Mission to Paris ns-12 Read online

  It took a few seconds — Prideaux had to get control of himself — then he said, so quietly that Herbert could only just hear the words, ‘Under the bed.’

  Herbert slid the valise from beneath the bed, undid the buckles, and peered inside. ‘Where are your personal things?’ he said.

  Prideaux gestured towards another valise, standing open at the foot of the bed.

  ‘Did you put any of the money in there? Have you spent some of it? Or is it all, every franc of it, in here? Best now to be truthful.’

  ‘It’s all there,’ Prideaux said.

  Herbert closed the valise and pulled the straps tight. ‘Well, we’ll see. I’m going to take this money away and count it and, if you’ve been honest with me I’ll be back, and I’ll give you a few hundred francs — at least something for wherever you’re going next. Shall I tell you why?’

  Prideaux, staring at the floor, didn’t answer.

  ‘It’s because people like you can be useful, in certain situations, and people like you never have enough money. So, when such people help us out, with whatever we might need, we are always generous. Very generous indeed.’

  Herbert let this sink in. It took some time, but Prideaux eventually said, ‘What if I’m… far away?’

  Herbert smiled. Prideaux’s eyes were cast down so he didn’t see the smile, which was just as well. ‘Monsieur Prideaux,’ Herbert said, as though he were saying poor Monsieur Prideaux, ‘there is no such thing as far away.’ Then he stepped into the hall and drew the door shut behind him.

  Herbert left Lothar to watch the hotel, likely unnecessary but why take chances. Prideaux, he thought, had taken the bait and would remain where he was. Herbert then returned to the nightclub, told General Aleksey where to find Prideaux and described him, in his pyjama top and underdrawers. Thirty minutes later, as the canvas horse capered and danced to the music of the accordion, Lothar and the Russian returned. Herbert counted out two thousand Swiss francs, General Aleksey put the money in his pocket, wished them a pleasant evening, and walked out the door.

  10 September, 1938. In Berlin, the Ribbentropburo — the political warfare department named for Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop — had its offices in the Reich Foreign Ministry at 3, Wilhelmstrasse. Senior bureaucrats from the ministry liked to take a morning coffee in the dining room of the vast and luxurious Hotel Kaiserhof, on the nearby Wilhelmplatz. This was especially true of the Deputy Director of the Ribbentropburo, who could be found, at seven in the morning, at his customary table in the corner, his sombre blue suit vivid against the background of shining white tablecloths.

  The Deputy Director, an SS major, had formerly been a junior professor of social sciences, particularly anthropology, at the University of Dresden. He was an exceptionally bright fellow, with sharp black eyes and sharp features — it was sometimes said of him, privately, that he had a face like an axe. This feature did him no harm, it made him look smart, and you had to be smart to succeed in the political warfare business; you had to understand your enemy’s history, his culture, and, most of all, his psychology.

  The Deputy Director’s morning ritual made him accessible to junior staff, of the courageous and ambitious sort, who dared to approach him at his table. This was dangerous, because the Deputy Director did not suffer fools gladly, but it could be done and, if done successfully, might move the underling one rung up the very steep ladder of advancement within the bureau. On the morning of the tenth, a fresh-faced young man carrying a briefcase presented himself to the Deputy Director and was invited to sit down and have a cup of coffee.

  After they’d spent a few minutes on the weather and the state of the world, the young man said, ‘A most interesting document has found its way to my desk.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I thought it worth bringing to your attention.’

  ‘And it is…?’

  The young man reached into his briefcase and brought out a press clipping. ‘I have it here, with a translation — the document is in English.’

  ‘I read English,’ said the Deputy Director. He then snapped his fingers and extended a hand to receive the interesting document.

  ‘It’s taken from the Hollywood newspaper called Variety,’ the young man said as the Deputy Director glanced at the clipping. ‘And reports that the movie actor Fredric Stahl is coming to Paris to make a film.’

  ‘He is influential? In America?’

  ‘Not really, he’s just an actor, but I believe we can make use of him once he gets to Paris. He will surely receive attention from the French newspapers and the radio.’

  The Deputy Director finished reading the release and handed it back to the young man. ‘What do you propose?’

  ‘To put him on the list maintained by our French section.’

  ‘Very well, you may add him to the list, and make sure that what’s-his-name who runs the section does something about it.’

