The World at Night

by Alan Furst

  “Too well.”

  “The Stranger, it’s called.”

  Casson nodded appreciatively. No problem putting that on a marquee.

  “By a writer named Albert Camus, from Algiers. Do you know him?”

  “I’ve heard the name.”

  The editor talked about the plot and the setting, then went on to other things. Casson wrote the title on a scrap of paper. It wasn’t what he’d made, more like what he’d always wanted to make, maybe would have made if the human-predicament stuff hadn’t been thrown overboard during the hunt for money.

  “Now I don’t know if this is for you,” the editor said, “but there’s a writer named Simone de Beauvoir—she has the cultural program on Radio Nationale—and she’s working on a novel . . .”

  Now he had the scent. The next day he spent at the Synops office, where synopses of ideas for films—from novels, short stories, treatments—were kept on file. It was busy; he saw Berthot, hunting eagerly through a stack of folders. “How’s the wedding business?” he asked. Berthot looked sheepish. “I’m out of it,” he said quietly. “For the moment.” What the hell, Casson thought. Was he the last one to catch on? The war was over, it was time to go back to business.

  “Hello, Casson!” Now there was a voice that caught your attention—foreign, and, by way of compensation, much too hearty. Casson looked up to see Erno Simic, the Hungarian. Or, if you liked your gossip, the “Hungarian.” A tall man, slightly stooped, a head too large for a pair of narrow shoulders, hooded eyes, a smile, meant to be ingratiating, that wasn’t. A French citizen of complex Balkan origins— no matter how many times he told you the story you could never keep it straight. Simic ran a small distribution company called Agna Film, which operated in Hungary and Romania.

  “Simic,” he said. “All going well?”

  “Today it is. Tell me please, Jean-Claude, we can eat together sometime soon?”

  “Of course. Call me at the office?”

  “I will, naturally. There is a Greek place, in the Tenth . . .”

  Better every day, his world coming back to life.

  Cold at night. None of that your side/my side diplomacy in the bed. Maybe he didn’t know her name and maybe the name she told him was a lie and maybe he did the same thing, but three in the morning found them curled and twisted and twined together in the chill air, hugging like long-lost lovers, riding each other’s bottoms through the night, arms wrapped around, hanging on to anything they could get hold of.

  Cold at night, and cold in the daytime. They had everything rationed now—coal and bread and wine and cigarettes. Only work kept him from thinking about it. Somewhere out in the lawless borderlands of the 19th Arrondissement he found Fischfang, as always at the center of incredibly complicated domestic arrangements. There were children, there were wives, there were apartments—mistresses, comrades, fugitives. Fischfang was never in one place for very long. Late one afternoon he sat with Casson in a tiny kitchen where a young woman was boiling diapers in a kettle. The coal stove smoked, mildew blackened the walls.

  Casson explained that he was back in business, that he was looking for a project, and how the rules had changed.

  Fischfang nodded. “Not too much reality—is that it?”

  “Yes. That’s how it has to be.”

  Fischfang stared out the window, the sky gray with winter coming. “Then what you might be able to do,” he said, “is a Summer Night movie. You know what I mean—the perfect night of summer in the full moon. A certain group of people have gathered in a castle, a country house, a liner on the high seas. A night of love, the night of love. Just once, dreams come true. By the end, one couple has parted, but we see that, ah, Paul has always loved Marie, no matter how life has tried to drive them apart. The crickets chirp, the moon rises, the music of the night is sublime. Hurry—life will soon be over, time is short, we have only this night, we must live out our loveliest dream, and it’s only a few hours until dawn.”

  He wound down. They were both silent. At last Fischfang cleared his throat, lit a cigarette. “Something like that,” he said. “It might work.”

  On the way back to his office, Casson saw a girl, maybe sixteen or so, wearing a school uniform, arms wrapped around her books. It was dusk. She looked directly into his eyes, an intimate look, as they moved toward each other on the crowded boulevard. “Monsieur,” she said. Her voice was urgent, emotional.

