Read Online The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst - Free Book Online
Authors: Alan Furst
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different: they talked to politicians, developed sources in government bureaux, and dug around for secrets. Sometimes they talked to, and traded with, one another. And, now and again, a journalist worked directly for the secret services.
Weisz smiled as he recalled the afternoon—they’d done a pretty fair job on him. It’s your old college chum! And his sexy girlfriend who thinks you’re sweet! Have a drink! Have six! Oh look, here’s our friend Mr. Brown! Mr. Green! Mr. Jones! Sparrow and Olivia were probably civilians, he guessed—the lives of nations were lately perilous, so one helped out if one were asked—but Mr. Brown was the real thing. And so, Weisz said to himself, what was it about this particular pee on this particular lamppost that so excited this particular hound? Was Ferrara suspected of something—had he gotten himself on a list? Weisz hoped not. But, if not, what? Because Brown wanted to know who he was and wanted to find him and had gone to some trouble over it. Damn, he’d felt this coming, as he contemplated writing about Ferrara, why hadn’t he listened to himself?
Calm down. The spies were always after something. If you were a journalist, here all of a sudden came the warmest Russian, most cultured German, most sophisticated Frenchwoman you ever met. Weisz’s personal favorite in Paris was the magnificent Count Polanyi, at the Hungarian legation—lovely old European manners, dire honesty, and a sense of humor: very appealing, very dangerous. A mistake to be anywhere near these people, but sometimes one erred. Weisz certainly had. With, for example, the British spy Lady Angela Hope—she made no secret of it—and the memory of her produced a drunken snort of laughter. He had twice, in her Passy apartment, erred with Lady Angela, who made a loud, elaborate opera of it all, surely he was at least Casanova to produce such shrieks—Christ, there were maids in the apartment. Never mind the maids, the neighbors! Oh my dear, Lady Angela’s been murdered. Again. This performance had been followed by a pillow interrogation of considerable length, all for the unreported tidbits from his interview with Gafencu, the Roumanian foreign minister. Which she’d not had, any more than Brown had found out where Colonel Ferrara had gone to ground.
By nine, Weisz was back in his room. He’d wanted dinner, by the time he reached the Sixth, but dinner at Chez this or Mère that, with a newspaper for company, had not appealed to him, so he’d stopped at his café and had a ham sandwich, coffee, and an apple. Once home, he thought about writing, writing from the heart, for himself, and would’ve worked on the novel in his desk drawer, but for the fact that there was no novel in the drawer. So he stretched out on the bed, listened to a symphony, smoked cigarettes, and read Malraux’s Man’s Fate — La Condition Humaine, in French—for the second time. Shanghai in 1927, the Communist uprising, peasant terrorists, Soviet political operatives working against Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces, secret police, spies, European aristocrats. Overlain with the French taste for philosophy. No refuge here from Weisz’s vocational life, but he did not, would not, seek refuge.
Still, there was at least, thankfully, one exception to the rule. He put the book down from time to time and thought about Olivia, about what it might have been like to make love to her, about Véronique, about his chaotic love life, this one and that one, wherever they were that night. Thought particularly about the, well, not the love of his life perhaps, but the woman he never stopped thinking about, because their hours together had been, always, exciting and passionate. “It’s just that we were made for each other,” she would say, a melancholy sigh in her voice. “Sometimes I think, why can’t we just, continue?” Continue meant, he supposed, a life of afternoons in hotel beds, occasional dinners in out-of-the-way
Weisz smiled as he recalled the afternoon—they’d done a pretty fair job on him. It’s your old college chum! And his sexy girlfriend who thinks you’re sweet! Have a drink! Have six! Oh look, here’s our friend Mr. Brown! Mr. Green! Mr. Jones! Sparrow and Olivia were probably civilians, he guessed—the lives of nations were lately perilous, so one helped out if one were asked—but Mr. Brown was the real thing. And so, Weisz said to himself, what was it about this particular pee on this particular lamppost that so excited this particular hound? Was Ferrara suspected of something—had he gotten himself on a list? Weisz hoped not. But, if not, what? Because Brown wanted to know who he was and wanted to find him and had gone to some trouble over it. Damn, he’d felt this coming, as he contemplated writing about Ferrara, why hadn’t he listened to himself?
Calm down. The spies were always after something. If you were a journalist, here all of a sudden came the warmest Russian, most cultured German, most sophisticated Frenchwoman you ever met. Weisz’s personal favorite in Paris was the magnificent Count Polanyi, at the Hungarian legation—lovely old European manners, dire honesty, and a sense of humor: very appealing, very dangerous. A mistake to be anywhere near these people, but sometimes one erred. Weisz certainly had. With, for example, the British spy Lady Angela Hope—she made no secret of it—and the memory of her produced a drunken snort of laughter. He had twice, in her Passy apartment, erred with Lady Angela, who made a loud, elaborate opera of it all, surely he was at least Casanova to produce such shrieks—Christ, there were maids in the apartment. Never mind the maids, the neighbors! Oh my dear, Lady Angela’s been murdered. Again. This performance had been followed by a pillow interrogation of considerable length, all for the unreported tidbits from his interview with Gafencu, the Roumanian foreign minister. Which she’d not had, any more than Brown had found out where Colonel Ferrara had gone to ground.
By nine, Weisz was back in his room. He’d wanted dinner, by the time he reached the Sixth, but dinner at Chez this or Mère that, with a newspaper for company, had not appealed to him, so he’d stopped at his café and had a ham sandwich, coffee, and an apple. Once home, he thought about writing, writing from the heart, for himself, and would’ve worked on the novel in his desk drawer, but for the fact that there was no novel in the drawer. So he stretched out on the bed, listened to a symphony, smoked cigarettes, and read Malraux’s Man’s Fate — La Condition Humaine, in French—for the second time. Shanghai in 1927, the Communist uprising, peasant terrorists, Soviet political operatives working against Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces, secret police, spies, European aristocrats. Overlain with the French taste for philosophy. No refuge here from Weisz’s vocational life, but he did not, would not, seek refuge.
Still, there was at least, thankfully, one exception to the rule. He put the book down from time to time and thought about Olivia, about what it might have been like to make love to her, about Véronique, about his chaotic love life, this one and that one, wherever they were that night. Thought particularly about the, well, not the love of his life perhaps, but the woman he never stopped thinking about, because their hours together had been, always, exciting and passionate. “It’s just that we were made for each other,” she would say, a melancholy sigh in her voice. “Sometimes I think, why can’t we just, continue?” Continue meant, he supposed, a life of afternoons in hotel beds, occasional dinners in out-of-the-way
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