Mission to Paris

A GOOD SOLDIER

17 December. 1.30 in the morning.

Seen from the window of a taxi headed for the Claridge, winter Paris. On a bridge across the Seine, the streetlamps along the balustrade were no more than ghostly blurs of light in the river fog. Deserted streets after that, wet from an evening rain, one cafe still lit, with one patron, a woman in a fur hat with a glass of wine before her. Winter Paris, Christmas coming, the Galeries Lafayette would have its toy train running in the window, the station roof glittering with granular snow. Stahl thanked heaven for getting him back here alive.

He was in danger, so his intuition told him, yet not so much now. After what he’d seen in the cellar of the gendarmerie he’d felt it, nearby, waiting for him. Late that afternoon he had, as promised, seen Renate Steiner. And told her, because she would surely hear about it, what had happened at Er Rashida. Then all they did was walk around the village, both of them edgy and distracted, too much aware of what was going on around them. He dropped her off at the Kasbah Oudami, then went over to the telegraph office, where he did what he could to warn Wilkinson that Orlova might be in trouble. Birthday greetings stop gift en route stop our friend may be unwell stop send card soonest stop Fredric

In his reaction to the murder Stahl had not been alone, Avila had also been alarmed — could it have been some spasm of anti-colonial politics? — and, for the next few days, he drove the company hard, wanting to finish the location shooting and get the hell out of there. So both Stahl and Renate had to spend long hours on the production — Stahl even lent a hand building rails for tracking shots out in the Sahara. The extra effort worked. The cast and crew left two days ahead of schedule, reaching Paris in the early hours of the seventeenth. On the aeroplane home, feeling that he’d somehow escaped, a relieved and talkative Stahl sat with Renate and went on about secret places — hidden parks, empty museums — that he liked to visit.

The taxi pulled up in front of the Claridge and, minutes later, Stahl, with a grateful sigh, slid into his sweetly welcoming bed. Exhausted, he slept deeply until 6.00 when his mental alarm clock jarred him awake: he had to see Wilkinson. By 8.30 he was at the neighbourhood Bureau de Poste, making an anonymous phone call to an emergency number Wilkinson had given him. An hour later, Stahl was once again in the stacks at the American Library, apparently searching the 330.94s, European Economies.

Minutes later, Stahl heard hurried footsteps on the staircase, then a smiling Wilkinson appeared. An outwardly relaxed and insouciant Wilkinson, wanting to reassure his rattled agent, but Stahl suspected he’d been shaken by the telegram. Wilkinson picked a book off the shelf, looked at the title, and said, ‘Have you read this one? Belgian Banking Practice in the Eighteenth Century? Kept me up all night, I couldn’t put it down.’ He returned the book to the shelf and said, ‘You seem to be okay.’

‘I guess I am.’

‘So, what went wrong?’

‘I made contact with the courier, he gave me the list and I paid him. Then, the next day, I found out he’d been strangled and thrown off the train, money and papers taken.’

‘Jesus!’

‘Just so.’

‘Could it have been a robbery? Happenstance, you know, coincidence.’

‘Could’ve. Is that what you think?’

‘No, it’s not. God damn it, what a mess.’

‘Did you warn Orlova?’

Wilkinson nodded, an unhappy nod but affirmative. Then he took a breath, blew it out, and said, ‘Anyhow, you did the right thing, letting me know that something had gone wrong. It did take me a minute to figure it out — my first thought was “it’s not my birthday”, then I understood. And by “gift en route” you meant…’

Stahl drew the envelope from his pocket and handed it to Wilkinson, who took the list out and for a time, turning pages, looked it over. ‘Hm, yes, good,’ he said. ‘They’ll like this in D.C., some kind of German operation in Poland.’ He turned a page and said, ‘I suspect the Polish congressmen from Chicago might find out about it, and their votes matter.’

‘Any idea what it means?’

‘These people could be Nazi spies… some of the names are German, and there are ethnic Germans in Poland who secretly admire Herr Hitler. Or it could be a list of targets — some propaganda operation being run by the Ribbentropburo. Or it could be anything.’

‘Do you think they’ve arrested Orlova?’

‘It’s possible, yes, maybe.’

‘And if they knew about the courier, do they know about me?’

Wilkinson shrugged and spread his hands. Stahl waited. Wilkinson said, ‘They didn’t know about you when you made the exchange. If they had, you wouldn’t be here. What happened suggests they were after the courier, but didn’t get him until you’d left the train. Meanwhile, if the worst happened, they’ve arrested Orlova and, given their methods, they’ll know about you soon enough.’

‘And then?’

‘I don’t…’ Wilkinson stopped, then said, ‘Please understand, this has never happened to me.’

‘Or to me,’ Stahl said.

‘Well, I guess you’ll have to face the possibility that they’ll come after you.’

‘How?’

‘Again, I can’t say. But better I don’t tell you not to worry, because you might believe me.’ Wilkinson thought for a moment, then said, ‘Is it possible for you to go back to California?’

‘Not now. I have to finish the movie.’

‘What if you didn’t?’

Stahl drew his finger across his throat. ‘It is the one thing you cannot do, you wouldn’t work again, not in Hollywood you wouldn’t.’

‘But you’d be alive.’

‘True, but I’ll tell you a funny thing, I won’t let them do that to me. Maybe I can’t stop them from murdering me, but they won’t destroy me.’

This earned, from Wilkinson, a faint but appreciative smile. ‘You’re a pretty good soldier, Fredric, you’ll never get a medal, but you are.’

‘What about you?’ Stahl said. ‘Would they come after you?’

‘It’s occurred to me,’ Wilkinson said. ‘But it’s something I can’t worry about.’ Then he shook his head and said, ‘Damn it all to hell, I wish this hadn’t happened.’

Avila had given the company the day off after the early-morning return to Paris. Thoroughly habituated to the rhythm of daily work, Stahl didn’t quite know what to do with himself. So he walked, a long walk, back to the Claridge from the American Library. Beneath an overcast sky, he wandered down side streets, paused at appealing shop windows, looked at the women as they passed him by, and had, in the way of people walking alone in a city, some conversation with himself. Yes, they might come after him, he thought, but brooding about it was pointless; what would happen would happen, though if he had the opportunity to fight back, then he’d fight them. Hard. Until then he decided to avoid, if he could, obsession with that part of his life. Think good thoughts, his mother had always told him. Well, that’s what he would try to do.

On the aeroplane, he had asked Renate for her telephone number and written it down on a scrap of paper, promising to call when they were back in Paris. This scrap of paper had migrated: from his pocket to his desk, then to the top of his bureau, and back to his pocket. When he returned to his room at 2.20 he could wait no longer, and called her. No answer. But at 2.45 she was home. They talked briefly, then he asked her to have dinner — was there something special she liked to eat? Lyonnais cooking? Normandy veal? The line hissed for a time, finally he said, ‘Renate?’ and she said, ‘Why don’t you come over here? I can make something for us.’ Her voice was strained, as though she feared his answer wouldn’t be the one she wanted.

‘Yes, of course, I’d like that,’ he said.

‘It’s not very fancy over here,’ she said. ‘Surely not what you’re used to.’ Then she gave him her address and they decided on a time, 7.00 p.m.

Stahl had brought his favourite sweater to Paris, very soft wool, in horizontal grey and black bands, which hung loose from his shoulders. This he wore, along with chocolate-coloured corduroy trousers, some cedar-smelling cologne — not too much! — then put on his belted raincoat and found his umbrella.

It was a few minutes after 6.00.

Not very fancy was to say the least. The rue Varlin was in a poor quartier near the Canal Saint-Martin and the railyards in the Tenth Arrondissement. Ancient workers’ tenements darkened the narrow street and the taxi slowed as it bumped over broken cobblestones. Said the driver, ‘Are you sure this is where you want to go?’ A concierge, an old woman in a kerchief who walked with two canes, let him in and said, ‘Steiner? On the top floor, monsieur.’ Heading for the staircase, Stahl passed the tenants’ mailboxes. No French names here — Poles, Italians, Germans — this was a building for emigres. The wooden stairs had hollows worn in the centre, a family fight was in progress on the third floor, a hunting cat crept past him and he was happy enough not to see its quarry.

Renate was, as always, all in black, sweater and heavy skirt, with, tonight, nylon stockings and low heels. He liked her mouth, the natural colour of her lips, but this she had ruined with red lipstick and, when he brushed her cheeks left and right, he encountered scented face powder. She was very tense, taking off her glasses and putting them back on. While he had not foreseen her mood, he was carrying a bottle of good Bordeaux, which would do as an antidote. The evening wobbled a little with a search for a strayed corkscrew — ‘I don’t have wine very often,’ she said.

It was a tiny apartment, the parlour furnished with little more than a battered old sofa, green velvet, that looked like a veteran of the flea markets. Smoothed across the back was a piece of Asian-looking fabric, either hiding or decorating. There were lots of books, in home-built bookcases painted red, and in stacks on the floor. A radio, hoarse with faint static, was playing a symphony. When the corkscrew was found, Stahl poured Bordeaux into mismatched water glasses. ‘ Salut,’ he said, wary of more affectionate forms.

They sat on the sofa, talked about Apres la Guerre, talked about the weather. When the first glass of wine had been drunk and the second was on the way, she said, ‘How do you like my little palace?’ gesturing grandly around the room.

‘It’s a lot nicer than the places I lived in when I was here in the twenties,’ he said. ‘At least you have heat.’

‘The building isn’t heated,’ she said. This was common in Paris; in winter people without offices to go to spent the day in heated cafes, reading books or newspapers, making a coffee last all afternoon. ‘I have that thing,’ she said, indicating a kerosene stove in the corner with a pipe that went into the wall, rags stuffed around the opening. ‘My departed husband, not much of a mechanical man, believe me, installed it, but it hasn’t killed me yet.’

‘Perhaps this evening,’ Stahl said. ‘They’ll find us together, dead as mackerels. Very romantic.’

