by Alan Furst
He held a French passport between thick forefinger and thumb. “This, this, you don’t see every day.” He sat down and flattened the passport out on the table and began removing its photograph by rubbing on chemical solvent with a piece of sponge. When he was done he handed the damp picture to Szara. “Jean Bonotte,” he said. The man looking back at him was vain, with humorous dark eyes that caught the light and a devil’s beard that ran from sideburn tight along the jawline and then swept up to join the mustache, the sort of beard kept closely pruned, trimmed daily with a scissors. “Looks smart, no? “
“He does.”
“Not so smart as he thought.”
“Italian?”
The cobbler shrugged eloquently. “Born Marseille. Could mean anything. A French citizen, though. That’s important. Coming from down there you can always say you’re Italian, or Corsican, or Lebanese. It’s whatever you say, down there.”
“Why is it so good? “
“Because it’s real. Because Monsieur Bonotte will not come to the attention of the Spanish Guardia just about the time you get off the ferry in Algeciras. Because Monsieur Bonotte will not again come to anyone’s attention, excepting Satan, but the police don’t know anything about it. He’s legally alive. This document is legally alive. You understand? “
“And he’s dead.”
“Very. What’s the sense to talk, but you can have confidence he has left us and will not be dug up by some French farmer. That’s why I say it’s so good.”
The cobbler took the photo back, lit the corner with a match, and watched the blue-green flame consume the paper before he dropped it in a saucer. “Born in 1902. Makes him thirty-seven. Okay with you? The less I have to change the better.”
“What do you think?” Szara asked.
The cobbler drew his head back a little, evidently farsighted, and looked him over. “Sure. Why not? Life’s hard sometimes and we show it in the face.”
“Then leave it as it is.”
The cobbler began to glue Szara’s photo to the paper. When he was done, he waddled over to a bureau and returned with a stamper, a franking machine that pressed paper into raised letters. “The real thing,” he said proudly. He placed the device at a precise angle to the photo, then slid a scrap of cardboard atop the part of the page already incised. He pressed hard for a few seconds, then released the device. “This prevents falsification,” he said with only the slightest hint of a smile. He returned the franking device to the bureau and brought back a rubber stamp and a pad, a pen, and a small bottle of green ink. “Government ink,” he said. “Free for them. Expensive for me.” He concentrated himself, then stamped the side of the page firmly. “I’m renewing it for you,” he said. He dipped the pen into the ink and signed the space provided in the rubber-stamped legend. “Prefect Cormier himself,” he said. He applied a blotter to the signature, then looked at it critically and blew on the ink to make sure it was dry. He handed the passport to Szara. “Now you’re a French citizen, if you aren’t already.”
Szara looked through the pages of the passport. It was well used, with several recorded entries into France and visits to Tangier, Oran, Istanbul, Bucharest, Sofia, and Athens. The home address was in the rue Paradis in Marseille. He checked the new date of expiry, March of 1942.
“When the time comes to renew again, just walk into any police station in France and tell them you’ve been living abroad. A French embassy in a foreign country is even better. You know the man who sent you to me?”
“No,” Szara said. De Montfried wouldn’t, he knew, make such a contact directly.
“Just as well,” the cobbler said. “You’re a gentleman, I’d say. You’re happy? “
“Yes.”
“Use it in good health,” said the cobbler. “Me I’d go and pick up a carte d’identite-say you lost it-and a health card and all the rest of it, but that’s up to you. And don’t put your hand in your pocket, it’s all taken care of.”
It was after six when he left the hotel. The St.-Paul Metro platform was packed solid. When the train rolled in, he had to force his way on, jamming himself against the back of a young woman who might have been, from the way she was dressed, a clerk or a secretary. She said something unpleasant that he didn’t quite catch as the train pulled away, but he got a good strong breath of the sausage she’d eaten for lunch. He could see the place on her neck where her face powder stopped. “Sorry,” he muttered. She said something in slang he didn’t understand. When the crowd surged on at the Hotel-de-Ville station he was pressed against her even harder; her stiff, curly hair rubbing against his nose. “Soon we’ll be married,” he said, trying to make light of the situation. She was not amused and pointedly ignored him.
