Mission to Paris: A Novel Page 6

  ‘Won’t you be missed?’

  ‘Not me. And I’m going to a much livelier party than this.’

  ‘That sounds exciting,’ Stahl said.

  ‘Why not see for yourself? Not a soul will know who you are, they don’t go to American movies.’

  This hit home, for it summoned his former life in the city, but he didn’t think he could just disappear.

  She moved closer to him, her voice lowered. ‘So we shall conspire, you and I. When I can’t stand it any more I’ll let you know, then you can do as you like. Where I’m going it’s a very different crowd.’

  Stahl hesitated. ‘The Baroness von Reschke would think …’

  Kiki flicked her fingers from her lips, the kiss floated in the air. From the corner of his eye, Stahl spotted the baroness, cutting her way through the crowd like a determined shark. ‘Here she comes now,’ Kiki said. ‘Cinderella’s stepmother. Perhaps I’ll see you later.’

  She slipped away, to be replaced by the baroness. ‘My dear Monsieur Stahl, there’s someone here you absolutely must meet …’

  It was eight-twenty when he escaped. Kiki de Saint-Ange, now wearing an embroidered evening jacket, was lighting a cigarette by the doors, made eye contact with Stahl, and left. Stahl followed her. Outside he found a classic autumn drizzle, and as he caught up to Kiki she said, ‘Now, a taxi.’

  ‘No need for that,’ Stahl said and led Kiki to the Panhard. Jimmy Louis leapt from the car and opened the back door, Kiki got in, and Jimmy closed the door and led Stahl around to the other side. ‘We’re going up to Boulogne-Billancourt, the quai on this side of the river,’ Kiki said. Jimmy took the rue de Grenelle, heading west, but not for long. Suddenly the Panhard jerked to a stop and Jimmy said, ‘Merde,’ under his breath, as though to himself, then added one or two elaborations in deep argot that Stahl couldn’t understand.

  Stahl leaned forward. ‘What’s wrong? Is it the car?’

  ‘No, sir, not the car.’ Clearly much worse than that, whatever it was. They had stopped by the Mairie, the mayor’s office of the Seventh Arrondissement, where a group of people stood in front of the doors, with more arriving.

  ‘Excuse me for a moment, sir,’ Jimmy said, left the car, and joined the crowd.

  ‘Any idea what’s happened?’ a puzzled Stahl said to Kiki.

  She knew. ‘Affiches blanches,’ she said. ‘We’re in for it now.’

  Stahl had no idea what she meant. White notices? At the Mairie, Jimmy was working his way towards the doors. ‘They must have just posted them,’ Kiki said. ‘Nobody at the party said a thing.’

  ‘“Them”? What are they?’

  ‘Mobilization notices,’ Kiki said. ‘Telling the men of Paris, telling men all over the country, that they must join their reserve units. Tomorrow. We’re at war, Monsieur Stahl.’ She found a cigarette and lit it, then threw the gold lighter angrily into her handbag. ‘So, that’s that,’ she said.

  Jimmy came trotting back to the car. ‘Categories two and three,’ he said.

  ‘Not general?’ Kiki said.

  ‘No, mobilisation partiale – it’s in big letters.’ He got behind the wheel, then sat there. ‘I’m in category three, so I’ll be on the train at dawn, Monsieur Stahl. I’m very sorry, but I have to go and fight. I’m sure Zolly will find someone for you.’

  ‘Can you take us up to the party?’ Kiki said. ‘Later we’ll find a taxi.’

  ‘There won’t be any taxis,’ Jimmy said. ‘The drivers will be home, packing and saying goodbye.’

  ‘Then we’ll use the Métro, or we’ll walk,’ Kiki said. ‘And if they start bombing us, we’ll run.’

  ‘What sort of unit are you in, Jimmy?’ Stahl said.

  ‘Infantry,’ Jimmy said, and put the car in gear.

  War came to the ‘very different crowd’ that night, its long shadow sometimes a presence in the room, but the crowd fought back; defiant and merry and to hell with everything. They had the radio on, tuned to Radio Paris, the official state network, which played light classical music interrupted by news bulletins: mobilized men must report to their units in the east, extra trains would be running from the Gare de l’Est on the Boulevard de Strasbourg. And the government wished to emphasize that war had not been declared. ‘Yet!’ cried the party guests every time they heard the announcement. Of the thirty or so people crammed into an artist’s studio, four or five of the men had been mobilized. Somebody said, ‘We who are about to die salute you,’ and that set the wits among them to shouting every possible obscene variation on the phrase. It kept them busy, it kept them amused, it chased the doom away.

