by Alan Furst
“Hotel du Parc.” The voice sounded very far away. “Hello? Are you there?”
Casson gave the name.
“Stay on the line.” The sound of the receiver being set down on a wooden countertop.
He waited. In the next cabine a woman was shouting at some relative somewhere in France. Where was the money, they were supposed to send it, it should have come days ago, no she didn’t want to hear about the problem.
The clerk picked the receiver up. “She’s coming now.” Then: “Hello?”
“Hello.”
A pause. “It’s you.”
“Yes.”
“I had to leave.”
“Yes, I know. How is Lyons?”
“Not so bad. I’m in a play.”
“Really?”
“Yes. A small part.”
“What sort of play?”
“A little comedy. Nothing much.”
“You sound good.”
“Do I?”
“Yes.”
The line hummed softly.
“Citrine, I wrote you a letter.”
“Where is it?”
“It went to the other hotel, but it came back. The woman there told me where you were.”
“What does it say?”
“It’s a love letter.”
“Ah.”
“No, really.”
“I wonder if I might read it, then.”
“Yes, of course. I’ll send it along—I just wanted to hear your voice.”
“The mail isn’t very good, these days.”
“No, that’s true.”
“Perhaps it would be better if you were to bring it.”
“Yes. You’re right. Citrine?”
“Yes?”
“I love you.”
“When can you come here?”
“As soon as I can.”
“I’ll wait for you.”
“I’ll let you know when.”
“I’ll wait.”
“I have to say good-bye.”
“Yes. Until then.”
“Until then.”
16 April, 1941.
Now the trees had little leaves and clouds of soft air rolled down the boulevards at dusk and people swore they could smell the fields in the countryside north of the city. Casson bought a train ticket, and made an appointment at the rue des Saussaies to get an Ausweis to leave the occupied zone and cross over to the area controlled by Vichy.
A warm day, the girls were out. Nothing better than Frenchwomen, he thought. Even with rationing, they insisted on spring—new scarves, cut from last year’s whatever, a little hat, made from a piece of felt somebody had left in a closet, something, at least something, to say that love was your reward for agreeing to live another day and walk around in the world.
On the top floor of the old Interior Ministry building, even SS-OBERSTURMBANNFÜHRER Guske knew it was spring. He came around the desk to shake hands, as tanned and well-oiled as ever, every one of his forty hairs in its proper place, a big leathery smile. Then, with a sigh, he got down to business. Made himself comfortable in his chair and studied the dossier before him, a sort of now where were we feeling in the air. “Ah yes,” he said. “You went last to Spain to see about locations for a film. So, how did it go for you?”
“Very well. One or two villages were, I can say, perfect. Extremely Spanish. The church and the tile roofs, and the little whitewashed houses.”
“Indeed! You’re making me want to go.”
“It’s a change, certainly. Very different from France.”
“Yes, here it is, Málaga. My wife and I used to go to Lloret-de-Mar every summer, until they started fighting. Find a pension in a little fishing village. What dinners! Besugo, espadon, delicious. If you can persuade them to hold back a little on the garlic, excellent!” He laughed, showing big white teeth. Looked back down at the dossier. Read for a moment, then a slight discomfort appeared on his face. “Hmm. Here’s a memorandum I’d forgotten all about.”
He read carefully, perhaps for three or four minutes. Shook his head in pique at something small and irritating. “I know you are famous for petty bureaucrats in France, but I tell you, Herr Casson, we Germans don’t do so badly. Look at this nonsense.”
“Sir?”
“I don’t have the faintest recollection of anything, you understand, I see people from dawn to dusk, of course, and I only remember the, well, the bad ones, if you know what I mean.” He raised his eyebrows to see if Casson had understood.
“What’s happened is,” he continued, “you told me, or, I thought you told me, that your army service was back in the 1914 war, but here it says that you—well, the people down at the Vincennes military base sent on to us a record that says you were transferred to a unit that was reactivated in May of 1940. Could that be right?”
“Yes. I was.”
“Well, I apparently got it wrong the last time we talked because now somebody’s gone and written a memorandum in your file saying that you, well, that you didn’t actually tell the truth.”
“I don’t really know what I . . .” Casson felt something flutter in his stomach.
“Ach,” Guske said, quite annoyed now. He stood up, walked toward the door. “I’m going to go down the hall and have this put right. I’ll be back in a minute.” He opened the door and gestured toward a chair in the hall. “Please,” he said. “I’ll have to ask you to wait in the corridor.”
Guske marched off down the hall. Casson wanted to get up and run out of the building, but he knew he’d never make it, and when they caught him he wouldn’t be able to explain. He wasn’t being threatened, exactly. It was something else—he didn’t know what it was, but he could feel it reaching for him.
Hold on, he told himself.
He very nearly couldn’t. He closed his eyes, heard typewriters, muted conversations, doors opening and closing, telephones. It was just an office.
