Mission to Paris: A Novel Read online

  ‘But they haven’t, have they?’

  ‘Thank heaven. In truth, the story in Le Matin wasn’t so bad, by now the market women are wrapping fish in it.’

  ‘Moppi, I have to go out in a little while …’

  ‘Forgive me, Franz, I blabber too much, my wife … I am calling to ask of you a favour, not that you owe me anything, you don’t, but my position in the embassy concerns culture, and I could be in difficulties if you won’t have a little lunch with us.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow, at Maxim’s. Are you allowing me to hope, Franz?’

  ‘I’ll look at my schedule later today and call you back. Maybe even tomorrow morning – is that too late?’

  ‘Why no. No! Not at all!’ The old exuberant Moppi had returned from wherever he’d been hiding. ‘Believe me, you won’t regret it.’

  Oh no?

  Stahl showered and shaved and dressed – casually, corduroys and a loose grey shirt – for work. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do about the lunch invitation and went back and forth; from confront these people to get as far away as you can, then gave up – he would decide later. But, if he was going to lunch the following day, he had to telephone Jean Avila. This wasn’t so easy; Stahl could only hope he hadn’t seen the story. A vain hope. ‘I didn’t realize,’ Avila said, ‘that you were so interested in French politics.’

  ‘I’m not.’ After a moment he said, ‘You read that paper?’

  ‘You know I don’t, but a friend felt obligated to tell me about it.’ Some tartness in his voice suggested what he felt about such ‘friends’.

  ‘They twisted everything I said. I thought I was doing publicity.’

  ‘You were, in a way, but their publicity, not yours. You have to be careful, Fredric, everything in this accursed country is so symbolic, a few words may mean more than you suspect – it’s like speaking in code.’

  ‘I spent this morning learning all about that,’ Stahl said ruefully, ‘and I won’t be talking to them again. Jean, I may have to go to a lunch tomorrow, can you work around me?’

  ‘Come to the set at ten, as usual, then stay until twelve-thirty. All right?’

  ‘Thank you, Jean, and thank you for being understanding about that trash in the newspaper.’

  ‘See you later, my friend, and don’t stop to talk to any journalists on the way.’

  29 October. Jimmy Louis drove Stahl to Maxim’s in the glowing silver Panhard. Moppi and his pals wanted a movie star, very well, they would have one. Stahl had decided to accept the invitation. He’d certainly heard Moppi’s threats, about the newspapers, and he’d heard him say they knew more about him – his night in jail – than he’d thought they did. We’re watching you. So he would go to lunch, and if he heard something interesting he’d let Wilkinson know about it. He would listen to them, and then he would find a way to let them know that it ended there, that he wouldn’t be intimidated. They might accept that, or they might not, and, if they didn’t, they would attack him in the press and he would have to fight back. A public brawl. Warner Bros. wouldn’t like it, Deschelles wouldn’t like it, so the longer he could put that off the better for him. Not unwise, he thought, to sacrifice two hours in defence of his career. But he’d go no further, he was done with them, and they were about to find that out.

  He had Jimmy drive around until 1.20, then they pulled up in front of the restaurant. Inside, spectacular opulence – Maxim’s had been established in the Belle Epoque, before the turn of the century, when life in Paris was, for a time, sweet and golden, if you had the money for sweet and golden. With the arrival of Art Nouveau in the 1920s, the restaurant was redecorated, and there it stopped. Stahl paused at the maître d’s station, but he was immediately led into the dining room, where he saw mostly businessmen and a sprinkling of tourists. And here came Moppi, red in the face and wiping his bald head with one of the restaurant’s enormous linen napkins. Moppi pumped his hand and tried to take Stahl, his greatly desired prize, by the elbow, but Stahl slipped away.

