The Foreign Correspondent

by Alan Furst

  There were no tears, only that she would miss him, and he realized, just at that moment, how much he’d liked her, what good times they’d had together, in bed and out.

  “Someone you met in Berlin, Carlo?”

  “Someone I met a long time ago.”

  “A second chance?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Very rare, the second chance.” You won’t get one here.

  “I will miss you,” he said.

  “You’re sweet, to say that.”

  “It’s true, I’m not just saying it.”

  A melancholy smile, a lift of the eyebrows.

  “May I call you, sometime, to see how you’re doing?”

  She put a hand, also soft, and warm, on his, by way of telling him what a jackass he’d just been, then stood up and said, “My coat?”

  He helped her on with her coat, she turned, shook out her hair so that it fell properly over her collar, rose to give him a dry kiss on the lips, and, hands in pockets, walked out the door. When, later, he left the café, from the woman behind the cash register, another melancholy smile, another lift of the eyebrows.

  The following day, he forced himself to deal with the list he’d brought out of Berlin. Leaving the office at lunchtime, he took an endless Métro ride out to the Porte de Clignancourt, wandered through the flea market, and bought a valise. It had been born cheap—cardboard covered with pebbled fabric—then lived a long, hard life; a tag on the handle evidence of a stay at a railway baggage room in Odessa.

  That done, he walked and walked, past stalls of prodigious furniture and racks of old clothes, until, at last, he found an old gent with a goatee and a dozen typewriters. He tried them all, even the red Mignon portable, and finally chose a Remington with a French, AZERTY, keyboard, haggled a little, put it in the valise, dropped it off at the hotel, and returned to the office.

  Long hours, the spy business. After an evening with Ferrara—the troop transport to Ethiopia, the misgivings of a fellow officer—Weisz walked back to the Dauphine, took the list from its hiding place, beneath the bottom drawer of his armoire, and went to work. The thing was a bear to retype, the old ribbon had barely any ink, and he had to do it twice. Finally, he typed two envelopes, one to the French Foreign Ministry, the other to the British embassy, added stamps, and went to bed. They would know what had been done—French keyboard, umlauts put in by hand, local mailing—but Weisz didn’t so much care, by that point, what anybody did with it. What he did care about was keeping his word to the man in the park, if he was still alive, and especially if he wasn’t.

  It was very late by the time he finished, but he wanted badly to be done with the whole business, so he burned the list, flushed the ashes down the toilet, and set out to dispose of the typewriter. Valise in hand, he walked down the stairs and out into the street. Harder than he thought, to lose a valise—people everywhere, and the last thing he wanted was some Frenchman running after him, waving his arms and crying, “Monsieur!” At last he found a deserted alley, set the valise by a wall, and walked away.

  14 April, 3:30 A.M. Weisz stood at the corner where the rue Dauphine met the quay above the Seine and waited for Salamone. And waited. Now what? It was the fault of that accursed Renault, old and mean. Why did nobody in his world ever have anything new? Everything in their lives was worn-out, used up, hadn’t really worked right for a long time. Fuck this, he thought, I’ll go to America. Where he would be poor again, in the midst of wealth. That was the old story, for Italian immigrants—the famous postcard back to Italy saying, “Not only are the streets not paved with gold, they are not paved, and we are expected to pave them.”

  The line of thought was interrupted by the coughing engine of Salamone’s car, and darkness pierced by one headlight. Butting the door open with his shoulder, Salamone said, by way of greeting, “Ché palle!” What balls! Meaning, what balls life has to do this to me! Then, “You have it?”

  Yes, he had it, the 10 April Liberazione, a sheaf of paper in his briefcase. They drove along the Seine, then turned and took the bridge across the river, working through small streets until they came to the all-night café near the Gare de Lyon. The conductor was waiting for them, drinking an apéritif and reading a newspaper. Weisz brought him to the car, where he sat in the backseat and spent a few minutes with them. “Now that cazzo”—that prick—“has us in Albania,” he said, sliding the Liberazione into a trainman’s leather case he wore over his shoulder. “And he’s got my poor nephew there, with the army. A kid, seventeen years old, a very good kid, sweet-natured, and they’ll surely kill him, those fucking goat thieves. Is that in here?” He tapped the leather case.