Forty minutes later, Guske came back down the hall shaking his head. In a bad humor, he waved Casson into his office. “This is extraordinarily irritating, Herr Casson, but this man at the other end of the hall is acting in a very unreasonable fashion. I mean, here we’ve had a simple misunderstanding, you gave me some information and it didn’t happen to hold with some piece of paper that somebody sent here, and now he’s going to be difficult about it.”
Casson started to speak, Guske held up his hand for silence.
“Please, there’s nothing you can say that will help. I am certainly going to take care of this problem—you can have every confidence in me—but it’s going to take a day or two, maybe even a little more. Your trip to Lyons, is it so very urgent?”
“No.”
“Good. Then I’m relieved. And you’ll appreciate I have to work with this fellow, I can’t be getting around him every five minutes. But he’s going to have to learn to separate these things—here is something that must concern us, over there is just a nuisance, a little pebble in the shoe. Eh?”
Guske stood and offered his hand. “Why don’t you call me back a week from today? Yes? I’m sure I’ll be able to give you the answer you want. These telephone numbers in your file, for home and office, they’re correct?”
“Yes.”
“Very good. Then I’ll see you in a week or so. Good day, Herr Casson. Please don’t think too badly of us, it will all be made right in the end.
Two days later, a Friday afternoon, a commotion in the réception of his office. Casson threw open his door, then stared with astonishment. It was a man called Bouffo—a comic actor, he used only that name. A huge man, gloriously fat, with three chins and merry little eyes— “France’s beloved Bouffo,” the publicity people said. Casson’s secretary, Mireille, was standing at her desk, vaguely horrified, uncertain what to do. Bouffo, as always in a white, tentlike suit and a gray fedora, was leaning against the wall, fanning himself with a newspaper, his face the color of chalk. “Please, my friends,” he said. “I beg you. Something to drink.”
“Wi
ll you take a glass of water, monsieur?” Mireille asked.
“God no.”
“Mireille,” Casson said. “Please go down to the brasserie and bring back a carafe of wine, tell them it’s an emergency.” He handed her some money.
“Now Bouffo,” he said, “let’s get you sat down.” Casson was terrified the man was going to die in his office.
“Forgive me Casson—I’ve had the most terrible experience.” Casson took his arm—he was trembling—and helped him onto the couch. Up close, the smell of lilac-scented talcum powder and sweat. “Please,” Casson said, “try to calm yourself.”
“What a horror,” Bouffo said.
“What happened?”
“Well. You know Perlemère?”
“Yes. The agent?”
“Yes. Well, some time ago he represented me, and he owed me a little money, and I thought I’d just kind of drop in on him, unannounced, and see if I could collect some of it, you know how things are, lately. So, I went over to his office, which is just the other side of the boulevard. I was in that little lobby there, waiting for the elevator, when there was a commotion on the staircase. It’s Perlemère, and there are three men with him, a short one, very well-dressed, and two tough types. Detectives, is what they were.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. One knows.”
“German?”
“French.”
“And?”
“They’re arresting Perlemère.”
“What?”
“He’s telling them he knows this one and that one and there’ll be hell to pay once his important friends find out how he’s being treated and all this kind of thing. But, clearly, they don’t care. Perlemère tries to stop on the staircase and says ‘Now see here, this has gone far enough’ and they hit him. I mean, they really hit him, it’s not like the movies. And he cried out.”
Bouffo stopped a moment and caught his breath. “I’ll be all right,” he said. “Then, one of them called him a Jew this and a Jew that, and they hit him again. It was sickening. The sound of it. There were tears on Perlemère’s face. Then, they saw me. And one of them says, ‘Hey look, it’s Bouffo!’ ”
“What did you do?”
“Casson, I was terrified. I gave a sort of nervous laugh, and I tipped my hat. Then they brushed by me. Perlemère looked in my eyes, he was pleading with me. There was blood on his mouth. I held the door open a crack after they went out—they threw him in a car, then they drove away. I didn’t know what to do. I started to go home, then I remembered your office was over here and I thought I better go someplace where I could sit down for a moment.”
Mireille returned, carrying a carafe of wine. Casson poured some in a water glass and gave it to Bouffo. “No good, Casson.” He wasn’t talking about the wine. Shook his head, tried to take deep breaths. “No good. I mean, who do you go to?”
Sunday night, late—one-thirty in the morning when he looked at his watch. He was reading, wearing an old shirt and slacks. Restless, not ready to sleep. Blackout curtains drawn, light of a single lamp, a very battered Maigret novel, The Nightclub, he’d bought at a stall on the Seine. The buzzer by his door startled him. Now what? He laid the book face down on the chair, turned off the lamp, went out onto the terrace. Down below, a dark shape waited at the door. Then a white face turned up toward him, and a stage whisper: “Jean-Claude, let me in.” Gabriella, with a small suitcase.
