Midnight in Europe (14 page)

“
Fa
 … what?”

“Fucking bastard, in shtetl Yiddish.”

“Where’s Szarny?”

“Lohr counted the money, then let him go. First he said something that made Szarny flinch.”

“What did he want from you?”

“Money. He meant to hold me for ransom.”

“And you said?”

“I said I would try to arrange it … pleading, like the sniveling gutter rat he wanted me to be. We’re not finished with this, Herr Lohr and I.”

As they approached the taxi, de Lyon said, “Cristián, how in hell did you manage it?”

“Frau Vaksmann’s idea, I went to see a big shot at the Gestapo, where I played the high-priced lawyer.”

“Which you are.”

“Which I am.”

De Lyon wanted to go and thank Frau Vaksmann immediately but Ferrar suggested they stop at the Kaiserhof first—de Lyon could clean up and change clothes and … He didn’t go on, not wanting to say too much with the driver listening. “You’ll see,” Ferrar said. At the Kaiserhof, de Lyon went off to his room while Ferrar waited for him. When he returned, Ferrar said, “I have a feeling that Szarny is still here,” then picked up the telephone and asked the operator to connect him to Herr Szarny’s room. The phone rang for a long time and Ferrar was about to give up when Szarny answered, apparently out of breath, his “Yes?” hesitant and fearful.

“Herr Szarny, is everything all right? My name is Ferrar, I’m Max de Lyon’s lawyer, and I arranged to have you released.”

“You did?”

“They promised they would let you go, I just wanted to make sure they kept their word.”

“I am very grateful,” Szarny said.

“Herr Szarny, may we drop by your room for a moment? There’s more I need to say.”

“Yes, I suppose so, I’m just sitting here.”

Szarny answered the door, then collapsed into a chair, head in hands. Ferrar was horrified at the sight, he’d never seen a man so dominated, it was as though someone had stolen his mind. And, in a way, Lohr had done precisely that, had used his greatest gift, a talent for intimidation—a useful talent in the right time and place: he essentially
owned
this poor man.

They got to work right away. Asked Szarny what he liked to drink, then had a bottle of cherry brandy sent up to the room and began, slowly at first, to administer it. The alcohol helped, so did the conversation. When de Lyon referred to Lohr as “that pimple on the devil’s ass,” Szarny smiled, a victory.

“He was blackmailing me,” Szarny said. They nodded, quite overtly not asking why.

“He won’t again,” de Lyon said. “If he tries it, you telephone me in Paris and I’ll make sure it’s taken care of.”

“I had a mistress,” Szarny said. “My wife is not well, and her oldest friend was so sympathetic …”

“It happens every day,” de Lyon said—
we’re all men of the world
.

“He threatened to write my wife a letter, so I gave him money and I gave him money and then, one day, he said that Germany would soon rule Czechoslovakia and he would make sure to have himself stationed there, so he could ‘take care of me in person.’ Then he asked for a lot of money.”

De Lyon looked at his watch and said, “It’s almost one o’clock, I think you need something to eat.” He picked up the telephone and asked for the room-service waiter to bring up an extra-large bowl of the famous Kaiserhof specialty: liver dumplings in potato soup, the soup flavored with bits of sausage and leek.

Szarny ate slowly, with great relish, the soup reminding him that so long as he was alive, things could get better. At one point, as the tension in him waned, he looked like he was close to tears. “Tell me, Herr Szarny,” de Lyon said, “what did Lohr say to you as you left the room?”

The deflection worked, tears replaced by anger as Szarny looked up from his liver dumplings and said, “He told me that if I ever said anything about this he would have my wife and children murdered. What made it worse was that to him this was
comical
, as though he’d played a joke on me. And he somehow let me know that he’d done this before and would do it again.”

“Not to you, he won’t,” de Lyon said.

Szarny finished his soup and said, “Now, if you gentlemen don’t mind, I would like to rest for a while, I haven’t really slept for days.”

“Then we’ll be going,” Ferrar said. “But first, we would like to ask you for a favor.”

“Yes, of course, for you, after …”

“The Spanish Republic has great need for armament, Herr Szarny. And I wonder, even after everything you’ve gone through, if you are still willing to sell us the anti-tank cannon.”

