The Polish Officer

They could see it from the hill, a ribbon of quiet water that flowed through brush-lined banks and joined, a few miles downstream near the town of Tournon, the Gartempe. This in turn became part of the Loire, and all of it eventually emptied into the Atlantic at the port of Saint-Nazaire.

What mattered was the confluence of the rivers—a geographical feature visible from an airplane flying on a moonlit night. They walked on in silence. The field was a good distance from any road, and therefore a good distance from German motorized transport. If the Germans saw parachutes floating from the sky, they were going to have to organize an overland expedition to go see about the problem.

The field itself had been chosen, de Milja thought, with great care. “It’s Jeanne-Marie’s choice,” Bonneau explained. “She is a serious naturalist—turns up everywhere in the countryside, so nobody notices what she does.”

“I’ve paced it more than once,” Jeanne-Marie said. “It is as suggested, about 650 by 250 yards.”

They walked its perimeter. “There were stumps, but I had our workmen haul them out with the plow horses.” Silently, on behalf of a descending parachutist, de Milja was grateful for her forethought. He saw also that somebody had moved big stones to one side of the field.

“How many people will you have?” de Milja asked.

“Four, perhaps. Six altogether.”

“You’ll need brushwood for your fires. It’s best to store it under canvas to keep it dry. Then the fires should be set in the shape of an arrow, giving wind direction.”

“Yes,” Jeanne-Marie said. “We know that.”

De Milja smiled at her. The mysterious foreigner who came from nowhere and told them things they already knew. She stood, holding her bicycle by the handlebars, in front of a huge French spring sky; a few strands of hair had escaped from the front of her kerchief and she brushed them back impatiently.

“Shall we have something before we go back?” Bonneau said.

Jeanne-Marie grinned to herself and nodded yes. She untied a cloth-wrapped packet from the back of her bicycle. They sat on the rim of the field—true to the suggested standard, Jeanne-Marie had located a slightly concave area—and ate bread and crumbly farm cheese and last fall’s apples, dried-out and sweet.

“Something must be done, and we hope it is soon,” Bonneau said. “The people here don’t like the Germans, but they are drifting. Petain speaks on the radio and says that all this has happened to us because France was immoral and self-indulgent. A number of people believe that, others will do whatever makes them comfortable at that moment. One lately hears the word attentisme—the philosophy of waiting. Do nothing, we’ll see what happens next. This is dangerous for France, because here we don’t really live in a country, you know. We live in our houses with our families, that’s our true nationality, and what’s best is determined from that point of view.”

It was Jeanne-Marie who answered her brother. “The English will do what they can,” she said, a snap in her voice. “But not from any tender feeling for the French. We’re allies, not friends.”

“Again she’s right,” de Milja said.

A local train west, then to Nantes, then north on a series of locals. Very, very careful now, he told himself. Where he was going the Germans were sensitive, because they had a secret.

As the train rolled to a stop at each little town, de Milja could see he was in the country of Madame Roubier. Brittany. Tall redheads with fair, freckled skin. Sharp-eyed—not easily fooled. Often venal, because it was them against the world, had always been so, and this unending war was fought with wealth.

It was late afternoon when he reached the town of Vannes, down the coast of Brittany from L’Orient, one of the bomber fields used in the Luftwaffe campaign against Britain. North from Vannes was Brest—on the south shore of the widening English Channel, across from Plymouth, on the Cornish coast. No doubt about the bomber field, Vannes railroad station was full of German airmen, returning from leave or heading off to sinful Paris for ten days.

De Milja kept his eyes down. Cheap leather briefcase in hand, felt hat with brim turned down, well-worn blue suit. A provincial lawyer, perhaps, snuffling out a living from feuding heirs and stubborn property owners and the tax indiscretions of petits commercants. He walked for a long time, toward the edge of town. No more Germans. Sidewalks that narrowed, then vanished. Old women with string bags, a few cats. The neighborhood darkened—buildings crumbling softly into genteel poverty, a grocery store with a sign on the boarded window: ferme.

Finally, a confiserie—a candy shop, the miniature gold-foil packets of chocolates in the window covered with a layer of fine dust. A bell jangled above the door as he entered and a young girl stood to attention behind the counter. She was very plain, skin and hair the same washed-out color, and wore a tight sweater that was more hopeful than seductive. The smell of candied violets and burnt sugar was intense in the dark interior of the shop. It made de Milja feel slightly queasy.

“Mademoiselle Herault?” he asked the clerk.

“In back, Monsieur.” Her voice was tiny.

Mademoiselle Herault sat at a desk in the office. She was in her forties, he guessed. But older than her years. A hard face, lined and severe. As though she dealt in candy from contempt for human appetite, not a desire to sell the world something sweet. Or maybe it was the silent store, the trays of stale orange drops, a small business failing by slow, agonizing degrees.

He identified himself—Guillaume for this meeting, and her eyes searched his, to see if he could be trusted. She was, he thought, not a particularly attractive woman, but she had probably never lacked for lovers, being one of those women who understands that attraction hasn’t much to do with it.

“May I take a minute of your time?” he asked.

She looked at him a little sideways—minutes, hours, she had nothing but time. Very slowly she worked a Gauloise free of its pack, tapped one end against her thumbnail, held it in her mouth with thumb and forefinger, handed de Milja a box of matches and leaned toward him so he could light it. “Thank you,” she said.

She opened a drawer in the desk, searched through papers, found an unsealed envelope and handed it to him. “Here it is,” she said.

He took out what looked like a polite note, written in purple ink on bordered paper sold in stationery stores. His eyes ran along the lines, trying to decipher the penmanship. Then, when he realized what he had, he read it through again.

“This is—this is extremely important,” he said.

She nodded in a sort of vague agreement—yes, so it seemed to her. She drew on her Gauloise and blew a plume of smoke at the ceiling.

“Was there a reason you did so much? The occupation?”

“No,” she said. “I am not French,” she added.

“What then?”

“I’m a Pole, though I’ve lived here a long time.”

De Milja came close to responding in Polish. He wanted to—then raged at himself for being so stupid. Guillaume was Guillaume— nobody. “Herault?” he said.

She shrugged. “That was my father’s attempt to fit in.”

“Did he fit in?”

“No,” she said. They were silent for a moment. “I don’t think I’ll tell you any reasons,” she said. “For what I’ve done, that is. I don’t especially believe in reasons.”

De Milja ran his eyes back over the paper. Kampfgeschwader 100, Pathfinder, Knickbein beam. De Milja was stunned at the quality of what he had in hand. He’d gotten the woman’s name from Fedin—an old contact from the late ’30s, nothing very productive, but an address that placed her, quite by accident, on the front line of the German offensive against Britain. Fedin had made the initial contact, then a signal from Vannes reached Paris that meant I have something for you. But this was well beyond anything de Milja had expected.

“Please, Mademoiselle. I must ask you to tell me how you managed this.”

A ghost of a smile passed over the woman’s face. She found his urgency a little bit pleasing. She nodded her head toward the front of the shop. “Veronique,” she said.

“Who?”

“My little clerk.”