The Foreign Correspondent (15 page)

“Good. So then, let’s be going, these things work better if you move quickly.”

Ferrara shook his head. Here was a sudden turn of fate, yes, but what sort of fate? So, stay? Go? Finally, he said, “Allright, yes, why not.”

As they walked back toward the barracks, Ferrara turned and gestured to his friend, who’d been following them, and the two men spoke for a time, the friend staring at Kolb as though to memorize him. Ferrara, in the stream of Italian, mentioned Kolb’s name, and his friend repeated it. Then Ferrara went into the barracks and emerged with a bundle of clothing, tied with a string. “It’s long past being worn,” he said, “but it does for a pillow.” When they reached the car, Kolb offered him the food he’d bought. Ferrara gathered up almost all of it, except for half a bread, said, “I’ll just be a minute,” and walked back through the gate.

As it happened, Ferrara did drive the automobile, after he got a taste of Kolb behind the wheel, thus it took only twenty minutes to reach the village, and then, an hour later, they left the car at the garage and took a taxi into Tarbes. Near the station, they found a haberdashery, where Ferrara selected a suit, shirt, underwear, everything but shoes—his army boots had survived well in the camp—and Kolb paid for it. As Ferrara changed, in the back of the store, the owner said, “He was in the camp, I imagine, they often come here, if they’re lucky enough to get out.” After a moment, he said, “A disgrace, for France.”

By late afternoon, they were on the train to Paris. In the last light of day, the arid south gave way slowly to patches of snow on plowed fields, to the soft hill country of the Limousin—pollarded trees lining little roads that wound away into the distance.
Invitations,
Kolb thought. They spoke, now and again, about the times they lived in. Ferrara explained that he’d learned French in the camp, to pass the empty hours, and for his new life as an émigré—if the government let him stay. He’d been in Paris once before, years earlier, but Kolb could tell from his voice that he remembered it and that now, for him, it meant refuge. He was, at times, still suspicious of Kolb, but then, this was not unusual. Somehow, Kolb’s work lingered in his presence, the cast shadow of a secret life, and could, however faintly, be apprehended. “Have you really,” Ferrara said, “been sent by the—how to say, what we call the
fuorusciti
?” Which meant—and it took both of them a few minutes to figure out the words—“those who have fled,” the Italian émigrés’ preferred description of themselves.

“Yes. They know all about you, of course.” Surely they did, so at least that much was true, though everything else that Kolb had said was pure lies. “And that’s what they want, your story.”
Anyhow, that’s what we want.

But let’s not concern ourselves with such things, Kolb thought, there would be plenty of time, later on, for the truth, better just then to watch the winter valleys, in their faded colors, as they drifted by to the rhythm of the wheels on the track.

•

It was just breaking dawn when they reached Paris, red streaks of light in the eastern sky, the street sweepers, old women, mostly, at work with twig brooms and water trucks. At the Gare de Lyon, Kolb found a taxi, which took them up to the Sixth Arrondissement and the Hotel Tournon, on the street of the same name.

The SIS had likely thought a long time, Kolb suspected, about where to put Ferrara. In superb accommodations? Overawe their newest pawn? Knock him senseless with luxury? With war coming, the treasury had perhaps opened its fist a little, but the Secret Intelligence Service had been starved all through the thirties, and they’d had to think hard about money—only Hitler could really open the bank, and, for the moment, though he’d snatched Czechoslovakia, it didn’t really matter all
that
much. Therefore, the Hotel Tournon—
get him a decent room, Harry, nothing too grand.
And the neighborhood was also, for their purposes, rather convenient, because Pawn Two lived there, and would be able to walk to work. Make it easy, keep them both happy, life went better that way.

Still, SIS rich or poor, the night clerk had been well greased. She rose from her couch in the lobby when Kolb hammered on the door, then appeared, in frightful housedress, wild auburn hair, and magnificent breath, to let them in.
“Ah, mais oui! Le nouveau monsieur pour numéro huit!”
Yes, here’s the new roomer in number eight, such generous friends, surely he would be, too.

