by Alan Furst
“Go two more streets, then slow down and turn right. It’s a narrow alley, but a car goes through.”
“What’s going on?” Hamilton said.
“The car must be hidden,” Weisz said. “Simard, do you want to go to a hospital?”
“This morning? No, a private doctor, the hotel will know.”
Weisz took the Guide Bleu and looked at a street sign. “Can you walk?”
Simard made a face, then nodded—he could if he had to.
“Where we turn, we can get out. It’s a short walk to the hotels.”
From a window in a baroque parlor at the Zlata Husa, Carlo Weisz watched the Wehrmacht parade up the broad boulevard in front of the hotel, red-and-black swastika flags stark against the white snowfall. Later in the day, the journalists gathered in the bar and traded news. The president, Emil Hacha, aged and in ill health, had been summoned to Berlin, where Hitler and Goering had screamed at him for hours, swearing they would bomb the city of Prague into ashes, until the old man fainted. Hitler feared they’d killed him, the story went, but he was revived, and forced to sign papers that made it all legitimate—diplomatic crisis resolved! The army stayed in its barracks, because the Czech defenses, up north in the Sudetenland, had been given away at Munich. Meanwhile, in newspapers across the Continent, the snowstorm had been named “God’s Judgment.”
In Berlin, late in the afternoon, Christa von Schirren telephoned the Reuters bureau. News on the radio foretold that Weisz would not be at the Adlon that day, but she wanted to make sure. The secretary was not unkind. No, Herr Weisz could not come to the telephone, he had left the city. Still, there was to have been a letter, and she fretted about that, finally going to the Adlon and asking if a message had been left for her. At the front desk, the assistant manager seemed troubled, and did not answer immediately, as though, despite the many ways, so native to his vocation, of saying things without saying them, there were, nowadays, things that could not be said at all. “I am sorry, madam, but there is no message.”
No, she thought, he would not do that. It was, something else.
In Prague, Weisz wrote out his cable in block letters. TODAY, THE ANCIENT CITY OF PRAGUE CAME UNDER GERMAN OCCUPATION, AND RESISTANCE BEGAN. IN THE OLD TOWN DISTRICT, TWO STUDENTS…
And the cable back said: GOOD WORK SEND MORE DELAHANTY END.
18 March, near the city of Tarbes, southwestern France.
Late in the morning, S. Kolb peered out at an arid countryside, rocks and brush, and wiped the beads of sweat from his brow. The man once said to have “the balls of a gorilla” sat, at that moment, straight as a stick, rigid with fear. Yes, he could live the subterranean life, hunted by police and secret agents, and yes, he could survive amid the tenements and back alleys of perilous cities, but now he was engaged in the one task that squeezed his heart with terror: he was driving an automobile.
Worse, a beautiful, valuable automobile, hired at a garage on the edge of Tarbes. “So very much money,” the garagiste had said in a melancholy voice, one hand resting on the car’s polished hood. “I must accept it. But, monsieur, I beg of you, you will be careful with it. Please.”
Kolb tried. Hurtling along at twenty miles an hour, hands white on the steering wheel, one twitch of his tired foot producing a horrible roar and a breathtaking burst of speed. Suddenly, from behind, the thunderous blast of a Klaxon horn. Kolb glanced in the rearview mirror, where a monster of a car filled the frame; close, closer still, its giant chrome grille leering at him. Kolb jerked the wheel over hard and jammed his foot onto the brake pedal, stopping at a peculiar angle on the side of the road. As the tormentor sped past, it issued a second blast on its horn. Learn to drive, you worm!
An hour later, Kolb found the village south of Toulouse. From here, he needed directions. He’d been told that the elusive Colonel Ferrara had slipped across the Spanish border into France, where, like thousands of other refugees, he’d been interned. The French found the expression concentration camp distasteful so, to them, a guarded barbed-wire enclosure was an assembly center. And that was what Kolb called it, first at the village boulangerie. No, never heard of such a place. Oh? Well, anyhow, he would have one of those well-done baguettes. Mmm, better make it two—no, three. Next he stopped at the crémerie. A slab of that hard, yellow cheese, s’il vous plaît. And that round one, goat? No, ewe. He’d have that, as well. Oh, and by the way…But, in answer, only an eloquent shrug, nothing like that here. At the grocery, after the purchase of two bottles of red wine filled from a spout in a wood cask, the same story. Finally, at the tabac, the woman behind the counter looked away and shook her head, but when Kolb stepped outside, a young woman, likely the daughter, followed him and drew a map on a scrap of paper. As Kolb walked back toward the car he heard, from within the store, the beginning of a good family fight.
