The Spies of Warsaw

ON RAVEN HILL

7 November, 1937. The Polish Foreign Ministry, housed in an elegant building on Saxon Square, held its autumn cocktail party in the ministry library, removing the long polished tables, setting up a bar-Polish vodka, French champagne, a tribute to the eternal alliance-in front of the tall draped window at the end of the room. A magnificent library. Ancient texts in leather-bound rows to the ceiling, some of the works, in medieval Latin, on the national specialties, mathematics and astronomy-Copernicus was there, among others-at which their scholars had traditionally excelled. Always a crowd at this party, the library’s imposing gloom inducing serious, sometimes elevated, conversation between the guests. And the fresh herring in cream was exceptional. So transcendently good one might be mindful of the country’s right of access to the Baltic, up at Danzig.

The French contingent gathered at the embassy and departed in a phalanx of Buicks, led by the ambassador and his wife, followed by LeBeau, the charge d’affaires, then Jourdain, joining Mercier in his car, with a splendid Marek in his most sober and official blue suit. Last in line, the naval and air attaches.

In the library, a glittering crowd: medals galore, the uniforms of at least eight armies and six navies. Mercier studied the faces of the women in the room, more than one of them finding such attention not unwelcome, but Anna Szarbek was nowhere to be found. The Biddles were there-he the American ambassador, the couple highly visible at the heights of the Warsovian social set-as well as the formidable Hungarian, Colonel de Vezenyi, doyen of the city’s military attaches, accompanied by his mistress, the stunning Polish film star known as Karenka. Mercier spent a few minutes with them, de Vezenyi infamous for his insight into the private lives of the diplomatic community. “And he was, I’m told, in the closet for two hours, trembling in his underwear.”

Mercier next found himself in the company of the Rozens, Viktor and Malka, the former a minor bureaucrat in the commercial section of the Soviet embassy. Communists were rare in Poland; the internal security was famously relentless in hunting them down, so no workers’ marches, no petitions crying out for justice in wherever it was that week. For a view of the world from that particular angle, Mercier had to chat with the Rozens, or other available comrades, whenever chance offered the opportunity. But he didn’t mind; he liked the Rozens.

How not? They were almost unbearably charming. Viktor Rozen, half stooped from some childhood malady in Odessa, looked up at his fellow humans, giving the fools among them the impression that they were somehow above him. His wife was irresistibly warm and maternal, with a smile that lingered just at the edge of a laugh. What a pair! At these affairs, always side by side-he with a monk’s fringe of gray hair, she much the taller and heavier of the two-twinkly-eyed Jewish intellectuals, always eager to hear about your life. GRU, people said, the Russian military intelligence service, not the thuggish NKVD, not the gentle Rozens. Was Malka Rozen the chief spy of the family, or was that Viktor? Among local diplomats, opinion was divided.

“Tell me, dear colonel, how has life been treating you?” Viktor Rozen said, his German softened by a Yiddish lilt.

“Very well, thank you. And yourselves?”

“Could be better, but I can’t complain. But we were having a little dispute just now, Malka and I.”

“You?”

Malka’s smile grew broader. “Only a little one.”

“Perhaps you can decide it for us. We were wondering whatever became of von Sosnowski.”

“In prison in Germany, I believe,” Mercier said. Von Sosnowski, the center of what became known as “the von Sosnowski affair,” a handsome aristocratic Polish cavalry officer living in Berlin, had recruited four or five beautiful German women, all of noble heritage. First as mistresses, stupefied with love for him, and then as agents, to spy on their employer, the German General Staff, where they, impoverished by the Great War, served as clerks.

“He was,” Viktor said. “He surely was in prison, for life, poor soul, but I’ve heard he’s been let out.”

“Of a German prison?” Malka said. “Never.”

“But a little bird told me he’d been traded, for a German woman spying on the Poles, at the behest of the SD people-Heydrich, that crowd.”

Slowly, Mercier shook his head. “No, not that I’ve heard, anyhow.”

“You see?” Rozen said to Malka. “The colonel is a great friend of the local administration, surely they would have mentioned it. Too good not to mention, no?”

“They don’t tell me all that much, Herr Rozen.” The seeming ingenuousness of the probe made Mercier smile.

“No? So maybe they don’t. But I heard von Sosnowski was here in Warsaw, a broken man, his hair gone white in prison, drinking, living in penury in a room somewhere.”

Mercier, about to respond, was distracted by a loud guffaw from a nearby guest and looked over Malka’s shoulder to discover the man at Anna Szarbek’s apartment, Maxim, in conversation with a gentleman wearing a monocle and an official sash. At Maxim’s side, Anna Szarbek, dressed pretty much as she’d been for the night at the Europejski, looking up at Maxim, acknowledging his joke with a smile. A rather tolerant smile, Mercier thought; or was it, perhaps, a forced smile?

The Rozens followed his eyes. “Friends of yours?” Viktor said.

“No, not really.”

“That’s Maxim Mostov,” Viktor said, “the Russian emigre. He writes for one of the local newspapers.” A shadow crossed his face. “So sad, how some people abandon us, some of the brightest.” He shook his head in sorrow.

“How does he come to be here?” Mercier said.

“Oh, he knows everybody, goes everywhere,” Viktor said. “People love to see their names in the newspapers.”

“He writes gossip?”

“No, dear colonel, not quite. Feuilletons, observations on the passing scene, an elevated form of gossip, perhaps. In the Soviet Union, before he emigrated, he did much the same thing, I believe.”

“So why leave?” Malka said. “He was a well-known journalist, in Moscow.”

“Not everybody wants to build socialism, my love,” Viktor said, half joking. Turning to Mercier, he said, “He was replaced, they’re all replaced, those who abandon us. It isn’t an easy life, where we come from: chaotic, dreadful in winter, at times disappointing-why not admit it? But, colonel, better than what we had before. Do you see it that way?”

“More or less,” Mercier said. “Every country has its difficult side.”

“So true, that’s so true,” Malka Rozen said, touching Mercier’s arm. “And we all must help each other, otherwise …”

“Oh, I suppose we can go it alone,” Viktor said, “if we have to, but friends are always welcome. That’s just human nature.”

“Very welcome,” Malka said. “It’s in the Russian soul to appreciate friendship.”

That’s enough of that. Mercier finished his vodka. “I believe I may have a little more of this,” he said, preparing his escape.

Viktor nodded. Yes, yes, run away. “Call us sometime, dear colonel. A home-cooked dinner makes for a nice change, in the diplomatic merry-go-round.” He moved closer to Mercier and lowered his voice. “We know what the world thinks of us, colonel, but, every now and then, when trouble comes knocking at the door, we’re good people to know. Yes?”

Mercier smiled, and bowed his head to indicate that he understood.

In the Buick, headed back to the embassy, Jourdain seemed distracted, not his usual self. “Did you have the vodka,” Mercier said, “or the champagne?”

“Champagne. But I just held the glass in my hand. You?”

“The vodka. Maybe a little more than I should’ve.”

“I saw you conspiring with the Rozens. Did they make advances? Try to recruit you?”

“Yes, as always.”

“They’re incorrigible,” Jourdain said fondly. “I expect they have a monthly quota, like everyone else in that accursed country. That’s the way Moscow thinks-x number of solicitations equals y number of recruits. I know bachelors who swear by it.”

“I don’t think I’ll change sides, Armand, not just yet.”

“Were they after anything in particular?”

“They asked about von Sosnowski. Supposedly traded by the Germans and now back in Warsaw.”

“That’s good to know about, if it’s true. The German propaganda put his story about as lurid nonsense, sex and espionage, but that’s not the whole story. Sosnowski used the darkroom in the cellar of the Polish embassy to develop negatives of photographs of Wehrmacht documents. Then one day another Polish agent, this one secretly working for the Germans, went to hang up his negatives-phony product-and discovered the real thing: elements of the German battle plans for France and Poland. Not comprehensive-memoranda, first drafts, sketches. One of Sosnowski’s girlfriends was in charge of burning the wastepaper at the end of the day, but she photographed it for Sosnowski. The gorgeous Benita von something. She was beheaded, eventually, and so was her friend. Barbaric, the hooded executioner with the axe, but I suppose not much worse than the guillotine. One of the other women disappeared, probably right into the SD. As for Sosnowski, the Poles might well have traded to get him back.”

“French battle plan?” Mercier said. “Did we see that?”

“I don’t know; that was in 1934, before I was posted here, but we might have. Still, three years old. General Staff plans change all the time. It wouldn’t be worth much now, certainly not worth annoying the Poles.”

They rode in silence for a time, then Mercier said, “Is anything wrong, Armand?”

Jourdain looked at Mercier, not pleased that whatever it was showed. “I’ve lost one of my people,” he said.

“Bad luck,” Mercier said.

“Can’t be helped, it does happen, but it’s always a shock. He went to work one morning, then, pfft, gone.”

“In Germany?”

“Here.” Jourdain flicked his eyes toward Marek’s back-he was trusted, but not that trusted.

“Anything I can do, you’ll let me know.”

“I’ll have to write a dispatch. Paris will be irritated-how much I’m not sure, but they won’t like it.”

“Well, that makes two of us.”

“Your little foray in the west? Shooting at German border guards?”

“Bruner was incensed.”

Jourdain laughed. “Nothing quite so safe and warm as an office in Paris.”

“Yes, a lovely fall afternoon, a window looking out on the Champ-de-Mars. ‘Merde, look what Mercier’s done!’ ” He smiled and spread his hands; life was hopeless. “To hell with them, Armand.”

Jourdain’s face showed agreement. “I just feel bad about it. He was a decent fellow, the real reptiles always seem to survive.”

14 November, 8:22 A.M.

In Glogau, in the SD office above the toy shop on Heimerstrasse, one of the secretaries in Major Voss’s office answered the telephone, then passed the call immediately to Voss.

“Yes?”

The voice identified itself as an SS sergeant stationed at the passport kontrol at the Glogau railway station. “We have made a possible identification, sir, of your person of interest.”

“Better than the one last week? This is turning into a comedy.”

“We hope so, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer. The subject’s passport is issued to one Edvard Uhl, U-H-L. He left on the eight-fourteen express to Warsaw, and he fits the description provided by your office.”

“So did the last three, sergeant.”

“We regret the errors, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer.”

“Very well, let’s hope you’re right, this time.”

Voss hung up. He shouted to one of his lieutenants; the man came running into his office. “We have another one-half the men in Germany have bulbous noses. The name this time is Edvard Uhl, find out immediately who he is, but first get somebody on the eight-fourteen express to Warsaw.”

The lieutenant looked at his watch, panic in his eyes.

Idiot. In the mock-gentle voice a frustrated parent might use on a stupid child, Voss said, “Send a wireless telegraph message to Zoller, in Leszno, and tell him to get on the train. The Poles take their time checking passports; they won’t be leaving Leszno for thirty minutes. And make very sure, lieutenant, that genius Zoller takes with him the description we’ve issued. Would you do that for me, lieutenant? I would so, appreciate, it, if, you … would!” Voss resumed his normal growl. “And as for information on this man”-Voss looked at his watch-“you have twenty minutes.”

The lieutenant, palms sweating, ran out of the office. “Bar-gumf,” he said, under his breath, the German version of a frog’s croak.

He was back in eighteen minutes, having bullied clerks-Voss could hear him shouting on the phone-in government bureaux from Glogau to Berlin. The major looked up from a railway timetable spread across his desk.

“Herr Edvard Uhl is a resident of Breslau,” the lieutenant said. “I have the address. He is employed by Adler Ironworks in the same city, where he is the senior engineer on a tank design project for the Krupp company. According to his employer, he is this morning at the office of a subcontractor in Gleiwitz.”

“And the photograph?”

“On the way, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer, by motorcycle courier from Breslau.”

“Get that woman in here, immediately. Anything else?”

“Herr Uhl has received an exit visa, to visit South Africa. For himself only, not his family.”

Voss nodded, and rubbed his hands. “A scenic country, lieutenant. But he’ll never see it.”

15 November, 5:45 A.M.

Standing amid a silent crowd of factory workers, Mercier rode the trolley to Praga for his meeting with the engineer Uhl. It was snowing, not the massive snowfall of the Polish winter, but a taste of the future-big, lazy flakes drifting through the gray light, the street white in some places, wet and shiny in others. Would Uhl show up for the meeting? Maybe not. He’d wobbled badly, the last time out. So, probably not. Mercier put it to himself as a bet and decided he’d bet no. And then? Then nothing. Uhl would never be betrayed to the Germans, not by him, not by anyone. Because if Uhl was compromised, all he’d given them would be compromised as well, not that the Germans could do much about it. Change the tank design? The other possibility, that Uhl might have been arrested, was, to Mercier’s thinking, unlikely. He’d sent the promised postal card-Hans was enjoying his visit to Warsaw, which meant all was well in Germany.

Mercier stepped off the trolley car at the third stop in Praga, walked past the burnt-sugar smell of the candy factory, and down the narrow alley to the nameless bar. Particularly nameless that morning; the lone drinkers lost in their shot glasses, the bartender bored with the morning paper, one office worker in a shabby suit, untasted coffee going cold in his cup. And, bet lost, Edvard Uhl, sitting at a table in the far corner.

After they’d greeted one another, Mercier said, “And the train ride yesterday, Herr Uhl, how was it? Packed with Gestapo men?”

“All was normal,” Uhl said. “From Gleiwitz to Glogau, only a few passengers. Then, on the express to Warsaw, a crowd, but nothing out of the ordinary, just the usual people looking into the compartment to see if there were any seats.”

