‘Tomorrow, at Maxim’s. Are you allowing me to hope, Franz?’
‘I’ll look at my schedule later today and call you back. Maybe even tomorrow morning — is that too late?’
‘Why no. No! Not at all!’ The old exuberant Moppi had returned from wherever he’d been hiding. ‘Believe me, you won’t regret it.’
Oh no?
Stahl showered and shaved and dressed — casually, corduroys and a loose grey shirt — for work. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do about the lunch invitation and went back and forth; from confront these people to get as far away as you can, then gave up — he would decide later. But, if he was going to lunch the following day, he had to telephone Jean Avila. This wasn’t so easy; Stahl could only hope he hadn’t seen the story. A vain hope. ‘I didn’t realize,’ Avila said, ‘that you were so interested in French politics.’
‘I’m not.’ After a moment he said, ‘You read that paper?’
‘You know I don’t, but a friend felt obligated to tell me about it.’ Some tartness in his voice suggested what he felt about such ‘friends’.
‘They twisted everything I said. I thought I was doing publicity.’
‘You were, in a way, but their publicity, not yours. You have to be careful, Fredric, everything in this accursed country is so symbolic, a few words may mean more than you suspect — it’s like speaking in code.’
‘I spent this morning learning all about that,’ Stahl said ruefully, ‘and I won’t be talking to them again. Jean, I may have to go to a lunch tomorrow, can you work around me?’
‘Come to the set at ten, as usual, then stay until twelve-thirty. All right?’
‘Thank you, Jean, and thank you for being understanding about that trash in the newspaper.’
‘See you later, my friend, and don’t stop to talk to any journalists on the way.’
29 October. Jimmy Louis drove Stahl to Maxim’s in the glowing silver Panhard. Moppi and his pals wanted a movie star, very well, they would have one. Stahl had decided to accept the invitation. He’d certainly heard Moppi’s threats, about the newspapers, and he’d heard him say they knew more about him — his night in jail — than he’d thought they did. We’re watching you. So he would go to lunch, and if he heard something interesting he’d let Wilkinson know about it. He would listen to them, and then he would find a way to let them know that it ended there, that he wouldn’t be intimidated. They might accept that, or they might not, and, if they didn’t, they would attack him in the press and he would have to fight back. A public brawl. Warner Bros. wouldn’t like it, Deschelles wouldn’t like it, so the longer he could put that off the better for him. Not unwise, he thought, to sacrifice two hours in defence of his career. But he’d go no further, he was done with them, and they were about to find that out.
He had Jimmy drive around until 1.20, then they pulled up in front of the restaurant. Inside, spectacular opulence — Maxim’s had been established in the Belle Epoque, before the turn of the century, when life in Paris was, for a time, sweet and golden, if you had the money for sweet and golden. With the arrival of Art Nouveau in the 1920s, the restaurant was redecorated, and there it stopped. Stahl paused at the maitre d’s station, but he was immediately led into the dining room, where he saw mostly businessmen and a sprinkling of tourists. And here came Moppi, red in the face and wiping his bald head with one of the restaurant’s enormous linen napkins. Moppi pumped his hand and tried to take Stahl, his greatly desired prize, by the elbow, but Stahl slipped away.
At a table in the centre of the room, five faces were eagerly turned towards him as he approached. Stahl was introduced — all German names — and he realized they had managed to round up one of his ‘friends from the legation’, an older man when Stahl knew him in Barcelona, now very old and very nervous. Stahl instinctively doubted this man lived in Paris, suspecting that he had been imported for the occasion. Even during the pre-lunch menu chitchat, all the men at the table deferred to the leader, one Emhof, whose speech was German, not Austrian. He was a good-sized gent — they were all good-sized except for the imported guest. Emhof was pop- eyed, which gave him a fervent stare no matter where he looked. He had a bass rumble for a voice, a vast belly, and a Nazi party pin — a swastika with a diamond at its centre — in his lapel. He was sitting to Stahl’s left, and smelled of smelly cigars. Taking the wine list in hand, he produced a pair of heavy, black-framed glasses, put them on, then tilted them upwards for sharper vision in the restaurant light. The wine waiter stood patiently by Emhof’s chair — this will be worth the wait — and Emhof finally said, ‘We’ll have the Chateau Margaux.’
