Mission to Paris ns-12

by Alan Furst

  Meanwhile, a roll of film.

  3 December.

  As the first snow of the season whitened the grounds of the Joinville studios, the production of Apres la Guerre was smoother and faster by the day. The anarchist Jean Avila turned out to be a not entirely benevolent despot and, with cast and crew doing precisely what they were told, the daily minutes of film went from two, to three, to, on some days, five. The romantic scenes between Colonel Vadic and Ilona absolutely smouldered, and were more than once applauded on the set. There was, to professionals like Stahl and Justine Piro, no higher praise than that.

  Even the message — as, after a gun battle in a Balkan village, the dying Gilles Brecker tells Colonel Vadic that an honourable death is the most important part of life — was emotional and moving. This was in no small part Avila’s victory, pressing the screenwriters, as he put it to them in a cafe, ‘to calm this fucking thing down a little — trust your actors.’ Because the lieutenant has fought bravely, because he’s given his life to save theirs, the colonel pretends to agree with him. But in Stahl’s reading of his lines, in the expression on his face as the camera moves to close-up, it is clear that Colonel Vadic has come to understand that death is death and, honourable though it may be, sorrowful beyond all else. At the end of the second day of shooting, when the sequence was completed, Avila took Stahl aside and said, ‘Thank you, Fredric.’ That wasn’t the last of the filming, not quite, but soon they would be leaving Joinville, to shoot exterior scenes in and around Beirut. Except that Beirut had now become some remote place in Morocco. ‘Where,’ Avila told the cast, repeating what Deschelles had said, ‘they are known to have sand. Plenty of sand. It’s called the Sahara.’ Once that was done, they would return to Paris, then go to the Hungarian castle — Paramount had agreed to pay! — for a few more scenes on location.

  By the third of December, Orlova’s letter had reached Paris by courier and Wilkinson knew about the film of the Polish list. And the price of the Polish list, copied out from the eighteen exposures, another two hundred thousand Swiss francs. Roosevelt’s millionaire friends had been generous enough so that Wilkinson could pay, he told Stahl in the billiard room of the American Club, but the exchange was difficult. He had planned on using a ballet troupe based in Boston, headed from Paris to Berlin on a cultural friendship tour, but the willing dancer had been injured in a taxi crash on the Boulevard Saint-Germain.

  For Fredric Stahl there was no reason, and even less desire, to go to Germany. In fact, he told Wilkinson, he would be going to Morocco, to a place called Erg Chebbi in the Ziz Valley. Wilkinson raised his eyebrows, Stahl said, ‘Dunes.’ The desert scenery was spectacular and had been used by other film companies. But Stahl said he would take on the job if Orlova could arrange for somebody — he doubted she’d be able to come herself — to meet him there. Wilkinson took out his notepad, rested it on the billiard table, and said, ‘Can you spell it?’

  Over the next few days, Stahl realized that the prospect of leaving Paris for a time was more than a little welcome. The city of moods had fallen into a kind of trough; Parisians were feeling the pressure and they didn’t like it. Il faut en finir, they said, there must be an end to this. They were fed up with alarms — Hitler said this, Roosevelt said that — hopes high one day, dashed the next, optimism followed by gloom. So, enough! After the Munich appeasement, Hitler seemed to think he’d won; France was finished, the war was over. This scared the French, it scared the sophisticated Parisians, and Stahl could feel it.

  And, almost despite himself, he became a collector of signs and omens. The Germans had installed a second news agency in Paris, the Prima Presse, that issued a flow of press releases quoted in French newspapers — more tanks, more planes, millions of men marching with guns and giving the Nazi salute. A garment manufacturer in Paris advertised its new pyjamas d’alerte, so women would have something attractive to wear in bomb shelters. And America made it clearer every day that help was not at hand. Time magazine’s newsreel series, The March of Time, brought out Inside Nazi Germany — 1938, which featured happy, hardworking Germans toiling in field and factory. Stahl watched it with disgust. And read an article by a young woman, a rising intellectual star, in which she described the French political climate as ‘a mixture of braggadocio and cowardice, hopelessness and panic’. A perfect description, Stahl thought. And on 6 December, France and Germany signed a friendship treaty, stating that ‘pacific and neighbourly relations between France and Germany constitute one of the essential elements of the consolidation of the situation in Europe and of the preservation of the general peace.’

