The Foreign Correspondent (22 page)

Weisz felt like an idiot, Ferrara caught his eye and looked to heaven,
what have we done
? They were led to a table, and Kolb ordered champagne, the only available beverage, delivered by a waitress dressed in a money pouch on a red sash. “You don’t want no change, do you?” she said.

“No,” Kolb said, accepting the inevitable. “I suppose not.”

“Very good,” she answered, her blue behind wobbling as she plodded away.

“What is she, Greek, you think?” Kolb said.

“Somewhere down there,” Weisz said. “Maybe Turkish.”

“Want to try another place?”

“Do you?” Weisz said to Ferrara.

“Oh, let’s have this bottle, then we’ll like it better.”

They had to work at it, the champagne was dreadful, and barely cool, but did in time elevate their spirits, and kept Weisz from falling dead asleep with his head on the table. Momo Tsipler sang a Viennese love song, and that got Kolb talking about Vienna, in the old days, before the
Anschluss
—the tiny Dollfuss, not five feet tall, the chancellor of Austria until the Nazis killed him in
1934
—and the infinitely bizarre personality—high culture, low lovelife—of that city. “All those high-breasted fraus in the pastry shops, noses in the air, proper as the day is long, well, I knew a fellow called Wolfi, a salesman of ladies’ undergarments, and he once told me…”

Ferrara excused himself and disappeared into the crowd. Kolb went on with his story, for a time, then wound down to silence when the colonel emerged with a dancing partner. Kolb watched them for a moment, then said, “Say this for him, he certainly picked the best.”

She was. Brassy blond hair in a French roll, a sulky face accented by a heavy lower lip, and a body both lithe and fulsome, which she clearly liked to show off, all of it alive and animated as she danced. The two of them made, in fact, an attractive couple. Momo Tsipler, his fingers walking up and down the keyboard, swiveled around on his piano stool for a better view, then gave them a grand Viennese wink, somewhere well beyond lewd.

“There is something I want to ask you,” Weisz said.

Kolb wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to be asked—he’d perfectly heard a certain note in Weisz’s voice, he’d heard it before, and always it preceded inquiries that touched on his vocation. “Oh? And what is that?”

Weisz laid out a condensed version of the OVRA attack on the
Liberazione
committee. Bottini’s murder, the interrogation of Véronique, Salamone’s lost job, his own experience on the place Concorde.

Kolb knew exactly what he was talking about. “What is it you want?” he said.

“Can you help us?”

“Not me,” Kolb said. “I don’t make decisions like that, you’d have to ask Mr. Brown, and he’d have to ask someone else, and the final answer would be, I expect, no.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Pretty much, I am. Our business is always quiet, to do what has to be done, then fade into the night. We aren’t in Paris to pick a fight with another service. That’s bad form, Weisz, that’s not the way this work is done.”

“But you oppose Mussolini. Certainly the British government does.”

“What gave you that idea?”

“You’re having an antifascist book written, creating an opposition hero, and that’s not fading into the night.”

Kolb was amused. “Written, yes. Published, we’ll see. I have no special information, but I would bet you ten francs that the diplomats are hard at it to bring Mussolini over to our side, just like last time, just like
1915
. If that doesn’t work, then, maybe, we’ll attack him, and it will be time for the book to appear.”

“Still, no matter what happens politically, you’ll want the support of the émigrés.”

“It’s always nice to have friends, but they’re not the crucial element, by far, not. We’re a traditional service, and we operate on the classic assumptions. Which means we concentrate on the three
C
’s: Crown, Capital, and Clergy. That’s where the influence is, that’s how a state changes sides, when the leader, king, premier, whatever he calls himself, and the big money—captains of industry—and the religious leaders, whatever God they pray to, when these people want a new policy, then things change. So, émigrés can help, but they’re famously a pain in the ass, every day some new problem. Forgive me, Weisz, for being frank with you, but it’s the same with journalists—journalists work for other people, for Capital, and that’s who gets to tell them what to write. Nations are run by oligarchies, by whoever’s powerful, and that’s where any service will commit its resources, and that’s what we’re doing in Italy.”

Weisz wasn’t so very good at hiding his reactions, Kolb could see what he felt. “I’m telling you something you don’t know?”

