by Alan Furst
“What are you doing this evening?” de Lyon said.
“I’m waiting to hear,” Ferrar said.
“Come over to Le Cygne, I’ll be there at eleven-thirty.”
•
Le Cygne was as Ferrar remembered it; a glossy, black and white Art Deco room in the cellar of a crumbling tenement, not far from the Les Halles market. As always, Max de Lyon’s personal table awaited him, the maître d’ whipped the RÉSERVÉ sign off the black lacquer tabletop and pocketed his tip, then beckoned imperiously to a waiter, who hurried over to take de Lyon’s order for champagne. Just about the time it arrived, so did Stavros. With a new girlfriend—he’d had one on either arm the last time they’d met—this one a pale brunette with waves of black hair falling around her face. She wore a black dress that showed a bare shoulder and, Ferrar suspected from her myopic stare, carried a pair of eyeglasses in her purse. He was able to diagnose her myopia because she was staring at him while he, recalling Stavros’s inclination toward Balkan jealousy, looked everywhere but at her.
Stavros, a swarthy bear of a man in a gray silk suit and a black shirt with an open collar, was pleased that de Lyon had called him. They bantered for a few minutes, then Stavros said, “So Max, tell me, what are we looking for?”
“Anti-aircraft shells, seventy-six millimeter. All we can find, price doesn’t matter.”
“Who makes it? Skoda? Do we call on our old pal Szarny?”
“The Russians make it for their AA guns. Maybe they also sell it, I don’t know. But they won’t sell any to Spain … because of Stalin’s devious machinations, or because they’re keeping it for themselves.”
“I can ask around,” Stavros said, not sounding confident about what he would find. “But, as we say, if you can’t buy it you have to steal it. That’s hard when you’re dealing with the Russians, and then, if you do manage to steal it, you can’t get it out of the country.”
“Sounds like you’ve tried, Stavros.”
“No, but I have a friend who did. He knew a guy, a gangster in Kiev, and this guy had a lot of tires in a warehouse.”
“And …?”
“Who knows. The gangster disappeared, maybe the police caught him, maybe somebody killed him.”
“Did your friend tell you anything else? How the tires got to Kiev?”
Stavros shook his head. “He told me what he wanted to tell me.”
“Can you get in touch with him?”
“That’s easy, he’s in prison, in the Santé, right here in Paris.”
De Lyon grimaced. “If you visit someone in the Santé, the guards listen to everything. We have to work as quietly as we can.”
Stavros laughed. “Ahh, Max, you always say that. And then …” Stavros threw his fingers into the air and made the ka-boom sound of an explosion.
“But we have to try, Stavros, really.”
“Sure, Max, I know.”
The brunette, watching a small combo setting up on the bandstand, said, “Oh, there’s music, who wants to dance with me?”
“Sorry, dear, we’re busy,” Stavros said.
“You’re no fun,” she said, teasing him.
“What’s your friend in prison for?” de Lyon said.
“Murder. He’s a murderer. That’s his job.”
The band began to play “Begin the Beguine” and the brunette pinched Stavros’s earlobe between thumb and forefinger and said, “Let’s go, Monsieur le Bear, out on the dance floor.”
Stavros made a what-can-I-do gesture and took his brunette off to dance.
Ferrar said, “There are munitions companies everywhere, somebody should be willing to sell us what we need, the difficulty is figuring out who that is.”
“This business is always difficult, one way or another. I have a collection of ring binders at the Oficina Técnica, a sort of library, newspaper clippings, military journals, whatever I can find, and I had a look after the meeting with Quebral. Only a few countries make anti-aircraft guns; Britain, France, Germany, Italy, America. Sweden makes one called the Bofors, and the Swiss make the light version of the weapon, called the Oerlikon. And, of course, all the calibres are different. So, what we have is the heavy Soviet weapon.” He shrugged, our bad luck. Then he said, “We’ll find a way.”
“Can’t we have the ammunition manufactured?”
