us who work for your success would prefer that all the people who go to the movies feel affection for you. Why annoy those who don’t like your political views?’
Stahl nodded. ‘You are a sensible person, Madame Boulanger.’
She smiled, reached out and rested two fingers lightly on his knee. ‘You are a successful man, a movie star, let’s keep it that way. How long are you in Paris?’
‘Four months? Less? It’s hard to know, I have to meet with the producer and the director, then I’ll have a better idea.’
Mme Boulanger swivelled back to face her desk, picked up an appointment book, its pages thickened by notes in blue ink, and thumbed through it. ‘I see people from the newspapers on a fairly regular basis, and I’ll set up a few interviews. And by the way, is this Apres la Guerre an outcry against war? Umm, the futility of war?’
Stahl shrugged. ‘Three soldiers, foreign legionnaires, try to return home from Turkey after the 1918 armistice.’
‘And you play…?’
‘Colonel Vadic, of obscure Balkan origin, the leader, and much-decorated hero. I may get to walk with a stick.’
Mme Boulanger’s face lit up. ‘I like that,’ she said. ‘A human story.’
Walking back to the hotel, Stahl sensed that the city’s mood had changed. Sombre today, the Parisians, unsmiling, eyes down, something had reached them on the morning of 19 September. The headlines weren’t so different than the day before, all to do with the possibility of a German march into Czechoslovakia. If that happened, France was obliged by treaty to go to war. Years earlier, in the last months of 1923, as Stahl was beginning a new life in Paris, war was a thing of the past — the last one so brutal and vicious that all the world knew there could never be another. At least all the world of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. In the Left Bank cafes that autumn, the word was barely mentioned, the talk was about paintings, books, music, scandals, reputations, and who was in whose bed. As Stahl’s French grew better, as he picked up the argot, the slang, he fell in love with the world of the cafes.
He’d come a long way to get there. When he was twenty and working at the legation in Barcelona, the war ended, the Central Powers had lost, and the legation gave all its employees steamship tickets to the Austro- Hungarian port of Trieste. From there, Stahl had made his way to Vienna. Returned home, where to his mother he was a prodigal son, to his father a self-indulgent wastrel. He managed to live at the family apartment for a few weeks, then fled to stay on friends’ couches, and finally found a room in a cellar, half of which was given over to the storage of potatoes. A stage-struck friend — from one of the most aristocratic and impoverished families in the city — had taken to hanging around the great Viennese theatres, the ‘Burg’ and the Volksoper, and Stahl joined him and found an occasional job as an extra. He couldn’t sing, but enthusiastically mimed the words, and it was always good to have a handsome face in the crowd cheering the king. He carried his first spear in Aida, wore his first muttonchops — and had his first addictive sniff of the spirit gum that stuck them to his face — in The Merry Widow. In time, he won dramatic roles at some of the city’s smaller playhouses, worked hard, was noticed in reviews, and began to build a career.
He loved acting.
He’d been born to act — at least he thought so but he wasn’t the only one. It was the pure craft of it that excited him. When the circuits closed between actor and audience, when a line drew a laugh or, better, a gasp, when a pause lasted for precisely the right interval, when lines were picked up smartly from fellow players, when a silent reaction meant more than spoken words, he felt, and began to crave, that excitement. He loved also — that month anyhow — an actress named Berta and, in the spring of 1923, Berta decided to try her luck in Paris and Stahl went with her. There they lived passionately together for six weeks, almost, until she seduced a successful playwright and left for a better arrondissement. But Stahl wasn’t going anywhere. When he’d arrived in Paris it was as though a switch had been thrown in his life: everything at home and in school that had been ‘wrong’ with him was now somehow right.
He worked hard to speak decent French, discovered the cafes where theatre people went, became one of them, and found roles he could play, even if he had to memorize his lines phonetically. By 1925 he’d been recruited for his first work in film — silent at the time, which forced the actors to communicate with face and body. Then, after Warner Bros.’ The Jazz Singer in 1928, the dam broke — the first French talking picture, Les Trois Masques, appeared in 1929. Later that year, Stahl had the lead role in his first sound film: the wealthy owner of a factory (Stahl) secretly goes to union meetings, falls in love with a tough slumgirl factory worker, defends the dignity of the working class, loses his family and his factory, runs away with the girl, and is shot dead at a street march in the last scene. And then, who happened to be in Paris on the honeymoon of his third marriage but Milt Freed, an executive at Warner Bros.
Despite the fact that he and his new wife spoke only the most basic restaurant French, they took in a movie.
‘Stalka! Franz Stalka!’
Stahl had just entered the hotel lobby. Shocked at hearing his real name, he stared at the man who’d called out to him: a chubby fellow with a shining bald head and a fringe of grey hair. Who was this, rising from a lobby chair, newspaper still in one hand, a huge grin on his face? Stahl had no idea, then he almost remembered, and then he did. Last seen, what was it, twenty years ago? By now the man was hurrying towards him.
‘It’s me, Stalka, Moppi, you can’t have forgotten!’ This in pure Viennese German.
‘Hello, uh, Moppi.’ This sudden incarnation was Karl Moppel, his boss at the Austro-Hungarian legation in Barcelona, lo these twenty years ago. A man he’d always called Herr Moppel, though he vaguely remembered other people at the legation using the nickname.
Moppi shook his head. ‘Ach, I should have called you Fredric Stahl — of course I’ve followed your career. What are you doing in Paris?’
‘I’m here to make a film.’
‘Fantastic. I’m so proud of you, we’re proud of you, all the old gang.’
‘I’m glad, that’s very kind of you to say.’
‘Can we have coffee?’ Moppi said, looking at his watch. ‘I’m supposed to meet somebody but she hasn’t shown up.’
‘Let’s just sit in the lobby, all right?’
‘Of course. I can’t believe I’ve run into you.’ They took two chairs separated by a rubber tree. ‘I’ve often wondered what became of you, over the years. Then, maybe five or six years ago, I saw your picture on a poster at a movie theatre and I thought, I know that fellow! That’s Franz Stalka, who worked for us in Barcelona. I was delighted, really, delighted. What a success you’ve become.’
‘What brings you to Paris, Moppi?’ Something inside Stahl curled up and quivered when he said that silly name.
‘Me? Oh, I work in the embassy now. Still a diplomat, old Moppi. It was the Austrian embassy but it’s German now, since the Anschluss in March.’
‘Were you pleased, when that happened?’
Moppi looked serious. ‘It was unsettling, I’ll tell you that, and I didn’t like it at all, not at all. But you know, Franz — may I call you Franz?’
‘Please do.’
‘The political situation was very bad, we were on the brink of civil war in Austria and, in a way, Hitler saved us. Anyhow, beyond flags and things like that it doesn’t mean very much. Except calm and prosperity — how does one go about disliking that, I ask you?’
‘It would be difficult,’ Stahl said.
Moppi sat back and gazed affectionately at Stahl, then slowly shook his head. ‘Just imagine, I know a Hollywood star.’
‘I’m the same person,’ Stahl said. ‘Older.’
Moppi roared and wiped his eyes. ‘Yes, isn’t it so, I try not to think about it.’
Now Stahl looked at his watch.
‘I’ll bet you’re busy, a fellow like you,’ Moppi said.
Stahl offered a smile of regret that meant yes, he was busy.
‘Say, I have an idea, before you rush off. Some of the old gang from the military intelligence are in Paris now,
