Mission to Paris (30 page)

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

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

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

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

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

‘Then how did he know where you were?’

‘I don’t know.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You couldn’t refuse?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘You’d better not.’

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

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

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

‘That’s for later.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Am I going to be taking notes?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘They never quit, do they.’

‘Well, not yet they haven’t.’

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

‘What’s that?’

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

‘The man on the phone certainly sounded confident.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Is she in Moscow?’

‘For her sake, I hope not.’

‘She
is
a survivor,’ Stahl said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stahl said he would.

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

‘I’m going to Hungary.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holding the receiver, Stahl looked around him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I can be there in twenty minutes.’

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

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