What We Become

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  Max, who was putting out his cigarette, remained unimpressed.

  “I don’t know the man.”

  “How strange, because he speaks very highly of you. Isn’t that right, Domenico? He describes you, word for word, as a decent fellow and a true gentleman.”

  Max’s expression remained inscrutable, even as he smiled inwardly at the memory of Fossataro: a tall, lithe individual with impeccable manners who had once worked for a company called Conforti, which manufactured safes, before he decided to use his knowledge to break them open.

  They had met in the café at Hotel Capşa in Bucharest in 1931, pooling their skills on several lucrative occasions. It was Fossataro who showed Max how to use a diamond tip to cut through windows, how to avail himself of the various locksmith’s tools, and how to crack a safe. Enrico always prided himself on behaving with a certain degree of honor, causing his victims the least possible distress. “You rob the rich, but you don’t ill-treat them,” he used to say. “They are generally insured against theft, but not against wickedness.” Before his social rehabilitation (like many of his compatriots he ended up joining the Fascist Party) Fossataro was a legend among the fashionable European underworld. An avid reader, he had on one occasion, in Verona, called a halt halfway through a break-in, leaving everything as he had found it, after discovering that the owner of the house was Gabriele D’Annunzio. And then there was that famous night when, having knocked out its nanny with a an ether-soaked handkerchief, Fossataro proceeded to give the baby its bottle as it lay awake in its cradle, while his accomplices burgled the house.

  “In other words,” Barbaresco concluded, “besides your social graces, and your gigolo ways, you are a shameless scoundrel. What the French delicately refer to as a cambrioleur, a thief, albeit of the gentlemanly variety.”

  “Am I supposed to look surprised?”

  “That won’t be necessary, we take no credit for knowing about you. We have the entire state apparatus at our disposal. As I am sure you are aware, the Italian police force is one of the most efficient in Europe.”

  “On a par with the Gestapo and the NKVD, I believe, as regards efficiency.”

  Barbaresco frowned.

  “You are no doubt thinking of OVRA, the fascist secret police. But my colleague and I are carabinieri. Do you understand? We are attached to the military police.”

  “That makes me feel a whole lot better.”

  Barbaresco remained silent. For a few seconds, his displeasure at the irony of Max’s remark was palpable. Finally he seemed content to let it pass.

  “A prominent figure in the world of international finance is in possession of some documents that are important to us,” he explained. “For complicated reasons relating to the situation in Spain, they are currently being kept in a house in Nice.”

  “And you want me to get them for you?”

  “Precisely.”

  “To steal them?”

  “No, not to steal them, to recover them. So as to return them to their rightful owner.”

  Beneath his apparent indifference, Max was becoming increasingly curious.

  “What documents are they?”

  “You’ll find out in good time.”

  “And why me, exactly?”

  “I told you before, you move easily in those circles.”

  “Who do you take me for? Rocambole?”

  For some unknown reason, the name of the fictional adventurer caused Tignanello to break into a smile, and his mournful expression lifted for an instant as he scratched the mole on his cheek. Afterward, he continued gazing at Max with the expression of someone who is always expecting bad news.

  “This is espionage. You are spies.”

  “You make it sound so melodramatic,” said Barbaresco, trying unsuccessfully to put the crease back in his trousers by pressing them between finger and thumb. “In fact, we are simple employees of the Italian state, with daily allowances and expense accounts and that sort of thing.” He turned to his companion, “Isn’t that right, Domenico?”

  Max didn’t find it so straightforward. At least not his part in it.

  “Spying in times of war is a capital offense,” he said.

  “France isn’t at war.”

  “But she could be soon. The outlook is bleak.”

  “The documents we want you to recover relate to Spain. . . . The worst thing they could do is deport you.”

  “But I don’t want to be deported. I like it here in France.”

  “I assure you, the risks are negligible.”

  Max looked at one, then the other with genuine surprise.

  “I thought secret agents used their own recruits for this kind of job.”

