The Foreign Correspondent ns-9

by Alan Furst

  “Chicago, yes, I know, white socks, young bears, wonderful.”

  “Goodby,” Weisz said.

  They shook hands. A strong hand, Weisz thought, inside the glove.

  Somebody on the other side of the river shot at the car as it rode along the ridge line, and a bullet came through the back door and out the roof. Weisz could see a ragged piece of sky through the hole. Sandoval swore and stomped on the gas pedal, the car accelerated and, as it hit the holes and ridges in the road, bounced high in the air and slammed down hard, crushing its old springs and landing steel on steel with a horrible bang. Weisz had to keep his jaw clamped shut so he wouldn’t break a tooth. Under his breath, Sandoval asked God to spare the tires, then, after a few minutes, slowed down. McGrath turned around in the passenger seat and poked a finger into the bullet hole. Calculating the distance between Weisz and the bullet’s path, she said, “Carlo? Are you okay?” The sound of the fighting ahead of them grew louder, but they never saw it. In the sky to the north, two airplanes appeared, German HE-111Heinkels, according to Sandoval. They dropped bombs on the Spanish positions above the Segre, then swooped down and machine-gunned the east side of the river.

  Sandoval pulled off the road and stopped the car beneath a tree, as much cover as he could find. “They will finish us,” he said. “There’s no point to it, unless you wish to see what has happened to the men by the river.” Weisz and McGrath did not need to see this, they had seen it many times before.

  So then, Castelldans.

  Sandoval turned the car around, drove back to the paved road, and headed east, toward the town of Mayals. For a time, the road was deserted, as it climbed a long, upward slope through oak forest, then emerged on a high plain and met a dirt road that passed through the villages to the south and north.

  Up here, the sky had closed in; gray cloud above empty scrubland and a ribbon of road that wound across it. On the road, a slow gray column that stretched to the far horizon, an army in retreat, miles of it, broken only by the occasional truck, pulled by mules, which carried the ones who could not walk. Here and there, among the plodding soldiers, were refugees, some with carts drawn by oxen, loaded down with chests and mattresses, the family dog on top, next to the old people, or women with infants.

  Sandoval turned off the engine, Weisz and McGrath got out and stood by the car. In the hard wind that blew down from the mountains, there was not a sound to be heard. McGrath took off her glasses and rubbed the lenses with her shirttail, squinting as she watched the column. “Dear God,” she said.

  “You’ve seen it before,” Weisz said.

  “Yes, I’ve seen it.”

  Sandoval spread a map across the hood. “If we go back a few miles,” he said, “we can go around it.”

  “Where does this road go?” McGrath said.

  “To Barcelona,” Sandoval said. “To the coast.”

  Weisz reached for a pad and pencil. By late morning, the sky had closed in, with low gray cloud above the high plain, and a ribbon of road that wound across it, wound east, toward Barcelona.

  The censor, in Castelldans, didn’t like it. He was an army major, tall and thin, with the face of an ascetic. He sat at a table in the back of what had been the post office, not far from the wireless/telegraph equipment and the clerk who operated it. “Why do you do this?” he said. His English was precise, he had once been a teacher. “Can you not say, ‘moving to reposition’?”

  “An army in retreat,” Weisz said, “is what I saw.”

  “It does not help us.”

  “I know,” Weisz said. “But it is so.”

  The major read back through the story, a few pages covered in penciled block print. “Your English is very good,” he said.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Tell me, Senor Weisz, can you not simply write about our Italian volunteers, and the colonel? The column you describe has been replaced, the line is still being held at the Segre.”

  “The column is part of the story, Major. It must be reported.”

  The major handed it back, and nodded toward the waiting clerk. “You may send it as it is,” he said to Weisz. “And then you may deal with your conscience in whatever way suits you.”

  26 December. Weisz sat back against the faded plush seat in a first-class compartment as the train chugged slowly past the outskirts of Barcelona. They would be at the border crossing in Port Bou in a few hours, then France. Weisz had the window seat, across from him a pensive child, next to his mother and father, a fastidious little man in a dark suit, with a gold watch chain looped across his vest. Next to Weisz, an older daughter, wearing a wedding ring, though no husband was to be seen, and a heavy woman with gray hair, perhaps an aunt. A silent family, pale, shaken, leaving home, likely forever.

