The Foreign Correspondent

by Alan Furst

  “About what?”

  “About you.”

  “What did he ask?”

  “Where did you live, who did you know. The details of your life.”

  “Why?”

  “I have no idea, you tell me.”

  “I meant, did he say why?”

  “No. Just that you were a ‘subject of interest’ in an investigation.”

  Pompon, Weisz thought. But why now? “A young man?” Weisz said. “Very neat and correct? Called Inspector Pompon?”

  “Oh no, not at all. He wasn’t young, and anything but neat—he had greasy hair, and dirt under his fingernails. And his name was something else.”

  “May I see his card?”

  “He didn’t leave a card—is that what they do?”

  “Generally, they do. What about the other one?”

  “What other one?”

  “He was alone? Usually, there are two of them.”

  “No, not this time. Just Inspector…something. It started with a D, I think. Or a B.”

  Weisz thought it over. “Are you sure he was from the Sûreté?”

  “He said he was. I believed him.” After a moment, she said, “More or less.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Oh, it’s just, snobisme, you know how that goes. I thought, is this the sort of man they employ, this, I don’t know, something crude, about him, about the way he looked at me.”

  “Crude?”

  “The way he spoke. He was not, overly educated. And not a Parisian—we can hear it.”

  “Was he French?”

  “Oh yes, certainly he was. From down south somewhere.” She paused, her face changed, and she said, “A fraud, you think? What then? Do you owe somebody money? And I don’t mean a bank.”

  “A gangster.”

  “Not the movie sort, but his eyes were never still. Up and down, you know? Maybe he thought it was seductive, or charming.” From the expression on her face, the man had not been anything like “charming.” “Who was he, Carlo?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Please, we’re not, strangers, you and I. You think you know who he was.”

  What to tell her? How much? “It may have something to do with Italian politics, émigré politics. There are people who don’t like us.”

  Her eyes widened. “But wouldn’t he be afraid you’d figure it out? That he’d said he was from the Sûreté when he was, an imposter?”

  “Well,” Weisz said, “to these people, it wouldn’t matter. It might be better. Did he say you had to keep it to yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “Of course not, I had to tell you.”

  “Not everybody would, you know,” Weisz said. He was silent for a moment. She had been courageous, on his behalf, and the way he met her eyes let her know he appreciated that. “You see, it works either way—I’m suspected of something criminal, so your feelings about me are changed, or you tell me, and I have to worry about the fact that I’m being investigated.”

  She thought about what he’d said, puzzled for a moment, then understanding. “That is, Carlo, a very ugly thing to do.”

  His smile was grim. “Yes, isn’t it,” he said.

  Heading back to the office, Weisz stood swaying in a crowded Métro car, the faces around him pale and blank, and private. There was a poem about that, by some American who loved Mussolini. What was it—faces like, like “petals on a wet, black bough.” He tried to remember the rest of it, but the man who’d questioned Véronique wouldn’t leave him alone. Maybe he was exactly who he’d said he was. Weisz’s experience of the Sûreté went no further than the two inspectors who’d interrogated him, but there were others, likely all sorts. Still, he’d come alone, and left no card, no telephone number. Never mind the Sûreté, this was not the way police anywhere operated. Information was often best recollected in private, later on, and flics all the world over knew it.

  He didn’t want to face what came next. That this was the OVRA, operating from a clandestine station in Paris, using French agents, and launching a new attack against the giellisti. Getting rid of Bottini hadn’t worked, so they’d try something else. The timing was right, they’d seen the new Liberazione a week earlier, and here was their response. It worked. From the time he’d left the gallery he’d been apprehensive, literally and figuratively looking over his shoulder. So, he told himself, they got what they came for. And he knew it wouldn’t stop there.

  He left work at six, saw Salamone at the bar and told him what had happened, and was at the Tournon, with Ferrara, by seven-forty-five. All he’d had to do was forget about dinner, but, the way he felt by nightfall, he wasn’t all that hungry.

