Midnight in Europe (10 page)

He left the apartment at six-thirty. At the foot of the stairway was a miniature lobby where the tenants had their mailboxes; there were four beside Ferrar’s, and one for the concierge. As Ferrar came down the last steps, he saw a woman wearing a toggle coat and a soft, peaked cap, a fashionable version of the caps that workers actually wore. She was bent over, using the light of a match to peer at the names on the mailboxes, and when Ferrar appeared she straightened up and blew out the match. Thus Ferrar had only the briefest look at her face in the dark lobby.

“May I help you, madame?” he said.

“I am looking for a Monsieur Leblanc.”

“I’m sorry, madame, there is no one by that name who lives here.”

She blew the little puff of air which served as a sound of frustration for French women. “I must have the wrong address,” she said. “Anyhow, thank you, monsieur.” And then she was out the door.

Ferrar caught a taxi for the ride to Louveciennes, and asked the driver to stop at the Spanish pastry shop next to what was known as “the Spanish church” up on the rue de la Pompe in the Sixteenth, itself fancy, but nothing compared to the luxurious enclave called Passy. At one time, pastry in Spain had been baked and sold at convents, so the names of the little treats came from those days. Ferrar bought
huesos de santo
, saints’ bones;
tetas de novicias
, novice nuns’ breasts; and
suspiros de monja
, nuns’ sighs. All were soft and thick, and liberally dusted with granulated sugar. Spaniards weren’t
alone in this. French patisseries offered
la religieuse
, the nun, a large, chocolate-capped puff pastry on the bottom, with a smaller version in the middle, and a little one on top, for the head. Or you could just buy a dozen of the little ones, known as
pets-de-nonne
, nun farts. The young girl behind the counter wrapped the pastries artfully, in pink paper folded into a triangle, then tied with a ribbon which was looped at the end so you could carry the package with one finger.

The family was waiting for him at the house in Louveciennes. His two brothers had long ago emigrated to South America, so the house was occupied by his mother and father, his pious sister Caridad, the spinster cousin who’d been taken in years ago and had been part of the family ever since, and his grandmother, Abuela. She was seventy-seven, stood straight as a rod, wore her ample white hair twisted into a braid, then wound into a bun, and had Ferrar’s very own deep green eyes. As they drank a glass of sherry before dinner, Abuela came over and sat next to him on the couch. “So, Cristián, dear one, what happens with you these days?”

“Life goes on, Abuela. I work hard, and enjoy myself when I can.”

“Nothing new, then, dear one?”

“Not much, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, very well, I simply wondered …”

She was, when it came to her grandson, close to psychic, and had sensed he was up to something. She patted his hand, then let her hand rest atop his. “I worry too much about you,” she said, “in these bad times.”

Two years earlier, when the war started and Ferrar had considered joining up, she had accepted, seemed to accept, what he wanted to do. Later, when he realized that he couldn’t abandon his family to poverty, she’d taken him aside and said, “Dear one,
listen
to me, do not be tempted by the war, do not give up your life to this bullshit.”

There was plenty to eat; lentil soup, a
céleri rémoulade
—shreds
of celeriac root swimming in handmade mayonnaise—pork cutlets, and then pastry. Eating his pastry with caution lest the granulated sugar sprinkle his tie, Ferrar’s father said, “Things are looking up, Cristián. The railroad bonds continue to pay, and I have managed to purchase quite a valuable stamp. From Togo, easily worth four times what I paid for it.” Three days a week, he took the train into Paris and spent hours at the stamp market on the avenue Marigny, hunting for bargains and gossiping with other collectors and the stamp dealers. This was as much of a job as he had and, though he pretended to be content with his life, it hurt him deeply that he could not support his family. Yes, there
were
South American railroad bonds, inherited years earlier from a wealthy relative, which paid a small amount quarterly. Not enough to live on, not nearly, but helpful at the end of the month when funds ran low.

After coffee, Ferrar’s sister Caridad, gold cross around her neck, led him upstairs to her tiny room, where a crack ran diagonally across one corner of the ceiling. “This poor house …,” she said. “I love it so but, as you see …”

Ferrar smoothed her hair and said, “Do not worry, Caridad, tell Abuela I said to call someone who can fix it.”

