I excused myself in German.
He nodded and returned to his conversation, which seemed, like every other conversation in the place, intense and ernsthaft. Very serious.
I arrived at the bar.
The fleshy face that let me into this joint appeared before me. He had a cloth in hand and began rubbing the counter space before me.
“Please tell me you still have an authentic beer,” I said. He looked me steadily in the eyes. He knew what I meant. Which was good for Joe Hunter’s credibility. Four centuries ago the Reinheitsgebot, the beer purity law of Bavaria, made it illegal to brew beer with anything but water, barley, and hops. A decade ago it was finally adopted in the unified Germany. If only that had been ambition enough for Kaiser Willie and he’d decided to conquer Europe with beer. A fine empire it would have been. Though among the boys surrounding me, I figured I’d better stay away from that last bit of editorializing. A German beer was simply a symbol of their innate superiority.
“You are from America?” the bartender asked.
“Lately.”
“So is our German beer. What we get must go first to you and then come back to us. Though unofficially. This is the only way.”
“So it’s not what the room is drinking.”
“We have not so much of it. And it is costly.”
I glanced to the left, where the bar-rail boys were. The nearest three faces were turned to me, watching and listening openly.
I nodded at them.
They nodded in return, nearly in unison.
I looked back to the bartender.
I said, “Is it, however, a good one?”
“It has come a long way, but yes. It is a nice Bavarian from Kulmbach.”
“Do you have enough for a round for the room?”
He gave me an ach-so lift of the brows and then an almost-smile like what a father gives a son who’s done something very good but the father doesn’t want to make a big thing out of it. “I think perhaps. Yes.”
“Then I wish to buy,” I said.
The American dollar in Paris had lately eclipsed even gold in value. You couldn’t take gold out of the country. But you could cross any border with the gold-standard greenbacks. While going inside my coat for my wallet, I did some quick figuring in my head, marking up his Kulmbachers generously. Before he finished his count I put a five-dollar bill in the center of his freshly cleaned counter.
“Will that do?” I said.
He glanced at me and I inclined my head in the direction of Illinois Abe. His eyes followed.
He lifted his hand, but not to take the money. He offered it to me. I shook it. He had the grip of the bouncer he no doubt also was.
He prolonged the handshake. He did not need to give words to his gratitude, which was manifestly stronger than I’d expected. Then he withdrew his hand, saying, “I will get the beer now” in a cadence that made him sound apologetic for letting go of his grip on me.
“Good,” I said.
“We will touch bottles, you and I, and you will tell me of your duel.” He nodded at my Schmiss.
“Heidelberg,” I said.
He spread his hands as if to say, There you are. I could have guessed.
“I am Hans,” he said.
“I am Joe,” I said.
“I understand,” he said, giving me an untempered smile.
He faced the room and silenced all his customers’ conversation with a cellar-filling voice he somehow made both genial and commanding. Achtung. Then, as they turned to him, his tone crispened, even as he spoke from the warmth I’d felt in his hand. “Gentlemen,” he said. “We have a German guest who comes to us from America.”
When I identified myself to him I had used the fully precise Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika, but he familiarized it, collegiated it by using the simple Amerika, speaking to these Germans’ present hopefulness for a continued Wilsonian neutrality, which many of them even took to be covert sympathy.
He said, “He has bought each of you a Kulmbach Schwarzbier.”
To a man, his Herren rose to their feet and lifted their bottles or their steins or their shot glasses to the American in their midst.
But before they could drink, Hans announced, “His name is Josef Wilhelm Jäger.” Then he said in English, “Call him Joe.”
In chorus they exclaimed, “Heil Joe!” And they drank to me.
While Hans went off to get the beer, some of them approached me at the bar, asking about America, where I was from over there and where I came from in Germany, what I did, what brought me to Paris. How and where I got my Schmiss.
The stage-role answers all came easily to my tongue: I grew up in St. Louis, but now I’m from Chicago. My father brought us from Berlin when I was a boy. I write stories for newspapers whose readers are the eight million Americans who have blood ties to the Fatherland. My stories give staunch support to an image of Germany that all you boys in this bar understand. I am in Paris to work on stories. The scar is from my college days, which were back in Germany, where I became a man.
But while I spoke, my mind slipped into a place that the actors I’d grown up around spoke of, especially during a long run, a place where they could hear their own performance, hear the words coming convincingly out of their mouths, while their real attention, for extended periods and in great detail, was on other matters, sometimes lofty, sometimes commonplace.
And so it was that I thought of Hans. And I thought of these men who were around me, not about their questions and my answers but about how it was that they were making me one of them. The Germans love putting words together to make new ones. In my actor’s concurrent flow of disparate thought about these men, I even formed a word of my own, for this thing they were feeling: Bindungsehnsucht. A deep and complex longing for an emotional connection, for a bond. I was surprised to think of this. I was here as a spy. One of them—if he was not here at the moment, he could well have been—one of them that they would hide and even assist could be a killer of civilians in the name of war. The men in this room were the Huns. And the connection they were creating between us was built upon my lies.
