Alan Furst - Mission to Paris

‘Two French gendarmes,’ Stahl said.

‘Anybody else?’

‘No. Just passengers. Moroccan passengers, I would say. Is there a problem?’

‘I don’t think so. One becomes overly sensitive, doing this… kind of thing.’ He meant to accompany his words with a casual smile but it didn’t really come off. In fact he was frightened. ‘Oh well,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to alarm you.’

Stahl nodded to the man, rose, went back down the aisle, and left the train. As he walked through the village twilight, he heard the train whistle as it departed.

When Stahl reached the Kasbah Oudami, he asked the desk clerk for the number of Renate Steiner’s room, then knocked on her door. She answered, wearing slacks and two sweaters, and seemed surprised to see him. ‘I wondered if you might like to go for a walk before dinner.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Now I don’t think I can go out.’

Stahl was disappointed and showed it. ‘Well, if you can’t, you can’t.’

‘It’s Annette, the woman I’m sharing the room with. She’s terribly ill, I don’t think I should leave her alone.’

‘I’m sorry, what’s wrong?’

‘She ate a sheep-liver kebab, from a street vendor, I may have to get her a doctor.’

‘Then another time,’ Stahl said brusquely, turning to leave.

She put two fingers on his forearm. ‘I did want to go,’ she said. ‘For a walk, with you.’ For a moment they looked at each other, then she said, ‘I can’t help what happened.’

‘I know,’ Stahl said. They both stood there. Stahl didn’t leave, Renate didn’t close the door. Finally he said, ‘Shall we try again, some time?’ He meant, he thought he meant, go for a walk, but it wasn’t only that, there was more.

‘Yes.’

‘Maybe tomorrow, when we come back to the hotel.’

‘I think we could, I don’t see why not.’ They stood there.

‘I’ll come down here, and we’ll go,’ he said.

She nodded and said, ‘Tomorrow.’

‘I’ll see you then,’ he said.

‘I’m looking forward to it.’

‘I hope Annette feels better.’

‘I will tell her that.’

‘So… good night.’

‘Yes, good night.’

10 December. At seven-thirty the following morning, the hotel desk clerk knocked at Jean Avila’s door. When Avila, who’d been up working since dawn, answered, the desk clerk said, ‘Forgive me, monsieur, for disturbing you, but a policeman has asked to see you. He’s waiting downstairs.’

The policeman turned out to be a gendarme officer, a captain, very official-looking in khaki uniform, leather strap from shoulder to pistol belt, and red and blue kepi with glossy black visor. He was a handsome man, dignified, freshly shaved. He introduced himself to Avila, his educated accent from somewhere in the south of France, and said, his voice polite and firm in equal measure, that he regretted the inconvenience but he had to ask Avila to accompany him up to the gendarmerie headquarters in Er Rashida. ‘And I must ask you to select another member of your crew to go along with us.’

‘Why is that, captain?’ Avila didn’t like police and wasn’t afraid of them.

‘A question of identification; we require the statements of two individuals. I will wait for you here, monsieur.’

Avila went up to Stahl’s room and told him what was going on, then they went downstairs together. ‘Any idea what they want from us?’ Stahl said.

‘We’re supposed to identify somebody, that’s all I know.’

In the military command car, the captain drove and, once they were on the road to Er Rashida, he said, ‘We have had a homicide. A male European, with no papers, found by the railway track a few miles from Erg Chebbi. Unfortunately, he may be somebody you can identify, somebody from your film company.’

Stahl was sitting behind the captain, and suddenly very glad to be there, though he made sure his reaction wasn’t visible. But he knew who this was. Why? What happened? He recalled everything he could about the courier, then settled on the man’s fear that he was being watched, perhaps followed, he’d noticed something, something threatening, and he’d been right. ‘Any theories about what happened?’ Stahl said, raising his voice above the car’s engine.

‘Theories?’ the captain said. ‘Robbery perhaps, our first task must be to find out who he is. Was.’

An hour later they were at the gendarmerie station at Er Rashida, the administrative centre for the Ziz Valley region. A sergeant at the desk took their passports and laboriously copied out their names and passport numbers. Then the captain led them down to a room in the cellar which served as a temporary morgue. On a long wooden table was a body beneath a sheet. When the captain drew the sheet down to the corpse’s bare chest, Stahl saw that what he’d feared was true. It was the courier, fair-haired and fattish, though it took a moment to recognize the face altered by death. A red and black bruise circled his throat.

‘Do either of you recognize this man?’ the captain said.

Avila and Stahl said, in turn, that they didn’t.

‘Very well. You’re sure?’

‘We are,’ Avila said. ‘He’s not part of the film company, I’ve never seen him before. How did he die?’

‘Garrotte.’

17 December. 1.30 in the morning.

Seen from the window of a taxi headed for the Claridge, winter Paris. On a bridge across the Seine, the streetlamps along the balustrade were no more than ghostly blurs of light in the river fog. Deserted streets after that, wet from an evening rain, one cafe still lit, with one patron, a woman in a fur hat with a glass of wine before her. Winter Paris, Christmas coming, the Galeries Lafayette would have its toy train running in the window, the station roof glittering with granular snow. Stahl thanked heaven for getting him back here alive.

He was in danger, so his intuition told him, yet not so much now. After what he’d seen in the cellar of the gendarmerie he’d felt it, nearby, waiting for him. Late that afternoon he had, as promised, seen Renate Steiner. And told her, because she would surely hear about it, what had happened at Er Rashida. Then all they did was walk around the village, both of them edgy and distracted, too much aware of what was going on around them. He dropped her off at the Kasbah Oudami, then went over to the telegraph office, where he did what he could to warn Wilkinson that Orlova might be in trouble. Birthday greetings stop gift en route stop our friend may be unwell stop send card soonest stop Fredric

In his reaction to the murder Stahl had not been alone, Avila had also been alarmed — could it have been some spasm of anti-colonial politics? — and, for the next few days, he drove the company hard, wanting to finish the location shooting and get the hell out of there. So both Stahl and Renate had to spend long hours on the production — Stahl even lent a hand building rails for tracking shots out in the Sahara. The extra effort worked. The cast and crew left two days ahead of schedule, reaching Paris in the early hours of the seventeenth. On the aeroplane home, feeling that he’d somehow escaped, a relieved and talkative Stahl sat with Renate and went on about secret places — hidden parks, empty museums — that he liked to visit.

The taxi pulled up in front of the Claridge and, minutes later, Stahl, with a grateful sigh, slid into his sweetly welcoming bed. Exhausted, he slept deeply until 6.00 when his mental alarm clock jarred him awake: he had to see Wilkinson. By 8.30 he was at the neighbourhood Bureau de Poste, making an anonymous phone call to an emergency number Wilkinson had given him. An hour later, Stahl was once again in the stacks at the American Library, apparently searching the 330.94s, European Economies.