Mission to Paris (11 page)

‘Not the same as it was, back in the twenties, but not so different. It’s still the city you fall in love with, despite the politics.’

‘Pretty grim, all this hostility, no?’

‘It is. The French didn’t used to be so, um,
concentrated
on it. Before, it was more like a game, but now it’s a war.’

Wilkinson nodded,
I’m glad you agree with me
. ‘I’ll tell you something, by trade I’m a lawyer in a Wall Street firm, but I worked for the Roosevelt campaigns in ’32 and ’36 and, believe me, there was plenty of rough stuff going on. But, compared to France, in the last few years, it was child’s play. And now, with war coming …’ He paused, then said, ‘I saw an announcement of your arrival in the
Paris Herald
and I admit I wondered, I mean, what the hell made you come here now?’

‘Jack Warner,’ Stahl said.

Wilkinson laughed, a bass rumble, and his eyes lit up. ‘I should’ve figured that out,’ he said. ‘But there’s a story about Jack Warner which might explain it. A few years ago, the Warner Bros. representative in Berlin, a man named Joe Kaufmann, was beaten to death by Nazi Brown Shirts – they didn’t like it that he was a Jew – and Warner closed the Berlin office. Then he started to make anti-fascist movies, and he got letters threatening to burn his house down. The other moguls, Goldwyn and Harry Cohn and the rest, don’t want to get involved, but Jack Warner decided to fight, bless his heart.’

‘Well, the decision to have one of his actors do a movie in Paris came from the top, from Jack Warner, personally.’

‘Glad you came? Showing the flag?’

‘I’m not sorry. Actors are told, “always avoid politics, it’s bad for the box office”, but I found out right away you can’t.’

‘How so, found out?’

‘Two weeks ago I was caught in a street march and got hit in the face with a steel rod. That’s the worst, but it started earlier. I was invited to a cocktail party – a
salon
– and they carried on like crazy, peace with Germany, peace with Germany, all we want is peace.’

From Wilkinson, a knowing smile. ‘Which hostess? There are four or five – they’re infamous.’

‘The Baroness von Reschke. What a terror! And there was someone else, a man called, what’s his name, he makes champagne, DeMotte? No, LaMotte. Philippe I think.’

‘Ah yes, the Comité Franco-Allemagne, a Nazi propaganda outfit.’

Stahl stared at Wilkinson. ‘You mean …
literally
? Nazi as in managed from Berlin?’

Slowly, Wilkinson nodded up and down. ‘Yes indeedy. You’re shocked?’

‘I guess I am. Isn’t that, um, espionage?’

‘Properly called “political warfare”. One form of espionage.’

‘The French government must know what’s going on, can’t they do something about it?’

‘They know everything, but they don’t do anything.’

‘Why not?’

Wilkinson raised his eyebrows, surprised that Stahl didn’t know the answer. ‘Political repercussions?’ he said, as though reminding Stahl about the nature of the world. ‘Politicians in power have to run for re-election, so what are they handing their opponents? They’ll be accused of being against peace, against negotiations; they’ll be called warmongers. And they’ll lose the election, which means leaving Paris, and going back to some town in the Auvergne. But that’s only one part of it, the other part is worse. The French know they were finished in 1917, and they were, until American troops showed up. So they’re scared to death they’ll push Hitler too far, scared to death of war – they lost a million and a half men the last time, and more than twice that wounded. And they know they’ll lose again if the Wehrmacht crosses the border.’

‘But, the Maginot Line …’

Wilkinson sighed, burdened by knowing more than was good for him. ‘The Maginot Line is a political tactic of the French right. Supposedly it protects the nation, which believes in it as though it were magic, which means the French won’t fully mobilize, won’t spend enough money on armament, and won’t invade Germany. It virtually pleads for Hitler’s mercy, and it won’t work. It’s meant to
delay
, as the French wait for the British to show up, and then they both wait for America. Meanwhile Hitler builds offensive weapons, tanks and warplanes.’ He moved a marble pen stand to the centre of his desk, picked up a stapler and circled it above the marble stand, then pressed the top and a staple popped out and clicked against the stand. ‘I could make an airplane noise, but you get the idea. That used to be the Maginot Line.’

‘So what can they do?’

Wilkinson shrugged.

Stahl was silent for a moment, trying to sort out what Wilkinson had told him. If his statements about the baroness and LaMotte were true, then some very rich and powerful people in Paris were working for the enemy. Finally he said, ‘What do they want with
me
, these people?’

