“Where to?” the muscleman asked.
“Just a minute,” I said.
I got in, sat down where Trask had been sitting, looked inside Fortier’s envelope. It held a small, folded map cut from a larger map. The German Quarter straddled the 9th and 10th arrondissements south of Rue Lafayette. Not as remotely isolated as I thought it would be. An easy walk from the Folies Bergère. There was also a letter identifying me for free access and full cooperation, typed on Préfecture de Police de Paris letterhead and signed by Émile Marie Laurent himself. My command over the police if I needed them. And there was a handwritten note with details about the man I was to meet. I didn’t read it.
I glanced into Trask’s envelope, as well, and was not surprised to find the Joe Hunter credentials I’d used in August. My two spy masters had figured from the jump that they had me. I put Fortier’s envelope inside Trask’s and laid it aside.
I unhooked the speaking tube and told the driver to take me back to my hotel. The secret services of two countries would have to wait till tomorrow. Today I was a reporter for real.
However.
I soon found myself simply standing in the center of my small, top-floor room, the casement windows and their outer shutters open to the mansard roofs of the Rue de Seine, which were still dim in mid-morning shadow. My Corona sat on the desk, its platen centered in the paper guide, a stack of blank bankers-bond typewriter paper beside it, the corners carefully squared, awaiting words. A horse and cart rang hollowly by in the street below. An alarm clock ticked on my nightstand.
I could type up my notes from the hospital yesterday. But I’d finish before the sun lit the rooftops across the way. And tonight there would be more notes, better ones, full of the words of the ambulance drivers themselves. Moreover, I found that my morning encounter with the secret service boys had riled up that other Kit Cobb. I had a chunk of the morning and a whole afternoon ahead of me.
So I sat at the desk, closely read the German informant’s details, and afterwards burnt the notepaper in the ashtray. He was Bernhard (which he now spelled as Bernard) Lang. Fifty years old. He’d lived at number seven, Cité de Trévise, third floor rear, since 1910. Worked as a maître d’hôtel at a prominent German restaurant in the neighborhood, now closed. Informing for money.
I put my own papers into the false bottom of my Gladstone bag, pocketed Josef Wilhelm Jäger’s papers and the map of the German Quarter, and strapped my Mauser pocket automatic pistol into its leather holster beneath my coat, at the small of my back.
I realized, with a minor shock, that it was as simple as that, my transformation. As simple as that, to change from Cobb the reporter into Cobb the spy. It grew simpler each time.
I went out of the hotel.
The street was empty and the Metro was nearby, and after a few minutes’ walk I was beside the thousand-year-old, porch-towered Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I paused at the top of the steps leading underground. Only for a moment, to shake off the sense of impending tight enclosure, the incipient clamp of my chest, clutch of my throat. Just a brief moment. It was a rare thing, but persistent. From my backstage childhood. For a long while—not long, actually; long only by the pulse of my fear for the few minutes it had actually lasted—I’d been trapped in a trunk backstage at the Lyceum Theatre in New York, playing a foolish child’s game.
But that was a couple of decades ago and I’d flexed through this scar tissue many times since. So I went down the steps, deep into the ground, and I was fine. The barrel vault of the train hall lifted the last little bit of oppression from me. The beveled white tiles of the station caught and held the cheddar light of the carbon lamps, and then I was inside a swell Sprague-Thomson train car with a passel of Parisians, and in less than ten minutes I was stepping out of the car and into a sweet, autumnal burning smell from the train’s wooden brake shoes. Still, when I emerged from beneath the ground into the expanse of air and sunlight of Rue Lafayette and paused between the Metro’s twin, art-nouveau, orchid-stalk lampposts, I felt something release in me that had not fully ceased until this moment.
Cité de Trévise was a cobbled street not even ten yards wide, canyoned between neo-Renaissance row houses. Number seven was just beyond the street’s central, circular place, where a fountain plashed softly above the heads of three gossamer-gowned stone nymphs holding hands.