  Being with Ferrara made him feel better. Weisz had begun to see Mr. Brown’s point about the colonel—the antifascist forces weren’t all fumbling intellectuals with eyeglasses and too many books, they had warriors, real warriors, on their side. And Soldier for Freedom was moving along swiftly, had now reached Ferrara’s flight to Marseilles.

  Weisz sat on one chair, with the new Remington they’d bought him on the other, between his knees, while Ferrara paced about the room, sitting sometimes on the edge of the bed, then pacing again. “It was strange to be on my own,” he said. “The military life keeps you occupied, tells you what to do next. Everybody complains about it, makes fun of it, but it has its comforts. When I left Ethiopia…we talked about the ship, the Greek tanker, right?”

  “Yes. Big, fat Captain Karazenis, the great smuggler.”

  Ferrara grinned at the memory. “You mustn’t make him out too much of a scoundrel. I mean, he was, but it was a pleasure to be around him, his answer to the cruel world was to steal it blind.”

  “That’s how he’ll be, in the book. Called only ‘the Greek captain.’”

  Ferrara nodded. “Anyhow, we had engine trouble off the Ligurian coast. Somewhere around Livorno. That was a bad day—what if we had to put into an Italian port? Would one of the crew give me away? And Karazenis liked to play games with me, said he had a girlfriend in Livorno. But, in the end, we made it, just made it, into Marseilles, and I went to a hotel in the port.”

  “What hotel was that?”

  “I’m not sure it had a name, the sign said ‘Hotel.’”

  “I’ll leave it out.”

  “I never knew you could stay anywhere for so little money. Bed bugs, yes, and lice. But you know the old saying: ‘Filth, like hunger, only matters for eight days.’ And I was there for months, and then–”

  “Wait, wait, not so fast.”

  They worked away at it, Weisz hammering on the keys, churning out pages. At eleven-thirty, they decided to call it quits. The air in the room was smoky and still, Ferrara opened the shutters, then the window, letting in a rush of cold night air. He leaned out, looking up and down the street.

  “What’s so interesting?” Weisz said, putting on his jacket.

  “Oh, there’s been some guy lurking about in doorways, the last few nights.”

  “Really?”

  “We’re being watched, I guess. Or maybe the word is guarded.”

  “Did you mention it?”

  “No. I don’t know that it has anything to do with me.”

  “You should tell them about it.”

  “Mm. Maybe I will. You don’t think it’s some kind of, problem, do you?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Well, maybe I’ll ask about it.” He went back to the window and looked up and down the street. “Not there now,” he said. “Not where I can see him.”

  The streets were deserted as Weisz walked back to the Dauphine, but he had an imagined Christa for company. Told her about his day, a version made entertaining for her amusement. Then, back in his room, he fell asleep and found her in his dreams—the first time they’d made love, on a yacht in Trieste harbor. She had worn, that late afternoon, a pair of oyster-colored pajamas, sheer and cool for a summer week at sea. He’d sensed that she had some k
ind of sensual affinity for the pajamas, so he did not take them off, the first time. Unbuttoned the top, slid the bottoms down her thighs. This inspired both of them, and, when the dream woke him, he found himself again inspired, and then, in the darkness, lived those moments once more.

  The editorial meeting for the new Liberazione was at midday on the twenty-ninth of April. Weisz hurried to get to the Europa, but he was the last one there. Salamone had waited for him, and began the meeting as he was sitting down. “Before we discuss the next issue,” he said, “we have to talk a little about our situation.”

  “Our situation?” the lawyer said, alert to a note in Salamone’s voice.

  “Some things are going on that have to be discussed.” He paused, then said, “For one thing, a friend of Carlo’s was questioned by a man who represented himself as an inspector of the Sûreté. There’s reason to believe that he wasn’t who he said he was. That he came from the opposition.”

  A long silence. Then the pharmacist said, “Do you mean the OVRA?”

  “It’s a possibility we have to face. So take a minute, and think about how things are going in your own lives. Your daily lives, anything not normal.”