After a change of trains he reached his stop, Sevres-Babylone, and went trotting up the rue du Cherche-Midi toward his apartment. No matter how hard he might be pressed, he could not meet with Valais while a second passport was in his pocket. The concierge said good evening through her little window as he rushed toward his entryway in the dark courtyard. He pounded up three flights of stairs, jiggled the lock open with his key, tucked the Bonotte passport under the carpet with the certificates, then took off downstairs. The concierge raised an eyebrow as he hurried past-very little bothered or surprised her, but in general she did not approve of haste.
Back to the Sevres Metro, dodging housewives returning from the markets and hurtling a dog leash stretched between an aristocratic gentleman and his Italian greyhound squatting at the curb.
The Metro was even worse as the hour of seven approached. Valais was forbidden to wait more than ten minutes for him; if he were any later they’d have to try for the fallback meeting the following day. The first train that stopped revealed an impenetrable wall of dark coats when the door opened, but he managed to force his way onto the next. After a change at Montparnasse, with almost no time to make sure he wasn’t being followed, he left the station a minute after seven, ran around the first corner, then went tearing back the way he’d come. It was primitive, but the best he could manage under the pressure of time.
With thirty seconds to spare, he entered a women’s clothing shop-long racks of cheap dresses and a dense cloud of perfume- just off the place d’Italie. The shop was owned by Valais’s girlfriend, a short, buxom woman with a hennaed permanent wave and crimson lipstick. What Valais, a contemplative, pipe-smoking lawyer, and she saw in each other he couldn’t imagine. She was a few years older than Valais and hard as nails. Szara was breathless as he strode toward the back of the store. The curtain at the entrance of the dressing room hung open, and a woman in a slip was thrashing her way into a pea green dress that was tangled about her head and shoulders.
Valais was waiting in a small workroom where alterations were done. When Szara entered he was about to leave, his overcoat buttoned and his gloves on. He looked up from his watch, clenched his pipe in his teeth, and shook hands. Szara collapsed in a chair in front of a sewing machine and put his feet up on the treadle.
Valais launched into a long, determined, cautiously phrased description of his activity over the past ten days. Szara pretended to pay attention, his mind returning to what Evans had said in the movie theater that afternoon, then found himself thinking about the woman he’d stood with on the Metro. Had she pressed back against him? No, he thought not. “And then there is LICHEN,” Valais said, waiting for Szara to respond.
Who the hell is LICHEN? Szara experienced a horrible moment of dead memory. At last it came: the young Basque prostitute Helene Cauxa, virtually inactive the past two years but collecting a monthly stipend nonetheless. “What’s she done now?” Szara asked.
Valais put a black briefcase on the sewing machine stand. “She, ah, met a German gentleman in the bar of a certain hotel where she sometimes has a drink. He proposed an arrangement, she agreed. They went off to a cheaper hotel, nearby, where she sometimes entertains clients. He forgot his briefcase. She brought it to me.”
Szara opened the briefcase: it was s
tuffed with a package of pamphlet-size booklets, perhaps two hundred of them, bound with string. Clipped to the cover of the one on top was a slip of paper with the word WEISS printed in pencil. He worked one of the booklets loose and opened it. On the left-hand side of the page were German phrases, on the right the same phrases in Polish:
Where is the mayor (head) of the village?
Tell me the name of the chief of police.
Is there good water in this well?
Did soldiers come through here today?
Hands up or I’ll shoot!
Surrender!
“She demanded additional money,” Valais said.
Szara’s hand automatically went to his pocket. Valais told him how much and Szara counted it out, telling himself he’d surely remember later how much it was and forgetting almost instantly. “WEISS must be the name of the operation,” he said to Valais. The word meant white.