  ‘You mean Herr Hoff, sir.’

  ‘Yes, Hoff. Have him work up a background study, all the usual items.’

  ‘I’ll do that, sir, as soon as I return to the office.’

  14 September.

  After midnight, the liner Ile de France rising and falling on the mid-Atlantic swell, a light sea breeze, the stars a million diamonds spread across a black sky. And, Stahl thought, a woman in my arms. Or at least by his side. They lay together on a deck chair, she in formal gown, he in tuxedo, the warmth of her body welcome on the chilly night, the soft weight of her breast, resting gently against him, a promise that wouldn’t be kept but a sweet promise just the same. Edith, he thought. Or was it Edna? He wasn’t sure so would avoid using her name, perhaps call her… what? Well, not my dear, anything was better than that, which he found stilted and pretentious though God knew he’d said it a few times. Said it because he’d had to, it was written so in the script and he was Fredric Stahl, yes, the Hollywood movie star, that Fredric Stahl, and he’d made a fortune using phrases like my dear, which melted the hearts of women from coast to coast when spoken in his faintly foreign accent.

  Thus Warner Bros. ‘Why not Fredric Stahl, hunh? With that European accent?’ And just how hard he’d worked to get that accent right they’d never know. He certainly wasn’t alone in this; the English Archie Leach had become Cary Grant by sounding like a sophisticated gent from the east coast, while the Hungarian Peter Lorre developed a voice — insinuating, oily, and menacing — that suggested vaguely Continental origin.

  ‘Penny for your thoughts,’ the woman said.

  ‘Such a beautiful night,’ he said.

  She moved closer to him, the gin on her breath strong in his nostrils. ‘Who would’ve thought you’d be so nice?’ she said. ‘I mean, in person.’ In response, he put his arm around her shoulders and hugged her a little.

  They’d met on the night the Ile de France sailed from New York, at the captain’s table in the first-class dining room. A long-suffering, pretty wife she was, her husband three sheets to the wind when they appeared for dinner. Soon he announced, in the middle of someone else’s story, that he owned a Cadillac dealership in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. ‘That’s on the Main Line, in case you don’t know.’ By the third night his table companions knew very well indeed, because he kept repeating it, and at last his wife, Edith, maybe Edna, dealt with the situation by taking him back to their cabin. She then reappeared and when, after dessert, Stahl said he was going for a walk on deck, she caught up to him at the portholed doors to the dining room and said, ‘Can I come along for the walk, Mr. Stahl?’ They walked, smoked, leaned on the rail, sometimes she held her hair back to keep it from blowing around. Finally he found a deck chair — the sling in French Line colours, the footrest polished teak — and they snuggled down together to enjoy the night at sea.

  ‘Tell me, umm, where are you going in Europe?’ he said.

  ‘It’s Iris — I bet you forgot.’

  ‘I won’t again.’

  ‘Paree,’ she said. ‘Brussels, Amsterdam, Geneva, Rome
, Vienna. There’s more, oh, ah, Venice. I’m still forgetting one.’

  ‘Maybe Budapest.’

  ‘Nooo, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Berlin?’

  ‘That’s it!’

  After a moment, Stahl said, ‘You’ll see a lot.’

  ‘Where are you going, Mr. Stahl?’

  ‘Just to Paris, to make a movie. And please call me Fredric.’

  ‘Oh, is that all? “Just to Paris”? “To make a movie”?’ A ladylike snort followed. She was already writing the postcard. You’ll never guess who I… ‘Are you French, Fredric?’

  ‘I was born in Vienna, wandered about the world for a time, lived and worked in Paris, then, in the summer of 1930, Hollywood. I’m an American now.’ He paused, then said, ‘Tell me, Iris, when you planned the trip, did you think about the politics, in Europe?’

  ‘Oh who cares — they’re always squabbling over something. You can’t go to Spain, ’cause there’s a war there, you know. Otherwise I expect the castles are all open, and the restaurants.’

  He could hear approaching footsteps on the iron deck, then a ship’s officer flicked a torch beam over them, touched the brim of his cap and said, ‘ Bonsoir, Madame, Monsieur.’

  ‘What’s it called, your movie?’

  ‘ Apres la Guerre. That would be After the War, in English. It takes place in 1918, at the end of the war.’

  ‘Will it play in Bryn Mawr?’

