On the train he read The Daily Telegraph to see what the British were thinking about that morning. Asked if Paris would be declared an open city, a French spokesman replied, “Never. We are confident that Hitler’s mechanized hordes will never get to Paris. But should they come so far, you may tell your countrymen we shall defend every stone, every clod of earth, every lamppost, every building, for we would rather have our city razed to the ground than fall into the hands of the Germans.”
Emerging at the Pont de Neuilly métro stop, de Milja saw a group of white-haired garbagemen—veterans, wearing their decorations— working on a line of twelve garbage trucks. They were engrossed in mounting machine guns on the trucks and, by that afternoon, the Paris police were wearing tin-pot helmets and carrying rifles.
“The government’s going to Tours,” Vyborg said.
“From what I saw this morning they were certainly going somewhere,” de Milja said.
Late afternoon, an anonymous café on the rue Blanche. Amber walls tinted brown with Gauloises smoke, etched glass panels between booths. An old lady with a small dog sat at the bar, the bored owner scowled as he read one of the single-sheet newspapers that had replaced the usual editions.
Vyborg and de Milja sat facing each other in a booth and sipped at glasses of beer. The afternoon was hot and still, a fly buzzing around a motionless fan in the ceiling. Sometimes, from the refugee columns trudging down the boulevards a block away, the sound of an auto horn. Vyborg wore an old gray suit, with no tie and shirt collar open. He looked, de Milja thought, like a lawyer with unpaid office rent and no clients.
“Hard to believe that it’s over here. That the French army lasted one month,” Vyborg said.
“It is over, then.”
“Yes. Paris will be declared an open city today or tomorrow. The Germans will be in here in a week or less.”
“But France will fight on.”
“No, it won’t. Reynaud cabled Roosevelt and demanded American intervention, Roosevelt’s response was a speech that dithered and said nothing. Pétain appeared before the cabinet in Tours and said that an armistice is, in his view, ‘the necessary condition for the survival of eternal France.’ That’s that.”
De Milja was incredulous. France remained powerful, had a formidable navy, had army units in Morocco, Syria, Algeria, could have fought on for years. “In Warsaw—”
“This isn’t Warsaw,” Vyborg said. “In Tours, they lost a top-secret cable, turned the whole chateau upside down looking for it. Finally a maid found it, crumpled up in Reynaud’s mistress’s bed. Now, that’s not the first time in the history of the world that such a thing has happened, but you get the feeling it’s the way things are. It’s as though they’ve woken from a dream, discovered the house on fire, then shrugged and walked away rather than calling the fire department or looking for a bucket. If you read history, you know there are times when nations fail, that’s what happened here.”
Vyborg took a pack of Gitanes from his pocket, offered it to de Milja, took one for himself, then lit both with a silver lighter. In the rue Blanche, a refugee family had become separated from the stream moving south across Paris. A man pulled a cart with quilts tied over the top of a mound of furniture; here and there a chair leg poked through. His wife led two goats on a rope. The farm dog, panting hard in the afternoon heat, walked in the shadow of the cart. Behind the cart were three small children, the oldest girl holding the hands of two little boys. The family had been on the road a long time; their eyes, glazed with fatigue, saw nothing of their surroundings.
The proprietor put his paper down for a moment and stared at the family as they labored past. A tough Parisian, his only comment was to turn his head and make a spitting sound before going back to his newspaper with an almost imperceptible shake of the head. The old woman’s lapdog barked fiercely at the goats. The farm dog glanced up, then ignored it—some little woolly thing in Paris that thought it was a dog; the things you see when you travel. The old woman shushed her dog, muttering something about “unfortunates” that de Milja could barely make out.
“Fucking German pigs,” Vyborg said quietly, with resignation.
“The local bully-boys—come Friday night and they beat up the neighbors. Which is why, I guess, the French and the Poles have always been friends; they share the problem.”
“I suppose,” de Milja said, “we’re going to London. Unless there’s a miracle.”
“There will be no miracle,” Vyborg said. “And, yes, it is London. We’ve got a destroyer berthed at the mouth of the Loire, in Nantes, not too far from the government in Tours. I’m going down there tomorrow, we have to be where official France is. You’re going to stay here—the last man out. Work on the reactivation program, whatever you can manage to get done. Just don’t stray too far from base, meaning Neuilly. That villa is now the French station of the Polish army’s intelligence service. As for a time of departure, it’s hard to predict exactly. It will be at the final hour—Polish honor demands at least that, with shells falling on the harbor and our fantail on fire. You’ll be contacted when we know a little more, by telephone or courier. Given a cipher, probably. The BBC has agreed to broadcast signals for us— we’re likely to do it that way, in the Messages Personnels, so get yourself a working radio and listen to it—ten, four, and midnight. Myself, I like the garden programs. Did you know that periwinkle can be used as a ground cover on a shady hillside?”
It was dark when de Milja returned to Neuilly. He carried with him a battered briefcase stuffed with French francs and a new list, in code, of Polish agents in Paris. People on the Genya Beilis level had been contacted, now there remained the small-fry, a surprisingly long list. But Poland had always had an aggressive, busy intelligence service—a characteristic of small countries with big enemies.
De Milja made a successful contact at 11:20 that night at a dance hall in Clichy—an aging, embittered clerk in the French department of the Admiralty who was paid a small monthly stipend. Then he hurried to the Notre-Dame-de-Lorette métro stop, but the woman he expected, an ethnic Pole running a group of engineers in the Hungarian armament industry, did not appear.
The following morning he awoke to find the air dark, the leaves of the tree outside his window covered in oily grime, and the spring birds fled. Later that day a taxi driver confirmed his suspicion: the Germans had bombed the gasoline storage tanks at Levallois-Perret, the black cloud of soot had drifted down on the city.
At the fall-back meeting of 2:25 p.m.—Notre-Dame-de-Lorette station replaced by Abbesses—the ethnic Pole appeared: Chanel scarf, clouds of perfume, and a refusal to meet his eyes when he handed her a payment of five thousand francs. She was gone, he thought. But he was doubly gracious, thanked her profusely, and passed her the SaintEtienne-du-Mont protocol anyhow. The best he could do was to try to leave a positive impression—the world changed, luck went sour, he wanted her to feel that working for the Polish service was a life preserver in a stormy sea.
Paris dying.
Refugees streaming past, among them disarmed French soldiers, still in uniform. The city now silent, seemingly empty but for the shuffle of the refugee columns. The abandoned government offices had caused consternation—even the one-page newspapers were gone now, the kiosks were shut tight, and the garbage was no longer collected.
De Milja could not escape the sadness. Even when it rained death and fire, Warsaw had fought desperately to survive; improvising and improvising, ingenuity and courage set against iron and explosives. They’d had no chance, but they fought anyhow; brave, deluded, stubborn. Closing his eyes, he saw the passengers on the Pilava local, clothing dirty, here and there bloody, walking into Romania with the heavy little crates of bullion.