The World at Night

by Alan Furst

  “Could be the key to it all, Hugo.”

  Altmann began preparing a cigar, piercing the leaf at the end with a metal pick he took from his pocket. He looked up suddenly, pointed the cigar at Casson. “You’re a liar,” he said. Then he broke out in a wide grin. “Have to take, uh, somebody down there with you, Jean-Claude? Just in case you need help?” He laughed and shook his head— you scoundrel, you almost had me there.

  Casson smiled, a little abashed. “Well,” he said.

  Altmann snapped his lighter until it lit, then warmed the cigar above the blue flame. “Romantic in Spain, Jean-Claude. Guitars and so forth. And one doesn’t run into every damn soul in the world one knows. You don’t really want to move the story there, do you?”

  “No,” Casson said. “There’s a lady involved.”

  Altmann nodded to himself in satisfaction, then counted out a sheaf of Occupation reichsmarks on top of the check. For a German in an occupied city, everything was virtually free. “Come take a walk with me, Jean-Claude,” he said. “I want to pick up some cashmere sweaters for my wife.”

  The following afternoon Altmann sent over a letter on Continental stationery and, after a phone call, Casson took it to the Gestapo office in the old Interior Ministry building on the rue des Saussaies. The officer he saw there occupied a private room on the top floor. SS-OBERSTURMBANNFÜHRER—lieutenant colonel—Guske wore civilian clothes, an expensively tailored gray suit, and had the glossy look of a successful businessman. A big, imposing head with large ears, sparse black hair—carefully combed for maximum coverage—and the tanned scalp of a man who owns a sailboat or a ski chalet, perhaps both.

  His French was extremely good. “So, we are off to sunny Spain. Not so sunny just now, I suppose.”

  “No. Not in January.”

  “You’ve been there before?”

  “Several times. Vacations on the beaches below Barcelona, in the early thirties.”

  “But not during the civil war.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Are you a Jew, Casson?”

  “No. Catholic by birth. By practice, not much of anything.”

  “I regret having to ask you that, but I’m sure you understand. The film business being what it is, unfortunately . . .”

  A knock at the door, a secretary entered and handed Guske a dossier. Casson could see his name, lettered across the top of the cardboard folder, and the official stamp of the Paris Préfecture de Police. Guske opened it on his desk and started reading, idly turning pages, at one point going back in the record and searching for something, running an index finger up and down the margin. Ah yes, there it was.

  He moved forward again, making the sort of small gestures—rhythmic bobbing of the head, pursing of the lips—that indicated irritation with petty minds that noted too many details, an inner voice saying yes, yes, then what, come on.

  At last he looked up and smiled pleasantly. “All in order.” He squared the sheets of paper, closed the dossier, and tied it shut with its ribbon. Then he took Altmann’s letter and read it over once more. “Will your assistant be coming to see us?” he asked.

  “No. Change of plans,” Casson said. “I’m going alone.”

  “Very well,” Guske said. He drew a line through a sentence in Altmann’s letter and initialed the margin, wrote a comment at the bottom and initialed that as well, then clipped the letter to the dossier and made a signal—Casson did not see how it was done—that brought the secretary back. When she left he said, “Come by tomorrow, after eleven. Your Ausweis will be waiting for you at the downstairs reception.”

  “Thank you,” Casson said.

  “You’re welcome,” Guske said. “By the way, what did you do during the May campaign? Were you recalled to military service?”

  “No,” Casson said. “I started out to go south, then I gave it up and stayed in Paris. The roads . . .”

  “Yes. Too bad, really, this kind of thing has to happen. We’re neighbors, after all, I’m sure we can do better than this.” He stood, offered a hand, he had a warm, powerful grip. “Forgive me, Herr Casson, I must tell you—we do expect you to return, so, please, no wanderlust. Some people here are not so understanding as I am, and they’ll haul you back by your ears.”

  He winked at Casson, gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder as he ushered him out of the office.

  Casson couldn’t reach Citrine by telephone. A clerk answered at the hotel desk, told him that guests at that establishment did not receive phone calls—maybe he should try the Ritz, and banged the receiver down. So Casson took the Métro, out past the Père-Lachaise cemetery, walked for what seemed like miles through a neighborhood of deserted factories, finally found the place, then read a newspaper in the dark lobby until Citrine came sweeping through the door.

