by Alan Furst
“This adieu,” Weisz said. “Were your people involved?”
Devoisin smiled. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”
“There are ways to say it. Not quite so, direct.”
“Not in this office, my friend. I suspect the British might have helped out, Prince Paul is their great chum.”
“So then, I’ll just say that the Franco-Yugoslav alliance is expected to strengthen.”
“It surely will-our love deepens with time.”
Weisz pretended to write. “I rather like that.”
“Actually, it’s the Serbs we love, you can’t do business with the Croats, they’re headed directly for Mussolini’s kennel.”
“They don’t like each other, down there, it’s in their blood.”
“Isn’t it. And, incidentally, if you should hear something about that, Croatian statehood, a word from you would be very much appreciated.”
“You’ll be the first to know. In any event, would you like to elaborate on the official statement? Not for attribution, of course. ‘A senior official says…’”
“Weisz, please, my hands are tied. France supports the change, and every word in the statement was hammered out of steel. Would you care for a coffee? I’ll have it brought up.”
“Thanks, no. I’ll use the Nazi background, without using the word.”
“It doesn’t come from me.”
“Of course not,” Weisz said.
Devoisin shifted the conversation-he was soon off to Saint-Moritz for a week of skiing, had Weisz seen the new Picasso show at Rosenberg’s, what did he think about it. Weisz’s internal clock was efficient: fifteen minutes, then he had “to get back to the office.”
“Don’t be such a stranger,” Devoisin said. “It’s always good to see you.” He had, Weisz thought, a truly magnificent smile.
12 February. The request-it was an order, of course-arrived as a telephone message in his mailbox at the office. The secretary who’d taken the message gave him a certain look when he came in that morning. So what’s all this? Not that he would tell her, not that she had any business asking, and it was only a momentary look, but a longish, concentrated sort of a moment. And she watched him as he read it-his presence required at Room 10, at the Surete Nationale, at eight the following morning. What did she think, that he would tremble? Break out in a cold sweat?
He did neither, but he felt it, in the pit of the stomach. The Surete was the national security police-what did they want? He put the slip of paper in his pocket, and, one foot in front of the other, got through his day. Later that morning, he made up a reason to stop by Delahanty’s office. Had the secretary told him? But Delahanty said nothing, and acted as he always did. Did he? Or was there, something? Leaving early for lunch, he called Salamone from a pay phone in a cafe, but Salamone was at work, and, beyond “Well, be careful,” couldn’t say much. That night, he took Veronique to the ballet-balcony seats, but they could see-and for supper afterward. Veronique was attentive, bright and talkative, and one didn’t ask men what was wrong. They hadn’t talked to her, had they? He considered asking, but the right moment never came. Walking home, it wouldn’t leave him alone; he made up questions, tried to answer them, then tried again.
At ten of eight the next morning, he walked up the avenue de Marigny to the Interior Ministry on the rue des Saussaies. Massive and gray, the building stretched to the horizon and rose above him; here lived the little gods in little rooms, the gods of emigre fate, who could have you put on a train, back to wherever it was, back to whatever awaited you.
A clerk led him to Room 10-a long table, a few chairs, a hissing steam radiator, a high window behind a grille. A powerful presence, in Room 10: the smell of cooked paint and stale cigarette smoke, but mostly the smell of sweat, like a gymnasium. They made him wait, of course, it was 9:20 before they showed up, dossiers in hand. There was something about the young one, in his twenties, Weisz thought, that suggested the word probationary. The older one was a cop, grizzled and slumped, with eyes that had seen everything.
Formal and correct, they introduced themselves and spread their dossiers out. Inspector Pompon, the younger one, his boiled white shirt gleaming like the sun, led the interrogation, and wrote out Weisz’s answers on a printed form. After sifting through the particulars, date of birth, address, employment, arrival in France-all of that from the dossier-he asked Weisz if he’d known Enrico Bottini.
“Yes, we were acquainted.”
“Good friends?”
“Friends, I would say.”
“Did you ever meet his paramour, Madame LaCroix?”
