THE LAST GOOD WAR: A Novel Read online

  Then there's that ten to fifteen hour bit. Her best guess: ten to fifteen hours if the job was dull and dead-end. If she caught on, the demands on her time might escalate. So there it was. Did she want to take on a ten-hour commitment to a dull job, which she would presumably quit after a few months? Did she want to take on an interesting, important job that might push out her studies?

  And, she suspected, most of her social life.

  As she opened the door to her room, Kirsten met her with a confession.

  “I'm sorry. I took Napoleon out of his cage to show Maria, the new girl upstairs.”

  Anna went over to Napoleon's cage. He seemed perfectly normal, though he was still in his round wire ball as well as his larger cage. She reached in, flipped open the wire ball, and cuddled the hamster to her cheek.

  “She was amused to see him navigate around the room, running in his ball.” Kirsten still seemed apologetic; Anna wasn't sure why. “I explained that he was mapping—finding all the nooks and crannies in case he escaped. Maria corrected me: 'Looking for Josephine, you mean.'

  “Before I could stop her,” Kirsten continued, “Maria had the door open. Napoleon was out in a flash, making his way merrily down the hall—much to the amusement of the other girls. Before we could catch him, he was at the top of the stairs. Then it was boing, boing, boing, boing. We picked him up at the bottom.... Sorry.”

  “We need an itsy-bitsy parachute?” asked Anna in baby-talk, holding the hamster close to her nose. She turned back to Kirsten. “No harm, it seems. Except that we'll have to keep our door locked from now on. And keep Maria out. I don't want Napoleon to become the mascot. Some day, he may run into a cat.”

  She had met Zbig during a mixer, the Saturday before classes started. He came from a good enough family. He was intelligent and handsome, and, as far as she could tell, he had inherited his family's knack for business. But somehow, there wasn't much spark. Maybe her parents were right. They made no secret of their views: Zbig wasn't “suitable.” To tell the truth, they had a point; he did have rough edges.

  Zbig suggested The Graven Image, the fanciest restaurant in town. Anna was surprised; not the sort of place frequented by students. Perhaps he, too, felt that the time had come for their relationship to go one way or the other.

  They hadn't seen one another for three days; Zbig was eager to catch up. She mentioned Napoleon's tumble down the stairs, then her Medieval European course. She'd taken it to fulfill her history requirement, but was glad she had.

  “Thanks for recommending it. I'm surprised; it's fascinating. The symbolism—Pope Leo deferentially bowing to Charlemagne after crowning him Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day, 800. Tensions between the church and temporal authorities—ideas that were never even whispered in high school history.”

  “More interesting than the endless wars and the mind-numbing memorization of kings. That's for sure.”

  She was about to mention that she might take a part-time job, but stopped short. “...not sure we can trust every one of your fellow students.” Anna wondered if Zygalski had given a hidden warning about Zbig. His mother was German. God, Anna hated politics. Hitler's occupation of the Rhineland had already led to one tense exchange between Zbig and Anna. It ended with a truce: they agreed not to talk politics. But was that any basis for a lasting romance—swearing off important topics, ruling them completely out of bounds?

  “I enjoyed meeting your parents, Anna; I'd like you to meet mine. Perhaps you could join us over the Christmas vacation? Maybe Christmas week itself, or, if you prefer, the week after.”

  “Thanks. But I can't cut into Christmas week, Zbig; it's the only time my whole family has a chance to get together. And that's just next week; we've already made plans.”

  Anna was slightly irked. If he wanted to invite her all the way down to Lvov, in the southeast corner of Poland, why wait until the last minute? She thought about the week between Christmas and New Year's; she already had a crowded schedule of parties. And her father had arranged an evening in Warsaw; he wanted to have dinner with her and with some of his young friends at the Foreign Office. Perhaps looking for a competitor to Zbig? But if Zbig were going to be in her future, it really was time to meet his family.

  Zbig was irked, too, and disappointed. Anna was leaving the week after Christmas hanging.