Under way once again, Kolb tried to follow the map. But these weren’t roads, these were paths, sand bordered by brush. Was this the left? No, it ended suddenly, at a rock wall. So then, back up, the car whining, unhappy, the rocks hurt its handsome tires. In time, after a frightful hour, he found it. High barbed wire, Senegalese guards, dozens of men shuffling slowly to the wire to see who might be coming in the big automobile.
Kolb talked his way past the gate and found an office with a commandant, a French colonial officer with a drunk’s purplish nose and bloodshot eyes, glaring suspiciously from the other side of a plank desk. Who consulted a well-thumbed typewritten list and, finally, said yes, we have this individual here, what do you want with him? Credit the SIS, Kolb thought. Someone had descended deep into the catacombs of the French bureaucracy and managed, miraculously, to find the single bone he needed.
A family tragedy, Kolb explained. His wife’s brother, that foolish dreamer, had gone off to fight in Spain and now found himself interned. What was to be done? This poor fellow was needed back in Italy to run the family business, a successful business, a wine brokerage in Naples. And, worse yet, the wife was pregnant, and sickly. How she, how they all, needed him! Of course there were expenses, that was well understood, his lodging, and food, and care, so generously supplied by the camp administration, had to be paid for, and they would see to that. A fat envelope was produced and laid on the desk. The bloodshot eyes widened, and the envelope was opened, revealing a thick wad of hundred-franc notes—a lot of money. Kolb, at his most diffident, said he hoped it would be sufficient.
As the envelope disappeared into a pocket, the commandant said, “Shall I have him brought here?” Kolb said he’d prefer to go and look for him, and a sergeant was summoned. It took a long time to find Ferrara—the camp stretched out endlessly, a flat wasteland of sand and rock, open to a cutting wind. There were no women to be seen, evidently they were held elsewhere. The internees were of every age, hollow-cheeked—obviously underfed, unshaven, their clothes in tatters. Some wore blankets, against the cold, some stood in groups, others sat on the ground, playing cards, using torn strips of newspaper marked with pencil. Behind one of the barracks, a sagging net, tied to two poles, hung half on the ground. Maybe they’d had a volleyball, Kolb thought, months earlier, when they were first brought here.
Wandering past the groups of internees, Kolb heard mostly Spanish, but also German, Serbo-Croatian, and Hungarian. From time to time, one of the men would ask for a cigarette, and Kolb gave away what he’d bought at the tabac, then simply held his open hands out. Sorry, no more. The sergeant was persistent. “Have you seen the man called Ferrara? An Italian?” Thus, at last he was found, sitting with a friend, leaning against the wall of a barracks. Kolb thanked the sergeant, who saluted, then headed back toward the office.
Ferrara was dressed as a civilian—a soiled jacket and trousers with ragged cuffs—his hair and beard chopped off, as though he’d done the cutting himself. But, nonetheless, he was clearly somebody, stood out from the crowd—curving scar, sharp cheekbones, eyes hooded. Kolb had been told to expect black gloves, but Ferrara’s hands were bare, the left one disfigured by
the ridged skin, pink and shiny, of a badly healed burn. “Colonel Ferrara,” Kolb said, and, in French, wished him good morning.
Both men stared at him, then Ferrara said, “And you are?” His French was very slow, but correct.
“I’m called Kolb.”
Ferrara waited for more. And so?
“I wonder if we could talk for a moment. Just the two of us.”
Ferarra said something to his friend in fast Italian, then stood up.
They walked together, past clusters of men, who glanced at Kolb, then looked away. When they were alone, Ferrara turned, faced Kolb, and said, “First of all, Monsieur Kolb, you can tell me who sent you here.”
“Friends of yours, in Paris.”
