The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst Read Free Book Online

to be written, and Ferrara himself had asked only that his future destination not be named. Easy enough to do that. Better —the reader might well imagine that he was off to fight somewhere else, wherever brave men and women were standing up against tyranny. Otherwise, Weisz asked himself, what could go wrong? The Italian secret services surely knew that Ferrara was in Spain, knew his real name, knew everything about him. And Weisz would make sure that this article would say nothing that could help them. And, in fact, these days, what wasn’t a ticking bomb? Very well then, he had his assignment and, that settled, he returned to the file folders.
    Carlo Weisz sat at his desk, his jacket hung over the back of the chair; he wore a pale gray shirt with a thin red stripe, sleeves rolled up, top button undone, tie pulled down. A pack of Gitanes sat next to an ashtray from the San Marco, the artists’ and conspirators’ café in Trieste. His radio was on, its dial glowing amber, tuned to a Duke Ellington performance recorded at a Harlem nightclub, and the room was dark, lit only by a small desk lamp with a green glass shade. He leaned back in the chair for a moment, rubbed his eyes, then ran his fingers back through his hair to get it off his forehead. And if, by chance, he was watched from an apartment across the street—the shutters were open—it would never occur to the watcher that this was a scene for a newsreel, or a page in some Warriors of the Twentieth Century picture book.
    From Weisz, a quiet sigh as he went back to work. He was, he realized, for the first time since the meeting with Salamone, at peace. Very odd, really, wasn’t it. Because all he was doing was reading.
      
    10 January, 1939. Since midnight, a slow, steady snow had fallen over Paris. At three-thirty in the morning, Weisz stood at the corner of the rue Dauphine and the quay that ran along the left bank of the Seine. He peered into the darkness, took off his gloves, and tried to rub a little warmth into his hands. A windless night; the snow floated down over the white street and the black river. Weisz squinted, looking up the quay, but he couldn’t see a thing, then looked at his watch. 3:34. Late, not like Salamone, maybe… But before he could concentrate on the possible catastrophes, he saw a pair of dim headlights, wobbling as the car skidded over the slippery cobbles.
    Salamone’s cranky old Renault slid sideways and stopped as Weisz waved. He had to pull hard to open the door as Salamone leaned over and pushed from the other side. “Ohh, fuck this,” Salamone said. The car was cold, its heater had not worked for a long time, and the efforts of its single windshield wiper did little to clear the window. On the backseat, a parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine.
    The car bumped and skidded along the quay, past the great dark bulk of Notre Dame, traveling east by the river to the Pont d’Austerlitz, the bridge that crossed to the right bank of the Seine. As the window fogged up, Salamone bent forward over the wheel. “I can see nothing,” he said.
    Weisz reached over and cleared a small circle with his glove. “Better?”
    “ Mannaggia! ” Salamone said, meaning damn the snow and the car and everything else. “Here, try this.” He fumbled in his overcoat pocket and produced a large white handkerchief. The Renault had waited patiently for this moment, when the driver had one hand on its wheel, and spun slowly in a circle as Salamone swore and stomped on the brake. The Renault ignored this, completed a second pirouette, then came to rest with its back wheels in a mound of snow that had drifted up against the streetlamp at the end of the bridge.
    Salamone put his handkerchief away, started the stalled car, and shifted into first gear. The wheels spun as the engine whined; once, twice, again. “Wait, stop, I’ll push it,” Weisz said. He used his shoulder to open the door, took one step outside, then his feet flew up and he