Alan Furst: The Foreign Correspondent

Delahanty, white-haired and blue-eyed, had many years earlier left school in Glasgow and, as he put it, “worked for the papers.” Selling them, at first, then moving from copyboy to cub reporter, his progress powered by grit and insolence and genteel opportunism. Until he reached the top; chief of the Paris bureau, who, as trusted specialist, saw copies of dispatches from the important-Berlin, Rome-European offices. Which made him very much the spider at the center of the web, in the wire-service neighborhood near the place de l’Opera, where, one chilly spring day, Carlo Weisz showed up. “So, Mr. Weisz-you say Weiss, not Veisch, correct? — you wrote for the Corriere. Not much of it left now. A sad fate, for a fine newspaper like that. Now tell me, would you happen to have any clippings of what you wrote?” The snipped-out articles, carried around in a cheap briefcase, were not in the best condition, but they could be read, and Delahanty read them. “No, sir,” he said, “you needn’t bother to translate, I can get along in Italian.”

Delahanty put on his glasses and read with a forefinger. “Hmm,” he said. “Hmm. It ain’t so bad. I’ve seen worse. What do you mean by this, right here? Oh, that makes sense. I believe you can do this sort of work, Mr. Weisz. Do you like to do it? And do you care what you do, Mr. Weisz? The new sewers of Antwerp? The beauty contest in Dusseldorf? You don’t mind, that sort of thing? How’s your German? Spoke it at home? A little Serbo-Croatian? Can’t hurt. Oh I see, Trieste, yes, they speak everything there, don’t they. How’s your French? Yes, me too, I get along, and they look at you funny, but you manage. Any Spanish? No, don’t worry, you’ll pick it up. Now let me be frank, here we do things the Reuters way, you’ll learn the rules, all you have to do is follow ‘em. And I have to tell you that you won’t be the Reuters man in Paris. But you’ll be a Reuters man, and that ain’t so bad. It’s what I was, and I wrote about every damn thing under the sun. So tell me, how does that sit with you, sir? Can you do it? Ride on trains and mule carts and whatnot and get us the story? With emotion? With a feel for the human side, for the prime minister at his grand desk and the peasant on his little patch of earth? You believe you can? I know you can! And you’ll do just fine. So, why not get down to it straight away? Say, tomorrow? The previous incumbent, well, a week ago he went up to Holland and passed out in the queen’s lap. It’s the curse of this profession, Mr. Weisz, I’m sure you know that. Very well, do you have any questions? None? Allright, then, that will bring us to the gloomy subject of money.”

Weisz drifted off to sleep, then woke as the train pulled in to Port Bou. The Spanish family stared at the platform across the tracks, at a few Guardia Civil lounging against the wall of the ticket office. At a small crowd of refugees standing amid trunks and bundles and suitcases tied with rope, waiting for the southbound train. Not everybody, it seemed, was allowed to cross the border. After a few minutes, Spanish officers came through the car, asking for papers. When they reached the adjoining compartment, the older daughter, next to Weisz, closed her eyes and pressed her hands together. She was, he realized, praying. But the officers were polite-this was, after all, first class-took only a cursory glance at the documents and then went on to the next compartment. Then the train blew its whistle and rolled a few hundred feet down the track, where the French officers were waiting.

Report of Agent 207, delivered by hand on the fifth of December, to a clandestine OVRA station in the Tenth Arrondissement:

The Liberazione group met on the morning of 4 December at the Cafe Europa, the same subjects attending as in previous reports, with the engineer AMATO and the journalist WEISZ absent. It was decided to publish a “political obituary” of the lawyer BOTTINI, and to state that his death was not a suicide. It was further decided that the journalist WEISZ will now assume the editorship of the Liberazione newspaper.

28 December. With prosperity, or at least its distant cousin, Weisz had found himself a new place to live, the Hotel Dauphine, on the rue Dauphine in the Sixth Arrondissement. The proprietor, Madame Rigaud, was a widow of the 1914 war and, like women to be seen everywhere in France, still, after twenty years, wore the black of mourning. She liked Weisz, and did not much overcharge him for his two rooms, linked by a door, up four endless flights of stairs, on the top floor. From time to time she fed him, poor boy, in the hotel kitchen, a pleasant break from his little haunts, Mere this and Chez that, sprinkled through the narrow streets of the Sixth.

Worn out, he slept late on the morning of the twenty-eighth, and when the sun slanted through the slats on the closed shutters, forced himself awake, to find, on getting to his feet, that pretty much everything hurt. Even a visit to a war, for a few weeks, took its toll. So he would eat the three-course lunch, stop briefly at the office, see if any of the regulars at his cafe were around, and maybe call Veronique, once she got home from the gallery. A pleasant day, at least in the anticipation of it. But the dusty sun shafts revealed a slip of paper, slid under his door at some point while he was away. A message, brought up by the clerk at the hotel desk. Now what could that be? Veronique? My darling, you must come and see me, how I yearn for you! Pure fantasy, and he knew it. Veronique would never even consider doing such a thing, theirs was a very pallid love affair, off and on, now and then. Still, one never knew, anything was possible. On the slim chance, he read the note. “Please telephone as soon as you return. Arturo.”

He met Salamone in a deserted bar near the insurance company. They sat in back and ordered coffee. “And how does it go in Spain?” Salamone said.

“Badly. It’s almost finished. What remains is the nobility of a lost cause, but that’s thin stuff in a war. We’re beaten, Arturo, for which we can thank the French and the British and the nonintervention pact. Outgunned, not outfought, end of story. So now it’s up to Hitler, what happens next.”

“Well, my news is no better. I must tell you that Enrico Bottini is dead.”

Weisz looked up sharply, and Salamone handed him a page cut from a newspaper. Weisz flinched when he saw the photograph, read quickly through the tabloid prose, then shook his head and gave it back. “Something happened, poor Bottini, but not this.”

“No, we believe this was done by the OVRA. Staged to look like a murder/suicide.”

Weisz felt it, the sharp little bite that sickened the heart; it wasn’t like being shot at, it was like seeing a snake. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Weisz took a deep breath, and let it out. “Let them burn in hell for doing this,” he said. Only anger cured the fear that had reached him.

Salamone nodded. “In time, they will.” He paused, then said, “But for today, Carlo, the committee wants you to replace him.”

From Weisz, a nod of casual assent, as though he’d been asked the time. “Mmm,” he said. Of course they do.

Salamone laughed, a bass rumble inside a bear. “We knew you’d be eager to do it.”

“Oh yes, eager barely says it. And I can’t wait to tell my girlfriend.”

Salamone almost believed him. “Ahh, I don’t think…”

“And the next time we go to bed, I must remember to shave. For the photograph.”

Salamone nodded, closed his eyes. Yes, I know, forgive me.

“All that aside,” Weisz said, “I wonder how I can do this and run around Europe for the Reuters.”