  At a table in the centre of the room, five faces were eagerly turned towards him as he approached. Stahl was introduced – all German names – and he realized they had managed to round up one of his ‘friends from the legation’, an older man when Stahl knew him in Barcelona, now very old and very nervous. Stahl instinctively doubted this man lived in Paris, suspecting that he had been imported for the occasion. Even during the pre-lunch menu chitchat, all the men at the table deferred to the leader, one Emhof, whose speech was German, not Austrian. He was a good-sized gent – they were all good-sized except for the imported guest. Emhof was pop-eyed, which gave him a fervent stare no matter where he looked. He had a bass rumble for a voice, a vast belly, and a Nazi party pin – a swastika with a diamond at its centre – in his lapel. He was sitting to Stahl’s left, and smelled of smelly cigars. Taking the wine list in hand, he produced a pair of heavy, black-framed glasses, put them on, then tilted them upwards for sharper vision in the restaurant light. The wine waiter stood patiently by Emhof’s chair – this will be worth the wait – and Emhof finally said, ‘We’ll have the Château Margaux.’

  ‘The 1932, monsieur?’

  ‘The 1899, and you might as well bring two bottles. No, three.’

  ‘Very good, monsieur.’

  Emhof turned towards Stahl and leaned back, taking off his glasses. ‘We’re pleased you could join us, Herr Stalka – or would you prefer to be called by your Hollywood name?’

  ‘As you wish, Herr Emhof. I was born Stalka, it’s still that way in my passport.’

  ‘And it’s …?’

  ‘Slovenian.’ As you well know.

  ‘Slovenian! So beautiful there, such majestic mountains. You ski, I would suppose.’

  ‘Not so much, sometimes on vacation I tried it, but my family was more Viennese than Slovenian, my mother and father’s people had been there for a long time.’

  ‘And your family lives there still?’

  ‘They do.’

  ‘But you are far away, in California. Do you manage to see them?’

  ‘Not for a long time, I’m afraid.’

  Moppi cleared his throat and said, ‘Perhaps you might …’ But Emhof stared at him and he shut up.

  ‘And Hollywood? You’re happy there? I understand that the movie business is almost entirely a Jewish business, am I right? Is that entirely comfortable? Or are you perhaps yourself of Jewish origin?’

  ‘I was raised as a Catholic, but I am not a religious person. And I’m very comfortable with whatever Jews work in Hollywood, it really doesn’t matter.’

  ‘We had them in the German film industry, though many of them have moved on. Yet the business seems to thrive so we don’t much notice the – absence.’

  The man on Emhof’s left, young and ambitious-looking, said, ‘Do you follow today’s German films, Herr Stalka?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Pity. It’s a very vibrant industry. UFA, our principal production house, makes hundreds of films and the best of them are quite good, just like Hollywood, I imagine.’

  ‘I’m sure they are,’ Stahl said.

  The waiter arrived. Emhof – and all but Stahl echoed his choice – ordered a Maxim’s classic: Tournedos Rossini, tender beef filet topped with foie gras and a sliver of truffle, and, another classic, the Pommes Anna, thinly sliced potatoes layered with butter and pressed into a block. Stahl ordered the Filet of Sole Albert, named for the famous Maxim maître d’hôtel.

  As the waiter left, Emhof said, ‘Tell me, Herr Stalka, does Hollywood make films about mountaineering?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Stahl said. ‘At least I don’t know of any.’

  ‘Extraordinary. We have been producing them in Germany since the mid-twenties. Have you not seen Arnold Fanck’s Der heilige Berg? “The Holy Mountain”? Where our own Leni Riefenstahl is the lead actress?’

  Stahl shook his head. He knew only of Riefenstahl’s propaganda films, about the Nuremberg rally of the Naz
i party, and the ’36 Olympics – young people with beautifully defined muscles.

  ‘It’s very popular in Germany,’ Moppi said, ‘the mountain film.’

  ‘It’s a national passion,’ the man to Emhof’s left said. ‘We all must climb, must make our way up the incline of life to the sunlit peak of success. A journey, a journey requiring great fortitude, great inner strength.’

  ‘No doubt.’ Out before Stahl could stop it, this was lightly flavoured with derision – the Viennese taste for irony was returning as he spoke German.

  Emhof raised his eyebrows. Moppi rushed in. ‘So much do we enjoy the mountain movie, Franz, that a film festival is scheduled to take place in Berlin. Forty mountain films will be shown! That will be exciting, no?’

  Stahl could only imagine. As for mountains in the movies, what came to mind was his musician friends’ amusement at a certain film cliché: when a mountaintop was shown, the shot was always scored with a long, triumphant note from a horn. Finally he said, ‘Always good to have a film festival.’

