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Friday, May 12, 2023

Mission To Paris - Incident at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin, Germany

I'm Reading Mission To Paris by Alan Furst. It takes place just before the German invasion of France at the beginning of World War 2. Frederick Stahl, an American actor working on a movie in Paris, attends a banquet in Berlin with a German actress. At the banquet when they agree to meet later in her quarters, they are overheard by a waiter. At first they don't seem to be too concerned, snotty little waiter, at worst it will just be a little gossip for the tabloids. Stahl, we find out later, doesn't leave a tip, which given the situation is probably an attempt to further irritate the waiter who's already annoyed that they're going off and having illegal assignations without him. You know, who do they think they are? Naughty upper class twits? So that's all there is at this point, it's just celebrities versus the paparazzi. But now Stahl goes up to our actress's room and hands over $250,000 Francs that he has carried in his coat and pockets all the way from Paris. So they are really up to no good but not the kind of no good that the waiter was expecting, I don't think. Probably should mention that they are in the on the top floor of the hotel and she is in the Hitler Suite and I think he is in the Bismarck Suite, it's, you know, the creme de La Creme of Nazi Germany. WTF? But now the waiter comes by Stahl's room and wants a payoff to keep quiet, he wants 10,000 Reichs marks. Stahl agrees to pay him, he calls the actress who comes over and talks to him, goes out, gets the money and brings it back. Stahl is going to go pay off the waiter, but the actress insists on going along. They go to the waiters room knock on the door and he lets them in. He's sitting in a chair cleaning his nails. Stahl hands him the money and then he and the actress both apologize, something that the weasely little waiter wasn't expecting. But then in the middle of Stahl's apology the actress shoots the waiter with the gun she had in her purse that's got a silencer on it. I was so not expecting that. I did not see it coming and when it happened I was so surprised I laughed out loud. Now I'm wondering if maybe the actress had a long-standing grudge against this waiter and this whole charade was setup by the actress so she could execute this snotty little weasel. 


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