Alan Furst - The Foreign Correspondent

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 numero 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. “Emigres?” 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 cafe 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 Metro 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 Necessita 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.”