Alan Furst - The Spies of Warsaw

Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 3/26/08 9:28 AM Page i This book has been optimized for viewingat a monitor setting of 1024 x 768 pixels. Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 3/26/08 9:28 AM Page i Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 3/26/08 9:28 AM Page ii a l s o b y a l a n f u rs t Night SoldiersDark StarThe Polish OfficerThe World at NightRed GoldKingdom of ShadowsBlood of VictoryDark VoyageThe Foreign Correspondent Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 3/26/08 9:28 AM Page iii

Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 3/26/08 9:28 AM Page iv Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 3/26/08 9:28 AM Page v THE ALAN WARSAW b N E W Y O R K Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 3/26/08 9:28 AM Page vi This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict the actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. Copyright (c) 2008 by Alan Furst Map copyright (c) 2008 by Anita Karl and Jim Kemp All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Random House and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. eISBN: 978-1-58836-716-7 www.atrandom.com v1.0 Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 3/26/08 9:28 AM Page vii As looking at a portrait suggests the impression of the subject's destiny to the observer, so the map of France tells our own fortune. The body of the country has in its centre a citadel, a forbidding mass of age-old mountains, flanked by the tablelands of Provence, Limousin, and Burgundy; and, all around, vast slopes, for the most part difficult of access to anyone attacking them from the outside and split by the gorges of the Saone, the Rhone, and the Garonne, barred by the walls of the Jura Alps and the Pyrenees or else plunging in the distance into the English Channel, the Atlantic, or the Mediterranean; but in the Northeast, there is a terrible breach between the essential basins of the Seine and the Loire and German territory. The Rhine, which nature meant for the Gauls to have as their boundary and their protection, has hardly touched France before it leaves her and lays her open to attack. -- Ca p ta i n C h a r l e s d e G au l l e The Army of the Future, 1934 Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 4/14/08 11:16 AM Page viii Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 4/14/08 11:16 AM Page ix Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 3/26/08 9:29 AM Page x Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 3/26/08 9:29 AM Page 1

EUROPEJSKI Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 3/26/08 9:29 AM Page 2 Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 3/26/08 9:29 AM Page 3 In the dying light of an autumn day in 1937, a certain Herr Edvard Uhl, a secret agent, descended from a first-class railway carriage in the city of Warsaw. Above the city, the sky was at war; the last of the sun struck blood-red embers off massed black cloud, while the clear horizon to the west was the color of blue ice.

Herr Uhl suppressed a shiver; the sharp air of the evening, he told himself. But this was Poland, the border of the Russian steppe, and what had reached him was well beyond the chill of an October twilight. A taxi waited on Jerozolimskie street, in front of the station. The driver, an old man with a seamed face, sat patiently, knotted hands at rest on the steering wheel. "Hotel Europejski," Uhl told the driver. He wanted to add, and be quick about it, but the words would have been in German, and it was not so good to speak German in this city.

Germany had absorbed the western part of Poland in 1795--Russia ruled Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 3/26/08 9:29 AM Page 4 4 * T H E S P I E S O F WA R S AW the east, Austria-Hungary the southwest corner--for a hundred and twenty-three years, a period the Poles called "the Partition," a time of national conspiracy and defeated insurrection, leaving ample bad blood on all sides. With the rebirth of Poland in 1918, the new borders left a million Germans in Poland and two million Poles in Germany, which guaranteed that the bad blood would stay bad. So, for a German visiting Warsaw, a current of silent hostility, closed faces, small slights: we don't want you here. Nonetheless, Edvard Uhl had looked forward to this trip for weeks. In his late forties, he combed what remained of his hair in strands across his scalp and cultivated a heavy dark mustache, meant to deflect attention from a prominent bulbous nose, the bulb divided at the tip. A feature one saw in Poland, often enough. So, an ordinarylooking man, who led a rather ordinary life, a more-than-decent life, in the small city of Breslau: a wife and three children, a good job--as a senior engineer at an ironworks and foundry, a subcontractor to the giant Rheinmetall firm in Dusseldorf--a few friends, memberships in a church and a singing society.

Oh, maybe the political situation--that wretched Hitler and his wretched Nazis strutting about--could have been better, but one abided, lived quietly, kept one's opinions to oneself; it wasn't so difficult. And the paycheck came every week. What more could a man want? Instinctively, his hand made sure of the leather satchel on the seat by his side. A tiny stab of regret touched his heart. Foolish, Edvard,truly it is. For the satchel, a gift from his first contact at the French embassy in Warsaw, had a false bottom, beneath which lay a sheaf of engineering diagrams.

Well, he thought, one did what one had to do, so life went. No, one did what one had to do in order to do what one wanted to do--so life really went. He wasn't supposed to be in Warsaw; he was supposed, by his family and his employer, to be in Gleiwitz--just on the German side of the frontier dividing German Lower Silesia from Polish Upper Silesia--where his firm employed a large metal shop for the work that exceeded their capacity in Breslau. With the Reich rearming, they could not keep up with the orders that Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 3/26/08 9:29 AM Page 5 H OT E L E U RO P E J S K I * 5 flowed from the Wehrmacht. The Gleiwitz works functioned well enough, but that wasn't what Uhl told his bosses. "A bunch of lazy idiots down there," he said, with a grim shake of the head, and found it necessary to take the train down to Gleiwitz once a month to straighten things out.

And he did go to Gleiwitz--that pest from Breslau, back again!- but he didn't stay there. When he was done bothering the local management he took the train up to Warsaw where, in a manner of speaking, one very particular thing got straightened out. For Uhl, a blissful night of lovemaking, followed by a brief meeting at dawn, a secret meeting, then back to Breslau, back to Frau Uhl and his morethan-decent life. Refreshed. Reborn. Too much, that word? No.

Just right. Uhl glanced at his watch. Drive faster, you peasant! This is anautomobile, not a plow. The taxi crawled along Nowy Swiat, the grand avenue of Warsaw, deserted at this hour--the Poles went home for dinner at four. As the taxi passed a church, the driver slowed for a moment, then lifted his cap. It was not especially reverent, Uhl thought, simply something the man did every time he passed a church. At last, the imposing Hotel Europejski, with its giant of a doorman in visored cap and uniform worthy of a Napoleonic marshal.

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