Up a flight of creaky wooden stairs, the room was spacious, with a tall window. Ferrara walked around, sat on the bed, opened the shutters so he could look out on the sleeping courtyard. Not bad, not bad at all, certainly not a tiny room in the apartment of some
fuorusciti,
and not a dirt-cheap hotel packed with Italian refugees. “Emigrés?” Ferrara said, clearly skeptical. “They paid for this?”

From Kolb, a shrug, and the most angelic of smiles.
May all your abductions be so sweet, my little lamb.
“You like it?” Kolb said.

“Of course I
like
it.” Ferrara left the rest unsaid.

“Well then,” Kolb replied, himself no slouch at leaving things unsaid.

Ferrara hung his jacket up on the hanger in the armoire, and took from his pockets his passport, a few papers, and a sepia photograph of his wife and three children in a cardboard frame. It had, at some point, been bent, and straightened out, so the photograph was broken across the upper corner.

“Your family?”

“Yes,” Ferrara said. “But their lives go on a long way from mine—it’s been more than two years since I last saw them.” He put the passport in the bottom drawer of the armoire, closed the door, and rested the photograph on the windowsill. “And that’s that,” he said.

Kolb, who knew too well what he meant, nodded in sympathy.

“I left a lot behind, crossing the Pyrenees on foot, at night, then the people who arrested me took pretty much everything else.” He shrugged and said, “So, I’m forty-seven years old, and that’s what I have.”

“The times we live in, Colonel,” Kolb said. “Now, I think, we’ll go to the café downstairs, for coffee with hot milk, and a
tartine.
” Which was a long, skinny bread. Cut in half. And amply buttered.

19
March.

The seers of weather predicted the rainiest spring of the century, and so it was when Carlo Weisz returned to Paris. It dripped off the brim of his hat, ran in the gutters, and did nothing to improve his state of mind. From train to Métro and then to the Hotel Dauphine, he thought up a dozen useless schemes to bring Christa von Schirren to Paris, not one of which was worth a sou. But he would, at least, write her a letter—a disguised letter, as though it came from an aunt, or an old school friend, perhaps, traveling in Europe, pausing in Paris, and collecting mail at the American Express office.

Delahanty was happy to see him that afternoon, he’d scored a beat on the opposition with the
resistance in Prague
story, though the London
Times
had run a version of it the following day. From Delahanty, the old saw, “Nothing quite like being shot at, if they miss.”

Salamone was also happy to see him, though not for long, when they met at the bar near his office. Raindrops, lit red by the neon sign, ran slowly down the window, and the bar dog shook off a great spray of water when she was let in the door. “Welcome back,” Salamone said. “I assume you’re glad to be out of there.”

“A nightmare,” Weisz said. “And no surprise. But, no matter how much you read the papers, you don’t know about the little things, not unless you go there—what people say when they can’t say what they want to, how they look at you, how they look away. And then, after two weeks of that, I went to Prague, where they’ve been occupied, and they know what it will mean for them.”

“Suicides,” Salamone said. “So it’s reported in the newspapers here. Hundreds of them, Jews, others. The ones who didn’t get out in time.”

“It was very bad,” Weisz said.

“Well, it’s not much better back home. And I have to tell you that we’ve lost two runners.”

He meant
distributors
—bus drivers, barmen, storekeepers, janitors, anybody who had contact with the public. Thus it was said that if you wanted to know what was really going on in the world, best to visit the second-floor lavatory at the National Gallery of Antique Art, in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. Always something to read, there.

But distribution was mostly managed by teenaged girls from the fascist student organizations. They had to join, just as their fathers joined the
Partito Nazionale Fascista,
the PNF.
Per Necessità Familiare,
the joke went, for family necessity. But a lot of the girls hated what they had to do—march, sing, collect money—and signed up to distribute newspapers, getting away with it because people thought that girls would never do such a thing, would never dare. The
fascisti
had it a little wrong there, but still, now and again most often by betrayal, the police caught them.

“Two of them,” Weisz said. “Arrested?”

“Yes, in Bologna. Fifteen-year-old girls, cousins.”

“Do we know what happened?”

“We don’t. They went out with papers, in their school satchels, to leave them at the railroad station, but they never came back. Then, the following day, the police notified the parents.”

“And now they’ll go before the Special Tribunals.”

“Yes, as always. They’ll get two or three years.”

