Midnight in Europe: A Novel Read online

  “Thank you, Jeannette,” Ferrar said. “And bonsoir.”

  Ferrar sat at the desk, staring at the number. He had a bad feeling about this, then chided himself for having the feeling. Let it be something to do with the émigré community, he thought, a funeral, a party, a meeting. He dialed the number, gave his name, and the receptionist put him through immediately.

  “Señor Ferrar, thank you for being prompt. Would it be possible for us to meet, perhaps tomorrow morning?”

  “At nine? At the embassy?”

  “Thank you, Señor Ferrar. I will see you at nine.”

  The embassy was a few minutes’ walk from the law firm; Ferrar felt he could just manage the meeting and be at Coudert by ten. He left the office and headed toward the Sixth Arrondissement, thinking he might take the Métro or find a taxi, but he did neither. It was a fine cold night, swirls of powdery snow blew over the cobblestones, Parisians flowed past him in their winter coats and scarves, so Ferrar, in no hurry to reach his silent apartment, crossed the Seine on the Pont Neuf, then stopped at a café and had a coffee, in time reached the Place Saint-Sulpice, and, reluctantly, went home.

  Ferrar arrived at the embassy just before nine, gave his name to the receptionist, and the diplomat Molina appeared a moment later. Appeared from the nineteenth century: he wore a high collar, pince-nez, a beautifully trimmed Vandyke beard, and held himself a certain way, his head at an upward angle, as though he were looking down on the world. Molina seemed highly pleased, perhaps relieved, to meet Ferrar, who suspected they’d met before but couldn’t remember where. When they’d shaken hands, Molina said, “Shall we go and have a coffee?” As he said it he raised an interrogatory eyebrow, then held his open hand behind Ferrar’s back and pointed his other hand toward the door. At the courteous end of assertive, the gesture meant they were going to have coffee.

  Once Ferrar was out on the street, the bad feeling returned—what was it that couldn’t be said at the embassy? They walked to the luxurious Hotel George V—named for the English king, the George Cinq to a Frenchman—and Molina led him to the tea salon called La Galerie. A gallery it was; a long narrow room with tables against the windowed wall and a glossy black piano with top up at the far end. For the rest it was all glowing marble in low light, glittering chandeliers, wall sconces, and tapestries—under foot and on the wall. Aubussons? Ferrar wondered. He wouldn’t put it past the George V.

  Molina ordered coffee, which came with a basket of small brioches. The waiter placed the basket just to the right of Ferrar’s hand; he could feel the warmth and the aroma was inspiring. Ferrar wanted one, but waited to see if his appetite survived what Molina was going to say. As the diplomat cleared his throat and polished his pince-nez, Ferrar looked around the room, which was almost deserted. There were two men with briefcases whispering at one table, perhaps Jews, Ferrar thought, of the hard-faced variety; and in the corner, a young, overdressed couple, maybe on honeymoon.

  Molina took a sip of coffee, then said, “Did you ever meet a man called Castillo?”

  It took a moment. “The museum curator?”

  “Yes. Did you know him?”

  Past tense. “We were, I believe, at émigré functions now and then, but I didn’t really know him.”

  “He has met with a great misfortune, I fear. I’m not entirely sure, he could show up tomorrow, but I have to accept the fact that he won’t.”

  “What happened?”

  “Castillo was a good man, too good, really, and he went to Madrid on a kind of private mission, and we have heard he was executed as a spy.”

  “And was he? A spy?”

  “No. Not really. Perhaps, technically, he was on that sort of business when he was in Madrid, but his work at the embassy was far from espionage. As best we know, this execution was a random event, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, was arrested, and immediately shot. There was no investigation, it all happened very quickly.”

  “You did say he was in Madrid …” Ferrar was puzzled. “So then, executed by the Republic?”

  “No, no,” Molina said emphatically, putting down his coffee cup and dabbing at his lips with a vast, white linen napkin. “This was an accident. Castillo would never have worked for the fascists. Never. No, it was just … in war, you know, these things happen.”

  “I am sorry,” Ferrar said. What does this have to do with me? “Did he have family?”

  “No, he was a bachelor.”

