the streets and made it hard to see. God, he was young, de Milja thought. Moonfaced, which made him seem placid. Hands shoved in the pockets of a baggy overcoat.
Chomak’s dachshund knew right away who he was. It exploded in a fit of barking and skittered about at the detective’s feet until his wife gathered it up in her arms and went into another room.
They took the evening workers’ train across the Vistula. The snow was falling thickly now, and looking out the window, de Milja could just see the iron-colored river curling slowly around the piers of a bridge. Nobody talked on this train; it had been a long day in the factories and they didn’t have the strength for it. De Milja and Chomak and the operative stood together in the aisle, holding on to the tops of the seats as the train swayed through the turns, the steamy windows white with snow blown sideways by the wind. At the second stop, a neighborhood of red-brick tenements, they got off the train and found a small bar near the station. They sat at a table and drank home- brewed beer.
“We’re trying to find out about the printer,” de Milja said. “The Gestapo arrested him.”
Chomak shrugged. “Inevitable,” he said.
“Why do you say that?”
“He was a thief,” Chomak said. “A Jew thief.”
“Really? How do you know?”
“Everybody knew,” Chomak said. “He was clever, very clever, just in the way he went around, in the way he did things. He was always up to something—you only had to look at him to see it.”
“And the Gestapo, you think, acted on that?”
Chomak thought for a time, then shrugged and lit a cigarette. De Milja saw that his hand was shaking. “Types like that get into trouble,” he said after the silence had gone on a little too long. “Sooner or later. Then they get caught. It’s a flaw they have.”
De Milja nodded slowly, the dark side of human nature making him pensive. “Well,” he said, “we can’t be late for our meeting.”
“You don’t think
“No.” Pause. “Did you? Maybe by accident?”
“Not me.”
“Time to go,” de Milja said. Then to Chomak: “You’re armed?”
“You didn’t tell me to bring anything, so I didn’t. I have to tell you, I don’t care for being suspected. That’s not right.”
De Milja stood up and left, Chomak following, the operative waving Chomak out the door ahead of him. “Don’t worry about it,” de Milja said.
Hunched over in the cold and the snow, they hurried along a narrow street that wound back toward the railroad. Chomak took a fast two steps and caught up with de Milja. “Why would you ask me a thing like that?” He had to raise his voice a little because of the wind and it made him sound querulous and insulted. “I served fourteen years in the detectives.” He was angry now. “We knew who did what. That type, you’re always on the short end of the deal—just once turn your back and then you’ll see.”
A Gestapo car, a black Grosser Mercedes with headlights taped down to slits because of the blackout, honked at them to get out of the way. They stood with their backs against the wall, faces averted, as it bumped past, the red taillights disappearing into the swirling snow.
“You see?” Chomak said, when they were walking again. “I could have flagged them down. But I didn’t, did I?”
At an arched railroad bridge, where the street dipped below the track, de Milja signaled to stop, and the three men stood by the curved wall and stamped their feet to keep warm. It was dark under the bridge and the snow was blowing right through it.
“Hell of a night for a meeting,” Chomak said, a good-natured laugh in his voice.
De Milja heard the sound of a train approaching in the distance. Bending over to protect the match from the wind, he lit a cigarette, then cupped his palm to shield the glow. “Face the wall,” he said to Chomak.
“What did you say?”
“Face the wall.”
Chomak turned slowly and faced the wall. The approaching train was moving slowly because of the snowstorm. “It’s not right,” Chomak said. “For a Jew thief. Some little sneak from the gutter. Not right.”
“Why would you do a thing like that?” de Milja said. “Were you in trouble?”
De Milja could see that Chomak’s legs were trembling, and he thought he might collapse. He looked at the operative and their eyes met for a moment as the train came closer. The sound of the wheels thundered in the tunnel as it passed overhead, Chomak bounced off the wall, then sagged back against it, his hand groping for a hold on the smooth surface. Very slowly, he slid down to his knees, then toppled over on his side. The operative straddled him and fired once into his temple.
January 1940. The French planes did not come. Perhaps, people thought, they are not going to come. Not ever. In the streets of Paris, the Communist party and its supporters marched and chanted for peace, for dignity, for an end to war. Especially this unjust war against Germany—Russia’s ally. On the Maginot Line, quartered in a schoolhouse near Strasbourg, Private Jean-Paul Sartre of the artillery’s meteorological intelligence service sent balloons aloft, reported on the speed and direction of the wind to gunners who never fired a shot, and wrote in his journal that “
In Great Britain, German magnetic mines had taken a considerable toll of merchant shipping, and rationing had been established for butter, sugar, bacon, and ham. Winston Churchill spoke on the radio, and told the nations of Europe that “each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. All of them hope that the storm will pass before their turn comes to be devoured.”
As for the United States, it remained stern and unrelenting in the maintenance of a “moral embargo” it had declared against Germany.
Meanwhile, Warsaw lived in ice. The calendar froze—a winter of ten thousand days was at hand. And as the hope of help from friends slowly waned, it became the time of the prophecies. Sometimes typed, sometimes handwritten, they were everywhere and, whether casually dismissed or secretly believed, were passionately followed. A battlefield of contending specters: rune-casters and biblical kings, the Black Madonna of Czestochowa and Nostradamus, the fire at the center of the earth, the cycles of the moon, the springs of magic water, the Apocrypha—the fourteen known books and the fifteenth, only just now revealed. The day was coming, it couldn’t quite be said exactly when, but blood would flow from stones, the dead would rise from their graves, the lame would walk, the blind would see, and the fucking
At a time when national consolation was almost nonexistent, the prophecies helped, strange as some of them were, and the intelligence service of the Polish underground certainly wrote their share. Meanwhile, hiding in their apartments from winter and the Gestapo, the people of Warsaw listened—on pain of death if caught—to the BBC on illicit radios. And they also studied English. That winter in Warsaw, an English grammar couldn’t be had for love or money. Even so, the joke everybody was telling around town went like this: the pessimists are learning German, the optimists are learning English, while the realists, in January of 1940, were said to be learning Russian.
In Room 9, Agata leaned back from the committee table, ran long fingers through her chopped-off hair, blew savage plumes of smoke from her nostrils, and said, “Next. The eastern zone, and the need to do something about the Russians. As of yesterday, a courier reported six more arrests by the NKVD.”
It had been a long meeting, not a good one, with too many problems tabled for future consideration. Colonel Broza did not respond— he stared absently at a map of Poland tacked to the green wall, but there was certainly little comfort for him there.
“The efficiency of the NKVD,” Agata went on, “seems only to increase. They are everywhere, how to say,
