The Foreign Correspondent

Citizen of the Night

3 MARCH, 1939.

Weisz had taken a compartment in a wagon-lit on the night train to Berlin, leaving at seven from the Gare du Nord, arriving Berlin at midday. A restless sleeper at best, he had spent the hours waking and dozing, staring out the window when the train stopped at the stations-Dortmund, Bielefeld-along the way. After midnight, the floodlit platforms were silent and deserted, only the occasional passenger or railway porter, now and then a policeman with a leashed Alsatian shepherd, their breaths steaming in the icy German air.

On the night he’d had drinks with Mr. Brown, he’d thought about Christa Zameny, his former lover, for a long time. Married three years earlier, in Germany, she was now beyond his reach, their elaborate afternoons together destined to remain a remembered love affair. Still, when Delahanty had ordered him to Berlin, he’d looked her up in his address book, and considered writing her a note. She’d sent him the address in a farewell letter, telling him of her marriage to von Schirren, telling him that it was, at this point in her life, the best thing for her. We will never see each other again, she’d meant. Followed, in the final paragraph, by her new address, where he would never see her again. Some love affairs die, he thought, others stop.

Now, at the Adlon, he would sleep for an hour or two, preparing for rest by unpacking his valise, stripping down to his underwear, hanging his suit and shirt in the closet, turning down the bedspread, and opening the Adlon’s stationery folder on the mahogany desk. A fine hotel, the Adlon, Berlin’s best, with such fine paper and envelopes, the hotel’s name and address in elegant gold script. Life was made easy for a guest here, one could write a note to an acquaintance, seal it in a thick creamy envelope, and summon the hall porter, who would provide a stamp and mail it off. So very easy, really. And Berlin’s postal system was fast, and efficient. Before ten o’clock on the following day, a delicate and very reserved little jingle from the telephone. Weisz sprang like a cat-there would be no second ring.

At four-thirty in the afternoon, the bar at the Adlon was almost empty. Dark and plush, it was not so very different from the Ritz-upholstered chairs, low drink tables. A fat man with a Nazi party pin in his lapel played Cole Porter on a white piano. Weisz ordered a cognac, then another. Perhaps she wouldn’t come, perhaps, at the last minute, she couldn’t. Her voice had been cool and courteous on the phone-it crossed his mind that she was not alone when she made the call. How thoughtful of him to write. Was he well? Oh, a drink? At the hotel? Well, she didn’t know, at four-thirty perhaps, she was not really sure, a terribly busy day, but she would try, so thoughtful of him to write.

This was the voice, and the manner, of an aristocrat. The sheltered child of an adoring father, a Hungarian noble, and a distant mother, the daughter of a German banker, she’d been raised by governesses in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin, attended boarding schools in England and Switzerland, then university in Jena. She wrote imagist poetry, often in French, privately published. And found ways, after graduating, to live beyond wealth-for a time managed a string quartet, served on the board of a school for deaf children.

They’d met in Trieste, in the summer of 1933, at a loud and drunken party, she with friends on a yacht, cruising the Adriatic. Thirty-seven when the love affair began, she maintained a style conceived in Berlin’s, and her own, twenties: very erotic woman costumed as very severe man. Black chalk-stripe suit, white shirt, sober tie, chestnut hair worn short, except in front, where it was cut on a sharp bias and pointed down at one eye. Sometimes, at the extreme of the style, she pomaded her hair and combed it back behind her ears. She had smooth, fair skin, a high forehead, wore no makeup-only a faint touch of seemingly colorless lipstick. A face more striking than pretty, with all its character in the eyes: green and pensive, concentrated, fearless, and penetrating.

The entry to the Adlon bar was up three marble steps, through a pair of leather-sheathed doors with portholes, and, when they parted, and Weisz turned to see who it was, his heart soared. Not so long after that, maybe fifteen minutes, a waiter approached the table, collected a large tip, half a cognac, and half a champagne cocktail.

It wasn’t only the heart that absence made grow fonder.

Outside the window, Berlin in the halftones of its winter twilight, inside the room, amid the snarled and tumbled wreckage of the bed linen, Weisz and Christa lay flopped back on the pillows, catching their breath. He raised up on one elbow, put three fingers on the hollow at the base of her throat, then traced her center down to the end. For a moment, she closed her eyes, a very faint smile on her lips. “You have,” he said, “red knees.”

She had a look. “So I do. You’re surprised?”

“Well, no.”

He moved his hand a little, then let it rest.

She laid a hand on top of his.

He looked at her for a long time.

“So, what do you see?”

“The best thing I ever saw.”

From Christa, a dubious smile.

“No, it’s true.”

“It’s your eyes, love. But I love to be what you see.”

He lay back, hands clasped beneath his head. She turned on her side and stretched an arm and a leg over him, her face pressed against his chest. They drifted in silence for a time, then he realized that his skin, where her face rested, was wet, and it burned. He started to speak, to ask, but she put a gentle finger on his lips.

Standing at the desk, with her back to him, she waited for the hotel operator to answer the phone, then gave her a number. She was, without clothing, slighter than he remembered-this always struck him-and enigmatically desirable. What was it, about her, that reached him so deeply? Mystery, lover’s mystery, a magnetic field beyond words. She waited as the phone rang, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, one hand unconsciously smoothing her hair. It stirred him to watch her; the nape of her neck-hair cut short and high, her long, taut back, pale curve of hip, deep cleft, nicely shaped legs, scuffed heels.

“Helma?” she said. “It’s me. Would you please tell Herr von Schirren that I am delayed? Oh, he isn’t. Well, when he gets home then, you’ll tell him. Yes, that’s it. Goodby.”

She placed the phone back on its high cradle, then turned, read his eyes, rose on the toes of one foot, hands raised, fingers in the castanet position, and did a Spanish dancer’s twirl on the Adlon’s carpet.

“Ole,” he said.

She came back to the bed, found an edge of quilt, and pulled it over them. Weisz reached across her and turned off the bedside lamp, leaving the room in darkness. For an hour, they would pretend to spend the night together.

Later, she dressed by the light of the streetlamp that shone in the window, then went into the bathroom to comb her hair. Weisz followed and stood in the doorway. “How long will you stay?” she said.

“Two weeks.”

“I will call you,” she said.

“Tomorrow?”

“Yes, tomorrow.” Looking in the mirror, she turned her head to one side, then the other. “At lunchtime, I can call.”

“You have an office?”

“We all must work, here in the thousand-year Reich. I’m a sort of executive, at the Bund Deutscher Maedchen, the League for German Girls-part of the Hitler Youth organization. A friend of von Schirren’s got me the job.”

Weisz nodded. “In Italy, they go down to the six-year-olds, make fascists of children, get them while they’re young. It’s awful.”

“It is. But must is what I meant. One must take part, otherwise, they come after you.”

“What do you do?”

“Organize things, make plans-for parades, or mass gymnastic exhibitions, or whatever it is that week. Sometimes I have to take them out to the countryside, thirty teenagers, for the harvest, or just to breathe the air of the German forest. We have a fire, and we sing, then some of them go off hand in hand into the woods. It’s all very Aryan.”

“Aryan?”

She laughed. “That’s how they think of it. Health and strength and Freiheit, freedom of the body. We’re supposed to encourage that, because the Nazis want them to breed. If they don’t wish to marry, they should go and find a lonely soldier and get pregnant. To make more soldiers. Herr Hitler will need all he can get, once we go to war.”

“And when is that?”

“Oh, that they don’t tell us. Soon, I would think. If a man is looking for a fight, sooner or later he’ll find it. We thought it would be the Czechs, but Hitler was handed what he wanted, so now, maybe, the Poles. Lately he screams at them, on the radio, and the Propaganda Ministry puts stories in the newspapers: those poor Germans in Danzig, beaten up by Polish gangs. It isn’t subtle.”

“If he goes for them, the British and the French will declare war.”

“Yes, I expect they will.”

“They’ll close the border, Christa.”

She turned and, for a moment, met his eyes. Finally, she said, “Yes, I know.” A last look at herself in the mirror, then she returned the comb to her purse, hunted around for a moment, and brought out a piece of jewelry, holding it up for Weisz to see. “My Hakenkreuz, all the ladies wear one, out where I live.” On a silver chain, a swastika made of old silver, with a diamond on each of the four bars.

“How beautiful,” Weisz said.

“Von Schirren gave it to me.”

“Is he in the party?”

“Heavens no! He’s old, rich Prussia, they hate Hitler.”

“But he stays.”

“Of course he stays, Carlo. Maybe he could’ve left three years ago, but there was still hope, then, that somebody would see the light and get rid of the Nazis. From the beginning, in ‘thirty-three, nobody here could believe what they were doing, that they could get away with it. But now, to cross the border would be to lose everything. Every house, every bank account, every horse, the servants. My dogs. Everything. Mother, father, family. To do what? Press pants in London? Meanwhile, life here goes on, and in the next minute, Hitler will reach too far, and the army will step in. Tomorrow, maybe. Or the next day. This is what von Schirren says, and he knows things.”

“Do you love him, Christa?”

“I am very fond of him, he’s a good man, a gentleman of old Europe, and he’s given me a place in life. I couldn’t go on any longer, living the way I did.”

“Everything else aside, I fear for you.”

She shook her head, put the Hakenkreuz back in her purse, closed the flap, and snapped the button shut. “No, no, Carlo, don’t do that. This nightmare will end, this government will fall, and then, well, one will be free to do what one wants.”

“I’m not so sure it will fall.”

“Oh, it will.” She lowered her voice and leaned toward him. “And, I guess I can say this, there are a few of us in this city who might even give it a little push.”

Weisz was at the Reuters office, at the end of the Wilhelmstrasse, by eight-thirty the next morning. The other two reporters hadn’t come in yet, but he was greeted by the two secretaries, both in their twenties, who, according to Delahanty, spoke perfect English and French and could get along in other languages if they had to. “We are so happy for Herr Wolf, will he return with his bride?” Weisz didn’t know-he doubted Wolf would do that, but he couldn’t say it. He sat in Wolf’s chair and read the morning news, in the thinking man’s newspapers, the Berlin Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung and Goebbels’s Das Reich. Not much there, Dr. Goebbels writing of the potential replacement of Chamberlain by Churchill, that “swapping horses in midstream is bad enough, but swapping an ass for a bull would be fatal.” For the rest, it was whatever the Propaganda Ministry wanted to say that day. So, government-controlled newspapers, nothing new there.

But control of the press could have unexpected consequences-Weisz recalled the classic example, the end of the Great War. The surrender of 1918 had sent waves of shock and anger through the German public. After all, they had read every day that their armies were victorious in the field, then, suddenly, the government capitulated. How could this happen? The infamous Dolchstoss, the stab in the back, that was the reason-political manipulation at home had undermined their brave soldiers and dishonored their sacrifice. So it was the Jews and the Communists, those crafty political guttersnipe, who were responsible for the defeat. This the German public believed. And the table was set for Hitler.

Done with the newspapers, Weisz started on the press releases, stacked in Wolf’s in box. He tried to make himself concentrate, but he couldn’t. What was Christa doing? Her lowered voice would not leave him-give them a little push. That meant clandestine business, conspiracy, resistance. Under the rule of the Nazis and their secret police, Germany had become a counterintelligence state, eager informers, and agents provocateurs, everywhere, did she know what could happen to her? Yes, she knew, damn her aristocratic eyes, but these people were not going to tell Christa Zameny von Schirren what she could and couldn’t do. Blood told, he thought, and told hard. But was it so different from what he was doing? It is, he thought. But it wasn’t, and he knew it.

The office door was open, but one of the secretaries stood at the threshold and knocked politely on the frame. “Herr Weisz?”

“Yes, uh…”

“I’m Gerda, Herr Weisz. You are to have a meeting, at the Propaganda Ministry press club, at eleven this morning, with Herr Doktor Martz.”

“Thank you, Gerda.”

Leaving time for a leisurely walk, Weisz headed down the Leipzigerstrasse toward the new press club. Passing Wertheim’s, the vast block-long department store, he stopped for a moment to watch a window dresser taking down a display of anti-Soviet books and posters-book titles outlined in flames, posters showing garish Bolshevik thugs with big hooked noses-and stacking them neatly on a handcart. When the window dresser stared back at him, Weisz went on his way.

Three years since he’d been in Berlin-was it different? The people on the street seemed prosperous, well fed, well dressed, but there was something in the air, not exactly fear, that reached him. It was as though they all had a secret, the same secret, but it was somehow unwise to let others know you had it. Berlin had always looked official-various kinds of police, tram conductors, zookeepers-but now it was a city dressed for war. Uniforms everywhere: the SS in black with lightning-flash insignia, Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine, Luftwaffe, others he didn’t recognize. When a pair of SA storm troopers, in brown tunics and trousers, and caps with chin straps, came toward him, nobody seemed to change direction, but a path opened for them, almost magically, on the crowded sidewalk.

He stopped at a newspaper stand, where rows of magazines displayed on the kiosk caught his attention. Faith and Beauty, The Dance, Modern Photography, all their covers showing nude women engaged in wholesome activities of one sort or another. The Nazi administration, on assuming power in 1933, had immediately banned pornography, but here was their version of it, meant to stimulate the male population, as Christa had suggested, to hop on the nearest Fraulein and produce a soldier.

