Midnight in Europe by Alan Furst Page B

photographs of statuesque women with big breasts and big smiles; group scenes of volleyball games—which was how nudists spent most of their time if you believed the magazines; a picnic in the woods, repose in beach chairs. Wearing lace-up shoes and thin socks, the nudists were enjoying themselves. They were all ages, all shapes, some with tired, saggy backsides, others well formed.
    With keen interest, his goaty side ascendant, Major Schwalbe peered at one page after another, while the passengers on the Paris/Berlin express looked at their watches and fretted.
    De Lyon said, “Would you care to keep those, Herr Major? I have more with me.”
    As Ferrar and de Lyon—now officially confirmed visitors to the Reich—settled back in their compartment, the train moved out of the station. “Well, a taste of what’s to come,” de Lyon said, lighting one of his brown cigarettes.
    “I was here three years ago,” Ferrar said. “It wasn’t so bad then.”
    “It will get worse. A country run by a political party and its security service … the newspapers don’t really tell the story.”
    Ferrar looked out the window as the train rattled across a railroad bridge over a frozen river. The spires of Cologne’s cathedral, lit by moonlight, could be seen in the distance.
    “We can count on being closely watched in Berlin, followed everywhere,” de Lyon said. “You go out of your hotel room, they come in. Every foreigner gets the same treatment, the police keep records of who you see, what you do. Of course they could make it difficult to enter the country but they want people to come here, to see what they’ve accomplished, to admire German progress, the Nazi miracle. Anyhow, for the moment, we’re the right kind of foreigners.”
    “Thanks to you and your magazines.”
    De Lyon shrugged. “One takes precautions, it becomes a habit.” He stubbed out his cigarette and said, “And we’ll have toplay the part in Berlin, those wicked Parisians and their naughty photographs—it’s theatre for the police.”
    “It seems to have worked with Major Schwalbe.”
    “It did. But they’re not all like that, believe me.”
    After a stop at Cologne, where they waited while a German locomotive was coupled to the passenger cars, the train crossed the Rhine and entered a new landscape. They were south of Essen now, in what the newspapers called the industrial heartland of Germany . All the way to the horizon, in the light of floodlamps, tall chimneys poured smoke into the night sky, huge smelting and refining plants bordered the track—sometimes on both sides, brilliant fires flared in the open hearths of factories, served by workers seen as silhouettes against the firelight, slag heaps climbed far above the roof of the railcar, and the smell of burning coal hung in the compartment. No green thing lived here, only gray concrete, rusted iron, and brown brick blackened by soot.
    De Lyon said, “Did you see the workers? How they hurry?”
    “Not running, exactly,” Ferrar said. “More like a fast trot.”
    For a time, de Lyon stared at the spectacle, then shook his head. “You know,” he said, his expression somewhere between regret and disgust, “the words ‘German rearmament’ don’t really mean much until you’ve seen all this.”
    “The Krupp works.”
    “Yes. Cannon, mortars, anti-aircraft guns, and the ammunition they need—millions of shells. And that’s what’s coming for us, sooner or later.”
    “In France? You believe that, Max?”
    “As of now, if nothing changes, the fascists will have Spain. Czechoslovakia is next, because Hitler knows that France and England are afraid to fight him. Then he’ll want more. And more.”
    “For instance, Russia.”
    The Russian in de Lyon grinned at that idea. “Hitler is evil, but he isn’t stupid.”
    The train slowed, then was shunted onto a siding so that afreight train, having precedence in the German rail system, could pass them by. Two locomotives pulled a