The Polish Officer

them—but he kept walking and she turned back to her glass of wine. What was she after, he wondered. A little money? A husband for a little problem in her belly? A man to beat up the landlord? Something, something. Nothing was free here—he’d learned that in the 1920s when he was studying at Saint-Cyr. He turned and looked back at her; sad now, staring into her glass. She had a heavy upper lip with a soft curve to it, and he could imagine the weight of her breasts against her cotton blouse. Jesus, she was beautiful; they all were. They couldn’t help it, it wasn’t their fault. He stopped, half turned, then continued on his way. Probably she was a whore, and he didn’t want to pay to make love.

Yes, well.

The industrialist who’d fled to Canada had not had time, apparently, to clean out his things in Neuilly. He’d left behind mounds of women’s clothing, much of it still folded in soft tissue paper, a crate of twenty telephones, a stack of chic little boxes covered in slick gold paper, and dozens of etchings—animals of every sort; lions, zebras, camels— signed Dovoz in a fluid hand. De Milja had simply made a neat pile on the dining-room table and ignored it. The toothbrush left in the sink, the paste dried on it, he’d thrown away.

Hard to sleep in a city waiting for invaders. De Milja stared out the window into the garden of the neighboring villa. So, the barbarians were due to arrive; plans were being made, the angles of survival calculated. He read for a time, a little Joseph Roth, a book he’d found on the night table—The Radetzky March. Roth had been an emigre who’d killed himself in Paris a year earlier. It was slow going in German, but de Milja was patient and dawn was long hours away.

The Trottas were not an old family. Their founder’s title had been conferred on him after the battle of Solferino. He was a Slovene and chose the name of his native village, Sipolje. Though fate elected him to perform an outstanding deed, he himself saw to it that his memory became obscured to posterity.

An infantry lieutenant, he was in command of a platoon at Solferino. The fighting had been in progress for half an hour. He watched the white backs of his men three paces in front of him. The front line was kneeling, the rear standing. They were all cheerful and confident of victory. They had . . .

Now it rained. Hard. De Milja had been lying on a long red-andgold couch with a brocade pillow under his head. He got to his feet, walked to the French doors, index finger holding his place in the book, and stared out into the night. Someone had stored pieces of old statuary behind the villa, water glistened on the stone when the lightning flickered. The wind grew stronger, rain blew in sheets over the garden, then the air cooled suddenly and the sound of thunder rolled and echoed down the deserted streets.

9 June 1940. 2, avenue de Tourville, Hotel des Invalides.

De Milja was prompt for his eleven o’clock meeting with Major Kercheval of the SR. The streets around the walled military complex at the center of the seventh arrondissement were quiet—the residents were away—but in the courtyard they were busy loading filing cabinets onto military trucks. It was hot, no air moved, the soldiers had their jackets off, sleeves rolled up, suspenders dangling, making them look like cannoneers from the Franco- Prussian war of 1870.

A fifteen-minute wait, then an elderly sergeant with plentiful decorations led him up long flights of stairs to Kercheval’s office. The major’s greeting was friendly but correct. They sat opposite each other in upholstered chairs. The office was impressive, a wall of leather-bound volumes, historic maps in elaborate frames were hung on the walnut boiserie.

“Not a happy moment,” Kercheval said, watching the trucks being loaded in the courtyard below.

“No,” de Milja agreed. “We went through it in Warsaw.”

Kercheval’s eyebrow twitched—this is not Warsaw. “We’re thinking,” he said, “it won’t be quite so difficult here. Some of our files are being shifted for temporary safekeeping.”

De Milja made a polite sound of agreement. “How is it up north?” he asked.

Kercheval steepled his fingers. “The Tenth Army’s situation on the Somme appears to have stabilized. At the river Oise we have a few problems still—mostly logistics, supply and whatnot. But we expect to clear that up in seventy-two hours. Our current appreciation of the position is this: we’ve got hell to pay for two or three days yet, we then achieve a static situation—une situation statique. We can maintain that indefinitely, of course, but I’d say give us two weeks of hard work and then, in the first heat of summer, look for us to be going the other way. Germans are Nordic—they don’t like hot weather.”

