by Alan Furst
But even so, unfair. Because the people who were going to shoot him didn’t know about any of that. He’d tried to enter a riding stable, the temporary encampment of a few companies of the Fifth Army Corps, where a guard had arrested him and taken him to the office of the Checa—secret police—at that moment stationed in a waterfront café. The officer in charge, seated at a table by the bar, was a bull of a man, with a fat moon face covered in dark blue beard shadow. He’d listened impatiently to the guard’s story, raised up on one haunch, scowled, then said, “He’s a spy, shoot him.”
He wasn’t wrong. Kolb was an operative of the British Secret Intelligence Service, a secret agent, yes, a spy. Nevertheless, this was terribly unfair. For he was, at that moment, not spying—not stealing documents, suborning officials, or taking photographs. Mostly that was his work, with the occasional murder thrown in when London demanded it, but not this week. This week, at the direction of his boss, an icy man known as Mr. Brown, S. Kolb had checked out of a comfortable whores’ hotel in Marseilles—an operation to do with the French Merchant Marine—and come running down to Spain in search of an Italian called Colonel Ferrara, thought to have retreated to Barcelona with elements of the Fifth Army Corps.
But Barcelona was a nightmare, not that Mr. Brown cared. The government had packed up its files and fled north to Gerona, thousands of refugees followed, headed to France, and the city was left to await the advancing Nationalist columns. Anarchy ruled, the municipal street cleaners had abandoned their brooms and gone home, great heaps of garbage, attended by clouds of flies, were piled on the sidewalks, refugees broke into empty grocery stores, the city now governed by armed drunks riding through the streets on the roofs of taxicabs.
Yet, even in the midst of chaos, Kolb had tried to do his job. “To the world,” Brown had once told him, “you may seem a meager little fellow, but you have, if I may say so, the balls of a gorilla.” Was that a compliment? God had made him meager, fate had ruined his life when he was accused, as a young man, of embezzlement while working in a bank in Austria, and the British SIS had done the rest. Not a very nice compliment, if that’s what it was. Still, he did persevere, had in this case found what remained of the Fifth Army Corps, and what was his reward?
Chained to anarchists, black scarves around their necks, and a pipe. Outside, in the adjacent alley, several shots were fired. Well, at least the queue was moving—when was lunch? “Hora de…?” he asked the nearest anarchist, making a spooning motion with his free hand. From the anarchist, a look of some admiration. Here was a man at death’s door, and he wanted lunch.
Suddenly, the door swung open and two militiamen, pistols in hand, came strolling into the WC. As one of them unbuttoned his fly and used the tiled hole in the floor, the other began to unlock the chain on the pipe. “Officer,” Kolb said. No response from the militiaman. “Comandante,” he tried. The man looked at him. “Por favor,” Kolb said politely. “Importante!”
The militiaman said something to his companion, who shrugged and began to button his fly. Then he grabbed Kolb by the shoulder and hauled the three chained men out the door and into the café. The Checa officer had a well-dressed man, head down, standing before him, and was making a point by tapping his finger on the table. “Señor!” Kolb called out as they headed for the door. “Señor Comandante!”
The officer looked up. Kolb had one chance. “Oro,” he said. “Oro para vida.” Kolb had worked this out while standing in the WC, trying desperately to assemble odd scraps and snips of Spanish. What was gold? What was life? The result—“gold for life”—was terse, but effective. The officer beckoned, Kolb and the anarchists were dragged up to the table. Now sign language took over. Kolb pointed urgently to the seam of his trouser leg and said “Oro.”
The officer followed the pantomime with interest, then extended his hand. When Kolb just stood there, the officer snapped his fingers twice and opened his hand again. A universal gesture: give me the gold. Hurriedly, Kolb unbuckled his belt and undid the buttons and managed, with one hand, to take his pants off and hand them to the officer, who ran a thumb down the seam. A very good tailor had been at work here, and the officer had to press hard to find the coins sewn into the material. When his thumb found a hard circle, he stared at Kolb with interest. Who are you, to arrange these matters with such care? But Kolb just stood there, now in baggy cotton underdrawers, gray with age, attire that made him, if possible, even less imposing than usual. The officer took a flick knife from his pocket and produced, with a snap of the wrist, a bright steel blade. He cut the seam open, to reveal twenty gold coins, Dutch guilders. A small fortune, his eyes widened as he stared at them, then narrowed. Clever little fellow, what else do you have?
