by Alan Furst
‘Dr Lawton, in A Fortunate Woman.’
‘That’s it. Kindly Dr Lawton – strong, wise, and compassionate. Who wouldn’t believe Dr Lawton? All this together, your status, and your character on screen, add up to what we call an “agent of influence”.’
Stahl saw this was true, and became acutely uncomfortable. ‘Should I make some kind of, what, public statement?’
‘What would you say? “I believe in democracy”? “I believe in America”? That would be fine with the Germans, America doesn’t want to fight a war any more than the French do. We have our own Maginot Line, it’s called the Atlantic Ocean.’
‘Then the hell with these people, I don’t have to go to their salons.’
‘You certainly don’t. But that doesn’t mean they won’t put pressure on you.’
‘Why would they?’
‘The people in Berlin, in von Ribbentrop’s Foreign Ministry, are persistent when they want something. And their people in Paris take orders, so …’
Now Stahl started to get mad. Why was this happening? Why him? He wanted nothing to do with the whole rotten business.
Wilkinson read him perfectly. ‘Don’t blame me for this,’ he said. ‘I’m on your side.’
‘What should I do?’
‘Stay away from them, see what happens.’
There was, suspended in the space between them, an or that lingered silently at the end of Wilkinson’s sentence. Or, if not, you could, something like that. Stahl knew it was there, felt the bare ghost of what it might demand from him, and thought Oh no you don’t. A Hollywood phrase he’d heard from Buzzy Mehlman suddenly came to him: What is this meeting about? Now Stahl thought he knew. ‘You’re not asking me to spy on these people, are you?’
‘No.’
‘Then what are you asking?’
Wilkinson leaned forward, clasped a pair of big, meaty hands together and rested them on his desk. ‘That you be careful, that you don’t let them use you if you can keep them from doing it. There’s no point in your finding out what’s going on and who is involved, the French know that already and so do we. Anyhow, you’re not a spy, that takes nerves of steel, and soon enough becomes a full-time job. And I’m no spymaster. America has military attachés who do that and we don’t have an overseas spy service.’
Stahl nodded that he understood, though he didn’t believe Wilkinson was being fully honest.
‘On the other hand,’ Wilkinson said, then let the phrase hang there for a time. ‘On the other hand, the people in the White House need to know as much as they can about what’s going on over here, and that’s one of the jobs an embassy, any embassy anywhere, has to do. So, if, in your time over here you, ah, stumble on something, something important, it wouldn’t be a bad idea if you let me know about it. That isn’t the official duty of an American in a foreign country but we’re all in this together, and if you feel like an American it’s not the worst thing to act like one.’ Wilkinson took a moment to let that sink in, then said, ‘Okay, the hell with all that stuff, tell me about the movie you’re making.’
In the days that followed, Stahl found himself thinking about the meeting at the embassy more than he wanted to. He felt foolish to have been naive about the political realities in France, after all he was European, off in California for eight years but still, shouldn’t he have known? Perhaps not. For one thing, this level of corruption was new, at least new to him. When he’d lived in Paris, the talk in the cafés took corruption as a regrettable but natural human undertaking – a means to weasel one’s way to wealth and power, merely one of the darker traditions of Old Europe. There followed, in the cafés, a shrug. But that corruption was never thought to be at the tips of foreign tentacles. It was, back then, French, like good wine and good lovemaking.
Meanwhile, in the US, it wasn’t much discussed. Americans were tired of the antics of slippery European politicians – a plague on all their houses! Europe was, as the woman on the Ile de France had put it when they shared a deck chair, a place where the bickering and squabbling never ended: sometimes they even shot each other, but they would shoot no more American boys. Thinking about the deck-chair conversation, Stahl recalled a scene in a 1936 MGM film called Libeled Lady, with Jean Harlow, and Spencer Tracy as a newspaper editor. At one point, Tracy is in a newsroom and a reporter asks him, ‘What’ll we use for a headline?’ Tracy says, ‘I don’t care. Anything. “War Threatens Europe.”’ The reporter asks, ‘Which country?’ and Tracy responds, ‘Flip a nickel!’
In Stahl’s Hollywood world, only the émigrés – the studio violinist from Germany, the make-up woman from Roumania, the scene painter from Hungary – followed European politics and the miseries of European Jews and communists and intellectuals. But the talk at a Warner commissary table, much of it heatedly leftist, quieted down when a ‘real American’ came by. Americans didn’t want to worry about foreign troubles, they had plenty of their own.