  He stopped. Yes? What? The usual Jean-Claude, the usual half-smile, whatever you want, I’m here. She thrust a folded paper into his hand, then was off down the street, disappearing into the shadows. He stepped into a doorway, unfolded the paper. It was a broadsheet, a one-page newspaper. Résistance, it was called. WE MUST FIGHT BACK, the headline said.

  On 17 December, Jean Casson signed with Continental.

  HOTEL DORADO

  9 December, 1940.

  Jean Casson sat at his desk at four in the afternoon. He wore an overcoat, a muffler, and gloves. Outside, a winter dusk— thick, gray sky, the lines of the rooftops softened and faded. Looking out his window he could see a corner where the rue Marbeuf met the boulevard. People in dark coats on the stone-colored pavement, like a black-and-white movie. Once upon a time they’d loved this hour in Paris; gold light spilling out on the cobbled streets, people laughing at nothing, whatever you meant to do in the gathering dark, you’d be doing it soon enough. On these boulevards night had never followed day—in between was evening, which began at the first fading of the light and went on as long as it could be made to last. Sometimes until dawn, he thought.

  He went back to his book, Neptune’s Daughter, turning the pages awkwardly with his glove, making notes in soft pencil. Work, work. The telephone rang, it was Marie-Claire, organizing a dinner. They were trying hard, his little group of friends, he was proud of them. Rolling the holiday boulder up a long and difficult slope—but at least working together. Christmas in France was not the ritual it was in England, but the New Year réveillon was important, and you were supposed to eat fine things and feel hopeful.

  They talked for a time, the same conversation they’d had for years— they must, he thought, somehow or other like having it. And it ended as it always did, with another telephone call planned—a Marie-Claire crisis could not, by definition, be resolved with a single telephone call.

  Neptune’s Daughter. Veronica and Perry drinking sidecars in Capri and watching the sun set. “Where do you suppose we’ll be on this day next year?” Veronica asks. “Will we be happy?” The telephone rang again. Marie-Claire, Casson thought, a forgotten detail. “Yes?” he said.

  “Hello? Is this Jean Casson?” An English voice, accenting the first syllable of Casson. A voice he knew.

  “Yes. Who is this, please?”

  “James Templeton.”

  The investment banker from London. “It, it’s good to hear from you.” Casson’s English worked at its own pace.

  “How are you getting on, over there?” Templeton asked.

  “Not so bad, thank you. The best that we can, you know, with the war . . .”

  “Yes, well, we haven’t forgotten you.”

  Casson’s thoughts were flying past. Why was this man calling him? Could it be that some incredibly complicated arrangement was going to allow British banks to invest in French films? There was a rumor that England and Germany continued to trade, despite the war, using middlemen in neutral nations. Or, maybe, a treaty had been signed, and this was a protocol sprung suddenly to life. Maybe, he thought, his heart quickening, the fucking war is over! “Thank you,” he managed to say. “What, uh . . .”

  “Tell me, do you happen to see much of Erno Simic? The Agna Film man?”

  “What? I’m sorry, you said?”

  “Simic. Has distribution arrangements in Hungary, I believe. Do you see him, ever?”

  “Well, yes. I mean, I have seen him.”

  “He can be extremely helpful, you know.”

  “Yes?”

  “Definitely. Certain busi
ness we’re doing now, he is somebody we are going to depend on. And since you’re a friend of ours in Paris, we thought you might be willing to lend a hand.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Sorry. To help, I mean.”

  “Oh. Yes, I see. All right. I’ll do what I can.”

  “Good. We are grateful. And we’ll be in touch. Good-bye, Casson.”

  “Good-bye.”

  He knew. And he didn’t know. He could decide, at that point, that he didn’t know. He fretted, waiting until six to walk over to Langlade’s office. “Jean-Claude!” Langlade said. “Come and have a little something.” From a bottom drawer he produced an old wine bottle refilled with calvados. “We went to see the Rouen side of the family on Sunday,” Langlade explained. “So you’ll share in the bounty.”

  Casson relaxed, sat back in his chair, the calvados was like soothing fire as it went down.

  “This is hard-won, I hope you appreciate it,” Langlade continued. “It took an afternoon of sitting on a couch and listening to a clock tick.”

