Poets and Chess Players #12: In Which Miss Martin Remarks That Wolves Don’t Eat Each Other

"As long as we’re all hunting the same enemy, I think you can at least trust us not to stab you in the back."

This is chapter 12 of Poets and Chess Players, a WWII spy adventure and drama serial. Previously, in Geneva, Mat and Jeannie traced Dr. Haber’s visa request back to a scheme by German counterintelligence to catch the Americans meddling in Europe—but they’re not going to let that stop them from meddling. Also previously, in Vienna, Mr. Polzin discovered that Dr. Haber is deeply entangled with a government-funded project to study psychic physiology—or at least he was before his partner cut him out of the picture. This time, the stage is set for two old comrades to confront how far their paths have diverged…

(You can also read my Part One recap post!)

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November 30, 1941
Bregenz, Greater Germany

It was still gray and now bitingly cold on the German side of the border, the morning weather dipping to just below freezing for the first time since they’d come to Europe. Snow flurried lightly out of the still-bright sky into a thin layer on the ground, but the darker clouds over the mountains to the east bode poorly for easy travel. Jeanne had been hoping when they got rooms for the night that it would be clearer today, or at least that the train to Salzburg via Munich would be running again. Going around the Alps, through what had used to be southern Germany before the Annexation, seemed like a far better idea to her than climbing another nine hundred meters into the avalanche country of Tyrol just to descend again when they got to Upper Austria. 

She had told Mr. Echevarria so, too—last night as well as just now, over the early breakfast he’d ordered up to his hotel room. (Hard rolls with gold-tinged spring butter, steaming liver sausages, and mountain cheese today, with hot chocolate substituted for coffee. Perfectly tolerable.) It was unlike Jeanne to bring any matter up a second time, but since his attitude hadn’t changed, she could only assume he hadn’t been listening.

“Naw, come on, Jeannie,” Echevarria said brightly. “Don’ wimp out on me now. Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“We’ve been on the Continent four days, and every single one of them has been an adventure,” she said. “I’m just about ready for something to go right the first time. Besides, you’re gonna get cold.”

“Cold? Ay … you’re riding with Berto Diaz, remember? I’m going out to buy a proper overcoat, an’ then it’s first-class tickets to Innsbruck for us. The steward tol’ me we could get a private compartment with its own radiator.” Mr. Echevarria paused suddenly to sit back in his chair and look Jeanne over; she wrinkled her nose in discomfort and looked down to escape his eyes. “You’re wearing that?” he said.

She kept looking down. That was a bottle-green two-piece dress with last year’s sleeves, the length and cut plausibly French, which had served her just fine so far. “Sure. Why not?”

“You got to get into character,” he said. “What’s your passport say, again?”

“Marguerite Jolicoeur.”

“Oh, that’s right! Yeah, Mad Madge.”

Jeanne snapped her head up to see him grinning. “I’m sorry?”

“That’s what the rest of the crew calls you,” Echevarria said, waving a hand as if this explained anything. “’Cause you once drew a pistol on Lucky for messing with the fuse panels on the Esmeralda. Seems a little disrespectful for me to do it, though, so I figured I’d stick with Margot or something myself.”

Oh. He’d really thought this out. Jeanne sipped her chocolate and wondered what kind of lady-reprobate would go to sea with a man like Roberto Diaz, but came up blank. It seemed easiest just to go with whatever Echevarria expected. “Sure. You can call me Margot,” she said finally. “But Margot don’t really sound like she cares about clothes.”

He pulled a wallet from his inside coat pocket and opened it rather theatrically. “Well, what would Margot do if Captain Diaz gave her two hundred Reichsmarks an’ told her to go shopping?”

“Hmm. She’d ask for fifty more to make damn sure that whoever sells her the illegal firearm stays quiet about it. I had to dump mine in Zürich.”

“I like you, Margot. You can fix anything and you got a sense of humor,” Echevarria said with a broad smile. He reached across and dropped the money next to her plate. “There’s five hundred. Get some new shoes, too, an’ a dress that looks like you belong in first class.”

