Mission to Paris Read online

  ‘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.

  ‘He speaks French, boys,’ Zolly called out. Then, an aside to Stahl, ‘I made sure the press got here.’

  A man with a small notebook appeared from the after-image. ‘Jardine, of Le Matin,’ he said in French. ‘How was your voyage?’

  ‘I enjoyed every minute of it,’ Stahl said. ‘The Ile de France is a fine ship, one of the best. Luxurious, and fast.’

  ‘Any storms?’

  Stahl shook his head, dismissing the idea. ‘A smooth voyage in every way. Maybe I ate a little more than I should have, but I couldn’t resist.’

  Now a different voice: ‘Would you say something about your new movie?’

  ‘It’s called Après la Guerre, being made for Paramount France and produced by Monsieur Jules Deschelles.’

  ‘You know Monsieur Deschelles?’

  Zolly cleared his throat.

  ‘By reputation,’ Stahl said. ‘He is well regarded in Hollywood.’

  ‘This movie,’ Jardine of Le Matin said, ‘is it about the, ah, futility of war?’

  ‘You might say that,’ Stahl said, then, as he considered going on, Zolly said, ‘That’s enough, boys. He’ll be available for interviews, but right now Mr. Stahl would like to get to Paris as soon as possible.’

  As the photographers took a few more shots, working around to get the Ile de France as background, a beautiful girl appeared at Stahl’s side, firmly taking his arm and smiling for the cameras. Stahl’s expression didn’t change but, out of the corner of his mouth, he said, ‘Who the hell is this?’

  ‘No idea,’ Zolly said. As he led Stahl away from the crowd, the Warner man in Paris glanced back over his shoulder. Winked? At the young woman he’d promised …? This was all in Stahl’s imagination, but it was a highly experienced and accurate imagination.

  Zolly Louis had a car and driver waiting on the pier. Since Stahl had already cleared customs and border control – the passports of first-class travellers were stamped in their staterooms – and his baggage would be delivered to his hotel, he was free to head south to Paris. The car was stunning, a grand four-door sedan that glowed pearlescent silver, with the graceful curve and sweep of an aerodynamic masterpiece. Curiously, the steering wheel was set in the centre of the dashboard, so a passenger could sit on either side of the driver.

  Who, Stahl thought, certainly looked like a relative of Zolly Louis – similar height, and a similar face, except for a thin moustache. ‘Meet your new driver,’ Zolly said. ‘My nephew, Jimmy.’ Handing Stahl a business card, Zolly said, ‘Call him anytime.’ Jimmy, sitting on a pile of seat cushions, nodded to Stahl – bowed might have been a better description – and said in English, ‘So pleased to meet you, sir,’ one word at a time.

  Zolly opened the rear door for Stahl, climbed in behind him, and said, ‘Now we go. To the Claridge, Jimmy, and make it snappy.’

  The Hotel Claridge, on the rue François 1er, was not at all where Stahl wanted to stay but somebody in Paris had made the reservation and Stahl hadn’t complained. The Claridge was where rich Englishmen took suites, close to the Champs-Elysées, a quartier of fancy cinemas, overpriced restaurants, and hordes of tourists. Stahl meant to find somewhere else as soon as he could.

  As they left the pier, Zolly said, ‘How about this car?’

  ‘Very impressive,’ Stahl said.

  ‘The 1938 Panhard Dynamic,’ Zolly said. ‘It’s all the rage in Paris.’

  The lights of Le Havre soon faded away behind them, replaced by the rolling fields of the night-time countryside. When Stahl lowered his window and inhaled the scent of it – damp earth, newly cut hay, a hint of pig manure – he was taken with a sudden rising of the spirit. And the more he inhaled this fragrant air, the better he felt, as though some part of his being had lain dormant in California but had now come back to life. Perhaps I have a French soul, he thought, and it knows it’s home. Home at that moment was a starless night, a steady wind, not a human to be seen. Except, now and again, a sleeping village; stone houses with closed shutters, the local café – a dimly lit window with figures gathered at a bar – then farm fields again, divided by ancient trees and tangled underbrush. Le Havre was only two hours from Paris but the land between was France, dark and silent and very old.

