Mission to Paris

ESPIONAGE

In Germany, in August of 1938,

A jewish emigre couple called Grynszpan was informed by the authorities that their residence permits had been cancelled and they would have to reapply for permission to remain in the country. They knew they needn’t bother; the Nazi government wanted to get rid of them, two among seventeen thousand Jews of Polish origin, all of whom would have to return to Poland. In March of that year, however, Poland had annulled the citizenship of almost all resident alien Jews in Germany and Austria. So the Grynszpans couldn’t stay where they were, but had nowhere else to go. On 26 October, the Gestapo resolved this paradox by arresting twelve thousand Jews, taking whatever they owned, putting them in boxcars, then herding them across the border to the Polish town of Zbaszyn, where the Poles refused to admit them.

Stranded in a field outside Zbaszyn, the Jews were without shelter and had very little to eat. So the Grynszpans, desperate for help of any kind, sent a postcard to their son, Herschel, who had fled Germany in 1936, at the age of fifteen, and was living illegally in Paris. On 31 October, Herschel Grynszpan received the postcard but there was nothing to be done, not by him, not by anyone he knew. Unable to help the people he loved, he was caught up in that particularly volatile mix of sorrow and anger and, by 7 November, he could bear it no longer. With the last of his money, he bought a revolver and ammunition, took the Metro to the Solferino station, walked to the German embassy on the rue de Lille and told the reception clerk he wished to speak with an official. The clerk told him he would be seen by a junior diplomat called Ernst vom Rath and sent him upstairs. When Grynszpan entered the office, he raised the revolver and shot vom Rath five times. Grynszpan, a farewell postcard to his parents in his pocket, made no attempt to run away, and was arrested by the French police. Vom Rath was taken to the hospital, where he died on 9 November.

The Nazi leadership was enraged — the more so for being shocked. How could such a thing happen? A Jew, a member of a weak and degenerate race, had had the audacity to attack a German? Imagine! Jews didn’t fight back, they were expected to be meek, and to suffer in silence. So Herschel Grynszpan’s action was seen as a racial insult, an intolerable insult, for which the Jews must be punished. How? Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels met with Chancellor Hitler, and they determined that the German people would avenge the insult with attacks on the Jewish population — in Berlin, and throughout Germany. Thus, on the night of 9 November, at 11.55 p.m., an order was issued by the Gestapo: B ERLIN N O. 234404 9 N OVEMBER, 1938 To all Gestapo Stations and Gestapo District Stations To Officer or Deputy This teleprinter message is to be submitted without delay: 1. At very short notice, Aktionen against Jews, especially against their synagogues, will take place throughout the whole of Germany. They are not to be hindered. In conjunction with the police, however, it is to be ensured that looting and other particular excesses can be prevented. 2. If important archival material is in synagogues, this is to be taken into safekeeping by an immediate measure. 3. Preparations are to be made for the arrest of about 20,000- 30,000 Jews in the Reich. Wealthy Jews in particular are to be selected. 4. Should, in the forthcoming Aktionen, Jews be found to be in possession of weapons, the most severe measures are to be taken. SS reserves as well as the General SS can be mobilized in the total Aktionen. The direction of the Aktionen by the Gestapo is in any case to be assured by appropriate measures. Gestapo II Muller This teleprinter message is secret.

9 November. The Lufthansa flight to Berlin would leave Le Bourget Airport at 10.20 a.m. A photographer from the Paris office of the DNB — Deutsches Nachrichtenburo, the German press agency — was at the airport, waiting to photograph Stahl as he climbed the stairway that was wheeled up to the door of the aeroplane. Starting early, Stahl thought. Very thorough, very Teutonic. But it would be a good photo — the handsome movie star in fedora and trench coat, the caption to read, American movie star Fredric Stahl leaves for Berlin. ‘Over here, Herr Stahl,’ the photographer called out. ‘Could you give us a wave?’ Then, ‘Thank you. Another?’ Well, Stahl told himself, you’d better be as good an actor as they say. Otherwise, the photo would reveal a very anxious man, going off to meet a bad fate.

In the plane, Herr Emhof was waiting for him, black-framed glasses tilted over his bulging eyes as he read his morning newspaper. ‘Ah, here you are, right on time,’ Emhof said as Stahl settled himself in a seat across the aisle.

‘Good morning, Herr Emhof,’ Stahl said. ‘A good day for flying.’ True enough. Despite a low sky heavy with Parisian cloud, it was, everywhere but in Stahl’s mind, calm weather. Stahl wasn’t surprised to find Emhof waiting for him, making sure his package would be delivered to Berlin, bringing his treasure home. Once Stahl had made the change-of-mind telephone call to Moppi — who’d been so excited Stahl could hear him breathing — he knew the machine would be put in motion.

For Stahl, some serious thought had gone into that call, a matter of tone. What he’d finally come up with was not precisely apologetic, something closer to I don’t really know why I made such a fuss about this. ‘I spoke with the publicity people in Paris,’ Stahl told Moppi. ‘And they thought it was a good idea. So, off to Berlin!’ Frivolous. Devil-may-care. It doesn’t matter. In fact, the newly cooperative Stahl had elected to stay a second night in his suite at the Hotel Adlon, so he could be honoured at the banquet opening the festival, then would announce the winners at a second banquet the following night.

What he’d told Moppi was, like any good lie, partly true. He had spoken to Mme Boulanger about the journey — he didn’t want her surprised, if she found out, didn’t want her to think he had secrets. And though he couldn’t tell her what he was really doing, he could lie persuasively, and confided to Mme Boulanger that ‘someone at Warner Bros.’ had suggested he go ahead and attend the festival. But he’d prefer, if possible, that nothing appear in the Paris press. She’d thought for a moment, then said, ‘I don’t see that they’d care, when you think about it, it has nothing to do with France.’ As long as no press release was issued in Paris, she suspected the event would slide past without public notice.

He’d told Jean Avila the same thing. Avila had grimaced, his loathing of Nazi Germany was no secret, but he understood Stahl’s position and simply said, ‘As long as you’re back on time, to hell with it.’ And then, he just couldn’t resist, ‘If they put you in a camp, be sure and send me a postcard. “Dachau at Sunset” maybe, if they have that one.’

Very funny. No, not so funny.

Emhof broke into his reverie. ‘Are you feeling well, this morning?’

‘I am,’ Stahl said. ‘And looking forward to the festival.’

With one finger, Stahl touched the inside pocket of his jacket, making sure, yet once again, that what he carried in there was still with him. He didn’t need to touch the pockets of his trousers, those were so full he could feel them against his body. ‘It’s quite safe, that way,’ Wilkinson had told him in the stacks of the American Library. ‘They wouldn’t dare to search you. Not you.’ Wilkinson had spread his hands and smiled — that’s why you’re valuable. Still, there was some considerable bulk to the money, two hundred thousand Swiss francs in thousand-franc notes — a little less than fifty thousand dollars. And then there was the crucial ten-reichsmark note, in his shirt pocket. Stahl had wanted to go back over the whole thing, making sure he had it all right, but heavy footsteps were ascending the stairs and Wilkinson had laid his index finger across his lips and with his other hand had gripped Stahl’s shoulder. Goodbye. Good luck. Strong, J. J. Wilkinson, perhaps he’d played football, somewhere in the Ivy League. Then the diplomat walked away down the narrow aisle, leaving the Dewey Decimal 330.94s, European Economies, for Languages in the 400s.

Grey mist whipped past the aeroplane window, stubbled fields and dark evergreens below when it cleared. Emhof, saying, ‘Perhaps you’d like something to read,’ handed Stahl the day’s newspapers, German newspapers. Well good, Stahl thought, a diversion. But of course it wasn’t. On top of the stack, Volkischer Beobachter — the nationalist observer — the Nazi party newspaper owned by Adolf Hitler. Or perhaps Das Reich, owned by Propaganda Minister Goebbels? Stahl settled on the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, supposedly the choice of German intellectuals.

Stahl had read his share of Los Angeles tabloids; dreadful crimes and humorous gossip — humorous as long as it wasn’t about you — and he’d grown up with an Austrian press that could be venomous and often was, but what he had before him was something new. Hitler here and Hitler there, Hitler and his cronies everywhere. What a newspaper! It grovelled and fawned, down on its knees in the hope that its lord and master would present a certain part of himself for a kiss. After ten minutes — news of sports: how mighty the German shot-putters, how swift her sprinters, how noble her soccer players — Stahl set the newspapers on his lap and looked out of the window, then closed his eyes and pretended to doze, avoiding a potential conversation with Emhof. But solitude, alas, led Stahl to brood about what lay ahead of him. So it was a long plane ride. A long, long plane ride.

On landing at Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, the traveller was met by a force not unlike a storm; a powerful and dangerous storm — on its tide you could be swept away into a dark sea and never be seen again. The most sacred phrase of the Nazi creed was Blood and Soil. Well, here was the soil, the German earth, and before you could set foot upon such precious stuff you had to face its guardians, its border post. Where the uniforms of the SS were a shade of black that seemed to glow in the light of the overcast afternoon. Their polished boots glistened, their faces like white stone. The Alsatian shepherds on chain leads — no effete leather for us! — were as watchful as their masters, and the black and red swastika flags were hung as stiffened banners, which the wind was forbidden to disturb. Stahl approached the customs officers but he never reached them — Emhof cut in front of him, produced an identity card, then took Stahl’s passport and had it stamped. Wilkinson was right: Stahl was too important to search, and ignored the stares of the officers as he walked past, his pockets stuffed with money.

The car waiting outside the terminal was a black Grosser Mercedes, its chauffeur standing at attention by the rear door. When Stahl and Emhof were settled in the back seat, Emhof barked out their destination and the chauffeur responded as though he’d been given a military order. And if Tempelhof Airport had been a kind of overture, the city of Berlin, when they reached its centre, was the Wagnerian climax. Uniforms everywhere, brown-shirted storm troopers with puttees bloused out above their boots, Wehrmacht officers in field grey, the navy in blue, the Luftwaffe in blue-grey, women in fur coats, men in homburgs and overcoats, and all of them, to a greater or lesser degree, marched. This country was already at war, though enemy forces had yet to appear, and Stahl could sense an almost palpable violence that hung above the city like a mist. And although he was not actually frightened, the street show had brought him to a state of high alert.

Emhof glanced over at him and said, ‘Not much like Paris, is it?’

‘No, not at all.’

‘As you can see, we are a very determined people.’

Berlin was, Stahl thought, a movie set, meticulously designed for effect. People who saw this place — visitors, or an audience watching a newsreel — might wonder what sort of fool would dare to attack such a country. A quote about Goering that Stahl had read somewhere suddenly came to him: ‘He loves war as a child loves Christmas.’

His suite at the Adlon, the Bismarck Suite — and there he was, in a gold frame on the wall, heroically painted with heavy white moustache and Pickelhaube spiked helmet — had all the luxuries and all the conveniences; for example a telephone in every room. These, Wilkinson had warned him, had microphones that were always alive, sending conversation in the room back to some technician wearing headphones as he sat in front of a console with dials and a wire recording machine. Best, if you had to speak privately, to disconnect the phone from its receptacle in the wall. Stahl’s suitcase had been taken from the plane and driven quickly to the Adlon and it had already been unpacked — and no doubt searched. His evening clothes, for that night’s banquet, then the party in his honour on the following evening, were hung carefully in the closet, his brush and comb and toothbrush laid out by the shining porcelain sink. He undressed, stretched out on the bed in his underwear and worked to calm himself down. So far, so good, he thought. It surprised him — how much he wanted to do this work, and do it successfully. Getting out of the Mercedes at the entry to the Adlon, as the chauffeur held the door, he saw a few civilians passing by and one of them, a rather elegant woman of some age, her chin held high in a near desperate attempt at preserved dignity, wore a yellow star on the breast of her woollen coat.

Stahl dressed for the banquet, then transferred the money and ten-reichsmark note to his evening clothes. As Wilkinson had put it, in the still, musty air of the library stacks, ‘If you leave this money in your room, you won’t be coming back to Paris.’ On the day before he boarded the plane, the resident seamstress at the Claridge had sewn a large inner pocket into the lining of his tuxedo jacket, much roomier than the one on the left side. He was now more than glad he’d had this done, for there was only a small back pocket on the trousers. Even so, he had to stash a few thousand Swiss francs in the back of his cummerbund. So I will not be dancing the polka tonight. Precisely on time, he made his way down to the Adlon’s grand ballroom.

Splendid it surely was. Vast chandeliers glittered above, the white tablecloths were dazzling, endless ranks of silverware marched away from the side of every golden service plate, the satin draperies were blood-red, and the centrepiece on the elevated centre table held an exceptional display of marzipan tanks and fighter planes.

Very carefully, to avoid a shower of Swiss francs, Stahl withdrew his typewritten speech — written in Paris with Mme Boulanger’s help — from his inner pocket. Herr von Somebody, the official host, spoke first, welcoming the bejewelled ladies and beaming gentlemen to the Reich National Festival of Mountain Cinema, ‘and tonight’s banquet in honour of Herr Fredric Stahl, who is to select the festival’s winners.’ There followed a flowery tribute to the Fuhrer, ‘who has made all this possible.’ Stahl was then introduced, and gave a short speech, thanking everybody in sight, citing the importance of cinema to all the world’s cultures, and looking forward to choosing the best mountain film of 1938, ‘though I expect, given the general level of excellence, that will be an extremely difficult task.’ When he was done, the guests — there must have been at least a hundred — rose to their feet and applauded.

