I heard Trask making a case for this bombing being a mess we needed to quietly stick our noses into. Quietly but urgently.
“Would they let us in on this?” I asked.
“The French have always been very adept at spying on the French. Forget the playwrights and novelists; this country’s greatest literary form is the dossier secret. But those files are mostly about the French financiers and politicians and clerics. The actors and artists. The jockeys and boxers and dudes. Not to mention the mistresses and fancy men of all these. That’s the work of the First Bureau of the French secret service. Spy on everybody in the public eye. The Second Bureau makes a little more sense to you and me. They’ve always watched the ports and the train stations and the border entries for suspicious outsiders, the radical socialists and the communists and the anarchists and all that rabble. Those, they know how to deal with.”
I could see where Trask was heading. I already arrived there yesterday morning.
I said, “But who’s watching the refugees? The German saboteurs sneaking in with them.”
I do like to surprise Trask. He thought he’d be giving me that idea himself. I elicited my second ephemeral smile of the morning from him. “Just so,” he said.
“They can’t handle this?”
“They’re a bureaucracy, set up for a different sort of world.”
“Do they even understand the need?” I offered this hopefully. I couldn’t see us doing this entirely on our own.
“I have a smart, well-placed friend amongst them.”
“Too bad.”
Trask ignored this, saying, “The situation calls for a certain rare set of talents. He has no one among his operatives even close.”
“Gott im Himmel,” I said, playing the exasperation of the oath, angling my face away from him to look out the vestibule window.
I could guess at the talents. Convincing actor for a cover story. Fluent German—field-tested—along with pretty good French. Handy in a fight. Certified proficiency in killing a man.
Trask said, “Even Gott isn’t right for this job.”
Across the river the Tuileries were passing. The cripples and widows over there were no longer made safe by their wounds or their losses. The Hun from last night could put a satchel beside a garden bench on a mild November afternoon and nip a bunch of compensatory romances in the bud.
I looked squarely at Trask again and said, “Only if I can continue to work on my news story.”
He didn’t show me a thing in his eyes.
And he wasn’t talking.
The fact was, I was still officially a newspaper reporter. This other Kit Cobb worked on the side. There was no binding contract for either spy or government. I worked from patriotism. From a pleasing stimulation of the nerves and a true-bred reporter’s curiosity with the world. Not from the hotels and the walkaround money and the visceral privilege of killing bad guys.
I said, firmly, leaning a little toward him, narrowing my eyes against his blankness, “Whatever’s to be done, I’ll juggle it in my own way.”
He pushed his lower lip upward ever so slightly.
He continued to keep quiet.
I said, “You know, James, I really like my little bijou of a hotel. It has everything I want and need right now.”
And Trask said, “Underlying that rare set of talents I referred to is trustworthiness.”
Characteristically affectless, Trask paused after this declaration, almost as if he were exhausted from the praise, even though he still had not overtly attributed any of this to me.
Then he said, “Very well then, Kit. Do it your way. We’ll all be fine with that.”
Not quite all of us. Not me.
4
The Ambassador’s bespoke Pierce-Arrow had a speaking tube and Trask unhooked it, brought it to his mouth, and said two words to his driver. “The island.”
Then he turned to me. “You need to see a Frenchman,” he said.
The island was the Île de la Cité, home to the Palais de Justice complex. As we approached it from the Right Bank, I figured the French secret service was somewhere inside its walls. But instead we turned onto the Pont Neuf, and halfway across, we entered the enclosed, triangular Place Dauphine, at the island’s western end. We stopped before one of its contiguous six-story row houses of brick and limestone and slate. This wasn’t the Palais. The door bore no sign. But it was indeed the French secret service.
Stepping with me out of the car, Trask said, “His name is Henri Fortier. He appreciates your help. A tough guy. You’ll like him.”
With no more words, Trask accompanied me to the second floor and into a high-ceilinged front office, bright from the casement French windows. At the shadowed far end of the room was a massive oak desk facing this way and a man rising behind it.
Trask held us up for a moment, but the man waved us to him. We approached. Trask fell back a step as we arrived and said, from over my shoulder, “This is Cobb. The man you’ve been expecting.”
Henri Fortier offered his hand across the wide desk, meeting mine in the middle. His grip was tough-guy firm, firm enough that I had to quickly ratchet up my own to match his. Which I did, while we looked each other steadily in the eyes.
A little test from a guy that a guy like Trask would admire for his toughness.
Fortier was not young. His pomaded hair and waxed mustache were storm-cloud gray and his face was creviced and weathered. But there was nothing jowly or flabby about him. A tough guy, as Trask said. No doubt.
After one last, enhanced pump of my hand he let go and pointed to a chair before his desk. “S’il vous plaît,” he said.
I sat and thanked him in French and told him I was pleased to meet him. He liked my French, giving me a brow-lifted smile and a nod, which he then gave to Trask, as well. I was as advertised.
“I will leave you, gentlemen,” Trask said, and his footsteps began to recede.