  The party was on a barge, tied up to a wharf in a long line of working barges where the city of Paris bordered the industrial suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt. The host, a cheerful old gent in a paint-spattered shirt, had a huge tangled grey beard with a bread-crumb caught in the middle. He gave Kiki a powerful hug, put his arm around Stahl’s shoulders, and led them both around the room. He’d built himself a studio on the barge; removed some of the deck planking and installed a set of angled windows above the curve of the bow. So, with little space for hanging paintings, he’d used easels to display his work. Not Picasso, but not bad, in Stahl’s opinion. After the tour they found a place to sit, Stahl took off his jacket and tie and turned up the cuffs of his shirt, while Kiki slipped out of her embroidered jacket. ‘It’s from Schiaparelli,’ she told a woman who asked. Mildly abstract nudes seemed to be the artist’s favoured style. One of which, a few feet from where Stahl and Kiki sat – on a love seat obviously rescued from a fire – had a face Stahl recognized. There was Kiki de Saint-Ange, lying languorous and seductive on a sofa, a ‘Naked Maja’ that imitated the Goya painting. ‘I see you keep looking at that,’ she said, teasing him. ‘It’s not a bad likeness, though I seem to have been grey-green that afternoon.’

  They called him ‘Fredric’, the men and women getting drunk together on strong, sour wine poured from ceramic jugs, smoking up the host’s hashish, petting the barge cats, now and then each other. The barge’s bedroom, partly obscured by a lank curtain, served those who simply had to shed their black sweaters and make love despite the coming storm, or because of it. Two or three of the guests told Stahl he looked familiar, had they met before? Stahl just smiled and said he didn’t think so. What with the long hours at the baroness’s party, he was tired of being the Fredric Stahl and had packed it in for the night.

  Needing some air, he made his way up to the deck, then noticed a young man who’d apparently done the same thing. He was one of those heading east in the morning and when their eyes met Stahl thought he might be close to tears – perhaps he’d sought privacy for that reason. They stood there in silence, then the man spoke. ‘You know, my life hasn’t been too bad, lately,’ he said, voice unsteady. ‘But now those bastards are going to get me killed.’ He shook his head and said, ‘No luck. No luck at all.’ Stahl didn’t answer, there was no answer. He just stared at the silent lights across the river and felt the heavy current in the deck beneath his feet. He had half turned to rejoin the party when there was a white flash that lit the clouds in the eastern sky, followed by a sharp crack of thunder. Maybe. Stahl and the young man looked at each other. Finally Stahl said, ‘I think that’s thunder.’ The young man nodded, yes, probably thunder. Then they went back to the party.

  Stahl and Kiki left sometime around three in the morning – long after the last Métro at eleven-thirty – and set out to walk back to the Seventh, where Kiki had an apartment. There were no taxis, the streets were deserted. They were not far from the apartment when suddenly, out of nowhere, the city’s air-raid sirens began to wail. They stopped dead, listened for the sound of aeroplane engines, and stared up into the rain. ‘Should we do something?’ Stahl said. ‘Go indoors?’

  ‘Where?’ Kiki said.

  The buildings were dark, the shops had their shutters rolled down. ‘I guess we won’t,’ Stahl said. They trudged on, past piles of sand in the streets. Somebody at the part
y had told them about the sand, delivered throughout the city by sanitation workers, meant to be taken up to the roof and stored there, in case the Germans dropped incendiary bombs. ‘Then,’ the guest said, ‘when a bomb falls on your roof and starts to burn, you use the sand to put out the fire, and you must remember to bring a shovel. But in Paris nobody has a shovel, so maybe a spoon.’

  At last, exhausted and soaked, they reached Kiki’s door, where she kissed him quickly on the lips and went inside. Then it was a long walk back to the Claridge, and after four when he got there. The desk clerk took one look at him and said, ‘I’ll send someone up to get your suit, sir. We’ll press it, it will be as good as new, sir, you’ll see.’ In the room, Stahl took everything off, put on a bathrobe, and waited for the porter. Standing at the window, he searched the sky, but no bombs fell on Paris that night.

