by Alan Furst
Reaching his rooms on the top floor of the hotel, Stahl tried to use his key but the door, already unlocked, swung open, slowly, as he pushed against it.
Inside, a man was sitting on the sofa, apparently waiting for him. Actually, not quite sitting, lounging said it better – he had one leg hooked over the arm of the sofa, his body resting against the cushions at an angle. A magazine that Stahl had left on the night table lay open on his lap. Was he a hotel thief? He wasn’t acting like one. He was tall, wearing a brown jacket and grey slacks, his collar unbuttoned, his tie pulled down. He had scant, colourless hair combed back from a high forehead, pale eyes, pale skin. To Stahl, he looked like a Scandinavian, perhaps a Swede, maybe a businessman. On the floor in front of the sofa was a small bag of pebbled black leather, like a doctor’s bag.
Stahl took a few steps towards the telephone on the desk, then put his hand on the receiver, ready to call downstairs, but the man just watched him as though he were an object of some, but not much, interest. ‘What are you doing here?’ Stahl said. ‘This isn’t your room.’
In German, the man said, ‘I stopped by to talk to you, Herr Stahl.’
Again, Stahl looked at the black bag. ‘Are you a doctor?’ he said, truly puzzled.
‘No, I’m not a doctor,’ the man said.
‘I’m going to call the desk and have you thrown out. Or arrested.’
‘Yes?’ said the man, as though Stahl had commented about the weather.
Stahl picked up the phone, but the man didn’t move. ‘It won’t take too long,’ he said. ‘Just a brief conversation is all I require, then I won’t trouble you any further.’
Stahl put the receiver back but kept his hand on it.
‘How was your lunch with Herr Sokoloff?’ the man said.
‘That’s none of your business.’
‘No? Maybe it is. He’s surely not a proper friend for you.’
Stahl almost laughed. ‘What?’
‘I think you are a little confused, Herr Stahl, about who your friends are. You are really being rather … difficult.’
‘Am I,’ Stahl said. ‘You’re German?’
The man nodded slowly, no expression on his face. ‘Proud to be,’ he said. ‘Especially the way things are going now.’
Stahl waited. The man unhooked his leg from the arm of the sofa and sat forward, elbows on knees, fingers clasped. ‘What we’ve learned in Germany is that life goes very well when everybody does their job, and does what they’re told to do. Harmony, as we call it, is a powerful force in a nation.’
‘I’m sure it is. But, so what?’
‘Well, we’ve told you what we want you to do, to come to Berlin, to appear at our film festival, but you seem disinclined to obey, and this is troubling.’
Stahl stared at the man with an expression of combined disbelief and distaste.
The man smiled to himself and gently shook his head. ‘Ah, defiance,’ he said, his voice soft and nostalgic – he remembered defiance, from some bygone age long ago. ‘Quite a bit of that, at the beginning, before we came to power, but we’re patient, hardworking people and in time we cured it. It turns, we’ve found, with persistence on our part, to disbelief, and, in time, to compliance. Oh, people think the most violent thoughts, you can’t imagine, but that stays inside. On the outside, however, in the daily world, the individual does what he’s told, and then there’s harmony. Much of Europe is finding this harmony not so bad as they feared, and soon all of us will work together.’
‘No doubt,’ Stahl said, sarcasm cutting a fine edge on the words. ‘You’ve broken into my room like a criminal, you’ve said what you came to say, now get out.’
‘You’re angry. Well, I understand that, but you’ll have some time to think this through, not a lot of time, but some, and I expect you’ll come to see where your interests lie. It’s easier, Herr Stahl, to try and get along with us, to do what we tell you to do – is it really so much? Ask yourself. A brief trip to Berlin, fine food, good company, people saying flattering things – would that be so bad?’
‘Stop it,’ Stahl said.
The man stretched, then looked at his watch, like someone who is tired but has things to do before he can relax. ‘Please don’t be rude to me, Herr Stahl, that isn’t good for either of us.’ He stood, stood rather abruptly, like a schoolboy’s feint, and Stahl, despite himself, reacted – didn’t move a muscle but the flinch had been there and he knew it. The man grinned, amused by his tactic, picked up his black bag, walked casually to the door, and said, ‘Good afternoon, Herr Stahl. One way or another, we’ll be in touch with you.’