At the press club-the former Foreigners’ Club on Leipzigerplatz-Dr. Martz was the merriest man alive, fat and sparkling, dark, with a toothbrush mustache and active, chubby hands. “Come, let me show you around!” he sang. Here was a journalist’s heaven, with a sumptuous restaurant, loudspeakers to page reporters, reading rooms with newspapers from every major city, workrooms with long rows of desks bearing typewriters and telephones. “For you, we have everything!”

They settled in red leather easy chairs in a lounge by the restaurant, and were immediately served coffee and a huge platter of Viennese coffee buns, babka, moist, buttery cake rolled around crushed walnuts flavored with cinnamon and sugar, or a ribbon of thick almond paste. Surprising, Weisz, that you became a Nazi. Oh, it’s a long story. “Have another, oh go ahead, who’s to know.” Well, maybe one more.

And that was just for starters. Martz gave him his own red identification card. “If you have a problem with a policeman, God forbid, just show him this.” Did he want tickets to the opera, or a film, or anything? “You need only ask.” Also, filing dispatches here was gloriously easy, there was a counter at the Propaganda Ministry, leave your story there and it would be cabled, uncensored, back to your office. “Of course,” Martz said, “we will read what you write in the newspapers, and we expect you to be fair. Two sides to every story, right?”

Right.

Clearly, Martz was a man happy in his work. He’d been, he told Weisz, an actor, had spent five years in Hollywood, playing Germans, Frenchmen, any role requiring a Continental accent. Then, on returning to Germany, his idiomatic English had landed him his present employment. “Mostly for the Americans, Herr Weisz, I must admit it, we want to make life pleasant for them.” Eventually, he got down to business, producing from his briefcase a thick dossier of stapled reports. “I’ve taken the liberty of having this compiled for you,” he said. “Facts and figures on Poland. Maybe you’ll take a look at it, when you have a moment.”

After wiping his fingers on a white linen napkin, Weisz paged through the dossier.

“It’s about the corridor we require, through Poland, from Germany to East Prussia. Also the situation in Danzig, getting worse every day, the treatment of the German population there, which is appalling. The Poles are being stubborn, they refuse to compromise, and our side of the story isn’t being told. Our concerns are legitimate, nobody can say they aren’t, we must be allowed to protect our national interest, no?”

Yes, of course.

“That’s all we ask, Herr Weisz, fair play. And we want to help you-any story you want to write, just say the word and we’ll supply the data, the appropriate periodicals, a list of sources, and we’ll arrange the interviews, excursions, anything you like. Go out into Germany, go see for yourself what we’ve accomplished here, with hard work and ingenuity.”

The waiter appeared, offering more coffee, a silver pitcher of thick cream, sugar from a silver bowl. From his briefcase, Martz produced one last sheet of paper: a schedule of press conferences, two every day, one at the Propaganda Ministry, the other at the Foreign Ministry. “Now,” he said, “let me tell you about the cocktail parties.”

Weisz trudged through the daytime hours, hungry for twilight.

Christa managed to come to the hotel almost every afternoon, sometimes at four, when she could, or at least by six. Very long days for Weisz, waiting, daydreaming, thinking of this, or maybe that, some neglected appetizer on the Great Menu, then making plans, detailed plans, for later.

She did the same thing. She didn’t say it, but he could tell. Two taps at the door, then Christa, cool and polite, no melodrama at all, only a brief kiss. She would settle in a chair, as though she just happened to be in the neighborhood and had stopped by, and, perhaps, this time, they would merely converse. Then, later, he would find himself led by her imagination to something new, a variation. The gentility of her bearing never changed, but doing what she liked excited her, charged her voice, quickened her hands, and this made his heart pound. Then it was his turn. Nothing new under the sun, of course, but for them it was a very broad sun. One night, von Schirren went away, to a family property up on the Baltic, and Christa spent the night. With leisure, they sat together in the bathtub, her breasts shining wet in the light, and talked about nothing in particular. Then he reached below the water until she closed her eyes, held her lower lip, delicately, between her teeth, and lay back against the porcelain curve.

Work grew harder every day. Weisz was infinitely dutiful, filing away, as Delahanty had suggested, asking press-conference questions of colonels or civil servants. How they hammered away at it: Germany wished only economic progress-just see what’s happened at our Pomeranian dairies! — and simple justice, and security, in Europe. Please take note, ladies and gentlemen-it’s in our communique-of the case of one Hermann Zimmer, a bookkeeper in the city of Danzig, beaten up by Polish thugs in the street before his house while his wife, looking out the window, cried for help. And then they killed his little dog.

Meanwhile, at small restaurants in Berlin neighborhoods, open the menu and find a slip of red paper with black printing: Juden Unerwunscht. Jews not welcome here. Weisz saw it in shop windows, taped to barbers’ mirrors, tacked to doors. He never got used to it. Great numbers of Jews had joined the Italian Fascist party in the 1920s. Then, in 1938, German pressure on Mussolini had finally prevailed, articles appeared in the papers suggesting that Italians were in reality a Nordic race, and Jews were anathematized. This was new, for Italy, and generally disliked-they weren’t like that. Weisz stopped going to the restaurants.

12 March.

On Tuesday morning, at eleven-twenty, a telephone call at the Reuters office. “Herr Weisz?” Gerda called from the reception area. “It is for you, a Fraulein Schmidt.”

“Hello?”

“Hello, it’s me. I need to see you, my love.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Oh, a domestic stupidity, but we must talk.”

A pause. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“It isn’t your fault, don’t be sorry.”

“Where are you? Is there, a bar? A cafe?”

“I’m up at Eberswalde, something for work.”

“Yes…”

“There’s a park, in the center of the town. Maybe you can take the train, it’s, oh, forty-five minutes.”

“I can take a taxi.”

“No. Forgive me, better to take the train. Easier, really, they run all the time, from the Nordbahnhof station.”

“Allright. I can leave immediately.”

“There’s a carnival here, in the park. I’ll find you.”

“I’ll be there.”

“I must talk to you, to, to deal with this. Together, maybe it’s for the best, I don’t know, we’ll see.”

What was this? It sounded like a lovers’ crisis but it was, he sensed, some form of theatre. “Whatever it is, together…” he said, playing his part.

“Yes, I know. I feel the same.”

“I’m on my way.”

“Hurry, my love, I can’t wait to see you.”

He was in Eberswalde by one-thirty. In the park, several carnival rides had been set up and calliope music played from a staticky loudspeaker. He wandered over to the merry-go-round and stood there, hands in pockets, until, five minutes later, she appeared, having been watching, apparently, from some vantage point. The day was icy, with a sharp wind, and she wore a beret and a trim gray ankle-length coat with a high collar buttoned at the throat. On a long lead she held two whippets, with wide leather collars on their slim necks.

She kissed him on the cheek. “Sorry to do this to you.”

“What is it? Von Schirren?”

“No, nothing like that. The phones aren’t safe, so this had to be a, a rendezvous.”

“Oh.” He was relieved, then not.

“There’s somebody I want you to meet. Just for a moment. You don’t need to know a name.”

“Allright.” His eyes wandered, looking for surveillance.

“Don’t be furtive,” she said. “We’re just star-crossed lovers.”

She took his arm and they walked, the dogs straining at their lead.

“They’re beautiful,” he said. They were: fawn-colored, lean and smooth, with tucked bellies and strong chests, built for speed.

“Hortense and Magda,” she said fondly. “I’m coming from home,” she explained. “I threw them in the car and said I was taking them out for a run.” One of the dogs looked over her shoulder when she heard the word run.

They walked past the merry-go-round to a ride with a brightly painted sign above the ticket booth: THE LANDT STUNTER. LEARN TO DIVE-BOMB! Attached to a heavy steel centerpiece was a pole bearing a miniature airplane, a black Maltese cross on its fuselage, which flew in a circle, sweeping close to the grass, rising twenty feet into the air, then plunging back toward the ground. A young boy, maybe ten years old, was flying the plane. He sat in the open cockpit, his face intense with concentration, his hands white as he clutched the pilot’s controls. When the plane dove, toy guns on the wings rattled and the mouths of the barrels sparkled like Roman candles. A long line of boys, eyes rapt with envy, some in Hitlerjugend uniforms, some holding their mothers’ hands, waited for their turn to fly, watching the plane as it fired its machine guns, then came around for another attack.

A middle-aged man in a brown overcoat and hat moved slowly through the crowd. “He’s here,” Christa said. He had the face, Weisz thought, of an intellectual-deeply lined, with deep-set eyes; a face that had read too much, and brooded about what it read. He nodded to Christa, who said, “This is my friend. From Paris.”

“Good afternoon.”

Weisz returned the greeting.

“You are the journalist?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Christa suggests you might help us.”

“If I can.”

“I have an envelope in my pocket. In a minute, the three of us will walk away from the crowd, and, as we approach the trees, I’m going to hand it to you.”

They watched the ride, then began to walk, Christa leaning back against the pull of the dogs.

“Christa tells me you’re Italian,” he said.

“I am, yes.”

“This information concerns Italy, Germany and Italy. We cannot mail it, because our mail is read by the security forces, but we believe it should be made known to the public. Perhaps by a French newspaper, though we doubt they will publish it, or by a newspaper of the Italian resistance. Do you know such people?”

“Yes, I know them.”

“And will you take it?”

“How do you come to have it?”

“One of our friends copied it, from documents in the finance office of the Interior Ministry. It is a list of German agents, operating in Italy with Italian consent. There are people, in Berlin, who support our work, and they would want to see it, but this information does not directly concern them, so it should be in the hands of people who understand that it must be revealed, not just filed.”

“In Paris, these newspapers are issued by people of various factions, do you have a preference?”

“No, we don’t care about that, though centrist parties are more likely to be believed.”

“That’s true,” Weisz said. “The extreme left is known to improvise.”

Christa let the dogs take her around in a circle, so that she faced the other way. “It’s good now,” she said.

The man reached in his pocket and handed Weisz an envelope.

Weisz waited until he was back at the office, then made sure he was not observed as he opened the envelope. Inside, he found six pages, single-spaced, a list of names, typed on thin paper, like airmail stationery, on a machine that used a German font. The names were principally, though not entirely, German, numbered from R100 to V718, thus six hundred and nineteen entries, preceded by various letters, R, M, T, and N predominant, with a scattering of several others. Each name was followed by a location, offices or associations, in a specific city-R for Rome, M for Milan, T for Turin, N for Naples, and so on-and a payment in Italian lire. The heading said, “Disbursements-January, 1939.” The copying had been done hastily, he thought, mistakes x-ed over, the correct letter or number handwritten above the entry.

Agents, the man in the park had called them. That covered a lot of ground. Were they spies? Weisz thought not; the names might be aliases, but they weren’t code names-CURATE, LEOPARD-and, studying the locations, he found no armament factories, no naval or army bases, no laboratories or engineering firms. What he did find was a surveillance organization, built into the Italian Ministry of the Interior, its Direzione della Pubblica Sicurezza, Department of Public Security, and, in turn, its branches of national police, called Questura, situated in every Italian town and city. In addition, these agents were attached to the offices of the Auslandsorganisation and Arbeitsfront in various cities, the former for German professionals and businessmen, the latter for salaried employees working in Italy.

What were they doing? Watching Germans abroad, from an official perspective, at the Pubblica Sicurezza in Rome and the Questura, and from a clandestine perspective, at the associations-in other words, managing dossiers or going to dinner parties. And a German security force, stationed in Italy, with Italian consent, would gain real command of the language, and a thorough understanding of the structures of national administration. This had begun-and the giellisti in Paris knew it-in 1936, with the installation of a German racial commission at the Italian Ministry of the Interior, sent down by Nazi officials to “help” Italy organize anti-Jewish operations. Now it had grown, from a dozen to six hundred, a force in place if, someday, Germany found it necessary to occupy its former ally. It occurred to Weisz that this organization, watching for disloyalty among Germans abroad, could also watch anti-Nazi Italians, as well as any other-British, American-foreign nationals resident in Italy.

Reading the list, his thumb running down the margin, he wondered who these people were. G455, A. M. Kruger, at the Auslandsorganisation in Genoa. An avid party member? Ambitious? His job to make friends and report on them? Do I, Weisz thought, know anyone who might do something like that? Or J. H. Horst, R140, at the Pubblica Sicurezza headquarters in Rome. A Gestapo official? Following orders? Why, Weisz asked himself, was it hard for him to believe in the existence of such people? How did they turn into…

“Herr Weisz? It is Herr Doktor Martz, sir. An urgent call for you.”

Weisz jumped, Gerda was standing in the doorway, had apparently called out to him and received no response. Had she seen the list? Certainly she had, and it was all Weisz could do not to clap his hand over it like a kid in school.

Amateur! Angry with himself, he thanked Gerda and picked up the receiver. The afternoon press conference at the Foreign Ministry had been moved to four o’clock. Significant developments, important news, Herr Weisz was urged to attend.

The press conference was addressed by the mighty von Ribbentrop himself. A former champagne salesman, he had, as foreign minister, inflated himself to an astonishing stature, his face beaming with pomposity and amour propre. He was, however, on 12 March, visibly annoyed, his face faintly red, the sheaf of papers in his hand tapped forcefully against the top of the lectern. Units of the Czech army had marched into Bratislava, deposed the fascist priest, Father Tiso, as premier of Slovakia, and dismissed the cabinet. Martial law had been declared. Von Ribbentrop’s demeanor said what his words didn’t: How dare they?