  This little man had apparently followed his principles, was either an ally of the Republican government or one of its minor officials. He had the look of a minor official. But now he had to get out while he could, the flight had begun, and what awaited him in France was, if he was unlucky, a refugee camp-barracks, barbed wire-or, if his luck held, penury. To avoid train sickness, the mother reached into a crumpled paper bag and, from time to time, dispensed a lemon drop to each member of the family; the small economies had begun.

  Glancing at the compartment across the aisle, Weisz could see Boutillon, of the Communist daily L’Humanite, and Chisholm, of the Christian Science Monitor, sharing sandwiches and a bottle of red wine. Weisz turned to the window and stared out at the gray-green brush that grew at the edge of the track.

  The Spanish major had been right about his English: it was good. After finishing secondary school at a private academy in Trieste, he’d gone off to the Scuola Normale-founded by Napoleon, in imitation of the Ecole Normale in Paris, and very much the cradle of prime ministers and philosophers-at the University of Pisa, probably the most prestigious university in Italy. Where he’d studied political economics. The Scuola Normale was not particularly his choice, but, rather, had been ordained at birth. By Herr Doktor Professor Helmut Weisz, the eminent ethnologist, and Weisz’s father, in that order. And then, according to plan, he’d entered Oxford University, again for economics, where he’d managed to stay for two years. At which time his tutor, an incredibly kind and gentle man, had suggested that his intellectual destiny lay elsewhere. It wasn’t that Weisz couldn’t do it-become a professor-it was that he didn’t want to do it, not really. At Oxford, not really was a variant spelling of doom. So, after one last night of drinking and singing, he left. But he left with very good English.

  And this turned out, in the strange and wondrous way the world worked, to be his salvation. Back in Trieste, which in 1919 had passed from Austro-Hungarian to Italian nationality, he spent his days in the cafes with his hometown pals. Not a professorial crowd: scruffy, smart, rebellious-a would-be novelist, a would-be actor, two or three don’t know/don’t care/don’t bother-mes, a would-be prospector for gold in the Amazon, one Communist, one gigolo, and Weisz.

  “You should be a journalist,” they told him. “See the world.”

  He got a job with the newspaper in Trieste. Wrote obituaries, reported on an occasional crime, now and then interviewed a local official. At which point, his father, always cold, positively glittered with frost, pulled a string, and Weisz returned to Milan, to write for Italy’s leading newspaper, Corriere della Sera. More obituaries, at first, then an assignment in France, another in Germany. At these, now age twenty-five, he worked-worked harder than he ever had, for he had at last discovered life’s great motivation: fear of failure. Presto, the magic potion!

  Too bad, really, because Mussolini’s reign had begun, with the March on Rome-Mussolini had gone by train-in 1922. Restrictive press laws soon followed and, by 1925, the ownership of the paper had passed to fascist sympathizers, and the editor had to resign. Senior editors went with him, a determined Weisz hung on for three months, then followed them out the door. He thought about emigrating, then returned to Trieste, conspired with his fri
ends, tore a poster or two off a wall, but generally kept his head down. He’d seen people beaten up, he’d seen people with blood on their faces, sitting in the street. Not for Weisz.

  Anyhow, Mussolini and his crowd would soon be gone, it was simply a question of waiting it out, the world had always righted itself, it would again. He took tepid assignments from the Trieste newspapers-a soccer match, a fire on a cargo ship in the port-tutored a few students in English, fell in and out of love, spent eighteen months writing for a commercial journal in Basel, another year at a shipping newspaper in Trieste, survived. Survived and survived. Forced by politics to the margins of professional existence, he watched as his life drifted away like sand.

  Then, in 1935, with Mussolini’s ghastly war in Ethiopia, he could bear it no longer. Three years earlier, he’d joined the giellisti in Trieste-the would-be novelist was now locked up on the prison island of Lipari, the Communist had become a fascist, the gigolo had married a countess and both had boyfriends, and the would-be prospector had found gold and died rich; there was more than treasure to be found in the Amazon.

  So Weisz went to Paris and took a room in a tiny hotel in the Belleville district and commenced to live on the diet imagined by every dreamer who went to Paris; bread and cheese and wine. But very good bread-its price controlled by the brutally sagacious French government-pretty good cheese, supplemented with olives and onions, and wretched Algerian wine. But it did the job. Women were a classic, and effective, addition to the diet: if you were thinking about women, you weren’t thinking about food. Politics was a tiresome addition to the diet, but it helped. It was easier, much easier, to suffer in company, and the company sometimes included dinner, and women. Then, after seven months of reading newspapers on cafe rollers, and looking for work, God sent him Delahanty. The Great Autodidact, Delahanty. Who had taught himself to read in French, to read in Spanish, to read-Lord have mercy! — in Greek, and to read, providentially, in Italian. Delahanty, the bureau chief of the Reuters wire service in Paris. Ecco, a job!

