Mission to Paris (34 page)

At the hotel, he told Renate to grab her passport and they would go immediately to the consulate. She had set her suitcase on the luggage rack and unpacked a few things. ‘Do you think you could lend me a handkerchief?’ she said. ‘I seem to have left mine back in the room.’

‘Of course,’ he said, put his suitcase on the bed and opened it up. Renate, standing by his side, said, ‘What’s that?’

‘An automatic pistol that Polanyi gave me.’ After a brief search, he found a handkerchief, handed it to her, and said, ‘Now can we go?’

By 5.15, Hungarian time, Renate had a visa to travel to America. If she could ever get out of Hungary alive. At 7.40, Stahl’s call to the William Morris Agency was put through and he went down to a telephone cabin in the lobby. The secretary who answered the phone found Buzzy right away. ‘Fredric? Can you hear me?’

‘Yes, I can.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘It’s a long story, but what’s happened is that I’m with a woman friend, we were shooting on location in Hungary, and the border officials won’t let us out.’

‘Won’t let
you
out?’

‘I go where she goes.’

‘Oh. Okay, now I understand. Let me make some calls, I’ll see what I can do.’ Stahl had heard this line before, and, when he’d heard it, good things had followed. Not always, but often enough.

‘Her name is Renate Steiner, Buzz. She’s officially a German citizen but she’s a political émigré and lives in Paris.’

‘Can you spell her name for me?’

Stahl spelled out the name.

‘Now, where are you? In Budapest, I know, but I need a telephone number.’

Stahl went to the desk for the number and, miraculously, when he returned, the line was still open. After he’d made sure the hotel and the number were correctly written down, he said, ‘Buzzy, do you think you can help?’

‘I’ll give it one helluva try.’

‘That’s all I can ask.’

‘Everything okay, otherwise?’

‘It is.’

‘You sound serious about this woman, maybe sometime I’ll meet her.’

‘God willing,’ Stahl said.

‘We’ll talk soon,’ Buzzy said, and hung up.

10 January. Stahl had no idea what Buzz Mehlman had done or who he’d talked to but, by eleven that morning, it produced, at the Astoria desk, one Jerry Silverberg. Short, pudgy, and nervous, wearing glasses in tortoiseshell frames with lenses so thick they distorted his eyes, Silverberg was wearing what Stahl suspected was a brand-new suit, possibly bought for this meeting. They went to a coffee shop in the hotel lobby, where Silverberg ordered a glass of seltzer. ‘I’m the Warner’s rep in eastern Europe,’ Silverberg said. ‘I work with all the distributors in Poland, Hungary, Roumania, and Bulgaria. After I got the big call, I took a train down here from Warsaw, because you are one important guy, Mr Stahl.’

‘The big call. From Buzz Mehlman?’

‘Who?’

‘My agent.’

‘Oh no, I got the call from Walter Perry, which, as I’m sure you know, means Jack Warner. So, believe me when I say I’m going to help you.’

‘I hope you can.’

‘I
better
. Mr Perry talked to me for a while, he told me who he was, which I knew, and he mentioned he was the Warner Bros. man who deals with people in Washington, D.C. Which I didn’t know, but I suppose somebody does that and he’s the one. He also said that Mr Warner himself was concerned about you, and told me to give you five thousand dollars, which I have with me. So, as I said, you’re one important guy.’

‘Very encouraging, Jerry, but the German police want to question my woman friend, and the Hungarians won’t let us out until she goes to the German legation.’

‘Mr Perry seemed to know all about it. And he wants me to help you. “Any way you can,” he said to me. So, first of all, if you’re thinking the Hungarians, with the Nazis looking over their shoulder, will let you out of here, don’t. You’ll be here forever. No, this has got to be done another way, what I like to call
informally
– in this part of the world it’s the way things get done, you understand?’

‘I do.’

‘Good. So here’s how it will work. You take a train down to a place called Arad, which is now in Roumania but it was Hungary for hundreds of years, and the people there are Hungarian. Including the border police, see? And there’s a certain major, Major Mihaly, who runs the Arad border control. To him you give three hundred bucks, no more and no less, and you tell him Mr Sobak sent you. And he’ll let you into Roumania. Here, write it down.’

Jerry Silverberg handed him a pad and a pencil, then repeated the information and spelled the names. That done, Stahl said, ‘Who is Mr Sobak?’

‘I do favours for Mr Sobak, Mr Sobak does favours for me. He owns a movie theatre in Warsaw but he’s one of those people with fingers in a lot of pies.’

‘Do you actually speak Polish, Jerry? And Hungarian?’

