The Spies of Warsaw

started to raise his flag, two businessmen, both with briefcases, came trotting along the platform and climbed aboard just as the stationmaster signaled to the engineer, and, with a jerk, the train began to move. The two businessmen, one of them wiping the rain from his eyeglasses with a handkerchief, came down the corridor and peered through the window into Uhl’s compartment. There was no room for them. They took a moment, satisfying themselves that the compartment was full, then went off to find seats elsewhere.

Uhl didn’t like them. Calm down, he told himself, think pleasant thoughts. His night with Countess Sczelenska. In detail. He’d woken in the darkness and begun to touch her until, sleepily, with a soft, compliant sigh, she started to make love to him. Make love. Was she in love with him? No, it was an “arrangement.” But she did seem to enjoy it, every sign he knew about said she did, and, as for himself, it was better than anything else in his life. What if they ran away together? This happened only in the movies, at least in his experience, but people surely did it, just not the people he knew. And then, if you ran away, you had to run away to someplace. What place would that be?

Some years earlier, he had encountered an old school friend in Breslau, who’d left Germany in the early 1930s and gone off to South Africa, where he’d become, evidently, quite prosperous as the proprietor of a commercial laundry. “It’s a fine country,” his friend had said. “The people, the Dutch and the English, are friendly.” But, he thought, would a countess, even a pretend countess, want to go to such a place? He doubted it. He tried to imagine her there, in some little bungalow with a picket fence, cooking dinner. Baking a cake.

Uhl looked at his watch. Was the train slow today? He returned to his reverie, soothing himself with daydreams of some sweet moment in the future, happy and carefree in a far-off land. The man in the black coat suddenly stood up-he was tall, with military posture-unclicked the latch on the compartment door, and turned left down the corridor. Left? The first-class WC was to the right-Uhl knew this; he’d used it often on his trips between Breslau and Warsaw. So then, why left? That led only to the second-class carriages, why would he go there? Was there another WC down that way which, for some eccentric personal reason, he preferred? Uhl didn’t know. He could, of course, go and find out for himself, but that would mean following the man down the corridor. This he didn’t care to do. Why not? He didn’t care to, period.

So he waited. The train slowed for the town of Krotoszyn, chugged past the small outdoor station. A group of passengers, stolid country people, sat on a bench, surrounded by boxes and suitcases. Waiting for some other train, a local train, to take them somewhere else. Outside Krotoszyn, a cluster of small shacks came to the edge of the railway. Uhl saw a dog in a window, watching the train go by, and somebody had left shirts on a wash line; now they were wet. Where was the man in the black coat? Were the two businessmen his friends? Had he gone to visit them? Impulsively, Uhl stood up. “Excuse me,” he said, as the other passengers drew their feet in so he could pass. Outside the door, he saw that the corridor was empty. He turned left, the sound of the wheels on the track deepened as the train crossed a railroad bridge over a river, then, on the other side, returned to its usual pitch. The carriage swayed, they were picking up speed now, as Uhl walked along the corridor. He was tempted to look in at each compartment, to see where the businessmen were, to see if the man in the black coat had joined them, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. It didn’t feel right, to Uhl, to do something like that. He was now certain that when he got off this train he would be arrested, beaten until he confessed, and, then, hanged.

There was no WC at the end of the carriage. Only a door that would open to the metal plate above the coupling, then another door, and a second-class carriage. Above the seats, arranged in rows divided by an aisle, a haze of smoke. In the first seat, a man and a woman were asleep; the woman’s mouth was wide open, which made her face seem worried and tense. As Uhl turned, he discovered that the first-class conductor had come down the corridor behind him. Gesturing with his thumb, back and forth above his shoulder, he said something in Polish. Then, when he saw that Uhl didn’t understand, he said in German, “It’s back there, sir. What you’re looking for.”

“How long until we reach Leszno?”

The conductor looked at his watch. “About an hour, not much more.”

