Alan Furst - Mission to Paris

Some of the tension left her, he could see it in her face. She met his eyes, then shook her head in mock despair, a corner of her mouth turned up and she said, ‘Go make love to a sexy man and see what happens.’

Perhaps, he thought, hoped, she wanted him more than peace of mind. ‘Speaking of which…,’ he said, with the playfully evil smile of a movie villain, a villain more than ready to skip dinner.

‘That’s for later.’

‘Then can we go get something good to eat? My dear Renate? My love?’

She liked that, lowered her head and bumped him gently in the chest. ‘Help me on with my coat,’ she said.

19 December. The mache-betterave was superb, what followed on the rue Varlin was even better. Having got the first time out of the way on the previous night, they had truly indulged themselves. Stahl reached the Claridge just after dawn, where the night deskman wished him a tender good morning — the hotel clerks of Paris were pleased when a guest enjoyed the delights of their city. Before Stahl left for work he telephoned Mme Brun and, after listening to a silent phone for a few minutes, was told Wilkinson would see him at 7.15 that evening, and the arrangements for their meeting.

A few minutes early, Stahl got out of a taxi at a river dock on the Quai de Grenelle. A middle-aged couple, apparently waiting for his arrival, greeted him like an old friend. ‘Hi there Fredric, what a night for a cruise, hey?’ said the man in American English. This dock served the tourist boat that went up and down the Seine, and a hand-lettered sign on the shuttered ticket booth said AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE CHRISTMAS CRUISE. Stahl chatted with the two Americans — Bob was a vice president at the National City Bank — until the launch arrived, strings of coloured lights shimmering in the icy mist, a band on the foredeck playing ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’.

J. J. Wilkinson, in a camel-hair overcoat, was waiting for him in the lounge, a shopping bag from the Au Printemps department store by his side. Holding, Stahl guessed, Christmas presents. ‘I’ve ordered you a scotch,’ Wilkinson said as they shook hands. ‘I hope it’s something you like.’

‘It’ll do me good,’ Stahl said. ‘A long day on the set.’

‘Am I going to be taking notes?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘They never quit, do they.’

‘Well, not yet they haven’t.’

As always, the blunt and beefy Wilkinson was a port in a storm, and a good listener. When Stahl was done describing the phone call at Renate’s apartment, Wilkinson said, ‘Well, another piece of the puzzle anyhow.’

‘What’s that?’

‘They know about Orlova, and they suspect you might have had some secret involvement with her.’

‘The man on the phone certainly sounded confident.’

Wilkinson shrugged. ‘What else? I suspect they were watching the courier, and went chasing after him when he headed for Morocco. And I believe they, the people following him, couldn’t let him do whatever they feared so they killed him. They were on that train, Fredric, and maybe — don’t take this badly — didn’t know who you were.’

Stahl grinned. ‘I thought everybody knew who I was.’

‘Luckily they didn’t. But once they found the money, they started to investigate all the people the courier had contact with. At this point, Orlova’s name came up. Now nobody, anywhere in the world, gets close to a national leader without serious attention from the security services, and that goes double for Hitler. Who is this person? What do they want? Who are their friends? Everything you can think of and some things you’d never imagine. I would guess they have a record, a daily, hourly record, of her life in Berlin. They knew that you spent the night with Orlova at the Adlon, so they took a close look at you, then decided to give you a poke to see what you did next. Now, that’s the optimistic version of…’

A waiter arrived with two scotch-and-sodas. ‘ Salut,’ Wilkinson said in French. To Stahl, the bite of the whisky felt comforting on a cold, raw evening.

‘The optimistic version, as I said. The other possibility is that they’ve caught Orlova spying and arrested her. Which means she’s been interrogated, and given them your name. However, if they really felt sure you were spying on Germany I doubt they’d fool around with telephone calls. So, there’s a chance that Orlova got away and they’re looking for her. One thing I do know is that she’s not in Berlin. She’s vanished.’

‘Is she in Moscow?’

‘For her sake, I hope not.’

‘She is a survivor,’ Stahl said.

‘She’d better be. And I suspect she’ll be doing her surviving in Mexico, or Brazil. Even so, the Gestapo has a long arm.’

‘Was that where the phone call came from? The Gestapo?’

‘I would think so. The crowd from the Ribbentropburo, Emhof and his friends, wouldn’t be involved at this level.’

‘Oh,’ Stahl said, meaning he understood. But something had jumped inside him when Wilkinson said ‘Gestapo’. ‘Is there anything I can do about it?’

Wilkinson thought it over. ‘You can go to the police, maybe the Deuxieme Bureau — I can help with that, but protecting you would involve a lot of time and money and many people. Still, they might do it. The danger comes if they say they’ll do it but don’t do much, the danger comes when, because you’re a movie star, they say things to make you feel better.’ Suddenly, Wilkinson turned grim and uncomfortable. ‘It’s been known to happen,’ he said.

It has happened, Stahl thought. Why on earth had he assumed he was the only one involved in Wilkinson’s operations? Now he knew he wasn’t and that, for some of the others, things had gone badly.

The launch pulled into another dock to pick up more passengers. The band on the foredeck began to play ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’, Wilkinson swirled what remained in his glass, then drank it off and said, ‘Care for another?’

Stahl said he would.

Wilkinson turned halfway round and signalled to the waiter. ‘Actually, you don’t have too much time left here, only a few weeks, right? You’ll just have to be cautious — where you are, who you’re with. You know your way around the city and you aren’t going anywhere else.’

‘I’m going to Hungary.’

Wilkinson looked at him, clearly alarmed. ‘Fredric, that’s not a good place for you, the Gestapo can do anything it wants there.’

‘Still, I have to go,’ Stahl said. ‘I am curious about one thing, why did you have the American couple on the dock?’

‘It seemed odd to have you go to an event like this by yourself. And I didn’t want you standing alone in a deserted place.’

The drinks arrived, Stahl took more than a sip, so did Wilkinson.

20 December.

True to the words of the voice on the telephone, the colleagues in Paris got in touch with him. A second phone call, this time in the morning, as Stahl, barely awake, was having his morning coffee. ‘Good morning, Herr Stahl, how are you feeling today?’

Stahl started to hang up the phone when the voice called out, ‘Oh no, you mustn’t do that, Herr Stahl.’

Holding the receiver, Stahl looked around him.

‘Over here, Herr Stahl, across the street.’

Directly opposite the Claridge was an unremarkable, but no doubt expensive, apartment building and, at a window that looked into his room, Stahl saw a hand waving at him. The voice on the phone said, ‘Yoo-hoo. Here I am.’ Then the hand disappeared.

‘Yes, I see you, and so what?’ Stahl said.

‘If I had a decent weapon I could just about put a little hole in your coffee cup.’

As Stahl slammed the receiver down he heard a laugh. Not a portentous or threatening laugh, but the honest, merry laughter of someone who finds something truly funny. And that, Stahl realized, was worse.