The banquet began with a thin, and absolutely delicious, potato soup. It had been a long time — back in his days in Vienna — since Stahl had tasted good German food, and he made himself hold back on the soup, sensing there were perhaps even better things to come. Wild boar from Karinhall, the Goering estate, said the giant, both-hands-required menu. Leaving the soup, Stahl turned to the lady on his left, Princess von Somebody, with diamonds dripping down towards the cleft of a snowy bosom.

With the arrival of the wild boar, Stahl turned to chat with the director of the festival, who sat across from him, the German film producer Otto Raab. Stahl had never met him, but as Raab talked about himself Stahl realized that he knew this man, knew him from experience. Likely he’d started his artistic career in the provincial theatre, a local genius who had, driven by ambition, gone off to the great city — Berlin in this case — there to discover he was no genius at all, at best a worker bee, so that his passion to succeed soured and turned to bitter resentment. How did it happen that these people, many of them Jews, communists, sexual deviates, were set above him? They were snobs, arrogant and sure of their talent, this so-called elite, but they were no better than he was. They succeeded because they knew the right people, they hobnobbed, they worked their insidious magic and rose to the top, where they looked down their noses at the struggling Otto Raabs of the world.

But with the Nazi ascent to power in 1933, the Otto Raabs of Germany perfectly understood what it meant for them. Now it was their turn. They joined the Nazi party, and success inevitably followed. Now look! A respected producer of films, wholesome films, German films, a powerful man snubbed no longer. Raab had weak, watery eyes, and in the way they fixed on Stahl as Raab recounted various triumphs, there was the purest hatred. Stahl was careful with him, gently encouraging, keeping condescension at bay. After he’d had all he could stand of Raab, he turned to the woman on his right, the highly acclaimed film actress Olga Orlova.

Stahl knew something of Orlova, who had a complicated history. She was said to be a descendant of the Russian novelist Lermontov, had trained in the great Moscow Art Theatre with Stanislavsky, had fled with the White armies from the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, landed on her feet in Germany, become a film star, and a great favourite of that madly passionate film buff Adolf Hitler. Who made sure that photographs of the two of them together appeared in newspapers and magazines.

Orlova was, like many actresses, not so much beautiful as striking, memorable, with plain, strong features, upswept dark hair parted to one side, and animated eyes. She may have been over forty but looked younger — smooth skin, a well-tended body in a lime-coloured evening gown that revealed the bare shoulders of an athlete. She wore a necklace and earrings of small emeralds and, as she talked, Stahl noticed she had slim, delicate hands. Her voice was low, and sensual in a way that Stahl couldn’t precisely define — she spoke intimately, but she was no coquette.

She admired him, she said, she knew his films. How on earth had they managed to lure him to this incredibly boring event?

‘I’m living in Paris now, making a film for Paramount, and my studio thought it would be a good idea.’

‘Ah yes,’ Orlova said. ‘There’s more to this business than the screen kiss.’

‘That’s true.’

‘It’s certainly true for me. I started out in the theatre, acted my little heart out, Chekhov, Pushkin, Shakespeare in Russian. But the Bolsheviks put an end to that, so now I am in movies.’

‘And a celebrity.’

‘That I am. I work at it, and important people here seem to like what I do.’

‘Surely one very important person,’ Stahl said.

Orlova’s smile was ever so slightly grim. ‘One is chosen, sometimes, it’s not up to you. But it’s not bad to be adored, and he is infinitely polite.’

‘To you.’

‘Yes, to me.’ She shrugged. ‘We have no intimate life, though the world is encouraged to think otherwise.’

‘And you don’t mind?’

‘Mind gossip? No, do you?’

‘Now and then, but it comes with the profession.’

‘And makes private life difficult. Still…’ For a moment, her eyes caught his in a certain way. ‘I find you, for example, quite interesting.’

‘I’m flattered,’ Stahl said. ‘But for people like us, privacy is almost impossible.’

‘Almost,’ she said. ‘But not quite.’ She paused for a moment, then said, ‘Where are they keeping you?’

‘Here.’ He pointed upwards. ‘In the Bismarck Suite.’

‘Well, well, the Bismarck Suite. Then you’re just down the hall from me.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, I’ve taken the Fuhrer’s suite for tonight. I don’t believe he’s ever been there, but the hotel keeps it exclusively for him.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Just down the hall. The number one hundred is on the door.’

‘I hadn’t noticed.’

‘No reason to, but now you know. I’ll leave the door ajar.’

From behind them, a waiter cleared his throat. Startled, Stahl and Orlova turned to face him. He was a wiry little man with oiled, slicked-back hair and a smug, almost triumphant smile on his face. ‘Excuse me, meine Frau, mein Herr, may I take your plates, please?’ The words were commonplace but the tone was just insinuating enough to let them know their conversation had been overheard.

‘By all means,’ Orlova said. Her voice was dismissive, and faintly irritated.

The waiter took their plates, moving from Orlova’s right to Stahl’s. ‘It is a pleasure to serve such glamorous people,’ he said. The insinuation in his voice was now plainly evident. ‘My name is Rudi, by the way.’

‘Thank you, Rudi,’ Stahl said, turning back to face Orlova.

The waiter bowed politely and said, ‘Some people are known to reward good service.’

‘We’ll remember that,’ Stahl said. ‘Now go away.’

After another bow, the waiter, a slight redness to his cheeks, went off towards the kitchen.

‘Rude little bastard, isn’t he. How much of that do you think he overheard?’ Stahl said. He had a bad feeling in his chest.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Orlova said. ‘I do what I want. My private life is my own affair, and certain people know that very well.’

‘Then I’ll see you later.’

‘After I go upstairs, give me a half-hour.’

Stahl looked to his left, meaning to resume conversation with Princess von Somebody, but Orlova put a hand on his arm. ‘By the way, a silly thing but I want to leave a little something for the maid. Do you happen to have a ten-reichsmark note?’

‘I do,’ Stahl said. ‘I’ll bring it with me.’

When Stahl saw the waiters clearing space in the middle of the ballroom, and a small orchestra began to set up, he realized it was time to go. He took Princess von Somebody’s hand, bent towards it, touched her skin with his lips and said good evening. The princess made a disappointed little mouth and said, ‘Will you not stay for the dancing?’

‘Forgive me, your grace, but I’m very tired, and I must rise early and watch the movies.’

‘I see,’ she said. ‘Then good night, Herr Stahl, it was a pleasure to meet you.’

Stahl realized she’d expected to spend the night with him, so wished her the most gracious good-evening he could manage. Next he looked for Orlova, who was nowhere to be seen, and then, needing a breath of fresh air, he walked through the lobby to the door of the hotel, stepped outside, and took a cigarette and a lighter from his side pocket. He was about to light his cigarette when he smelled smoke. Not woodsmoke from a fireplace, the other kind, where something is burning that shouldn’t be burning. He looked over at the doorman, a giant in a coat with epaulettes, who stood nearby, rubbing his hands to keep them warm — it was a chilly night, with a cutting little wind from the north. ‘Is something on fire?’ Stahl said.

‘No, sir,’ the doorman said.

Stahl looked up the front of the hotel but saw nothing. The smell was getting stronger. For a few moments he waited, listening for sirens, but the night was quiet. Curiously quiet, there was no traffic on what was usually, even late at night, a busy street. ‘You’re sure?’ Stahl said to the doorman.

‘Yes, sir. I am quite sure. But when you have finished your cigarette, it would be better to remain in the hotel for the evening.’

Why? But Stahl said his thank you and lit his cigarette.

12.30 a.m. Stahl walked down the hallway, couldn’t find the Hitler suite, then went back the other way and found a door at the end which faced the corridor, a gold plate inscribed 100 screwed to the polished oak surface. And yes, it was slightly ajar. He knocked lightly, then entered. He was in a foyer, through an open door he could see a bedroom, and a pair of legs with bare feet. Olga Orlova was stretched out on the bed, her gown hiked up above her knees. She rose to a sitting position and smiled at him. ‘My lover at last,’ she said, eyes amused.

‘I’m here, my darling.’

‘Yes, I heard your carriage arrive. Do you have my reichsmark note?’

Stahl handed it to her. She opened a small address book on the night table and spoke the bill’s serial number aloud, consulting her book to make sure the numbers matched. ‘Really,’ she said, ‘I don’t see why we have to do this. I’ve surely seen you enough to know who you are.’ She handed the note back to him and said, ‘For next time.’

Stahl began to fish the Swiss francs out of his tuxedo pockets, then unbuckled his cummerbund, retrieved the rest, and set the stacks on the satin coverlet. ‘A lot of paper,’ he said.

‘How much?’

‘Two hundred thousand francs.’

‘That’s the right number, I’ll count it later. The telephones are turned off by the way, so we don’t have to play the love scene.’

‘They listen to Hitler’s phones?’

She shrugged. ‘Who knows what they do. I’m sure they’re watching your room, so you’d better stay for an hour while we make passionate love.’

Stahl found a chair in the corner and sat down.

Orlova gathered up the money and put it in a large handbag with a shoulder strap. ‘My spy bag,’ she said. She poked around inside, then drew out a sheaf of very thin paper with tiny, spidery writing from top to bottom and edge to edge and walked it over to Stahl. ‘Here’s what your friends are expecting. There’s quite a lot of it this time, Orlova has been terribly social these last few weeks.’

‘Thank you,’ Stahl said.

‘If I knew how to do it properly, I would spit,’ she said. ‘But they didn’t teach girls to do that, not in Czarist Russia. Maybe they do now, in their USSR.’

‘Why spit?’

‘If you read what I brought you, and I don’t think you’re supposed to, you’d know why. These monsters are bad enough in public, but you ought to get a taste of them in private. You’d spit too.’ She lay back down on the bed and put her hands over her eyes. ‘I am tired, Herr Stahl, Fredric. For years.’ She was quiet for a time, Stahl thought she might be going to sleep, but she sat up suddenly and said, ‘Christ! The goddamn hotel’s on fire!’

‘No, I made sure it isn’t, but something is.’

Orlova’s eyes were wide. ‘I know that smell, I know that smell from 1917, that’s a burning building.’

‘Yes, I think it is.’

After a moment she lay back on the bed again.

‘I wonder,’ Stahl said, ‘will there be talk, about our being together up here? If they’re watching my room they know I’m not in there.’

Orlova turned on her side to face him. ‘Talk? Not from the hotel people. For one thing, you could be anywhere in the hotel — the staircase in the Adlon is famous for night-time visits, you don’t have to use the elevator. And even if they suspected something, when it comes to Adolf and his circle they keep their traps well shut. As for the morons who are running the festival, all they know is that I arranged to sit next to you. So what? Maybe I want to go to Hollywood.’

‘Do you?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve thought about it.’

‘They like foreign stars out there — you could be the next Marlene Dietrich. Anyhow, in time you may decide to try it.’

Orlova rolled onto her back and rubbed her eyes. ‘Not much time left, Fredric, based on what’s in your pocket.’

‘Do they speak openly, in front of you?’

‘No, but they like to talk to each other in what they think is a sort of code; winks, and pokes in the ribs, and too bad we can’t let you in on the big secrets.’ She was silent for a moment, then said, ‘Now I’m going to take a nap, you should wait for an hour before you leave.’

3.40 a.m. Stahl had found it hard to go to sleep, had read a third of his Simenon novel, decided to have a brandy sent up to his suite but thought better of it, not wanting to call attention to himself. Finally, sometime after four in the morning, he drifted off.

Then, something brought him sharply awake.

What could have happened? A noise? A nightmare? A noise, for now he heard it again: shattering glass. Something of considerable size, plate glass, like a shop window. And there it was again, somewhere down in the street. He rolled off the bed, went to the window, and moved the drapery just enough so that he could see out. He thought he heard shouting, more than one voice, then, across the street from the hotel, a shadow went past, running at full speed. He caught only a glimpse but, with eyes fixed on the street, he saw a group of men, five or six of them, more trotting than running. They disappeared in the same direction the shadow had taken. Hunting him? He stood at the window for some time but saw nothing else, only a glow in the eastern sky. And the smell of burning was now very strong; acrid, unpleasant.

The young woman wore her shining blonde hair rolled in plaits above her ears — she was a peasant after all and, in the movies, that was the way pretty peasant girls wore their hair. As they also could be counted on to wear a dirndl — a tightly fitted bodice and full skirt, this costume in baby blue and white, so pure was she, toiling her way up the side of an alp. She climbed with the aid of a stick and with her other hand held a small brass urn to her breast. Poor Hans was in there — his ashes anyhow — cremated after being shot by a Jewish gangster in the evil city where he never ever should have gone, in the mistaken belief that he had lost her love. The violins worked away and, as she at last reached the crest, the sun just now rising above the neighbouring mountain, here came, as Stahl had anticipated, a long blast on an alpine horn. Triumph! True, there were tears in the girl’s eyes, but there was also a fierce determination, hope for tomorrow: in the new Germany, this sort of tragedy must never happen again!

The film ended. Stahl was sitting in the middle row of a positively baroque movie theatre in downtown Berlin, a theatre with plaster angels and sconces and loges and plush seats, where he’d been taken to judge the best of the mountain movies. Not really his decision, of course. Emhof, seated next to him, said, ‘I think I needn’t tell you that you have just seen the festival’s finest work.’ Stahl thought he detected, in Emhof’s eyes, a certain moisture. Had he been moved to tears?

