‘Give up? Ruin your career? You won’t do that.’
‘No, probably I won’t. I can’t.’
‘You’re not the type. The people in Hollywood cast you as they do for a reason, Monsieur Stahl, they build on what is already there.’
‘Perhaps, some day, I will do an interview with you, Monsieur Sokoloff.’
‘Maybe some day, but not yet. As we used to say in the trenches, keep your head down.’
Stahl placed his knife and fork on the plate, then lit a cigarette.
Trying to ease the gloom he’d felt after talking to Sokoloff, he decided to walk for a while, taking the narrow, sunless streets of the Marais, the ancient Jewish quarter, in the general direction of the hotel. For a long time, nothing had changed here; tenement walls leaned over crooked lanes, the markets had kosher chickens hung on steel hooks, men wearing yarmulkes spoke Yiddish together — but stopped speaking until he’d passed by — and the women, heads covered with shawls or scarves, did not meet his eyes. It was, he thought, as though he were in some shtetl in Poland.
Still, by the time he left the district he was at least hopeful. He felt he could deal with his problems and do in Paris what he’d come here to do. Which wasn’t politics. He had faced down Moppi and his dreadful friends, and, in Andre Sokoloff, he had a new ally, without doubt a good man in a fight. Slowly, he regained himself — this wasn’t the first trouble in his life and it surely wouldn’t be the last, but he’d dealt with it before and he would now. A taxi cruised slowly by his side, inviting him to ride, Stahl raised a hand, the taxi stopped. And, on the way to the Claridge, just looking out at the streets made him feel better.
Reaching his rooms on the top floor of the hotel, Stahl tried to use his key but the door, already unlocked, swung open, slowly, as he pushed against it.
Inside, a man was sitting on the sofa, apparently waiting for him. Actually, not quite sitting, lounging said it better — he had one leg hooked over the arm of the sofa, his body resting against the cushions at an angle. A magazine that Stahl had left on the night table lay open on his lap. Was he a hotel thief? He wasn’t acting like one. He was tall, wearing a brown jacket and grey slacks, his collar unbuttoned, his tie pulled down. He had scant, colourless hair combed back from a high forehead, pale eyes, pale skin. To Stahl, he looked like a Scandinavian, perhaps a Swede, maybe a businessman. On the floor in front of the sofa was a small bag of pebbled black leather, like a doctor’s bag.
Stahl took a few steps towards the telephone on the desk, then put his hand on the receiver, ready to call downstairs, but the man just watched him as though he were an object of some, but not much, interest. ‘What are you doing here?’ Stahl said. ‘This isn’t your room.’
In German, the man said, ‘I stopped by to talk to you, Herr Stahl.’
Again, Stahl looked at the black bag. ‘Are you a doctor?’ he said, truly puzzled.
‘No, I’m not a doctor,’ the man said.
‘I’m going to call the desk and have you thrown out. Or arrested.’
‘Yes?’ said the man, as though Stahl had commented about the weather.
Stahl picked up the phone, but the man didn’t move. ‘It won’t take too long,’ he said. ‘Just a brief conversation is all I require, then I won’t trouble you any further.’
Stahl put the receiver back but kept his hand on it.
‘How was your lunch with Herr Sokoloff?’ the man said.
‘That’s none of your business.’
‘No? Maybe it is. He’s surely not a proper friend for you.’
Stahl almost laughed. ‘What?’
‘I think you are a little confused, Herr Stahl, about who your friends are. You are really being rather… difficult.’
‘Am I,’ Stahl said. ‘You’re German?’
The man nodded slowly, no expression on his face. ‘Proud to be,’ he said. ‘Especially the way things are going now.’
Stahl waited. The man unhooked his leg from the arm of the sofa and sat forward, elbows on knees, fingers clasped. ‘What we’ve learned in Germany is that life goes very well when everybody does their job, and does what they’re told to do. Harmony, as we call it, is a powerful force in a nation.’
