The man with the parcel tried to brush past him, but Mercier moved to block him. From the corner of his eye, he could see that a few people had stopped to see what was going on. Suddenly enraged, the red-faced man swung his free hand at Mercier and hit him under the eye. Not very hard. Mercier was knocked backward, recovered, and punched the man in the mouth. From behind, the weasel hit him with a blackjack.
Mercier’s legs collapsed and he fell to his knees. But the blackjack had been a mistake. Mercier heard a loud clang-the coalman had dropped his shovel-and now, like an avenging giant, face black with coal dust, he grabbed the red-faced man by the back of the collar. When he growled something in Polish, the weasel ran away, jummped into the car, and gunned the engine. The red-faced man broke free, tried to keep his balance, lost it, and, as he fell, the parcel slid off his shoulder and landed on the sidewalk with a soft thump. The red-faced man, now scarlet, rose to a sitting position and reached inside his jacket, but a shout from the car stopped him, and he scrambled to his feet as the coalman walked toward him. Then the passenger-side door flew open, the red-faced man got in and, with a look toward Mercier of pure and absolute hatred, slammed the door as, tires squealing, the Opel drove away.
Now the man that Mercier had seen striding down Gesia came sprinting out of the Orla, shrieked at the departing car, and chased after it. The Opel jerked to a stop, the pursuer got in the back and the car sped off, trunk lid flapping as the wheels bounced over the cobblestones.
Mercier tried to get to his feet, somebody helped him, and the coalman handed him his hat. Fearing the worst, he knelt over the parcel, discovered a strong chemical smell, and saw that the coverlet, yellow daisies on a red field, had been tied shut with two lengths of cord. He worked at the first knot as the crowd closed in around him. Somebody said, “Get a scissors.” Finally, Mercier managed to undo the first knot, then the coalman, impatient, reached down and broke the second cord with his hands. As Mercier unfolded the coverlet, the chemical smell grew stronger. Chloroform, he thought. Something like that.
Uhl was dead. Eyes closed, mouth slack, snowflakes falling on his face. A voice in the crowd said, “Finished,” and several people hurried away. Mercier put his fingers on Uhl’s neck and probed for a pulse. Nothing. A woman knelt beside him and said, “Excuse me, please,” gently removing Mercier’s fingers and replacing them with her own. “No,” she said. “It’s faint, but it’s there. Better get the ambulance.”
“Brazen,” Jourdain said. “Unbelievable. In broad daylight.” They were in the chancery, in Jourdain’s office; photographs of diplomats shaking hands lined the walls. “Does it hurt?”
“Yes.”
“You’re dripping on your collar.”
Mercier held a towel filled with ice to the back of his head, which ached so badly it made him squint. “I don’t care,” he said.
It was Jourdain who had, after a telephone call, retrieved him from the police station, where they didn’t care if he said he was the French military attache: they had reports to fill out, he would be there for a while. Uhl was in the hospital, with a policeman standing in the hall outside his door.
Mercier sat back in the chair, closed his eyes, and pressed the towel to the alarming lump on the back of his head. “Goddamn that little bastard,” he said.
There were two sharp raps on the door, which swung open to reveal the ambassador: tall, white-haired, and angry. Mercier began to rise, but the ambassador waved him back down. “Colonel Mercier,” he said. Then, “Are you injured?”
“No, sir, not really, just sore.”
That out of the way, the ambassador said, “Can we expect more of this, colonel? Gun battles? Brawling in the street? Yes, I know why, and you had to intervene, but still …”
“I apologize, sir,” Mercier said. “Circumstance.”
The ambassador nodded, as though that explanation meant something. “Mmm. Sorry I won’t be there when you tell them that in Paris. Because you’ll surely be-ah, summoned.”
Mercier took a breath, then said nothing.
“You’ll take care of that-that situation-in the hospital?”
“This afternoon, sir.”
“Jourdain will help you; you don’t look all that well, to me.”
“Count on it, sir,” Jourdain said. “And please don’t be concerned.”
“No, you’re right, I shouldn’t be concerned,” the ambassador said, meaning very much the opposite. “And I so look forward to the evening papers. Photographs, colonel? Will we have to look at it?”
“No, sir. The police were faster than the journalists.”
The ambassador sighed. “The press attache will do the best he can, and I’ve already made a few telephone calls.” Stepping back into the hall, he said, “And colonel? Let it rest there. Please? I don’t want to lose you.”
Mercier nodded, not ungrateful, and said, “Yes, sir.”
As the ambassador prepared to close the door, he met Mercier’s eyes and his face changed: subtly, but enough so that Mercier understood that he was perhaps more than a little proud of his military attache.
At dusk, back in the apartment, Mercier sent Wlada out for the evening papers and saw that the affair had been nicely smoothed over. An altercation at the Hotel Orla, an attempted abduction, foiled by a passerby. One Hermann Schmitt had been drugged by unknown assailants, political motives were suspected, the police were investigating.
Wlada, having left Mercier to his reading, now returned to the study, Mercier’s battered old hat held firmly in both hands. “Colonel, I can do nothing with this, it’s ruined,” she said, extending the hat so that he could see what she meant. On the brim, the black print of the coalman’s thumb.
“Please don’t worry so, Wlada,” Mercier said gently. “It’s not ruined. Not at all.”
28 November.
The eight-fifteen LOT flight, Warsaw to Paris, was only a third full, and Mercier sat alone toward the rear of the airplane. Out the window, the fields of Poland were white with snow, and the plane bumped and jerked as it fought through the winds and climbed into the blue sky above the clouds.
Bruner and his superiors had, as predicted by the ambassador, recalled him to Paris for consultations, so he could look forward to a few disagreeable meetings and at least the possibility that he would be transferred from his assignment in Warsaw. On the other hand, he’d been guilty of fighting Germans, and the Poles would not be pleased if Paris pulled him back to the General Staff for doing that.
On the afternoon following the attempted abduction, he’d visited Uhl in the hospital, where he’d come to realize that the engineer was, whatever else he may have been, a lucky man. How he’d been discovered Mercier didn’t know, though he had spent a long time taking Uhl through the details of his home and office life. The luck came into play because Uhl had been issued a visa for travel to South Africa. Yes, he’d planned to run away-from Breslau, from “Andre,” from work and family. With his countess, or alone if necessary. The SD or the Gestapo, Mercier believed, had learned of the visa and, fearing his imminent flight, had determined they’d better snatch Uhl while they could still get their hands on him. Otherwise, they would simply have allowed him to return to Germany, watched him there, and arrested him at their leisure.
Somebody, most likely the officer in charge of the case, had panicked and ordered an almost spur-of-the-moment abduction by German operatives in Poland. Which had almost succeeded, then come to grief, but, even so, better than having a suspected spy vanish into thin air. Now Uhl was Mercier’s problem-what to do with him? In the short term, Mercier and Jourdain had to assume the hospital was being watched and so, after three days there, Uhl left the building on a stretcher, covered by a sheet, which was slid into the back of a hearse. Then, at the funeral home, out the back door and into a rented room on the outskirts of the city. “Now,” Jourdain had said, “we just have to keep him away from the ladies.”