The Foreign Correspondent (10 page)

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes?”

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

“Oh? That’s nice.”

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

“A long honeymoon?”

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

“When do you want me there?”

“The third of March.”

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

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

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

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

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

3
M
ARCH, 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.

“
Olé,
” 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.