Alan Furst - The Foreign Correspondent

Ferrara and his new friend came over to the table, champagne cocktails in hand. Weisz stood up to offer her his chair, but she waved him off and settled on Ferrara’s lap. “Hello everybody,” she said. “I am Irina.” She had a heavy Russian accent.

After that, she ignored them, moving around on Ferrara’s lap, toying with his hair, giggling and carrying on, whispering answers to whatever he was saying in her ear. Finally, he said to Kolb, “Don’t bother looking for me when you go back to the hotel.” Then, to Weisz: “And I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

“We can take you wherever you’re going, in the taxi,” Kolb said.

Ferrara smiled. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll find my way home.”

A few minutes later, they left, Irina clinging to his arm. Kolb said good night, then gave them a few minutes, enough for her to get dressed. He looked at his watch as he stood up to leave. “Some nights…” he said with a sigh, and left it at that. Weisz could see he wasn’t pleased-now he would have to spend hours, likely till dawn, sitting in the back of the taxi and watching some doorway, God only knew where.

11 May. Salamone called an editorial committee meeting for midday. As Weisz arrived, hurrying up the street, he saw Salamone and a few other giellisti standing silent in front of the Cafe Europa. Why? Was it locked? When Weisz joined them, he saw why. The entry to the cafe was blocked by a few scrap boards nailed across the door. Inside, shelves of broken bottles rose above the bar, in front of a charred wall. The ceiling was black, as were the tables and chairs, tumbled this way and that on the tile floor, amid puddles of black water. The bitter smell of dead fire, of burnt plaster and paint, hung in the air on the street.

Salamone didn’t comment, his face said it all. From the others, hands in pockets, a subdued greeting. Finally, Salamone said, “I guess we’ll have to meet somewhere else,” but his voice was low and defeated.

“Maybe the station buffet, at the Gare du Nord,” the benefactor said.

“Good idea,” Weisz said. “It’s just a few minutes’ walk.”

They headed for the railway station, and entered the crowded buffet. The waiter was helpful, found them a table for five, but there were people all around them, who glanced over as the forlorn little group settled themselves and ordered coffees. “Not an easy place to talk,” Salamone said. “But then, I don’t think we have much to say.”

“Are you sure, Arturo?” the professor from Siena said. “I mean, it’s a shock, to see something like that. No accident, I think.”

“No, not an accident,” Elena said.

“It’s maybe not the moment to make decisions,” the benefactor said. “Why not wait a day or two, then we’ll see how we feel.”

“I’d like to agree,” Salamone said. “But this has gone on long enough.”

“Where is everybody?” Elena said.

“That’s the problem, Elena,” Salamone said. “I spoke to the lawyer yesterday. He didn’t resign, officially, but when I telephoned, he told me his apartment had been robbed. A terrible mess, he said. They’d spent all night trying to clean it up, everything thrown on the floor, broken glasses and dishes.”

“Did he call the police?” the Sienese professor said.

“Yes, he did. They said such things happened all the time. Asked for a list of stolen items.”

“And our friend from Venice?”

“Don’t know,” Salamone said. “He said he would be here, but he hasn’t shown up, so now it’s just the five of us.”

“That’s enough,” Elena said.

“I think we have to postpone the next issue,” Weisz said, to spare Salamone from saying it.

“And give them what they want,” Elena said.

“Well,” Salamone said, “we can’t go on until we can find a way to fight back, and nobody’s come up with a way to do that. Suppose some detective from the Prefecture agreed to take the case, what then? Assign twenty men to watch all of us? Day and night? Until they caught somebody? This is never going to happen, and the OVRA perfectly well know it won’t.”

“So,” the Sienese professor said, “it’s finished?”

“Postponed,” Salamone said. “Which is perhaps a nice word for finished . I suggest we skip a month, wait until June, then we’ll meet once more. Elena, do you agree?”

She shrugged, unwilling to say the words.

“Sergio?”

“Agreed,” the benefactor said.

“Zerba?”

“I’ll go along with the committee,” the Sienese professor said.

“And Carlo.”

“Wait until June,” Weisz said.

“Very well. It’s unanimous.”

Agent 207 was precise, in a report to the OVRA delivered in Paris the following day, on the decision and the vote of the committee. Which meant, once the report reached the Pubblica Sicurezza committee in Rome, that their operation was not yet complete. Their objective was to finish Liberazione -not postpone its publication-and make an example, to let the others, Communist, socialist, Catholic, see what happened to those who dared to oppose fascism. Then, too, they were great believers in the seventeenth-century English adage, coined in civil war, which said, “He that draws his sword against his prince must throw away the scabbard.” Thus inspired, they determined that the Paris operation, as planned, with dates and targets and various actions, would continue.

The conductor on the 7:15 Paris/Genoa Express was approached on the fourteenth of May. After the train left the station at Lyons, the passengers slept, or read, or watched the springtime fields passing by the windows, and the conductor headed for the baggage car. There he found two friends: a dining-car waiter, and a sleeping-car porter, playing two-handed scopa, using a steamer trunk turned on its side for a card table. “Care to join us?” the waiter said. The conductor agreed, and was dealt a hand.

They played for a time, gossiping and joking, then the sound of the train, the beat of the engine and the wheels on the track, rose sharply as the door at the end of the car was opened. They looked up, to see a uniformed inspector of the Milizia Ferroviaria, the railway police, called Gennaro, who they’d known for years.

The railway police were Mussolini’s way of enforcing his most noted achievement, making the trains run on time. This was the result of a determined effort in the early 1920s, after a train headed for Turin arrived four hundred hours behind schedule, much too late. But that was long ago, when Italy seemed to be following Russia into Bolshevism, and the trains often stopped, for long periods, so the trainworkers could participate in political meetings. Those days were over, but the Milizia Ferroviaria still rode the trains, now investigating crimes against the regime.

“Gennaro, come and play scopa, ” the waiter said, and the inspector pulled a suitcase up to the steamer trunk.

Fresh cards were dealt and they started a new game. “Tell me,” Gennaro said to the conductor, “you ever see anybody on this train with one of those secret newspapers?”

“Secret newspapers?”

“Oh come on, you know what I mean.”

“On this train? You mean a passenger, reading it?”

“No. Somebody taking them down to Genoa. Bundled up, maybe.”

“Not me. Did you ever see that?” he asked the waiter.

“No. I never did.”

“What about you?” he asked the porter.

“No, not me either. Of course, if it’s the Communists, you’d never know about it, they’d have some secret way of doing it.”

“That’s true,” the conductor said. “Maybe you should look for the Communists.”

“Are they on this train?”