She grinned, the wine was at work. He picked up the bottle and waggled it over her glass, his eyebrows raised. She drank off what remained, said, ‘Please,’ and he refilled her glass. ‘This really is very good,’ she said, and looked at him with her head to one side: and so?

Now? No, later. What’s the hurry? He took out a cigarette and offered her the pack. Delicately, she drew one out and he lit it for her with his lighter. A board on bricks in front of the sofa held a vase of weeds, and a Suze ashtray purloined from a cafe. With one bony finger she moved it towards them. She had, he saw, at least not put polish on her pared-back fingernails.

‘Tell me when you’re hungry,’ she said. ‘I have good ham and butter and a baguette and a salad from the charcuterie.’

‘For the moment, I’ll stay with this,’ he said, holding up his glass.

‘Are you comfortable?’

‘I am, yes.’

‘Why don’t you put your feet up?’

She stood, he raised his legs and stretched out full length. But he’d taken up too much of the sofa. She perched on the edge, then, with a jerk of her head, used a rough expression that meant move it and pressed a soft, heavy hip against his knee, making space for herself. He could have made more room by shifting his legs but didn’t, just stayed as he was, where he could feel the warmth of her body beneath the skirt. ‘Happy like that?’ she said.

He smiled at her. ‘What do you think?’

She took off her glasses and rested them on the arm of the sofa. ‘It’s starting to rain,’ she said.

He could hear the thin patter on the roof above them. He took the wine glass in his left hand and put his right hand on her knee. She looked at it, then back up at him, and, after a moment, covered his hand with hers. He thought about sliding his hand upwards, bringing her skirt with it, then didn’t. For a time they sat like that, the low-volume music and the sound of the rain made the room very still.

Now.

‘I wonder if I could…’

‘ Merde! ’ she said. ‘I forgot I bought candles. It’s too bright in here, isn’t it?’

With a small sigh he said, ‘Much too bright.’

She rose and hurried around the sofa, returning with two short white candles set on saucers. She struck a wooden match on the box, lit the candles, then twisted around and turned off a lamp. Turning back to him she said, ‘You were saying, monsieur?’ Delivered with one of her best ironic smiles.

‘Well, there was a preface to this, but now I’ll just ask you.’

‘And what were you going to ask?’

‘Why don’t you take off your clothes?’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘All right.’ Then, ‘Here? Or go into the other room and come back… without them?’

‘Here. So I can watch you.’

She stood up, rolled her sweater over her head and tossed it on the floor. Then unbuttoned her skirt, let it drop, and stepped out of it. Next the shoes came off, which left her in white bra and panties, garter belt and stockings. ‘Is this what you wanted to see?’

‘Some of it. There’s more.’

But in truth there was a lot. She was bigger than he’d imagined her, heavy breasts, hips, tummy, and thighs. Emphasized by a narrow waist.

‘More?’

‘Yes, everything.’

She bent over, reached behind her back, undid her bra and slid it down her arms, then cradled her breasts with her hands. He was already excited, but this gesture provoked him even more. ‘So,’ she said. ‘Now you’ve seen me.’ Her eyes fastened on his, she raised one of her thumbs and circled it around her nipple, which came erect as he watched.

Suddenly he sat upright, meaning to go and snatch the rest of her clothes off her, but she took two steps towards him, put a hand on his chest and made him lie back. ‘Stay there,’ she said. ‘I like you as a sultan.’

‘A sultan?’

‘Something like that — a ruler who expects to be served.’

‘A sultan. Do you have a towel I can wear on my head?’

She hadn’t moved back and now, standing over him, inches away, she unhooked her garter belt, took it off, and removed her stockings. ‘Anything else you want?’

Growing wildly impatient, he reached for the waistband of her panties but she took his hands and put them on his chest and said, ‘Now, now.’

‘Renate, take your pants down.’

She did, he gazed up at the vee between her legs.

Again he moved his hand towards her but she bent over, put her mouth on his and, as his tongue slid across her lips, climbed on top of him. But he still had his clothes on, so worked his hands beneath her. She gave him a little room, he pulled at the sweater until it bunched under his chin, managed to undo one button on his shirt, then yanked hard and the rest were torn off. Now, back curved, she let the tips of her breasts rub against his bare chest. He lay still for a time, face lit with pleasure, then put his arms around her and held her bottom in his hands and, when he tightened his grip, it drew from her a sharp intake of breath — startled and excited at once.

He let her go and tried to rid himself of his trousers, but she sat upright and worked her way backwards until she straddled his knees. ‘Soon enough,’ she said, ‘but there’s something I want to see.’ In no hurry, she unbuttoned his fly, freed him from his shorts, and, taking it between thumb and two fingers, gave it a few slow strokes, clearly pleased with the view, then lowered her head, met his eyes, and opened her mouth.

Eventually they got his clothes off and went at it; one way, another way — she knelt on the sofa and rested her forehead against the back — and did everything they liked to do. She was not the vocal type, though when the moment came it was accompanied by a series of moaning sighs that every time recharged him, inspired him to start over until, when he once again wanted her, she said, almost laughing, ‘I’m sorry but I don’t think there’s another one in there.’ Then she led him to her bedroom, barely large enough to hold a narrow cot, with a yellowed shade pulled down over the window. There they talked quietly; he told her he loved her curved body, she said she loved the way he touched her, what his hands did to her. Thus they at least used the word, and there was more to say, but with ceaseless fucking and drumming rain and a wintry night in Paris they let it go at that and fell dead asleep.

It was the most adorable little tearoom, with chintz cafe curtains and pink linen tablecloths, on a tree-lined street across from the Tiergarten park, and Olga Orlova often went there when she was in Berlin and not out at the Babelsberg studio making films. That afternoon, the tenth of December, she didn’t have anything in particular to do, so invited Trudi Mueller for tea at four o’clock. Trudi was an easy companion, who saved up tidbits from her daily life and could be depended on for table conversation. Since their encounter at an alpine hotel, when Trudi had revealed her romantic feelings for Orlova, the Russian actress had made sure they saw each other often and stayed friends. It was important, to the clandestine side of Orlova’s life, that there be no bad feelings between them.

Trudi prattled away, a waitress served a pot of tea and a plate of cream-filled pastries, Orlova smiled or frowned on cue, but her mind was far away. One of her couriers, a Swiss attorney called Wendel, was en route to some godforsaken village in the Moroccan desert, and would eventually return to Berlin with payment for the list of Polish names she’d photographed while Trudi was in the bathtub. This list she’d copied — eighteen typed pages! — and sold to the Americans and the British. As for the photographs themselves, they’d gone immediately to her superiors in Moscow, who believed that she was fairly compensated for her work. Very quietly, she disagreed, and sold her stolen secrets to those who would pay dearly to get their hands on them. Orlova had starved in Russia during the civil war that followed the revolution, but now she made sure that would never happen again. She did wonder, sometimes, how long that kind of thing could go on, but put the thought out of her head. In fact, she would have an answer soon enough.

Orlova took a bite of a pastry and, to avoid a cream moustache, was dabbing at her mouth with a pink napkin, when she saw the jolly proprietor making his way across the room. But when he reached Orlova’s table, he wasn’t so jolly. ‘Excuse me, Frau Orlova,’ he said, ‘but there is a call for you on our telephone.’ His voice was professionally courteous but his manner was stiff and uncertain — this sort of thing was unusual and he didn’t care for it, even with a customer who was very much a local celebrity.

To Trudi, Orlova said, ‘Well, I suppose I must answer the telephone,’ and laid her napkin on the table. Orlova the actress seemed mildly surprised and bemused by this intrusion, but Orlova the spy was terrified. The tearoom telephone was a contact point designated for extreme emergencies only, it had never been used before. She followed the proprietor back to the cashier’s counter, picked up the receiver and said, ‘Good afternoon, this is Frau Orlova.’

The chatter in the tearoom was loud and she pressed the receiver to her ear. On the other end of the line: a man’s voice speaking German with a Slavic accent, a man’s voice almost breathless with tension. ‘Get out,’ he said. ‘Right away. Now. This minute. There are Gestapo officers in your apartment.’ Then there was a click as the man disconnected. Orlova saw that the proprietor was hovering nearby so, for his benefit, she spoke to the dead line. ‘Oh yes?’ she said. Then waited as though someone were speaking. After a few seconds she said, ‘Ahh, I see, I’m sorry to hear that.’ Then she said goodbye and replaced the receiver. To the proprietor, who was still standing there, she apologized for the inconvenience. ‘All is well?’ he said.

‘I’m afraid there’s something I must attend to,’ she said, asked for the bill and paid it, her heart hammering inside her.

Back at the table, she said, ‘Trudi dear, please forgive me but I must leave immediately.’

Trudi’s eyes, usually tender and caring, were suddenly wide with alarm. ‘You’ve gone pale,’ she said. ‘What’s happened?’

Orlova took her fur coat from the back of the chair and put it on. ‘I’ve had bad news, I’m afraid I must go to the railway station.’

‘Then let me drive you, I have the car today, Freddi is in Potsdam.’

Orlova started to say no, then realized it would be faster than looking for a taxi and said yes.

Dusk came early to Berlin in December, yet many drivers were stubborn about turning on their headlights and it was hard to see them. At Orlova’s direction, Trudi, knuckles white as she gripped the wheel, worked her way towards the Lehrter Bahnhof, Berlin’s international railway terminal. Watching the traffic as it came at them, Orlova fought for control of her mind, fought to suppress the sharp little flashes of panic so she could concentrate. She doubted she would survive a search of her apartment — the Leica camera, the Walther automatic — and she realized that her time in Berlin was over. Now she had to run, to some other country and, wherever in the world she went, she knew they would take her if they found her.

‘Are you worrying, Olga dear?’

‘What?’

‘Are you worrying, I said. You’re being very quiet.’

‘Yes, I am worried.’