“I can do that,” Szarny said. “But certain officials will demand money in exchange for their stamp of approval.”

“We can pay whatever is needed,” de Lyon said. “We’re losing a war, money doesn’t matter.”

“In that case, I will sell you whatever you wish. At one time I could have covered these extra costs myself, but over the last year and a half any money I had put aside went into Lohr’s pocket.” As de Lyon and Ferrar rose to leave, Szarny said, “As for losing a war, I pray you don’t, my friends, because, if you do, we’re next.”

In the elevator, Ferrar was cautious—the uniformed operator able to hear everything. “Did you mean what you said, Max? About a telephone call to Paris and
 … taking care of
our short friend?”

“Yes.”

Back in Ferrar’s room, de Lyon said, “Now let’s get the hell out of this fucking country.”

“Don’t you want to visit the museum?” Ferrar said, picking up the phone. He reached the front desk and asked about airline tickets. The clerk said, “I am sorry, sir, there will not be seats available for days, we have commercial exhibitions in Berlin this time of year. Do you want me to reserve on the first available date?”

“Not at the moment,” Ferrar said. He hung up, then dialed the
hotel operator and asked to be connected to Lufthansa, “not the reservations office, the corporate office.”

When a receptionist answered the phone, Ferrar asked for the law department, and, when they came on the line, he said, “Herr Bruno von Scheldt, please, and tell him that it’s Herr Ferrar, from Coudert.”

Von Scheldt took the call right away. “Cristián!” he said. “So good to hear from you, I miss the old firm, I really do. And, as for Paris … well, you know.”

“Come for a visit, Bruno. We’ll go to the Tour d’Argent, my treat.”

“Maybe some day I will, but they keep me busy here. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Speaking of Paris, a friend and I are trying to get home, but the planes are booked for days.”

“Can you leave tonight?”

“We can.”

“Where are you, Cristián?”

“At the Kaiserhof.”

“I’ll call you back in ten minutes.”

As February turned to March, the spring rains began to blow in from the west, and some of the chestnut trees at Métro entrances started to bud, forced by the warm air drifting up from the stations below. Parisians found themselves restless and vaguely melancholy for no evident reason, an annual malady accompanying the nameless season that fell between winter and spring. The streets were quiet—only dog walkers beneath shiny umbrellas and the occasional couple with nowhere to be alone. In the cafés, newspapers on their wooden dowels went unread, as though the patrons refused to read them until they produced better news. A change of government was in the air, though nobody believed it would change anything but itself.

Ferrar tried to regain his peace of mind but it was slow in coming. What he’d seen in Berlin had affected him.
Evil
was the only word for it, and Ferrar now knew it would not cure itself, as most of the world hoped. He tried to take refuge in work, but work was more and more about what was coming to Europe. Many of Coudert’s wealthy clients were converting paper assets into cash, buying paintings of stable value, and shipping them to America for storage. Twice he saw Chantal, the woman he’d met at a restaurant. The first time she spent the night at his apartment, where they tried to find the excitement of their first meeting, but only managed to make love by the book and fall asleep. The second time they went to the movies and he took her home in a taxi. There was to be no third time.

Then, on a drizzling mid-afternoon, he returned from a meeting to find Jeannette, his secretary, waiting impatiently to see him, her expression agitated and concerned. “You’ve had a telephone call, Monsieur Ferrar, from a woman friend in America. She has no telephone, so is waiting at a friend’s house for you to call her. Here is the number.” She sat there for a time, wanting to say more, and finally added, “Could you call right away? Even so, there will be a delay for the transatlantic line.”

“Please try it for me, Jeannette,” he said.

Twenty minutes later, he was speaking to Eileen Moore, his sometime lover in an affair carried on during his trips to New York. She had never telephoned before, they wrote back and forth as the time for their meetings approached. She managed to say hello and ask him how he was, determined not to be emotional, then went silent as she started to cry.

“Eileen? Are you there?”

“Yes, I’m here.” Again, she couldn’t talk.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Cristián, a terrible thing has happened.”

“Eileen?”

“Sorry, I can’t help it.” She blew her nose. “I’m pregnant, Cristián, that’s what has happened.”