  When he suggested they go to his apartment she gave him a look. “It’s work,” he said. “I’m going to Spain tomorrow, and you know what an office is like at night.”

  They took a bicycle taxi up to the Passy shopping district, by the La Muette Métro and the Ranelagh gardens. It was just getting dark. “We’ll want something to eat, later on,” he explained.

  Her eyes opened wide with feigned innocence. “And look! A bottle of wine. Someone must have left it here.”

  “Work and supper, my love. Home before curfew.”

  Truce. She walked with him in the way he’d always liked, hand curled around his arm, pressed tight to his side, yet gliding along the street like a dancer. That was good, but not best. Best was how she used to slip her hand in his coat pocket as they walked together. That would make him so happy he would forget to talk, and she would say, innocent as dawn, “Yes? And?”

  For a winter evening La Muette wasn’t so bad. The little merry-go-round wouldn’t be back until the spring, but there was an organ-grinder, a blind man who smiled up at the sky as he turned the handle. Casson gave him all his change. The snow drifted down, a flake at a time, through the blue lamplight.

  He’d stored up a hoard of ration coupons, even buying some on the black-market bourse that now functioned at a local café. So, for a half-hour, he could once again be the provident man-about-town. “The smoked salmon looks good, doesn’t it.” They decided on a galantine of vegetables. “A little more, please,” he said as the clerk rested her knife on the loaf and raised an eyebrow. For dessert, two beautiful oranges, chosen after long deliberation and a frank exchange between Citrine and the fruit man. Also, a very small, very expensive piece of chocolate.

  There was a long line in front of the boulangerie. The smell of the fresh bread hung in the cold air, people stamped their feet to keep the circulation going. This line was always the slowest—portions had to be weighed, ration coupons cut out with a scissors—and sometimes a discussion started up. “Has anybody heard about North Africa?” Casson looked around to see who was speaking. A small, attractive woman wearing a coat with a Persian-lamb collar. “They say,” she continued, “an important city has been captured by the English.” She sounded hopeful—there’d been no good news for a long time. “Perhaps it’s just a rumor.”

  It was not a rumor. Casson had heard the report on the French service of the BBC. The city was Tobruk, in Libya. Twenty-five thousand Italian troops taken prisoner, eighty-seven tanks captured by Australian and British soldiers. He started to answer, Citrine gave him a sharp tug on the arm and hissed in his ear, “Tais-toi!” Shut up.

  Nobody on the line spoke, they waited, in their own worlds. On the way home to the rue Chardin, Citrine said, “You must be born yesterday. Don’t you know there are informers on the food lines? They get money for each radio the Germans find, they have only to persuade some fool to say he heard the news on the BBC. Jean-Claude, please, come down from the clouds.”

  “I didn’t realize,” he said.

  He had almost spoken, he had actually started to speak when Citrine stopped him. They would have searched the apartment. Looked in the closet.

  “You must be careful,” she said gen
tly.

  On the rue Chardin, a gleaming black Mercedes was idling at the curb. The radio! No, he told himself. Then the door opened and out came the baroness, smothered in furs, who lived in the apartment below him. “Oh, monsieur, good evening,” she said, startled into courtesy.

  The man who’d held the door for her, a German naval officer, stepped to her side and made a certain motion, a slight stiffening of the posture, a barely perceptible inclination of the head; a bow due the very tiniest of the petit bourgeois. He was pale and featureless, one of those aristocrats, Casson thought, so refined by ages of breeding they are invisible in front of a white wall. There was an awkward moment— introduction was both unavoidable and unthinkable. The baroness solved the problem with a small, meaningless sound, the officer with a second stiffening, then both rushed toward the Mercedes.

  “What was that?” Citrine asked, once they were in the apartment.

  “The baroness. She lives down below.”

  “Well, well. She’s rather pretty. Do you—?”

  “Are you crazy?”

  They took off their coats. Citrine walked around the small living room, moved the drape aside and stared out over the rooftops. The Eiffel Tower was a dim shape in the darkness on the other side of the river. “It’s all the same,” she said. “Except for the lights.”

  “Oh look,” he said. “A bottle of wine. Someone must have left it here.”