Was the ‘you’ subtly inflected? Very subtly inflected? Or, Stahl wondered, had he just heard it that way. The man nodded to him and left the room. Stahl heard him walking away down the corridor and shut the door but the lock didn’t click shut. He tried again, and the same thing happened. The lock no longer worked, and now he would have to get it fixed.
3 November. At 3.30 on the afternoon of the third, the senior staff of the Ribbentropburo – the political warfare bureau of the Reich Foreign Ministry, named for Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop – held its weekly meeting. In a general way, their mission was similar to that of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, but Goebbels’s people supervised all internal culture – the painters and the writers and the composers, the films and the newspapers – while the bureau operated mostly abroad, and was far more clandestine and aggressive in its methods. ‘We don’t send out press releases,’ they liked to say, ‘we send out operatives, and then other people send out press releases.’
This was an important meeting, decisions had to be made, and some of the men around the table had their jackets hung on the backs of their chairs and their sleeves rolled up. Herr Emhof, of the bulging eyes, attended the meeting but was not of sufficient stature to merit a place at the table, so sat on one of the chairs ranged around the walls and did not speak unless spoken to.
The agenda for this meeting was a typed list of thirty-eight names, which represented thirty-eight problems that had to be resolved. There were hundreds of names in the bureau’s files, and most had agreed, some gladly, some not so gladly, to do what the bureau had determined they should do; thus there was no point in wasting time on them. The thirty-eight names, however – people of various backgrounds, all pertinent to the bureau’s operations in France – had to be dealt with because they represented potential failures. The Reich Foreign Ministry did not accept failures, so you couldn’t really afford, if you worked there, to have too many of them on your record, or you would find yourself working somewhere else. Perhaps at the coal administration, or the department of gasoline rationing, or, at the very worst, you might have to take your wife and family and pets and go off to work in Essen, or Dortmund, or Ulm – exiled.
The meeting was led by the Deputy Director of the bureau, an SS major who had formerly been a junior professor of social sciences, particularly anthropology, at the University of Dresden. He appeared, as always, in civilian clothes, a dark-blue suit, and he was exceptionally bright. A little young for his senior position, a smart, sharp-witted fellow on the way up in the Nazi administration.
The warm air in the room was thick with cigarette smoke, a grey November drizzle outside, and the men at the cluttered table – stacks of dossiers, notepads, ashtrays – made slow but steady progress as they worked their way down the alphabetized list; it was almost five by the time they reached the names beginning with the letter S. They disposed of the first three quickly, then came to the priest Père Sébastien, Father Sébastien, who preached fervently against Nazi atheism at an important church in the city of Lyons. Over the past few months, the bureau had made sure he was besieged by letters from the pious in various parts of France, negative – though gravely respectful – commentary had appeared in the Lyonnais newspapers, and the Vatican had been contacted by German diplomats in Rome. Why, they asked, was Père Sébastien so obsessed with the religious institutions of a foreign nation? Was he not using
the pulpit to advance his own, rather leftist, political agenda? Should he not, the Lord’s Shepherd, be paying more attention to the tending of his own local flock?
‘The Vatican doesn’t exactly disagree,’ said the man who saw to operations in the Rhône Valley, ‘but the administration is slow as a snail, very tentative, and very cautious.’
‘Are our Italian friends willing to help?’ said the Deputy Director.
‘To date they are useless. They say they will intervene, but then they do nothing.’
‘Can we prod him?’
‘No, no, let’s not. He has a true sense of mission, that will only inspire him.’
The Deputy Director thought for a moment. ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right. Priests!’
Here and there at the table, an appreciative laugh.
‘Perhaps I can do something,’ said the Deputy Director. ‘I will have a word with our Vatican diplomats, they might just have to insist – it’s the lepers on Martinique who require such a passionate fellow.’