  “That’s precisely what we are trying to do now,” said Barbaresco, smiling benignly. “To recruit you. How else do you suppose we find people? They don’t simply walk up to us and say: ‘I want to be a spy.’ Some are persuaded by patriotism, others by money. You don’t appear to sympathize with either side in the Spanish Civil War. In fact, I’d say you don’t care one way or the other.”

  “The truth is, I am more Argentinian than Spanish.”

  “That must explain it. In any case, patriotism aside, the only other motive is money. And in that area you have proven to have firm convictions. We have been authorized to offer you a reasonable sum.”

  Max laced his fingers together, resting them on the knee of his crossed leg.

  “How reasonable?”

  Barbaresco leaned across the table, lowering his voice.

  “Two hundred thousand francs in the currency of your choice, plus an advance of ten thousand francs for expenses in the form of a check from the Crédit Lyonnais, Monte Carlo. I can give you the check right now.”

  Max gazed with absentminded professional fondness at the jewelry shop next door. The owner, a Jew called Gompers with whom Max occasionally did business, would every afternoon repurchase from the gamblers at the Casino the majority of the jewels he had sold them that very morning.

  “I have several ongoing matters to deal with. This would mean putting them on hold.”

  “We believe that the amount we are offering is more than enough to compensate you.”

  “I need time to think it over.”

  “There isn’t any time. You only have three weeks in which to sort this out.”

  Max looked from right to left, taking in the façades of the casino, the HÔtel de Paris, and the adjacent Sporting Club, and the permanent column of gleaming Rolls-Royces, Daimlers, and Packards parked around the square, their drivers standing in groups chatting beside the steps. Only three nights earlier, in those very places, Max had enjoyed a double slice of luck: an Austrian lady (ex-wife of an artificial leather manufacturer from Klagenfurt), no longer in her prime, though still beautiful, with whom he had a rendezvous of four days’ time aboard Le Train Bleu, and a cheval in the Sporting Club, when the little ivory ball landed in number 26, winning Max eighteen thousand francs.

  “Let me put it a different way. I am very happy working alone. I do as I choose, and it’s never occurred to me to work for any government, whether it be fascist, national-socialist, Bolshevik, or run by Fu Manchu.”

  “Of course, you are free to refuse.” Barbaresco’s expression belied his words. “But you ought to bear in mind a couple of things. Your refusal would upset our government. Isn’t that right, Domenico? . . . And the police authorities would doubtless be forced to reconsider their attitude toward you, if for any reason you decided to set foot on Italian soil.”

  Max made a swift calculation. Being unable to enter Italy would mean having to forsake the eccentric American ladies in Capri and on the Amalfi coast, the bored Englishwomen in their rented villas on the outskirts of Florence, and the nouveau-riche Germans and Italians, who left their wives unattended in Cortina d’Ampezzo and the Venice Lido while they haunte
d the bars and casinos.

  “And not only that,” Barbaresco went on. “Italy enjoys excellent relations with Germany and other European countries. Not forgetting Franco’s more than likely victory in Spain. As you know, police forces can be more efficient than the League of Nations. And they sometimes work together. If one country were to show a keen interest in you, others would soon be alerted. And if that were the case, the territory in which you claim to work alone and do your own thing could become exasperatingly small. Am I making myself clear?”

  “You are,” Max replied calmly.

  “Now imagine the opposite scenario. The future possibilities. Good friends everywhere, and a vast hunting ground . . . not to mention the money you’ll earn from this.”

  “I’ll need more details. To see for myself whether what you’re proposing is at all possible.”

  “You’ll be given that information the day after tomorrow, in Nice. You have a room reserved for you for three weeks at the Negresco: we know that’s where you like to stay. It’s still a good hotel, isn’t it? Although we prefer the Ruhl.”

  “You will be at the Ruhl?”

  “No such luck. Our superiors believe that luxury should be reserved for celebrities like yourself. We’ll be in a small, rented house near the port. Isn’t that right, Domenico? . . . Spies in tailcoats with gardenias in their buttonholes only exist in movies. Like the ones by that Englishman, Hitchcock, and fools like him.”