‘So,’ Stahl said, ‘the winner is Das Berg von Hedwig?’ Hedwig’s mountain.

‘If you agree,’ Emhof said.

‘Well, I do agree. An excellent production, good acting, fine music, and produced and directed by Otto Raab.’

‘Yes, of course Herr Goebbels’s deputy will make the announcement, as Raab is the director of the festival.’

‘That shouldn’t matter, when such quality…’ Stahl left it at that.

Emhof nodded. Stahl hoped he could now escape for the rest of the day.

He’d seen the newspapers that morning, which had reported that some German citizens, angered at the murder of the diplomat vom Rath, shot dead by a Jew in Paris, had attacked Jewish synagogues, setting them on fire, and breaking the windows of Jewish shops. This action, the papers said, was regrettable, but certainly understandable. The police and the Gestapo, concerned about further Jewish violence, worried about conspiracies, had arrested between twenty and thirty thousand prominent Jews. Local Berliners, the reports went on, had taken to calling the event Kristallnacht, after the crystalline appearance of shattered glass on the streets of German towns and cities.

Standing up to leave the movie theatre, Stahl counted the hours he had to endure before leaving this place. The Grosser Mercedes was waiting in front of the theatre and as Stahl was driven through the city he could see — and could hear — the streetsweepers shovelling up the broken glass. By the time he reached the Adlon it was mid-afternoon and all he wanted to do was escape: have a couple of brandies and fall asleep. He ordered the brandies and collapsed into a chair. Then the telephone rang.

He answered by saying, ‘Yes?’

‘This is the front desk. There’s someone here to see you, Herr Stahl, could you be so kind as to come downstairs?’

Somehow it didn’t sound like a front-desk voice. ‘Who is it?’

‘Oh, please forgive the inconvenience, but the gentleman does not give his name.’

Stahl hesitated, then said, ‘Very well, I’ll be down in a minute.’

He put on his jacket and straightened his tie. As he went out the door, he could see the back of a man waiting for the elevator, who turned around when Stahl’s door clicked shut. It was the waiter from the banquet, wearing street clothes, his mouth twisted into a triumphant smirk. ‘Remember me?’ he said. ‘Bet you thought you’d never see me again.’

Stahl wondered how he’d managed to make a telephone call from ‘the front desk’, then appear at the elevator — he must have, Stahl thought, used an empty room on the same floor. ‘Yes, I remember you, your name is Rudi. Is there something you want?’

‘Can’t you guess? I asked for a small gratuity last night but you dismissed me, didn’t you. Like a dog. “Go away,” you said. But maybe you’ll change your mind, Herr Stahl, maybe you’ll decide I ought to have something after all.’

The waiter had moved towards Stahl, was now close enough so that Stahl could smell beer on his breath. Taking a step back, Stahl said, ‘Would you like it now?’

Rudi seemed mollified. ‘Well, I would like it, better late than never, as they say. But now you’ve insulted me, so it won’t be a small gratuity, more like ten thousand reichsmarks.’

Ambitious blackmail, Stahl thought, $5,000. ‘How much?’ he said.

‘You heard me, Herr Stahl.’

‘Where would I get that kind of money?’ Stahl was almost amused.

‘You’re a rich and famous man, you have plenty of money. But if you can’t get at it, you’ll have to ask your Russian, your bitch-in-heat Orlova. She’ll surely help you. Want to know why? Because she wouldn’t want me talking about what went on last night.’

‘I don’t think she cares,’ Stahl said.

‘Doesn’t she? All right, then I’ll just have a chat with my brother-in-law, who happens to work for the Gestapo. Maybe you two were plotting against the Fuhrer, who knows? But they’ll find something, these gentlemen, because they can always find something.’

Now Stahl was alarmed. ‘I see, yes, you’re right, you should have what you want. But it has to be tonight, I’m leaving in the morning.’

Rudi moved closer and said through clenched teeth, ‘You think you’re leaving but that’s up to me. So you have until six this evening, which is when I have to go to work. Or maybe you want to stay in Germany for a while, it’s up to you, maybe you’d like…’

‘Where would I meet you?’ Stahl said.

‘I have a key for room eight-oh-two, down the corridor. Knock twice, then once.’ He turned on his heel and headed for the stairway, then spun around, his face contorted by the memory of a thousand insults. ‘You’d better be there, mein Herr.’ The last two words he snarled, enraged by the polite form, enraged that he’d ever used it.

Stahl returned to his suite. Moments later, the room waiter delivered his brandies. He drank the first one immediately and told himself to calm down. He had only a thousand reichsmarks with him — five hundred dollars — and there was no way he could get any money in Berlin. Well, one way. In case of emergency, Wilkinson had asked him to memorize a telephone number which could put him in contact with Orlova. Now Stahl composed himself, took the pad on the desk and wrote down the number, praying that he had it right. ‘It is dangerous,’ Wilkinson had said, ‘to call this number, don’t use it unless you absolutely have to.’

Stahl asked the hotel operator for a line, then dialled the number, which rang twice, three times, four, five. He looked at what he’d written on the pad — was it 4, 2? Or 2, 4? He was about to hang up when a breathless woman’s voice said, ‘Hello?’

It wasn’t Orlova’s voice. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you…’

‘Wait a minute, I was just walking the dog. Mitzi, sit! Now, you were saying?’

‘Is Olga Orlova there?’

‘No, she’s not here. Mitzi! Goddamnit!’

‘It’s quite urgent,’ Stahl said.

‘She’s my neighbour, across the hall. Do you want me to knock on her door?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘Who’s calling?’

‘Tell her Fredric.’

‘Oh, I see. Like that, is it. Very well, give me a minute.’

Stahl waited, drank off the second brandy and stared at the phone. Then he looked at his watch, the second hand sweeping around the dial. Finally, the receiver was picked up and Orlova said, ‘Who is this?’ She sounded irritated but Stahl could hear that she was also frightened. In the background, a small dog was barking.

‘This is Fredric Stahl, Madame Orlova. I wonder if I might ask you for a favour?’ Stahl’s eyes were fixed on the baseboard, where the telephone wire was connected to a small box.

‘Oh, of course. Are you calling from, ah, the hotel?’

‘Yes, I am. I was wondering if you might be able to come over here.’

‘I suppose I could, is something wrong?’

‘I must speak to the audience tonight, at the banquet where I will announce the winners of the festival. And I’m having a woeful time of it, writing the speech. I don’t really know the film industry here, and I don’t want to sound ignorant.’

‘I’m not much good as a writer, Herr Stahl.’

‘Even so, some advice would be helpful. Is it possible you could come soon? Maybe even right away?’

Orlova sighed, the things I’m asked to do. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can. Maybe some day you’ll return the favour.’

‘You need only ask, Madame Orlova.’

They hung up. Stahl settled down to wait. It was nearing four o’clock. Once she arrived, and Stahl told her what was going on, she would have to find the money and be back by six.

Orlova was almost frantic when she reached the room. When he opened the door of the Bismarck Suite she didn’t say hello, she said, ‘What’s happened?’ Stahl told her the story, her reaction a mixture of disbelief, fear, and anger. ‘ That little man? Rudi? Rudi the waiter?’ He dared? Then she got hold of herself and said, ‘I’d better leave now, you said ten thousand reichsmarks?’

She was back at 5.40. By that point, Stahl, unable to sit down, was pacing back and forth and smoking one cigarette after another. He’d left the door open and she came rushing in. ‘Christ, I couldn’t find a taxi.’ She sat on the edge of the couch. ‘Anyhow, I have it.’

‘From your bank?’

She looked up abruptly: are you crazy? ‘From an umbrella shop,’ she said. ‘There’s money in this city that will never see a bank; Jewish money, criminal money, Nazi money. All those bribes and thefts and…’

Stahl looked at his watch, then up at Orlova. For the meeting she’d changed outfits: under her open raincoat a revealing sweater and a tight skirt, made all the more provocative by the accessories of a prominent woman of the city — red silk scarf, tight black gloves, gold earrings, Chanel No. 5, and dark sunglasses. She was now the movie star of a waiter’s fantasies. At 6.00 p.m. precisely they left the room. Stahl could hear her breathing, and could sense in her a powerful tension, which seemed to grow as they walked along the silent, carpeted corridor. In a whisper, Stahl said, ‘Can you calm down a little?’

She didn’t answer. It was as though she was so intensely fixed on the meeting that she hadn’t heard him. Instead, she pursed her lips and expelled a short breath, then did it again.

In an attempt to distract her he said, ‘Do you know this room? Eight-oh-two?’

She started to answer then worked her mouth, as though it was so dry she couldn’t speak. ‘A small room, I’d guess. For a servant or a bodyguard.’

As they stood in front of the room, Stahl saw that her hands, holding her bag, were trembling. He patted her shoulder. ‘Just give me the money,’ he said. ‘Let me do it, he doesn’t need to see you.’

She shook her head, jerking it back and forth, brushing off his suggestion as though it were absurd and irritating.

Stahl knocked twice, then once.

From inside: ‘It’s not locked.’

Stahl opened the door. It was a small room, meagrely furnished. Rudi was sitting in a chair by the wall at the foot of the bed and was cleaning his nails with a clasp knife. He looked up at them and set the open knife on his lap. ‘Hello, Rudi,’ Orlova said. She was now quite amiable and relaxed.

‘You have the money?’

‘It’s right here.’ She took an envelope out of her raincoat pocket, walked over to Rudi and handed it to him, then waited while he counted the twenty reichsmark notes. ‘All is good?’ she said with a smile.

Rudi nodded, and started to get up. Orlova put a hand on his shoulder, which startled him. ‘I’ll just take another moment,’ she said. ‘Will you accept my apology?’

This was unexpected. ‘Maybe,’ he said, sulky and uncertain.

‘And that also goes for me,’ Stahl said. Rudi stared at him, not quite comfortable with his victory. ‘It was a long evening,’ Stahl explained, ‘and I was tired and I…’

At this point in the apology, Stahl was interrupted by a low sound, thuck, saw the automatic pistol and silencer in Orlova’s gloved hand and realized she’d shot Rudi in the temple. His head fell back against the chair, his eyes and mouth wide open, as though he were surprised to find himself dead. A bead of blood grew next to his ear, ran slowly down his cheek, then stopped.

Orlova started to twist the long tube of the silencer, unscrewing it from the pistol. ‘This was never going to end,’ she said. ‘So I ended it. Get his clothes off, everything but his underwear, and put that little knife in his pocket.’

Stahl was frozen, staring at Rudi.

‘Please,’ Orlova said.

He nodded and went to work untying Rudi’s shoes. Orlova took them and lined them up beneath the chair. Stahl handed her the socks, trousers — after trouble with Rudi’s belt buckle — jacket, tie, and shirt. When he was done, he saw that Orlova had folded everything into a neat pile. ‘This will go on the chair,’ she said. ‘You put him on the bed, I’ll write the note.’ She had brought with her a pencil and a sheet of cheap paper. Stahl took Rudi under the arms and pulled backwards, which tipped the chair over. ‘Shh!’ Orlova said. ‘Christ, be quiet.’

He dragged Rudi up onto the bed, raised his head and slipped the pillow beneath it. Orlova set the pile of clothes on the chair and put the note on the night table. Stahl read the note, written in unruly script: I can stand it no longer. ‘Will that do?’ Orlova said.

Stahl nodded. ‘Of course the police might wonder if it’s really suicide.’

‘They won’t pursue it. This is a certain kind of hotel, if a waiter killed himself, or if someone else killed him, doesn’t matter. Not these days it doesn’t. And there’s a good chance the hotel will get rid of the body themselves — who wants to talk to the police?’

Orlova stood at the door and looked critically at the scene in the room. Then she placed the automatic in Rudi’s hand, made a dent in the other pillow, as though a head had rested there, took a little bottle of perfume out of her bag and put a drop or two on the sheet below the dented pillow. ‘What do you think?’ she said.

‘It looks like his lover bid him goodbye, then he shot himself.’

She took one last look around, then remembered to leave the pencil by the note. She looked at Stahl and said, ‘It had to be done. In time, he would have denounced us, just as he said he would.’

Stahl nodded.

‘I’ll be going,’ Orlova said. ‘Enjoy the banquet.’

He got through it. As the grinning faces came to greet him, as medals caught the light of the chandeliers, as Goebbels’s deputy spoke at great length and flattered him and flashbulbs popped, as he read out the names of the winning films. Otto Raab was deeply moved when Stahl, after a dramatic pause, announced that Das Berg von Hedwig had won the grand prize, a gold Oscar-sized statuette of a mountain with a movie camera on top. Stahl delivered his speech — a tepid joke about the lion at the Berlin zoo drew a great roar of laughter. He ended with praise for the Reich National Festival of Mountain Cinema; it was only the beginning, many more festivals would follow, as German film-makers climbed to the summit of their craft. When he was done, Goebbels’s deputy presented him with a two-foot-high crystal sculpture of an eagle, a Nazi eagle, head and beak in profile, stiff wings outstretched, its claws holding a swastika in a wreath. The hideous thing was incredibly heavy, Stahl almost dropped it, but held on.

