Alan Furst - Mission to Paris

The party was on a barge, tied up to a wharf in a long line of working barges where the city of Paris bordered the industrial suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt. The host, a cheerful old gent in a paint-spattered shirt, had a huge tangled grey beard with a bread-crumb caught in the middle. He gave Kiki a powerful hug, put his arm around Stahl’s shoulders, and led them both around the room. He’d built himself a studio on the barge; removed some of the deck planking and installed a set of angled windows above the curve of the bow. So, with little space for hanging paintings, he’d used easels to display his work. Not Picasso, but not bad, in Stahl’s opinion. After the tour they found a place to sit, Stahl took off his jacket and tie and turned up the cuffs of his shirt, while Kiki slipped out of her embroidered jacket. ‘It’s from Schiaparelli,’ she told a woman who asked. Mildly abstract nudes seemed to be the artist’s favoured style. One of which, a few feet from where Stahl and Kiki sat — on a love seat obviously rescued from a fire — had a face Stahl recognized. There was Kiki de Saint-Ange, lying languorous and seductive on a sofa, a ‘Naked Maja’ that imitated the Goya painting. ‘I see you keep looking at that,’ she said, teasing him. ‘It’s not a bad likeness, though I seem to have been grey-green that afternoon.’

They called him ‘Fredric’, the men and women getting drunk together on strong, sour wine poured from ceramic jugs, smoking up the host’s hashish, petting the barge cats, now and then each other. The barge’s bedroom, partly obscured by a lank curtain, served those who simply had to shed their black sweaters and make love despite the coming storm, or because of it. Two or three of the guests told Stahl he looked familiar, had they met before? Stahl just smiled and said he didn’t think so. What with the long hours at the baroness’s party, he was tired of being the Fredric Stahl and had packed it in for the night.

Needing some air, he made his way up to the deck, then noticed a young man who’d apparently done the same thing. He was one of those heading east in the morning and when their eyes met Stahl thought he might be close to tears — perhaps he’d sought privacy for that reason. They stood there in silence, then the man spoke. ‘You know, my life hasn’t been too bad, lately,’ he said, voice unsteady. ‘But now those bastards are going to get me killed.’ He shook his head and said, ‘No luck. No luck at all.’ Stahl didn’t answer, there was no answer. He just stared at the silent lights across the river and felt the heavy current in the deck beneath his feet. He had half turned to rejoin the party when there was a white flash that lit the clouds in the eastern sky, followed by a sharp crack of thunder. Maybe. Stahl and the young man looked at each other. Finally Stahl said, ‘I think that’s thunder.’ The young man nodded, yes, probably thunder. Then they went back to the party.

Stahl and Kiki left sometime around three in the morning — long after the last Metro at eleven-thirty — and set out to walk back to the Seventh, where Kiki had an apartment. There were no taxis, the streets were deserted. They were not far from the apartment when suddenly, out of nowhere, the city’s air-raid sirens began to wail. They stopped dead, listened for the sound of aeroplane engines, and stared up into the rain. ‘Should we do something?’ Stahl said. ‘Go indoors?’

‘Where?’ Kiki said.

The buildings were dark, the shops had their shutters rolled down. ‘I guess we won’t,’ Stahl said. They trudged on, past piles of sand in the streets. Somebody at the party had told them about the sand, delivered throughout the city by sanitation workers, meant to be taken up to the roof and stored there, in case the Germans dropped incendiary bombs. ‘Then,’ the guest said, ‘when a bomb falls on your roof and starts to burn, you use the sand to put out the fire, and you must remember to bring a shovel. But in Paris nobody has a shovel, so maybe a spoon.’

At last, exhausted and soaked, they reached Kiki’s door, where she kissed him quickly on the lips and went inside. Then it was a long walk back to the Claridge, and after four when he got there. The desk clerk took one look at him and said, ‘I’ll send someone up to get your suit, sir. We’ll press it, it will be as good as new, sir, you’ll see.’ In the room, Stahl took everything off, put on a bathrobe, and waited for the porter. Standing at the window, he searched the sky, but no bombs fell on Paris that night.

When the telephone woke him at nine, Stahl struggled to sit up and reached for a cigarette. On the other end of the line, an excited Jules Deschelles. ‘All is not lost!’ Deschelles said. ‘Have you seen the papers? Daladier and Chamberlain are going to Munich to meet with Hitler, a last chance for peace.’ Daladier was the Premier of France, Chamberlain the Prime Minister of Great Britain.

‘I thought the war would begin today,’ Stahl said.

‘Oh no, not yet, there’s still hope. We’ve lost Emile Simon, our director, he’s been called back to Belgium. However, they might let him go, we’ll see. Then some of the crew, grips and electricians, were sent to their units in Alsace — we’ll see about them as well. So, there will be a delay, but don’t book passage, the movie will somehow get made.’

‘What will happen to the Czechs?’

For a moment, Deschelles was silent, then he said, ‘Who knows? Perhaps they will fight, perhaps they won’t. Are you concerned about that?’

‘Well, I don’t want to see them occupied.’

‘No, of course not, nobody wants that,’ Deschelles said. ‘I just felt I should make sure you aren’t worried about the film. And there’s a lot we can get done while all this madness works itself out.’

‘I can learn lines,’ Stahl said.

‘That’s the spirit! And I’ll have our costume designer get in touch with you, perhaps today or tomorrow.’

‘Good. I’ll wait for the call.’

Deschelles said goodbye and hung up. Stahl tried to go back to sleep.

29 September.

The costume designer, a woman named Renate Steiner, had arranged to meet with Stahl at her workroom, in Building K at the Paramount studios in Joinville, a working-class suburb southeast of Paris. He’d then telephoned Zolly Louis, who told Stahl he was still looking for a driver. ‘I’d be happy to do it myself,’ Zolly said, ‘but I don’t drive so much, maybe you can find a taxi.’ In fact there was a taxi, on the morning of the twenty-ninth, waiting near the front of the Claridge. The driver was an old man in a clean white shirt buttoned at the throat, who had an artificial hand — a leather cup enclosing the wrist, a leather glove with thumb and fingers set in a half-curled position. ‘A German did that to me,’ the driver said as they drove off. ‘I could get a better one, but it’s expensive.’ He explained that the taxi belonged to his son. ‘Just now he’s driving an army truck, up around Lille, much good it will do him or anybody else,’ he said and spat out the window.

In time they reached Joinville and the driver, when Stahl handed him a hundred francs — twenty dollars — agreed to wait until Stahl was done with his appointment. The studios were vast — bought by Paramount in 1930, then used as a movie factory, making as many as fourteen versions of a new film in fourteen languages spoken by fourteen casts, thus making money fourteen times out of a single vehicle. This was possible because everybody everywhere liked to go to the movies, talking movies that talked in their own language. So the classic line of the American Saturday night: Say, honey, whattaya say we take in the new show at the Bijou? was repeated in its own linguistic version around the world. And still was, though by the time Stahl reached Joinville it had, with the development of new sound technology, become a dubbing studio: an actor moved his lips in French, the audience heard Spanish.