Weisz made furious notes, and rushed to cable as the conference ended. REUTERS PARIS MARCH TWELVE DATE BERLIN WEISZ VON RIBBENTROP THREATENS REPRISAL AGAINST CZECHS FOR DEPOSING FATHER TISO AS PREMIER SLOVAKIA AND DECLARING MARTIAL LAW END. He then hurried to the office and wrote the dispatch, while Gerda obtained a line from the international operator and held it open, chatting with her counterpart in Paris.

By the time he was done dictating, it was after six. He returned to the Adlon, stripped off his sweaty clothes, and had a quick bath. Christa arrived at seven-twenty. “I was here earlier,” she said, “but they told me at the desk that you were away.”

“Sorry, I was. The Czechs have thrown the Nazis out of Slovakia.”

“Yes, I heard it on the radio. What will happen now?”

“Germany sends troops, France and England declare war. I am interned, to spend the next ten years reading Tolstoy and playing bridge.”

“You, play bridge?”

“I’ll learn.”

“I thought you were angry.”

He sighed. “No, I’m not angry.”

Her mouth was set hard, her look determined, close to defiant. “I would hope not.” Clearly, she’d spent some time, wherever she’d gone earlier, preparing to answer his anger with her own, and she wasn’t quite ready to give that up. “Would you prefer that I go away?”

“Christa.”

“Would you?”

“No. I want you to stay. Please.”

She sat on the edge of a chaise longue angled into a corner. “I asked you to help us because you were here. And because I thought you would. Would want to.”

“That’s true. I’ve looked at the papers, they’re important.”

“And I suspect, my sweet, that you, in Paris, are no angel.”

He laughed. “Well, maybe a fallen angel, but Paris isn’t Berlin, not yet it isn’t, and I don’t talk about it because it’s better not to. No? Makes sense?”

“Yes, I suppose it does.”

“It does, believe me.”

She relaxed, made a sour face, and shook her head. I can scarcely believe this world we live in.

He knew what she meant. “For me it’s the same, love.” The sentence in German, except for the last word, carissima.

“What did you think of my friend?”

He paused, then said, “An idealist, certainly.”

“A saint.”

“Close to it. Doing what he believes in.”

“It’s only the very best, now, who will do anything. Here, in this, monstrosity.”

“I only worry, well, it’s that the lives of the saints usually end in martyrdom. And I care for you, Christa. And more.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know.” Then, softly: “Also for me, more.”

“And I think I should mention that hotel rooms, where journalists stay, are sometimes…” He cupped his hand around his ear. “Yes?”

By this, she was slightly ruffled. “I hadn’t thought of that,” she said.

“Nor did I, not immediately.”

For a time, they were silent. Neither one of them looked at a watch, but Christa said, “Whatever else goes on with this room, it is also very warm.” She stood and took off her jacket and skirt, then her shirt, stockings, and garter belt, and folded them over the top of the chaise longue. Usually, she wore expensive cotton underwear, white or ivory, and soft to the touch, but tonight she was in plum-colored silk, the bra with a lace trim, the panties low at the waist, high at the hip, and tight, a style called, Veronique had once told him, French-cut. They were new, he suspected, and bought for him, maybe bought that afternoon.

“Very appealing,” he said, a certain look in his eyes.

“You like them?” She turned this way and that.

“Very much,” he said.

She walked over to the desk, opened her purse, and took out a cigarette. Her walk was as always, like her, sensible and straightforward, simply a way to get from here to there, but, even so, the plum-colored panties made a difference, and maybe it took her a little longer, at that moment, to go from here to there. As she returned to the chaise longue, Weisz left his chair and, ashtray in hand, settled on the bed. “Come sit with me,” he said.

“I like it over here,” she said. “On this furniture, one can be languid.” She lay back, crossed her ankles, cupped an elbow with one hand, while the other, with the cigarette, was held by her ear-a movie siren’s pose. “But perhaps,” she said, with a voice and smile that matched the pose, “you’ll join me.”

The following day, 13 March, the Czechoslovakian situation deteriorated. Father Tiso had been summoned to Berlin, to meet personally with Hitler, and Slovakia, by noon, was on the way to declaring itself independent. Thus the nation, pasted together at Versailles, then torn apart at Munich, was in its final hours. At the Reuters bureau, Carlo Weisz was fully engaged-the telephones never stopped ringing, and the teleprinter bell chimed as it issued communiques from the Reich ministries. Central Europe was, once again, about to explode.

In the middle of it, Gerda, with a certain knowing tenderness, called out, “Herr Weisz, it is Fraulein Schmidt.” The conversation with Christa was difficult, darkened by approaching separation. Sunday, the seventeenth, would be his last day in Berlin, Eric Wolf was due back in the office on Monday, and Weisz was expected in Paris. This meant that Friday, the fifteenth, would be the last time they could be together.

“I can see you this afternoon,” she said. “Tomorrow I cannot, and Friday, I don’t know, I don’t want to think about it, maybe we can meet, but I don’t want, I don’t want to say goodby. Carlo? Hello? Are you there?”

“Yes, I’m here. The lines have been bad all day,” he said. Then: “We’ll meet at four, can you be there at four?”

She agreed.

Weisz left the office at three-thirty. Outside, the shadow of war lay over the city-people walked quickly, faces closed, eyes down, while Wehrmacht staff cars sped by, and Grosser Mercedes, flying pennants on their front bumpers, were lined up at the entry to the Adlon. Passing knots of guests in the lobby, he twice heard the word again. And, a few minutes later, the shadow was in his room. “Now it’s coming,” Christa said.

“I think so.” They were sitting side by side on the edge of the bed. “Christa,” he said.

“Yes?”

“When I leave, on Sunday, I want you to come with me. Take whatever you can, bring the dogs-they have dogs in Paris-and meet me at the ten-forty express, on the platform by the first-class wagons-lits.”

“I can’t,” she said. “Not now. I can’t leave.” She looked around the room, as though someone were hiding there, as though there might be something she could see. “It isn’t von Schirren,” she said. “It’s my friends, I cannot just, abandon them.” Her eyes met his, making sure he understood her. “They need me.”

Weisz hesitated, then said, “Forgive me, Christa, but, what you are doing, you and your friends, will it really change anything?”

“Who can say? But what I do know is that if I don’t do something, it will change me.”

He started to counter, then saw it wouldn’t matter, she would not be persuaded. The more danger threatened, he realized, the less she would run from it. “Allright,” he said, giving in, “we’ll meet on Friday.”

“Yes,” she said, “but not to say goodby. To make plans. Because I will come to Paris, if you want me to. A few months, maybe, it’s only a matter of time-it can’t go on like this.”

Weisz nodded. Of course. It couldn’t. “I don’t like saying this, but if, for some reason, I’m not here on Friday, stop at the desk. I’ll leave a letter for you.”

“You think you won’t be here?”

“It’s possible. If something important happens, they could send me anywhere.”

There was no more to say. She leaned against him, took his hand, and held it.

The morning of the fourteenth, the temperature dropped to ten degrees and it started to snow, a bad spring snow, thick and heavy. Perhaps that made a difference, perhaps it cooled tempers, in a city muffled and silent. The phones rang only now and then-tipsters calling in to report the same rumor: diplomats would defuse the crisis-and the teleprinter was quiet. Cables from the London office demanded news, but the only news was in London, where, late in the morning, Chamberlain issued a statement: when Britain and France had committed to protect Czechoslovakia from aggression, they’d meant military aggression, and this crisis was diplomatic. Weisz got back to the hotel after seven, tired, and alone.

At four-thirty in the morning, the telephone rang. Weisz rolled out of bed, staggered to the desk, and picked up the receiver. “Yes?”

The connection was terrible. Through crackling static, Delahanty’s voice was just barely audible. “Hello, Carlo, it’s me. How is it there?”

“It’s snowing. Hard.”

“Start packing, laddie. We’ve heard that German troops are leaving their barracks in the Sudetenland. Which means that Hitler’s done talking to the Czechs, and that puts you on the first train to Prague. Our man in the Prague office is down in Slovakia-independent Slovakia, this morning-where they’ve closed the border. Now, I’m looking at a timetable, and there’s a train at five-twenty-five. We’ve cabled the Prague office, they’re expecting you, and there’s a room for you at the Zlata Husa. Anything else you need?”

“No, I’m on my way.”

“Call or cable, when you get there.”

Weisz went into the bathroom, turned on the cold water, and splashed his face. How did Delahanty, in Paris, know about German troop movements? Well, he had his sources. Very good sources. Dark sources, perhaps. Weisz packed quickly, lit a cigarette, then, from his overcoat pocket, he took the list he’d received from Christa’s friend, thought for a moment, and hunted through his briefcase until he found a twelve-page press release-“Steel Production in the Saar Valley, 1936–1939.” He carefully removed the staple, inserted the list of names between pages ten and eleven, refixed the staple, then slid the revised document into the middle of a sheaf of similar papers. Short of calling on a clandestine tailor at four in the morning, that was the best he could do.

Then, on a sheet of Adlon stationery, he wrote: My love, they’ve sent me to Prague, and I’ll likely return to Paris when that’s done. I’ll write you from there, I’ll wait for you there. I love you, Carlo.

He put the letter in an envelope, addressed it Frau von S., sealed it, and left it at the desk when he checked out.

On the 5:25 express, Berlin/Dresden/Prague, Weisz joined two other journalists in a first-class compartment: Simard, a sharply dressed little weasel from Havas, the French wire service, and Ian Hamilton, in a fur hat with flaps, from the Times of London. “I guess you’ve heard what I’ve heard,” Weisz said, stowing his valise above the plush seat.

“No luck at all, the sorry bastards,” Hamilton said. “Adolf will have them now.”

Simard shrugged. “Yes, the poor Czechs, but they have Paris and London to thank for this.”

They settled in for the four-hour trip-at least that, maybe more with the snow. Simard slept, Hamilton read the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. “Article on Italy today,” he said to Weisz. “Have you seen it?”

“No. What’s it about?”

“The state of Italian politics, struggle against the antifascist forces. Which are all Bolshevik-influenced, they’d have you believe.”

Weisz shrugged, nothing new there.

Hamilton scanned the page, then read, ”’…thwarted by the patriotic forces of the OVRA…’ Tell me, Weisz, what does that stand for? You see it now and again, but mostly they just use the initials.”

“It’s said to mean Organizzazione di Vigilanza e Repressione dell‘ Antifascismo, which would be the Organization for the Vigilant Repression of Antifascism, but there’s another version. I’ve heard that it comes from a memo Mussolini wrote, where he said he wanted a national police organization, with tentacles that would reach into Italian life like a piovra, which is a mythical giant octopus. But the word was mistyped as ovra, and Mussolini liked the sound of it, thought it was frightening, so OVRA became the official name.”

“Really,” Hamilton said. “That’s worth knowing.” He took out a pad and pen and wrote down the story. “Watch out, it’s the piovra!”

Weisz’s grin was tart. “Not so funny, in real life,” he said.

“No, I suppose it isn’t. Still, it’s hard to take the man seriously.”

“Yes, I know,” Weisz said. Mussolini, the comic buffoon, a widely held view, but what he’d done wasn’t comic at all.

Hamilton gave up on the German paper. “Care for a look?”

“No thanks.”

Hamilton reached into his briefcase and opened to a dog-eared page in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. “Better for train trips,” he said.

Weisz looked out the window, hypnotized by the falling snow, thinking mostly about Christa, about her coming to Paris. Then he got out the Malraux novel and started reading, but, three or four pages later, he dozed off.

It was Hamilton’s voice that woke him. “Well, well,” he said, “look who’s here.” The railroad tracks, following the river Elbe, now ran by the road, where, dimly visible through the driving snow, a Wehrmacht column was headed south, toward Prague. Truckloads of infantry huddled under canvas tops, skidding motorcycles, ambulances, occasional staff cars. The three journalists watched in silence, then, after a few minutes, went back to conversation, but the column never ended, and, an hour later, when the track crossed to the other side of the river, it was still moving slowly down the snow-covered road. At the next station, the express shifted over to a siding so a military train could go past. Pulled by two locomotives, endless flatcars rolled past, carrying artillery pieces and tanks, their long cannons poking out from beneath tied-down tarpaulins.

“Just like la derniere,” Simard said-“the last one,” as the French called it.

“And the next,” Hamilton said. “And the one after that.”

And the one in Spain, Weisz thought. And, again, he would write about it. He watched the train until it ended, with a caboose, which had a machine-gun emplacement on its roof; the protective rim of sandbags and the helmets of the gunners white with snow.

At the next scheduled stop, the Czech town of Kralupy, the train stood in the station for a long time, its locomotive emitting an occasional snort of steam. Eventually, as Hamilton rose “to see what’s going on,” the first-class conductor appeared at the door of their compartment. “Gentlemen, I beg your pardon, but the train cannot proceed.”

“Why not?” Weisz said.

“We are not informed,” the conductor said. “We regret the inconvenience, gentlemen, perhaps later in the day, we may continue.”

“Is it the snow?” Hamilton said.

“Please,” the conductor said. “We do regret the inconvenience.”

“Well then,” Hamilton said philosophically, “damn it all to bloody hell.” He stood and yanked his valise off the luggage rack. “Where is beastly Prague?”

