moment, then walked back to the platform. ‘Looks good to me,’ Renate said. ‘I won’t keep you — I’m sure it’s been a long day.’
‘Well, you’re not keeping me, but I imagine you have work to do.’
‘First I’m going to have a cup of tea, would you like one?’
‘You can make tea?’
‘I have a hot plate. I can live for days in here if I have to.’
‘A cup of tea would be very welcome.’
In the back of the workroom, she put a pot of water on a hot plate. ‘I didn’t mean to… shock you. I just bought that blouse and I wanted to try it on.’
‘What’s the verdict?’
‘It’s awful, I have to take it back. I don’t know what came over me in the store.’ They waited as the hot plate element began to glow orange. ‘How was your time in Germany?’ she said.
‘Worse than I expected. How did you hear about that?’
‘Somebody on the set mentioned that you’d gone — is it a secret?’
‘No. Warner Bros. wanted me to go, they saw it as a boost for the German market.’
‘Still, I was surprised… that you let them use you, use your reputation. And that you’d have anything to do with the Nazis.’
‘I held my nose, and did what I had to do.’
‘What’s it like there, now?’
‘Surreal. All these monsters strutting around as though they owned the world. And then, the night I was there they burned down the synagogues.’
The water boiled, Renate took a spoonful of tea from a canister, then added water to a small, chipped teapot. ‘Now it must steep,’ she said.
‘You don’t think badly of me, do you? For going there?’
‘It doesn’t matter what I think,’ she said.
‘To me it does,’ Stahl said. She glanced at him, her faded-blue eyes found his, a momentary uncertainty in her expression, then she looked away. ‘I was wondering,’ Stahl said, the words deliberate, ‘if later on… Would you like to go somewhere? Get something to eat?’
‘Mm. I’d like to, but I don’t think I can. I have to go home, then I’m going to see friends. You remember Inga and Klaus? My emigre friends?’
Stahl was blank, then did remember — they’d arrived on bicycles the night when it seemed Germany would go to war with Czechoslovakia. ‘I do,’ he said.
‘An emigre evening,’ she said. ‘I don’t really look forward to it. Now let me pour you some tea. Do you take sugar? I don’t have milk.’
They talked for a while, mostly about the movie, until Stahl felt it was time for him to go. He thanked Renate for refitting his costume, and for the tea. She walked him to the door, said goodbye and turned her face upwards, expecting the Parisian kiss on each cheek. Then Stahl, for a moment, touched her lips with his. As he drew back, he saw the same look in her eyes, now not so much wary as hurt. That Stahl, being who he was, would want her, an easy conquest to satisfy a casual desire.
‘Perhaps another time,’ he said. ‘We’ll have an evening out.’
‘Oh stop it,’ she said, with one of her particularly ironic smiles. ‘But it was nice to be asked.’
He hoped she might stand there and watch him walk away but he heard the door click shut on his second step.
It took more than an hour for the hotel operator to connect him with Wolf Lustig’s office. There was a storm somewhere between Paris and Berlin, the line crackled with static and the woman in Lustig’s office had to raise her voice, almost shouting in order to be heard. But shouting very courteously. Herr Lustig, she said, wished urgently to meet with him regarding an important UFA production. And soon Herr Lustig would be in Paris. However, his time there was extremely limited and busy. Would it be possible for Monsieur Stahl to meet Herr Lustig at a social function? They could talk there. And what social function was that? A cocktail party, given by the Rousillon champagne people, at the restaurant Pre Catelan in the Bois de Boulogne. Did he know it? He did. The party would be on the seventeenth, at five o’clock. Would his schedule permit him to attend? He thought it would. Oh, Herr Lustig will be so pleased.
In the hotel suite, Stahl turned on the radio, and found swing-band music recorded in New York — Artie Shaw playing ‘Frenesi’ and ‘Begin the Beguine’. For a rejected lover, maybe the best thing on a lonely night: people wanted each other, then life got in the way but, if the songs told the truth, desire would not be denied. Not forever, anyhow. Stahl brooded as the music played; Renate Steiner had misunderstood him, he would have to try again, and they would be together. In Stahl’s imagination it happened this way, no, that way, no… Eventually he drifted off to sleep, and woke at four to find himself wearing a bathrobe and lying on the coverlet as rain fell on the city.
17 November.
The Pre Catelan was a small white chateau. Located on a winding road in the vast Bois de Boulogne park at the western edge of the Sixteenth Arrondissement, it had been built in the 1700s, becoming a restaurant in 1906, and soon enough the place for elegant and luxurious celebrations. Stahl changed clothes at the studio and, with Jimmy Louis driving the silver Panhard, he managed to get there by six. The dining room had a high, domed ceiling, the walls featured marble columns and triple sconces, the windows looked past a grand terrace to the park’s bare trees. Above the dining-room entry, a banner ran from wall to wall: ROUSILLON BRUT MILLESIME. Apparently, the party celebrated the new brand of champagne being marketed by Rousillon Freres. At the door, a lovely young woman welcomed him and handed him a glass of champagne. Now what? He was at the edge of a huge, chattering mob of people, loud and getting louder, quite merry an hour into the event. Somewhere in there was Wolf Lustig.
Then the Baroness von Reschke emerged, miraculously, from the crowd, her predator’s lupine smile shining brighter with every step. ‘Oh Monsieur Stahl, my dear Fredric, you’re here, it’s so good to see you!’ She was as he remembered her, in a cocktail dress of puffy emerald silk, blue vein at her temple, stylishly set straw hair. She took Stahl’s hand in both claws and said, ‘I’m giving a dinner on the weekend, all sorts of interesting people, may I hope you’ll join us?’ Stahl said he would be leaving town. Behind the baroness, awaiting his turn with Stahl, was Philippe LaMotte, who Stahl had met at the baroness’s cocktail party in September. LaMotte, he recalled, was an executive at Rousillon and a leader of the Comite Franco-Allemagne, the friendship society pledged to bring harmony to relations between France and Germany. The baroness fled, promising to be back in a moment, and LaMotte, in his exquisite suit, shook Stahl’s hand. ‘I wanted to welcome you personally,’ he said. ‘My favourite American actor. How is the world treating you, my friend?’
As well as could be hoped for, he was much occupied with work.
‘Ah, but you managed to visit Berlin, everyone speaks of the impression you made there. A triumph, it’s said.’
Stahl was not going to discuss Berlin, and asked LaMotte about the champagne business.
‘Our brand is ordered everywhere, it is a great success.’
Stahl sipped the champagne, which was too fruity for his taste, and raised his eyebrows to show how good it was.
LaMotte glowed. ‘Yes, yes, only the Epernay soil does this to the grape, hard, chalky soil, bad soil, the vines struggle to grow yet this is what they produce!’
‘One can see why it’s popular,’ Stahl said.
‘Still, we must advertise. Have you given any thought to what I mentioned the last time we met? To appear in our advertisements? You need only to hold a glass of champagne and look successful; the text might say something about having a glass of Rousillon champagne before you play a love scene.’
Alas, Stahl did not at the moment have the time, and…
Over LaMotte’s shoulder, the baroness again materialized, this time with — Stahl recognized him from his photographs — the eminent German producer Wolf Lustig. Now Stahl, most especially after his recent experience of the Third Reich, had a determined loathing for the baroness and her fascist friends, but his reaction to Lustig was instant and visceral revulsion. His photographs did not do him justice. He smiled enthusiastically as they were introduced, the smile spread across thick, liver-coloured lips, and held his head in an unusual way, canted over