The morning flight from Tempelhof landed at Le Bourget at 2.30 p.m. There was a little bar in one corner of the terminal building where uniformed customs officers and airport workers in bleu de travail smocks took time off during the day. They stood at the zinc bar, drank red wine or coffee, smoked — there was always one with the stub of a Gauloise stuck to his lips — and talked in low voices. As the exhausted Stahl entered the terminal — carrying the paper-wrapped eagle, Orlova’s notes in his jacket pocket — he was met by the smell of coffee and cigarettes and the sound of quiet conversation and thanked God that he was back in France.

Production for Apres la Guerre began that afternoon, 11 November, with scenes that could be shot on sets built in the studios at Joinville, and a few exteriors using local settings. Location shooting was now to take place in and around Beirut, where it would be ‘summer’ — sunshine and blue sky — in December, so Deschelles and Avila were pleased with the weather, the cold rain and gloom of November, appropriate for scenes in the Balkans as the story wound to its finale. Some trouble with the screenwriters here, the script specified a death scene for Stahl’s Colonel Vadic but Deschelles argued that they couldn’t kill off Fredric Stahl, so it would have to be rewritten. He almost dies but, nursed back to health by the loving false countess, he survives. Avila argued the other way, Deschelles allowed him to lose gracefully, and in return agreed to ask Paramount for money to shoot the Hungarian castle scenes in a Hungarian castle.

The first time that cameras rolled in a film was traditionally a superstitious moment for the cast and crew, an omen of what was to come. Avila was smart, and chose a scene that he felt would go well — Pasquin’s comic night of love with a heavy-set Turkish woman, the wife of a local policeman. The script called for a dog that had to scratch at a bedroom door — the husband was on the other side, unaware that his wife had returned home, unaware that she was in bed with Pasquin’s sergeant. For this scene Avila had chosen a French bulldog, a good character to play against the roly-poly Pasquin.

But the dog wouldn’t scratch at the door, it simply stood there like a rock while its trainer, on the other side of the door, called out first commands, then baby-talk endearments, and finally tried to tempt it with hazelnut ice cream, its favorite treat. Time went by, a certain anxiety began to spread through the people on the set, a half-naked Pasquin sat up in bed and shouted, ‘Scratch the fucking door, goddamn it!’ but the bulldog merely turned its head towards the source of the noise and broke wind. That relieved the tension — the ‘Turkish wife’ laughed so hard that tears rolled down her chubby face and her make-up had to be reapplied.

At last, one of the prop men came to the rescue, with a trick he’d seen in other productions. From his prop room he produced a stuffed toy, a tabby cat. When he showed it to the dog, the animal went crazy, it hated cats, and the prop man only just managed to snatch the toy away before it was savaged. Avila was now poised to call out ‘Action’, the cameraman was ready, the trainer took the tabby cat outside the room and closed the door, and the dog stood there. Immediately, a conference was held — do without the scratching at the door? From Avila, an emphatic no. So the prop man tried one last thing: he pushed the cat’s tail beneath the door and when the trainer released the bulldog it galloped towards the tail and, when the prop man on the other side whisked it away, the dog scratched at the door as though he was trying to tear it to pieces. The cameras rolled, the policeman’s wife said, ‘Oh my God, he smells my husband,’ Avila said ‘Cut!’ and the cast and crew applauded.

They were on the set until 5.30, Avila had met his day’s quota — two minutes of film — and Stahl, though he ached to go back to the Claridge and get into a hot shower, had one final chore ahead of him. Renate Steiner was expecting his appearance at her workroom in Building K. Colonel Vadic had to wear, at several points in the film, a thin cotton long-sleeved undershirt with buttons at the top — a khaki-coloured garment meant to look like Foreign Legion issue. This could not be bought in Paris, so a seamstress ran one up, a duplicate to follow once Stahl had a fitting.

It was a long walk to Building K in the cold fading twilight but Steiner’s workroom was warm, heated by a small charcoal stove in one corner. And Renate was glad to see him — a sweet smile, kisses on both cheeks. ‘You seem to be doing better,’ Stahl said. ‘The last time I was here…’ She’d been in tears with husband trouble.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘One’s personal life… But everything’s different now.’

‘You’ve made up? Your husband found a job?’

‘My husband found a girlfriend,’ she said. ‘And off they went. I was miserable for a week, then I discovered how relieved I was to have him gone — thank heaven for sexy little Monique! Oh, that sounds terribly cold, doesn’t it.’

‘Not to me.’

She shrugged. ‘If we hadn’t had to run away from Germany everything might have been all right but… that’s just what happened.’

‘You do seem different,’ Stahl said.

‘Freedom,’ she said. ‘It’s good for me. Now, Fredric, would you be so kind as to take off your shirt? You can go behind the curtain if you like.’

Stahl took off his sweater, then unbuttoned his shirt and hung it over the back of a chair. He was just muscular enough, no bare-to-the-waist pirate but not at all soft, that he didn’t mind being seen in his skin. Steiner held the khaki undershirt up by its shoulders and showed it to Stahl. ‘What do you think?’

‘I like it.’

‘It’s your women fans who must like it, so it should show the outline of your shoulders and chest, then loosen a bit as it falls to the waist.’

‘What do I wear down below?’

‘Uniform trousers, then civilian trousers. These were voluminous in the script and tied with a string but that’s just writers, Avila wants to show your bottom half. Now it’s Gilles Brecker who gets the big trousers. How is his wrist, by the way?’

‘We’re shooting around him for another two weeks, then he’ll be fine.’

Stahl slid the undershirt over his head; Renate had perched on a high stool and lit a cigarette, shaking the match out as she looked critically at the fit of the shirt. ‘Can you turn sideways?’

He did.

‘Now the back.’

He turned his back to her.

‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘For a first try.’

She put her cigarette out in an ashtray and, pins in mouth, set about refitting the undershirt. She was very close to him, he could smell some sort of woodsy perfume, and when she reached up beneath the shirt her hand was warm against his skin. ‘If I stick you just yell,’ she said, her words slurred by the pins in her mouth.

‘I will,’ Stahl said.

She kept on fussing with the shirt, stepping back for a look, then repositioning the pins to move a seam. Stahl hitched up his trousers because, to his surprise, not an unpleasant surprise, he’d become excited and he didn’t want her to see it. ‘What are you doing?’ she said.

‘Pulling up my pants.’

‘Well, don’t. Just stand still.’ Then she said ‘ Merde! ’ and withdrew her hand, a drop of blood on the ball of her index finger. This she put in her mouth for a moment, took it out and pressed her thumb against it. Looking for something to cover the pinprick, she walked over to her work table. Stahl couldn’t take his eyes off the back view. She wore, as usual, a smock over a long skirt, which should have hidden the motion beneath but didn’t quite. He hadn’t noticed this the last time he’d seen her — was she wearing a different skirt? Had she changed for his eyes? That idea he liked very well but he knew it was wishful thinking. Probably.

At the table she found a strip of adhesive tape, tore off a piece with her teeth and stuck it on her finger. That done, she mumbled, ‘Goddamn thimble,’ and went rummaging through mounds of fabric, retrieved only a scissors and a magazine photo, then gave up. She turned, walked back and stood in front of him. ‘You can take it off now,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry this took so long.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘I expect you want to go home and have a drink.’

‘I do.’ Then, after a moment, ‘Is there anything here?’

‘There is, but…’

‘But what?’

‘I have Strega.’

‘Strega!’ Of all things. ‘The witch,’ he said, translating the Italian word. It was a liqueur made of mountain herbs, secret herbs — a strange taste, sweet at first, then something more.

She walked over to a cabinet, took out a bottle of Strega and two cloudy glasses, poured some thick, dark-gold liqueur in each, returned and handed him a glass. ‘ Salut,’ she said.

‘To us,’ he said and immediately regretted it. He was acting like a teenager.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘To us. You like it?’

‘It’s been a while since I’ve had it.’

‘Myself I like it.’

‘I like it too.’

‘Good. Want some more?’

‘Please.’

‘Aren’t you getting cold?’

‘Not at all. I don’t mind being undressed.’

‘Hm. Well…’ She took the undershirt back to her table and said, ‘You’ve been very patient.’

He put his shirt back on, buttoning it as he walked over and stood next to her, their shoulders almost touching. For a moment, neither of them moved, then Stahl said, ‘I guess I should go.’

‘I will need another fitting once it’s been resewn.’

‘When is that?’

‘Oh, tomorrow. Can you stop by when the filming’s over?’

‘I’ll see you then.’

Stahl found a taxi on the street that bordered the studio and, settled in the back seat, felt the excitement of a man who’d found treasure. He’d been drawn to her the first time they met but she was married, off-limits. He had wondered what it would be like with her, then let it go. But when she’d told him she was free, when she’d flirted with him… She had, hadn’t she? He hoped so because now he really wanted her, he wanted to fuck her — it was the same heat he’d felt as a schoolboy. What was it that reached him? What? She was no pinup girl, more the opposite: the minister’s prim daughter, the well-curved spinster beneath the spinster skirt. In fact, Renate Steiner wasn’t anything like that, she was a sophisticated, intellectual woman. That was her inner self, no secrets there, but her outer self, her face with its pointy nose and pale forehead, her concealed shape, was that of the fantasy spinster. And Stahl, after weeks of Parisian glamour, after the erotic tricks of Kiki de Saint-Ange, discovered that, at least for the moment, he was again sixteen, and hot for one of the plainer girls in the school. Would she do it with him? In the back seat of the taxi it was already tomorrow night and his imagination undressed her: she would touch not one button, one popper, one waistband of her clothing.

There was a crowd of people in the street as they drove up the Champs-Elysees and the driver had to slow down and work his way through them. A few held signs, NEVER AGAIN and SAVE THE PEACE, and Stahl realized it was 11 November, Armistice Day, celebrating the end of ‘the war to end all wars’. There’d no doubt been a military parade, an official parade, earlier in the day; this was just a crowd of people — workers, students, middle-class Parisians — who’d made a few signs. The driver asked Stahl what he thought about the march and Stahl said, ‘Who doesn’t want peace?’ The driver turned halfway round and said, ‘Amen to that, monsieur.’ But to Stahl it was a dream, a hope. He’d seen Germany, and he knew there would be war.

The night of his return to Paris he’d met J. J. Wilkinson, as planned, in the waiting room of the American Hospital in Neuilly and, in the hallway by the WC, handed him Orlova’s notes. They were together only a moment, but Wilkinson had said, ‘You’ll be invited to a party on the night of the eleventh, please be there if you can manage it and we’ll have a chance to talk.’ Stahl’s time with Renate Steiner had, until this moment, undone his memory but now he realized he would have to go. The party was being given by an American woman, her name sometimes in the society columns, a longtime expatriate married to a French aristocrat. Oh well, he would at least have his hot shower at the Claridge. His heart sank a little, at the idea of going to a party, but the people marching in the street cured that. Going to a dinner party was the least he could do.

Wilkinson wasn’t at the party. A dozen well-dressed people and a vast centerpiece of white gladioli, but no diplomat. A disappointed Stahl did the best he could, chatting right and left, telling a few movie stories, getting a laugh or two, resisting the urge to look at his watch. After dessert, as he headed dutifully off to the library for brandy and cigars, the hostess appeared by his side and said, ‘There’s a staircase behind that door at the end of the hall. Your friend is waiting upstairs.’ She smiled at him and her eyes twinkled — nothing quite like a little intrigue.

The apartment was a duplex — there were a few of these in the Sixteenth Arrondissement — and J. J. Wilkinson, drink in hand, tie pulled down, was waiting for him in what had once been a small bedroom for a child — a model aeroplane, a Spad fighter, hung on a cord from the ceiling light fixture, and boys’ books, Poppy Ott and the Stuttering Parrot, filled the bookcase. Wilkinson was sitting on a narrow cot covered with a camp blanket and rose to give Stahl his powerful handshake. ‘First of all, thank you,’ he said.

Stahl sat on the other end of the cot and told the story of his time in Berlin. Wilkinson made notes, interrupting only to make sure he had the names right. Stahl tried to be thorough, and hesitated only when it came time to tell Wilkinson about Rudi — was it wise to confess he’d helped to commit a murder? But to keep it secret wasn’t a possibility — he had to trust Wilkinson. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘this next part is difficult, but it happened, and you ought to know about it.’

Wilkinson nodded, took a sip of his drink, and said, ‘Might as well.’ What could be so bad? But when Stahl described what had gone on in room 802, Wilkinson sat bolt upright, his eyes widened and he said, ‘Good God.’

Stahl shrugged. ‘She had to do it, she said something about “this will never end”, and she was right.’

‘Yes, but…’

‘I know,’ Stahl said. ‘I saw it, but I couldn’t believe it was happening.’

Wilkinson reached over to the windowsill, took a half-smoked cigar from a clamshell and, after several tries, got it lit. ‘I’m shocked,’ he said, ‘but maybe not that shocked, now that I think about it. People talk about tough women, “a tigress” and all that, but Orlova is the real thing.’

‘You’ve met her?’

Wilkinson shook his head. ‘She sent a friend to see someone else at the embassy. Everything after that was in letters carried by hand. But, to do what she does, under the nose of the Gestapo…’

‘Anyhow,’ Stahl said, ‘I trust her report was worth it.’

‘Not up to me, Fredric. But I suspect it’ll be useful.’

Useful? ‘I mean, fifty thousand dollars — I assume the government wouldn’t spend money like that unless it was very important.’

