The Foreign Correspondent

“No, it’s allright. I’m a journalist.”

“Try and stand.”

He was very wobbly, but he managed. “Maybe a taxi,” he said.

“They don’t stick around, when these things happen. How about a cafe?”

“Yes, that’s a good idea.”

“See who hit you?”

“No.”

“Any idea why?”

“No idea.”

The flic shook his head-saw too much of human nature and didn’t like it. “Maybe just for fun. Anyhow, let’s try for the cafe.”

He held Weisz up on one side and walked him slowly over to the rue de Rivoli, where a tourist cafe had emptied out as soon as the fighting started. Weisz sat down hard, a waiter brought him a glass of water and a bar towel. “You can’t go home like that,” he said.

Weisz invited Salamone out for dinner the following night-by way of encouraging a friend in difficulties. They met at a little Italian place out in the Thirteenth, the second-best Italian restaurant in Paris-the best owned by a well-known supporter of Mussolini, so there they could not go. “What happened to you?” Salamone said, as Weisz arrived.

Weisz had gone to his doctor that morning, and now wore a white gauze bandage on the left side of his face, badly scraped by the rough surface of a cobblestone, and a puffy red mark below his temple on the other side. His new glasses would be ready in a day or two. “A street demonstration last night,” he told Salamone. “Somebody hit me.”

“I’ll say they did. Who was it?”

“I have no idea.”

“No confrontation?”

“He was behind me, ran away, and I never saw him.”

“What, somebody followed you? Somebody, ah, we know?”

“I thought about it all night. With a handkerchief tied around my head.”

“And?”

“Nothing else makes sense. People don’t just do that.”

Salamone’s oath was more in sorrow than in anger. He poured red wine from a large carafe into two straight-sided glasses, then handed Weisz a bread stick. “It can’t go on like this,” he said, an Italian echo of il faut en finir. “And it could have been worse.”

“Yes,” Weisz said. “I thought about that, too.”

“What do we do, Carlo?”

“I don’t know.” He gave Salamone a menu, and opened his own. Cured ham, spring lamb with baby artichokes and potatoes, early greens-from the south of France, he supposed-then figs preserved in syrup.

“A feast,” Salamone said.

“That’s what I intended,” Weisz said. “For morale.” He raised his glass, “Salute.”

Salamone took a second sip. “This isn’t Chianti,” he said. “It’s, maybe, Barolo.”

“Something very good,” Weisz said.

They looked over at the proprietor, by the cash register, whose nod and smile acknowledged what he’d done: Enjoy it, boys, I know who you are. Saying thank-you, Weisz and Salamone raised their glasses to him.

Weisz signaled the waiter and ordered the grand dinners. “Are you managing?” he said to Salamone.

“More or less. My wife is angry with me-this politics, enough is enough. And she hates the idea of taking charity.”

“And the girls?”

“They don’t say much-they’re grown, and they have their own lives. They were in their twenties when we came here in ‘thirty-two, and they’re getting to be more French than Italian.” Salamone paused, then said, “Our pharmacist is gone, by the way. He’s going to take a few months off, as he put it, until things cool down. Also the engineer, a note. He regrets, but goodby.”

“Anyone else?”

“Not yet, but we’ll lose a few more, before this is over. In time, it could be just Elena, who’s a fighter, and our benefactor, you and me, maybe the lawyer-he’s thinking it over-and our friend from Siena.”

“Always smiling.”

“Yes, not much bothers him. He takes it all in stride, Signor Zerba.”

“Anything about the job, at the gas company?”

“No, but I may have something else, from another friend, at a warehouse out in Levallois.”

“Levallois! A long way-does the Metro go out there?”

“Close enough. You take a bus, or walk, after the last stop.”

“Can you use the car?”

“The poor thing, no, I don’t think so. The gasoline is expensive, and the tires, well, you know.”

“Arturo, you can’t work in a warehouse, you’re fifty…what? Three?”

“Six. But it’s just a checker’s job, crates in and out. A friend of ours pretty much runs the union, so it’s a real offer.”

The waiter approached with plates bearing slices of brick-colored ham. “Basta,” Salamone said, enough. “Here’s our dinner, so we’ll talk about life and love. Salute, Carlo.”

They kept work out of it for the duration of the dinner, which was very good, the leg of young lamb roasted with garlic, the early greens fresh and carefully picked over. When they’d finished the figs in syrup, and lit cigarettes to go with their espressos, Salamone said, “I guess the real question is, if we can’t protect ourselves, who is there to protect us? The police-the people at the Prefecture?”

“Not likely,” Weisz said. “Oh officer, we’re engaged in illegal operations against a neighbor country, and, as they’re attacking us, we’d like you to help us out.”

“I guess that’s right. It is, technically, illegal.”

“Technically nothing, it’s illegal, period. The French have laws against everything, then they pick and choose. For the moment we’re tolerated, for political expediency, but I don’t think we qualify for protection. My inspector at the Surete won’t even admit I’m the editor of Liberazione, though he surely knows I am. I’m a friend of the editor, the way he puts it. Very French, that approach.”

“So, we’re on our own.”

“We are.”

“Then how do we fight back? What do we use for weapons?”

“You don’t mean guns, do you?”

Salamone shrugged, and his “No” was tentative. “Maybe influence, favors. That too is French.”

“And what do we do for them in return? They don’t do favors here.”

“They don’t do favors anywhere.”

“The inspector at the Surete, as I told you, asked us to publish the real list, from Berlin. Should we do that?”

“Mannaggia no!”

“So then,” Weisz said, “what?”

“How do the English feel about you, lately?”

“Christ, I’d rather publish the list.”

“Could be we’re fucked, Carlo.”

“Could be. What about the next edition? Farewell?”

“That hurts my heart. But we have to think about it.”

“Fine,” Weisz said. “We’ll think.”

After dinner, walking from the Luxembourg Metro to the Hotel Tournon for his evening session with Ferrara,