  “Very much in there,” Weisz said.

  “I’ll read it on my way down.”

  “Tell Matteo we’re thinking about him.” Salamone meant their Linotype operator in Genoa.

  “Poor Matteo.”

  “What’s gone wrong?” Salamone’s voice was tight.

  “It’s his shoulder. He can barely raise his arm.”

  “He hurt it?”

  “No, he’s getting old, and you know what Genoa’s like. Cold and damp, and the coal is hard to find these days, and it costs an arm and a leg.”

  14 April, 10:40 A.M. On the 7:15 to Genoa, the conductor made his way to the baggage car and sat on a trunk. Finding himself alone, with no stop until Lyons, he lit a panatella and settled in to read Liberazione. Some of it he knew already, and the editorial was puzzling. What were the Germans doing? Working for the security? So what? They were no different than the Italians, and they should all burn in hell. But the cartoon made him laugh out loud, and he liked the piece about the Albanian invasion. Yes, he thought, give it to them good.

  15 April, 1:20 A.M. The printing plant of Il Secolo, Genoa’s daily newspaper, was not far from the giant refineries, on the road to the port, and tank cars were shunted back and forth all night long on the railway track behind the building. Il Secolo, in better days, had been the oldest democratic newspaper in Italy, then, in 1923, a forced sale had brought it under fascist management, and the editorial policy had changed. But Matteo, and many of the people he worked with, had not changed. As he finished up a run of leaflets for the Genoa association of fascist pharmacists, the production foreman stopped by to say good night. “You almost done?”

  “Almost.”

  “Well, see you tomorrow.”

  “Good night.”

  Matteo waited a few minutes, then started the setup for a run of Liberazione. What was it this time? Albania, yes, everybody agreed about that. “Why? To grab four rocks?” So the latest line in the piazza—in the public square, thus everywhere. You heard it on the bus, you heard it in the cafés. Matteo took great satisfaction in his night printing, even though it was dangerous, because he was one of those people who really didn’t like being pushed around, and that was the fascist specialty: making you do what they wanted, then smiling at you. Well, he thought, setting the controls, then pulling a lever to print a sample copy, sit on this. And spin.

  16 April, 2:15 P.M. Antonio, who drove his coal-delivery truck from Genoa down to Rapallo, didn’t read Liberazione, because he couldn’t read. Well, not exactly, but anything written took him a long time to figure out, and there were a lot of words in this newspaper that he didn’t know. The delivery of these bundles was his wife’s idea—her sister lived in Rapallo and was married to a Jewish man who used to own a small hotel—and it had, without question, increased his stature in her eyes. Maybe she’d had some doubts when she’d faced the fact, two months pregnant, that it was definitely time to get married, but not so much these days. Nothing was said, in the house, but he could feel the change. Women had ways of letting you know something without actually saying it.

  The road to Rapallo ran straight, past the town of Santa Margherita, but Antonio slowed down and hauled the wheel around to turn onto a dirt road that ran up into the hills, to the village of Torriglia. Just outside the village was a big, fancy house, the country
villa of a Genoese lawyer, whose daughter, Gabriella, went to school in Genoa. One of these bundles was hers to distribute. All of sixteen years old, she was, and something to look at. Not that he, a married man and the mere owner of a coal truck, had any notion of trying anything, but he liked her just the same, and she had a very appealing way about her when she looked at him. You are a hero, something like that. For a man like Antonio, pretty rare, very nice. He hoped she was careful, fooling around with this smuggling business, because the police in Genoa were pretty tough customers. Well, maybe not all of them, but many.

