Mission to Paris (16 page)

Stahl had assembled a forkful of sauerkraut, speared a bite of frankfurter, spread some mustard on it, and raised the fork halfway to his mouth. There it stayed. He raised his head and met Sokoloff’s eyes. ‘That is …’ He hesitated, then said, ‘That’s treason.’

‘Not yet.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Stahl said. ‘Am I just being naive?’

‘You’re a well-meaning European who’s been away from Europe for eight years, during which time political life has changed. What hasn’t changed is the power of money – it was the big banks, the insurance companies, and the heavy industries that brought down the Popular Front. They are secretive about what they do, they crave anonymity. But there is also the magnate, the
gros légume
– the big vegetable – the warrior of the right. We have more than our share of those, it seems.’

‘And they are?’

‘For example Pierre Taittinger, of the house of champagne, who formed his very own fascist gang, the
Jeunesses Patriotes
, the young patriots, and introduced the symbolic blue beret as part of his, and their, uniform. For example François Coty, who famously said, “perfume is a woman’s love affair with herself”, and hid crates of weapons in his château at Louveciennes, on the outskirts of Paris, for
his
fascist gang,
Solidarité Française
. For example Jean Hennessy of the cognac firm, and the Michelin brothers, the tyre people, thought to be responsible for a terrorist bombing on the rue de Presbourg. These are people who work to bring down the government by force, and replace it with one more to their liking. Some of them have their own newspapers, some support, and arm, their own private militias, but all of them have one thing in common.’

‘Which is?’

‘They are French.’

‘But I’m told there is also German money, a lot of it, buying influence in the French government, and used to support propaganda, political warfare, that is meant to destroy the French will to fight.’

‘What you say is true, and
now
you have treason.’

Stahl returned to his lunch and his beer, but Sokoloff’s last comment didn’t go away. In the brasserie, the lunchtime symphony rose in volume – the clatter of silverware and china, spirited chatter, laughter, exclamations of ‘
Mais oui!
’ and ‘
C’est terrible!
’ Did they know? If they knew, did they care? The French looked away from evil, it drained the pleasure from life.
Perhaps
, they thought,
it will just go away
. In his very soul, Stahl wanted them to be right.

Sokoloff, sensing Stahl’s change of mood, looked guilty. ‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘let’s have another beer. Yes?’

Stahl said, ‘What the hell, why not.’ Then, after a moment, ‘What is it with the Germans? They didn’t used to be like this.’

Sokoloff shrugged. ‘They lost a war and it made them furious, now they want to destroy us. Hitler has, at times, a certain twinkle in his eye, you know?
What a sly fox am I
– something like that. He means he conquered two nations, Austria and Czechoslovakia, without firing a shot, and France is next. He said in
Mein Kampf
that France should be isolated, then destroyed. Have you looked at a map lately? We’re surrounded by fascist dictatorships: Italy, Portugal, soon enough Spain, and Germany itself. Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands; all neutral. Others, like Hungary, bullied into alliance with the Nazis. We no longer
have
friends, the world is becoming, for us, a very cold place.’

‘Well,
I’m
your friend,’ Stahl said,
as though that meant anything
.

‘I know you are, and you’re an American, which makes you a very welcome friend.’

‘So then, what can I do? What should I do? Nothing?’

Sokoloff thought it over, then, with a rather wistful smile, said, ‘I don’t think I have an answer. I will tell you, as a friend, to be careful. They, and I mean the French and the Germans, will attack their enemies – especially in the press. All they’ve done so far is
use
you, bad enough, but it can be much worse.’ He paused, then said, ‘Have you ever heard of a man named Roger Salengro?’

‘No.’

‘He was Blum’s Minister of the Interior – that means he directed all the security forces, all counter-espionage. Salengro wasn’t going to stand for their nonsense, so they attacked him. A particularly nasty little magazine, called
Gringoire
, wrote that Salengro, who fought bravely in the last war until he was captured, allowed himself to be taken prisoner on purpose, to save his life, an act of cowardice. This was a lie, but
Gringoire
kept repeating it until, one day, when Salengro went to the ministry, the soldiers guarding the entrance refused to salute him. They had come to believe the lie. Salengro’s heart was broken, and he went home and killed himself.’

‘That’s vile,’ Stahl said.

‘It is. But better for you to know about it.’

Stahl nodded, the story reaching him as he stared out at the crowded room. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe I should just go back to America.’

‘Give up? Ruin your career? You won’t do that.’

