The Foreign Correspondent

In the Resistenza

In Paris, the last days of autumn; a gray, troubled sky at daybreak, the fall of twilight at noon, followed, at seven-thirty, by slanting rains and black umbrellas as the people of the city hurried home past the bare trees. On the third of December, 1938, in the heart of the Seventh Arrondissement, a champagne-colored Lancia sedan turned the corner of the rue Saint-Dominique and rolled to a stop in the rue Augereau. Then the man in the backseat leaned forward for a moment and the chauffeur drove a few feet further and stopped again, this time in the shadow between two streetlamps.

The man in the back of the Lancia was called Ettore, il conte Amandola-the nineteenth Ettore, Hector, in the Amandola line, and count only the grandest of his titles. Closer to sixty than fifty, he had dark, slightly bulging eyes, as though life had surprised him, though it had never dared to do that, and a pink flush along his cheekbones, which suggested a bottle of wine with lunch, or excitement in the anticipation of an event planned for the evening. In fact, it was both. For the rest of his colors, he was a very silvery sort of man: his silver hair, gleaming with brilliantine, was brushed back to a smooth surface, and a thin silver mustache, trimmed daily with a scissors, traced his upper lip. Beneath a white wool overcoat, on the lapel of a gray silk suit, he wore a ribbon holding a silver Maltese cross on a blue enamel field, which meant he held the rank of cavaliere in the Order of the Crown of Italy. On the other lapel, the silver medal of the Italian Fascist party; a tipped square with diagonal fasces-a bundle of birch rods tied, with a red cord, to an axe. This symbolized the power of the consuls of the Roman Empire, who had the real rods and axe carried before them, and had the authority to beat with the birch rods, or behead with the axe.

Count Amandola looked at his watch, then rolled down the rear window and peered through the rain at a short street, the rue du Gros Caillou, that intersected the rue Augereau. From this point of observation-and he had twice made sure of it earlier that week-he could see the entry of the Hotel Colbert; a rather subtle entry, only the name in gold letters on the glass door, and a spill of light from the lobby that shone on the wet pavement. A rather subtle hotel, the Colbert, quiet, discreet, that catered to les affaires cinq-a-sept; amours conducted between five and seven, those flexible hours of the early evening. But, Amandola thought, a little taste of fame for you tomorrow. The hotel commissionaire, holding a large umbrella, left the entry and headed briskly down the street, toward the rue Saint-Dominique. Once more, Amandola looked at his watch. 7:32, it said. No, he thought, it is 1932 hours.

For this occasion, twenty-four-hour time, military time, was obviously the proper form. He was, after all, a major, had taken a commission in 1915, served in the Great War, and had the medals, and seven lavishly tailored uniforms, to prove it. Served with distinction-officially recognized-in the purchasing office of the Ministry of War, in Rome, where he had given orders, maintained discipline, read and signed forms and letters, and made and answered calls on the telephone, his military decorum scrupulous in every way.

And so it had remained, since 1927, in his tenure as a senior official in the Pubblica Sicurezza, the department of Public Security of the Ministry of the Interior, set up by Mussolini’s chief of national police a year earlier. The work was not so different from his job during the war; the forms, the letters, the telephone, and the maintenance of discipline-his staff sat at attention at their desks, and formality was the rule in all discourse.

1944 hours. Rain drummed steadily on the roof of the Lancia and Amandola pulled his overcoat tighter, against the chill. Outside on the sidewalk, a maid-under her open raincoat a gray-and-white uniform-was pulled along by a dachshund wearing a sweater. As the dog sniffed at the pavement and began to circle, the maid squinted through the window at Amandola. Rude, the Parisians. He did not bother to turn away, simply looked through her, she did not exist. A few minutes later, a black square-bodied taxi pulled up to the entry of the Colbert. The commissionaire hopped out, leaving the door open, as a couple emerged from the lobby; he white-haired, tall and stooped, she younger, wearing a hat with a veil. They stood together under the commissionaire’s umbrella, she raised her veil and they kissed passionately-until next Tuesday, my beloved. Then the woman climbed into the taxi, the man tipped the commissionaire, raised his own umbrella, and strode around the corner.

1950 hours. Ecco, Bottini!

The chauffeur was watching his side-view mirror. “Il galletto,” he said. Yes, the cockerel, so they called him, for he did indeed strut. Heading along the rue Augereau toward the Colbert, he was the classical short man who refused to be short: posture erect, back stiff, chin high, chest out. Bottini was a Turinese lawyer who had emigrated to Paris in 1935, dissatisfied with the fascist policies of his native country. A dissatisfaction no doubt sharpened by a good public beating and a half a bottle of castor oil, administered by a Blackshirt action squad as a crowd gathered and gawked in silence. Always a liberal, probably a socialist, possibly a secret Communist, Amandola suspected-slippery as eels, these types-Bottini was a friend to the oppressed, and prominent in the friends-to-the-oppressed community.

But the problem with il galletto wasn’t that he strutted, the problem was that he crowed. Arriving in Paris, he had naturally joined the Giustizia e Liberta-justice and liberty-organization, the largest and most determined group of the antifascist opposition, and then become editor of one of their clandestine newspapers, Liberazione, written in Paris, smuggled into Italy, then printed and covertly distributed. Infamita! This paper kicked like a mule; barbed, witty, knowing, and savage, with not a wisp of respect for Italy’s glorious fascismo or Il Duce or any of his achievements. But now, Amandola thought, this galletto was done crowing.

As Bottini turned the corner of the rue Augereau, he took off his steel-framed eyeglasses, wiped the rain from the lenses with a large white handkerchief, and put the glasses in a case. Then he entered the hotel. He was precisely on schedule, according to the surveillance reports. On Tuesday evenings, from eight to ten, always in Room 44, he would entertain his mistress, the wife of the French socialist politician LaCroix. LaCroix, who had headed one ministry, then another, in the Popular Front government. LaCroix, who stood beside the Prime Minister, Daladier, in the newspaper photographs. LaCroix, who dined at his club every Tuesday and played bridge until midnight.

It was 2015 before a taxi pulled up to the Colbert and Madame LaCroix emerged, and ran with tiny steps into the hotel. Amandola got only a glimpse of her-brick red hair, pointy white nose, a Rubenesque woman, fleshy and abundant. And greatly appetitious, according to the operatives who’d rented Room 46 and eavesdropped on the other side of the wall. Subjects are vocal, and noisy, said one report. Describing, Amandola supposed, every sort of moan and squeal as the two went at their coupling like excited swine. Oh, he knew her sort; she liked her food and she liked her wine and she liked her naked pleasures-any and all of them no doubt, the full deck of naughty playing cards. Libertines. A full-length mirror faced the foot of the large bed in Room 44 and surely they took advantage of it, thrilled to watch themselves thrashing about, thrilled to watch-everything.

Now, Amandola thought, one must wait.

They had learned it was the lovers’ custom to spend a few minutes in conversation before they got busy. So, give them a little time. Amandola’s OVRA operatives-OVRA was the name of the secret police, the political police, established by Mussolini in the 1920s-were already inside the hotel, had taken rooms that afternoon, accompanied by prostitutes. Who might well, in time, be found by the police and interrogated, but what could they say? He was bald, he wore a beard, he said his name was Mario. But bald Mario and bearded Mario would be, at that point, long gone across the border, back in Italy. At most, the girls would get their pictures in the newspaper.

Madame LaCroix, when the OVRA men burst into the room, would no doubt be indignant, this was, she would assume, some vile trick perpetrated by her serpent of a husband. But she would not assume it for long, and when the revolver appeared, with its long snout of a silencer, it would be too late to scream. Would Bottini? Or would he plead for his life? No, Amandola thought, he would do neither. He would curse them, a vain galletto to the end, and take his medicine. In the temple. Then, the silencer unscrewed, the revolver placed in Bottini’s hand. So sad, so dreary, a doomed love affair, a lover’s despair.

And would the world believe it? The tryst that ended in tragedy? Most would, but some wouldn’t, and it was for them that this event had been staged, the ones who would know immediately that this was politics, not passion. Because this was not a quiet disappearance, this was public, and flamboyant, so meant to serve as a warning: We will do anything we want to do, you cannot stop us. The French would be outraged, but then, the French were habitually outraged. Well, let them sputter.

It was 2042 when the leader of the OVRA squad left the hotel and crossed to Amandola’s side of the rue Augereau. Hands in pockets, head down, he wore a rubber raincoat and a black felt hat, rain dripping off the brim. As he passed the Lancia, he raised his head, revealing a dark, heavy face, a southern face, and made eye contact with Amandola. A brief glance, but sufficient. It’s done.

4 December, 1938. The Cafe Europa, in a narrow street near the Gare du Nord, was owned by a Frenchman of Italian descent. A man of fervent and heated opinions, an idealist, he made his back room available to a group of Parisian giellisti, so-called for their membership in the Giustizia e Liberta-known informally by the initials GL, thus giellisti. There were eight of them that morning, called to an emergency meeting. They all wore dark overcoats, sitting around a table in the unlit room, and, except for the one woman, they wore their hats. Because the room was cold and damp, and also, though nobody ever said it out loud, because it was somehow in keeping with the conspiratorial nature of their politics: the antifascist resistance, the Resistenza.

They were all more or less in midlife, emigres from Italy, and members of a certain class-a lawyer from Rome, a medical school professor from Venice, an art historian from Siena, a man who had owned a pharmacy in the same city, the woman formerly an industrial chemist in Milan. And so on-several with eyeglasses, most of them smoking cigarettes, except for the Sienese professor of art history, lately employed as a meter reader for the gas company, who smoked a powerful little cigar.

Three of them had brought along a certain morning newspaper, the very vilest and most outrageous of the Parisian tabloids, and a copy lay on the table, folded open to a grainy photograph beneath the headline MURDER /SUICIDE AT LOVERS HOTEL. Bottini, bare-chested, sat propped against a headboard, a sheet pulled up to his waist, eyes open and unseeing, blood on his face. By his side, a shape beneath the sheet, its arms flung wide.

The leader of the group, Arturo Salamone, let the newspaper lie open for a time, a silent eulogy. Then, with a sigh, he flipped it closed, folded it in half, and put it by the side of his chair. Salamone was a great bear of a man, with heavy jowls, and thick eyebrows that met at the bridge of his nose. He had been a shipping agent in Genoa, now worked as a bookkeeper at an insurance company. “So then,” he said. “Do we accept this?”

“I do not,” said the lawyer. “Staged.”

“Do we agree?”

The pharmacist cleared his throat and said, “Are we completely sure? That this was, assassination?”

“I am,” Salamone said. “Bottini had no such brutality in him. They killed him, and his lover-the OVRA, or someone like them. This was ordered by Rome; it was planned, prepared, and executed. And not only did they murder Bottini, they defamed him: ‘this is the sort of man, unstable, vicious, who speaks against our noble fascism.’ And, of course, there are people who will believe it.”

“Some will, always, anything,” the woman chemist said. “But we shall see what the Italian papers say about it.”

“They will have to follow the government line,” the Venetian professor said.

The woman shrugged. “As usual. Still, we have a few friends there, and a simple word or two, alleged or supposedly, can cast a shadow. Nobody just reads the news these days, they decipher it, like a code.”

“Then how do we counter?” the lawyer said. “Not an eye for an eye.”

“No,” Salamone said. “We are not them. Not yet.”

“We must expose it,” the woman said. “The true story, in Liberazione. And hope the clandestine press, here and in Italy, will follow us. We can’t let these people get away with what they’ve done, we can’t let them think they got away with it. And we should say where this monstrosity came from.”

“Where is that?” the lawyer said.

She pointed upward. “The top.”

The lawyer nodded. “Yes, you’re right. Perhaps it could be done as an obituary, in a box outlined in black, a political obituary. It should be strong, very strong-here is a man, a hero, who died for what he believed in, a man who told truths the government could not bear to have revealed.”

“Will you write it?” Salamone said.

“I will do a draft,” the lawyer said. “Then we’ll see.”

The professor from Siena said, “Maybe you could end by writing that when Mussolini and his friends are swept away, we will pull down his fucking statue on a horse and raise one to honor Bottini.”

The lawyer took pen and pad from his pocket and made a note.

“What about the family?” the pharmacist said. “Bottini’s family.”

“I will talk to his wife,” Salamone said. “And we have a fund, we must help as best we can.” After a moment, he added, “And also, we must choose a new editor. Suggestions?”

“Weisz,” the woman said. “He’s the journalist.”

Around the table, affirmation, the obvious choice. Carlo Weisz was a foreign correspondent, had been with the Milanese Corriere della Sera, then emigrated to Paris in 1935 and somehow found work with the Reuters bureau.

“Where is he, this morning?” the lawyer said.

“Somewhere in Spain,” Salamone said. “He’s been sent down there to write about Franco’s new offensive. Perhaps the final offensive-the Spanish war is dying.”

“It is Europe that’s dying, my friends.”

This from a wealthy businessman, by far their most openhanded contributor, who rarely spoke at meetings. He had fled Milan and settled in Paris a few months earlier, following the imposition of anti-Jewish laws in September. His words, spoken with gentle regret, brought a moment of silence, because he was not wrong and they knew it. That autumn had been an evil season on the Continent-the Czechs sold out at Munich at the end of September, then, the second week of November, a newly emboldened Hitler had launched Kristallnacht, the smashing of Jewish shop windows all across Germany, arrest of prominent Jews, terrible humiliations in the streets.

Finally, Salamone, his voice soft, said, “That’s true, Alberto, it cannot be denied. And, yesterday, it was our turn, we were attacked, told to shut up or else. But, even so, there will be copies of Liberazione in Italy later this month, it will be passed from hand to hand, and it will say what it has always said: don’t give up. Really, what else?”

In Spain, an hour after dawn on the twenty-third of December, the Nationalist field guns fired their first barrage. Carlo Weisz, only half-asleep, heard it, and felt it. Maybe, he thought, a few miles south. At the market town of Mequinenza, where the river Segre met the river Ebro. He stood up, unwound himself from the rubber poncho he’d slept in, and went out the doorway-the door was long vanished-into the courtyard of the monastery.