  From the lawyer, a forced laugh. “Normal? My life at the language school?” But nobody else thought it was funny.

  The art historian from Siena said, “It all goes on as usual, with me.”

  Salamone, a sigh in his voice, said, “Well, what’s happened to me is that I’ve lost my job. I’ve been discharged.”

  For a moment, dead silence, broken only by the muted sounds of café life on the other side of the door. Finally, Elena said, “Did they tell you why?”

  “My supervisor wouldn’t quite say. Something about not enough work, but that was a lie. He had some other reason.”

  “You think that he, too, had a visit from the Sûreté,” the lawyer said. “And not the real one.”

  From Salamone, spread hands and raised eyebrows. What else can I think?

  This was immediately personal. Every one of them worked at whatever they could find—the lawyer at Berlitz, the Sienese professor as a meter reader for the gas company, Elena selling hosiery at the Galeries Lafayette—but that was common émigré Paris, where Russian cavalry officers drove taxis. Around the table, the same reaction: at least they had jobs, but what if they lost them? And as Weisz, perhaps the luckiest of them all, thought about Delahanty, the rest thought about their own employers.

  “We survived Bottini’s murder,” Elena said. “But this…” She could not say, out loud, that it was worse, but, in its way, it was.

  Sergio, the businessman from Milan, who’d come to Paris with the passage of the anti-Semitic laws, said, “For the moment, Arturo, you won’t have to worry about money.”

  Salamone nodded. “I appreciate that,” he said. He left it there, but what didn’t need to be said was that their benefactor couldn’t support them all. “This may be the time,” he went on, “for all of us to consider what we want to do now. Some of us may not want to continue with this work. Think it over, carefully. Leaving for a few months won’t mean you can’t return, and leaving for a few months might be what you should do. Don’t say anything here, telephone me at home, or stop by. It may be for the best. For you, for the people who depend on you. This isn’t a question of honor, it’s practical.”

  “Is Liberazione finished?” Elena said.

  “Not yet,” Salamone said.

  “We can be replaced,” the pharmacist said, more to himself than anybody else.

  “We can,” Salamone said. “And that goes for me, too. The Giustizia e Libertà in Turin was destroyed in 1937, all of them arrested. Yet here we are today.”

  “Arturo,” the Sienese professor said, “I work with a Roumanian man, at one time a ballet master in Bucharest. The point is, is that I think he’s leaving, in a few weeks, to go to America. Anyhow, that’s one possibility, the gas company. You have to go down into the cellars, sometimes you see a rat, but it’s not so bad.”

  “America,” the lawyer said. “Lucky man.”

  “We can’t all go to America,” the Venetian professor said.

  Why not? But no one said it.

  Report of Agent 207, delivered by hand on 30 April, to a clandestine OVRA station in the Tenth Arrondissement:

  The Liberazione group met at midday on 29 April at the Café Europa, the same subjects attending as in previous reports. Subject SALAMONE reported his discharge from the Assurance du Nord company and discussed the possibility that a clandestine operative had defamed him to his employer. SALAMONE suggested that a friend of subject WEISZ had been similarly approached, and warned the group that they may have to reconsider their participation in the Liberazione publication. An editorial meeting followed, with discussion of the occupation of Albania and the state of Italo-German relations as possible subjects for the next issue.

  The following morning, with a hesitant spring day, the real Sûreté was back in Weisz’s life. The message came this time, thank heaven, to the Dauphine, and not to Reuters, said simply, “Please contact me immediately,” had a telephone number, and was signed “Monsieur,” not “Inspector,” Pompon. Looking up from the slip of paper, he said to Madame Rigaud, on the other side of the reception desk, “A friend,” as though he needed to explain the message. She shrugged. One has friends, they telephone. For your room rent, as long as you pay it, we take your messages.

