The spies of warsaw (23 page)

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THE

FRONT

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22 December, 1937. The Schorfheide. Fifty miles northeast of

Berlin, a region known for its deserted countryside, its marshland and

forest, deep lakes, bountiful game, and splendid hunting lodges.

Notably Hermann Goring's Karinhall, where, some months earlier, at

one of the field marshal's infamous parties, he had appeared wearing

a leather jerkin, grasping a spear, and leading a pair of bison on a

chain. The bison had been induced to mate, while the guests fell to

awed whispers, and the story was told everywhere.

For Sturmbannfuhrer August Voss, that evening, a party not to be

missed, held at a Berlin banker's hunting lodge not far from Karinhall.

"I think he bought them," said Voss's friend Meino, referring to the

wolf pelts, bearskins, and stag antlers that decorated the pine walls.

The two men stood before a crackling fire in a fieldstone fireplace,

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drinking champagne, following a dinner of wild boar and potatoes in

cream.

"Look at him," Voss said. "I doubt he hunts anything."

The banker, in eager conversation with an SS colonel, was a fat little elf who rubbed his hands and laughed no matter what anybody

said. He looked like a man who'd never been outdoors, much less

hunting.

"Maybe he hunts women," said Willi, third in the trio of SS pals.

"Or boys, more likely," Meino said.

Voss reached inside his black tunic, brought out a cigar, and lit it.

"Care for one?" he said to his friends.

Meino declined. Willi produced one of his own and said, "I'll have

this."

They'd met years earlier: Meino built like a gross cherub, with big

belly and behind, and balding Willi, with a fake dueling scar, made by

a kitchen knife, on his cheek, and a newly installed
von
in front of his

name. He now worked in the administration office of the SD in Berlin,

while Meino was second-in-command of the Regensburg headquarters. They'd joined the SS in the late twenties, together fought communist dockworkers in Hamburg, together beaten up their share of

Jews, got drunk together, threw up together, were staunch friends and

brothers-in-arms--that would never change.

"Where are the wives?" Willi said.

"In the parlor, gossiping," Voss said.

Willi frowned. "No good will come of that," he said.

"What about this Frenchman?" Meino said, returning to an earlier

part of the conversation.

"He's the military attache in Warsaw," Voss said. "Made me look

like a fool. Then Gluck hauled me up to Berlin and roasted my ass."

"Gluck?" Willi said.

"Obersturmbannfuhrer, my boss."

"Oh,
that
prick," Willi said, expelling a long plume of cigar

smoke.

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"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

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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.

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"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 horsedrawn 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

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days, famously making people crazy--an old law excused crimes committed from madness brought on by the incessant moaning of the
mis-

tral
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

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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 detailed report of his observation,

including the coordinated operations of air and ground forces. He

couldn't say:
this is important
; he could only do his best to be descriptive, technical, and precise. What then? A note to General de Beauvilliers? No, not appropriate, simply:
listen to me
. And, really, why

should they?

The German articles had, he thought, a companion piece, which

he'd read earlier that year, a book by the French general Chauvineau

called
L'Invasion est-elle encore possible?
Is invasion still possible?

With a foreword by none other than Marshal Petain. Back in Warsaw,

in a file cabinet, was a hand copy of Petain's words, which Mercier had

thought worth saving:

If the entire theatre of operations is obstructed, there is no