  It was quiet in the car, even with the window down, only the hum of the engine and the brush of tyres on the road. Stahl, in a pensive mood, lit a cigarette – on the boat he’d changed over to Gauloises, replacing his Lucky Strikes – and thought about a conversation they’d had as they began their journey. It was no more than genial chitchat, making the time pass, which began in English but changed soon enough to French. Zolly Louis was rather a different individual when he spoke French. English for Zolly was the language of the promo man, the salesman, the drummer, whereas in French he was close to circumspect. The way Stahl put it to himself, Zolly Louis spoke the French of the émigré. Familiar to Stahl, who’d spent seven years in Paris as an émigré among émigrés, which was a long way from what Americans meant when they called themselves expatriates: expatriates could go home, émigrés couldn’t.

  That side of Zolly had made Stahl curious. ‘Tell me,’ he’d said, ‘the name “Zolly” is short for …?’ He’d wondered if it might be, perhaps, Solomon. ‘Short for Zoltan,’ was the answer. ‘What else?’ Even in the darkened back seat, Stahl caught the flicker in Zolly’s eyes. Stahl then asked where he was from. This question was answered with a shrug, spread hands, who knows? Finally Zolly said, ‘In some parts of Europe, the Roumanians say you’re not Roumanian, the Hungarians say you’re not Hungarian, and the Serbs don’t say anything. That’s where I’m from.’

  Stahl didn’t pursue it and, after a silence, Zolly changed the subject and asked about the new movie – what about it had so appealed to him that he was willing to leave Hollywood? Stahl didn’t care to tell the truth and said he liked the role, and the idea of working in Paris. Zolly nodded, and let it go. But Stahl had understood him perfectly: Any day now, Europe’s going up in flames. What are you doing here?

  Zolly, I wish I knew.

  In July, Stahl’s agent at the William Morris Agency, Baruch ‘Buzzy’ Mehlman, had told him he’d be meeting with Walter Perry, the studio’s éminence grise, and Jack Warner himself, in Perry’s office. When Stahl showed up, prompt to the minute and shaved to perfection, Perry said, ‘Jack’s upstairs in a meeting, he’ll join us as soon as he can.’ Which meant never, of course, but Stahl got the point: when Walter Perry spoke, he spoke for Jack Warner, and everybody at Warner’s knew it. And what Jack had to say was: We’re loaning you out to Paramount France, to make a movie at Joinville, Paramount’s studios outside Paris. And in return the Paramount star Gary Cooper will be making a western for Warner. ‘Naturally,’ Walter Perry had said, ‘you’ll need some time to think it over. We’ll send you a synopsis, take a look at it, talk it over with Buzzy, then let me know. But I should tell you, Fredric, you’ll make Jack really happy if you say yes.’

  The synopsis wasn’t bad, the money, by the time Buzzy got done with Paramount, would be something more than his usual $100,000 a picture, and so Fredric Stahl decided to make Jack really happy. Which, Walter Perry told Buzzy, who told Stahl, it did. So, good, go to Paris. Still, in all this there was something that wasn’t quite right. He couldn’t have said why, it simply felt – odd. When he told friends about it, there was a certain moment of hesitation before they congratulated him, so he wasn’t alone in wondering if there somehow wasn’t more to this, perhaps studio politics, perhaps
…

  It was Zolly who broke into the reverie. ‘Time for pipi,’ he announced, Jimmy stopped the Panhard and the three of them stood side by side at the edge of the road and watered a field.

  Paris.

  The night manager of the Claridge took Stahl’s passport – the police collected them late in the evening and returned them by morning – then personally led Zolly and Stahl up to the reserved suite. Abundant flowers and chocolates had been provided, as well as a bottle of Badoit, since American visitors feared European tap water. When the manager and Zolly left, Stahl stretched out on a chaise longue and had just closed his eyes when his luggage arrived, accompanied by a hall porter and a maid who opened his wardrobe trunks and began to unpack and put away his clothing. Stahl retrieved a sweater and a pair of corduroy trousers, then went out to find Paris.

