by Alan Furst
In 1932, Italy is still in the grip of the Depression, so nobody comes to stay at l’albergo del bosco—the inn of the forest, near a village outside of Naples. The innkeeper, with five daughters, is beset by debt collectors and so gives the last of his savings to the local marchese for safekeeping. But, through a misunderstanding, the marchese, very decayed nobility and no richer than the innkeeper, donates the money to charity. Accidentally learning of his error—the innkeeper is a proud fellow and pretends he wanted to give the money away—the marchese sells his last two family portraits, then pays the innkeeper to hold a grand feast for the poor people of the village.
Not so bad, it kept Weisz’s interest. The cameraman was good, very good, even in black and white, so the hills and meadows, tall grass swaying in the wind, the little white road bordered by poplars, the lovely Neapolitan sky, looked very real to Weisz. He knew this place, or places like it. He knew the village—its dry fountain with a crumbling rim, its tenements shadowing the narrow street, and its people—the postman, the women in kerchiefs. He knew the marchese’s villa, tiles fallen from the roof stacked hopefully by the door, the old servant, not paid for years. Sentimental Italy, Weisz thought, every frame of it. And the music was also very good—vaguely operatic, lyrical, sweet. Really very sentimental, Weisz thought, the Italy of dreams, or poems. Still, it broke his heart. As he walked up the aisle toward the door, the owner stared at him for a moment, this man in a good dark overcoat, glasses in one hand, the index finger of the other touching the corners of his eyes.
3 MARCH, 1939.
Weisz had taken a compartment in a wagon-lit on the night train to Berlin, leaving at seven from the Gare du Nord, arriving Berlin at midday. A restless sleeper at best, he had spent the hours waking and dozing, staring out the window when the train stopped at the stations—Dortmund, Bielefeld—along the way. After midnight, the floodlit platforms were silent and deserted, only the occasional passenger or railway porter, now and then a policeman with a leashed Alsatian shepherd, their breaths steaming in the icy German air.
On the night he’d had drinks with Mr. Brown, he’d thought about Christa Zameny, his former lover, for a long time. Married three years earlier, in Germany, she was now beyond his reach, their elaborate afternoons together destined to remain a remembered love affair. Still, when Delahanty had ordered him to Berlin, he’d looked her up in his address book, and considered writing her a note. She’d sent him the address in a farewell letter, telling him of her marriage to von Schirren, telling him that it was, at this point in her life, the best thing for her. We will never see each other again, she’d meant. Followed, in the final paragraph, by her new address, where he would never see her again. Some love affairs die, he thought, others stop.
Now, at the Adlon, he would sleep for an hour or two, preparing for rest by unpacking his valise, stripping down to his underwear, hanging his suit and shirt in the closet, turning down the bedspread, and opening the Adlon’s stationery folder on the mahogany desk. A fine hotel, the Adlon, Berlin’s best, with such fine paper and envelopes, the hotel’s name and address in elegant gold script. Life was made easy for a guest here, one could write a note to an acquaintance, seal it in a thick creamy envelope, and summon the hall porter, who would provide a stamp and mail it off. So very easy, really. And Berlin’s postal system was fast, and efficient. Before ten o’clock on the following day, a delicate and very reserved little jingle from the telephone. Weisz sprang like a cat—there would be no second ring.
At four-thirty in the afternoon, the bar at the Adlon was almost empty. Dark and plush, it was not so very different from the Ritz—upholstered chairs, low drink tables. A fat man with a Nazi party pin in his lapel played Cole Porter on a white piano. Weisz ordered a cognac, then another. Perhaps she wouldn’t come, perhaps, at the last minute, she couldn’t. Her voice had been cool and courteous on the phone—it crossed his mind that she was not alone when she made the call. How thoughtful of him to write. Was he well? Oh, a drink? At the hotel? Well, she didn’t know, at four-thirty perhaps, she was not really sure, a terribly busy day, but she would try, so thoughtful of him to write.
