The Polish Officer

Vyborg showed up that morning. In a good brown suit and a striped British tie. Had there always been a gentleman under that uniform, or was it just a trick that London tailors did? They could do nothing, however, about the face: the Baltic knight, squinting into a blizzard and ready to cut down a company of Russian pikemen, was still very much in evidence. He suggested a walk in the hills and they did that, with guards following a little way down the path. November, de Milja thought, was a strange time in dry countries; faded colors, sky gray and listless. Vyborg told de Milja that his wife had died. They walked in silence for a long time after that. Finally de Milja was able to say, “Where is she?”

“A small cemetery in the town where the spa is. A mass was said for her. It had to be done quietly, but it was done.” They walked for a moment, through a stand of low pines. “My sympathies, Alexander,” Vyborg said softly. “It comes from all of us, from everyone who knows you.”

“How, please.”

“Influenza.”

De Milja was again unable to speak.

“She was working in the kitchen,” Vyborg went on. “Some of us do best in bad times, and that was true of her. She had a high fever for three days, and then she died in her sleep.”

“I think I would like to go back to the house,” de Milja said.

He visited Barcelona once or twice, but it was just another conquered city. It had the silence that passed for peace, the courtesy of fear. The police state was in place, people in the street avoided his eyes. There were still bullet chips and shell holes in the buildings, but the masons were at work, and there were glaziers, their glass sheets balanced on the sides of their mules, shouting up the sides of apartment houses to announce their presence.

He spent a lot of time walking in the hills, sometimes with two men from the Sixth Bureau; one clerkish, a man who sat behind a desk, the other with a hard, bald head, a well-groomed mustache, and small, angry eyes. They needed to know about various things in France and de Milja told them what he could. The bald-headed man, though he did not come out and say it, was clearly concerned with the construction of new and better wireless/telegraphy sets, and de Milja didn’t feel he was able to help much. The other man asked questions about French political life under the Germans and de Milja helped him, if possible, even less. But they were decent men who tried to make things easy for him—as long as we all happen to find ourselves in Spain, why not spend a moment chatting about the views of the French communist party—and de Milja did the best he could for them.

Again and again, he thought about his wife. He had, in October of 1939, said good-bye to her, left her in charge of her destiny, as she’d asked. Maybe he shouldn’t have done that. But then he had never once been able to make her, crazy or sane, do anything she did not want to do.

Down the road from the villa was a tiny cafe in the garden of an old woman’s house. She had a granddaughter who said gracias when she served coffee, and when it wasn’t raining de Milja and Vyborg would sit at a rusty iron table and talk about the war.

“Operation Sealion has failed,” Vyborg said. “The first time Hitler’s been beaten.”

“Do we know what actually happened?” de Milja asked.

“We know some of it. It wasn’t a total victory, of course, nothing like that. The RAF sank 21 out of 170 troop transports. That’s a loss, but not a crippling loss for people contemplating an invasion from the sea. Out of 1,900 barges, 214 were destroyed. Only five tugboats out of 368; only three motorboats out of more than a thousand.”

“Three, did you say?”

“Yes.”

“Then what made them quit?”

Vyborg shrugged. “An invasion is more than ships. A five-hundredton ammunition dump was blown up at Den Helder, in Holland. On the sixth of September, a rations depot was burned out. In Belgium, an ammunition train was destroyed. Then down at Le Havre, where a number of German divisions were based, the waterworks were put out of commission. There was also the training exercise—you saw some of the results at Nieuwpoort, and German hospital trains crossed Belgium all that night. Therefore, if the RAF could hit a practice run through that hard, what would they do once the real thing got started? Funny thing about the German character, they’re very brave, not at all afraid to die, but they are afraid to fail. In some ways, our best hope for Germany is the Wehrmacht—the generals. If Germany loses again, and then again, perhaps they can be persuaded that honor lies in a change of government.”

“Can that really happen?”

Vyborg thought about it. “Maybe,” he said. “With time.”

It drizzled, then stopped. The little girl came and put up a faded umbrella and wiped the table with a cloth and said, “Gracias.” She smiled at de Milja, then ran away.

“One last time, the people who knew you as Lezhev?” Vyborg said.

“Freddi Schoen.”

“Dead.”

“Junger, the Wehrmacht staff officer.”

“Transferred. In Germany at the OKW headquarters.”

“Traudl von Behr.”

“She’s in Lille, at the moment. Aide to a staff major running transports from northern France to Germany.”

“There were more Germans, but they didn’t know who I was. Somebody they saw here and there, perhaps Russian.”

“Be absolutely certain,” Vyborg said.

De Milja nodded that he was.

12 January 1941.

In the cold, still air of the Paris winter, smoke spilled from the chimneys and hung lifeless above the tiled rooftops.

Stein crunched along the snow-covered rue du Chateau-d’Eau, head down, hands jammed deep in the pockets of his overcoat. Cold in the 5:00 p.m. darkness, colder with the snow turned blue by the lamplight, colder with the wind that blew all the way from the Russian steppe. You can feel it, Parisians said, you can feel the bite. Eighteen degrees, the newspaper said that morning.

Stein walked fast, breath visible. Here was 26,rue du Chateau-d’Eau. Was that right? He reached into an inside pocket, drew out the typewritten letter with the exquisite signature. Office of the notary LeGros, yes, this was the building. Notaries and lawyers and huissiers—officers of the court—all through this quarter. It wasn’t that it was pleasant, because it wasn’t. It was simply where they gathered. Probably, as usual, something to do with a Napoleonic decree—a patent, a license, a dispensation. A special privilege.

The concierge was sweeping snow from the courtyard entry with a twig broom, two mufflers tied around her face, her hands wound in flannel cloths. “Notaire LeGros? Third floor, take the stairs to your left, Monsieur.”

LeGros opened the door immediately. He was an old man with a finely made face and snow-white hair. He wore a cardigan sweater beneath his jacket and his hand was like ice when Stein shook it.

The business was done in the dining room, at an enormous chestnut table covered with official papers. Huysmanns, a Belgian with broad shoulders and a thick neck, was waiting for him, stood and grunted in guttural French when they shook hands. Stein sat down, kept his coat on—the apartment was freezing and he could still see his breath. “Hard winter,” Huysmanns said.

“Yes, that’s true,” Stein said.

“Gentlemen,” said the notary.

He gathered papers from the table, which he seemed to understand by geology: the Stein-Huysmanns matter buried just below the Duval matter. The two men signed and signed, writing read and approved, then dating each signature, their pens scratching over the paper, their breathing audible. Finally LeGros said, “I believe the agreed payment is forty thousand francs?”

Stein reached into the inner pocket of his overcoat and withdrew a sheaf of five-hundred-franc notes. He