During the little exchange between these two I let my attention drift to the wall behind Fortier’s desk. I’d been focused on the man so intently that the display there startled me now. In the middle hung a long, sleek, walnut-stock, bolt-action military rifle with a big cat’s-eye of a trigger and guard. A Chassepot from France’s last war with the Germans. I figured it was once the young Fortier’s weapon, which put him at about age sixty-five.
But he’d been using it since. To the right of the rifle hung a mounted boar’s head. To the left, the head of a wolf. A big one. My eyes were on the wolf, thinking how its face was almost identical—except in its magnified size and posed ferocity—to some American farm boy’s sheepdog.
“The wolves are mostly extinct now in France,” Fortier said, still in French. We were to speak his language together. That was fine with me.
“Did you shoot him with your Chassepot?” I asked.
“Ah, you know the weapon, do you?”
I turned my eyes from the wolf to the man. “I’ve never fired one,” I said.
“Perhaps someday. I take it down now and then. I will invite you.”
“I’d like that.”
“The answer to your question is yes,” he said. “I put twenty-five grams of lead into its heart.”
“One round.”
He gave me an approving smile. “One round.”
I looked back to the wolf. The taxidermist had bared its teeth, as if it were about to kill.
Fortier said, “In Brittany. Nearly forty years ago. They savaged anything made of flesh. Livestock. Children. These beasts were a scourge of France. Merciless. We hunted them until they were all dead.”
I looked back to the man. I sensed he was no longer simply speaking of wolves.
I said, “Now they’ve come to the streets of Paris.”
He gave me another approving look. This one was not quite a smile. It was an I-can-do-business-with-this-man look.
“They have,” he said.
“How can I help?” I said.
“You heard of our event two nights ago?�
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“I saw your event.”
“Saw it?”
“I was sitting outside the Café de la Rotonde.”
“Very near.”
“Very near.”
“Did you go?”
“At once.”
“Any thoughts?”
“Just before, I’d been watching your aviators on patrol. The Zeppelins wish to be the wolves. But you stop them. Better than the British.”
“Machines.” Fortier nearly spat the word.
“The wolves are flesh and blood,” I said.
“Just so,” he said, and he looked away, as if to control his rage. A moment later he returned to me. “We have fifteen months of war. Now suddenly the sabotage in the capital. We ask ourselves where these saboteurs have been. Some Germans were already existing in our country, of course. Immigrants.”
He paused ever so slightly after this word. He had given it the same expectorant inflection as machines.
“We have been dealing with them,” he said. “But there is only so much we can do. They are here. We do not have the wherewithal to put them somewhere else. And many of their second generation have become French citizens, technically speaking. But your President Roosevelt—would he were still the president of your country—he understands about hyphenated citizens. He spoke only recently. Do you know?”
I’d read about his speech in the American papers. He’d given it just last month in New York. On Columbus Day.
Fortier went on: “Your President Roosevelt said, ‘There is no room in our country for hyphenated Americans.’ He meant the Irish-Americans. The Italian-Americans. The German-Americans. All of them. He said, ‘A hyphenated American is no American at all.’”
“I do know,” I said.
“We understand. In French we do not allow our hyphens to serve that sort of purpose. But it is hard to call these Goths among us Frenchmen. They may have papers of one sort or other. But they are not French. We do not melt them in a pot in this country.”
I thought: At least Teddy would banish the hyphen to make the assimilated German a fellow American. Not to preserve a vision of his own purity.
But as Americans we had no hyphens for allies, either. I was now the American ally of this Frenchman before me, so he was one of my own.
I said, “I had another thought yesterday, the morning after the event. About saboteurs.”
“I would be interested to hear.”
“The refugees.”
I had more to say on this, of course, but I’d already struck a chord in Fortier. He pushed back in his chair and rose to his feet.
I didn’t continue. He wanted to take the floor.
“Mr. Cobb, we have separately come to the same conclusion. It is no longer a matter of keeping our eyes on a managed flow of outsiders through the ports and borders. These refugees come now huddled together in great numbers. Many of them, of course, are our own brethren displaced within our country by the Huns. So Parisians have opened their hearts. Others are our legitimate allies. The Belgians, for example. These we wish to care for. This is who we are. We put our refugees wherever we can. Church halls and warehouses. The old seminary of Saint-Suplice. The arena of the Winter Circus. And still they come. The compassion is admirable. The security is disastrous. There are no papers for these people, no eyes to watch them. The conditions are such that these others, the wolves in immigrant clothing, can blend in and sneak through. Each of them is a potential weapon far more effective than any Zeppelin.”
He finished his point. Stayed standing. Seemed to be waiting for my assent.
I said, “Why throw a bomb into the dark from ten thousand feet, when you can personally deliver it to the center of a restaurant in a handbag.”
Fortier laughed, a sharp, guttural sound worthy of either of the heads flanking him on the wall.
With that thought I glanced briefly at the wolf. Fortier saw the look, turned around and reached up to the Chassepot, saying, “Would you like to hold it?”
