The spies of warsaw by Alan Furst Read Free Book Online Page B

almost six when they reached the Polish border at Leszno.
    Uhl decided to get off the train and wait for the next one, but the conductor had stationed himself to block the door. Broad and stocky, feet
    spread wide, he stood like an official wall. "You must wait for the
    passport officers, sir," he said. He wasn't polite. Did he think Uhl
    wanted to run away? No, he knew that Uhl wanted to run away. Six
    days a week he worked on this train, what hadn't he seen? Fugitives,
    certainly, who'd lost their nerve and couldn't face the authorities.
    "Of course," Uhl said, returning to his compartment.
    What a fool he was! He was an ordinary man, not cut out for a life
    like this. He'd been born to put on his carpet slippers after dinner, to
    sit in his easy chair, read his newspaper, and listen to music on the
    radio. In the compartment, the other passengers were restive. They
    didn't speak but shifted about, cleared their throats, touched their
    faces. And there they sat, as twenty minutes crawled by. Then, at last,
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    at the end of the car, the sound of boots on the steel platform, a little
    joke, a laugh. The two officers entered the compartment, took each
    passport in turn, glanced at the owner, found the proper page, and
    stamped it: Odjazd Polska -- 18 Pazdziernik 1937.
    Well, that wasn't so bad. The passengers relaxed. The woman
    across from Uhl searched in her purse, found a hard candy, unwrapped
    it, and popped it in her mouth--so much for the Polish frontier! Then
    she noticed that Uhl was watching her. "Would you care for a candy?"
    she said.
    "No, thank you."
    "Sometimes, the motion of the train . . ." she said. There was
    sympathy in her eyes.
    Did he look ill? What did she see, in his face? He turned away and
    stared out the window. The train had left the lights of Leszno; outside
    it was dark, outside it was Germany. Now what Uhl saw in the window was his own reflection, but if he pressed his forehead against the
    cold glass he could just make out a forest, a one-street village, a black
    car, shiny in the rain, waiting at the lowered bar of a railway crossing. What if, he wondered, the next time he went to Warsaw, he simply
    didn't show up for Andre's meeting? What would they do? Would they
    betray him? Or just let him go? The former, he thought. He was
    trapped, and they would not set him free; the world didn't work that
    way, not their world. His mind was working like a machine gone wild;
    fantasies of escape, fantasies of capture, a dozen alibis, all of them
    absurd, the possibility that he was afraid of shadows, that none of it
    was real.
    "Glo-gau!"
    The conductor's voice was loud in the corridor. Then, from further away, "Glogau!"
    The train rumbled through the outlying districts of the city, then
    slowed for the bridge that crossed the river Oder, a long span of
    arches, the current churning white as it curled around the stone block.
    An ancient border, no matter where the diplomats drew their lines,
    "east of the Oder" meant Slavic Europe, the other Europe.
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    H OT E L E U RO P E J S K I * 3 7
    "All out for Glogau."
    The passport kontrol was set up at the door to the station,
    beneath a large swastika flag. Uhl counted five men, one of them
    seated at a small table, another with an Alsatian shepherd on a
    braided leash. Three were in uniform, their holstered sidearms worn
    high, and two were civilians, standing so they could see a sheaf of
    papers on the table. A list.
    Uhl's heart was pounding as he stepped down onto the platform.
    You have nothing to fear, he told himself. If they searched him they
    would find only a thousand zloty. So what? Everyone carried money.
    But they have a list. What if his name was on it? A few months earlier
    he'd seen it happen, right here, at Glogau station. A heavy man, with
    a red face, led quietly away, a guiding hand above his