“I have no friends in Paris.”
“Carlo Weisz, the Reuters journalist, considers himself your friend.”
For a time, Ferrara thought about it. “Well, maybe,” he said.
“I’ve arranged your release,” Kolb said. “You can come back to Paris with me, if you like.”
“You work for Reuters?”
“Sometimes. My job is to find people.”
“A confidential agent.”
“Something like that.”
After a moment, Ferrara said, “Paris.” Then: “Perhaps by way of Italy.” His smile was ice cold.
“No, it isn’t that,” Kolb said. “There’d be three or four of us, if it was. There’s just me. From here we go to Tarbes, then to Paris by train. I have a car, outside the gate, you can drive it if you want.”
“You said ‘arranged,’ what did that mean?”
“Money, Colonel.”
“Reuters paid for this?”
“No, Weisz and his friends. Emigrés.”
“Why would they do that?”
“For politics. They want you to tell your story, they want you to be a hero against the fascists.”
Ferrara didn’t quite laugh, but he stopped walking and met Kolb’s eyes. “You’re serious, aren’t you.”
“I am. And so are they. They’ve found you a place to stay, in Paris. What kind of papers do you have?”
“An Italian passport,” Ferrara said, the irony still in his voice.
“Good. So then, let’s be going, these things work better if you move quickly.”
Ferrara shook his head. Here was a sudden turn of fate, yes, but what sort of fate? So, stay? Go? Finally, he said, “Allright, yes, why not.”
As they walked back toward the barracks, Ferrara turned and gestured to his friend, who’d been following them, and the two men spoke for a time, the friend staring at Kolb as though to memorize him. Ferrara, in the stream of Italian, mentioned Kolb’s name, and his friend repeated it. Then Ferrara went into the barracks and emerged with a bundle of clothing, tied with a string. “It’s long past being worn,” he said, “but it does for a pillow.” When they reached the car, Kolb offered him the food he’d bought. Ferrara gathered up almost all of it, except for half a bread, said, “I’ll just be a minute,” and walked back through the gate.
As it happened, Ferrara did drive the automobile, after he got a taste of Kolb behind the wheel, thus it took only twenty minutes to reach the village, and then, an hour later, they left the car at the garage and took a taxi into Tarbes. Near the station, they found a haberdashery, where Ferrara selected a suit, shirt, underwear, everything but shoes—his army boots had survived well in the camp—and Kolb paid for it. As Ferrara changed, in the back of the store, the owner said, “He was in the camp, I imagine, they often come here, if they’re lucky enough to get out.” After a moment, he said, “A disgrace, for France.”
By late afternoon, they were on the train to Paris. In the last light of day, the arid south gave way slowly to patches of snow on plowed fields, to the soft hill country of the Limousin—pollarded trees lining little roads that wound away into the distance. Invitations, Kolb thought. They spoke, now and again, about the times they lived in. Ferrara explained that he’d learned French in the camp, to pass the empty hours, and for his new life as an émigré—if the government let him stay. He’d been in Paris once before, years earlier, but Kolb could tell from his voice that he remembered it and that now, for him, it meant refuge. He was, at times, still suspicious of Kolb, but then, this was not unusual. Somehow, Kolb’s work lingered in his presence, the cast shadow of a secret life, and could, however faintly, be apprehended. “Have you really,” Ferrara said, “been sent by the—how to say, what we call the fuorusciti?” Which meant—and it took both of them a few minutes to figure out the words—“those who have fled,” the Italian émigrés’ preferred description of themselves.
“Yes. They know all about you, of course.” Surely they did, so at least that much was true, though everything else that Kolb had said was pure lies. “And that’s what they want, your story.” Anyhow, that’s what we want.
But let’s not concern ourselves with such things, Kolb thought, there would be plenty of time, later on, for the truth, better just then to watch the winter valleys, in their faded colors, as they drifted by to the rhythm of the wheels on the track.
•
It was just breaking dawn when they reached Paris, red streaks of light in the eastern sky, the street sweepers, old women, mostly, at work with twig brooms and water trucks. At the Gare de Lyon, Kolb found a taxi, which took them up to the Sixth Arrondissement and the Hotel Tournon, on the street of the same name.