“About twenty miles from here,” Weisz said.

They left the train and trudged across the platform, to the station cafe on the other side of the street. There, the proprietor made a telephone call, which produced, twenty minutes later, the Kralupy taxicab and its sullen giant of a driver. “Prague!” he said. “Prague?” How dare they call him away from hearth and home in such weather.

Weisz began to peel reichsmarks from the roll in his pocket.

“I’ll take part of it,” Hamilton said quietly, reading the driver’s eyes.

“I can only help a little,” Simard said. “At Havas, they…”

Weisz and Hamilton waved him off, they didn’t care, were of a traveling class that mythically availed itself of oxcarts or elephants or sedan chairs with native bearers, so the overpriced Kralupy taxi barely deserved comment.

The taxi was a Tatra, with long, sloping rear end and bulbous body, and an extra headlight, like a cyclops’s eye, between the usual two. Weisz and Simard sat in the spacious backseat, while Hamilton sat next to the driver. Who grumbled continually as he squinted into the snow, and pushed hard against the wheel as they churned through the higher drifts, internal combustion being, to him, only part of the locomotion process. The invading Germans had closed the road to Prague, as well as the railway, and, at one point, the taxi was flagged down by a Wehrmacht traffic-control unit-two motorcycles with sidecars that blocked the way. But a determined display of red press cards did the trick and they were waved through, with a casual stiff-armed salute and an amiable “Heil Hitler.”

“So then, Prague, here we are,” the driver said, stopping the taxi on some nameless road on the outskirts of the city. Weisz started to argue, in Slovenian, distant from Czech but in the same general family.

“But I don’t know this place,” the driver said.

“Go that way!” Hamilton said in German, waving generally south.

“Are you German?” the driver said.

“No, British.”

From the look on the driver’s face, that was worse. But he slammed the Tatra into gear and drove on. “We’re going to Wenceslas Square,” Weisz said, “in the old city.” Hamilton was also staying at the Zlata Husa-the Golden Goose-while Simard was at the Ambassador. Once more, as they crossed a bridge over the Vltava, they were stopped by German traffic police, and got through by using their press cards. In the central districts, south of the river, there was hardly a soul to be seen-when your country is being invaded, better to stay home. As the taxi entered the old city, and began to work its way through the ancient winding streets, Simard called out, “We just passed Blkova, we’re almost there.” He had a Guide Bleu, open to a map, on his knees.

As the driver shifted down to first gear, trying to turn a corner never meant for automobiles, a boy ran in front of the taxi and waved his arms. Weisz’s impression was student-maybe eighteen, with tousled fair hair and a battered wool jacket. The driver swore, and the car stalled as he slammed on the brakes. Then the back door flew open and another boy, similar to the first, dove headfirst onto the floor at Weisz’s feet. He was breathing hard, and laughing, and bunched in his hand was a swastika flag.

The boy in front of the taxi ran around the car and joined his friend on the floor. His face was bright red. “Go ahead! Go, now. Hurry!” he shouted. The driver, muttering and cursing, started the taxi, but, as they began to move, they were hit from behind. Weisz, knocked halfway off the seat, turned around to see, through the snow-dappled rear window, a black Opel, which had been unable to stop on the slippery cobbles and rammed them, its front grille spewing steam.

The driver reached for the ignition key, but Weisz yelled, “Don’t stop.” He didn’t. The back wheels slewed sideways, then the car gained traction and drove away. Behind them, two men in overcoats climbed out of the Opel and started to run, shouting in German, “Halt! Police!”

“What police?” Hamilton said, watching from the front seat. “Gestapo?”

Suddenly, a man in a black leather coat ran out of an alley, a Luger pistol in hand. Everybody ducked, a hole appeared in the windshield, and another round hit the back door panel. The boy in the wool jacket yelled, “Get out of here,” and the driver stepped on the gas. The man with the gun had run in front of the taxi, now he tried to leap out of the way, slipped, and fell. There was a bump beneath the wheels, accompanied by a furious squawk, then the taxi sideswiped a wall-metal grinding on stone-and, with the driver hauling maniacally at the wheel, slid around a corner, wheels spinning, and swerved crazily down the street.

Just before they turned, Weisz had seen the man with the pistol, obviously in pain, trying to crawl away. “I think we ran over his foot,” he said.

“Serves him right,” Hamilton said. Then, to the boys on the floor, in German: “Who are you?” A reporter’s question, Weisz heard it in his voice.

“Never mind that,” the boy in the wool jacket said, now leaning against the door. “We took their fucking flag.”

“You’re students?”

The two looked at each other. Finally, the one in the wool jacket said, “Yes. We were.”

“Merde,” Simard said, mildly irritated, as though he’d lost a button. Gingerly, he raised the cuff of his trouser leg, to reveal a red gash that pulsed blood down his shin and into his sock. “I am shot,” he said, barely able to believe it. He took a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket and dabbed the wound. “Don’t dab at it,” Hamilton said. “Press it.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Simard said. “I’ve been shot before.”

“So have I,” Hamilton said.

“Use pressure,” Weisz said. “To stop bleeding.” He found his own handkerchief, held the ends, and twirled it around to make a tourniquet.

“I’ll do it,” Simard said, taking the handkerchief. His face was very pale, Weisz thought he might be in shock.

In the front seat, as the taxi hurtled down a broad, empty street, the driver turned around to see what was going on in back. He started to speak, then didn’t, and held a hand to his forehead. Of course his head ached-his windshield had a bullet hole, his doors were scraped, trunk dented, and, now, blood on the upholstery. Behind them, in the distance, the high and low notes of a siren.

The student holding the flag got to his knees and peered out the window. “You had better hide your taxi,” he said to the driver.

“Hide it? Under the bed?”

“Pavel, maybe,” the other student said.

His friend said, “Yes, of course.” Then, to the driver: “A friend of ours lives in a building with a stable in back, we can hide it there. You can’t drive around like this.”

The driver blew out his breath in a great sigh. “A stable? With horses?”

“Go two more streets, then slow down and turn right. It’s a narrow alley, but a car goes through.”

“What’s going on?” Hamilton said.

“The car must be hidden,” Weisz said. “Simard, do you want to go to a hospital?”

“This morning? No, a private doctor, the hotel will know.”

Weisz took the Guide Bleu and looked at a street sign. “Can you walk?”

Simard made a face, then nodded-he could if he had to.

“Where we turn, we can get out. It’s a short walk to the hotels.”

From a window in a baroque parlor at the Zlata Husa, Carlo Weisz watched the Wehrmacht parade up the broad boulevard in front of the hotel, red-and-black swastika flags stark against the white snowfall. Later in the day, the journalists gathered in the bar and traded news. The president, Emil Hacha, aged and in ill health, had been summoned to Berlin, where Hitler and Goering had screamed at him for hours, swearing they would bomb the city of Prague into ashes, until the old man fainted. Hitler feared they’d killed him, the story went, but he was revived, and forced to sign papers that made it all legitimate-diplomatic crisis resolved! The army stayed in its barracks, because the Czech defenses, up north in the Sudetenland, had been given away at Munich. Meanwhile, in newspapers across the Continent, the snowstorm had been named “God’s Judgment.”

In Berlin, late in the afternoon, Christa von Schirren telephoned the Reuters bureau. News on the radio foretold that Weisz would not be at the Adlon that day, but she wanted to make sure. The secretary was not unkind. No, Herr Weisz could not come to the telephone, he had left the city. Still, there was to have been a letter, and she fretted about that, finally going to the Adlon and asking if a message had been left for her. At the front desk, the assistant manager seemed troubled, and did not answer immediately, as though, despite the many ways, so native to his vocation, of saying things without saying them, there were, nowadays, things that could not be said at all. “I am sorry, madam, but there is no message.”

No, she thought, he would not do that. It was, something else.

In Prague, Weisz wrote out his cable in block letters. TODAY, THE ANCIENT CITY OF PRAGUE CAME UNDER GERMAN OCCUPATION, AND RESISTANCE BEGAN. IN THE OLD TOWN DISTRICT, TWO STUDENTS…

And the cable back said: GOOD WORK SEND MORE DELAHANTY END.

18 March, near the city of Tarbes, southwestern France.

Late in the morning, S. Kolb peered out at an arid countryside, rocks and brush, and wiped the beads of sweat from his brow. The man once said to have “the balls of a gorilla” sat, at that moment, straight as a stick, rigid with fear. Yes, he could live the subterranean life, hunted by police and secret agents, and yes, he could survive amid the tenements and back alleys of perilous cities, but now he was engaged in the one task that squeezed his heart with terror: he was driving an automobile.

Worse, a beautiful, valuable automobile, hired at a garage on the edge of Tarbes. “So very much money,” the garagiste had said in a melancholy voice, one hand resting on the car’s polished hood. “I must accept it. But, monsieur, I beg of you, you will be careful with it. Please.”

Kolb tried. Hurtling along at twenty miles an hour, hands white on the steering wheel, one twitch of his tired foot producing a horrible roar and a breathtaking burst of speed. Suddenly, from behind, the thunderous blast of a Klaxon horn. Kolb glanced in the rearview mirror, where a monster of a car filled the frame; close, closer still, its giant chrome grille leering at him. Kolb jerked the wheel over hard and jammed his foot onto the brake pedal, stopping at a peculiar angle on the side of the road. As the tormentor sped past, it issued a second blast on its horn. Learn to drive, you worm!

An hour later, Kolb found the village south of Toulouse. From here, he needed directions. He’d been told that the elusive Colonel Ferrara had slipped across the Spanish border into France, where, like thousands of other refugees, he’d been interned. The French found the expression concentration camp distasteful so, to them, a guarded barbed-wire enclosure was an assembly center. And that was what Kolb called it, first at the village boulangerie. No, never heard of such a place. Oh? Well, anyhow, he would have one of those well-done baguettes. Mmm, better make it two-no, three. Next he stopped at the cremerie. A slab of that hard, yellow cheese, s’il vous plait. And that round one, goat? No, ewe. He’d have that, as well. Oh, and by the way…But, in answer, only an eloquent shrug, nothing like that here. At the grocery, after the purchase of two bottles of red wine filled from a spout in a wood cask, the same story. Finally, at the tabac, the woman behind the counter looked away and shook her head, but when Kolb stepped outside, a young woman, likely the daughter, followed him and drew a map on a scrap of paper. As Kolb walked back toward the car he heard, from within the store, the beginning of a good family fight.

Under way once again, Kolb tried to follow the map. But these weren’t roads, these were paths, sand bordered by brush. Was this the left? No, it ended suddenly, at a rock wall. So then, back up, the car whining, unhappy, the rocks hurt its handsome tires. In time, after a frightful hour, he found it. High barbed wire, Senegalese guards, dozens of men shuffling slowly to the wire to see who might be coming in the big automobile.

Kolb talked his way past the gate and found an office with a commandant, a French colonial officer with a drunk’s purplish nose and bloodshot eyes, glaring suspiciously from the other side of a plank desk. Who consulted a well-thumbed typewritten list and, finally, said yes, we have this individual here, what do you want with him? Credit the SIS, Kolb thought. Someone had descended deep into the catacombs of the French bureaucracy and managed, miraculously, to find the single bone he needed.

A family tragedy, Kolb explained. His wife’s brother, that foolish dreamer, had gone off to fight in Spain and now found himself interned. What was to be done? This poor fellow was needed back in Italy to run the family business, a successful business, a wine brokerage in Naples. And, worse yet, the wife was pregnant, and sickly. How she, how they all, needed him! Of course there were expenses, that was well understood, his lodging, and food, and care, so generously supplied by the camp administration, had to be paid for, and they would see to that. A fat envelope was produced and laid on the desk. The bloodshot eyes widened, and the envelope was opened, revealing a thick wad of hundred-franc notes-a lot of money. Kolb, at his most diffident, said he hoped it would be sufficient.

As the envelope disappeared into a pocket, the commandant said, “Shall I have him brought here?” Kolb said he’d prefer to go and look for him, and a sergeant was summoned. It took a long time to find Ferrara-the camp stretched out endlessly, a flat wasteland of sand and rock, open to a cutting wind. There were no women to be seen, evidently they were held elsewhere. The internees were of every age, hollow-cheeked-obviously underfed, unshaven, their clothes in tatters. Some wore blankets, against the cold, some stood in groups, others sat on the ground, playing cards, using torn strips of newspaper marked with pencil. Behind one of the barracks, a sagging net, tied to two poles, hung half on the ground. Maybe they’d had a volleyball, Kolb thought, months earlier, when they were first brought here.

Wandering past the groups of internees, Kolb heard mostly Spanish, but also German, Serbo-Croatian, and Hungarian. From time to time, one of the men would ask for a cigarette, and Kolb gave away what he’d bought at the tabac, then simply held his open hands out. Sorry, no more. The sergeant was persistent. “Have you seen the man called Ferrara? An Italian?” Thus, at last he was found, sitting with a friend, leaning against the wall of a barracks. Kolb thanked the sergeant, who saluted, then headed back toward the office.

Ferrara was dressed as a civilian-a soiled jacket and trousers with ragged cuffs-his hair and beard chopped off, as though he’d done the cutting himself. But, nonetheless, he was clearly somebody, stood out from the crowd-curving scar, sharp cheekbones, eyes hooded. Kolb had been told to expect black gloves, but Ferrara’s hands were bare, the left one disfigured by the ridged skin, pink and shiny, of a badly healed burn. “Colonel Ferrara,” Kolb said, and, in French, wished him good morning.

