The Foreign Correspondent

“Yes, I’m here. The lines have been bad all day,” he said. Then: “We’ll meet at four, can you be there at four?”

She agreed.

Weisz left the office at three-thirty. Outside, the shadow of war lay over the city-people walked quickly, faces closed, eyes down, while Wehrmacht staff cars sped by, and Grosser Mercedes, flying pennants on their front bumpers, were lined up at the entry to the Adlon. Passing knots of guests in the lobby, he twice heard the word again. And, a few minutes later, the shadow was in his room. “Now it’s coming,” Christa said.

“I think so.” They were sitting side by side on the edge of the bed. “Christa,” he said.

“Yes?”

“When I leave, on Sunday, I want you to come with me. Take whatever you can, bring the dogs-they have dogs in Paris-and meet me at the ten-forty express, on the platform by the first-class wagons- lits.”

“I can’t,” she said. “Not now. I can’t leave.” She looked around the room, as though someone were hiding there, as though there might be something she could see. “It isn’t von Schirren,” she said. “It’s my friends, I cannot just, abandon them.” Her eyes met his, making sure he understood her. “They need me.”

Weisz hesitated, then said, “Forgive me, Christa, but, what you are doing, you and your friends, will it really change anything?”

“Who can say? But what I do know is that if I don’t do something, it will change me.”

He started to counter, then saw it wouldn’t matter, she would not be persuaded. The more danger threatened, he realized, the less she would run from it. “Allright,” he said, giving in, “we’ll meet on Friday.”

“Yes,” she said, “but not to say goodby. To make plans. Because I will come to Paris, if you want me to. A few months, maybe, it’s only a matter of time-it can’t go on like this.”

Weisz nodded. Of course. It couldn’t. “I don’t like saying this, but if, for some reason, I’m not here on Friday, stop at the desk. I’ll leave a letter for you.”

“You think you won’t be here?”

“It’s possible. If something important happens, they could send me anywhere.”

There was no more to say. She leaned against him, took his hand, and held it.

The morning of the fourteenth, the temperature dropped to ten degrees and it started to snow, a bad spring snow, thick and heavy. Perhaps that made a difference, perhaps it cooled tempers, in a city muffled and silent. The phones rang only now and then-tipsters calling in to report the same rumor: diplomats would defuse the crisis-and the teleprinter was quiet. Cables from the London office demanded news, but the only news was in London, where, late in the morning, Chamberlain issued a statement: when Britain and France had committed to protect Czechoslovakia from aggression, they’d meant military aggression, and this crisis was diplomatic. Weisz got back to the hotel after seven, tired, and alone.

At four-thirty in the morning, the telephone rang. Weisz rolled out of bed, staggered to the desk, and picked up the receiver. “Yes?”

The connection was terrible. Through crackling static, Delahanty’s voice was just barely audible. “Hello, Carlo, it’s me. How is it there?”

“It’s snowing. Hard.”

“Start packing, laddie. We’ve heard that German troops are leaving their barracks in the Sudetenland. Which means that Hitler’s done talking to the Czechs, and that puts you on the first train to Prague. Our man in the Prague office is down in Slovakia-independent Slovakia, this morning-where they’ve closed the border. Now, I’m looking at a timetable, and there’s a train at five-twenty-five. We’ve cabled the Prague office, they’re expecting you, and there’s a room for you at the Zlata Husa. Anything else you need?”

“No, I’m on my way.”

“Call or cable, when you get there.”

Weisz went into the bathroom, turned on the cold water, and splashed his face. How did Delahanty, in Paris, know about German troop movements? Well, he had his sources. Very good sources. Dark sources, perhaps. Weisz packed quickly, lit a cigarette, then, from his overcoat pocket, he took the list he’d received from Christa’s friend, thought for a moment, and hunted through his briefcase until he found a twelve-page press release-“Steel Production in the Saar Valley, 1936–1939.” He carefully removed the staple, inserted the list of names between pages ten and eleven, refixed the staple, then slid the revised document into the middle of a sheaf of similar papers. Short of calling on a clandestine tailor at four in the morning, that was the best he could do.

Then, on a sheet of Adlon stationery, he wrote: My love, they’ve sent me to Prague, and I’ll likely return to Paris when that’s done. I’ll write you from there, I’ll wait for you there. I love you, Carlo.

He put the letter in an envelope, addressed it Frau von S., sealed it, and left it at the desk when he checked out.

On the 5:25 express, Berlin/Dresden/Prague, Weisz joined two other journalists in a first-class compartment: Simard, a sharply dressed little weasel from Havas, the French wire service, and Ian Hamilton, in a fur hat with flaps, from the Times of London. “I guess you’ve heard what I’ve heard,” Weisz said, stowing his valise above the plush seat.

“No luck at all, the sorry bastards,” Hamilton said. “Adolf will have them now.”

Simard shrugged. “Yes, the poor Czechs, but they have Paris and London to thank for this.”

They settled in for the four-hour trip-at least that, maybe more with the snow. Simard slept, Hamilton read the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. “Article on Italy today,” he said to Weisz. “Have you seen it?”

“No. What’s it about?”

“The state of Italian politics, struggle against the antifascist forces. Which are all Bolshevik-influenced, they’d have you believe.”

Weisz shrugged, nothing new there.

Hamilton scanned the page, then read, ”’…thwarted by the patriotic forces of the OVRA…’ Tell me, Weisz, what does that stand for? You see it now and again, but mostly they just use the initials.”

“It’s said to mean Organizzazione di Vigilanza e Repressione dell‘ Antifascismo, which would be the Organization for the Vigilant Repression of Antifascism, but there’s another version. I’ve heard that it comes from a memo Mussolini wrote, where he said he wanted a national police organization, with tentacles that would reach into Italian life like a piovra, which is a mythical giant octopus. But the word was mistyped as ovra, and Mussolini liked the sound of it, thought it was frightening, so OVRA became the official name.”

“Really,” Hamilton said. “That’s worth knowing.” He took out a pad and pen and wrote down the story. “Watch out, it’s the piovra!”

Weisz’s grin was tart. “Not so funny, in real life,” he said.

“No, I suppose it isn’t. Still, it’s hard to take the man seriously.”

“Yes, I know,” Weisz said. Mussolini, the comic buffoon, a widely held view, but what he’d done wasn’t comic at all.

Hamilton gave up on the German paper. “Care for a look?”

“No thanks.”

Hamilton reached into his briefcase and opened to a dog-eared page in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. “Better for train trips,” he said.

Weisz looked out the window, hypnotized by the falling snow, thinking mostly about Christa, about her coming to Paris. Then he got out the Malraux novel and started reading, but, three or four pages later, he dozed off.

It was Hamilton’s voice that woke him. “Well, well,” he said, “look who’s here.” The railroad tracks, following the river Elbe, now ran by the road, where, dimly visible through the driving snow, a Wehrmacht column was headed south, toward Prague. Truckloads of infantry huddled under canvas tops, skidding motorcycles, ambulances, occasional staff cars. The three journalists watched in silence, then, after a few minutes, went back to conversation, but the column never ended, and, an hour later, when the track crossed to the other side of the river, it was still moving slowly down the snow-covered road. At the