  “Turn about does seem fair play. I met your family.”

  Not exactly the same thing as an exhausting, seven hundred kilometer train trip, thought Anna. Her parents had visited her in Poznan; that's when they met Zbig. And why should he worry about fairness, anyway?

  “I'd like to think about it,” she replied. “And check with my family first.”

  “Your family? Shouldn't my family be given some consideration, too?”

  There it was. Fairness. Again.

  The small band struck up a Viennese waltz. Zbig knew how much Anna loved to waltz, but seemed preoccupied. When Anna gazed toward the dance floor, he finally took the cue. Would she like to dance?

  As they returned to the table, she wanted to avoid a squabble about Christmas, and changed the subject. “Your courses—anything interesting?”

  “Not really. Well, yes. Yesterday, in psychology, we were talking about pets. How they take on the personality of their owners.”

  “Like Hitler and his German shepherd?” asked Anna. “They both love to wolf down tasty morsels. Countries, in Hitler's case.” She wished she hadn't said that; she wasn't supposed to mention politics.

  “Or perhaps Napoleon.”

  “Hunh? He had a German shepherd, too?”

  “No, no. I mean your hamster. You let him roam around in his ball, rather than keeping him in a cage. The psych prof would have fun with that. You're expressing yourself. You don't want to be trapped in a cage either.”

  Unlike other people? Anna thought to herself.

  But Zbig was dead right. She didn't want to feel trapped. At least, not in a romance with him.

  The first Monday of the New Year, as Anna entered the Special Meteorology Project, she glanced around the building which, she guessed, might become her home for the next few months. The reception area was Spartan, with a secretary seated in a tiny cubicle in front of a telephone switchboard.

  Glancing down the halls, Anna saw that all the walls were the same dingy, insipid air force blue. She wondered when they had last felt the stroke of a paintbrush. Not since it was built, she was willing to bet. The building was standard military—not the least imagination in its design, with everything perfectly rectangular and straight. Except for the floor, which was already beginning to sag in spots, even though she guessed the building was less than twenty years old. Suddenly, she felt uneasy, even more out of place than when she first arrived at the university.

  It was too late for second thoughts.

  She introduced herself. The secretary fumbled with a cable, finally managing to plug it in. She buzzed twice. Zygalski appeared almost immediately.

  "Delighted to see you.... Well?"

  "I'm inclined to accept. But I need to know something first."

  “Of course. Hope I'll be able to help.” He led her around to his office, a spacious room at the corner of the building. A large window looked out toward the Gothic tower of the Arts building. The newly-fallen snow was still crisp; Anna imagined the crunch, crunch as students trudged to class.

  “You wanted to find out about something?” Zygalski asked.

  “I was wondering if you offered me a job because I understand English. My first loyalty is to Poland. But, as you know, my mother is English. I won't spy on Britain.”

  Zygalski laughed. “No need to worry. Your job will have nothing to do with the English language.”

  “Then yes, I'm happy to accept.”

  "Marvelous. Just a few formalities, in the administrative offices in A3. Then you can join us in B8. Just around the corner," Zygalski said, leading her down the hall and stopping in front of A3.

  Most of the paperwork was routine.
But there were a few added features: mug shots and fingerprints. There were security forms to sign, threatening dire consequences, up to death, for violation of the Secrets Act. Anna paused, then signed. In for a penny, in for a pound.

  4

  The Inscrutable Six

  Things are seldom as they seem. Skim milk masquerades as cream.

  Gilbert and Sullivan, HMS Pinafore

  When Anna got around to B8, she knocked, heard a shout inside, and entered. Three men were huddled around a typewriter. She knew Marian Rejewski from the University. Zygalski introduced her to Jerzy Rozycki.