  Delahanty, white-haired and blue-eyed, had many years earlier left school in Glasgow and, as he put it, “worked for the papers.” Selling them, at first, then moving from copyboy to cub reporter, his progress powered by grit and insolence and genteel opportunism. Until he reached the top; chief of the Paris bureau, who, as trusted specialist, saw copies of dispatches from the important-Berlin, Rome-European offices. Which made him very much the spider at the center of the web, in the wire-service neighborhood near the place de l’Opera, where, one chilly spring day, Carlo Weisz showed up. “So, Mr. Weisz-you say Weiss, not Veisch, correct? — you wrote for the Corriere. Not much of it left now. A sad fate, for a fine newspaper like that. Now tell me, would you happen to have any clippings of what you wrote?” The snipped-out articles, carried around in a cheap briefcase, were not in the best condition, but they could be read, and Delahanty read them. “No, sir,” he said, “you needn’t bother to translate, I can get along in Italian.”

  Delahanty put on his glasses and read with a forefinger. “Hmm,” he said. “Hmm. It ain’t so bad. I’ve seen worse. What do you mean by this, right here? Oh, that makes sense. I believe you can do this sort of work, Mr. Weisz. Do you like to do it? And do you care what you do, Mr. Weisz? The new sewers of Antwerp? The beauty contest in Dusseldorf? You don’t mind, that sort of thing? How’s your German? Spoke it at home? A little Serbo-Croatian? Can’t hurt. Oh I see, Trieste, yes, they speak everything there, don’t they. How’s your French? Yes, me too, I get along, and they look at you funny, but you manage. Any Spanish? No, don’t worry, you’ll pick it up. Now let me be frank, here we do things the Reuters way, you’ll learn the rules, all you have to do is follow ‘em. And I have to tell you that you won’t be the Reuters man in Paris. But you’ll be a Reuters man, and that ain’t so bad. It’s what I was, and I wrote about every damn thing under the sun. So tell me, how does that sit with you, sir? Can you do it? Ride on trains and mule carts and whatnot and get us the story? With emotion? With a feel for the human side, for the prime minister at his grand desk and the peasant on his little patch of earth? You believe you can? I know you can! And you’ll do just fine. So, why not get down to it straight away? Say, tomorrow? The previous incumbent, well, a week ago he went up to Holland and passed out in the queen’s lap. It’s the curse of this profession, Mr. Weisz, I’m sure you know that. Very well, do you have any questions? None? Allright, then, that will bring us to the gloomy subject of money.”

  Weisz drifted off to sleep, then woke as the train pulled in to Port Bou. The Spanish family stared at the platform across the tracks, at a few Guardia Civil lounging against the wall of the ticket office. At a small crowd of refugees standing amid trunks and bundles and suitcases tied with rope, waiting for the southbound train. Not everybody, it seemed, was allowed to cross the border. After a few minutes, Spanish officers came through the car, asking for papers. When they reached the adjoining compartment, the older daughter, next to Weisz, closed her eyes and pressed her hands together. She was, he realized, praying. But the officers were polite-this was, after all, first class-took only a cursory glance at the documents and then went on to the next compartment. Then the train blew its whistle and rolled a few hundred feet down the track, where the French officers were waiting.

  Report of Agent 207, delivered by hand on the fifth of December, to a clandestine OVRA station in the Tenth Arrondissement:

  The Liberazione group met on the morning of 4 December at the Cafe Europa, the same subjects attending as in previous reports, with the engineer AMATO and the journalist WEISZ absent. It was decided to publish a “political obituary” of the lawyer BOTTINI, and to state that his death was not a suicide. It was further decided that the journalist WEISZ will now assume the editorship of the Liberazione newspaper.

