Alan Furst - Mission to Paris

‘A polite word,’ Stahl said. ‘At least that.’

‘Okay,’ Stanton said. ‘Basically you and your friend have to get out of Hungary, and the difficulty here is that she’s technically a German citizen. Now what I can do is this: I’m going to approve a visa for her to travel to the US, giving us at least some official standing to intervene with the authorities in Budapest — they don’t have to honour the German request.’

‘How long will that take?’

Stanton drummed his fingers on the desk. ‘I always hope for days, but I’ve seen days become weeks. Still, it’s a chance. And once the Hungarians release her, you can charter another aeroplane and fly right over Hitler.’

‘This is very good of you,’ Stahl said. ‘I think I’ll go back to the Astoria and bring her over here.’

‘See you later,’ Stanton said. ‘And now I can write to my mom in Ohio and tell her I met Fredric Stahl.’

On the street outside the consulate was a long line — people applying for American visas. The line disappeared around the corner, Stahl had no idea how far it went after that.

At the hotel, he told Renate to grab her passport and they would go immediately to the consulate. She had set her suitcase on the luggage rack and unpacked a few things. ‘Do you think you could lend me a handkerchief?’ she said. ‘I seem to have left mine back in the room.’

‘Of course,’ he said, put his suitcase on the bed and opened it up. Renate, standing by his side, said, ‘What’s that?’

‘An automatic pistol that Polanyi gave me.’ After a brief search, he found a handkerchief, handed it to her, and said, ‘Now can we go?’

By 5.15, Hungarian time, Renate had a visa to travel to America. If she could ever get out of Hungary alive. At 7.40, Stahl’s call to the William Morris Agency was put through and he went down to a telephone cabin in the lobby. The secretary who answered the phone found Buzzy right away. ‘Fredric? Can you hear me?’

‘Yes, I can.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘It’s a long story, but what’s happened is that I’m with a woman friend, we were shooting on location in Hungary, and the border officials won’t let us out.’

‘Won’t let you out?’

‘I go where she goes.’

‘Oh. Okay, now I understand. Let me make some calls, I’ll see what I can do.’ Stahl had heard this line before, and, when he’d heard it, good things had followed. Not always, but often enough.

‘Her name is Renate Steiner, Buzz. She’s officially a German citizen but she’s a political emigre and lives in Paris.’

‘Can you spell her name for me?’

Stahl spelled out the name.

‘Now, where are you? In Budapest, I know, but I need a telephone number.’

Stahl went to the desk for the number and, miraculously, when he returned, the line was still open. After he’d made sure the hotel and the number were correctly written down, he said, ‘Buzzy, do you think you can help?’

‘I’ll give it one helluva try.’

‘That’s all I can ask.’

‘Everything okay, otherwise?’

‘It is.’

‘You sound serious about this woman, maybe sometime I’ll meet her.’

‘God willing,’ Stahl said.

‘We’ll talk soon,’ Buzzy said, and hung up.

10 January.

Stahl had no idea what Buzz Mehlman had done or who he’d talked to but, by eleven that morning, it produced, at the Astoria desk, one Jerry Silverberg. Short, pudgy, and nervous, wearing glasses in tortoiseshell frames with lenses so thick they distorted his eyes, Silverberg was wearing what Stahl suspected was a brand-new suit, possibly bought for this meeting. They went to a coffee shop in the hotel lobby, where Silverberg ordered a glass of seltzer. ‘I’m the Warner’s rep in eastern Europe,’ Silverberg said. ‘I work with all the distributors in Poland, Hungary, Roumania, and Bulgaria. After I got the big call, I took a train down here from Warsaw, because you are one important guy, Mr Stahl.’

‘The big call. From Buzz Mehlman?’

‘Who?’

‘My agent.’

‘Oh no, I got the call from Walter Perry, which, as I’m sure you know, means Jack Warner. So, believe me when I say I’m going to help you.’

‘I hope you can.’

‘I better. Mr Perry talked to me for a while, he told me who he was, which I knew, and he mentioned he was the Warner Bros. man who deals with people in Washington, D.C. Which I didn’t know, but I suppose somebody does that and he’s the one. He also said that Mr Warner himself was concerned about you, and told me to give you five thousand dollars, which I have with me. So, as I said, you’re one important guy.’

‘Very encouraging, Jerry, but the German police want to question my woman friend, and the Hungarians won’t let us out until she goes to the German legation.’

‘Mr Perry seemed to know all about it. And he wants me to help you. “Any way you can,” he said to me. So, first of all, if you’re thinking the Hungarians, with the Nazis looking over their shoulder, will let you out of here, don’t. You’ll be here forever. No, this has got to be done another way, what I like to call informally — in this part of the world it’s the way things get done, you understand?’

‘I do.’

‘Good. So here’s how it will work. You take a train down to a place called Arad, which is now in Roumania but it was Hungary for hundreds of years, and the people there are Hungarian. Including the border police, see? And there’s a certain major, Major Mihaly, who runs the Arad border control. To him you give three hundred bucks, no more and no less, and you tell him Mr Sobak sent you. And he’ll let you into Roumania. Here, write it down.’

Jerry Silverberg handed him a pad and a pencil, then repeated the information and spelled the names. That done, Stahl said, ‘Who is Mr Sobak?’

‘I do favours for Mr Sobak, Mr Sobak does favours for me. He owns a movie theatre in Warsaw but he’s one of those people with fingers in a lot of pies.’

‘Do you actually speak Polish, Jerry? And Hungarian?’

‘A little. A little of everything, really, but mostly I speak German — I grew up in Minsk speaking Yiddish, then when I was twelve we moved to Brooklyn. Later on, my brother-in-law was hired as an accountant at Warner Bros. and, after a while, he got me this job. I owned a dry cleaners at the time, nothing but headaches. So now I work for Warner Bros.’

‘No headaches there.’

Silverberg laughed. ‘Plenty, but they pay better. You want to hear the rest?’

Stahl nodded.

‘From Arad there’s a train to Constanta, the Roumanian port on the Black Sea, then you take a steamer to Istanbul, and from there you get a ship to Lisbon. Where you board the boat for New York, and then you can catch the 20th Century Limited to L.A. You’re finished with your movie, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then it’s time you went home. I took the liberty of booking all your passages, and your friend Miss Steiner is included. First class all the way! You pick up your tickets from the Thomas Cook office in Constanta. Now this will take a long time, but it’s the southern route and it avoids German Europe — you won’t be alone on these boats, you’ll see.’

‘You did all this?’

‘Who else? And when you get back to Hollywood, and you see Mr Walter Perry, maybe put in a good word for me. Now, here’s the money.’

Stahl took the envelope and said, ‘Jerry, can I buy you lunch? A drink?’

‘Thanks. Kind of you, but as long as I’m in Budapest I might as well see some people.’ He stood, put out a pudgy hand and said, ‘Good luck, Mr Stahl, I hope everything goes all right. And, when you get back to L.A., you ought to write an article or give a speech, tell people what goes on here in Europe, because they just don’t know.’