Both men stared at him, then Ferrara said, “And you are?” His French was very slow, but correct.

“I’m called Kolb.”

Ferrara waited for more. And so?

“I wonder if we could talk for a moment. Just the two of us.”

Ferarra said something to his friend in fast Italian, then stood up.

They walked together, past clusters of men, who glanced at Kolb, then looked away. When they were alone, Ferrara turned, faced Kolb, and said, “First of all, Monsieur Kolb, you can tell me who sent you here.”

“Friends of yours, in Paris.”

“I have no friends in Paris.”

“Carlo Weisz, the Reuters journalist, considers himself your friend.”

For a time, Ferrara thought about it. “Well, maybe,” he said.

“I’ve arranged your release,” Kolb said. “You can come back to Paris with me, if you like.”

“You work for Reuters?”

“Sometimes. My job is to find people.”

“A confidential agent.”

“Something like that.”

After a moment, Ferrara said, “Paris.” Then: “Perhaps by way of Italy.” His smile was ice cold.

“No, it isn’t that,” Kolb said. “There’d be three or four of us, if it was. There’s just me. From here we go to Tarbes, then to Paris by train. I have a car, outside the gate, you can drive it if you want.”

“You said ‘arranged,’ what did that mean?”

“Money, Colonel.”

“Reuters paid for this?”

“No, Weisz and his friends. Emigres.”

“Why would they do that?”

“For politics. They want you to tell your story, they want you to be a hero against the fascists.”

Ferrara didn’t quite laugh, but he stopped walking and met Kolb’s eyes. “You’re serious, aren’t you.”

“I am. And so are they. They’ve found you a place to stay, in Paris. What kind of papers do you have?”

“An Italian passport,” Ferrara said, the irony still in his voice.

“Good. So then, let’s be going, these things work better if you move quickly.”

Ferrara shook his head. Here was a sudden turn of fate, yes, but what sort of fate? So, stay? Go? Finally, he said, “Allright, yes, why not.”

As they walked back toward the barracks, Ferrara turned and gestured to his friend, who’d been following them, and the two men spoke for a time, the friend staring at Kolb as though to memorize him. Ferrara, in the stream of Italian, mentioned Kolb’s name, and his friend repeated it. Then Ferrara went into the barracks and emerged with a bundle of clothing, tied with a string. “It’s long past being worn,” he said, “but it does for a pillow.” When they reached the car, Kolb offered him the food he’d bought. Ferrara gathered up almost all of it, except for half a bread, said, “I’ll just be a minute,” and walked back through the gate.

As it happened, Ferrara did drive the automobile, after he got a taste of Kolb behind the wheel, thus it took only twenty minutes to reach the village, and then, an hour later, they left the car at the garage and took a taxi into Tarbes. Near the station, they found a haberdashery, where Ferrara selected a suit, shirt, underwear, everything but shoes-his army boots had survived well in the camp-and Kolb paid for it. As Ferrara changed, in the back of the store, the owner said, “He was in the camp, I imagine, they often come here, if they’re lucky enough to get out.” After a moment, he said, “A disgrace, for France.”

By late afternoon, they were on the train to Paris. In the last light of day, the arid south gave way slowly to patches of snow on plowed fields, to the soft hill country of the Limousin-pollarded trees lining little roads that wound away into the distance. Invitations, Kolb thought. They spoke, now and again, about the times they lived in. Ferrara explained that he’d learned French in the camp, to pass the empty hours, and for his new life as an emigre-if the government let him stay. He’d been in Paris once before, years earlier, but Kolb could tell from his voice that he remembered it and that now, for him, it meant refuge. He was, at times, still suspicious of Kolb, but then, this was not unusual. Somehow, Kolb’s work lingered in his presence, the cast shadow of a secret life, and could, however faintly, be apprehended. “Have you really,” Ferrara said, “been sent by the-how to say, what we call the fuorusciti?” Which meant-and it took both of them a few minutes to figure out the words-“those who have fled,” the Italian emigres’ preferred description of themselves.

“Yes. They know all about you, of course.” Surely they did, so at least that much was true, though everything else that Kolb had said was pure lies. “And that’s what they want, your story.” Anyhow, that’s what we want.

But let’s not concern ourselves with such things, Kolb thought, there would be plenty of time, later on, for the truth, better just then to watch the winter valleys, in their faded colors, as they drifted by to the rhythm of the wheels on the track.

It was just breaking dawn when they reached Paris, red streaks of light in the eastern sky, the street sweepers, old women, mostly, at work with twig brooms and water trucks. At the Gare de Lyon, Kolb found a taxi, which took them up to the Sixth Arrondissement and the Hotel Tournon, on the street of the same name.

The SIS had likely thought a long time, Kolb suspected, about where to put Ferrara. In superb accommodations? Overawe their newest pawn? Knock him senseless with luxury? With war coming, the treasury had perhaps opened its fist a little, but the Secret Intelligence Service had been starved all through the thirties, and they’d had to think hard about money-only Hitler could really open the bank, and, for the moment, though he’d snatched Czechoslovakia, it didn’t really matter all that much. Therefore, the Hotel Tournon-get him a decent room, Harry, nothing too grand. And the neighborhood was also, for their purposes, rather convenient, because Pawn Two lived there, and would be able to walk to work. Make it easy, keep them both happy, life went better that way.

Still, SIS rich or poor, the night clerk had been well greased. She rose from her couch in the lobby when Kolb hammered on the door, then appeared, in frightful housedress, wild auburn hair, and magnificent breath, to let them in. “Ah, mais oui! Le nouveau monsieur pour numero huit!” Yes, here’s the new roomer in number eight, such generous friends, surely he would be, too.

Up a flight of creaky wooden stairs, the room was spacious, with a tall window. Ferrara walked around, sat on the bed, opened the shutters so he could look out on the sleeping courtyard. Not bad, not bad at all, certainly not a tiny room in the apartment of some fuorusciti, and not a dirt-cheap hotel packed with Italian refugees. “Emigres?” Ferrara said, clearly skeptical. “They paid for this?”

From Kolb, a shrug, and the most angelic of smiles. May all your abductions be so sweet, my little lamb. “You like it?” Kolb said.

“Of course I like it.” Ferrara left the rest unsaid.

“Well then,” Kolb replied, himself no slouch at leaving things unsaid.

Ferrara hung his jacket up on the hanger in the armoire, and took from his pockets his passport, a few papers, and a sepia photograph of his wife and three children in a cardboard frame. It had, at some point, been bent, and straightened out, so the photograph was broken across the upper corner.

“Your family?”

“Yes,” Ferrara said. “But their lives go on a long way from mine-it’s been more than two years since I last saw them.” He put the passport in the bottom drawer of the armoire, closed the door, and rested the photograph on the windowsill. “And that’s that,” he said.

Kolb, who knew too well what he meant, nodded in sympathy.

“I left a lot behind, crossing the Pyrenees on foot, at night, then the people who arrested me took pretty much everything else.” He shrugged and said, “So, I’m forty-seven years old, and that’s what I have.”

“The times we live in, Colonel,” Kolb said. “Now, I think, we’ll go to the cafe downstairs, for coffee with hot milk, and a tartine.” Which was a long, skinny bread. Cut in half. And amply buttered.

19 March.

The seers of weather predicted the rainiest spring of the century, and so it was when Carlo Weisz returned to Paris. It dripped off the brim of his hat, ran in the gutters, and did nothing to improve his state of mind. From train to Metro and then to the Hotel Dauphine, he thought up a dozen useless schemes to bring Christa von Schirren to Paris, not one of which was worth a sou. But he would, at least, write her a letter-a disguised letter, as though it came from an aunt, or an old school friend, perhaps, traveling in Europe, pausing in Paris, and collecting mail at the American Express office.

Delahanty was happy to see him that afternoon, he’d scored a beat on the opposition with the resistance in Prague story, though the London Times had run a version of it the following day. From Delahanty, the old saw, “Nothing quite like being shot at, if they miss.”

Salamone was also happy to see him, though not for long, when they met at the bar near his office. Raindrops, lit red by the neon sign, ran slowly down the window, and the bar dog shook off a great spray of water when she was let in the door. “Welcome back,” Salamone said. “I assume you’re glad to be out of there.”

“A nightmare,” Weisz said. “And no surprise. But, no matter how much you read the papers, you don’t know about the little things, not unless you go there-what people say when they can’t say what they want to, how they look at you, how they look away. And then, after two weeks of that, I went to Prague, where they’ve been occupied, and they know what it will mean for them.”

“Suicides,” Salamone said. “So it’s reported in the newspapers here. Hundreds of them, Jews, others. The ones who didn’t get out in time.”

“It was very bad,” Weisz said.

“Well, it’s not much better back home. And I have to tell you that we’ve lost two runners.”

He meant distributors-bus drivers, barmen, storekeepers, janitors, anybody who had contact with the public. Thus it was said that if you wanted to know what was really going on in the world, best to visit the second-floor lavatory at the National Gallery of Antique Art, in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. Always something to read, there.

But distribution was mostly managed by teenaged girls from the fascist student organizations. They had to join, just as their fathers joined the Partito Nazionale Fascista, the PNF. Per Necessita Familiare, the joke went, for family necessity. But a lot of the girls hated what they had to do-march, sing, collect money-and signed up to distribute newspapers, getting away with it because people thought that girls would never do such a thing, would never dare. The fascisti had it a little wrong there, but still, now and again most often by betrayal, the police caught them.

“Two of them,” Weisz said. “Arrested?”

“Yes, in Bologna. Fifteen-year-old girls, cousins.”

“Do we know what happened?”

“We don’t. They went out with papers, in their school satchels, to leave them at the railroad station, but they never came back. Then, the following day, the police notified the parents.”

“And now they’ll go before the Special Tribunals.”

“Yes, as always. They’ll get two or three years.”

Weisz wondered, for a moment, whether the whole thing was worth it; girls in jail while the giellisti conspired in Paris, but he knew it for a question that couldn’t be answered. “Perhaps,” he said, “they can be pried loose.”

“Not in this case,” Salamone said. “The families are poor.”

They were silent for a time, the bar was quiet, only the sound of the rain in the street. Weisz unbuckled his briefcase and put the lists of German agents on the table. “I’ve brought you a present,” he said. “From Berlin.”

Salamone worked away at it; leaned on his elbows, soon enough pressed his fingers against his temples, then moved his head slowly from side to side. When he looked up, he said, “What is it with you? First that fucking torpedo, now this. Are you, some kind of, magnet?”

“It would seem so,” Weisz said.

“How’d you get it?”

“From a man in a park. It comes from the Foreign Ministry.”

“A man in a park.”

“Leave it at that, Arturo.”

“Fine, but at least tell me what it means.”

Weisz explained-German penetration throughout the Italian security system.

“Mannaggia,” Salamone said quietly, still reading through the list. “What a gift, it’s a death sentence. Next time, maybe a little stuffed bear, eh?”

“What do we do?”

Weisz watched Salamone as he tried to work it out. Yes, he was called a giellisti, but so what. The man on the other side of the table was in late middle age, a former shipping broker, his career destroyed by the government, and now a clerk. Nothing in life had prepared him for conspiracy, he had to figure it out as he went along.

“I’m not sure,” Salamone said. “We can’t just print it, that I do know, it would bring them down on us like-I don’t know, like hellfire, or think up something worse. And we’d have the Germans as well, the local Gestapo, with their pals in Berlin tearing the Foreign Ministry apart until they find out who went to the park.”

“But we can’t burn it, not this time.”

“No, Carlo, this hurts them. Remember the rule, anything that forces Germany and Italy apart, we want. And this does, this will make some of the fascisti mad-our people are mad already, which doesn’t mean shit to a snail, but, get them, the fearful them, mad, and we’ve done something worthwhile.”

“It’s how we do it.”

“Yes, I think so. We can’t be cowards and slip this to the Communists, though I admit it crossed my mind.”

“That’s where it comes from, I suspect. I was told as much.”

Salamone shrugged. “I’m not surprised. To do such a thing as this, in Germany, under the Nazi regime, would take somebody very strong, very committed, somebody with real ideology.”

“Maybe,” Weisz said, “maybe we can just say we know, that we’ve heard this is going on. The fascists will know how to find out the rest, since it’s in the heart of their machine. It’s disloyalty, to Italy, to allow another country to prepare for an occupation. Thus, even if you don’t like us, when we print this, we’re patriots.”

“How would you put it?”

“Just as I’ve said. A concerned official in an Italian bureau has informed Liberazione…Or an anonymous letter, which we believe.”

“Not bad,” Salamone said.

“But then, we have the real thing to deal with.”

“Give it to somebody who can use it.”

“The French? The British? Both? Hand it to a diplomat?”

“Don’t do that!”

“Why not?”

“Because they’ll be back in a week, wanting more. And they won’t say please.”

“In the mail, then. Mail it to the Foreign Ministry and the British embassy. Let them deal with the OVRA.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Salamone said, sliding the list toward his side of the table.

Weisz took it back. “No, I’m responsible for it, I’ll do it. Should I, maybe, retype it?”

“Then it’s from your typewriter,” Salamone said. “They can figure these things out. In the crime novels, they can, and I think that’s true.”