Thus it fell to somebody like Wilkinson to worry, because ‘the people in the White House’ needed information. That was slightly odd, once Stahl had a chance to think about it. Wouldn’t it be the Department of State – what Stahl thought of as the Foreign Ministry – that needed to know what was going on? Well, he was a foreigner, an émigré, and there were a lot of things he didn’t understand. Still, he was grateful that Wilkinson had told him what was going on, it meant he could protect himself. So when a note from the Baroness von Reschke reached him at the Claridge – ‘my friends were absolutely delighted to meet you, and I hope you will join us …’ – Stahl tore it up. The note went on to say that the exquisite Josephine Baker would be giving a private performance. Likely in her skirt made of bananas, Stahl thought, but she won’t be wearing it for me. He found great satisfaction in letting the note go unanswered – take that, you Nazi witch, I’m being rude! Maybe not a blow for democracy, but at least something.
And then, when he was handed a telephone message from Herr Moppel, he tore that up as well. Dear old Moppi was the very last person he wished to see. But Moppi didn’t give up so easily, and called again the following day. This time Stahl was in his suite and answered the phone. ‘Franz! Hello! It’s me, Moppi!’ Stahl was brusque and cold. He was at work on a film, he really had no time for social engagements. Goodbye. Bang went the phone, fuck you. This felt even better than ignoring the baroness, and Stahl sensed he’d avoided trouble, real trouble.
20 October. The director of Après la Guerre, Jean Avila, had finally made his way to Paris and telephoned the principal actors, asking them to come out to Joinville for a preliminary read-through of the script. They gathered at ten in the morning, on a set that was available until 2.00 p.m., a set for a romantic farce, Cinéma de Boulevard, in fin de siècle Paris. The actors settled on fringed velvet sofas and chatted until Jean Avila came hurrying through the door. ‘Here at last,’ he said. ‘They held me up for three days at the border.’ Avila seemed well beyond his twenty-five years. He had long, black, wiry hair, a lean body, and a face marked by the character lines of an older man, which gave him the sort of brooding good looks that women fell for. Starting with Stahl – ‘pleased to have you here,’ he said, ‘very pleased’ – he introduced himself to each member of the cast.
At first, the reading went well. ‘Let’s begin on page thirty-six,’ Avila said. ‘The top of the page, where Colonel Vadic and the others are trying to get food from the Turkish farm woman.’ That line, ‘There she is, looking out the window,’ belonged to Gilles Brecker, who had a faint Alsatian accent and, with blond hair and steel-framed glasses, looked like a cinematic German. He would play the war-loving lieutenant, eager to fight again after getting out of the prison camp.
‘Justine, would you read the farm woman?’ Avila said.
Justine Piro, wearing slacks and a sweater, her hair swept up in a kerchief, said, ‘Go away, or I’ll set the dogs on you.’
‘We hear the dogs barking.’ Avila said, reading the stage direction.
The fat, burly Pasquin
lit a cigarette and planted a thick forefinger on the page. ‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘It’s the uniforms,’ Stahl said.
‘Dear madam,’ Pasquin crooned. ‘A little something to eat?’ He mimed bringing food to his mouth and twice smacked his lips. Avila looked up and smiled.
‘Let’s just kick down the door and take whatever she has,’ Brecker said, the impatience in his voice nudging anger.
‘Hasn’t there been enough of that?’ Stahl said, sounding tired of the world. ‘And what if she resists? What then? Will you beat her?’
‘We must eat,’ Brecker said. ‘We need our strength.’
‘We will eat, lieutenant, we will find something, somewhere. Maybe at the next farm,’ Stahl said.
Pasquin cupped a hand to his ear. ‘What’s that? Did I hear a chicken?’
Avila read the stage direction: ‘An old man wearing a tweed cap and an ancient suit jacket and holding a shotgun is seen stage left. We see his face, then he gestures them away with the shotgun.’
From Stahl: ‘As I said, the next farm.’
From Avila: ‘The three legionnaires trudging along a dirt path, the wind is blowing, the sun beats …’ Avila stopped dead.
The door had flown open, every one of them stared. In the doorway stood Moppi, bright red in the face, breathing hard as though he’d been running, wearing a green loden jacket and an alpine hat with a feather. ‘Franz!’ he called out. ‘Oh no, I’m so sorry, I’ve interrupted your work. But I couldn’t reach you on the phone, so I thought I’d come out to the studio …’
‘Herr Moppel,’ Stahl said, his voice quiet but ice-cold. ‘Would you kindly get out of here? Can’t you see we’re working?’