Mercier nodded: there, that’s better. “So now, to work, Herr Uhl.”

Uhl had brought the formula for the case-hardened steel to be used for the new tank bodies, as Mercier had requested. “It’s in here,” Uhl said, gesturing toward his newspaper. “I had to copy it by hand, the roneo machine was in use all morning.” Otherwise, not much new in Breslau: design work on the Ausf B version of the Panzerkampfwagen 1 continued, none of the specifications had changed, the final engineering blueprints would soon be completed.

“Our next meeting will be the fourteenth of December,” Mercier said, feeling for the envelope of zloty in the pocket of his battered overcoat. “I will look forward to copies of the blueprints.”

“The fourteenth?” Uhl said.

Here we go again.

“Not the fourteenth, I’m afraid,” Uhl said. “I cannot come to Warsaw until the night of the seventeenth.”

“Why not the fourteenth?”

“I must go to Schramberg, on business.”

“Schramberg?”

“In the Black Forest. There are three of us going, from the ironworks, all engineers. We are to observe tank exercises; then we will be asked for opinions and recommendations. There will be a dinner that night, at the inn in Schramberg, with Wehrmacht officials, technical people, and we leave the following morning, the fifteenth. So, you see I cannot come to Warsaw until the night of the seventeenth, and we can meet the following morning.”

“Where is there terrain for tanks, Herr Uhl, in the Black Forest?” To Mercier, it sounded like a story-this little sneak of a man was up to something. What?

“I don’t know where, exactly, but I was told the maneuvers will take place in the forest.”

“Tanks don’t go in forests, Herr Uhl. There are trees in the forest, tanks can’t get through.”

“Yes, so I thought. Perhaps they wish to have us suggest modifications that might make it possible. The fact is, I don’t know what they’re doing, but, in any case, I’ve been ordered to attend, so I must.”

Surely you must. “You’ll write us a report, Herr Uhl, about the exercises. Be thorough, please: formations, speeds, angles of ascent and descent, how long it takes to go a certain distance. And, also, the names of the Wehrmacht officials. Do you need to make a note to yourself?”

Uhl shook his head. “I know what you want.”

“Then we’ll meet again on the morning of the eighteenth.”

Uhl agreed, though Mercier sensed a growing reluctance, as though the day would come, soon enough, when these meetings would end. He slid the envelope into his newspaper and received the steel formula in return. Uhl signed the receipt, then left the bar.

Mercier lit a Mewa, his mind working on what Uhl had told him. Just precisely what forest were the Germans thinking about? The mountains on the border with Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland region? There was no forest on the frontier between Germany and Denmark, as far as he knew. And the Polish steppe had virtually been made for tank formations. Where else? The forests between Germany and France? Under the artillery of the Maginot Line forts? Suicide. Austria? Hitler might attack Austria, but it would be a political, not a military, invasion.

That left what? That left the Ardennes, in Belgium, north of the Maginot Line. No. For a thousand reasons, a very remote possibility. But, he thought, somewhere.

Mercier finished his coffee, bad as it was. The bar felt oppressive; he disliked waiting for Uhl to leave the area and kept glancing at his watch. Finally, twenty minutes-well, almost. The doctrine on agent meetings said last to arrive, first to leave, but Mercier did it his own way, and, to date, nothing had gone wrong.

Out in the street, he hurried through the floating snowflakes, heading toward the tram stop. He was anxious to return to the apartment, to change out of his disguise, this old coat and hat, and be off to the embassy, where he could look at his maps. He peered ahead, to make sure he didn’t catch up to Uhl, though anyone dawdling in this weather seemed unlikely, and Uhl had to get his train back to Breslau. Did he use the same tram stop? Mercier couldn’t decide; the alley lay almost midway between two stops. As he neared the corner where he took the trolley, he heard its bell ringing behind him and broke into as much of a run as he could manage. In the event, the motorman saw him loping along and waited, and Mercier thanked him as he climbed aboard.

He started to move through the standing crowd toward the rear platform, then stopped dead. Uhl! At the center of the car. Well, they would just have to ignore each other. Evidently, Uhl had gone to the other stop, and the trolley was running late. Mercier found room on the opposite side of the aisle and stared out the grimy window, then chanced one fast look at Uhl. What was this? He wasn’t alone. Holding the back of a wicker seat with one hand, briefcase under his arm, he was engaged in animated conversation with-who? An angel. That was the word that sprang into his head. Because she stood on Uhl’s left and was turned toward him, Mercier could see her face, could see that she was very young, barely twenty, and, even in a city of striking blond women, extraordinary-innocent as a child, the rabbit-fur collar of her coat turned up, her long flaxen hair set off by a knit cap, sky blue, with a tassel. Standing close to Uhl, face upturned, she was rapt, transfixed by what he was saying, laughing, gloved hand over her mouth, then giving her hair a seductive shake. Had this just begun? On the trolley? Mercier guessed not-it had started at the tram stop. Again she laughed, leaning toward Uhl, almost, but not quite, touching him. Was she a prostitute? No sign of that, to Mercier’s eyes. Or, if she was, an extremely rare version of the breed, not the sort who would pick up a man at a tram stop at six-thirty on a snowy morning.

Immediately, Mercier sensed that something was wrong. He forced himself to look away, at a row of brick factories sliding past the window, until the trolley slowed for the next stop. Then he stole another glance. If they got off together, what would he do?

But they stayed on the tram. Which rolled over the bridge that crossed the Vistula, the snow swirling in the wind above the dark river. Now it was her turn to talk, her face concentrated, wanting the man she’d met, older, experienced, to take her seriously. Was she speaking Polish? Did Uhl speak the language? Breslau had forever been a disputed city-Wroclaw, as far as the Poles were concerned-and it was possible that Uhl spoke some Polish. A woman standing next to Mercier-he could smell the damp wool of her coat-caught him staring and gave him a look: mind your own business. He turned back to the window. The trolley was now approaching his stop, in central Warsaw, and, as the motorman pulled on the cord that rang the bell, Mercier glanced up the aisle and saw that Uhl and the blond girl were moving toward the rear platform.

Mercier left by the front door, circled the tram-thus shielded from Uhl and the girl-headed quickly for the shops across the street, and chose one with a set-back entry. Like some sly private detective, he thought, lurking in a doorway. A fancy perfume shop, as it happened, great clouds of scent rolling out each time the door opened. When the trolley pulled away, he spotted the blue cap in the crowd waiting to transfer to another line. Where the hell were they going? Not to the Europejski. A taxi drove up to the front of the shop, a pair of women in the back, and Mercier arrived in time to hold the door as they emerged. “Oh, why thank you,” the first one said. Mercier mumbled “You’re welcome” and slid into the seat.

“Sir?” the driver said. He was in his twenties, with a well-oiled pompadour.

“Don’t go anywhere, not just yet,” Mercier said. “Some friends of mine are waiting for a trolley; we’ll just follow along behind.”

“Friends?” A wise-guy grin, who are you kidding?

“Yes, it’s a surprise.”

The driver snickered. Mercier peeled twenty zloty off the wad in his pocket-for agent meetings, one carried plenty of money. The driver thanked him, and they waited together, the ill-tuned engine coughing away in neutral.

Waited for ten very long minutes. At last, a trolley arrived and the blue cap climbed aboard, followed by Uhl. “That’s the one we want,” Mercier said.

As the driver put the taxi in gear and fell in behind the tram, he said, “It’s the number four line. Up to Muranow.”

Not bad at this, the driver, he’d evidently done it before, pulling over well to the rear of the trolley each time it stopped. The tram tracks curved into Nalewki, the main street of the Jewish quarter: kosher butchers, pushcarts piled with old clothes or pots and pans, men in caftans and fur hats, hurrying along through the snow. Mercier could see that the crowd of passengers inside the trolley had thinned out-had Uhl and the girl somehow gotten away? No, the next stop was Gesia, Goose street, and they appeared on the rear platform as the trolley slowed. Mercier put his head down.

“That them?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus, look at her.”

Mercier handed over more zloty and climbed out. He found himself in front of an open stall on the cobblestones, a chicken-seller, scrawny birds hung by their heads from hooks, and a smell that almost made his eyes tear. To Mercier, it now seemed that the girl was leading the way, her arm looped in Uhl’s, walking quickly. Mercier hung back, close to the buildings, ready to step into a doorway if one of them turned around. Gesia was an old street-three-story buildings, some wood, others gray stone darkened by time and coal smoke-where every shop called out to potential customers: a clock hung out over the sidewalk advertised a watchmaker; a painted sign showed a pair of eyes wearing spectacles; M. PERLMUTTER-FINE GLOVES.

HOTEL ORLA.

Now Mercier knew where they were going. He dropped back well behind them as they crossed the street, past a crowd of schoolboys with curly sideburns and yarmulkes, past a horse-drawn coal wagon, the driver, wearing a long leather apron, shoveling coal down a chute that led into the hotel’s cellar. The Orla-eagle-had the look of hourly rates and no questions asked; as Warsaw slang put it, a Paris hotel. Mercier stationed himself where he could see the entry, using the doorway of a shop with stacks of old books piled high in the window, some with Hebrew writing on their spines. After a time, the proprietor of the shop came to his door and had a look at Mercier, then nodded to himself, a faint look of disgust on his face-so here’s another one, the watchers of the Hotel Orla.

It was now after nine in the morning, and Uhl, having to return to the Europejski for his valise, would miss the express to Breslau. Well, there was always another train, and Uhl, who had fallen to the charms of the Countess Sczelenska, now took advantage of a new opportunity, but that was the way of the world-Uhl’s world, at any rate. An opportunity much too good to be true, Mercier thought, but maybe he was seeing the same phantoms that had spooked the engineer on his last trip to Warsaw.

The Orla was busy-a couple hurried out of the hotel, and, a minute later, another. An officious little fellow, all business, came striding down Gesia, looked left and right-feeling guilty, monsieur? — then went inside. A luxurious black Opel, a German car with Polish license plates, drew up in front of the hotel and waited there, engine idling. Mercier shifted his stance, stared at the books in the window, watched the morning shoppers go by, the women’s heads covered with shawls, string bags in hand.

Then, suddenly, the blond girl came out of the hotel.

What now? She was very pale, and grim-faced, as she looked around, then walked, almost ran, to a taxi parked a little way down the street. The snow made it hard to see, but Mercier thought there might be a silhouette in the rear window. He couldn’t be sure, because the girl was still closing the door when the taxi took off and sped away down the street.

Mercier tensed; now he had to go in there and find Uhl. He was halfway across the street when a fat man with a red face came out of the Orla, struggling with the weight of a parcel wrapped in a bed coverlet and flung over his shoulder. A step at a time, he moved toward the Opel. The driver, a sinister little weasel of a man with tinted glasses, jumped out and ran around the car to open the trunk.

For an instant, Mercier didn’t know what he was looking at, and then he did. He ran the last few steps and planted himself in front of the man with the parcel. “Put it down.” He said it in German.

And so he was answered. “Get out of my way.” The weight on the man’s shoulder made him take a step to the side.

The weasel came from behind the car and, with a hand like a claw, took Mercier roughly by the elbow. “Better get out of here, my friend, this doesn’t concern you.”

The man with the parcel tried to brush past him, but Mercier moved to block him. From the corner of his eye, he could see that a few people had stopped to see what was going on. Suddenly enraged, the red-faced man swung his free hand at Mercier and hit him under the eye. Not very hard. Mercier was knocked backward, recovered, and punched the man in the mouth. From behind, the weasel hit him with a blackjack.

Mercier’s legs collapsed and he fell to his knees. But the blackjack had been a mistake. Mercier heard a loud clang-the coalman had dropped his shovel-and now, like an avenging giant, face black with coal dust, he grabbed the red-faced man by the back of the collar. When he growled something in Polish, the weasel ran away, jummped into the car, and gunned the engine. The red-faced man broke free, tried to keep his balance, lost it, and, as he fell, the parcel slid off his shoulder and landed on the sidewalk with a soft thump. The red-faced man, now scarlet, rose to a sitting position and reached inside his jacket, but a shout from the car stopped him, and he scrambled to his feet as the coalman walked toward him. Then the passenger-side door flew open, the red-faced man got in and, with a look toward Mercier of pure and absolute hatred, slammed the door as, tires squealing, the Opel drove away.

Now the man that Mercier had seen striding down Gesia came sprinting out of the Orla, shrieked at the departing car, and chased after it. The Opel jerked to a stop, the pursuer got in the back and the car sped off, trunk lid flapping as the wheels bounced over the cobblestones.

Mercier tried to get to his feet, somebody helped him, and the coalman handed him his hat. Fearing the worst, he knelt over the parcel, discovered a strong chemical smell, and saw that the coverlet, yellow daisies on a red field, had been tied shut with two lengths of cord. He worked at the first knot as the crowd closed in around him. Somebody said, “Get a scissors.” Finally, Mercier managed to undo the first knot, then the coalman, impatient, reached down and broke the second cord with his hands. As Mercier unfolded the coverlet, the chemical smell grew stronger. Chloroform, he thought. Something like that.

Uhl was dead. Eyes closed, mouth slack, snowflakes falling on his face. A voice in the crowd said, “Finished,” and several people hurried away. Mercier put his fingers on Uhl’s neck and probed for a pulse. Nothing. A woman knelt beside him and said, “Excuse me, please,” gently removing Mercier’s fingers and replacing them with her own. “No,” she said. “It’s faint, but it’s there. Better get the ambulance.”