  ‘Yes, we think so too,’ Emhof said.

  The wine appeared, and with some ceremony the bottles were placed on angled silver wine-rests. ‘Shall I open all of them, monsieur?’

  ‘Naturally,’ Emhof said.

  When all six glasses were poured, Emhof said ‘Sieg Heil’, and raised his glass as the other four Germans repeated the toast. Stahl looked away, and two or three heads turned towards them at nearby tables.

  Yes, Stahl thought, Château Margaux was transcendent – if only he’d been with a lover or with friends, he would have enjoyed it.

  The lunch arrived soon thereafter; an appetizer plate of caviar with blini and chopped egg. And then the tournedos. As the plates were set down, all the Germans said, ‘Ahh.’ Had this been a table of Parisians, some light conversation would have been maintained – to talk while dining demanded a certain level of skill. Not the Germans, they fell on the tournedos with avid concentration, while the old man from Stahl’s Barcelona days ate in such a way, eyes never leaving his plate, that it occurred to Stahl it might have been some time since he’d had a good meal. Meanwhile, Stahl ate some of his sole.

  As the plates were taken away, Emhof dabbed at his mouth with a napkin and said, ‘The French can cook, that much we must say for them.’

  The others nodded and agreed.

  ‘And they must be encouraged to continue, no matter what,’ said the man next to Emhof.

  No matter what? This remark, with just a hint of knowing undertone, was, Stahl sensed, meant to go over his head and resonate with the man’s colleagues.

  Emhof intervened, making sure the man to his left did not elaborate. ‘It isn’t only cooking, there are many things that the French – ‘He was winding up to expand on this theme but he stopped dead and his face lit with anticipation as a waiter appeared, rolling a cart that held a large pan, cordials, and a plate of crêpes – here were the makings of Crêpes Suzette!

  ‘Oh-ho,’ said Moppi, grinning and rubbing his hands.

  ‘I wonder,’ Emhof said, turning to face Stahl, ‘if you would be willing to listen to an idea that’s just now occurred to me.’

  ‘I will always listen,’ Stahl said.

  ‘Our festival of mountain movies begins in November, in Berlin, and we are going to offer a number of prizes, in various categories; technical achievement, performance, umm, spiritual value – just like the Oscars.’ He paused, Stahl waited. ‘So, of course, if there are prizes, there must be judges. Is there any chance you would consider coming over – even for a day, I know you’re a busy man – to be one of them? Think of the film-makers, how excited they would be just to meet a man of your stature. And there is quite a substantial honorarium to be paid, twenty thousand reichsmarks – ten thousand dollars in American money. Only a day’s work, Herr Stalka, Herr Fredric Stahl, and Lufthansa will fly you over and back. What do you think?’

  ‘I think I won’t be coming to your festival, Herr Emhof. And I won’t be coming to any more lunches, and I won’t be answering Herr Moppi’s telephone calls, or letters, or telegrams. And if Herr Moppi shows up again at a movie set where I’m working, I’ll have him arrested. Have I made myself clear?’

  ‘Speaking of movies,’ said the man to Emhof’s left, addressing all at the table, ‘I saw once again, last week, the magnificent Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel.’

  ‘What an actress,’ Emhof said.

  ‘Oh she was wonderful, wasn’t she,’ Moppi said. ‘What was she called? I can never remember.’

  ‘Lola Lola,’ said Emhof. ‘Memorable, one of our greatest films.’

  ‘Right! Lola Lola!’ Moppi said.

  Stahl rose, placed his napkin by his plate, said, ‘Good day, gentlemen,’ and walked towards the door. Behind him, the old man said, ‘Good day, sir.’ At a table near the maître d’ station sat a very respectable couple, drinking wine and waiting for their next course. The man, dressed to perfection in a dark suit, crisp white shirt, and sober tie, his mouth set in prim disapproval, turned his head towards Stahl and, just for an instant, met his eyes, then looked away. Stahl continued towards the door. The last thing he heard from the table of Germans was a cry of delight as the liqueurs in the crêpe pan were set ablaze.

  The cast out at Joinville worked hard the following day. Stahl and the others had not yet ‘dropped their scripts’, but they could rehearse by glancing over their lines and setting their scripts aside, which freed them to move around and add physical action to the dialogue.