An El Greco dawn. Towering billows of gray cloud piled high on the southern horizon, struck red by the first shafts of sunlight. As he watched, muzzle flares flickered on the cloud and, a moment later, the reports, like muttering thunder, came rolling up the Segre. Yes, Mequinenza. They had been told to expect a new offensive, “the Catalonian campaign,” just before Christmas. Well, here it was.

To warn the others, he walked back into the room where they’d spent the night. At one time, before war came here, the room had been a chapel. Now, the tall, narrow windows were edged by shards of colored glass, while the rest of it glittered on the floor, there were holes in the roof, and an exterior corner had been blown open. At some point, it had held prisoners-that was evident from the graffiti scratched into the plaster walls: names, crosses topped by three dots, dates, pleas to be remembered, an address without a city. And it had been used as a field hospital, a mound of used bandages piled up in a corner, bloodstains on the burlap sacking that covered the ancient straw mattresses.

His two companions were already awake; Mary McGrath of the Chicago Tribune, and a lieutenant from the Republican forces, Sandoval, who was their minder, driver, and bodyguard. McGrath tilted her canteen, poured a little water into her cupped palm, and rubbed it over her face. “Sounds like it’s started,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Down at Mequinenza.”

“We had better be on our way,” Sandoval said. That in Spanish. Reuters had sent Weisz to Spain before, eight or nine assignments since 1936, and this was one of the phrases he’d picked up early on.

Weisz knelt by his knapsack, found a small bag of tobacco and a packet of papers-he’d run out of Gitanes a week ago-and began to roll a cigarette. Age forty for another few months, he was of medium height, lean and compact, with long dark hair, not quite black, that he combed back with his fingers when it fell down on his forehead. He came from Trieste, and, like the city, was half-Italian, on his mother’s side, and half-Slovenian-long ago Austrian, thus the name-on his father’s. From his mother, a Florentine face, slightly hawkish, strongly made, with inquisitive eyes, a soft, striking gray-a face descended from nobility, perhaps, a face found in Renaissance portraits. But not quite. Spoiled by curiosity, and sympathy, it was not a face lit by a prince’s greed or a cardinal’s power. Weisz twisted the ends of the cigarette, held it between his lips, and flicked a military lighter, a steel cylinder that worked in the wind, until it produced a flame.

Sandoval, holding a distributor cap with dangling wires-the time-honored way to make sure one’s vehicle was still there in the morning-went off to start the car.

“Where is he taking us?” Weisz asked McGrath.

“North of here, he said, a few miles. He thinks the Italians are holding the road on the east side of the river. Maybe.”

They were in search of a company of Italian volunteers, remnants of the Garibaldi Battalion, now attached to the Republican Fifth Army Corps. Formerly, the Garibaldi Battalion, with the Thaelmann Battalion and the Andre Marty Battalion, German and French, had made up the Twelfth International Brigade, most of them sent home in November as part of a Republican political initiative. But one Italian company had elected to fight on, and Weisz and Mary McGrath were after their story.

Courage in the face of almost certain defeat. Because the Republican government, after two and a half years of civil war, held only Madrid, under siege since 1936, and the northeast corner of the country, Catalonia, with the administration now situated in Barcelona, some eighty-five miles from the foothills above the river.

McGrath screwed the top back on her canteen and lit an Old Gold. “Then,” she said, “if we find them, we’ll head up to Castelldans to file.” A market town to the north, and headquarters of the Fifth Army Corps, Castelldans had wireless/telegraph service and a military censor.

“Certainly today,” Weisz said. The artillery exchanges to the south had intensified, the Catalonian campaign had begun, they had to wire stories as soon as they could.

McGrath, a veteran correspondent in her forties, responded with a complicit smile, and looked at her watch. “It’s one-twenty A.M. in Chicago. So, afternoon edition.”

Parked by a wall in the courtyard, a military car. As Weisz and McGrath watched, Sandoval unhinged the raised hood and stepped back as it banged shut, then slid into the driver’s seat and, presently, produced a string of explosions-sharp and loud, the engine had no muffler-and a stuttering plume of black exhaust, the rhythm of the explosions slowing as he played with the choke. Then he turned, with a triumphant smile, and waved them over.

It was a French command car, khaki-colored but long bleached out by sun and rain, that had served in the Great War and, twenty years later, been sent to Spain despite European neutrality treaties-nonintervention elastique, the French called it. Not elastique enough-Germany and Italy had armed Franco’s Nationalists, while the Republican government received grudging help from the USSR and bought whatever it could on the black market. Still, a car was a car. When it arrived in Spain, someone with a brush and a can of red paint, someone in a hurry, had tried to paint a hammer and sickle on the driver’s door. Someone else had lettered J-28 in white on the hood, someone else had fired two bullets through the rear seat, and someone else had knocked out the passenger window with a hammer. Or maybe it had all been done by the same person-in the Spanish war, an actual possibility.

As they drove off, a man in a monk’s robe appeared in the courtyard of the chapel, staring at them as they left. They’d had no idea there was anyone in the monastery, but apparently he’d been hiding somewhere. Weisz waved, but the man just stood there, making sure they were gone.

Sandoval drove slowly on the rutted dirt track that ran by the river. Weisz smoked his cigarettes, put his feet up on the backseat and watched the countryside, scrub oak and juniper, sometimes a village of a few houses, a tall pine tree with crows ranged along its branches. They stopped once for sheep; the rams had bells around their necks that sounded a heavy clank or two as they walked, driven along by a scruffy little Pyrenees sheepdog who ran ceaselessly at the edges of the flock. The shepherd came to the driver’s window, touched his beret in salute, and said good morning. “They will cross the river today,” he said. “Franco’s Moors.” Weisz and the others stared at the opposite bank, but saw only reeds and poplars. “They are there,” the shepherd said. “But you cannot see them.” He spat, wished them good luck, and followed his sheep up the hill.

Ten minutes later, a pair of soldiers waved them down. They were breathing hard, sweating in the chill air, their rifles slung over their shoulders. Sandoval slowed but didn’t stop. “Take us with you!” one of them called out. Weisz looked out the back window, wondering if they would fire at the car, but they just stood there.

“Shouldn’t we take them?” McGrath said.

“They are running away. I should’ve shot them.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t have the heart for it,” Sandoval said.

After a few minutes, they were stopped again, an officer walking down the hill from the forest. “Where are you going?” he asked Sandoval.

“These are from the foreign newspapers, they are looking for the Italian company.”

“Which?”

“Italians. From the Garibaldi.”

“With red scarves?”

“Is that correct?” Sandoval asked Weisz.

Weisz told him it was. The Garibaldi Brigade had included both Communist and non-Communist volunteers. Most of the latter were officers.

“Then they are ahead of you, I believe. But you had better stay up on the ridge.”

A few miles further on, the track divided, and the car crawled up the steep slope, the hammering of its lowest gear echoing off the trees. On the top of the ridge, a dirt road ran north. From here, they had a better view of the Segre, a slow river, and shallow, gliding past gravel islands in midstream. Sandoval drove on, past a battery firing at the opposite bank. The artillerymen were working hard, carrying shells to the loaders, who put their fingers in their ears as the cannon fired, wheels rolling back with each recoil. Halfway up the hill, a shell burst above the trees, a sudden puff of black smoke that floated off on the wind. McGrath asked Sandoval to stop for a moment, then she got out of the car and took a pair of binoculars from her knapsack.

“You will be careful of the sun,” Sandoval said. Snipers were drawn to the reflective flash of sunlight off binoculars, could put a round through a lens from a great distance. McGrath used her hand as a shield, then gave the binoculars to Weisz. In pale, drifting smoke, he caught a glimpse of green uniform, perhaps a quarter mile from the western shore.

When they were back in the car, McGrath said, “They can see us, up on this ridge.”

“Certainly they can,” Sandoval said.

The line of the Fifth Army Corps strengthened as they drove north and, at the paved road that ran to the town of Seros, on the other side of the river, they found the Italian company, well dug in below the ridge. Weisz counted three Hotchkiss 6.5-mm machine guns, mounted on bipods-manufactured in Greece, he’d heard, and smuggled into Spain by Greek antiroyalists. There were, as well, three mortars. The Italian company had been ordered to hold an important position, covering the paved road, and a wooden bridge across the river. The bridge had been blown apart, leaving charred pilings standing in the riverbed, and a few blackened boards, washed up on the bank by the current. When Sandoval parked the car, a sergeant came over to see what they wanted. As Weisz and McGrath got out of the car, he said, “This will be in Italian, but I’ll translate for you later.” She thanked him, and they both produced pads and pencils. That was all the sergeant needed to see. “A moment, please, I’ll get the officer.”

Weisz laughed. “Well, your name, at least.”

The sergeant grinned back at him. “That would be Sergeant Bianchi, right?” Don’t use my name, he meant. Signor Bianchi and Signor Rossi-Mr. White and Mr. Red-were the Italian equivalent of Smith and Jones, generic names for a joke or a comic alias. “Write whatever you want,” the sergeant said, “but I have family back there.” He strolled off and, a few minutes later, the officer arrived.

Weisz caught McGrath’s eye, but she didn’t see what he did. The officer was dark, his face not handsome, but memorable, with sharp cheekbones, beaked nose, inquisitive, hooded eyes, and a scar that curved from the corner of his right eye down to the middle of his cheek. On his head, the soft green cap of a Spanish infantryman, its high top, with long black tassel, flopped over. He wore a heavy black sweater beneath the khaki tunic, without insignia, of some army, and the trousers of another. Looped over one shoulder, a pistol belt with a holstered automatic. On his hands, black leather gloves.

In Italian, Weisz said good morning and added, “We are correspondents. My name is Weisz, this is Signora McGrath.”

“From Italy?” the officer said, incredulous. “You’re on the wrong side of this river.”

“The signora is from the Chicago Tribune,” Weisz said. “And I work for the British wire service, Reuters.”

The officer, wary, studied them for a moment. “Well, we’re honored. But please, no photographs.”

“No, of course not. Why do you say ‘the wrong side of the river’?”

“That’s the Littorio Division, over there. The Black Arrows, and the Green Arrows. Italian officers, enlisted men both Italian and Spanish. So, today, we will kill the fascisti, and they’ll kill us.” From the officer, a grim smile-so life went, but sad that it did. “Where are you from, Signor Weisz? Your Italian is native, I would say.”

“From Trieste,” Weisz said. “And you?”

The officer hesitated. To lie, or tell the truth? Finally, he said, “I am from Ferrara, known as Colonel Ferrara.”

His look was almost rueful, but it confirmed Weisz’s hunch, born the instant he’d seen the officer, because photographs of this face, with its curving scar, had been in the newspapers-lauded or defamed, depending on the politics.

“Colonel Ferrara” was a nom de guerre, use of an alias common among volunteers on the Republican side, particularly among Stalin’s Eastern European operatives. But this nom de guerre predated the civil war. In 1935, the colonel, taking the name of his city, had left the Italian forces fighting in Ethiopia-raining mustard gas from airplanes onto villages and native militia-and surfaced in Marseilles. Interviewed by the French press, he’d said that no man of conscience could take part in Mussolini’s war of conquest, a war for empire.

In Italy, the fascists had tried to destroy his reputation any way they could, because the man who called himself Colonel Ferrara was a legitimate, highly decorated, hero. At the age of nineteen, he’d been a junior officer fighting the Austro-Hungarian and German armies on Italy’s northern, alpine, border, an officer in the arditi. These were shock troops, their name taken from the verb ardire, which meant “to dare,” and they were Italy’s most honored soldiers, known for wearing black sweaters, known for storming enemy trenches at night, knives held in their teeth, a hand grenade in each hand, never using a weapon effective beyond thirty yards. When Mussolini launched the Fascist party, in 1919, his first recruits were forty veterans of the arditi, angry at the broken promises of French and British diplomats, promises used to draw Italy into the war in 1915. But this ardito was an enemy, a public enemy, of fascism, not the least of his credentials his wounded face, and one hand so badly burned that he wore gloves.

“So I may describe you as Colonel Ferrara,” Weisz said.

“Yes. My real name doesn’t matter.”

“Formerly with the Garibaldi Battalion, Twelfth International.”

“That’s right.”

“Which has been disbanded, sent home.”

“Sent into exile,” Ferrara said. “They could hardly go back to Italy. So they, with the Germans and Poles and Hungarians, all of us stray dogs who won’t run with the pack, have gone looking for a new home. Mostly in France, the way the wind blows lately, though we aren’t much welcome there.”

“But you’ve stayed.”

“We’ve stayed,” he said. “A hundred and twenty-two of us, this morning. Not ready to give up this fight, ah, this cause, so here we are.”

“Which cause, Colonel? How would you describe it?”

“There are too many words, Signor Weisz, in this war of words. It’s easy for the Bolsheviks, they have their formulas-Marx says this, Lenin says that. But, for the rest of us, it’s not so cut-and-dried. We are fighting for the freedom of Europe, certainly, for liberty, if you like, for justice, perhaps, and surely against all the cazzi fasulli who want to run the world their way. Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, take your pick, and all the sly little men who do their work.”

“I can’t say ‘cazzi fasulli.’” It meant “phony pricks.” “Want to change it?”

Ferrara shrugged. “Leave it out. I can’t say it any better.”

“How long will you stay?”

“To the end, whatever that turns out to mean.”

“Some people say the Republic is finished.”

“Some people could be right, but you never know. If you’re doing the sort of job we do here, you like to think that one bullet, fired by one rifleman, could turn defeat to victory. Or, maybe, someone like you writes about our little company, and the Americans jump up and say, By God that’s true, let’s go get ‘em, boys!” Ferrara’s face was lit by a sudden smile-the idea so far beyond hope it was funny.

“This will be seen mostly in Great Britain and Canada, and in South America, where the newspapers run our dispatches.”

“Fine, then let the British do the jumping up, though we both know they won’t, not until it’s their turn to eat Adolf’s wiener schnitzel. Or let everything go to hell in Spain, then just see if it stops here.”