A woman appeared at the doorway, also breathing hard, apparently Moppi had outdistanced her in a race to the studio building. ‘Pardon, pardon,’ she said. ‘This man insisted, at the reception. I told him he couldn’t come here but he wouldn’t listen. Shall I get the guard?’
‘No, you needn’t, I know when I’m not wanted,’ Moppi said, sounding sullen and hurt. ‘Goodbye, Franz, all I wanted to do was make a time for lunch.’
‘Go away,’ Stahl said. ‘Don’t ever come back.’
Moppi left, the woman glared at him, then again apologized and closed the door behind her. All the others turned and looked at Stahl. ‘Who’s Franz?’ Pasquin said, honestly confused.
‘My name before I was an actor,’ Stahl said. ‘I was born in Austria.’
This was met with silence. Then Avila said, his voice incredulous, ‘That man is a friend of yours?’
Stahl thought quickly and said, ‘A friend of my family, long ago. He knew me as a child, now he’s discovered I’m a movie actor.’
The silence continued. Then it was Justine Piro who saved the day. ‘My God,’ she said, ‘I was afraid he was going to yodel.’
Laughter broke the tension. Avila said, ‘Where were we?’ But then looked up from his script and said to Stahl, ‘How on earth did he know where you were?’ It was the question of a man who’d grown up in a family that spent its life dodging the secret police of many countries.
Stahl shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Did he call Deschelles’s office?’
‘He didn’t follow you, did he?’
‘Oh Jean,’ Piro said. ‘Don’t say such things. Please.’
‘He might have,’ Stahl said. ‘I think he’s maybe a little …’ He circled a finger at his temple.
‘No, he’s just a German,’ Pasquin said. ‘They always find a way.’
Avila lit a cigarette, so did Stahl. ‘Well, to hell with him,’ Avila said. He looked down at his script and said, ‘The three legionnaires trudging along a dirt path …’
Stahl was back at the Claridge by three. He took off his jacket and sat down hard on the edge of the bed. A few minutes later, he called the desk and asked for a glass of Pepto-Bismol to be brought up to his suite. This would settle his stomach and calm his nerves and Stahl needed all of that. When the Pepto-Bismol arrived – on a silver tray, with a linen napkin – Stahl drank the chalky stuff and waited for it to take effect. Then, still shaken, he went to the window and, for the first time in his life, peered down at the street below and tried to see if someone was watching him.
There was a letter for him the following morning, a letter from America, the name on the return address was Betsy Belle. He sat on a couch in the lobby and opened the envelope, reluctantly, because he had a strong premonition about what was in there, and this turned out to be the case. In the careful script of an Iowa schoolgirl, Betsy was telling him goodbye. She knew he would understand, she was sorry, they’d had such good times together and she had, always would have, loving feelings for him. But she’d met a man, older than her, but kind and considerate, who worked in the accounting office at MGM. He had proposed marriage, after they’d seen each other a few times, and she had accepted. ‘My life was just going on, going noplace in particular, and I had to do something. Maybe I’ll get a part in a movie sometime, but maybe I never will. That’s cruel, but it might happen. I always leveled with you Fredric and truth is I feel like I’ve been saved. I took my things from the house, so what’s done is done.’ She signed the letter ‘Love, Betsy.’
He’d suspected something like this was coming but still it hurt him. They’d been closer than he’d realized, but a future together hadn’t been part of the bargain and women didn’t work like that forever, so now she’d been ‘saved’. He hoped that was true, he didn’t want bad things to happen to her. Deeply, he didn’t.
23 October. ‘Hello, Kiki, it’s Fredric Stahl. Would you like to go to a movie?’
‘Oh yes, I would like to. When?’
‘How about tonight?’
‘Tonight?’
‘If you can, or maybe Friday if you can’t.’
‘Well, I’d like to do something.’
‘Tonight is possible?’
‘What time?’
‘I’ll come and get you at eight – it’s an eight-thirty show.’
The line buzzed. ‘Eight will be fine.’
‘I’ll be there then.’