This was the voice, and the manner, of an aristocrat. The sheltered child of an adoring father, a Hungarian noble, and a distant mother, the daughter of a German banker, she’d been raised by governesses in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin, attended boarding schools in England and Switzerland, then university in Jena. She wrote imagist poetry, often in French, privately published. And found ways, after graduating, to live beyond wealth—for a time managed a string quartet, served on the board of a school for deaf children.
They’d met in Trieste, in the summer of 1933, at a loud and drunken party, she with friends on a yacht, cruising the Adriatic. Thirty-seven when the love affair began, she maintained a style conceived in Berlin’s, and her own, twenties: very erotic woman costumed as very severe man. Black chalk-stripe suit, white shirt, sober tie, chestnut hair worn short, except in front, where it was cut on a sharp bias and pointed down at one eye. Sometimes, at the extreme of the style, she pomaded her hair and combed it back behind her ears. She had smooth, fair skin, a high forehead, wore no makeup—only a faint touch of seemingly colorless lipstick. A face more striking than pretty, with all its character in the eyes: green and pensive, concentrated, fearless, and penetrating.
The entry to the Adlon bar was up three marble steps, through a pair of leather-sheathed doors with portholes, and, when they parted, and Weisz turned to see who it was, his heart soared. Not so long after that, maybe fifteen minutes, a waiter approached the table, collected a large tip, half a cognac, and half a champagne cocktail.
It wasn’t only the heart that absence made grow fonder.
Outside the window, Berlin in the halftones of its winter twilight, inside the room, amid the snarled and tumbled wreckage of the bed linen, Weisz and Christa lay flopped back on the pillows, catching their breath. He raised up on one elbow, put three fingers on the hollow at the base of her throat, then traced her center down to the end. For a moment, she closed her eyes, a very faint smile on her lips. “You have,” he said, “red knees.”
She had a look. “So I do. You’re surprised?”
“Well, no.”
He moved his hand a little, then let it rest.
She laid a hand on top of his.
He looked at her for a long time.
“So, what do you see?”
“The best thing I ever saw.”
From Christa, a dubious smile.
“No, it’s true.”
“It’s your eyes, love. But I love to be what you see.”
He lay back, hands clasped beneath his head. She turned on her side and stretched an arm and a leg over him, her face pressed against his chest. They drifted in silence for a time, then he realized that his skin, where her face rested, was wet, and it burned. He started to speak, to ask, but she put a gentle finger on his lips.
Standing at the desk, with her back to him, she waited for the hotel operator to answer the phone, then gave her a number. She was, without clothing, slighter than he remembered—this always struck him—and enigmatically desirable. What was it, about her, that reached him so deeply? Mystery, lover’s mystery, a magnetic field beyond words. She waited as the phone rang, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, one hand unconsciously smoothing her hair. It stirred him to watch her; the nape of her neck—hair cut short and high, her long, taut back, pale curve of hip, deep cleft, nicely shaped legs, scuffed heels.
“Helma?” she said. “It’s me. Would you please tell Herr von Schirren that I am delayed? Oh, he isn’t. Well, when he gets home then, you’ll tell him. Yes, that’s it. Goodby.”
She placed the phone back on its high cradle, then turned, read his eyes, rose on the toes of one foot, hands raised, fingers in the castanet position, and did a Spanish dancer’s twirl on the Adlon’s carpet.
“Olé,” he said.
She came back to the bed, found an edge of quilt, and
pulled it over them. Weisz reached across her and turned off the bedside lamp, leaving the room in darkness. For an hour, they would pretend to spend the night together.
Later, she dressed by the light of the streetlamp that shone in the window, then went into the bathroom to comb her hair. Weisz followed and stood in the doorway. “How long will you stay?” she said.
“Two weeks.”
“I will call you,” she said.
“Tomorrow?”
“Yes, tomorrow.” Looking in the mirror, she turned her head to one side, then the other. “At lunchtime, I can call.”
“You have an office?”
“We all must work, here in the thousand-year Reich. I’m a sort of executive, at the Bund Deutscher Maedchen, the League for German Girls—part of the Hitler Youth organization. A friend of von Schirren’s got me the job.”
Weisz nodded. “In Italy, they go down to the six-year-olds, make fascists of children, get them while they’re young. It’s awful.”