“And the Littorio Division, across the river, what do you think about them?”

“Oh, we know them, the Littorio, and the Blackshirt militia. We fought them in Madrid, and when they occupied the Ibarra Castle, we stormed it and sent them running. And we’ll do it again today.”

Weisz turned to McGrath. “Anything you want to ask?”

“How is it so far? What does he think about the war, about defeat?”

“We’ve done that-it’s good.”

From across the river, a voice shouted “Eia, eia, alala.” This was the fascist battle cry, first used by the Blackshirt squads in their early street battles. Other voices repeated the phrase.

The answer came from a machine-gun position below the road. “Va f’an culo, alala!” Go fuck yourself in the ass. Somebody else laughed, and two or three voices picked up the cry. A machine gunner fired a short burst, cutting down a line of reeds on the opposite bank.

“I’d get my head down if I were you,” Ferrara said. Bent low, he went trotting off across the hillside.

Weisz and McGrath lay flat, McGrath produced her binoculars. “I can see him!”

Weisz took a turn with the binoculars. A soldier was lying in a patch of reeds, his hands cupped around his mouth as he repeated the battle cry. When the machine gun fired again, he slithered backward and vanished.

Sandoval, revolver in hand, came running from the car and flopped down beside them.

“It’s starting,” Weisz said.

“They won’t try to cross the river,” Sandoval said. “That comes tonight.”

From the opposite bank, a muted thunk, followed by an explosion that shattered a juniper bush and sent a flock of small birds flying from the trees, Weisz could hear the beating of their wings as they flew over the crest of the hill. “Mortar,” Sandoval said. “Not good. Maybe I should get you out of here.”

“I think we should stay for a while,” McGrath said.

Weisz agreed. When McGrath told Sandoval they would stay, he pointed at a cluster of pines. “Better over there,” he said. On the count of three, they ran, and reached the trees just as a bullet snapped overhead.

The mortaring went on for ten minutes. Ferrara’s company did not fire back, their mortars were ranged in on the river, and they had to save what shells they had for the coming night. When the Nationalist fire stopped, the smoke drifted away and silence returned to the hillside.

After a time, Weisz realized he was hungry. The Republican units barely had enough food for themselves, so the two correspondents and their lieutenant had been living off stale bread and a cloth sack of lentils-known, after the Republican finance minister’s description, as “Dr. Negrin’s victory pills.” They couldn’t build a fire here, so Weisz dug around in his knapsack and produced his last tin of sardines-not opened earlier because the key needed to roll back the metal top was missing. Sandoval solved that problem, using a clasp knife to cut the top open, and the three of them speared sardines and ate them on chunks of bread, pouring a little of the oil over the top. As they ate, the sound of fighting somewhere to the north, the rattle of machine guns and rifle fire, rose to a steady beat. Weisz and McGrath decided to go have a look, then head northeast to Castelldans and file their stories.

They found Ferrara at one of the machine-gun positions, said goodby, and wished him luck. “Where will you go, when this ends?” Weisz asked him. “Perhaps we can talk again.” He wanted to write a second story about Ferrara, the story of a volunteer in exile, a postwar story.

“If I’m still in one piece, France, somewhere. But please don’t say that.”

“I won’t.”

“My family is in Italy. Maybe, in the street, or at the market, somebody says something, or makes a gesture, but mostly they are left alone. For me it’s different, they might do something, if they knew where I was.”

“They know you’re here,” Weisz said.

“Oh I believe they do know that. Across the river, they know. So all they have to do is come up here, and we’ll pass the time of day.” He lifted an eyebrow. Whatever else happened, he was good at what he did.

“Signora McGrath will send her story to Chicago.”

“Chicago, yes, I know, white socks, young bears, wonderful.”

“Goodby,” Weisz said.

They shook hands. A strong hand, Weisz thought, inside the glove.

Somebody on the other side of the river shot at the car as it rode along the ridge line, and a bullet came through the back door and out the roof. Weisz could see a ragged piece of sky through the hole. Sandoval swore and stomped on the gas pedal, the car accelerated and, as it hit the holes and ridges in the road, bounced high in the air and slammed down hard, crushing its old springs and landing steel on steel with a horrible bang. Weisz had to keep his jaw clamped shut so he wouldn’t break a tooth. Under his breath, Sandoval asked God to spare the tires, then, after a few minutes, slowed down. McGrath turned around in the passenger seat and poked a finger into the bullet hole. Calculating the distance between Weisz and the bullet’s path, she said, “Carlo? Are you okay?” The sound of the fighting ahead of them grew louder, but they never saw it. In the sky to the north, two airplanes appeared, German HE-111Heinkels, according to Sandoval. They dropped bombs on the Spanish positions above the Segre, then swooped down and machine-gunned the east side of the river.

Sandoval pulled off the road and stopped the car beneath a tree, as much cover as he could find. “They will finish us,” he said. “There’s no point to it, unless you wish to see what has happened to the men by the river.” Weisz and McGrath did not need to see this, they had seen it many times before.

So then, Castelldans.

Sandoval turned the car around, drove back to the paved road, and headed east, toward the town of Mayals. For a time, the road was deserted, as it climbed a long, upward slope through oak forest, then emerged on a high plain and met a dirt road that passed through the villages to the south and north.

Up here, the sky had closed in; gray cloud above empty scrubland and a ribbon of road that wound across it. On the road, a slow gray column that stretched to the far horizon, an army in retreat, miles of it, broken only by the occasional truck, pulled by mules, which carried the ones who could not walk. Here and there, among the plodding soldiers, were refugees, some with carts drawn by oxen, loaded down with chests and mattresses, the family dog on top, next to the old people, or women with infants.

Sandoval turned off the engine, Weisz and McGrath got out and stood by the car. In the hard wind that blew down from the mountains, there was not a sound to be heard. McGrath took off her glasses and rubbed the lenses with her shirttail, squinting as she watched the column. “Dear God,” she said.

“You’ve seen it before,” Weisz said.

“Yes, I’ve seen it.”

Sandoval spread a map across the hood. “If we go back a few miles,” he said, “we can go around it.”

“Where does this road go?” McGrath said.

“To Barcelona,” Sandoval said. “To the coast.”

Weisz reached for a pad and pencil. By late morning, the sky had closed in, with low gray cloud above the high plain, and a ribbon of road that wound across it, wound east, toward Barcelona.

The censor, in Castelldans, didn’t like it. He was an army major, tall and thin, with the face of an ascetic. He sat at a table in the back of what had been the post office, not far from the wireless/telegraph equipment and the clerk who operated it. “Why do you do this?” he said. His English was precise, he had once been a teacher. “Can you not say, ‘moving to reposition’?”

“An army in retreat,” Weisz said, “is what I saw.”

“It does not help us.”

“I know,” Weisz said. “But it is so.”

The major read back through the story, a few pages covered in penciled block print. “Your English is very good,” he said.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Tell me, Senor Weisz, can you not simply write about our Italian volunteers, and the colonel? The column you describe has been replaced, the line is still being held at the Segre.”

“The column is part of the story, Major. It must be reported.”

The major handed it back, and nodded toward the waiting clerk. “You may send it as it is,” he said to Weisz. “And then you may deal with your conscience in whatever way suits you.”

26 December. Weisz sat back against the faded plush seat in a first-class compartment as the train chugged slowly past the outskirts of Barcelona. They would be at the border crossing in Port Bou in a few hours, then France. Weisz had the window seat, across from him a pensive child, next to his mother and father, a fastidious little man in a dark suit, with a gold watch chain looped across his vest. Next to Weisz, an older daughter, wearing a wedding ring, though no husband was to be seen, and a heavy woman with gray hair, perhaps an aunt. A silent family, pale, shaken, leaving home, likely forever.

This little man had apparently followed his principles, was either an ally of the Republican government or one of its minor officials. He had the look of a minor official. But now he had to get out while he could, the flight had begun, and what awaited him in France was, if he was unlucky, a refugee camp-barracks, barbed wire-or, if his luck held, penury. To avoid train sickness, the mother reached into a crumpled paper bag and, from time to time, dispensed a lemon drop to each member of the family; the small economies had begun.

Glancing at the compartment across the aisle, Weisz could see Boutillon, of the Communist daily L’Humanite, and Chisholm, of the Christian Science Monitor, sharing sandwiches and a bottle of red wine. Weisz turned to the window and stared out at the gray-green brush that grew at the edge of the track.

The Spanish major had been right about his English: it was good. After finishing secondary school at a private academy in Trieste, he’d gone off to the Scuola Normale-founded by Napoleon, in imitation of the Ecole Normale in Paris, and very much the cradle of prime ministers and philosophers-at the University of Pisa, probably the most prestigious university in Italy. Where he’d studied political economics. The Scuola Normale was not particularly his choice, but, rather, had been ordained at birth. By Herr Doktor Professor Helmut Weisz, the eminent ethnologist, and Weisz’s father, in that order. And then, according to plan, he’d entered Oxford University, again for economics, where he’d managed to stay for two years. At which time his tutor, an incredibly kind and gentle man, had suggested that his intellectual destiny lay elsewhere. It wasn’t that Weisz couldn’t do it-become a professor-it was that he didn’t want to do it, not really. At Oxford, not really was a variant spelling of doom. So, after one last night of drinking and singing, he left. But he left with very good English.

And this turned out, in the strange and wondrous way the world worked, to be his salvation. Back in Trieste, which in 1919 had passed from Austro-Hungarian to Italian nationality, he spent his days in the cafes with his hometown pals. Not a professorial crowd: scruffy, smart, rebellious-a would-be novelist, a would-be actor, two or three don’t know/don’t care/don’t bother-mes, a would-be prospector for gold in the Amazon, one Communist, one gigolo, and Weisz.

“You should be a journalist,” they told him. “See the world.”

He got a job with the newspaper in Trieste. Wrote obituaries, reported on an occasional crime, now and then interviewed a local official. At which point, his father, always cold, positively glittered with frost, pulled a string, and Weisz returned to Milan, to write for Italy’s leading newspaper, Corriere della Sera. More obituaries, at first, then an assignment in France, another in Germany. At these, now age twenty-five, he worked-worked harder than he ever had, for he had at last discovered life’s great motivation: fear of failure. Presto, the magic potion!

Too bad, really, because Mussolini’s reign had begun, with the March on Rome-Mussolini had gone by train-in 1922. Restrictive press laws soon followed and, by 1925, the ownership of the paper had passed to fascist sympathizers, and the editor had to resign. Senior editors went with him, a determined Weisz hung on for three months, then followed them out the door. He thought about emigrating, then returned to Trieste, conspired with his friends, tore a poster or two off a wall, but generally kept his head down. He’d seen people beaten up, he’d seen people with blood on their faces, sitting in the street. Not for Weisz.

Anyhow, Mussolini and his crowd would soon be gone, it was simply a question of waiting it out, the world had always righted itself, it would again. He took tepid assignments from the Trieste newspapers-a soccer match, a fire on a cargo ship in the port-tutored a few students in English, fell in and out of love, spent eighteen months writing for a commercial journal in Basel, another year at a shipping newspaper in Trieste, survived. Survived and survived. Forced by politics to the margins of professional existence, he watched as his life drifted away like sand.

Then, in 1935, with Mussolini’s ghastly war in Ethiopia, he could bear it no longer. Three years earlier, he’d joined the giellisti in Trieste-the would-be novelist was now locked up on the prison island of Lipari, the Communist had become a fascist, the gigolo had married a countess and both had boyfriends, and the would-be prospector had found gold and died rich; there was more than treasure to be found in the Amazon.

So Weisz went to Paris and took a room in a tiny hotel in the Belleville district and commenced to live on the diet imagined by every dreamer who went to Paris; bread and cheese and wine. But very good bread-its price controlled by the brutally sagacious French government-pretty good cheese, supplemented with olives and onions, and wretched Algerian wine. But it did the job. Women were a classic, and effective, addition to the diet: if you were thinking about women, you weren’t thinking about food. Politics was a tiresome addition to the diet, but it helped. It was easier, much easier, to suffer in company, and the company sometimes included dinner, and women. Then, after seven months of reading newspapers on cafe rollers, and looking for work, God sent him Delahanty. The Great Autodidact, Delahanty. Who had taught himself to read in French, to read in Spanish, to read-Lord have mercy! — in Greek, and to read, providentially, in Italian. Delahanty, the bureau chief of the Reuters wire service in Paris. Ecco, a job!

Delahanty, white-haired and blue-eyed, had many years earlier left school in Glasgow and, as he put it, “worked for the papers.” Selling them, at first, then moving from copyboy to cub reporter, his progress powered by grit and insolence and genteel opportunism. Until he reached the top; chief of the Paris bureau, who, as trusted specialist, saw copies of dispatches from the important-Berlin, Rome-European offices. Which made him very much the spider at the center of the web, in the wire-service neighborhood near the place de l’Opera, where, one chilly spring day, Carlo Weisz showed up. “So, Mr. Weisz-you say Weiss, not Veisch, correct? — you wrote for the Corriere. Not much of it left now. A sad fate, for a fine newspaper like that. Now tell me, would you happen to have any clippings of what you wrote?” The snipped-out articles, carried around in a cheap briefcase, were not in the best condition, but they could be read, and Delahanty read them. “No, sir,” he said, “you needn’t bother to translate, I can get along in Italian.”

Delahanty put on his glasses and read with a forefinger. “Hmm,” he said. “Hmm. It ain’t so bad. I’ve seen worse. What do you mean by this, right here? Oh, that makes sense. I believe you can do this sort of work, Mr. Weisz. Do you like to do it? And do you care what you do, Mr. Weisz? The new sewers of Antwerp? The beauty contest in Dusseldorf? You don’t mind, that sort of thing? How’s your German? Spoke it at home? A little Serbo-Croatian? Can’t hurt. Oh I see, Trieste, yes, they speak everything there, don’t they. How’s your French? Yes, me too, I get along, and they look at you funny, but you manage. Any Spanish? No, don’t worry, you’ll pick it up. Now let me be frank, here we do things the Reuters way, you’ll learn the rules, all you have to do is follow ‘em. And I have to tell you that you won’t be the Reuters man in Paris. But you’ll be a Reuters man, and that ain’t so bad. It’s what I was, and I wrote about every damn thing under the sun. So tell me, how does that sit with you, sir? Can you do it? Ride on trains and mule carts and whatnot and get us the story? With emotion? With a feel for the human side, for the prime minister at his grand desk and the peasant on his little patch of earth? You believe you can? I know you can! And you’ll do just fine. So, why not get down to it straight away? Say, tomorrow? The previous incumbent, well, a week ago he went up to Holland and passed out in the queen’s lap. It’s the curse of this profession, Mr. Weisz, I’m sure you know that. Very well, do you have any questions? None? Allright, then, that will bring us to the gloomy subject of money.”