  His Paris. Which was found by crossing the Seine on the Pont d’Alma and, eventually, entering the maze of narrow streets of the Sixth Arrondissement, the Faubourg Saint-Germain. And if the damp earth of the French countryside had lifted his spirit, being back in his old quartier was as though a door to heaven had been left open. Walking slowly, looking at everything, he couldn’t get enough of the Parisian air: it smelled of a thousand years of rain dripping on stone, smelled of rough black tobacco and garlic and drains, of perfume, of potatoes frying in fat. It smelled as it had smelled when he was twenty-five.

  A warm evening, people were out, the bistros crowded and noisy. On the wall of a newspaper kiosk, closed down for the night, the day’s front-page headlines were still posted: CZECHOSLOVAKIA DECLARES STATE OF EMERGENCY. And, below that, GERMAN DIVISIONS PREPARE TO MARCH. Two women walking arm in arm passed by and when Stahl looked back over his shoulder he caught one of them doing the same thing and she laughed and turned away. In a café at the corner of the rue du Four and the rue Mabillon, an old woman with red hair was playing a violin. Stahl went into the café, stood at the bar, ordered a cognac, saw his reflection in the mirror, and smiled. ‘A fine evening, no?’ said the bartender.

  ‘Yes it is,’ Stahl said.

  In the morning, Stahl woke up suddenly, jolted into consciousness by a chorus of bleating taxi horns down on the street. Like a flock of crows, he thought, once disturbed they became violently loud and indignant. Now he needed coffee, reached for the telephone and in a few minutes a tray was brought up with coffee and a basket of croissants. He broke the tip off one of them, which produced a shower of pastry flakes, ate the tip, then ate the croissant, then ate all the others, then ate the flakes. As he finished up, a bellboy arrived with an envelope on a silver tray. Inside the envelope was a handwritten note from Zolly Louis, who said he had to be away for a day or two, please stop by the office at 7, rue Scribe, near the American Express office, where Mme Boulanger would be waiting for him.

  Warner Bros. France was, according to the directory in the lobby, on the third floor. Stahl pressed the button to call the elevator and was about to take the stairs when he heard whirring and grinding above him, peered up through the wire cage and saw the cables on the bottom of the car, then, very slowly, the tiny elevator itself. Up on the third floor, searching through the gloom of a long corridor, he found the name of the company on a pebbled glass door, which opened to an office furnished with well-used desks – cigarette burns on the edges – black telephones, and Warner movie posters: 42nd Street, Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood – showing Errol Flynn in green hat with feather and Olivia de Havilland in a sort of wimple – and The Life of Emile Zola, released a year earlier. It was, by way of the story of the Dreyfus affair, Warner’s, in fact Hollywood’s, first anti-fascist movie. And in prominent position, between two grimy windows, a poster of the actor who’d made a great deal of money for Warner, Porky Pig.

  Stahl stood at the open door; a man was gesturing as he argued on the phone, a girl typing at great speed, eyes on a pencilled draft. Then: ‘Ah, voilà! He arrives!’ A woman in a rather snug knit suit was rising from her swivel chair, evidently Mme Boulanger. Fiftyish and determined, with bright red lips and fingernails, she was one of those businesswomen who wore a hat in the office – a black pillbox with a bow on one side. Holding a cigarette in one hand, she brushed his cheeks with her lips. ‘Elsa Boulanger,’ she said.

  ‘Good morning, Madame Boulanger.’

  ‘Have a seat,’ she commanded, turning her swivel chair to face him. ‘I’m to do your publicity – the Warner star in Paris part. Paramount will work on the movie itself. Did you have a good voyage? Did your luggage arrive? Are you comfortable in your hotel? Have you seen Le Matin?’ She handed him a newspaper folded open to two photographs. There he was, with the Ile de France in the background, as he smiled and waved. The second photograph showed the young woman holding his arm, the caption below read, Fredric Stahl is welcomed to France by the film actress Colette Dulac.

  ‘Who is she?’ Stahl said. ‘She just … appeared.’

  Mme Boulanger shrugged. ‘Nobody,’ she said. ‘But she wants to change that, I’d say.’ She paused, and stubbed her cigarette out in a café ashtray that said SUZE. Stahl turned the newspaper to see what was above the fold and found a review of Le Quai des Brumes, a Marcel Carné film starring Jean Gabin. ‘I’d like to see this,’ Stahl said. ‘I knew Carné, at least to say hello to, when I worked here.’

