The Spies of Warsaw

“Gluck?” Willi said.

“Obersturmbannfuhrer, my boss.”

“Oh, that prick,” Willi said, expelling a long plume of cigar smoke.

“Lawyer prick,” Meino said. “No?”

“Yes, before he discovered the party. Opportunist.” Voss spat the word. “I said something about getting even, but that made him even madder.”

“So what? You can’t let it end there,” Willi said.

“Willi’s right,” Meino said. “I hate these French fairies-they think they own the world.”

“This one needs to be taught a lesson,” Voss said.

“That’s right, Augi,” Meino said. “You can’t let him get away with it.”

Voss thought for a moment. “Maybe we ought to pay him a visit, up in Warsaw. The three of us. Bring some friends along.”

“Jah,” Willi said. “Mucki Drimmer.” Then he laughed.

“Where’s old Mucki, these days?” Meino said.

“Dachau,” Willi said. “Just under the commandant. I once saw him tear a telephone book in half.”

“Isn’t that a trick?” Voss said.

“Drimmer does tricks, all right. But not with telephone books. Tricks with a pair of pliers, and handcuffs, that’s Mucki’s style.”

Voss laughed, then looked at his empty glass. “Back to the bar, for me.”

Willi gave Voss an affectionate smack on the shoulder, people nearby turned around at the sound of it. “Cheer up, Augi, we’ll put this right. Too long since I’ve been in Warsaw.”

Then they went off to the bar.

23 December.

Mercier’s flight to Paris on the twenty-second had been delayed, and they’d landed at Le Bourget in darkness. He’d stayed at the apartment, cold and silent with Albertine off in Aleppo, decided he couldn’t face dinner in a restaurant, so went to bed hungry, and feeling very much alone. He was glad to be out of there, at six the following morning, taking the express to Lyon, then changing to the local for the trip down to Montelimar. And there stood Fernand, in his Sunday suit, by the battered old farm truck, smiling as Mercier walked toward him.

The truck, not much bigger than a car, had been a Renault back in the twenties but had become, over time, a collection of replacement parts cannibalized from every sort of machine. A handsome green, long ago, it had faded to the color of a gray cloud, the seat a horse blanket atop crushed springs, the two dials on the dashboard frozen in middle age, the gearshift sounding like a madman with a hammer. The engine managed a steady twenty miles an hour on a flat grade, but hills were an adventure meant only for the brave. It took them over two hours to reach Boutillon and then, twenty minutes later, at the end of a long allee of ancient lime trees, the house.

Still there, his heart rose at the sight of it. Not fallen into ruin, not quite, but surely dilapidated, the shutters askew, the earlier stonework laid bare in patches. Even so, a grand presence-foreign visitors wanted to call it a chateau, but it was just an old stone country house. Nevertheless, home. Home. Lisette stood before the door, alerted by the dogs, who’d heard the truck coming from a great distance down the road, as had most of the neighborhood. The dogs came galloping up the drive, barking like crazy, then ran alongside until the truck rolled to a halt, the ignition was turned off, and, a few beats later, the engine stopped.

They were excited to have him back, Achille and Celeste, a reserved excitement in the manner of the Braque Ariegeois: a muted whine or two, a lick on the cheek as he knelt and tousled their lovely floppy ears. Master greeted, they immediately wanted to go to field, anxious to work for him, their highest form of affection. “Not yet, sweethearts. Later on. Later.” For now, Lisette made him an omelet, which he ate at the zinc-topped table in the kitchen; there was fresh bread from the Boutillon bakery and a glass of wine from a bottle with no label. As Lisette cleared his plate, Fernand brought him a telegram that had arrived that morning: home the 27th. gabrielle. “Madame Gabrielle will arrive on Friday,” he said.

“I will make up her old room,” Lisette said simply. But Mercier could tell that she was very nearly as excited as he was.

It was getting late in the afternoon, so he changed into his country clothes, smelling of months in a damp armoire, and took the dogs for a run. They pointed on birds, were released, then flushed a hare, which zigzagged away and just barely managed to get down a hole. Balked, they stood there, heads canted in puzzlement- why does this happen? — then turned to him, awaiting an answer, but even he, master of all, could do nothing. He stood by them, gazing over the pale winter field toward the mountains in the east. Then he walked for a long time, as dusk came on, at least some of the way across his property, once a run of wheat fields but now, since the 1920s, given over to the commercial growth of lavender.

Lavender had always grown wild in the Drome, but the agronomists had learned how to grow it as a crop, and the perfume companies in Grasse paid well for whatever he could deliver. At harvest time, the air was heavy with the scent, as a few trucks, but mostly horse-drawn carts, piled high with purplish branches, moved slowly along the narrow roads. Enough money to live on, back when, but not now; life as a penurious country gentleman awaited him if he resigned his commission. The property-line lawsuit brought by his eastern neighbor had dragged on for years; bills from a lawyer in Montelimar arrived semiannually. Fernand and Lisette were paid for their service, wood and kerosene had to be bought in winter, straw and hay provided for Ambrose, the plow horse now living alone in a stable with eight stalls-a sad thing for a family with generations of cavalry officers-and Ambrose wasn’t getting any younger. Gasoline for the truck, field help at harvest time, and taxes-oh, the taxes-it all added up.

Full dusk now, in typical winter weather for the south, the chill, moist air sharpened by a steady wind from the east. Foreign visitors called it the mistral, but that was the northwesterly and went on for days, famously making people crazy-an old law excused crimes committed from madness brought on by the incessant moaning of the mistral wind. He didn’t want to go back to the house, not yet, he would turn for home at the end of the field, by a cluster of gnarled olive trees and a few cypress, tall and narrow. This land, like so much of the French countryside, was a painting, but Mercier felt his heart touched with melancholy and realized, not for the first time, that beautiful places were hard on lonely people.

“Achille! Celeste! Let’s go, dogs, time for dinner.”

They came loping across the field, tongues out now because they were tired, and headed for home.

He stayed up late that night, reading in bed, wearing a sweater over his pajama top in order to stay warm. The kerosene heater had been turned on as darkness fell, and, when he went up to his room, found that Lisette had preceded him with a lidded copper pan on a long handle, filled with embers from the fireplace, and warmed the sheets, but the stone house breathed winter into every room, and you had to sleep with your nose beneath the covers.

The journals he’d brought with him from Warsaw should have put him to sleep, but they had the opposite effect. With smoke drifting up from a cigarette in the ashtray on the night table, he worked his way through an article in a journal called Deutsche Wehr-German War-one of several publications issued by the German General Staff. The writer made no secret of what Germany had in mind for the future: an army of three hundred divisions, sufficient fuel for ten thousand tanks and the same number of aircraft, and a prediction that medium and heavy tanks would be built to join the lighter models already in production. If the Deuxieme Bureau had been clever enough or lucky enough to steal such information, it would have caused a riptide of reaction-meetings held and papers written as French military doctrine was re-examined in light of German intentions, yet here it was, for all the world to see. Did they read this journal in Paris? And, if they did, did they believe it? Or did they think that because it wasn’t kept secret, it couldn’t be true? Woe to us if they do, Mercier thought, and took a drag on his cigarette.

Turning to the Militarwissenschaftliche Rundschau, the military science review, he found an article by the chief of staff of the German Armoured Corps that discussed an attack in the north, a massive tank thrust through the Ardennes into Belgium and down into France, the same route they’d followed in the 1914 war and more or less what he’d witnessed at the Schramberg tank maneuvers. He’d sent the film off to Paris, with a