Weisz drifted off to sleep, then woke as the train pulled in to Port Bou. The Spanish family stared at the platform across the tracks, at a few Guardia Civil lounging against the wall of the ticket office. At a small crowd of refugees standing amid trunks and bundles and suitcases tied with rope, waiting for the southbound train. Not everybody, it seemed, was allowed to cross the border. After a few minutes, Spanish officers came through the car, asking for papers. When they reached the adjoining compartment, the older daughter, next to Weisz, closed her eyes and pressed her hands together. She was, he realized, praying. But the officers were polite-this was, after all, first class-took only a cursory glance at the documents and then went on to the next compartment. Then the train blew its whistle and rolled a few hundred feet down the track, where the French officers were waiting.

Report of Agent 207, delivered by hand on the fifth of December, to a clandestine OVRA station in the Tenth Arrondissement:

The Liberazione group met on the morning of 4 December at the Cafe Europa, the same subjects attending as in previous reports, with the engineer AMATO and the journalist WEISZ absent. It was decided to publish a “political obituary” of the lawyer BOTTINI, and to state that his death was not a suicide. It was further decided that the journalist WEISZ will now assume the editorship of the Liberazione newspaper.

28 December. With prosperity, or at least its distant cousin, Weisz had found himself a new place to live, the Hotel Dauphine, on the rue Dauphine in the Sixth Arrondissement. The proprietor, Madame Rigaud, was a widow of the 1914 war and, like women to be seen everywhere in France, still, after twenty years, wore the black of mourning. She liked Weisz, and did not much overcharge him for his two rooms, linked by a door, up four endless flights of stairs, on the top floor. From time to time she fed him, poor boy, in the hotel kitchen, a pleasant break from his little haunts, Mere this and Chez that, sprinkled through the narrow streets of the Sixth.

Worn out, he slept late on the morning of the twenty-eighth, and when the sun slanted through the slats on the closed shutters, forced himself awake, to find, on getting to his feet, that pretty much everything hurt. Even a visit to a war, for a few weeks, took its toll. So he would eat the three-course lunch, stop briefly at the office, see if any of the regulars at his cafe were around, and maybe call Veronique, once she got home from the gallery. A pleasant day, at least in the anticipation of it. But the dusty sun shafts revealed a slip of paper, slid under his door at some point while he was away. A message, brought up by the clerk at the hotel desk. Now what could that be? Veronique? My darling, you must come and see me, how I yearn for you! Pure fantasy, and he knew it. Veronique would never even consider doing such a thing, theirs was a very pallid love affair, off and on, now and then. Still, one never knew, anything was possible. On the slim chance, he read the note. “Please telephone as soon as you return. Arturo.”

He met Salamone in a deserted bar near the insurance company. They sat in back and ordered coffee. “And how does it go in Spain?” Salamone said.

“Badly. It’s almost finished. What remains is the nobility of a lost cause, but that’s thin stuff in a war. We’re beaten, Arturo, for which we can thank the French and the British and the nonintervention pact. Outgunned, not outfought, end of story. So now it’s up to Hitler, what happens next.”

“Well, my news is no better. I must tell you that Enrico Bottini is dead.”

Weisz looked up sharply, and Salamone handed him a page cut from a newspaper. Weisz flinched when he saw the photograph, read quickly through the tabloid prose, then shook his head and gave it back. “Something happened, poor Bottini, but not this.”

“No, we believe this was done by the OVRA. Staged to look like a murder/suicide.”

Weisz felt it, the sharp little bite that sickened the heart; it wasn’t like being shot at, it was like seeing a snake. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Weisz took a deep breath, and let it out. “Let them burn in hell for doing this,” he said. Only anger cured the fear that had reached him.

Salamone nodded. “In time, they will.” He paused, then said, “But for today, Carlo, the committee wants you to replace him.”

From Weisz, a nod of casual assent, as though he’d been asked the time. “Mmm,” he said. Of course they do.

Salamone laughed, a bass rumble inside a bear. “We knew you’d be eager to do it.”

“Oh yes, eager barely says it. And I can’t wait to tell my girlfriend.”

Salamone almost believed him. “Ahh, I don’t think…”

“And the next time we go to bed, I must remember to shave. For the photograph.”

Salamone nodded, closed his eyes. Yes, I know, forgive me.

“All that aside,” Weisz said, “I wonder how I can do this and run around Europe for the Reuters.”

“It’s your instinct we need, Carlo. Ideas, insights. We know we’ll have to stand in for you, day to day.”

“But not when it comes to the great moment, Arturo. That’s all mine.”

“That’s all yours,” Salamone said. “But, kidding aside, it’s yes?” Weisz smiled. “Do you suppose they have a Strega here?”

“Let’s ask,” Salamone said.

What they had was cognac, and they settled for that.

Weisz tried for the pleasant day, proving to himself that the change in his life didn’t affect him all that much. The three-course lunch, celeri remoulade, veal a la Normande, tarte Tatin, was consumed-some of it, anyhow-and the waiter’s silent query ignored, but for a generous tip inspired by guilt. Brooding, he passed up his regular cafe and had coffee elsewhere, sitting next to a table of German tourists with cameras and guidebooks. Rather quiet and sober German tourists, it seemed to him. And he did, that evening, see Veronique, at her art-laden apartment in the Seventh. Here he did better; the ritual preliminaries pursued with greater urgency, and at greater length, than usual-he knew what she liked, she knew what he liked, so they had a good time. Afterward, he smoked a Gitane and watched her as she sat at her dressing table, her small breasts rising and falling as she brushed her hair. “Your life goes well?” she said, catching his eye in the mirror. “Right now it does.” This she acknowledged with a warm smile, affectionate and reassured, her Frenchwoman’s soul demanding that he find consolation in making love to her.

Leaving at midnight, he did not go directly home-a fifteen-minute walk-but found a taxi at the Metro rank, went to Salamone’s apartment, in Montparnasse, and had the driver wait. The transfer of the editorial office of Liberazione-boxes of five-by-eight index cards, stacks of file folders-required two trips up and down the stairs at Salamone’s, and two more at the Dauphine. Weisz took it all to the office he’d made for himself in his second room; a small desk in front of the window, a 1931 Olivetti typewriter, a handsome oak filing cabinet that had once served in the office of a grain brokerage. When the moving was done, the boxes and folders covered the top of the desk, with one stack on the floor. So, there it was, paper.

Paging through a few back copies, he found the last article he’d written, a piece about Spain, for the first of the two November issues. The story was based on an editorial in the International Brigade’s weekly paper, Our Fight. With so many Communists and anarchists in the ranks of the brigade, the conventions of military discipline were often viewed as contrary to egalitarian ideals. For instance, saluting. Weisz’s story had a nice ironic flair to it-we must find a way, he told his readers in Italy, to cooperate, to work together against fascismo. But this was not always so easy, just have a look at what goes on in the Spanish war, even amidst the ferocious combat. The writer in Our Fight justified saluting as “the military way of saying hello.” Pointed out that the salute was not undemocratic, that, after all, two officers of equal rank would salute each other, that “a salute is a sign that a comrade who was an egocentric individualist in private life has adjusted himself to the collective way of getting things done.” Weisz’s article was also a gentle dig at one of Liberazione‘s competitors, the Communist L’Unita, printed in Lugano and widely distributed. Our crowd, he implied, we democratic liberals, social democrats, humanist centrists, is not, thank heaven, afflicted with all that doctrinal agony over symbols.

His article had been, he hoped, entertaining, and that was crucial. It was meant to offer a respite from daily fascist life-a much-needed respite. For instance, the Mussolini government issued a daily communique on the radio, and anyone within hearing had to stand up during the broadcast. That was the law. So, if you were in a cafe, or at work, or even in your own home, you stood, and woe betide those who didn’t.

Now, what did he have for January. The lawyer from Rome was writing the obituary for Bottini. That had to be, who would murder an honorable man? Weisz anticipated that Salamone would do a revision, and so would he. There was always a digest of world news-news which was withheld or slanted in Italy, where journalism had been defined, by law, as a supportive adjunct to national policy. The digest, taken from French and British papers, and particularly from the BBC, was the preserve of the chemist from Milan, and was always factual and precise. They had also, always tried to have, a cartoon, usually drawn by an emigre employed by the Parisian Le Journal. For January, here was baby Mussolini, in a particularly frilly baby hat, seated on Hitler’s knee, and being fed a heaping spoonful of swastikas. “More, more!” cries baby Mussolini.

The giellisti wanted, more than anything, to drive a wedge between Hitler and Mussolini, because Hitler meant to bring Italy into the coming war, on his side, despite the fact that Mussolini himself had declared that Italy would not be prepared to go to war until 1943.

Fine, what else?

Salamone had told him that the professor from Siena was working on a piece, based on a smuggled letter, that described the behavior of a police chief and a fascist gang in a town in the Abruzzi. The point of the article was to name the police chief, who would quickly hear of his new fame once the paper reached Italy. We know who you are, and we know what you’re doing, and you will be held accountable when the time comes. Also, when you’re out in the street, watch your back. This exposure would make him angry, but might serve to make him think twice about what he was doing.

So then: Bottini, digest, cartoon, police chief, a few odds and ends, maybe a political-theory piece-Weisz would make sure it was brief-and an editorial, always passionate and operatic, which pretty much always said the same thing: resist in small ways, this can’t go on, the tables will turn. The great Italian liberal heroes, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Cavour, to be quoted. And always, in boldface across the top of the front page: “Please don’t destroy this newspaper, give it to a trusted friend, or leave it where others may read it.”

Weisz had four pages to fill, the paper printed on a single folded sheet. Too bad, he thought, they couldn’t run advertisements. After a long, hard day of political dissent, discriminating giellisti like to dine at Lorenzo’s. No, that was not to be, the remaining space was his, and the subject was obvious, Colonel Ferrara, but…But what? He wasn’t sure. Somewhere in this idea he sensed a ticking bomb. Where? He couldn’t find it. The Colonel Ferrara story was not new, he’d been written about, in Italian and French newspapers, in 1935, and the story had no doubt been picked up by the wire services. He would appear in the Reuters story, which would likely be rewritten as human interest-the wire services, and the British press in general, did not take sides in the Spanish war.

His story in Liberazione would be nothing like that. Written under his pseudonym, Palestrina-they all used composers as pen names-it would be heroic, inspiring, emotional. The infantryman’s hat, the pistol on a belt, the shouting across the river. Mussolini had sent seventy-five thousand Italian troops to Spain, a hundred Caproni bombers, Whippet tanks, field guns, ammunition, ships-everything. A national shame; they’d said it before, they would say it again. But here was one officer, and a hundred and twenty-two men, who had the courage to fight for their ideals. And the distributors would make sure to leave copies in the towns by the military bases.

So this had to be written, and Ferrara himself had asked only that his future destination not be named. Easy enough to do that. Better-the reader might well imagine that he was off to fight somewhere else, wherever brave men and women were standing up against tyranny. Otherwise, Weisz asked himself, what could go wrong? The Italian secret services surely knew that Ferrara was in Spain, knew his real name, knew everything about him. And Weisz would make sure that this article would say nothing that could help them. And, in fact, these days, what wasn’t a ticking bomb? Very well then, he had his assignment and, that settled, he returned to the file folders.

Carlo Weisz sat at his desk, his jacket hung over the back of the chair; he wore a pale gray shirt with a thin red stripe, sleeves rolled up, top button undone, tie pulled down. A pack of Gitanes sat next to an ashtray from the San Marco, the artists’ and conspirators’ cafe in Trieste. His radio was on, its dial glowing amber, tuned to a Duke Ellington performance recorded at a Harlem nightclub, and the room was dark, lit only by a small desk lamp with a green glass shade. He leaned back in the chair for a moment, rubbed his eyes, then ran his fingers back through his hair to get it off his forehead. And if, by chance, he was watched from an apartment across the street-the shutters were open-it would never occur to the watcher that this was a scene for a newsreel, or a page in some Warriors of the Twentieth Century picture book.

From Weisz, a quiet sigh as he went back to work. He was, he realized, for the first time since the meeting with Salamone, at peace. Very odd, really, wasn’t it. Because all he was doing was reading.

10 January, 1939. Since midnight, a slow, steady snow had fallen over Paris. At three-thirty in the morning, Weisz stood at the corner of the rue Dauphine and the quay that ran along the left bank of the Seine. He peered into the darkness, took off his gloves, and tried to rub a little warmth into his hands. A windless night; the snow floated down over the white street and the black river. Weisz squinted, looking up the quay, but he couldn’t see a thing, then looked at his watch. 3:34. Late, not like Salamone, maybe… But before he could concentrate on the possible catastrophes, he saw a pair of dim headlights, wobbling as the car skidded over the slippery cobbles.

Salamone’s cranky old Renault slid sideways and stopped as Weisz waved. He had to pull hard to open the door as Salamone leaned over and pushed from the other side. “Ohh, fuck this,” Salamone said. The car was cold, its heater had not worked for a long time, and the efforts of its single windshield wiper did little to clear the window. On the backseat, a parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine.

The car bumped and skidded along the quay, past the great dark bulk of Notre Dame, traveling east by the river to the Pont d’Austerlitz, the bridge that crossed to the right bank of the Seine. As the window fogged up, Salamone bent forward over the wheel. “I can see nothing,” he said.

Weisz reached over and cleared a small circle with his glove. “Better?”