‘Don’t, please don’t. Everything will turn out for the best, I promise.’

Trudi had taken at least two wrong turns, each time provoking loud blasts from the horns of irritated drivers, which made her visibly flinch. Her car was a small Opel and, given the rules of the road in Berlin, drivers of fancier models bullied the cheaper car. But, at last, they reached the Lehrter Bahnhof. Naturally there were crowds of SS men at the entries, and to Orlova’s eyes they looked particularly grim and determined. They were, she thought, waiting for her. The Opel jerked to a stop as Trudi stamped on the brakes and said, ‘Sorry.’ Then, ‘Well, here we are. Where are you going? Can you tell me?’

‘Zurich.’

‘Is there someone in Zurich…’ Trudi didn’t quite know how to finish this question but Orlova understood what she meant: a lover, perhaps a secret lover. For Trudi, a rival.

Possible answers tumbled across Orlova’s mind; my beloved aunt, who has only days to live, my oldest friend, who has only days to live, but none of them sounded credible. Heavy traffic moved about the station, busy this time of night with travellers coming and going. Finally, Orlova said, ‘Trudi, I think I had better tell you something. The fact is, I’m in trouble.’

‘I knew it! I felt it!’

‘Trouble with the Gestapo.’

‘My God! What have you done?’

‘Nothing. But I have enemies, vicious enemies who are jealous of my connections with important people, and they’ve spread terrible rumours about me. I didn’t think that anyone would believe such things, but I was wrong.’

‘You’re running away, Olga, aren’t you.’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘They’ll catch you if you try to get on a train, that’s where they look for people, it’s in the newspapers all the time.’

‘I know,’ Orlova said. She had with her two passports, one her own, the other a false passport, a Swiss passport, with a different name. She always carried a lot of money, that was a basic rule of clandestine life. What she had to do was become that other woman, and get out of Germany. ‘Trudi,’ she said, ‘can you find a small hotel somewhere?’

‘I don’t see why not,’ Trudi said, pressed the clutch to the floor and forced the shift into first gear.

Driving away from the station, she took side streets, until they came upon a small building with a sign over the door, HOTEL LUXURIA. Trudi parked the car and the two women entered the hotel. Yes, they had a room available. When asked about luggage, Orlova explained that they’d missed their train and left their luggage in the baggage room. And, by the way, was there a pharmacy nearby? There was, a block away on the Bernauer Strasse.

It was a tired little room, a commercial traveller’s room: twin beds with thin, floral coverlets, a single chair, a rusty sink, WC down the hall. Orlova described what she needed and, once Trudi headed off to the pharmacy, she lay down on one of the beds and stared up at the lightbulb in the ceiling. If she did manage to get away, what would she do with her life? She had money in Switzerland, enough to last for a few years if she lived frugally. As a fugitive, her movie star days were over. But then, her spying days were also over. What would it be like to live in obscurity, quiet as a mouse, always waiting for a knock on the door? A German knock, or a Russian knock. My God, she thought, they will all come looking for me.

Twenty minutes later, Trudi returned, with scissors and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. Orlova said, ‘Trudi, you are going to cut my hair. Short, very short, above the ears, like a boy.’

‘I don’t really know how, I’m afraid I’ll make a mess of it.’

‘No matter, just snip away, and when you’re done you’re going to make me a blonde.’

Trudi took a deep breath; she couldn’t say no to her friend, she just had to be careful and take her time. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I’ll do as you ask. But if I’m going to use the peroxide, you’d better take off your dress, and your slip.’ After a last look at her old self in the cloudy mirror above the sink, and as Trudi, scissors in hand, watched her, Orlova undressed.

The following morning, the newly blonde and boyish Orlova stood at the door, anxious to leave. But when she put her hand on the knob, Trudi stopped her. ‘Wait, please wait,’ she said. ‘Just a few seconds. I lay awake for a long time last night, thinking about myself, and about my life, and I made a decision. Olga, I don’t want to lose you, I want to run away with you if you’ll let me. I know it will be difficult, and I will have to write to Freddi and tell him what I’ve done, but I don’t want to go back to him. I want to follow my heart, I want to stay with you.’

Orlova was moved by this and showed it. And with all the kindness she could muster she said, ‘You know I can’t let you do that. Sharing the life of a fugitive will not make you happy. Please don’t cry. I will never forget what you said, Trudi, I will always remember you, but I must go on alone.’

For a moment, Trudi fought back tears. Finally she said, ‘All right, Olga, I understand, so I have only one last request. I would like a kiss, a kiss goodbye, a real kiss.’

They held each other, the kiss was warm and slow and touched with sadness. Then they left the hotel. At Orlova’s direction, Trudi drove out of Berlin to nearby Wannsee. From there, Orlova spent a long day taking local trains until she reached the city of Frankfurt where, at the main terminal, she bought a ticket and, an hour later, was on her way to Prague.

18 December. Early in the morning, Stahl left Renate’s apartment and returned to the Claridge. In the bathroom mirror, he found shadows beneath his eyes — that dissolute Colonel Vadic — so used a washcloth and cold water as a compress. Perhaps this helped, but not much. By nine o’clock he was out at Joinville, where they had to do retakes of scenes that hadn’t, for a variety of reasons, turned out right. A mysterious hand on the back of a chair, a hat magically gone in mid-conversation, a line badly delivered, Pasquin’s sergeant saying, ‘Jean, let me try that again.’ Before they started shooting, the make-up man worked on Stahl and removed the evidence of a night rather too well spent.

When Renate Steiner arrived on the set, carrying a different tunic for the lieutenant, she seemed all business, but she glanced at Stahl and a certain look passed between them. It was the look of those who see each other for the first time after making love, for the first time, the night before, and it made his heart soar. Then a technician approached with a question and Stahl had to turn away, but he would not forget that moment. Renate held up the ‘blood’-spattered tunic by the shoulders and said to Avila, ‘This will be much better, Jean. Now he’s really been shot.’

At the end of the day, Stahl walked over to Renate’s workroom but she wasn’t there so he returned to the hotel and telephoned her. He would pick her up at 7.30, they would have dinner at Balzar, an active, noisy bistro in the Sixth. ‘We can have the mache-betterave,’ he said, a salad of beets and sweet little clumps of mache lettuce with a mustard-flavoured dressing. ‘Then perhaps a steak-frites or a ragout of veal. Everything there is good.’

When he arrived at the rue Varlin tenement, the concierge welcomed him back with a sly but affectionate smile: she knew, she approved. On the top floor, Renate was still getting dressed so Stahl sat on the sofa, recalling favoured details of what had gone on there the night before. When the telephone rang, Renate said ‘Now what?’ and answered with a brusque ‘Hello?’ She listened for a moment, then turned to Stahl, clearly puzzled, and said, ‘It’s for you. How would…’ She didn’t finish the question, simply handed him the receiver.

‘Yes?’ he said.

‘Is it Herr Stahl on the line?’

‘Yes, who is this?’

‘My name doesn’t matter, Herr Stahl, not at the moment, anyhow. I’ll tell you when we meet.’ His German was refined and educated, his voice smooth.

‘Why would we meet?’

‘I believe you might be able to help us. We’re trying to resolve a

… trying to resolve certain questions that involve your friend Olga Orlova — the actress. Have you seen her lately?’

‘No. What questions are you talking about?’

‘Mmm, better that we discuss these things in person. Are you planning a visit to Germany any time soon?’

‘I’m not.’

‘No matter, we can meet in Paris. Always a pleasure to be there.’

‘Herr whatever-your-name-is, I don’t think I can help you. My regrets, but I must go now.’

‘Of course. I understand,’ the man said, his voice sympathetic. ‘Perhaps my colleagues in Paris will be in touch with you.’

Stahl handed the receiver back to Renate and she hung up. Shaken, he reached for the cigarette pack in his pocket.

Renate stood there for a moment, silent and uncertain, then said, ‘Were you expecting a telephone call here?’ She was being careful, trying to make the question sound offhand; she didn’t mind, she was just curious. Then she added, ‘From someone who speaks German?’

‘No, it was as much of a surprise to me as it was to you.’

‘Then how did he know where you were?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘This is very strange,’ she said. ‘Has it happened before?’

She won’t let it go. So, how much to tell her? With a sigh in his voice he said, ‘I am, unfortunately, of some interest to certain German officials. The worst kind of German officials.’

‘Oh. Well now I understand. German officials of the worst kind who are evidently following you around the city. Will they be joining us for dinner?’

‘Renate, please, if you can find a way to ignore this…’

She cut him off. ‘I’m an emigre, Fredric, a political refugee. I don’t like strange phone calls.’ She was going to continue but something suddenly occurred to her — from her expression, something she’d almost forgotten. ‘Does this have anything to do with that vile little Austrian who appeared on the set? The man in the alpine costume?’

Stahl nodded, and tapped the ash from his cigarette into the Suze ashtray. ‘The same crowd. They’ve been bothering me ever since I came to Paris.’

She thought it over. ‘Is that why you went to Berlin? To appease these people?’

Now he had to lie. He couldn’t reveal what he’d done in Berlin. ‘No, the Warner publicity people liked the idea, so I agreed to go.’

‘You couldn’t refuse?’

‘Let’s say I didn’t, maybe I should have.’

She took off her glasses, her faded blue eyes searching his face, her witchy nose scenting a lie. Finally she said, ‘I want to believe you…’

She didn’t finish the sentence but he knew what came next. He looked at his watch. ‘Maybe we should…’

‘That telephone call scared me, Fredric. I know these people and what they do, I saw it, in Germany, and now it’s here, in this room.’

‘Which is my fault, but I don’t think I can do anything about it, except walk away from the movie and leave France. Is that what I should do?’

‘You’d better not.’

‘Then we have to live with it.’ He rested his cigarette on the ashtray, took her hands in his and held them tight. ‘Can you do that?’

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

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

‘That’s for later.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Am I going to be taking notes?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘They never quit, do they.’