  28 December. With prosperity, or at least its distant cousin, Weisz had found himself a new place to live, the Hotel Dauphine, on the rue Dauphine in the Sixth Arrondissement. The proprietor, Madame Rigaud, was a widow of the 1914 war and, like women to be seen everywhere in France, still, after twenty years, wore the black of mourning. She liked Weisz, and did not much overcharge him for his two rooms, linked by a door, up four endless flights of stairs, on the top floor. From time to time she fed him, poor boy, in the hotel kitchen, a pleasant break from his little haunts, Mere this and Chez that, sprinkled through the narrow streets of the Sixth.

  Worn out, he slept late on the morning of the twenty-eighth, and when the sun slanted through the slats on the closed shutters, forced himself awake, to find, on getting to his feet, that pretty much everything hurt. Even a visit to a war, for a few weeks, took its toll. So he would eat the three-course lunch, stop briefly at the office, see if any of the regulars at his cafe were around, and maybe call Veronique, once she got home from the gallery. A pleasant day, at least in the anticipation of it. But the dusty sun shafts revealed a slip of paper, slid under his door at some point while he was away. A message, brought up by the clerk at the hotel desk. Now what could that be? Veronique? My darling, you must come and see me, how I yearn for you! Pure fantasy, and he knew it. Veronique would never even consider doing such a thing, theirs was a very pallid love affair, off and on, now and then. Still, one never knew, anything was possible. On the slim chance, he read the note. “Please telephone as soon as you return. Arturo.”

  He met Salamone in a deserted bar near the insurance company. They sat in back and ordered coffee. “And how does it go in Spain?” Salamone said.

  “Badly. It’s almost finished. What remains is the nobility of a lost cause, but that’s thin stuff in a war. We’re beaten, Arturo, for which we can thank the French and the British and the nonintervention pact. Outgunned, not outfought, end of story. So now it’s up to Hitler, what happens next.”

  “Well, my news is no better. I must tell you that Enrico Bottini is dead.”

  Weisz looked up sharply, and Salamone handed him a page cut from a newspaper. Weisz flinched when he saw the pho
tograph, read quickly through the tabloid prose, then shook his head and gave it back. “Something happened, poor Bottini, but not this.”

  “No, we believe this was done by the OVRA. Staged to look like a murder/suicide.”

  Weisz felt it, the sharp little bite that sickened the heart; it wasn’t like being shot at, it was like seeing a snake. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Weisz took a deep breath, and let it out. “Let them burn in hell for doing this,” he said. Only anger cured the fear that had reached him.

  Salamone nodded. “In time, they will.” He paused, then said, “But for today, Carlo, the committee wants you to replace him.”

  From Weisz, a nod of casual assent, as though he’d been asked the time. “Mmm,” he said. Of course they do.

  Salamone laughed, a bass rumble inside a bear. “We knew you’d be eager to do it.”

  “Oh yes, eager barely says it. And I can’t wait to tell my girlfriend.”

  Salamone almost believed him. “Ahh, I don’t think…”

  “And the next time we go to bed, I must remember to shave. For the photograph.”

  Salamone nodded, closed his eyes. Yes, I know, forgive me.

  “All that aside,” Weisz said, “I wonder how I can do this and run around Europe for the Reuters.”

  “It’s your instinct we need, Carlo. Ideas, insights. We know we’ll have to stand in for you, day to day.”

  “But not when it comes to the great moment, Arturo. That’s all mine.”

  “That’s all yours,” Salamone said. “But, kidding aside, it’s yes?” Weisz smiled. “Do you suppose they have a Strega here?”

  “Let’s ask,” Salamone said.

  What they had was cognac, and they settled for that.

  Weisz tried for the pleasant day, proving to himself that the change in his life didn’t affect him all that much. The three-course lunch, celeri remoulade, veal a la Normande, tarte Tatin, was consumed-some of it, anyhow-and the waiter’s silent query ignored, but for a generous tip inspired by guilt. Brooding, he passed up his regular cafe and had coffee elsewhere, sitting next to a table of German tourists with cameras and guidebooks. Rather quiet and sober German tourists, it seemed to him. And he did, that evening, see Veronique, at her art-laden apartment in the Seventh. Here he did better; the ritual preliminaries pursued with greater urgency, and at greater length, than usual-he knew what she liked, she knew what he liked, so they had a good time. Afterward, he smoked a Gitane and watched her as she sat at her dressing table, her small breasts rising and falling as she brushed her hair. “Your life goes well?” she said, catching his eye in the mirror. “Right now it does.” This she acknowledged with a warm smile, affectionate and reassured, her Frenchwoman’s soul demanding that he find consolation in making love to her.