he didn’t trust Hitler. ‘This man is the neighbourhood bully,’ he said, anger tightening his voice. ‘Don’t they see that, these diplomats? You appease a thug like Hitler, it just makes him greedy for more, because he smells fear.’ Distracted by his emotions, he took a route through Paris on the left bank of the Seine, entering the city via the Thirteenth Arrondissement and continuing into the Fifth on the quai by the river. To reach the Claridge, he should have taken the right bank, which Stahl noticed, without any particular concern.
But, as they reached the foot of the Boulevard Saint-Germain, traffic slowed down, and soon the taxi could move only a few feet before it had to stop. The driver swore, and with his good hand swung off the boulevard onto a side street. Here, however, the traffic barely crawled, and when he tried to return to Saint-Germain, a policeman stopped him and said, ‘You’ll have to go back the other way — they’re marching on the boulevard.’ The driver raised his hands, he surrendered. So Stahl thanked him, paid the fare, added a generous tip, then headed for the Metro station on the Place Maubert. By the time he got there he was mixed in with the marchers, students angered at the Munich agreement, with signs that said SHAME! and chants of ‘Down with Daladier!’ At last he reached the Metro, to find its grilled gate shut and a hand-lettered sign that said On Strike. Well, no surprise, the Metro-workers’ union was a communist union and would strike if angered by government policy.
With an oath that was more sigh than curse, Stahl set out for the hotel. Not a bad day for a walk: grey clouds above the city, a chill in the air, the forces of autumn were gathering. As he made his way up the boulevard, he realized that a lot of the marchers were women — many of the male students had apparently been mobilized. He then began to notice small knots of men gathered on the pavement, glaring at the marchers, sometimes turning to each other and making comments that drew a snicker from their pals. The marching students ignored the sneering crowd. Until one of them joined the march, just long enough to bump the shoulder of a student, who turned and said something as the man laughed and retreated back to the pavement.
And then, about ten feet away from Stahl, a man wearing a grey hood with eyeholes cut in it came running out of an alley waving a metal rod. Some of the marchers stopped to see what was going on, somebody shouted a warning, a second hooded man followed the first and swung his metal rod, hitting a woman in the side of the head. As she sank to her knees, a drop of blood running from beneath her hair, the man swung the rod back, preparing to hit her again. Stahl ran at him, shouting ‘Stop!’ as he grabbed at the rod. The man swore, words muffled by the hood, and Stahl barely held on, until the man stopped pulling at the rod and pushed against him, so that he stumbled into the girl on her knees, who yelped as Stahl fell over her. When the man lifted the rod over his head, Stahl kicked at him, then got himself upright. In time for the rod to hit him in the face. With salty blood in his mouth, he rushed at the man and punched him in the centre of the hood, which knocked him back a step.
This was not the only fight on the boulevard — there were hooded men with rods attacking marchers on both sides of him, people on the ground, shouting and screaming everywhere. Stahl spat the blood out of his mouth and went after the man who’d hit him. And now tried to do it again. Stahl dodged away from the rod, which landed on his shoulder, grabbed the bottom of the hood and tore it off, revealing a fair-haired teenager with the sparse beginnings of a moustache. His eyes widened as Stahl threw the hood at him and punched him again, square in the mouth. Sputtering with rage, the teenager swung the rod back over his head, but a girl student wearing broken glasses got the fingernails of both hands into the side of his face and raked him from forehead to jaw. He didn’t mind hitting women but he didn’t like women hitting back so he hesitated, turned, and ran away. Somebody grabbed Stahl from behind, somebody very strong, lifting him off his feet as he tried to fight free. ‘Calm down,’ a voice said. ‘Or else.’ The arm around his chest was wearing a police uniform, so Stahl stopped struggling.
As more police arrived, Stahl’s arms were pulled back, and handcuffs snapped on his wrists.