‘Well, not yet they haven’t.’

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

‘What’s that?’

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

‘The man on the phone certainly sounded confident.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Is she in Moscow?’

‘For her sake, I hope not.’

‘She is a survivor,’ Stahl said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stahl said he would.

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

‘I’m going to Hungary.’

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

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

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

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

20 December.

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

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

Holding the receiver, Stahl looked around him.

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

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

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

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

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

Out at Joinville that morning, Stahl asked Avila when they were going to Hungary. ‘A few days from now,’ Avila said. ‘Paramount has rented the castle, and we can stay in the rooms there, most of us anyhow. There’s a hotel in the town for everyone else. Wait till you see it, Fredric, the location is perfect.’ So much for Stahl’s faint hope that the trip might be cancelled. He worked with particular concentration that day, making a point to himself: he wasn’t going to allow voices on a telephone or someone waving from a window to distract him from doing his best. He did think about it, between takes, but finally realized this led nowhere and turned his mind to other things.

By four o’clock Stahl was back at the hotel, where a square parcel in brown paper awaited him at the desk. Holding it in his hands — it hardly weighed anything — his defensive instincts surged: another one of their tricks? But the return address on the package said, B. Mehlman, The William Morris Agency and Stahl relaxed — his agent had sent him a Christmas present. In the room, he tore off the brown wrapping, which revealed fancy gift paper, silver stars on a blue background, tied with a red ribbon. Given the size of the box, Stahl suspected sweaters. Not like Buzzy to do this, he’d never done it before, perhaps it heralded good news about his career. The card would tell the story — where was it? No doubt in the box. And so it was. A small sealed envelope lay on crumpled white paper, in the middle of what he realized — after a few seconds of blank incomprehension — was a garrotte. Sickened by the look of the thing, he held it up and examined it: some kind of very strong cord, like a bowstring, that had a knot in the middle and two wooden handles. With some difficulty, his hands not their usual selves, he tore open the envelope and read the card, which said, in German, ‘Merry Christmas’.

He went out a few minutes later and eventually came upon an alley where, by the open back door of a restaurant, he found a garbage can and threw the box on top of a mound of potato peelings. The card he kept.

21 December.

Renate had to work late so Stahl, in for the evening, had a brandy and started a new Van Dine murder mystery. He’d thought about going to a movie — the Marx Brothers’ Room Service was playing nearby — but preferred to stay home and rest. He wasn’t precisely afraid, he just didn’t want to be out in the street. Some combination of Philo Vance and brandy had him dozing by 10.20, when the telephone rang. He went over to the desk and watched it for a ring or two, then thought what the hell and picked it up. And was relieved when a voice on the other end said, ‘Hello, Fredric, it’s Kiki,’ but then, a moment later, not so relieved. This was not a late-evening call from a former lover — there was real urgency in her voice as she said, ‘Fredric, there’s something I must tell you, it has nothing to do with, with you and me, it’s something… very different. And not for the telephone. Can you meet me at a cafe? It’s not far from your hotel, a little place on the rue de la Tremoille. Please say yes.’ Whatever motive lay behind the call he did not know, but it wasn’t seduction. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Are you at this cafe?’

‘I can be there in twenty minutes.’

Stahl paced the room for a time, then threw a trench coat on and left the hotel.

The rue de la Tremoille was lined with imperious apartment houses built, lavishly, in the nineteenth century — here there were rich people. But it was after ten at night and the street was dark and silent, a condition that the inhabitants, inside their fortresses, no doubt found restful and much to their taste. Not so Stahl. Wilkinson’s cautionary words, about being aware of where you were, echoed in his memory. Not a soul to be seen, not a light visible in the draped windows. When a car’s headlights turned a corner and came up behind him, he stepped into a doorway. Slowly, as though the driver were searching for something, the heavy car rumbled past, its taillights glowed red for a moment, then it went on its way.

Minutes later, Stahl found the cafe, an old-fashioned oasis in the desert of a fashionable neighborhood. Inside it was all amber walls and a haze of Gauloises smoke, and crowded with the usual cast of characters: old women with their dogs, men in workers’ caps at the bar, lovers without a place to go. From a far corner, Kiki waved to him and Stahl wound his way past the close-set tables, and they kissed hello. Kiki, despite the cloud of expensive perfume, seemed to be playing a chaste version of herself; the seductress make-up was gone, leaving her fresh-faced and younger, and she wore a sweater of very soft wool in a colour that reminded Stahl of mocha cream. Inside the shawl collar of the sweater, a silk scarf decorated with gold anchors replaced her pearl necklace. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said, meaning it. ‘You sounded like you were half-asleep.’

‘I was,’ Stahl said.

‘I should’ve called earlier,’ Kiki said, ‘but I couldn’t make up my mind, and I was afraid you’d just hang up on me.’

‘That’s not like you, Kiki.’

‘No, I suppose it isn’t, but you’ll see why. Are you going to order something?’

‘I don’t really want coffee, it will keep me awake. Anyhow, I’m getting more curious by the moment, so…’

Kiki took a breath, then said, ‘I’m here as a messenger, Fredric. And the message comes from the Baroness von Reschke. She knew you wouldn’t agree to see her, and she regrets that, though she does understand. But I must tell you this: when she told me what she wanted me to say to you she was, how to put it, intense, serious, and not her usual self — you know what she’s like.’

‘I do know,’ Stahl said. ‘All charm and smiles, the baroness.’

‘Not when I saw her. She wanted to make sure, absolutely sure, that you received what she called “a final warning”. According to her, certain people, her words, no explanation, certain people require your cooperation, and it would be unwise not to help them. What she said was, “please make him understand that he won’t be warned again.” Does that make any sense to you?’

‘It does.’

‘Who are these people, to threaten you?’

‘Being in the movies, Kiki, doesn’t shield you from what goes on in the real world. And the people she’s talking about are very much from the real world, where politics is a game with no rules, and they’re determined to make me help them.’

‘Do you know who they are?’

‘Well, they’re friends of the baroness, and sure of her to the point that they’ve used her, and thus you, to send their message.’

She stared at him. ‘What if you don’t do what they want? Are you in danger?’

‘Not really. You shouldn’t worry about it, and I’ll only be in Paris for a few more weeks.’

‘I care for you, Fredric, being with you meant a lot to me. I don’t want you to be — hurt.’

‘Likely that won’t happen, though it’s hard to predict.’

‘What shall I tell her? She said, “I must have an answer,” and she meant it. Not like her at all, not the baroness I know. Suddenly, right there in her parlour, she was a different woman. Cold, and almost, well, cruel.’

‘The answer is that you gave me the message. I heard what she wanted me to hear.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘No, nothing else.’

‘Fredric’ — she reached across the table and took his hand in hers — ‘is there anything I can do to help you?’

He shook his head. ‘Leave it alone, Kiki. Forget this happened. There is no point in your being involved, in fact there’s every reason you shouldn’t be.’

She let go of his hand and sat back. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘But the offer is still there, if you change your mind.’

Amid the low burble and clatter of the night-time cafe, Stahl was silent for a time, then leaned forward and said, ‘Kiki, maybe I shouldn’t ask, but I will anyhow. Are you more a part of this than you’re telling me?’

Slowly, she shook her head. ‘I’m only Kiki de Saint-Ange, Fredric, that’s all I know how to be. And when you go back to America I’ll just be a girl you knew in Paris.’

Stahl and Renate spent Christmas Eve together — had a champagne supper served in his suite, then stayed for the night. Renate Steiner was a supremely sophisticated woman, but a supremely sophisticated woman who had lived in penury for a long time and Stahl was secretly delighted to watch as the luxurious surroundings went to her head. A glass of champagne in hand, she took a bubble bath in the glorious bathroom, then, pink and excited, lounged around the suite in Stahl’s pyjamas as the radio played Christmas carols — ‘O the rising of the sun, the running of the deer’. Finally, drunk and happy, they went to bed, made love, and woke in the morning to the icy fog of a northern European winter.

Late that morning they took a taxi to Renate’s apartment, where she was giving a buffet lunch for her emigre friends. Perhaps twenty people were packed into the tiny apartment, all of them fugitives; artists, leftists, Jews, the sort of people the Nazis loathed, the sort of people the Nazis murdered. A ragtag lot, all of them poor to one degree or another. The lunch was abundant — Stahl saw to that — and practically all of it was eaten. And drunk. A few tears were shed, and La Belle France was toasted as their saviour, though one of the guests turned to Stahl and whispered, ‘For the time being, anyhow.’ Stahl had visited his bank the day before and, as a line of guests left en masse — ‘I don’t want these opened at the party,’ he’d told Renate — each was given an envelope containing a thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills. He was plenty rich enough to make such gestures, and so he did.

Trouble came the following day, from an unexpected direction, and it also affected a group of emigres, including Stahl and Renate. Avila called a meeting of the cast and crew on the set, where he announced that Paramount had declined to pay for air travel to Budapest. The cast and crew would, the studio executives had declared, have to go by train. A certain hush fell over the set when Avila said this. It took a moment, but soon enough everybody realized what that meant: the eleven emigres working on Apres la Guerre could not cross the German border. The Gestapo list of those who had fled Germany illegally was precise and thorough, and the emigres would certainly be arrested. And to reach Hungary from France you had to go through Germany. ‘Deschelles fought hard,’ Avila explained, ‘but the Paramount executives wouldn’t budge. As Jules put it to me, ‘I did the best I could, but I am an ant and they are a thumb.’

In the discussion that followed, the emigres didn’t say much, but the rest of the company was passionate on their behalf. ‘We are a family,’ Justine Piro said. ‘Every good production company becomes a family, we can’t leave people behind.’ At the end of the discussion, it was worked out that the eleven would fly on a small chartered aeroplane; Deschelles would ‘borrow’ some money from production funds, and those who could afford it — which meant Stahl, paying for himself and Renate, and two others making high salaries — would contribute. Avila would donate, and so would Piro, Pasquin, and Gilles Brecker. At the end of the discussion, a carpenter from Hamburg, formerly a communist streetfighter, stood and thanked everyone there. ‘I’ll tell you it’s a fucking pity,’ Pasquin said to Stahl as the meeting broke up, ‘that the whole country won’t work this way.’