“You know, we did some of that—had weapons and ammunition manufactured—in the first year of the war. We found a factory up in Belgium, you gave them a sample and they’d make whatever you wanted, but the government shut it down.”
“These shells, where are they stored?”
“Armouries, military bases. All closely guarded. Sometimes they’re mounted on ships.”
“Steal ammunition from a Russian ship?”
“Even if you found a way to steal, there wouldn’t be enough. One thing my library made clear—you want to shoot down an airplane, you need a lot of shells. The aiming method is complicated, mostly you miss.”
Stavros, beads of sweat on his face, held his girlfriend tight and stomped around the dance floor, doing his very own version of the beguine. But the Le Cygne crowd, slumming nouveaux riches, swindlers, spies, prostitutes of the higher order, didn’t laugh or stare, not at Stavros they didn’t. The scene struck Ferrar as a kind of undersea world. Beneath a placid sea, exotic creatures mated and fed on each other and, as you sank deeper, the world turned darker and the creatures grew strange indeed.
Stavros returned from the dance floor, brunette in tow. Dancing was hard work, the nightclub was warm, so the smell of his cologne was stronger than usual. He drank off his champagne and de Lyon refilled his glass. “Not the dance for me,” Stavros said. When he sat down, de Lyon said, “Tell me, Stavros, do you think there’s a way you can speak privately with your friend?”
“I’ll find a way. Maybe a bribe. You want me to try it?”
“Might as well. We have to talk to people, if you talk to people they turn out to know more than you thought. Sometimes more than they thought.”
“I’ll do it,” Stavros said. “He’s an old friend and I’m sure he’d like a visitor.”
“As soon as you can,” de Lyon said.
The following day, de Lyon made contact with one S. Kolb, a meager little man nobody ever noticed and a spy. De Lyon’s customary spy, in his business a necessary acquaintance. To reach Kolb you called a certain number, a woman answered, you gave her a name, some name, maybe your name, and, in time, Kolb would find you. He did travel for his work, you never knew where he was, but he always knew where you were. In this case, Kolb was apparently in Paris, because he turned up at the café where de Lyon went for lunch. De Lyon was eating veal stew, took a bite, went to take another, and S. Kolb was sitting at the table. De Lyon said the spring weather was fine and how did one go about buying Soviet anti-aircraft ammunition.
Kolb looked at the handwritten menu, summoned a waiter, and ordered the veal stew. “Might as well have lunch, right?” he said.
“You’re my guest,” de Lyon said. “Have a glass of wine.”
“What a question you ask,” Kolb said. His French was fluent, but not native. Surely he’d grown up somewhere and spoke the language, but where that was nobody knew although there were plenty of theories. It was also said of Kolb that he was a British spy, but there were plenty of theories about that as well. “And what if,” Kolb continued, “I said ‘I don’t know’?”
“You often say it.”
“Yes, but what if, this time, I were telling the truth?”
“Then I’d ask how you might go about finding out.”
“Here’s the problem, Max. To find out—about anything—you have to ask questions and, with what you need, you would be asking questions about Soviet military matters, which are secret, like everything else in the USSR. And when the Russians discover that somebody is asking such questions, they will want to know what’s going on … they are extremely ticklish in this area, and they don’t like to be tickled. F’shtai, Max?” Which me
ant you understand? in Yiddish. Not that Kolb was Jewish, he wasn’t, but he knew a few phrases and used them for emphasis.
“I do.”
“Now I appreciate your asking me, I like to be asked questions, just as I appreciate hearing about any tidbit you happen to turn up in your work. So my first answer has to be: don’t go poking your nose into Soviet secrets, because it will produce the NKVD on your doorstep. No, I tell a lie …” he laughed—“it will produce the GRU, the military service, which is just as mean but twice as smart.”
“Then what? Give it up? Stay safe?”
“You?”
“I’ve done it before.”
“Really? Often?”
“No, not often.”