“Aye, Capt’n,” Jeanne sighed. The overgrown boy across the table snickered out loud and tossed her an ironic salute as he got up to leave. She supposed he had a point: if he was determined to stick with the pirate angle, then Mad Madge, scourge of the Cantabrian Sea, couldn't very well go around looking like a Gascon seamstress. This little lakeside town wouldn't have much, but she'd take a look … after she got herself another gun.

Despite having almost twenty hours to think—sixteen, if you subtracted the fitful sleep in a gloomy mountainside hostel—Viktor Polzin had not yet managed to come up with a plan. There were simply too many variables, and his mind had not stopped reeling long enough to tackle a single one. All he could do was to move forward on instinct and principle, trusting to bald luck and to the fact that it had never once, in all their time together, been difficult to find Mat Azeri anywhere.

As he descended the train at Bregenz, he brushed off a waiting porter and walked through a nearly empty station to the lower street exit. It was an odd time of day for travelers, and the locals would be tucked into restaurants and beer halls taking a mid-morning snack. Polzin stopped at the edge of the street to mentally cast himself back three years and imagine the Fox walking beside him. Yes, if Azeri had gotten off the train here, he'd have stopped in a restaurant too. Personally, no amount of time spent pretending to be German could accustom him to the constant grazing like goats—but that boy had never turned down a meal, and it was difficult to think of him changing much.

Now crunching through the slowly-accumulating snow, Polzin followed his inner compass down to the edge of Lake Constance. It took two failures, but the third time he asked after a Spaniard, the waiter pointed him through the dining room towards a leaded picture window overlooking the water.

There he was. The Soviet clenched his jaw for a moment, thanked the man, and sidled in past the other diners. Azeri was practicing his French on the brunette sharing his table, but trailed off before Polzin was close enough to do anything but brace himself for the inevitable blast of personality.

Somewhat to his surprise, it didn't come. Mat simply stood up, grasped him by the shoulders, and embraced him like a lost member of the family. “So it’s really you,” he said tightly, his Spanish unusually soft.

Viktor looked off through the window at the wind-chopped surface of the lake. He couldn’t even bring himself to raise a hand to the boy’s arm.

When was the last time anyone had given him more than a handshake or a fist to the ribs?

“I really thought you were dead, Vic,” Mat continued as he pulled back. “God, I did. Everything fell to shit without you, do you know that?”

“I wouldn’t know,” he said, still numb. The half-forgotten language came to his tongue without having to be consciously recalled.

“Heh, yeah, I guess you wouldn’t.” Mat’s half-smile broke into a grin as he seemed to recall something. “But I should introduce myself properly, given the circumstances! You’re talking to Captain Roberto Díaz Martínez, my friend. And this is my chief engineer, security specialist, and future sister-in-l— … uh, who fortunately speaks no Spanish … don’t tell her that I said that. Anyhow, Margot Jolicoeur.”

Viktor eyed the young woman skeptically. In contrast to Azeri’s flamboyant presentation, she was dressed severely and in dark colors, down to the knee-high hiking boots so new they didn't even have creases yet. She had a winter skirt on and a relatively fashionable hat, but a man’s shirt buttoned up to her chin under a man’s waistcoat and jacket. She looked back at him distantly, as though she’d somehow seen enough of life already to be permanently unimpressed with it. “Heinrich Graner, mademoiselle,” he said.

“Enchantée,” she said, her voice a low rumble.

Mat swiveled back to address her in English—for his benefit, Viktor presumed. “What was that?”

“You told me to get inta character,” she replied, immediately pitching-up several steps. The accent was unmistakably American and so thick he almost couldn't parse the words. “Margot’s a tough gal. I thought I'd do Fréhel.”¹

“Well, don’ do Fréhel. It gives me the creeps. Shit.” Mat rubbed the back of his neck and gestured to the table. “Sit down, huh? Let me get you a beer, we’ll catch up.”

Viktor answered in Spanish; it was too hard at the moment to dredge up the English words he needed, and the thought of hiding his accent was even more tiring. “No, not here.” Mat looked around openly at the other patrons, earning himself an instinctive slap on the arm. Viktor’s hand was tingling from the impact before he realized he’d done it. “You imbecile, any one of them could be watching us,” he hissed.

