The Katyn Order (27 page)

Adam almost dropped the phone. “Oh Christ! They think Banach collaborated with the Nazis.” He slumped back in the leather desk chair and stared at the ornately carved wooden beams in the ceiling of the former Nazi's study. “This whole thing is insane,” he snapped. “My uncle has been back in Krakow since 1940, and I never knew. I was gone, doing what
you
trained me to do. Doing things that—”

“He'll start looking for him,” Whitehall said.

“What?”

“This NKVD agent, Tarnov. He'll start looking for Banach.”

Adam suddenly felt dizzy. “We've got to find him first.”

“Do you have a contact?” Whitehall asked. “Someone in the AK who was in Krakow, someone who might know where to start?”

“I don't know . . . they're all gone . . . they're . . .” Adam closed his eyes to let the dizziness subside. Slowly an image formed in his mind, an image of Natalia sprinting toward a sewer in Warsaw, wearing her blue railway conductor's uniform. That was her code name,
Conductor.
She had mentioned it that last night in Warsaw, in the ammunition cellar. “Not very original as code names go,” she had said. Snatches of the conversation gradually came back to him. Just before the artillery shell hit and they bolted out of the cellar, Natalia had said, “I heard from a priest . . .”

And then . . . what else? There was something else, something he had been trying to remember for weeks. Adam forced himself to concentrate, trying to recall her exact words. “I heard from a priest, of all things . . . then someone I never met . . .”

It struck him like a thunderbolt.

“. . . someone I never met, called the
Provider.”

Adam abruptly stood up, squeezing the telephone receiver, his knuckles turning white.
Of course! How could I have missed it?
Natalia had never finished the thought, but now it was suddenly clear.

The Conductor . . . The Provider.

She was part of the channel!

“There may be someone,” he said into the telephone. “Someone I knew . . .”

“What's his name?” Whitehall asked.

“Her name,” Adam said. “Her name is Natalia.”

6 J
UNE

K
RAKOW'S
M
EDIEVAL
S
TARE
M
IASTO
D
ISTRICT
stretched for almost two kilometers along the Royal Way, from the Gothic tower of St. Florian's Gate in the north to Wawel Castle, high above the banks of the Vistula River, in the south. And in the center of the district, encircled by the wide pathways and greenery of the Planty park, was the Rynek Glowny, the largest market square in Europe, and since the thirteenth century, the heart and soul of the City of Kings.

Natalia walked briskly across the Rynek Glowny and continued south, along the narrow, cobblestone streets of the Stare Miasto, struggling to suppress her anxiety about being back in the city after months of hiding out in forests and AK safe houses. She knew she should keep moving, blending in with the pedestrian flow so as not to attract attention.

But she paused for a moment at the base of Wawel Castle and glanced up at the towering edifice of the royal palace and the adjoining cathedral where every Polish monarch for a thousand years had been coronated. Flags fluttered from the towers high above the stone fortifications that surrounded the castle. They were Soviet flags now, the hammer-and-sickle having replaced the swastika since she'd last been here. The Russians had driven out the Germans, the flags had changed, and the black uniforms of the SS were replaced with the khaki uniforms of the NKVD.

Natalia sighed and turned away from the castle, following the route she had taken dozens of times over the years, through the tree-lined paths of the Planty park then along a labyrinth of narrow, Medieval streets where the rich ensemble of Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque architecture remained unscathed by the war that had ravaged the rest of the country.

The Stare Miasto was crowded at this hour, but subdued. There were few vehicles, and pedestrians avoided conversation with strangers, averting their glances as they'd been conditioned to do through the long, dark period of occupation. The shops had little to sell, the cafés offered only a few meager selections and the hundreds of churches were mostly empty under the atheist influence of the communist occupier.

Natalia continued on, moving briskly, avoiding eye contact. She made her way along the boulevards bordering the Vistula River to the Kazimierz District, once a separate city and for three hundred years the home of Krakow's Jewish quarter. It was a familiar route, a familiar city, remarkably undamaged yet inexorably altered, its royal soul deadened.