He sliced open the other seam, the fly, the waistband, the cuffs, and the flaps on the back pockets, leaving the trousers in shreds. He tossed them into a corner, then asked Kolb a question he didn’t understand. Rather, almost didn’t, because he recognized the expression that meant “for all.” Did Kolb mean to ransom himself, or the two anarchists as well?
Kolb sensed danger, and his mind sped over the possibilities. What to do? What to say? As Kolb hesitated, the officer grew impatient, dismissed the whole business with a cavalier wave of the hand, and said something to the militiaman, who began to unchain Kolb and the anarchists, who looked at each other, then headed for the door. On the table, Kolb saw his passport—his briefcase, money, and watch had disappeared, but he needed the passport to get out of this accursed country. Meekly, with the greatest diffidence he could manage, Kolb stepped forward and took the passport, nodding humbly to the officer as he backed away. The officer, gathering up the coins from the table, glanced at him but said nothing. Heart pounding, Kolb walked out of the café.
Outside, the waterfront. Burned-out warehouses, bomb craters in the cobbled street, a half-sunk tender tied to a pier. The street was crowded: soldiers, refugees—sitting amid their baggage, waiting for a ship that would never arrive, local citizens, with nothing to do, and nowhere to go. One of Barcelona’s horse-drawn fiacres for hire, with two elegantly dressed men in the open carriage, moved slowly through the crowd. One of the men looked at Kolb for a moment, then turned away.
Well he might. A little clerk of a man in his underpants, otherwise dressed for a day at the office. Some people stared, others didn’t—Kolb was not the strangest thing they’d seen that day in Barcelona, not by a great deal. Meanwhile, S. Kolb’s legs were cold in the wind off the bay, should he tie his jacket around his waist? Maybe he would, in a minute, but for the moment, he wanted only to get as far away from the café as he could. Money, he thought, then a train ticket. He walked quickly, heading for the corner. Should he try to return to the riding stable? Hurrying along the waterfront, he considered it.
3 February, Paris.
The weather broke, to a false, cloudy spring, the city returning to its normal grisaille—gray stone, gray sky. Carlo Weisz left the Hotel Dauphine at eleven in the morning, for a meeting of the Liberazione committee at the Café Europa. He was surely followed once, perhaps twice.
He walked over to the Saint-Germain-des-Prés Métro, on his way to the Gare du Nord, stopped to look at a shop window he liked, old maps and nautical charts, and, out of the corner of his eye, noticed that a man at mid-block had also stopped, to look, apparently, in the window of a tabac. Nothing unusual about this man, in his thirties, who wore a gray peaked cap and had his hands in the pockets of a tweed jacket. Weisz, done with looking at Madagascar, 1856, continued on, entered the Métro, and descended the stairs that led to the Direction Porte de Clignancourt side of the tracks. On his way down, he heard hurrying footsteps above him, and glanced back over his shoulder. At that moment, the footsteps stopped. Now Weisz turned around, and caught a glimpse of a tweed jacket, as whoever it was reversed direction and disappeared around the corner of the stairway. Was it the same jacket? The same man? Who in the world went down Métro stairs, then up? A man who had forgotten something. A man who realized he w
as on the wrong Métro line.
Weisz heard the train coming, and walked quickly down to the platform. He entered the car—only a few passengers this time of the morning. As he went to take a seat, he saw the man in the tweed jacket again, running for the car closest to the foot of the stairway. That was that. Weisz found a seat and opened a copy of Le Journal.
But that was not quite that. Because, when the train stopped at Château d’Eau, someone said “Signor,” and, when Weisz looked up, handed him an envelope, then went quickly out the door, just before the train started to move. Weisz had only a brief look at him: fifty or so, poorly dressed, dark shirt buttoned at the throat, a deeply lined face, worried eyes. As the train picked up speed, Weisz went to the door and saw the man hurrying away down the platform. He returned to his seat, had a look at the envelope—brown, blank, sealed—and opened it.