  For the occasion, a pack of Gauloises. They smoked, drank wine, played the radio at its lowest volume. Citrine paged through the script, following the trail of SYLVIE as it wound from scene to scene. Casson watched her face carefully—this was Fischfang’s first real test. Altmann could be fooled, not Citrine. She scowled, sighed, flipped pages when she grew impatient. “How old is this Sylvie, do you think?”

  “Young, but experienced. In the important moments, much older than her years. She wants very much to be frivolous—her life carried her past those times too quickly—but she can’t forget what she’s seen, and what she knows.”

  Citrine concentrated on a certain passage, then closed the script, keeping the place with her index finger. She met Casson’s eyes, became another person. “ ‘My dreams? No, I don’t remember them. Oh, sometimes I’m running. But we all run away at night, don’t we.’ ”

  Casson opened his copy. “Where are you?”

  “Page fifty-five, in the attic. With Paul, we’re . . .” She hunted for a moment. “We’re . . . we’ve opened a trunk full of old costumes.”

  “For the carnival, at Lent.”

  “Oh.” She turned to the wall, crossed her arms. “ ‘My dreams.’ ” She shook her head. “ ‘No. I don’t remember them.’ ” I don’t want to remember them. And somehow she bent the word dreams back toward its other meaning. She relaxed, dropped out of character. “Too much?”

  “I wish Louis were here. He’d like it that way.”

  “You?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You want to direct this, don’t you.”

  “I always want to, Citrine. But I know not to.”

  8:30. A second bottle of wine. Scarlatti from the BBC. The room smelled like smoke, wine, and perfume. “Did you know,” she said, “I made a movie in Finland?”

  “In Finnish?”

  “No. They dubbed it later. I just went ba-ba-ba with whatever feeling they told me to have and the other actors spoke Finnish.”

  “That doesn’t work,” Casson said. “We did a German version that way, for The Devil’s Bridge.”

  Citrine’s eyes filled with soft passion, she leaned forward on the couch, her voice a whisper. “Ba, ba-ba. Ba-ba-ba?”

  Casson extended the wine bottle, holding it over Citrine’s glass. “Ba ba?”

  “Don’t,” she said, laughing.

  He smiled at her, poured the wine. Happiness rolled over him, he felt suddenly warm. Perhaps, he thought, paradise goes by in an instant. When you’re not looking.

  “I’m almost asleep,” she said.

  Or was it? Warmth rolled over him, he felt suddenly happy. He went to the radiator and put a hand on it. “A miracle,” he said. The apartment hadn’t been like this for months. From somewhere, coal, apparently abundant coal, had appeared, and Madame Fitou had decided, against all precedent, to use a great deal of it. This was, he realized, a rather complicated miracle.

  “Suddenly,” he said, “there’s heat.”

  Citrine spread her hands, meaning obvious conclusion. “Don’t you see?”

  “No.”

  “A beautiful baroness, a dashing German officer, coal is delivered.”

  It felt good in the apartment, they were in no hurry to leave. The Occupation authority, grateful for a compliant population, had given Paris a Christmas present: extension of curfew to 3:00 A.M. Casson and Citrine talked—Hotel Dorado, life and times, the way of the world. They’d never disagreed about big things, it had gone wrong between them somewhere else. They liked eccentricity, they liked kindness, coincidence, people who lost themselves in the study of planets or bugs. They liked people with big hearts. They wanted to hear that in the end it all turned out for the best.

  Just after midnight she wandered into the kitchen, dabbed her finger in some galantine gelatin left on a plate and licked it off. A moment later Casson came in to see what she was doing, found her standing by the pipe that ran, mysteriously, through the corners of all the kitchens in the building. She was listening to something, hand pressed over her mouth, like a schoolgirl, to keep from giggling.

  “What—?” he said.

  She touched a finger to her lips, then pointed to the pipe. He listened, heard faint sounds from below. It made no sense at first.

  “Your baroness?” she whispered.

  “Yes?”

  “Is getting a red bottom.”

  Sharp reports—slow and deliberate, demure little cries. There was only one thing in the world that sounded like that.

  “Tiens,” Casson said, amazed. “And in the kitchen.”

