Alan Furst - The Foreign Correspondent

“I thought about it all night. With a handkerchief tied around my head.”

“And?”

“Nothing else makes sense. People don’t just do that.”

Salamone’s oath was more in sorrow than in anger. He poured red wine from a large carafe into two straight-sided glasses, then handed Weisz a bread stick. “It can’t go on like this,” he said, an Italian echo of il faut en finir. “And it could have been worse.”

“Yes,” Weisz said. “I thought about that, too.”

“What do we do, Carlo?”

“I don’t know.” He gave Salamone a menu, and opened his own. Cured ham, spring lamb with baby artichokes and potatoes, early greens-from the south of France, he supposed-then figs preserved in syrup.

“A feast,” Salamone said.

“That’s what I intended,” Weisz said. “For morale.” He raised his glass, “Salute.”

Salamone took a second sip. “This isn’t Chianti,” he said. “It’s, maybe, Barolo.”

“Something very good,” Weisz said.

They looked over at the proprietor, by the cash register, whose nod and smile acknowledged what he’d done: Enjoy it, boys, I know who you are. Saying thank-you, Weisz and Salamone raised their glasses to him.

Weisz signaled the waiter and ordered the grand dinners. “Are you managing?” he said to Salamone.

“More or less. My wife is angry with me-this politics, enough is enough. And she hates the idea of taking charity.”

“And the girls?”

“They don’t say much-they’re grown, and they have their own lives. They were in their twenties when we came here in ‘thirty-two, and they’re getting to be more French than Italian.” Salamone paused, then said, “Our pharmacist is gone, by the way. He’s going to take a few months off, as he put it, until things cool down. Also the engineer, a note. He regrets, but goodby.”

“Anyone else?”

“Not yet, but we’ll lose a few more, before this is over. In time, it could be just Elena, who’s a fighter, and our benefactor, you and me, maybe the lawyer-he’s thinking it over-and our friend from Siena.”

“Always smiling.”

“Yes, not much bothers him. He takes it all in stride, Signor Zerba.”

“Anything about the job, at the gas company?”

“No, but I may have something else, from another friend, at a warehouse out in Levallois.”

“Levallois! A long way-does the Metro go out there?”

“Close enough. You take a bus, or walk, after the last stop.”

“Can you use the car?”

“The poor thing, no, I don’t think so. The gasoline is expensive, and the tires, well, you know.”

“Arturo, you can’t work in a warehouse, you’re fifty…what? Three?”

“Six. But it’s just a checker’s job, crates in and out. A friend of ours pretty much runs the union, so it’s a real offer.”

The waiter approached with plates bearing slices of brick-colored ham. “ Basta, ” Salamone said, enough. “Here’s our dinner, so we’ll talk about life and love. Salute, Carlo.”

They kept work out of it for the duration of the dinner, which was very good, the leg of young lamb roasted with garlic, the early greens fresh and carefully picked over. When they’d finished the figs in syrup, and lit cigarettes to go with their espressos, Salamone said, “I guess the real question is, if we can’t protect ourselves, who is there to protect us? The police-the people at the Prefecture ?”

“Not likely,” Weisz said. “Oh officer, we’re engaged in illegal operations against a neighbor country, and, as they’re attacking us, we’d like you to help us out.”

“I guess that’s right. It is, technically, illegal.”

“Technically nothing, it’s illegal, period. The French have laws against everything, then they pick and choose. For the moment we’re tolerated, for political expediency, but I don’t think we qualify for protection. My inspector at the Surete won’t even admit I’m the editor of Liberazione, though he surely knows I am. I’m a friend of the editor, the way he puts it. Very French, that approach.”

“So, we’re on our own.”

“We are.”

“Then how do we fight back? What do we use for weapons?”

“You don’t mean guns, do you?”

Salamone shrugged, and his “No” was tentative. “Maybe influence, favors. That too is French.”

“And what do we do for them in return? They don’t do favors here.”

“They don’t do favors anywhere.”

“The inspector at the Surete, as I told you, asked us to publish the real list, from Berlin. Should we do that?”

“ Mannaggia no!”

“So then,” Weisz said, “what?”

“How do the English feel about you, lately?”

“Christ, I’d rather publish the list.”

“Could be we’re fucked, Carlo.”

“Could be. What about the next edition? Farewell?”

“That hurts my heart. But we have to think about it.”

“Fine,” Weisz said. “We’ll think.”

After dinner, walking from the Luxembourg Metro to the Hotel Tournon for his evening session with Ferrara, Weisz passed a car, parked facing him, on the rue de Medicis. It was an unusual car for this quarter-it would not have been remarkable over in the Eighth, on the grand boulevards, or up in snooty Passy, but maybe he would have noticed it anyhow. Because it was an Italian car, a champagne-colored Lancia sedan, the aristocrat of the line, with a chauffeur, in proper cap and uniform, sitting stiff and straight behind the wheel.

In back, a man with carefully brushed silver hair, gleaming with brilliantine, and a thin silver mustache. On the lapels of his gray silk suit, an Order of the Crown of Italy, and a silver Fascist party pin. This was a type of man that Weisz easily recognized: fine manners, scented powder, and a certain supercilious contempt for anyone beneath him in the social order-most of the world. Weisz slowed for a moment, didn’t quite stop, then continued on. This momentary hesitation appeared to interest the silvery man, whose eyes acknowledged his presence, then pointedly looked away, as though Weisz’s existence was of little concern.

It was almost nine by the time Weisz arrived at Ferrara’s room. They were still working on the colonel’s time in Marseilles, where he’d found a job at a stall in the fish market, where he’d been discovered by a French journalist, then defamed in the Italian fascist press, and where, in time, he’d made contact with a man recruiting for the International Brigades, a month or so after Franco’s military insurrection against the elected government.

Then, beginning to worry about page count, Weisz took Ferrara back to his 1917 service with the arditi, the elite trench raiders, and the fateful Italian defeat at Caporetto, where the army broke and ran. A national humiliation, which, five years later, was more than a little responsible for the birth of fascism. In the face of poisoned-gas attacks by German and Austro-Hungarian regiments, many Italian soldiers had thrown away their rifles and headed south, shouting, “ Andiamo a casa! ” We’re going home.

“But not us,” Ferrara said, his expression dark. “We took the losses, and retreated because we had to, but we never stopped killing them.”

As Weisz typed, a timid knock at the door.

“Yes?” Ferrara said.

The door opened, to admit a seedy little man, who said, in French, “So, how goes the book tonight?”

Ferrara introduced him as Monsieur Kolb, one of his minders, and the operative who had extracted him from the internment camp. Kolb said he was pleased to meet Weisz, then looked at his watch. “It’s eleven-thirty,” he said, “time for all good authors to be in bed, or out raising hell. It’s the latter we have in mind for you, if you like.”