The Polish Officer

operate against the Russians.”

Broza thought about it for a time. “Why?” he said.

“Why are the Russians better at it?” Agata said.

“Yes.”

“Oh, tradition. A thousand years of espionage, the secret police of Ivan the Terrible—is that what you want to hear?”

Broza’s expression was grim, almost despairing—wasn’t there perhaps a little more to it? No? Maybe?

Agata tapped a pencil eraser against the open page of a notebook. “There is a difference,” she said slowly, “that interests me. Say that it is the difference between nationalism and, ah, what we might call social theory. For the Germans, nationalism is an issue of race, ethnicity. For example, they accept as their own the Volksdeutsch—descendents of German colonists, many of whom do not even speak German. But their blood is German blood—these Teutonic philosophers really believe in such things. Cut a vein, listen closely, you can hear the overture to Lohengrin—why, that’s a German you’ve got there! The Bolsheviks are just the opposite—they recruit the mind, or so they like to pretend. And all the world is invited to join them; you can be a communist any time you like—‘Good heavens! I just realized it’s all in the dictatorship of the working class.’

“Now as a practical matter, that difference serves the purposes of the NKVD very nicely. We all accept that every society has its opportunists—criminals, misfits, unrecognized geniuses, the pathologically disappointed—and when the conqueror comes, that’s the moment to even the score. But, here in western Poland, the only job open is collaborator—you can’t just get up in the morning and decide to be German. On the Soviet side, however, you can experience insight, then conversion, and you’ll be welcomed. Oh, you may have to tattle a little, tell the NKVD whatever you happen to know—and everybody knows something. You can invite your former friends to join you in conspiracies, you can inform on your enemies. And what are you then? A traitor? No, a friend of peace and the working class. And, if you turn out to have a bit of a flair for the work, you can be a commissar.”

Agata paused a moment, lit a new cigarette. “And if that’s not bad enough,” she said, shaking out the match, “the NKVD is very shrewd, and never in a hurry. They follow the spirit of resistance like a hidden current running through an ocean: they detain, interrogate, torture, turn a few to work for them, shoot the rest, and start over.”

Colonel Broza nodded slowly. “Tyranny,” he said, “has become a science.” He turned to de Milja. “What do you think we can do, Captain.”

De Milja was in no hurry to answer. “Perhaps, over time, we’ll prove to be stronger than they are. But right now, I would say the important thing for us is to hammer at the links between the Germans and the Russians. For us, in this room, the worst would be if NKVD methods were to spread to the Gestapo.”

“We know they’ve been meeting in Cracow,” Grodewicz said, “but the Russians aren’t sharing much. They cooperate by handing over German communists who fled to Moscow in the thirties, but they don’t talk about methods.”

“That is because,” Agata said, “they are going to fight.”

“Yes. They must, eventually,” Broza said. He thought a moment, then his eyes met de Milja’s. “Take some time and a few people, Captain. See if you can get a sense of when that might be.”

A week later, he left the freezing basement. Life immediately improved, was certainly warmer, better in a number of ways. He moved to a room in the Mokotow district, down a long hallway in the apartment of a former customs official, now a clerk in a factory office and a great friend to the resistance. Since the occupation authority had closed the schools—Poles, as a slave race, needed only to understand simple directions and to count to twenty—the official’s wife taught at a secret school in a church basement while the children attended classes.

That left de Milja alone in the apartment for much of the day. Alone, except for Madame Kuester. Fortyish, probably a little older, a distant cousin of one side of the family or the other, she had met and married a Dutch engineer—Herr Kuester—who had gone off to work on a bridge in Kuala Lumpur in 1938, then vanished. Madame Kuester, childless, had then come to stay with the family. Not quite a servant, not quite an equal, she had worked in fashionable women’s shops before the war, lived quietly in her room, proud of not being a burden to anyone. The title “madame” was a survival of the world of the shops, where she had been, evidently, a bad-tempered and difficult supervisor to a generation of young assistants.

Given the hours of proximity, a love affair seemed inevitable. But the captain resisted. A deep, almost haunted longing for the wife who wasn’t there, a nominal—and sometimes not so nominal— Catholicism, and ZWZ security procedures: everything was against it. Including the attitude of Madame Kuester, haughty and cold, clearly meant to discourage familiarity between two people forced by war into the accidental intimacies of apartment life.

She was, de Milja came to understand, a snob to her very marrow. She set herself above the world, looking down on its unrefined excesses with small, angry eyes set in a great expanse of white brow. Her mouth was mean, down-curved, she wore her coarse hair elaborately pinned up, went about the apartment in gray blouse and long wool skirt—the prewar uniform of some of the better shops—that hung shapeless over a thick, heavy figure, and her walk, hard and definitive, told the world all it needed to know: you have left me alone, now leave me alone.

But it was cold, always cold.

The February snow hissed against the window, the afternoons were silent, and dark, and endless. Captain de Milja was now subject to increased ZWZ security constraints; stay out of the center of Warsaw, where police patrols were abundant, try not to be on the streets during working hours—use the morning and evening travel periods as cover for getting around the city. He had to hold agent meetings as he probed for German intentions toward the U.S.S.R., but he scheduled them early in the morning and late in the afternoon, always in public places —libraries, railway stations, the thicker the crowd the better he liked it. But for much of the day he was a prisoner in the Mokotow apartment.

Where he discovered that he was keeping track of Madame Kuester by the sound of her presence: the scrape of the match as she lit the stove for midmorning tea, the rhythm of a carpet sweeper rolled relentlessly back and forth, the polite slam of a firmly closed door as she retired to her room for a midday rest, the creak of the bedspring as she lay down to nap.

Every afternoon at about 2:35, that was. She rather believed, he sensed, in the idea of routine, consistency. It was the way her sort of people—never defined, yet always with her—chose to live. After lunch she would sit primly in the corner of the sofa, then, after forty-five minutes of reading, rise majestically and disappear into her room. On Sunday, with the family present, everything was different, but six days a week her habit never varied, never changed.

Well, perhaps just once it did. On an otherwise unremarkable day in the middle of the week, she forgot her book. Ha! What absurdly spiteful joy he felt at such a lapse. He was immediately ashamed of himself, but there it lay, open, facedown on the arm of the sofa, protected by the blue paper cover she fussily wrapped her books in. Curious, he had a look. French. Well, of course, he should have known. A French novel, the very thing her sort of people would amuse themselves with.

De Milja scanned the page to see what kept Madame so occupied that she hadn’t a thought for the rest of the world. “. . . dans une position en lequel ses places ombrees etaient, comme on dit, disponibles, mais c’etait le sens de la caresse de l’aire sur elles, ces ouvertures, qui faisait battre fort son coeur . . .”

What?

In pure astonishment and disbelief he slipped the cover off the novel: La Belle Dominique. Written by that well-known and time-honored author, Vaguely Saucy Nom de Plume. The French novel was a French novel! He flipped the pages, and read some more, and flipped the pages, and read some more. It was the sheer contrast of the moment that struck his heart. The dying, ice-bound city, heavy with fear and misery and the exhaustion of daily life, set against these brittle pages of print, where gold passementerie was untied and heavy drapes flowed together, where pale skin flushed rose with excitement, where silk rustled to the floors of moonlit chambers.

De Milja’s eyes sought the door to Madame Kuester’s room, which, in defiance of her cherished routine, stood open a suggestive inch. He opened it the rest of the way and stepped inside. A small room in a Warsaw apartment,