  Citrine listened for a time. “Well,” she said, “I predict you’ll have a warm winter.”

  Later he walked her to the Métro—she wouldn’t let him take her back to the hotel. “Good night,” he said.

  She kissed him on the lips, very quickly and lightly, it was over before he realized it was happening. “Jean-Claude,” she said. “I had a good time tonight. Thank you.”

  “I’ll call you,” he said.

  She nodded, waved at him, turned and went down the stairs of the Métro. She’s gone, he thought.

  A CITIZEN OF THE EVENING

  Night train to Madrid.

  The air was ice, the heavens swept with winter stars, white and still in a black sky. Jean Casson had done what he’d done, there was no going back. The train pulled slowly from the Gare de Lyon, clattered through the railyards south of the city, then out into the night.

  A first-class compartment; burgundy velveteen drapes, gleaming brass doorknobs. Casson pressed his forehead against the cold window and stared out into the dark countryside. Looking out train windows was good for lovers. Citrine, Citrine. They’d made love in a train once; lying on their sides in a narrow berth, looking out at the back-yards of some town, sheets hanging on wash lines, cats on windowsills, smoke from chimneys on tile roofs. It was a long autumn that year and nobody thought about war.

  Staring out train windows good for lovers, not so bad for secret agents. We are all adrift in the world, we do what we have to do. Casson turned out the lamps so he could see better. Outside, the Beauce. Old, deep France—France profonde, it was said. A flat plain where they grew wheat and barley, sometimes a forest where long ago they’d hunted bear with Beauceron dogs. A knock at the door, his heart hammered. “Monsieur?” Only a steward in a white jacket, peering at a list.

  “Monsieur Dubreuil?”

  “No, Casson.”

  “Monsieur Casson, yes. Would you wish the first or second seating?”

  “Second.”

  “Very good, sir.”<
br />
  He closed the door, the rattle of the train subsided. A man with eyes shadowed by the brim of a fedora came down the corridor, glanced into Casson’s compartment. Calm down, Casson told himself. But he couldn’t. The tanned, smiling Colonel Guske kept forcing himself to the front of Casson’s attention. He wasn’t a smart lawyer—Simic had been right there, Casson thought—but he was the sort of man who got things done. Worked hard, full of vigor and stupefying optimism about life. Must get that spinnaker rigged! Must keep the racquet straight on my backhand! Must get to the bottom of that Casson business!

  He closed his eyes for a moment, took a deep breath. Forced himself to take comfort from the dark countryside beyond the window. The French had fought and marched across these plains for centuries. They’d fought the Moslems in the south, the Germans in the east, the British in the west. The Dutch in the north? He didn’t know. But they must have, some time or other. The War of the Spanish Succession? The Thirty Years’ War? Napoleon?

  Calm down. Or they’d find him dead of fear, staring wide-eyed at the scenery. Then it would be their turn to worry about the three hundred thousand pesetas. Of course, he thought, they wouldn’t worry very long. Or, perhaps, it would just stay where it was—God only knew what would be lost forever in this war. The train slowed, and stopped. Outside, nothing special, a frozen field.

  Compartment doors opening and closing, the sound of a slow train rumbling past. Something to do, anyhow. He got up and joined the other passengers, standing at the windows in the corridor. A freight train, flat cars loaded with tanks and artillery pieces under canvas tarpaulins, gun barrels pointing at the sky. He counted thirty, forty, fifty, then stopped, the train seemed to go on forever. His heart fell—what could he, what could any of them do against these people? Lately it was fashionable in Paris to avert one’s eyes when seated across from Germans in the Métro. Yes, he thought, that would do it—the French won’t look at us, we’re going home.

  His fellow passengers felt it too. Not the German aviators at the end of the car, probably not their French girlfriends, drunk and giggling. But the man who looked like a butcher in a Sunday suit, and Madame Butcher, they had the same expression on their faces as he did: faintly introspective, not very interested, vague. Strange, he thought, how people choose the same mask. Tall man, head of an ostrich, spectacles. A professor of Greek? A young man and his older friend—theatre people, Casson would have bet on it. The woman who stood next to him was an aristocrat of some sort. Late forties, red-and-brown tweed suit for traveling, cost a fortune years ago, maintained by maids ever since.