Midnight in Europe: A Novel

by Alan Furst

  Max de Lyon called him the following day, could Ferrar meet with him after work?

  “I’ll come over around six, six-thirty maybe,” Ferrar said.

  “Why don’t we have a drink? At the big brasserie on the rue Marbeuf, you know the one? It’s just down the boulevard from you.”

  Ferrar said he did and at six-twenty he left work and headed down the Champs-Elysées. De Lyon was waiting for him at the bar, drinking a large draft beer. It looked good to Ferrar so he ordered one for himself. “I have some news,” de Lyon said. “Our friend in Brno has agreed to a meeting.”

  “When will that be?” Ferrar said.

  “Perhaps next week. The meeting is in Berlin, he’s afraid he’ll be seen with us in Brno and that people will wonder about it.”

  “Then we’ll go to Berlin,” Ferrar said. “I’ve been there a few times, on business.”

  “We’ll have to be careful,” de Lyon said.

  “I would say so. Everyone spies on everyone else.”

  “Also, I ought to tell you, we’re not here because I wanted a drink. We’re here because someone has been poking around in my office, in my files.”

  “You have a way of knowing that?”

  “I do. And I’ll show you, if you like.”

  “Well …” Ferrar had started to say, why would I need that, but then he didn’t. He said, “Why not?”

  De Lyon looked at his watch. “Forgive me, but I’m a little pressed this evening.” He reached for a briefcase at his feet, unbuckled the straps, and brought out a manila envelope. “A present for you,” he said. Ferrar took the envelope, which was unexpectedly heavy and had a bulge at one end. When Ferrar started to unwind the string that held the flap down, de Lyon said, “Not in here. Later, when you’re alone.”

  But Ferrar didn’t need to open the envelope, the bulge in his hand was a small automatic pistol.

  “Have you fired one of these?”

  Ferrar shook his head.

  “There’s a gun dealer at the lower end of the rue Saint-Antoine, by the furniture factories, it’s called J. Romault. He has a firing range behind the store, he’ll show you what you need to know and he’ll sell you ammunition. Then you can practice on the range.” De Lyon waited to see if Ferrar had any questions, then said, “It’s a good weapon, a Walther PPK, and well used.”

  “By you?”

  De Lyon laughed. “Nooo, not me. I doubt very much you’ll need it but, if you do, you’ll be glad to have it.”

  “Thank you, Max. Perhaps I should pay …”

  De Lyon held up a hand. “As I said, a present.”

  15 FEBRUARY, 1938. THE PARIS/BERLIN NIGHT EXPRESS LEFT THE Gare du Nord at 4:08 in the afternoon and arrived at Friedrichstrasse Station at 10:32 in the morning. Eighteen hours, longer if there were delays—a snowstorm, a cow on the tracks, a fugitive apprehended at a border—but the first-class compartments in the wagon-lit cars were private and comfortable, and when you wanted to sleep you rang for a porter to convert the plush seats to upper and lower berths. Ferrar gazed out the window as the train chugged northeast, past the local stations of northern France and Belgium, past fields white with snow tinted a cold, pale blue at dusk.

  “It would be a lot easier by airplane,” de Lyon had explained. “But the control at Tempelhof Airport is thorough. The Germans are very interested in travelers who have the money to fly. They are polite at Tempelhof, but determined, and if their suspicion is provoked they are known to keep you company during your visit, at a distance, to see where you go and who you meet. For us, the train is safer.”

  Ferrar perfectly understood. He didn’t, in the event they were searched, want to try to explain the presence of a hundred thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar denominations. Of these, obtained at the Spanish embassy’s Soviet bank in Paris, de Lyon and Ferrar each carried five hundred, in wads of banknotes disbursed in the pockets of jackets and trousers. Szarny, the Czech owner of the ironworks foundry in Brno, had demanded British gold sovereigns, the preferred currency of smugglers and secret agents, but de Lyon had said there was no chance of that. “Four hundred and sixty-two pounds of gold coins? How? In trunks in a railroad baggage car? In a big Citroën? A big Citroën down on its springs? The German border guards will see that right away. No, we’ll put the money on the table and let him walk away if he wants. He won’t.” Ferrar had suggested that Szarny could take his money to the Bank of Zurich branch in Berlin and have the bank exchange it into sovereigns as he wished. “I suspect the gold is the blackmailer’s idea,” he’d said.

