Free The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst

of this accursed country. Meekly, with the greatest diffidence he could manage, Kolb stepped forward and took the passport, nodding humbly to the officer as he backed away. The officer, gathering up the coins from the table, glanced at him but said nothing. Heart pounding, Kolb walked out of the café.
    Outside, the waterfront. Burned-out warehouses, bomb craters in the cobbled street, a half-sunk tender tied to a pier. The street was crowded: soldiers, refugees—sitting amid their baggage, waiting for a ship that would never arrive, local citizens, with nothing to do, and nowhere to go. One of Barcelona’s horse-drawn fiacres for hire, with two elegantly dressed men in the open carriage, moved slowly through the crowd. One of the men looked at Kolb for a moment, then turned away.
    Well he might. A little clerk of a man in his underpants, otherwise dressed for a day at the office. Some people stared, others didn’t—Kolb was not the strangest thing they’d seen that day in Barcelona, not by a great deal. Meanwhile, S. Kolb’s legs were cold in the wind off the bay, should he tie his jacket around his waist? Maybe he would, in a minute, but for the moment, he wanted only to get as far away from the café as he could. Money, he thought, then a train ticket. He walked quickly, heading for the corner. Should he try to return to the riding stable? Hurrying along the waterfront, he considered it.
      
    3 February, Paris.
    The weather broke, to a false, cloudy spring, the city returning to its normal grisaille —gray stone, gray sky. Carlo Weisz left the Hotel Dauphine at eleven in the morning, for a meeting of the Liberazione committee at the Café Europa. He was surely followed once, perhaps twice.
    He walked over to the Saint-Germain-des-Prés Métro, on his way to the Gare du Nord, stopped to look at a shop window he liked, old maps and nautical charts, and, out of the corner of his eye, noticed that a man at mid-block had also stopped, to look, apparently, in the window of a tabac. Nothing unusual about this man, in his thirties, who wore a gray peaked cap and had his hands in the pockets of a tweed jacket. Weisz, done with looking at Madagascar, 1856, continued on, entered the Métro, and descended the stairs that led to the Direction Porte de Clignancourt side of the tracks. On his way down, he heard hurrying footsteps above him, and glanced back over his shoulder. At that moment, the footsteps stopped. Now Weisz turned around, and caught a glimpse of a tweed jacket, as whoever it was reversed direction and disappeared around the corner of the stairway. Was it the same jacket? The same man? Who in the world went down Métro stairs, then up? A man who had forgotten something. A man who realized he was on the wrong Métro line.
    Weisz heard the train coming, and walked quickly down to the platform. He entered the car—only a few passengers this time of the morning. As he went to take a seat, he saw the man in the tweed jacket again, running for the car closest to the foot of the stairway. That was that. Weisz found a seat and opened a copy of Le Journal.
    But that was not quite that. Because, when the train stopped at Château d’Eau, someone said “Signor,” and, when Weisz looked up, handed him an envelope, then went quickly out the door, just before the train started to move. Weisz had only a brief look at him: fifty or so, poorly dressed, dark shirt buttoned at the throat, a deeply lined face, worried eyes. As the train picked up speed, Weisz went to the door and saw the man hurrying away down the platform. He returned to his seat, had a look at the envelope—brown, blank, sealed—and opened it.
    Inside, a single folded sheet of yellow drafting paper with the carefully drawn schematic of a long, tapered shape, its nose shaded dark, a propeller and fins at the other end. A torpedo. Extraordinary! Look at all the apparatus the thing contained, lettered descriptions, in Italian, ranged along its length—valves,