And, it turned out, the spinster cousin, who knitted the family’s winter sweaters, needed new eyeglasses.

None of this mattered to Ferrar, the visit had warmed his heart. And he stared out the taxi window on the way back to Paris and wondered if he’d been foolish to take on his new work.

Max de Lyon called him the following day, could Ferrar meet with him after work?

“I’ll come over around six, six-thirty maybe,” Ferrar said.

“Why don’t we have a drink? At the big brasserie on the rue Marbeuf, you know the one? It’s just down the boulevard from you.”

Ferrar said he did and at six-twenty he left work and headed down the Champs-Elysées. De Lyon was waiting for him at the bar,
drinking a large draft beer. It looked good to Ferrar so he ordered one for himself. “I have some news,” de Lyon said. “Our friend in Brno has agreed to a meeting.”

“When will that be?” Ferrar said.

“Perhaps next week. The meeting is in Berlin, he’s afraid he’ll be seen with us in Brno and that people will wonder about it.”

“Then we’ll go to Berlin,” Ferrar said. “I’ve been there a few times, on business.”

“We’ll have to be careful,” de Lyon said.

“I would say so. Everyone spies on everyone else.”

“Also, I ought to tell you, we’re not here because I wanted a drink. We’re here because someone has been poking around in my office, in my files.”

“You have a way of knowing that?”

“I do. And I’ll show you, if you like.”

“Well …” Ferrar had started to say,
why would I need that
, but then he didn’t. He said, “Why not?”

De Lyon looked at his watch. “Forgive me, but I’m a little pressed this evening.” He reached for a briefcase at his feet, unbuckled the straps, and brought out a manila envelope. “A present for you,” he said. Ferrar took the envelope, which was unexpectedly heavy and had a bulge at one end. When Ferrar started to unwind the string that held the flap down, de Lyon said, “Not in here. Later, when you’re alone.”

But Ferrar didn’t need to open the envelope, the bulge in his hand was a small automatic pistol.

“Have you fired one of these?”

Ferrar shook his head.

“There’s a gun dealer at the lower end of the rue Saint-Antoine, by the furniture factories, it’s called J. Romault. He has a firing range behind the store, he’ll show you what you need to know and he’ll sell you ammunition. Then you can practice on the range.” De Lyon waited to see if Ferrar had any questions, then said, “It’s a good weapon, a Walther PPK, and well used.”

“By you?”

De Lyon laughed. “Nooo, not me. I doubt very much you’ll need it but, if you do, you’ll be glad to have it.”

“Thank you, Max. Perhaps I should pay …”

De Lyon held up a hand. “As I said, a present.”

15 F
EBRUARY
, 1938. T
HE
P
ARIS
/B
ERLIN NIGHT EXPRESS LEFT THE
Gare du Nord at 4:08 in the afternoon and arrived at Friedrichstrasse Station at 10:32 in the morning. Eighteen hours, longer if there were delays—a snowstorm, a cow on the tracks, a fugitive apprehended at a border—but the first-class compartments in the wagon-lit cars were private and comfortable, and when you wanted to sleep you rang for a porter to convert the plush seats to upper and lower berths. Ferrar gazed out the window as the train chugged northeast, past the local stations of northern France and Belgium, past fields white with snow tinted a cold, pale blue at dusk.

“It would be a lot easier by airplane,” de Lyon had explained. “But the control at Tempelhof Airport is thorough. The Germans are very interested in travelers who have the money to fly. They are
polite at Tempelhof, but determined, and if their suspicion is provoked they are known to keep you company during your visit, at a distance, to see where you go and who you meet. For us, the train is safer.”

