The spies of warsaw

Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 3/26/08 9:28 AM Page i

This book has been optimized for viewing

at 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 Soldiers

Dark Star

The Polish Officer

The World at Night

Red Gold

Kingdom of Shadows

Blood of Victory

Dark Voyage

The 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 an

automobile, 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.

Uhl handed the driver his fare--he kept a reserve of Polish zloty in

his desk at the office--and added a small, proper gratuity, then said

"
Dankeschon
." It didn't matter now, he was where he wanted to be. In

the room, he hung up his suit, shirt, and tie, laid out fresh socks and

underwear on the bed, and went into the bathroom to have a thorough

wash. He had just enough time; the Countess Sczelenska would arrive

in thirty minutes. Or, rather, that was the time set for the rendezvous;

she would of course be late, would make him wait for her, let him

think, let him anticipate, let him steam.

And was she a countess? A real Polish countess? Probably not, he

thought. But so she called herself, and she was, to him,
like
a countess:

imperious, haughty, and demanding. Oh how this provoked him, as

the evening lengthened and they drank champagne, as her mood slid,

Furs_9781400066025_3p_all_r1.qxp 3/26/08 9:29 AM Page 6

6 * T H E S P I E S O F WA R S AW

subtly, from courteous disdain to sly submission, then on to breathless

urgency. It was the same always, their private melodrama, with an

ending that never changed. Uhl the stallion--despite the image in the

mirrored armoire, a middle-aged gentleman with thin legs and potbelly and pale chest home to a few wisps of hair--demonstrably

excited as he knelt on the hotel carpet, while the countess, looking

down at him over her shoulder, eyebrows raised in mock surprise,

deigned to let him roll her silk underpants down her great, saucy, fat

bottom.
Noblesse oblige
. You may have your little pleasure, she

seemed to say, if you are so inspired by what the noble Sczelenska

bloodline has wrought. Uhl would embrace her middle and honor the

noble heritage with tender kisses. In time very effective, such honor,

and she would raise him up, eager for what came next.

He'd met her a year and a half earlier, in Breslau, at a
Weinstube
where

the office employees of the foundry would stop for a little something

after work. The
Weinstube
had a small terrace in back, three tables

and a vine, and there she sat, alone at one of the tables on the deserted

terrace: morose and preoccupied. He'd sat at the next table, found her

attractive--not young, not old, on the buxom side, with brassy hair

pinned up high and an appealing face--and said good evening. And

why so glum, on such a pleasant night?

She'd come down from Warsaw, she explained, to see her sister, a

family crisis, a catastrophe. The family had owned, for several generations, a small but profitable lumber mill in the forest along the eastern border. But they had suffered financial reverses, and then the

storage sheds had been burned down by a Ukrainian nationalist gang,

and they'd had to borrow money from a Jewish speculator. But the

problems wouldn't stop, they could not repay the loans, and now that

dreadful man had gone to court and taken the mill. Just like them,