Early on the morning of 28 December, Stahl took a taxi to Le Bourget. As they left the city, the driver said, ‘Excuse me, monsieur, is it possible that someone is following you?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Because there’s a car that’s been behind us at every turn.’ Then, with the bellicose flair of the Parisian taxi driver, he said, ‘I’ll lose them if you want me to, monsieur.’ Stahl told him not to bother. An hour later he was in an aeroplane, looking down at the snow-dusted forests of Germany.

28 December.

They circled Budapest as the lights of the city came on, then landed at the nearby airfield. The customs officers were amiable enough, smiling and silent as they stamped passports — silent because they knew that nobody spoke Hungarian, and they didn’t care to conduct business in German, the second language of Hungary, and what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Next, the eleven emigres crowded into two rattletrap taxis. Avila had given Stahl a hand-drawn map of the castle’s location, near the Danubian port of Komarom, and Stahl handed it to the taxi drivers. After some head scratching and a spirited argument, inspiration struck and the taxis drove off over snow-covered roads. Soon enough the driving grew difficult, the bald tyres spun, the drivers cursed, everybody got out and pushed. Finally, at the edge of a tiny village, the drivers gave up. ‘Can’t go,’ said one of them in rudimentary German. Stahl paid him, the driver said they should stay where they were and that someone would come for them. Then the taxis got turned around and headed back towards Budapest.

As the emigres stood by their baggage, rubbing their hands and stamping their feet, they wondered what would become of them. A cold hour passed, and just when they’d decided to walk into the village, they heard the jingling of little bells. Then, from the darkness, there appeared two sleighs, each of them drawn by two immense horses. Once again, Stahl produced his map, but these drivers took one glance and knew where they were going. The emigres seated themselves in the sleighs and were then covered by large blankets, more like rugs, thick wool with canvas backing. A crown and Cross-of-Lorraine design, red on grey, decorated the wool, which smelled like horse sweat and manure. At last, with long plumes steaming from the horses’ nostrils, they trotted off towards Komarom.

The moon cast blue-tinted light on the snow and, except for the muffled clop of hooves, the jingling bells, and the occasional gentle ‘hup’ of the driver, there wasn’t a sound to be heard. ‘We’ve gone back in time,’ Renate said as she pressed against Stahl, sharing his warmth. The road wound through a forest, where bare branches glittered with ice in the moonlight, then returned to the white fields. Far off in the distance, they heard two wolves, howling back and forth. The grinning driver turned halfway round and, rubbing his tummy, said something in Hungarian which made him laugh. After an hour or so, and just as the frigid air started to hurt the skin on their faces, a dark, massive silhouette appeared in the distance. The driver pointed with his whip and said, ‘Castle Polanyi.’

In the moonlight, the castle rose from a hill high above the grey Danube. A jagged ruin, black as soot, destroyed not so much by time as by stones flung from siege machines, by cannon, by fire, by the wars of three hundred years. Here and there, broken towers climbed above the crumbling battlements. The castle’s factotum, manager of noble estates, greeted the frozen travellers at the end of a bridge over the empty moat, and led them into a rebuilt part of the castle, then up a stone stairway where rooms awaited them, each with a blazing fire. As the factotum, who introduced himself as Csaba, pronounced chaba, showed Stahl his room, he said that the Count Polanyi intended to visit the castle while filming was in progress. ‘You should be honoured,’ said Csaba. ‘He doesn’t often come here, except in hunting season. The count is a diplomat at the Hungarian legation in Paris. A great man, you shall see.’ Stahl and Renate stayed together, huddled under many blankets, the chill air in the room so cold that Stahl slid out of bed from time to time and added a log to the fire.

As night fell on the following day, the cast and crew arrived from Budapest. ‘We only just made it,’ Avila told Stahl. ‘There were trucks waiting for us at the railway station, but we had to stop and dig them out of the snow every few miles.’ In the morning, the last day of December, the last day of 1938, they once again began work on Apres la Guerre.

In the movie it was autumn, but in Komarom it was winter, so two of the count’s stablemen shovelled the snow off the castle’s courtyard. The prop man had brought large burlap bags of dead leaves and, with the help of a fan, these blew across the ancient sett stones. Stahl, in his legionnaire’s uniform, and Piro, in black kerchief and a man’s torn coat, sat on a low wall, where the leaves swirled past their feet — to be gathered at the far end of the courtyard and sent across again, though the rough surface did them no good. Once Avila had the camera properly angled, so that it captured the profile of the black tower above them, the day’s shooting began.

‘I think,’ Ilona says, ‘before we go in there, I must tell you the truth about myself.’

‘What truth is that?’ says Vadic, his hair ruffled handsomely by the leaf fan.

‘I am no countess, Colonel Vadic. It was all… a lie.’

‘Are you Ilona? Are you Hungarian?’

‘I am Ilona and, at least on my mother’s side, Hungarian. I was afraid you wouldn’t take me along, so I made up a story.’

‘Oh well, it was nice to have a countess with us. I suppose that if we go in there, they won’t greet you with open arms.’

A rueful smile. ‘They will stare at me, they will wonder, “who is this ragged woman, pretending to be a countess?”’

‘Beautiful woman, I’d say.’

‘You flatter me, but I don’t believe they’ll care. They will have the servants throw us out, or worse.’

They will — a reluctant nod from Colonel Vadic. ‘So, no jewels, no loyal lady’s maid.’

‘No, colonel. Not even dinner. It was only my daydream of a different life.’

‘Well, all is not lost. We shall just be wayfaring strangers, going home after the war. They still might feed us.’

‘Are you angry with me? I wouldn’t blame you.’

‘I can’t be angry, Ilona, not with you. And beautiful women are allowed a few lies.’

As they sit for a moment in silence, a noisy flock of crows — no part of the script — lands on the tower above the wall. Then Ilona says, ‘Why do you keep saying I am beautiful? Just look at me.’

‘To me you have always been beautiful, from the first moment I saw you.’

She looks up at him and in her eyes, in the subtle alteration of her face, is the slow comprehension of what he’s been trying to say. Slowly, he leans towards her, he is going to kiss her but a voice from a window shouts ‘Get out of here, you filthy tramps.’

‘Cut!’ Avila said. ‘Let’s try another take, that can’t have been as good as I thought it was.’ Then, to the soundman, ‘Gerard, let’s keep those crows. Have somebody throw a stone up there, maybe we can get them to caw for the next take.’

Count Janos Polanyi arrived late in the afternoon and, by way of Csaba, let Avila, Stahl, and Justine Piro know they were expected for dinner at 8.30. The dining room had a long table of polished walnut and vases of fresh flowers. In December, fresh flowers. Polanyi was well into his sixties, a large, heavy man with thick white hair, who smelled of bay rum, cigar smoke, and wine, and wore a blue suit cut by a London tailor. He had the easy warmth of a wealthy host, and the distance of power and privilege.

The main course was a spit-roasted haunch of venison. In response to the exclamations of delight at the first taste, the count said, ‘I would like you to think this came from a great stag, that I brought down with a single shot. But the truth is, I picked it up at my Paris butcher on the way to the airport.’ Thus Polanyi. A brief rumble of a laugh followed, joined by the guests at the table.

With the pears and local cheese, and having drunk more than his share of Echezeaux Burgundy, Polanyi became reflective. ‘My poor old battered castle,’ he said. ‘It’s the border of northern Hungary now — the treaty that followed the Great War turned the other side of the river into Czech territory. But for this castle, it was just one more war. It began life as a Roman fortification, was taken by the Hungarian Grand Duke Arpad in 895 — legend has it that the Milky Way was formed from the dust raised by his army’s horses. Then it was destroyed in 1241 by the Mongolian Tartars — a costly invasion, half the people of Hungary were murdered. Rebuilt, it was besieged by the Turks in 1683, then recaptured by Charles of Lorraine in 1684. History has always been bloody in this part of the world, and is about to be once again. But, what can we do. Now we’ll have to sign some sort of treaty with Hitler and his thugs and, once the French and the British have dealt with them, oh how we shall suffer for that.’ He paused for a time, then said, ‘Well, here comes the brandy, would anyone care to join me for a cigar?’

1 January, 1939.

New Year’s Day for much of the world, but there were no holidays for film crews on location. But Stahl didn’t mind. As long as production went smoothly, the reality of a good location inspired the cast, so Stahl was eager to work. At breakfast, on trestle tables set up in the entry hall, the company raised their cups of coffee or tea and drank to a better year in 1939, peace on earth, good will towards men.

But not just yet.

As Stahl rose to leave, the cameraman came running down the stairway, his face blank with shock. ‘Jean!’ he shouted. ‘The cameras have been stolen!’

The room had gone dead silent. Avila stood up and said, ‘What?’

‘They were taken from the room we’re using for storage. Sometime last night.’

‘We’ll have to find cameras in Budapest,’ Avila said. ‘How could this happen?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ He was frantic, close to tears.

‘Calm down, Jean-Paul. Was the door locked?’

‘No, there’s no lock. All I found was…’ He gave Avila a piece of paper. Avila read it twice, then handed it to Stahl. ‘What do you make of this?’

The note was in German, hand-printed in ink, and said, ‘If you want your cameras back it will cost you a thousand American dollars.’ Then went on to describe an inn, outside the town of Szony. ‘If you alert the police,’ it went on, ‘you will never see your cameras again. Come to this place promptly at 5.15 tonight.’ There was no signature.

‘Jean,’ Stahl said, ‘I must speak with you in private.’