“The invasion of Poland,” Valais said. He made a sucking noise, and a cloud of pipe smoke drifted to the ceiling of the dress shop. From the front of the store, Szara heard the ring of the cash register. Had the woman in the slip bought the pea green dress?
“Yes,” he said. “These are intended for Wehrmacht officers who will be transferred from attache duty in Paris, a few of them anyhow, back to their units in Germany before the attack. Then some for the Abwehr, military intelligence. Still, seems quite a few. Maybe he was on his way to other cities after Paris.”
“More Polish sorrow,” Valais said. “And it puts Hitler on the frontier of the Soviet Union.”
“If he’s successful,” Szara said. “Don’t underestimate the Poles. And France and England have guaranteed the Polish border. If the Germans aren’t careful they’re going to take on the whole world again, just like 1914.”
“They are confident,” Valais said. “They have an unshakable faith in themselves.” He smoked his pipe for a time. “Have you read Sallust? The Roman historian? He speaks of the Germanic tribes with awe. The Finns, he says, in winter find a hollow log to sleep in, but the Germans simply lay down naked in the snow.” He shook his head at the thought. “I am, perhaps you don’t know, a reserve officer. In an artillery unit.”
Szara lit a cigarette and swore silently in Polish-psia krew, dogs’ blood. Now everything was going straight to hell.
Back on the Metro with the briefcase. Running up the stairs on the rue du Cherche-Midi. Looking in the mirror and combing his hair back with his fingers, he discovered a white streak of plaster dust on the shoulder of his raincoat-he’d rubbed up against a wall somewhere. He brushed at it, then gave up, put the briefcase in the back of his closet, and went out the door. Raced halfway down the stairs, reversed himself, and climbed back up. Reentered his apartment, snatched the pile of emigration certificates from under the carpet, put them in his own briefcase, and went out a second time.
The streets were crowded: couples going out for dinner, people coming home from work. The wind was ferocious, swirling up dust and papers. People held their hats on and grimaced; waves of chalk-colored cloud were speeding across the night sky. He’d take the Metro to Concorde, then change to the Neuilly line. From there it was a half-hour walk at least if he couldn’t find a taxi. It would certainly rain. His umbrella was in the closet. He’d arrive at the Cercle Renaissance late, looking like a drowned rat, with a white streak on his shoulder. He held tightly to the briefcase with its hundred and seventy-five certificates inside. Had she pressed back against him? A little?
When Szara entered the library de Montfried was reading a newspaper. He looked up, his face flushed with anger. “He’s going into Poland,” he said. “Do you know what that will mean?”
“I think so.” Uninvited, Szara sat down. De Montfried closed the paper emphatically and took off his reading glasses. His eyes seemed the color of mud in the half light of the small room.
“All this ranting and raving about the poor, suffering German minority in Danzig-that’s what it means.”
“Yes.”
“My God, the Jews in Poland are living in the ninth century. Do you know? They’re … when the Hasid hear of the possible invasion they dance to show their joy-the worse it gets, the more they are certain that Messiah is coming. Meanwhile, it’s already started, the Poles themselves have started it. No pogroms just yet but beatings and knifings-the gangs are running free in Warsaw.” He glared angrily at Szara. His face was twisted with pain but, at the same moment, he was an important man who had the right to demand explanations.
“I was born in Poland,” Szara said. “I know what it’s like.”
“But why is he alive, this man, this Adolf Hitler? Why is he permitted to live? ” He folded the newspaper and put it down on a small marquetry table. The club’s dinner hour was approaching and Szara could smell roasting beef.
“I don’t know.”
“Can nothing be done?”
Szara was silent.
“An organization like yours, its capacities, resources for such things … I don’t understand.”
Szara opened his briefcase and passed the stack of certificates to de Montfried, who held them in his hands and stared at them vacantly. “I have another engagement,” Szara said, as gently as he could.
De Montfried shook his head to clear it. “Forgive me,” he said. “What I feel is like an illness. It will not leave me.”
“I know,” Szara said, rising to leave.
