perfume, seemed to be playing a chaste version of herself; the seductress make-up was gone, leaving her fresh- faced and younger, and she wore a sweater of very soft wool in a colour that reminded Stahl of mocha cream. Inside the shawl collar of the sweater, a silk scarf decorated with gold anchors replaced her pearl necklace. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said, meaning it. ‘You sounded like you were half-asleep.’
‘I was,’ Stahl said.
‘I should’ve called earlier,’ Kiki said, ‘but I couldn’t make up my mind, and I was afraid you’d just hang up on me.’
‘That’s not like you, Kiki.’
‘No, I suppose it isn’t, but you’ll see why. Are you going to order something?’
‘I don’t really want coffee, it will keep me awake. Anyhow, I’m getting more curious by the moment, so…’
Kiki took a breath, then said, ‘I’m here as a messenger, Fredric. And the message comes from the Baroness von Reschke. She knew you wouldn’t agree to see her, and she regrets that, though she does understand. But I must tell you this: when she told me what she wanted me to say to you she was, how to put it, intense, serious, and not her usual self — you know what she’s like.’
‘I do know,’ Stahl said. ‘All charm and smiles, the baroness.’
‘Not when I saw her. She wanted to make sure, absolutely sure, that you received what she called “a final warning”. According to her, certain people, her words, no explanation, certain people require your cooperation, and it would be unwise not to help them. What she said was, “please make him understand that he won’t be warned again.” Does that make any sense to you?’
‘It does.’
‘Who are these people, to threaten you?’
‘Being in the movies, Kiki, doesn’t shield you from what goes on in the real world. And the people she’s talking about are very much from the real world, where politics is a game with no rules, and they’re determined to make me help them.’
‘Do you know who they are?’
‘Well, they’re friends of the baroness, and sure of her to the point that they’ve used her, and thus you, to send their message.’
She stared at him. ‘What if you don’t do what they want? Are you in danger?’
‘Not really. You shouldn’t worry about it, and I’ll only be in Paris for a few more weeks.’
‘I care for you, Fredric, being with you meant a lot to me. I don’t want you to be — hurt.’
‘Likely that won’t happen, though it’s hard to predict.’
‘What shall I tell her? She said, “I must have an answer,” and she meant it. Not like her at all, not the baroness I know. Suddenly, right there in her parlour, she was a different woman. Cold, and almost, well, cruel.’
‘The answer is that you gave me the message. I heard what she wanted me to hear.’
‘Nothing else?’
‘No, nothing else.’
‘Fredric’ — she reached across the table and took his hand in hers — ‘is there anything I can do to help you?’
He shook his head. ‘Leave it alone, Kiki. Forget this happened. There is no point in your being involved, in fact there’s every reason you shouldn’t be.’
She let go of his hand and sat back. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘But the offer is still there, if you change your mind.’
Amid the low burble and clatter of the night-time cafe, Stahl was silent for a time, then leaned forward and said, ‘Kiki, maybe I shouldn’t ask, but I will anyhow. Are you more a part of this than you’re telling me?’
Slowly, she shook her head. ‘I’m only Kiki de Saint-Ange, Fredric, that’s all I know how to be. And when you go back to America I’ll just be a girl you knew in Paris.’
Stahl and Renate spent Christmas Eve together — had a champagne supper served in his suite, then stayed for the night. Renate Steiner was a supremely sophisticated woman, but a supremely sophisticated woman who had lived in penury for a long time and Stahl was secretly delighted to watch as the luxurious surroundings went to her head. A glass of champagne in hand, she took a bubble bath in the glorious bathroom, then, pink and excited, lounged around the suite in Stahl’s pyjamas as the radio played Christmas carols — ‘O the rising of the sun, the running of the deer’. Finally, drunk and happy, they went to bed, made love, and woke in the morning to the icy fog of a northern European winter.
Late that morning they took a taxi to Renate’s apartment, where she was giving a buffet lunch for her emigre friends. Perhaps twenty people were packed into the tiny apartment, all of them fugitives; artists, leftists, Jews, the sort of people the Nazis loathed, the sort of people the Nazis murdered. A ragtag lot, all of them poor to one degree or another. The lunch was abundant — Stahl saw to that — and practically all of it was eaten. And drunk. A few tears were shed, and La Belle France was toasted as their saviour, though one of the guests turned to Stahl and whispered, ‘For the time being, anyhow.’ Stahl had visited his bank the day before and, as a line of guests left en masse — ‘I don’t want these opened at the party,’ he’d told Renate — each was given an envelope containing a thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills. He was plenty rich enough to make such gestures, and so he did.
Trouble came the following day, from an unexpected direction, and it also affected a group of emigres, including Stahl and Renate. Avila called a meeting of the cast and crew on the set, where he announced that Paramount had declined to pay for air travel to Budapest. The cast and crew would, the studio executives had declared, have to go by train. A certain hush fell over the set when Avila said this. It took a moment, but soon enough everybody realized what that meant: the eleven emigres working on Apres la Guerre could not cross the German border. The Gestapo list of those who had fled Germany illegally was precise and thorough, and the emigres would certainly be arrested. And to reach Hungary from France you had to go through Germany. ‘Deschelles fought hard,’ Avila explained, ‘but the Paramount executives wouldn’t budge. As Jules put it to me, ‘I did the best I could, but I am an ant and they are a thumb.’
In the discussion that followed, the emigres didn’t say much, but the rest of the company was passionate on their behalf. ‘We are a family,’ Justine Piro said. ‘Every good production company becomes a family, we can’t leave people behind.’ At the end of the discussion, it was worked out that the eleven would fly on a small chartered aeroplane; Deschelles would ‘borrow’ some money from production funds, and those who could afford it — which meant Stahl, paying for himself and Renate, and two others making high salaries — would contribute. Avila would donate, and so would Piro, Pasquin, and Gilles Brecker. At the end of the discussion, a carpenter from Hamburg, formerly a communist streetfighter, stood and thanked everyone there. ‘I’ll tell you it’s a fucking pity,’ Pasquin said to Stahl as the meeting broke up, ‘that the whole country won’t work this way.’
Early on the morning of 28 December, Stahl took a taxi to Le Bourget. As they left the city, the driver said, ‘Excuse me, monsieur, is it possible that someone is following you?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Because there’s a car that’s been behind us at every turn.’ Then, with the bellicose flair of the Parisian taxi driver, he said, ‘I’ll lose them if you want me to, monsieur.’ Stahl told him not to bother. An hour later he was in an aeroplane, looking down at the snow-dusted forests of Germany.
28 December.
They circled Budapest as the lights of the city came on, then landed at the nearby airfield. The customs officers were amiable enough, smiling and silent as they stamped passports — silent because they knew that nobody spoke Hungarian, and they didn’t care to conduct business in German, the second language of Hungary, and what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Next, the eleven emigres crowded into two rattletrap taxis. Avila had given Stahl a hand-drawn map of the castle’s location, near the Danubian port of Komarom, and Stahl handed it to the taxi drivers. After some head scratching and a spirited argument, inspiration struck and the taxis drove off over snow-covered roads. Soon enough the driving grew difficult, the bald tyres spun, the drivers cursed, everybody got out and pushed. Finally, at the edge of a tiny village, the drivers gave up. ‘Can’t go,’ said one of them in rudimentary German. Stahl paid him, the driver said they should stay where they were and that someone would come for them. Then the taxis got turned around and headed back towards Budapest.
As the emigres stood by their baggage, rubbing their hands and stamping their feet, they wondered what