Now Wilkinson stopped. He took a puff on his cigar, blew the smoke out, and stared at Stahl, trying to make up his mind. ‘Very well, I think you’ve earned the right to hear a little more about this. I don’t know what I’m supposed to tell you, or what stays secret — the truth is I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, I have to make it up, to improvise, as I go along. Just promise me you’ll keep your mouth shut — I don’t mean to be rude, but no point in mincing words.’

‘You have my promise,’ Stahl said. ‘I am not going to talk about it.’

Wilkinson nodded, but he was clearly uncomfortable. ‘First of all, this is not government money. The USA doesn’t spend money like that, maybe it should, but it doesn’t. The money is, umm, donated? I guess that’s the word. The Department of State and the military spend a little money for information but nothing like this. With Orlova, we don’t even know where it goes — it’s not some kind of sale, she demanded the money and we found a way to get it into Germany. Maybe she keeps it, maybe she pays agents of her own, maybe she gives it to the Reds.’

‘The Reds? She’s a Russian spy?’

‘Who knows. Circumstantial evidence says she could be. She’s got family, prominent family, still in Russia, I can’t believe the Bolsheviks just let her pal around with Hitler and his crowd.’

‘She works for you, she works for them…’

‘And God knows who else.’

‘But she doesn’t get caught.’

‘No she doesn’t, and you just saw why.’

‘I guess I did,’ Stahl said. ‘But still, the information is important.’

‘Very important. We don’t have a political spy service, but, um, people have to know what’s going on.’

‘People?’

Wilkinson pointed up at the ceiling with his index finger. ‘People who live in a big, white, house, those people. Oh what the hell, that person.’

‘The President.’

‘Yeah, him.’

Stahl was sufficiently impressed that he had no idea what to say. At last, he managed a quiet ‘Oh.’

From Wilkinson, a thin smile. ‘America is isolationist, he isn’t. America doesn’t want to fight, he does. But he can’t, politically can not, and what truly hurt was the appeasement at Munich — all over the US the sentiment was, “if the Europeans don’t want to fight Germany, why should we?”’

‘They don’t know what goes on there,’ Stahl said, more passion in his voice than he intended. ‘If they did…’

‘And if my grandmother had wheels she’d be a cart,’ Wilkinson said. ‘It’s not that Americans don’t know what goes on, endless articles have been written in the liberal press, in small magazines, but that has no effect on the population — people in small towns, “just plain folks”, as they say. So FDR and the people around him are looking for an opening, some damning intelligence that lets the American people know they’re threatened, not just some Frenchy with a moustache. The army and navy attaches do their jobs, they count aeroplanes and cannons and ships, but the president needs to know what the Nazis are up to, and he’s enlisted his friends, rich and powerful friends, to learn what goes on. They have money, and plenty of nerve, and there’s at least a chance they’ll find something.’ The cigar had gone out, Wilkinson looked at it in disgust and squashed it into the clamshell.

‘I didn’t set out to be in the Foreign Service, Fredric. As I told you earlier, I’m a Wall Street lawyer. But they got me appointed Second Secretary and here I am. Why me? Well, my mother’s people came from Holland, a long time ago, we’re one of those old Dutch families up the Hudson River and we’re distantly related to the Roosevelts. This work is, as I said, improvisation, so we use whoever’s around, if we can trust them.’

‘Even movie actors,’ Stahl said.

‘Movie stars, Fredric.’

‘At one point, I don’t think I mentioned it, Orlova gave me back the ten-reichsmark note and said something like, “for next time”. Is there a next time?’

‘I don’t know, maybe. Would you do it again if I asked you?’

‘Whatever you want,’ Stahl said. ‘You know where to find me.’

12 November.

Heading off for work, Stahl was beckoned by the clerk at the front desk, who handed him a letter from America. The return address said The William Morris Agency, with an address in Beverly Hills that Stahl knew well. His agent, Buzzy Mehlman, had scrawled a note on agency stationery: ‘Attaboy, keep up the good work! Buzz.’ The note was accompanied by a clipping from the Variety gossip column where the phrase we hear headed every item. WE HEAR that Fredric Stahl’s new film for Paramount France, Apres la Guerre, has started production in Paris and that leading man Stahl is working hard at publicity for the European market.

Stahl was relieved. Apparently he needn’t have worried what impression his trip to Berlin made back home. A deft hand, in the press release: he hadn’t been in Germany, he’d been in Europe. Someone, somewhere, had protected him.

Out at Joinville, the day crept by at tortoise speed. Stahl couldn’t stop thinking about what would follow the day’s shooting — a visit to Renate Steiner’s workroom in Building K. Script in hand, he went through the scene he’d play once the cameras rolled but, no matter how hard he tried to concentrate, his mind summoned images of what he hoped for that evening.

In the studio, a hayloft set had been built and here the legionnaires would spend the night — supposedly in Roumania, just across the border from Hungary. In this scene, Justine Piro’s false countess Ilona and Stahl’s Colonel Vadic first discover they are falling in love. Pasquin’s and Gilles Brecker’s characters have gone off to search for food, Ilona and the colonel are alone. Outside the hayloft window, the lighting designer had created twilight, the soundmen would provide distant rumbles of thunder, and the music, added later, would complete the illusion.

Ilona, in a black cotton dress, her hair worn loose and artfully disordered, is lying on her side in the hay, her head propped on her hand, the colonel sits with his arms clasped around his knees. The first shot took a long time to set up — Avila wanted Ilona’s face lit a certain way and the spot had to be adjusted again and again until he was satisfied. Then, when he had what he wanted, there was a problem with the camera. Meanwhile, dust from the hay made Stahl and Piro sneeze, and Stahl’s back started to hurt every time he got himself into position.

At last, the camera was ready and Piro delivered Ilona’s line: ‘You know, I was a little afraid of you, at first.’

In the distance, the thunder rumbled.

‘Afraid? Of me?’

‘Cut!’ Avila shouted. The spot lighting Ilona’s face was flickering on and off. ‘Louis, we need another bulb.’

‘It’s not the bulb, chief.’

‘Where’s the electrician?’

‘He’s wiring the other set.’

‘Would someone go and find him, please. Quickly.’

And so on, for hours. Every time they got something to work, something else didn’t. Or a line was fluffed, or the thunder was too loud.

By three-twenty, Avila had had enough. ‘The gods are against us today,’ he said. ‘We’ll start here in the morning; nine-thirty sharp, everybody.’

Finally, Stahl thought. He felt drained, but some Strega and conversation in Building K would fix that, he just needed time to recover. Then, as he was headed to his dressing room to change out of his uniform, one of the studio office workers handed him a telephone message. Wolf Lustig’s office in Berlin telephoned, can you please call them back as soon as possible. There followed a telephone number.

Stahl’s first reaction was irritation — what the hell did he want? Stahl had never met Wolf Lustig but he knew who he was: one of the most prominent producers at the UFA studios in Babelsberg — Germany’s Hollywood — and UFA was the biggest, and now almost the only, film company in Germany. Taking off his uniform tunic, Stahl wondered if he had to call back, then put off deciding until the morning. What would Wolf Lustig want with him? By the time Stahl had brushed his hair, he thought he knew. This was not film business, this was Emhof business, Moppi business. Somewhere in his mind, Stahl had decided that once he was done with the festival, those people would be done with him. How naive, he thought. Now the decision to call back would have to be taken in a different light. No, he thought, now he would have to call back, because that was ‘Wilkinson business’.

Outside, the late-afternoon sun had broken through, shafts piercing the rain clouds, and the wet tiles on the roof of Building K shimmered in the light. The door to Renate Steiner’s workroom was open, Stahl looked in from the threshold and called out, ‘Hello? Renate?’

The response was a small shriek. Renate was standing on the platform in front of the mirror, in profile to Stahl, wearing a peasant blouse, panties, garter belt, black stockings, and no shoes. She hurried for the shelter of the curtain, leaving Stahl with an image of very white, full thighs and well-shaped legs. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I…’

From behind the curtain: ‘Why are you so early?’

‘Avila let us go.’

‘Close your eyes.’

He heard her walking quickly, then opened his eyes to see her wrapped in the blue smock. ‘Shall I try the entry again?’

She laughed. ‘Bad boy, you surprised me.’

‘I am sorry, I didn’t mean to…’

‘Oh it doesn’t matter. Your undershirt’s on a hanger by the platform. Why don’t you try it on while I get decent.’

Stahl took off his blazer and shirt and pulled the undershirt over his head. In the mirror, the undershirt fit perfectly, falling just so across his shoulders. Meanwhile, Renate was again dressed as usual. As she approached him, he saw a faint rose colour on her cheeks. The glimpse he’d had of her had aroused him, the blush did nothing to change that. Renate stared at Stahl’s image in the mirror, put her silver-rimmed glasses on, then took them off. ‘What do you think?’ she said.

‘It’s perfect.’

She took the bottom of the shirt and shook it, then let it fall back in place. ‘Can you take a little walk for me?’

Stahl squared his shoulders in Colonel Vadic’s military posture, walked to the wall, turned, stood for a moment, then walked back to the platform. ‘Looks good to me,’ Renate said. ‘I won’t keep you — I’m sure it’s been a long day.’

‘Well, you’re not keeping me, but I imagine you have work to do.’

‘First I’m going to have a cup of tea, would you like one?’

‘You can make tea?’

‘I have a hot plate. I can live for days in here if I have to.’

‘A cup of tea would be very welcome.’

In the back of the workroom, she put a pot of water on a hot plate. ‘I didn’t mean to… shock you. I just bought that blouse and I wanted to try it on.’

‘What’s the verdict?’

‘It’s awful, I have to take it back. I don’t know what came over me in the store.’ They waited as the hot plate element began to glow orange. ‘How was your time in Germany?’ she said.

‘Worse than I expected. How did you hear about that?’

‘Somebody on the set mentioned that you’d gone — is it a secret?’

‘No. Warner Bros. wanted me to go, they saw it as a boost for the German market.’

‘Still, I was surprised… that you let them use you, use your reputation. And that you’d have anything to do with the Nazis.’

‘I held my nose, and did what I had to do.’

‘What’s it like there, now?’

‘Surreal. All these monsters strutting around as though they owned the world. And then, the night I was there they burned down the synagogues.’

The water boiled, Renate took a spoonful of tea from a canister, then added water to a small, chipped teapot. ‘Now it must steep,’ she said.

‘You don’t think badly of me, do you? For going there?’

‘It doesn’t matter what I think,’ she said.

‘To me it does,’ Stahl said. She glanced at him, her faded-blue eyes found his, a momentary uncertainty in her expression, then she looked away. ‘I was wondering,’ Stahl said, the words deliberate, ‘if later on… Would you like to go somewhere? Get something to eat?’

‘Mm. I’d like to, but I don’t think I can. I have to go home, then I’m going to see friends. You remember Inga and Klaus? My emigre friends?’

Stahl was blank, then did remember — they’d arrived on bicycles the night when it seemed Germany would go to war with Czechoslovakia. ‘I do,’ he said.

‘An emigre evening,’ she said. ‘I don’t really look forward to it. Now let me pour you some tea. Do you take sugar? I don’t have milk.’

They talked for a while, mostly about the movie, until Stahl felt it was time for him to go. He thanked Renate for refitting his costume, and for the tea. She walked him to the door, said goodbye and turned her face upwards, expecting the Parisian kiss on each cheek. Then Stahl, for a moment, touched her lips with his. As he drew back, he saw the same look in her eyes, now not so much wary as hurt. That Stahl, being who he was, would want her, an easy conquest to satisfy a casual desire.

‘Perhaps another time,’ he said. ‘We’ll have an evening out.’

‘Oh stop it,’ she said, with one of her particularly ironic smiles. ‘But it was nice to be asked.’

He hoped she might stand there and watch him walk away but he heard the door click shut on his second step.

It took more than an hour for the hotel operator to connect him with Wolf Lustig’s office. There was a storm somewhere between Paris and Berlin, the line crackled with static and the woman in Lustig’s office had to raise her voice, almost shouting in order to be heard. But shouting very courteously. Herr Lustig, she said, wished urgently to meet with him regarding an important UFA production. And soon Herr Lustig would be in Paris. However, his time there was extremely limited and busy. Would it be possible for Monsieur Stahl to meet Herr Lustig at a social function? They could talk there. And what social function was that? A cocktail party, given by the Rousillon champagne people, at the restaurant Pre Catelan in the Bois de Boulogne. Did he know it? He did. The party would be on the seventeenth, at five o’clock. Would his schedule permit him to attend? He thought it would. Oh, Herr Lustig will be so pleased.

In the hotel suite, Stahl turned on the radio, and found swing-band music recorded in New York — Artie Shaw playing ‘Frenesi’ and ‘Begin the Beguine’. For a rejected lover, maybe the best thing on a lonely night: people wanted each other, then life got in the way but, if the songs told the truth, desire would not be denied. Not forever, anyhow. Stahl brooded as the music played; Renate Steiner had misunderstood him, he would have to try again, and they would be together. In Stahl’s imagination it happened this way, no, that way, no… Eventually he drifted off to sleep, and woke at four to find himself wearing a bathrobe and lying on the coverlet as rain fell on the city.