  When the telephone woke him at nine, Stahl struggled to sit up and reached for a cigarette. On the other end of the line, an excited Jules Deschelles. ‘All is not lost!’ Deschelles said. ‘Have you seen the papers? Daladier and Chamberlain are going to Munich to meet with Hitler, a last chance for peace.’ Daladier was the Premier of France, Chamberlain the Prime Minister of Great Britain.

  ‘I thought the war would begin today,’ Stahl said.

  ‘Oh no, not yet, there’s still hope. We’ve lost Emile Simon, our director, he’s been called back to Belgium. However, they might let him go, we’ll see. Then some of the crew, grips and electricians, were sent to their units in Alsace – we’ll see about them as well. So, there will be a delay, but don’t book passage, the movie will somehow get made.’

  ‘What will happen to the Czechs?’

  For a moment, Deschelles was silent, then he said, ‘Who knows? Perhaps they will fight, perhaps they won’t. Are you concerned about that?’

  ‘Well, I don’t want to see them occupied.’

  ‘No, of course not, nobody wants that,’ Deschelles said. ‘I just felt I should make sure you aren’t worried about the film. And there’s a lot we can get done while all this madness works itself out.’

  ‘I can learn lines,’ Stahl said.

  ‘That’s the spirit! And I’ll have our costume designer get in touch with you, perhaps today or tomorrow.’

  ‘Good. I’ll wait for the call.’

  Deschelles said goodbye and hung up. Stahl tried to go back to sleep.

  29 September. The costume designer, a woman named Renate Steiner, had arranged to meet with Stahl at her workroom, in Building K at the Paramount studios in Joinville, a working-class suburb southeast of Paris. He’d then telephoned Zolly Louis, who told Stahl he was still looking for a driver. ‘I’d be happy to do it myself,’ Zolly said, ‘but I don’t drive so much, maybe you can find a taxi.’ In fact there was a taxi, on the morning of the twenty-ninth, waiting near the front of the Claridge. The driver was an old man in a clean white shirt buttoned at the throat, who had an artificial hand – a leather cup enclosing the wrist, a leather glove with thumb and fingers set in a half-curled position. ‘A German did that to me,’ the driver said as they drove off. ‘I could get a better one, but it’s expensive.’ He explained that the taxi belonged to his son. ‘Just now he’s driving an army truck, up around Lille, much good it will do him or anybody else,’ he said and spat out the window.

  In time they reached Joinville and the driver, when Stahl handed him a hundred francs – twenty dollars – agreed to wait until Stahl was done with his appointment. The studios were vast – bought by Paramount in 1930, then used as a movie factory, making as many as fourteen versions of a new film in fourteen languages spoken by fourteen casts, thus making money fourteen times out of a single vehicle. This was possible because everybody everywhere liked to go to the movies, talking movies that talked in their own language. So the classic line of the American Saturday night: Say, honey, whattaya say we take in the new show at the Bijou? was repeated in its own linguistic version around the world. And still was, though by the time Stahl reached Joinville it had, with the development of new sound technology, become a dubbing studio: an actor moved his lips in French, the audience heard Spanish.

  Stahl, in the course of a long search for Building K, stopped for a time to watch a moustachioed gaucho with a guitar singing ‘te amo’ to a señorita on a balcony as the cameraman peered through his lens and the technicians squatted out of the frame. It was mostly, at Joinville, pretty much the same movie – love ignited, love thwarted, love triumphant. Just like, Stahl told himself with an inner smile, Hollywood.

  Eventually, he found what he was looking for: a one-storey, rust-stained stucco Building K, situated between Building R and Building 22 – the French were staunchly committed anarchists when it suited them. Renate Steiner’s workroom was spacious, long wooden tables held bolts of fabric, boxes of buttons in every colour and size, boxes of zips, cloth flowers, snips of material (I’ll want that later), and spools of thread, attended by every imaginable species of mannequin – from wire mesh to stained cotton, some of them in costume: here a Zouave, there a king’s ermine, and in between a pirate’s striped shirt and a convict’s striped outfit.