  Ferrar didn’t go to sleep, he smoked Gitanes and stared out at the passing countryside, his mind wandering here and there to the beat of the rails. He had once, long ago in his early twenties, made love in a first-class compartment, on a slow train traveling through the night in central France. He had been alone in the compartment when a woman joined him. She was Viennese, was Klara, a solid bourgeois matron returning from the marriage of her daughter in London and “in no hurry to get home,” as she put it. She was much older than he was, with fine skin, a pointy nose, and small eyes, wearing a wedding ring and a green Robin Hood hat with a feather.

  She was eager to talk and sat across from him, then next to him. How people are was the topic of the evening, so false the verdict; they had, she said, desires, but, obsessed with convention, they hid their feelings and feared discovery. Wouldn’t it be a better world if people revealed themselves? Did what they secretly wanted? “I know you want to kiss me,” she said. “What are you afraid of?” So he locked the door and they went ahead with it, his hands exploring her until he encountered a stiff and unyielding girdle. She stood, removed hat and dress, then took the waistband of the awful thing in her fists and said, suddenly self-conscious, “Would you look away for a moment?” He did, discovering a perfect image of the dimly lit compartment in the dark window as she wriggled out of the girdle, freeing a cascade of soft, rosy flesh.

  They went on from there but it was this particular image that Ferrar would forever remember. He turned it this way and that way in his imagination, then his mind drifted away to the women he’d known in his past; Eileen Moore, others. Eventually he dozed off, but the train would stop, for no apparent reason, then lurch forward, waking him up, coal smoke from the engine flavoring the air of the compartment with the smell of cinders. Ferrar knew where he was: the land of war. A few miles north and south of the tracks were the towns that had given their names to battlefields: Douai, Compiègne, Verdun, Cambrai, Sedan, Waterloo. For a long time, the track wound its way through forest, the Ardennes, the route of the German invasion in 1914. As the train clattered along the bank of the river Meuse, Ferrar could see broken sheets of ice floating on the dark water. Then, after the track curved away from the river, the engine rolled to a halt at a road crossing and two men in hats and overcoats, both carrying briefcases, got out of a Mercedes automobile and boarded the train. At five in the morning, no hint of dawn, farm trucks moved east along the road that ran by the tracks, headed for the markets of Liège.

  Thirty minutes later, when Ferrar had at last fallen asleep, he woke to the conductor’s rap on the door and the words “Liège. The last stop in Belgium. Passengers must wait in the corridor for passport control. Liège.”

  As they waited in the corridor, a man and a woman hurried toward the head of the line, baggage in hand, murmuring, “Excuse us, please, we must get off here. Pardon. Pardon.” An anxious couple, Ferrar thought, deciding to end their journey in Liège, the “last stop in Belgium,” rather than enter Germany. The Belgian border guard was barely awake, his eyes heavy with sleep, a cigarette dangling from his lips as he stamped passports without bothering to look at the passengers. The anxious couple, once the guard was done with them, got off the train.

  A few minutes later, Aachen Station; they had crossed the frontier into the German Reich and, had some traveler not noticed, there were numerous flags to remind him, the swastikas glowing a powerful red and black under the station light
s. Through static, high-volume loudspeakers made announcements in German. Directions to waiting passengers no doubt, but the sound had its effect on Ferrar. There were uniformed officers everywhere, the SS in black, the Wehrmacht in field gray, all of them very conscious of their appearance, standing tall and straight, holstered sidearms on their heavy belts.

  Two uniformed border guards, stern and hard-eyed, appeared at the end of the corridor as, passports in hand, the passengers waited to have their documents examined. The officer attending to Ferrar’s papers took his time with them, looking up and down to match face and photograph, then again, and once more. His stamp remained unused. “Herr Ferrar,” he said, “you are a Spanish citizen, resident in France?” Thus on the side of the Republic.

  “I am,” Ferrar said. “I was taken to Paris as a child, in 1909.” So not on anyone’s side.

  “Ah, I see. You gentlemen are traveling together?” he said with a nod at de Lyon. It had, Ferrar realized, been a mistake not to have separated for the border control.

