Free The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst Page A

cables, a turbine, an air flask, rudders, fuse, drive shaft, and plenty more. All of it fated, alas, to blow up. On the side of the page, a list of specifications. Weight: 3,748 pounds. Length: 23 feet, 7 inches. Charge: 595 pounds. Range/speed: 4,400 yards at 50 knots, 13,000 yards at 30 knots. Power: wet heater. Which meant, after he thought about it for a moment, that the torpedo was driven through the water by steam.
    Why was he given this?
    The train slowed for the next station, Gare du Nord, blue tile set in the curve of the white tunnel wall. Weisz refolded the drawing and put it back in the envelope. On the short walk to the Café Europa, he tried every way he knew to see if somebody was following him. There was a woman with a shopping basket, a man walking a spaniel. How was one to know?
      
    At the Café Europa, Weisz had a quiet word with Salamone, saying that a stranger on the Métro had handed him an envelope—a copy of a mechanical blueprint. The expression on Salamone’s face was eloquent: this is the last thing I needed today. “We’ll look at it after the meeting,” he said. “If it’s a…blueprint? I better ask Elena to join us.” Elena, the Milanese chemist, was the committee’s adviser on anything technical, the rest of them could barely change a lightbulb. Weisz agreed. He liked Elena. Her sharp face, long, graying hair worn back in a clip, her severe dark suits, did not especially reveal who she was. Her smile did; one corner of her mouth upturned, the reluctant half smile of the ironist, witness to the absurdities of existence, half amused, half not. Weisz found her appealing and, more important, he trusted her.
    It was not a good meeting.
    They’d all had time to brood about Bottini’s murder, about what it might mean to them, to be targets of OVRA—not as giellisti, but as individuals, trying to live their daily lives. In the first flash of anger, they had thought only of counterattack, but now, after a discussion of articles for the next issue of Liberazione, they wanted to talk about changing the location of the meeting, about security. They believed themselves to be skilled amateurs, at newspaper production, but security was not a discipline for skilled amateurs, they knew that, and it frightened them.
    When everyone else had left, Salamone said, “Allright, Carlo, I guess we’d better take a look at your drawing.”
    Weisz laid it out on the table. “A torpedo,” he said.
    Elena studied it for a time, then shrugged. “Someone copied this, from an engineering blueprint, so someone thought it was important. Why? Because it’s different, improved, perhaps experimental, but God only knows how, I don’t. This is meant for an ordnance expert.”
    “There are two possibilities,” Salamone said. “It’s an Italian blueprint, so it can only have come from Pola, on the Adriatic, from what used to be the Whitehead Torpedo Company—founded by the British, taken over by Austria-Hungary, then Italian after the war. You’re right, Elena, it must be significant, surely secret, so, by having it, we’re involved in espionage. Which means that the man in the Métro could have been an agent provocateur, and this paper is planted evidence. On that basis, we burn it.”
    “And the other possibility,” Weisz said, “is that it’s a gesture. Of resistance.”
    “What if it is?” Elena said. “This is of interest only to a navy, likely it’s meant for the British navy, or the French. So, if that idiot in Rome gets us into a war, with France, or Great Britain, God forbid, it would lead to the loss of Italian ships, Italian lives. How? I can’t work out the details, but secret knowledge of a weapon’s capabilities is always an advantage.”
    “That’s true,” Salamone said. “And, on that basis, we don’t want anything to do with it. We are a resistance organization, and this is spying, this is treason, not resistance, though there are those on the other side who think it’s the