“But it would be on the man in the park’s typewriter. What if somebody figured that out?”

“So, find another typewriter.”

Weisz grinned. “I think this game is called hot potato. Where in hell will I find another typewriter?”

“Buy it, my friend. Out at Clignancourt, in the flea market. Then get rid of it. Pawn it, throw it out, or leave it in the street somewhere. And do it before the mail is delivered.”

Weisz refolded the list and put it back in its envelope.

At eight that evening, Weisz went looking for dinner. Mere this? Chez that? He’d read that day’s Le Journal, so he stopped at a newsstand and bought a Petit Parisien as a dinner companion. It was a terrible rag, but he secretly enjoyed it, all that lust and greed in high places somehow went well with dinner, especially dinner alone.

Walking through the rain, he took a side street, and came upon a little place called Henri. The window was well steamed, but he could see a black-and-white tile floor, diners at most of the tables, and a blackboard with that night’s menu. When he entered, the proprietor, properly heavy and red-faced, came to greet him, wiping his hands on his apron. A couvert for one, monsieur? Yes, please. Weisz hung his raincoat and hat on the clothes tree by the door. In very crowded restaurants, in bad weather, the thing would in time become overladen, and could be depended on to tip over at least once during the evening, which always made Weisz laugh.

What Henri offered that night was a large plate of steamed leeks, followed by rognons de veau, morsels of veal kidney, sauteed with mushrooms in a brown sauce, and a mound of crisp pommes frites. Reading the paper, following the prodigious love affairs of a nightclub singer, Weisz finished most of his carafe of red wine, mopping up the veal sauce with a piece of bread, then decided to have the cheese, a vacherin.

Weisz was seated at a corner table, and, when the door opened, he glanced sideways to see who might be coming in for dinner. The man who entered took off his hat and coat and found an unused peg on the clothes tree. He was a fattish, benign sort of fellow, a pipe clenched in his teeth, a slipover sweater worn beneath his jacket. The man looked around, searching for somebody, and, as Henri approached, eventually spotted Weisz. “Well, hello,” he said. “Mr. Carlo Weisz, what luck.”

“Mr. Brown. Good evening.”

“Don’t suppose I might join you. Are you waiting for somebody?”

“No, I’m just finishing up.”

“Hate to eat alone.”

Henri, wiping his hands on his apron, was not quite following this, but when Mr. Brown took a step toward Weisz’s table, he smiled and pulled out a chair. “Much appreciated,” Brown said, settling himself at the table and putting on his glasses to peer at the blackboard. “How’s the food?”

“Very good.”

“Kidneys,” he said. “That will do nicely.” He ordered, then said, “I’ve been meaning to get in touch with you, actually.”

“Oh? Why is that?”

“A small project, something that might interest you.”

“Really? Reuters pretty much takes up all my time.”

“Yes, I imagine they would. Still, this is quite out of the ordinary, and it’s a chance to, well, to make a difference.”

“A difference?”

“That’s it. In Europe these days, the way things are going, what with Hitler and Mussolini…I think you know what I mean. Anyhow, the world is too much with me, getting and spending, as the man said, but one does want to do something more, and I’m associated with a few like-minded fellows, and, every now and again, we try to do a little something worthwhile. Very informal, you understand, this group, but we pitch in a few pounds, and use our business connections, and, you never know, it might just, as I said, make a difference.”

A waiter brought a carafe of wine and a basket of bread. Mr. Brown said, “Mmm,” by way of thanks, poured himself a glass of wine, took a sip, and said, “Good. Very good, whatever it is. They never tell you, do they.” He had another sip, tore a piece of bread in half, and ate it. “Now,” he said, “where was I? Oh yes, our small project. Actually, it began the night we had drinks at the Ritz bar, with Geoffrey Sparrow and his girl, you recall?”

“I do, of course,” Weisz said cautiously, apprehensive about what might be coming next.

“Well, you know, it got me thinking. Here was an opportunity to do a little something for the sorry world out there. So I had a friend make inquiries, and, by a lucky chance, we actually found this Colonel Ferrara you wrote about. Poor bastard, his unit retreated to Barcelona, where they had to get rid of their uniforms and make a run for it, across the Pyrenees at night, which is very damn dangerous, I don’t have to tell you. Once in France, he was arrested, naturally, and interned at one of those wretched camps down in Gascony. Where we actually found him, through a friend in one of the French ministries.”

Worse and worse. “Not easy to do, something like that.”

“No, not easy. But, damn it all, worth it, don’t you think? I mean, you’re the one who told his story, so you know who he is-what he is, I should say. He’s a hero. Don’t see that word too much these days, it ain’t fashionable, but that’s the truth of it. In the midst of all this whining and hand-wringing, here’s a man who stands up for what he believes in, and-”

The waiter arrived with a generous wedge of vacherin, soft and smelly. Not that Weisz particularly wanted it, not anymore. Brown and his like-minded fellows had, with whatever else they were about, whipped his appetite away and replaced it with a cold knot in the stomach.

“Ah, the cheese. Nice and ripe, I’d say.”

“It is,” Weisz said, testing it lightly with his thumb. He cut a piece-a proper diagonal, not the nose-and stuck his fork in it, but that was as far as he got. “You were saying?”

“Uh, oh yes, Colonel Ferrara. A hero, Mr. Weisz, and one the world ought to know about. You certainly thought so, and, evidently, so did Reuters. Really, can you name another? Plenty of victims, out there, and plenty of nasty villains, but then, where are the heroes, tonight?”

Weisz wasn’t meant to answer this, and he didn’t. “And so?”

“So this, Mr. Weisz: we think that Colonel Ferrara should make his story known. In detail, in public.”

“And how would he do that?”

“The usual way. Always the best way, the usual way, and in this case that would mean, a book. His book. Soldier of Freedom, something like that. To Fight for Freedom? Is that better?”

Weisz wouldn’t bite. His expression said, who knows?

“But, whatever the title, it’s a good story. We start in the camp-will he ever get out? Then we find out how he got there. He grows up in a poor family, he joins the army, becomes an officer, fights with an elite force at the Piave River, in the Great War, is ordered to Ethiopia, Mussolini’s quest for empire, then resigns his commission, in protest, after Italian planes spray the tribal villages with poison gas, goes to Spain, and fights the fascists, Spanish and Italian. Now, here he is, at the end, preparing to fight fascism again. That’s a book I’d read, wouldn’t you?”

“I guess I would.”

“Of course you would!” Brown made a bracket of his thumb and index finger, then moved it across the title as he said, “My Fight for Freedom, by ‘Colonel Ferrara.’ In quotation marks, of course, and no first name, because it’s a nom de guerre, which makes for a rather tasty dust jacket, don’t you think? You get to buy a book by a fellow who must keep his real identity a secret, has to use an alias. Why? Because tomorrow, when he finishes writing, he goes back to war, against Mussolini, or Hitler, in Roumania, or Portugal, or little Estonia-who knows where it might break out next. So we feel, my friends and I, that here is a book which should see the light of day. Now, how does this sound to you. Can it be done?”

“I would think so,” Weisz said, his voice as neutral as he could possibly make it.

“Only one problem, as far as we can see. This Colonel Ferrara, a gifted army officer, can do many things, but one thing he can’t do is write books.”

“Les poireaux,” the waiter said, sliding a plate of leeks onto the table. It was no more than a momentary flicker of the eyes, as Mr. Brown regarded the plate, but it revealed to Weisz that Mr. Brown didn’t actually like steamed leeks, probably didn’t like veal kidneys, maybe didn’t like French food, or the French, or France.

“So then,” Brown said, “what we thought is that maybe the journalist Carlo Weisz could help us out in this area.”

“I don’t think that’s possible.”

“Oh yes it is.”

“I have too much work, Mr. Brown. Really, I’m sorry, but I can’t do it.”

“I’d wager you can. A thousand pounds, I’d wager.”

That was a great deal of money, but the cost of it! “Sorry,” Weisz said.

“Are you sure? Because I can see that you haven’t thought this over, you haven’t seen all the possibilities, all the benefits. It would be a chance, certainly, to enhance your repuation. Your name won’t be on the book, but your bureau chief, what’s-his-name, Delahanty, would know about it. Likely he’d see it as patriotism, on your part, to take a hand in the fight against Britain’s enemies. Wouldn’t he? I know Sir Roderick would.”

This thrust went home. We’ll tell your boss, if you don’t do what we want. Sir Roderick Jones was the managing director of the Reuters bureau-a famous tyrant, a holy terror. Wore the school ties of schools he’d never attended, implied service in regiments he was too short to have joined. At night, when his chauffeured Rolls-Royce took him home from the office, an employee was sent out to jump on a rubber pad in the street, which, as the car approached, turned the traffic light to green. And he was said to have berated a servant for not ironing his shoelaces.

“How do you know he would?” Weisz said.

“Oh, he’s a friend of a friend,” Brown said. “Eccentric, sometimes, but his heart’s in the right place. Especially when it’s a matter of patriotism.”

“I don’t know,” Weisz said, searching for some way out. “If Colonel Ferrara is all the way down in Gascony…”

“Good heavens no! He’s not in Gascony, he’s right here, in Paris, up on the rue de Tournon. So, now that that’s out of our way, will you, at least, think it over?”

Weisz nodded.

“Good,” Brown said. “Better to consider these sorts of things, take some time, see how the wind blows.”

“I’ll think it over,” Weisz said.

“You do that, Mr. Weisz. Take your time. I’ll call you in the morning.”

By nine-thirty, Carlo Weisz wasn’t ready to jump into the Seine, but he did want to look at it. Brown had made a fast exit from the restaurant, tossing franc notes on the table, more than enough to pay for both dinners, sparing himself the veal kidney, and leaving Henri to gaze anxiously out the door as he went down the street. Weisz didn’t dawdle, paid for his own dinner, and left a few minutes later. So, for the waiter, a gratuity to be remembered.

There was no going back to the Dauphine, not just then. Weisz walked and walked, down to the river and onto the Pont d’Arcole, the Notre Dame cathedral looming up behind him, a vast shadow in the rain. All his life he’d gazed at rivers, from London’s Thames to Budapest’s Danube, with the Arno, the Tiber, and the Grand Canal of Venice in between, but the Seine was queen of the poetic rivers, to Weisz it was. Restless and melancholy, or soft and slow, depending on the mood of the river, or his. That night it was black, dappled with rain, and running high in its banks, just beneath the lower quay. What shall I do? he wondered, leaning on a parapet made for leaning, staring at the river as though it would answer. Why not try running down to the sea? Suits me.

But that he couldn’t do. He didn’t like being trapped, but he was. Trapped in Paris, trapped in a good job-all the world should be so trapped! But add Mr. Brown’s trap and the equation changed. What would he do if they booted him out of Reuters? He would not soon find another Delahanty, who liked him, who protected him, who had fashioned a job particularly for his abilities. In his mind, he went down the list of little jobs the giellisti had managed to acquire. Not a good list-a place to go in the morning, a little money, not much more. And, he feared, a life sentence. Hitler wasn’t going to fall anytime soon, history was ripe with forty-year dictatorships, and that made him a free man at last, at the age of eighty-one. Time to begin anew!

Perhaps he could delay the project, he thought, say yes but mean no, then disentangle himself in some clever way. But if Brown had the power to get him fired, he might also have the power to have him expelled. Weisz had to face that possibility. In the morning light, Zanzibar was not so grim as he’d feared. Or worse, the letter to Christa-a change of plans, my love. No, no, impossible, he had to survive, to stay where he was. And then, despite the cold ironic twist in Brown’s soul, such a project might in truth be good for the sorry world out there, might inspire other Colonel Ferraras to take arms against the devil. Was it, really, so different from the work he did with Liberazione?

This was enough to get him moving, to the end of the bridge, past the traditional embracing couple, and onto the upper quay of the right bank, walking east, away from the hotel. A whore blew him a kiss, a clochard got five francs, a woman with a stylish umbrella didn’t exactly give him a look, and a few lonely souls, heads down in the rain, weren’t going home, not yet. He walked for a long time, past the Hotel de Ville, past the garden shops across the street, and found himself eventually at the Canal Saint-Martin, where it met the place Bastille.

A few steps down a narrow street off Bastille was a restaurant called Le Brasserie Heininger. At the entry, stalls of crushed ice displayed lobsters and shellfish, while a waiter, dressed as a Breton fisherman, worked at opening oysters. Weisz had once written about the Heininger, in June of 1937. The political intrigues of Bulgarian emigres in Paris took a violent turn last night at the popular Brasserie Heininger, just off the place de la Bastille, near the dance halls and nightclubs of the notorious rue de Lappe. Just after 10:30 in the evening, the popular headwaiter of the brasserie, one Omaraeff, arefugee from Bulgaria, was gunned down while attempting to hide in a stall in the ladies’ WC. Then, to show they meant business, two men wearing long coats and fedoras-gangsters from Clichy, according to the police-sprayed the elegant dining room with submachine-gun fire, sparing the terrified patrons but smashing all the gold-framed mirrors, save one, which survived, a single bullet hole in its lower corner. “I will not replace that one,” said Maurice “Papa” Heininger, owner of the brasserie. “I will leave it as it is, a memorial to poor Omaraeff.” The police are investigating.

