There?s a little time to relax in this master?s new espionage thriller

June 17, 2008|Michael Kenney

The Spies of Warsaw, By Alan Furst, Random House, 266 pp., $25

As "The Polish Officer," Alan Furst's 1995 novel of espionage, opened, it was Sept. 11, 1939, and German forces were closing in upon Warsaw. "War - fire and smoke - had made autumn come early, dead leaves rattled along the cobblestones and caught in the iron drain covers."

And as Colonel Anton Vyborg, director of the Polish Army's intelligence unit, was arranging the shipment of the nation's gold bullion reserves to temporary safety in Romania, he remarked sadly that even as the Germans had surrounded Warsaw, Russian armies were massing along Poland's eastern borders.

Colonel Vyborg appears now in Furst's "The Spies of Warsaw." The Polish capital is again a battlefield, but it is October 1937, and the battles are for intelligence.

And in place of - or as precursors of - battalions and regiments, there are the spies plying their edgy trade, the word "spy" never used in their dealings with their employers.

There are Germans and Russians in the game, soon to be allies in carving up Poland, now eyeing each other warily.

And also the French, in the person of Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier, the military attaché who is one of Furst's most fully-realized characters. An aristocrat, like Captain Alexander de Milja of "The Polish Officer"; wounded in the 1914 War against the Germans, and again fighting with a Polish cavalry unit against the Red Army in 1920; the assignment in Warsaw "a career victory."

"You are actually brave, aren't you," says Anna Szarbek as they engage each other during a not-quite-by-chance "adventure" on the Belgrade train.

Mercier's mission is to ferret out the German war plans as they may pertain to France, and that involves the cultivating of spies, the close study of German military manuals, and then secretly observing German tank maneuvers barely 40 miles from the French border.

But in this, Furst's 10th novel of espionage, there is time - no one expects a shooting war for a year, two, maybe three or four. And that allows Furst to craft a novel in which, without the urgency of combat, there is time and space to linger in the last days of peace and for him to do what he does so well - convey the sense of atmosphere.

There is the Café Cleo, on "a lively and elegant street" in Warsaw, where Mercier meets with one of his agents: ". . . marble tables, black-and-white tiled floor, a bow window looking out on the avenue, where a less-favored world hurried by. The small room was almost full; the customers chattered away, read the papers, played chess, drank foamy cups of hot chocolate with whipped cream; their dogs, mostly beagles, lay attentive under the tables, waiting for cake crumbs."