Alan Furst - The Foreign Correspondent

“Raising what?” Ferrara said.

“An English expression. Means to have a good time. We thought you might like to go up to Pigalle, to some disreputable place. Drink, dance, who knows what. You’ve earned it, Mr. Brown says, and you can’t just sit in this hotel.”

“I’ll go if you will,” Ferrara said to Weisz.

Weisz was exhausted. He was working at three jobs, and the steady grind was beginning to get to him. Worse, the espresso he’d drunk earlier in the evening had had absolutely no effect on the Barolo he’d shared with Salamone. But their conversation was still on his mind, and an informal chat with one of Mr. Brown’s people might not be a bad idea, better than approaching Mr. Brown himself. “Let’s go,” Weisz said. “He’s right, you can’t just sit here.”

Kolb had evidently sensed they would agree, and had a taxi idling in front of the hotel.

Place Pigalle was the heart of it, but the strip of nightclubs, neon-lit, marched up and down the boulevard Clichy, suggesting bountiful sin for every taste. There was plenty of real sin to be had in Paris, in well-known bordellos thoughout the city, whipping rooms, harems with veiled girls in balloon pants, high erotic-instructive Japanese prints on the walls-or low and beastly, but up here it was more the promise of sin, offered to wandering crowds of tourists sprinkled with sailors, thugs, and pimps. Gay Paree. The famous Moulin Rouge and the flipped skirts of its cancan dancers, the La Boheme at Impasse Blanche, Eros, Enfants de la Chance, El Monico, the Romance Bar, and Chez les Nudistes-Kolb’s, and likely Mr. Brown’s, choice for the evening.

The nudist colony. Which described the women, dressed only in high heels and powdery blue light, but not the men dancing with them, to the slow strains of Momo Tsipler and his Wienerwald Companions-according to a sign at the corner of a raised platform. Five of them, including the oldest cellist in captivity, a tiny violinist, cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth, wings of white hair fluffed out above his ears, Rex the drummer, Hoffy on the clarinet, and Momo himself, in a metallic green dinner jacket, astride the piano stool. A weary orchestra, drifting far from their hometown Vienna on the nightclub sea, playing a schmaltz version of “Let’s Fall in Love” as the couples shuffled about in circles, doing whatever dance steps the male patrons could manage.

Weisz felt like an idiot, Ferrara caught his eye and looked to heaven, what have we done ? They were led to a table, and Kolb ordered champagne, the only available beverage, delivered by a waitress dressed in a money pouch on a red sash. “You don’t want no change, do you?” she said.

“No,” Kolb said, accepting the inevitable. “I suppose not.”

“Very good,” she answered, her blue behind wobbling as she plodded away.

“What is she, Greek, you think?” Kolb said.

“Somewhere down there,” Weisz said. “Maybe Turkish.”

“Want to try another place?”

“Do you?” Weisz said to Ferrara.

“Oh, let’s have this bottle, then we’ll like it better.”

They had to work at it, the champagne was dreadful, and barely cool, but did in time elevate their spirits, and kept Weisz from falling dead asleep with his head on the table. Momo Tsipler sang a Viennese love song, and that got Kolb talking about Vienna, in the old days, before the Anschluss -the tiny Dollfuss, not five feet tall, the chancellor of Austria until the Nazis killed him in 1934-and the infinitely bizarre personality-high culture, low lovelife-of that city. “All those high-breasted fraus in the pastry shops, noses in the air, proper as the day is long, well, I knew a fellow called Wolfi, a salesman of ladies’ undergarments, and he once told me…”

Ferrara excused himself and disappeared into the crowd. Kolb went on with his story, for a time, then wound down to silence when the colonel emerged with a dancing partner. Kolb watched them for a moment, then said, “Say this for him, he certainly picked the best.”

She was. Brassy blond hair in a French roll, a sulky face accented by a heavy lower lip, and a body both lithe and fulsome, which she clearly liked to show off, all of it alive and animated as she danced. The two of them made, in fact, an attractive couple. Momo Tsipler, his fingers walking up and down the keyboard, swiveled around on his piano stool for a better view, then gave them a grand Viennese wink, somewhere well beyond lewd.

“There is something I want to ask you,” Weisz said.

Kolb wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to be asked-he’d perfectly heard a certain note in Weisz’s voice, he’d heard it before, and always it preceded inquiries that touched on his vocation. “Oh? And what is that?”

Weisz laid out a condensed version of the OVRA attack on the Liberazione committee. Bottini’s murder, the interrogation of Veronique, Salamone’s lost job, his own experience on the place Concorde.

Kolb knew exactly what he was talking about. “What is it you want?” he said.

“Can you help us?”

“Not me,” Kolb said. “I don’t make decisions like that, you’d have to ask Mr. Brown, and he’d have to ask someone else, and the final answer would be, I expect, no.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Pretty much, I am. Our business is always quiet, to do what has to be done, then fade into the night. We aren’t in Paris to pick a fight with another service. That’s bad form, Weisz, that’s not the way this work is done.”

“But you oppose Mussolini. Certainly the British government does.”

“What gave you that idea?”

“You’re having an antifascist book written, creating an opposition hero, and that’s not fading into the night.”

Kolb was amused. “Written, yes. Published, we’ll see. I have no special information, but I would bet you ten francs that the diplomats are hard at it to bring Mussolini over to our side, just like last time, just like 1915. If that doesn’t work, then, maybe, we’ll attack him, and it will be time for the book to appear.”

“Still, no matter what happens politically, you’ll want the support of the emigres.”

“It’s always nice to have friends, but they’re not the crucial element, by far, not. We’re a traditional service, and we operate on the classic assumptions. Which means we concentrate on the three C ‘s: Crown, Capital, and Clergy. That’s where the influence is, that’s how a state changes sides, when the leader, king, premier, whatever he calls himself, and the big money-captains of industry-and the religious leaders, whatever God they pray to, when these people want a new policy, then things change. So, emigres can help, but they’re famously a pain in the ass, every day some new problem. Forgive me, Weisz, for being frank with you, but it’s the same with journalists-journalists work for other people, for Capital, and that’s who gets to tell them what to write. Nations are run by oligarchies, by whoever’s powerful, and that’s where any service will commit its resources, and that’s what we’re doing in Italy.”

Weisz wasn’t so very good at hiding his reactions, Kolb could see what he felt. “I’m telling you something you don’t know?”

“No, you aren’t, it all makes sense. But we don’t know where to turn, and we’re going to lose the newspaper.”

The music stopped, it was time for the Wienerwald Companions to take a break-the drummer wiped his face with a handkerchief, the violinist lit a fresh cigarette. Ferrara and his partner walked over to the bar and waited to be served.

“Look,” Kolb said. “You’re working hard for us, never mind the money, and Brown appreciates what you’re doing, that’s why you’re being treated to a big night. Of course, this doesn’t mean he’ll get us into a war with the Italians, but-by the way, we never had this conversation-but, maybe, if you come up with something in return, we might talk to somebody in one of the French services.”