  He’d worried about her, lately. It wasn’t that she’d stopped being nice to him, just, lately, not quite so warm. Was this simply another Gallic shift of mood, common enough in this moody city, or something more? There had always been, in her demeanor, a night visit on the horizon. She was playful, but she’d let him know that her black dress could, at some point, be removed, and that beneath it lay a lovely treat for a good boy like him. This bothered Weisz, the first few weeks of his tenancy—what if something went wrong? Was lovemaking a covert condition of room rental?

  But that wasn’t true, she simply liked to flirt with him, to tease him into the bawdy landlady fantasy, and, in time, he began to relax and enjoy it. She was hatchet-faced, hatchet-minded, and henna-dyed, but the accidental brush or bump—“Oh pardon, Monsieur Weisz!”—revealed the real Madame Rigaud, curved and firm, and all for him. Eventually.

  That was, the last week or so, gone. Where did it go?

  •

  On the way to the Métro, he stopped at a post office and telephoned Pompon, who suggested a meeting at nine the following morning, at a café across from the Opéra—the lobby floor of the Grand Hotel—and conveniently close to the Reuters office. These arrangements were, oh no, considerate, and, uh-oh, thoughtful, and led to one more day of trying to work while fighting off the urge to speculate. Britain and France Offer Guarantees to Greece: calls to Devoisin at the Quai d’Orsay, then to other sources, swimming deeper in the tidal pools of French diplomacy, as well as contact with the Greek embassy, and the editor of an émigré Greek newspaper—the Paris side of the news.

  Weisz worked hard. Worked for Delahanty, to show how truly crucial he was to the Reuters effort, worked for Christa, so he wouldn’t be driving a delivery van when she came to Paris, worked for the giellisti—the paper was on the edge of mortality and losing his job might very well be the last straw. And for his own pride—not money, pride.

  A long night. And then, the café meeting, and a topic he should have, he realized, foreseen. “We have come into possession of a document,” Pompon said, “originally mailed to the Foreign Ministry. A document that should be made public. Not directly, but in a covert manner, in, perhaps, a clandestine newspaper.”

  Oh?

  “It contains information that the newspaper Liberazione mentioned, as rumor, in its last issue, but that was rumor, and what we’ve got our hands on now is specific. Very specific. Of course we know you have contact with these émigrés, and someone like you, in your position, would be a realistic source for such information.”

  Maybe.

 
; “The document reveals German penetration of the Italian security system, a massive penetration, in the hundreds, and revealing it could create antagonism toward Germany, toward these sorts of tactics, which are dangerous to any state. The rumor, as published in Liberazione, was provocative, but the actual list, now that could really cause problems.” Did Weisz see what he was getting at?

  Well—what the French called un petit oui, a little yes—yes.

  “I have a copy of the document with me, Monsieur Weisz, would you care to see it?”

  Ah, naturally.

  Pompon unbuckled his briefcase and withdrew the pages, folded so that they would fit into an envelope, and handed them to Weisz. It wasn’t the list he’d typed, but a precise copy. He unfolded the pages and pretended to study them; at first puzzled, then interested, finally fascinated.

  Pompon smiled—the pantomime had evidently worked. “Quite a coup for Liberazione, no? To publish the real evidence?”

  He certainly thought so. But…

  But?

  The present condition of that journal was uncertain. Some members of the editorial board had come under pressure—he’d heard that the paper might not survive.

  Pressure?

  Lost jobs, harassment by fascist agents.

  A silent Pompon stared at him. Amid tables of chattering Parisians, who’d been shopping at the nearby Galeries Lafayette, hotel guests with guidebooks, a pair of newlyweds from the provinces, arguing about money. All in clouds of smoke and perfume. Waiters flew past—who on earth was ordering éclairs at this time of the morning?

  Weisz waited, but the inspector did not bite. Or maybe bit in some way that Weisz could not observe. “Fascist agents” pestering émigrés was not the subject for today, the subject for today was inducing a resistance organization to do a little job for him. Or for the Foreign Ministry, or God only knew who. That other business, a different department handled that, down the hall, one flight up, and who’d want their inquisitive snouts poking into his carefully tended émigré garden? Not Pompon.