The Spies of Warsaw

“We’re in search of an ashtray,” Mercier said.

“Over by the food. Try the smoked sturgeon while you’re there, it’s from the chef at the Bristol.” Again the wind moaned. “Oh my,” Madame Dupin said. A brief shower of hail rattled furiously against the greenhouse. “Listen to it, perhaps we’ll have to stay all night.” She scowled up at the heavens, the embattled hostess, then said, “I’m off, my dears. Please try and circulate.”

When she’d gone, Anna said, “Maybe we should.”

Mercier shrugged. “Why?”

She grinned. “Such a scoundrel,” she said, and gave him a playful push on the shoulder.

“Oh yes, that’s me,” he said, meaning very much the opposite, but wishing it were so.

At the food table they found an ashtray, then tried the sturgeon, the smoked trout, and salmon roe with chopped egg on toast. Anna ate with zeal, once making a small sound of satisfaction when one of the hors d’oeuvres was especially good. Next, back to the bar for another vodka, and they clinked glasses before they drank. Outside, the storm began to beat wildly against the glass.

“Maybe we’ll have to stay all night,” Mercier said.

“Please!” she said. “You’ll get me in trouble.”

“Well, at least let me see you home.”

“Thank you,” she said. “That I would like.”

Twenty minutes later, they said good night to Shublin and Madame Dupin and left the greenhouse. Mercier looked around for a taxi, but the street was deserted. “Which way is home?” he said.

She pointed and said, “Up there. It’s a block off Marszalkowska, where we can take a trolley car, or we’re much more likely to find a taxi.”

They set off, heading west, then north, against the wind, which howled and moaned in the narrow street, sent a sheet of newspaper flying past, and made it difficult to walk. It wasn’t so bad at first, but soon enough striding boldly into the storm changed to walking sideways, hunched over, eyes half shut, the hail stinging their faces. “Damn!” she said. “This is worse than I thought.”

Mercier kept searching for a taxi, but there wasn’t a headlight to be seen anywhere.

“I’m going to have to hang on to you,” she said. “Do you mind?”

“Not at all.”

She held his arm with both her own, tight against her body, and hid her face behind his shoulder. Moving slowly, they made their way to Marszalkowska avenue, the Broadway of Warsaw. “How much further?” Mercier said. He sensed she wasn’t doing well.

“Twenty minutes, on a nice day.”

She was trembling, he could feel it, and, when he turned to look at her, there were frost crystals in her eyelashes. “Maybe we’d better get inside somewhere,” he said. The cold was brutal, her sweater thin, and her winter coat more stylish than warm.

“Allright. Where?”

“I don’t know. The next place we see.” Up and down the avenue, the Marszalkowska cafes and restaurants were shuttered and dark. In the distance, a man made slow progress, holding his hat on his head, and the streetlamps, coated with ice, glowed dimly on the whitened pavement, with not a tire track to be seen.

“My father used to talk about these storms,” she said. “They blow down from Siberia, a gift to Poland from Russia.” Her teeth chattered, and she held him tighter.

Mercier had begun to consider doorways, maybe even trying the door of one of the cars parked on the avenue, when he saw, up ahead somewhere, light shining on the sidewalk. “Whatever that is,” he said, “that’s where we’re going.”

He felt her nod, urgently: yes, anything.

The light came from a movie theatre, from a ticket booth set back beneath a small marquee. The old lady in the booth wore one shawl over her head and another around her shoulders. As Mercier paid, she said, “You shouldn’t be out in this, my children.”

In the theatre, the audience, unaware of the storm outside, was laughing and having a good time. Mercier found seats and rubbed his frozen hands.

“That was awful,” Anna said. “Really. Awful.”

“Maybe it will die down,” Mercier said. “At least we’ll be warm for a while.”

On the screen, a diminutive soldier with a Hitler mustache was saluting an officer, a vigorous salute yet somehow wrong-a parody of a salute. A close-up of the officer’s face showed a man at the end of his patience. He spoke angrily; the soldier tried again. Worse. He was the classic recruit who, believing he has assumed a military posture, only manages to mock the prescribed form. Mercier leaned over and whispered, “Do you know what we’re watching?”

” ‘Dodek na froncie,‘ Dodek Goes to War. That’s Adolf Dymsza.”

“I know that name.”

“The Polish Charlie Chaplin.”

“Have you seen it?”

“No, actually I haven’t.” After a moment, with a laugh in her voice, she said, “Were you concerned?”

“Of course,” he said.

“You can be very droll, colonel.”

“Jean-Francois.”

“Very well. Jean-Francois.”

From behind them: “Shhhh!”

“Sorry.”

Mercier tried; but the film was more romantic comedy than farce, and the hiss and crackle of the sound track was particularly loud, so he missed much of the dialogue, and that’s what was making the audience laugh. At one point, Anna also laughed, and Mercier whispered, “What did he say?”

In order not to annoy the man behind them, she whispered by his ear. “In French, it’s ‘That’s odd, my dog said the same thing.’ ” But then, she didn’t turn away, she waited, and, when he turned toward her, her eyes closed and they kissed-tenderly, her lips dry, moving softly against his. After a few long seconds, she sat back in her seat, but her shoulder rested against his, and there it stayed.

Forty minutes later, the film ended and they had to leave the theatre. The storm had not abated. They walked quickly, her hands in the pockets of her coat; neither one of them wanted to be the first to speak. Then, as the silence grew heavy, Mercier saw a horse cab. He waved and shouted, the driver stopped, and Mercier took Anna’s hand and helped her into the carriage. This might have been an opportunity sent down by the gods of romance, but it wasn’t to be. Anna was quiet, and thoughtful. Mercier tried to start a light conversation, but she, politely enough, made it clear that talking was not what she wanted to do, so he sat in silence as the intrepid horse, its blanket covered with melting hail, clopped along the avenue until Anna directed the coachman to turn into the street that Mercier remembered from the night he’d taken her to the Europejski.

He helped her out of the carriage as he asked the driver to wait-he would take the cab back home-then the two of them stood facing each other. Before he could say anything, she put her hand flat against his chest and held it there-a gesture that silenced him, yet somehow, and he felt it strongly, meant also attraction-desire mixed with regret. He could see in her face that she was troubled: about what had happened in the movie theatre, about what had happened all evening. “Good night,” she said, “Jean-Francois.”

“May I see you again?”

“I don’t know. Maybe better if we don’t.”

“Then, good night.”

“Yes, good night.”

In Paris, during Mercier’s meeting with the people at the Deuxieme Bureau, the Wehrmacht‘s planned tank maneuvers at Schramberg had been discussed at length. And so, on the tenth of December, four German agents of the Service des Renseignements had been sent into the town: an elderly gentleman and his wife, who were to celebrate their wedding anniversary by walking the low hills of the Black Forest; a salesman of kitchenwares from Stuttgart, calling on the local shops;