“All right,” the Basque said quietly, shrugging. “All right. Eh, Margot—” He continued in French; whatever it was he’d said, the girl’s face twitched a little as she got up, but she showed no real emotion. Viktor watched her carefully until she deliberately hung back for him and Mat to walk ahead.

The cold wind coming off the lake sliced Polzin’s face again as they walked down to the shore, and he leaned into it while Azeri buried his face in his scarf. 

“Do you want me to send Jeannie back to the hotel so we can talk without her?” Azeri asked finally, a little muffled. 

Polzin frowned. “Probably so. Who is she?”

“Lou called her a ‘girl Friday’, which I think means that she does a little of everything²—you remember Lou, don’t you? Lou Brennan?”

His neck prickled at the new reminder of his past life. “Yes.”

“Well, he’s got a job with the American government now,” Azeri said. “He introduced Jeannie to me as his file clerk, but she used to work for the British before that—” 

“The Anglos?” Polzin snapped, stealing the barest glance at the girl from the corner of his eye. She was trailing them at a few paces, hands in her pockets and her eyes alert in that listless face. Damned if this didn’t get worse all the time. “Those fascists? And you brought her to meet me? What game do you think you’re playing?”

“Come on, Vic, let me finish a sentence,” Azeri whined. “What’s gotten into you?”

“Nothing I didn’t deserve.” The words came out colder and harder than he’d meant them to, but, with the fear building in his stomach, they felt true. “I thought the war whipped some more sense into you than this, LISA. Don't give me any more rambling excuses. Why are you here?”

The boy paused. Polzin could imagine the look of hurt on his face, but shoved the feeling aside and kept staring into the wind. “I've got some information you could use,” Azeri said. “I think we're working the same case from different ends. You know, the Haber thing.”

“What do you mean?” He tried and failed to restrain his racing mind.

“I’m here because you called Otsoa’s boss, Otsoa’s boss called him, Otsoa called Miss Jeanne Martin back there, and Lou had me go along with Jeannie to check it out,” Azeri said, as though he couldn’t possibly follow his own train of thought unless he listed off all the stops aloud.  

Polzin wheeled in front of him and stopped, forcing them both to a halt. “Ibarra sent you?” he demanded.

“Yes,” Azeri said, looking puzzled. “Well, and no. I was getting to that. What’s wrong with the Wolf?”

Polzin stood still and ground his teeth for a few seconds without answering. Azeri seemed genuinely innocent, and perhaps it was better not to put ideas in his head. Then again, perhaps the course of the last few years had made him genuinely as cunning as his namesake. Polzin desperately wished for a scrap of that old intuition, just enough to know who was lying to him. He had known, once, who to trust. But he’d only had to be wrong once to bring the whole thing down.

“Are you two biddies done gossipin’ about me?” the girl Martin called from behind them. Polzin turned to see her standing at the first step to an empty pier that they’d passed without his noticing. She had a better idea than Azeri, anyway, of what constituted a reasonably private space.

“Forget it,” he muttered to Azeri. “Come on. Your ‘security specialist’ can listen if she likes.”

They trudged back to the pier and stepped out carefully onto the icy boards, following the girl out over the lake. She leaned against the rail to wait for them at the end.

“So?” Polzin asked, shifting into English. “Both yes and no, was it, LISA?”

“Ol’ codename,” Azeri said to Miss Martin’s raised eyebrow. “I tol’ you he was our coordinator in the war–it means the same as Azeria. ’Course, he also used to call Brennan ‘Luisa’ whenever he was being a real pain—”

“LISA,” Polzin repeated, impatient. “How do you mean both yes and no?”

“I’m here because our, eh…mutual friend tol’ us where to find you, but he didn’ send us. Dr. Haber was in negotiations with the Americans when he disappeared, an’ my job’s to find him an’ make good on the deal.”

“Negotiations?”

“Yeah. His technical dossier for a visa and a way out of Germany.”

