Alan Furst - The Foreign Correspondent

Finally, Weisz said, “I will talk to them, at Liberazione. ”

“Do you wish to keep that copy? We have others, though you must be very careful with it.”

No, he knew what it was, he would prefer to leave the document with Pompon.

As he’d earlier said to Salamone: hot potato.

The taxi sped through the Paris night. A soft May evening, the air warm and seductive, half the city out on the boulevards. Weisz had been happy enough in his room, but the night manager at Reuters had sent him off, pad and pencil in hand, to the Hotel Crillon. “It’s King Zog,” he’d said on the Dauphine telephone. “The local Albanians have discovered him, and they’re gathering on the place Concorde. Go and have a look, will you?”

Weisz’s driver took the Pont Royal bridge, turned on Saint-Honore, drove ten feet down the rue Royale, and stopped behind a line of cars that disappeared into a crowd. There they were stuck, and were now honking their horns, making sure that nobody got out of their way. The driver threw his taxi into reverse, waving at the car behind him to back up. “Not me,” he said to Weisz, “not tonight.” Weisz paid, jotted down the fare, and got out.

What was Zog, Ahmed Zogu, former king of Albania, doing there? Thrown out by Mussolini, he’d wandered through various capitals, the press keeping track of him, and had apparently landed at the Crillon. But, local Albanians? Albania was the lost mountain kingdom of the Balkans-and that was very lost indeed-independent in 1920, then snatched at, north and south, by Italy and Yugoslavia, until Mussolini grabbed the whole thing a month earlier. But, as far as Weisz knew, there was not much of a political emigre community in Paris.

There was certainly a crowd on the rue Royale, mostly curious passersby, and, when Weisz finally pushed his way through, on Concorde, where he realized that however many Albanians had made their way to Paris, they’d showed up that night. Six or seven hundred, he thought, with a few hundred French supporters. Not the Communists-no red flags-because what you had in Albania was a little dictator eaten up by a big dictator, but those who thought it was never a good idea for one nation to occupy another, and, on a lovely May night, why not take a stroll over to the Crillon?

Weisz worked toward the front of the hotel, where a bedsheet nailed to a pair of poles, swaying with the motion of the crowd, said something in Albanian. Up here they were also chanting-Weisz caught the words Zog and Mussolini, but that was about it. At the Crillon entry, a score of porters and bellmen were ranged protectively in front of the door and, as Weisz watched, the flics began to show up, truncheons tapping their legs, ready for action. All across the face of the hotel, guests were looking out, pointing here and there, enjoying the show. Then a window on the top floor opened, a light went on in the room, and a matinee idol, with dashing mustache, leaned out and gave the Zogist salute: hand flattened, palm forward, over the heart. King Zog! From behind the drape, someone reached out, and now the king wore a general’s hat, heavy with gold braid, above his Sulka bathrobe. The crowd cheered, Queen Geraldine appeared at the king’s side, and both waved.

Now some idiot- anti-Zogist elements in the crowd, Weisz wrote-threw a bottle, which shattered in front of a bellboy, who lost his little cap as he leapt away. Then the king and queen stepped back from the window, and the light went off. Next to Weisz, a bearded giant put his hands beside his mouth and shouted, in French, “That’s right, run away, you little pussy.” This drew a snicker from his tiny girlfriend, and an angry Albanian shout from somewhere in the crowd. On the top floor, another window opened, and a uniformed army officer looked out.

The police began to advance, barring their truncheons and forcing the crowd back from the front of the hotel. The fighting started almost immediately-surging knots of people in the crowd, others pushing and shoving, trying to get out of the way. “Ah,” said the giant with some satisfaction, “ les chevaux. ” The horses. The cavalry had arrived, mounted police with long truncheons, advancing down the avenue Gabriel.

“You don’t like the king?” Weisz said to the giant-he had to get some kind of quote from somebody, jot down a few lines, find a telephone, file the story, and go out for dinner.

“He doesn’t like anybody,” said the giant’s girlfriend.

What was he, Weisz wondered. A Communist? Fascist? Anarchist?

But this he was not to learn.

Because the next thing he knew, he was on the ground. Someone behind him had hit him in the side of the head, with something, he had no idea what, hit him hard enough to knock him over. Not a good place to be, down here. His vision blurred, a forest of shoes moved away, and a few indignant oaths followed somebody, whoever’d hit him, as the man sliced his way through the crowd.

“You are bleeding,” said the giant.

Weisz felt his face, and his hand came away red-maybe he’d cut himself on the sharp edge of a cobblestone-then he started groping around for his glasses. “Here they are.” A hand offered them, one lens cracked, the temple piece gone.

Somebody put his hands beneath Weisz’s armpits and hauled him to his feet. It was the giant, who said, “We better get out of here.”

Weisz heard the horses, in a swift walk, advancing toward him. He got a handkerchief from his back pocket and held it to the side of his head, took a step, almost toppled over. Only one eye, he realized, saw properly, the other had everything out of focus. He went down on one knee. Maybe, he thought, I’m hurt.

The crowd broke around him as it ran away, pursued by the mounted police, swinging their truncheons. Then a tough old Parisian flic appeared at his side-he was now alone on a vast stretch of the place Concorde. “Can you stand up?” the flic said.

“I think so.”

“Because, if you can’t, I have to put you in an ambulance.”

“No, it’s allright. I’m a journalist.”

“Try and stand.”

He was very wobbly, but he managed. “Maybe a taxi,” he said.

“They don’t stick around, when these things happen. How about a cafe?”

“Yes, that’s a good idea.”

“See who hit you?”

“No.”

“Any idea why?”

“No idea.”

The flic shook his head-saw too much of human nature and didn’t like it. “Maybe just for fun. Anyhow, let’s try for the cafe.”

He held Weisz up on one side and walked him slowly over to the rue de Rivoli, where a tourist cafe had emptied out as soon as the fighting started. Weisz sat down hard, a waiter brought him a glass of water and a bar towel. “You can’t go home like that,” he said.

Weisz invited Salamone out for dinner the following night-by way of encouraging a friend in difficulties. They met at a little Italian place out in the Thirteenth, the second-best Italian restaurant in Paris-the best owned by a well-known supporter of Mussolini, so there they could not go. “What happened to you?” Salamone said, as Weisz arrived.

Weisz had gone to his doctor that morning, and now wore a white gauze bandage on the left side of his face, badly scraped by the rough surface of a cobblestone, and a puffy red mark below his temple on the other side. His new glasses would be ready in a day or two. “A street demonstration last night,” he told Salamone. “Somebody hit me.”

“I’ll say they did. Who was it?”

“I have no idea.”

“No confrontation?”

“He was behind me, ran away, and I never saw him.”

“What, somebody followed you? Somebody, ah, we know?”