The Polish Officer

“A friend of Monsieur Lezhev?” she asked.

“Unfortunately, no.”

Polite, she thought. Through the veil, she could see a strong, pale forehead. He was in his late thirties, hair expensively cut, faintly military bearing. Aristocrat, she thought. But not from here.

“An associate of Monsieur Pavel,” he said.

Oh.

She was, just for a moment, very angry. Boris was gone, she would never hear his voice again. For all his drinking and brawling he’d been a tender soul, accidentally caught up in flags and blood and honor and history, now dead of it. And here by her side was a man whose work lay in such things. I am sick of countries, she wanted to say to him. But she did not say it. They walked together on the gravel path as the first thunder of the storm grumbled in the distance.

“The help you’ve provided is very much appreciated,” he said quietly. She sensed he knew what she’d been thinking. “The government has to leave Paris—but we wanted to set up a contact protocol for the future, if that is acceptable to you.”

She hesitated a moment, then said, “Yes, it’s acceptable.” Suddenly she was dizzy, thought she might faint. She stopped walking and put a hand on the man’s forearm to steady herself. The thunder rumbled again and she pressed her lips together hard—she did not want to cry.

“There’s a bench—” the man said.

She shook her head no, fumbled in her purse for a handkerchief. The other mourners circled around them. Yushin the playwright tipped his hat. “So sorry, Genya Maximova, so sorry. Just the other night, he . . . my regrets.” He walked backward for a step or two, tipped his hat again, then turned around and scurried away.

The man at her side handed her a clean white handkerchief and she held it to her eyes. It smelled faintly of bay rum cologne. “Thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome.” They started walking again. “The protocol will mention the church of Saint-Etienne-du- Mont, and the view from the rue de la Montagne. Can you remember it?”

“Yes. I like that church.”

“The contact may come by mail, or in person. But it will come— sooner or later. As I said, we are grateful.”

His voice trailed away. She nodded yes, she understood; yes, she’d help; yes, it had to be done; whatever yes they needed to hear that day. He understood immediately. “Again, our sympathies,” he said. Then: “I’ll leave you here—there are French security agents in a car at the bottom of the hill.”

He moved ahead of her, down the path. He wasn’t so bad, she thought. It just happened that information flowed to her like waves on a beach, and he was an intelligence officer in time of war. Big drops of rain began to fall on the gravel path and one of the men in dark suits with medals on the breast pocket appeared at her side and opened a black umbrella above her head.

It was a long way from the Russian neighborhoods in Boulogne to Neuilly—where he was staying in the villa of an industrialist who’d fled to Canada—and a storm was coming, but Captain Alexander de Milja decided to walk, and spent the evening headed north along the curve of the Seine, past factories and docks and rail sidings, past workers’ neighborhoods and little cafes where bargemen came in to drink at night.

They had dragged him, black with coal dust and more dead than alive, from the hold of the freighter Enkoping, laid him on the backseat of a Polish diplomatic car and sped off to the embassy. A strange time. Not connected with the real world at all, drifting among dim lights and hollow sounds, a sort of mystic’s paradise, and when people said “Stockholm” he could only wonder what they meant. Wherever he’d been, it hadn’t been Stockholm.

And where was he now? A place called poor Paris, he thought. In poor France. He saw the posters on his walk, half torn, flapping aimlessly on the brick factory walls: nous vaincrons car nous sommes les plus forts. Signed by the new prime minister, Paul Reynaud. “We will win because we are the strongest.” Yes, well, was all de Milja could think. What could you say, even to yourself, about such empty huffing and puffing? Paris had been bombed twice, not heavily. But, while the Wehrmacht was still north of the Belgian border, France had quit. He knew it—it was what he and Colonel Broza had fought against in Warsaw—and he’d felt it happen here.

De Milja had arrived in Paris in late April and gone to work for Colonel Vyborg, the “Baltic knight” who had recruited him into the ZWZ as the Germans began the siege of Warsaw. At first it was as though he’d returned to his old job—staff work in military intelligence. There were meetings, dinners, papers written and read, serious and urgent business but essentially the life of the military attache. He had assisted in some of the intelligence collection, developed assets, liaised with French officers.