  Rozycki was thirtyish. His solid frame suggested that he might have been athletic in his youth, but his expanding waistline told another story: his main exercise now was raising a fork to his mouth. Rejewski was perhaps five years older, his sharp features accented by a pointed beard, prematurely flecked with gray. He wore a rumpled tweed jacket with elbow patches—the same jacket he had worn every day in class the previous year. Surprising; he should be able to afford better, even on his slim salary. He was something of a legend from his undergraduate days. A professional gambler had spent a weekend hanging around his dormitory, looking for easy pickings. In a marathon encounter, Rejewski relieved him of a stupendous sum, equivalent to $8,000.

  "Here we use only first names: Marian and Jerzy, and I'm Henryk. Of course, I will still be Professor Zygalski when you see me at the university, and Marian will likewise be Professor Rejewski."

  He stepped aside and motioned her to sit down by the machine. It wasn't a standard typewriter: The keyboard was smaller, with only the 26 letters of the alphabet, no numbers or punctuation marks. Behind the keys were three wheels with letters and teeth; apparently the wheels could be rotated. At the top was a panel on which the letters of the keyboard were repeated in a set of recessed glass circles.

  "Let's try an experiment," said Henryk, rotating the three wheels. The teeth clicked slightly as he set them so that the letter "A" was at the top of each. "Why don't you type in a message. Let's make it short, not more than ten or fifteen letters."

  Anna thought of her favorite operetta, The Merry Widow. She pressed the letter "M."

  The right-hand wheel clicked, rotating one notch, from “A” to “B.” On the lampboard at the top, the circle "V" lit up.

  "V," she announced, and Henryk, who was then at the other machine, pressed a key.

  And so it went. As she typed in her short phrase, she announced the letters one by one:

  VSOBP TXVHE.

  "Merry Widow," said Henryk immediately, with a smile.

  "Impressive.” Anna leaned back in her seat. "A cipher machine. And not a simple one. The two R's in merry came out differently—O, then B."

  To check, Anna pressed Z four times. "WHFI" she announced.

  "ZZZZ" came the immediate response.

  Anna decided to cheat. The first two wheels were still at A. The third wheel had by now rotated to Q. As inconspicuously as possible, she rotated this wheel until it was again at its initial setting, A. No one noticed; the slight clicking noise of the wheel was hidden by the banging of the pipes as the heating system warmed up.

  Merry, she typed in again, announcing the results: VSOBP.

  "QIJJC," Henryk replied, with a puzzled look. "Oh, he said," you're testing me. "MERRY. You reset the third wheel back to A."

  "Marvelous," replied Anna. "The letters are scrambled. But if you start with the same wheel setting—in this case AAA—a word, such as merry, always comes out with the same encoded result."

  She thought for a few moments.

  "I think I see how it works. Every time you push a key, a wheel rotates one notch, giving a different encoding. But how can the other machine decode so quickly? It must be a mirror image of the first one. Sounds complicated."

  "Not really. The two aren't mirror images; they're identical. They work on an electric current. Pins on the three wheels stick out and make an electrical connection with the next wheel; the wheels have internal wiring to translate each letter into a different one. If all three wheels are set at A, you won't get an A if you press the A key; you'll get any other letter, say, T. Next to the third wheel is a reflector. It means that the machine also works the other way round: if you pressed T, you would get A. Thus, the same machine is used either for coding or decoding.”

  "Great. So we've been developing it for the Polish Air Force?"

  "Not exactly. It's a copy of a German machine."

  Anna wondered where they had gotten it but didn't want to seem too curious.

  Henryk read her mind. "It was invented in 1919 and manufactured by a German company, who sold it commercially to railroads and other businesses who wanted to keep their communications secret. We bought one, but the Germans stopped selling them when the machine was adopted by their army in 1926. Our technical services are in the process of making additional copies."

  Henryk didn't want to give the least hint that they had a spy in Germany. Accordingly, he hadn't told the whole truth—that the Germans were using a modified version, with different rotors, and that Marian had worked out the wiring of the new ones, using information supplied by Schmidt.

  "I suppose our task is to decipher the German messages by figuring out the setting of the wheels."

  "Right you are."