‘No, probably I won’t. I can’t.’

‘You’re not the type. The people in Hollywood cast you as they do for a reason, Monsieur Stahl, they build on what is already there.’

‘Perhaps, some day, I will do an interview with you, Monsieur Sokoloff.’

‘Maybe some day, but not yet. As we used to say in the trenches, keep your head down.’

Stahl placed his knife and fork on the plate, then lit a cigarette.

Trying to ease the gloom he’d felt after talking to Sokoloff, he decided to walk for a while, taking the narrow, sunless streets of the Marais, the ancient Jewish quarter, in the general direction of the hotel. For a long time, nothing had changed here; tenement walls leaned over crooked lanes, the markets had kosher chickens hung on steel hooks, men wearing yarmulkes spoke Yiddish together – but stopped speaking until he’d passed by – and the women, heads covered with shawls or scarves, did not meet his eyes. It was, he thought, as though he were in some shtetl in Poland.

Still, by the time he left the district he was at least hopeful. He felt he could deal with his problems and do in Paris what he’d come here to do. Which wasn’t politics. He had faced down Moppi and his dreadful friends, and, in André Sokoloff, he had a new ally, without doubt a good man in a fight. Slowly, he regained himself – this wasn’t the first trouble in his life and it surely wouldn’t be the last, but he’d dealt with it before and he would now. A taxi cruised slowly by his side, inviting him to ride, Stahl raised a hand, the taxi stopped. And, on the way to the Claridge, just looking out at the streets made him feel better.

Reaching his rooms on the top floor of the hotel, Stahl tried to use his key but the door, already unlocked, swung open, slowly, as he pushed against it.

Inside, a man was sitting on the sofa, apparently waiting for him. Actually, not quite sitting,
lounging
said it better – he had one leg hooked over the arm of the sofa, his body resting against the cushions at an angle. A magazine that Stahl had left on the night table lay open on his lap. Was he a hotel thief? He wasn’t acting like one. He was tall, wearing a brown jacket and grey slacks, his collar unbuttoned, his tie pulled down. He had scant, colourless hair combed back from a high forehead, pale eyes, pale skin. To Stahl, he looked like a Scandinavian, perhaps a Swede, maybe a businessman. On the floor in front of the sofa was a small bag of pebbled black leather, like a doctor’s bag.

Stahl took a few steps towards the telephone on the desk, then put his hand on the receiver, ready to call downstairs, but the man just watched him as though he were an object of some, but not much, interest. ‘What are you doing here?’ Stahl said. ‘This isn’t your room.’

In German, the man said, ‘I stopped by to talk to you, Herr Stahl.’

Again, Stahl looked at the black bag. ‘Are you a doctor?’ he said, truly puzzled.

‘No, I’m not a doctor,’ the man said.

‘I’m going to call the desk and have you thrown out. Or arrested.’

‘Yes?’ said the man, as though Stahl had commented about the weather.

Stahl picked up the phone, but the man didn’t move. ‘It won’t take too long,’ he said. ‘Just a brief conversation is all I require, then I won’t trouble you any further.’

Stahl put the receiver back but kept his hand on it.

‘How was your lunch with Herr Sokoloff?’ the man said.

‘That’s none of your business.’

‘No? Maybe it is. He’s surely not a proper friend for you.’

Stahl almost laughed. ‘What?’

‘I think you are a little confused, Herr Stahl, about who your friends are. You are really being rather … difficult.’

‘Am I,’ Stahl said. ‘You’re German?’

The man nodded slowly, no expression on his face. ‘Proud to be,’ he said. ‘Especially the way things are going now.’

Stahl waited. The man unhooked his leg from the arm of the sofa and sat forward, elbows on knees, fingers clasped. ‘What we’ve learned in Germany is that life goes very well when everybody does their job, and does what they’re told to do. Harmony, as we call it, is a powerful force in a nation.’

‘I’m sure it is. But, so what?’

‘Well, we’ve told you what we want you to do, to come to Berlin, to appear at our film festival, but you seem disinclined to obey, and this is troubling.’

Stahl stared at the man with an expression of combined disbelief and distaste.

The man smiled to himself and gently shook his head. ‘Ah, defiance,’ he said, his voice soft and nostalgic – he remembered defiance, from some bygone age long ago. ‘Quite a bit of
that
, at the beginning, before we came to power, but we’re patient, hardworking people and in time we cured it. It turns, we’ve found, with persistence on our part, to disbelief, and, in time, to compliance. Oh, people think the most violent thoughts, you can’t imagine, but that stays inside. On the outside, however, in the daily world, the individual does what he’s told, and then there’s harmony. Much of Europe is finding this harmony not so bad as they feared, and soon all of us will work together.’