  Ferrar shook his head in sorrow. He’d heard so many of these stories as Spain tore itself to pieces, so he did what everyone did: reacted, felt sympathy, and waited to hear the next.

  “A terrible thing,” Molina said. “And a grave loss for us, for the embassy here in Paris. Castillo worked in what we call the Oficina Técnica, which tries to buy arms for the Republic on the world market. From the beginning we have lost battles and territory because we lack weapons: rifles, bullets, artillery, airplanes, everything.”

  “I know,” Ferrar said. “The world knows and all it does is watch.”

  “Stalin helps us, to a point, the Russian pilots in Spain fight the German pilots of the Condor Legion, but this alliance will finish us, in the end.”

  Ferrar recalled seeing a headline on the front page of a tabloid in New York. He didn’t remember the headline, what he did remember was the phrase Red Spain. The American president, Roosevelt, was a determined anti-fascist, but the Spanish anarchists murdered priests and nuns and burned down churches. Which meant that Roosevelt’s crucial supporters, Catholic working men and women in the cities, would not tolerate his helping people who did such things.

  “Do you really believe we’ve lost the war?” Ferrar said.

  “Not quite yet, not as long as we hold Madrid and Barcelona. We are doomed, however, if England and France and America don’t help us. And they won’t, politically can’t, as long as victory for the Republic is seen as the creation of a Soviet state in Europe. Meanwhile, every day we are more dependent on the USSR. For example, the French and American banks won’t process our payments, so we can pay for weapons only through the Banque Commerciale pour l’Europe du Nord, which is the Soviet Union’s bank in Paris. Texaco sells oil only to Franco, and Dupont has sold Franco forty thousand bombs and evaded the American embargo by shipping via Germany. The French Popular Front was our great ally, at the beginning, but then the British, and the French right wing, forced France into the Non-Intervention Pact. And they mean it—the Non-Intervention Committee has representatives at the frontiers, making sure no weapons pass through customs. Nonetheless, we persist, the Oficina Técnica continues its work and we have another arms-buying office in New York.”

  “Yes, I know, in fact I stopped by there on my last trip to the States and brought some envelopes back to Paris. Envelopes that couldn’t be mailed.”

  “We are grateful for your help,” Molina said.

  “Is there some way the Coudert law firm can help?” Which had to be, Ferrar thought, why he was having coffee at La Galerie.

  “I don’t believe a law firm can help us now. It’s you who can help your country … if Spain is still your country.”

  “It is. But what would you want me to do?”

  “With Castillo’s death, our staff at the Oficina is weakened, they work hard but they need guidance, they need ideas, they need someone who can find a path through the swamp. Will you do that for the Republic?”

  “In my heart I would like to, señor, but I cannot. I must work as a lawyer because my family depends on me. I support them; my parents, my sister, my grandmother. When the war started in ’36 I spoke to friends about going off to fight, but when I suggested to my family that I might join up they were horrified. Nobody objected, quite the opposite. They nodded, they exchanged glances, they were silent, they were brave, and it was that I couldn’t bear, that they would accept terrible poverty in a foreign country.”

  From Molina, a subtle dip of the head, eyes for just an instant closed. Of course I understand.

>   “Perhaps now and then, if you face a particular problem, I will gladly help you. But I cannot resign from my firm in order to work at the arms office.”

  “We’ll take anything we can get, it’s what we’ve done from the beginning.”

  “You have my office telephone, and I will give you my number at home.”

  “I should add that you might have to be, perhaps not careful, a better word is aware. Because the Soviets, for their own political reasons, want to be in control of the purchase of whatever arms we can buy. Yes, Stalin sells us armament of Russian manufacture, he likes to see photographs in the newspapers, but most of what the Russians provide is bought on the black market by operatives of the Comintern, the International Communist Party, essentially civilians of strong conviction secretly directed by the NKVD.”

  Like the man with slumped shoulders in his blue overcoat. Did the Russians have him followed in New York because they knew he was going to be a courier for the arms-buying office? Only people in the embassy would have known what he was going to do. Tell Molina this? No. He couldn’t explain why, but no.