  Four days after the conversation in the Café de Paris, sitting beneath an awning outside La Frégate opposite the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, Max (in white cotton twill trousers and a double-breasted navy blue jacket, his cane and panama hat on the adjacent seat) was squinting against the intense glare from the bay. All around was a blaze of luminous buildings in whites, pinks, and creams, and the reflection off the water was so bright that the crowd strolling along the seafront resembled a line of anonymous backlit shadows.

  It was barely noticeable that summer was over, he thought. The street sweepers had a few more fallen leaves to sweep up, and at dawn and dusk the landscape acquired the pearly gray hues of autumn. And yet the orange trees were still heavy with fruit, and the mistral kept the sky cloudless and the sea indigo blue, while the walkway overlooking the pebbly beach across from the line of hotels, restaurants, and casinos was filled with people every day. Unlike in other towns along the coast, where luxury boutiques were already closing and the hotel beach huts were being dismantled, in Nice the saison continued into winter. Despite the arrival of paid vacations, which, after the victory of the Popular Front in France, had seen a wave of tourists flock south (one and a half million workers had enjoyed cheap train tickets that year), Nice had kept its perennial inhabitants: wealthy pensioners, English couples with dog included, elderly ladies who concealed the ravages of time beneath wide-brimmed hats and Chantilly lace veils, or Russian families, who, forced to sell off their luxury villas, hung on in modest downtown apartments. Not even at the height of the season did Nice pretend to be a resort: the naked backs and espadrilles that abounded in nearby tourist destinations were frowned upon there. And more often than not the American tourists, rowdy Parisians, and middle-class Englishwomen passing themselves off as distinguished ladies glided through without stopping on their way to Cannes or Monte Carlo, as did the German and Italian businessmen who plagued the Riviera, the new rich who had prospered under the Nazi and fascist regimes.

  One of the figures silhouetted against the light stood out among the others, and as it drew closer to the table and to Max, it began to acquire features as well as an aroma of Worth perfume. By then, Max had already risen to his feet, adjusting his tie, and with a luminous smile as dazzling as the light flooding everything around him, he extended both hands in greeting.

  “Good God, you look ravishing, Baroness.”

  “Flatteur.”

  Asia Schwarzenberg sat down and removed her sunglasses. After ordering a whiskey with Perrier water, she gazed at Max with her big, almond-shaped, slightly Slavic eyes. Max gestured toward the menu on the table.

  “Shall we go to a restaurant or would you prefer a light lunch?”

  “A light lunch here will be fine.”

  Max browsed the menu, which had on the back a Matisse drawing of the Palais de la Méditerranée with some palm trees along the Promenade.

  “Foie gras and Château d’Yquem?”

  “Perfect.”

  The baroness smiled, revealing a set of pearl-white teeth, her incisors stained with the ubiquitous red lipstick she left on everything from cigarettes to the rims of glasses and the shirt collars of men she was kissing good-bye. But, perfume aside (in Max’s opinion Worth made perfect clothes but their scents were too musky), that was her only indulgence. Unlike the bogus titles many international gold diggers paraded around the Riviera, Baroness Anastasia von Schwarzenberg was the genuine article. A brother of hers, a friend of Prince Yusupov, was among Rasputin’s assassins, and her first husband was executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918. Her title, however, came from her second marriage to a Prussian aristocrat who died of a heart attack in 1923, bankrupted after his horse Marauder lost the Grand Prix de Deauville by a head. With no other source of income, although well connected, Asia Schwarzenberg, who was tall, slender, and graceful, had modeled for some of the largest fashion houses in France. The old, bound editions of Vogue and Vanity Fair still found in the reading rooms of transatlantic liners and luxury hotels were full of sophisticated photographs of her by Edward Steichen or the Seebergers. And the fact is that, despite being almost fifty, she still looked stunning in clothes (a dark blue bolero jacket over baggy cream-colored trousers, which Max’s trained eye identified as Hermès or Schiaparelli).

  “I need an introduction,” he said.