They went out into the hallway, where Stahl told Avila what was going on. Not all of it, there wasn’t time, but enough. German secret police, he said, were after him because of a suspected connection with a woman who had been spying on the Nazi leadership. ‘This could be a coincidence, Jean, just a simple robbery, but I don’t believe in coincidence. This theft is my fault, and I will be the one to go to the inn, pay the ransom, and get the cameras back.’

Avila, too well aware of conspiracy and its strategies, wasn’t slow to see the implications of the note: Stahl lured to some isolated place and abducted. ‘You are the target, Fredric, and so you can’t be the one to go — I will take care of this. However, we can do nothing without telling Polanyi, it happened in his house, he’ll never forgive us if we don’t tell him.’

‘But he will involve the police, and we’ll lose the cameras.’

‘Then we’ll have to insist. It’s our equipment, and we’re responsible for retrieving it. That means me and one other person, because you can’t go anywhere near that inn.’

‘Jean, we have to see Polanyi, right away. Then, later on, you and I can argue. But I warn you, I can’t just sit here, I cannot. Will not. Because if something happened to you I couldn’t live with it. As for the money, I’ve got about six hundred dollars with me, and we’ll have to find the rest.’

‘I have it,’ Avila said. ‘I brought dollars with me, because they work when nothing else will. Christ, what an evil thing to do.’

They went off in search of Csaba, who led them upstairs to Polanyi’s suite of rooms. The count, in a green satin dressing gown with lime silk lapels, was having his breakfast. An egg cup, of near translucent porcelain, held a boiled egg with its top neatly sliced off. Tiny spoon in hand, he said good morning as Csaba showed them into his room. When Avila told him what had happened, and added Stahl’s explanation, Polanyi barely responded — raised eyebrows, little more. As a diplomat, he was conditioned to hearing bad news and had long ago learned not to react to it. ‘Very brazen of them,’ he said, ‘to sneak in here at night. What do the Nazis want with a thousand dollars?’

‘Perhaps,’ Stahl said, ‘to make it look like the work of a local thief. Who would get nothing like a thousand dollars from some pawnbroker.’

Polanyi almost smiled. ‘A local thief? Clearly they’ve never met the local thief. Tell me, what exactly did they take?’

‘Five Mitchell Standard film cameras, packed in five large suitcases. The tripods travel separately.’

‘Well, if they’re at Szony, you’ll soon have them back.’

‘Will you notify the police?’

‘In Budapest, I would. There are detectives there who could take care of this in a hurry. But, out here in the countryside, we have the gendarmerie, and they aren’t… what we need. But, gentlemen, don’t despair! I have a couple of friends in the neighbourhood, old cavalry friends from the war. And they know how to deal with people who do such things.’

‘Count Polanyi,’ Stahl said, ‘this happened because of me, and I am honour-bound to take part in the recovery.’

Now Polanyi did smile, a bittersweet smile. He put his spoon down by the egg cup and said, ‘Honour-bound, are you? It’s been some time since I’ve heard that expression, people don’t often use it these days. So then, you wish to come along with us? Is that what you want?’

‘“Us” you say. Does that mean you’re going?’

‘It is my house, sir. And my honour that has been affronted. So of course I will go.’

Stahl had been rebuked and he showed it.

And then, after a moment’s thought, Polanyi relented. ‘Oh all right,’ he said. ‘I do understand.’ With a sigh he put his hands on his knees, rose to his feet, walked across the room to an elaborate antique dresser and opened the top drawer. From which he took a well-worn leather holster that held an automatic pistol with an extra clip bound to the barrel with a rubber band. Handing it to Stahl he said, ‘Have you ever used one of these?’

‘Only in the movies, with blank cartridges.’

Polanyi nodded and said, ‘Naturally. Well, you won’t need it, but bring it along.’ Then, after a glance at his cooling egg, he looked at his watch and said, ‘Now, gentlemen, I must get dressed. It is the first day of the new year, and I will be going to mass.’

Polanyi’s friends arrived before three, Csaba came for Stahl and he went downstairs to meet them. They were both in their late forties, Ferenc and Anton, with dark eyes and black moustaches. Tall and lean and weathered, they looked to Stahl as though they’d spent their lives on horseback. Stahl was wearing the holstered automatic on his belt and, after they’d all been introduced, Ferenc said, ‘What’ve you got there?’ Stahl drew the pistol and handed it to him grip first. Ferenc had a professional look at it, worked the slide, then said, ‘Very good, the Frommer 7.65, our military sidearm for a long time. Do you plan to shoot somebody?’

‘I don’t plan on it but, if I have to, I will.’

‘Well, if it turns out that way, and sometimes it does, just aim for the centre of the body and you may hit something. Of course, with a weapon like this, closer is always better.’ Ferenc handed the pistol back to Stahl and said, ‘We should be leaving in about ten minutes.’

Stahl returned to his room, where Renate awaited him. Earlier, when he’d told her what he was going to do, she’d simply said, ‘I see,’ in the flat voice of the practised fatalist but, after he’d buttoned up his warm jacket, she put her arms around him, pulled him close, and held him tight. Then she stepped back and said, ‘Now you can go, but for God’s sake be careful.’

A low, cloudy sky that afternoon, with winter light and a liquid tang in the air that meant it would snow. Polanyi appeared in the entry hall, dressed for hunting, a shotgun held by the barrels resting on his shoulder. Ferenc and Anton, rifles slung on their backs, holstered pistols on their hips, joined them. ‘So, off we go,’ Polanyi said.

‘How do we get there?’ Stahl said. All afternoon he’d been apprehensive about horseback riding. He could do it, he’d done it, but he wasn’t good at it.

‘By launch,’ Polanyi said. ‘Szony is just down the river from here, maybe twenty minutes — the current is with us.’

‘I thought the note said five-fifteen,’ Stahl said.

The courteous Polanyi, trying to hide his amusement, said, ‘Indeed it did, but it might be a good idea to have a look at the place in daylight.’ He patted Stahl on the shoulder with a heavy hand. We’ll be fine.

They walked down the hill to a wooden dock, its pilings forced askew by the downstream tide. The launch was small and compact, with flaking grey paint on its hull — one more working boat on a commercial river — but when Polanyi started it up the engine roared with power before he cut back the throttle. Nobody said much — a compulsion to chatter when facing action was considered to be bad form. As Polanyi steered for the centre of the river, Stahl, standing on the deck behind the open wheelhouse, could feel the heavy strength of the current. Polanyi, raising his voice over the chug of the engine, said, ‘In one way we’re lucky — usually the Danube would be frozen up by now, but not this year.’

Twenty minutes later they passed the port of Szony, on the same side of the river as Komarom, and larger than Stahl had imagined, where two Danube freighters were being serviced at a refuelling dock. Then, once the port had fallen astern, Ferenc, standing watch at the bow, said, ‘There it is.’ Partly hidden by the tangle of poplar and willow that traced the shoreline, was a one-storey building of wooden slats with a faded sign above its door and its windows boarded up. Looking past the inn, Stahl caught a glimpse of the road that ran along the river on the Hungarian side.

Once the launch, following a slight curve, had passed the inn and it was no longer visible, Polanyi slowed the engine. Turning to Stahl he said, ‘I think I know what they were planning. Once they’d got hold of you, all they had to do was throw you in the boot of a car, drive west to Komarom, then take the bridge across to Slovakian territory. Slovakia is Germany’s great friend — they hate the Czechs — and from there it’s not that far to the Reich, and a cellar on the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, Gestapo headquarters.’ Stepping partway out of the wheelhouse, he called out, ‘Hey Ferenc, is the road passable?’

‘It’s snow-covered, but I’ve already seen a small truck go by. Not driving fast, but making way well enough.’

Polanyi cut the engine back and steered the boat towards the shoreline. At the stern, Anton tossed an anchor over the side, and the launch tugged at it but stayed where it was. ‘Now we wait,’ Polanyi said and shut the engine off. He took a silver flask from his pocket, had a drink, then passed it to Stahl, saying, ‘This will keep you warm.’ It was fruit brandy in the flask, slivovitz, distilled from plums. Stahl remembered it well — a good way to get plastered when he’d been a teenager in Vienna.

By four-thirty, the twilight was fading fast, soon enough it would be dark. A rowing boat suspended from davits at the stern was lowered into the water by Polanyi and Ferenc. ‘We’re going to have a look at the inn,’ Polanyi said to Stahl. ‘If somebody tries to board the launch, shoot him, don’t waste time on conversation. Otherwise, your job is to wait here.’

Stahl acknowledged the order and settled on the landward side of the launch, his back against the wall of the wheelhouse. The rowing boat moved off into the marsh at the edge of the river and, once the dip of the oars could no longer be heard, the silence deepened, broken only by gusts of wind that rustled the high reeds. Staring into the darkness, he thought he saw a momentary gleam of light near the inn — perhaps a flashlight — then it was dark once again. As the brandy’s warmth wore off, Stahl felt the cold, and wanted to move around but stayed where he was. If the launch was being watched, he wasn’t going to make himself an easy target. He couldn’t see the dial on his watch, but guessed the time set for the meeting had passed.

Then, in the distance, he heard a voice. Only a syllable or two, maybe a shout, maybe a cry of alarm, he couldn’t tell. Staying low, he moved to the railing and opened the holster, drawing the automatic, holding it ready in his hand. From the direction of the inn, two flat snaps, gunshots, followed by a fusillade that went on for a few seconds and shouting from various voices, the words indistinguishable. Something went whistling through the reeds, hit the water, and whined off into the night. Had somebody shot at him? No, a stray round from the gunfight. A moment of dead silence was ended by a single report, louder and deeper than the others, and the sound of a car’s ignition and an engine with the gas pedal on the floor in first gear. The car was headed away from him, back towards Komarom. Then, nothing. Where were Polanyi and the others? He started counting, because if nobody appeared he would have to go and see what had happened. Somebody hurt? Somebody dead? All of them dead? He counted to one hundred, then stood up, prepared to go into the marsh and work his way towards the inn.