“Brazen,” Jourdain said. “Unbelievable. In broad daylight.” They were in the chancery, in Jourdain’s office; photographs of diplomats shaking hands lined the walls. “Does it hurt?”

“Yes.”

“You’re dripping on your collar.”

Mercier held a towel filled with ice to the back of his head, which ached so badly it made him squint. “I don’t care,” he said.

It was Jourdain who had, after a telephone call, retrieved him from the police station, where they didn’t care if he said he was the French military attache: they had reports to fill out, he would be there for a while. Uhl was in the hospital, with a policeman standing in the hall outside his door.

Mercier sat back in the chair, closed his eyes, and pressed the towel to the alarming lump on the back of his head. “Goddamn that little bastard,” he said.

There were two sharp raps on the door, which swung open to reveal the ambassador: tall, white-haired, and angry. Mercier began to rise, but the ambassador waved him back down. “Colonel Mercier,” he said. Then, “Are you injured?”

“No, sir, not really, just sore.”

That out of the way, the ambassador said, “Can we expect more of this, colonel? Gun battles? Brawling in the street? Yes, I know why, and you had to intervene, but still …”

“I apologize, sir,” Mercier said. “Circumstance.”

The ambassador nodded, as though that explanation meant something. “Mmm. Sorry I won’t be there when you tell them that in Paris. Because you’ll surely be-ah, summoned.”

Mercier took a breath, then said nothing.

“You’ll take care of that-that situation-in the hospital?”

“This afternoon, sir.”

“Jourdain will help you; you don’t look all that well, to me.”

“Count on it, sir,” Jourdain said. “And please don’t be concerned.”

“No, you’re right, I shouldn’t be concerned,” the ambassador said, meaning very much the opposite. “And I so look forward to the evening papers. Photographs, colonel? Will we have to look at it?”

“No, sir. The police were faster than the journalists.”

The ambassador sighed. “The press attache will do the best he can, and I’ve already made a few telephone calls.” Stepping back into the hall, he said, “And colonel? Let it rest there. Please? I don’t want to lose you.”

Mercier nodded, not ungrateful, and said, “Yes, sir.”

As the ambassador prepared to close the door, he met Mercier’s eyes and his face changed: subtly, but enough so that Mercier understood that he was perhaps more than a little proud of his military attache.

At dusk, back in the apartment, Mercier sent Wlada out for the evening papers and saw that the affair had been nicely smoothed over. An altercation at the Hotel Orla, an attempted abduction, foiled by a passerby. One Hermann Schmitt had been drugged by unknown assailants, political motives were suspected, the police were investigating.

Wlada, having left Mercier to his reading, now returned to the study, Mercier’s battered old hat held firmly in both hands. “Colonel, I can do nothing with this, it’s ruined,” she said, extending the hat so that he could see what she meant. On the brim, the black print of the coalman’s thumb.

“Please don’t worry so, Wlada,” Mercier said gently. “It’s not ruined. Not at all.”

28 November.

The eight-fifteen LOT flight, Warsaw to Paris, was only a third full, and Mercier sat alone toward the rear of the airplane. Out the window, the fields of Poland were white with snow, and the plane bumped and jerked as it fought through the winds and climbed into the blue sky above the clouds.

Bruner and his superiors had, as predicted by the ambassador, recalled him to Paris for consultations, so he could look forward to a few disagreeable meetings and at least the possibility that he would be transferred from his assignment in Warsaw. On the other hand, he’d been guilty of fighting Germans, and the Poles would not be pleased if Paris pulled him back to the General Staff for doing that.

On the afternoon following the attempted abduction, he’d visited Uhl in the hospital, where he’d come to realize that the engineer was, whatever else he may have been, a lucky man. How he’d been discovered Mercier didn’t know, though he had spent a long time taking Uhl through the details of his home and office life. The luck came into play because Uhl had been issued a visa for travel to South Africa. Yes, he’d planned to run away-from Breslau, from “Andre,” from work and family. With his countess, or alone if necessary. The SD or the Gestapo, Mercier believed, had learned of the visa and, fearing his imminent flight, had determined they’d better snatch Uhl while they could still get their hands on him. Otherwise, they would simply have allowed him to return to Germany, watched him there, and arrested him at their leisure.

Somebody, most likely the officer in charge of the case, had panicked and ordered an almost spur-of-the-moment abduction by German operatives in Poland. Which had almost succeeded, then come to grief, but, even so, better than having a suspected spy vanish into thin air. Now Uhl was Mercier’s problem-what to do with him? In the short term, Mercier and Jourdain had to assume the hospital was being watched and so, after three days there, Uhl left the building on a stretcher, covered by a sheet, which was slid into the back of a hearse. Then, at the funeral home, out the back door and into a rented room on the outskirts of the city. “Now,” Jourdain had said, “we just have to keep him away from the ladies.”

“I suspect he’s learned his lesson,” Mercier answered. “He’ll never again meet a seductive woman without wondering.”

For the long term, the problem was harder, and Mercier and Jourdain spent hours on possible solutions. Mercier was surprised to discover how much he cared, but, like all the best military officers, he felt a great depth of responsibility for those under his command, and injury to one of them, no matter his opinion of that individual, affected him far more than the civilian world would ever understand.

Given: Uhl could never go back to Germany. And he couldn’t go to South Africa either; German agents would be waiting for him. Also given: the Deuxieme Bureau of the General Staff wasn’t going to provide a lifetime of support for their former spy-Uhl would have to work. Under a new identity, his life history rewritten in an office at 2, bis, in Paris. Work where? Martinique and French Guyana were no more than brief candidates, Canada was the logical choice-Quebec, where the French General Staff had friends who could help them out, and make sure that Uhl lived a quiet, and very private, life. This project was being worked on in Paris, and Mercier expected to hear about it when he reached the city. Ordered to go to Paris, he thought, smiling to himself. How life is hard! He’d written to his cousin Albertine, so his rooms in the vast Mercier de Boutillon apartment in the Seventh Arrondissement would be made up and waiting for him. The steady drone of the engines made him sleepy; he stared out at Cloudland below him, a kingdom of children’s books, and dozed off.

When he woke, they were flying over Germany: crisp little towns, then crisp little farm fields. Beneath him, the snow thinned out, then stopped, leaving the woodlands dark and bare as winter came. From his briefcase he took a popular new book, currently a bestseller in Germany, called Achtung-Panzer! by Colonel Heinz Guderian, commander of Germany’s 2nd Panzer Division. With a French/German dictionary on his lap, Mercier went to work.

We live in a world that is ringing with the clangor of weapons. Mankind is arming on all sides, and it will go ill with a state that is unable or unwilling to rely on its own strength. Some nations are fortunate enough to be favored by nature. Their borders are strong, affording them complete or partial protection against hostile invasion, through chains of mountains or wide expanses of sea. By way of contrast, the existence of other nations is inherently insecure. Their living space is small and in all likelihood ringed by borders that are inherently open, and lie under constant threat from an accumulation of neighbors who combine an unstable temperament with armed superiority.

Well, surely he’s read de Gaulle’s book-and produced a similar opening paragraph. Mercier turned pages-skimmed through a history of British and French tank attacks in the latter half of the Great War-then came upon Guderian’s description of the situation in the first months of 1937.

At the beginning of 1937 the French possessed … more than 4,500 tanks, which means that the number of tanks exceeds by a wide margin the number of artillery pieces, even in the peace-time army. No other country shows such a disproportion between armour and artillery. Figures like these give us food for thought!

True, Mercier thought, the numbers were known, but what to do with these machines? Ah, that was the dessert of the food for thought.

Toward the end of the book, Mercier found the tactical conclusions: the successful use of tanks depended on surprise, deployment en masse, and suitable terrain. These were, Mercier knew, precisely de Gaulle’s conclusions, in his book and in successive monographs, urging the formation of tank units which he called Brigades du Choc. Shock formations-to break the stalemate of a static trench war. Tanks should fight together, in numbers, not be scattered to support companies of infantry. As for terrain, Mercier would have to read fully, but Guderian seemed to concentrate mostly on the subject of national road systems to bring tanks to the front, and avoidance of ground broken by shellholes-natural tank traps-or churned to liquid mud by preparatory artillery barrages. These, in the Great War, sometimes went on for days, as massed field guns fired as many as five million shells.

And forests? Not specifically mentioned, though perhaps more lay buried in the text. And, Mercier thought, now that Uhl was lost, he would have to find some other way to observe the planned Wehrmacht maneuvers at Schramberg.

At five-thirty, leaving a taxi in the rue Saint-Simon, Mercier felt the Parisian mystique take hold of his heart: a sudden nameless ecstasy in the damp air-air scented by black tobacco and fried potatoes and charged with the restless melancholy of the city at the end of its day. Oh, this was home all right, he knew it in his soul-not the autumn mists of the Drome, not his pointers running free in a field, but home nonetheless, which some part of him never left.

Here, in the depths of the Seventh Arrondissement, the residents were rich, quiet, and cold, stewards of the inner chamber. A walled city, its walls hiding formal gardens and silent monasteries, Napoleonic barracks and foreign embassies. One saw the residents only now and again: retired army officers in dark suits, women of the nobility, perfect in afternoon Chanel.

Halfway up the narrow street: 23, rue Saint-Simon. Mercier rang the bell by the familiar door-built for the height of a carriage-and the concierge, who’d known him for twenty years, let him in. He crossed the interior courtyard, ignored by the twittering sparrows, his steps on the stone block loud in the thick silence of the building, and climbed to the second floor, unlocked the door, and entered the apartment: bought in the middle of the nineteenth century by his great-grandfather, only the plumbing updated, the rest as it had always been-leaded glass windows in small panes, vast, gloomy carpets, massive armoires and chests. Not elegant, the furnishings, but sturdy. The Merciers lived on country estates, and the women of the family had always treated the Paris apartment as a tiresome necessity-people of their class always had to go to Paris for one reason or another, and the alternative was hotels, and restaurants. Unthinkable. Thus they’d been economical in the purchase of slipcoverings and draperies, everything dark, not to show use and meant to last. The fabrics were protected by closed shutters and heavy drapes-the sun was not allowed in here.

Mercier dropped his briefcase and valise in the bedroom and found a note from his cousin Albertine on the night table.

Dearest Jean-Francois,

Welcome. I am out for the afternoon but I shall return at six-thirty, and we can go out for dinner, if you like, or I can cook something if you’re too tired. Looking forward to seeing you,

Albertine.

In Mercier’s past, Cousin Albertine occupied a very special niche. She was the youngest daughter of his father’s favorite brother, later to die in the war, and they’d grown up as neighbors-his uncle’s property a few miles away from their own-so together often: at Christmas and Easter, in summer when they were home from their respective boarding schools. Surely she’d always been the odd one out of the Mercier clan: tall, awkward, pale, serious, and curiously redheaded-auburn, really-with freckles scattered across her forehead. Where, the family wondered, had she come from? All the other Merciers were dark, like Jean-Francois, so, it was theorized, some ancient gene had surfaced in his cousin and made her different. The other possibility was never considered-or, rather, never spoken aloud….

One Saturday morning at the end of summer, when Mercier was fourteen and Albertine sixteen, Uncle Gerard and his family had come to visit. The adults and the other children had gone off somewhere-to a livestock auction in a distant village, as Mercier remembered it-and he and Albertine were left alone in the house. The servants downstairs were preparing midday dinner; they would be twelve at table, for various other family members would be joining them.

In his room, Mercier was dressing for dinner, in underpants and his best shirt, in front of a wall mirror, working at tying his tie. First the bottom part came out absurdly short, then too long. On his third attempt, the door opened and, in the mirror, Cousin Albertine appeared. She watched him for a moment, then, with a strange look on her face, at once shy and determined, came up behind him. “Can I try it?” she said.

“I can do it,” he said.

“I want to try,” she said. “To see if I can.”

“How do you know about ties?”

“I watch my brothers do it.”

“Oh.”

This was intended to mean, oh, I see, but came out as more of an oh! because, as Albertine reached around him, her heavy breasts, in a thin summer dress, rested lightly against his back.

“Now,” she said, “we cross it around and loop it through.”

In the mirror, Albertine’s face was dreamy, her eyes half closed, mouth slightly open. Also in the mirror, the front of his underpants highly distended. For a few seconds, they stood like statues, then she whispered, “I want to see it,” hooked her thumbs in the waistband of his underpants, and pulled them down.

“Alber-tine!”

“What?”

She reached out and closed her hand around it, her skin warm and damp. He leaned back against her, then moved away. “We’re not supposed-”

“Oh foo,” she said. So much for family morals. “You like it,” she said firmly, and ran her finger along the underside, back and forth. “Don’t you?”

He could only nod.

She pressed against him, above and below, and he reached back, hands on her bottom, and pulled her closer. She now stroked him with index finger and thumb: where had she learned to do this? He was very excited and, a few seconds later, came the inevitable conclusion, accompanied, from deep within him, by a sound somewhere between a sigh and a gasp.

“There,” she said softly, taking her hand away.

“Well, that’s what happens.”

“I know that.”

He started to move away from her, but she wrapped her arms around his shoulders and held him tight. Close to his ear, she whispered, “Now it’s my turn.”

“What?” His heart quaked.

