Mission to Paris: A Novel Read online

  ‘You heard me, Herr Stahl.’

  ‘Where would I get that kind of money?’ Stahl was almost amused.

  ‘You’re a rich and famous man, you have plenty of money. But if you can’t get at it, you’ll have to ask your Russian, your bitch-in-heat Orlova. She’ll surely help you. Want to know why? Because she wouldn’t want me talking about what went on last night.’

  ‘I don’t think she cares,’ Stahl said.

  ‘Doesn’t she? All right, then I’ll just have a chat with my brother-in-law, who happens to work for the Gestapo. Maybe you two were plotting against the Führer, who knows? But they’ll find something, these gentlemen, because they can always find something.’

  Now Stahl was alarmed. ‘I see, yes, you’re right, you should have what you want. But it has to be tonight, I’m leaving in the morning.’

  Rudi moved closer and said through clenched teeth, ‘You think you’re leaving but that’s up to me. So you have until six this evening, which is when I have to go to work. Or maybe you want to stay in Germany for a while, it’s up to you, maybe you’d like …’

  ‘Where would I meet you?’ Stahl said.

  ‘I have a key for room eight-oh-two, down the corridor. Knock twice, then once.’ He turned on his heel and headed for the stairway, then spun around, his face contorted by the memory of a thousand insults. ‘You’d better be there, mein Herr.’ The last two words he snarled, enraged by the polite form, enraged that he’d ever used it.

  Stahl returned to his suite. Moments later, the room waiter delivered his brandies. He drank the first one immediately and told himself to calm down. He had only a thousand reichsmarks with him – five hundred dollars – and there was no way he could get any money in Berlin. Well, one way. In case of emergency, Wilkinson had asked him to memorize a telephone number which could put him in contact with Orlova. Now Stahl composed himself, took the pad on the desk and wrote down the number, praying that he had it right. ‘It is dangerous,’ Wilkinson had said, ‘to call this number, don’t use it unless you absolutely have to.’

  Stahl asked the hotel operator for a line, then dialled the number, which rang twice, three times, four, five. He looked at what he’d written on the pad – was it 4, 2? Or 2, 4? He was about to hang up when a breathless woman’s voice said, ‘Hello?’

  It wasn’t Orlova’s voice. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you …’

  ‘Wait a minute, I was just walking the dog. Mitzi, sit! Now, you were saying?’

  ‘Is Olga Orlova there?’

  ‘No, she’s not here. Mitzi! Goddamnit!’

  ‘It’s quite urgent,’ Stahl said.

  ‘She’s my neighbour, across the hall. Do you want me to knock on her door?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Who’s calling?’

  ‘Tell her Fredric.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Like that, is it. Very well, give me a minute.’

  Stahl waited, drank off the second brandy and stared at the phone. Then he looked at his watch, the second hand sweeping around the dial. Finally, the receiver was picked up and Orlova said, ‘Who is this?’ She sounded irritated but Stahl could hear that she was also frightened. In the background, a small dog was barking.

  ‘This is Fredric Stahl, Madame Orlova. I wonder if I might ask you for a favour?’ Stahl’s eyes were fixed on the baseboard, where the telephone wire was connected to a small box.

  ‘Oh, of course. Are you calling from, ah, the hotel?’

  ‘Yes, I am. I was wondering if you might be able to come over here.’

  ‘I suppose I could, is something wrong?’

  ‘I must speak to the audience tonight, at the banquet where I will announce the winners of the festival. And I’m having a woeful time of it, writing the speech. I don’t really know the film industry here, and I don’t want to sound ignorant.’

  ‘I’m not much good as a writer, Herr Stahl.’

  ‘Even so, some advice would be helpful. Is it possible you could come soon? Maybe even right away?’

  Orlova sighed, the things I’m asked to do. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can. Maybe some day you’ll return the favour.’

  ‘You need only ask, Madame Orlova.’

  They hung up. Stahl settled down to wait. It was nearing four o’clock. Once she arrived, and Stahl told her what was going on, she would have to find the money and be back by six.

  Orlova was almost frantic when she reached the room. When he opened the door of the Bismarck Suite she didn’t say hello, she said, ‘What’s happened?’ Stahl told her the story, her reaction a mixture of disbelief, fear, and anger. ‘That little man? Rudi? Rudi the waiter?’ He dared? Then she got hold of herself and said, ‘I’d better leave now, you said ten thousand reichsmarks?’