But, it turned out, he didn’t have to. As the rowing boat emerged from the darkness, weaving through the reeds and willows, Polanyi called out, ‘It’s your friends, Herr Stahl, please hold your fire.’ Stahl relaxed and let out a long-held breath. Polanyi and his two friends pulled themselves over the open stern, then the count came towards him and handed him a shoe. Puzzled, he stared at it — a well-made man’s shoe, black, and recently shined, the sort of shoe worn in a city, worn in an office. ‘Booty from the raid,’ Polanyi said. ‘And yours if you want it, perhaps a trophy.’

‘What happened?’ Stahl said.

‘Well, they were there all right, three of them, wearing overcoats and hats. They were waiting for you outside the inn, in the trees on the far side of the road. Basically, we surprised each other, which happens in combat, and we fired at them as they fired at us, and nobody hit anybody, despite a lot of bullets flying around. But they weren’t there for a gun battle, they were there for an abduction — they were armed with pistols, and when the rifles took pieces out of the tree trunks they yelled in German and ran for their car. On the way, one of them lost a shoe.’

Ferenc, standing next to Polanyi, cleared his throat, a sound of polite disagreement. Then he said, ‘The Count Polanyi fired both barrels as they were running away and I believe he may have hit one of them, possibly in the backside — he leapt into the air and squawked — but maybe that’s just wishful thinking. We had a look around where the car had been parked and there may have been blood on the weeds. But who knows, it was dark, and torches don’t really give you enough light. Still, it might have been blood.’

‘Maybe,’ Polanyi said. ‘In any event, they ran away. So, honour satisfied. However, we did break into the inn and had a look, and I’m sorry but there was no sign of any suitcase or camera, or anything, really. The inn is closed for the winter, chairs stacked, windows boarded up, no sign of use.’

‘I want to thank you, Count Polanyi,’ Stahl said. ‘And to thank Ferenc and Anton as well. For doing this, for…’

Polanyi raised a hand. ‘You are welcome. As it happens, we don’t like seeing Germans with guns on Hungarian soil and we would do it again tomorrow if we had to. In fact we may have to, time will tell. And, as for the cameras, I will telephone to Budapest in the morning and see what can be arranged. We make plenty of movies in Hungary, and I know one or two people who might be able to help.’

‘I can only say thank you once again.’

‘Well, wait until tomorrow for that. By the way, do you want to keep the shoe?’

‘I think not,’ Stahl said.

‘In that case…,’ Polanyi said, nodding towards the river.

Stahl flipped the shoe over the railing.

Polanyi went to start the engine while Ferenc and Anton cranked the rowing boat back onto the launch. As they pulled away from the shore, Polanyi turned on a spotlight mounted on the roof of the wheelhouse and the beam swept the black water ahead of them as they made for Komarom.

There were cameras in Budapest — in fact there were two Mitchells, which made life easier for the cameraman and, by the morning of the third, the company was again at work, shooting inside the castle, and then staging the climactic gun battle, using for background the blackened stone walls and two windows that opened on the courtyard. And it did look, once Avila worked out the angles, like ‘somewhere in the Balkans’. The first part of the scene, a fight in a bar, had been shot at Joinville, so what they filmed now was the climax: Colonel Vadic’s heroism, Pasquin’s jolly bravery, and the lieutenant’s wounding that leads to his death speech. The actors playing the Balkan thugs were more than frightening, one of them a Russian giant discovered by Avila, who found him working as a nightclub doorman.

From Stahl’s perspective it worked perfectly well — mostly running and shooting, no subtle acting required. But he sensed that the cast and crew had been rattled by the theft and were more than ready to go back to Paris. There were, according to Avila, two or three retakes they could do at Joinville, or perhaps not, it would be up to Deschelles. Essentially, for all practical purposes, the filming of Apres la Guerre was complete. The movie would have its final edit and music would be added in the weeks to come, but Stahl’s work on the production was finished.

That night, Stahl and Renate had the discussion that they had been, for some time, avoiding. They pulled two wing chairs up to the huge fireplace and Stahl built a splendid fire. Once it was blazing, he settled in his chair and said, ‘We haven’t talked about this, but I think the time has come. I don’t like it, but, with everything that’s happened, I had better get out of France as soon as I can.’

‘Yes, I saw it coming,’ Renate said. ‘Once you got that telephone call at my apartment I started thinking, and I began to realize that, after the movie was done, you’d be better off leaving the country.’

‘I did want to stay, there was a time when I thought about staying for a while, or even longer. In a proper world, Paris is where I belong.’

‘I know,’ Renate said. ‘It’s no secret, how you feel.’

‘And you as well, Renate. No?’

‘Oh yes, it was… When my husband and I were struggling to get out of Germany, Paris was my dream. Just get there, I thought, and everything will be perfect. But it turned out that this wasn’t so, not for my husband, wherever he is tonight, and not really for me either, until I met you. Then it, the city, kept its promises.’

‘How would you feel if you came back to California with me? You wouldn’t have to stay if you hated it. Because people do, you know, truly hate it.’

‘Oh I’m sure I would hate it — I’m a European, in my heart. And I doubt I could work there.’

‘You could. I know people who can make it possible.’

‘But what about a visa? It takes months now — half the world wants to go to America.’

‘That won’t be a problem. I think the embassy might move you up the list. And, if for some reason they won’t, we’ll just have to get married.’

It gladdened Stahl’s heart to see her smile in the usual way as she said, irony just barely touching her voice, ‘A proposal?’

They looked at each other for a time, then Stahl said, ‘I don’t want to lose you, Renate. We should be together.’

‘Then that is what we shall do,’ Renate said. ‘Now, no more of this, let’s get into bed before we freeze to death.’

8 January. There was to be no end-of-production party at the castle — the cast and crew voted — but Avila said he would arrange something when they were back home. And so they all packed, and Stahl spent a few minutes saying goodbye to Polanyi. The count had no appetite for sentiment, and waved off Stahl’s expression of gratitude. ‘I’ll see you in Paris, my friend,’ he said. ‘That’s where I work, at the legation, and I like the idea of having a movie star at my social evenings.’

‘I would enjoy it,’ Stahl said. ‘But I suspect I’ll be heading off to California.’

‘Oh I think you’ll be back, once the current mess is resolved. So, until then…’ They shook hands, and Stahl realized that Polanyi had thoroughly enjoyed saving his life and was sorry to see him leave.

‘I’ll just go to my room,’ Stahl said, ‘and bring your pistol back.’

‘No, no,’ Polanyi said. ‘You keep that, it’s my gift to you.’

The road to Budapest was now open and Stahl and Renate and the other emigres headed for the airfield, and the chartered plane, in three taxis that came to get them at the castle. Staring out of the window at the winter fields, Stahl wondered about Polanyi. Something about him, Stahl couldn’t say exactly what that was, reminded him of J. J. Wilkinson. Maybe Polanyi was a working diplomat, but Stahl thought there might be a little more. He had, Stahl thought, some spy in him. Maybe more than some.

The airport was crowded and busy, but the emigres were in good spirits, they had worked hard, earned money, were now headed home to the people that cared about them. Stahl, as the leader of the group, stood at the end of the passport control line, Renate at his side. What they had together had grown, in front of the castle fireplace; they had a future now, and that changed them. The passport officers were slower that day, they checked photographs against faces, asked about Hungarian money and art, and took their time making sense of various official papers: some of the emigres were travelling on French documents, some on the Nansen passports issued to stateless persons by the League of Nations, and some on German passports that would never be renewed but were still valid. The officers also had a list. One did not like seeing a list, one knew what that might mean.

And so it did.

When it came Renate’s turn — the rest of the emigres waiting on the other side of the desks — the officer, a rather intellectual-looking fellow with a trim beard, said, ‘Madam Steiner, I must ask you to wait for a minute. I’ll see to the gentleman with you first, it won’t take long.’

It didn’t. Stahl’s American document was quickly stamped. Then the officer excused himself and walked a few steps to an office directly opposite the passport control area.

‘What could be wrong?’ Stahl said. ‘Have you used your passport before?’

‘Not since I came to Paris. And we crossed into France at night, like everyone else, through a forest. The Nazis weren’t going to let us out. One of my friends tried to leave in the official way, to her sorrow.’

The door of the office was open and they could see the control officer, in conversation with a man who wore a suit. Back and forth they went, not animated in the least, simply dealing with some sort of problem. Finally, the officer returned to his desk. He looked at Stahl and said, ‘You may proceed, sir, you don’t have to wait here.’

‘I don’t mind,’ Stahl said. ‘We’re travelling together.’

‘I’m afraid there’s some difficulty in approving Madam Steiner’s exit. Apparently, German officials wish to question her regarding her husband, who is being sought by the German police, and they have requested that we detain her until she can be questioned. I regret the inconvenience, but we must honour their request. It’s not usually done this way, but it does happen sometimes.’

‘Are you sure?’ Stahl said. ‘Steiner is a common name in Germany.’

‘Perhaps they’ve made an error. But, even if they haven’t, this shouldn’t be too hard to straighten out, she needs simply to visit the German legation here in Budapest. However, since she’ll have to travel later, there’s no reason you should miss your flight. Madam Steiner will surely be following on in a day or two.’

‘Go ahead,’ Renate whispered to him. ‘Go. Get out of here.’

‘I believe we’ll travel together,’ Stahl said to the officer. ‘So I’ll have to wait as well.’

The officer met Stahl’s eyes, then, with a covert nod of the head towards the other side of the control desk, he let Stahl know that he had best join his friends while he still could. Stahl didn’t move. ‘Well,’ the officer said, ‘that’s up to you.’

In a taxi, headed for the Hotel Astoria, Renate tried, and failed, not to show her reaction to the denied exit. After a brooding silence, she said, ‘I really thought we were safe. I really did. But that kind of thinking is a curse. Funny, but I never learn, a fault in my character perhaps. But it was nice while it lasted, wasn’t it. Should I go to the German legation?’