17 November.

The Pre Catelan was a small white chateau. Located on a winding road in the vast Bois de Boulogne park at the western edge of the Sixteenth Arrondissement, it had been built in the 1700s, becoming a restaurant in 1906, and soon enough the place for elegant and luxurious celebrations. Stahl changed clothes at the studio and, with Jimmy Louis driving the silver Panhard, he managed to get there by six. The dining room had a high, domed ceiling, the walls featured marble columns and triple sconces, the windows looked past a grand terrace to the park’s bare trees. Above the dining-room entry, a banner ran from wall to wall: ROUSILLON BRUT MILLESIME. Apparently, the party celebrated the new brand of champagne being marketed by Rousillon Freres. At the door, a lovely young woman welcomed him and handed him a glass of champagne. Now what? He was at the edge of a huge, chattering mob of people, loud and getting louder, quite merry an hour into the event. Somewhere in there was Wolf Lustig.

Then the Baroness von Reschke emerged, miraculously, from the crowd, her predator’s lupine smile shining brighter with every step. ‘Oh Monsieur Stahl, my dear Fredric, you’re here, it’s so good to see you!’ She was as he remembered her, in a cocktail dress of puffy emerald silk, blue vein at her temple, stylishly set straw hair. She took Stahl’s hand in both claws and said, ‘I’m giving a dinner on the weekend, all sorts of interesting people, may I hope you’ll join us?’ Stahl said he would be leaving town. Behind the baroness, awaiting his turn with Stahl, was Philippe LaMotte, who Stahl had met at the baroness’s cocktail party in September. LaMotte, he recalled, was an executive at Rousillon and a leader of the Comite Franco-Allemagne, the friendship society pledged to bring harmony to relations between France and Germany. The baroness fled, promising to be back in a moment, and LaMotte, in his exquisite suit, shook Stahl’s hand. ‘I wanted to welcome you personally,’ he said. ‘My favourite American actor. How is the world treating you, my friend?’

As well as could be hoped for, he was much occupied with work.

‘Ah, but you managed to visit Berlin, everyone speaks of the impression you made there. A triumph, it’s said.’

Stahl was not going to discuss Berlin, and asked LaMotte about the champagne business.

‘Our brand is ordered everywhere, it is a great success.’

Stahl sipped the champagne, which was too fruity for his taste, and raised his eyebrows to show how good it was.

LaMotte glowed. ‘Yes, yes, only the Epernay soil does this to the grape, hard, chalky soil, bad soil, the vines struggle to grow yet this is what they produce!’

‘One can see why it’s popular,’ Stahl said.

‘Still, we must advertise. Have you given any thought to what I mentioned the last time we met? To appear in our advertisements? You need only to hold a glass of champagne and look successful; the text might say something about having a glass of Rousillon champagne before you play a love scene.’

Alas, Stahl did not at the moment have the time, and…

Over LaMotte’s shoulder, the baroness again materialized, this time with — Stahl recognized him from his photographs — the eminent German producer Wolf Lustig. Now Stahl, most especially after his recent experience of the Third Reich, had a determined loathing for the baroness and her fascist friends, but his reaction to Lustig was instant and visceral revulsion. His photographs did not do him justice. He smiled enthusiastically as they were introduced, the smile spread across thick, liver-coloured lips, and held his head in an unusual way, canted over towards his shoulder, which made him look like a licentious uncle bent on the seduction of an adorable niece — seamy didn’t describe him. ‘I’m honoured to meet you, Monsieur Stahl,’ he said. ‘You stand far above your colleagues in America.’

‘You are too kind.’

Lustig seemed amused. Of course I’m being too kind, do you not understand the art of flattery?

‘I expect the UFA is doing quite well at the moment,’ Stahl said, trying to expedite the conversation to the point where he could run away.

‘We are, sir. We Germans are a movie-loving people — what better after a hard day’s work at the factory?’

‘True everywhere,’ Stahl said.

‘I’m so pleased you could be here,’ Lustig said. ‘I’ve been wanting to discuss a project, yes, a certain project. A film, naturally. With quite a grand budget — we spend money when we see a good thing.’

And what good thing was this?

‘It’s a story from today’s papers, may I tell you what I have in mind?’

Stahl nodded. His physical aversion to Lustig was growing stronger, it was like sitting next to the wrong person on the Metro and being unable to get away.

‘It’s called Harvest of Destiny, a romantic tragedy. The time is now, the place is the border between Poland and Germany, the eastern side of the Polish Corridor. The hero is a handsome young fellow called Franz, simple, honest, who works on the family farm — we see him gathering hay, feeding the cow, at home in the evening, reading by lamplight. One day, a wagon stops at the farm, the draught horse has pulled up lame. So far, so good?’

‘I think I follow it,’ Stahl said.

‘It’s a Polish farmer who’s driving the wagon, which is full of potatoes or whatever it is, and he is that day accompanied by his daughter, Wanda. Need I say his beautiful daughter? I think not.’ Lustig’s eyes twinkled and he placed a warm hand on Stahl’s arm. ‘So now we have Franz and Wanda falling in love. He walks across the fields at night to see his girl but he’s caught by Polish border guards, who give him a hard time. The plot moves along, Franz and Wanda come hand in hand out of the forest and we know what’s happened. And next we learn that he has proposed marriage and she has accepted him.

‘But all is not well. When Franz seeks permission from his father, he is warned: “Things have not always gone well between our two nations,” the father says. “This is sorrowful but it is a fact and we would do nothing but worry about the two of you.” Of course, we need a strong, sympathetic actor for the father…’ Lustig let the sentence hang, waiting for Stahl to react.

‘And that would be me?’ said Stahl, a hardened veteran of producers’ pitches.

‘It’s the perfect part for you,’ Lustig said. ‘Anyhow, the star-crossed lovers decide to run away together. We thought about having her pregnant, but the idea of a German fathering a child with a Polish woman is not acceptable. So they elope, and here they have adventures — swim a fast river, escape the brutish Poles who guard the border, whatever we can think up. In time they reach their destination, a city, which is, of course…’ He waited for Stahl to take the bait, then said, ‘Danzig.’

At this point, Lustig winked. Danzig was a disputed city — in Polish territory but with a majority German population, and the name had lately been in the news. So it was a significant wink. It meant that Lustig presumed Stahl was on his side, was complicit, was sympathetic to the Nazi version of the Polish problem. Hitler’s phrase.

Lustig, having made his point, said, ‘Franz and Wanda try to make a life in Danzig — he gets a job as a stevedore, but the Poles who work on the docks don’t like Germans, and he is attacked by a Polish gang and beaten up. He fights back — fiercely, he fights — but when they cannot subdue him with their fists, they stab him, and he dies. It is left for the father, for you, to spell out the film’s moral: that the European powers have stirred up conflict, and here is the tragedy that results when they won’t make things right.’ He paused and searched Stahl’s face, then said, ‘So? What do you think?’

‘ Harvest of Destiny you said. And what is the destiny?’

Lustig was surprised by the question. ‘The destiny is war between Germany and Poland, unless Europe prevails on the Poles to see the light and agree to the Reich’s demands.’

To this, Stahl did not respond. He was at the party to see what Lustig wanted with him, not to start a fight, not to throw bad champagne in his face, though the thought did cross his mind. ‘Of course I appreciate your thinking of me for the role, Herr Lustig, but my contract with Warner Bros. would never allow me to take on a project for UFA.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I am.’

‘Well, not all the foreign actors remain in Hollywood. Emil Jannings, who you’ll remember from The Blue Angel, has come back to Germany and is quite thoroughly happy and successful. And Maurice Chevalier, after some success in America, is now working in his native France. Have you ever considered something like this? A return to the homeland?’

‘I haven’t, Herr Lustig.’

‘Perhaps you ought to think about it. Whatever you earn at Warner Bros. would be exceeded at UFA, you would be acting in your native language, and the choice of roles would be yours.’

‘Again, thank you, but I will likely remain in Hollywood.’

Lustig shrugged. ‘It’s up to you, naturally. Perhaps events in the future will make the possibility… more appealing.’ He waited, Stahl just stood there. ‘Very well, I’m off to the buffet table. I will be in Paris for another day, meetings and more meetings, then I’ll be going to Poland to scout locations for Harvest. That looks to be an interesting visit, have you ever been in Poland?’

‘I haven’t, Herr Lustig.’

‘Come along, if you like, everything first class,’ he said. ‘Though what that means to the Poles I can’t be sure.’ He laughed at that, a snicker, and said, ‘Who knows, a look at what goes on over there might change your mind.’ Then he said goodbye, his soft hand found Stahl’s and held it, and he was away.

Stahl breathed a sigh of relief and turned towards the door, only to find Kiki de Saint-Ange standing at his side. ‘Remember me?’ she said.

‘Kiki, hello! What are you doing here?’

‘Waiting for you. No, not really, I was invited, and it was such a boring afternoon…’

‘Well, it’s good to see you.’

That was true. Kiki looked her best — a black Chanel suit, chiffon blouse, a knotted rope of pearls, and tight black gloves. Her chestnut hair was cut short, with a swathe brushed across her forehead. She held a cigarette by her ear, her other hand cupping her elbow, and her eyes met his as she flirted with him. ‘I think you’re avoiding me, you know, you are very silent lately.’

‘Not on purpose,’ he said. ‘It’s just…’

‘Or maybe you think I’ve exhausted my, my, umm, repertoire. Well, don’t. I am the most adventurous girl.’

‘You are, and I know it.’

‘So where are you going after this?’

Stahl was severely tempted. Kiki held nothing back — unlike others he could name who held everything back. And he found himself wondering just what sort of wickedness she had in mind. Oh, what the hell, why not. As she took a puff on her cigarette and blew smoke from her nostrils, her eyes stayed fixed on his. With, now, pure enquiry.

‘I have to meet my producer,’ he said, and immediately regretted it. Why had he done this? He thought he knew — there was someone else he really wanted — but he’d surprised himself. Not like me, he thought.

‘I see,’ she said, an edge of anger in her voice. ‘Your producer. Well, don’t leave it too long, good things don’t last forever.’ She reached up and stroked his cheek with two gloved fingers.

‘I will telephone you, Kiki,’ he said. He kissed her lightly, left and right, inhaling the perfume in her hair.

19 November.

The Paris Herald was brought to Stahl’s room every morning with his coffee and croissants. He had, like many Americans living in Paris, become addicted to it. The lead stories were, as usual since Stahl’s arrival, about political manoeuvres in European capitals. There was news of social goings-on, of sports — mostly football now — and the stock market. On the inside of the back page, a brief article caught Stahl’s attention. A certain Professor James Franklin, on sabbatical from the University of Illinois, and his wife, Dorothea, had left Paris on a trip to Berlin and there vanished. It had been three weeks since they were last seen. German police were investigating.

Stahl read the article twice, then again. Was this an instance of random violence? Had they encountered criminals? It was known in Paris that some Americans had been confronted in German cities by Brown Shirts and, refusing to return the Nazi salute, had been badly beaten up. Some had died. These events were rarely reported, but they were known to occur. Or was there a reason for their disappearance — had they been caught doing something clandestine? Stahl was to see J. J. Wilkinson late that afternoon and he considered raising the subject, then decided he shouldn’t. It would amount, implicitly, to an accusation: did you have something to do with this?

Stahl had his breakfast, then left the Herald on the tray for the room waiter to take away. Dressed for work at Joinville, on his way to the door, he read the article once again.

5.20 p.m. The Paris branch of the National City Bank, on the Champs-Elysees, had closed at five but Stahl, following directions, rang a bell by the door and was admitted, then escorted through the immense bronze doors to the vault and led to a private room reserved for safe-deposit box holders. Here Wilkinson awaited him.

After a very productive day on the movie set, Stahl was in a good mood — successful work almost always had this effect on him — and his narrative of the meeting with Wolf Lustig was lightened, here and there, by a touch of comedy. Traditionally, stories about god-awful movie producers were good for a laugh. But Wilkinson didn’t find it so funny. He made Stahl go back over details — ‘Are you sure he said that?’ and so on, as though the report he would write was an especially important one. ‘You’ve done well,’ Wilkinson said, when Stahl wound down.

‘Did I? I just stood there and let him talk. Do you suppose he really thought I was going to be in his wretched film?’

‘He had a try at it, he was likely told to try it. And then he went further, proposing that you go to live in Germany.’

Stahl shook his head. ‘How could anybody…’

‘Think you might? The Nazis believe they’re going to rule the world, and “believe” isn’t the right word — they know it. So maybe, with a little persuasion, with a little pressure, they might get you to join them. After all, you went to Berlin, you did what they wanted. And it would have been a real triumph if it had worked. Imagine the German newspapers.’

‘Well, he didn’t stop there. As I told you, he invited me to go scouting for locations in Poland.’

‘Yes, I’ll be spying on Poland, why not come along.’

Stahl looked incredulous.

‘Scouting locations?’ Wilkinson said. ‘That would perhaps include railways? Bridges? Ports? With a camera no doubt. What would you call it?’

‘ That never occurred to me. I’m afraid I’m not so smart about this… kind of thing.’

‘Movie producers are catnip to spy services — they turn up everywhere, they spend a lot of money, they can reach important people, it’s one of those useful professions.’ Wilkinson put his notepad back in his briefcase. ‘Anyhow, you’ve helped us. Roosevelt is about to go to Congress with a proposal for millions of dollars to be spent on rearmament. Five hundred million dollars, to be precise, which ain’t chicken feed. And the only thing that will persuade Congress to spend this kind of money is some strong indication that there will be war in Europe. Hitler has been screaming about Poland lately, and suddenly it’s in the French press. I don’t know if you saw it, probably you didn’t, but that fascist bastard Marcel Deat just published an opinion piece called ‘ Mourir pour Danzig? ’ To die for Danzig? Who would want to die in some quarrel over a faraway city? So French public opinion is once again being, as they say, “harmonized”.

