Alan Furst - Mission to Paris

8 December.

Deschelles had chartered two aeroplanes to fly cast, crew, and equipment to Morocco, with stops for refuelling at Marseille, and then Tangiers — for the three-hundred-mile flight to a military airfield at Er Rashida. From there, cars and trucks would take them to Erg Chebbi, where they would stay at a hotel called the Kasbah Oudami; the producer had secured all thirty rooms for ten days. They left Le Bourget Airport at dawn. More than a few of the cast and crew had never flown in an aeroplane and, when the flight turned bumpy and the plane hit air pockets, had to be calmed by the administration of strong spirits, which were not denied to the other passengers. The well-oiled Pasquin, it turned out, knew a selection of incredibly filthy songs, which most of them had never heard before. But they weren’t hard to learn.

An hour into the flight, Stahl changed seats with an electrician so he could sit next to Renate Steiner, first asking her if she minded. He managed to keep the conversation light and easy, he wanted her to understand that, everything else aside, he truly liked her, which he did. Once she relaxed she was good company, smart, funny, and Stahl realized he could make her laugh, in its way a powerful form of intimacy. A key to the heart? At the Kasbah Oudami she would, she said, be sharing a room with the actress who played Pasquin’s conquest in a Turkish village. Just in case he had any ideas. Which he did. And when she dozed off, somewhere over the Mediterranean, his shoulder was available, but she leaned her head against the window, and Stahl, who’d equipped himself for the journey with a few S. S. Van Dine mysteries, opened one of them, trying to follow the clues as Philo Vance solved The Casino Murder Case.

It was after midnight by the time they reached the hotel. ‘I’m going to take a walk,’ Stahl said. ‘Would you like to come along?’

‘I’m worn out,’ she said. ‘But maybe tomorrow I might.’

Something in her voice caught Stahl’s attention, the lowering, slight as it was, of a barrier. ‘Promise?’ Stahl said, unwilling to let her go.

She nodded and said, ‘Yes, tomorrow,’ accompanied by one of her ironic smiles. I know what you want. Now she was toying with him, he thought, but he didn’t mind because it could lead him exactly where he wanted to go.

In good spirits he entered the hotel and started up the tiled stairway to his room which, as leading man, he did not have to share. But the good spirits quickly evaporated. The Kasbah Oudami, occupying a rebuilt section of an abandoned Berber fortress, was suffused with cold, blue light. The walls had been, a long time ago, painted blue, the paint now puckered and peeling, and the air was chilled and clammy. This was, Stahl thought, a good place to be murdered. Should he actually go for a walk? With all those Swiss francs in his pockets? Still, honour demanded that he at least go back outside, which he did, and discovered Avila standing in front of the hotel.

Avila’s face lit up when he saw Stahl. ‘Want to have a look at the desert?’ he said.

‘I was thinking about it,’ Stahl said, uncertainty in his voice.

‘We’ll be fine,’ Avila said, and off they went.

It wasn’t much better outdoors — this was Africa, not Europe, and they both, walking through the twisty streets of Erg Chebbi, felt a certain, nameless apprehension. A slice of moon lit the town, which had no streetlamps, and the silence of the place was heavy enough to preclude conversation. A few minutes later they stood at the edge of the desert, where a steady wind blew across the high dunes and the silence was even deeper. ‘Is it ominous, or is it just me?’ Stahl said.

‘It’s something,’ Avila said. ‘Supposedly, we’re still in France.’ Morocco was a French colonial possession.

Stahl laughed.

‘Deschelles made some sort of deal with the colonial authority,’ Avila said. ‘We had to use French territory, so it was between Morocco and the Lebanon, Beirut, and Morocco won.’

‘Can you get this… the feeling of this place, on film?’

‘Slow pan, no music, mostly silence. Sun rising over the dunes.’

‘You sound like you can’t wait,’ Stahl said.

‘You’re right, I can’t.’

It was too cold to stay for very long. As they walked back to the hotel, a caravan came in off the desert, a line of loaded camels clopping up the cobbled street, bells jingling, each rider wearing a burnoose, the end of the cloth wrapped around the face, leaving only the eyes exposed.

The following morning brought grey cloud, so they had to wait out in the desert until eleven or so, when the sun burned through and the cameras rolled. Stahl, Gilles Brecker, and Pasquin were back in their tattered legionnaire uniforms, slogging through the sandy wastes of eastern Turkey in the brutal heat. The wind kept drying their ‘sweat’, so the make-up man came running before every shot. Pursued by two policemen in a battered command car — previously seen in a British war-against-the-natives film and rented at a high price — they lie flat, just below the crest of a dune, when they hear the chugging engine. Brecker reaches inside his tunic and brings out the pistol he’s stolen. ‘Don’t do that, lieutenant,’ Stahl says. The lieutenant says that he won’t be taken alive. Pasquin grabs the pistol and says, ‘Get yourself killed if you like, but not me.’ One of the policemen climbs out of the car, walks almost to the top of the dune, stands there for a moment, then decides he doesn’t want to go any further.

At five in the afternoon, Stahl re-counted the money, put it in a manila envelope, and headed for the Erg Chebbi railway station. A small crowd, amid mounds of baggage, waited on the platform, gazing hopefully up the long, straight track that ran to the horizon, and ultimately to Algeria. The train was late, the crowd fretted and paced, then went silent as two French gendarmes strolled to the end of the platform and leaned casually against a baggage cart. Twenty minutes later, the chuff of a steam engine in the distance was followed by grey smoke, and the crowd prepared to board.

The last carriage on the train was almost deserted, the aisle between yellow wicker seats littered with newspapers and cigarette butts. Stahl passed a Moroccan man in a suit and fez, and two women in lavishly embroidered robes, then, at the end of the carriage, found what he was looking for: a European reading a copy of Paris Match. The photograph on the cover showed French soldiers peeling potatoes into a huge

iron pot, somewhere, as the cover advertised, SUR LA LIGNE MAGINOT.

The man looked up as Stahl approached. He was of indeterminate middle age, fair-haired and fattish. German? French? British? He wore the white suit of the colonial European, and seemed prosperous and self-confident. Stahl slid into the seat across the aisle and gave the first part of the protocol, in German as specified: ‘Excuse me, sir, does this train go to Cairo?’

The man looked him over carefully and said, ‘No, it goes to Alexandria.’

Stahl had tucked the envelope in his trouser waist, far enough around so that it was hidden by his jacket, and now drew it out and handed it to the man across the aisle. ‘I’m sure you wish to count it,’ he said.

The man reached inside his jacket, produced an envelope, and handed it to Stahl. ‘Have a look,’ he said. His German sounded native to Stahl. Inside the envelope, typed on very thin paper, several pages of Polish names and numbers. The list had been copied on a German keyboard, and the Polish accents applied with a pencil. As Stahl examined the list, the locomotive vented a plume of steam with a loud hiss. Startled, he began to rise in order to get off the train before it left the station.

‘Don’t worry,’ the man said. ‘You have a few minutes yet.’ Holding the money below the back of the seat in front of him, he thumbed through the last of the Swiss franc notes, then put the money back in the envelope. ‘All is correct,’ he said. Then he turned and looked out of the window, searching the platform. ‘Did you see any other Europeans?’ he said. ‘Waiting for the train?’