know they are doing that, too, then they are acting, according to their own rules, like people fighting in an enemy country among enemies.”
“It was certainly that way in Krymno,” de Milja said. “And we were asked—that’s not really the word for the way it was put—to follow them to their camp.”
“Two of our people, in the northern Polesian district, did just that. They believed they were going somewhere to sit down and work out an agreement. One is dead. The other, we’re told, is in the Lubianka. So we are both fighting the Germans, but we are not allies.”
He stopped a moment, considered what he would say next. “So,” he said. “We, I mean London and Warsaw, we are interested in the story of Sergeant Krewinski, the brother of the man captured in the attack on the repair train.”
“The man in Rovno prison?”
“Yes. What we want you to do now, Captain, is to force Rovno prison. Liberate Krewinski—and two ZWZ officers who are also being held there. All are going to be executed.”
De Milja met the major’s eyes, but his look was opaque and distant. There’d been three attempts on German prisons that de Milja knew about, all had failed. Then he understood: this was a committee at work, and if they assigned what was in effect a suicide mission, there was nothing Olenik could do about it.
“It’s right away, then?” de Milja said.
Olenik spread his hands:
That completed Major Olenik’s work and he left the city by train the following evening. As a notional waterworks engineer, his papers allowed him to travel anywhere within German-occupied lands. He handed over to de Milja a group of code and contact procedures: ZWZ officers and operatives in the district were at his disposal. Explosives, weapons, whatever he needed was available.
De Milja returned to the forest, explaining to Razakavia what had to be done. The first step was to move the encampment, from huts in a clearing to an abandoned farm at the edge of a wood about ten miles from Rovno. The farm would serve as a reception base for the freed prisoners and some members of the attack commando. A doctor and nurse would set up an aid station at the farmhouse twenty-four hours before the attack.
Back in Rovno he made contact with a local ZWZ operative known as Vlach, a man in his late twenties, with tipped-up nose, carefully combed blond hair and a wise-guy curl to his lip. The ZWZ ran, in general, to more sober and stable personalities—Vlach had replaced one of those very gentlemen in late July. Had survived, had impressed Major Olenik; those were his credentials. At Vlach’s suggestion they met in a tearoom in Rovno’s central square, a very proper place, where German officials’ wives and girlfriends could drink tea with extended pinkies and nibble at mounds of pale-green petits fours. “Ha ha,” Vlach laughed. “Who would look for us here?”
Then he grew serious. “We can get you anything you like,” he said. “Cars, trucks, you say what.”
“How can you do that?”
“We all do the same thing here, everybody who you-know-what. See, the Luftwaffe and the panzer tanks, they can really do the job. Whatever the Russians had here is flat, gone. I never saw such a mess; staff cars on top of each other, railroad tracks peeled straight up into the air, airfields turned into junkyards. So now it’s conquered, so now it all has to be rebuilt.
“So, just about the time the Wehrmacht shot the last sniper and hanged the last commissar, the big German construction companies came in. Ho, ho—Ve gonna make money now, Fritz! The military authority told them what they needed—airfields, barracks, airplane hangars, oil-storage tanks—exactly what they just finished blowing up. Plus, as long as they were at it, roads, which they never had here.
“So, the construction companies get all these contracts, but when they finished rubbing their hands and winking at each other, it begins to dawn on them that they’re going to have to find somebody to do the work. Ah, not so easy. Can’t bring in people from Germany, either they’re building airplanes and submarines back in Essen, or they’re shooting more Russians, six hundred miles east of here. See, when you shoot a Russian, somebody puts another one down, but they haven’t figured that out yet.
“Anyhow, they’re going to have to use local labor. We started by getting one guy hired. Every German’s dream of what a Pole should be—cooperative, friendly, religious, trustworthy. A fifty-five-year-old man, a machinist all his life, Henryk. So all the Germans loved Henryk. They could count on him, he never drank, he never stole, he never answered back, and you said be at the job site at five-thirty in the morning, and there he was.”
Vlach blew out his cheeks to make a fat German face. “‘Henryk, mein friend, maybe you haff a cousin?’ Well, guess what, he does. He has also an uncle, an aunt, a long-lost friend, a nephew—that’s me— and about eighteen more, one way and another. We go anywhere we like, we have company trucks, two Opel automobiles. If we want to carry something that’s—unusual, you understand, we can request a Wehrmacht driver. When they’re behind the wheel, nobody even pretends to look.”
Respectable little man, tortoiseshell spectacles gave him a slight resemblance to the American comedian Harold Lloyd. Except that Harold Lloyd would have bought new glasses if he’d cracked a lens.
“The Russians put him in a camp in ’39,” Vlach said.
“How did you get out?” de Milja asked.
“I escaped,” the man said.
He sat with de Milja and Vlach in the apartment, a map of Rovno unfolded on the kitchen table. “From the central telephone exchange, which is here, there are three lines that leave Rovno.” He pointed, his hands cracked and peeling from working as a dishwasher in a restaurant. “The main line goes west, to Lutsk. Then we had a branch north, to Klesow, and one south, to Ostrog. From there a line went to Kiev— but it was often cut, or blocked. The Russians interfered any way they could.”
“And the wireless telegraph—is that something you knew about?” The man had been the regional accounting supervisor for the telephone system before the war.
“There were five stations,” he said.
“So if we disabled those, and cut the telephone lines—”
“They would use the military wireless. I don’t think you can silence them, sir.”
The prison guard had never liked his work. They paid him slave wages to sit on the lid of a garbage can, the way he saw it. But it was better than nothing, so he did what he had to do. A mean existence; everything had to be watched, saved, rationed: lightbulbs, soap, coal, meat. He’d never, not once, had a lot of something he liked. His kids were gone, had their own sorry lives. His wife was still with him, mostly the Church to thank for that, but whatever had once been inside her had died years ago. For himself, he sat in a bar after work and soaked up vodka until he was numb enough to go home. He would have liked, once he got older, to go back to the countryside where he’d been raised. Since the war you could buy a small farm, it didn’t take much, just more than he’d ever had.
So when the offer came, he didn’t say no. They’d probably watched him, the way he looked, the misery in his step. The old man who made the offer wasn’t such a bad sort. Polish, with the sharp cheekbones like they had sometimes. And educated, maybe very educated. “You’ve had enough bad weather,” the old man said. “Time to take a walk in the sunshine.” Then he mentioned an amount of money, and the guard just nodded.
“You don’t have to do anything,” the old man said. “Just draw what’s inside, the corridors and the offices and the cells, and show me how it’s numbered.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“They don’t tell me. It’s the Russians gave me this job.”
“Bandits. We have some of them locked up.”
“Just draw and number.”
“I’ll take care of it at home,” the guard said.
The old man put a sheet of paper and a pencil in front of him. “Why not right now? There’s nobody here.”
So the guard did it. And when his mind raced as he lay in bed that night—should he tell, could he sell the old man to the Germans, should he have demanded more money?—he realized that his childish drawing was as good as a signed confession. That scared him. So he hid the money under the mattress and kept quiet.
Vlach and de Milja shivered in the cold of the unheated garage. Outside the snow whispered down, the air frozen and still. Henryk was exactly as Vlach had described him, square-jawed and square-shouldered, sleeves and collar buttoned up. An honest man, not a crooked bone in his body. It just happened that he was a patriot, and the construction executives hadn’t really thought that through.
Henryk was lying on his back under a large German truck, working with a wrench. His face reddened as one
