Adam stared at the glowing end of the cigarette for several long moments. Then he stubbed it out and reached under the bed. He pulled out a leather briefcase, unlocked it and removed the surveillance report on SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Heisenberg.
Natalia was still wide awake. She rolled over and tilted the brass clock on the nightstand so it caught the moonlight streaming in the window. It was two o’clock. On the cot next to her in the tiny second-floor bedroom, her friend Berta slept soundly. Natalia sat up and stretched. Falcon had wanted her to come home with him last night, but he had started drinking right after the briefing ended and it soon turned ugly. Someone shoved him and he shoved back. There was a fist fight, broken bottles and bleeding noses. He apologized, but she put him off. He was drunk, she was tired, and it wouldn’t have meant anything, so why bother?
Frustrated, Natalia got out of bed, grabbed her coat from the back of a chair and slipped quietly from the bedroom, pulling the curtain closed behind her. She tip-toed down the creaky stairs, stepped carefully around a dozen women commandos asleep on cots jammed into the parlor of the vacant apartment. Formerly occupied by a tailor and his family, who had fled the city, the apartment was an unusual affair with a parlor, kitchen and bathroom on one floor, and a small bedroom upstairs. It was situated above the ground-floor tailor shop and was one of only a few residential apartments—now all vacant—in the five-story office building on Trebacka Street in the City Center, north of Pilsudski Square.
Natalia made her way to the cramped, white-tiled kitchen and rummaged through her coat pockets until she found a leftover cigarette. She lit it and sat at the round, wooden table, staring out the dirt-streaked window at a rubble pile—all that remained of the building across the street. In the distance she could hear the dull thump of artillery.
It was only a matter of time—another few weeks, maybe less—before the Germans crushed the Rising. The AK insurgents were fighting valiantly, but less than a third of them had real weapons, and most of those were rebuilt relics left over from ’39. Ammunition was scarce, the food and water supplies were running out, and the corpses were piling up. It couldn’t last much longer.
Then what? The Russians weren’t coming in to help. That much Natalia knew for certain. Where she grew up, danger had always come from the monster to the east. She inhaled the stale cigarette smoke deeply and thought about her brother, Michal, and the one letter she’d received, sent from a Russian prison camp somewhere near Smolensk. Most of the words had been crossed out with thick black ink, but he had said he was being well-treated and would be home soon. That had been five years ago. Natalia took a last drag on the cigarette then grimaced and ground it out. If there was a force on earth more evil than Hitler’s Germany, it was Stalin’s Russia and his secret police, the NKVD.
A drink, she needed a drink to clear her head. She took a bottle of vodka from one of the brightly painted, green-and-yellow cabinets on either side of the sink, poured some in a glass and swallowed it. She poured another, carried it back to the table and sat down, looking out the window again.
Gradually, her thoughts turned to the AK commando standing off by himself during last night’s briefing, the same one she and Rabbit had encountered in the hospital square that day—the sharpshooter. The man they called Wolf.
Natalia had heard about him. She’d heard he was an American, trained by the British and dropped into Poland years ago. Perhaps it was just a myth, or a rumor: things like that were rampant among the operatives of the AK. But it could be true. There were some like him, she knew, covert agents trained as assassins and dropped behind the lines with instructions to kill high-level German officers. They were highly skilled and deadly, with no identity, no background—and nothing to lose.
Another burst of artillery jarred her back to the moment, and Natalia flinched at a shadow in the doorway.
Berta stepped into the kitchen and whispered, “Sorry if I startled you. I couldn’t sleep. Apparently you couldn’t either.”
“Oh, I’m fine, just a little restless. But you were snoring up a storm when I left the room.”
“The damn artillery fire woke me. Christ, sometimes I have this dream that one of those screaming cows lands right in my bed. Probably be as good a way to go as any, I guess.”
Natalia took a deep breath and held up the glass of vodka. “Maybe this will help. Want one?”
“No, if I get started I’m not going to want to stop. I’ll save it for your birthday party.”
Natalia smiled but felt a sudden twinge in her stomach. Her birthday was a week away, and she would turn twenty-nine. She wondered if she would live to see thirty.
“You didn’t go with Falcon last night?” Berta asked with a shiver and grabbed her coat from the hook.
“He was drunk again, and I don’t need that.”
“Getting a bit tired of him are you?”
“I don’t know… maybe… it’s getting annoying. He’s way too possessive, like I’m a piece of his property.”
“Well, if you decide to dump him, let me know. I could use a good roll in the hay right now.” Berta sat down and dropped her elbows on the table with a heavy sigh. She was several years older than Natalia, with gray streaks running through her short brown hair. She had been a dispatcher for the railway during the time when Natalia was making her courier runs from Krakow to Warsaw.
“It looks like I’m losing my ‘cocktail chucker,’” Natalia said, changing the subject.
“Rabbit?”
“He’s being reassigned to sewer duty. It was announced at the briefing. You weren’t there.”
“I was exhausted,” Berta said. “Besides, sometimes I feel better not knowing too much.”
“Hah, you always want to know what’s going on.”
“I used to… in the days when there were just a few of us making decisions, running our own show, like we did during those years on the railway.”
Natalia nodded. “You ran a good operation then, Berta. I learned a lot from you.”
Berta shrugged and sat back in the chair. “You always knew what you were doing. I just covered your tracks once in a while when you took a few too many chances.”
“Or when I was just plain stupid, like the time I ordered the Gestapo agent off the train because he didn’t have a ticket.”
Berta laughed but caught herself, trying not to wake the others. “Christ, I’d almost forgotten about that. He wanted to have your head on a platter, bitched and carried on like a madman.”
“Well, he also didn’t have his ID, claimed he’d left his wallet at home, so I didn’t know who he was. Just another arrogant ass who spoke German.”
“And there were plenty of those characters around.”
“Didn’t you give him a bottle of cognac or something to calm him down?”
“Not just a bottle—a whole damn case. I offered him a bottle, but the greedy son of a bitch followed me into the store room and spotted the case. The station manager almost had my head on a platter when he found out. It was his own private stock.” Then, still chuckling, Berta leaned over the table and said, “And what about the time the SS cleared the whole train just before you were due to leave Krakow because they were convinced there was a smuggler on board.”
“Oh God, that’s right. I remember they searched every one of the passengers and tore through every piece of luggage.”
“And all the time you were standing right there with stolen documents hidden in your conductor’s pouch.”