“All right, Max, you’re a friend, as far as it goes, so I’ll let you talk to a certain man, a man who … a man who knows everything? No, no such man exists. But this one has now and then surprised me. I say now and then because I don’t often use him, only once in a while, since I don’t know much about him and that makes me ticklish. Also, he is the oddest human being I’ve ever encountered, which is saying a lot, believe me.”
“And his name?”
“I’ve named him Professor Z”—he pronounced it “zed”—“as I have no idea of his real name, it’s not what he calls himself. He reminds me of a professor, though, a professor from a foreign land who is no longer a professor. He knows things, all sorts of things, and he hates the fascists. But, you must be careful.”
“Why is that?”
“Better these days, when someone knows what you’re doing, that they don’t know who you are.”
“Very well, I’m warned.”
Kolb’s veal stew arrived and he ordered a carafe of red wine.
“So, how do I find Professor Z?”
Kolb chewed on the tough veal, then said, “I will have to set it up. Someone will contact you with a time and a place. And you go alone.”
“I am grateful for your help, Monsieur Kolb.”
“Are you?”
“I am.”
“Well then, where have you been lately? Any place interesting?”
The meeting with Professor Z was scheduled for noon on the ninth of May, on the Square Récamier, which was perhaps the most private park in Paris. Private, de Lyon soon learned, because it was hard to find. He walked past the entry, off the rue de Sèvres, twice. Then, getting anxious, he had to ask the girl behind the counter of a boulangerie.
Finding Professor Z was not hard; he was sitting on a bench at the foot of a staircase beneath an ivy-covered pergola, reading a French novel. When he looked up and saw de Lyon, he kept his place in the book with his finger, and there it stayed for the length of their conversation. The professor was wearing a battered old chalk-stripe suit and had the sort of beard worn by men who don’t like to shave but don’t like beards either; a scraggly growth, brown and gray, chopped back when it grew too long. He was smoking a cigarette in a cigarette holder and was, apparently, a chain-smoker—there were more than a few squashed-out butts on the brick cobblestones by his feet.
“Good morning,” de Lyon said. “A friend told me I would meet you here.”
“At your service,” the professor said. De Lyon heard the trace of an accent but couldn’t say where it came from.
“I am here on behalf of some friends who are working to help the Spanish Republic.”
The professor sighed and said, “Spain.”
“A sorry time for us, if that’s what you mean.”
“Europe is a nice neighborhood with a mad dog. Just now the dog is biting Spain, and nobody else in the neighborhood wants to get bitten, so they look away.”
“That’s true, but we do what we can. At the moment we’re trying to buy ammunition for a Soviet anti-aircraft gun.”
“Don’t have any, myself.”
“No? Then who does?”
Silence, as the wheels turned in the professor’s mind. “The Red Army. Have you asked them?”
“We have, they won’t sell.”
“Understandable, with Hitler chewing on his carpet.” He paused, then said, “In the old days, the way to deal with the USSR was the bribe, you could buy a Soviet general, back then. But, with the Stalin purges, that’s changed, they’re all terrified now, they will think you are an agent provocateur. Of course you could take a chance, as long as you got it right on the first try, otherwise … well, you know what I mean.”
“Yes, you would have to be sure of your target, if you don’t care to be arrested.”
“Mmm, Siberia.”
“Not my preference.”
“Nor mine.” The professor was briefly absent—lost in the memory of another time and place. When he returned he said, “Still, there might be a way. Perhaps diversion, a shipment of arms leaves the factory and is never seen again. It sounds unlikely but in Russia it actually happens—whole trains have been known to disappear. Where are they? Nobody knows, and they are never found.”
“How would you go about diversion?”
“Perhaps on the clerical level, where, say, an office worker believes himself to be a fish so small that no one will catch him. He will be wrong, but you will have what you want, so he will have to be sacrificed. People are, you know, they are … sacrificed every day.”
“Do you suppose it would be possible to steal the ammunition? Not by diversion, by force.”
“Spill blood? Yes, I suppose you could. Are you prepared to die for this ammunition, monsieur?”
“I’d rather not.”
