The spies of warsaw (16 page)

shells.

And forests? Not specifically mentioned, though perhaps more lay

buried in the text. And, Mercier thought, now that Uhl was lost, he

would have to find some other way to observe the planned
Wehrmacht

maneuvers at Schramberg.

At five-thirty, leaving a taxi in the rue Saint-Simon, Mercier felt the

Parisian mystique take hold of his heart: a sudden nameless ecstasy in

the damp air--air scented by black tobacco and fried potatoes and

charged with the restless melancholy of the city at the end of its day.

Oh, this was home all right, he knew it in his soul--not the autumn

mists of the Drome, not his pointers running free in a field, but home

nonetheless, which some part of him never left.

Here, in the depths of the Seventh Arrondissement, the residents

were rich, quiet, and cold, stewards of the inner chamber. A walled

city, its walls hiding formal gardens and silent monasteries, Napoleonic barracks and foreign embassies. One saw the residents only

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now and again: retired army officers in dark suits, women of the

nobility, perfect in afternoon Chanel.

Halfway up the narrow street: 23, rue Saint-Simon. Mercier rang

the bell by the familiar door--built for the height of a carriage--and

the concierge, who'd known him for twenty years, let him in. He

crossed the interior courtyard, ignored by the twittering sparrows, his

steps on the stone block loud in the thick silence of the building, and

climbed to the second floor, unlocked the door, and entered the apartment: bought in the middle of the nineteenth century by his greatgrandfather, only the plumbing updated, the rest as it had always

been--leaded glass windows in small panes, vast, gloomy carpets,

massive armoires and chests. Not elegant, the furnishings, but sturdy.

The Merciers lived on country estates, and the women of the family

had always treated
the Paris apartment
as a tiresome necessity--

people of their class always had to go to Paris for one reason or

another, and the alternative was
hotels,
and
restaurants
. Unthinkable.

Thus they'd been economical in the purchase of slipcoverings and

draperies, everything dark, not to show use and meant to last. The

fabrics were protected by closed shutters and heavy drapes--the sun

was not allowed in here.

Mercier dropped his briefcase and valise in the bedroom and

found a note from his cousin Albertine on the night table.

Dearest Jean-Francois,

Welcome. I am out for the afternoon but I shall return at

six-thirty, and we can go out for dinner, if you like, or I can cook

something if you're too tired. Looking forward to seeing you,

Albertine.

In Mercier's past, Cousin Albertine occupied a very special niche.

She was the youngest daughter of his father's favorite brother, later to

die in the war, and they'd grown up as neighbors--his uncle's property

a few miles away from their own--so together often: at Christmas and

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Easter, in summer when they were home from their respective boarding schools. Surely she'd always been the odd one out of the Mercier

clan: tall, awkward, pale, serious, and curiously redheaded--auburn,

really--with freckles scattered across her forehead. Where, the family

wondered, had she come from? All the other Merciers were dark, like

Jean-Francois, so, it was theorized, some ancient gene had surfaced in

his cousin and made her different. The other possibility was never

considered--or, rather, never spoken aloud. . . .

One Saturday morning at the end of summer, when Mercier was

fourteen and Albertine sixteen, Uncle Gerard and his family had come

to visit. The adults and the other children had gone off somewhere--

to a livestock auction in a distant village, as Mercier remembered it--

and he and Albertine were left alone in the house. The servants

downstairs were preparing midday dinner; they would be twelve at

table, for various other family members would be joining them.

In his room, Mercier was dressing for dinner, in underpants and

his best shirt, in front of a wall mirror, working at tying his tie. First

the bottom part came out absurdly short, then too long. On his third

attempt, the door opened and, in the mirror, Cousin Albertine appeared. She watched him for a moment, then, with a strange look on

her face, at once shy and determined, came up behind him. "Can I try

it?" she said.

"I can do it," he said.

"I want to try," she said. "To see if I can."

"How do you know about ties?"

"I watch my brothers do it."

"Oh."

This was intended to mean,
oh, I see,
but came out as more of an

oh!,
because, as Albertine reached around him, her heavy breasts, in a

thin summer dress, rested lightly against his back.

"Now," she said, "we cross it around and loop it through."

In the mirror, Albertine's face was dreamy, her eyes half closed,

mouth slightly open. Also in the mirror, the front of his underpants

highly distended. For a few seconds, they stood like statues, then she

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whispered, "I want to see it," hooked her thumbs in the waistband of

his underpants, and pulled them down.

"Alber-
tine
!"

"What?"

She reached out and closed her hand around it, her skin warm and

damp. He leaned back against her, then moved away. "We're not supposed--"

"Oh foo," she said. So much for family morals. "You like it," she

said firmly, and ran her finger along the underside, back and forth.

"Don't you?"

He could only nod.

She pressed against him, above and below, and he reached back,

hands on her bottom, and pulled her closer. She now stroked him with

index finger and thumb:
where had she learned to do this?
He was

very excited and, a few seconds later, came the inevitable conclusion,

accompanied, from deep within him, by a sound somewhere between

a sigh and a gasp.

"There," she said softly, taking her hand away.

"Well, that's what happens."

"I
know
that."

He started to move away from her, but she wrapped her arms

around his shoulders and held him tight. Close to his ear, she whispered, "Now it's my turn."

"
What?
" His heart quaked.

