A waiter arrived with two scotch-and-sodas. ‘ Salut,’ Wilkinson said in French. To Stahl, the bite of the whisky felt comforting on a cold, raw evening.
‘The optimistic version, as I said. The other possibility is that they’ve caught Orlova spying and arrested her. Which means she’s been interrogated, and given them your name. However, if they really felt sure you were spying on Germany I doubt they’d fool around with telephone calls. So, there’s a chance that Orlova got away and they’re looking for her. One thing I do know is that she’s not in Berlin. She’s vanished.’
‘Is she in Moscow?’
‘For her sake, I hope not.’
‘She is a survivor,’ Stahl said.
‘She’d better be. And I suspect she’ll be doing her surviving in Mexico, or Brazil. Even so, the Gestapo has a long arm.’
‘Was that where the phone call came from? The Gestapo?’
‘I would think so. The crowd from the Ribbentropburo, Emhof and his friends, wouldn’t be involved at this level.’
‘Oh,’ Stahl said, meaning he understood. But something had jumped inside him when Wilkinson said ‘Gestapo’. ‘Is there anything I can do about it?’
Wilkinson thought it over. ‘You can go to the police, maybe the Deuxieme Bureau — I can help with that, but protecting you would involve a lot of time and money and many people. Still, they might do it. The danger comes if they say they’ll do it but don’t do much, the danger comes when, because you’re a movie star, they say things to make you feel better.’ Suddenly, Wilkinson turned grim and uncomfortable. ‘It’s been known to happen,’ he said.
It has happened, Stahl thought. Why on earth had he assumed he was the only one involved in Wilkinson’s operations? Now he knew he wasn’t and that, for some of the others, things had gone badly.
The launch pulled into another dock to pick up more passengers. The band on the foredeck began to play ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’, Wilkinson swirled what remained in his glass, then drank it off and said, ‘Care for another?’
Stahl said he would.
Wilkinson turned halfway round and signalled to the waiter. ‘Actually, you don’t have too much time left here, only a few weeks, right? You’ll just have to be cautious — where you are, who you’re with. You know your way around the city and you aren’t going anywhere else.’
‘I’m going to Hungary.’
Wilkinson looked at him, clearly alarmed. ‘Fredric, that’s not a good place for you, the Gestapo can do anything it wants there.’
‘Still, I have to go,’ Stahl said. ‘I am curious about one thing, why did you have the American couple on the dock?’
‘It seemed odd to have you go to an event like this by yourself. And I didn’t want you standing alone in a deserted place.’
The drinks arrived, Stahl took more than a sip, so did Wilkinson.
20 December.
True to the words of the voice on the telephone, the colleagues in Paris got in touch with him. A second phone call, this time in the morning, as Stahl, barely awake, was having his morning coffee. ‘Good morning, Herr Stahl, how are you feeling today?’
Stahl started to hang up the phone when the voice called out, ‘Oh no, you mustn’t do that, Herr Stahl.’
Holding the receiver, Stahl looked around him.
‘Over here, Herr Stahl, across the street.’
Directly opposite the Claridge was an unremarkable, but no doubt expensive, apartment building and, at a window that looked into his room, Stahl saw a hand waving at him. The voice on the phone said, ‘Yoo-hoo. Here I am.’ Then the hand disappeared.
‘Yes, I see you, and so what?’ Stahl said.
‘If I had a decent weapon I could just about put a little hole in your coffee cup.’
As Stahl slammed the receiver down he heard a laugh. Not a portentous or threatening laugh, but the honest, merry laughter of someone who finds something truly funny. And that, Stahl realized, was worse.
Out at Joinville that morning, Stahl asked Avila when they were going to Hungary. ‘A few days from now,’ Avila said. ‘Paramount has rented the castle, and we can stay in the rooms there, most of us anyhow. There’s a hotel in the town for everyone else. Wait till you see it, Fredric, the location is perfect.’ So much for Stahl’s faint hope that the trip might be cancelled. He worked with particular concentration that day, making a point to himself: he wasn’t going to allow voices on a telephone or someone waving from a window to distract him from doing his best. He did think about it, between takes, but finally realized this led nowhere and turned his mind to other things.
By four o’clock Stahl was back at the hotel, where a square parcel in brown paper awaited him at the desk. Holding it in his hands — it hardly weighed anything — his defensive instincts surged: another one of their tricks? But the return address on the package said, B. Mehlman, The William Morris Agency and Stahl relaxed — his agent had sent him a Christmas present. In the room, he tore off the brown wrapping, which revealed fancy gift paper, silver stars on a blue background, tied with a red ribbon. Given the size of the box, Stahl suspected sweaters. Not like Buzzy to do this, he’d never done it before, perhaps it heralded good news about his career. The card would tell the story — where was it? No doubt in the box. And so it was. A small sealed envelope lay on crumpled white paper, in the middle of what he realized — after a few seconds of blank incomprehension — was a garrotte. Sickened by the look of the thing, he held it up and examined it: some kind of very strong cord, like a bowstring, that had a knot in the middle and two wooden handles. With some difficulty, his hands not their usual selves, he tore open the envelope and read the card, which said, in German, ‘Merry Christmas’.
He went out a few minutes later and eventually came upon an alley where, by the open back door of a restaurant, he found a garbage can and threw the box on top of a mound of potato peelings. The card he kept.
21 December.
Renate had to work late so Stahl, in for the evening, had a brandy and started a new Van Dine murder mystery. He’d thought about going to a movie — the Marx Brothers’ Room Service was playing nearby — but preferred to stay home and rest. He wasn’t precisely afraid, he just didn’t want to be out in the street. Some combination of Philo Vance and brandy had him dozing by 10.20, when the telephone rang. He went over to the desk and watched it for a ring or two, then thought what the hell and picked it up. And was relieved when a voice on the other end said, ‘Hello, Fredric, it’s Kiki,’ but then, a moment later, not so relieved. This was not a late- evening call from a former lover — there was real urgency in her voice as she said, ‘Fredric, there’s something I must tell you, it has nothing to do with, with you and me, it’s something… very different. And not for the telephone. Can you meet me at a cafe? It’s not far from your hotel, a little place on the rue de la Tremoille. Please say yes.’ Whatever motive lay behind the call he did not know, but it wasn’t seduction. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Are you at this cafe?’
‘I can be there in twenty minutes.’
Stahl paced the room for a time, then threw a trench coat on and left the hotel.
The rue de la Tremoille was lined with imperious apartment houses built, lavishly, in the nineteenth century — here there were rich people. But it was after ten at night and the street was dark and silent, a condition that the inhabitants, inside their fortresses, no doubt found restful and much to their taste. Not so Stahl. Wilkinson’s cautionary words, about being aware of where you were, echoed in his memory. Not a soul to be seen, not a light visible in the draped windows. When a car’s headlights turned a corner and came up behind him, he stepped into a doorway. Slowly, as though the driver were searching for something, the heavy car rumbled past, its taillights glowed red for a moment, then it went on its way.
Minutes later, Stahl found the cafe, an old-fashioned oasis in the desert of a fashionable neighborhood. Inside it was all amber walls and a haze of Gauloises smoke, and crowded with the usual cast of characters: old women with their dogs, men in workers’ caps at the bar, lovers without a place to go. From a far corner, Kiki waved to him and Stahl wound his way past the close-set tables, and they kissed hello. Kiki, despite the cloud of expensive