“Or do you plan not to be there when it happens? Now there you have an entire class of people in the modern world, the class that arranges not to be there when it happens. Criminals, among others, think that way. Are you a criminal?”
“Mostly not. Though I have done things.”
“I would guess you are not prepared to kill for your ammunition, or to be killed. But then, we’ve only just met.”
De Lyon sensed that the discussion was over and said, “Thank you, sir, for your help. Would you allow me to offer you something for your time?”
The professor laughed; a dry, rattling laugh that sounded like a cough. “No, no,” he said. “That is not what I do.”
De Lyon went back up the stairway. Birds were singing in the park; beneath the ivy, sunlight cast leaf shadows on the steps. When he reached the street, he found a busy afternoon in Paris; it was as though the conversation in the park had taken place in another world.
Stavros prepared carefully for his visit to the Santé prison. He bought a Panama hat, made of yellow straw, which was too big for him so rested on the tops of his ears and made him look silly, not dangerous. He next prepared a parcel for his friend in prison and wrapped it in brown paper. Then he took the Métro up to the Fourteenth Arrondissement and walked over to the prison on the rue de la Santé. Built long ago, the prison looked like an old factory, its low buildings darkened with time.
At the entry he was asked for his passport and produced one of his better forgeries, standing quietly while a clerk copied out the information into a huge register book with blue lines that, like the prison, belonged to an earlier century which, perhaps, it did. “I am here to see prisoner Videau, Albert,” he said. A guard was summoned and Stavros was taken through a door of iron bars, down a hallway, and into a room where visitors could meet with prisoners. A guard was always present, and prisoner and visitor sat across from each other at a wide table.
Stavros handed the parcel to the guard and said, “I have brought some things for Prisoner Videau.” The guard opened the parcel, then found what Stavros had put there for him to find: canned sausages, canned spinach, canned sardines, canned soup, and a thick wad of francs, the equivalent of five hundred dollars.
The guard shook his head at such naiveté. “You can’t bring money to a prisoner, don’t you know the rules?”
“I’m sorry but I don’t, I’ve never been here before.”
“Well, this money has to be forfeited, that’s the rule her
e and I didn’t make it.”
“Oh, I thought my friend could use it to buy a few luxuries. What about the food?”
“That is permitted. Eight cans. You’ve brought four. We will keep those until Wednesday, which is the day when prisoners may receive gifts. You will sit on that side of the table, I will stand at the end, and your conversation must be at a normal level. No whispering allowed. And you may not touch the prisoner.” Stavros did as he was told and Videau was brought in a few minutes later. He was much as Stavros remembered him: bald, with a hard, round, bony head and eyeglasses—these had broken at the bridge and he’d stuck the halves back together with a piece of tape. When he saw Stavros his face lit up and he said, “Stavros!” The what are you doing here was unspoken.
Forbidden to shake hands, Stavros waved and said, “Hello, Albert, I thought you might like a visit from an old friend.”
“Thank you for coming, Stavros, it’s good to see you.”
“Honorine sends her best.” There was no such person.
“How is she?”
“She misses you, Albert. Does she write you letters?”
“Not often, she isn’t much for writing, Honorine.”
The guard, bribed with a wad of francs, now did what he’d been paid to do—left his standing position at the end of the table, found himself a chair by the door, and began to read a newspaper. Stavros didn’t exactly whisper, but a lifetime of conspiracy had taught him to use a low voice that didn’t carry. “How’s it going, Albert?” he said.
“It’s prison, I make the best of it.”
“Any chance of getting out?”
“My lawyer tells me I have to do another year before they’ll think about it. But he’s a good lawyer, and so far he’s kept me from being guillotined and stopped them from transporting me to Guiana. Technicality after technicality, petition following petition, bless his heart.” He paused, then said, “So then, Stavros, what brings you here?”
“Albert, about two years ago you told me about some guy in Kiev who had a warehouse full of tires.”
“Sure, I remember. He wanted help selling the tires in France but nothing came of it.”
“Who was he?”