She raised her dress, revealing white cotton underdrawers, and

bunched it around her waist, then took his hand and placed it between

her legs. He'd never touched a girl there and had no idea what was

expected of him, but immediately found out, as she pressed his hand

against herself and began to move it. In the mirror, he could see her

face: eyes closed, lower lip held delicately between her teeth. With his

free hand, he again reached around her, where, in slow rhythm, her

bottom tensed, relaxed, and tensed again. After what seemed to him

like a long time--he began to wonder what he was doing wrong--she

exhaled hard, her breath audible, and held on to him as though she

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might fall down. Astonishing! It had never occurred to him that this

happened to a girl; his friends at school had a completely different version of things.

He pulled up his underpants, then sat down hard on the edge of

his bed. Albertine resettled her dress, then came and sat beside him,

brushing her long hair off her face. "Did you like it, Jean-Francois?"

"Yes, of course."

"Both things?"

"Yes, both."

She kissed him, a dry kiss on the cheek. "I think you're sweet," she

said and, for a moment, rested her head on his shoulder.

This was not the only time, for the Mercier cousins; it happened once

more before they went north to their schools. The following week, the

cook baked grand brioches, as big as cakes, and his mother asked him

to take two of them over to Uncle Gerard's. Mercier, already a cavalry

officer in his daydreams, climbed on his bicycle and pedaled like a fury

over the tiny dirt lanes that wound through the hills to his uncle's

house. Once there, amid the usual disorder, he set the brioches down

on the table in the kitchen, then waited while his aunt wrote a thankyou note. Albertine appeared, as he was retrieving his bicycle from the

steps that led to the terrace, and told her mother she would ride with

him part of the way back home. Halfway there, they walked their

bicycles away from the lane and found a grove of cork oaks, and, this

time, Albertine suggested that they take off all their clothes.

Mercier hesitated, uncertain of what lay ahead. "I don't want you

to have a baby," he said.

She laughed, brushing her hair aside. "I'm not going to do
that
.

Cousins mustn't do
that,
but we can play. Playing is always allowed."

What rules she was following he did not know, but in the days

after their first encounter, before he went to sleep and when he woke in

the morning, he had ravished his gawky cousin in every way his imagination offered and was now more than ready for anything she might

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think up. And so, her skin white in the hot sun, Albertine posed prettily for him and then, at their leisure on a summer's day, as the cicadas

whirred away in the high grass, they played twice.

True to her word, Albertine returned to the apartment at six-thirty.

Her hair was darker now, styled short, falling just to her jawline. She

wore a quiet tweed suit with big buttons, skirt well below the knee,

and a fancy silk scarf from one of the fashion houses, wound around

her neck and tucked into the vee of her suit jacket. With pearl earrings

and fine leather gloves, she was very much an aristocrat of the Seventh. As in all their meetings over the years, he could find the Albertine he'd known that summer; she was, as he put it to himself,
still in

there
; he could find her if he tried.

She made them drinks, vermouth with lemon, and showed him the

latest additions to her collection--onyx cameos and intaglios on

small wooden stands, filling the shelves of two glass-fronted bookcases. Some of the new ones were ancient, Greek and Roman, others

from tsarist Russia and the Austro-Hungarian empire. "They are

exceptional," he said, taking time to study them, appreciating what

she'd achieved. Then they walked out to the boulevard and over to a

busy brasserie on the rue Saint-Dominique. A compromise: she didn't

want to cook, it was too early to go to a proper restaurant, and neither

of them cared that much. So they ordered
omelettes
and
frites
and a

bottle of Saint-Estephe.

"It is so good to see you, Jean-Francois," she said, taking the first

sip of her wine. "Is life going well? I expect you miss Annemarie."

"Every day."

"And do you see anyone?"

I wish I could,
he thought, Anna Szarbek's image smiling up at

him on a nightclub dance floor. "No," he said. "I would like to, but it

isn't easy, meeting somebody--who's available."

"Oh you will, dear," she said, looking at him fondly. "People do

find each other, somehow."

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"Let's hope so. And you?" Years earlier, there had been a fiance,

then another, but, after that, silence.

"Oh, I've settled into my life," she said. "How are the girls?"

"Thriving, but passionately busy. Beatrice is in Cairo, her sister,

Gabrielle, in Copenhagen--I haven't seen them for a long time. At

Christmas, perhaps. I might see if Gabrielle will come down to the

house in Boutillon. That is, if I can get there myself."

"And Warsaw? Is that a good place to be, for you?"

He nodded. "I certainly see enough of it--hotels, restaurants,

cocktail parties, receptions."

"The glamorous life!"

His tart smile told Albertine all she needed to know about that.

"Always difficult, a new job. But I assume you're good at it," she

said.

"It has its ups and downs--as you say, a new job."

"You don't like it?"

"No, but I'm a soldier. I do what they tell me."

"What
is
that? Are you a spymaster?"

"Nothing so dramatic. Mostly I am a liaison between the French

and Polish General Staffs. Everybody has to know what everybody

else is up to."

The
omelettes
--
aux fines herbes
--arrived, with mounds of
frites,

crisp and golden and powerfully aromatic. Albertine, suddenly maternal, salted both their portions. "Still, you must learn secrets."

"Bad manners, Albertine, when the host country is an old friend."

"Yes, of course, that makes sense," she said, thinking it over.

"Maybe German secrets."

"Well, if they come swimming by in the stream, I net them."