  8 December.

  Deschelles had chartered two aeroplanes to fly cast, crew, and equipment to Morocco, with stops for refuelling at Marseille, and then Tangiers — for the three-hundred-mile flight to a military airfield at Er Rashida. From there, cars and trucks would take them to Erg Chebbi, where they would stay at a hotel called the Kasbah Oudami; the producer had secured all thirty rooms for ten days. They left Le Bourget Airport at dawn. More than a few of the cast and crew had never flown in an aeroplane and, when the flight turned bumpy and the plane hit air pockets, had to be calmed by the administration of strong spirits, which were not denied to the other passengers. The well-oiled Pasquin, it turned out, knew a selection of incredibly filthy songs, which most of them had never heard before. But they weren’t hard to learn.

  An hour into the flight, Stahl changed seats with an electrician so he could sit next to Renate Steiner, first asking her if she minded. He managed to keep the conversation light and easy, he wanted her to understand that, everything else aside, he truly liked her, which he did. Once she relaxed she was good company, smart, funny, and Stahl realized he could make her laugh, in its way a powerful form of intimacy. A key to the heart? At the Kasbah Oudami she would, she said, be sharing a room with the actress who played Pasquin’s conquest in a Turkish village. Just in case he had any ideas. Which he did. And when she dozed off, somewhere over the Mediterranean, his shoulder was available, but she leaned her head against the window, and Stahl, who’d equipped himself for the journey with a few S. S. Van Dine mysteries, opened one of them, trying to follow the clues as Philo Vance solved The Casino Murder Case.

  It was after midnight by the time they reached the hotel. ‘I’m going to take a walk,’ Stahl said. ‘Would you like to come along?’

  ‘I’m worn out,’ she said. ‘But maybe tomorrow I might.’

  Something in her voice caught Stahl’s attention, the lowering, slight as it was, of a barrier. ‘Promise?’ Stahl said, unwilling to let her go.

  She nodded and said, ‘Yes, tomorrow,’ accompanied by one of her ironic smiles. I know what you want. Now she was toying with him, he thought, but he didn’t mind because it could lead him exactly where he wanted to go.

  In good spirits he entered the hotel and started up the tiled stairway to his room which, as leading man, he did not have to share. But the good spirits quickly evaporated. The Kasbah Oudami, occupying a rebuilt section of an abandoned Berber fortress, was suffused with cold, blue light. The walls had been, a long time ago, painted blue, the paint now puckered and peeling, and the air was chilled and clammy. This was, Stahl thought, a good place to be murdered. Should he actually go for a walk? With all those Swiss francs in his pockets? Still, honour demanded that he at least go back outside, which he did, and discovered Avila standing in front of the hotel.

  Avila’s face lit up when he saw Stahl. ‘Want to have a look at the desert?’ he said.

  ‘I was thinking about it,’ Stahl said, uncertainty in his voice.

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ Avila said, and off they went.

  It wasn’t much better outdoors — this was Africa, not Europe, and they both, walking through the twisty streets of Erg Chebbi, felt a certain, nameless apprehension. A slice of moon lit the town, which had no streetlamps, and the silence of the place was heavy enough to preclude conversation. A few minutes later they stood at the edge of the desert, where a stea
dy wind blew across the high dunes and the silence was even deeper. ‘Is it ominous, or is it just me?’ Stahl said.

  ‘It’s something,’ Avila said. ‘Supposedly, we’re still in France.’ Morocco was a French colonial possession.

  Stahl laughed.

  ‘Deschelles made some sort of deal with the colonial authority,’ Avila said. ‘We had to use French territory, so it was between Morocco and the Lebanon, Beirut, and Morocco won.’

  ‘Can you get this… the feeling of this place, on film?’

  ‘Slow pan, no music, mostly silence. Sun rising over the dunes.’

  ‘You sound like you can’t wait,’ Stahl said.

  ‘You’re right, I can’t.’