“Mannaggia!” Salamone said, meaning damn the snow and the car and everything else. “Here, try this.” He fumbled in his overcoat pocket and produced a large white handkerchief. The Renault had waited patiently for this moment, when the driver had one hand on its wheel, and spun slowly in a circle as Salamone swore and stomped on the brake. The Renault ignored this, completed a second pirouette, then came to rest with its back wheels in a mound of snow that had drifted up against the streetlamp at the end of the bridge.

Salamone put his handkerchief away, started the stalled car, and shifted into first gear. The wheels spun as the engine whined; once, twice, again. “Wait, stop, I’ll push it,” Weisz said. He used his shoulder to open the door, took one step outside, then his feet flew up and he landed hard.

“Carlo?”

Weisz fought his way upright, and, taking baby steps, circled the car and put both hands on the trunk. “Try it now.”

The engine raced as the wheels spun themselves deeper into the grooves they’d built. “Not so much gas!”

The window squeaked as Salamone cranked it down. “What?”

“Gently, gently.”

“Allright.”

Weisz pushed again. There would be no Liberazione this week.

From a boulangerie on the corner, a baker appeared, in white undershirt, white apron, and a white cloth knotted at the corners that covered his head. The wood-burning ovens of the bakeries had to be fired up at three in the morning, Weisz could smell the bread.

The baker stood next to Weisz and said, “Now we do it.” After three or four tries, the Renault shot forward, into the path of a taxi, the only other car on the streets of Paris that morning. The driver swerved away, blew his horn, shouted, “What the hell’s the matter with you?” and circled his index finger beside his temple. The taxi slid on the snow, then drove across the bridge as Weisz thanked the baker.

Salamone crossed the river, going five miles an hour, then turned left and right on the side streets until he found the rue Parrot, close by the Gare de Lyon railroad station. Here, for travelers and railroad workers, was an all-night cafe. Salamone left the car and walked to the glassed-in terrace. Seated alone at a table by the door, a short man in the uniform and hat of a conductor on the Italian railways was reading a newspaper and drinking an aperitif. Salamone tapped on the glass, the man looked up, finished his drink, left money on the table, and followed Salamone to the car. Maybe an inch or two over five feet tall, he wore a thick, trainman’s mustache, and his belly was big enough to spread the uniform jacket between the buttons. He climbed into the backseat and shook hands with Weisz. “Nice weather, eh?” he said, brushing the snow off his shoulders.

Weisz said it was.

“All the way up from Dijon, it’s doing this.”

Salamone got into the front seat. “Our friend here works on the seven-fifteen to Genoa,” he said to Weisz. Then to the conductor: “That’s for you.” He nodded toward the parcel.

The conductor lifted it up. “What’s in here?”

“Galley trays, for the Linotype. Also money, for Matteo. And the newspaper, with a makeup sheet.”

“Christ, must be a lot of money, you can look for me in Mexico.”

“It’s the trays, they’re zinc.”

“Can’t he get trays?”

“He says not.”

The conductor shrugged.

“How’s life at home?” Salamone said.

“It doesn’t get any better. Confidenti everywhere, you have to watch what you say.”

“You stay at the cafe until seven?” Weisz said.

“Not me. I go to the first-class wagon-lit and have a snooze.”

“Well, we better be going,” Salamone said.

The conductor got out, carrying the parcel with both hands. “Please be careful,” Salamone said. “Watch your step.”

“I watch it all,” the conductor said. He grinned at the idea and shuffled off through the snow.

Salamone put the car into gear. “He’s good at it. And you can’t ever tell, about that. The one before him lasted a month.”

“What happened to him?”

“Prison,” Salamone said. “In Genoa. We try and send a little something to the family.”

“Costly, this business we’re in,” Weisz said.

Salamone knew he meant more than money, and shook his head in sorrow. “Most of it I keep to myself, I don’t tell the committee more than they need to know. Of course, I’ll fill you in as we go along, just in case, if you see what I mean.”

20 January. It stayed cold and gray, the snow mostly gone, except for soot-blackened mounds that clogged the gutters. Weisz went to the Reuters bureau at ten, up near the Opera Metro station, close by the Associated Press, the French Havas bureau, and the American Express office. He stopped there first. “Mail for Monsieur Johnson?” There was one letter-only a few of the Paris giellisti were allowed to use the system, which was anonymous, and, they believed, not yet known to the OVRA spies in Paris. Weisz showed the Johnson carte d’identite, collected the letter-return address in Bari-then went up to the bureau.

Delahanty had the corner office, its tall windows opaque with grime, his desk stacked high with papers. He was drinking milky tea with a spoon in the cup and, as Weisz paused at the doorway, gave him a tart smile and pushed his glasses up on his forehead. “Come in, come in, said the spider to the fly.”

Weisz said good morning and slid into the chair on the other side of the desk.

“Your lucky day, today,” Delahanty said, riffling through his out box and handing Weisz a press release. The International Association of Writers was, shockingly, holding a conference. At 1:00 P.M. on 20 January, at the Palais de la Mutualite, by place Maubert in the Fifth. The public cordially invited. Listed speakers included Theodore Dreiser, Langston Hughes, Stephen Spender, C. Day-Lewis, and Louis Aragon. Aragon, who had started as a Surrealist, became a Stalinist, and wound up as both, would make sure the Moscow line was maintained. On the agenda: Spain falling to Franco, China attacked by Japan, Czechoslovakia dominated by Hitler-none of it good news. The indignation engines, Weisz knew, would be running at full steam, but, no matter the red politics, it was better than silence.

“You’ve earned a little boredom, Carlo, and it’s your turn for one of these chores,” Delahanty said, sipping at his cold tea. “We’ll want something from Dreiser-dig around in the Marxism and get me an honorable quote-and La Pasionaria is always worth a graph.” The affectionate nickname for Dolores Ibarurri, the orator for the Republican cause, described always as “fiery.” “Just a wee dispatch, laddie, you won’t hear anything new but we have to have somebody there, and Spain is important for the South American papers. So, be off with you, and don’t sign anything.”

Dutifully, Weisz arrived on time. The hall was full, crowds milling about in a haze of cigarette smoke-engages of every description, the Latin Quarter in full throb, a few red banners visible above the throng, and everybody seemed to know everyone else. Reports from Spain that morning said that the line on the east bank of the Segre had been abandoned, which meant that the taking of Barcelona wasn’t far off. So, as they’d always known, Madrid, with its stubborn pride, would be the last to give in.

Eventually, the thing got itself started, and the speakers spoke, and spoke, and spoke. The situation was dire. Their efforts had to be redoubled. A survey of the League of American Writers showed that 410 of the 418 members favored the Republican side. There was a notable absence of Russian writers at the conference, as they were busy mining gold in Siberia or being shot in the Lubyanka. Weisz, of course, could not write anything like that-it would have to be entered in the great book of stories that I never wrote kept by every correspondent.

“Carlo? Carlo Weisz!”

Now who was this-this man in the aisle peering down at him? It took a moment for memory to work; somebody he’d known, distantly, at Oxford. “Geoffrey Sparrow,” the man said. “You do remember, don’t you?”

“Of course, Geoffrey, how are you?”

They were talking in whispers, while a bearded man pounded his fist on the lectern. “Let’s go outside,” Sparrow said.

He was tall and fair and smiling and, now it came back to Weisz, rich and smart. As he went up the aisle, all long legs and flannel, Weisz saw that he wasn’t alone, had with him a smashing girl. Naturally, inevitably.

When they reached the lobby, Sparrow said, “This is my friend Olivia.”

“Hullo there, Carlo.”

“So, you’re here for Reuters?” Sparrow said, his eyes on the pad and pencil in Weisz’s hand.

“Yes, I’m based in Paris now.”

“Are you. Well, that can’t be too bad.”

“Did you come over for the conference?” Weisz said, a journalist’s version of what the hell are you doing here?

“Oh, actually not. We sneaked away for a long weekend, but, this morning, we just couldn’t face the Louvre, so…just for a lark, you know, we thought we’d have a look.” His smile turned rueful, it hadn’t really been all that much fun. “But damned if I thought I’d see someone I knew!” He turned to Olivia and said, “Carlo and I were at university together. Uh, what was it, Harold Dowling’s course, I think, right?”

“Yes, that’s right. Very long lectures, I recall.”

From Sparrow, a merry laugh. They’d had such fun together, hadn’t they, Dowling, all that. “So, you’ve left Italy?”

“I did, about three years ago. I couldn’t stay there any longer.”

“Yes, I know, Mussolini and his little men, damn shame, really. I do see your name on a Reuters dispatch, now and again, and I knew there couldn’t be two of you.”

Weisz smiled, graciously enough. “No, it’s me.”

“Well, a foreign correspondent,” Olivia said.

“He is, the rogue, while I sit in a bank,” Sparrow said. “Actually, now that I think about it, I have a friend in Paris who’s rather a fan of yours. Damn, what was it he mentioned? Some story from Warsaw? No, Danzig! About Volksdeutsche militia training in the forest. Was that yours?”

“It was-I’m surprised you remember it.”

“I’m surprised I remember anything, but my friend went on about it-fat men in short pants with old rifles. Singing around the campfire.”

Weisz was, despite himself, flattered. “Frightening, in its way. They mean to fight the Poles.”

“Yes, and here comes Adolf, to help them out. Say, Carlo, have you got plans for this afternoon? We’re booked for dinner, damn it all, but what say you to drinks? At six? Maybe I’ll call my friend, I’m sure he’d want to meet you.”

“Well, I do have to write this story.” He nodded toward the hall, where a woman’s voice was building to a crescendo.

“Oh that won’t take long,” Olivia said, her eyes meeting his.

“I’ll try,” Weisz said. “Where are you staying?”

“At the Bristol,” Sparrow said. “But we won’t drink there, maybe the Deux Magots, or watchamacallit next door. Drinks with old Sartre!”

“It’s the Flore,” Weisz said.

“Please, darling,” Olivia said. “No more filthy beards-can’t we go to Le Petit Bar? We’re not here every day.” Le Petit Bar was the much-more-chic of the two bars at the Ritz. Turning to Weisz, she said, “Ritz cocktails, Carlo!” And when I’m tiddly I just don’t care what goes on under the table.

“Done!” Sparrow said. “The Ritz at six. Can’t be too bad.”

“I’ll call if I can’t make it,” Weisz said.

“Oh do try, Carlo,” Olivia said. “Please?”

Weisz, clacketting steadily away at the Olivetti, was done by four-thirty. Plenty of time to call the Bristol and cancel the drinks. He stood up, ready to go downstairs and use the telephone, then didn’t. The prospect of an hour with Sparrow and Olivia and friend appealed to him as, at least, a change. Not another evening of gloomy politics with fellow emigres. He knew perfectly well that Sparrow’s girlfriend was only flirting, but flirting wasn’t so bad, and Sparrow was bright, and could be amusing. Don’t be such a hermit, he told himself. And if the friend thought he was good at what he did, well, why not? He heard few enough compliments, absent Delahanty’s backhanded ironies, a few kind words from a reader wouldn’t be the end of the world. So he put on his cleanest shirt and his best tie, his silk red-and-gray stripe, combed his hair with water, left his glasses on the desk, went downstairs at five-forty-five, and had the not inconsiderable pleasure of telling a taxi driver, “Le Ritz, s’il vous plait.”

No floral print tonight for Olivia, a cocktail dress for cocktails, her smart little breasts swelling just above the neckline, and a tight, stylish hat on her golden hair. She took a Players from a box in her evening bag and handed Weisz a gold lighter. “Thanks, Carlo.” Meanwhile, a splendid Sparrow in high London tailoring talked cleverly about nothing, but no guest, not yet. They chattered while they waited, in the dark wood-paneled bar with its drawing room furnishings-Sparrow and Olivia on a divan, Weisz in an upholstered chair by the draped French door that led to the terrace. Oh it felt very good to Weisz, all this, after abandoned monasteries and smoky meeting halls. Very good indeed, better and better as the Ritz 75 went down. Basically a French 75, gin and champagne, named after the French 75-mm cannon of the Great War, and later a staple at the bar of the Stork Club. Bertin, the famous barman of the Ritz, added lemon juice and sugar and, voila, the Ritz 75. Voila indeed. Weisz loved all humankind, and his wit knew no bounds-delighted smiles from Olivia, toothy har-hars from Sparrow.

Twenty minutes later, the friend. Weisz had expected a Sparrow friend to be cast from the same mold, but this was not the case. The friend’s aura said trade, loud and clear, as he looked around the room, spotted their table, and ambled toward them. He was older than Sparrow by at least a decade, fattish and benign, a pipe clenched in his teeth, a slipover sweater worn beneath the jacket of a comfortable suit. “Sorry to be late,” he said as he arrived. “Damnedest gall I’ve ever seen, that cabman, drove me all around Paris.”

“Edwin Brown, this is Carlo Weisz,” Sparrow said proudly as they rose to greet the friend.

Brown was clearly pleased to meet him, his pleasure indicated by an emphatic “Hmmm!” spoken around the stem of his pipe as they shook hands. After he’d settled in his chair, he said, “I think you are a hell of a fine writer, Mr. Weisz. Did Sparrow tell you?”

“He did, and you’re kind to say it.”

“I’m right, is what I am, you can forget ‘kind.’ I always look for your byline, when they let you have one.”

“Thank you,” Weisz said.

They had to order a third round of cocktails, now that Mr. Brown had arrived. And, in Weisz, the spring of life burbled ever more happily. Olivia had a rosy blush on her cheeks and was somewhere well east of tiddly, laughed easily, met Weisz’s eyes, now and again. Excited, he sensed, more by the elegance of Le Petit Bar, the evening, Paris, than whatever she might see in him. When she laughed, she tilted her head back, and the soft light caught her pearl necklace.

Conversation wandered to the afternoon conference, Sparrow’s Tory sneer not so very far from Weisz’s amiable liberalism, and for Olivia it all began and ended with beards. Mr. Brown was rather more opaque, his political views apparently held in secrecy, though he was emphatically a Churchill man. Even quoted Winston, addressing Chamberlain and his colleagues on the occasion of the cowardly cave-in at Munich. “‘You were given a choice between shame and war. You have chosen shame, and you shall have war,’” adding, “And I’m sure you agree with that, Mr. Weisz.”