“Well, we’ll just have to …”

“No, you don’t understand, you’re not …” This hit him hard—surprised him, how hard it hit. “Not long after you left,” she went on, “I met someone. He’s a very nice man, we had a fling, I got pregnant. I thought about having it taken care of, but I can’t.”

“What are you going to do?”

“He’s going to marry me, to do the right thing … We aren’t in love, Cristián.”

She meant
but you and I are
. His voice tight, he said, “I’m sorry about this, Eileen, much more than sorry. We …” He stopped himself from going further, far worse for her now, because it was too late, to hear a declaration of something that had always been just beneath the surface, and never said out loud. At last, in the transatlantic static, he managed, “Can I do anything? Do you need anything?”

“No, I’ll come through this.”

“I don’t want to lose touch with you. If you move, please send me your address.”

“All right, if you want me to, I will. And I do have to move, you can’t have a baby at the Iroquois Hotel.”

“I will miss you,” Ferrar said.

“I think we better hang up now. Goodby, Cristián.”

“Goodby.”

To allow him privacy, Jeannette had stepped into the hallway, now she returned and said, “I hope everything is all right, Monsieur Ferrar.”

“Maybe it will be,” Ferrar said.

Jeannette went back to work, Ferrar stared at the document he’d been reading,
Marteau v. The Commercial Bank of Aberdeen
, but all he saw was lines of typewritten print. He badly wanted to go home, to be alone, but he couldn’t.
I have lost her
, he thought, his turn to realize that sometimes you don’t know how much you care for someone until she’s gone.

•

De Lyon called the following day. “I’ve just had a letter from Sarah Vaksmann, she’s living in London, with her nephew, so it seems she took our advice.”

In Berlin, there’d been time, before they left, to go to see Frau Vaksmann and thank her for what she’d done. Then de Lyon had told her in very strong terms that she had to leave Germany, Ferrar adding that her Oberfuehrer would throw her to the wolves without a second thought, she must
not
depend on him. She hadn’t been receptive at the moment but with time, evidently, she understood they were right.

De Lyon said, “We may have saved her. I wish I could feel satisfaction about that, I mean, I’m glad she’s safe, but she’s lost everything. Told everyone she was taking a vacation, then ran for it. Now she’s trying to sell the pension, which is complicated for an owner living abroad.”

“If she needs help with the sale,” Ferrar said, “have her get in touch with me at the office. It’s something we do here.”

On 8 March, after work, Ferrar walked over to the Oficina Técnica. From Max de Lyon’s office, the sound of one finger typing. When Ferrar opened the door, he found de Lyon, his face screwed into a scowl of intense concentration, using his index finger to fill out, a letter at a time, a densely printed form of several pages. As de Lyon worked he said, “May he roast in hell, whoever wrote this fucking thing.”

“There are those who love forms, Max. They think it’s clever to make people tell them things. What have you got there?”

“This, my friend, is an end-user certificate, originally dreamed up by the American Congress, in a law known as the Spanish Embargo Act of 1937. Now, of course, the whole world has them. So, if you ship arms from Country X to Country Y, Country Y must swear they are going to keep them, not sell them on to mean old Country Z, otherwise known as Spain. Without a signed form, Country X can’t ship their guns.”

“I know the end-user certificate, Max.”

“Then you also know that everyone cheats, but those who ship to Franco somehow don’t get caught at it.” He sat back, shook his stiffening index finger, and said, “Thanks for coming over, Cristián. This is a new version of the form, maybe you could look it over, then we have an eight-thirty dinner reservation at Lapérouse, have you been there?”

“I have. Very Belle Epoque, as the French put it, and the food is good.”

“An elegant restaurant, expensive and not subtle about it. We want our guest to feel honored and respected, a man we see as a high personage, because we’re going to insult him, by assuming he’s the sort of gent who would take a bribe. There’s gossip that says he might, but no more than that.”

“And he is?”

“An Estonian military man called General Zoltau. The name is German but no surprise there, the Germans—Teutonic Knights, Baltic Barons, what have you—ran the country for centuries.”

“It sounds like you know him.”

“I don’t, but I’ve seen him in person and heard his voice. I bought his photograph from a French press agency and spent a couple of hours in a car outside the Estonian legation and, presto, there he was. As for the voice, a faked-up telephone call works nicely. Once I have a look, and hear a voice, I’m more often right than wrong. So, are you able to join us?”