Free Mission to Paris by Alan Furst Page A

Deschelles was silent, then he said, ‘Who knows? Perhaps they will fight, perhaps they won’t. Are you concerned about that?’
    ‘Well, I don’t want to see them occupied.’
    ‘No, of course not, nobody wants that,’ Deschelles said. ‘I just felt I should make sure you aren’t worried about the film. And there’s a lot we can get done while all this madness works itself out.’
    ‘I can learn lines,’ Stahl said.
    ‘That’s the spirit! And I’ll have our costume designer get in touch with you, perhaps today or tomorrow.’
    ‘Good. I’ll wait for the call.’
    Deschelles said goodbye and hung up. Stahl tried to go back to sleep.
    29 September. The costume designer, a woman named Renate Steiner, had arranged to meet with Stahl at her workroom, in Building K at the Paramount studios in Joinville, a working-class suburb southeast of Paris. He’d then telephoned Zolly Louis, who told Stahl he was still looking for a driver. ‘I’d be happy to do it myself,’ Zolly said, ‘but I don’t drive so much, maybe you can find a taxi.’ In fact there was a taxi, on the morning of the twenty-ninth, waiting near the front of the Claridge. The driver was an old man in a clean white shirt buttoned at the throat, who had an artificial hand – a leather cup enclosing the wrist, a leather glove with thumb and fingers set in a half-curled position. ‘A German did that to me,’ the driver said as they drove off. ‘I could get a better one, but it’s expensive.’ He explained that the taxi belonged to his son. ‘Just now he’s driving an army truck, up around Lille, much good it will do him or anybody else,’ he said and spat out the window.
    In time they reached Joinville and the driver, when Stahl handed him a hundred francs – twenty dollars – agreed to wait until Stahl was done with his appointment. The studios were vast – bought by Paramount in 1930, then used as a movie factory, making as many as fourteen versions of a new film in fourteen languages spoken by fourteen casts, thus making money fourteen times out of a single vehicle. This was possible because everybody everywhere liked to go to the movies, talking movies that talked in their own language. So the classic line of the American Saturday night: Say, honey, whattaya say we take in the new show at the Bijou? was repeated in its own linguistic version around the world. And still was, though by the time Stahl reached Joinville it had, with the development of new sound technology, become a dubbing studio: an actor moved his lips in French, the audience heard Spanish.
    Stahl, in the course of a long search for Building K, stopped for a time to watch a moustachioed gaucho with a guitar singing ‘ te amo ’ to a señorita on a balcony as the cameraman peered through his lens and the technicians squatted out of the frame. It was mostly, at Joinville, pretty much the same movie – love ignited, love thwarted, love triumphant. Just like, Stahl told himself with an inner smile, Hollywood.
    Eventually, he found what he was looking for: a one-storey, rust-stained stucco Building K, situated between Building R and Building 22 – the French were staunchly committed anarchists when it suited them. Renate Steiner’s workroom was spacious, long wooden tables held bolts of fabric, boxes of buttons in every colour and size, boxes of zips, cloth flowers, snips of material ( I’ll want that later ), and spools of thread, attended by every imaginable species of mannequin – from wire mesh to stained cotton, some of them in costume: here a Zouave, there a king’s ermine, and in between a pirate’s striped shirt and a convict’s striped outfit.
    Steiner sat before a sewing machine, matt black from constant use, SINGER in gold letters across the side. As she looked up to see who her visitor was, she ceased working the pedals and the two-stroke music of the machine slowed, then stopped. ‘Fredric Stahl,’ she said, her voice pleased to see him. ‘I’m