  “And I must prevail on you,” Molina said, “to undergo a certain interview with the head of security at the embassy, Colonel Zaguan. Forgive me for this, he can be a difficult fellow but I must observe protocol.”

  “Then I will meet with him.”

  “I’ll have my secretary arrange the meeting, at your convenience, Señor Ferrar. And I thank you for your offer of assistance. Now, señor, will you not have a single brioche?”

  Ferrar walked over to the office only to discover that Barabee had canceled their meeting; he’d been summoned to a client’s chateau in the Loire Valley—an emergency, or what the client thought was an emergency. Ferrar worked through the day, then took a taxi home to the Place Saint-Sulpice. Where he changed to a blazer and flannel trousers and then set out for a little Lyonnais place on the rue du Cherche Midi. He knew what he wanted: winter food—layers of sliced potatoes and onions cooked slowly in creamy milk, and half a roast chicken from Bresse, the best chicken in France.

  Hunched over, collar up, the icy, still air burning his face, he told himself he didn’t mind yet one more solitary dinner. But it wasn’t true. He was lonely, he had no woman friend to take to dinner, he had no woman friend to take to bed. At the moment, anyhow—he’d had his share of love affairs in Paris, some of them exciting. He sometimes thought about Eileen Moore, but he saw her only at long intervals and that wouldn’t change. They might be happy together, he believed, but he could not move to New York and Eileen, uprooted from her Manhattan life, would in Paris be lost among strangers. She surely had amours of her own and he sensed that she liked the arrangement they had.

  He reached the restaurant, its windows opaque with steam, and was greeted affectionately; they knew him here. Chez Lucette had only twelve tables; the husband and wife cooked, the daughter served. As dinner companion, Ferrar had brought along a copy of Le Soir, not that he would read it, he simply found staring at a newspaper preferable to staring at a wall. He had an oeuf dur mayonnaise to start, then the pommes lyonnaise and poulet de Bresse arrived, accompanied by a carafe of red wine. The dinner was, as always, very good, and he ate slowly, taking care to enjoy it. Looking up for a moment, he discovered another solitary diner, a woman at a table across the room. She had light brown hair, almost blond, falling in soft waves from a tilted black beret, and, he saw, had brought her own reading, a magazine. As Ferrar stared at her she looked up and their eyes met. Then unmet.

  The French had a very sensible theory that the office and the dinner table should be kept separate, but Ferrar could not stop himself from going back over his meeting with Molina. He had seemed genial and forthcoming, but he was a diplomat and it was his job to seem so. What was the old joke? Ferrar had to reconstruct the logic but soon enough he had it right. “When a lady says ‘no’ she means ‘maybe.’ When a lady says ‘maybe’ she means ‘yes.’ But if a lady says ‘yes’ she’s no lady. When a diplomat says ‘yes’ he means ‘maybe.’ When a diplomat says ‘maybe’ he means ‘no.’ But if a diplomat says ‘no’ he’s no diplomat.” Ferrar wondered idly what it would be like to do what Molina did—would he be content with that kind of work? He took the last sip of wine in his glass and reached for the carafe. The woman in the black beret, he saw, was having an apple for dessert. Eyes on her magazine, she cut slices from the apple and ate them with her fingers. What was she, thirty-five? A little older? Small and fine-boned—petite was the word people used.

  Suddenly she raised her head and caught him looking at her. She met his eyes, then, for a bare instant, an impish smile lit her face and she was gone, back to reading. Was that for him? No, she was just amused, it wasn’t flirtation.

  What was he doing? Oh yes, pouring wine. The carafe was made of thick, heavy glass, he supposed it would last longer that way, used and washed and used again. Now he tried to be covert, had a brief glance at her, only to discover that she had beckoned the waitress to her table. Was she asking for the check? Yes, only the apple core was left, she was done with dinner. The waitress acknowledged the request and turned away to get the check. Oh well. As Ferrar drank from his glass, the waitress stopped, the woman said something, the waitress answered, then hurried off.