“No.”
“Perhaps he spoke of her.”
“Not to me.”
“Do you know, Monsieur Weisz, why you are here today?”
“In fact, I don’t know.”
“This investigation would normally be conducted by the local Prefecture, but we have interested ourselves in it because it involves the family of an individual who serves in the national government. So, we are concerned with the, ah, political implications. Of the murder/suicide. Is that clear?”
Weisz said it was. And it was, though French was not his native language, and answering questions at the Surete was not the same as chatting with Devoisin or telling Veronique he liked her perfume. Fortunately, Pompon took considerable pleasure in the sound of his own voice, mellow and precise, and that slowed him down to a point where Weisz, working hard, could pretty much understand every word.
Pompon put Weisz’s dossier aside, opened another, and hunted around for what he wanted. Weisz could see the impression of an official stamp, made with a red ink pad, at the upper corner of each page. “Was your friend Bottini left-handed, Monsieur Weisz?”
Weisz thought it over. “I don’t know,” he said. “I never noticed that he was.”
“And how would you describe his political affiliation?”
“He was a political emigre, from Italy, so I would describe his politics as antifascist.”
Pompon wrote down the answer, his careful hand the product of a school system that spent endless hours on penmanship. “Of the left, would you say?”
“Of the center.”
“You discussed politics?”
“In a general way, when it came up.”
“Have you heard of a newspaper, a clandestine publication, that is called Liberazione?”
“Yes. An opposition newspaper distributed in Italy.”
“Have you read it?”
“No, I’ve seen others, the ones published in Paris.”
“But not Liberazione.”
“No.”
“And Bottini’s relationship to this newspaper?”
“I wouldn’t know. He never mentioned it.”
“Would you describe Bottini? What sort of man he was?”
“Very proud, sure of himself. Sensitive to slights, I would say, and conscious of his-do you say ‘standing’? His place in the scheme of things. He had been a prominent lawyer, in Turin, and was always a lawyer, even as a friend.”
“Meaning what, precisely?”
Weisz thought for a moment. “If there was an argument, even a friendly argument, he still liked to win it.”
“Was he, would you say, capable of violence?”
“No, I think that violence, to him, meant failure, a loss, a loss of…”
“Self-control?”
“He believed in words, discourse, rationality. Violence, to him, was a, how to say, descent, a descent to the level of, well, beasts.”
“But he murdered his paramour. Was it, do you think, romantic passion that drove him to do such a thing?”
“I don’t believe that.”
“What then?”
“I suspect this crime was a double murder, not a murder/suicide.”
“Committed by whom, Monsieur Weisz?”
“By operatives of the Italian government.”
“An assassination, then.”
“Yes.”
“With no concern th
at one of the victims was the wife of an important French politician.”
“No, I don’t think they cared.”
“Was Bottini, then, to your way of thinking, the primary victim?”
“I believe he was, yes.”
“Why do you believe that?”
“I think it had to do with his involvement in the antifascist opposition.”
“Why him, Monsieur Weisz? There are others in Paris. Quite a number.”
“I don’t know why,” Weisz said. It was very hot in the room, Weisz felt a bead of sweat run from beneath his arm down to the edge of his undershirt.
“As an emigre, Monsieur Weisz, what is your opinion of France?”
“I have always liked it here, and that was true long before I emigrated.”
“What exactly is it that you like?”
“I would say,” he paused, then said, “the tradition of individual freedom has always been strong here, and I enjoy the culture, and Paris is, is everything that’s said of it. One is privileged to live here.”
“You are aware that there are disputes between us-Italy claims Corsica, Tunisia, and Nice-so if, regrettably, your native country and your adopted country were to go to war, what would you do then?”
“Well, I wouldn’t leave.”
“Would you serve a foreign country, against your native land?”
“Today,” Weisz said, “I don’t know how to answer that. My hope is for change in the government of Italy, and peace between both nations. Really, if ever there were two countries who ought not to go to war, that would be Italy and France.”