The floors I climbed were quiet. It had been a rough sixteen months for many of the residents of Cité de Trévise no doubt. They were German, no matter how long they’d been here or what their papers said. Where could they flee? Many were behind these doors, lying low.
I knocked at the apartment at the rear of the third floor. There was stirring inside, briefly voices, more than one. I had acquired a reflex in the past two years. Pistol awareness. I made no move to it, no gesture to suggest it was there, but I became keenly conscious of the Mauser leaning heavily into the small of my back.
The voices stopped.
Footsteps approached.
Then silence.
At eye level was a peephole. A shadow moved on the inner side of its small glass lens.
I held still, waited.
Then a bolt was thrown. Then a chain lock. Then a twist lock in the handle.
Bernard Lang was a man afraid.
The door opened.
He was a big guy, thick-necked, walrus-mustached, as upright and commanding and smartly authoritarian as you’d expect from a maître d’ of a prominent German restaurant, even with the top half of his ribbed-wool union suit taking the place of his ex-officio tuxedo shirt. His suspenders stretched tight over his barrel chest holding up his blue serge pants that had gone a little loose at the waist from the hard times.
His bearing was fine but his eyes had lost their maître d’ command. He did not examine mine, though he focused on them. He was ready to flinch. Ready, always, to be taken away.
I said, low, “Gott strafe Deutschland.”
He exhaled sharply. His eyes softened. What Fortier would have me look for was not here. These were not the reflex responses of a German loyalist pretending to be an informant. His breath was a release of fear. His eyes saw an ally. And he said, just as low but with what sounded to me like conviction: “Gott strafe Deutschland.”
We said no more for a moment.
I then lifted my chin to indicate the space behind him. “Shall we talk inside?” I put on my best German.
His eyes widened a little, no doubt at hearing me continue in his native language.
“Yes. Please come in,” he said, also in German.
He turned and led me down a short corridor, past two closed doors, past another corridor going to the left, and into a parlor at the back of the apartment. Its windows looked out on a narrow courtyard and across to the shuttered windows of other apartments.
I chose a chair at a right angle to the windows, with my back toward a wall with a piano. Lang accepted my choice, sat in a facing chair. Beyond him was an open door to a dining room and, straight on, another open door to a kitchen.
Even as the kitchen registered on me, a woman appeared there, moving past, but her face turned to the parlor, and she drew up at my seeing her.
She was a Valkyrie of a mate for an imposing maître d’, big-boned and wide-shouldered, a middle-aged Brünnhilde-at-home, wearing a flowered bathrobe with a tasseled cinch, her hair braided into a long, thick rope. She’d squared around now to look at me, since I was looking at her. The robe was only loosely wrapped and she was showing a wide expanse of her ample chest rising from a lacy something she was wearing underneath. This she quickly realized but only slowly remedied. More defiantly than slowly, really. She took her time pulling her robe together.
I realized that one of the voices I’d heard through the door had been a woman’s. A deep-pitched, shield-maiden of a voice.
Lang said, “You are German?” Not quite a question. Ready to believe a Ja.
I focused on him. “I am from German parents,” I said. Joe Hunter’s story.<
br />
“Perhaps I knew there was something,” he said.
“Perhaps I have an American accent.”
“American,” he said with a faint twist of what might be admiration in his voice. He had already made himself an immigrant. Perhaps he had a further ambition.
“The accent is only small,” he said. “Not even worth mentioning. Very small.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“You have been sent,” he said. He raised the volume of his voice. This was not simply a confirming declaration directed at me. He was informing the woman in the other room.
“Yes, I’ve been sent,” I said, raising my voice enough for her to hear, lifting my chin a little in her direction, to let them understand I was wise to them. If Fortier had known about her, he’d have mentioned her in his note. But I had no problem if Lang’s woman was part of his operation.
“What do you have for me?” I asked.