Twenty minutes later, in the heart of Kazimierz, Natalia walked down a long narrow street, lined with stone walls on either side, and entered the courtyard of the Church of Archangel Michael and Saint Stanislaus. A rose garden was in full bloom, and an elderly man hunched over, clipping grass at the base of a towering oak tree. The tree shaded a rectangular pond with a granite statute of the saint at its center.

Natalia wore stout shoes and dark trousers, a white long-sleeved shirt and a gray vest. Along with her felt hat and short brown hair, she could be taken for a man by a casual observer, which was safer than a woman alone. But caution was a habit, and she turned away from the elderly man.

She glanced at her watch. It was one o'clock in the afternoon. And it was the sixth of June, a Wednesday. She paused for a moment, studying the red-brick church building with its twin towers and high-peaked tile roof, then slowly climbed the curved, limestone staircase. With her cap folded under her arm she entered the gloomy sanctuary.

There was a faint odor of incense in the air, and she waited a moment for her eyes to adjust. Then she knelt, made the sign of the cross and slipped into the last pew on the right, the one closest to the confessional in the rear of the sanctuary. There were several people ahead of her, and she withdrew a rosary from her pocket. She closed her eyes, absently fingering the beads, thinking about the extraordinary message that had brought her back here.

It had arrived on her last day at the AK safe house in Zyrardow. The NKVD had been closing in, investigating the shooting of the two agents, and it was time to move on. Zeeka had made contact with another AK cell in Lodz and had sent Hammer and Rabbit on ahead. But as Natalia and Zeeka were gathering their things, the AK wireless operator came down from the attic with a message.

“From Lodz?” Zeeka asked.

The wireless operator shook his head. “It's from SOE in London. It was sent several days ago, but it was routed through three different cells before I got it.” He handed Natalia the message. “It's for you.”

“From the SOE in London? Are you sure it's for me?”

“It's addressed to ‘The Conductor' and that's you,” he said with a shrug.

Natalia hesitated then unfolded the paper and read the decoded message:

M
UST LOCATE
P
ROVIDER

R
EPEAT:
L
OCATE
P
ROVIDER

Avoiding trains and keeping to the back roads and small villages, it had taken Natalia a week to get to Krakow. She had traveled first with Zeeka as far as Lodz, where she parted with her friends and comrades-in-arms. Rabbit had wanted to go with her, but whatever awaited her in Krakow, Natalia knew that she had to do this alone.

She had no idea why SOE wanted to locate the Provider. She had never even known there was a connection between the two. During her years acting as a courier, she'd never met the Provider. It was just a name, someone in the channel who passed documents to the priest, or to someone in between. She really didn't know; she didn't need to know. All she had ever needed to know was to kneel at the confessional in this church between one and two o'clock in the afternoon on a Wednesday.

But why would SOE contact
her?
She hadn't been an active part of the channel since she left for Warsaw at the start of the Rising, almost a year ago.
Why now? Why me?
She had no idea. But it was an assignment, and it was not her place to question it. She had been instructed to locate the Provider. And this was the only place to start.

A woman sitting on Natalia's left nudged her elbow, indicating that it was her turn. Natalia took a deep breath, then stood up, and stepped around a marble pillar and over to the confessional. It was an enclosure of rich mahogany wood, a bit larger than a telephone booth, with a peaked roof and adorned with intricately carved scrollwork. A slatted wooden screen allowed the penitent to communicate with the priest waiting inside. Natalia knelt on the velvet-padded kneeler and whispered into the screen, “In the name of our Lord, I come seeking.”

There was a moment of silence. Then a voice from the other side whispered back, “Whom do you seek, my child?”

Natalia paused before responding, her tension momentarily relieved at the familiar voice and the customary words. “I seek the one who has provided us with so much.”

“It has been a long time,” the voice said.

“A difficult time,” Natalia answered.

When the voice spoke again there was a slight tremor. “The Provider is no longer among us.”