They were sympathetic—poor Poland. Clandestine flights with money and explosives for the underground would be starting any day now, any day now. There were technical problems, you needed a full moon, calm weather, extra gas tanks on the airplanes. That was true, de Milja knew, yet somehow he sensed it wouldn’t happen even when conditions were right. “Steady pressure,” Vyborg said. “Representatives of governments-in-exile are patient, courteous men who do not lose their tempers.” De Milja understood, and smiled.

His counterpart, a Major Kercheval of the SR—Service des renseignements, the foreign intelligence operation that supplied data to the Deuxieme Bureau of the French General Staff—invited him to tour the Maginot Line. “Be impressed,” Vyborg told him. Well, he was, truly he was. A long drive through spring rains, past the Meuse, the Marne, the battlefields of the 1914 war. Then barbed wire, and an iron gate with a grille, opening into a tunnel dug deep in the side of a hill. Over the entrance, a sign: ils ne passeront pas—They shall not pass. Three hundred feet down by elevator, then a cage of mice hung by the door as a warning—they’d keel over if gas were present—and a brilliantly lit tunnel traversed by a little train that rang a bell. In vast, concrete chambers there were offices, blackboards, and telephones—a huge fire-control center staffed by sharp young soldiers dressed in white coveralls. A general officiated, demanding that de Milja choose a German target from a selection of black-and-white photographs. All he could see were trees and brush, but his cartographer’s eye turned up a woodcutter’s hut by a stream and he pinned it with his finger. “Voila,” said the general, and great activity ensued—bells rang, soldiers talked on telephones, maps were unrolled, numbers written hurriedly on blackboards. At last, a dial in the wall was turned and the deep gong of a bell sounded again and again. “The target has received full artillery fire. It is completely destroyed.” De Milja was impressed. He did wonder, briefly, why, since the French were officially at war with the Germans, they rang a bell instead of firing an actual gun, but that was, he supposed, a detail. In fact, the series of fortresses could direct enormous firepower at an enemy from underground bunkers. The Maginot Line went as far as the Belgian border. And there it stopped.

So on 10 May, when Hitler felt the time was ripe, the Wehrmacht went through Belgium. A French officer said to de Milja, “But don’t you see? They have violated Belgian neutrality! They have played into our hands!”

Just where the river rounded the Isle of Puteaux, de Milja came to a tabac, a boulangerie, and a cluster of cheap cafes: a little village. Because of the blackout the streetlamps of Paris had been painted blue, and now the city was suffused with strange, cold light. It made the street cinematic, surreal. Friday night, the cafes should have been jammed with Parisians—to hell with the world, have a glass of wine! Can I see you home? Now they were triste, half-empty. But these were workers. Out in Passy, in Neuilly, in Saint-Germain and Palais-Royal there wasn’t anybody. They had all discovered a sudden need to go to the country; to Tante Giselle or their adored grandmere or their little house on the river whatever-it-was. Where they’d gone in 1914. Where they’d gone, for that matter, in 1789.

Meanwhile, in Poland, they were committing suicide. Vyborg had told him that, white lines of anger at the corners of his mouth. France was a kind of special heaven to the Poles, with its great depths of culture, its adept wit, and ancient, forgiving intelligence. To the Poles, it was simple: don’t give in, fight on, when Hitler tangles with the French that’ll be the end of him. But that wasn’t what happened and now they knew it—they risked their lives listening to the BBC and they heard what the announcer tried not to say. The French ran. They didn’t, wouldn’t, fight. A wave of suicides washed over Warsaw, Cracow, the manor houses in the mountains.

A girl at a cafe table looked at de Milja. Beret and raincoat, curly, copper-colored hair with a lock tumbled onto the forehead, a dark mole setting off the white skin on her cheek, lips a deep, solemn red. With her eyes she asked him some sort of question that could not quite be put into words. De Milja wanted her—he wanted all of