  She was back at 5.40. By that point, Stahl, unable to sit down, was pacing back and forth and smoking one cigarette after another. He’d left the door open and she came rushing in. ‘Christ, I couldn’t find a taxi.’ She sat on the edge of the couch. ‘Anyhow, I have it.’

  ‘From your bank?’

  She looked up abruptly: are you crazy? ‘From an umbrella shop,’ she said. ‘There’s money in this city that will never see a bank; Jewish money, criminal money, Nazi money. All those bribes and thefts and …’

  Stahl looked at his watch, then up at Orlova. For the meeting she’d changed outfits: under her open raincoat a revealing sweater and a tight skirt, made all the more provocative by the accessories of a prominent woman of the city – red silk scarf, tight black gloves, gold earrings, Chanel No. 5, and dark sunglasses. She was now the movie star of a waiter’s fantasies. At 6.00 p.m. precisely they left the room. Stahl could hear her breathing, and could sense in her a powerful tension, which seemed to grow as they walked along the silent, carpeted corridor. In a whisper, Stahl said, ‘Can you calm down a little?’

  She didn’t answer. It was as though she was so intensely fixed on the meeting that she hadn’t heard him. Instead, she pursed her lips and expelled a short breath, then did it again.

  In an attempt to distract her he said, ‘Do you know this room? Eight-oh-two?’

  She started to answer then worked her mouth, as though it was so dry she couldn’t speak. ‘A small room, I’d guess. For a servant or a bodyguard.’

  As they stood in front of the room, Stahl saw that her hands, holding her bag, were trembling. He patted her shoulder. ‘Just give me the money,’ he said. ‘Let me do it, he doesn’t need to see you.’

  She shook her head, jerking it back and forth, brushing off his suggestion as though it were absurd and irritating.

  Stahl knocked twice, then once.

  From inside: ‘It’s not locked.’

  Stahl opened the door. It was a small room, meagrely furnished. Rudi was sitting in a chair by the wall at the foot of the bed and was cleaning his nails with a clasp knife. He looked up at them and set the open knife on his lap. ‘Hello, Rudi,’ Orlova said. She was now quite amiable and relaxed.

  ‘You have the money?’

  ‘It’s right here.’ She took an envelope out of her raincoat pocket, walked over to Rudi and handed it to him, then waited while he counted the twenty reichsmark notes. ‘All is good?’ she said with a smile.

  Rudi nodded, and started to get up. Orlova put a hand on his shoulder, which startled him. ‘I’ll just take another moment,’ she said. ‘Will you accept my apology?’

  This was unexpected. ‘Maybe,’ he said, sulky and uncertain.

  ‘And that also goes for me,’ Stahl said. Rudi stared at him, not quite comfortable with his victory. ‘It was a long evening,’ Stahl explained, ‘and I was tired and I …’

  At this point in the apology, Stahl was interrupted by a low sound, thuck, saw the automatic pistol and silencer in Orlova’s gloved hand and realized she’d shot Rudi in the temple. His head fell back against the chair, his eyes and mouth wide open, as though he were surprised to find himself dead. A bead of blood grew next to his ear, ran slowly down his cheek, then stopped.

 
; Orlova started to twist the long tube of the silencer, unscrewing it from the pistol. ‘This was never going to end,’ she said. ‘So I ended it. Get his clothes off, everything but his underwear, and put that little knife in his pocket.’

  Stahl was frozen, staring at Rudi.

  ‘Please,’ Orlova said.

  He nodded and went to work untying Rudi’s shoes. Orlova took them and lined them up beneath the chair. Stahl handed her the socks, trousers – after trouble with Rudi’s belt buckle – jacket, tie, and shirt. When he was done, he saw that Orlova had folded everything into a neat pile. ‘This will go on the chair,’ she said. ‘You put him on the bed, I’ll write the note.’ She had brought with her a pencil and a sheet of cheap paper. Stahl took Rudi under the arms and pulled backwards, which tipped the chair over. ‘Shh!’ Orlova said. ‘Christ, be quiet.’