  17 April, 3:30 P.M. At the Sacred Heart Academy for Girls, in the best neighborhood of Genoa, field hockey was compulsory. So Gabriella spent the late afternoon running about in bloomers, waving at a ball with a stick, and calling out instructions to her teammates, which they rarely followed. After twenty minutes, the girls were red-faced and damp, and Sister Perpetua told them to sit down and cool off. Gabriella sat on the grass, next to her friend Lucia, and informed her that the new Liberazione had arrived, hidden at her country house, but she had, in her locker, ten copies for Lucia and her secret boyfriend, a young policeman.

  “I’ll get them later,” Lucia said.

  “Give them out quickly,” Gabriella said. Lucia could be lazy, and required an occasional prod.

  “Yes, yes. I know, I will.” Nothing to be done with Gabriella, a force of nature, best not to resist.

  Gabriella was the saint-in-training of the Sacred Heart Academy. She knew what was right, and, when you knew what was right, you had to do it. This was the most important thing in life, and always would be. The fascists, as she’d seen, were brutal men, and wicked. And wickedness had always to be overcome, otherwise the lovely things in the world, beauty, truth, and romance, would all be ruined, and nobody would want to live in it. After school, she rode her bicycle the long way home, newspapers folded beneath her schoolbooks in the basket, stopping at a trattoria, a grocery, and a telephone booth at the post office.

  19 April, 7:10 A.M. Lieutenant DeFranco, a detective in the rough waterfront district of Genoa, visited the WC at the precinct house at this time every morning, the high wooden stall an island in the general bustle that accompanied the arrival of the day shift. The station had been renovated two years earlier—the fascist government cared for the comforts of its policemen—and new, sit-down toilets had been installed, to replace the old porcelain squares. Lieutenant De-Franco lit a cigarette and reached behind the bowl to see if there was anything to read today and, luck was with him, there was, a copy of Liberazione.

  As always, he wondered idly who’d put it there, but that was hard to figure out. Some of the policemen were Communists, so maybe one of them, or it might be anybody, against the regime for whatever reason, idealism or revenge, because these days, people were quiet about such feelings. On the first page, Albania, cartoon, editorial. They weren’t so wrong, he thought, not that there was much to be done about it. In time, Mussolini would falter, and the other wolves would be on him. That was, had always been, the way in this part of the world. One simply had to wait, but, while you waited, something to read with your morning ritual.

  At ten-thirty that morning, he visited a dockside bar that catered to the stevedores of the port, to have a chat with a petty thief, who now and again passed along a few bits of local gossip. No longer young, the thief believed that when he was eventually caught, climbing in a window somewhere, the law might go a little easier on him, maybe a year instead of two, and that was well worth the occasional chat with the neighborhood cop.

  “I was over at the vegetable market yesterday,” he said, leaning across the table. “The Cuozzo brothers’ place, you know?”

  “Yes,” DeFranco said. “I know it.”

  “I notice they’re still around.”

  “I believe they are.”

  “Because, well, you remember what I told you, right?”

  “That you sold them a rifle, a carbine, that you stole.”

  “I did, too. I wasn’t lying.”

  “And so?”

  “Well, they’re still there. Selling vegetables.”

  “We’re investigating. You wouldn’t be telling me how to do my job, would you?”

  “Lieutenant! Never! I just, you know, wondered.”

  “Don’t wonder, my friend, it isn’t good for you.”

  DeFranco himself wasn’t sure why he’d put the information aside. He could, if he applied himself, probably find the rifle and arrest the Cuozzo brothers—glum, pugnacious little men who worked from dawn to dusk. But he hadn’t done this. Why not? Because he wasn’t sure what they had in mind. He doubted they meant to use it for some simmering feud, he doubted they intended to resell it. Something else. They were forever, he’d heard, grumbling about the government. Could they be so foolish as to contemplate an armed uprising? Could such a thing actually happen?

  Maybe. There was, certainly, a fierce opposition. Only words, for the moment, but that could change. Look at this Liberazione crowd, what were they saying? Resist. Don’t give up. And they were not angry little vegetable merchants, they’d been important, respectable people, before Mussolini. Lawyers, professors, journalists—one didn’t rise to such professions by wishing on a star. In time, they might just prevail—they surely thought they would. With guns? Perhaps, depending how the world went. If Mussolini changed sides, and the Germans came down here, the best thing to have would be a rifle. So, for the moment, let the Cuozzo brothers keep it. Wait and see, he thought. Wait and see.

