Mission to Paris (31 page)

Minutes later, Stahl found the café, an old-fashioned oasis in the desert of a fashionable neighborhood. Inside it was all amber walls and a haze of Gauloises smoke, and crowded with the usual cast of characters: old women with their dogs, men in workers’ caps at the bar, lovers without a place to go. From a far corner, Kiki waved to him and Stahl wound his way past the close-set tables, and they kissed hello. Kiki, despite the cloud of expensive perfume, seemed to be playing a chaste version of herself; the seductress make-up was gone, leaving her fresh-faced and younger, and she wore a sweater of very soft wool in a colour that reminded Stahl of mocha cream. Inside the shawl collar of the sweater, a silk scarf decorated with gold anchors replaced her pearl necklace. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said, meaning it. ‘You sounded like you were half-asleep.’

‘I was,’ Stahl said.

‘I should’ve called earlier,’ Kiki said, ‘but I couldn’t make up my mind, and I was afraid you’d just hang up on me.’

‘That’s not like you, Kiki.’

‘No, I suppose it isn’t, but you’ll see why. Are you going to order something?’

‘I don’t really want coffee, it will keep me awake. Anyhow, I’m getting more curious by the moment, so …’

Kiki took a breath, then said, ‘I’m here as a messenger, Fredric. And the message comes from the Baroness von Reschke. She knew you wouldn’t agree to see her, and she regrets that, though she does understand. But I must tell you this: when she told me what she wanted me to say to you she was, how to put it, intense,
serious
, and not her usual self – you know what she’s like.’

‘I do know,’ Stahl said. ‘All charm and smiles, the baroness.’

‘Not when I saw her. She wanted to make sure, absolutely sure, that you received what she called “a final warning”. According to her, certain people, her words, no explanation, certain people require your cooperation, and it would be unwise not to help them. What she said was, “please make him understand that he won’t be warned again.” Does that make any sense to you?’

‘It does.’

‘Who are these people, to threaten
you
?’

‘Being in the movies, Kiki, doesn’t shield you from what goes on in the real world. And the people she’s talking about are very much from the real world, where politics is a game with no rules, and they’re determined to make me help them.’

‘Do you know who they are?’

‘Well, they’re friends of the baroness, and sure of her to the point that they’ve used her, and thus you, to send their message.’

She stared at him. ‘What if you don’t do what they want? Are you in danger?’

‘Not really. You shouldn’t worry about it, and I’ll only be in Paris for a few more weeks.’

‘I care for you, Fredric, being with you meant a lot to me. I don’t want you to be – hurt.’

‘Likely that won’t happen, though it’s hard to predict.’

‘What shall I tell her? She said, “I must have an answer,” and she meant it. Not like her at all, not the baroness I know. Suddenly, right there in her parlour, she was a different woman. Cold, and almost, well,
cruel
.’

‘The answer is that you gave me the message. I heard what she wanted me to hear.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘No, nothing else.’

‘Fredric’ – she reached across the table and took his hand in hers – ‘is there anything I can do to help you?’

He shook his head. ‘Leave it alone, Kiki. Forget this happened. There is no point in your being involved, in fact there’s every reason you shouldn’t be.’

She let go of his hand and sat back. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘But the offer is still there, if you change your mind.’

Amid the low burble and clatter of the night-time café, Stahl was silent for a time, then leaned forward and said, ‘Kiki, maybe I shouldn’t ask, but I will anyhow. Are you more a part of this than you’re telling me?’

Slowly, she shook her head. ‘I’m only Kiki de Saint-Ange, Fredric, that’s all I know how to be. And when you go back to America I’ll just be a girl you knew in Paris.’

Stahl and Renate spent Christmas Eve together – had a champagne supper served in his suite, then stayed for the night. Renate Steiner was a supremely sophisticated woman, but a supremely sophisticated woman who had lived in penury for a long time and Stahl was secretly delighted to watch as the luxurious surroundings went to her head. A glass of champagne in hand, she took a bubble bath in the glorious bathroom, then, pink and excited, lounged around the suite in Stahl’s pyjamas as the radio played Christmas carols – ‘O the rising of the sun, the running of the deer’. Finally, drunk and happy, they went to bed, made love, and woke in the morning to the icy fog of a northern European winter.