He lifted the rifle from its mounting hooks and turned to me.
I rose from my chair. “Of course,” I said.
He gave me the weapon.
It was lighter than I’d expected for its era. About the weight of the Mauser 98 I’d handled in Mexico a couple of years ago. I put it to my shoulder and sighted into a dim corner of the room.
Fortier let me hold the rifle in silence, though when I lowered it and turned to him, he was smiling at me like a proud papa.
The rifle had been far superior to the German infantry’s comparable breechloader, the Dreyse.
“The Prussians feared it,” I said.
“They did. Greatly.” Fortier said this with his pride nowhere to be found in his tone. The Chassepot’s war, the war of Fortier’s youth, was lost by the French emperor and his politicians and generals.
Fortier took the rifle from me and put it back on the wall. He motioned me silently to my chair and we both sat.
He stewed for a moment more.
It could be argued that the present war actually began with the French failures in their War of 1870, which ended up uniting the German states and emboldening their military.
Then Fortier rolled his shoulders and steeled his face and said, “I understand you were in Germany a few months ago.”
“I was.”
“Not as yourself.”
“As a German-American newspaperman.”
“Is he still of your acquaintance?”
“He can be.”
“We asked ourselves where these possible saboteurs, who make themselves like refugees and come into our capital, where they will go.”
He paused.
“After the circus,” I said.
“Yes.”
He waited some more. As if he were still measuring me, testing me.
I said, “The immigrant Germans in Paris, the ones you dealt with but only so far. Are they scattered? Or do they have a neighborhood?”
Fortier lifted his hand, his forefinger pointing to the ceiling, and then he dipped the finger at me. “Exactly so,” he said.
“Josef Wilhelm Jäger,” I said.
I paused and waited for him this time.
When he realized I was saying no more, he lifted his brows a little, then gave me a slow smile. “That is you.”
“I relinquished my hyphen in America and became Joe Hunter. But I am still German. You understand. I would like to find the true Germans, the loyal Germans trapped in Paris, so I can tell their story to their counterparts in America.”
Fortier smiled again. “You are very convincing. As Mr. Trask promised.” He opened a drawer, removed a number-ten letter envelope, saying, “He tells me you are good at figuring out what to do next.” He closed the drawer, reached partway across the desk and laid the envelope down. “The neighborhood,” he said.
He had even more of these small, subtly destabilizing power moves than Trask. He used one of them now only from long habit, I figured; his smiles at me felt genuine, but he was making me reach.
I leaned forward in my chair and picked up the envelope.
I did not give it a glance. I put it in my inner coat pocket.
Fortier said, “You will also find a man’s name and his address. He is German, living amongst them. But he works for us as an informant. We have been of help to him, and he has reason to safely preserve his place in France. In his case, do not present yourself as Herr Jäger or Mr. Hunter either one. He expects a man at his door who will greet him with Gott strafe Deutschland.”
God punish Germany. I’d heard the original version of this often in the streets of Berlin this summer: Gott strafe England.
Fortier said, “He is to answer with the same. This will give you a chance to watch his eyes, hear his voice. Mr. Trask says you are adept at reading these things. I would be interested if you find any trace of discomfort in him as he damns his home country.”
Fortier paused.
“He has information for me?” I asked.
&
nbsp; “He does. He has recently become credible to us.”
“But you’re still assessing him.”
“We are always assessing.”
I said, “How do you assess the timing of his information? Am I right you’ve suppressed mention of the bombing in the press? I haven’t seen anything.”
“For the moment the newspapers are patriotic. The German bomb is meant to explode more than a restaurant. The confidence of the people of France is the real target.”
“So how did your informant go to work on this so quickly?”
A pair of furrows popped up between his brows.
I got it.
“He warned you beforehand,” I said.
Fortier didn’t answer. But the furrows remained. He’d been warned well before, but he did not give it credence. The informant’s present credibility was determined two nights ago.
I decided not to push it. I said nothing more.
The silence lasted long enough that Fortier unfurrowed. He even gave me a little nod. I’d proved my smarts and I’d proved my discretion.
He pushed back in his chair.
We both stood up, though one crucial question remained.
He said, “Someone will answer our door downstairs at any hour.”
Which only hinted at it.
I suspected I knew the answer. But I was curious to hear how he might tell me.
I said, “And if things come to pass that I am, let us say, confronted with a man or men I think to be German saboteurs? If I have no effective way to apprehend them?”
“I leave that to your discretion,” he said. “You have a free hand.”
No wink. No nudge. No fleeting smile. No inflection to his voice other than the flatness of it, which I took to be a clear inflection of its own.
I was known by this liberty now. I was free to kill.
He offered his hand, and this time I made his grip ratchet up to mine.
5
Trask’s driver was waiting for me when I emerged from Fortier’s row house. He handed me another envelope, a larger one, and opened the Pierce-Arrow vestibule door for me. Trask was not inside.
Paris in the Dark Page 3