She raised her dress, revealing white cotton underdrawers, and bunched it around her waist, then took his hand and placed it between her legs. He’d never touched a girl there and had no idea what was expected of him, but immediately found out, as she pressed his hand against herself and began to move it. In the mirror, he could see her face: eyes closed, lower lip held delicately between her teeth. With his free hand, he again reached around her, where, in slow rhythm, her bottom tensed, relaxed, and tensed again. After what seemed to him like a long time-he began to wonder what he was doing wrong-she exhaled hard, her breath audible, and held on to him as though she might fall down. Astonishing! It had never occurred to him that this happened to a girl; his friends at school had a completely different version of things.

He pulled up his underpants, then sat down hard on the edge of his bed. Albertine resettled her dress, then came and sat beside him, brushing her long hair off her face. “Did you like it, Jean-Francois?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Both things?”

“Yes, both.”

She kissed him, a dry kiss on the cheek. “I think you’re sweet,” she said and, for a moment, rested her head on his shoulder.

This was not the only time, for the Mercier cousins; it happened once more before they went north to their schools. The following week, the cook baked grand brioches, as big as cakes, and his mother asked him to take two of them over to Uncle Gerard’s. Mercier, already a cavalry officer in his daydreams, climbed on his bicycle and pedaled like a fury over the tiny dirt lanes that wound through the hills to his uncle’s house. Once there, amid the usual disorder, he set the brioches down on the table in the kitchen, then waited while his aunt wrote a thank you note. Albertine appeared, as he was retrieving his bicycle from the steps that led to the terrace, and told her mother she would ride with him part of the way back home. Halfway there, they walked their bicycles away from the lane and found a grove of cork oaks, and, this time, Albertine suggested that they take off all their clothes.

Mercier hesitated, uncertain of what lay ahead. “I don’t want you to have a baby,” he said.

She laughed, brushing her hair aside. “I’m not going to do that. Cousins mustn’t do that, but we can play. Playing is always allowed.”

What rules she was following he did not know, but in the days after their first encounter, before he went to sleep and when he woke in the morning, he had ravished his gawky cousin in every way his imagination offered and was now more than ready for anything she might think up. And so, her skin white in the hot sun, Albertine posed prettily for him and then, at their leisure on a summer’s day, as the cicadas whirred away in the high grass, they played twice.

True to her word, Albertine returned to the apartment at six-thirty. Her hair was darker now, styled short, falling just to her jawline. She wore a quiet tweed suit with big buttons, skirt well below the knee, and a fancy silk scarf from one of the fashion houses, wound around her neck and tucked into the vee of her suit jacket. With pearl earrings and fine leather gloves, she was very much an aristocrat of the Seventh. As in all their meetings over the years, he could find the Albertine he’d known that summer; she was, as he put it to himself, still in there; he could find her if he tried.

She made them drinks, vermouth with lemon, and showed him the latest additions to her collection-onyx cameos and intaglios on small wooden stands, filling the shelves of two glass-fronted bookcases. Some of the new ones were ancient, Greek and Roman, others from tsarist Russia and the Austro-Hungarian empire. “They are exceptional,” he said, taking time to study them, appreciating what she’d achieved. Then they walked out to the boulevard and over to a busy brasserie on the rue Saint-Dominique. A compromise: she didn’t want to cook, it was too early to go to a proper restaurant, and neither of them cared that much. So they ordered omelettes and frites and a bottle of Saint-Estephe.

“It is so good to see you, Jean-Francois,” she said, taking the first sip of her wine. “Is life going well? I expect you miss Annemarie.”

“Every day.”

“And do you see anyone?”

I wish I could, he thought, Anna Szarbek’s image smiling up at him on a nightclub dance floor. “No,” he said. “I would like to, but it isn’t easy, meeting somebody-who’s available.”

“Oh you will, dear,” she said, looking at him fondly. “People do find each other, somehow.”

“Let’s hope so. And you?” Years earlier, there had been a fiance, then another, but, after that, silence.

“Oh, I’ve settled into my life,” she said. “How are the girls?”

“Thriving, but passionately busy. Beatrice is in Cairo, her sister, Gabrielle, in Copenhagen-I haven’t seen them for a long time. At Christmas, perhaps. I might see if Gabrielle will come down to the house in Boutillon. That is, if I can get there myself.”

“And Warsaw? Is that a good place to be, for you?”

He nodded. “I certainly see enough of it-hotels, restaurants, cocktail parties, receptions.”

“The glamorous life!”

His tart smile told Albertine all she needed to know about that.

“Always difficult, a new job. But I assume you’re good at it,” she said.

“It has its ups and downs-as you say, a new job.”

“You don’t like it?”

“No, but I’m a soldier. I do what they tell me.”

“What is that? Are you a spymaster?”

“Nothing so dramatic. Mostly I am a liaison between the French and Polish General Staffs. Everybody has to know what everybody else is up to.”

The omelettes-aux fines herbes-arrived, with mounds of frites, crisp and golden and powerfully aromatic. Albertine, suddenly maternal, salted both their portions. “Still, you must learn secrets.”

“Bad manners, Albertine, when the host country is an old friend.”

“Yes, of course, that makes sense,” she said, thinking it over. “Maybe German secrets.”

“Well, if they come swimming by in the stream, I net them.”

“Evil bastards, Jean-Francois, they’ve got their whole country in prison. I have friends who are Jews, a couple, fled from Frankfurt with the clothes on their backs. Surely great threats to the government: cellists, both of them. Did you know that, by German law, persons of more than twenty-five percent non-Aryan blood are forbidden to play Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, or any other Aryan composer? Can you imagine? I know I shouldn’t pry, but if you get a chance to put a boot up their backsides I trust you’ll give it an extra shove for me.”

“I’ll remember that,” he said. “You never know what might happen.” He poured more wine for both of them. “And you, Albertine? What goes on with you?”

She shrugged. “I work hard at what I do-charities, boards of directors, and so forth, wherever they need people they don’t have to pay. Oh, speaking of boards, some awful woman, Madame de Michaux is her name … had dinner with you in Warsaw? She was eager to tell me about it. Very taken with you, she was.”

“Yes, I’d forgotten her name. The dinner was a banquet, at the Europejski.”

“Perhaps, since you’re in Paris, you’ll go and see her.”

“Albertine, don’t be wicked.”

She smiled. I can be, as you well know. “Here’s one bit of news. I’m going to Aleppo, in December.”

“Any special reason?”

“I might buy something for the collection, we’ll see. I’m going with a friend of mine, she’s a professor of archaeology at the Sorbonne, so that will give me entree to the local collectors-and the tomb robbers.” She paused, then said, “Have you a secret mission for me, as long as I’m there?”

“I’m not concerned with Syria, dear. And best not to say such things.”

“Oh foo,” she said. “I wasn’t born yesterday.”

He laughed and said, “Albertine, you are incorrigible.”

Albertine’s eyes wandered, then fixed on a nearby table. Mercier ate some frites, then looked over to see what interested her. A very handsome man was having dinner with his daughter, maybe twelve, who was chattering away while she worked at eating a plate of escargots. She was quite adept, using the shell-holding tool with one hand, probing for the snail morsel with a special fork, yet more than keeping up her end of the conversation. The father listened earnestly. “Yes? … Really? … That must have been interesting.”

Albertine leaned toward Mercier and said, “Are you watching this?”

“What’s going on?”

“Can’t you see?”

“No, what is it?”

“He’s teaching her how to have dinner with a man.”

Mercier took another look. “Yes, I do see, now that you mention it.”

Albertine was amused, and pleased with what she’d discovered. “How I love this quartier,” she said. “And, come to think of it, this country. I mean, where else?”

Back at the apartment, Albertine made sure that Mercier had everything he needed, then went off to her room, down the hall. He tried to read Guderian, but it had been a long day, they’d finished the Saint-Estephe, and German military theory wasn’t the best bedside companion. He thought about the following morning: Bruner, the others. Would he defend himself? Or just sit there and listen? The latter, an easy decision, the best way to keep his job. His pursuit of the Wehrmacht‘s intentions-the abandoned tank trap, a careful reading of Guderian’s book-had changed the chemistry of his assignment in Warsaw. This, along with the abduction of his agent Uhl, had turned a desk job into something very much like a fight, so to walk away now would be to walk away from a fight. He had never done that, and he never would.

It was quiet outside, in the hidden rue Saint-Simon, quiet in the building, and quiet in the apartment; private, cloistered. Warm enough, with the radiators going, the room mostly in shadow, with only a small lamp on the night table lighting his bed. From down the hall, he heard the faint sound of music-Albertine apparently had a radio in her room-a swing orchestra playing a dance tune, then a woman vocalist, singing a song he recognized: “Night and Day.” Was Albertine reading? Or lying in the darkness, listening to her radio? Not, he thought, that he would ever find out. Not that he would walk down the hall and knock at her door. Not that she wanted him to do that. Nor would she-walk down the hall and open his door. Not that he wanted her to, not really. Not that much, anyhow.

29 November. In his best uniform, shoes polished to a high gloss, Mercier walked up the rue de Grenelle, past the walled Soviet embassy, then along avenue des Invalides to the avenue de Tourville. The chill gray morning, typical for the city this time of year, did nothing to soften the official buildings, the heart of military Paris. Saluted by the sentry, he entered 2, bis, climbed the stairs to Bruner’s office, and at ten hundred hours sharp, as ordered, he knocked at the door.

Bruner took his time, and after he got around to calling, “Come in,” his greeting was subdued-polite and cold. “How was your flight, colonel?”

“It was uneventful, sir. On time.”

“When I served in Warsaw, I always found LOT to be dependable.” Bruner took a sheet of paper from his drawer and placed it before him, squaring it up with his fingertips. He had, Mercier sensed, flourished with his promotion to full colonel and his new position. Short and tubby, with a soft face and a dapper little mustache, he virtually glowed with vanity, and its evil twin, the infinite capacity for vengeance when insulted. “So then,” he said. “Our lost spy in Germany.”

“Yes, colonel.”

“How did this happen?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ll have to find out, won’t you.”

“He thought he was under surveillance on the previous trip. Somehow the Gestapo, or a counterespionage unit of the SD, uncovered him. I’ve questioned him at length, and he’s been forthcoming, but he doesn’t have the answer.”

“And what do you propose to do about it? It’s a serious loss, a view on German armaments, which imply tactics, and that is information crucial to our own planning. We’re in the midst of a political conflict these days, the politicians don’t want to spend money on tanks and planes-we still have serious unemployment-but Hitler has no such problem. He spends what he likes.”

“I am aware of this, colonel.”

“Perhaps this position, in Warsaw, is not to your taste, Colonel Mercier. Would you like me to arrange a new assignment?”

“No, colonel. It is my preference to remain in Poland.”

Bruner returned to their lost spy, then spent some time on the shooting incident in Silesia, and around again. He was like a terrier-once he took hold, he wouldn’t let go. But, at last, with a final threat or two, Mercier was dismissed. “There will be more meetings, Colonel Mercier, so please be good enough to stay in contact with my adjutant for the next two days. You are also scheduled to see General de Beauvilliers. Call his office for the details.”

Oh no. Not de Beauvilliers. Now, Mercier thought, he really would be sent off to some fever-ridden island.

When he left Bruner’s office, he badly wanted coffee. There’d been no sign of Albertine when he got up, and he hadn’t bothered to make it for himself, so he descended to the officers’ mess in the basement and found an empty table. There were three officers at the next table, including a major, a fellow military attache he recognized from his training class the previous spring. They acknowledged each other; then, as Mercier ordered coffee from a mess steward, the major resumed telling a story, which the other two were clearly enjoying.

“So they took me to the far end of the palace,” the major said, “to a glorious room: divans, you know, and gauze curtains.”

“Perhaps you were in the harem.”

“Perhaps. But there were no women about. Just the sultan, the chief eunuch, the head of the army-the sultan’s younger brother-and me. For a time, we made small talk: the progress of the new railroad, their war with one of the mountain tribes. Then a servant-turban, dagger tucked in sash, those slippers with the toes turned up-entered with a brass tray. Which held four little pipes, made of silver, filigreed silver, very old and beautiful, and a silver bowl holding four brown-well, lumps, the size of small pebbles.”

“Ah,” said one of the other officers. “Opium.”

“No, hashish. As the honored guest, I was served first. Which meant the servant put a brown lump in the bowl of a pipe and held a taper over it until I managed to get the damn thing to light.”

“You couldn’t decline?”

“I could’ve, but you can’t be rude to sultans. That might have been the end of French concessions in the sultanate.”

“How was it?”

“Harsh. Quite harsh-I had to stop myself from coughing. Then the sultan lit up, followed by the general and the eunuch. The smoke is very fragrant, sweet; not like anything else. When we were done, the servant took the pipes away. And then we began to negotiate. Imagine! I’d memorized a list of objectives-what we wanted, what we could offer in return-”

“And so you offered them Marseille.”

“They didn’t ask for it, but just as well they didn’t.”

“And you felt …?”

“Light-headed. And peaceful. With a great desire to smile, an overwhelming desire.”

“And did you? Smile?”

“Not quite. I managed to force the corners of my mouth to stay where they were. Meanwhile, the eunuch was watching me carefully, and the general began to talk about Schneider-Creusot cannon, seventy-fives. Then, right in the middle of it, the sultan cut him off and began to tell a story, the silliest story, really, about his visit to France before the war, some hotel in Nice, and shoes left outside the rooms at night to be shined by the porter, and his cousin switching them around-two right shoes here, two lefts down the hall. Doesn’t sound so funny, now, but if you’d been there….”