  Mme Boulanger leaned towards him and lowered her voice. ‘Mon cher Monsieur Stahl,’ she said, the my dear not without affection, then hesitated as she took the paper away from him and ran her finger along the text below his photograph. ‘What is this all about? This line, “Monsieur Stahl told Le Matin that his new film, Après la Guerre, will be about ‘the futility of war’.” Is there any special reason you said that?’

  ‘I didn’t say it. The Le Matin man put it in a question and I, well, I did no more than agree. I really didn’t know what to say.’

  ‘You will have to be more careful here, you know.’

  ‘Careful?’

  ‘Yes, these days, careful.’

  Stahl tried to laugh it off. ‘Isn’t war always futile, Madame Boulanger?’

  Mme Boulanger wasn’t amused. ‘Le Matin, mon cher, is a very rightist newspaper.’

  Stahl was puzzled and showed it. ‘Rightist?’ he said. ‘The French right is against war? Has turned pacifist?’

  ‘In its way. The press and politicians on the right try to persuade us that resistance to Hitler is futile. The German military is too large, too strong, their machines are new and efficient and deadly, and their passion for a fight unequalled. Poor France can never win against such a powerful and determined force. That’s what we’re being fed, over here.’

  ‘What do they want France to do?’

  ‘Negotiate, sign treaties, acknowledge Hitler’s supremacy, let him do whatever he wants in Europe as long as he leaves us alone.’

  Stahl shook his head. ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘You are Austrian by birth, no?’

  ‘Viennese.’

  ‘What do you think about what goes on over there?’ She nodded her head in the general direction of France’s eastern border with Germany, a little more than two hundred miles from where they sat.

  ‘Sickening,’ he said. Mme Boulanger’s expression barely changed but Stahl could tell she was relieved. ‘And dangerous,’ he went on. ‘I can’t bear to watch Hitler in the newsreels.’

  ‘Le Matin doesn’t know where you stand, but they offer you an opportunity, as an actor, as an artist, to speak out against European war.’

  ‘Perhaps I’ll let them know,’ he said. Then added, ‘Where I stand.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ll find a way to keep out of politics, Monsieur Stahl. For actors it’s much the best idea. Those of us who work for your success would prefer that all the people who go to the movies feel affection for you. Why annoy those who don’t like your political views?’

  Stahl nodded. ‘You are a sensible person, Madame Boulanger.’

  She smiled, reached out and rested two fingers lightly on
his knee. ‘You are a successful man, a movie star, let’s keep it that way. How long are you in Paris?’

  ‘Four months? Less? It’s hard to know, I have to meet with the producer and the director, then I’ll have a better idea.’

  Mme Boulanger swivelled back to face her desk, picked up an appointment book, its pages thickened by notes in blue ink, and thumbed through it. ‘I see people from the newspapers on a fairly regular basis, and I’ll set up a few interviews. And by the way, is this Après la Guerre an outcry against war? Umm, the futility of war?’

  Stahl shrugged. ‘Three soldiers, foreign legionnaires, try to return home from Turkey after the 1918 armistice.’

  ‘And you play …?’

  ‘Colonel Vadic, of obscure Balkan origin, the leader, and much-decorated hero. I may get to walk with a stick.’

  Mme Boulanger’s face lit up. ‘I like that,’ she said. ‘A human story.’

  Walking back to the hotel, Stahl sensed that the city’s mood had changed. Sombre today, the Parisians, unsmiling, eyes down, something had reached them on the morning of 19 September. The headlines weren’t so different than the day before, all to do with the possibility of a German march into Czechoslovakia. If that happened, France was obliged by treaty to go to war. Years earlier, in the last months of 1923, as Stahl was beginning a new life in Paris, war was a thing of the past – the last one so brutal and vicious that all the world knew there could never be another. At least all the world of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. In the Left Bank cafés that autumn, the word was barely mentioned, the talk was about paintings, books, music, scandals, reputations, and who was in whose bed. As Stahl’s French grew better, as he picked up the argot, the slang, he fell in love with the world of the cafés.