‘A little. A little of everything, really, but mostly I speak German – I grew up in Minsk speaking Yiddish, then when I was twelve we moved to Brooklyn. Later on, my brother-in-law was hired as an accountant at Warner Bros. and, after a while, he got me this job. I owned a dry cleaners at the time, nothing but headaches. So now I work for Warner Bros.’

‘No headaches there.’

Silverberg laughed. ‘Plenty, but they pay better. You want to hear the rest?’

Stahl nodded.

‘From Arad there’s a train to Constanta, the Roumanian port on the Black Sea, then you take a steamer to Istanbul, and from
there
you get a ship to Lisbon. Where you board the boat for New York, and then you can catch the 20th Century Limited to L.A. You’re finished with your movie, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then it’s time you went home. I took the liberty of booking all your passages, and your friend Miss Steiner is included. First class all the way! You pick up your tickets from the Thomas Cook office in Constanta. Now this will take a long time, but it’s the southern route and it avoids German Europe – you won’t be alone on these boats, you’ll see.’

‘You did all this?’

‘Who else? And when you get back to Hollywood, and you see Mr Walter Perry, maybe put in a good word for me. Now, here’s the money.’

Stahl took the envelope and said, ‘Jerry, can I buy you lunch? A drink?’

‘Thanks. Kind of you, but as long as I’m in Budapest I might as well see some people.’ He stood, put out a pudgy hand and said, ‘Good luck, Mr Stahl, I hope everything goes all right. And, when you get back to L.A., you ought to write an article or give a speech, tell people what goes on here in Europe, because they just don’t know.’

In the room, Renate was wide-eyed as Stahl read the itinerary off the pad. ‘A long voyage,’ she said. ‘And everything in Paris, just … left there.’

‘Three weeks or so, maybe a few days more. Think of it as a honeymoon.’

‘Maybe I can get my friends to send me some things; photographs, my scissors.’

‘I don’t see why not.’

She took a breath and said, ‘When do we leave?’

‘Now,’ Stahl said.

For three hours, the local to Arad chugged its way southeast. When the train rolled around a long curve, Stahl could see the tracks up ahead of them, two dark lines that disappeared into the winter countryside. In the late afternoon, they got off at Arad station, where the signs were in Roumanian. Going to the border control, Stahl asked to see Major Mihaly and an officer went off to find him, at the café where he spent his days. The major appeared when he was good and ready, a man with a waxed moustache who nipped in his waist with a corset and reeked of hair oil. The six fifty-dollar bills slipped magically from sight into his uniform as he said, ‘When you see Mr Sobak, tell him the price is going up, and give him my best regards. So many people lately, passing through here, he’ll understand.’

‘I’ll let him know,’ Stahl said as the major stamped their passports.

‘Enjoy Roumania, if you can,’ said the Hungarian major and saluted with two fingers to the brim of his uniform cap.

It took a long eight hours to get to Constanta, and the best they could do was a run-down waterfront hotel called the Princess Maria. Stahl went off to the Cook agency, the boat to Istanbul would leave in three days, on 14 January.

12 January. The professional assassin Herbert was also in Constanta, though at a much better hotel. He was, as usual, accompanied by his colleague Lothar, and that night they visited one of Constanta’s better brothels, which catered mostly to the many German visitors in the city that winter. After spending time in the rooms upstairs, Herbert and Lothar sat comfortably in the parlour, ordered schnapps, and relaxed, not having to go to work until the following day.

‘Have we been here before?’ Lothar asked.

‘No, that was last fall. We were in Varna, the
Bulgarian
port, taking care of some Frenchman who ran away with bribe money.’

‘Ah, that’s right. Is this man Stahl somebody I should know? The name is familiar.’

‘A movie actor, a Viennese who lives in America.’

‘That’s unusual,’ Lothar said. ‘For us.’

‘Somehow he got tangled up with the Ribbentropburo, in Paris. Then the Gestapo got involved, and there was some sort of debacle in Hungary. For which Himmler himself blamed von Ribbentrop, he had to blame
somebody
. So now the Ribbentrop people – you know, Emhof – want to be rid of Herr Stahl before anything else goes wrong. They’re afraid of Himmler, this operation is meant to appease him.’

‘I guess it doesn’t matter.’

‘Not to me it doesn’t, as long as somebody pays.’

‘Who’s doing the job?’

‘I found us a new Russian, Volodya he calls himself, an émigré in Bucharest. He’ll be here tomorrow, we’ll do it then.’

‘Care to go back upstairs?’ Lothar said.