‘Don’t be like that, Renate. You’d never come out and you know it.’

‘Then what?’

‘There’s surely an American consulate in Budapest, I’ll get in touch with them as soon as we’re settled in the hotel.’

‘But the chartered aeroplane is gone, Fredric. It’s gone, it flew away to Paris. And, when I looked at the notice board in the airport, every flight, it seems, requires a transfer in Berlin. Where will I go?’ She was, he thought, close to tears, but would get no closer.

He put his arm around her shoulders. ‘You’re going with me,’ he said.

The Astoria was almost full, but a small single room remained and Stahl took it. They didn’t unpack, they sat side by side on the edge of the bed and schemed. There was no telephone in the room, so Stahl went down to the desk and placed a call to the American consulate. The woman who answered the phone was, by her accent, American, and Stahl spoke English with her. She knew who he was, and told him he could see a consular officer that afternoon. America would help them, he believed, but, just in case, he booked a call to Buzz Mehlman. ‘As soon as the foreign operator gets through,’ he told the hotel clerk, ‘please call me. I’m in room sixty-five.’

It was three-thirty by the time he reached the American consulate, six-thirty in the morning Pacific Coast Time, so he was safe there because he’d called Buzz at the William Morris office. The consular official was a young fellow called Stanton, and he, a committed movie fan, was eager to help. Yes, he would telephone Mr Wilkinson at the Paris embassy but he doubted there was much he could do, this problem had to be dealt with locally. Stahl explained what had happened in the airport but went no further. It was Renate Steiner who needed help, because the Reich officials were being… Stanton filled in the word: ‘Difficult?’

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

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

‘How long will that take?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes, I can.’

‘What’s going on?’

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

‘Won’t let you out?’

‘I go where she goes.’

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

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

‘Can you spell her name for me?’

Stahl spelled out the name.

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

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

‘I’ll give it one helluva try.’

‘That’s all I can ask.’

‘Everything okay, otherwise?’

‘It is.’

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

‘God willing,’ Stahl said.

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

10 January.

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

‘The big call. From Buzz Mehlman?’

‘Who?’

‘My agent.’

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

‘I hope you can.’

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

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

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

‘I do.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘No headaches there.’

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

Stahl nodded.

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

‘Yes.’

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

‘You did all this?’

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

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

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

In the room, Renate was wide-eyed as Stahl read the itinerary off the pad. ‘A long voyage,’ she said. ‘And everything in Paris, just… left there.’

‘Three weeks or so, maybe a few days more. Think of it as a honeymoon.’

‘Maybe I can get my friends to send me some things; photographs, my scissors.’

‘I don’t see why not.’

She took a breath and said, ‘When do we leave?’

‘Now,’ Stahl said.

For three hours, the local to Arad chugged its way southeast. When the train rolled around a long curve, Stahl could see the tracks up ahead of them, two dark lines that disappeared into the winter countryside. In the late afternoon, they got off at Arad station, where the signs were in Roumanian. Going to the border control, Stahl asked to see Major Mihaly and an officer went off to find him, at the cafe where he spent his days. The major appeared when he was good and ready, a man with a waxed moustache who nipped in his waist with a corset and reeked of hair oil. The six fifty-dollar bills slipped magically from sight into his uniform as he said, ‘When you see Mr Sobak, tell him the price is going up, and give him my best regards. So many people lately, passing through here, he’ll understand.’

‘I’ll let him know,’ Stahl said as the major stamped their passports.

‘Enjoy Roumania, if you can,’ said the Hungarian major and saluted with two fingers to the brim of his uniform cap.

It took a long eight hours to get to Constanta, and the best they could do was a run-down waterfront hotel called the Princess Maria. Stahl went off to the Cook agency, the boat to Istanbul would leave in three days, on 14 January.

12 January.

The professional assassin Herbert was also in Constanta, though at a much better hotel. He was, as usual, accompanied by his colleague Lothar, and that night they visited one of Constanta’s better brothels, which catered mostly to the many German visitors in the city that winter. After spending time in the rooms upstairs, Herbert and Lothar sat comfortably in the parlour, ordered schnapps, and relaxed, not having to go to work until the following day.

‘Have we been here before?’ Lothar asked.

‘No, that was last fall. We were in Varna, the Bulgarian port, taking care of some Frenchman who ran away with bribe money.’

‘Ah, that’s right. Is this man Stahl somebody I should know? The name is familiar.’

‘A movie actor, a Viennese who lives in America.’

‘That’s unusual,’ Lothar said. ‘For us.’

‘Somehow he got tangled up with the Ribbentropburo, in Paris. Then the Gestapo got involved, and there was some sort of debacle in Hungary. For which Himmler himself blamed von Ribbentrop, he had to blame somebody. So now the Ribbentrop people — you know, Emhof — want to be rid of Herr Stahl before anything else goes wrong. They’re afraid of Himmler, this operation is meant to appease him.’

‘I guess it doesn’t matter.’

‘Not to me it doesn’t, as long as somebody pays.’

‘Who’s doing the job?’

‘I found us a new Russian, Volodya he calls himself, an emigre in Bucharest. He’ll be here tomorrow, we’ll do it then.’

‘Care to go back upstairs?’ Lothar said.

‘I’m thinking about it, one’s never quite enough. Maybe that little blonde thing, whatever her name is. What about you?’

‘I’m tired, the train was miserable. But I’m happy to wait for you.’

‘Then I think I’ll indulge,’ Herbert said. ‘It’s cheap enough.’

13 January.

As was their usual practice, Herbert and Lothar were to meet their gunman at a local bar in a workers’ quarter. Their Russian, however, was late — two o’clock passed, then two-thirty. In time he showed up — through the window they could see him coming, weaving from one side of the pavement to the other, and chuckling to himself. Herbert swore — there wasn’t much more he could do. Volodya entered singing, and backed up a step when he saw his employers. Then he made his way to their table, collapsed on a chair, and said a few choice words in Russian, which neither Herbert nor Lothar understood.

Herbert was enraged, though you would have had to know him well to see that. Shaking his head, smiling away, he handed Volodya some money, far less than he was supposed to be paid, but he seemed happy enough as he staggered away from the bar. ‘And what do we do now?’ Lothar said.

‘I’ll have to handle it myself,’ Herbert said. ‘Just like the old days. There isn’t time to find somebody else — they sail tomorrow.’

‘Want company?’

‘No, you wait for me here. I won’t be long.’ From a briefcase he took an old Luger pistol and tucked it in his waistband. Then he rose, shook his head once more, and said, ‘Something always goes wrong, doesn’t it,’ and left the bar, headed for the Princess Maria Hotel.

Stahl and Renate were lying on the bed, reading their books, waiting for the hours to pass until they sailed, when someone knocked at the door. Stahl got to his feet and said, ‘Yes? Who is it?’

‘Desk clerk, open up, please.’

Stahl and Renate looked at each other. The desk clerk spoke a form of hotel German, what had been said in the corridor was the language of a Berliner. Stahl called out, ‘One moment,’ and got down on his knees, peered through the crack beneath the door and saw a pair of very well-made shoes. Standing up, he said, ‘What do you want?’

From the other side of the door: ‘Open up, sir.’

This was no desk clerk. As Renate watched, Stahl tiptoed to his open suitcase and took the automatic pistol from its holster. Then he stood in front of the door and waited for the man in the corridor to go away.

Now Herbert, who had had an irritating day, smacked the side of his fist on the thin wooden door, which made it bang against the simple lock. ‘Open up!’ the voice repeated and something surged inside Stahl. The loud report deafened him, a splintery hole appeared in the door. Renate gasped and leapt to her feet, horrified. ‘What happened?’ she said.

Listening at the door, Stahl heard only silence. He made himself wait for a full minute, then looked out into the corridor, but there was nobody there.

Later that afternoon, Stahl went downstairs to pay the bill — they had decided that it was wiser not to stay at the hotel overnight. The desk clerk said to him, ‘Did someone upstairs fire a gun?’

‘They did. A while ago. Some madman in a uniform, I think, on the floor above us. I wouldn’t go up there, if I were you.’

The clerk’s eyes went from Stahl to the staircase and back, then his Adam’s apple rose and fell, and he took the money that Stahl offered him.

The Princess Maria Hotel was on a broad avenue that faced the sea, where benches set beneath lime trees invited passersby to spend a moment. On one of the benches sat a man who was going to spend more than a moment, his head at rest against the uppermost wooden slat, one eye open, a hand inside his jacket. As people walked by, they had a brief glance, then looked away. Was a dead man sitting on a bench, in the Roumania of 1939, of no consequence? Perhaps so. In any event, the men and women in the street went about their business. As to the unpleasant sight on the bench, there was nothing they cared to do.

Someone would see to it.

It was a long voyage: fourteen days at sea, a few days waiting to embark in the ports of Istanbul and Lisbon, three weeks by the time they reached New York. There were fierce storms in the Mediterranean and heavy seas in the January Atlantic, where they sailed on a Dutch liner much favoured by students and intellectuals — a melancholy group on that leg of the voyage, sad to leave Europe to its fate, or just sad to leave Europe. Stahl and Renate spent the time together, fought and made up, made love, slept in the afternoon, sometimes just stared at the sea, hypnotized by the long swells, and got to know each other very well indeed but were, more than ever, by the time the ship entered New York Harbor, friends and lovers. Just after dawn that day, the ship blew three long blasts on its foghorn. The more seasoned travellers knew what that meant and flocked to the railing on the port side of the ship as the Statue of Liberty appeared from the morning mist. Here Stahl and Renate joined the crowd and held hands, not letting go until Renate required the use of a handkerchief, and Stahl had to touch the corners of his eyes with his fingers. And they weren’t the only ones.

France was attacked by Germany on 10 May, 1940, and surrendered on 21 June.