Maybe he was taking a chance, he thought – Kiki had some connection to the baroness and her crowd – but not much of a chance, and he was terribly lonely. According to Kiki, it was her parents who’d been invited to the von Reschke cocktail party, she had stood in for them, and she’d had no good words for the baroness’s friends, preferring the company of the Bohemian crowd on the artist’s barge. So he hoped. And then, after all, if she were part of some sinister plot against him, what could she do? Anyhow, he didn’t think she was manipulating him, he just didn’t.
It had rained, and it would rain again, on that chilly October evening. And as Fredric Stahl made his way through the Seventh Arrondissement, the city once again captured his heart: bittersweet autumn air, fallen leaves plastered to the cobblestones, lamplit rooms seen from the street – a night that sent his spirit aloft in a kind of melancholy elation. When he turned a corner, he discovered a woman wearing a raincoat over lounging pyjamas, waiting in a doorway while her spaniel visited the base of a streetlamp. Passing by, Stahl wished her a good evening. ‘It is that, monsieur,’ she said, with a conspirator’s smile. ‘And a good evening to you.’
Stahl had chosen a movie theatre near Kiki’s apartment so they could walk. It wasn’t that he wanted to see a particular movie, he wanted to go to the movies, and walking there was part of it. The theatre was showing Algiers, a Hollywood remake of Pépé le Moko, with the French Charles Boyer and Stahl’s fellow Austrian Hedy Lamarr. As they left Kiki’s building he told her what was playing. ‘You haven’t seen it, have you?’
‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘But I wanted to.’ As the first few drops of rain fell and the wind rattled the leaves left on the trees, she took his arm.
In the darkened theatre, an usherette with a torch led them down the aisle to, at Kiki’s direction, an empty row. Almost immediately, a Pathé newsreel began. Stern music accompa
nied the narrator’s voice for a marrying-and-murdering insurance salesman who’d been arrested in Toulon. Excited strings as bicyclists raced through a village street in the mountains. A few bars of triumphant brass – a perfume heiress in goggles and leather headgear rode on the wing of a monoplane. Then the drums and trumpets of war as Franco’s Moorish soldiers charged across a dry riverbed. Finally a Wagnerian march, the volume much louder now. ‘In Berlin, Adolf Hitler takes the salute …,’ said the narrator as German soldiers, tall and fiercely serious, goose-stepped past a reviewing stand draped with swastikas. ‘Fucking Boche,’ said a voice in the theatre. ‘Shhh!’ said another. Then it was time for Charles Boyer.
As the famous jewel thief Pépé le Moko, and a fugitive from French justice, Charles Boyer is trapped in the Casbah, the ‘native quarter’ of Algiers. ‘A melting pot for all the sins of the earth,’ said the voice-over. As the credits ran, Kiki took Stahl’s hand and held it on top of the raincoat folded on her lap. Stahl moved closer so that their shoulders were touching. When Hedy Lamarr came on the screen, Kiki, her mouth by Stahl’s ear, whispered, ‘Do you think she is very beautiful?’ Her breath smelled of licorice, with just a bare hint of wine.
‘Everyone says she is,’ Stahl said.
‘Does she always wear so much make-up?’
‘We all do.’
A tough police inspector arrives from Paris. He’s come to arrest the wily jewel thief. Kiki moved Stahl’s hand from the folded raincoat to the top of her wool skirt and the soft thigh beneath it. He was stirred by this and wanted to respond, but Kiki had hold of his left hand and his right was too far away. It occurred to him that he might say something, then it occurred to him that there was nothing to say, and a turn of the head to look at her wasn’t the right thing either. So he watched the movie.
Where the French inspector leads a search through the narrow streets of the Casbah. As they approach one of Pépé’s many hideouts, three beggars in three adjacent doorways rap their staves on the street doors, warning Pépé and his gang. It was getting very warm where Kiki’s hand held his. She changed positions and gave him a delicate squeeze, which he returned. Now Inspector Slimane, an Algerian detective in a tarboosh, and Pépé’s amiable opponent, is telling the jewel thief that the date of his future arrest is written on the wall of his office. Stahl was absorbed in the clever dialogue so it surprised him when Kiki, with a decorous parting of her legs, moved his hand beneath her skirt, where it rested partly on the hem of her silk panties, on her garter belt, and on the smooth skin of her inner thigh. Now Stahl had to turn and look at her. But Kiki’s profile showed nothing, her eyes were fixed on the screen, she was watching Algiers, whatever might be going on elsewhere had nothing to do with her.