Late that morning they took a taxi to Renate’s apartment, where she was giving a buffet lunch for her émigré friends. Perhaps twenty people were packed into the tiny apartment, all of them fugitives; artists, leftists, Jews, the sort of people the Nazis loathed, the sort of people the Nazis murdered. A ragtag lot, all of them poor to one degree or another. The lunch was abundant – Stahl saw to that – and practically all of it was eaten. And drunk. A few tears were shed, and La Belle France was toasted as their saviour, though one of the guests turned to Stahl and whispered, ‘For the time being, anyhow.’ Stahl had visited his bank the day before and, as a line of guests left en masse – ‘I don’t want these opened at the party,’ he’d told Renate – each was given an envelope containing a thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills. He was plenty rich enough to make such gestures, and so he did.

Trouble came the following day, from an unexpected direction, and it also affected a group of émigrés, including Stahl and Renate. Avila called a meeting of the cast and crew on the set, where he announced that Paramount had declined to pay for air travel to Budapest. The cast and crew would, the studio executives had declared, have to go by train. A certain hush fell over the set when Avila said this. It took a moment, but soon enough everybody realized what that meant: the eleven émigrés working on
Après la Guerre
could not cross the German border. The Gestapo list of those who had fled Germany illegally was precise and thorough, and the émigrés would certainly be arrested. And to reach Hungary from France you had to go through Germany. ‘Deschelles fought hard,’ Avila explained, ‘but the Paramount executives wouldn’t budge. As Jules put it to me, ‘I did the best I could, but I am an ant and they are a thumb.’

In the discussion that followed, the émigrés didn’t say much, but the rest of the company was passionate on their behalf. ‘We are a family,’ Justine Piro said. ‘Every good production company becomes a family, we can’t leave people behind.’ At the end of the discussion, it was worked out that the eleven would fly on a small chartered aeroplane; Deschelles would ‘borrow’ some money from production funds, and those who could afford it – which meant Stahl, paying for himself and Renate, and two others making high salaries – would contribute. Avila would donate, and so would Piro, Pasquin, and Gilles Brecker. At the end of the discussion, a carpenter from Hamburg, formerly a communist streetfighter, stood and thanked everyone there. ‘I’ll tell you it’s a fucking pity,’ Pasquin said to Stahl as the meeting broke up, ‘that the whole country won’t work this way.’

Early on the morning of 28 December, Stahl took a taxi to Le Bourget. As they left the city, the driver said, ‘Excuse me, monsieur, is it possible that someone is following you?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Because there’s a car that’s been behind us at every turn.’ Then, with the bellicose flair of the Parisian taxi driver, he said, ‘I’ll lose them if you want me to, monsieur.’ Stahl told him not to bother. An hour later he was in an aeroplane, looking down at the snow-dusted forests of Germany.

28 December. They circled Budapest as the lights of the city came on, then landed at the nearby airfield. The customs officers were amiable enough, smiling and silent as they stamped passports – silent because they knew that nobody spoke Hungarian, and they didn’t care to conduct business in German, the second language of Hungary, and what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Next, the eleven émigrés crowded into two rattletrap taxis. Avila had given Stahl a hand-drawn map of the castle’s location, near the Danubian port of Komarom, and Stahl handed it to the taxi drivers. After some head scratching and a spirited argument, inspiration struck and the taxis drove off over snow-covered roads. Soon enough the driving grew difficult, the bald tyres spun, the drivers cursed, everybody got out and pushed. Finally, at the edge of a tiny village, the drivers gave up. ‘Can’t go,’ said one of them in rudimentary German. Stahl paid him, the driver said they should stay where they were and that someone would come for them. Then the taxis got turned around and headed back towards Budapest.

As the émigrés stood by their baggage, rubbing their hands and stamping their feet, they wondered what would become of them. A cold hour passed, and just when they’d decided to walk into the village, they heard the jingling of little bells. Then, from the darkness, there appeared two sleighs, each of them drawn by two immense horses. Once again, Stahl produced his map, but these drivers took one glance and knew where they were going. The émigrés seated themselves in the sleighs and were then covered by large blankets, more like rugs, thick wool with canvas backing. A crown and Cross-of-Lorraine design, red on grey, decorated the wool, which smelled like horse sweat and manure. At last, with long plumes steaming from the horses’ nostrils, they trotted off towards Komarom.