There was no going further east, Weisz realized, in that direction lay dark, empty streets, and the furniture workshops of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. So then, how to avoid going home? Maybe a drink, he thought. Or two. At the Brasserie Heininger, a refuge, bright lights and people, why not. He walked down the street, entered the brasserie, and climbed the white marble staircase to the dining room. What a crowd! Laughing and flirting and drinking, while waiters with mutton-chop whiskers hurried by, carrying silver platters of oysters or choucroute garni, the room all red plush banquettes, painted cupids, and polished wood. The maitre d’ fingered his velvet rope and gave Weisz a long look, not very welcoming. Who was this lone wolf, dripping wet, trying to come down to the campfire? “I fear it will be quite a long wait, monsieur, we are very full tonight.”

Weisz hesitated for a moment, hoping to see someone call for a check, then turned to leave.

“Weisz!”

He searched for the source of the voice.

“Carlo Weisz!”

Working his way through the crowded room was Count Janos Polanyi, the Hungarian diplomat, tall and bulky and white-haired, and, tonight, not perfectly steady on his feet. He shook Weisz’s hand, took him by the arm, and led him toward a corner table. Pushed up against Polanyi in the narrow path between chair backs, Weisz caught a strong smell of wine, mixed with the scents of bay rum cologne and good cigars. “He’ll be joining us,” Polanyi called back to the maitre d’. “At table fourteen. So bring a chair.”

At table fourteen, just beneath the mirror with the bullet hole, a sea of upturned faces. Polanyi introduced Weisz, adding, “a journalist at the Reuters bureau,” and a chorus of greetings followed, all in French, apparently the language of the evening. “So then,” Polanyi said to Weisz, “left to right, my nephew, Nicholas Morath, his friend Cara Dionello. Andre Szara, the Pravda correspondent.” Szara nodded to Weisz, they’d met, now and again, at press conferences. “And Mademoiselle Allard.” The latter was leaning against Szara, on the end of the banquette, not asleep, but fading fast. “Then Louis Fischfang, the screenwriter, and next the famous Voyschinkowsky, who you’ll know as ‘the Lion of the Bourse,’ and, by his side, Lady Angela Hope.”

“We’ve met,” Lady Angela said, with a certain smile.

“Have you? Splendid.”

The maitre d’ arrived with a chair and everybody moved closer together to make room. “We’re drinking Echezeaux,” Polanyi said to Weisz. Clearly they were, Weisz counted five empty bottles on the table, and half a sixth. To the maitre d’, Polanyi said, “We’ll need a glass, and another Echezeaux. No, better make it two.” The maitre d’ signaled to a waiter, then took Weisz’s coat and hat and headed toward the cloakroom. Moments later, a waiter arrived with a glass and the new bottles. As he worked at opening them, Polanyi said to Weisz, “What brings you out in this vile weather? Not after a story, are you?”

“No, no,” Weisz said. “Not tonight. I’m just out for a walk in the rain.”

“Anyhow,” Fischfang said.

“Oh yes, we were in the middle of a story,” Polanyi said.

“A Hitler’s parrot joke,” Fischfang said. “Number whatever it is. Is anybody counting?” Fischfang was a tense little man with bent wire-framed glasses, which made him look like Leon Trotsky.

“Start over, Louis,” Voyschinkowsky said.

“In this one, Hitler’s parrot is asleep on his perch, Hitler’s working at his desk. Suddenly, the parrot wakes up and cries, ‘Here comes Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe.’ Hitler stops working. What goes on? Then the door opens and it’s Goering. So Hitler and Goering start to talk, but the bird interrupts. ‘Here comes Joseph Goebbels, minister of propaganda.’ And, lo and behold, a minute later, it’s true. Hitler tells what’s going on, but Goering and Goebbels think he’s kidding. ‘Ah, go on, Adolf, it’s a trick, you’re giving the bird a signal.’ ‘No, no,’ Hitler says. ‘This bird somehow knows who’s coming, and I’ll prove it to you. We’ll hide in the closet, where the bird can’t see me, and wait for the next visitor.’ So there they are, in the closet, and the bird starts up again. But this time it just trembles and hides its head under its wing and squawks.” Fischfang hunched over, hid his head beneath his arm, and produced a series of frightened squawks. At nearby tables, a few heads turned. “After a minute, the door opens, and it’s Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo. He looks around, thinks the office is empty, and goes away. ‘Allright, boys,’ the parrot says, ‘it’s safe to come out now. The Gestapo’s gone.’”

A few smiles, a tepid laugh from the courteous Voyschinkowsky. “Gestapo jokes,” Szara said.

“Not so funny, is it,” Fischfang said. “A friend of mine picked that up in Berlin. But, anyhow, they’re still working at it.”

“Why don’t they work at shooting that bastard?” Cara said.

“I’ll drink to that,” Szara said, his French flavored with a strong Russian accent.

The Echezeaux was something that Weisz had never tasted-far too expensive. The first sip told him why.

“Patience, children,” Polanyi said, setting his glass back on the tablecloth. “We’ll get him.”

“To us, then,” Lady Angela said, raising her glass.

Morath was amused, and said to Weisz, “You’ve fallen among, well, not thieves, exactly, ah, citizens of the night.”

Szara laughed, Polanyi grinned. “Not thieves, Nicky? But, let’s all remember that Monsieur Weisz is a journalist.”

Weisz didn’t like being excluded. “Not tonight,” he said. “I’m just one more emigre.”

“From where did you emigrate?” Voyschinkowsky said.

“He’s from Trieste,” Lady Angela said, a nudge and a wink in her voice. Now everybody was amused.

“Well then, he has honorary membership,” Fischfang said.

“As what?” Lady Angela said, all innocence.

“As, uh, what Nicky said. ‘Citizen of the night.’”

“To Trieste, then,” Szara said, ready to drink.

“Trieste, and the others,” Polanyi said. “Geneva, say. And Lugano.”

“Certainly Lugano. The so-called Spyopolis,” Morath said.

“Have you heard that?” Voyschinkowsky asked Weisz.

Weisz smiled. “Yes, Spyopolis. Like any border city.”

“Or any city,” Polanyi said, “with Russian emigres.”

“Oh good,” Lady Angela said. “Now we can include Paris.”

“And Shanghai,” Fischfang said. “And Harbin, especially Harbin, ‘where the women dress on credit and disrobe for cash.’”

“To them,” Cara said. “The White Russian women of Harbin.”

They drank to that, and Polanyi refilled the glasses. “Of course, we should include the others. Hotel doormen, for example.”

Szara liked that idea. “Then, embassy code clerks. Nightclub dancers.”

“And tennis pros,” Cara said. “With perfect manners.”

“Yes,” Weisz said. “And the journalists.”

“Hear, hear,” Lady Angela said in English.

“Long life,” Polanyi said, raising his glass.

Now everyone laughed, drank the toast, and drank again. Except for Mlle. Allard, whose head lay against Szara’s shoulder, eyes closed, mouth slightly open. Weisz lit a cigarette and looked around the table. Were they all spies? Polanyi was, and so was Lady Angela Hope. Morath, Polanyi’s nephew, probably was, and Szara, a Pravda correspondent, had to be, given the voracious appetite of the NKVD. And Fischfang as well, from what he’d said. And all on the same side? Two Hungarians, an Englishwoman, a Russian. What was Fischfang? Likely a Polish Jew, resident in France. And Voyschinkowsky? French, of, maybe, Ukrainian ancestry. Cara Dionello, who was sometimes mentioned in the gossip columns, was Argentine, and very rich. What a crowd! But all, it would seem, working against the Nazis, one way or another. And don’t forget, he thought, one Carlo Weisz, Italian. No, Triestine.

It was just after two in the morning when the Triestine climbed out of a taxi in front of the Hotel Dauphine, managed, on his eighth try, to get his key in the lock, opened the door, made his way past the deserted reception desk, and, eventually, after stumbling back a step at least three times, up the stairs to his refuge. Where he shed his clothes, down to shorts and undershirt, hunted through his jacket pockets until he found his glasses, and sat down at the Olivetti. The opening volley sounded loud to Weisz, but he ignored it-the other tenants never seemed to mind the late-night tapping of a typewriter. Or, if they did, they never said anything about it. Typing late at night had near saintly status in the city of Paris-who knew what wondrous flights of imagination might be in progress-and people liked the idea of an inspired soul, pounding away after a midnight visit from the muse.

An inspired clandestine journalist, anyhow, writing a short, simple article about German agents at the heart of the Italian security system. It was pretty much as he’d told Salamone in the bar, earlier that day. The Liberazione editors had heard, from friends in Italy, about these Germans, some official, some not, working inside the police and security organizations. Shameful, really, if it were true, and they believed it was, that Italy, so often invaded, would invite foreign agents inside its defensive walls, inside its castle. A Trojan horse? Preparation for another, a German, invasion? An invasion supported by the fascists themselves? Liberazione hoped not. But then, what did it mean? How would it end? Was this the proper course for those who called themselves patriots? We giellisti, he wrote, have always shared one passion with our opponents: love of country. So please, our readers in the police and security services-we know you read our newspaper, even though it’s forbidden-take some time to think about this, about what it means to you, about what it means to Italy.

The following day, a telephone call at the Reuters bureau. Had Mr. Brown, at this point, been his cold, hard self, and leaned on his advantage, he might have been issued a brisk va f’an culo and sent on his way. But it was a mild, sensible Mr. Brown, trudging along through a vocational morning, on the other end of the line. Hoping Weisz had thought over his proposition, hoping that, in the politics of the moment, he saw the point of Soldier for Freedom. Their interests were, in this instance, mutual. A little time, a little hard work, a blow against the common enemy. And they would pay him only if he wanted to be paid. “That’s up to you, Mr. Weisz.”

They met that day after work, at the cafe-down three steps from the street-below the Hotel Tournon. Mr. Brown, Colonel Ferrara, and Weisz. Ferrara was glad to see him-Weisz had wondered about that, because he’d brought this down on Ferrara’s head. But that head had recently been locked up in a camp, so Weisz was a savior, and Ferrara let him know it.

Mr. Brown spoke English at the meeting, while Weisz translated for Ferrara. “Naturally, you’ll write in Italian,” Brown said. “And we have somebody who will do the English version, pretty much day by day. Because first publication, as soon as possible, will be in London, with Staunton and Weeks. We considered Chapman amp; Hall, or maybe Victor Gollancz, but we like Staunton. For the Italian publication, maybe a small French house, or we’ll use one of the emigre journals-their name, anyhow-but we’ll get copies into Italy, you can depend on that. And it must go to the United States, it could be influential there, and we want the Americans to think about going to war, but Staunton will make that sale. Allright so far?”

After Weisz told him what had been said, the colonel nodded. The reality of being an author was just beginning to reach him. “Please ask,” he said to Weisz, “what if the publisher in London doesn’t like it?”

“Oh, they’ll like it well enough,” Brown said.

“Don’t worry,” Weisz said to Ferrara. “This is the best kind of story, a story that tells itself.”

Not quite. Weisz found, through the end of March and the early days of April, that considerable embroidery was needed, but this came more easily to him than he would have suspected-he knew Italian life, and he knew the history. Still, he held tight to the narrative, and Ferrara, on prompting, had a good memory.

“My father worked for the railroad, in the town of Ferrara. As a brakeman in the railroad yards.”

And your father-stern and distant? Warm and tender? A bad temper? Tall? Short? The house, what did it look like? Family? Holidays? A scene at Christmas? That could be appealing, snow, candles in the windows. Did he play at being a soldier?

“If I did, I don’t remember.”

“No? With a broomstick, maybe, for a rifle?”

“What I recall is football, every spare minute I had. But we didn’t play all that much, I had chores to do, after school. Bringing water from the pump or coal for the little stove we had. It took a lot of work, just to live day to day.”

“So, nothing military.”

“No, I never thought about it. When I was eleven, I brought my father his dinner, at the yards, and I would meet his friends. It was understood that I would do the same work he did.”

“You liked that idea?”

“It wasn’t up to me to like it.” He thought for a time. “Actually, now that I think about it, my mother’s brother had been a soldier, and he let me wear a sort of canvas belt he had, with a canteen on it. I did like that. I wore it, and I filled the canteen and drank the water. Which tasted, different.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Water from a canteen has a certain taste. Musty, but not bad, canteen water is not like other water.”

Ahh.

By 10 April, the new issue of Liberazione was, against all odds, ready for publication. Weisz’s evenings were taken up with the book, and his days belonged to Reuters, which left Salamone, and eventually Elena, to do much of the editorial work. Weisz had to tell Salamone what he was doing, but Elena knew only that he was “involved in work on another project.” This she accepted, saying, “I don’t have to know the details.”

For the 10 April Liberazione, there was plenty to write about, and both the Roman lawyer and the art historian from Siena contributed articles. Mussolini had issued an ultimatum to King Zog of Albania, demanding, essentially, that he give his country to Italy. Britain was asked to intercede, but declined and, on 7 April, the Italian navy bombarded the Albanian coast, and the army invaded. This invasion violated the Anglo-Italian agreement signed a year earlier, but the Chamberlain government was silent.

Not so Liberazione.

A New Imperial Adventure, they said. More dead and wounded, more money, all for Mussolini’s frantic competition with Adolf Hitler, who, on 22 March, had taken the port of Memel by sending a registered letter to the Lithuanian government, then sailing into the port, to grinding newsreel cameras and popping flashbulbs, on a German warship. Very saucy, as Hitler liked to say, with the sort of panache guaranteed to infuriate Mussolini.

