The Polish Officer

“You must take a cognac with us,” Stein said.

A waiter brought small gilt chairs. Jammed together at the table they were pleasantly crowded, breathing an atmosphere of cigarette smoke and perfume and body heat and breaths of oranges and mints and wine. The count’s white-and-black hair was combed back smoothly and rested lightly atop his ears.

“A celebration tonight,” Stein said.

“Oh?” said the count.

“I became, today, a charbonnier.”

“You did?”

“Yes.”

“A coal merchant, eh? Well, you must permit us to be your customers. Shall you haul the sacks down the cellar stairs?”

“Absolutely, you may depend on it.”

“A Polack!”

“Exactly!”

“Stein?”

“Yes?”

“You’re an amusing fellow.”

They sipped at their balloon glasses of cognac. “What year?” said the count.

“Nineteen ten.”

“Alas, before your time,” the count said to Madame Roubier.

“Yes? It’s your guess?”

“My certain knowledge!”

“Dear me, how is one to repay such a compliment?”

The taxi that served as limousine took them home from a nightclub at dawn, the snow turned gray in the January light. Madame Roubier snored by his side in the backseat. She slept snuggled up to him, the ermine warm against his cheek.

Success purchased investment. Perhaps you fought, with luck you won, then came the little men with the money. Vyborg had made a point of telling him that, because Vyborg knew exactly who de Milja really was. Vyborg knew how happy he’d been fussing over his maps, knew about his academic papers, worked over endlessly, on the signalization of braiding, or aggrading, rivers. He’d spent his daily life occupied with the Lehman system of hachuring, the way in which the angle of slope is shown on military surveys—important knowledge for artillery people—contour intervals, hydrographic symbolism. He was, in Vyborg’s words to Sixth Bureau staff meetings, “his father’s very own son.” He was, in fact, a man whose physical presence to some degree betrayed his personality. He wanted to be a mole who lived in libraries, but he didn’t look like that, and the world didn’t take him that way.

His mother, de Milja thought, would have made a good spy. She was deceptive, manipulative, attractive— people wanted to talk to her. The world she lived in was a corrupt and cynical place where one had to keep one’s guard up at all times, and the probable truth of her opinions had often been the subject of a sort of communal sigh privately shared by de Milja and his father.

But the chief resident intelligence officer for France had to be an executive, not a cartographer. De Milja’s quarterly budget was 600,000 francs; rental of safe houses, agents’ pay, railroad tickets, hotels, endless expenses. Bribes were extra. The money for Huysmanns was extra—and it had been made clear to de Milja that the company had to succeed and profit.

Instinctively, de Milja knew what he would find at Huysmanns Coal. He knew Huysmanns—phlegmatic, northern, Belgian. Profit earned a franc at a time, dogged patience, do we really need all these lights on? Would such a man employ a troupe of merry philosophers?

Never. Thus the man de Milja needed was already in place, right there in Huysmanns’s office overlooking the coal yard by the railroad tracks. Monsieur Zim-maire it was said. Zimmer, an Alsatian, fifty or so, who wore a clean, gray dustcoat every day, buttoned all the way to the knees. At one time or another he’d taken a hand in everything the company did. He’d driven the trucks, hauled sacks of coal, a job that turned the deliveryman black by the second or third call. He talked to the suppliers, the mines in northern France, and he knew the important customers: hospitals and office buildings and workshops. There were two secretaries who kept the books and sent out the bills, Helene and Cybeline. At Zimmer’s suggestion, they fired Cybeline. She was a distant relation of Huysmanns—that didn’t matter to Zimmer or de Milja but she insisted it meant she didn’t have to work. She filed her nails, sipped coffee, gossiped on the phone and flirted with the drivers. As for Helene, who actually did the work, she got a raise.

Zimmer, too, got a raise. He would, in fact, be running the company. “I’ll be seeking out new customers,” was the way de Milja put it. “So I expect to be traveling a good part of the time.”

That was true. The Sixth Bureau had directed him to assist in certain British operations against Luftwaffe units based in France. The nightly bombing was relentless. Something had to be done.

8 March 1941.

West of Bourges, de Milja pedaled a bicycle down a cow path. Early spring morning, raw and chilly, the ground mist lying thick on the fields. Leading the way, a Frenchman called Bonneau. Perhaps thirty, a tank officer wounded and captured in late May of 1940. Sent to a POW camp, a munitions factory near Aachen. Escaped. Recaptured. Escaped again, this time reached France and made it stick.

Riding just ahead of de Milja, Bonneau’s sister Jeanne-Marie, perhaps twenty, thin and intense and avid to fight the Germans. Through a prewar association—something commercial, Bonneau had sold British agricultural equipment in central France—he’d gotten in touch with somebody in London, and his name had been passed to the special services.

De Milja liked him. Forthright, handsome, with a scrupulous sense of honor. The best of the French, de Milja thought, were the incarnations of heroes in boys’ books. Or girls’ books—because the principle was twice as true for the French women. De Milja had seen them face down the Germans more than once; iron-willed idealists, proud and free, and quite prepared to die to keep it that way.

“Bonjour, Monsieur Gache,” Bonneau called out, coasting on his bicycle. Jeanne- Marie echoed the greeting.

Monsieur Gache was a fourteenth-century peasant. He’d loomed up through the milky-gray mist holding a long switch, surrounded by a half-dozen cows, their breaths steaming, bells clanking. He squinted at de Milja from beneath a heavy brow, his glance suspicious and hostile. He knew every pebble and cowpie in these fields—perhaps this stranger was aiming to help himself to a few. Well, he’d know about it soon enough.

It’s spring, start of the war season in Europe, de Milja thought. And Monsieur Gache knew, in some ancient, intuitive sense, exactly who he was and what his appearance meant. Nothing good, certainly. Caesar likely sent somebody up here in the spring of 56 b.c. to take a look at the Gauls—and there was Monsieur Gache and his six cows.

“That’s old Gache,” Bonneau called back to him. “It’s his uncle’s land we’ll be using.”

De Milja grunted assent, implying that it seemed a good idea. He hoped it was. This was something worked out between people in the countryside, such rural arrangements being typically far too complicated to be successfully explained to outsiders.

They pedaled on for fifteen minutes, threading their way among great expanses of plowed black earth separated by patches of old-growth forest, oak and beech, left standing as windbreak. The cow path ended at a small stream and Bonneau dismounted like a ten-yearold, riding a little way on one pedal, then hopping off.

“Oop-la!” he said with a laugh. He grinned cheerfully, a man who meant to like whatever life brought him that day. Wounded during the German attack, he had fought on for twelve hours with only a gunner left alive in his tank.

“Now, sir, we shall have to walk,” Jeanne-Marie said. “For, perhaps, twenty-five minutes.”

“Exactly?” de Milja said.

“In good weather, close to it.”

“If she says it, it’s probably true,” Bonneau said wearily, admiring his sister and teasing her in the same breath.

“Here is the Creuse,” she said, pointing across a field.