“It is. But must is what I meant. One must take part, otherwise, they come after you.”
“What do you do?”
“Organize things, make plans—for parades, or mass gymnastic exhibitions, or whatever it is that week. Sometimes I have to take them out to the countryside, thirty teenagers, for the harvest, or just to breathe the air of the German forest. We have a fire, and we sing, then some of them go off hand in hand into the woods. It’s all very Aryan.”
“Aryan?”
She laughed. “That’s how they think of it. Health and strength and Freiheit, freedom of the body. We’re supposed to encourage that, because the Nazis want them to breed. If they don’t wish to marry, they should go and find a lonely soldier and get pregnant. To make more soldiers. Herr Hitler will need all he can get, once we go to war.”
“And when is that?”
“Oh, that they don’t tell us. Soon, I would think. If a man is looking for a fight, sooner or later he’ll find it. We thought it would be the Czechs, but Hitler was handed what he wanted, so now, maybe, the Poles. Lately he screams at them, on the radio, and the Propaganda Ministry puts stories in the newspapers: those poor Germans in Danzig, beaten up by Polish gangs. It isn’t subtle.”
“If he goes for them, the British and the French will declare war.”
“Yes, I expect they will.”
“They’ll close the border, Christa.”
She turned and, for a moment, met his eyes. Finally, she said, “Yes, I know.” A last look at herself in the mirror, then she returned the comb to her purse, hunted around for a moment, and brought out a piece of jewelry, holding it up for Weisz to see. “My Hakenkreuz, all the ladies wear one, out where I live.” On a silver chain, a swastika made of old silver, with a diamond on each of the four bars.
“How beautiful,” Weisz said.
“Von Schirren gave it to me.”
“Is he in the party?”
“Heavens no! He’s old, rich Prussia, they hate Hitler.”
“But he stays.”
“Of course he stays, Carlo. Maybe he could’ve left three years ago, but there was still hope, then, that somebody would see the light and get rid of the Nazis. From the beginning, in ’thirty-three, nobody here could believe what they were doing, that they could get away with it. But now, to cross the border would be to lose everything. Every house, every bank account, every horse, the servants. My dogs. Everything. Mother, father, family. To do what? Press pants in London? Meanwhile, life here goes on, and in the next minute, Hitler will reach too far, and the army will step in. Tomorrow, maybe. Or the next day. This is what von Schirren says, and he knows things.”
“Do you love him, Christa?”
“I am very fond of him, he’s a good man, a gentleman of old Europe, and he’s given me a place in life. I couldn’t go on any longer, living the way I did.”
“Everything else aside, I fear for you.”
She shook her head, put the Hakenkreuz back in her purse, closed the flap, and snapped the button shut. “No, no, Carlo, don’t do that. This nightmare will end, this government will fall, and then, well, one will be free to do what one wants.”
“I’m not so sure it will fall.”
“Oh, it will.” She lowered her voice and leaned toward him. “And, I guess I can say this, there are a few of us in this city who might even give it a little push.”
Weisz was at the Reuters office, at the end of the Wilhelmstrasse, by eight-thirty the next morning. The other two reporters hadn’t come in yet, but he was greeted by the two secretaries, both in their twenties, who, according to Delahanty, spoke perfect English and French and could get along in other languages if they had to. “We are so happy for Herr Wolf, will he return with his bride?” Weisz didn’t know—he doubted Wolf would do that, but he couldn’t say it. He sat in Wolf’s chair and read the morning news, in the thinking man’s newspapers, the Berlin Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung and Goebbels’s Das Reich. Not much there, Dr. Goebbels writing of the potential replacement of Chamberlain by Churchill, that “swapping horses in midstream is bad enough, but swapping an ass for a bull would be fatal.” For the rest, it was whatever the Propaganda Ministry wanted to say that day. So, government-controlled newspapers, nothing new there.
