The spies of warsaw (19 page)

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. How-Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 3/26/08 9:29 AM Page 116

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ever, 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

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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. Ver-Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 3/26/08 9:29 AM Page 118

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chak 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

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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

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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.

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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