Mercier finished his coffee and left the building. The major’s story-an attache stupifie with hashish in some desert kingdom-had been, in its way, instructive. Droll, rather than violent, but nonetheless, like his own experience, a misadventure of foreign service. Perhaps the major too had been recalled for consultations. Well, Mercier thought, he’d survived; endured that pompous ass Bruner without losing his temper, the parting shot no more than an order to replace Uhl, at least to the extent of having the Schramberg maneuvers observed. But that was more than reasonable-he would have done that without a trip to Paris. What lay ahead of him now was a session with the Service des Renseignements-the clandestine service of the Deuxieme Bureau-which would not be a scolding, simply an interview. And a meeting with General de Beauvilliers, which was worth worrying about, but just then Mercier didn’t feel like worrying. On the walk home he took the rue Saint-Dominique, a commercial street, busy in the late morning, where he saw a bunch of red gladioli in a florist’s shop and bought them for the apartment.

30 November. Sturmbannfuhrer August Voss rode the express back from Berlin to Glogau. There was only one other passenger in the first-class compartment and Voss gazed out the window but saw nothing, so much was his mind occupied with anger. He’d gone up to the central command office on Wilhelmstrasse for the normal monthly meeting with his superior, but the meeting had not been at all normal. His superior, Obersturmbannfuhrer Gluck, a bright young lawyer from Berlin in his previous life, had criticized him for the Edvard Uhl affair. No compliments for unveiling a spy, only disapproval for that absurd folly at the hotel in Warsaw. Gluck wasn’t sarcastic or loud, not the type to slam his fist on the desk-he was too high and mighty for that. No, he regretted the incident, wondered if it wasn’t just a bit precipitous to snatch this man in the middle of a foreign city, and unfortunate that the abduction had failed. This was Gluck’s typical manner: quietly rueful, seemingly not all that perturbed. But then, when you left the office, he had your dossier brought out and destroyed you. And what came next was a new assignment-where you’d be tucked away in some cemetery of a bureau where they gathered up failures and kept them busy with meaningless paper.

The deed, for all Voss knew, might already have been done. But, he vowed to himself, the story wouldn’t end there. Zoller, his operative in Leszno who’d followed Uhl up to Warsaw, had been transferred to the Balkans-the Zagreb station, let him deal with the Croats and the Serbs-and Voss had made sure that everyone in his office knew it. But, much more important, the jackass who’d intervened outside the Hotel Orla would be dealt with next.

Voss had worked at that, hard, in the days following the aborted kidnapping. Who was he? The Warsaw operatives knew what he looked like, and Voss had hauled the leader, a Polish fascist, down to Glogau and given him the tongue-lashing of his life. “Find him, or else!” Voss didn’t care how. And the man had done the job in less than a week. His chief thug, once a professional wrestler in Chicago, had kept watch on the main Warsaw hospital and, lo and behold, there he was. Visiting in the morning, leaving an hour later, and followed back to the French embassy. He wore an officer’s uniform, but the operative had gotten a good look at him at the Hotel Orla and thought he was the same man.

In Glogau, Voss had not reported this discovery in a dispatch, sensing he might need it at the meeting in Berlin. And, he thought at first, he’d been right. When Gluck’s criticism finally wound down, he’d said, “Well, at least we’ve identified the man who interfered,” then paused, anticipating words of praise.

They weren’t spoken, only a polite “Yes?”

“A Frenchman, working at the embassy. An army officer.”

“Military attache?”

“Perhaps, we can’t be sure. But we’ll find out, once we’ve got our hands on him.”

“Your hands on him, Sturmbannfuhrer Voss? A military attache? In diplomatic service at an embassy?” Gluck had stared at him, his blue lawyer’s eyes as cold as ice. “You don’t mean that seriously, do you?”

“But …”

“Of course you don’t. You are irritated by failure, naturally, who wouldn’t be, but an attack on a serving military attache?” Gluck closed his eyes and gave his head a delicate shake: this must be a nightmare, where I’m forced to work with fools. “Do we, Sturmbannfuhrer Voss, need to discuss this further?”

“No, sir. Of course not. I perfectly understand.”

In the compartment on the Berlin/Glogau train, Voss’s fury rose as he recollected the conversation-how he’d crawled! The other passenger glanced over at him and rattled his newspaper. Had he spoken aloud? Perhaps he had, but no matter. What mattered was that this Frenchman would pay for sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. The Polish operative had described him as “handsome, aloof, aristocratic.” Yes, exactly, just the sort of Frenchman one could truly loathe. Well, Pierre, you will answer for what you did to me. It couldn’t be done officially, but there were always alternatives; one simply had to take the initiative. In his interior monologue, Voss mocked his superior. That didn’t cure him, nothing would cure him, but he felt better.

“Where?” In the apartment, Albertine turned toward Mercier, the bottle of vermouth suspended over a glass.

“The Brasserie Heininger. For lunch, tomorrow.”

“Down at Bastille? That place? For lunch with a general?”

“Yes.”

“Good heavens,” she said.

1 December.

Papa Heininger, proprietor of the brasserie just off the Place de Bastille, unconsciously straightened his posture when he saw the two officers waiting to be shown to their table. He edged the maitre d’ aside with his hand and said, “Good afternoon, messieurs.”

The older one, at least a general from his uniform and insignia, said, “Yes. The reservation is in the name ‘de Beauvilliers.’ ” He turned to the other officer, who walked with a stick, and said, “We’re upstairs, where it’s quiet.”

Perhaps it would be, Mercier thought, but it wasn’t here. The Heininger was famously excessive: white marble staircase, red plush banquettes, pudgy cupids painted on the walls between the gold-framed mirrors, golden passementeries on the drapery. The waiters, many wearing muttonchop whiskers, ran back and forth, balancing giant silver trays crammed with pink langoustines and knobby black oysters, and the lunchtime crowd was noisy and merry; in clouds of cigarette smoke and perfume they laughed, talked above the din, called out for more champagne.

When they’d climbed the staircase, Papa Heininger showed them to a table in the far corner, only to discover a silver-haired gentleman and a much younger brunette side by side on the banquette, whispering tenderly with their heads together. They were also notably well-dressed-but not for long. Heininger was aghast and started to speak, but the gentleman at the table turned a fierce eye on him and he stopped dead. “There’s been a mistake,” he said, and began an elaborate apology. The general cut him off. “Just anywhere will do,” he said, his voice midway between a sigh and a command.

They were then taken back downstairs, to table fourteen, which bore a reserve sign on a silver stand. Papa Heininger, with a dramatic flourish, whipped it away and said, “Our most-requested table. And please allow me to have a bottle of champagne brought over, with my compliments.”

“As you wish,” the general said. Then, to Mercier, as he slid onto the banquette, “The infamous table fourteen.” He nodded his head toward the mirror on the wall, which had a small hole with crackled edges in its lower corner.

“That can’t be what it looks like.”

“In fact it is. A bullet hole.” From de Beauvilliers, a tolerant smile. In his sixties, he had the face of a sad hound, long and mournful, with the red-rimmed eyes of the insomniac and a shaggy gray mustache. He was famously the intellectual of the Conseil Superieur de la Guerre, the high committee of military strategy, and was said to be one of the most powerful men in France, though precisely what he did, and how he did it, remained almost entirely in shadow. “A few months ago,” he continued, “June, I think it was, they had a Bulgarian head-waiter here who played at emigre politics and got himself assassinated while hiding in a stall in the ladies’ WC. The gang also shot up the dining room, and all the mirrors had to be replaced. All but this one, kept as a memorial. Makes for a good story, anyhow. Personally, I come here for the choucroute-I’ve seen enough bullet holes in my life.”

The champagne arrived in a silver bucket, and both men ordered the choucroute. “You may put an extra frankfurter on mine,” de Beauvilliers said. The waiter twisted out the champagne cork and poured two glasses. When he’d hurried off, de Beauvilliers said, “I would’ve preferred beer, but life has a way of thwarting simple pleasures.” He tasted the champagne and had a look at the label. “Not so bad,” he said. “Did Bruner give you hell?”

“He did.”

“Don’t worry about him, he has his place, in the scheme of things, but he’s kept on a short leash. I want you in Warsaw, colonel.”

“Thank you,” Mercier said. “There’s work to be done there.”

“I know. Too bad about the Poles, but they’ve got to be made to understand we aren’t coming to help them, no matter what the treaties say. We might be able to, if de Gaulle and his allies-like Reynaud-had their way, but they won’t get it. French military doctrine is in the hands of Marshal Petain, de Gaulle’s enemy, and he won’t let go.”

“Defense. And more defense. The Maginot Line.”

“Precisely. De Gaulle’s up at Metz, commanding the Five-oh-seventh Tank Regiment. But there won’t be many more, no armoured divisions, not until nineteen-forty, if then.”

“May I ask why?” Mercier said.

“It’s what I ask myself,” de Beauvilliers said. “What some of us have been asking since Hitler marched into the Rhineland in ‘thirty-six. But the answer isn’t complicated. Petain, and his allies, are committed to the theory of Methodical Battle. Hitler to be appeased-to gain time, to cement our alliance with Great Britain-then a battle of attrition. The British navy blockades, the Germans starve, and we launch a counteroffensive in two to three years. It worked in nineteen-eighteen, after the Americans showed up.”

“It won’t work again, general. Hitler is committed to armoured regiments. He was there, in nineteen-eighteen, he saw what happened.”

“He did. And he knows that if the Germans don’t win in six months, they don’t win period. But France feels it can’t compete: political constraints, lack of money, a shaky procurement system, not enough men, not enough training areas. Gamelin, the chief of staff, has nothing but excuses.”

“The Germans are building tanks,” Mercier said. “I was watching them, until I lost an agent. And they’re planning maneuvers in Schramberg-in the Black Forest. They are, I believe, thinking hard about the Ardennes Forest, in Belgium, where the Maginot Line ends.”

“We know. Of course we know. And we’ve conducted war games based on a tank thrust through the Ardennes. But what matters in war games is the conclusion, the lesson drawn.”

“Can you tell me what that was, general?”

De Beauvilliers took a moment to consider his answer. “We are, in France, obsessed by the idea of great men-nobody else would build the Pantheon. So Marshal Petain, the hero of Verdun, much honored, idolized, even, has persuaded himself that he is omniscient. In a recent pamphlet, he wrote, ‘The Ardennes forest is impenetrable; and if the Germans were imprudent enough to get entangled in it, we should seize them as they came out!’ “

“That’s nonsense, sir,” Mercier said. “Forgive my brevity, general, but that’s what it is.”

“I believe I used the same word, colonel. And worse. But now, what can we do about it?”

“Les choucroutes!” The waiter served them-for each a mound of sauerkraut, pork cutlet, thick, lean slices of bacon, and a frankfurter-two for the general. A small pot of fiery mustard was set between them. “A perfect dish for a discussion of Germany,” de Beauvilliers said to Mercier. Then, to the waiter, “Bring me a glass of your best pilsener.”

“One should have what one wants,” Mercier said.

“At lunch, anyhow, one should. Tell me what’s going on in Poland.”

As the general attacked his first frankfurter, Mercier said, “You know I lost an agent-almost lost him to the Germans, but we have him hidden away in Warsaw for the moment. Otherwise it’s quiet. The Poles are doing their best to buy weapons, but it’s a slow process; the Depression still cripples their economy. But they remain confident. After all, they won their war with the Russians, and resolved their border disputes in Silesia and Lithuania, and they haven’t forgotten any of it. They’re still fighting the Ukrainian nationalists in the east, who are secretly armed by the Germans, but they’re not going to give away territory.”

“Confidence isn’t always the best thing.”

“No, and Pilsudski’s death hurt them. After he died, the government swung to the right, and there’s a strong fascist presence in the universities-actions against the Jews-but the fascists remain a minority. I should add that I’m not expert here. Mostly I concentrate on the army, not the politics.”

De Beauvilliers nodded that he understood, then said, “One bit of gossip that came my way is the retrieval of von Sosnowski, traded for a German spy.”

“It came my way as well.”

“Really? From where?”

“Russians. Intelligence types from the Warsaw embassy. At a cocktail party.”

“You’ll want to go carefully, there.” De Beauvilliers paused, a forkful of sauerkraut in midair, then a fond smile was followed by, “Jurik von Sosnowski, the Chevalier von Nalecz, yes; now there was a good spy.” He ate the sauerkraut and said, “He had a long reach, did Jurik. Right into Section I.N. Six-Intelligenz Nachforschung, intelligence research-of the German General Staff, Guderian’s office. And brought out the plan of attack, with tank regiments, for the invasion of Poland. But, in the end, the Poles suspected that the Germans knew what he was doing and were feeding him false information.”

“That seems odd, to me,” Mercier said. “It implies that the true plan was something else. But what could that have been? Artillery bombardment of the border fortifications and a slow advance? I would doubt that, myself.”

“He may have gotten his hands on the invasion plans for us as well, but nobody ever told us he did. Anyhow, he was active for a few years, and arrested in ‘thirty-four, so it’s likely the details have all been reworked.”

“Yes, likely they have.”

“Only one way to find out, of course,” de Beauvilliers said. A certain expression-rueful amusement, perhaps-flickered over his face for an instant, then vanished. “Invasion plans,” he said. “Many gems in this murky business, colonel, all sorts of rubies and emeralds, always worth stealing if you can. Ahh, but invasion plans, now you have diamonds. And they only come from one mine, the same I.N. Six that Sosnowski penetrated with his German girlfriends. But, alas, that probably can’t be done again.”