“And would you be willing to put such ideals to work? To work for what you believe should be harmony between these two nations?”
Oh fuck you. “Truly, I cannot imagine what I could do, to help. It all takes place high up, these difficulties. Between our countries.”
Pompon almost smiled, started to speak, to attack, but his colleague, very quietly, cleared his throat. “We appreciate your candor, Monsieur Weisz. Not so easy, these politics. Perhaps you’re one of those who in his heart thinks that wars should be settled by diplomats in their underwear, fighting with brooms.”
Weisz smiled, intensely grateful. “I’d pay to watch it, yes.”
“Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. Too bad, eh? By the way, speaking of diplomats, I wonder if you’ve heard, as a journalist, that an Italian official, from the embassy here, has been sent home. Persona non grata, I believe that’s the phrase.”
“I hadn’t heard.”
“No? You’re sure? Well, maybe a communique wasn’t issued-that’s not up to us, down here in the trenches, but I’m told it did happen.”
“I didn’t know,” Weisz said. “Nothing came to Reuters.”
The cop shrugged. “Then better keep it under your hat, eh?”
“I will,” Weisz said.
“Much obliged,” the cop said.
Pompon closed his file. “I think that’s all, for today,” he said. “Of course we’ll be speaking with you again.”
Weisz left the ministry, a lone figure amid a stream of men with briefcases, circled the building-this took a long time-at last left its shadow, and headed toward the Reuters office. Going back over the interview, his mind spun, but in time settled on the official sent back to Italy. Why had they told him that? What did they want from him? Because he sensed they knew he’d become the new editor of Liberazione, had expected the pro forma lie, then tempted him with an interesting story. Officially, the clandestine press did not exist, but it was, potentially, useful. How? Because the French government might wish to make known, to both allies and enemies in Italy, that they had taken action in the Bottini affair. They had not issued a communique, did not want to force the Mussolini government to send home a French official, the traditional pawn sacrifice in diplomatic chess. On the other hand, they could not simply do nothing, they had to avenge the wrong done to LaCroix, an important politician.
Was this true? If it wasn’t, and the story appeared in Liberazione, they would be very annoyed with him. Keep it under your hat, eh? Best to do that, if you valued the head that wore it. No, he thought, leave it alone, let them find some other newspaper, don’t take the bait. The French allowed Liberazione and the others to exist because France publicly opposed the fascist government. Today. Tomorrow, that could change. Everywhere in Europe, the possibility of another war forced alliances governed by realpolitik: England and France needed Italy as a partner against Germany, they couldn’t have Russia, and they wouldn’t have America, so they had to fight Mussolini with one hand, and stroke him with the other. The waltz of diplomacy, and Weisz now invited to join the dance.
But he would decline, with silence. He’d been summoned to this meeting, he decided, as the editor of Liberazione-an assignment for Inspector Pompon, the new man on the job: Would he spy for them? Would he be discreet on the subject of French politics? And we’ll be speaking with you again meant we’re watching you. So then, watch. But the answers, no, and yes, would not change.
Now Weisz felt better. Not such a bad day, he thought, the sun in and out, big, fancy clouds coming in from the Channel and flying east over the city. Weisz, on his way to the Opera quarter, had left the ministry neighborhood and returned to the streets of Paris: two shop girls in gray smocks, riding bicycles, an old man in a cafe, reading Le Figaro, his terrier curled up beneath the table, a musician on the corner, playing the clarinet, his upturned hat holding a few centimes. All of them, he thought, adding a one-franc coin to the hat, with dossiers. It had shaken him a little to see his very own, but so life went. Still, triste in its way. But no different than Italy, the dossiers there called schedatura-someone presumed to have a police file termed schedata-where they had been compiled by the national police for more than a decade, recording political views, the habits of daily life, sins great and small, everything. It was all written down.
