Alan Furst: Mission to Paris

Warner Bros. France was, according to the directory in the lobby, on the third floor. Stahl pressed the button to call the elevator and was about to take the stairs when he heard whirring and grinding above him, peered up through the wire cage and saw the cables on the bottom of the car, then, very slowly, the tiny elevator itself. Up on the third floor, searching through the gloom of a long corridor, he found the name of the company on a pebbled glass door, which opened to an office furnished with well-used desks — cigarette burns on the edges — black telephones, and Warner movie posters: 42nd Street, Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood — showing Errol Flynn in green hat with feather and Olivia de Havilland in a sort of wimple — and The Life of Emile Zola, released a year earlier. It was, by way of the story of the Dreyfus affair, Warner’s, in fact Hollywood’s, first anti-fascist movie. And in prominent position, between two grimy windows, a poster of the actor who’d made a great deal of money for Warner, Porky Pig.

Stahl stood at the open door; a man was gesturing as he argued on the phone, a girl typing at great speed, eyes on a pencilled draft. Then: ‘Ah, voila! He arrives!’ A woman in a rather snug knit suit was rising from her swivel chair, evidently Mme Boulanger. Fiftyish and determined, with bright red lips and fingernails, she was one of those businesswomen who wore a hat in the office — a black pillbox with a bow on one side. Holding a cigarette in one hand, she brushed his cheeks with her lips. ‘Elsa Boulanger,’ she said.

‘Good morning, Madame Boulanger.’

‘Have a seat,’ she commanded, turning her swivel chair to face him. ‘I’m to do your publicity — the Warner star in Paris part. Paramount will work on the movie itself. Did you have a good voyage? Did your luggage arrive? Are you comfortable in your hotel? Have you seen Le Matin?’ She handed him a newspaper folded open to two photographs. There he was, with the Ile de France in the background, as he smiled and waved. The second photograph showed the young woman holding his arm, the caption below read, Fredric Stahl is welcomed to France by the film actress Colette Dulac.

‘Who is she?’ Stahl said. ‘She just… appeared.’

Mme Boulanger shrugged. ‘Nobody,’ she said. ‘But she wants to change that, I’d say.’ She paused, and stubbed her cigarette out in a cafe ashtray that said SUZE. Stahl turned the newspaper to see what was above the fold and found a review of Le Quai des Brumes, a Marcel Carne film starring Jean Gabin. ‘I’d like to see this,’ Stahl said. ‘I knew Carne, at least to say hello to, when I worked here.’

Mme Boulanger leaned towards him and lowered her voice. ‘ Mon cher Monsieur Stahl,’ she said, the my dear not without affection, then hesitated as she took the paper away from him and ran her finger along the text below his photograph. ‘What is this all about? This line, “Monsieur Stahl told Le Matin that his new film, Apres la Guerre, will be about ‘the futility of war’.” Is there any special reason you said that?’

‘I didn’t say it. The Le Matin man put it in a question and I, well, I did no more than agree. I really didn’t know what to say.’

‘You will have to be more careful here, you know.’

‘Careful?’

‘Yes, these days, careful.’

Stahl tried to laugh it off. ‘Isn’t war always futile, Madame Boulanger?’

Mme Boulanger wasn’t amused. ‘ Le Matin, mon cher, is a very rightist newspaper.’

Stahl was puzzled and showed it. ‘Rightist?’ he said. ‘The French right is against war? Has turned pacifist?’

‘In its way. The press and politicians on the right try to persuade us that resistance to Hitler is futile. The German military is too large, too strong, their machines are new and efficient and deadly, and their passion for a fight unequalled. Poor France can never win against such a powerful and determined force. That’s what we’re being fed, over here.’

‘What do they want France to do?’

‘Negotiate, sign treaties, acknowledge Hitler’s supremacy, let him do whatever he wants in Europe as long as he leaves us alone.’

Stahl shook his head. ‘I had no idea.’

‘You are Austrian by birth, no?’

‘Viennese.’

‘What do you think about what goes on over there?’ She nodded her head in the general direction of France’s eastern border with Germany, a little more than two hundred miles from where they sat.

‘Sickening,’ he said. Mme Boulanger’s expression barely changed but Stahl could tell she was relieved. ‘And dangerous,’ he went on. ‘I can’t bear to watch Hitler in the newsreels.’

‘ Le Matin doesn’t know where you stand, but they offer you an opportunity, as an actor, as an artist, to speak out against European war.’

‘Perhaps I’ll let them know,’ he said. Then added, ‘Where I stand.’

‘Perhaps you’ll find a way to keep out of politics, Monsieur Stahl. For actors it’s much the best idea. Those of us who work for your success would prefer that all the people who go to the movies feel affection for you. Why annoy those who don’t like your political views?’

Stahl nodded. ‘You are a sensible person, Madame Boulanger.’

She smiled, reached out and rested two fingers lightly on his knee. ‘You are a successful man, a movie star, let’s keep it that way. How long are you in Paris?’

‘Four months? Less? It’s hard to know, I have to meet with the producer and the director, then I’ll have a better idea.’

Mme Boulanger swivelled back to face her desk, picked up an appointment book, its pages thickened by notes in blue ink, and thumbed through it. ‘I see people from the newspapers on a fairly regular basis, and I’ll set up a few interviews. And by the way, is this Apres la Guerre an outcry against war? Umm, the futility of war?’

Stahl shrugged. ‘Three soldiers, foreign legionnaires, try to return home from Turkey after the 1918 armistice.’

‘And you play…?’

‘Colonel Vadic, of obscure Balkan origin, the leader, and much-decorated hero. I may get to walk with a stick.’

Mme Boulanger’s face lit up. ‘I like that,’ she said. ‘A human story.’

Walking back to the hotel, Stahl sensed that the city’s mood had changed. Sombre today, the Parisians, unsmiling, eyes down, something had reached them on the morning of 19 September. The headlines weren’t so different than the day before, all to do with the possibility of a German march into Czechoslovakia. If that happened, France was obliged by treaty to go to war. Years earlier, in the last months of 1923, as Stahl was beginning a new life in Paris, war was a thing of the past — the last one so brutal and vicious that all the world knew there could never be another. At least all the world of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. In the Left Bank cafes that autumn, the word was barely mentioned, the talk was about paintings, books, music, scandals, reputations, and who was in whose bed. As Stahl’s French grew better, as he picked up the argot, the slang, he fell in love with the world of the cafes.

He’d come a long way to get there. When he was twenty and working at the legation in Barcelona, the war ended, the Central Powers had lost, and the legation gave all its employees steamship tickets to the Austro-Hungarian port of Trieste. From there, Stahl had made his way to Vienna. Returned home, where to his mother he was a prodigal son, to his father a self-indulgent wastrel. He managed to live at the family apartment for a few weeks, then fled to stay on friends’ couches, and finally found a room in a cellar, half of which was given over to the storage of potatoes. A stage-struck friend — from one of the most aristocratic and impoverished families in the city — had taken to hanging around the great Viennese theatres, the ‘Burg’ and the Volksoper, and Stahl joined him and found an occasional job as an extra. He couldn’t sing, but enthusiastically mimed the words, and it was always good to have a handsome face in the crowd cheering the king. He carried his first spear in Aida, wore his first muttonchops — and had his first addictive sniff of the spirit gum that stuck them to his face — in The Merry Widow. In time, he won dramatic roles at some of the city’s smaller playhouses, worked hard, was noticed in reviews, and began to build a career.