One last minute, then they rose to their feet and, crouched over, went running back to Poland.
Mercier had planned to spend the night at a hotel in Katowice but never gave it a second thought. When they reached the farm, they climbed into the Buick and drove at speed, bumping and bouncing over the rutted surface, turning the lights on only when they reached the main road. Once they left Katowice and were back in the countryside, Marek said, “A close thing.”
“Yes. We were lucky, I think.”
“I wasn’t going to let them take me, colonel.”
Mercier nodded. He knew that Marek had been captured by the Russians when he’d fought in the Polish Legion, under Pilsudski. Ten hours only, but Marek never forgot what they did to him.
“There is one thing I want to ask you,” Marek said. “Why did they cover up their tank trap?”
“Maybe they changed their minds. Maybe it wasn’t where they wanted it. Maybe there’s another one a few hundred yards north, who can say, but that’s the likely explanation. Or, if you wanted to think another way, an army that’s going to attack, with a tank force, will get rid of the static defenses between them and the enemy border. Because, then, they’re in the way.” Mercier’s technical description barely suggested what he feared. This was nothing less than preparation for war; a classic, telltale sign of planned aggression. The journalists could wring their hands from morning edition to night-War is coming! War is coming! — but what he’d found in the darkness wasn’t opinion, it was an abandoned tank trap, defense put aside, and what came next was offense, attack, houses burning in the night.
Marek didn’t want to believe it. After a moment he said, “They are coming this way, colonel, that is what you think, isn’t it. German tanks, moving onto Polish soil.”
“God knows, I don’t. Sometimes governments prepare to act, then change their minds. The wire was still up.”
“You’ll report it, colonel?”
“Yes, Marek, that’s what I do.”
They drove all night long, Mercier taking a turn at the wheel for a few hours. East of Koluszki, Marek driving again, a tire blew out and they had to stop and change it, the iron wrench freezing their hands. The sky was turning light as they drove into Warsaw, and when Mercier let himself into the apartment, Wlada heard him walking around and, frightened of a possible intruder, called out, “Colonel?”
“Yes, Wlada, it’s me.”
She opened the door of her room off the kitchen. “You are home early,” she said. “Thank God.”
“Yes,” he said. “I am. Go back to sleep.”
He left his automatic pistol on the desk, now it would have to be cleaned again. Then, as he took off his field clothing, he thought about the letter in the drawer of his desk at the embassy, a letter requesting transfer. That would have to be torn up.
The abandoned tank trap had worked on him-it wasn’t much, as evidence, would mean nothing to the lords of the General Staff, but it had hit him a certain way and he could not let go of it. Then too, he thought, settling the Barbour on its hanger, he might, if he stayed in Warsaw, see Anna Szarbek again. See her alone, somewhere. An afternoon together. Surely he wanted to, maybe she did too.
From the other side of the apartment, Wlada called out to him. “Good night, colonel.”
Yes, dear Wlada, I am home and safe. “Good night, Wlada. Sleep well.”
ON RAVEN HILL
7 November, 1937. The Polish Foreign Ministry, housed in an elegant building on Saxon Square, held its autumn cocktail party in the ministry library, removing the long polished tables, setting up a bar-Polish vodka, French champagne, a tribute to the eternal alliance-in front of the tall draped window at the end of the room. A magnificent library. Ancient texts in leather-bound rows to the ceiling, some of the works, in medieval Latin, on the national specialties, mathematics and astronomy-Copernicus was there, among others-at which their scholars had traditionally excelled. Always a crowd at this party, the library’s imposing gloom inducing serious, sometimes elevated, conversation between the guests. And the fresh herring in cream was exceptional. So transcendently good one might be mindful of the country’s right of access to the Baltic, up at Danzig.
The French contingent gathered at the embassy and departed in a phalanx of Buicks, led by the ambassador and his wife, followed by LeBeau, the charge d’affaires, then Jourdain, joining Mercier in his car, with a splendid Marek in his most sober and official blue suit. Last in line, the naval and air attaches.
In the library, a glittering crowd: medals galore, the uniforms of at least eight armies and six navies. Mercier studied the faces of the women in the room, more than one of them finding such attention not unwelcome, but Anna Szarbek was nowhere to be found. The Biddles were there-he the American ambassador, the couple highly visible at the heights of the Warsovian social set-as well as the formidable Hungarian, Colonel de Vezenyi, doyen of the city’s military attaches, accompanied by his mistress, the stunning Polish film star known as Karenka. Mercier spent a few minutes with them, de Vezenyi infamous for his insight into the private lives of the diplomatic community. “And he was, I’m told, in the closet for two hours, trembling in his underwear.”
Mercier next found himself in the company of the Rozens, Viktor and Malka, the former a minor bureaucrat in the commercial section of the Soviet embassy. Communists were rare in Poland; the internal security was famously relentless in hunting them down, so no workers’ marches, no petitions crying out for justice in wherever it was that week. For a view of the world from that particular angle, Mercier had to chat with the Rozens, or other available comrades, whenever chance offered the opportunity. But he didn’t mind; he liked the Rozens.
How not? They were almost unbearably charming. Viktor Rozen, half stooped from some childhood malady in Odessa, looked up at his fellow humans, giving the fools among them the impression that they were somehow above him. His wife was irresistibly warm and maternal, with a smile that lingered just at the edge of a laugh. What a pair! At these affairs, always side by side-he with a monk’s fringe of gray hair, she much the taller and heavier of the two-twinkly-eyed Jewish intellectuals, always eager to hear about your life. GRU, people said, the Russian military intelligence service, not the thuggish NKVD, not the gentle Rozens. Was Malka Rozen the chief spy of the family, or was that Viktor? Among local diplomats, opinion was divided.
“Tell me, dear colonel, how has life been treating you?” Viktor Rozen said, his German softened by a Yiddish lilt.
“Very well, thank you. And yourselves?”
“Could be better, but I can’t complain. But we were having a little dispute just now, Malka and I.”
“You?”
Malka’s smile grew broader. “Only a little one.”
“Perhaps you can decide it for us. We were wondering whatever became of von Sosnowski.”
“In prison in Germany, I believe,” Mercier said. Von Sosnowski, the center of what became known as “the von Sosnowski affair,” a handsome aristocratic Polish cavalry officer living in Berlin, had recruited four or five beautiful German women, all of noble heritage. First as mistresses, stupefied with love for him, and then as agents, to spy on their employer, the German General Staff, where they, impoverished by the Great War, served as clerks.
“He was,” Viktor said. “He surely was in prison, for life, poor soul, but I’ve heard he’s been let out.”
“Of a German prison?” Malka said. “Never.”
“But a little bird told me he’d been traded, for a German woman spying on the Poles, at the behest of the SD people-Heydrich, that crowd.”
Slowly, Mercier shook his head. “No, not that I’ve heard, anyhow.”
“You see?” Rozen said to Malka. “The colonel is a great friend of the local administration, surely they would have mentioned it. Too good not to mention, no?”