  Steiner sat before a sewing machine, matt black from constant use, SINGER in gold letters across the side. As she looked up to see who her visitor was, she ceased working the pedals and the two-stroke music of the machine slowed, then stopped. ‘Fredric Stahl,’ she said, her voice pleased to see him. ‘I’m Renate Steiner. Thank you for coming out here.’ She stood and said, ‘Let me find you a place to sit,’ walked to the end of the table and whipped a caveman’s bearskin off a chair. As she moved her own chair to face his, she said, ‘Not too much trouble finding me?’

  ‘Not so much – I’m used to studio lots.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Still, people get horribly lost out here.’ She settled herself in the chair and took off her silver-rimmed glasses.

  She was in her early forties, he guessed – a few silver strands in dark hair stylishly cut to look chopped off and practical – and wore a blue work smock that buttoned up the front. Sitting close to her, he saw that she was very fair-skinned, with a sharp line to her jaw and a pointy nose that suggested mischief, the tip faintly reddened in the chill of the unheated room. Her eyes were a faded blue, her smile ironic, and subtly challenging. The face of an intellectual, he thought – she would be partial to symphonies and serious books. She was dressed for the chill, in a long, loose skirt, thick black wool stockings, and laced, low-heeled boots. She wore no make-up he could see but somehow didn’t need it, looking scrubbed and sensible.

  ‘So then,’ she said. ‘Après la Guerre, an appealing title, isn’t it, what with … everything going on right now. What do you think of the script?’

  ‘I’ve read through it a couple of times, and I’m almost done with the book – normally I would have finished it but it kept putting me to sleep.’

  ‘Yes, I felt the same way, but the script is better. Much better, would you say?’

  From Stahl, a nod of enthusiasm. ‘It has real possibilities, depending on who directs – Jules Deschelles was going to tell me who will replace Emile Simon but so far he hasn’t. A lot will depend on how it’s shot, on the music, and … but you know all that. You’ve been doing this for a while, no?’

  ‘Ten years, give or take. I started in Germany, with UFA, but we, my husband and I, had to leave when Hitler took power in ’33. We weren’t the sort of people he wanted in Germany – my husband was a journalist, a little too far to the left. So, late at night, we ran like hell and took only whatever money we had in the house. I wondered if we weren’t just scaring ourselves with this whole Nazi business but, a month after we left, some of our old friends disappeared, and you know what’s gone on there since ’33. After all, you’re from Vienna, or so I’ve read, anyhow.’

  ‘I left when I was sixteen, but that had to do with family, not politics. Later I went back for a few years, then lived in Paris before they brought me out to Hollywood.’

  ‘Do you lik
e it there?’

  ‘I try to. I don’t think anybody actually likes it, not the people I talk to. Mostly they feel some mixture of gratitude and anxiety, because it pays a lot but after a while you discover it’s perilous – you can really say the wrong thing to the wrong person, and it’s probably wise to understand that a career in movies is temporary. On the other hand, I like America. Well, I like Americans, I’m not sorry to be one of them, as much as I am.’

  She shrugged. ‘You’re an émigré, like us. I don’t suppose you’d prefer to speak German, we can.’

  ‘Oh no, I have to speak French right now, think in French as much as possible.’

  She was silent for a moment, then, for no particular reason, smiled at him. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I suppose we have to go to work, get you measured up to be Colonel Vadic. Where’s he from, your colonel?’

  ‘“A Slav” is all it says in the script. In the book he’s from somewhere in the Balkans.’

  ‘Deschelles saw something there, in the book, let’s hope he was right,’ she said, then stood and drew a rolled yellow tape measure out of the pocket of her smock. ‘Could you stand in front of my mirror?’

  Stahl stepped onto a wooden platform in front of the mirror. Renate Steiner took a long, appraising look at him and said, ‘You’re nice and tall, aren’t you. Thank heaven, or your forebears. There are some very handsome, very short actors in this business, and the producer has to cast a very short woman as the love interest or the actor has to stand on a box.’ She found a pad and pencil on the table and said, ‘Could you hold your left arm out straight, palm facing me?’

  Stahl did as he was told. Renate put her glasses back on, clamped the pencil between her teeth, then stretched the tape from the tip of his middle finger to his armpit. She studied the tape where it met his finger, steadied the end under his arm, and said, ‘You’re not ticklish, are you?’

  ‘Not for a long time.’

  ‘That makes this easier, now and then we’ve had comedy in here.’ She let the tape go and wrote down the measurement and said, ‘By the way, may I call you Fredric?’