They had two holding cells at the Fifth Arrondissement prefecture, so the marchers and the attackers — ‘the fascists’, the students called them — were separated. In Stahl’s cell, the walls bled moisture, and one of the graffiti carved into the stone was dated 1889. A woman in the cell lent Stahl her compact, its mirror revealing a livid purple bruise which ran down the right side of his face. The inside of his upper lip had been gashed by his teeth, his head ached terribly, his right hand was swollen — possibly a broken knuckle — but the worst pain was in his shoulder. Still, in a way he’d been lucky: if his nose was broken there was no evidence of it, and he had all his teeth.
He wound up sitting on the stone floor, back against the wall, next to a man about his own age, who explained that he was a Metro worker, a motorman, and had been on a picket line when the ‘ cagoulards ’, hooded ones, had attacked them. ‘Very foolish,’ the motorman said. ‘We gave them a thrashing they’ll remember.’ Stahl offered him a cigarette, the motorman was grateful. ‘How did you do?’ he said to Stahl.
Stahl shrugged. ‘I hit one of them, a couple of times.’
‘Good for you. I don’t imagine you do much fighting.’
‘No,’ Stahl said. He started to smile but it hurt. ‘I had a couple of fights at sea, when I was a kid. The first one didn’t last long — I drew my arm back, then I was looking at the sky and they threw a pail of water on me. The guy was built like an ox — a stoker.’
The motorman was amused. ‘You don’t want to fight a man who shovels coal all day.’
‘My face was numb for hours,’ Stahl said. ‘The other one was with a mess steward, that went better. We punched each other for maybe a minute, then the crewmen separated us — we were both finished, gasping for breath. So I didn’t win, but I didn’t lose.’
‘Oh, I’d say you won — they probably left you alone after that.’
‘Then I guess I won.’
The motorman was released an hour later — his union had sent a lawyer. It was dawn before Zolly Louis showed up. ‘The police couldn’t find you,’ Zolly said.
‘How did you know to look for me?’
‘A journalist called the office. Was it possible that Fredric Stahl was arrested for fighting? A witness was almost sure he’d seen a movie star taken away. You weren’t at the hotel, so we called the police. Eventually, the flics figured out where you were.’
‘What did you tell the journalist?’
‘That you were on a train to Geneva.’
Zolly had paid somebody off, and a sergeant led them down a tunnel which eventually led to a street behind the prefecture. ‘Just in case there’s a reporter in front,’ Zolly said. ‘Or, God forbid, a photographer.’
30 September.
Herve Charais, a news commentator on Radio Paris, was lying in bed that afternoon, propped up on a pillow so he could better feast his eyes on his exquisite little Spanish mistress, one Consuela, as she stood naked before a dressing-table mirror and, in profile, bent over to peer at a non-existent blemish on her forehead. While Consuela was very much worth looking at, Herve Charais was certainly not; soft and squat and pudgy, he walked splay- footed, so waddled like a duck. But Herve Charais had a most cultured, mellifluous, and persuasive voice, and therein lay his considerable popularity. Across the darkened room, Consuela held back her thick hair and squinted at her reflection: a thirty-five-year-old face above, the body of a fifteen-year-old below. Like a Greek statue, he thought, a statue that could be warmed up to just the proper temperature — ‘but only by you,’ as she put it.
And to think it had all started with an accident! Some months earlier, she’d spilled a drink on him when he was out with friends at a nightclub. That led to an apology, and that led to a new drink, and that led, in time, to this very room. ‘Come back to bed, my precious,’ he said tenderly.
‘Yes, in a moment, I have something on my forehead.’
And soon you’ll have something somewhere else.
‘Don’t you have to write your commentary, for tonight?’
‘It’s mostly written, in my head anyhow.’
‘Is it about Czechoslovakia?’
‘What else?’
‘So what will you say?’
‘Oh, nothing special. The nation is relieved, surely, but maybe just for the time being.’
‘Why don’t you say something about the Sudeten Germans? They seem to have been forgotten in all this… whatever you call it.’
‘You think so? What do you have in mind?’
‘Just what happens to all these people who live in the wrong country, the poor Poles, the poor Hungarians, the poor, other people. But also the German minority living in Czechoslovakia, one hears the most frightening things, rapes and beatings by the Czech police, houses burned down…’
