The Polish Officer (39 page)

Suggested Reading

There is an enormous body of literature, fiction and nonfiction, written about the period 1933–1945, so Alan Furst’s recommendations for reading in that era are very specific. He often uses characters who are idealistic intellectuals, particularly French and Russian, who become disillusioned with the Soviet Union but still find themselves caught up in the political warfare of the period. “Among the historical figures who wrote about that time,” Furst says, “Arthur Koestler may well be ‘first among equals.’ ” Furst suggests Koestler’s
Darkness at Noon
as a classic story of the European intellectual at midcentury.

Furst, as a novelist of historical espionage, is most often compared with the British authors Graham Greene and Eric Ambler. Asked about Ambler’s books, Furst replies that “the best one I know is
A Coffin for Dimitrios.
” Published in 1939, a month before the invasion of Poland, Ambler’s novel concentrates on clandestine operations in the Balkans and includes murder for money, political assassination, espionage, and drug smuggling. The plot, like that of an Alan Furst novel, weaves intrigue and conspiracy into the real politics of 1930s Europe.

For the reality of daily life in eastern Europe, Furst suggests the novelist Gregor von Rezzori, of Italian/Austro-Hungarian background, who grew up in a remote corner of southeastern Europe, between the wars, and writes about it brilliantly in
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite,
which takes place in the villages of Romania and the city of Bucharest in the years before the war.

To see life in that period from the German perspective, Furst says that Christopher Isherwood’s novels
The Last of Mr. Norris
and
Goodbye to Berlin
are among the best possible choices. The sources for the stage plays
I Am a Camera
and
Cabaret,
these are novelized autobiographies of Isherwood’s time in Berlin; they are now published as
The Berlin Stories.
Furst calls them “perceptive and wonderfully written chronicles of bohemian life during the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party.”

For a historical overview of the period, Alan Furst recommends Martin Gilbert’s
A History of the Twentieth Century, Volume Two: 1933–1951.
All the major political events that rule the lives of the characters in Alan Furst’s novels are described, in chronological sequence, in this history.

READ ON FOR AN EXCERPT FROM

MISSION TO PARIS

BY

ALAN FURST

PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE

I
N
P
ARIS, THE EVENINGS OF
S
EPTEMBER ARE SOMETIMES WARM, EXCESSIVELY
gentle, and, in the magic particular to that city, irresistably seductive. The autumn of the year 1938 began in just such weather and on the terraces of the best cafés, in the famous restaurants, at the dinner parties one wished to attend, the conversation was, of necessity, lively and smart: fashion, cinema, love affairs, politics, and, yes, the possibility of war—that too had its moment. Almost anything, really, except money. Or, rather,
German
money. A curious silence, for hundreds of millions of francs—tens of millions of dollars—had been paid to some of the most distinguished citizens of France since Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933. But maybe not so curious, because those who had taken the money were aware of a certain shadow in these transactions and, in that shadow, the people who require darkness for the kind of work they do.

The distinguished citizens, had they been willing to talk about it, would have admitted that the Germans, the political operatives who offered the bounty, were surprisingly adept. They knew how to soften a conscience, presented bribery as little more than a form of sophisticated commerce, of the sort that evolves in
salons
and offices and the private rooms of banks—a gentleman’s treason. And the operatives could depend on one hard-edged principle: that those who style themselves as
men of the world
know there is an iron fist in every velvet glove, understand what might await them in the shadows and so, having decided to play the game, they will obey its rules.

Still, human nature being what it is, there will forever be
somebody
, won’t there, who will not.

One such, on the fourteenth of September, was a rising political star called Prideaux. Had he been in Paris that evening, he would have been having drinks at Fouquet with a Spanish marquis, a diplomat, after which he could have chosen between two good dinner parties: one in the quarter clustered around the Palais Bourbon, the other in a lovely old mansion up in Passy. It was destiny, Prideaux believed, that he spend his evenings in such exalted places. And, he thought, if fucking destiny had a shred of mercy left in its cold heart he would just now be hailing a taxi. Fucking destiny, however, had other things in mind for the future and didn’t care a bit what became of Prideaux.

Who felt, in his heart, terribly wronged. This shouldn’t be happening to him, not to
him
, the famously clever Louis Prideaux,
chef de cabinet
—technically chief of staff but far more powerful than that—to an important senator in Paris. Well, it had happened. As
tout Paris
left for the August migration to the countryside, Prideaux had been forced to admit that his elegant world was doomed to collapse (expensive mistress, borrowed money, vengeful wife) and so he’d fled, desperate for a new life, finding himself on the night of the fourteenth in Varna, the Black Sea port of Bulgaria.
Bulgaria!
Prideaux fell back on his lumpy bed at a waterfront hotel, crushed by loss: the row of beautiful suits in his armoire, the apartment windows that looked out at the Seine, the slim, white hands of his aristocratic—by birth, not behavior—mistress. All gone, all gone. For a moment he actually contemplated weeping but then his fingers, dangling over the side of the bed, touched the supple leather of his valise. For Prideaux, the life preserver in a stormy sea: a million francs. A soothing, restorative, million, francs.

