The Polish Officer (21 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

De Milja smiled ruefully.

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

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

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

“A few days,” de Milja said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Papers, please.”

They handed them over.

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

“French citizen.”

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

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

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

“All of it?”

“You heard me.”

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

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

“Where do you go there?”

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

“French orphans eat Vienna sausage?”

“For the sisters, I think. The nuns.”

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

“Load it up,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 September, 9:26 P.M.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But not in London, we hope.”

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

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

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

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

“Leftenant Schillich,” said a youthful voice.

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

“Starting at Caulaincourt,
now,
” Schillich announced.

From the speaker: 562 511

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

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

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

From the receiver: 335.

Then 428.

Then silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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