  "Let's see. The right-hand wheel can be set with any letter at the top? That's 26 positions. The same is true of the other two?” Henryk nodded. "That's 26 x 26 x 26 possible settings... over 15 thousand."

  "17,576, to be exact. If you pushed the keys 17,576 times, your setting would come back to where it started.”

  “Like an odometer on a car? Once it reaches 99999, it turns back to 00000—provided the car hasn't fallen apart by that time.”

  "Exactly.... Or maybe not exactly,” added Henryk. “A new car starts at 00000. But with the Enigma, the Germans don't start at AAA. They can start anywhere. And, as far as we can tell, they use a different setting for every message.”

  "So what's left is brute force—trying each setting for every message?” Anna wondered.

  "Yes and no. That's one place to begin. But our game will be to figure out some pattern—so we don't have to run through all 17,000."

  "We've got a good place to start," said Jerzy, “a long, clear intercepted message.” He slid several papers across to Anna. She was distracted by the cloud of cigar smoke when he leaned across the table, but tried to ignore it as she looked down at the papers. She could read the first few lines, but they were followed by a jumble of letters:

  Discriminant: Blue

  Seventy-two

  One hundred and twenty eight

  Then came a line with six apparently random letters, in two groups of three:

  DSI FDR

  The next line was a series of 50 or 60 letters.

  Next came groups of five letters each, filling a number of lines.

  “First,” explained Marian, “is the so-called discriminant—Blue. It appears in about 40 percent of the messages. It indicates the army; anyone with a blue codebook will be able to look up the initial settings of the rotors for army messages. There are different settings for different organizations—red, green, orange, and so on—so they can't read one another's mail.

  “The next line, 72, is the number of letters giving the address—from so and so to such and such—and the date. Then comes 128, the number of letters in the main message. They're divided into groups of five to help the recipient keep track; if he only has four letters in a group, he knows he's dropped one letter and he knows where. If he doesn't keep track, the wheels won't click the right number of times, and he won't get anything but gibberish.

  "Our best guess is that the six letters—two groups of three each—have something to do with the resetting of the rotors. We're not sure; the Germans have changed their procedures since we were able to break some messages several years ago. What we do know is that, once we figure out the wheel settings for the address, the settings don't change again, a
t least not for that particular message; we can read through the rest of it.”

  There was a knock on the door. Henryk opened it, letting the security officer in.

  “Yes, Liwicki?”

  “Sorry to interrupt, sir, but there's a problem with Miss Raczynska's forms.”

  Anna was astonished; what could the trouble be? According to Henryk, her security check hadn't turned up any problem.

  “She gave her mother's birth date as 1896. Her older brother was born in 1904. That means her mother was only eight when her brother was born.”

  “That's right,” said Anna, deadpan. “Only eight.”

  “But....” Liwicki was perplexed.

  Henryk looked at her sharply. She hadn't learned the first rule of military security: no jokes, please.

  “He's only a half brother. My father's first wife—Stefan's mother—died in 1914.”

  Liwicki retreated, apologizing profusely.

  “Coming back to the subject,” said Henryk, a hint of exasperation in his voice, “we're in the process of decoding a set of blue messages by trial and error. When we've got several dozen, we'll see if we have enough to work backward to figure out the previous six letters—the two sets of three letters.

  “We'd like you to work on the message Jerzy gave you. We've found that the Germans tend to avoid settings near the beginning of the alphabet, so why don't you start by setting the wheels in the middle, say, at MMM. See if you get anything in German in the first few letters of the address line. If it's garbage, start over with the next setting, MMN. If you get a German word, keep going to see if you can read the whole message. Sooner or later, you should find the right setting.

  "Unless there are questions, you might as well get your feet wet,” continued Henryk. “If you can start this evening," Anna nodded, "you can see how it goes. Be sure to keep a record of what the settings were when you stopped; that will tell you where to start when you come back.

  “Tonight, as you leave, stop by the security office and let Sergeant Liwicki know your schedule, when you'll be available. When you do, please try not to give him a hard time.”