Inside, a single folded sheet of yellow drafting paper with the carefully drawn schematic of a long, tapered shape, its nose shaded dark, a propeller and fins at the other end. A torpedo. Extraordinary! Look at all the apparatus the thing contained, lettered descriptions, in Italian, ranged along its length—valves, cables, a turbine, an air flask, rudders, fuse, drive shaft, and plenty more. All of it fated, alas, to blow up. On the side of the page, a list of specifications. Weight: 3,748 pounds. Length: 23 feet, 7 inches. Charge: 595 pounds. Range/speed: 4,400 yards at 50 knots, 13,000 yards at 30 knots. Power: wet heater. Which meant, after he thought about it for a moment, that the torpedo was driven through the water by steam.
Why was he given this?
The train slowed for the next station, Gare du Nord, blue tile set in the curve of the white tunnel wall. Weisz refolded the drawing and put it back in the envelope. On the short walk to the Café Europa, he tried every way he knew to see if somebody was following him. There was a woman with a shopping basket, a man walking a spaniel. How was one to know?
At the Café Europa, Weisz had a quiet word with Salamone, saying that a stranger on the Métro had handed him an envelope—a copy of a mechanical blueprint. The expression on Salamone’s face was eloquent: this is the last thing I needed today. “We’ll look at it after the meeting,” he said. “If it’s a…blueprint? I better ask Elena to join us.” Elena, the Milanese chemist, was the committee’s adviser on anything technical, the rest of them could barely change a lightbulb. Weisz agreed. He liked Elena. Her sharp face, long, graying hair worn back in a clip, her severe dark suits, did not especially reveal who she was. Her smile did; one corner of her mouth upturned, the reluctant half smile of the ironist, witness to the absurdities of existence, half amused, half not. Weisz found her appealing and, more important, he trusted her.
It was not a good meeting.
They’d all had time to brood about Bottini’s murder, about what it might mean to them, to be targets of OVRA—not as giellisti, but as individuals, trying to live their daily lives. In the first flash of anger, they had thought only of counterattack, but now, after a discussion of articles for the next issue of Liberazione, they wanted to talk about changing the location of the meeting, about security. They believed themselves to be skilled amateurs, at newspaper production, but security was not a discipline for skilled amateurs, they knew that, and it frightened them.
When everyone else had left, Salamone said, “Allright, Carlo, I guess we’d better take a look at your drawing.”
Weisz laid it out on the table. “A torpedo,” he said.
Elena studied it for a time, then shrugged. “Someone copied this, from an engineering blueprint, so someone thought it was important. Why? Because it’s different, improved, perhaps experimental, but God only knows how, I don’t. This is meant for an ordnance expert.”
“There are two possibilities,” Salamone said. “It’s an Italian blueprint, so it can only have come from Pola, on the Adriatic, from what used to be the Whitehead Torpedo Company—founded by the British, taken over by Austria-Hungary, then Italian after the war. You’re right, Elena, it must be significant, surely secret, so, by having it, we’re involved in espionage. Which means that the man in the Métro could have been an agent provocateur, and this paper is planted evidence. On that basis, we burn it.”
“And the other possibility,” Weisz said, “is that it’s a gesture. Of resistance.”
“What if it is?” Elena said. “This is of interest only to a navy, likely it’s meant for the British navy, or the French. So, if that idiot in Rome gets us into a war, with France, or Great Britain, God forbid, it would lead to the loss of Italian ships, Italian lives. How? I can’t work out the details, but secret knowledge of a weapon’s capabilities is always an advantage.”
“That’s true,” Salamone said. “And, on that basis, we don’t want anything to do with it. We are a resistance organization, and this is spying, this is treason, not resistance, though there are those on the other side who think it’s the same thing. So, once again, we burn it.”
“There’s more,” Weisz said. “I think I might have been followed, earlier this morning, when I walked to the Métro.” Briefly, he described the behavior of the man in the tweed jacket.
