, I don’t. Sometimes governments prepare to act, then change their minds. The wire was still up.”

“You’ll report it, colonel?”

“Yes, Marek, that’s what I do.”

They drove all night long, Mercier taking a turn at the wheel for a few hours. East of Koluszki, Marek driving again, a tire blew out and they had to stop and change it, the iron wrench freezing their hands. The sky was turning light as they drove into Warsaw, and when Mercier let himself into the apartment, Wlada heard him walking around and, frightened of a possible intruder, called out, “Colonel?”

“Yes, Wlada, it’s me.”

She opened the door of her room off the kitchen. “You are home early,” she said. “Thank God.”

“Yes,” he said. “I am. Go back to sleep.”

He left his automatic pistol on the desk, now it would have to be cleaned again. Then, as he took off his field clothing, he thought about the letter in the drawer of his desk at the embassy, a letter requesting transfer. That would have to be torn up.

The abandoned tank trap had worked on him-it wasn’t much, as evidence, would mean nothing to the lords of the General Staff, but it had hit him a certain way and he could not let go of it. Then too, he thought, settling the Barbour on its hanger, he might, if he stayed in Warsaw, see Anna Szarbek again. See her alone, somewhere. An afternoon together. Surely he wanted to, maybe she did too.

From the other side of the apartment, Wlada called out to him. “Good night, colonel.”

Yes, dear Wlada, I am home and safe. “Good night, Wlada. Sleep well.”