“Probably not.”

“Still, if by circumstance, the right person, the right moment …”

“In that case, it could be tried.”

“Surely it could. Well worth it, I’d think. But I doubt seduction is the answer, not anymore, not with the Gestapo and the SD. And old von Sosnowski was one of a kind, wasn’t he-a hundred women a year, that was the rumor. Wouldn’t work again, I’d say, reprise isn’t the answer. No, this time it would have to be money.”

“Quite a lot of money,” Mercier said.

From de Beauvilliers, a rather gloomy nod of agreement. However, all was not lost. As he leaned toward Mercier, his voice was quiet but firm. “Of course, we do have a lot of money.”

That said, he returned to his lunch. Mercier drank some champagne, then, suddenly, and for no reason he could think of, he was very conscious of the life around him, the Parisian chatter and laughter that filled the smoky air of the restaurant. A strange awareness; not enjoyment, more apprehension. Like the dogs, he thought. Sometimes, at rest, they would raise their heads, alert to something distant, then, after a moment, lie back down again, always with a kind of sigh. What would happen to these people, he wondered, if war came here?

3 December, Warsaw.

Now the winter snow began to fall. At night, it melted into golden droplets on the Ujazdowska gas lamps and, by morning, turned the street white and silent. Out in the countryside, the first paw prints of wolves were seen near the villages.

Mercier’s mail grew fat with Christmas cards; the Vyborgs sent a manger with infant and sheep, similarly the Spanish naval attache. From Prince Kaz and Princess Toni-postmarked Venice-a yule tree dusted with bits of silver, and a Hope to see you in the spring, in girls’ academy handwriting below the printed greeting. From Albertine a warm holiday letter, not so different from the one he’d sent her. By now she would be in Aleppo, he imagined, and found himself remembering the darkened hall that led to her room and the faint music he’d heard.

From the Rozens, a Chanukah card with a menorah, and another from Dr. Goldszteyn, his sometime partner in the foursomes at the Milanowek Tennis Club. Inside the card was a letter, on a sheet of cream-colored stationery.

Dear Colonel Mercier,

We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Sadly, I must take this occasion to say goodby. My family and I will soon be in Cincinnahti, joining my brother who emigrated a few years ago. This will be a better situation for us, I believe. For your kindness and thoughtful consideration I thank you, and wish you happiness of the season. Sincerely yours,

Judah Goldszteyn

Mercier read it more than once, thought about answering the letter, then realized, a sadder thing than the letter itself, that there was nothing to be said. He was not able to throw the letter away, so put it in a drawer.

The mail also included invitations, fancy ones-the Warsaw printers thrived this time of year-to more official gatherings than Mercier could ever hope to attend, and a few private parties. RSVP. He declined most, and accepted a few. A handwritten note from Madame Dupin, the deputy director of protocol at the embassy, invited him to a vernissage “for one of Poland’s finest young painters, Marc Shublin.” The vernissage-“varnishing,” it meant, thus the completion of an oil painting-was an old Paris tradition, the first showing of an artist’s new work, typically at his studio.

Mercier had added the note to his no pile, but Madame Dupin, bright and forceful as always, had shown up at his office a day later. “Oh really, you must come,” she’d said. “Congenial people, you’ll have a good time. Marc’s so popular, we’re having it at an abandoned greenhouse on Hortensya street. Please, Jean-Francois, say yes, the young man’s worth your evening, my friend Anna is invited, and everything else this year will be so boring. Please?”

“Of course, Marie, I’ll be there.”

On the afternoon of the eleventh, in suit and tie, Mercier took a trolley to the outskirts of the city to meet a man called Verchak. This was a favor done for him by Colonel Vyborg, thus an offer that could not be turned down, though Mercier doubted it would be productive. Verchak had served with the Dabrowsky battalion in the Spanish civil war and, wounded in the fighting, had been allowed-“because of his family,” Vyborg had said-to return to Poland. Most of the battalion had been made up of Polish miners, from the Lille region of France, almost all of them members of the communist labor union, who’d fought as part of the XIth International Brigade, prominent in the defense of Madrid. Emigre communists knew better than to try to re-enter Poland, so Verchak was a valuable rarity, according to Vyborg.

The two-room apartment in a workers’ district was scrupulously clean-cleanliness being the Polish antidote to poverty-and smelled of medicine. Mercier was taken to the second room, bare of decoration except for a small cedar tree set on a bench and hung with beautiful wooden Christmas ornaments, where he was shown to the good chair, while Verchak sat on a handmade plank chair across from him. Pana Verchak served tea, offered sugar, which Mercier knew not to accept, then left the room.

A broken man, Mercier thought-no wound was physically apparent, but Verchak was old and slumped well beyond his years. His Polish was slow and precise, for which Mercier was grateful, and someone, Vyborg no doubt, had urged him to be forthcoming. Mercier said only that he was Vyborg’s friend and wished to hear of Verchak’s experience of the war in Spain.

Verchak accepted this and began a recitation, clearly having told his story more than once. “In the first week of November, it was cold, and rained every day; we took the village of Boadilla, near the Corunna road, that led from Madrid to Las Rozas. The Nationalists wanted to cut that road and lay siege to the city and, after some hours, while we prepared defensive positions, they attacked us. They surrounded the village.”

“What sort of attack was it?”

Verchak looked out the window for a moment, lost in his memory, then turned back to Mercier. “We couldn’t stop it, sir,” he said. “First the planes bombed us, then came tanks, then two waves of infantry, then more tanks. But we held on for a long time, though half of our men were killed.”

“You fired at the tanks.”

“With machine guns, but it meant little. One of them we set on fire, with a field gun, and we shot the crew as they came out of the hatch. One or two others got stuck in a ravine, and we put hand grenades under the engine in the back. But there were too many of them.”

“How many?”

Verchak slowly shook his head. “Too many to count. We were next to the Thaelmann Battalion, German communists, mostly, and they said it was called ‘Lightning war.’ “

“In Polish, they said that?”

“No, sir. In German.”

“So then, Blitzkrieg?”

“It might’ve been that. I don’t remember.”

“It was their word? The Germans in the Thaelmann Battalion?”

“I think they said they’d heard it from the German advisors who fought with the Nationalists.”

“How did they come to hear it, Pan Verchak? From a prisoner?”

“They might’ve, sir, they didn’t say. Perhaps they listened to the Germans talking on their radios. They were very clever people.”

“Did the planes return?”

“Not that day, but the following morning, as we moved back toward Madrid. We were out of ammunition. They sent us blank cartridges, the officers in Madrid.”

“Why would they do such a thing?”

“For courage, people said, so we wouldn’t retreat.”

“Did the men in the tanks talk to the planes, Pani?”

“I wouldn’t know, sir. But I do know it can be done.”

“Really? Why do you say that?”

“I saw it with my own eyes, later, when we fought at the Jarama river. The tanks were on our side there, big Russian tanks, and I saw a tank commander, halfway out of the open hatch, using a radio and watching the Russian war planes in the sky. He shouted at them-I was only a few feet away-when the bombs began to fall on our own trenches. Then, after he shouted, the bombing stopped. Not soon enough, sir, some of the comrades were killed, but it did stop. Of course, he shouldn’t have been out of the tank, for the Moors shot him.” Verchak stopped for a moment, as though he could see the tank commander. “It was a terrible war, sir,” he said.

Verchak’s wife returned to the room soon thereafter, a signal, Mercier thought, that her husband could not continue much longer. When Mercier rose to leave, he slid a thousand zloty into a piece of folded paper from his notepad and put it under the Christmas tree. The Verchaks looked at each other-should they accept such a gift? — and Pana Verchak started to speak. But Mercier told her it was an old French tradition, in this season, that entering a home with a Christmas tree, a gift must be left beneath it. “I have to follow my traditions,” he said, and, as he’d well known, they would not argue with that.

11 December.

Ominous weather, as night fell, the air ice cold and completely still. At eight-thirty, Mercier strolled over to the old greenhouse on Hortensya street, a facility long disused, that had once served the parks and gardens of the city. It was, Mercier thought, typical of Madame Dupin to adopt some artist in the city where she worked; she was forever doing things, involving herself in an endless series of projects and pastimes. Shublin was at the door of the greenhouse, Madame Dupin at his side. He was young, with a roughneck’s good looks, and very intense. What other pleasure, beyond the satisfaction of patronage, he might have provided for Madame Dupin was open to question-as, in fact, was her erotic life, a subject of some speculation in the diplomatic community. That night she was effusive and excited, taking Mercier’s hand in both of hers and near joyful that he’d actually shown up. Clearly, she’d feared he wouldn’t.

Shublin and his friends had gone to great lengths to turn the old greenhouse into an artist’s studio. The artist’s props-skulls, statuettes of deformed people and imaginary beasts, easels bearing newspaper decoupages, a dressmaker’s mannikin on a wire cage-had been imported for the evening, and his largest canvas hung from an iron beam on ropes, flanked by a pair of skeletons, their names on cardboard squares tied beneath their chins. Mercier immediately liked the painting, as well as the others propped against the cloudy old glass walls: fire. Fire in its every aspect-orange flames roaring into azure skies, black smoke pouring from a brilliant yellow flash, fire, and more fire.

Mercier, his costume for a bohemian soiree a bulky sweater and corduroy trousers beneath a long overcoat, with a black wool scarf looped insouciantly-he hoped-about his neck, was introduced here and there. For a time, he spoke with a professor of art history and brought up the subject of Polish war paintings, for him a particular treasure he’d discovered in Warsaw-huge battlefield scenes laden with cavalry and cannon, exquisitely detailed and compelling. But the professor didn’t much care for them, and, discovering that Mercier was French, went on and on about Matisse. Mercier spoke also with Shublin’s girlfriend, who was very up-to-date on European politics-perhaps the last thing in the world he wanted to talk about. But she was smart and amusing, and Mercier discovered he was, as promised, actually having a good time. The wine and vodka were plentiful, and platters of hors d’oeuvres had been brought in from a good restaurant, generously provided by Madame Dupin. With secret embassy funds? Lord, he hoped not.

It was nine-fifteen when Anna Szarbek appeared. The same Anna Szarbek; dark-blond hair, swept across her forehead and pinned in back, deep green eyes, wary and restless, the slight downward curve of her nose and heavy lips suggesting sensuality. Suggesting it to him, certainly. His heart rose to look at her, he wanted to rush her through the night in a taxi, off to his bedroom, there to relieve her of coat, boots, sweater, skirt, and all the rest, there to see what he’d barely touched the night they danced together. And then … Well, his imagination was in perfect order, and therein her desire, in their first moment together, was the equal of his, and his desire was making him almost dizzy. But not so much that he didn’t search the room for Maxim, who was nowhere to be seen, and Mercier, elated beyond reason, felt a great smile appear on his face. His search of the room did reveal Madame Dupin, turned partly away from a conversing group, a sharp, inquisitive eye directly on him. Was this why she’d wanted him here? Was she matchmaking? Could that be true? Back and forth he went.

Trapped, meanwhile, by the most boring man on earth-“But, you understand, the laws of the city expressly forbid them to build a wall there! Myself I find it almost impossible to believe”-Mercier kept saying “Mm,” and “Mm,” his eyes wandering rudely over the man’s shoulder. Anna was easy to spot-her sweater was a deep red, with a design in tiny pearls below a raised collar-as she navigated through the crowded greenhouse. Stopped to have a look at the skeletons, peered nearsightedly at the cardboard nameplates, responded with a wry smile, and moved on.

“We could go to court, serve them right, having to hire some expensive lawyer….”

“Mm. Mm.”

Now she saw him. She had been looking for him. His heart leapt. “Forgive me, I think I’ll have another glass of wine.”

“You don’t have a glass of wine.”

“Then I’ll go and get one.”

Mercier worked his way toward her, and they exchanged conspiratorial smiles-oh what a crowd-at the difficulty of his progress. At last they stood together and shook hands, her skin cold from the night outside. “Very nice to see you again,” he said.

“I think I saw you at the foreign office cocktail party,” she said. Her voice was slightly husky-he’d forgotten that, as well as the faint accent.

“You did. I saw you too, but I couldn’t get over to say hello.”

“You seemed busy,” she said.

“An official reception. I had to be there. But this is much nicer.”

“A Marie Dupin affair, they’re always good parties. Poor Maxim had to interview a politician, so I almost didn’t come, but, I thought, why not? And I’d promised.”

“Something to drink?”

“Yes, good, I can use it. The cold tonight is awful, even for Warsaw.”

They made their way to the bar in the far corner. “Two vodkas, please,” Mercier said. Then, to Anna, “Is that all right with you? Insulation against the weather.”

“Yes, thanks. I knew it would be freezing in here, I mean, it’s glass.”

“They have kerosene heaters.”

Anna wasn’t impressed. “Poor plants.”

“Not anymore. What do you think of the paintings?”

“A little frightening-they’re not cozy fires.”

“War fires, you think?”

“Violent, anyhow. At least they don’t show what’s burning. Houses, or ships.”

“Maybe you’re meant to imagine them.”

She nodded, yes, could be, searched in her bag, found a cigarette and a lighter, and handed the lighter to Mercier. He lit her cigarette and said, “I’ll go find you an ashtray, if you like.”

“Let’s go together, I don’t know a soul in here.”

As they began to move toward the hors d’oeuvres table, a heavy gust of wind hit the greenhouse, then the sound of hail, loud against the glass roof. It stopped almost immediately. “I don’t know anybody either,” Mercier said. “You’re supposed to introduce yourself around, at these affairs.”