  “Better than what you get in a store,” Casson said.

  Langlade refilled the glass. “My good news,” he said, “is that suddenly we’re busy. Some factory in Berlin ordered these tiny little lightbulbs, custom-made, grosses of them. God only knows what they’re for, but, frankly, who cares?” He gave Casson a certain look—it meant he’d been closer to disaster than he’d been willing to let on. “And you, Jean-Claude? Everything all right?”

  “A very strange thing, Bernard. Somebody just telephoned me from London.”

  “What?”

  “A call, from a banker in London.”

  Langlade thought hard for a moment, then shook his head. “No, no, Jean-Claude. That’s not possible.”

  “It happened. Just now.”

  “They’ve cut the lines. There isn’t any way that somebody could call you from London.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Yes. Who did you say?”

  “An English banker.”

  “Not from London, mon ami. What did he want?”

  “He wasn’t direct, but he suggested that I do business with a certain distribution company.”

  Langlade stared at the ceiling for awhile. When he spoke again, his tone of voice was subtly altered. “He called from France.” Then, “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Casson said. “He’s in France, you think?”

  “Possibly Spain, or Switzerland, but definitely on the Continent— because the lines under the Channel were cut last June.”

  “Well,” Casson said.

  “You better think it over,” Langlade said.

  Someone knocked discreetly on the office door. Langlade, it seemed to Casson, was not sorry to be interrupted.

  The apartment was across a courtyard from a dress factory, through a cloudy window Casson could see women working at sewing machines. Fischfang sat at a table in the tiny kitchen, wearing an old sweater, and a blanket around his shoulders. He’d shaved his beard and mustache, the skin looked pale and tender, and his eyes were red, as though he hadn’t slept the night before. Outside, a few snowflakes drifted past the window.

  “Do you need anything?” Casson asked.

  Fischfang shrugged—everything, nothing. The apartment belonged to his aunt. When she’d opened the door, Fischfang had taken a moment to make sure it was Casson, then used an index finger to close a drawer in the kitchen table. But not before Casson had caught sight of a revolver.

  Casson sat at the table, the aunt served them some strange drink— not exactly tea—but at least it was hot. Casson held the cup with both hands to keep warm. “Louis,” he said, “why do you have a gun? Who’s coming through the door?”

  Fischfang looked out the window, a muscle in his jaw ticked. Casson had never seen him like this. Angry, of course, but that was nothing new. A communist, he lived on injustice, a vitamin crucial to daily life, and he was always fuming about what X said or Y wrote. But now, something else. This was nothing to do with Marxist fury. Fischfang was scared, and bitter.

  “I have been denounced,” he said, as though the words were strange to him.

  Casson’s face showed sympathy, but in his heart he wasn’t surprised. The kind of life Fischfang lived, seething with politics—the Association of Revolutionary Artists and Writers, left deviation, rotten liberalism, Stalinists, Trotskyites, Spartacists, and God only knew what else. Denunciation must have been a daily, perhaps hourly, event.

  “Maybe you remember,” Fischfang went on, “that last August the Germans demanded that all Jews register.”

  “I remember,” Casson said.

  “I didn’t.”

  Casson nodded once—of course not.

  “Someone found that out, I don’t know who it was. They turned me in. For money, perhaps. Or some advantage. I don’t know.”

  The aunt closed a bureau drawer in the other room. From across the courtyard Casson could hear the clatter of sewing machines. The women were hunched over their work, their hands moving quickly. “Now I understand,” he said. “You’re certain?”

  “No, not completely. But things have happened.”

  Casson took a breath. “So then, we’ll have to get you away somewhere.”

  Fischfang stared at him for a moment. Will you really? When the time comes? Then he looked down, squared a tablet of lined paper on the table in front of him, laughed a little. “Life goes on,” he said, in a tone that meant he didn’t particularly care if it did or not. Then he passed the tablet across to Casson. “Have a look,” he said.