‘You’re an important person, Mr Stahl, well known, respected, from a powerful part of the world. People will listen to what you say, they may even change their minds. I recall you once played a doctor, is that right?’

‘Dr Lawton, in
A Fortunate Woman
.’

‘That’s it. Kindly Dr Lawton – strong, wise, and compassionate. Who wouldn’t believe Dr Lawton? All this together, your status, and your character on screen, add up to what we call an “agent of influence”.’

Stahl saw this was true, and became acutely uncomfortable. ‘Should I make some kind of, what, public statement?’

‘What would you say? “I believe in democracy”? “I believe in America”? That would be fine with the Germans, America doesn’t want to fight a war any more than the French do. We have our own Maginot Line, it’s called the Atlantic Ocean.’

‘Then the hell with these people, I don’t have to go to their
salons
.’

‘You certainly don’t. But that doesn’t mean they won’t put pressure on you.’

‘Why would they?’

‘The people in Berlin, in von Ribbentrop’s Foreign Ministry, are persistent when they want something. And their people in Paris take orders, so …’

Now Stahl started to get mad. Why was this happening? Why him? He wanted nothing to do with the whole rotten business.

Wilkinson read him perfectly. ‘Don’t blame
me
for this,’ he said. ‘I’m on your side.’

‘What should I do?’

‘Stay away from them, see what happens.’

There was, suspended in the space between them, an
or
that lingered silently at the end of Wilkinson’s sentence.
Or, if not, you could
, something like that. Stahl knew it was there, felt the bare ghost of what it might demand from him, and thought
Oh no you don’t
. A Hollywood phrase he’d heard from Buzzy Mehlman suddenly came to him:
What is this meeting about?
Now Stahl thought he knew. ‘You’re not asking me to spy on these people, are you?’

‘No.’

‘Then what
are
you asking?’

Wilkinson leaned forward, clasped a pair of big, meaty hands together and rested them on his desk. ‘That you be careful, that you don’t let them use you if you can keep them from doing it. There’s no point in your finding out what’s going on and who is involved, the French know that already and so do we. Anyhow, you’re not a spy, that takes nerves of steel, and soon enough becomes a full-time job. And I’m no spymaster. America has military attachés who do that and we don’t have an overseas spy service.’

Stahl nodded that he understood, though he didn’t believe Wilkinson was being fully honest.

‘On the other hand,’ Wilkinson said, then let the phrase hang there for a time. ‘On the other hand, the people in the White House need to know as much as they can about what’s going on over here, and that’s one of the jobs an embassy, any embassy anywhere, has to do. So, if, in your time over here you, ah,
stumble
on something, something important, it wouldn’t be a bad idea if you let me know about it. That isn’t the official duty of an American in a foreign country but we’re all in this together, and if you feel like an American it’s not the worst thing to act like one.’ Wilkinson took a moment to let that sink in, then said, ‘Okay, the hell with all that stuff, tell me about the movie you’re making.’

In the days that followed, Stahl found himself thinking about the meeting at the embassy more than he wanted to. He felt foolish to have been naive about the political realities in France, after all he was European, off in California for eight years but still, shouldn’t he have known? Perhaps not. For one thing, this level of corruption was new, at least new to him. When he’d lived in Paris, the talk in the cafés took corruption as a regrettable but natural human undertaking – a means to weasel one’s way to wealth and power, merely one of the darker traditions of Old Europe. There followed, in the cafés, a shrug. But that corruption was never thought to be at the tips of foreign tentacles. It was, back then,
French
, like good wine and good lovemaking.

Meanwhile, in the US, it wasn’t much discussed. Americans were tired of the antics of slippery European politicians – a plague on all their houses! Europe was, as the woman on the
Ile de France
had put it when they shared a deck chair, a place where the bickering and squabbling never ended: sometimes they even shot each other, but they would shoot no more American boys. Thinking about the deck-chair conversation, Stahl recalled a scene in a 1936 MGM film called
Libeled Lady
, with Jean Harlow, and Spencer Tracy as a newspaper editor. At one point, Tracy is in a newsroom and a reporter asks him, ‘What’ll we use for a headline?’ Tracy says, ‘I don’t care. Anything. “War Threatens Europe.”’ The reporter asks, ‘Which country?’ and Tracy responds, ‘Flip a nickel!’