  “We are,” de Lyon said.

  The officer peered at de Lyon’s passport, then looked up and said, “And you, Herr de Lyon, are of Swiss nationality?”

  “I am, sir.”

  The officer, holding both passports, flapped them against his palm, did that a few times—which meant he was turning things over in his mind. Then he made his decision and said, “Please wait here. Do either of you have luggage in the baggage car?”

  Ferrar said they didn’t, they each carried a small valise and a briefcase. When the officer left the car, Ferrar and de Lyon exchanged a look. As for the other passengers, they had to wait. In some other place at some other time, there might have been complaints, indignation, but not here, here one stood in silence.

  Eventually the officer reappeared and, firm but polite, said, “Will you gentlemen accompany me, please? And bring your baggage.” They did as they were told. Following the officer, Ferrar was relieved that, at de Lyon’s direction, he had left the Walther in Paris. As a Spanish émigré, traveling with a Swiss, he had already provoked suspicion, and the discovery of a weapon would have made it worse. “And,” de Lyon had added, “pack your bag to be searched.”

  Ferrar and de Lyon were led through the busy waiting room—inspiring the occasional furtive glance—to an office with a sign on the door that said GEHEIME STAATSPOLIZEI, abbreviated in common usage to “Gestapo.” Inside, a bulky man in a suit was sitting behind a desk as the first suspects of the day were brought before him. His colorless hair was shorn on the sides, his thick neck bulged over his collar, he wore steel-framed eyeglasses, and had a gold swastika pin on his lapel. Both passports lay on the desk in front of him, next to a pen, a tearaway pad of official forms, and a cup of coffee. He indicated that they should seat themselves, took a handkerchief from his pocket, blew his nose, then shook his head and said, “Ach, what weather.” He stared at them for a moment, and then began to work.

  Carefully, he tore a form from the pad, looked at his watch, filled in time and date, and slowly copied Ferrar’s name. Then, a new form for de Lyon. That done, he said, “Good morning, I am Major Schwalbe. So then, I will ask what business brings you to Germany? Or are you, perhaps, tourists?”

  Following the script de Lyon had laid out for this eventuality, Ferrar said, “We are magazine publishers, sir.”

  Schwalbe wrote this down on the designated line. “In Paris?”

  “Yes, sir,” de Lyon said. “But our magazines are sold all across Europe.”

  “And the name of your company?”

  “Editions Renard, sir.”

  “And what sort of magazines do you publish?”

  “Naturist magazines, sir,” de Lyon said.

  “Magazines about nature? Animals and … what to say, fish?”

  “Forgive me, perhaps I do not have the proper name in German. The word in French means nudism.”

  Schwalbe had heavy eyebrows, which flicked upward at the word. “What then will you do in Germany?”

  “We are here to take photographs for a special issue, to be called Nudism in the Reich. It is quite popular in Germany, we are told.” It was. In an effort to stimulate the national libido, and thus breed more Germans, public nudity had been officially endorsed. Hitler himself, known to be a great prude in all things, had attended a nude ballet in Munich.

  “Yes, it is.” Schwalbe knew the official line and tried to quote what he’d read somewhere but got only as far as “The human form …” before his memory failed him.

  “Herr Major?” de Lyon said. “Would you care to have a look? I’ve brought along some recent issues.”

  “Very well.”

  De Lyon unbuckled his briefcase and brought out three copies of a French magazine called Chez les Nudistes, which meant nudist colony, and was also the name of a popular nightclub up in Place Pigalle. He handed the magazines to the major, who began to study them, taking his time with each page.

  To Ferrar, the pages were upside down, but he could see well enough: grainy black and white photographs of statuesque women with big breasts and big smiles; group scenes of volleyball games—which was how nudists spent most of their time if you believed the magazines; a picnic in the woods, repose in beach chairs. Wearing lace-up shoes and thin socks, the nudists were enjoying themselves. They were all ages, all shapes, some with tired, saggy backsides, others well formed.

  With keen interest, his goaty side ascendant, Major Schwalbe peered at one page after another, while the passengers on the Paris/Berlin express looked at their watches and fretted.

