Alan Furst: The Foreign Correspondent

Calm down. The spies were always after something. If you were a journalist, here all of a sudden came the warmest Russian, most cultured German, most sophisticated Frenchwoman you ever met. Weisz’s personal favorite in Paris was the magnificent Count Polanyi, at the Hungarian legation-lovely old European manners, dire honesty, and a sense of humor: very appealing, very dangerous. A mistake to be anywhere near these people, but sometimes one erred. Weisz certainly had. With, for example, the British spy Lady Angela Hope-she made no secret of it-and the memory of her produced a drunken snort of laughter. He had twice, in her Passy apartment, erred with Lady Angela, who made a loud, elaborate opera of it all, surely he was at least Casanova to produce such shrieks-Christ, there were maids in the apartment. Never mind the maids, the neighbors! Oh my dear, Lady Angela’s been murdered. Again. This performance had been followed by a pillow interrogation of considerable length, all for the unreported tidbits from his interview with Gafencu, the Roumanian foreign minister. Which she’d not had, any more than Brown had found out where Colonel Ferrara had gone to ground.

By nine, Weisz was back in his room. He’d wanted dinner, by the time he reached the Sixth, but dinner at Chez this or Mere that, with a newspaper for company, had not appealed to him, so he’d stopped at his cafe and had a ham sandwich, coffee, and an apple. Once home, he thought about writing, writing from the heart, for himself, and would’ve worked on the novel in his desk drawer, but for the fact that there was no novel in the drawer. So he stretched out on the bed, listened to a symphony, smoked cigarettes, and read Malraux’s Man’s Fate - La Condition Humaine, in French-for the second time. Shanghai in 1927, the Communist uprising, peasant terrorists, Soviet political operatives working against Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces, secret police, spies, European aristocrats. Overlain with the French taste for philosophy. No refuge here from Weisz’s vocational life, but he did not, would not, seek refuge.

Still, there was at least, thankfully, one exception to the rule. He put the book down from time to time and thought about Olivia, about what it might have been like to make love to her, about Veronique, about his chaotic love life, this one and that one, wherever they were that night. Thought particularly about the, well, not the love of his life perhaps, but the woman he never stopped thinking about, because their hours together had been, always, exciting and passionate. “It’s just that we were made for each other,” she would say, a melancholy sigh in her voice. “Sometimes I think, why can’t we just, continue?” Continue meant, he supposed, a life of afternoons in hotel beds, occasional dinners in out-of-the-way restaurants. His desire for her never ended, and she told him it was that way for her. But. It would not translate to marriage, children, domestic life, it was a love affair, and they both knew it. She’d married, three years earlier, in Germany, a marriage of money, and social standing, a marriage, he thought, brought on by turning forty and fatigue with love affairs, even theirs. Still, when he was lonely, he thought about her. And he was very lonely.

He’d never imagined it would turn out that way, but the political maelstrom of his twenties and thirties, the world gone wrong, the pulse of evil and the unending flight from it, had turned life on its wrong side. Anyhow he blamed it, for leaving him alone in a hotel room in a foreign city. Where he fell asleep twice, by eleven-thirty, before giving up on the day, crawling under the blanket, and turning out the light.

28 January, Barcelona.

S. Kolb.

So he was called, on his present passport, a workname they gave him when it suited their inclinations. His real name had disappeared, long ago, and he had become Mr. Nobody, from the nation of Nowhere, and he looked it: bald, with a fringe of dark hair, eyeglasses, a sparse mustache-a short, inconsequential man in a tired suit, at that moment chained to two anarchists and a water pipe in the WC of a cafe on the bombed-out waterfront of an abandoned city. Sentenced to be shot. Eventually. There was a queue, one had to wait one’s turn, and the executioners might not go back to work until they’d had lunch.

Terribly unfair, it seemed to S. Kolb.

His papers said he was the representative of a Swiss engineering firm in Zurich, and a letter in his briefcase, on Republican government stationery, dated two weeks earlier, confirmed his appointment at the office of military procurement. Fiction, all of it. The letter was a forgery, the office of military procurement was now an empty room, its floor littered with important papers, the name was an alias, and Kolb was no salesman.

But even so, unfair. Because the people who were going to shoot him didn’t know about any of that. He’d tried to enter a riding stable, the temporary encampment of a few companies of the Fifth Army Corps, where a guard had arrested him and taken him to the office of the Checa -secret police-at that moment stationed in a waterfront cafe. The officer in charge, seated at a table by the bar, was a bull of a man, with a fat moon face covered in dark blue beard shadow. He’d listened impatiently to the guard’s story, raised up on one haunch, scowled, then said, “He’s a spy, shoot him.”

He wasn’t wrong. Kolb was an operative of the British Secret Intelligence Service, a secret agent, yes, a spy. Nevertheless, this was terribly unfair. For he was, at that moment, not spying-not stealing documents, suborning officials, or taking photographs. Mostly that was his work, with the occasional murder thrown in when London demanded it, but not this week. This week, at the direction of his boss, an icy man known as Mr. Brown, S. Kolb had checked out of a comfortable whores’ hotel in Marseilles-an operation to do with the French Merchant Marine-and come running down to Spain in search of an Italian called Colonel Ferrara, thought to have retreated to Barcelona with elements of the Fifth Army Corps.

But Barcelona was a nightmare, not that Mr. Brown cared. The government had packed up its files and fled north to Gerona, thousands of refugees followed, headed to France, and the city was left to await the advancing Nationalist columns. Anarchy ruled, the municipal street cleaners had abandoned their brooms and gone home, great heaps of garbage, attended by clouds of flies, were piled on the sidewalks, refugees broke into empty grocery stores, the city now governed by armed drunks riding through the streets on the roofs of taxicabs.

Yet, even in the midst of chaos, Kolb had tried to do his job. “To the world,” Brown had once told him, “you may seem a meager little fellow, but you have, if I may say so, the balls of a gorilla.” Was that a compliment? God had made him meager, fate had ruined his life when he was accused, as a young man, of embezzlement while working in a bank in Austria, and the British SIS had done the rest. Not a very nice compliment, if that’s what it was. Still, he did persevere, had in this case found what remained of the Fifth Army Corps, and what was his reward?

Chained to anarchists, black scarves around their necks, and a pipe. Outside, in the adjacent alley, several shots were fired. Well, at least the queue was moving-when was lunch? “ Hora de…? ” he asked the nearest anarchist, making a spooning motion with his free hand. From the anarchist, a look of some admiration. Here was a man at death’s door, and he wanted lunch.

Suddenly, the door swung open and two militiamen, pistols in hand, came strolling into the WC. As one of them unbuttoned his fly and used the tiled hole in the floor, the other began to unlock the chain on the pipe. “Officer,” Kolb said. No response from the militiaman. “ Comandante, ” he tried. The man looked at him. “ Por favor, ” Kolb said politely. “ Importante! ”