‘The 1932, monsieur?’
‘The 1899, and you might as well bring two bottles. No, three.’
‘Very good, monsieur.’
Emhof turned towards Stahl and leaned back, taking off his glasses. ‘We’re pleased you could join us, Herr Stalka — or would you prefer to be called by your Hollywood name?’
‘As you wish, Herr Emhof. I was born Stalka, it’s still that way in my passport.’
‘And it’s…?’
‘Slovenian.’ As you well know.
‘Slovenian! So beautiful there, such majestic mountains. You ski, I would suppose.’
‘Not so much, sometimes on vacation I tried it, but my family was more Viennese than Slovenian, my mother and father’s people had been there for a long time.’
‘And your family lives there still?’
‘They do.’
‘But you are far away, in California. Do you manage to see them?’
‘Not for a long time, I’m afraid.’
Moppi cleared his throat and said, ‘Perhaps you might…’ But Emhof stared at him and he shut up.
‘And Hollywood? You’re happy there? I understand that the movie business is almost entirely a Jewish business, am I right? Is that entirely comfortable? Or are you perhaps yourself of Jewish origin?’
‘I was raised as a Catholic, but I am not a religious person. And I’m very comfortable with whatever Jews work in Hollywood, it really doesn’t matter.’
‘We had them in the German film industry, though many of them have moved on. Yet the business seems to thrive so we don’t much notice the — absence.’
The man on Emhof’s left, young and ambitious-looking, said, ‘Do you follow today’s German films, Herr Stalka?’
‘I don’t.’
‘Pity. It’s a very vibrant industry. UFA, our principal production house, makes hundreds of films and the best of them are quite good, just like Hollywood, I imagine.’
‘I’m sure they are,’ Stahl said.
The waiter arrived. Emhof — and all but Stahl echoed his choice — ordered a Maxim’s classic: Tournedos Rossini, tender beef filet topped with foie gras and a sliver of truffle, and, another classic, the Pommes Anna, thinly sliced potatoes layered with butter and pressed into a block. Stahl ordered the Filet of Sole Albert, named for the famous Maxim maitre d’hotel.
As the waiter left, Emhof said, ‘Tell me, Herr Stalka, does Hollywood make films about mountaineering?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Stahl said. ‘At least I don’t know of any.’
‘Extraordinary. We have been producing them in Germany since the mid-twenties. Have you not seen Arnold Fanck’s Der heilige Berg? “The Holy Mountain”? Where our own Leni Riefenstahl is the lead actress?’
Stahl shook his head. He knew only of Riefenstahl’s propaganda films, about the Nuremberg rally of the Nazi party, and the ’36 Olympics — young people with beautifully defined muscles.
‘It’s very popular in Germany,’ Moppi said, ‘the mountain film.’
‘It’s a national passion,’ the man to Emhof’s left said. ‘We all must climb, must make our way up the incline of life to the sunlit peak of success. A journey, a journey requiring great fortitude, great inner strength.’
‘No doubt.’ Out before Stahl could stop it, this was lightly flavoured with derision — the Viennese taste for irony was returning as he spoke German.
Emhof raised his eyebrows. Moppi rushed in. ‘So much do we enjoy the mountain movie, Franz, that a film festival is scheduled to take place in Berlin. Forty mountain films will be shown! That will be exciting, no?’
Stahl could only imagine. As for mountains in the movies, what came to mind was his musician friends’ amusement at a certain film cliche: when a mountaintop was shown, the shot was always scored with a long, triumphant note from a horn. Finally he said, ‘Always good to have a film festival.’
‘Yes, we think so too,’ Emhof said.
The wine appeared, and with some ceremony the bottles were placed on angled silver wine-rests. ‘Shall I