The man in charge of Lyons made a note – though a secretary seated on one of the chairs kept a record of the meeting in shorthand – and work on the list continued. The journalist Sablier had died in a motoring accident – ‘Ours?’ ‘No, the hand of fate, a mountain road’ – and the owner of a small chain of radio stations, Schimmel, a Jew, had put his business up for sale and was going to emigrate to Canada.
‘The emigration papers are truly filed?’
‘Yes, we checked.’
‘That brings us to’ – he ran his finger down the list – ‘Monsieur Sicot.’ Sicot was the publisher and editor of a small socialist newspaper in the city of Bordeaux.
‘He rants and raves,’ said the man in charge of Sicot. ‘“The Maginot Line will not save us!” On and on he goes, calls for fleets of fighter planes. He was highly decorated in the Great War and is a fanatic patriot.’
‘Who won’t listen to reason.’
‘Not Sicot. Not ever.’
‘Then he’ll have to have business problems. Perhaps the advertisers, perhaps the unions, perhaps the bank that holds his notes. Can this be done?’
‘I’ll go to work immediately, it will take some research.’
‘Use the SD’ – the intelligence service of the SS – ‘and see what you can do. I’ll expect a report at our meeting the first week of December. Now then’ – he paused, again consulted the list – ‘to Fredric Stahl, the movie actor.’
‘No good news, I’m afraid,’ said the man in charge of Stahl. Called Hoff, he was a plain, middle-aged man who’d served twenty years in the Foreign Ministry with very little distinction – but no serious missteps – then made his way to a position in the bureau through seniority, longtime alliances, and a rather late but practical membership in the Nazi party. ‘He moved a little,’ Hoff said, ‘attended a luncheon, but there he stopped.’
‘He’s an actor, no? What’s the problem? Nervous about his career? Studio control?’
‘Some of that, but we suspect he’s concerned about his, um, we can call it integrity – being faithful to his political beliefs.’
‘His what?’
‘Integrity.’
The Deputy Director was a very smooth man, but he had a temper, and it was getting towards the time when he wanted a drink and dinner. ‘And so?’ he said, voice rising. ‘And so we kiss him goodbye?’
‘We may have to.’
‘Somebody give me the goddamn file.’
Hoff shuffled through the dossiers in front of him, where was it? Not this, not this …
‘Now, Hoff. Now!’
‘Yes, sir. Here it is.’
The Deputy Director opened the dossier by slamming the cover against the table, then, using his index finger, searched through the typed reports of contacts and surveillance. ‘We want him to visit the Reich, for a day, for a single day, to judge some little movie festival, is that correct?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Well, I’ll tell you what, Herr Hoff.’ By now the Deputy Director was almost shouting. ‘He will visit the Reich. And we will take his photograph for the newspapers, with fucking Goebbels we’ll take his photograph, and he will pick some idiot as a winner and we will take another photograph as they both hold a fucking bouquet! Do I make myself clear?’
‘Yes, sir. Very clear.’
The Deputy Director read further, slapping each page down as he turned it over. ‘So, he was visited in his hotel room. What a blow! Is anything else planned?’
‘Not for the moment. I thought it best to seek your counsel.’ Hoff had moved his hands off the table and hidden them in his lap because they were shaking.
‘Seek my counsel? Oh, very flattering, Hoff, you’re seeking my counsel. Well, here’s my counsel: you think up something to make this man behave, and you send me a memorandum before you do it. Is that understood, Herr Hoff?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And, if you cannot persuade him to put aside this saintly integrity – Christ! What a word! – and do what we want, you can have somebody get in touch with, ah, Heinrich, and instead of visiting the Reich he can visit the devil. Oh, excuse me, I forgot he’s a saint, so he can visit the angels.’
From down the table, a small, hesitant voice: ‘It’s not Heinrich, sir, the man who does these things for us is called Herbert.’