  ‘Maybe it will. I hope so.’

  ‘Well, we can always go to Philadelphia to see it, if we have to.’

  It was true that he’d ‘wandered about the world’. The phrase suggested romance and adventure — something like that had appeared in a Warner Bros. publicity bio — but it didn’t tell the whole story. In fact, he’d run away to sea at the age of sixteen. He was also not really ‘Fredric Stahl’, had been born Franz Stalka, forty years earlier in Vienna, to a Slovenian father and an Austrian mother of solidly bourgeois families resident in Austria-Hungary for generations. His father was beyond strict; the rigid, fearsome lord of the family, a tyrant with a face like an angry prune. Thus Stahl grew up in a world of rules and punishments — there was hardly a moment in his early life when he wasn’t in trouble for doing something wrong. He had two older brothers, obedient little gentlemen and utterly servile — ‘Yes, papa,’ ‘As you wish, papa’ — who studied for hours and did well in private academies. He had also a younger sister, Klara, and if he was the bad boy of the family, she was the angel and Stahl adored her. A beautiful little angel, with her mother’s good looks. Inherited, as well, by the boy who would become an actor and take a new name.

  It was said of him by those who made a living in the business of faces and bodies that he was ‘a very masculine actor’. Stahl wasn’t sure precisely what they meant, but he knew they were rich and not for nothing. It referred, he suspected, to a certain inner confidence, expressed by, among other things, a low-pitched voice — assurance, not just a bass register — from an actor who always sounded ‘quiet’ no matter how loudly he spoke. He could play the sympathetic lawyer, the kind aristocrat, the saintly husband, the comforting doctor, or the good lover — the knight not the gigolo.

  His hair was dark, combed back from a high, noble forehead which rose from deep-set eyes. Cold grey eyes — the grey was cold, the eyes were warm: receptive and expressive. Just enough grey in those eyes for black-and-white film, and even better — it turned out to his great relief — in technicolour. His posture was relaxed — hands in pockets for Stahl was not a weak gesture — and his physique appropriate for the parts he played. He’d been scrawny as a boy but two years as an Ordinary Seaman, scraping rust, painting decks, had put just enough muscle on him so he could be filmed wearing a bathing suit. He couldn’t punch another man, he wasn’t Clark Gable, and he couldn’t fight a duel, he was not Errol Flynn. But neither was he Charles Boyer — he wasn’t so sophisticated. Mostly he played a warm man in a cold world. And, if all his movies were taken together, Fredric Stahl was not somebody you knew, but somebody you would very much like to know.

  In fact he was good at his profession — had two Oscar nominations, one for Supporting Actor, the other for the lead in Summer Storm — and very much in control of gesture and tone but, beyond skill, he had the single, inexplicable quality of the star actor or actress. When he was on screen, you couldn’t take your eyes off him.

  Stahl shifted slightly in the deck chair, the damp was beginning to reach him and he had to suppress a shiver. And, he sensed, the weather was turning — sometimes the ship’s bow hit the oncoming wave with a loud smack. ‘We might just have a storm,’ he said. It was, he thought, time to get Iris back where she belonged, the cuddling had devloped a certain familiar edge.

  ‘A storm?’ she said. ‘Oh, I hope not. I’m afraid I’ll get seasick.’

  ‘You’ll be fine. Just remember: don’t stay in your cabin, go someplace where you can keep your eyes on the horizon.’

  ‘Is it that easy?’

  ‘Yes. I spent two years at sea, that’s how I know.’

  ‘ You? A sailor?’

  He nodded. ‘I ran away to sea when I was sixteen.’

  ‘Your poor mom!’

  ‘I wrote them a letter,’ he said. ‘I went to Hamburg, and for a month all I did was sweep out the union hall, but then a Dutch ship needed a deckhand and I signed on and saw the world — Shanghai, Batavia, Calcutta…’ This had been the purest possible luck; Stahl had gone to sea in the spring of 1914, before the war, on what by chance was the ship of a country that remained neutral, thus he was spared service for the enemies of Austria-Hungary.

  ‘Say, you’ve had some adventures, haven’t you,’ she said.

  ‘I did. In 1916 we were shelled and set on fire, just off the coast of Spain. An Italian destroyer did that.’