“It certainly looks that way,” Weisz said. In the small silence that followed, he said, “Forgive a journalist’s question, Mr. Brown, but may one ask what sort of business you’re in?”

“Certainly you may, though, as they say, not for publication.” Here the pipe emitted a large puff of sweetish smoke, as though to underline the prohibition.

“You’re safe for tonight,” Weisz said. “Off the record.” His tone was playful, Brown couldn’t possibly think he was being interviewed.

“I own a small company that controls a few warehouses on the Istanbul waterfront,” he said. “Just plain old commerce, I fear, and I’m only there some of the time.” He produced a card and handed it to Weisz.

“And you can only hope that the Turks don’t sign on with Germany.”

“That’s it,” Brown said. “But I think they’ll stay neutral-they had all the war they wanted, by 1918.”

“So did we all,” Sparrow said. “Let’s not do that again, shall we?”

“Can’t stop it, once it starts,” Brown said. “Look at Spain.”

“I think we should’ve helped them,” Olivia said.

“I suppose we should’ve,” Brown said. “But we were thinking about 1914 ourselves, y’know.” To Weisz he said, “Haven’t you written something about Spain, Mr. Weisz?”

“Now and then, I have.”

Brown looked at him for a moment. “What did I read, was it recently? I was up in Birmingham, something in the paper there, the Catalonian campaign?”

“Perhaps you did. I filed down there a few weeks ago, end of December.”

Brown finished his drink. “Very nice, shall we try one more? Have you time, Geoffrey? On me, this round.”

Sparrow waved at the waiter.

“Oh Lord,” Olivia said. “And wine with dinner.”

“Got it,” Brown said. “About some Italian fellow, fighting the Mussolini Italians? Was that you?”

“Likely it was. They subscribe to Reuters, in Birmingham.”

“A colonel, he was. Colonel something.”

“Colonel Ferrara.” Tick.

“With a hat, of some sort.”

“You have quite a memory, Mr. Brown.”

“Well, sad to say I don’t, not really, but that stuck, somehow.”

“A brave man,” Weisz said. Then, to Sparrow and Olivia: “He fought with the International Brigades, and stayed on when they left.”

“Much good it will do him now,” Sparrow said.

“What will become of him?” Brown said. “When the Republicans surrender.”

Slowly, Weisz shook his head.

“It must be odd,” Brown said. “To interview people, to hear their story, and then, they’re gone. Do you ever keep track, Mr. Weisz?”

“That’s hard to do, with the way the world is now. People disappear, or think they might have to, tomorrow, next month…”

“Yes, I can see that. Still, he must’ve made an impression on you. He’s quite unusual, in his way, a military officer, fighting for another nation’s cause.”

“I think he saw it as one cause, Mr. Brown. Do you know the line from Rosselli? He and his brother founded an emigre organization in the twenties, and he was murdered in Paris in ‘37.”

“I know the Rosselli story, I don’t know the line.”

“‘Today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy.’”

“Which means?”

“The battle is for freedom in Europe; democracy versus fascism.”

“Not communism versus fascism?”

“Not for Rosselli.”

“But for Colonel Ferrara, perhaps?”

“No, no. Not for him either. He is an idealist.”

“That’s very romantic,” Olivia said. “Like a movie.”

“Indeed,” Brown said.

It was almost eight when Weisz left the hotel, passed up the line of taxis at the curb, and headed toward the river. Let the weather, cold and damp, clear his head, he’d find a taxi later. He often told himself this, then didn’t bother, choosing his streets for the pleasure of walking them. He circled place Vendome, its jewelers’ windows lying in wait for the Ritz clientele, then took rue Saint-Honore, past fancy shops, now closed, and the occasional restaurant, its sign gold on green, a secret refuge, the scent of rich food drifting through the night air.

Mr. Brown had offered him dinner, but he’d declined-he’d been questioned enough for one evening. Continental Trading, Ltd. said the card, with telephone numbers in Istanbul and London, but Weisz had a pretty good idea of Mr. Brown’s real business, which was the espionage business, he believed, likely the British Secret Intelligence Service. Nothing new or surprising here, not really, spies and journalists were fated to go through life together, and it was sometimes hard to tell one from the other. Their jobs weren’t all that different: they talked to politicians, developed sources in government bureaux, and dug around for secrets. Sometimes they talked to, and traded with, one another. And, now and again, a journalist worked directly for the secret services.

Weisz smiled as he recalled the afternoon-they’d done a pretty fair job on him. It’s your old college chum! And his sexy girlfriend who thinks you’re sweet! Have a drink! Have six! Oh look, here’s our friend Mr. Brown! Mr. Green! Mr. Jones! Sparrow and Olivia were probably civilians, he guessed-the lives of nations were lately perilous, so one helped out if one were asked-but Mr. Brown was the real thing. And so, Weisz said to himself, what was it about this particular pee on this particular lamppost that so excited this particular hound? Was Ferrara suspected of something-had he gotten himself on a list? Weisz hoped not. But, if not, what? Because Brown wanted to know who he was and wanted to find him and had gone to some trouble over it. Damn, he’d felt this coming, as he contemplated writing about Ferrara, why hadn’t he listened to himself?

Calm down. The spies were always after something. If you were a journalist, here all of a sudden came the warmest Russian, most cultured German, most sophisticated Frenchwoman you ever met. Weisz’s personal favorite in Paris was the magnificent Count Polanyi, at the Hungarian legation-lovely old European manners, dire honesty, and a sense of humor: very appealing, very dangerous. A mistake to be anywhere near these people, but sometimes one erred. Weisz certainly had. With, for example, the British spy Lady Angela Hope-she made no secret of it-and the memory of her produced a drunken snort of laughter. He had twice, in her Passy apartment, erred with Lady Angela, who made a loud, elaborate opera of it all, surely he was at least Casanova to produce such shrieks-Christ, there were maids in the apartment. Never mind the maids, the neighbors! Oh my dear, Lady Angela’s been murdered. Again. This performance had been followed by a pillow interrogation of considerable length, all for the unreported tidbits from his interview with Gafencu, the Roumanian foreign minister. Which she’d not had, any more than Brown had found out where Colonel Ferrara had gone to ground.

By nine, Weisz was back in his room. He’d wanted dinner, by the time he reached the Sixth, but dinner at Chez this or Mere that, with a newspaper for company, had not appealed to him, so he’d stopped at his cafe and had a ham sandwich, coffee, and an apple. Once home, he thought about writing, writing from the heart, for himself, and would’ve worked on the novel in his desk drawer, but for the fact that there was no novel in the drawer. So he stretched out on the bed, listened to a symphony, smoked cigarettes, and read Malraux’s Man’s Fate-La Condition Humaine, in French-for the second time. Shanghai in 1927, the Communist uprising, peasant terrorists, Soviet political operatives working against Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces, secret police, spies, European aristocrats. Overlain with the French taste for philosophy. No refuge here from Weisz’s vocational life, but he did not, would not, seek refuge.

Still, there was at least, thankfully, one exception to the rule. He put the book down from time to time and thought about Olivia, about what it might have been like to make love to her, about Veronique, about his chaotic love life, this one and that one, wherever they were that night. Thought particularly about the, well, not the love of his life perhaps, but the woman he never stopped thinking about, because their hours together had been, always, exciting and passionate. “It’s just that we were made for each other,” she would say, a melancholy sigh in her voice. “Sometimes I think, why can’t we just, continue?” Continue meant, he supposed, a life of afternoons in hotel beds, occasional dinners in out-of-the-way restaurants. His desire for her never ended, and she told him it was that way for her. But. It would not translate to marriage, children, domestic life, it was a love affair, and they both knew it. She’d married, three years earlier, in Germany, a marriage of money, and social standing, a marriage, he thought, brought on by turning forty and fatigue with love affairs, even theirs. Still, when he was lonely, he thought about her. And he was very lonely.

He’d never imagined it would turn out that way, but the political maelstrom of his twenties and thirties, the world gone wrong, the pulse of evil and the unending flight from it, had turned life on its wrong side. Anyhow he blamed it, for leaving him alone in a hotel room in a foreign city. Where he fell asleep twice, by eleven-thirty, before giving up on the day, crawling under the blanket, and turning out the light.

28 January, Barcelona.

S. Kolb.

So he was called, on his present passport, a workname they gave him when it suited their inclinations. His real name had disappeared, long ago, and he had become Mr. Nobody, from the nation of Nowhere, and he looked it: bald, with a fringe of dark hair, eyeglasses, a sparse mustache-a short, inconsequential man in a tired suit, at that moment chained to two anarchists and a water pipe in the WC of a cafe on the bombed-out waterfront of an abandoned city. Sentenced to be shot. Eventually. There was a queue, one had to wait one’s turn, and the executioners might not go back to work until they’d had lunch.

Terribly unfair, it seemed to S. Kolb.

His papers said he was the representative of a Swiss engineering firm in Zurich, and a letter in his briefcase, on Republican government stationery, dated two weeks earlier, confirmed his appointment at the office of military procurement. Fiction, all of it. The letter was a forgery, the office of military procurement was now an empty room, its floor littered with important papers, the name was an alias, and Kolb was no salesman.

But even so, unfair. Because the people who were going to shoot him didn’t know about any of that. He’d tried to enter a riding stable, the temporary encampment of a few companies of the Fifth Army Corps, where a guard had arrested him and taken him to the office of the Checa-secret police-at that moment stationed in a waterfront cafe. The officer in charge, seated at a table by the bar, was a bull of a man, with a fat moon face covered in dark blue beard shadow. He’d listened impatiently to the guard’s story, raised up on one haunch, scowled, then said, “He’s a spy, shoot him.”

He wasn’t wrong. Kolb was an operative of the British Secret Intelligence Service, a secret agent, yes, a spy. Nevertheless, this was terribly unfair. For he was, at that moment, not spying-not stealing documents, suborning officials, or taking photographs. Mostly that was his work, with the occasional murder thrown in when London demanded it, but not this week. This week, at the direction of his boss, an icy man known as Mr. Brown, S. Kolb had checked out of a comfortable whores’ hotel in Marseilles-an operation to do with the French Merchant Marine-and come running down to Spain in search of an Italian called Colonel Ferrara, thought to have retreated to Barcelona with elements of the Fifth Army Corps.

But Barcelona was a nightmare, not that Mr. Brown cared. The government had packed up its files and fled north to Gerona, thousands of refugees followed, headed to France, and the city was left to await the advancing Nationalist columns. Anarchy ruled, the municipal street cleaners had abandoned their brooms and gone home, great heaps of garbage, attended by clouds of flies, were piled on the sidewalks, refugees broke into empty grocery stores, the city now governed by armed drunks riding through the streets on the roofs of taxicabs.

Yet, even in the midst of chaos, Kolb had tried to do his job. “To the world,” Brown had once told him, “you may seem a meager little fellow, but you have, if I may say so, the balls of a gorilla.” Was that a compliment? God had made him meager, fate had ruined his life when he was accused, as a young man, of embezzlement while working in a bank in Austria, and the British SIS had done the rest. Not a very nice compliment, if that’s what it was. Still, he did persevere, had in this case found what remained of the Fifth Army Corps, and what was his reward?

Chained to anarchists, black scarves around their necks, and a pipe. Outside, in the adjacent alley, several shots were fired. Well, at least the queue was moving-when was lunch? “Hora de…?” he asked the nearest anarchist, making a spooning motion with his free hand. From the anarchist, a look of some admiration. Here was a man at death’s door, and he wanted lunch.

Suddenly, the door swung open and two militiamen, pistols in hand, came strolling into the WC. As one of them unbuttoned his fly and used the tiled hole in the floor, the other began to unlock the chain on the pipe. “Officer,” Kolb said. No response from the militiaman. “Comandante,” he tried. The man looked at him. “Por favor,” Kolb said politely. “Importante!”

The militiaman said something to his companion, who shrugged and began to button his fly. Then he grabbed Kolb by the shoulder and hauled the three chained men out the door and into the cafe. The Checa officer had a well-dressed man, head down, standing before him, and was making a point by tapping his finger on the table. “Senor!” Kolb called out as they headed for the door. “Senor Comandante!”

The officer looked up. Kolb had one chance. “Oro,” he said. “Oro para vida.” Kolb had worked this out while standing in the WC, trying desperately to assemble odd scraps and snips of Spanish. What was gold? What was life? The result-“gold for life”-was terse, but effective. The officer beckoned, Kolb and the anarchists were dragged up to the table. Now sign language took over. Kolb pointed urgently to the seam of his trouser leg and said “Oro.”

The officer followed the pantomime with interest, then extended his hand. When Kolb just stood there, the officer snapped his fingers twice and opened his hand again. A universal gesture: give me the gold. Hurriedly, Kolb unbuckled his belt and undid the buttons and managed, with one hand, to take his pants off and hand them to the officer, who ran a thumb down the seam. A very good tailor had been at work here, and the officer had to press hard to find the coins sewn into the material. When his thumb found a hard circle, he stared at Kolb with interest. Who are you, to arrange these matters with such care? But Kolb just stood there, now in baggy cotton underdrawers, gray with age, attire that made him, if possible, even less imposing than usual. The officer took a flick knife from his pocket and produced, with a snap of the wrist, a bright steel blade. He cut the seam open, to reveal twenty gold coins, Dutch guilders. A small fortune, his eyes widened as he stared at them, then narrowed. Clever little fellow, what else do you have?

He sliced open the other seam, the fly, the waistband, the cuffs, and the flaps on the back pockets, leaving the trousers in shreds. He tossed them into a corner, then asked Kolb a question he didn’t understand. Rather, almost didn’t, because he recognized the expression that meant “for all.” Did Kolb mean to ransom himself, or the two anarchists as well?

