Free Midnight in Europe by Alan Furst Page B

woman’s desire is the best aphrodisiac.”
    De Lyon raised his glass and they drank to desire.
    As midnight approached, a short, swarthy bear of a man came grinning toward the table. He was almost bald, strands of hair oiled to his scalp, wore a baggy, gray silk suit over a black shirt with open collar, and a mist of powerful cologne. He had, on one arm, a blonde in a cloche hat with a feather, on the other, a brunette in a tight, scarlet dress. When de Lyon rose to greet his guests, so did Ferrar. “Stavros!” de Lyon said.
    “Max, my friend!” said the bear.
    They shook hands, then the bear put his arms around de Lyon, laughed, and smacked him twice on the shoulder. As introductions were quickly made, both women seemed a little vague, even dazed. Behind the trio came the waiter, carrying three chairs and breathing hard. When the three were seated, de Lyon caught the waiter’s eye and raised two fingers and soon enough two new bottles of champagne appeared. “So, Stavros,” de Lyon said, “how goes our business?”
    “I am close to getting what we want …,” Stavros said, holdinghis thumb and index finger an inch apart and adding, “… this close.” In a deep rumble of a voice he spoke French with what Ferrar took to be a Greek accent. Not wanting to go further in front of his girlfriends, Stavros looked left and right and said, “Girls, look what Uncle Stavros has for you.” He produced a folded paper square and pressed it into the hand of the blonde. “Now go off to the ladies’ WC and try this out. And we’ll miss your pretty faces but don’t be in a hurry, take your time.” He rose, pulled their chairs back, and sent them off with a big, evil grin. When they’d gone, he looked pointedly at Ferrar: who’s he?
    “Cristián is working with me,” de Lyon said. “You can trust him.”
    Stavros leaned conspiratorially across the table and said, “I think I’ve found the man we want, he owns a company in Brno.”
    “A Czech,” de Lyon said.
    “Yes, a hungry one.”
    “Who is he?”
    “He’s called Szarny, a big, flabby type with pink cheeks—he looks like a tuba player in an oompah band. Somehow he has gotten himself into money trouble, though I think he makes plenty. He’s one of those solid bourgeois types who’s got one big, bad fault, which he hides from everybody, especially his family. I don’t know what it is, but someone like me can smell it: the guilty conscience. A taste for rare and special sex that’s costly to buy? Does he gamble? Does he like to be … mistreated? You know what I mean, Max? You, Cristián?”
    They knew.
    “Szarny has a foundry called Brno Ironworks that’s connected to the Skoda arms company. I don’t know how, I don’t know who owns what, but Szarny says he can deliver what we need.”
    De Lyon looked over at Ferrar, meaning can you find out? Ferrar nodded, he could discover who owned what. De Lyon said, “How did you find him, Stavros?”
    “I have a man in Brno, where they make the Skoda anti-tankguns. He’s a confidential agent and collects information from chambermaids in hotels, barmen, maybe a cop or two, and when I asked him about Skoda he came up with Szarny.”
    As an aside, de Lyon said to Ferrar, “You know that Czechoslovakia is the leading arms exporter in Europe. They make the Panzer tank the Germans love so much.”
    “I do know,” Ferrar said. People who read newspapers knew about Czechoslovakia, so beloved by Hitler. Who had stated rather clearly, if you knew how to read him, that he meant to have it. Thus the propaganda about the poor, much-abused German minority in the Sudetenlands.
    “So,” Stavros said, “Szarny has a bad case of nerves, he’s so cautious on the telephone that I sometimes can’t understand what the hell he’s talking about. He starts calling guns bicycles, ‘shipping the bicycles,’ good, I finally figure it out. Then the next time it’s lamps. I suppose he’s afraid somebody’s listening to