The SIS had likely thought a long time, Kolb suspected, about where to put Ferrara. In superb accommodations? Overawe their newest pawn? Knock him senseless with luxury? With war coming, the treasury had perhaps opened its fist a little, but the Secret Intelligence Service had been starved all through the thirties, and they’d had to think hard about money—only Hitler could really open the bank, and, for the moment, though he’d snatched Czechoslovakia, it didn’t really matter all that much. Therefore, the Hotel Tournon—get him a decent room, Harry, nothing too grand. And the neighborhood was also, for their purposes, rather convenient, because Pawn Two lived there, and would be able to walk to work. Make it easy, keep them both happy, life went better that way.
Still, SIS rich or poor, the night clerk had been well greased. She rose from her couch in the lobby when Kolb hammered on the door, then appeared, in frightful housedress, wild auburn hair, and magnificent breath, to let them in. “Ah, mais oui! Le nouveau monsieur pour numéro huit!” Yes, here’s the new roomer in number eight, such generous friends, surely he would be, too.
Up a flight of creaky wooden stairs, the room was spacious, with a tall window. Ferrara walked around, sat on the bed, opened the shutters so he could look out on the sleeping courtyard. Not bad, not bad at all, certainly not a tiny room in the apartment of some fuorusciti, and not a dirt-cheap hotel packed with Italian refugees. “Emigrés?” Ferrara said, clearly skeptical. “They paid for this?”
From Kolb, a shrug, and the most angelic of smiles. May all your abductions be so sweet, my little lamb. “You like it?” Kolb said.
“Of course I like it.” Ferrara left the rest unsaid.
“Well then,” Kolb replied, himself no slouch at leaving things unsaid.
Ferrara hung his jacket up on the hanger in the armoire, and took from his pockets his passport, a few papers, and a sepia photograph of his wife and three children in a cardboard frame. It had, at some point, been bent, and straightened out, so the photograph was broken across the upper corner.
“Your family?”
“Yes,” Ferrara said. “But their lives go on a long way from mine—it’s been more than two years since I last saw them.” He put the passport in the bottom drawer of the armoire, closed the door, and rested the photograph on the windowsill. “And that’s that,” he said.
Kolb, who knew too well what he meant, nodded in sympathy.
“I left a lot behind, crossing the Pyrenees on foot, at night, then the people who arrested me took pretty much everything else.” He shrugged and said, “So, I’m forty-seven years old, and that�
�s what I have.”
“The times we live in, Colonel,” Kolb said. “Now, I think, we’ll go to the café downstairs, for coffee with hot milk, and a tartine.” Which was a long, skinny bread. Cut in half. And amply buttered.
19 March.
The seers of weather predicted the rainiest spring of the century, and so it was when Carlo Weisz returned to Paris. It dripped off the brim of his hat, ran in the gutters, and did nothing to improve his state of mind. From train to Métro and then to the Hotel Dauphine, he thought up a dozen useless schemes to bring Christa von Schirren to Paris, not one of which was worth a sou. But he would, at least, write her a letter—a disguised letter, as though it came from an aunt, or an old school friend, perhaps, traveling in Europe, pausing in Paris, and collecting mail at the American Express office.
Delahanty was happy to see him that afternoon, he’d scored a beat on the opposition with the resistance in Prague story, though the London Times had run a version of it the following day. From Delahanty, the old saw, “Nothing quite like being shot at, if they miss.”
Salamone was also happy to see him, though not for long, when they met at the bar near his office. Raindrops, lit red by the neon sign, ran slowly down the window, and the bar dog shook off a great spray of water when she was let in the door. “Welcome back,” Salamone said. “I assume you’re glad to be out of there.”
“A nightmare,” Weisz said. “And no surprise. But, no matter how much you read the papers, you don’t know about the little things, not unless you go there—what people say when they can’t say what they want to, how they look at you, how they look away. And then, after two weeks of that, I went to Prague, where they’ve been occupied, and they know what it will mean for them.”
“Suicides,” Salamone said. “So it’s reported in the newspapers here. Hundreds of them, Jews, others. The ones who didn’t get out in time.”
