The Spies of Warsaw

of diagrams for the production of the new-1B-version of the Panzer tank, the payment made, establishment of the next meeting.

Should he include the fact that Uhl was wriggling? No, nothing had really happened; surely they didn’t care, in Paris, to be bothered with such trivia. He had a long, careful look at the diagrams to make sure they were as described-there was potential here for real disaster; it had happened more than once, they’d told him; plans for a public lavatory or a design for a mechanical can opener-then gave the report, the diagrams, and the signed receipt to one of the embassy clerks for transmission back to the General Staff in Paris, with a copy of the report to the ambassador’s office and another for the safe that held his office files.

Next he took a taxi-he had an embassy car and driver available to him, but he didn’t want to bother-out to the neighborhood of the Citadel, where the Polish General Staff had its offices, to a small cafe where he was to meet with his Polish counterpart, Colonel Anton Vyborg. He was first to arrive. They came to this cafe not precisely for secrecy, rather for privacy-it was more comfortable to speak openly away from their respective offices. That was one reason, there was another.

As soon as Mercier was seated at their usual table, the proprietor produced a large platter of ponczkis, a kind of small jelly dough-nut, dusted with granulated sugar, light and fluffy, to which Mercier was gravely addicted. The proprietor, chubby and smiling, in a well-spattered apron, produced also a silver carafe of coffee. It required all of Mercier’s aristocratic courtesy and diplomatic reserve to leave the warm, damnably fragrant ponczkis on the platter.

Vyborg, thank heaven, was precisely on time, and together they set upon the pastries. There was something of the Baltic knight in Colonel Vyborg. In his forties, he was tall and well-built and thin-lipped, with webbed lines at the corners of eyes made to squint into blizzards, and stiff, colorless hair cut short in the cavalry officer fashion. He wore high leather boots, supple and dark, well rubbed with saddle soap-Mercier always caught a whiff of it in Vyborg’s presence, mixed with the smell of the little cigars he smoked.

Vyborg was a senior officer in the intelligence service, the Oddzial II-the Deuxieme Bureau, named in the French tradition-of the Polish Army General Staff, known as the Dwojka, which meant “the two.” Vyborg worked in Section IIb, where they dealt with Austria, Germany, and France; Section IIa occupied itself with the country’s primary enemies-thus the a-Russia, Lithuania, Byelorussia, and the Ukraine. Did Vyborg’s section run agents on French territory? Likely they did. Did France do the same thing? Mercier thought so, but was kept ignorant of such operations, at any rate officially ignorant, but it was more than probable that the French SR, the Service des Renseignements, the clandestine service of the Deuxieme Bureau, did precisely that. Know your enemies, know your friends, avoid surprise at all costs. But the discovery of such operations, when they came to light, was always an unhappy moment. Allies were, for reasons of the heart more than the brain, supposed to trust each other. And when they demonstrably didn’t, it was as though the state of the human condition had slipped a notch.

“Have the last one,” Vyborg said, refilling Mercier’s coffee cup.

“For you, Anton.”

“No, I must insist.”

Gracefully, Mercier acceded to diplomacy.

Breakfast over, Vyborg lit one of his miniature cigars, and Mercier a Mewa-a Seagull-one of the better Polish cigarettes.

“So,” Vyborg said, “the Renault people will be here the day after tomorrow.” A delegation of executives and engineers was scheduled to visit Warsaw, a step in the process of selling Renault tanks to the Polish army.

“Yes,” Mercier said, “we are ready for them. They’re bringing a senator.”

“You’ll be at the dinner?”

From Mercier, a rather grim smile: no escape.

Their eyes met, they had in common a distaste for the obligatory social engagements required for their work. “It will be very boring,” Vyborg said. “In case you were concerned.”

“I was counting on it.”

“You’ll be accompanied?”

Mercier nodded. With no wife or fiancee, he would be with the deputy director of protocol at the embassy, who served as table partner to Mercier, and one other bachelor diplomat, when the need arose. “You’ve met Madame Dupin?”

“I’ve had the pleasure,” Vyborg said.

“Where is it?”

“We sent a note to your office,” Vyborg said, one eyebrow arched. Don’t you read your mail? “A private dining room at the Europejski,” Vyborg said. “They’re going to watch a field maneuver earlier in the day, so they’re sure to be exhausted, which will make the evening even more amusing. Then we’re going on to a nightclub-the Adria, of course-for dancing until dawn.”

“I can’t wait,” Mercier said.

“It’s obligatory. When the purchasing delegation went to Renault in Paris, they were taken to some naughty cancan place-they’re still talking about it-so …”

“Will you buy anything?”

“We shouldn’t, but there’s always a possibility. They want to sell us the R Thirty-five, which was demonstrated when the delegation visited the factory. This visit is supposed to close the deal.”

“The R Thirty-five isn’t so bad.” Mercier, officially loyal to the national industries, had to say that and Vyborg knew it. “For infantry support.”

Vyborg shrugged. “A thirty-seven-millimeter cannon, one machine gun. And they only go twelve miles an hour, with a range of eighty miles. The armour’s thick enough, but you don’t get much machine for the money. Truthfully, if it wasn’t French, we wouldn’t bother, but this is up to Smigly-Rydz’s office.” He meant the inspector general of the Polish army. “And they may have to bow to political pressure, so, potentially, our tank crews will die for the cancan.”

“What do you have now? The last figure I heard was two hundred.”

“That’s about right, unfortunately. The Russians have two thousand, best we know, and the same for the Germans. The Ursus factory is working on the Seven TP, our own model, under license from Vickers, but Ursus has to make farm tractors as well, and we need those. In the end, it’s always the same problem: money. You’ve been out to the Ursus factory?”

“I was. At the end of the summer.”

“Maybe that’s the answer, maybe not. It really depends on how much time we have until the next war starts.”

Mercier finished his coffee, then refilled both their cups. “Hitler loves his tanks,” he said.

“Yes, we heard that story. ‘These are wonderful! Make more of them!’ An infantry soldier in the war, he knows what the British did at Cambrai, a hundred tanks, all at once. The Germans broke and ran.”

“Not like them.”

“No, but they did that day.”

For a moment, they were both in the past.

“Who else is coming to the dinner?” Mercier said.

“Well, they have a senator, so we’ll have somebody from the Sejm. Then a few people from the French community: the ubiquitous Monsieur Travas, the Pathe agency manager, is coming, with some gorgeous girlfriend, no doubt, and we’ve asked your ambassador, of course, but he’s declined. We may get the charge d’affaires.”

“Who’s the senator?”

“Bernand? Bertrand? Something like that. I have it back at the office. One of the Popular Front politicians. Somebody from Beck’s office will talk with him, though we doubt he’ll have anything new to say.”

Josef Beck was the Polish foreign minister, and Vyborg now referred to the issue that stood between him and Mercier, between France and Poland. Treaties aside, would France come to Poland’s aid if Poland were attacked?

“Likely he won’t,” Mercier said.

“We think not,” Vyborg agreed. “But we must try.”

France’s political condition-strikes, communist pressure, a right wing divided into fascists and conservatives,