  In the film, the three legionnaires have found a morning’s work, cleaning an olive-oil mill in a small Turkish town. When they are paid – much less than promised – they replace their tattered uniforms with old clothing from the local souk. They are then seen on a platform at the railway station, waiting for a local train which will eventually take them to the last stop in Turkey where, since they have no papers, they plan a clandestine crossing at night, into Syria. They expect that Syria, a French colonial possession since the end of the Great War, will be a place where they can acquire passports and money.

  They ride for a few stops, and begin to believe their plan will work, but then they are discovered by a conductor and, without tickets, they are thrown off the train in some tiny village. In the same carriage, the character played by Justine Piro is also unable to produce a ticket and she is pushed out the door of the railway carriage. Her character, called Ilona, says she is an impoverished Hungarian countess, and needs only to reach Hungary, where she has money and family. In return for the legionnaires’ protection, she will help them when they get to Budapest.

  Having identified Stahl’s Colonel Vadic as the leader of the trio, she seeks to enlist his sympathy. ‘How on earth did you wind up in Turkey?’ Vadic asks her.

  ‘My fiancé was a diplomat, sent to Istanbul when the war began, and he brought me there.’

  ‘What happened?’ the lieutenant asks.

  ‘What often happens,’ she says.

  ‘He abandoned you?’ Pasquin’s sergeant says. ‘You?’

  Avila broke in. ‘The sergeant doesn’t really believe anything she says, Pasquin, but he is amused by her lie, so he should smile with that line.’

  The sergeant, it later turns out, is correct – Ilona is not Hungarian, not a countess, and there never was a fiancé. Pasquin and Justine Piro worked at the two-line sequence for a time, trying it in a slightly altered form on each repetition, as Avila commented and suggested different variations.

  By 3.00 p.m., when the costumed upper-class rakes and ingenues arrived for their boulevard comedy, the cast of Après la Guerre had been at it for five hours. As they prepared to leave, Avila took Stahl aside and asked if he would mind going over to Building K, where Renate Steiner, the costume designer, needed him for a fitting. Stahl was worn out, it had been a long rehearsal and, after the lunch at Maxim’s the day before, he’d had trouble sleeping. But of course he had to go off to Building K.

  At Building K, a different Renate St
einer. Dark-haired and fair-skinned, with a sharp jawline and a pointy nose, she wore the same blue work-smock over a long dress, thick stockings, and laced boots. But her smile, ironic and subtly challenging, was not to be seen, and her faded blue eyes, that had caught his interest, were swollen and faintly red. Was something wrong? He didn’t know her well enough to ask. Better just to assume her life, like his, like everybody else’s, had its ups and downs.

  ‘Thank you for coming over,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you’re tired – when you work with Avila you don’t take time off, because he never does.’

  ‘I’m used to hard work,’ he said. ‘All going well?’

  She shrugged. ‘Well enough, I guess. Let’s get you into uniform, Fredric.’ She nodded towards a curtain in one corner, her changing room, and handed him the uniform. ‘While you change clothes, I’ll get your boots,’ she said.

  He reappeared as Colonel Vadic, his Foreign Legion uniform bleached out and artfully torn at the sleeve. She looked him over with a critical eye, then shook her head. Lord, why me? As she snatched a lump of tailor’s chalk from her work table she said, ‘I’m training a new seamstress, so there will be mistakes.’ With a strong hand she grabbed the shoulder of his tunic, moved it back and forth, then flattened it out and drew a line for a new seam. ‘And I have three more of these,’ she said, irritation in her voice. ‘A duplicate of this one, because God-only-knows what happens on movie sets, one even more distressed, for your travels in the desert, and the last one, terribly ratty, that you try to sell at the used-clothing stall in the souk. The merchant has a funny line about it, if I remember correctly.’

  It took some time – there was something wrong with each uniform – and the late-afternoon light outside the windows began to fade towards an early dusk. Holding a few pins between her lips, she knelt and changed the length of his trousers, then stood, stared at him for a long minute, and said, ‘Let’s get rid of that button on your breast pocket.’ She found a razor blade with a covered edge and sliced off a button. ‘I’ll fix the flap so it doesn’t lie flat but I don’t need to do that now. Have a look.’