  De Lyon said, “Would you care to keep those, Herr Major? I have more with me.”

  As Ferrar and de Lyon—now officially confirmed visitors to the Reich—settled back in their compartment, the train moved out of the station. “Well, a taste of what’s to come,” de Lyon said, lighting one of his brown cigarettes.

  “I was here three years ago,” Ferrar said. “It wasn’t so bad then.”

  “It will get worse. A country run by a political party and its security service … the newspapers don’t really tell the story.”

  Ferrar looked out the window as the train rattled across a railroad bridge over a frozen river. The spires of Cologne’s cathedral, lit by moonlight, could be seen in the distance.

  “We can count on being closely watched in Berlin, followed everywhere,” de Lyon said. “You go out of your hotel room, they come in. Every foreigner gets the same treatment, the police keep records of who you see, what you do. Of course they could make it difficult to enter the country but they want people to come here, to see what they’ve accomplished, to admire German progress, the Nazi miracle. Anyhow, for the moment, we’re the right kind of foreigners.”

  “Thanks to you and your magazines.”

  De Lyon shrugged. “One takes precautions, it becomes a habit.” He stubbed out his cigarette and said, “And we’ll have to play the part in Berlin, those wicked Parisians and their naughty photographs—it’s theatre for the police.”

  “It seems to have worked with Major Schwalbe.”

  “It did. But they’re not all like that, believe me.”

  After a stop at Cologne, where they waited while a German locomotive was coupled to the passenger cars, the train crossed the Rhine and entered a new landscape. They were south of Essen now, in what the newspapers called the industrial heartland of Germany. All the way to the horizon, in the light of floodlamps, tall chimneys poured smoke into the night sky, huge smelting and refining plants bordered the track—sometimes on both sides, brilliant fires flared in the open hearths of factories, served by workers seen as silhouettes against the firelight, slag heaps climbed far above the roof of the railcar, and the smell of burning coal hung in the compartment. No green thing lived here, only gray concrete, rusted iron, and brown brick blackened by soot.

  De Lyon said, “Did you see the workers? How they hurry?”

  “Not running, exactly,” Ferrar said. “More like a fast trot.”

  F
or a time, de Lyon stared at the spectacle, then shook his head. “You know,” he said, his expression somewhere between regret and disgust, “the words ‘German rearmament’ don’t really mean much until you’ve seen all this.”

  “The Krupp works.”

  “Yes. Cannon, mortars, anti-aircraft guns, and the ammunition they need—millions of shells. And that’s what’s coming for us, sooner or later.”

  “In France? You believe that, Max?”

  “As of now, if nothing changes, the fascists will have Spain. Czechoslovakia is next, because Hitler knows that France and England are afraid to fight him. Then he’ll want more. And more.”

  “For instance, Russia.”

  The Russian in de Lyon grinned at that idea. “Hitler is evil, but he isn’t stupid.”

  The train slowed, then was shunted onto a siding so that a freight train, having precedence in the German rail system, could pass them by. Two locomotives pulled a long line of flatcars that carried bulky shapes beneath canvas tarpaulins. Ferrar started to count the cars, then gave up. Seventy? Eighty?

  De Lyon took off his tweed jacket and hung it on a hook by the window, then unbuttoned his collar and loosened his tie. “We’ll ring for the porter later,” de Lyon said. “I’m not ready to go to sleep.” He reached into his briefcase, took out a newspaper, and, leaning back in the plush seat, began to read, then dozed off. Ferrar stayed awake, fascinated by the dark countryside slipping past as the train got under way.

  16 February, Berlin. At 10:30 A.M., in the Friedrichstrasse Station, the pace of the crowd was fast and furious, uniforms everywhere, civilians looking prosperous and well fed as they hurried to make their trains. Passing through the station buffet, Ferrar saw a newspaper kiosk where a headline in thick German lettering announced that Teruel had been retaken by Franco’s forces. There were two photographs for this story, important because it told of a victory for a cherished ally: one a stock reproduction of General Franco, index finger raised, making a point during a speech. The other showed a Moorish soldier, holding his rifle above his head in celebration as he stood in front of the Teruel branch of the Bank of Spain. “This is very bad news,” de Lyon said, his voice low and confidential.