The Foreign Correspondent (14 page)

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
crémerie.
A slab of that hard, yellow cheese,
s’il vous plaît.
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. Emigrés.”

“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.