  He dragged Rudi up onto the bed, raised his head and slipped the pillow beneath it. Orlova set the pile of clothes on the chair and put the note on the night table. Stahl read the note, written in unruly script: I can stand it no longer. ‘Will that do?’ Orlova said.

  Stahl nodded. ‘Of course the police might wonder if it’s really suicide.’

  ‘They won’t pursue it. This is a certain kind of hotel, if a waiter killed himself, or if someone else killed him, doesn’t matter. Not these days it doesn’t. And there’s a good chance the hotel will get rid of the body themselves – who wants to talk to the police?’

  Orlova stood at the door and looked critically at the scene in the room. Then she placed the automatic in Rudi’s hand, made a dent in the other pillow, as though a head had rested there, took a little bottle of perfume out of her bag and put a drop or two on the sheet below the dented pillow. ‘What do you think?’ she said.

  ‘It looks like his lover bid him goodbye, then he shot himself.’

  She took one last look around, then remembered to leave the pencil by the note. She looked at Stahl and said, ‘It had to be done. In time, he would have denounced us, just as he said he would.’

  Stahl nodded.

  ‘I’ll be going,’ Orlova said. ‘Enjoy the banquet.’

  He got through it. As the grinning faces came to greet him, as medals caught the light of the chandeliers, as Goebbels’s deputy spoke at great length and flattered him and flashbulbs popped, as he read out the names of the winning films. Otto Raab was deeply moved when Stahl, after a dramatic pause, announced that Das Berg von Hedwig had won the grand prize, a gold Oscar-sized statuette of a mountain with a movie camera on top. Stahl delivered his speech – a tepid joke about the lion at the Berlin zoo drew a great roar of laughter. He ended with praise for the Reich National Festival of Mountain Cinema; it was only the beginning, many more festivals would follow, as German film-makers climbed to the summit of their craft. When he was done, Goebbels’s deputy presented him with a two-foot-high crystal sculpture of an eagle, a Nazi eagle, head and beak in profile, stiff wings outstretched, its claws holding a swastika in a wreath. The hideous thing was incredibly heavy, Stahl almost dropped it, but held on.

  The morning flight from Tempelhof landed at Le Bourget at 2.30 p.m. There was a little bar in one corner of the terminal building where uniformed customs officers and airport workers in bleu de travail smocks took time off during the day. They stood at the zinc bar, drank red wine or coffee, smoked – there was always one with the stub of a Gauloise stuck to his lips – and talked in low voices. As the exhausted Stahl entered the terminal – carrying the paper-wrapped eagle, Orlova’s notes in his jacket pocket – he was met by the smell of coffee and cigarettes and the sound of quiet conversation and thanked God that he was back in France.

  Production for Après la Guerre began that afternoon, 11 November, with scenes that could be shot on sets built in the studios at Joinville, and a few exteriors using local settings. Location shooting was now to take place in and around Beirut, where it would be ‘summer’ – sunshine and blue sky – in December, so Deschelles and Avila were pleased with the weather, the cold rain and gloom of November, appropriate for scenes in the Balkans as the story wound to its finale. Some trouble with the screenwriters here, the script specified a death scene for Stahl’s Colonel Vadic but Deschelles argued that they couldn’t kill off Fredric Stahl, so it would have to be rewritten. He almost dies but, nursed back to health by the loving false countess, he survives. Avila argued the other way, Deschelles allowed him to lose gracefully, and in return agreed to ask Paramount for money to shoot the Hungarian castle scenes in a Hungarian castle.

  The first time that cameras rolled in a film was traditionally a superstitious moment for the cast and crew, an omen of what was to come. Avila was smart, and chose a scene that he felt would go well – Pasquin’s comic night of love with a heavy-set Turkish woman, the wife of a local policeman. The script called for a dog that had to scratch at a bedroom door – the husband was on the other side, unaware that his wife had returned home, unaware that she was in bed with Pasquin’s sergeant. For this scene Avila had chosen a French bulldog, a good character to play against the roly-poly Pasquin.

  But the dog wouldn’t scratch at the door, it simply stood there like a rock while its trainer, on the other side of the door, called out first commands, then baby-talk endearments, and finally tried to tempt it with hazelnut ice cream, its favorite treat. Time went by, a certain anxiety began to spread through the people on the set, a half-naked Pasquin sat up in bed and shouted, ‘Scratch the fucking door, goddamn it!’ but the bulldog merely turned its head towards the source of the noise and broke wind. That relieved the tension – the ‘Turkish wife’ laughed so hard that tears rolled down her chubby face and her make-up had to be reapplied.