He shifted to the particular concerns they shared—the flow of information from open and clandestine sources, how much of it the Poles got to see. He spoke easily, at length, in confidential tones. The meaning of what he said, as far as de Milja could make out, was that the people above them, the diplomats and senior officers in the rarefied atmosphere of binational relations, had yet to complete work on a format of cooperation but they would soon do so, and at that time de Milja and his colleagues could look forward to a substantive increase of shared intelligence.

Kercheval was in his late forties, with dry skin, a corded underside to his jaw, and smooth, glossy hair combed flat. A turtle’s head, de Milja thought. The small, mobile mouth, whether talking or eating, strengthened that impression. The exterior was flawless: courteous, confident, polished and hard as a diamond. If Kercheval lied, he lied, regrettably, for reasons of state—raisons d’etat—and if you listened carefully you would hear a faint and deeply subtle signal inviting you to agree that deception was simply a part of life, as all very old cultures had learned, sadder but wiser, to acknowledge. Come now, you must admit it’s so.

“It’s an ordeal, and takes forever,” he went on, “but experience has shown that relations go much more smoothly, indeed much more productively, when the initial understandings are thoroughly formulated.”

He smiled warmly at de Milja, perhaps a hint of apology in his face—our friendship will surely survive all the nonsense I’m forced to tell you, you certainly won’t hold it against me. Life’s too short for resentment, my dear fellow.

De Milja tried to nod agreement as enthusiastically as he could, an importunate smile nailed to his mouth. The situation statique on the Somme was that the Tenth Army had been encircled and destroyed, and de Milja knew it. To Kercheval, however, the fate of an army was of secondary importance to the conversation he was having with de Milja. Of primary concern was that adverse and humiliating information could not be stated in front of a foreigner, of lesser rank and lower social position. As for “some of our files are being shifted,” de Milja passed through the sentry gates, turned right toward the metro, and passed sixty trucks lined up and waiting to enter the courtyard.

On the train he read The Daily Telegraph to see what the British were thinking about that morning. Asked if Paris would be declared an open city, a French spokesman replied, “Never. We are confident that Hitler’s mechanized hordes will never get to Paris. But should they come so far, you may tell your countrymen we shall defend every stone, every clod of earth, every lamppost, every building, for we would rather have our city razed to the ground than fall into the hands of the Germans.”

Emerging at the Pont de Neuilly metro stop, de Milja saw a group of white-haired garbagemen—veterans, wearing their decorations— working on a line of twelve garbage trucks. They were engrossed in mounting machine guns on the trucks and, by that afternoon, the Paris police were wearing tin-pot helmets and carrying rifles.

“The government’s going to Tours,” Vyborg said.

“From what I saw this morning they were certainly going somewhere,” de Milja said.

Late afternoon, an anonymous cafe on the rue Blanche. Amber walls tinted brown with Gauloises smoke, etched glass panels between booths. An old lady with a small dog sat at the bar, the bored owner scowled as he read one of the single-sheet newspapers that had replaced the usual editions.

Vyborg and de Milja sat facing each other in a booth and sipped at glasses of beer. The afternoon was hot and still, a fly buzzing around a motionless fan in the ceiling. Sometimes, from the refugee columns trudging down the boulevards a block away, the sound of an auto horn. Vyborg wore an old gray suit, with no tie and shirt collar open. He looked, de Milja thought, like a lawyer with unpaid office rent and no clients.

“Hard to believe that it’s over here. That the French army lasted one month,” Vyborg said.

“It is over, then.”

“Yes. Paris will be declared an open city today or tomorrow. The Germans will be in here in a week or less.”

“But France will fight on.”

“No, it won’t. Reynaud cabled Roosevelt and demanded American intervention, Roosevelt’s response was a