The Polish Officer

She almost laughed out loud, so stupid and lost did he look. Then, when she saw the mist clear, she said, “Yes, that.”

“By design?”

She made a face: who could say? Paused a moment, leaned closer, lowered her voice. “Ugly as sin, poor thing. But for everyone there is someone, and for poor Veronique there is poor Kurt. Eighteen, away from home for the first time, short, homely, with bad teeth and bad eyes. In his unit the lowest of the low: he helps the mechanics who fix the aircraft. I believe engine parts are washed in gasoline. Is that so?”

“Yes.”

“He does mostly that. Red hands the result. But he is a conqueror, Monsieur Whatever-you-call-yourself. And he has discovered, in this shapeless lump of a child, le vrai passion. He drives her, I assure you, to the very edge of sanity. No, beyond.”

“And in bed, he tells her things?”

“No, Monsieur. Men don’t tell women things in bed. Men tell women things when they are trying to get them into bed. To let women know how important they are. Once in bed, the time for telling things is over.”

“But Veronique continues.”

“Yes. She loves Kurt. He is her man, hers alone. National borders are here transcended. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“Of course they do chatter, in the way people do, and she tells me things—just to gossip, just to have something to say. They are innocent, Monsieur.”

De Milja nodded sympathetically.

“Someday, you might be asked to do something for Veronique.”

“What is that?”

“Well, national borders are never transcended. Love doesn’t conquer all. In Veronique’s mind, the Germans will be here for forty years. Should she wait until she’s fifty-nine to go on with life? Of course not. Unfortunately for her, I suspect the end of this war may come sooner than forty years. And then, the women who have made love with the enemy will not fare well. The people here who have collaborated silently, skillfully, the ones who talk but do nothing, they will take it out on the poor Veroniques of the world. And they can be very cruel. When this happens, perhaps I will find you, or somebody like you, and you will try to do something for poor Veronique.”

“How do you know these things?”

“I know. I’m a Pole—it came to me in my mother’s milk. Will you help?”

“If I can, I will,” he said. “In the meantime, stop. Don’t do anything—and don’t permit her to do anything—that could lead to exposure. The most important thing now is that nobody finds out what was discovered.”

It rained in Paris. Slowly, endlessly. The bare branches of the chestnut trees dripped water in the gray light. At five in the afternoon, Anton Stein stared out the window above his coal yard. A freight train moved slowly along the track. Its couplings rattled and banged as it maneuvered—stopped, jerked ahead a few feet, stopped, backed up. The board siding of the freight cars and the cast-iron wheels glistened in the rain.

On his desk, March earnings. They were doing well—Zimmer was implacable. All day long, in his clean gray smock, he tended the business. Spillage. Theft. Truck fuel. Suppliers’ invoices with added charges. Defaulting customers. Margin of profit, date of delivery. Anton Stein made money.

And Captain Alexander de Milja spent it.

Rental of the apartment on the rue A, where a W/T operator enciphered and transmitted, moving like a butterfly among a hundred different bands to elude the Funkabwehr technicians. Rental of the apartment on the rue B, where an alternate W/T operator was based. Rental of the villa in the suburb of C, where a wounded British pilot was in hiding. Not to mention the apartment on the avenue Hoche, each window dressed with jabot and festoon.

He was tired now. Spirit worn away by the tide. Clandestine war since September of 1939—it had gone on too long, there’d been too much of it.

He forced his eyes away from the freight cars, back to a sheet of cheap paper on the desk. Huysmanns’s desk. Scarred oak, burns on the edge where somebody had rested a cigarette, little drawers full of used rubber bands and thumbtacks and dried-out inkpads for stamps.

On the paper, in his own informal code, the first draft of a report to London: at the Luftwaffe base at Vannes was Kampfgeschwader 100, a unit of Pathfinders—pilots who flew along a radio beam, called a Knickbein beam because it had the shape of a dog leg. The job of these Pathfinders was to lead flights of bombers to the target, then drop incendiaries, to light fires for the guidance of the planes behind them.

What Veronique the shop clerk had found out was this: the pilots of Kampfgeschwader 100 did not live on the base in barracks, they lived in various billets in the town of Vannes, and on the afternoon before a mission they traveled to the field by bus. All together, maybe thirty of them, slated to lead various night attacks against British targets. De Milja knew what happened next. He went to the movie theaters on the Champs-Elysees where they showed German newsreels—always with the lights on, because in darkness the French audience made rude noises—of the bombing raids. So he had seen the burning factories, and the bridges down in the rivers, and the firemen weeping with exhaustion.

All together, maybe thirty of them, traveled to the field by bus.

On the Route Nationale—the RN18—that traced the coast of Brittany: from Brest south to Quimper, L’Orient, then Vannes. The airfield was twelve miles from the outskirts of Vannes, and there were several points of interest along the way. A curve with a rock outcropping to the east, a grove of stunted beach pine to the west, between the road and the sea. Or perhaps the old fish cannery, abandoned in ’38, with rows of dark windows, the glass long ago broken out.

Block the road. A coal truck—somebody else’s coal truck—would do that nicely. You’d want six—no eight— operatives. Take the driver and the tires. Then you had leisure for the pilots. Fragmentation grenades in the windows, then someone with a carbine in the bus. Short range, multiple rounds.

Thirty Pathfinder pilots. All that training, experience, talent. Hard to replace. The ratio of bravado to skill was nearly one to one. Flying an aeroplane along a transmitted beam meant constant correction as you drifted and the signal tone faded. Flying at the apex of the attack meant searchlights and flak—you had to have a real demon in you to want to do that.

“Monsieur Stein?”

He looked up from the wood-flecked paper, initials and numbers, a curving line for a road, a rectangle for a blocking truck. Helene was holding a large leatherbound book. “Monsieur Zimmer asked that these be sent out today, Monsieur.” She left the book on Stein’s desk and returned to work.

Inside the leather cover were checks for him to sign—a typical practice in a French office. He made sure his pen had ink and went to work—Anton Stein, Anton Stein. The payees were coal mines up in Metz, mostly. He was permitted to buy what was left over after the Germans, paying with absurdly inflated currency, took what they wanted and shipped it east. Just after the New Year the Germans had returned the ashes of Napoleon’s son, L’Aiglon, to France. Thus the joke of the week: they take our coal and send us back ashes.

Two more to sign. One a donation, to the Comite FranceAllemagne, in business since 1933 to foster Franco-German harmony and understanding. Well, they’d fostered it all right—now the French had just about all the harmony and understanding anybody could want. The other check was made out to Anton Stein for ten thousand francs. His night money.

At the avenue Matignon, the evening performance with Madame Roubier. “Oh, oh,” she cried out. Under the guise of nuzzling her pale neck he got a view of his watch. 8:25. Outside, the air-raid sirens began. Gently, he unwound himself from her, stood by the bed and turned off the pink bed-table lamp that made her skin glow. Opened the window, then the shutter, just a crack.

Circles of light against the clouds, then arching yellow flames and golden fire that seemed to drip back down toward the dark earth. Kids would be in the parks tomorrow, he thought, adding to their shrapnel collections. A sharp fingernail traveled across his bare backside.