Uhl returned to the compartment. At Leszno, after Polish border guards checked the first-class passports, the train would continue to Glogau, where the passengers had to get off for German frontier kontrol; then he would change trains, for a local that went south to Breslau. Back in his compartment, Uhl kept looking at his watch. Diagonally across from him, an empty seat. The man in the black coat had not returned. Had the train stopped? No. He was simply somewhere else.

It was almost six when they reached the Polish border at Leszno. Uhl decided to get off the train and wait for the next one, but the conductor had stationed himself to block the door. Broad and stocky, feet spread wide, he stood like an official wall. “You must wait for the passport officers, sir,” he said. He wasn’t polite. Did he think Uhl wanted to run away? No, he knew that Uhl wanted to run away. Six days a week he worked on this train, what hadn’t he seen? Fugitives, certainly, who’d lost their nerve and couldn’t face the authorities.

“Of course,” Uhl said, returning to his compartment.

What a fool he was! He was an ordinary man, not cut out for a life like this. He’d been born to put on his carpet slippers after dinner, to sit in his easy chair, read his newspaper, and listen to music on the radio. In the compartment, the other passengers were restive. They didn’t speak but shifted about, cleared their throats, touched their faces. And there they sat, as twenty minutes crawled by. Then, at last, at the end of the car, the sound of boots on the steel platform, a little joke, a laugh. The two officers entered the compartment, took each passport in turn, glanced at the owner, found the proper page, and stamped it: Odjazd Polska-18 Pazdziernik 1937.

Well, that wasn’t so bad. The passengers relaxed. The woman across from Uhl searched in her purse, found a hard candy, unwrapped it, and popped it in her mouth-so much for the Polish frontier! Then she noticed that Uhl was watching her. “Would you care for a candy?” she said.

“No, thank you.”

“Sometimes, the motion of the train …” she said. There was sympathy in her eyes.

Did he look ill? What did she see, in his face? He turned away and stared out the window. The train had left the lights of Leszno; outside it was dark, outside it was Germany. Now what Uhl saw in the window was his own reflection, but if he pressed his forehead against the cold glass he could just make out a forest, a one-street village, a black car, shiny in the rain, waiting at the lowered bar of a railway crossing. What if, he wondered, the next time he went to Warsaw, he simply didn’t show up for Andre’s meeting? What would they do? Would they betray him? Or just let him go? The former, he thought. He was trapped, and they would not set him free; the world didn’t work that way, not their world. His mind was working like a machine gone wild; fantasies of escape, fantasies of capture, a dozen alibis, all of them absurd, the possibility that he was afraid of shadows, that none of it was real.

“Glo-gau!”

The conductor’s voice was loud in the corridor. Then, from further away, “Glogau!”

The train rumbled through the outlying districts of the city, then slowed for the bridge that crossed the river Oder, a long span of arches, the current churning white as it curled around the stone block. An ancient border, no matter where the diplomats drew their lines, “east of the Oder” meant Slavic Europe, the other Europe.

“All out for Glogau.”

The passport kontrol was set up at the door to the station, beneath a large swastika flag. Uhl counted five men, one of them seated at a small table, another with an Alsatian shepherd on a braided leash. Three were in uniform, their holstered sidearms worn high, and two were civilians, standing so they could see a sheaf of papers on the table. A list.

Uhl’s heart was pounding as he stepped down onto the platform. You have nothing to fear, he told himself. If they searched him they would find only a thousand zloty. So what? Everyone carried money. But they have a list. What if his name was on it? A few months earlier he’d seen it happen, right here, at Glogau station. A heavy man, with a red face, led quietly away, a guiding hand above his elbow. Now he saw the two businessmen; they were ahead of him on the line that led to the passport kontrol. One of them looked over his shoulder, then said something, something private, to his friend. Yes, he’s just back there, behind us. And then Uhl discovered the man in the black leather coat. He was not on the line, he was sitting on a bench by the wall of the station, hands in pockets, legs crossed, very much at ease. Because he did not have to go through passport kontrol, because he was one of them, a Gestapo man, who’d followed him down from Warsaw, making sure he didn’t get off the train. And now his job was done, work over for the day. Tomorrow, a new assignment. Uhl felt beads of sweat break out at his hairline, took off his hat, and wiped