Natalia's stomach tightened as she stared at the wooden screen. She swallowed hard, carefully choosing her next words. “Did he leave anything for me?”

Another moment of silence. Then the voice said, “This afternoon, five o'clock, Dietla and Stradomska. Get on the tram for Stare Miasto.”

The tram was crowded, and Natalia had to stand. The priest sat on the right side of the car, a newspaper folded under his arm. When they reached the first stop in the Stare Miasto District, the priest got up and pushed his way through the crowd. Natalia followed him out of the car.

As they walked toward the Rynek Glowny, Natalia waited for the priest to say something, but he was silent. He was a thin, severe-looking man in his sixties with sharp, chiseled features and an imperious manner that Natalia had at first found intimidating. In later years she had little patience for the man's haughty nature and had rarely spoken with him outside of the confessional.

“What happened to the Provider?” she finally asked.

The priest remained silent, walking briskly, staring straight ahead.

“Is he alive?”

The priest slowed his pace and glanced at her. His face, partially hidden under his black, wide-brimmed hat, was pale, his eyes blank and distant. “He's gone.”

“Gone where? When?”

“I don't know. The day before the Russians arrived, he was just . . . gone.”

They entered the Rynek Glowny, an enormous cobblestone square surrounded by church spires, Medieval merchant halls and former residences of Krakow's elite. They found a table at an outdoor café where they tried to order tea but had to settle for bitter, ersatz coffee. While they exchanged small talk about the weather, Natalia glanced at the folded newspaper which the priest had laid on the table. Inside would be an address handwritten in the margin.

The priest finished his coffee, his dull eyes darting around the busy market square. He whispered, “God be with you, my child.” Then he stood and walked away.

An hour later, Natalia found the address in the eastern section of the Kazimierz District. For centuries it had been a crowded, bustling district of apartment buildings, banks and synagogues, tailor shops and jewelers, butchers, clothing stores, and outdoor markets. The Jews who built it were gone now, murdered in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka, and little remained in the area except decaying buildings, emaciated stray dogs foraging for scraps in the gutters, and crippled beggars, dressed in rags, holding empty cups in their bony hands.

Repeating the same procedure she had used during the war, Natalia let herself into the run-down apartment building and retrieved a key from the mailbox in the vestibule. She climbed the creaking stairs to the third floor, wondering if anyone still lived there, unlocked the door to a room at the end of the hall and locked it behind her. She opened the window a crack to let in a bit of fresh air, and stood in the center of the room listening to the silence. Then she got down on her knees and reached under the bed.

The package was wrapped in the usual brown paper, but it was smaller than the others she had retrieved in the same manner from other rooms in other shabby buildings. This package felt more like a book than the files of documents she had received during the years she had spent as part of the channel.

Natalia sat on the bed and held the package, turning it over in her hands, thinking about the hundreds of documents that had been passed along this same channel during the years of Nazi occupation, documents that she could never resist reading despite putting herself in even greater jeopardy by possessing the information. There had been meticulously prepared reports, including daily logs and charts filled with numbers, revealing inconceivable atrocities taking place behind the walls of Auschwitz, Treblinka and the other death camps of Poland.

Extreme risks had been taken by everyone along the channel, from the Provider to another unknown contact, then to the priest and finally to Natalia, who carried them on the train to Warsaw. The identities of those involved in the channel were a carefully guarded secret. Natalia knew only those with whom she had direct contact: the priest, Berta and Falcon. The documents had been passed along, and perhaps some had made it to London, New York or Washington. Natalia had no way of knowing. It hadn't done any good. That much she knew. The carnage had escalated. Hundreds of thousands were murdered, perhaps millions.

And now, when the war had ended, the Nazis were defeated . . .
the Provider is gone?

Natalia stared at the package, her nerves taut as piano strings. Then, very slowly, she removed the wrapping paper. Inside was the customary envelope containing currency, a thin stack of fifty-zloty banknotes to help her with expenses. There was also a book.