Kolb sensed danger, and his mind sped over the possibilities. What to do? What to say? As Kolb hesitated, the officer grew impatient, dismissed the whole business with a cavalier wave of the hand, and said something to the militiaman, who began to unchain Kolb and the anarchists, who looked at each other, then headed for the door. On the table, Kolb saw his passport-his briefcase, money, and watch had disappeared, but he needed the passport to get out of this accursed country. Meekly, with the greatest diffidence he could manage, Kolb stepped forward and took the passport, nodding humbly to the officer as he backed away. The officer, gathering up the coins from the table, glanced at him but said nothing. Heart pounding, Kolb walked out of the cafe.

Outside, the waterfront. Burned-out warehouses, bomb craters in the cobbled street, a half-sunk tender tied to a pier. The street was crowded: soldiers, refugees-sitting amid their baggage, waiting for a ship that would never arrive, local citizens, with nothing to do, and nowhere to go. One of Barcelona’s horse-drawn fiacres for hire, with two elegantly dressed men in the open carriage, moved slowly through the crowd. One of the men looked at Kolb for a moment, then turned away.

Well he might. A little clerk of a man in his underpants, otherwise dressed for a day at the office. Some people stared, others didn’t-Kolb was not the strangest thing they’d seen that day in Barcelona, not by a great deal. Meanwhile, S. Kolb’s legs were cold in the wind off the bay, should he tie his jacket around his waist? Maybe he would, in a minute, but for the moment, he wanted only to get as far away from the cafe as he could. Money, he thought, then a train ticket. He walked quickly, heading for the corner. Should he try to return to the riding stable? Hurrying along the waterfront, he considered it.

3 February, Paris.

The weather broke, to a false, cloudy spring, the city returning to its normal grisaille-gray stone, gray sky. Carlo Weisz left the Hotel Dauphine at eleven in the morning, for a meeting of the Liberazione committee at the Cafe Europa. He was surely followed once, perhaps twice.

He walked over to the Saint-Germain-des-Pres Metro, on his way to the Gare du Nord, stopped to look at a shop window he liked, old maps and nautical charts, and, out of the corner of his eye, noticed that a man at mid-block had also stopped, to look, apparently, in the window of a tabac. Nothing unusual about this man, in his thirties, who wore a gray peaked cap and had his hands in the pockets of a tweed jacket. Weisz, done with looking at Madagascar, 1856, continued on, entered the Metro, and descended the stairs that led to the Direction Porte de Clignancourt side of the tracks. On his way down, he heard hurrying footsteps above him, and glanced back over his shoulder. At that moment, the footsteps stopped. Now Weisz turned around, and caught a glimpse of a tweed jacket, as whoever it was reversed direction and disappeared around the corner of the stairway. Was it the same jacket? The same man? Who in the world went down Metro stairs, then up? A man who had forgotten something. A man who realized he was on the wrong Metro line.

Weisz heard the train coming, and walked quickly down to the platform. He entered the car-only a few passengers this time of the morning. As he went to take a seat, he saw the man in the tweed jacket again, running for the car closest to the foot of the stairway. That was that. Weisz found a seat and opened a copy of Le Journal.

But that was not quite that. Because, when the train stopped at Chateau d’Eau, someone said “Signor,” and, when Weisz looked up, handed him an envelope, then went quickly out the door, just before the train started to move. Weisz had only a brief look at him: fifty or so, poorly dressed, dark shirt buttoned at the throat, a deeply lined face, worried eyes. As the train picked up speed, Weisz went to the door and saw the man hurrying away down the platform. He returned to his seat, had a look at the envelope-brown, blank, sealed-and opened it.

Inside, a single folded sheet of yellow drafting paper with the carefully drawn schematic of a long, tapered shape, its nose shaded dark, a propeller and fins at the other end. A torpedo. Extraordinary! Look at all the apparatus the thing contained, lettered descriptions, in Italian, ranged along its length-valves, cables, a turbine, an air flask, rudders, fuse, drive shaft, and plenty more. All of it fated, alas, to blow up. On the side of the page, a list of specifications. Weight: 3,748 pounds. Length: 23 feet, 7 inches. Charge: 595 pounds. Range/speed: 4,400 yards at 50 knots, 13,000 yards at 30 knots. Power: wet heater. Which meant, after he thought about it for a moment, that the torpedo was driven through the water by steam.

Why was he given this?

The train slowed for the next station, Gare du Nord, blue tile set in the curve of the white tunnel wall. Weisz refolded the drawing and put it back in the envelope. On the short walk to the Cafe Europa, he tried every way he knew to see if somebody was following him. There was a woman with a shopping basket, a man walking a spaniel. How was one to know?

At the Cafe Europa, Weisz had a quiet word with Salamone, saying that a stranger on the Metro had handed him an envelope-a copy of a mechanical blueprint. The expression on Salamone’s face was eloquent: this is the last thing I needed today. “We’ll look at it after the meeting,” he said. “If it’s a…blueprint? I better ask Elena to join us.” Elena, the Milanese chemist, was the committee’s adviser on anything technical, the rest of them could barely change a lightbulb. Weisz agreed. He liked Elena. Her sharp face, long, graying hair worn back in a clip, her severe dark suits, did not especially reveal who she was. Her smile did; one corner of her mouth upturned, the reluctant half smile of the ironist, witness to the absurdities of existence, half amused, half not. Weisz found her appealing and, more important, he trusted her.

It was not a good meeting.

They’d all had time to brood about Bottini’s murder, about what it might mean to them, to be targets of OVRA-not as giellisti, but as individuals, trying to live their daily lives. In the first flash of anger, they had thought only of counterattack, but now, after a discussion of articles for the next issue of Liberazione, they wanted to talk about changing the location of the meeting, about security. They believed themselves to be skilled amateurs, at newspaper production, but security was not a discipline for skilled amateurs, they knew that, and it frightened them.

When everyone else had left, Salamone said, “Allright, Carlo, I guess we’d better take a look at your drawing.”

Weisz laid it out on the table. “A torpedo,” he said.

Elena studied it for a time, then shrugged. “Someone copied this, from an engineering blueprint, so someone thought it was important. Why? Because it’s different, improved, perhaps experimental, but God only knows how, I don’t. This is meant for an ordnance expert.”

“There are two possibilities,” Salamone said. “It’s an Italian blueprint, so it can only have come from Pola, on the Adriatic, from what used to be the Whitehead Torpedo Company-founded by the British, taken over by Austria-Hungary, then Italian after the war. You’re right, Elena, it must be significant, surely secret, so, by having it, we’re involved in espionage. Which means that the man in the Metro could have been an agent provocateur, and this paper is planted evidence. On that basis, we burn it.”

“And the other possibility,” Weisz said, “is that it’s a gesture. Of resistance.”

“What if it is?” Elena said. “This is of interest only to a navy, likely it’s meant for the British navy, or the French. So, if that idiot in Rome gets us into a war, with France, or Great Britain, God forbid, it would lead to the loss of Italian ships, Italian lives. How? I can’t work out the details, but secret knowledge of a weapon’s capabilities is always an advantage.”

“That’s true,” Salamone said. “And, on that basis, we don’t want anything to do with it. We are a resistance organization, and this is spying, this is treason, not resistance, though there are those on the other side who think it’s the same thing. So, once again, we burn it.”

“There’s more,” Weisz said. “I think I might have been followed, earlier this morning, when I walked to the Metro.” Briefly, he described the behavior of the man in the tweed jacket.

“Were the two of them somehow working together?” Elena said.

“I don’t know,” Weisz said. “Maybe I’m seeing monsters under the bed.”

“Ah yes,” Elena said. “Those monsters.”

“Under all our beds,” Salamone said tartly. “The way the meeting went today.”

“Is there anything we can do?” Weisz said.

“Not that I know about, short of ceasing publication. We try to be as secretive as we can, but, in the emigre community, people talk, and the OVRA spies are everywhere.”

“On the committee?” Elena said.

“Maybe.”

“What a world,” Weisz said.

“Our very own,” Salamone said. “But the clandestine press has been a fact of life since 1924. In Italy, in Paris, in Belgium, everywhere we ran to. And OVRA can’t stop it. They can slow it down. They arrest a socialist group in Turin, but the giellisti in Florence start a new publication. And the major newspapers have survived for a long time-the socialist Avanti, the Communist Unita. Our older brother, the Giustizia e Liberta paper published in Paris. The emigres who issue Non Mollare! as the name of their journal states, don’t give in, and the Catholic Action people publish Il Corriere degli Italiani. The OVRA can’t kill us all. They might want to, but Mussolini still craves legitimacy in the eyes of the world. And, when they do assassinate-Matteotti in 1924, the Rosselli brothers, in France, in ‘37-they create martyrs; martyrs for the Italian opposition, and martyrs in the world’s newspapers. This is a war, and, in a war, sometimes you lose, sometimes you win, and, sometimes, when you think you’ve lost, you’ve won.”

Elena liked that idea. “Maybe this needs to be said to the committee.”

Weisz agreed. The fascists didn’t always have things their way. When Matteotti, the leader of the Italian Socialist party, disappeared, after making a passionate antifascist speech, the reaction in Italy, even among members of the Fascist party, had been so intense that Mussolini was forced to support an investigation. A month later, Matteotti’s body had been discovered in a shallow grave outside Rome, a carpenter’s file driven into his chest. The following year, a man named Dumini was arrested, tried, and found guilty, more or less. He was guilty, said the court, of “nonpremeditated homicide extenuated by the subnormal physical resistance of Matteotti and by other circumstances.” So, yes, murdered, but not very murdered.

“And Liberazione?” Weisz said. “Do we, as you say of the major newspapers, survive?”

“Maybe,” Salamone said. “Now, before the cops come rushing in here…” He crumpled the yellow drafting paper into a ball and dropped it in the ashtray. “Who’ll do the honors? Carlo?”

Weisz took out his steel lighter and lit a corner of the paper.

It was a brisk little fire, flaring and smoking, tended by Weisz with the point of a pencil. As the ashes were stirred about, a tap at the door was followed by the appearance of the barman. “Everything allright in here?”

Salamone said it was.

“If you’re going to burn the place down, let me know first, eh?”

4 February.

Weisz sat back in his chair for a moment and watched people in the street below his office window, then forced himself back to work.

“MONSIEUR DE PARIS” DEAD AT 76Anatole Deibler, the Grand High Executioner of France, died of a heart attack yesterday in the Chatelet station of the Paris Metro. Known by the traditional honorific “Monsieur de Paris,” Deibler was on his way to his 401st execution, having attended France’s guillotine for forty years. Deibler was the last male heir to the position held by his family, executioners since 1829, and it is said that he is to be replaced by his assistant, known as “the valet.” Thus Andre Obrecht, Monsieur Deibler’s nephew, will be the new “Monsieur de Paris.”

Would this take a second paragraph? Deibler had been, according to his wife, a passionate bicycliste, and had raced for his bicycle club. He had married into another family of executioners, and his father, Louis, had been the last to wear the traditional top hat as he lopped off heads. Any of that? No, he thought not. What about the invention of Dr. Joseph Guillotin in revolutionary France? You always saw that when the contraption was mentioned, but did they care in Manchester or Montevideo? He doubted they did. And the rewrite man would likely strike it out anyhow. Still, it was sometimes useful to give him something he could strike out. No, leave it alone. And, with any luck at all, Delahanty would spare him an afternoon at a February funeral.

FRANCE SUPPORTS CVETKOVICH APPOINTMENT

The Quai d’Orsay today announced its support of the new premier of Yugoslavia, Dr. Dragisha Cvetkovich, designated by the Yugoslav ruler, Prince Paul, to replace Dr. Milan Stoyadinovich.

That much they had from the press release-a few colorless diplomatic paragraphs marching after. But of sufficient weight to send Weisz off to see his contact at the Foreign Ministry. Off to the regal headquarters on the quai d’Orsay, next to the Palais Bourbon, back in time to the eighteenth century: vast chandeliers, miles of Aubusson carpet, endless marble stairways, the hush of state.

Devoisin, a permanent undersecretary in the ministry, had a magnificent smile, and a magnificent office, his windows looking down on a wintry, slate-colored Seine. He offered Weisz a cigarette from a fruitwood box on his desk and said, “Off the record, we’re glad to see the back of that bastard Stoyadinovich. A Nazi, Weisz, to his very marrow, which is no news to you.”

“Yes, the Vodja,” Weisz said dryly.

“Dreadful. The leader, just like his pals; the Fuehrer, the Duce,and the Caudillo, as Franco likes to call himself. And old Vodja had the rest of it as well, Greenshirt militia, stiff-arm salute, the whole nasty business. Anyhow, adieu, at least for the moment.”

“This adieu,” Weisz said. “Were your people involved?”

Devoisin smiled. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“There are ways to say it. Not quite so, direct.”

“Not in this office, my friend. I suspect the British might have helped out, Prince Paul is their great chum.”

“So then, I’ll just say that the Franco-Yugoslav alliance is expected to strengthen.”

“It surely will-our love deepens with time.”

Weisz pretended to write. “I rather like that.”

“Actually, it’s the Serbs we love, you can’t do business with the Croats, they’re headed directly for Mussolini’s kennel.”

“They don’t like each other, down there, it’s in their blood.”

“Isn’t it. And, incidentally, if you should hear something about that, Croatian statehood, a word from you would be very much appreciated.”

“You’ll be the first to know. In any event, would you like to elaborate on the official statement? Not for attribution, of course. ‘A senior official says…’”

“Weisz, please, my hands are tied. France supports the change, and every word in the statement was hammered out of steel. Would you care for a coffee? I’ll have it brought up.”

“Thanks, no. I’ll use the Nazi background, without using the word.”

“It doesn’t come from me.”

“Of course not,” Weisz said.

Devoisin shifted the conversation-he was soon off to Saint-Moritz for a week of skiing, had Weisz seen the new Picasso show at Rosenberg’s, what did he think about it. Weisz’s internal clock was efficient: fifteen minutes, then he had “to get back to the office.”

“Don’t be such a stranger,” Devoisin said. “It’s always good to see you.” He had, Weisz thought, a truly magnificent smile.