By ten-fifteen, Weisz was back in the office. To, once again, a certain look from the secretary: What, not in chains? And she had, as he’d feared, told Delahanty about the message, because he said, “Everything allright, laddie?” when Weisz visited his office. Weisz looked at the ceiling and spread his hands, Delahanty grinned. Police and emigres, nothing new there. The way Delahanty saw it, you could be a bit of an axe murderer, as long as the foreign minister’s quote was accurate.
With the interview behind him, Weisz treated himself to a gentle day at the office. He put off a call to Salamone, drank coffee at his desk, and, a cruciverbiste, as the French called it, fiddled with the crossword puzzle in Paris-Soir. Making little headway there, he found three of the five animals in the picture puzzle, then turned to the entertainment pages, consulted the cinema schedules, and discovered, in the distant reaches of the Eleventh Arrondissement, L’Albergo del Bosco, made in 1932. What was that doing out there? The Eleventh was barely in France, a poor district, home to refugees, one heard more Yiddish, Polish, and Russian than French in those dark streets. And Italian? Perhaps. There were thousands of Italians in Paris, working at whatever they could find, living wherever rent was low and food cheap. Weisz wrote down the address of the theatre, maybe he’d go.
He looked up, to see Delahanty strolling toward his desk, hands in pockets. At work, the bureau chief looked like a workman-a consummately rumpled workman: jacket off, sleeves rolled up, collar points bent, trousers baggy and worn low beneath a big belly. He half-sat on the edge of Weisz’s desk and said, “Carlo, my oldest and dearest friend…”
“Yes?”
“You’ll be pleased to hear that Eric Wolf is getting married.”
“Oh? That’s nice.”
“Very nice indeed. Going back to London, he is, to wed his sweetie and carry her off for a honeymoon in Cornwall.”
“A long honeymoon?”
“Two weeks. Which leaves Berlin uncovered, of course.”
“When do you want me there?”
“The third of March.”
Weisz nodded. “I’l
l be there,” he said.
Delahanty stood. “We’re grateful, laddie. With Eric gone, you’re my best German speaker. You know the drill: they’ll take you out to eat, feed you propaganda, you’ll file, we won’t publish, but, if I don’t cover, that little weasel will start a war on me, just for spite, and we wouldn’t want that, would we.”
The Cinema Desargues was not on the rue Desargues, not quite. It was down at the end of an alley, in what had once been a garage-twenty wooden folding chairs, a bedsheetlike screen hung from the ceiling. The owner, a sour-faced gnome wearing a yarmulke, took the money, then ran the film from a chair tilted back against the wall. He watched the movie in a kind of trance, the smoke from his cigarette drifting through the blue light beamed at the screen, while the dialogue crackled above the hiss of the sound track and the rhythmic whir of the projector.
In 1932, Italy is still in the grip of the Depression, so nobody comes to stay at l’albergo del bosco-the inn of the forest, near a village outside of Naples. The innkeeper, with five daughters, is beset by debt collectors and so gives the last of his savings to the local marchese for safekeeping. But, through a misunderstanding, the marchese, very decayed nobility and no richer than the innkeeper, donates the money to charity. Accidentally learning of his error-the innkeeper is a proud fellow and pretends he wanted to give the money away-the marchese sells his last two family portraits, then pays the innkeeper to hold a grand feast for the poor people of the village.
Not so bad, it kept Weisz’s interest. The cameraman was good, very good, even in black and white, so the hills and meadows, tall grass swaying in the wind, the little white road bordered by poplars, the lovely Neapolitan sky, looked very real to Weisz. He knew this place, or places like it. He knew the village-its dry fountain with a crumbling rim, its tenements shadowing the narrow street, and its people-the postman, the women in kerchiefs. He knew the marchese‘s villa, tiles fallen from the roof stacked hopefully by the door, the old servant, not paid for years. Sentimental Italy, Weisz thought, every frame of it. And the music was also very good-vaguely operatic, lyrical, sweet. Really very sentimental, Weisz thought, the Italy of dreams, or poems. Still, it broke his heart. As he walked up the aisle toward the door, the owner stared at him for a moment, this man in a good dark overcoat, glasses in one hand, the index finger of the other touching the corners of his eyes.