But superficial lies. Lies that could easily have been replaced by equally superficial truths. So easily as to show how irrelevant lies or truth were to the making of this bond they sought. Because the biggest surprise of all was that I was feeling the Bindungsehnsucht in me as well. That they were Germans and I was an American or even that I was an American spy portraying an American German to help prosecute a war against them: all that seemed somehow irrelevant. In this moment we were simply men. In a bar. Finding things to bind us, to give us cause to shake hands, lift our glasses, drink in concert, prop each other up, get varying degrees of drunk together, come to a rapport. That the rapport could be achieved over trivial and interchangeable things only spoke to how deep was the longing itself and, therefore, paradoxically, how profound was the rapport.
Hans had returned. He was lining up bottles of beer on the zinc surface of the bar. A long, orderly row. When I would think of this later, with a reporter’s reflex for glib metaphor, the bottles were disciplined and orderly like German troops marching into Belgium. In the moment, however, in a cellar in the German Quarter of Paris, it was all about how these men waited patiently for the bottles to be arranged, how they spoke to me even as they knew the beer was arriving and how they waited and queried and listened so they could learn about Joe, until all the bottles were arrayed.
Then they filed by and Hans opened the beers one by one.
And, yes, I watched each face, looking for the killer who had brought the war to the innocents of Paris, as the German U-boat commanders were doing in the North Atlantic, as the German troops did to Belgium to begin it all.
Franz Staub was not among them.
After the last man had filed past me with a nod and a smile and a cuff on the shoulder and a danke, after all these men had gone back to their places, they remained standing, without drinking, until Hans opened his own beer and mine.
Then we all lifted our bottles, and in the brief moment before someone spoke, I played my role with the complexity of the past few minutes driven into my head as deeply as for any actor at the Moscow Art Theatre. In a voice that filled the bar, I toasted, “Deutschland über alles!”
With those words, I was a German-American who had found his allies, and I was a guy named Joe among his new pals whose language I spoke and who shared their Bindungsehnsucht, and I was an American spy in the midst of the enemy. Every voice in the bar veritably sang the toast in response.
The beer was dark and malty and as cool as the cellar air. After I took my first sip I turned to Hans, who had just taken a sip of his. We touched bottles and nodded to each other.
And I noticed one unopened bottle sitting on the bar before him.
The simple explanation was that he’d miscounted. Easy enough to have done. But when my eyes fell to the bottle, Hans glanced at it too. He put his own bottle down and said, leaning to me, speaking loudly and giving the nearest drinker at the bar a little sideways smile, “I’m leaving my own beer for a moment. Keep an eye on these ruffians.” Unraffinierte Kerlen was his phrase in German. A friendly wink of an insult. “Don’t let them steal it,” he said.
“You’re safe,” I said.
Hans picked up the unopened bottle and moved off. One bottle too many could easily have been set aside nearby. I watched Hans cross the room with it and disappear into the hallway at the far end.
The ruffian next to me caught my eye and nodded at Hans’s bottle on the bar. “Do you intend to maintain your American neutrality about that beer?”
“I will defend that German beer as if it were my own.”
The man lifted his own bottle and invited a clink of mine. I obliged.
“Good man,” he said.
We drank.
He asked what story I was working on. I was doing okay without getting too far into a journalistic hoax. I was vague and he hadn’t been all that interested anyway, as he immediately launched into a long diatribe about the British, and I simply was called on to nod and grunt. I needed only to shift my eyes a very little past his right ear to watch the door from the hallway.
Hans was gone for several minutes. Then he emerged without the beer and crossed to the bar.
There was a back room. Someone was in it. Someone not showing his face.
Hans arrived and we talked about Heidelberg and swordplay and the evolving weaponry of this war, and through all of it I was thinking about the man in the back room. Finally enough time had passed for me to excuse myself without arousing suspicion. In a brief lull in our conversation I leaned to Hans and asked for the toilet. There was only one place where it could be.
He motioned to the passageway across the room. “Last door.”
I sauntered off. I stopped and shook an offered hand of a grateful beer drinker. I sauntered on. Nonchalant.
The corridor was empty and dim. A single electric bulb burned at the far end, beside what was apparently the door to the toilette. I walked lightly now. No noise. Along the right-hand wall were two doors. The first was dark at its bottom edge. The second showed a light.
I stopped there.
I held my breath.
I looked over my shoulder. No one in the bar had an angle to view this far down. I put my ear gently against the door.
Nothing.
Then a stirring inside. The rustle of a body. Brief. Then silence.
My options. Quickly now. What if I were to push into the room and find it was Staub? And find what else? The makings of a bomb? I would kill him. If it was Staub and around him were only a few personal things that a refugee would have? He might still be the man Fortier, by way of Lang, suspected he was. Suspected. Unproven in such a context. Yet even if the bomb making wasn’t clear, he was still likely a German secret agent. But only by the say-so of an out-of-work maître d’.
I was thinking it out too much.
I was still wearing my overcoat, unbuttoned. I slipped my hand inside and beneath my suit coat and to the small of my back and drew my Mauser. I put it into the right-hand pocket of my overcoat and kept my hand on it.
Though there was a room full of German patriots between me and the way out, I had to know.