Back to the rue du Cherche-Midi. Briefcases exchanged. Szara headed out into the windy night and slowly made his way to the rue Delesseux house. The Directorate, he thought, would want physical possession of the pamphlets, would have a special courier bring them to Moscow. Still, he believed it was best to transmit the contents and the WEISS code name as soon as possible. He began to switch from Metro line to Metro line, now following procedures closely; rue Delesseux was not to be approached by a direct route. At the La Chapelle station there was fighting. Perhaps communists and fascists, it was hard to tell. A crowd of workingmen in caps, all mixed together, three or four of them down on the floor with blood on their faces, two holding a third against a wall while a fourth worked on him. The motorman didn’t stop. The train rolled slowly through the station with white faces staring from the windows. They could hear the shouts and curses over the sound of the train, and one man was hurled against the side of the moving car and bounced hard, the shock felt by the passengers as he hit-several people gasped or cried out when it happened. Then the train returned to the darkness of the tunnel.
Schau-Wehrli was at work in the rue Delesseux. Szara handed her a pamphlet and stood quietly while she looked it over. “Yes,” she said reflectively, “everything points to it now. My commissary people in Berlin, who work for the German railway system, say the same thing. They’ve heard about requests for a traffic analysis on the lines that go to the Polish border. That means troop trains.”
“When?”
“Nobody knows.”
“Is it a bluff?”
“No, I think not. It most certainly was with the Czechs, but not now. The Reich industrial production is meeting quotas, the war machinery is just about in place.”
“And what will we do?”
“Stalin alone knows that,” Schau-Wehrli said. “And he doesn’t tell me.”
It was well after midnight when Szara finally got home. He’d never managed to eat anything, but hunger was long gone, replaced by cigarettes and adrenaline. Now he just felt cold and grimy and used up. There was a large tin bathtub in the kitchen, and he turned on the hot water tap to see what might be left. Yes, there was one good thing in the world that night, a bath, and he would have it. He stripped off his clothes and threw them on a chair, poured himself a glass of red wine, and turned the radio dial until he found some American jazz. When the tub was ready he climbed in and settled back, drank a little wine, rested the glass on the broad part of the rim, and closed his eyes.
Poor de Montfried, he thought. All that money, yet he could do little, at least that
was the way he saw it. The man had virtually humiliated him in the library, had been so angry that the certificates, bought at a cost he could not imagine, seemed a small and insufficient gesture. Oh the rich. Would any of the cafe girls still be about? No, that was hopeless. There was one he could telephone-full of understanding, that one, she loved what she called adventures of the night. No, he thought, sleep. The music ended and a man began to announce the news. Szara reached for the dial, his arm dripping water on the kitchen floor, but the radio was just a little too far. So he had to hear that the miners were on strike in Lille, that the minister of finance had denied all allegations, that the little girl missing in the Vosges had been found, that Madrid continued to hold out, factions fighting each other in the besieged city. Stalin had issued an important political statement, referring to the current crisis as “the Second Imperialistic War.” He stated he would “not allow Soviet Russia to be drawn into conflicts by warmongers who are accustomed to having others pull their chestnuts out of the fire,” and attacked those nations who wanted “to arouse Soviet anger against Germany, to poison the atmosphere, and to provoke a conflict with Germany without visible reason.”
Then the music returned, saxophones and trumpets from a dance hall on Long Island. Szara rested his head against the tub and closed his eyes. Stalin claimed that England and France were plotting against him, maneuvering him to fight Hitler while they waited to pounce on a weakened winner. Perhaps they were. Aristocrats ran those countries, intellectuals and ministers of state, graduates of the best universities. Stalin and Hitler were scum from the gutters of Europe who’d managed to float to the top. Well, one way or another, there would be war. And he would be killed. Marta Haecht as well. The Baumanns, Kranov, the operative who’d driven him away from Wittenau on Kristallnacht, Valais, Schau-Wehrli, Goldman, Nadia Tscherova. All of them. The bath was cooling much too fast. He pulled the plug and let some of it gurgle out, then added more hot water and lay back in the stream.