‘Now newspaper stories won’t convince the honourable senator from Ohio, but what may convince him is being invited to lunch at the White House and told, not for publication, of course, that the Germans are making propaganda films about Poland. They’re going down the same road they took in Czechoslovakia, but the Poles only just got their country back, twenty years ago, and they’ll fight to keep it. And when they fight, Britain and France will have to declare war — they wriggled out of their treaties with the Czechs at Munich but they can’t do that again.’

‘I assume there’s more than Harvest of Destiny.’

‘There is. All sorts of things that add up, Orlova’s notes included, and intelligence from here and there. The German administration in Danzig just threw all the Jews out of the city, for instance, and Danzig isn’t in Germany, it’s in Poland, supposedly administered by the League of Nations, so it will be a long lunch at the White House.’

‘Mr Wilkinson, you aren’t suggesting I go to Poland, are you?’

‘No. That’s potentially a trap.’

‘A trap?’

‘Maybe, could be, you never know. Talk about headlines! “Poles arrest American actor spying for Germany.” I doubt you’d be going back to Hollywood after that. And you really might wind up working for UFA.’

‘Good God.’

‘Yes, kindly old Dr Lawton joins up with the Nazis.’ The idea was horrifying but the way Wilkinson had put it amused them both. ‘Better stay here in Paris,’ Wilkinson said. ‘And, even here, watch out for yourself. These people may seem absurd, like Wolf Lustig and Moppi and his pals, but absurdity can shield the truth, which is that these people are dangerous.’

Adolf Hitler was a man who needed an audience. When he spoke in public, the shrieking crowd drove him to his most passionate moments. In private, he required a circle of admirers, sitting rapt and silent as he delivered his monologues. Of course the people around him had to be the right people: senior military officers, old comrades from the early Nazi days, a few blonde women, maybe an actress or two, a sprinkling of diplomats. One such was a cousin of Propaganda Minister Goebbels, a young man called Manfred Mueller. Freddi, Hitler called him, and he was something of a court favourite. He wore owlish round glasses in tortoiseshell frames, stood — and sat — straight as a stick, laughed at Hitler’s snide remarks, and carefully deferred to Hitler’s powerful friends but not in a way that got on their nerves. He was just a very nice young man, easy to have around.

Sometimes the whole gang went off to one of Hitler’s country retreats, the Berghof, say, in the mountain town of Berchtesgaden in the Austrian Alps. There wasn’t room for everybody at the Berghof — Hitler liked his numerous bodyguards close by — so his guests would stay at the Berchtesgadener Hof, the local hotel. Since these were social events, couples were welcome, and Freddi Mueller was often accompanied by his wife, Gertrud, called Trudi.

Trudi Mueller was also easy to have around, always following the expected protocol: women were there to listen to what the men said and to appreciate their brilliance, laugh at their wit, look serious when important subjects were being discussed. In her thirties, she was pretty in a careful way, with smooth brown hair and fine skin. She dressed conservatively and, like her husband, had excellent posture. A perfect couple, the Muellers: attentive, unassuming, and perfectly correct in everything they did, in everything they thought.

Well, almost everything. Because Trudi Mueller had fallen in love with Olga Orlova. Did Trudi admit this, even to herself? Possibly she didn’t, and buried certain desires so deeply that she could ignore their existence. But, whatever her dreams or reveries, and some of her dreams were unsettling, Trudi openly worshipped the Russian actress; thought her terribly glamorous, loved her beautiful clothes, loved the way she spoke — that Slavic undertone in her German, loved the way she held herself, loved the way her well-exercised body looked in a bathing suit. She saw Orlova, who was in her forties, as the successful older woman; sophisticated, confident, comfortable with her life. Trudi wouldn’t have dared to think she could ever be like her, it was more than enough to be near her.

Now Trudi may not have known what she felt but Orlova surely did. She’d been in this position before, she knew the signs, and didn’t mind — being desired was a daily commonplace for a film star and it was inevitable that sometimes women did the desiring. So Orlova knew. Trudi often touched her, her eyes had a certain light in them when the two of them talked, and she was responsive to Orlova’s moods and fell in with them. Was something funny? They laughed together. Was something sad? They mourned together. Would it ever go beyond that? Here Orlova was uncertain. Trudi was from a certain social class, strict, conventional, and rigidly proper, where such feelings between women were not discussed, and, supposedly, never acted upon. Even in the 1920s, when open and fervent sexuality flourished in German cities, the Trudi Muellers of the world sniffed and pretended not to notice. As for Orlova, a life in the theatre and then in film had room for pretty much anything, as long as it was discreet, as long as, the saying went, it didn’t frighten the cat.

Meanwhile, Orlova the professional spy sensed opportunity in Trudi’s affections. She couldn’t have said precisely what that was but felt its presence — something useful, a secret to be stolen, so she kept at it, and she and Trudi were often in each other’s company. On days when the men up at the Berghof had private matters to discuss and the women didn’t appear until dinnertime, the two of them would go walking in the mountains, take tea together in the hotel parlour — crackling fire on the hearth, bear and chamois trophy heads on the walls — and now and then visit in one of their rooms if the weather was bad.

And there came an afternoon in November when the weather was very bad indeed. It didn’t start that way, was chilly and calm all morning. Freddi was in a meeting up at the Berghof. Orlova, having the sort of day when boredom becomes intolerable, knocked at the door of Trudi’s room and suggested they take one of the trails up the mountain. She was already dressed for it: a ski parka, wool trousers — plus fours, buttoned over heavy socks below the knee — and a knit stocking cap, snug on her head, that hung down to her shoulder and ended in a fluffy pompom. The red cap made her look like a child, an elfin child, and Trudi said it was adorable.

Trudi was eager to go for a walk but she had to change into outdoor clothes. Orlova made as if to leave, so Trudi could dress in private, but Trudi insisted she stay, it wouldn’t take too long. Orlova sat in a chair, Trudi took off her dress and hung it up, tossed her slip on the bed, and walked around in her underwear, gathering up a cold-weather outfit and chattering away. Something of a display, really, a show, and Orlova wondered idly if she knew what she was doing. Perhaps she did — turning to Orlova and saying, ‘You don’t mind, do you, if I go about like this?’

‘Of course not.’

‘After all, we’re both girls.’

Trudi put on a heavy sweater and slacks, then lace-up boots. All the while she talked; they had the painters in their apartment in Berlin and the inconvenience, and the smell of fresh paint, was frankly testing her patience. Should they stay at a hotel? That seemed to her extravagant, didn’t Olga think so? No? No doubt Olga was used to luxurious hotels but Trudi was so much more comfortable at home. On and on she went, talking to Orlova through the open bathroom door as she fixed her make-up. Watching her apply fresh lipstick, Orlova thought, Must look good in case we meet a bear.

At that moment, Orlova’s eye happened to fall on a briefcase, leaning on the leg of a chair set before a small desk. Freddi’s briefcase. Forgotten? Left on purpose? She wondered what might be in there, then Trudi came out of the bathroom and said, reaching for her coat, ‘Ready at last!’

Outside, the clouds above the mountain had lowered while Trudi changed her clothes, and a white mist had blanked out the summit, which meant alpine weather on the way, but they were dressed for it. They walked through the town, past the little shops and the statue of Goethe, then started up one of the trails. About twenty minutes later a few flakes of snow came drifting down — big, soft flakes that spun through the still air. Trudi wiped her face with her mitten, Orlova’s cap turned from red to white. A wind stirred, then grew stronger and sighed through the forest, while the branches of the pine trees bowed with the weight of the new snow.

The trail had a gentle slope as it climbed the face of the mountain, the streets and houses below looked remote and serene, like a village in a painting, and Trudi grew confidential. Did Olga, she wondered, ever feel lonely? In truth, Orlova said, she didn’t — she seemed always to have people around her. Trudi said that even in a crowd she sometimes felt very much alone. For a time, the grade steepened, which made conversation difficult as they worked their way upwards, but then it levelled out and Trudi said that she and Freddi had always wanted children — but did Orlova think every couple had to have them? Orlova didn’t think so; people ought to be free to do as they liked. Trudi agreed — wistfully, it seemed to Orlova. Maybe in the future they’d have them, Trudi said, lately Freddi worked so hard, cared so very much about his job, that he was always tired. Every night, he was tired. ‘He falls asleep when his head hits the pillow. It leaves me feeling, oh, “lonely” is the word, I guess.’

Just about here it occurred to Orlova that a comment about Trudi’s sleepwear might be in order, but then she was distracted by the weather. A Muscovite by birth, she knew a thing or two about snow, which had started to come down thick and fast. They really couldn’t see the town any longer and when she turned and looked back down the trail, their footprints had disappeared. In fact, the word ‘blizzard’ wouldn’t have been all that wrong.

‘Trudi, dear,’ she said. ‘I think we shouldn’t go much further.’

‘That’s what I think,’ Trudi said, apparently eager to return to the hotel, and they started back down the mountain, the going sufficiently difficult that now and then Trudi had to hold on to Orlova’s arm. They were never really in trouble, but by the time they reached the hotel they were both red in the face and breathing hard. When Orlova dropped Trudi off at her room and said she was going upstairs to change, Trudi said, ‘You will come back, won’t you? And keep me company?’

‘I’ll see you in a few minutes,’ Orlova said. ‘Why don’t you have them send up a bottle of brandy? It’ll warm us up.’

In her room, Orlova hung up her wet clothes and put on slacks and a sweater, then stood for a time before her open suitcase, contemplating a small Leica camera. It wasn’t a miniature camera, a spy’s camera — discovery of such a thing would have been a catastrophe — but, equipped with a certain lens, it worked almost as well. It had done so in the past. Take it down to Trudi’s room? Where Freddi’s briefcase rested against a chair? How? In a handbag. Would there be an opportunity to use it? Orlova thought this through, and found no suitable strategy, but then, with a nod to the gods of chance, she dropped it in her bag.

Downstairs, Trudi was wearing a quilted pink bathrobe that hung down to her ankles. The bottle of brandy and two glasses had arrived, along with a message from the hotel telephone operator: the roads down the mountain from the Berghof were impassable, Herr Mueller would not be able to return until the morning. Trudi didn’t seem all that disappointed, quite the reverse. ‘So it’s just you and me, tonight,’ she said.

They sat together and talked for a while, then Trudi said, ‘I’ve caught a chill, feel my hands.’

‘Like ice,’ Orlova said, rubbing them for a moment.

‘I think I’d better take a bath,’ Trudi said.

‘You should, it will warm you up.’

Trudi slipped off her robe and walked into the bathroom, leaving the door open behind her. When the water was turned on, Orlova calculated that the sound would cover any noise she might make and headed for the briefcase. She unsnapped the latch and spread the sides open, to be greeted by a bulky sheaf of papers. A memorandum, something about Plan ALBRECHT. Another, this one to do with secretarial holidays. A draft for a report, script written in pen, the sentences hard to read. Then, from the bathroom, ‘Olga, dear?’

‘Yes?’

‘Could you bring me my drink?’

‘Be right there.’

Orlova managed to shuffle through a few more pages, then found Trudi’s glass, poured in some more brandy, and took it into the bathroom. Through the steam, she could see Trudi’s white body in the green water. ‘Here it is.’

‘Thank you. You can sit on the edge of the tub, if you like.’

‘The steam is getting me wet, I’ll wait for you in the room.’ As she turned to go, the significance of one of the papers came to her: a list of names with numbers, reichsmarks, next to them. Which could have been anything, but now Orlova realized that she’d seen a crossed L, the L, which was pronounced W.

In Polish.

Orlova snatched the Leica from her purse, found the list, and laid it flat on the desk. She riffled through to the end, some thirty pages. She had only eighteen exposures left on the film in her camera, but she’d get what she could.

Now the splash of water in the bathroom stopped. Orlova glanced at the open door, her heart pounding, but there was only drifting steam. She returned to the document and snapped the first photograph. ‘Olga?’

‘Yes?’

‘Do you think Freddi is a good husband?’

Calling out, ‘Of course he is,’ Orlova used the sound of her voice to conceal a turn to the next page.

‘Oh, in a way he is, he’s…’ Click. Next page. ‘… kind and considerate.’

‘There’s much to be said for kindness.’ Click. Next page.

‘But shouldn’t there be more?’ Click. Next page.

‘Do you mean physical things?’ Click. Next page. ‘Intimate things?’

‘That is what…’ Click. Next page. ‘… I mean, Olga.’

‘It is important in love affairs.’ Click. ‘But a marriage isn’t

…’ Next page. Click. ‘… a love affair.’ Next page.

‘Do you think…’ Click. Next page. ‘… I should have a love affair?’ Click. Next page.

The dialogue continued, with an occasional slosh from the bathroom as Trudi changed positions. Was there somebody Trudi liked? Well, yes, there was, could Orlova guess who that might be? Orlova said she wouldn’t even try to guess. And what if Freddi found out? What then? There was no way he ever would. Orlova doubted that. Trudi persisted — the person she had in mind would never tell, of that she was sure. Then, as Orlova rushed to turn a page, it rattled, and Trudi called out, ‘Are you reading the newspaper?’