He fixed his gaze on Miss Martin. “So the Anglos are not involved here.”

She flicked her eyes at him, then away. Squirrelly child. He wondered what she was hiding. “No. I don’t know what he told you, but I can assure you they ain’t talkin’ to me anymore.”

“Hm.” Polzin tried to fit the pieces together in his mind, but it didn’t make any sense. He had to proceed with only what was in front of him. “There is no deal,” he said, turning back to Azeri. “He is my informant—or he was my informant. And I need the dossier, myself.”

“We can work together,” Azeri said. “Share the results. I told you, I got some information you need.”

“What information is that?”

The girl put a hand on Azeri’s arm, glaring daggers to make him shut his mouth again. “You’re not gettin’ it that easy,” she said. 

“Jeannie, he said he’s Heinrich Graner.”

“Yeah, I know. We shouldn’t even be talkin’ to him in public, boss.”

“Tell me,” Polzin said sharply.

“Mr. Echevarria’s spilled enough official business already,” Miss Martin said, folding her arms. “Tell us what you know first.”

Polzin turned away from the wind and considered the proposition. “I am sure you know much of what I know,” he said. “The man is missing since almost five months now—the dossier, also. He is wanted by Gestapo, maybe also by other agencies. Nobody knows a thing.”

“Nobody?” Azeri said.

He frowned. “I have done my work, LISA. Did you know he was contributing to the government project?”

“Of course—the tanks.”

“Not just that. Medical research. He was involved with some very strange developments.”

Azeri met Miss Martin’s skeptical glance with a reassuring one. “So we’ll get intelligence on that, too.”

“You should not trust him,” Polzin said.

Miss Martin frowned. “But we should trust you?”

“I have been open with you, yes,” he said sharply. “What is it I need to know?”

“Haber’s definitely wanted by Abwehr,” Azeri said, giving Miss Martin the sharp look this time. “We ran into one of their contacts back in Switzerland. They don’ know where he is, but they know he wrote to the Americans, and they’ve been waiting for us to turn up. They’ve been following you, too. I don’ know that they’re onto you, exactly, but you’re under suspicion. Don’ worry, though—I think I have a plan to fix that. But we have to find Dr. Haber first.”

Polzin waited for the wave of panic, but it didn’t come. Instead he felt focused–grateful, almost, to have identified the threat he faced. His instincts for self-preservation, honed to a knife’s edge by the cruel necessities of life within NKVD, could finally be allowed free rein. In an instant, he saw the ideal path ahead, a page out of Seleznyov’s book: send Azeri and the girl to Vienna, to meet with his lieutenant and bring the Abwehr down on top of them all. MONAKH, wherever he was, could go to hell. Polzin was less than five miles from the border–and the intriguing possibility of rebuilding his career from exile. Who would be there, now, to contradict any story he might send back to the Center?

“Vic?” Mat asked. “You all right?”

Viktor’s view of the lake and the boy’s concerned face sharpened, and he realized that he had completely dissociated from his surroundings while he thought, perhaps for much longer than he’d realized. Miss Martin had moved completely around them and was now idly chipping ice from the railing to flick into the waves below. 

No, he couldn’t do this on his own–whether that meant leaving the country, or going back to Vienna. And even Miss Löwe, whom he was just as happy to throw to Abwehr as anyone, could only be of so much help.

“Were you really always like this?” he asked Mat, reverting to Spanish. “I mean, making everyone else’s problems your own.”

“Not always,” he said. “But I had to grow up at some point, you know? And I wouldn’t have got to do that if you hadn’t taken a chance on me once.”

“Maybe.” Viktor shook off the thought of emotion. “Well? What’s this plan you’re suggesting?”

“I’m working on it,” Mat said cagily. “It all depends on how things look when we get back to Vienna. And we can decide who gets Dr. Haber later. Are you sure there’s nothing else I can give Jeannie to prove we aren’t just as well off trying to do this without you?”

Viktor looked sideways again at Miss Martin. “This may work,” he said in English. “I have other leads; you can help me investigate. If we are all being watched, at least we can force them to spread out, and three are faster than one.”