  At last, one of the prop men came to the rescue, with a trick he’d seen in other productions. From his prop room he produced a stuffed toy, a tabby cat. When he showed it to the dog, the animal went crazy, it hated cats, and the prop man only just managed to snatch the toy away before it was savaged. Avila was now poised to call out ‘Action’, the cameraman was ready, the trainer took the tabby cat outside the room and closed the door, and the dog stood there. Immediately, a conference was held – do without the scratching at the door? From Avila, an emphatic no. So the prop man tried one last thing: he pushed the cat’s tail beneath the door and when the trainer released the bulldog it galloped towards the tail and, when the prop man on the other side whisked it away, the dog scratched at the door as though he was trying to tear it to pieces. The cameras rolled, the policeman’s wife said, ‘Oh my God, he smells my husband,’ Avila said ‘Cut!’ and the cast and crew applauded.

  They were on the set until 5.30, Avila had met his day’s quota – two minutes of film – and Stahl, though he ached to go back to the Claridge and get into a hot shower, had one final chore ahead of him. Renate Steiner was expecting his appearance at her workroom in Building K. Colonel Vadic had to wear, at several points in the film, a thin cotton long-sleeved undershirt with buttons at the top – a khaki-coloured garment meant to look like Foreign Legion issue. This could not be bought in Paris, so a seamstress ran one up, a duplicate to follow once Stahl had a fitting.

  It was a long walk to Building K in the cold fading twilight but Steiner’s workroom was warm, heated by a small charcoal stove in one corner. And Renate was glad to see him – a sweet smile, kisses on both cheeks. ‘You seem to be doing better,’ Stahl said. ‘The last time I was here …’ She’d been in tears with husband trouble.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘One’s personal life … But everything’s different now.’

  ‘You’ve made up? Your husband found a job?’

  ‘My husband found a girlfriend,’ she said. ‘And off they went. I was miserable for a week, then I discovered how relieved I was to have him gone – thank heaven for sexy little Monique! Oh, that sounds terribly cold, doesn’t it.’

  ‘Not to me.’

  She shrugged. ‘If we hadn’t had to run away from Germany everything might have been all right but … that’s ju
st what happened.’

  ‘You do seem different,’ Stahl said.

  ‘Freedom,’ she said. ‘It’s good for me. Now, Fredric, would you be so kind as to take off your shirt? You can go behind the curtain if you like.’

  Stahl took off his sweater, then unbuttoned his shirt and hung it over the back of a chair. He was just muscular enough, no bare-to-the-waist pirate but not at all soft, that he didn’t mind being seen in his skin. Steiner held the khaki undershirt up by its shoulders and showed it to Stahl. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I like it.’

  ‘It’s your women fans who must like it, so it should show the outline of your shoulders and chest, then loosen a bit as it falls to the waist.’

  ‘What do I wear down below?’

  ‘Uniform trousers, then civilian trousers. These were voluminous in the script and tied with a string but that’s just writers, Avila wants to show your bottom half. Now it’s Gilles Brecker who gets the big trousers. How is his wrist, by the way?’

  ‘We’re shooting around him for another two weeks, then he’ll be fine.’

  Stahl slid the undershirt over his head; Renate had perched on a high stool and lit a cigarette, shaking the match out as she looked critically at the fit of the shirt. ‘Can you turn sideways?’

  He did.

  ‘Now the back.’

  He turned his back to her.

  ‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘For a first try.’

  She put her cigarette out in an ashtray and, pins in mouth, set about refitting the undershirt. She was very close to him, he could smell some sort of woodsy perfume, and when she reached up beneath the shirt her hand was warm against his skin. ‘If I stick you just yell,’ she said, her words slurred by the pins in her mouth.

  ‘I will,’ Stahl said.

  She kept on fussing with the shirt, stepping back for a look, then repositioning the pins to move a seam. Stahl hitched up his trousers because, to his surprise, not an unpleasant surprise, he’d become excited and he didn’t want her to see it. ‘What are you doing?’ she said.