“Were the two of them somehow working together?” Elena said.
“I don’t know,” Weisz said. “Maybe I’m seeing monsters under the bed.”
“Ah yes,” Elena said. “Those monsters.”
“Under all our beds,” Salamone said tartly. “The way the meeting went today.”
“Is there anything we can do?” Weisz said.
“Not that I know about, short of ceasing publication. We try to be as secretive as we can, but, in the émigré community, people talk, and the OVRA spies are everywhere.”
“On the committee?” Elena said.
“Maybe.”
“What a world,” Weisz said.
“Our very own,” Salamone said. “But the clandestine press has been a fact of life since 1924. In Italy, in Paris, in Belgium, everywhere we ran to. And OVRA can’t stop it. They can slow it down. They arrest a socialist group in Turin, but the giellisti in Florence start a new publication. And the major newspapers have survived for a long time—the socialist Avanti, the Communist Unità. Our older brother, the Giustizia e Libertà paper published in Paris. The émigrés who issue Non Mollare!, as the name of their journal states, don’t give in, and the Catholic Action people publish Il Corriere degli Italiani. The OVRA can’t kill us all. They might want to, but Mussolini still craves legitimacy in the eyes of the world. And, when they do assassinate—Matteotti in 1924, the Rosselli brothers, in France, in ’37—they create martyrs; martyrs for the Italian opposition, and martyrs in the world’s newspapers. This is a war, and, in a war, sometimes you lose, sometimes you win, and, sometimes, when you think you’ve lost, you’ve won.”
Elena liked that idea. “Maybe this needs to be said to the committee.”
Weisz agreed. The fascists didn’t always have things their way. When Matteotti, the leader of the Italian Socialist party, disappeared, after making a passionate antifascist speech, the reaction in Italy, even among members of the Fascist party, had been so intense that Mussolini was forced to support an investigation. A month later, Matteotti’s body had been discovered in a shallow grave outside Rome, a carpenter’s file driven into his chest. The following year, a man named Dumini was arrested, tried, and found guilty, more or less. He was guilty, said the court, of “nonpremeditated homicide extenuated by the subnormal physical resistance of Matteotti and by other circumstances.” So, yes, murdered, but not very murdered.
“And Liberazione?” Weisz said. “Do we, as you say of the major newspapers, survive?”
“Maybe,” Salamone said. “Now, before the cops come rushing in here…” He crumpled the yellow drafting paper into a ball and dropped it in the ashtray. “Who’ll do the honors? Carlo?”
Weisz took out his steel lighter and lit a corner of the paper.
It was a brisk little fire, flaring and smoking, tended by Weisz with the point of a pencil. As the ashes we
re stirred about, a tap at the door was followed by the appearance of the barman. “Everything allright in here?”
Salamone said it was.
“If you’re going to burn the place down, let me know first, eh?”
4 February. Weisz sat back in his chair for a moment and watched people in the street below his office window, then forced himself back to work.
“MONSIEUR DE PARIS” DEAD AT 76
Anatole Deibler, the Grand High Executioner of France, died of a heart attack yesterday in the Châtelet station of the Paris Métro. Known by the traditional honorific “Monsieur de Paris,” Deibler was on his way to his 401st execution, having attended France’s guillotine for forty years. Deibler was the last male heir to the position held by his family, executioners since 1829, and it is said that he is to be replaced by his assistant, known as “the valet.” Thus André Obrecht, Monsieur Deibler’s nephew, will be the new “Monsieur de Paris.”
Would this take a second paragraph? Deibler had been, according to his wife, a passionate bicycliste, and had raced for his bicycle club. He had married into another family of executioners, and his father, Louis, had been the last to wear the traditional top hat as he lopped off heads. Any of that? No, he thought not. What about the invention of Dr. Joseph Guillotin in revolutionary France? You always saw that when the contraption was mentioned, but did they care in Manchester or Montevideo? He doubted they did. And the rewrite man would likely strike it out anyhow. Still, it was sometimes useful to give him something he could strike out. No, leave it alone. And, with any luck at all, Delahanty would spare him an afternoon at a February funeral.