  It was too cold to stay for very long. As they walked back to the hotel, a caravan came in off the desert, a line of loaded camels clopping up the cobbled street, bells jingling, each rider wearing a burnoose, the end of the cloth wrapped around the face, leaving only the eyes exposed.

  The following morning brought grey cloud, so they had to wait out in the desert until eleven or so, when the sun burned through and the cameras rolled. Stahl, Gilles Brecker, and Pasquin were back in their tattered legionnaire uniforms, slogging through the sandy wastes of eastern Turkey in the brutal heat. The wind kept drying their ‘sweat’, so the make-up man came running before every shot. Pursued by two policemen in a battered command car — previously seen in a British war-against-the-natives film and rented at a high price — they lie flat, just below the crest of a dune, when they hear the chugging engine. Brecker reaches inside his tunic and brings out the pistol he’s stolen. ‘Don’t do that, lieutenant,’ Stahl says. The lieutenant says that he won’t be taken alive. Pasquin grabs the pistol and says, ‘Get yourself killed if you like, but not me.’ One of the policemen climbs out of the car, walks almost to the top of the dune, stands there for a moment, then decides he doesn’t want to go any further.

  At five in the afternoon, Stahl re-counted the money, put it in a manila envelope, and headed for the Erg Chebbi railway station. A small crowd, amid mounds of baggage, waited on the platform, gazing hopefully up the long, straight track that ran to the horizon, and ultimately to Algeria. The train was late, the crowd fretted and paced, then went silent as two French gendarmes strolled to the end of the platform and leaned casually against a baggage cart. Twenty minutes later, the chuff of a steam engine in the distance was followed by grey smoke, and the crowd prepared to board.

  The last carriage on the train was almost deserted, the aisle between yellow wicker seats littered with newspapers and cigarette butts. Stahl passed a Moroccan man in a suit and fez, and two women in lavishly embroidered robes, then, at the end of the carriage, found what he was looking for: a European reading a copy of Paris Match. The photograph on the cover showed French soldiers peeling potatoes into a huge

  iron pot, somewhere, as the cover advertised, SUR LA LIGNE MAGINOT.

  The man looked up as Stahl approached. He was of indeterminate middle age, fair-haired and fattish. German? French? British? He wore the white suit of the colonial European, and seemed prosperous and self-confident. Stahl slid into the seat across the aisle and gave the first part of the protocol, in German as specified: ‘Excuse me, sir, does this train go to Cairo?’

  The man looked him over carefully and said, ‘No, it goes to Alexandria.’

  Stahl had tucked the envelope in his trouser waist, far enough around so that it was hidden by his jacket, and now drew it out and handed it to the man across the aisle. ‘I’m sure you wish to count it,’ he said.

  The man reached inside his jacket, produced an envelope, and handed it to Stahl. ‘Have a look,’ he said. His German sounded native to Stahl. Inside the envelope, typed on very thin paper, several pages of Polish names and numbers. The list had been copied on a German keyboard, and the Polish accents applied with a pencil. As Stahl examined the list, the locomotive vented a plume of steam with a loud hiss. Startled, he began to rise in order to get off the train before it left the station.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ the man said. ‘You have a few minutes yet.’ Holding the money below the back of the seat in front of him, he thumbed through the last of the Swiss franc notes, then put the money back in the envelope. ‘All is correct,’ he said. Then he turned and looked out of the window, searching the platform. ‘Did you see any other Europeans?’ he said. ‘Waiting for the train?’

  ‘Two French gendarmes,’ Stahl said.

  ‘Anybody else?’

  ‘No. Just passengers. Moroccan passengers, I would say. Is there a problem?’

  ‘I don’t think so. One becomes overly sensitive, doing this… kind of thing.’ He meant to accompany his words with a casual smile but it didn’t really come off. In fact he was frightened. ‘Oh well,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to alarm you.’

  Stahl nodded to the man, rose, went back down the aisle, and left the train. As he walked through the village twilight, he heard the train whistle as it departed.

  When Stahl reached the Kasbah Oudami, he asked the desk clerk for the number of Renate Steiner’s room, then knocked on her door. She answered, wearing slacks and two sweaters, and seemed surprised to see him. ‘I wondered if you might like to go for a walk before dinner.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Now I don’t think I can go out.’

