Alan Furst: Mission to Paris

The Hotel Claridge, on the rue Francois 1er, was not at all where Stahl wanted to stay but somebody in Paris had made the reservation and Stahl hadn’t complained. The Claridge was where rich Englishmen took suites, close to the Champs-Elysees, a quartier of fancy cinemas, overpriced restaurants, and hordes of tourists. Stahl meant to find somewhere else as soon as he could.

As they left the pier, Zolly said, ‘How about this car?’

‘Very impressive,’ Stahl said.

‘The 1938 Panhard Dynamic,’ Zolly said. ‘It’s all the rage in Paris.’

The lights of Le Havre soon faded away behind them, replaced by the rolling fields of the night-time countryside. When Stahl lowered his window and inhaled the scent of it — damp earth, newly cut hay, a hint of pig manure — he was taken with a sudden rising of the spirit. And the more he inhaled this fragrant air, the better he felt, as though some part of his being had lain dormant in California but had now come back to life. Perhaps I have a French soul, he thought, and it knows it’s home. Home at that moment was a starless night, a steady wind, not a human to be seen. Except, now and again, a sleeping village; stone houses with closed shutters, the local cafe — a dimly lit window with figures gathered at a bar — then farm fields again, divided by ancient trees and tangled underbrush. Le Havre was only two hours from Paris but the land between was France, dark and silent and very old.

It was quiet in the car, even with the window down, only the hum of the engine and the brush of tyres on the road. Stahl, in a pensive mood, lit a cigarette — on the boat he’d changed over to Gauloises, replacing his Lucky Strikes — and thought about a conversation they’d had as they began their journey. It was no more than genial chitchat, making the time pass, which began in English but changed soon enough to French. Zolly Louis was rather a different individual when he spoke French. English for Zolly was the language of the promo man, the salesman, the drummer, whereas in French he was close to circumspect. The way Stahl put it to himself, Zolly Louis spoke the French of the emigre. Familiar to Stahl, who’d spent seven years in Paris as an emigre among emigres, which was a long way from what Americans meant when they called themselves expatriates: expatriates could go home, emigres couldn’t.

That side of Zolly had made Stahl curious. ‘Tell me,’ he’d said, ‘the name “Zolly” is short for…?’ He’d wondered if it might be, perhaps, Solomon. ‘Short for Zoltan,’ was the answer. ‘What else?’ Even in the darkened back seat, Stahl caught the flicker in Zolly’s eyes. Stahl then asked where he was from. This question was answered with a shrug, spread hands, who knows? Finally Zolly said, ‘In some parts of Europe, the Roumanians say you’re not Roumanian, the Hungarians say you’re not Hungarian, and the Serbs don’t say anything. That’s where I’m from.’

Stahl didn’t pursue it and, after a silence, Zolly changed the subject and asked about the new movie — what about it had so appealed to him that he was willing to leave Hollywood? Stahl didn’t care to tell the truth and said he liked the role, and the idea of working in Paris. Zolly nodded, and let it go. But Stahl had understood him perfectly: Any day now, Europe’s going up in flames. What are you doing here?

Zolly, I wish I knew.

In July, Stahl’s agent at the William Morris Agency, Baruch ‘Buzzy’ Mehlman, had told him he’d be meeting with Walter Perry, the studio’s eminence grise, and Jack Warner himself, in Perry’s office. When Stahl showed up, prompt to the minute and shaved to perfection, Perry said, ‘Jack’s upstairs in a meeting, he’ll join us as soon as he can.’ Which meant never, of course, but Stahl got the point: when Walter Perry spoke, he spoke for Jack Warner, and everybody at Warner’s knew it. And what Jack had to say was: We’re loaning you out to Paramount France, to make a movie at Joinville, Paramount’s studios outside Paris. And in return the Paramount star Gary Cooper will be making a western for Warner. ‘Naturally,’ Walter Perry had said, ‘you’ll need some time to think it over. We’ll send you a synopsis, take a look at it, talk it over with Buzzy, then let me know. But I should tell you, Fredric, you’ll make Jack really happy if you say yes.’

The synopsis wasn’t bad, the money, by the time Buzzy got done with Paramount, would be something more than his usual $100,000 a picture, and so Fredric Stahl decided to make Jack really happy. Which, Walter Perry told Buzzy, who told Stahl, it did. So, good, go to Paris. Still, in all this there was something that wasn’t quite right. He couldn’t have said why, it simply felt — odd. When he told friends about it, there was a certain moment of hesitation before they congratulated him, so he wasn’t alone in wondering if there somehow wasn’t more to this, perhaps studio politics, perhaps…

It was Zolly who broke into the reverie. ‘Time for pipi,’ he announced, Jimmy stopped the Panhard and the three of them stood side by side at the edge of the road and watered a field.

Paris.

The night manager of the Claridge took Stahl’s passport — the police collected them late in the evening and returned them by morning — then personally led Zolly and Stahl up to the reserved suite. Abundant flowers and chocolates had been provided, as well as a bottle of Badoit, since American visitors feared European tap water. When the manager and Zolly left, Stahl stretched out on a chaise longue and had just closed his eyes when his luggage arrived, accompanied by a hall porter and a maid who opened his wardrobe trunks and began to unpack and put away his clothing. Stahl retrieved a sweater and a pair of corduroy trousers, then went out to find Paris.

His Paris. Which was found by crossing the Seine on the Pont d’Alma and, eventually, entering the maze of narrow streets of the Sixth Arrondissement, the Faubourg Saint-Germain. And if the damp earth of the French countryside had lifted his spirit, being back in his old quartier was as though a door to heaven had been left open. Walking slowly, looking at everything, he couldn’t get enough of the Parisian air: it smelled of a thousand years of rain dripping on stone, smelled of rough black tobacco and garlic and drains, of perfume, of potatoes frying in fat. It smelled as it had smelled when he was twenty-five.

A warm evening, people were out, the bistros crowded and noisy. On the wall of a newspaper kiosk, closed down for the night, the day’s front-page headlines were still posted: CZECHOSLOVAKIA DECLARES STATE OF EMERGENCY. And, below that, GERMAN DIVISIONS PREPARE TO MARCH. Two women walking arm in arm passed by and when Stahl looked back over his shoulder he caught one of them doing the same thing and she laughed and turned away. In a cafe at the corner of the rue du Four and the rue Mabillon, an old woman with red hair was playing a violin. Stahl went into the cafe, stood at the bar, ordered a cognac, saw his reflection in the mirror, and smiled. ‘A fine evening, no?’ said the bartender.

‘Yes it is,’ Stahl said.

In the morning, Stahl woke up suddenly, jolted into consciousness by a chorus of bleating taxi horns down on the street. Like a flock of crows, he thought, once disturbed they became violently loud and indignant. Now he needed coffee, reached for the telephone and in a few minutes a tray was brought up with coffee and a basket of croissants. He broke the tip off one of them, which produced a shower of pastry flakes, ate the tip, then ate the croissant, then ate all the others, then ate the flakes. As he finished up, a bellboy arrived with an envelope on a silver tray. Inside the envelope was a handwritten note from Zolly Louis, who said he had to be away for a day or two, please stop by the office at 7, rue Scribe, near the American Express office, where Mme Boulanger would be waiting for him.