The Spies of Warsaw

In a muted baritone, Mercier sang an old French ballad, which had haunted him for years. A dumb thing, but it had a catchy melody, sad and sweet. Poor petite Jeanette, how she adored her departed lover, how she remembered him, “encore et encore.” Jeanette may have remembered, Mercier didn’t, so he sang the chorus and hummed the rest, turning slowly in the streaming water.

When he heard the bathroom door open, and close, he stopped. Through the heavy cotton of the shower curtain he could see a silhouette, which divested itself of shirt and shorts. Then, slowly, drew the curtain aside, its rings scraping along the metal bar. Standing there, in a cloud of steam, a lavender-colored cake of soap in one hand, was the Princess Antowina Brosowicz. Without clothes, she seemed small but, again like a doll, perfectly proportioned. With an impish smile, she reached a hand toward him and, using her fingernail, drew a line down the wet hair plastered to his chest. “That’s nice,” she said. “I can draw a picture on you.” Then, after a moment, “Are you going to invite me in, Jean-Francois?”

“Of course.” His laugh was not quite a nervous laugh, but close. “You surprised me.”

She entered the shower, closed the curtain, stepped toward him so that the tips of her breasts just barely touched his chest, stood on her toes, and kissed him lightly on the lips. “I meant to,” she said. Then she handed him the lavender soap. Only a princess, he thought, would join a man in the shower but disdain the use of the guest soap.

She turned once around beneath the spray, raised her face to the water, and finger-combed her hair back. Then she leaned on the tile wall with both hands and said, “Would you be kind enough to wash my back?”

“With pleasure,” he said.

“What was that you were singing?”

“An old French song. It stays with me, I don’t know why.”

“Oh, reasons,” she said, who knew why anything happened.

“Do you sing in the shower?”

She turned her head so that he could see that she was smiling. “Perhaps in a little while, I will.”

The skin of her back was still lightly tanned from the summer sun, then, below the curved line of her bathing suit, very white. He worked up a creamy lather, put the soap in a dish on the wall, and slid his hands up and down, sideways, round and round.

“Mmm,” she said. Then, “Don’t neglect my front, dear.”

He re-soaped his hands and reached around her. As the water drummed down on them, the white part of her, warm and slippery, gradually turned a rosy pink. And, in time, she did sing, or something like it, and, even though they were there for quite some time, the hot water never ran out.

17 October, 5:15 A.M. Crossing the Vistula in a crowded trolley car, Mercier leaned on a steel pole at the rear. He wore a battered hat, the front of the brim low on his forehead, and a grimy overcoat, purchased from a used-clothing pushcart in the poor Jewish district. He carried a cheap briefcase beneath his arm and looked, he thought, like some lost soul sentenced to live in a Russian novel. The workers packed inside the trolley, facing a long day in the Praga factories, were grim-faced and silent, staring out the windows at the gray dawn and the gray river below the railway bridge.

At the third stop in Praga, Mercier stepped down from the rear platform, just past the Wedel candy factory, the smell of burned sugar strong in the raw morning air. He walked the length of the factory, crossed to a street of brick tenements, then on to a row of workshops, machinery rattling and whining inside the clapboard sheds. At one of them, the high doors had been rolled apart, and he could see dark shapes shoveling coal into open furnaces, the fires flaring yellow and orange.

He turned down an alley to a nameless little bar, open at dawn, crowded with workers who needed a shot or two in order to get themselves into the factories. Here too it was silent. The men at the bar drank off their shots, left a few groszy by their empty glasses, and walked out. At a table on the opposite wall, Edvard Uhl, the engineer from Breslau, sat stolidly with a coffee and a Polish newspaper, folded on the table by his cup and saucer.

Mercier sat across from him and said good morning. He spoke German, badly and slowly, but he could manage. As the language of France’s traditional enemy, German had been a compulsory course at Saint-Cyr.

Uhl looked up at him and nodded.

“All goes well with you,” Mercier said. It wasn’t precisely a question.

“Best I can expect.” Poor me. He didn’t much like the business they did together. He was, Mercier could see it in his face, reluctant, and frightened. Maybe life had gone better with Mercier’s predecessor, “Henri,” Emile Bruner, now a full colonel and Mercier’s superior at the General Staff, but he doubted it. “Considering what I must do,” Uhl added.

Mercier shrugged. What did he care? For him, best to be cold and formal at agent meetings-they had a commercial arrangement; friendship was not required. “What have you brought?”

“We’re retooling for the Ausf B.” He meant the B version of the Panzerkampfwagen 1, the Wehrmacht‘s battle tank. “I have the first diagrams for the new turret.”

“What’s different?”

“It’s a new design, from the Krupp works; the turret will now be made to rotate, three hundred and sixty degrees, a hand traverse operated by the gunner.”

“And the armour?”

“The same. Thirteen millimeters on the sides, eight millimeters on the top of the turret, six millimeters on the top and bottom of the hull. But now the plates are to be face-hardened-that means carbon cementation, very expensive but the strength is greatly increased.”

“From stopping rifle and machine-gun fire to stopping antitank weapons.”

“So it would seem.”

Mercier thought for a moment. The Panzerkampfwagen 1A had not done well in Spain, where it had been used by Franco’s forces against the Soviet T-26. Armed only with a pair of 7.92-millimeter machine guns in the turret, it was effective against infantry but could not defeat an armoured enemy tank. Now, with the 1B, they were preparing for a different kind of combat. Finally he said, “All right, we’ll have a look at it. And next time we’d like to see the face-hardening process you’re using, the formula.”

“Next time,” Uhl said. “Well, I’m not sure I’ll be able …”

Mercier cut him off. “Fifteen November. If there’s an emergency, a real emergency, you have a telephone number.”

“What would happen if I just couldn’t be here?”

“We will reschedule.” Mercier paused. “But it’s not at all easy for us, if we have to do that.”

“Yes, but there’s always the possibility …”

“You will manage, Herr Uhl. We know you are resourceful, there are always problems in this sort of work; we expect you to deal with them.”

Uhl started to speak, but Mercier raised his hand. Then he opened his briefcase and withdrew a folded Polish newspaper and a slip of paper, typewritten and then copied on a roneo duplicator: a receipt form, with date, amount, and Uhl’s name typed on the appropriate lines, and a line for signature at the bottom. “Do you need a pen?” Mercier said.

Uhl reached into an inside pocket, withdrew a fountain pen, then signed his name at the bottom of the receipt. Mercier put the slip of paper in his briefcase and slid the newspaper toward Uhl. “A thousand zloty,” he said. He peeled up a corner of Uhl’s newspaper, revealing the edges of engineering diagrams.

Uhl took Mercier’s folded newspaper, secured it tightly beneath his arm, then rose to leave.

“Fifteen November,” Mercier said. “We’ll meet here, at the same time.”

A very subdued Herr Uhl nodded in agreement, mumbled a goodby, and left the bar.

Mercier looked at his watch-the rules said he had to give Uhl a twenty-minute head start. A pair of workers, in gray oil-stained jackets and trousers, entered the bar and ordered vodka and beer. One of them glanced over at Mercier, then looked away. Which meant nothing, Mercier thought. Officer A met Agent B in a country foreign to both, neutral ground, it wasn’t even against the law. So they’d told him, anyhow, when he’d taken the six-week course for new military attaches at the Ecole Superieure de Guerre, part of the Invalides complex in Paris.