They walked in the stables of the cavalry barracks, added to the Savka fortress when the Tenth Polish Hussars rode with Bonaparte in the Napoleonic Wars. The indoor riding ring—a floor of raked dirt below ax-hewn beams—was by tradition the regimental champ d’honneur; not just pistols at thirty paces, but duels on horseback with cavalry sabers. Beyond the riding ring, the horse barns. The horses stamped their hooves and whickered softly as the officers approached. The air smelled good to de Milja; manure and straw, autumn evening and Vyborg’s cigar. Not the smell of burning buildings, not the smell of burning paper. A cloud of gnats hung in the still air, the light fading slowly from dusk into darkness.
There was something of the Baltic knight in Colonel Vyborg. In his forties, he was tall and lean and thin-lipped, with webbed lines at the corners of eyes made to squint into blizzards, and stiff, colorless hair cut short in the cavalry-officer fashion. He wore high leather boots, supple and dark, well-rubbed with saddle soap. His job was to direct the work of intelligence officers—usually but not always military attachés in foreign postings—who operated secret agents.
“Have one of these,” Vyborg said.
Vyborg lit the captain’s small cigar, then spoke quietly as they walked. “As of tonight, our situation is this: there are fifty-two German divisions in Poland, about a million and a half soldiers, led by thousands of tanks. Our air force was blown up on the ground the first morning. Our allies, France and England, have declared war, and made gestures—of course, we had hoped for more. America is neutral, and disinterested. So, as usual, we find ourselves alone. Worse, Stalin has forty divisions on the eastern border and all our intelligence indicates an attack within hours. Meanwhile, we have half a million men in uniform—or, rather, had. Our communications have broken down, but we know of a hundred thousand casualties and a hundred thousand taken prisoner. Probably it’s worse than that. I suppose our view of the immediate future is implicit in the fact that we are burning the files. But it’s not the first time, and this is Poland, and, for us at least, all is not necessarily lost. You agree?”
“I do, sir.”
“Good. We want to offer you a job, but I’m to emphasize that you have a choice. You can go out to one of the regular combat divisions— we’re going to make a stand at the Bzura River, and, in addition, some units are going to try and hold out in the Pripet Marshes in the eastern provinces. The nation is defeated, but the idea of the nation mustn’t be. So, if that’s what you want to do, to die on the battlefield, I won’t stop you.”
“Or?”
“Or come to work for us. Over on the west side of the building—at least that’s where we used to be. It’s no small decision, but time’s the one thing we don’t have. The city’s almost completely cut off, and by tomorrow there’ll be no getting out. The Germans won’t try to break in, they know they’ll pay in blood for that and they aren’t quite so brave as their reputation makes them out. They’ll continue to send the bomber flights, unopposed, and they’ll sit out there where we can’t get at them and shell the city. We’ll take it as long as we can, then we’ll sign something to get it stopped.”
“And then?”
“And then the war will begin.”
A horse leaned over the gate of its stall and the colonel stopped to run his hand through its mane. “Wish I had an apple for you,” Vyborg said. “What about it, Captain, shall we shoot these beasts? Or let the
Germans have them?”
“Can they be hidden? In stables with cart horses, perhaps?”
“It’s hard to hide valuable things from Germans, Captain. Very hard.”
They walked in silence for a time. A flight of Heinkel bombers passed overhead; both officers looked up, then waited. The bombs fell on the southern part of the city, a noise like rapid peals of thunder, then the planes turned away, a few antiaircraft rounds burst well below and behind them, and the silence returned as the sound of engines faded.
“Well?” Vyborg said.
“The west side of the building, Colonel.”
“You know the sorts of things that go on if the Germans get hold of people like us, Captain.”
“Yes, sir.”
“A dossier has been prepared for you—we assumed that you would accept the offer. It will be delivered to your office when you return. It assigns a nom de guerre—we don’t want anyone to know who you are. It has also some memoranda written over the last forty-eight hours, you will want to review that for a nine-fifteen meeting in my office. Questions?”
“No questions, sir.”
“There’s a great deal of improvisation at the moment, but we’re not going into the chaos business anytime soon. We’re going to lose a war, not our minds. And not our souls.”
“Understood, sir.”
“Anything you want to say?”
“With regard to my wife—”
“Yes?”
“She’s in a private clinic. In the countryside, near Tarnopol.”
“An illness?”
“She is—the doctor puts it that she has entered a private world.”
Vyborg shook his head in sympathy and scowled at the idea of illness attacking people he knew.
“Can she be rescued?”
Vyborg thought it over. Senior intelligence officers became almost intuitive about possibility—some miracles could be done, some couldn’t.
Once initiated, above a certain rank, you knew.
“I’m sorry,” the colonel said.
The captain inclined his head; he understood, it need not be further discussed. They walked in silence for a time, then the colonel said, “We’ll see you at nine-fifteen, then.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Officially, we’re glad to have you with us.” They shook hands. The captain saluted, the colonel returned the salute.
A quarter moon, red with fire, over the Vilna station railyards.
The yard supervisor wore a bandage over one eye, his suit and shirt had not been changed for days, days of crawling under freight cars, of floating soot and oily smoke, and his hands were trembling. He was ashamed of that, so had wedged them in his pockets as though he were a street-corner tough who whistled at girls.
“This was our best,” he said sadly. Captain de Milja flicked the beam of his flashlight over a passenger car with its roof peeled back. A woman’s scarf, light enough to float in the wind, was snagged on a shard of iron. “Bolen Coachworks,” the supervisor said. “Leadedglass lamps in the first-class compartments. Now look.”
“What’s back there?” de Milja asked.
“Nothing much. Just some old stock we pulled in from the local runs—the Pruszkow line, Wolomin.”
Cinders crunched under their feet as they walked. Yard workers with iron bars and acetylene torches were trying to repair the track. There were showers of blue sparks and the smell of scorched metal as they cut through the twisted rail.
“And this?”
The supervisor shrugged. “We run little trains to the villages, on market days. This is what’s left of the Solchow local. It was caught by a bombing raid on Thursday, just past the power station. The engineer panicked, he had his fireman uncouple the engine and they made a run for Vilna station. Maybe he thought he’d be safe under the roof, though I can’t imagine why, because it’s a glass roof, or it used to be. When the all clear sounded, the engine had been blown to pieces but the rest of the train was just left sitting out there on the track, full of angry old farm ladies and crates of chickens.”