  “Man or woman?”

  “A woman. Here in Nice.”

  “Difficult?”

  “Somewhat. A lot of money and social standing. I want to join her circle.”

  The baroness listened attentively, with finesse. Weighing up the possible benefits, Max supposed. Besides selling antiques, claiming they belonged to her Russian family, for many years she had made a living from her contacts, obtaining invitations to parties, villa rentals, a reservation at an exclusive restaurant, or an article in a fashion magazine. On the Riviera, Baroness Asia Schwarzenberg was a kind of society go-between.

  “I won’t ask what you are up to,” she said, “because I can usually imagine.”

  “It’s not so simple this time.”

  “Do I know her?”

  “You’d have no difficulty even if you didn’t. But tell me, Asia Alexandrovna, is there anyone you don’t know?”

  The foie gras and champagne arrived, and Max deliberately left off talking while they sampled them, without the baroness showing any impatience. She and Max had dallied briefly five years before, when they met on New Year’s Eve at the embassy in Saint Moritz. Things didn’t go any further because they both realized at the same time that the other was a penniless gold digger. And so they had stayed up until dawn, breakfasting on cake and hot chocolate at Hanselmann’s, she in a gold lamé gown under her mink coat, and he still formal in his tailcoat. Since then, their relations had been friendly and mutually advantageous, neither encroaching on the other’s territory.

  “You were photographed together this summer in Long­champs,” Max said at last. “I saw the picture in Marie Claire, or another of those magazines.”

  The baroness was genuinely surprised, arching her meticulously plucked eyebrows.

  “Susana Ferriol?”

  “Yes, her.”

  The baroness’s wicker chair creaked slightly as she leaned back, crossing her legs.

  “You are talking big game, darling.”

  “Why do you think I came to you?”

  Max had opened his cigarette case and was offering it to her. He leaned forward to light her
cigarette then lit his own.

  “It’s not a problem as far as I am concerned,” said the baroness, puffing thoughtfully on her cigarette. “I’ve known Suzi for years. What exactly do you need?”

  “Nothing in particular. The chance to visit her home.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes. The rest is my business.”

  A cloud of smoke. Slow. Cautious.

  “I have no wish to know about the rest,” she added. “But I warn you she is not a woman of easy virtue. I’ve never known her to take a lover . . . although, what with the war in Spain, everything has been turned upside down. People are constantly coming and going, refugees and everyone else. . . . Utter chaos.”

  That word, refugees, was ambiguous, thought Max. It conjured up images of poor people, their photographs published in the foreign press: weathered peasant faces, tears trickling down their furrowed cheeks, families fleeing the bombing, filthy children sleeping on top of wretched bundles of clothes, the misery and despair of those who had lost all but their lives. And yet, many of the Spaniards who sought refuge on the Riviera had nothing in common with those people. Comfortably installed in a climate that resembled their own, they would take villas, apartments, or hotel rooms, bask in the sun, and dine at expensive restaurants. And not only on the Riviera. Four weeks earlier, while Max was preparing a coup that didn’t work out as planned, he had met several of those exiles in Florence, an aperitif in Casone followed by dinner in Picciolo or Betti. For those who had managed to flee, and still possessed bank accounts abroad, the Civil War was no more than a temporary inconvenience. A distant storm.

  “Do you know her brother, Tomás Ferriol?”

  “Of course I do,” she said, and raised a warning finger. “Watch out for him.”

  Max recalled his most recent conversation, that morning, with the two Italian secret service men at Café Monnot in Place Masséna, next to the municipal casino. The two men had abstemiously ordered lemonades, and Tignanello sat there gloomily silent as in Monte Carlo, while Barbaresco gave Max the promised details of the job they wanted him to do. Susana Ferriol is the key person, Barbaresco had explained. Her villa at the foot of Mont Boron is a kind of private office for her brother’s secret business. It is also where Tomás Ferriol stays whenever he comes to the Riviera, and he keeps the documents in the safe in his study. Your job is to infiltrate their circle of friends, size up the situation, and obtain what we need.