The moon cast blue-tinted light on the snow and, except for the muffled clop of hooves, the jingling bells, and the occasional gentle ‘hup’ of the driver, there wasn’t a sound to be heard. ‘We’ve gone back in time,’ Renate said as she pressed against Stahl, sharing his warmth. The road wound through a forest, where bare branches glittered with ice in the moonlight, then returned to the white fields. Far off in the distance, they heard two wolves, howling back and forth. The grinning driver turned halfway round and, rubbing his tummy, said something in Hungarian which made him laugh. After an hour or so, and just as the frigid air started to hurt the skin on their faces, a dark, massive silhouette appeared in the distance. The driver pointed with his whip and said, ‘Castle Polanyi.’

In the moonlight, the castle rose from a hill high above the grey Danube. A jagged ruin, black as soot, destroyed not so much by time as by stones flung from siege machines, by cannon, by fire, by the wars of three hundred years. Here and there, broken towers climbed above the crumbling battlements. The castle’s factotum, manager of noble estates, greeted the frozen travellers at the end of a bridge over the empty moat, and led them into a rebuilt part of the castle, then up a stone stairway where rooms awaited them, each with a blazing fire. As the factotum, who introduced himself as Csaba, pronounced
chaba
, showed Stahl his room, he said that the Count Polanyi intended to visit the castle while filming was in progress. ‘You should be honoured,’ said Csaba. ‘He doesn’t often come here, except in hunting season. The count is a diplomat at the Hungarian legation in Paris. A great man, you shall see.’ Stahl and Renate stayed together, huddled under many blankets, the chill air in the room so cold that Stahl slid out of bed from time to time and added a log to the fire.

As night fell on the following day, the cast and crew arrived from Budapest. ‘We only just made it,’ Avila told Stahl. ‘There were trucks waiting for us at the railway station, but we had to stop and dig them out of the snow every few miles.’ In the morning, the last day of December, the last day of 1938, they once again began work on
Après la Guerre
.

In the movie it was autumn, but in Komárom it was winter, so two of the count’s stablemen shovelled the snow off the castle’s courtyard. The prop man had brought large burlap bags of dead leaves and, with the help of a fan, these blew across the ancient sett stones. Stahl, in his legionnaire’s uniform, and Piro, in black kerchief and a man’s torn coat, sat on a low wall, where the leaves swirled past their feet – to be gathered at the far end of the courtyard and sent across again, though the rough surface did them no good. Once Avila had the camera properly angled, so that it captured the profile of the black tower above them, the day’s shooting began.

‘I think,’ Ilona says, ‘before we go in there, I must tell you the truth about myself.’

‘What truth is that?’ says Vadic, his hair ruffled handsomely by the leaf fan.

‘I am no countess, Colonel Vadic. It was all … a lie.’

‘Are you Ilona? Are you Hungarian?’

‘I am Ilona and, at least on my mother’s side, Hungarian. I was afraid you wouldn’t take me along, so I made up a story.’

‘Oh well, it was nice to have a countess with us. I suppose that if we go in there, they won’t greet you with open arms.’

A rueful smile. ‘They will stare at me, they will wonder, “who is this ragged woman, pretending to be a countess?”’

‘Beautiful woman, I’d say.’

‘You flatter me, but I don’t believe they’ll care. They will have the servants throw us out, or worse.’

They will
– a reluctant nod from Colonel Vadic. ‘So, no jewels, no loyal lady’s maid.’

‘No, colonel. Not even dinner. It was only my daydream of a different life.’

‘Well, all is not lost. We shall just be wayfaring strangers, going home after the war. They still might feed us.’

‘Are you angry with me? I wouldn’t blame you.’

‘I can’t be angry, Ilona, not with you. And beautiful women are allowed a few lies.’

As they sit for a moment in silence, a noisy flock of crows – no part of the script – lands on the tower above the wall. Then Ilona says, ‘Why do you keep saying I am beautiful? Just
look
at me.’

‘To me you have always been beautiful, from the first moment I saw you.’

She looks up at him and in her eyes, in the subtle alteration of her face, is the slow comprehension of what he’s been trying to say. Slowly, he leans towards her, he is going to kiss her but a voice from a window shouts ‘Get out of here, you filthy tramps.’