But control of the press could have unexpected consequences—Weisz recalled the classic example, the end of the Great War. The surrender of 1918 had sent waves of shock and anger through the German public. After all, they had read every day that their armies were victorious in the field, then, suddenly, the government capitulated. How could this happen? The infamous Dolchstoss, the stab in the back, that was the reason—political manipulation at home had undermined their brave soldiers and dishonored their sacrifice. So it was the Jews and the Communists, those crafty political guttersnipe, who were responsible for the defeat. This the German public believed. And the table was set for Hitler.
Done with the newspapers, Weisz started on the press releases, stacked in Wolf’s in box. He tried to make himself concentrate, but he couldn’t. What was Christa doing? Her lowered voice would not leave him—give them a little push. That meant clandestine business, conspiracy, resistance. Under the rule of the Nazis and their secret police, Germany had become a counterintelligence state, eager informers, and agents provocateurs, everywhere, did she know what could happen to her? Yes, she knew, damn her aristocratic eyes, but these people were not going to tell Christa Zameny von Schirren what she could and couldn’t do. Blood told, he thought, and told hard. But was it so different from what he was doing? It is, he thought. But it wasn’t, and he knew it.
The office door was open, but one of the secretaries stood at the threshold and knocked politely on the frame. “Herr Weisz?”
“Yes, uh…”
“I’m Gerda, Herr Weisz. You are to have a meeting, at the Propaganda Ministry press club, at eleven this morning, with Herr Doktor Martz.”
“Thank you, Gerda.”
•
Leaving time for a leisurely walk, Weisz headed down the Leipzigerstrasse toward the new press club. Passing Wertheim’s, the vast block-long department store, he stopped for a moment to watch a window dresser taking down a display of anti-Soviet books and posters—book titles outlined in flames, posters showing garish Bolshevik thugs with big hooked noses—and stacking them neatly on a handcart. When the window dresser stared back at him, Weisz went on his way.
Three years since he’d been in Berlin—was it different? The people on the street seemed prosperous, well fed, well dressed, but there was something in the air, not exactly fear, that reached him. It was as though they all had a secret, the same secret, but it was somehow unwise to let others know you had it. Berlin had always looked official—various kinds of police, tram conductors, zookeepers—but now it was a city dressed for war. Uniforms everywhere: the SS in black with lightning-flash insignia, Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine, Luftwaffe, others he didn’t recognize. When a pair of SA storm troopers, in brown tunics and trousers, and caps with chin str
aps, came toward him, nobody seemed to change direction, but a path opened for them, almost magically, on the crowded sidewalk.
He stopped at a newspaper stand, where rows of magazines displayed on the kiosk caught his attention. Faith and Beauty, The Dance, Modern Photography, all their covers showing nude women engaged in wholesome activities of one sort or another. The Nazi administration, on assuming power in 1933, had immediately banned pornography, but here was their version of it, meant to stimulate the male population, as Christa had suggested, to hop on the nearest Fräulein and produce a soldier.
At the press club—the former Foreigners’ Club on Leipzigerplatz—Dr. Martz was the merriest man alive, fat and sparkling, dark, with a toothbrush mustache and active, chubby hands. “Come, let me show you around!” he sang. Here was a journalist’s heaven, with a sumptuous restaurant, loudspeakers to page reporters, reading rooms with newspapers from every major city, workrooms with long rows of desks bearing typewriters and telephones. “For you, we have everything!”
They settled in red leather easy chairs in a lounge by the restaurant, and were immediately served coffee and a huge platter of Viennese coffee buns, babka, moist, buttery cake rolled around crushed walnuts flavored with cinnamon and sugar, or a ribbon of thick almond paste. Surprising, Weisz, that you became a Nazi. Oh, it’s a long story. “Have another, oh go ahead, who’s to know.” Well, maybe one more.
And that was just for starters. Martz gave him his own red identification card. “If you have a problem with a policeman, God forbid, just show him this.” Did he want tickets to the opera, or a film, or anything? “You need only ask.” Also, filing dispatches here was gloriously easy, there was a counter at the Propaganda Ministry, leave your story there and it would be cabled, uncensored, back to your office. “Of course,” Martz said, “we will read what you write in the newspapers, and we expect you to be fair. Two sides to every story, right?”