I put my left hand on the doorknob, took a breath, and I thought: Gently now. I tried to turn the nob.
It was locked. And it snicked at the attempt. Quite clearly.
The body rustled again inside.
And now a footfall.
I took a step back.
A slip bolt was thrown.
The door opened.
Wide.
The face was clean-shaven, gaunt. It had a scar angling down from hairline to left eyebrow. Staub. He was in his shirtsleeves. No tie. The door was fully open. On the wall behind him was a dresser and upon it, a shaving mug and an open travel case. Nothing else visible.
“I’m sorry,” I said in my best German. “I thought this was the toilet.”
He glanced to the end of the hall. To see if my mistake was plausible. There was no sign on the closed door. There was an indicative smell no doubt but that smell was also present where we were standing. A mistake was plausible.
He returned his gaze to me, seeming more weary than suspicious. “The door at the end,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
I did not immediately move away as he might have expected, nor did he. His eyes remained on mine, but impassively, as if I were a tree or a lamppost or a pattern in the wallpaper and he was simply lost in a thought.
“I didn’t know you were back here,” I said. “I just bought a round of Kulmbacher. I don’t want to miss anyone.”
“That was you?” Staub asked. His tone was flat.
“Yes.”
“Thank you. Hans brought me one.”
“Good,” I said.
My hand was still in my pocket, on my pistol. At least for the present time, it seemed to me, small talk would be preferable to assassination. I had things to learn. There could be others actively working with him.
I withdrew my hand. Not too slow. Not too fast. He had a spy’s nerves. My movement was within his field of vision, but he kept his eyes on mine and he did not blink.
“I am Josef Wilhelm Jäger.” I offered my hand to him.
Germans love to shake. But Staub hesitated. I started to withdraw it but he quickly offered me his.
“Herr Jäger,” he said. “I am Franz Staub.”
“Herr Staub,” I said.
He quickly let go. “I have only lately arrived in Paris,” he said. “If you’ll forgive me.”
And he withdrew into his room and closed the door.
I needed to follow him.
I needed to search his room.
He bolted the door.
Not on this night.
8
The next morning the concierge of my hotel appeared at my table in the dining alcove off the lobby as I was finishing my coffee. He was a limping man with hair as off-white as the French ration bread, which he was once again apologizing for, though he could see I’d eaten it all.
“I am so sorry for it,” he said. “It has been sabotaged by potatoes.”
“Your wheat is off fighting the war,” I said.
He bowed a little to me.
“This came for you,” he said, producing a telegram.
I thanked him, and he vanished.
The telegram was from Clyde Fetter in Chicago, my editor in chief at the Post-Express, and I could hear his voice, with pauses for effect to draw on his cigar: Kit old man. He paused and puffed. You got your wish, at least for ambulance angle. Frogs’ War Ministry okayed you riding along in Paris and to front. Second-line trenches farthest. He paused and examined the end of his cigar. Need to wangle your way forward like a real reporter. He puffed and blew. Which you are. The last two remarks were Clyde being Clyde. The needle and the pat on the back, in rapid succession. He was in on my doings with the government. He and the ne
wspaper owner were the only ones in Chicago who knew. He was a patriot but he also was of the opinion that newspaper work was more valuable to the country than spy work. At this point in the cable I could see him lean forward and tap off his ash. American hospital already informed. Off you go. Clyde.
An hour later, the wartime superintendent of the American Hospital, an affable French bureaucrat named Pichon, examined the permission papers and grunted at the signatures, individually, with escalating intensity up the chain of command, from the Section d’Information to the Mission de la Presse Anglo-Americain to the Cabinet du General-en-Chef to the Ministère de la Guerre.
“Very well,” he said.
I stepped from his office.
Louise was standing in the middle of the sunlit hallway, her hands crossed demurely before her, at her waist.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello,” she said.
“Are you waiting for him or for me?”
She didn’t answer. Her hands dropped. Her eyes had suddenly focused intently on my face. The left side of my face. Without shifting her gaze away, she took two steps toward me, coming within lilac-smelling distance, and I realized what it was.
My scar.
She kept her tungsten beam of a gaze on it for another few moments and then brought her eyes to mine. “Are there more of these?” she asked.
“Scars?”
“Yes.”
“None to speak of.”
There was a faint letting go in her, as if she were relieved.
I wondered if she knew enough about the enemy to recognize what the scar resembled.
I decided to intervene. “This one’s from covering another war,” I said, which was more or less true. “A shrapnel wound,” I said, which was a lie.
She nodded.
I said, “I’ve been given permission to ride with your boys.”
“I know,” she said.
The superintendent had merely put on a little show, going through the motions of checking the signatures when he’d already passed on the word.
“That’s why I’m here,” Louise said. “You’re in luck.” And she turned and moved off at a near trot. She was all business now, content to keep me half a step behind her. She was, once again, Supervising Nurse Pickering, with no hint of last night, with even the recent comments about my scar seeming impersonal in retrospect, seeming like a professional interest from a professional nurse recognizing a battle wound and wondering what I’d been through.
Paris in the Dark Page 6