  Now what? Ferrar ate a bite of potato and waited for developments. And moments later the waitress returned with a coffee. The woman in the black beret had changed her mind, she would linger awhile over coffee. Ferrar didn’t want to get caught again and lowered his eyes. Lowered his eyes for a few seconds, then looked up. Now he’d caught her, peering at him over the cup as she drank. In a small face, large eyes, dark, with long lashes. Like dogs’ eyes, he thought. What a compliment! Mentally, he laughed at himself. But the silent laugh rose to the surface as a smile.

  This time returned.

  Ferrar had eaten most of his dinner, did he really want the rest? He signaled to the waitress and, when she came to the table, he looked at his watch, spread his hands in the nothing to be done position, and said, “L’addition, s’il vous plaît.”

  Ferrar paid the check, then bided his time. When the woman in the beret rose from her chair he could see all of her. She was petite—maybe two inches over five feet tall—but well shaped in a chocolate-brown wool dress cinched by a narrow belt. As she headed for the coat tree he followed her, arriving just as she took her overcoat off the peg. Ferrar, reaching for his coat, said, “Cold tonight, do you have a long way home?”

  “Oh, it’s not all that far.” Her voice, low and resolute, suggested that it was far.

  “I was thinking, there’s a taxi stand a little way up Cherche Midi, I’d be happy to give you a ride home, if you like.”

  “Why that is so kind of you. What if I said ‘yes’?”

  “It would be my pleasure. My name is Cristián.”

  “And I am Chantal.” She slid her arm into the sleeve of her coat, then said “Merde!” and made a face, pulling her arm back out of the sleeve with an oatmeal-colored wool scarf in her hand. “I never fail to stuff my scarf in the sleeve so I don’t forget it, and I never fail to forget it’s there.”

  She wound the scarf around her neck, looping it over and under in the style favored by Parisian women, put on her coat, and led him to the door. Walking toward the taxi stand she said, “I have always liked Chez Lucette,” and went on for a time about the restaurant, puffs of steam coming from her mouth as she spoke. There was a taxi waiting—thank heaven—the driver starting the engine as they approached. Ferrar held the door open as Chantal climbed in, then went around and got in the other side. “I live on the avenue Bourdonnais,” she said. “Number fourteen, the far end.”

  As the taxi wove its way through narrow streets, they were silent; what had gone on between them in the restaurant had been replaced by a certain tension. Outside, Paris was wintry and deserted. As the taxi neared the avenue Bourdonnais, Chantal suddenly looked at her watch, then covered her face with her hands. “Oh I have been stupid,”
she said.

  “What did you do?”

  “I have loaned my apartment to a friend and her lover; they had nowhere to be alone. But I said I would not be back before midnight and it’s a long time until then. Perhaps we could find a café where I can wait.”

  “Why not wait at my place?”

  “Oh no, I …”

  “Yes you can, why not? I have some brandy … I think.”

  “You have already been so thoughtful, I …”

  “Please, Chantal. I would enjoy the company.”

  “Well …”

  “Driver, a change of plans, we’re going to the Place Saint-Sulpice, number five.”

  The driver nodded and, as he turned into the next street, kept nodding, as though to himself: Yes, my dear, why not wait at my place.

  When Ferrar had purchased his apartment, the former owner had left a few pieces of furniture and they were still there. One of them, in the room Ferrar used as a study, was a kind of love seat, called a tête-à-tête, and curved in such a way that the seats faced in opposite directions—thus a chaperoned couple could have intimate conversation. A dreadful thing, upholstered in plush velvet of a deep plum color. Ferrar supposed it was meant to be in the middle of a large room but, having no such room, he had pushed it up against the wall, where one side functioned as a chair, while on the blocked side he’d stacked books that wouldn’t fit on his shelves. Chantal sat there, Ferrar slid his reading chair over so he could face her. There was a living room, with a proper sofa, but it was underheated; more comfortable to settle in the study.

  It turned out that Ferrar did have brandy, even brandy glasses, and as they talked and drank the atmosphere between them warmed nicely. She was a teacher, she said, at a private academy for girls up in the Sixteenth Arrondissement. Her family was from a little village in Burgundy, where her father had worked at one of the wineries. She loved living in Paris, she went to the cinema whenever she could. Did he like the Marx Brothers? Yes? “Grou-sho,” she said, the French version of Groucho, “is such a funny man, that silly walk he does.”