The spies of warsaw (15 page)

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.

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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

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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,

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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

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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.

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*

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 peacetime army. No other country shows such a disproportion between armour and artillery. Figures like these give us food for

thought!

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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