Ferrar perfectly understood. He didn’t, in the event they were searched, want to try to explain the presence of a hundred thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar denominations. Of these, obtained at the Spanish embassy’s Soviet bank in Paris, de Lyon and Ferrar each carried five hundred, in wads of banknotes disbursed in the pockets of jackets and trousers. Szarny, the Czech owner of the ironworks foundry in Brno, had demanded British gold sovereigns, the preferred currency of smugglers and secret agents, but de Lyon had said there was no chance of that. “Four hundred and sixty-two pounds of gold coins? How? In trunks in a railroad baggage car? In a big Citroën? A big Citroën down on its springs? The German border guards will see that right away. No, we’ll put the money on the table and let him walk away if he wants. He won’t.” Ferrar had suggested that Szarny could take his money to the Bank of Zurich branch in Berlin and have the bank exchange it into sovereigns as he wished. “I suspect the gold is the blackmailer’s idea,” he’d said.

Ferrar didn’t go to sleep, he smoked Gitanes and stared out at the passing countryside, his mind wandering here and there to the beat of the rails. He had once, long ago in his early twenties, made love in a first-class compartment, on a slow train traveling through the night in central France. He had been alone in the compartment when a woman joined him. She was Viennese, was Klara, a solid bourgeois matron returning from the marriage of her daughter in London and “in no hurry to get home,” as she put it. She was much older than he was, with fine skin, a pointy nose, and small eyes, wearing a wedding ring and a green Robin Hood hat with a feather.

She was eager to talk and sat across from him, then next to him.
How people are
was the topic of the evening,
so false
the verdict; they had, she said, desires, but, obsessed with convention,
they hid their feelings and feared discovery. Wouldn’t it be a better world if people revealed themselves? Did what they secretly wanted? “I know you want to kiss me,” she said. “What are you afraid of?” So he locked the door and they went ahead with it, his hands exploring her until he encountered a stiff and unyielding girdle. She stood, removed hat and dress, then took the waistband of the awful thing in her fists and said, suddenly self-conscious, “Would you look away for a moment?” He did, discovering a perfect image of the dimly lit compartment in the dark window as she wriggled out of the girdle, freeing a cascade of soft, rosy flesh.

They went on from there but it was this particular image that Ferrar would forever remember. He turned it this way and that way in his imagination, then his mind drifted away to the women he’d known in his past; Eileen Moore, others. Eventually he dozed off, but the train would stop, for no apparent reason, then lurch forward, waking him up, coal smoke from the engine flavoring the air of the compartment with the smell of cinders. Ferrar knew where he was: the land of war. A few miles north and south of the tracks were the towns that had given their names to battlefields: Douai, Compiègne, Verdun, Cambrai, Sedan, Waterloo. For a long time, the track wound its way through forest, the Ardennes, the route of the German invasion in 1914. As the train clattered along the bank of the river Meuse, Ferrar could see broken sheets of ice floating on the dark water. Then, after the track curved away from the river, the engine rolled to a halt at a road crossing and two men in hats and overcoats, both carrying briefcases, got out of a Mercedes automobile and boarded the train. At five in the morning, no hint of dawn, farm trucks moved east along the road that ran by the tracks, headed for the markets of Liège.

Thirty minutes later, when Ferrar had at last fallen asleep, he woke to the conductor’s rap on the door and the words “Liège. The last stop in Belgium. Passengers must wait in the corridor for passport control. Liège.”

As they waited in the corridor, a man and a woman hurried
toward the head of the line, baggage in hand, murmuring, “Excuse us, please, we must get off here. Pardon. Pardon.” An anxious couple, Ferrar thought, deciding to end their journey in Liège, the “last stop in Belgium,” rather than enter Germany. The Belgian border guard was barely awake, his eyes heavy with sleep, a cigarette dangling from his lips as he stamped passports without bothering to look at the passengers. The anxious couple, once the guard was done with them, got off the train.

A few minutes later, Aachen Station; they had crossed the frontier into the German Reich and, had some traveler not noticed, there were numerous flags to remind him, the swastikas glowing a powerful red and black under the station lights. Through static, high-volume loudspeakers made announcements in German. Directions to waiting passengers no doubt, but the sound had its effect on Ferrar. There were uniformed officers everywhere, the SS in black, the Wehrmacht in field gray, all of them very conscious of their appearance, standing tall and straight, holstered sidearms on their heavy belts.