“Not me. You have to be the bright and cheerful sort to do that. I’m not. Are you?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“I depend on introductions, then I can socialize. Otherwise-”

“It’s the dreadful corner. And the hopeful smile.”

They circled around the professor, now with an older woman wearing a cloche hat and still raving on about Matisse. Then Madame Dupin materialized in front of them. “Hello you two, I see you found each other.”

“We did,” Anna said. “You’ve got a good crowd.”

“Marc is pleased, anyhow I think he is; he doesn’t talk, I was afraid of the weather, but, as you see …”

“We’re in search of an ashtray,” Mercier said.

“Over by the food. Try the smoked sturgeon while you’re there, it’s from the chef at the Bristol.” Again the wind moaned. “Oh my,” Madame Dupin said. A brief shower of hail rattled furiously against the greenhouse. “Listen to it, perhaps we’ll have to stay all night.” She scowled up at the heavens, the embattled hostess, then said, “I’m off, my dears. Please try and circulate.”

When she’d gone, Anna said, “Maybe we should.”

Mercier shrugged. “Why?”

She grinned. “Such a scoundrel,” she said, and gave him a playful push on the shoulder.

“Oh yes, that’s me,” he said, meaning very much the opposite, but wishing it were so.

At the food table they found an ashtray, then tried the sturgeon, the smoked trout, and salmon roe with chopped egg on toast. Anna ate with zeal, once making a small sound of satisfaction when one of the hors d’oeuvres was especially good. Next, back to the bar for another vodka, and they clinked glasses before they drank. Outside, the storm began to beat wildly against the glass.

“Maybe we’ll have to stay all night,” Mercier said.

“Please!” she said. “You’ll get me in trouble.”

“Well, at least let me see you home.”

“Thank you,” she said. “That I would like.”

Twenty minutes later, they said good night to Shublin and Madame Dupin and left the greenhouse. Mercier looked around for a taxi, but the street was deserted. “Which way is home?” he said.

She pointed and said, “Up there. It’s a block off Marszalkowska, where we can take a trolley car, or we’re much more likely to find a taxi.”

They set off, heading west, then north, against the wind, which howled and moaned in the narrow street, sent a sheet of newspaper flying past, and made it difficult to walk. It wasn’t so bad at first, but soon enough striding boldly into the storm changed to walking sideways, hunched over, eyes half shut, the hail stinging their faces. “Damn!” she said. “This is worse than I thought.”

Mercier kept searching for a taxi, but there wasn’t a headlight to be seen anywhere.

“I’m going to have to hang on to you,” she said. “Do you mind?”

“Not at all.”

She held his arm with both her own, tight against her body, and hid her face behind his shoulder. Moving slowly, they made their way to Marszalkowska avenue, the Broadway of Warsaw. “How much further?” Mercier said. He sensed she wasn’t doing well.

“Twenty minutes, on a nice day.”

She was trembling, he could feel it, and, when he turned to look at her, there were frost crystals in her eyelashes. “Maybe we’d better get inside somewhere,” he said. The cold was brutal, her sweater thin, and her winter coat more stylish than warm.

“Allright. Where?”

“I don’t know. The next place we see.” Up and down the avenue, the Marszalkowska cafes and restaurants were shuttered and dark. In the distance, a man made slow progress, holding his hat on his head, and the streetlamps, coated with ice, glowed dimly on the whitened pavement, with not a tire track to be seen.

“My father used to talk about these storms,” she said. “They blow down from Siberia, a gift to Poland from Russia.” Her teeth chattered, and she held him tighter.

Mercier had begun to consider doorways, maybe even trying the door of one of the cars parked on the avenue, when he saw, up ahead somewhere, light shining on the sidewalk. “Whatever that is,” he said, “that’s where we’re going.”

He felt her nod, urgently: yes, anything.

The light came from a movie theatre, from a ticket booth set back beneath a small marquee. The old lady in the booth wore one shawl over her head and another around her shoulders. As Mercier paid, she said, “You shouldn’t be out in this, my children.”

In the theatre, the audience, unaware of the storm outside, was laughing and having a good time. Mercier found seats and rubbed his frozen hands.

“That was awful,” Anna said. “Really. Awful.”

“Maybe it will die down,” Mercier said. “At least we’ll be warm for a while.”

On the screen, a diminutive soldier with a Hitler mustache was saluting an officer, a vigorous salute yet somehow wrong-a parody of a salute. A close-up of the officer’s face showed a man at the end of his patience. He spoke angrily; the soldier tried again. Worse. He was the classic recruit who, believing he has assumed a military posture, only manages to mock the prescribed form. Mercier leaned over and whispered, “Do you know what we’re watching?”

” ‘Dodek na froncie,‘ Dodek Goes to War. That’s Adolf Dymsza.”

“I know that name.”

“The Polish Charlie Chaplin.”

“Have you seen it?”

“No, actually I haven’t.” After a moment, with a laugh in her voice, she said, “Were you concerned?”

“Of course,” he said.

“You can be very droll, colonel.”

“Jean-Francois.”

“Very well. Jean-Francois.”

From behind them: “Shhhh!”

“Sorry.”

Mercier tried; but the film was more romantic comedy than farce, and the hiss and crackle of the sound track was particularly loud, so he missed much of the dialogue, and that’s what was making the audience laugh. At one point, Anna also laughed, and Mercier whispered, “What did he say?”

In order not to annoy the man behind them, she whispered by his ear. “In French, it’s ‘That’s odd, my dog said the same thing.’ ” But then, she didn’t turn away, she waited, and, when he turned toward her, her eyes closed and they kissed-tenderly, her lips dry, moving softly against his. After a few long seconds, she sat back in her seat, but her shoulder rested against his, and there it stayed.

Forty minutes later, the film ended and they had to leave the theatre. The storm had not abated. They walked quickly, her hands in the pockets of her coat; neither one of them wanted to be the first to speak. Then, as the silence grew heavy, Mercier saw a horse cab. He waved and shouted, the driver stopped, and Mercier took Anna’s hand and helped her into the carriage. This might have been an opportunity sent down by the gods of romance, but it wasn’t to be. Anna was quiet, and thoughtful. Mercier tried to start a light conversation, but she, politely enough, made it clear that talking was not what she wanted to do, so he sat in silence as the intrepid horse, its blanket covered with melting hail, clopped along the avenue until Anna directed the coachman to turn into the street that Mercier remembered from the night he’d taken her to the Europejski.

He helped her out of the carriage as he asked the driver to wait-he would take the cab back home-then the two of them stood facing each other. Before he could say anything, she put her hand flat against his chest and held it there-a gesture that silenced him, yet somehow, and he felt it strongly, meant also attraction-desire mixed with regret. He could see in her face that she was troubled: about what had happened in the movie theatre, about what had happened all evening. “Good night,” she said, “Jean-Francois.”

“May I see you again?”

“I don’t know. Maybe better if we don’t.”

“Then, good night.”

“Yes, good night.”

In Paris, during Mercier’s meeting with the people at the Deuxieme Bureau, the Wehrmacht‘s planned tank maneuvers at Schramberg had been discussed at length. And so, on the tenth of December, four German agents of the Service des Renseignements had been sent into the town: an elderly gentleman and his wife, who were to celebrate their wedding anniversary by walking the low hills of the Black Forest; a salesman of kitchenwares from Stuttgart, calling on the local shops; and a representative of UFA, the Berlin film production company, in search of locations for a new version of the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales.

Not a bad choice for a fairy tale, the older part of Schramberg: winding streets, half-timbered cottages with sloping rooves, shop signs in Gothic lettering. Adorable, really. And the townspeople were eager to talk, to praise their charming Schramberg, understanding perfectly the benefits to be had from film crews, who famously threw money about like straw. The best kind of business: they came, they annoyed everyone, but then they went away and left their money behind.

So the local dignitaries, the mayor, the councilmen, went on and on, describing the gemutlich delights of the town. Though this was, please understand, not the best moment to visit. The Wehrmacht was coming, everybody knew it, one of the roads that wound up into the hills had been closed off, all the rooms at the inn had been reserved, and a few supply trucks were already there, with more to arrive at any moment. Oh well. Still, the good gentleman could see for himself how picturesque the forest was, and, if the area up on the Rabenhugel, Raven Hill, was torn up by the army’s machines, there were plenty of other places just as scenic. More scenic! And would the company be hiring local people to perform in the film? In a crowd, perhaps? Or even, say, as a mayor? Naturally they would, said the UFA man, it was always done that way. What about those two hefty fellows, seated by the window in the Schwarzwald coffeehouse, having their second breakfast? Oh no, they weren’t local! They had just arrived, they were here to make sure that, that-um-that everything went well. Wink.

For the anniversary couple, in loden-green outfits and matching alpine hats-a vigorous yodel could not be far in the future-the same story, as they produced their touring map for the lady who’d rented them a room. No, no, not there, that was forbidden, until after the fourteenth. You cannot go east of the town, to the Rabenhugel, but to the south-ah, there it was even lovelier, the magnificent pines, the tiny red birds that stayed the winter; south, much better, and would they care to have her make a picnic to take along? They would? Ach, wunderbar! She would see to it right away.

And so for the salesman, in his Panhard automobile with sample pots and pans in the backseat, headed over to the town of Waldmossingen. Halted at a sawhorse barrier manned by three soldiers, he was told that this road was closed, he would have to go back to Schramberg, and then down to Hardt and circle around. Of course he knew the way, and only took this road for the scenery. Was this permanent, this road-closing? No, sir, only for a few days. “Heil Hitler!”

“Heil Hitler!”

13 December.

Mercier took the early LOT flight to Zurich, then the train to Basel and a taxi to the French consulate. Climbing the stairs to the consul’s office, he was his darkest self, tense and brooding and in no mood for polite conversation, a pre-combat condition he knew all too well. But the consul, a Mediterranean Frenchman with a goatee, was just what the doctor ordered. “So, colonel, a stroll in the German woods?”

Maybe the best approach, Mercier thought, irony in the face of danger. And it would be dangerous. The Wehrmacht wouldn’t care much for a foreign military attache observing maneuvers-there to discover strengths and weaknesses, what certain tanks could do in the forest and what they couldn’t. Because, if it came to war, such intelligence would lead to casualties, and could be the difference between victory and defeat.

The people at 2, bis, in receipt of reports from their German agents, had acted quickly, sending to Warsaw maps of the Schramberg district: the roads, the walking paths in the forest, the hill known as the Rabenhugel, and two nearby hills with a view of the site to be used for maneuvers. A coded wireless message from the General Staff Meteorological Service predicted a nighttime temperature of 28 degrees Fahrenheit, reaching 35 degrees by noon, and a possible light dusting of snow on the morning of the fourteenth. Mercier had his own field glasses, and the rest of his equipment, as promised in Paris, had been brought down to Basel by courier; a suitcase stood behind the consul’s office door.

The consul hefted it up onto a table, handed Mercier the key, and watched with interest as the contents were brought out: a Swiss army greatcoat-its insignia long ago removed-a peaked wool hat with earflaps, a blanket roll, a knapsack. When Mercier unwrapped a Pathe Baby, the 9.5-millimeter movie camera, the consul said, “Thought of everything, haven’t they.”

With the camera, a typed sheet of instructions. Simple enough: one cranked the handle; the action was operated by a spring. One roll of film was in the camera, ten more could be found in the knapsack; directions for reloading followed, with a diagram.

“What about distance?” the consul said.

“I would assume the lens has been refitted. Otherwise, they’ll have the march of the tiny toys. But even so, it can be enlarged at the laboratory. At least I think it can.”

“So, just aim and press the button?”

Mercier pointed the camera at the consul, who waved and smiled, then went to a closet and produced a six-foot walking staff fashioned from a tree branch. “I won’t tell you what we went through to obtain this, but Paris insisted that you have it.”

“War wound.”

“Then it will help. But please, colonel, try not to lose it,” the consul said. “Now, you’ll be leaving at dusk, your driver will arrive in an hour. If you’d like to rest until then, we’ve set aside a room for you. Care for something to eat?”

“No, thank you.”

The consul nodded. “It was always that way for me, in la derniere.” The phrase was common among people who’d been there, it meant the last one. He opened a drawer in his desk, produced a Swiss passport, and handed it to Mercier. Albert Ducasse, from Lausanne, thus a French-speaking Swiss. The photograph, applied at 2, bis, was a duplicate of the one in his dossier in Paris. The consul cleared his throat and said, “They’ve instructed me to ask you to leave your French passport with this office.”

Whose idea was that, Bruner’s? Out of uniform, on foreign ground, in covert surveillance, he was, by the rules, a spy. But out of uniform, with a false identity-that made him a real spy.

“Of course,” the consul said, “if you are caught, in that situation, you could be shot. Technically speaking, that is.”

“Yes, I know,” Mercier said. And gave the consul his passport.

In the early dusk of winter, Mercier climbed into an Opel with German plates. The young driver called himself Stefan and said he was from an emigre family that had settled in Besancon. “In ‘thirty-three,” he added. “The minute Hitler took power, my father got the suitcases down. He was a socialist politician, and he knew what was coming. Then, after we settled in France, the people you work for showed up right away, and they’ve kept me busy ever since.”

They crossed into Germany easily enough, Stefan using a German passport, and drove north on the road to Tubingen that passed through Schramberg. “About an hour and half,” Stefan said. “I’ll take you into the town and out on the forest road, where I’ll pick you up tomorrow night, so mark the spot carefully.”