12 February. The request-it was an order, of course-arrived as a telephone message in his mailbox at the office. The secretary who’d taken the message gave him a certain look when he came in that morning. So what’s all this? Not that he would tell her, not that she had any business asking, and it was only a momentary look, but a longish, concentrated sort of a moment. And she watched him as he read it-his presence required at Room 10, at the Surete Nationale, at eight the following morning. What did she think, that he would tremble? Break out in a cold sweat?

He did neither, but he felt it, in the pit of the stomach. The Surete was the national security police-what did they want? He put the slip of paper in his pocket, and, one foot in front of the other, got through his day. Later that morning, he made up a reason to stop by Delahanty’s office. Had the secretary told him? But Delahanty said nothing, and acted as he always did. Did he? Or was there, something? Leaving early for lunch, he called Salamone from a pay phone in a cafe, but Salamone was at work, and, beyond “Well, be careful,” couldn’t say much. That night, he took Veronique to the ballet-balcony seats, but they could see-and for supper afterward. Veronique was attentive, bright and talkative, and one didn’t ask men what was wrong. They hadn’t talked to her, had they? He considered asking, but the right moment never came. Walking home, it wouldn’t leave him alone; he made up questions, tried to answer them, then tried again.

At ten of eight the next morning, he walked up the avenue de Marigny to the Interior Ministry on the rue des Saussaies. Massive and gray, the building stretched to the horizon and rose above him; here lived the little gods in little rooms, the gods of emigre fate, who could have you put on a train, back to wherever it was, back to whatever awaited you.

A clerk led him to Room 10-a long table, a few chairs, a hissing steam radiator, a high window behind a grille. A powerful presence, in Room 10: the smell of cooked paint and stale cigarette smoke, but mostly the smell of sweat, like a gymnasium. They made him wait, of course, it was 9:20 before they showed up, dossiers in hand. There was something about the young one, in his twenties, Weisz thought, that suggested the word probationary. The older one was a cop, grizzled and slumped, with eyes that had seen everything.

Formal and correct, they introduced themselves and spread their dossiers out. Inspector Pompon, the younger one, his boiled white shirt gleaming like the sun, led the interrogation, and wrote out Weisz’s answers on a printed form. After sifting through the particulars, date of birth, address, employment, arrival in France-all of that from the dossier-he asked Weisz if he’d known Enrico Bottini.

“Yes, we were acquainted.”

“Good friends?”

“Friends, I would say.”

“Did you ever meet his paramour, Madame LaCroix?”

“No.”

“Perhaps he spoke of her.”

“Not to me.”

“Do you know, Monsieur Weisz, why you are here today?”

“In fact, I don’t know.”

“This investigation would normally be conducted by the local Prefecture, but we have interested ourselves in it because it involves the family of an individual who serves in the national government. So, we are concerned with the, ah, political implications. Of the murder/suicide. Is that clear?”

Weisz said it was. And it was, though French was not his native language, and answering questions at the Surete was not the same as chatting with Devoisin or telling Veronique he liked her perfume. Fortunately, Pompon took considerable pleasure in the sound of his own voice, mellow and precise, and that slowed him down to a point where Weisz, working hard, could pretty much understand every word.

Pompon put Weisz’s dossier aside, opened another, and hunted around for what he wanted. Weisz could see the impression of an official stamp, made with a red ink pad, at the upper corner of each page. “Was your friend Bottini left-handed, Monsieur Weisz?”

Weisz thought it over. “I don’t know,” he said. “I never noticed that he was.”

“And how would you describe his political affiliation?”

“He was a political emigre, from Italy, so I would describe his politics as antifascist.”

Pompon wrote down the answer, his careful hand the product of a school system that spent endless hours on penmanship. “Of the left, would you say?”

“Of the center.”

“You discussed politics?”

“In a general way, when it came up.”

“Have you heard of a newspaper, a clandestine publication, that is called Liberazione?”

“Yes. An opposition newspaper distributed in Italy.”

“Have you read it?”

“No, I’ve seen others, the ones published in Paris.”

“But not Liberazione.”

“No.”

“And Bottini’s relationship to this newspaper?”

“I wouldn’t know. He never mentioned it.”

“Would you describe Bottini? What sort of man he was?”

“Very proud, sure of himself. Sensitive to slights, I would say, and conscious of his-do you say ‘standing’? His place in the scheme of things. He had been a prominent lawyer, in Turin, and was always a lawyer, even as a friend.”

“Meaning what, precisely?”

Weisz thought for a moment. “If there was an argument, even a friendly argument, he still liked to win it.”

“Was he, would you say, capable of violence?”

“No, I think that violence, to him, meant failure, a loss, a loss of…”

“Self-control?”

“He believed in words, discourse, rationality. Violence, to him, was a, how to say, descent, a descent to the level of, well, beasts.”

“But he murdered his paramour. Was it, do you think, romantic passion that drove him to do such a thing?”

“I don’t believe that.”

“What then?”

“I suspect this crime was a double murder, not a murder/suicide.”

“Committed by whom, Monsieur Weisz?”

“By operatives of the Italian government.”

“An assassination, then.”

“Yes.”

“With no concern that one of the victims was the wife of an important French politician.”

“No, I don’t think they cared.”

“Was Bottini, then, to your way of thinking, the primary victim?”

“I believe he was, yes.”

“Why do you believe that?”

“I think it had to do with his involvement in the antifascist opposition.”

“Why him, Monsieur Weisz? There are others in Paris. Quite a number.”

“I don’t know why,” Weisz said. It was very hot in the room, Weisz felt a bead of sweat run from beneath his arm down to the edge of his undershirt.

“As an emigre, Monsieur Weisz, what is your opinion of France?”

“I have always liked it here, and that was true long before I emigrated.”

“What exactly is it that you like?”

“I would say,” he paused, then said, “the tradition of individual freedom has always been strong here, and I enjoy the culture, and Paris is, is everything that’s said of it. One is privileged to live here.”

“You are aware that there are disputes between us-Italy claims Corsica, Tunisia, and Nice-so if, regrettably, your native country and your adopted country were to go to war, what would you do then?”

“Well, I wouldn’t leave.”

“Would you serve a foreign country, against your native land?”

“Today,” Weisz said, “I don’t know how to answer that. My hope is for change in the government of Italy, and peace between both nations. Really, if ever there were two countries who ought not to go to war, that would be Italy and France.”

“And would you be willing to put such ideals to work? To work for what you believe should be harmony between these two nations?”

Oh fuck you. “Truly, I cannot imagine what I could do, to help. It all takes place high up, these difficulties. Between our countries.”

Pompon almost smiled, started to speak, to attack, but his colleague, very quietly, cleared his throat. “We appreciate your candor, Monsieur Weisz. Not so easy, these politics. Perhaps you’re one of those who in his heart thinks that wars should be settled by diplomats in their underwear, fighting with brooms.”

Weisz smiled, intensely grateful. “I’d pay to watch it, yes.”

“Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. Too bad, eh? By the way, speaking of diplomats, I wonder if you’ve heard, as a journalist, that an Italian official, from the embassy here, has been sent home. Persona non grata, I believe that’s the phrase.”

“I hadn’t heard.”

“No? You’re sure? Well, maybe a communique wasn’t issued-that’s not up to us, down here in the trenches, but I’m told it did happen.”

“I didn’t know,” Weisz said. “Nothing came to Reuters.”

The cop shrugged. “Then better keep it under your hat, eh?”

“I will,” Weisz said.

“Much obliged,” the cop said.

Pompon closed his file. “I think that’s all, for today,” he said. “Of course we’ll be speaking with you again.”

Weisz left the ministry, a lone figure amid a stream of men with briefcases, circled the building-this took a long time-at last left its shadow, and headed toward the Reuters office. Going back over the interview, his mind spun, but in time settled on the official sent back to Italy. Why had they told him that? What did they want from him? Because he sensed they knew he’d become the new editor of Liberazione, had expected the pro forma lie, then tempted him with an interesting story. Officially, the clandestine press did not exist, but it was, potentially, useful. How? Because the French government might wish to make known, to both allies and enemies in Italy, that they had taken action in the Bottini affair. They had not issued a communique, did not want to force the Mussolini government to send home a French official, the traditional pawn sacrifice in diplomatic chess. On the other hand, they could not simply do nothing, they had to avenge the wrong done to LaCroix, an important politician.

Was this true? If it wasn’t, and the story appeared in Liberazione, they would be very annoyed with him. Keep it under your hat, eh? Best to do that, if you valued the head that wore it. No, he thought, leave it alone, let them find some other newspaper, don’t take the bait. The French allowed Liberazione and the others to exist because France publicly opposed the fascist government. Today. Tomorrow, that could change. Everywhere in Europe, the possibility of another war forced alliances governed by realpolitik: England and France needed Italy as a partner against Germany, they couldn’t have Russia, and they wouldn’t have America, so they had to fight Mussolini with one hand, and stroke him with the other. The waltz of diplomacy, and Weisz now invited to join the dance.

But he would decline, with silence. He’d been summoned to this meeting, he decided, as the editor of Liberazione-an assignment for Inspector Pompon, the new man on the job: Would he spy for them? Would he be discreet on the subject of French politics? And we’ll be speaking with you again meant we’re watching you. So then, watch. But the answers, no, and yes, would not change.

Now Weisz felt better. Not such a bad day, he thought, the sun in and out, big, fancy clouds coming in from the Channel and flying east over the city. Weisz, on his way to the Opera quarter, had left the ministry neighborhood and returned to the streets of Paris: two shop girls in gray smocks, riding bicycles, an old man in a cafe, reading Le Figaro, his terrier curled up beneath the table, a musician on the corner, playing the clarinet, his upturned hat holding a few centimes. All of them, he thought, adding a one-franc coin to the hat, with dossiers. It had shaken him a little to see his very own, but so life went. Still, triste in its way. But no different than Italy, the dossiers there called schedatura-someone presumed to have a police file termed schedata-where they had been compiled by the national police for more than a decade, recording political views, the habits of daily life, sins great and small, everything. It was all written down.

By ten-fifteen, Weisz was back in the office. To, once again, a certain look from the secretary: What, not in chains? And she had, as he’d feared, told Delahanty about the message, because he said, “Everything allright, laddie?” when Weisz visited his office. Weisz looked at the ceiling and spread his hands, Delahanty grinned. Police and emigres, nothing new there. The way Delahanty saw it, you could be a bit of an axe murderer, as long as the foreign minister’s quote was accurate.

With the interview behind him, Weisz treated himself to a gentle day at the office. He put off a call to Salamone, drank coffee at his desk, and, a cruciverbiste, as the French called it, fiddled with the crossword puzzle in Paris-Soir. Making little headway there, he found three of the five animals in the picture puzzle, then turned to the entertainment pages, consulted the cinema schedules, and discovered, in the distant reaches of the Eleventh Arrondissement, L’Albergo del Bosco, made in 1932. What was that doing out there? The Eleventh was barely in France, a poor district, home to refugees, one heard more Yiddish, Polish, and Russian than French in those dark streets. And Italian? Perhaps. There were thousands of Italians in Paris, working at whatever they could find, living wherever rent was low and food cheap. Weisz wrote down the address of the theatre, maybe he’d go.

He looked up, to see Delahanty strolling toward his desk, hands in pockets. At work, the bureau chief looked like a workman-a consummately rumpled workman: jacket off, sleeves rolled up, collar points bent, trousers baggy and worn low beneath a big belly. He half-sat on the edge of Weisz’s desk and said, “Carlo, my oldest and dearest friend…”

“Yes?”

“You’ll be pleased to hear that Eric Wolf is getting married.”

“Oh? That’s nice.”

“Very nice indeed. Going back to London, he is, to wed his sweetie and carry her off for a honeymoon in Cornwall.”

“A long honeymoon?”

“Two weeks. Which leaves Berlin uncovered, of course.”

“When do you want me there?”

“The third of March.”

Weisz nodded. “I’ll be there,” he said.

Delahanty stood. “We’re grateful, laddie. With Eric gone, you’re my best German speaker. You know the drill: they’ll take you out to eat, feed you propaganda, you’ll file, we won’t publish, but, if I don’t cover, that little weasel will start a war on me, just for spite, and we wouldn’t want that, would we.”

The Cinema Desargues was not on the rue Desargues, not quite. It was down at the end of an alley, in what had once been a garage-twenty wooden folding chairs, a bedsheetlike screen hung from the ceiling. The owner, a sour-faced gnome wearing a yarmulke, took the money, then ran the film from a chair tilted back against the wall. He watched the movie in a kind of trance, the smoke from his cigarette drifting through the blue light beamed at the screen, while the dialogue crackled above the hiss of the sound track and the rhythmic whir of the projector.

In 1932, Italy is still in the grip of the Depression, so nobody comes to stay at l’albergo del bosco-the inn of the forest, near a village outside of Naples. The innkeeper, with five daughters, is beset by debt collectors and so gives the last of his savings to the local marchese for safekeeping. But, through a misunderstanding, the marchese, very decayed nobility and no richer than the innkeeper, donates the money to charity. Accidentally learning of his error-the innkeeper is a proud fellow and pretends he wanted to give the money away-the marchese sells his last two family portraits, then pays the innkeeper to hold a grand feast for the poor people of the village.

Not so bad, it kept Weisz’s interest. The cameraman was good, very good, even in black and white, so the hills and meadows, tall grass swaying in the wind, the little white road bordered by poplars, the lovely Neapolitan sky, looked very real to Weisz. He knew this place, or places like it. He knew the village-its dry fountain with a crumbling rim, its tenements shadowing the narrow street, and its people-the postman, the women in kerchiefs. He knew the marchese‘s villa, tiles fallen from the roof stacked hopefully by the door, the old servant, not paid for years. Sentimental Italy, Weisz thought, every frame of it. And the music was also very good-vaguely operatic, lyrical, sweet. Really very sentimental, Weisz thought, the Italy of dreams, or poems. Still, it broke his heart. As he walked up the aisle toward the door, the owner stared at him for a moment, this man in a good dark overcoat, glasses in one hand, the index finger of the other touching the corners of his eyes.