“A dangerous man has entered France as a refugee,” Lang said, leaning toward me, his hand rising from his lap, twisting palm upward. “He crossed at the Belgian border.”
“When was this?”
“I’m not sure. At least two weeks ago.”
“And how long has he been in Paris?”
“For ten days now.”
It took a little effort for me to show nothing in my face. Fortier and his boys had certainly muffed it.
A moment of silence passed between us. Lang was making an effort with his face, as well.
For a similar reason. He said, “I told them right away.”
He was anxious for me to know about the timing. Had he heard of the bombing? Nothing had been in the papers, but this was the second day after. The rumor of a thing like that would get around pretty fast.
“They should have listened to you,” I said.
He shrugged. But his hands moved to his knees and gripped them hard.
He’d heard.
There was movement behind Lang. I looked beyond him. His woman had arrived in the doorway to the parlor.
She leaned against the jamb.
I said, “Is he still in a processing center?”
Lang huffed faintly. It was harder now. “Too late for that,” he said.
“Do you think he’s here, in the German Quarter?”
“I am told he is.” Lang’s hands rubbed at his knees, as if both palms had suddenly begun to itch.
“Were you told where he might be found?”
“There is one place where he may go. This is new information. A cellar bar. Once Le Rouge et le Noir. Closed now, to the French eye. The sign is gone, the windows are shuttered. But men of the Quarter still drink there. He would perhaps be among them. Number nineteen, Rue des Petites Écuries.”
“Will they let me in?”
“At the door you will be asked your name. You must first reply, ‘Et le Blanc.’“
The Red and the Black. Ironic to start with. Then speaking the white that was always there unspoken, turning the Stendhal novel into the flag of the German Empire. These boys were the thinkers in the community.
“Their politics?” I asked it more rhetorically than for information.
“As you might imagine,” Lang said. “They favor Berlin.”
“How did I learn their password?”
“Not from me.”
“Of course not. That’s why I’m asking.”
He thought for a moment, began to speak and then didn’t. Now he thought again, and then asked, “Whoever you will be to them, could you know a waiter at Café de la Paix?”
“I could.”
“His name is Dieter. He would tell you this.”
“And how will I recognize our refugee?”
“He is a gaunt man. Clean-shaven. About my age. There is a scar like so.” Lang put his forefinger high up on the center of his forehead and drew it down at an angle toward the outer edge of his left eyebrow.
The woman suddenly appeared directly behind Lang. Very close.
Lang seemed unaware of her. He said, “He has come into France as Franz Staub.”
The woman laid her hand upon his shoulder. Gently. There was no trace of surprise in him. Nor did he look up at her now. He simply lifted his own hand and placed it on hers.
It remained there as he said, “He is working for the German government. I am told he is a man who can do anything. Assassination. A bomb. He is very dangerous, a very grave threat.”
“Do you know him personally?”
Lang drew a breath. Tilted his head a little. “Not personally,” he said. “Before the war, for a brief time, he frequented the restaurant where I worked. I was told about him even then, that he was with the secret service.”
Lang paused. He seemed to have nothing more to say.
I glanced from his face up to the woman’s. They had the same focus, the same gravity. I figured I understood. I asked, “Does he know you are alert to him?”
Lang lifted his eyebrows. My implicit concern for him was a surprise. “Yes. I am afraid he does.”
“Does he know where you are?”
“If he knew that, I would be dead already.”
“I understand,” I said. I looked up at the woman.
She was focused gravely on Lang.
“I’m sorry not to introduce her,” he said. “This is Greta.”
She lifted her face to me.
He did not elaborate.
I nodded. “Greta,” I said.
She nodded in return.
“Please catch this man,” Lang said. “But be warned. He will try to kill you. He does not hesitate a moment to do such a thing. You should not hesitate either.”
I rose.
Lang did not. He and Greta remained where they were. He lowered his hand, but hers remained on his shoulder.
I went out.