“True,” the girl said. She looked at Azeri and added something in French.

“What is that?” Viktor asked, frowning.

“Wolves don’t eat each other,” she translated. “Uh—it means there’s honor among thieves. Maybe we’re not your friends, but as long as we’re all huntin’ the same enemy, I think you can at least trust us not to stab you in the back…and vice versa.”

Azeri smiled at her. “Well said, eh? We’ll get our things and meet you at the station, Vic.”

“Good. I must place a call.” 

Seleznyov was out of the shop—not still out, fortunately, but again—so it was Miss Löwe who noted the train they ought to arrive by tomorrow morning, and assured him that she would send Herr Ersek to meet them at the station. According to her, all had been quiet, and Dr. Weiss did not expect to see him again until Friday the fifth. They would have a few days to work. He hung up wondering not if there was a tap on the shop phone, but how many had been placed. Under suspicion! There were hardly any worse words that he could think of.

Viktor checked his pocket for the cyanide capsule he’d obtained before leaving Vienna, half afraid that the Abwehr would be waiting for them despite all their precautions, and he would have to use it. Any number of fears were starting to squirm under his ribcage again, unimpeded by the knowledge that he had done the best he knew how to do. Nonetheless, as he found his seat in the well-appointed compartment which Azeri had insisted his cover required, he found all of them draining away. His body and mind completely exhausted, he closed his eyes to the sound of Mat beginning a doubtless exaggerated retelling of the adventures that had brought him here, and fell asleep before the train had even pulled out of the station.

It was only Seleznyov whom he found waiting when they pulled into Wien Westbahnhof on Monday morning. The Kazakh stood at the end of the platform with something less than his usual reserve, his face set in mild amusement as Polzin introduced his new associates under the cover names that they were all evidently now to be stuck with. 

“If they are here on business with us, they are conspicuous, no?” Seleznyov said.

“I am well aware. Believe me, it was not my choice,” Miss Martin interjected, hitting the lispy tones of an Alpine Frenchwoman perfectly. Seleznyov looked at her more closely before seeming to discard the idea. “I am sure ’Err Graner will address it with the Captain.”

“I was intending to, yes,” Polzin said. “Never mind that now. It’s been too long since we talked, Ersek. What did you find out?”

“Not as much as I wish,” Seleznyov said as they began to walk down to the street. “You remember the cigarette end?”

“Yes. What of it?” They had found it in Haber’s flat, left by one of the searchers. Polzin recalled now that Seleznyov had intended to investigate it, recognizing it as a brand he himself bought on the black market.

“Very little. My tobacconist keeps no records. He is sure, though, he does not sell to…professionals.” He cleared his throat meaningfully. “My other investigations agree—professionals are only the obstacle. I think you were right: we deal with something else.”

Polzin sighed irritably as he considered this. If Azeri and Seleznyov were right, then counterintelligence at least was just as lost as he was. He would have to press Seleznyov more closely as to whether the police might still be involved. All indications continued to point back to forces he didn’t yet understand—a deeply uncomfortable place for him to be.

“I see. Did you look into the break-in?” Polzin asked.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“Well—I found Herr Mueller,” Seleznyov said.

“What? Where?”

With a gesture, Seleznyov indicated the canal up ahead where stretcher-bearers were just hefting a dripping, blanket-sheathed form into the back of a windowless van. Miss Martin crossed herself reflexively, and Azeri grimaced. 

Polzin pulled out his cigarette-case and tapped one into his hand. “Now, then,” he said, lighting up, “we are really starting to get somewhere.”

< Previous || Directory || Poets and Chess Players, Part Two, will return May 28.>

1. A formidable chanteuse known for 1939’s hit song «La Java bleue» as well as (in a just world, anyway) the feat of upstaging Jean Gabin on film not once but twice.

2. It was a reference to 1940’s film His Girl Friday, itself an ironic reference to the servant “Friday” in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Rosalind Russell’s character considers settling down as a housewife, but ultimately prefers her exciting professional life, where she’s on more equal footing with men.