  Spidery writing in blue ink, floating from margin to margin. Hotel Dorado it said on top. A sort of miracle, Casson thought, the way these things started from nothing. Just a few words on a piece of paper. For an instant he could smell movie theatre—figures flickering on the screen, the pitch of the voices, the sound of the projector when there was a pause in the dialogue. He pictured the title. On the marquee of the Graumont, just off the place de l’Opéra. He didn’t know why there, it was just the theatre he always imagined.

  He read on. A little village in the south of France, on the Mediterranean. A fishing village, where a few Parisians come every August to stay at the Hotel Dorado. Autumn, the season over, the hotel deserted. The owners, an old couple, about to retire. The hotel has been sold to a large combine, they’re going to tear it down and build a new one, modern and expensive. The couple decides to write to their oldest, most faithful clients. “The hotel is going out of business, but come and stay with us the last weekend in October, we’ll have a glass of wine, a few memories.”

  Casson looked up. “All in one weekend?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s good.”

  “A night when they arrive. A day when we meet them, a long night when everything happens, then a little scene where they get on the train to go back to Paris—except for the ones who are going to run off together and start a new life.”

  Casson went back to reading. The characters you’d want—the Corps Humaine, the human repertory company—were all there. The banker, the confidence man, the actress, the postal clerk and his wife who scrimp and save all year so they can pretend to be upper class for two weeks, the lovers—their spouses left in Paris—the widow, the couple about to separate, giving it one last chance.

  “Who’s the star, Louis?”

  “I thought—one of those ideas that’s either a love letter from the gods or a little patch of quicksand meant just for you—it should be a young woman. Lonely, mysterious. Who misses her train and comes there by accident. Not a member of the sentimental company but, finally, its heart. Or, I don’t know, maybe that’s overdoing it.”

  Casson waved him off. “No, that’s what I like about this kind of movie, you can’t really overdo it.”

  “Who would you want to star?”

  Casson watched the falling snow for a time. “Last May, a hundred years ago if you know what I mean, I had lunch with old Perlemère, who u
sed to represent Citrine, and her name came up in the conversation.”

  Fischfang’s eyes sparkled. “That’s good. More than one way, if you think about it.”

  “Beautiful—not pretty. Mysterious. No virgin. She’s been to the wars, she’s battle-scarred, but maybe she can try one last time, maybe she can love again, but we don’t know until the final scene. It should be—will life let her?”

  “A character trying to come back,” Fischfang said. “Played by an actress trying to come back.”

  Casson nodded. “Something like that.”

  They both smiled. Maybe it would work, maybe it wouldn’t, like everything else. But they were trying, at least. They could see their breath when they talked in the cold kitchen, outside the snow drifted past. “I’ll get it typed up,” Casson said.

  Hugo Altmann tilted his chair back and blew a long, slow, meditative plume of smoke at the ceiling of his office. “Citrine, Citrine,” he said. “Do you know, Casson, that she always seemed to me the most elementally French actress. The sort of woman, in bed she gives everything. Yet there is something inside her, a bitterness, a knowledge of the world, that spoils it all—you get everything, but it isn’t what you wanted.” He paused a moment. “You’ve worked with her before?”

  “Night Run.”

  “Ach, of course. And to direct?”

  “Don’t really know yet.”

  “Well, let’s find you some development money, and get a screenplay on paper. Who do you have in mind there? Cocteau’s working, lots of others.”

  “Louis Moreau, perhaps.”

  “Who?”

  “Moreau.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “He’s new.”

  “Hm. Well, all right, give him a try.” He leaned over toward Casson, his expression shrewd and confidential. “So, between us, who saves the hotel at the end, eh? I’m betting on the confidence man,” he said with a wink.

  It took two weeks to find Citrine. He trudged across the city, office to office, the world of small-time talent agents, booking agents, press agents—everybody knew somebody. Perlemère helped, offering the names of a few friends. In the end, it turned out that she was performing at a cabaret amid the working-class dance halls on the rue de Lappe, out by Bastille. Le Perroquet, the parrot, it was called. Casson pulled his coat tight around him and kept his eyes down—this was not his district, he didn’t belong here, and he didn’t want a punch in the nose to remind him of it.