  Stahl was disappointed and showed it. ‘Well, if you can’t, you can’t.’

  ‘It’s Annette, the woman I’m sharing the room with. She’s terribly ill, I don’t think I should leave her alone.’

  ‘I’m sorry, what’s wrong?’

  ‘She ate a sheep-liver kebab, from a street vendor, I may have to get her a doctor.’

  ‘Then another time,’ Stahl said brusquely, turning to leave.

  She put two fingers on his forearm. ‘I did want to go,’ she said. ‘For a walk, with you.’ For a moment they looked at each other, then she said, ‘I can’t help what happened.’

  ‘I know,’ Stahl said. They both stood there. Stahl didn’t leave, Renate didn’t close the door. Finally he said, ‘Shall we try again, some time?’ He meant, he thought he meant, go for a walk, but it wasn’t only that, there was more.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Maybe tomorrow, when we come back to the hotel.’

  ‘I think we could, I don’t see why not.’ They stood there.

  ‘I’ll come down here, and we’ll go,’ he said.

  She nodded and said, ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll see you then,’ he said.

  ‘I’m looking forward to it.’

  ‘I hope Annette feels better.’

  ‘I will tell her that.’

  ‘So… good night.’

  ‘Yes, good night.’

  10 December. At seven-thirty the following morning, the hotel desk clerk knocked at Jean Avila’s door. When Avila, who’d been up working since dawn, answered, the desk clerk said, ‘Forgive me, monsieur, for disturbing you, but a policeman has asked to see you. He’s waiting downstairs.’

  The policeman turned out to be a gendarme officer, a captain, very official-looking in khaki uniform, leather strap from shoulder to pistol belt, and red and blue kepi with glossy black visor. He was a handsome man, dignified, freshly shaved. He introduced himself to Avila, his educated accent from somewhere in the south of France, and said, his voice polite and firm in equal measure, that he regretted the inconvenience but he had to ask Avila to accompany him up to the gendarmerie headquarters in Er Rashida. ‘And I must ask you to select another member of your crew to go along with us.’

  ‘Why is that, captain?’ Avila didn’t like police and wasn’t afraid of them.

  ‘A question of identification; we require the statements of two individuals. I will wait for you here, monsieur.’

  Avila went up to Stahl’s room and told him what was going on, then they went downstairs together. ‘Any idea what they want from us?’ Stahl said.

  ‘We’re supposed to identify somebody, that’s all I know.’

&nbs
p; In the military command car, the captain drove and, once they were on the road to Er Rashida, he said, ‘We have had a homicide. A male European, with no papers, found by the railway track a few miles from Erg Chebbi. Unfortunately, he may be somebody you can identify, somebody from your film company.’

  Stahl was sitting behind the captain, and suddenly very glad to be there, though he made sure his reaction wasn’t visible. But he knew who this was. Why? What happened? He recalled everything he could about the courier, then settled on the man’s fear that he was being watched, perhaps followed, he’d noticed something, something threatening, and he’d been right. ‘Any theories about what happened?’ Stahl said, raising his voice above the car’s engine.

  ‘Theories?’ the captain said. ‘Robbery perhaps, our first task must be to find out who he is. Was.’

  An hour later they were at the gendarmerie station at Er Rashida, the administrative centre for the Ziz Valley region. A sergeant at the desk took their passports and laboriously copied out their names and passport numbers. Then the captain led them down to a room in the cellar which served as a temporary morgue. On a long wooden table was a body beneath a sheet. When the captain drew the sheet down to the corpse’s bare chest, Stahl saw that what he’d feared was true. It was the courier, fair-haired and fattish, though it took a moment to recognize the face altered by death. A red and black bruise circled his throat.

  ‘Do either of you recognize this man?’ the captain said.

  Avila and Stahl said, in turn, that they didn’t.

  ‘Very well. You’re sure?’

  ‘We are,’ Avila said. ‘He’s not part of the film company, I’ve never seen him before. How did he die?’

  ‘Garrotte.’

  A GOOD SOLDIER

  17 December. 1.30 in the morning.