  20 APRIL, 1939.

  Il faut en finir.

  “There must be an end to this.” So said the customer in the chair next to Weisz, at Perini’s barbershop in the rue Mabillon. Not the rain, the politics—a popular sentiment that spring. Weisz had heard it at Mère this or Chez that, from Mme. Rigaud, proprietor of the Hotel Dauphine, from a dignified woman, to her companion, at Weisz’s café. The Parisians were in a sour mood: the news was never good, Hitler wouldn’t stop. Il faut en finir, true, though the nature of the ending was, in a particularly Gallic fashion, obscure—somebody must do something, and they were fed up with waiting for it.

  “It cannot continue,” the man in the next chair said. Perini held up a mirror so the man, turning left and right, could see the back of his head. “Yes,” he said, “looks good to me.” Perini nodded to the shoe-shine boy, who brought the man his cane, then helped him maneuver himself out of the chair. “They got me the last time,” he said to the men in the barbershop, “but we’ll have to do it all over again.” With a sympathetic murmur, Perini undid the protective sheet fastened at the customer’s neck, whipped it away, handed it to the shoe-shine boy, then took a whisk broom and gave the man’s suit a good brushing.

  Weisz was next. Perini tilted the chair back, nimbly drew a steaming towel from the metal heater and wrapped it around Weisz’s face. “As usual, Signor Weisz?”

  “Just a trim, please, not too much,” Weisz said, his voice muffled by the towel.

  “And a nice shave, for you?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Weisz hoped the man with the cane was wrong, but feared he wasn’t. The last war had been pure hell for the French, slaughter followed slaughter, until the troops could stand it no longer—there had been sixty-eight mutinies in the hundred-and-twelve French divisions. He tried to relax, the wet heat working its way into his skin. Somewhere behind him, Perini was humming opera, content with the world of his shop, believing that nothing could change that.

  On the twenty-first, a phone call at Reuters. “Carlo, it’s me, Véronique.”

  “I know your voice, love,” Weisz said gently. He was startled by the call. It had been ten days or so since they’d parted, and he’d expected that he’d never hear from her again.

  “I must see you,” she said. “Immediately.”

  What was this? She loved him? She couldn’t bear for him to leave her? Véronique? No, this was not the voice of lost love, something had frightened her. “What is i
t?” he said cautiously.

  “Not on the telephone. Please. Don’t make me tell you.”

  “Are you at the gallery?”

  “Yes. Forgive me for…”

  “It’s allright, don’t apologize, I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  As he passed Delahanty’s office, the bureau chief looked up from his work, but said nothing.

  When Weisz opened the door to the gallery, he heard heels clicking on the polished floor. “Carlo,” she said. She hesitated—an embrace? No, a brush kiss on each cheek, then a step back. This was a Véronique he’d never seen; tense, agitated, and vaguely hesitant—not entirely sure she was glad to see him.

  Standing to one side, a spectre of old, bygone Montmartre, with graying beard, and suit and cravat from the 1920s. “This is Valkenda,” she said, her voice implying great fame and stature. On the walls, swirling portraits of a dissolute waif, almost nude, covered here and there by a shawl.

  “Of course,” Weisz said. “Pleased to meet you.”

  As Valkenda bowed, his eyes closed.

  “We’ll go back to the office,” Véronique said.

  They sat on a pair of spindly gold chairs. “Valkenda?” Weisz said, with half a smile.

  Véronique shrugged. “They jump off the walls,” she said. “They pay the rent.”

  “Véronique, what’s happened?”

  “Ouf, I’m glad you’re here.” The words were followed by a mock shudder. “I had, this morning, the Sûreté.” She emphasized the word, of all things. “A dreadful little man, who showed up and, and, interrogated me.”