As I crossed the place, I paused briefly beneath the nymphs. She had hardly been a nymph, but this threesome before me, in their diaphanous clothes, reminded me of Greta. Her late-morning dishabille, her hovering over him, her tender touch of his shoulder. And I thought of how naturally he requited her touch. For a couple their age, the thing between them seemed fresh. Recent. Now a German agent, who’d perhaps already killed in Paris, was her enemy. Had she known what she was getting into with her new man?
6
That night I took a fiacre to the New York Bar on Rue Daunou, near l’Opéra de Paris. No bistro tables and al fresco drinking here. This was a vintage American saloon behind a Paris storefront.
I stepped in.
Part of me twinged over a different bar tonight, that I should be there instead. In a cellar in the German Quarter. But I counterpunched that thought. The other men I was pursuing were here on Rue Daunou tonight, waiting for me. They had a story that needed telling.
The place was owned by a pretty fair American jockey named Tod Sloan, who had a reputation among the French turf gentry and railbirds. Sloan decided a few years ago that the Prohibition harpies in America would eventually succeed, so he dismantled a bar on New York’s West Side and had it shipped to Paris and reassembled, mahogany walls and tables, zinc bar, brass spittoons, tooled leather ceiling and all.
The place was dense with tobacco smoke. It was packed with expatriates and with hyphenless Frenchmen who had a secret taste for things American. It also happened to be the favorite joint for American volunteer ambulance drivers, three of whom were supposed to be waiting for me.
I made my way through the smoke and conversations. No one was catching my eye or fitting the bill. I was running out of saloon and starting to worry I’d been jilted. Then I glanced to a far corner, and a face I recognized was looking at me. Supervising Nurse Louise Pickering, though she was in mufti—a shirtwaist and cardigan—and her hair was drawn up into a simple pompadour knot. She was sitting at the head of a table, presiding over three strapping boys in khakis and puttees, who, naturally enough, weren’t looking at me at all. They were focused on her.
I had the feeling she’d been watching me fo
r a while. There was no snap of recognition in her face now that our eyes met. After an odd moment of simple, placid staring, she merely gave a small nod of the head. Then her lips moved and the three young men turned around to look at me.
I drew near.
The driver who’d secured the place directly opposite Nurse Pickering—a broad-shouldered, flush-faced, auburn-headed lad—instantly gave way to me, moving his chair around to the longer side of the table, where his dark-haired compatriot slid his chair closer to Louise, with a couple of apologetic head bobs.
I pulled an unused chair from beside the next table and placed it at the alternate head of ours, glancing now to my left, to the third driver, who was straw-colored in complexion and hair and of a certain chesty broadness. He was of the same height and size as the young man who gave his place away to me. But across the table the latter was clearly solidly muscled while this guy gave off a sense of nascent corpulence.
I sat down and looked across to Louise, who was still watching me.
I had not expected her to be here.
But she was showing me not even a hint of her thoughts.
Everyone at the table seemed of the same generation. Mine, technically. But the gap between my early thirties and their mid-twenties felt somehow like a big separation between us. Which made me think: She’s involved with one of these men.
The most likely candidate, it seemed to me, was this guy to my left, who I now noticed had already placed himself a little nearer Louise than had the dark-haired deferential one. He had a square-jawed, cleft-chinned, Gibson-man sort of face. The kind certain women go for. Till he gets fat.
He smiled with more straight and glistening teeth than one usually expects in a smile, and he began the introductions with an offered hand, which I took and shook. A milksoppy shake.
“John Barrington Lacey,” he said.
“Where from?”
“Boston,” he said. Bahston. Beacon Street accent. A touch of hauteur.
Of course. This was her guy. From before Paris.
“Kit Cobb,” I said, letting go of his hand.
“I’m here with the Harvard contingent,” he said with what sounded like the intention of setting himself above the two rubes across the table. Or making a claim on Nurse Louise from Mass General. Or both.
Paris in the Dark Page 4