‘I’m thinking about it, one’s never quite enough. Maybe that little blonde thing, whatever her name is. What about you?’

‘I’m tired, the train was miserable. But I’m happy to wait for you.’

‘Then I think I’ll indulge,’ Herbert said. ‘It’s cheap enough.’

13 January. As was their usual practice, Herbert and Lothar were to meet their gunman at a local bar in a workers’ quarter. Their Russian, however, was late – two o’clock passed, then two-thirty. In time he showed up – through the window they could see him coming, weaving from one side of the pavement to the other, and chuckling to himself. Herbert swore – there wasn’t much more he could do. Volodya entered singing, and backed up a step when he saw his employers. Then he made his way to their table, collapsed on a chair, and said a few choice words in Russian, which neither Herbert nor Lothar understood.

Herbert was enraged, though you would have had to know him well to see that. Shaking his head, smiling away, he handed Volodya some money, far less than he was supposed to be paid, but he seemed happy enough as he staggered away from the bar. ‘And what do we do now?’ Lothar said.

‘I’ll have to handle it myself,’ Herbert said. ‘Just like the old days. There isn’t time to find somebody else – they sail tomorrow.’

‘Want company?’

‘No, you wait for me here. I won’t be long.’ From a briefcase he took an old Luger pistol and tucked it in his waistband. Then he rose, shook his head once more, and said, ‘Something always goes wrong, doesn’t it,’ and left the bar, headed for the Princess Maria Hotel.

Stahl and Renate were lying on the bed, reading their books, waiting for the hours to pass until they sailed, when someone knocked at the door. Stahl got to his feet and said, ‘Yes? Who is it?’

‘Desk clerk, open up, please.’

Stahl and Renate looked at each other. The desk clerk spoke a form of hotel German, what had been said in the corridor was the language of a Berliner. Stahl called out, ‘One moment,’ and got down on his knees, peered through the crack beneath the door and saw a pair of very well-made shoes. Standing up, he said, ‘What do you want?’

From the other side of the door: ‘Open up, sir.’

This was no desk clerk. As Renate watched, Stahl tiptoed to his open suitcase and took the automatic pistol from its holster. Then he stood in front of the door and waited for the man in the corridor to go away.

Now Herbert, who had had an irritating day, smacked the side of his fist on the thin wooden door, which made it bang against the simple lock. ‘Open up!’ the voice repeated and something surged inside Stahl. The loud report deafened him, a splintery hole appeared in the door. Renate gasped and leapt to her feet, horrified. ‘What happened?’ she said.

Listening at the door, Stahl heard only silence. He made himself wait for a full minute, then looked out into the corridor, but there was nobody there.

Later that afternoon, Stahl went downstairs to pay the bill – they had decided that it was wiser not to stay at the hotel overnight. The desk clerk said to him, ‘Did someone upstairs fire a gun?’

‘They did. A while ago. Some madman in a uniform, I think, on the floor above us. I wouldn’t go up there, if I were you.’

The clerk’s eyes went from Stahl to the staircase and back, then his Adam’s apple rose and fell, and he took the money that Stahl offered him.

The Princess Maria Hotel was on a broad avenue that faced the sea, where benches set beneath lime trees invited passersby to spend a moment. On one of the benches sat a man who was going to spend more than a moment, his head at rest against the uppermost wooden slat, one eye open, a hand inside his jacket. As people walked by, they had a brief glance, then looked away. Was a dead man sitting on a bench, in the Roumania of 1939, of no consequence? Perhaps so. In any event, the men and women in the street went about their business. As to the unpleasant sight on the bench, there was nothing they cared to do.

Someone would see to it.

It
was
a long voyage: fourteen days at sea, a few days waiting to embark in the ports of Istanbul and Lisbon, three weeks by the time they reached New York. There were fierce storms in the Mediterranean and heavy seas in the January Atlantic, where they sailed on a Dutch liner much favoured by students and intellectuals – a melancholy group on that leg of the voyage, sad to leave Europe to its fate, or just sad to leave Europe. Stahl and Renate spent the time together, fought and made up, made love, slept in the afternoon, sometimes just stared at the sea, hypnotized by the long swells, and got to know each other very well indeed but were, more than ever, by the time the ship entered New York Harbor, friends and lovers. Just after dawn that day, the ship blew three long blasts on its foghorn. The more seasoned travellers knew what that meant and flocked to the railing on the port side of the ship as the Statue of Liberty appeared from the morning mist. Here Stahl and Renate joined the crowd and held hands, not letting go until Renate required the use of a handkerchief, and Stahl had to touch the corners of his eyes with his fingers. And they weren’t the only ones.