“No, you aren’t, it all makes sense. But we don’t know where to turn, and we’re going to lose the newspaper.”

The music stopped, it was time for the Wienerwald Companions to take a break—the drummer wiped his face with a handkerchief, the violinist lit a fresh cigarette. Ferrara and his partner walked over to the bar and waited to be served.

“Look,” Kolb said. “You’re working hard for us, never mind the money, and Brown appreciates what you’re doing, that’s why you’re being treated to a big night. Of course, this doesn’t mean he’ll get us into a war with the Italians, but—by the way, we never had this conversation—but, maybe, if you come up with something in return, we might talk to somebody in one of the French services.”

Ferrara and his new friend came over to the table, champagne cocktails in hand. Weisz stood up to offer her his chair, but she waved him off and settled on Ferrara’s lap. “Hello everybody,” she said. “I am Irina.” She had a heavy Russian accent.

After that, she ignored them, moving around on Ferrara’s lap, toying with his hair, giggling and carrying on, whispering answers to whatever he was saying in her ear. Finally, he said to Kolb, “Don’t bother looking for me when you go back to the hotel.” Then, to Weisz: “And I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

“We can take you wherever you’re going, in the taxi,” Kolb said.

Ferrara smiled. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll find my way home.”

A few minutes later, they left, Irina clinging to his arm. Kolb said good night, then gave them a few minutes, enough for her to get dressed. He looked at his watch as he stood up to leave. “Some nights…” he said with a sigh, and left it at that. Weisz could see he wasn’t pleased—now he would have to spend hours, likely till dawn, sitting in the back of the taxi and watching some doorway, God only knew where.

11
May. Salamone called an editorial committee meeting for midday. As Weisz arrived, hurrying up the street, he saw Salamone and a few other
giellisti
standing silent in front of the Café Europa. Why? Was it locked? When Weisz joined them, he saw why. The entry to the café was blocked by a few scrap boards nailed across the door. Inside, shelves of broken bottles rose above the bar, in front of a charred wall. The ceiling was black, as were the tables and chairs, tumbled this way and that on the tile floor, amid puddles of black water. The bitter smell of dead fire, of burnt plaster and paint, hung in the air on the street.

Salamone didn’t comment, his face said it all. From the others, hands in pockets, a subdued greeting. Finally, Salamone said, “I guess we’ll have to meet somewhere else,” but his voice was low and defeated.

“Maybe the station buffet, at the Gare du Nord,” the benefactor said.

“Good idea,” Weisz said. “It’s just a few minutes’ walk.”

They headed for the railway station, and entered the crowded buffet. The waiter was helpful, found them a table for five, but there were people all around them, who glanced over as the forlorn little group settled themselves and ordered coffees. “Not an easy place to talk,” Salamone said. “But then, I don’t think we have much to say.”

“Are you sure, Arturo?” the professor from Siena said. “I mean, it’s a shock, to see something like that. No accident, I think.”

“No, not an accident,” Elena said.

“It’s maybe not the moment to make decisions,” the benefactor said. “Why not wait a day or two, then we’ll see how we feel.”

“I’d like to agree,” Salamone said. “But this has gone on long enough.”

“Where is everybody?” Elena said.

“That’s the problem, Elena,” Salamone said. “I spoke to the lawyer yesterday. He didn’t resign, officially, but when I telephoned, he told me his apartment had been robbed. A terrible mess, he said. They’d spent all night trying to clean it up, everything thrown on the floor, broken glasses and dishes.”

“Did he call the police?” the Sienese professor said.

“Yes, he did. They said such things happened all the time. Asked for a list of stolen items.”

“And our friend from Venice?”

“Don’t know,” Salamone said. “He said he would be here, but he hasn’t shown up, so now it’s just the five of us.”

“That’s enough,” Elena said.

“I think we have to postpone the next issue,” Weisz said, to spare Salamone from saying it.

“And give them what they want,” Elena said.

“Well,” Salamone said, “we can’t go on until we can find a way to fight back, and nobody’s come up with a way to do that. Suppose some detective from the
Préfecture
agreed to take the case, what then? Assign twenty men to watch all of us? Day and night? Until they caught somebody? This is never going to happen, and the OVRA perfectly well know it won’t.”