“Before the roadblock.”

“Well before. It’s one-point-six miles from the Schramberg town hall.”

“And then, tomorrow night …”

“At nineteen-oh-five hours. Stay in the woods until then, I’ll be there on the minute. Is it only a one-day maneuver?”

“Likely more, but they want me out by tomorrow night.”

“A good idea,” Stefan said. “Don’t be greedy, that’s what I always say. And you’ll want to watch out for the foresters.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll keep my head down.”

“They’re always in the woods, cutting, pruning.” After a moment he said, “It’s a strange nation, when you think about it. Fussy. Rules for everything-the branches of each tree must only just touch the neighboring branches, and so on.”

“How do you come to know that?”

“Everybody knows that. In Germany.”

They drove on, through pretty Schwabisch villages. Every one of them had its Christbaum, a tall evergreen in the center of town, with candles lit as darkness fell, and a star on top. There were also candles in every window, and red-berried holly wreaths hung on the doors. By the side of the road, at the entry to each village, stood a sign attacking the Jews. This was, Mercier thought, a kind of competition, for none of the signs were the same. Juden dirfen nicht bleiben-“Jews must not stay here”-was followed by Wer die Juden unterstuzt fordert den Kommunissmus, “Who helps the Jews helps communism,” then the dramatic “This flat-footed stranger, with kinky hair and hooked nose, he shall not our land enjoy, he must leave, he must leave.”

“Perhaps an amateur poet, that one,” Stefan said.

“One publishes where one can,” Mercier said.

“Bastards,” Stefan said. “I grew up in the middle of it. Hard to believe, at first. Then it didn’t go away, it grew.” He shifted into second gear, the Opel climbing a grade where forest closed in on the darkening road. He had been rambling along in rough-hewn emigre French, now he switched to native German and said, quietly, “Ihr sollt in der Holle schmoren!” Burn in hell.

Twenty minutes later, they reached the town of Schramberg. A few Wehrmacht officers wandered along the winding streets, pausing to look in the shop windows, out for a pre-dinner walk to stir the appetite. In honor of the army’s visit, swastika flags lined the square in front of the ancient town hall, their deep red a handsome contrast to the green Christbaum, its candles flickering in the evening breeze. Stefan turned right on the street just past the town hall, took a good look at the odometer, and then, as the street turned into a narrow paved road and the town fell away behind them, switched off the headlights. “They don’t need to know we’re coming,” he said, peering into the gathering darkness, squinting at the odometer. Finally he slowed and let the car roll to a stop. “At the center of this curve,” he said. “See the rock? That’s our mark.”

As Mercier reached into the backseat for his walking staff, Stefan opened the glove compartment and handed him a thick bar of chocolate. “Take this along,” he said. “You might want it.”

Mercier thanked him and, making sure no headlights were visible, stepped out of the car and started to cross the road. Stefan rolled the window down and, his voice close to a whisper, said, “Good hunting. Remember, nineteen-oh-five hours, by the rock.” In two moves he reversed the car and drove back toward Schramberg.

Pure night. Mercier thought of it that way. Faint stars, wisps of cloud, and not a sound to be heard. He reached into his pocket and found his pencil sketch of the Deuxieme Bureau‘s map. He had to climb the hill above the road, turn east, and walk a distance just short of two miles, descending the first hill, climbing a second, and descending again, to a point just below the crest, where there would be, presumably, a view of the tank maneuvers. For the moment he was warm enough, though he could feel the first bite of the night-borne chill. Wool hat, surplus greatcoat, walking staff, and knapsack-the Swiss hiker, if anyone were to see him, but it was planned that nobody would. And, he thought, with a camera in his knapsack, they’d better not. He entered the forest and started to climb, his footsteps almost silent on the pine-needle litter on the forest floor.

His knee ached soon enough, and he was grateful for the long staff. When he heard the whine of an approaching car, he moved behind a tree, then watched the headlights as they swept along the road, sped around the curve, and disappeared. That would be, he thought, the changing of the guard at the roadblock. Ten minutes later, the car returned, headed back to Schramberg, and Mercier resumed his climb.

The forest never thickened, it was as Stefan had described, a woodland treated as a kind of garden, every tree identified and carefully nurtured. Even fallen tree branches were removed, perhaps taken away by the poor, for use as firewood. Suddenly some animal, sensing his presence, went running off across the hillside. Mercier never saw it; a wild boar, perhaps, or a deer. Too bad he didn’t have his dogs with him, they would have smelled it long before it broke cover, frozen into motionless statues, each with left foreleg raised, tail straight, nose pointed toward the game: that’s dinner, right over there. Then, when the rifle shot didn’t follow, they would look at him, waiting for a release from point.

How he missed them! Well, he’d see them when he went home for Christmas. If he managed to get there. And, even if he did, his daughter Gabrielle probably wouldn’t join him. She’d often meant to, but then her busy life intervened. And Annemarie wouldn’t be there. Not ever again. So it would be just him and the dogs, and Fernand and Lisette, who lived in the house and maintained the property-it belonged more to them now than to him. And they’re getting older, he thought, hired by his grandfather, a long time ago. What, he wondered, would they make of Anna Szarbek? Well, that he’d never know. Stop and rest. He put a hand on a pine tree, forcing himself to stand still until his breathing returned to normal. Whatever drove him, nameless spirit, had been forcing him uphill at full speed.

Did he truly need to be on this hillside? Any trusted agent could have operated the camera, but the people at 2, bis were determined he should himself stand in for his lost spy, and he’d shown them every enthusiasm. Still, it was-oh, not exactly dangerous, France wasn’t at war with Germany, but potentially an embarrassing failure, more a threat to his career than his life.

Again he walked. Confronted by a ravine, with a frozen streamlet at the bottom, he slid down one side and then, a bad moment, had to claw his way up the opposing slope. An hour later he was midway down the second hillside, the trees on the facing hill silver in the light of the rising moon. He had a look with his field glasses, searching for an advance unit, but saw nothing. So he unrolled his blanket and sat on it, back braced against an oak tree, ate some chocolate, and settled in to wait for dawn.

Slow hours. Sometimes he dozed, the cold woke him, then he dozed again, finally waking with a start, face numb, hands so stiff they didn’t quite work. He struggled to his feet, rubbing his hands as he walked back and forth, trying to get warm. His watch said 4:22 but there was, a week before the winter solstice, no sign of dawn. In the black sky above him, the stars were sharp points of light, the air cold and clean and faintly scented by the forest. Then, in the distance, he heard the faint rumble of engines.

He concentrated on the sound and discovered it was not coming from the direction of Schramberg, west of him, but from the north. Of course! The Wehrmacht hadn’t bothered to set up a tank park on the outskirts of town-a long, complicated business involving commissary, medical units, and fuel tankers-they were coming from an army base, likely somewhere near the city of Tubingen.

He rolled up his blanket and climbed until he found a thick forest shrub, branches bare for the winter but still good cover. The sound rose steadily, reaching finally an enormous crescendo: the roar of huge unmuffled engines and the loud clatter of rolling treads. A tank column, stretched far down the road. How many? Thirty tanks in a formation was common; he had to guess there were at least that many. The earth beneath Mercier trembled as the first lights of the column appeared on the road, and the air filled with the raw smell of gasoline. Two staff cars appeared at the foot of the Rabenhugel, then a tank, and two more, the rest of the column obscured from view by the curve of the hill.

An officer climbed out of the leading staff car, signaled with his hand, and, moments later, Mercier heard the stuttering whine of motorcycles and saw moving lights among the trees. He tracked them with his field glasses, the riders gray forms, working up the shallow grade, skidding on the pine-needle carpet, steadying themselves with a foot on the ground as they wove through the trees. Suddenly, his peripheral vision caught the motion of a silhouette, uphill from his position and moving fast, which he managed to catch a glimpse of just before it vanished: a small bear, whimpering with panic as it ran, low to the ground, in flight from the invasion of its forest. When he again looked at the road, a few officers and tank commanders had gathered by one of the staff cars, smoking and talking, playing a flashlight on a map spread out on the car’s hood.

Army time. Nothing much going on. Waiting. Twenty minutes later, a pair of Mercedes automobiles came up the road from the direction of Schramberg, a civilian in an overcoat got out, gave a Heil salute to what Mercier took to be the senior officer, and received one, a rather casual version of the raised arm, in return. The officer pointed, the civilian got back in his car, and it drove away. Perhaps the engineers, Mercier guessed, there to observe the maneuvers.

At eight o’clock sharp, the rising sun casting shadows on the hills, the tanks made their first attempt at climbing the Rabenhugel.

Mercier, working quickly, reached into his knapsack and brought out the camera, made sure that the handle was fully wound, pointed it at the climbing tanks, and pressed the button. In the wall of engine noise he could barely hear it. Also, some other sound distracted him; he puzzled for a moment, and that almost did for him. A drone, only just audible above the engine thunder, somewhere above him. Merde, that was an airplane! He dove to the earth, slid beneath the branches of the shrub, and rolled onto his back.

Circling lazily in the morning sky, a Fieseler Storch reconnaissance plane, small and slow, looking like a fugitive from the 1914 air war, but lethal. Had they seen him? Was the radio alert to a staff car below already sent? He covered his face with the gray-green sleeve of his greatcoat and lay perfectly still. The plane’s circuit took it north, then, coming back toward him, it descended, now less than a hundred feet above the hilltop. At its slowest speed, it skimmed over his head; then, thirty seconds later, the drone faded away to the west. But Mercier stayed beneath his shrub, as the plane returned once more, now gaining altitude. For fifteen minutes it circled the site of the maneuvers, then disappeared.

By the time Mercier was back to his cover position behind the shrub, the tanks were spread out across the hill, a few hundred feet above the road, but the exercise was not going well. He could see at least six of them, the light model Uhl had been working on. Down by the road, one of the tanks had failed immediately; the crew had the rear hatch cover off and were kneeling on the deck in order to work on the engine. A second had climbed thirty feet, then stopped, blue exhaust streaming from its vent as the commander crawled between the treads to check on ground clearance. A third had tried to mow down a pine, had broken it off, then got hung up on the stump and thrown a tread. The other three had reached the crest of the hill and were now out of sight. But Mercier could see that all was not well for one tank at least, because, in the distance to the north, a column of black smoke rose slowly above the forest.

They worked at it all morning, and for most of the afternoon. Now and again, the Fieseler Storch returned for thirty minutes, and Mercier had to hide beneath the shrub. Then, late in the afternoon, the weak December sun low in the sky, they tried something new. From the north, a blue Opel sedan drove up and parked next to the staff cars. This was, clearly, somebody’s personal car: a few years old, its paint job faded and dusty, a dent on the door panel. The driver, a young Wehrmacht officer-a lieutenant; Mercier could see the insignia with his field glasses-talked to the senior officers for a time, then took a length of iron pipe, long enough so that its end stuck out the rolleddown rear window, from the car. While the others watched, hands clasped behind their backs in a classic officer pose, he knelt by the front of the Opel and wired the pipe to the bumper. Mercier adjusted the field glasses and focused on the lieutenant’s face as he chatted away while he worked at twisting the ends of the wire until it was secure. Oh well, likely it won’t work, but you never know…. For a moment, Mercier wasn’t sure what he was looking at, but then, when the lieutenant produced a measuring tape, he understood perfectly: the pipe was the width of a light tank. The lieutenant slid behind the wheel and drove cautiously up the hill. More than once he misjudged distance, one end of the pipe banging into a tree, and had to reverse the Opel and try a different path. But the idea was simple and effective.

If you contemplated a tank attack through a forest, all you needed was a car and a length of pipe. If the pipe on the car fit through the trees, so would a tank.

In the town of Schramberg, the anniversary couple was enjoying the fourth day of their vacation. On the morning of the fourteenth, after a copious breakfast, as the lady who’d rented them a room waved from the doorway, they set off for their daily walk in the Black Forest. Such a sweet couple, in their loden-green walking shorts, high stockings, and alpine hats. They headed south out of town, as their kind hostess had recommended, but then turned north, using a compass to make sure they weren’t going around in circles. After an hour’s walk, they took a radio receiver from a knapsack and ran its aerial up a tree, fixing it in place with a piece of string. No result, so they kept walking. On the fourth attempt, it worked. Holding a pair of headphones to his ear, the elderly gentleman smiled with satisfaction: a babble of voices-commands, curses, yes, sirs and no, sirs, the radio traffic of a tank formation moving over difficult terrain. The anniversary couple were now within range of shortwave tank radios, about five miles. They connected a wire recorder to the receiver and settled in for the day. Likely the people they worked with would make sense of it; certainly the couple hoped they would.

Not worked for, the way they thought about it, but worked with. They had refused payment, their spying was an act of conscience. Sincere Christians, German Lutherans, they had watched with horror as the Nazis violated every precept sacred to them. But then, what to do about it? They could not leave Germany, for a list of commonplace domestic reasons, so they had traveled up to Paris, a year earlier, taken a room at an inexpensive hotel, written a note to the General Staff headquarters, and settled in to wait. It took a week, then two men appeared at the hotel, and the couple offered their services. No, they didn’t care to be paid. They had prayed together for hours, they explained, down on their knees, trying to make this decision, but now it was made. The people who led Germany were evil, and they were obliged, by their faith, to act against them. “Very well,” said one of the men. “Give us your address in Germany. We’ll see about who you are and then, in time, someone will get in touch with you.”

Three months later, someone did.