Weisz passed a car, parked facing him, on the rue de Medicis. It was an unusual car for this quarter-it would not have been remarkable over in the Eighth, on the grand boulevards, or up in snooty Passy, but maybe he would have noticed it anyhow. Because it was an Italian car, a champagne-colored Lancia sedan, the aristocrat of the line, with a chauffeur, in proper cap and uniform, sitting stiff and straight behind the wheel.
In back, a man with carefully brushed silver hair, gleaming with brilliantine, and a thin silver mustache. On the lapels of his gray silk suit, an Order of the Crown of Italy, and a silver Fascist party pin. This was a type of man that Weisz easily recognized: fine manners, scented powder, and a certain supercilious contempt for anyone beneath him in the social order-most of the world. Weisz slowed for a moment, didn’t quite stop, then continued on. This momentary hesitation appeared to interest the silvery man, whose eyes acknowledged his presence, then pointedly looked away, as though Weisz’s existence was of little concern.
It was almost nine by the time Weisz arrived at Ferrara’s room. They were still working on the colonel’s time in Marseilles, where he’d found a job at a stall in the fish market, where he’d been discovered by a French journalist, then defamed in the Italian fascist press, and where, in time, he’d made contact with a man recruiting for the International Brigades, a month or so after Franco’s military insurrection against the elected government.
Then, beginning to worry about page count, Weisz took Ferrara back to his 1917 service with the
“But not us,” Ferrara said, his expression dark. “We took the losses, and retreated because we had to, but we never stopped killing them.”
As Weisz typed, a timid knock at the door.
“Yes?” Ferrara said.
The door opened, to admit a seedy little man, who said, in French, “So, how goes the book tonight?”
Ferrara introduced him as Monsieur Kolb, one of his minders, and the operative who had extracted him from the internment camp. Kolb said he was pleased to meet Weisz, then looked at his watch. “It’s eleven-thirty,” he said, “time for all good authors to be in bed, or out raising hell. It’s the latter we have in mind for you, if you like.”
“Raising what?” Ferrara said.
“An English expression. Means to have a good time. We thought you might like to go up to Pigalle, to some disreputable place. Drink, dance, who knows what. You’ve earned it, Mr. Brown says, and you can’t just sit in this hotel.”
“I’ll go if you will,” Ferrara said to Weisz.
Weisz was exhausted. He was working at three jobs, and the steady grind was beginning to get to him. Worse, the espresso he’d drunk earlier in the evening had had absolutely no effect on the Barolo he’d shared with Salamone. But their conversation was still on his mind, and an informal chat with one of Mr. Brown’s people might not be a bad idea, better than approaching Mr. Brown himself. “Let’s go,” Weisz said. “He’s right, you can’t just sit here.”
Kolb had evidently sensed they would agree, and had a taxi idling in front of the hotel.
Place Pigalle was the heart of it, but the strip of nightclubs, neon-lit, marched up and down the boulevard Clichy, suggesting bountiful sin for every taste. There was plenty of real sin to be had in Paris, in well-known bordellos thoughout the city, whipping rooms, harems with veiled girls in balloon pants, high erotic-instructive Japanese prints on the walls-or low and beastly, but up here it was more the promise of sin, offered to wandering crowds of tourists sprinkled with sailors, thugs, and pimps. Gay Paree. The famous Moulin Rouge and the flipped skirts of its cancan dancers, the La Boheme at Impasse Blanche, Eros, Enfants de la Chance, El Monico, the Romance Bar, and Chez les Nudistes-Kolb’s, and likely Mr. Brown’s, choice for the evening.
The nudist colony. Which described the women, dressed only in high heels and powdery blue light, but not the men dancing with them, to the slow strains of Momo Tsipler and his Wienerwald Companions-according to a sign at the corner of a raised platform. Five of them, including the oldest cellist in captivity, a tiny violinist, cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth, wings of white hair fluffed out above his ears, Rex the drummer, Hoffy on the clarinet, and Momo himself, in a metallic green dinner jacket, astride the piano stool. A weary orchestra, drifting far from their hometown Vienna on the nightclub sea, playing a schmaltz version of “Let’s Fall in Love” as the couples shuffled about in circles, doing whatever dance steps the male patrons could manage.
Weisz felt like an idiot, Ferrara caught his eye and looked to heaven,
“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
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
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 emigres.”