“So,” the Sienese professor said, “it’s finished?”

“Postponed,” Salamone said. “Which is perhaps a nice word for
finished
. I suggest we skip a month, wait until June, then we’ll meet once more. Elena, do you agree?”

She shrugged, unwilling to say the words.

“Sergio?”

“Agreed,” the benefactor said.

“Zerba?”

“I’ll go along with the committee,” the Sienese professor said.

“And Carlo.”

“Wait until June,” Weisz said.

“Very well. It’s unanimous.”

Agent
207
was precise, in a report to the OVRA delivered in Paris the following day, on the decision and the vote of the committee. Which meant, once the report reached the
Pubblica Sicurezza
committee in Rome, that their operation was not yet complete. Their objective was to finish
Liberazione
—not postpone its publication—and make an example, to let the others, Communist, socialist, Catholic, see what happened to those who dared to oppose fascism. Then, too, they were great believers in the seventeenth-century English adage, coined in civil war, which said, “He that draws his sword against his prince must throw away the scabbard.” Thus inspired, they determined that the Paris operation, as planned, with dates and targets and various actions, would continue.

The conductor on the
7:15
Paris/Genoa Express was approached on the fourteenth of May. After the train left the station at Lyons, the passengers slept, or read, or watched the springtime fields passing by the windows, and the conductor headed for the baggage car. There he found two friends: a dining-car waiter, and a sleeping-car porter, playing two-handed
scopa,
using a steamer trunk turned on its side for a card table. “Care to join us?” the waiter said. The conductor agreed, and was dealt a hand.

They played for a time, gossiping and joking, then the sound of the train, the beat of the engine and the wheels on the track, rose sharply as the door at the end of the car was opened. They looked up, to see a uniformed inspector of the
Milizia Ferroviaria,
the railway police, called Gennaro, who they’d known for years.

The railway police were Mussolini’s way of enforcing his most noted achievement, making the trains run on time. This was the result of a determined effort in the early
1920
s, after a train headed for Turin arrived four hundred hours behind schedule, much too late. But that was long ago, when Italy seemed to be following Russia into Bolshevism, and the trains often stopped, for long periods, so the trainworkers could participate in political meetings. Those days were over, but the
Milizia Ferroviaria
still rode the trains, now investigating crimes against the regime.

“Gennaro, come and play
scopa,
” the waiter said, and the inspector pulled a suitcase up to the steamer trunk.

Fresh cards were dealt and they started a new game. “Tell me,” Gennaro said to the conductor, “you ever see anybody on this train with one of those secret newspapers?”

“Secret newspapers?”

“Oh come on, you know what I mean.”

“On this train? You mean a passenger, reading it?”

“No. Somebody taking them down to Genoa. Bundled up, maybe.”

“Not me. Did you ever see that?” he asked the waiter.

“No. I never did.”

“What about you?” he asked the porter.

“No, not me either. Of course, if it’s the Communists, you’d never know about it, they’d have some secret way of doing it.”

“That’s true,” the conductor said. “Maybe you should look for the Communists.”

“Are they on this train?”

“This train? Oh no, we wouldn’t have that. I mean, you can’t talk to those guys.”

“So, you think it’s the Communists,” Gennaro said.

The waiter played a three of cups, from the forty-card Italian deck, the conductor answered with a six of coins, and the porter said, “Hah!”

Gennaro stared at his cards for a moment, then said, “But it’s not a Communist paper. That’s what they tell me.”

“Who then?”

“The GL, they say, it’s their paper.” Cautiously, he laid down a six of cups.

“Sure you want to do that?” the waiter said.

Gennaro nodded. The waiter took the trick with a ten of swords.

“Who knows,” the conductor said, “they’re all the same to me, those political types. All they do is argue, they don’t like this, they don’t like that.
Va Napoli,
is what I say to them.” Go to Naples, which meant
fuck you.

The waiter dealt the cards for the next hand. “Maybe it’s in the baggage,” the waiter said. “We could be playing on it right now.”

Gennaro looked around, at trunks and suitcases piled everywhere. “They search that at the border,” he said.