But, just in case it didn’t, the April Liberazione surely did-if the palace stooges allowed him to see it. For there was not only the editorial about German agents but also a cartoon. Talk about saucy. It’s nighttime, and here’s Mussolini, as usual, on a balcony. This balcony, however, is off a bedroom, the outline of a bed barely visible in the darkness. It’s the familiar Il Duce; big jaw thrust out, arms folded, but he’s wearing only a pajama top-with medals, of course-revealing hairy, knobby cartoon legs, while, from behind the French door, a pair of woman’s eyes, very alarmed, are peering out of the gloom, suggesting that all has not gone well in the bedroom. A suggestion confirmed by the old Sicilian proverb used as the caption: “Potere e meglio di fottere.” Nice rhyme, there, the sort of thing that made it fun to say, and easy to remember. “Power is better than fucking.”

It had been three weeks since Weisz’s return from Berlin, and he had to call Veronique-casual as the love affair had been, he couldn’t just vanish. So, on a Thursday afternoon, he telephoned and asked her to meet him after work at a cafe near the gallery. She knew. Somehow she knew. And, Parisian warrior that she was, had never looked so lovely. So soft-her hair soft and simple, eyes barely made up, blouse falling softly over her breasts, with a new perfume, sweet, not sophisticated, clouds of it. Three weeks’ absence and a meeting at a cafe made words practically pointless, but decency demanded an explanation. “I have met, somebody,” he said. “It is, I think, serious.”

There were no tears, only that she would miss him, and he realized, just at that moment, how much he’d liked her, what good times they’d had together, in bed and out.

“Someone you met in Berlin, Carlo?”

“Someone I met a long time ago.”

“A second chance?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Very rare, the second chance.” You won’t get one here.

“I will miss you,” he said.

“You’re sweet, to say that.”

“It’s true, I’m not just saying it.”

A melancholy smile, a lift of the eyebrows.

“May I call you, sometime, to see how you’re doing?”

She put a hand, also soft, and warm, on his, by way of telling him what a jackass he’d just been, then stood up and said, “My coat?”

He helped her on with her coat, she turned, shook out her hair so that it fell properly over her collar, rose to give him a dry kiss on the lips, and, hands in pockets, walked out the door. When, later, he left the cafe, from the woman behind the cash register, another melancholy smile, another lift of the eyebrows.

The following day, he forced himself to deal with the list he’d brought out of Berlin. Leaving the office at lunchtime, he took an endless Metro ride out to the Porte de Clignancourt, wandered through the flea market, and bought a valise. It had been born cheap-cardboard covered with pebbled fabric-then lived a long, hard life; a tag on the handle evidence of a stay at a railway baggage room in Odessa.

That done, he walked and walked, past stalls of prodigious furniture and racks of old clothes, until, at last, he found an old gent with a goatee and a dozen typewriters. He tried them all, even the red Mignon portable, and finally chose a Remington with a French, AZERTY, keyboard, haggled a little, put it in the valise, dropped it off at the hotel, and returned to the office.

Long hours, the spy business. After an evening with Ferrara-the troop transport to Ethiopia, the misgivings of a fellow officer-Weisz walked back to the Dauphine, took the list from its hiding place, beneath the bottom drawer of his armoire, and went to work. The thing was a bear to retype, the old ribbon had barely any ink, and he had to do it twice. Finally, he typed two envelopes, one to the French Foreign Ministry, the other to the British embassy, added stamps, and went to bed. They would know what had been done-French keyboard, umlauts put in by hand, local mailing-but Weisz didn’t so much care, by that point, what anybody did with it. What he did care about was keeping his word to the man in the park, if he was still alive, and especially if he wasn’t.

It was very late by the time he finished, but he wanted badly to be done with the whole business, so he burned the list, flushed the ashes down the toilet, and set out to dispose of the typewriter. Valise in hand, he walked down the stairs and out into the street. Harder than he thought, to lose a valise-people everywhere, and the last thing he wanted was some Frenchman running after him, waving his arms and crying, “Monsieur!” At last he found a deserted alley, set the valise by a wall, and walked away.

14 April, 3:30 A.M. Weisz stood at the corner where the rue Dauphine met the quay above the Seine and waited for Salamone. And waited. Now what? It was the fault of that accursed Renault, old and mean. Why did nobody in his world ever have anything new? Everything in their lives was worn-out, used up, hadn’t really worked right for a long time. Fuck this, he thought, I’ll go to America. Where he would be poor again, in the midst of wealth. That was the old story, for Italian immigrants-the famous postcard back to Italy saying, “Not only are the streets not paved with gold, they are not paved, and we are expected to pave them.”

The line of thought was interrupted by the coughing engine of Salamone’s car, and darkness pierced by one headlight. Butting the door open with his shoulder, Salamone said, by way of greeting, “Che palle!” What balls! Meaning, what balls life has to do this to me! Then, “You have it?”

Yes, he had it, the 10 April Liberazione, a sheaf of paper in his briefcase. They drove along the Seine, then turned and took the bridge across the river, working through small streets until they came to the all-night cafe near the Gare de Lyon. The conductor was waiting for them, drinking an aperitif and reading a newspaper. Weisz brought him to the car, where he sat in the backseat and spent a few minutes with them. “Now that cazzo“-that prick-“has us in Albania,” he said, sliding the Liberazione into a trainman’s leather case he wore over his shoulder. “And he’s got my poor nephew there, with the army. A kid, seventeen years old, a very good kid, sweet-natured, and they’ll surely kill him, those fucking goat thieves. Is that in here?” He tapped the leather case.

“Very much in there,” Weisz said.

“I’ll read it on my way down.”

“Tell Matteo we’re thinking about him.” Salamone meant their Linotype operator in Genoa.

“Poor Matteo.”

“What’s gone wrong?” Salamone’s voice was tight.

“It’s his shoulder. He can barely raise his arm.”

“He hurt it?”

“No, he’s getting old, and you know what Genoa’s like. Cold and damp, and the coal is hard to find these days, and it costs an arm and a leg.”

14 April, 10:40 A.M. On the 7:15 to Genoa, the conductor made his way to the baggage car and sat on a trunk. Finding himself alone, with no stop until Lyons, he lit a panatella and settled in to read Liberazione. Some of it he knew already, and the editorial was puzzling. What were the Germans doing? Working for the security? So what? They were no different than the Italians, and they should all burn in hell. But the cartoon made him laugh out loud, and he liked the piece about the Albanian invasion. Yes, he thought, give it to them good.

15 April, 1:20 A.M. The printing plant of Il Secolo, Genoa’s daily newspaper, was not far from the giant refineries, on the road to the port, and tank cars were shunted back and forth all night long on the railway track behind the building. Il Secolo, in better days, had been the oldest democratic newspaper in Italy, then, in 1923, a forced sale had brought it under fascist management, and the editorial policy had changed. But Matteo, and many of the people he worked with, had not changed. As he finished up a run of leaflets for the Genoa association of fascist pharmacists, the production foreman stopped by to say good night. “You almost done?”

“Almost.”

“Well, see you tomorrow.”

“Good night.”

Matteo waited a few minutes, then started the setup for a run of Liberazione. What was it this time? Albania, yes, everybody agreed about that. “Why? To grab four rocks?” So the latest line in the piazza-in the public square, thus everywhere. You heard it on the bus, you heard it in the cafes. Matteo took great satisfaction in his night printing, even though it was dangerous, because he was one of those people who really didn’t like being pushed around, and that was the fascist specialty: making you do what they wanted, then smiling at you. Well, he thought, setting the controls, then pulling a lever to print a sample copy, sit on this. And spin.

16 April, 2:15 P.M. Antonio, who drove his coal-delivery truck from Genoa down to Rapallo, didn’t read Liberazione, because he couldn’t read. Well, not exactly, but anything written took him a long time to figure out, and there were a lot of words in this newspaper that he didn’t know. The delivery of these bundles was his wife’s idea-her sister lived in Rapallo and was married to a Jewish man who used to own a small hotel-and it had, without question, increased his stature in her eyes. Maybe she’d had some doubts when she’d faced the fact, two months pregnant, that it was definitely time to get married, but not so much these days. Nothing was said, in the house, but he could feel the change. Women had ways of letting you know something without actually saying it.

The road to Rapallo ran straight, past the town of Santa Margherita, but Antonio slowed down and hauled the wheel around to turn onto a dirt road that ran up into the hills, to the village of Torriglia. Just outside the village was a big, fancy house, the country villa of a Genoese lawyer, whose daughter, Gabriella, went to school in Genoa. One of these bundles was hers to distribute. All of sixteen years old, she was, and something to look at. Not that he, a married man and the mere owner of a coal truck, had any notion of trying anything, but he liked her just the same, and she had a very appealing way about her when she looked at him. You are a hero, something like that. For a man like Antonio, pretty rare, very nice. He hoped she was careful, fooling around with this smuggling business, because the police in Genoa were pretty tough customers. Well, maybe not all of them, but many.

17 April, 3:30 P.M.

At the Sacred Heart Academy for Girls, in the best neighborhood of Genoa, field hockey was compulsory. So Gabriella spent the late afternoon running about in bloomers, waving at a ball with a stick, and calling out instructions to her teammates, which they rarely followed. After twenty minutes, the girls were red-faced and damp, and Sister Perpetua told them to sit down and cool off. Gabriella sat on the grass, next to her friend Lucia, and informed her that the new Liberazione had arrived, hidden at her country house, but she had, in her locker, ten copies for Lucia and her secret boyfriend, a young policeman.

“I’ll get them later,” Lucia said.

“Give them out quickly,” Gabriella said. Lucia could be lazy, and required an occasional prod.

“Yes, yes. I know, I will.” Nothing to be done with Gabriella, a force of nature, best not to resist.

Gabriella was the saint-in-training of the Sacred Heart Academy. She knew what was right, and, when you knew what was right, you had to do it. This was the most important thing in life, and always would be. The fascists, as she’d seen, were brutal men, and wicked. And wickedness had always to be overcome, otherwise the lovely things in the world, beauty, truth, and romance, would all be ruined, and nobody would want to live in it. After school, she rode her bicycle the long way home, newspapers folded beneath her schoolbooks in the basket, stopping at a trattoria, a grocery, and a telephone booth at the post office.

19 April, 7:10 A.M. Lieutenant DeFranco, a detective in the rough waterfront district of Genoa, visited the WC at the precinct house at this time every morning, the high wooden stall an island in the general bustle that accompanied the arrival of the day shift. The station had been renovated two years earlier-the fascist government cared for the comforts of its policemen-and new, sit-down toilets had been installed, to replace the old porcelain squares. Lieutenant DeFranco lit a cigarette and reached behind the bowl to see if there was anything to read today and, luck was with him, there was, a copy of Liberazione.

As always, he wondered idly who’d put it there, but that was hard to figure out. Some of the policemen were Communists, so maybe one of them, or it might be anybody, against the regime for whatever reason, idealism or revenge, because these days, people were quiet about such feelings. On the first page, Albania, cartoon, editorial. They weren’t so wrong, he thought, not that there was much to be done about it. In time, Mussolini would falter, and the other wolves would be on him. That was, had always been, the way in this part of the world. One simply had to wait, but, while you waited, something to read with your morning ritual.

At ten-thirty that morning, he visited a dockside bar that catered to the stevedores of the port, to have a chat with a petty thief, who now and again passed along a few bits of local gossip. No longer young, the thief believed that when he was eventually caught, climbing in a window somewhere, the law might go a little easier on him, maybe a year instead of two, and that was well worth the occasional chat with the neighborhood cop.

“I was over at the vegetable market yesterday,” he said, leaning across the table. “The Cuozzo brothers’ place, you know?”

“Yes,” DeFranco said. “I know it.”

“I notice they’re still around.”

“I believe they are.”

“Because, well, you remember what I told you, right?”

“That you sold them a rifle, a carbine, that you stole.”

“I did, too. I wasn’t lying.”

“And so?”

“Well, they’re still there. Selling vegetables.”

“We’re investigating. You wouldn’t be telling me how to do my job, would you?”

“Lieutenant! Never! I just, you know, wondered.”

“Don’t wonder, my friend, it isn’t good for you.”

DeFranco himself wasn’t sure why he’d put the information aside. He could, if he applied himself, probably find the rifle and arrest the Cuozzo brothers-glum, pugnacious little men who worked from dawn to dusk. But he hadn’t done this. Why not? Because he wasn’t sure what they had in mind. He doubted they meant to use it for some simmering feud, he doubted they intended to resell it. Something else. They were forever, he’d heard, grumbling about the government. Could they be so foolish as to contemplate an armed uprising? Could such a thing actually happen?

Maybe. There was, certainly, a fierce opposition. Only words, for the moment, but that could change. Look at this Liberazione crowd, what were they saying? Resist. Don’t give up. And they were not angry little vegetable merchants, they’d been important, respectable people, before Mussolini. Lawyers, professors, journalists-one didn’t rise to such professions by wishing on a star. In time, they might just prevail-they surely thought they would. With guns? Perhaps, depending how the world went. If Mussolini changed sides, and the Germans came down here, the best thing to have would be a rifle. So, for the moment, let the Cuozzo brothers keep it. Wait and see, he thought. Wait and see.