Alan Furst - Mission to Paris

Thus Warner Bros. ‘Why not Fredric Stahl, hunh? With that European accent?’ And just how hard he’d worked to get that accent right they’d never know. He certainly wasn’t alone in this; the English Archie Leach had become Cary Grant by sounding like a sophisticated gent from the east coast, while the Hungarian Peter Lorre developed a voice — insinuating, oily, and menacing — that suggested vaguely Continental origin.

‘Penny for your thoughts,’ the woman said.

‘Such a beautiful night,’ he said.

She moved closer to him, the gin on her breath strong in his nostrils. ‘Who would’ve thought you’d be so nice?’ she said. ‘I mean, in person.’ In response, he put his arm around her shoulders and hugged her a little.

They’d met on the night the Ile de France sailed from New York, at the captain’s table in the first-class dining room. A long-suffering, pretty wife she was, her husband three sheets to the wind when they appeared for dinner. Soon he announced, in the middle of someone else’s story, that he owned a Cadillac dealership in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. ‘That’s on the Main Line, in case you don’t know.’ By the third night his table companions knew very well indeed, because he kept repeating it, and at last his wife, Edith, maybe Edna, dealt with the situation by taking him back to their cabin. She then reappeared and when, after dessert, Stahl said he was going for a walk on deck, she caught up to him at the portholed doors to the dining room and said, ‘Can I come along for the walk, Mr. Stahl?’ They walked, smoked, leaned on the rail, sometimes she held her hair back to keep it from blowing around. Finally he found a deck chair — the sling in French Line colours, the footrest polished teak — and they snuggled down together to enjoy the night at sea.

‘Tell me, umm, where are you going in Europe?’ he said.

‘It’s Iris — I bet you forgot.’

‘I won’t again.’

‘Paree,’ she said. ‘Brussels, Amsterdam, Geneva, Rome, Vienna. There’s more, oh, ah, Venice. I’m still forgetting one.’

‘Maybe Budapest.’

‘Nooo, I don’t think so.’

‘Berlin?’

‘That’s it!’

After a moment, Stahl said, ‘You’ll see a lot.’

‘Where are you going, Mr. Stahl?’

‘Just to Paris, to make a movie. And please call me Fredric.’

‘Oh, is that all? “Just to Paris”? “To make a movie”?’ A ladylike snort followed. She was already writing the postcard. You’ll never guess who I… ‘Are you French, Fredric?’

‘I was born in Vienna, wandered about the world for a time, lived and worked in Paris, then, in the summer of 1930, Hollywood. I’m an American now.’ He paused, then said, ‘Tell me, Iris, when you planned the trip, did you think about the politics, in Europe?’

‘Oh who cares — they’re always squabbling over something. You can’t go to Spain, ’cause there’s a war there, you know. Otherwise I expect the castles are all open, and the restaurants.’

He could hear approaching footsteps on the iron deck, then a ship’s officer flicked a torch beam over them, touched the brim of his cap and said, ‘ Bonsoir, Madame, Monsieur.’

‘What’s it called, your movie?’

‘ Apres la Guerre. That would be After the War, in English. It takes place in 1918, at the end of the war.’

‘Will it play in Bryn Mawr?’

‘Maybe it will. I hope so.’

‘Well, we can always go to Philadelphia to see it, if we have to.’

It was true that he’d ‘wandered about the world’. The phrase suggested romance and adventure — something like that had appeared in a Warner Bros. publicity bio — but it didn’t tell the whole story. In fact, he’d run away to sea at the age of sixteen. He was also not really ‘Fredric Stahl’, had been born Franz Stalka, forty years earlier in Vienna, to a Slovenian father and an Austrian mother of solidly bourgeois families resident in Austria-Hungary for generations. His father was beyond strict; the rigid, fearsome lord of the family, a tyrant with a face like an angry prune. Thus Stahl grew up in a world of rules and punishments — there was hardly a moment in his early life when he wasn’t in trouble for doing something wrong. He had two older brothers, obedient little gentlemen and utterly servile — ‘Yes, papa,’ ‘As you wish, papa’ — who studied for hours and did well in private academies. He had also a younger sister, Klara, and if he was the bad boy of the family, she was the angel and Stahl adored her. A beautiful little angel, with her mother’s good looks. Inherited, as well, by the boy who would become an actor and take a new name.

It was said of him by those who made a living in the business of faces and bodies that he was ‘a very masculine actor’. Stahl wasn’t sure precisely what they meant, but he knew they were rich and not for nothing. It referred, he suspected, to a certain inner confidence, expressed by, among other things, a low-pitched voice — assurance, not just a bass register — from an actor who always sounded ‘quiet’ no matter how loudly he spoke. He could play the sympathetic lawyer, the kind aristocrat, the saintly husband, the comforting doctor, or the good lover — the knight not the gigolo.

His hair was dark, combed back from a high, noble forehead which rose from deep-set eyes. Cold grey eyes — the grey was cold, the eyes were warm: receptive and expressive. Just enough grey in those eyes for black-and-white film, and even better — it turned out to his great relief — in technicolour. His posture was relaxed — hands in pockets for Stahl was not a weak gesture — and his physique appropriate for the parts he played. He’d been scrawny as a boy but two years as an Ordinary Seaman, scraping rust, painting decks, had put just enough muscle on him so he could be filmed wearing a bathing suit. He couldn’t punch another man, he wasn’t Clark Gable, and he couldn’t fight a duel, he was not Errol Flynn. But neither was he Charles Boyer — he wasn’t so sophisticated. Mostly he played a warm man in a cold world. And, if all his movies were taken together, Fredric Stahl was not somebody you knew, but somebody you would very much like to know.

In fact he was good at his profession — had two Oscar nominations, one for Supporting Actor, the other for the lead in Summer Storm — and very much in control of gesture and tone but, beyond skill, he had the single, inexplicable quality of the star actor or actress. When he was on screen, you couldn’t take your eyes off him.

Stahl shifted slightly in the deck chair, the damp was beginning to reach him and he had to suppress a shiver. And, he sensed, the weather was turning — sometimes the ship’s bow hit the oncoming wave with a loud smack. ‘We might just have a storm,’ he said. It was, he thought, time to get Iris back where she belonged, the cuddling had devloped a certain familiar edge.

‘A storm?’ she said. ‘Oh, I hope not. I’m afraid I’ll get seasick.’

‘You’ll be fine. Just remember: don’t stay in your cabin, go someplace where you can keep your eyes on the horizon.’

‘Is it that easy?’

‘Yes. I spent two years at sea, that’s how I know.’

‘ You? A sailor?’

He nodded. ‘I ran away to sea when I was sixteen.’

‘Your poor mom!’

‘I wrote them a letter,’ he said. ‘I went to Hamburg, and for a month all I did was sweep out the union hall, but then a Dutch ship needed a deckhand and I signed on and saw the world — Shanghai, Batavia, Calcutta…’ This had been the purest possible luck; Stahl had gone to sea in the spring of 1914, before the war, on what by chance was the ship of a country that remained neutral, thus he was spared service for the enemies of Austria-Hungary.