Desperately, Orlova looked around the room. Was there a newspaper? Yes! There it was, on a chair. ‘I’m just thumbing through it,’ she answered. Then, from the bathroom, the sound of Trudi getting out of the tub, and, as she dried herself, Orlova took the final exposure, jammed the document back in the briefcase, closed it, and put the camera in her bag. ‘I don’t think anybody would ever know,’ Trudi said.

Orlova hurried over to the chair, grabbed the newspaper and was standing there holding it when Trudi ran naked from the bathroom, jumped into the bed, pulled the covers up to her chin, and said, ‘That felt so good, my bath.’

‘Well, when you’re chilled…’

‘Olga, dear?’

‘Yes?’

‘Why don’t you get in here with me and keep me warm?’

Orlova laughed and threw the newspaper back on the chair. ‘I’m going to take my brandy upstairs and rest for a while.’

‘Are you sure, Olga?’ Trudi’s voice had lowered, I’m serious. The question was overt and direct.

Orlova walked over to the bed and smoothed Trudi’s hair back. ‘Yes, Trudi, I am sure,’ she said, her tone affectionate and understanding. Then she said, ‘I’ll be back later, and we’ll have dinner together,’ and left the room.

Climbing the stairs to the floor above, Orlova hoped that Trudi wouldn’t hate her — she might, that was one possible reaction. But the alternative was too dangerous. In different circumstances, Orlova thought, she might have done it — a dalliance on a snowy afternoon in the mountains, a couple of hours of discovery and excitement, nobody the wiser. With Trudi, however, she feared all that heat stored up inside would explode in real passion, real love, not just a crush on an admired older woman. What then? Longing looks from Trudi Mueller in the midst of the Hitler menagerie? These people were shrewd, they had the sharpened instincts of survivors, and they might very well figure out what was going on. No, impossible, Orlova thought as she opened the door to her room. She would be particularly sweet to Trudi at dinner; she loved her like a friend, she loved her like an older sister.

Meanwhile, a roll of film.

3 December.

As the first snow of the season whitened the grounds of the Joinville studios, the production of Apres la Guerre was smoother and faster by the day. The anarchist Jean Avila turned out to be a not entirely benevolent despot and, with cast and crew doing precisely what they were told, the daily minutes of film went from two, to three, to, on some days, five. The romantic scenes between Colonel Vadic and Ilona absolutely smouldered, and were more than once applauded on the set. There was, to professionals like Stahl and Justine Piro, no higher praise than that.

Even the message — as, after a gun battle in a Balkan village, the dying Gilles Brecker tells Colonel Vadic that an honourable death is the most important part of life — was emotional and moving. This was in no small part Avila’s victory, pressing the screenwriters, as he put it to them in a cafe, ‘to calm this fucking thing down a little — trust your actors.’ Because the lieutenant has fought bravely, because he’s given his life to save theirs, the colonel pretends to agree with him. But in Stahl’s reading of his lines, in the expression on his face as the camera moves to close-up, it is clear that Colonel Vadic has come to understand that death is death and, honourable though it may be, sorrowful beyond all else. At the end of the second day of shooting, when the sequence was completed, Avila took Stahl aside and said, ‘Thank you, Fredric.’ That wasn’t the last of the filming, not quite, but soon they would be leaving Joinville, to shoot exterior scenes in and around Beirut. Except that Beirut had now become some remote place in Morocco. ‘Where,’ Avila told the cast, repeating what Deschelles had said, ‘they are known to have sand. Plenty of sand. It’s called the Sahara.’ Once that was done, they would return to Paris, then go to the Hungarian castle — Paramount had agreed to pay! — for a few more scenes on location.

By the third of December, Orlova’s letter had reached Paris by courier and Wilkinson knew about the film of the Polish list. And the price of the Polish list, copied out from the eighteen exposures, another two hundred thousand Swiss francs. Roosevelt’s millionaire friends had been generous enough so that Wilkinson could pay, he told Stahl in the billiard room of the American Club, but the exchange was difficult. He had planned on using a ballet troupe based in Boston, headed from Paris to Berlin on a cultural friendship tour, but the willing dancer had been injured in a taxi crash on the Boulevard Saint-Germain.

For Fredric Stahl there was no reason, and even less desire, to go to Germany. In fact, he told Wilkinson, he would be going to Morocco, to a place called Erg Chebbi in the Ziz Valley. Wilkinson raised his eyebrows, Stahl said, ‘Dunes.’ The desert scenery was spectacular and had been used by other film companies. But Stahl said he would take on the job if Orlova could arrange for somebody — he doubted she’d be able to come herself — to meet him there. Wilkinson took out his notepad, rested it on the billiard table, and said, ‘Can you spell it?’

Over the next few days, Stahl realized that the prospect of leaving Paris for a time was more than a little welcome. The city of moods had fallen into a kind of trough; Parisians were feeling the pressure and they didn’t like it. Il faut en finir, they said, there must be an end to this. They were fed up with alarms — Hitler said this, Roosevelt said that — hopes high one day, dashed the next, optimism followed by gloom. So, enough! After the Munich appeasement, Hitler seemed to think he’d won; France was finished, the war was over. This scared the French, it scared the sophisticated Parisians, and Stahl could feel it.

And, almost despite himself, he became a collector of signs and omens. The Germans had installed a second news agency in Paris, the Prima Presse, that issued a flow of press releases quoted in French newspapers — more tanks, more planes, millions of men marching with guns and giving the Nazi salute. A garment manufacturer in Paris advertised its new pyjamas d’alerte, so women would have something attractive to wear in bomb shelters. And America made it clearer every day that help was not at hand. Time magazine’s newsreel series, The March of Time, brought out Inside Nazi Germany — 1938, which featured happy, hardworking Germans toiling in field and factory. Stahl watched it with disgust. And read an article by a young woman, a rising intellectual star, in which she described the French political climate as ‘a mixture of braggadocio and cowardice, hopelessness and panic’. A perfect description, Stahl thought. And on 6 December, France and Germany signed a friendship treaty, stating that ‘pacific and neighbourly relations between France and Germany constitute one of the essential elements of the consolidation of the situation in Europe and of the preservation of the general peace.’

8 December.

Deschelles had chartered two aeroplanes to fly cast, crew, and equipment to Morocco, with stops for refuelling at Marseille, and then Tangiers — for the three-hundred-mile flight to a military airfield at Er Rashida. From there, cars and trucks would take them to Erg Chebbi, where they would stay at a hotel called the Kasbah Oudami; the producer had secured all thirty rooms for ten days. They left Le Bourget Airport at dawn. More than a few of the cast and crew had never flown in an aeroplane and, when the flight turned bumpy and the plane hit air pockets, had to be calmed by the administration of strong spirits, which were not denied to the other passengers. The well-oiled Pasquin, it turned out, knew a selection of incredibly filthy songs, which most of them had never heard before. But they weren’t hard to learn.

An hour into the flight, Stahl changed seats with an electrician so he could sit next to Renate Steiner, first asking her if she minded. He managed to keep the conversation light and easy, he wanted her to understand that, everything else aside, he truly liked her, which he did. Once she relaxed she was good company, smart, funny, and Stahl realized he could make her laugh, in its way a powerful form of intimacy. A key to the heart? At the Kasbah Oudami she would, she said, be sharing a room with the actress who played Pasquin’s conquest in a Turkish village. Just in case he had any ideas. Which he did. And when she dozed off, somewhere over the Mediterranean, his shoulder was available, but she leaned her head against the window, and Stahl, who’d equipped himself for the journey with a few S. S. Van Dine mysteries, opened one of them, trying to follow the clues as Philo Vance solved The Casino Murder Case.

It was after midnight by the time they reached the hotel. ‘I’m going to take a walk,’ Stahl said. ‘Would you like to come along?’

‘I’m worn out,’ she said. ‘But maybe tomorrow I might.’

Something in her voice caught Stahl’s attention, the lowering, slight as it was, of a barrier. ‘Promise?’ Stahl said, unwilling to let her go.

She nodded and said, ‘Yes, tomorrow,’ accompanied by one of her ironic smiles. I know what you want. Now she was toying with him, he thought, but he didn’t mind because it could lead him exactly where he wanted to go.

In good spirits he entered the hotel and started up the tiled stairway to his room which, as leading man, he did not have to share. But the good spirits quickly evaporated. The Kasbah Oudami, occupying a rebuilt section of an abandoned Berber fortress, was suffused with cold, blue light. The walls had been, a long time ago, painted blue, the paint now puckered and peeling, and the air was chilled and clammy. This was, Stahl thought, a good place to be murdered. Should he actually go for a walk? With all those Swiss francs in his pockets? Still, honour demanded that he at least go back outside, which he did, and discovered Avila standing in front of the hotel.

Avila’s face lit up when he saw Stahl. ‘Want to have a look at the desert?’ he said.

‘I was thinking about it,’ Stahl said, uncertainty in his voice.

‘We’ll be fine,’ Avila said, and off they went.

It wasn’t much better outdoors — this was Africa, not Europe, and they both, walking through the twisty streets of Erg Chebbi, felt a certain, nameless apprehension. A slice of moon lit the town, which had no streetlamps, and the silence of the place was heavy enough to preclude conversation. A few minutes later they stood at the edge of the desert, where a steady wind blew across the high dunes and the silence was even deeper. ‘Is it ominous, or is it just me?’ Stahl said.

‘It’s something,’ Avila said. ‘Supposedly, we’re still in France.’ Morocco was a French colonial possession.

Stahl laughed.

‘Deschelles made some sort of deal with the colonial authority,’ Avila said. ‘We had to use French territory, so it was between Morocco and the Lebanon, Beirut, and Morocco won.’

‘Can you get this… the feeling of this place, on film?’

‘Slow pan, no music, mostly silence. Sun rising over the dunes.’

‘You sound like you can’t wait,’ Stahl said.

‘You’re right, I can’t.’

It was too cold to stay for very long. As they walked back to the hotel, a caravan came in off the desert, a line of loaded camels clopping up the cobbled street, bells jingling, each rider wearing a burnoose, the end of the cloth wrapped around the face, leaving only the eyes exposed.

The following morning brought grey cloud, so they had to wait out in the desert until eleven or so, when the sun burned through and the cameras rolled. Stahl, Gilles Brecker, and Pasquin were back in their tattered legionnaire uniforms, slogging through the sandy wastes of eastern Turkey in the brutal heat. The wind kept drying their ‘sweat’, so the make-up man came running before every shot. Pursued by two policemen in a battered command car — previously seen in a British war-against-the-natives film and rented at a high price — they lie flat, just below the crest of a dune, when they hear the chugging engine. Brecker reaches inside his tunic and brings out the pistol he’s stolen. ‘Don’t do that, lieutenant,’ Stahl says. The lieutenant says that he won’t be taken alive. Pasquin grabs the pistol and says, ‘Get yourself killed if you like, but not me.’ One of the policemen climbs out of the car, walks almost to the top of the dune, stands there for a moment, then decides he doesn’t want to go any further.

At five in the afternoon, Stahl re-counted the money, put it in a manila envelope, and headed for the Erg Chebbi railway station. A small crowd, amid mounds of baggage, waited on the platform, gazing hopefully up the long, straight track that ran to the horizon, and ultimately to Algeria. The train was late, the crowd fretted and paced, then went silent as two French gendarmes strolled to the end of the platform and leaned casually against a baggage cart. Twenty minutes later, the chuff of a steam engine in the distance was followed by grey smoke, and the crowd prepared to board.

The last carriage on the train was almost deserted, the aisle between yellow wicker seats littered with newspapers and cigarette butts. Stahl passed a Moroccan man in a suit and fez, and two women in lavishly embroidered robes, then, at the end of the carriage, found what he was looking for: a European reading a copy of Paris Match. The photograph on the cover showed French soldiers peeling potatoes into a huge

iron pot, somewhere, as the cover advertised, SUR LA LIGNE MAGINOT.

The man looked up as Stahl approached. He was of indeterminate middle age, fair-haired and fattish. German? French? British? He wore the white suit of the colonial European, and seemed prosperous and self-confident. Stahl slid into the seat across the aisle and gave the first part of the protocol, in German as specified: ‘Excuse me, sir, does this train go to Cairo?’

The man looked him over carefully and said, ‘No, it goes to Alexandria.’

Stahl had tucked the envelope in his trouser waist, far enough around so that it was hidden by his jacket, and now drew it out and handed it to the man across the aisle. ‘I’m sure you wish to count it,’ he said.

The man reached inside his jacket, produced an envelope, and handed it to Stahl. ‘Have a look,’ he said. His German sounded native to Stahl. Inside the envelope, typed on very thin paper, several pages of Polish names and numbers. The list had been copied on a German keyboard, and the Polish accents applied with a pencil. As Stahl examined the list, the locomotive vented a plume of steam with a loud hiss. Startled, he began to rise in order to get off the train before it left the station.

‘Don’t worry,’ the man said. ‘You have a few minutes yet.’ Holding the money below the back of the seat in front of him, he thumbed through the last of the Swiss franc notes, then put the money back in the envelope. ‘All is correct,’ he said. Then he turned and looked out of the window, searching the platform. ‘Did you see any other Europeans?’ he said. ‘Waiting for the train?’

‘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.’