  ‘But, you said “neutral”…’

  ‘We never knew why they did it. Exuberance, maybe, we didn’t ask. But we managed to reach the port of Barcelona, where I got help from the Austrian legation. They could have sent me off to fight in the trenches, but instead they gave me a job, and that was my military service.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I opened the mail. Made sure it got to the right people.’

  She started to ask a question, but then a gust of wind hit her and she said ‘Brrr’ and burrowed against Stahl, close enough now that her voice was soft. ‘So,’ she said, lingering on the word, ‘when did you decide to become an actor?’

  ‘A little later, when I was back in Vienna.’ The Ile de France lifted and fell, hitting another wave. ‘I think, Iris, it might be time for you to go back to your cabin, your husband’s probably beginning to wonder where you are.’

  ‘Oh, Jack sleeps like a log when he’s drunk.’

  Nonetheless, she wasn’t coming to Stahl’s cabin. She didn’t really want to, Stahl felt, maybe she wanted to be asked. But, in any event, what he didn’t need was a public row with some lush over a wife’s shipboard infidelity. With certain actors, Warner Bros. wouldn’t have cared, but not Fredric Stahl. He put a hand on her cheek and turned her face towards him. ‘One kiss, Iris, and then back to our cabins.’

  The kiss was dry, and tender, and went on for a time because they both enjoyed it.

  The storm came full force after midnight, the liner pitching and rolling in heavy seas. Stahl woke up, grumbled at the weather, and went back to sleep. When he left his cabin in the morning, the exquisite art deco carpets had been covered with rolls of brown paper and, up on deck, the sky was heavy with dark cloud and every wave sent spray flying over the bow. Returning to his cabin after a long walk, he found the ship’s daily news bulletin slipped beneath the door. The French Line wishes you good morning. Temperature at 0600 hours 53°. The Paris weather 66° and partly cloudy. The 1938 Salon d’Automne will open 5 October at the Grand Palais in Paris. The International Surrealist Exhibition remains open at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts, 60 artists, including Marcel Duchamp, and 300 works, including
Salvador Dali’s ‘Rainy Taxi’. Yesterday at the European Championships in Paris, the Finnish runner Taisto Maki set a new record in the 10,000 metre race, 29 minutes, 52 seconds. The British Prime Minister Chamberlain goes to Berchtesgaden today for consultations on the Sudeten issue with Reichs Chancellor Hitler. In Hollywood, filming has begun on ‘The Wizard of Oz’ with Buddy Ebsen, allergic to his costume, replaced by Jack Haley. Great Britain has ordered its fleet at Invergordon to alert status. Pittsburgh halfback Whizzer White, injured in a loss to the Eagles, has said he will play against the NY Giants on Friday. The first-class shuffleboard tournament has been postponed until 1400 hours tomorrow.

  It was dusk when the Ile de France docked at Le Havre, and a brass band greeted the passengers at the foot of the first-class gangway. A band made up, according to the fancy writing on a giant bass drum, of municipal sanitation workers. Wearing blue uniforms and caps, working away at a spirited march, they could surely not all have been short and stocky with black moustaches, but that was Stahl’s impression. As he stepped onto the pier, a shout rose above the cornets and trombones. ‘ Mr. Stahl! Fredric Stahl! ’ Who was this? Or, rather, where was he? He was, Stahl now saw, attached to a hand waving frantically above the heads of people waiting to meet the passengers.

  With difficulty, the man wormed his way through the crowd and stood in front of Stahl. He was not much over five feet tall, with a hook nose and a beaming smile, nattily dressed in a tan double-breasted suit. What remained of his hair was arranged in strands across his head and plastered down with oil. Reaching up, he grasped Stahl’s hand, gave it an enthusiastic pump, and said, ‘Welcome to France, I am Zolly!’ When Stahl didn’t react he added, ‘ Zolly Louis, the Warner man in Paris!’ His accent was from somewhere well east of the dock in Le Havre.

  ‘Hello, Zolly, thanks for meeting me,’ Stahl said.

  Then the flashbulbs went off. The floating lights of the afterimages made it difficult for Stahl to see much of anything, but he didn’t need to see. Instinctively, he turned his head slightly to the left, to show his right, his better, side, and his face broke into an amiable smile, accompanied by a raised hand seemingly caught in mid-wave. A voice called out, ‘Over to here, Mis-ter Stahl.’ Stahl turned towards the voice and, blind as a bat, smiled away.