The spies of warsaw (18 page)

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

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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 night-

mare, 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."

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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 goldframed 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 welldressed--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

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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 headwaiter 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-ohseventh 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

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have been asking since Hitler marched into the Rhineland in 'thirtysix. 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 nineteeneighteen, 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?"

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"
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,

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"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