This money, German money, had been meant for the senator, so that he might influence the recommendation of a defense committee, which had for some time been considering a large outlay for construction on the northern extension of the Maginot Line. Up into Belgium, the Ardennes forest, where the Germans had attacked in 1914. A decision of such magnitude, he would tell the committee, should not be made precipitously, it needed more time, it should be
studied
, pros and cons worked through by technicians who understood the whole complicated business.
Later
, the committee would decide. Was it not wise to delay a little? That’s what the people of France demanded of them: not rash expenditure, wisdom.

All that August, Prideaux had temporized: what to do? The suitcase of money for the senator had reached Prideaux by way of a prominent hostess, a German baroness named von Reschke, who’d settled in Paris a few years earlier and, using wealth and connection, had become the ruling despot of one of the loftiest
salons
in the city. The baroness spent the summer at her château near Versailles and there, in the drawing room, had handed Prideaux an envelope. Inside, a claim ticket for the baggage office at the Gare de Lyon railway station. “This is for you-know-who,” she’d said, ever the coquette, flirting with the handsome Prideaux. He’d collected the suitcase and hidden it under a couch, where it gave off a magnetic energy—he could
feel
its presence. Its potential.

The senator was in Cap Ferrat, wouldn’t return until the third of September, and Prideaux sweated through hot August nights of temptation. Sometimes he thought he might resist, but the forces of catastrophe were waiting and they wouldn’t wait long: his wife’s ferocious lawyer, the shady individuals who’d loaned him money when the banks no longer would, and his cruel mistress, whose passion was kindled by expensive wines with expensive dinners and expensive jewelry to wear at the table. When unappeased she was cold, no bed. And while what happened in that bed was the best thing that had ever happened to Prideaux, it would soon be only a memory.

He had to escape before it all came crashing down on him.
Take the money
, Prideaux’s devil whispered. The Germans have more where that came from. Go to, say, Istanbul, where a perfect new identity could be purchased. Then, on to exotic climes—Alexandria? Johannesburg? Quebec? A visit to a travel agency revealed that a Greek freighter, the
Olympios
, took on a few passengers at the Bulgarian port of Varna, easily reached by train from Paris. Stay? Or go? Prideaux couldn’t decide but then, after an exceptionally uncomfortable telephone call from one of his creditors, he took the money and ran. Before anyone came looking for him.

But they were looking for him. In fact, they’d found him.

The senator had been approached on September fifth, in his office. No, the
package
hadn’t arrived, was there a problem? His
chef de cabinet
was up at Deauville, he had telephoned and would return in a few days. The committee meeting? The senator consulted his calendar, that would be on the eleventh. Surely, by then …

In Berlin, at von Ribbentrop’s Foreign Ministry, the people at the political warfare bureau found this news troubling, and spoke to the bribery people, who were very troubled indeed. So much so that, just to make sure, they got in touch with a dependable friend, a detective at the
Sûreté Nationale
—the French security service—and asked him to lend a hand. For the detective, an easy job. Prideaux wasn’t in Deauville, according to his concierge, he was staying indoors. The concierge rubbed her thumb across the pads of her index and middle fingers and raised an eyebrow—
money
, it meant. And that gesture did it. At the Foreign Ministry they had a meeting and, by day’s end, a discussion—
not
at the ministry!—with Herbert.

——

Slim, well-dressed, quiet, Herbert made no particular impression on anybody he met, probably he was some kind of businessman, though he never quite got around to saying what he did. Perhaps you’d meet him again, perhaps you wouldn’t, it didn’t particularly matter. He circulated comfortably at the mid-level of Berlin society, turning up here and there, invited or not—what could you do, you couldn’t ask him to leave. Anyhow, nobody ever did, and he was always pleasant. There were, however, a few individuals in Berlin—those with uncommonly sharp instincts, those who somehow heard interesting things—who met Herbert only once. They didn’t precisely avoid him, not overtly, they just weren’t where he was or, if they were, they soon had to be elsewhere and, all courtesy, vanished.

What did they know? They didn’t know much, in fact they’d better not. Because Herbert had a certain vocation, supposedly secret to all but those who made use of his services. Exceptional services: silent, and efficient. For example, surveillance on Prideaux was in place within hours of Herbert’s meeting with his contact at the Foreign Ministry, and Prideaux was not entirely alone as he climbed aboard the first of the trains that would take him to Varna. Where Herbert, informed of Prideaux’s booking on the
Olympios
, awaited him. Herbert and his second-in-command, one Lothar, had hired a plane and pilot and flown to an airfield near Varna a night earlier and, on the evening of the fourteenth, they called off their associates and sent them back to wherever they came from. The Greek freighter was not expected at the dock until the sixteenth and would likely be late, so Prideaux wasn’t going anywhere.