‘I’m sure it is. But, so what?’
‘Well, we’ve told you what we want you to do, to come to Berlin, to appear at our film festival, but you seem disinclined to obey, and this is troubling.’
Stahl stared at the man with an expression of combined disbelief and distaste.
The man smiled to himself and gently shook his head. ‘Ah, defiance,’ he said, his voice soft and nostalgic — he remembered defiance, from some bygone age long ago. ‘Quite a bit of that, at the beginning, before we came to power, but we’re patient, hardworking people and in time we cured it. It turns, we’ve found, with persistence on our part, to disbelief, and, in time, to compliance. Oh, people think the most violent thoughts, you can’t imagine, but that stays inside. On the outside, however, in the daily world, the individual does what he’s told, and then there’s harmony. Much of Europe is finding this harmony not so bad as they feared, and soon all of us will work together.’
‘No doubt,’ Stahl said, sarcasm cutting a fine edge on the words. ‘You’ve broken into my room like a criminal, you’ve said what you came to say, now get out.’
‘You’re angry. Well, I understand that, but you’ll have some time to think this through, not a lot of time, but some, and I expect you’ll come to see where your interests lie. It’s easier, Herr Stahl, to try and get along with us, to do what we tell you to do — is it really so much? Ask yourself. A brief trip to Berlin, fine food, good company, people saying flattering things — would that be so bad?’
‘Stop it,’ Stahl said.
The man stretched, then looked at his watch, like someone who is tired but has things to do before he can relax. ‘Please don’t be rude to me, Herr Stahl, that isn’t good for either of us.’ He stood, stood rather abruptly, like a schoolboy’s feint, and Stahl, despite himself, reacted — didn’t move a muscle but the flinch had been there and he knew it. The man grinned, amused by his tactic, picked up his black bag, walked casually to the door, and said, ‘Good afternoon, Herr Stahl. One way or another, we’ll be in touch with you.’
Was the ‘you’ subtly inflected? Very subtly inflected? Or, Stahl wondered, had he just heard it that way. The man nodded to him and left the room. Stahl heard him walking away down the corridor and shut the door but the lock didn’t click shut. He tried again, and the same thing happened. The lock no longer worked, and now he would have to get it fixed.
3 November. At 3.30 on the afternoon of the third, the senior staff of the Ribbentropburo — the political warfare bureau of the Reich Foreign Ministry, named for Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop — held its weekly meeting. In a general way, their mission was similar to that of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, but Goebbels’s people supervised all internal culture — the painters and the writers and the composers, the films and the newspapers — while the bureau operated mostly abroad, and was far more clandestine and aggressive in its methods. ‘We don’t send out press releases,’ they liked to say, ‘we send out operatives, and then other people send out press releases.’
This was an important meeting, decisions had to be made, and some of the men around the table had their jackets hung on the backs of their chairs and their sleeves rolled up. Herr Emhof, of the bulging eyes, attended the meeting but was not of sufficient stature to merit a place at the table, so sat on one of the chairs ranged around the walls and did not speak unless spoken to.
The agenda for this meeting was a typed list of thirty-eight names, which represented thirty-eight problems that had to be resolved. There were hundreds of names in the bureau’s files, and most had agreed, some gladly, some not so gladly, to do what the bureau had determined they should do; thus there was no point in wasting time on them. The thirty-eight names, however — people of various backgrounds, all pertinent to the bureau’s operations in France — had to be dealt with because they represented potential failures. The Reich Foreign Ministry did not accept failures, so you couldn’t really afford, if you worked there, to have too many of them on your record, or you would find yourself working somewhere else. Perhaps at the coal administration, or the department of gasoline rationing, or, at the very worst, you might have to take your wife and family and pets and go off to work in Essen, or Dortmund, or Ulm — exiled.
The meeting was led by the Deputy Director of the bureau, an SS major who had formerly been a junior