3 November. At 7.15, Stahl decided to stop worrying and go out for dinner. Too often that day he’d caught himself brooding about the man who’d entered his room, and all the rest of it, which he suspected was exactly what they wanted him to do. Therefore, he wouldn’t. He could have gone down to the hotel restaurant, but the food there was rich and elaborate, living up to its price, and really much fancier than he liked. So he put on a pair of corduroys and a comfortable jacket, with a wool scarf and a pair of leather gloves to keep him warm, walked over to the Champs-Elysées, then down to a big Alsatian brasserie that served the commercial residents of the quarter – butchers from the wholesale meat markets on the rue Marbeuf, office workers, and shop clerks. It was a big, rough, loud sort of place, where you could eat cheaply by ordering the plat du jour, or in grander fashion, oysters, lobster, champagne, if you were in the mood and had the money. For Stahl, always steak au poivre, a tough, delicious steak, barely cooked, and more frites – crisp, golden, and brown at the edges – than you thought you could eat, though you were usually wrong about that.
He was just seated at a table when Kiki de Saint-Ange walked through the door, peered about, discovered Stahl, and came hurrying towards him. She was very good to look at that evening, a black afternoon dress beneath her raincoat – a vivid memory from their night at the movies – and a violet and grey scarf arranged in the complicated style Parisian women were taught at birth, arty gold earrings, and her little knitted cap. Stahl was delighted to see her, a friend welcome when one thinks one will be dining alone, but for the question what’s she doing here? The more contact he had with his German enemies, the more sensitive he became to coincidence.
‘I hoped it was you,’ she said, slightly breathless. ‘I saw you on the boulevard, from a distance, and I thought, ‘Is that Fredric?’ My eyesight is terrible – it wouldn’t have been the first time I chased down a stranger. May I join you? Maybe you’re expecting somebody.’
‘Please,’ said Stahl, standing up and waiting until she was seated. ‘I’m not expecting anybody. What brings you to the neighbourhood?’
‘Ai! Horreur! I had to see my attorney, he has his office up the Champs-Elysées, and I’d finally got done with him and was walking down the hill, upset, close to tears, and hello, there you were! At least I suspected it was you and, honestly, I really hoped it was.’
‘What’s going on?’
‘Darling, may I have a cognac? A double?’
‘Ah, Fredric, manners! Yes, of course, forgive me.’ Stahl signalled to the waiter, who made eye contact, meaning yes, I see you, be patient.
‘What’s going on,’ said Kiki, ‘is that a year ago, my lovel
y old aunt, whom I adored, got sick and died. I used to go and stay with her when things were too awful at home, she had the sweetest little house, down in the Sologne, do you know it? It’s where the Parisian aristocrats hunt wild boar, and anything else they can shoot at. There are hunting lodges down there but she just had a country cottage, in a kind of hidden valley, looking out at the river Sauldre. In her will, she left the house for my sister and me to share, which was not a problem at all, but then there was every sort of legal complication that comes with inheritance. Fredric, if you hate somebody and want to ruin their life, die and leave them a house in France. Anyhow, I just spent two hours with the lawyer and, when I said close to tears, I meant tears of frustration. I got so angry I finally said, “Let’s give the damn thing to a charity,” to which the lawyer replied, “Impossible, mademoiselle, it cannot be done until you have taken legal possession of the property.”’
The waiter rushed over, Stahl ordered two double cognacs while in his mind a cartoon version of a steak au poivre grew wings and flew away. He sensed the evening would end with the two of them in bed together, and disliked making love on a full stomach – the stag grows thin during the rutting season and all that. And he’d always preferred sex to food. ‘You have my sympathy,’ he said. ‘I’ve spent hours in lawyers’ offices, my nose shoved in the worst side of humanity.’ He shook his head at the memory. ‘Still, I expect it will all work itself out, in time.’
From Kiki, a glum smile. ‘You really are an American, my dear. Hopeful, optimistic. Some things here, believe me, never work out – lawsuits, property disputes, absurd legal entanglements – these things can go on for generations. I just want it over with.’ She looked rueful for a moment, then said, ‘You would have liked that house, we could have had a very nice weekend there.’
‘I’m sure I would have, though I’d likely leave the boars alone.’ A moment of silence, the waiter appeared with the cognacs, a napkin riding atop each glass. Stahl took a sip, pure fire all the way down, and said, ‘So what have you been doing?’ And then – strange what the mind did when you weren’t watching it – ‘Have you seen the baroness lately?’