‘No doubt,’ Stahl said, sarcasm cutting a fine edge on the words. ‘You’ve broken into my room like a criminal, you’ve said what you came to say, now get out.’

‘You’re angry. Well, I understand that, but you’ll have some time to think this through, not a lot of time, but some, and I expect you’ll come to see where your interests lie. It’s
easier
, Herr Stahl, to try and get along with us, to do what we tell you to do – is it really so much? Ask yourself. A brief trip to Berlin, fine food, good company, people saying flattering things – would that be so bad?’

‘Stop it,’ Stahl said.

The man stretched, then looked at his watch, like someone who is tired but has things to do before he can relax. ‘Please don’t be rude to me, Herr Stahl, that isn’t good for either of us.’ He stood, stood rather abruptly, like a schoolboy’s feint, and Stahl, despite himself, reacted – didn’t move a muscle but the flinch had been there and he knew it. The man grinned, amused by his tactic, picked up his black bag, walked casually to the door, and said, ‘Good afternoon, Herr Stahl. One way or another, we’ll be in touch with you.’

Was the ‘you’ subtly inflected? Very subtly inflected? Or, Stahl wondered, had he just heard it that way. The man nodded to him and left the room. Stahl heard him walking away down the corridor and shut the door but the lock didn’t click shut. He tried again, and the same thing happened. The lock no longer worked, and now he would have to get it fixed.

3 November. At 3.30 on the afternoon of the third, the senior staff of the Ribbentropburo – the political warfare bureau of the Reich Foreign Ministry, named for Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop – held its weekly meeting. In a general way, their mission was similar to that of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, but Goebbels’s people supervised all internal culture – the painters and the writers and the composers, the films and the newspapers – while the bureau operated mostly abroad, and was far more clandestine and aggressive in its methods. ‘We don’t send out press releases,’ they liked to say, ‘we send out operatives, and then
other
people send out press releases.’

This was an important meeting, decisions had to be made, and some of the men around the table had their jackets hung on the backs of their chairs and their sleeves rolled up. Herr Emhof, of the bulging eyes, attended the meeting but was not of sufficient stature to merit a place at the table, so sat on one of the chairs ranged around the walls and did not speak unless spoken to.

The agenda for this meeting was a typed list of thirty-eight names, which represented thirty-eight problems that had to be resolved. There were hundreds of names in the bureau’s files, and most had agreed, some gladly, some not so gladly, to do what the bureau had determined they should do; thus there was no point in wasting time on them. The thirty-eight names, however – people of various backgrounds, all pertinent to the bureau’s operations in France – had to be dealt with because they represented potential failures. The Reich Foreign Ministry did not accept failures, so you couldn’t really afford, if you worked there, to have too many of them on your record, or you would find yourself working somewhere else. Perhaps at the coal administration, or the department of gasoline rationing, or, at the very worst, you might have to take your wife and family and pets and go off to work in Essen, or Dortmund, or Ulm – exiled.

The meeting was led by the Deputy Director of the bureau, an SS major who had formerly been a junior professor of social sciences, particularly anthropology, at the University of Dresden. He appeared, as always, in civilian clothes, a dark-blue suit, and he was exceptionally bright. A little young for his senior position, a smart, sharp-witted fellow on the way up in the Nazi administration.

The warm air in the room was thick with cigarette smoke, a grey November drizzle outside, and the men at the cluttered table – stacks of dossiers, notepads, ashtrays – made slow but steady progress as they worked their way down the alphabetized list; it was almost five by the time they reached the names beginning with the letter
S
. They disposed of the first three quickly, then came to the priest Père Sébastien, Father Sébastien, who preached fervently against Nazi atheism at an important church in the city of Lyons. Over the past few months, the bureau had made sure he was besieged by letters from the pious in various parts of France, negative – though gravely respectful – commentary had appeared in the Lyonnais newspapers, and the Vatican had been contacted by German diplomats in Rome. Why, they asked, was Père Sébastien so obsessed with the religious institutions of a foreign nation? Was he not using the pulpit to advance his own, rather leftist, political agenda? Should he not, the Lord’s Shepherd, be paying more attention to the tending of his own local flock?