He really wasn’t.

Which meant Herbert and Lothar could relax. For a while, at least, as only one final task lay ahead of them and they had a spare hour or two. Why not have fun in the interim? They had a contact scheduled at a local nightclub and so went looking for it, working their way through a maze of dockside streets; dark, twisting lanes decorated with broken glass and scented with urine, where in time they came upon an iron door beneath a board that said
UNCLE BORIS
. Inside, Herbert handed the maître d’ a fistful of leva notes and the one-eyed monster showed them to a table in the corner, said something amusing in Bulgarian, laughed, made as though to slap Herbert on the back, then didn’t. The two Germans settled in to drink mastika and enjoy the show, keeping an eye on the door as they awaited the appearance of their “brute,” as they playfully referred to him. Their brute for
this
operation, Herbert rarely used them more than once.

Lothar was fiftyish, fat and jolly, with tufts of dark red hair and a red face. Like Herbert, he’d been a junior officer during the Great War, the 1914 war, but they never met in the trenches—with five million men under arms an unlikely possibility—but found each other later, in one of the many veterans’ organizations that formed in Germany after the defeat of 1918. They fought a little more in the 1920s, after joining a militia, killing off the communists who were trying to take over the country. By the early 1930s Herbert had discovered his true vocation and enlisted Lothar as his second-in-command. A wise choice—Lothar was all business when it mattered but he was also good company. As the nightclub show unfolded, he nudged Herbert with an elbow and rumbled with baritone laughter.

In a space cleared of chairs and tables, a novelty act from somewhere in the Balkans: a two-man canvas horse that danced and capered, the front and rear halves in perfect harmony. Done well, this was by itself entertaining, but what made it memorable was a girl, in scanty, spangled costume, who played the accordion as she stood center stage on a pair of very sexy legs. The men in the club found them enticing, bare and shapely, as did the canvas horse, which danced nearer and nearer to the girl, the head lunging and feinting as though to nuzzle her thighs, then turning to the audience:
Shall I?

Oh yes!
The shouts were in Bulgarian but there was no question of what they meant. “Will it have her?” Herbert said.

“I should think so,” Lothar said. “Otherwise people will throw things.”

The one-eyed monster brought fresh mastika, the shouts grew louder, the accordion played on. At last, the horse found its courage and, having galloped around the girl a few times, stood in back of her on its hind legs with its hooves on her shoulders. The girl never missed a beat but then, when the horse covered her breasts with its hooves, and to the absolute delight of the audience, she blushed, her face turning pink, her eyes closing. As the horse began to move in a rhythmic manner familiar to all.

A little after ten o’clock, a white-haired man with a skull for a face entered the nightclub and peered around the room. When Herbert beckoned to him he approached the table and stood there a moment while the attentive one-eyed monster brought a chair and an extra glass. “You would be Aleksey?” Herbert said. “The Russian?”

“That’s right.” German was the second language of eastern Europe and Aleksey seemed comfortable speaking it.

“General Aleksey?”

“So I’m called—there are many other Alekseys. How did you recognize me?”

“My associate in Belgrade sent me a photograph.”

“I don’t remember him taking a photograph.”

Herbert’s shrug was eloquent, they did what they wanted to do. “In security work,” he said, “it’s important to take precautions.”

“Yes, of course it is,” Aleksey said, letting them know he wasn’t intimidated.

“Your contract with us calls for payment in Swiss francs, once you’ve done your job, is that right?”

“Yes. Two thousand Swiss francs.”

“If I may ask,” Herbert said, “of what army a general?”

“The Russian army, the Czar’s army. Not the Bolsheviks.”

“So, after 1917, you emigrated to Belgrade.”

“ ‘Emigrated’ is barely the word. But, yes, I went to Belgrade, to the émigré community there. Fellow Slavs, the Serbians, all that.”

“Do you have with you … what you’ll need?”

“Yes. Small but dependable.”

“With silencer?”

“As you ordered.”

“Good. My colleague and I are going out for a while, when we return it will be time for you to do your work. You’ve done it before, we’re told.”

“I’ve done many things, as I don’t care to sweep floors, and Belgrade has more than enough émigré taxi drivers.” He paused a moment, then said, “So …”

From Herbert, a nod of approval. To the question he’d asked, an oblique answer was apparently the preferred answer. As General Aleksey poured himself some mastika, Herbert met Lothar’s eyes and gestured toward the door. To Aleksey he said, “We have an errand to run, when we return we’ll tell you where to go. Meanwhile, the floor show should start up again any time now, you may find it amusing.”