Weisz wondered, for a moment, whether the whole thing was worth it; girls in jail while the
giellisti
conspired in Paris, but he knew it for a question that couldn’t be answered. “Perhaps,” he said, “they can be pried loose.”

“Not in this case,” Salamone said. “The families are poor.”

They were silent for a time, the bar was quiet, only the sound of the rain in the street. Weisz unbuckled his briefcase and put the lists of German agents on the table. “I’ve brought you a present,” he said. “From Berlin.”

Salamone worked away at it; leaned on his elbows, soon enough pressed his fingers against his temples, then moved his head slowly from side to side. When he looked up, he said, “What is it with you? First that fucking torpedo, now this. Are you, some kind of,
magnet
?”

“It would seem so,” Weisz said.

“How’d you get it?”

“From a man in a park. It comes from the Foreign Ministry.”

“A man in a park.”

“Leave it at that, Arturo.”

“Fine, but at least tell me what it means.”

Weisz explained—German penetration throughout the Italian security system.

“
Mannaggia,
” Salamone said quietly, still reading through the list. “What a gift, it’s a death sentence. Next time, maybe a little stuffed bear, eh?”

“What do we do?”

Weisz watched Salamone as he tried to work it out. Yes, he was called a
giellisti,
but so what. The man on the other side of the table was in late middle age, a former shipping broker, his career destroyed by the government, and now a clerk. Nothing in life had prepared him for conspiracy, he had to figure it out as he went along.

“I’m not sure,” Salamone said. “We can’t just print it, that I do know, it would bring them down on us like—I don’t know, like hellfire, or think up something worse. And we’d have the Germans as well, the local Gestapo, with their pals in Berlin tearing the Foreign Ministry apart until they find out who went to the park.”

“But we can’t burn it, not this time.”

“No, Carlo, this hurts them. Remember the rule, anything that forces Germany and Italy apart, we want. And this does, this will make some of the
fascisti
mad—our people are mad already, which doesn’t mean shit to a snail, but, get
them,
the fearful
them,
mad, and we’ve done something worthwhile.”

“It’s
how
we do it.”

“Yes, I think so. We can’t be cowards and slip this to the Communists, though I admit it crossed my mind.”

“That’s where it comes from, I suspect. I was told as much.”

Salamone shrugged. “I’m not surprised. To do such a thing as this, in Germany, under the Nazi regime, would take somebody very strong, very committed, somebody with real
ideology.
”

“Maybe,” Weisz said, “maybe we can just say we know, that we’ve heard this is going on. The fascists will know how to find out the rest, since it’s in the heart of their machine. It’s disloyalty, to Italy, to allow another country to prepare for an occupation. Thus, even if you don’t like us, when we print this, we’re patriots.”

“How would you put it?”

“Just as I’ve said. A concerned official in an Italian bureau has informed
Liberazione
…Or an anonymous letter, which we believe.”

“Not bad,” Salamone said.

“But then, we have the real thing to deal with.”

“Give it to somebody who can use it.”

“The French? The British? Both? Hand it to a diplomat?”

“Don’t do that!”

“Why not?”

“Because they’ll be back in a week, wanting more. And they won’t say please.”

“In the mail, then. Mail it to the Foreign Ministry and the British embassy. Let them deal with the OVRA.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Salamone said, sliding the list toward his side of the table.

Weisz took it back. “No, I’m responsible for it, I’ll do it. Should I, maybe, retype it?”

“Then it’s from your typewriter,” Salamone said. “They can figure these things out. In the crime novels, they can, and I think that’s true.”

“But it would be on the man in the park’s typewriter. What if somebody figured
that
out?”

“So, find another typewriter.”

Weisz grinned. “I think this game is called
hot potato.
Where in hell will I find another typewriter?”

“Buy it, my friend. Out at Clignancourt, in the flea market. Then get rid of it. Pawn it, throw it out, or leave it in the street somewhere. And do it before the mail is delivered.”

Weisz refolded the list and put it back in its envelope.

At eight that evening, Weisz went looking for dinner.
Mère
this?
Chez
that? He’d read that day’s
Le Journal,
so he stopped at a newsstand and bought a
Petit Parisien
as a dinner companion. It was a terrible rag, but he secretly enjoyed it, all that lust and greed in high places somehow went well with dinner, especially dinner alone.