In Stahl’s Hollywood world, only the émigrés – the studio violinist from Germany, the make-up woman from Roumania, the scene painter from Hungary – followed European politics and the miseries of European Jews and communists and intellectuals. But the talk at a Warner commissary table, much of it heatedly leftist, quieted down when a ‘real American’ came by. Americans didn’t want to worry about foreign troubles, they had plenty of their own.

Thus it fell to somebody like Wilkinson to worry, because ‘the people in the White House’ needed information. That was slightly odd, once Stahl had a chance to think about it. Wouldn’t it be the Department of State – what Stahl thought of as the Foreign Ministry – that needed to know what was going on? Well, he was a foreigner, an émigré, and there were a lot of things he didn’t understand. Still, he was grateful that Wilkinson had told him what was going on, it meant he could protect himself. So when a note from the Baroness von Reschke reached him at the Claridge – ‘my friends were absolutely delighted to meet you, and I hope you will join us …’ – Stahl tore it up. The note went on to say that the exquisite Josephine Baker would be giving a private performance. Likely in her skirt made of bananas, Stahl thought, but she won’t be wearing it for me. He found great satisfaction in letting the note go unanswered –
take that, you Nazi witch, I’m being rude!
Maybe not a blow for democracy, but at least something.

And then, when he was handed a telephone message from Herr Moppel, he tore that up as well. Dear old Moppi was the very last person he wished to see. But Moppi didn’t give up so easily, and called again the following day. This time Stahl was in his suite and answered the phone. ‘Franz! Hello! It’s me, Moppi!’ Stahl was brusque and cold. He was at work on a film, he really had no time for social engagements. Goodbye. Bang went the phone,
fuck you
. This felt even better than ignoring the baroness, and Stahl sensed he’d avoided trouble, real trouble.

20 October. The director of
Après la Guerre
, Jean Avila, had finally made his way to Paris and telephoned the principal actors, asking them to come out to Joinville for a preliminary read-through of the script. They gathered at ten in the morning, on a set that was available until 2.00 p.m., a set for a romantic farce,
Cinéma de Boulevard
, in fin de siècle Paris. The actors settled on fringed velvet sofas and chatted until Jean Avila came hurrying through the door. ‘Here at last,’ he said. ‘They held me up for three days at the border.’ Avila seemed well beyond his twenty-five years. He had long, black, wiry hair, a lean body, and a face marked by the character lines of an older man, which gave him the sort of brooding good looks that women fell for. Starting with Stahl – ‘pleased to have you here,’ he said, ‘very pleased’ – he introduced himself to each member of the cast.

At first, the reading went well. ‘Let’s begin on page thirty-six,’ Avila said. ‘The top of the page, where Colonel Vadic and the others are trying to get food from the Turkish farm woman.’ That line, ‘There she is, looking out the window,’ belonged to Gilles Brecker, who had a faint Alsatian accent and, with blond hair and steel-framed glasses, looked like a cinematic German. He would play the war-loving lieutenant, eager to fight again after getting out of the prison camp.

‘Justine, would you read the farm woman?’ Avila said.

Justine Piro, wearing slacks and a sweater, her hair swept up in a kerchief, said, ‘Go away, or I’ll set the dogs on you.’

‘We hear the dogs barking.’ Avila said, reading the stage direction.

The fat, burly Pasquin lit a cigarette and planted a thick forefinger on the page. ‘What’s wrong with her?’

‘It’s the uniforms,’ Stahl said.

‘Dear madam,’ Pasquin crooned. ‘A little something to eat?’ He mimed bringing food to his mouth and twice smacked his lips. Avila looked up and smiled.

‘Let’s just kick down the door and take whatever she has,’ Brecker said, the impatience in his voice nudging anger.

‘Hasn’t there been enough of that?’ Stahl said, sounding tired of the world. ‘And what if she resists? What then? Will you beat her?’

‘We must eat,’ Brecker said. ‘We need our strength.’

‘We will eat, lieutenant, we will find something, somewhere. Maybe at the next farm,’ Stahl said.

Pasquin cupped a hand to his ear. ‘What’s that? Did I hear a
chicken
?’

Avila read the stage direction: ‘An old man wearing a tweed cap and an ancient suit jacket and holding a shotgun is seen stage left. We see his face, then he gestures them away with the shotgun.’