He hurried down the stairs, the marble steps cold on his feet because he was wearing only socks. He unlocked the door and pushed it open. He heard a stirring from the concierge apartment, called out, “It’s just a friend, Madame Fitou.”
Back in the apartment he poured a glass of red wine and set out some bread and blackcurrant jam. Gabriella was exhausted and pale, a smudge on the elbow of her coat. “It happened on one of the trains,” she told him. “Really I can’t remember which one it was. I had a first-class compartment, Milan to Turin, then I took the night train to Geneva, eventually the Dijon/Paris express. Then I just barely managed to catch the last Métro from the Gare de Lyon.”
“Gabriella, why?”
“I told my husband I was coming up here to see an old girlfriend— as far as anybody knows I arrive tomorrow morning, eight-thirty, on the train from Milan. Do you see what I did?”
“Yes.”
“Jean-Claude, could I have a cigarette?”
He lit it for her. She took a deep breath and sat back in the chair. “I had to see you,” she said.
This was not the same Gabriella. She’d changed the way she looked—had her hair cut short, then set. She wore three rings: a diamond, a wide gold wedding band with filigree, and an antique, a dull green stone in a worn silver setting, ancient, a family treasure. Clearly she had a new life.
Their eyes met, a look only possible between people who’ve made love, then she looked away. No, he thought, it isn’t that. They’d had one night together, it had been intimate, very intimate. He had wanted her—long legs, pure face—for months, but she turned out not to be someone who lost herself, or maybe just not his to excite. As for her, he’d realized later that she’d been in love with him, the real thing. So, in the end, neither one got what they wanted.
She sighed, met his eyes again, ran a hand through her hair. “I’m married now,” she said softly.
“Gabriella, are you in trouble?”
She shook her head. “No,” she said, “it’s you.”
“Me?”
“Yes. One morning last week, after my husband left for work, two men came to the house. One was from the security service, in Rome, and the other was German. Educated, soft-spoken, reasonably good Italian. The German asked the questions—first about my time in Paris, then about you. ‘Please, do not worry yourself, signora, this is simply routine, just a few things we need to know.’ He asked about your politics, how did you vote, did you belong to a political party. It was very thorough, carefully done. They knew a great deal about your business, about the films you’d made, about Marie-Claire and your friends. He asked what sorts of foreigners did you know. Did you travel abroad? Often? Where to?
“I made a great show of trying to be helpful, but I tried to persuade them that most of my work was typing letters and filing and answering the telephone. I just didn’t know much about your personal life. They seemed to accept that. ‘And signora, please, if it’s all the same to you, we’d rather he didn’t know we’d been around asking questions.’ That was a threat. The Italian looked at me a certain way. Not brutal, but it could not be misunderstood.”
“But you came here anyhow.”
She shrugged. “Well, that was the only way. You can’t say anything on the phone, they read your mail. We’ve had Mussolini and the fascisti since 1922, so we do what we have to do.”
“Not everybody,” he said.
“Well, no, there are always—you learn who they are.”
They talked for a long time, closer than they’d ever been. Trains and borders, special permits, passports. It wasn’t about resistance, it was about secret police and day-to-day life. What had it been, he thought, since the May night they’d spent together—ten months? Back then, this gossip would have been about books, or vacations. “At the line for the railroad controls,” she said, “they always have somebody watching to see who decides to turn back.”
She yawned, he took her by the hand into the bedroom. She washed up, changed into silk pajamas, slid under the blankets. “Talk to me a minute more,” she said. He turned the lights off, sat on the floor and leaned back against the bed. They kept their voices low in the darkness. “It is very strange at home now,” she told him. “The Milanese don’t believe they live in Italy. You mention Mussolini and they look to heaven—yet one more of life’s afflictions that has to be tolerated. If you say ‘what if we are bombed?’ they become indignant. What, here, in Milan? Are you crazy?”
It felt good to talk to a friend, he thought, never better than when your enemies are gathering. It felt good to con
spire. “It’s hard to imagine—” he said, then stopped. Above him, a gentle snore. Good night, Gabriella. Ration coupons—did he have enough to take her for coffee in the morning? Yes, he would have a demitasse, it would just work out.
Really, he thought, who was this Guske to tell him what to do with his life? How did it happen that some German sat in an office and told Jean Casson whether or not he could have a love affair with a woman who lived in Lyons?
THE NIGHT VISITOR
24 April, 1941.
4:20 A.M., the wind sighing across the fields, the river white where it shoaled over the gravel islands. Jean Casson lay on his stomach at the top of a low hill, wrapped up in overcoat and muffler, dark hat worn at an angle, a small valise by his side. The damp from the wet earth chilled him to the bone but there was nothing he could do about it. At the foot of the hill, standing at the edge of the river, two border guards, the last of the waning moonlight a pale glow on their helmets, rifles slung over their shoulders. They were sharing a cigarette and talking in low voices, the rough German sounds, the sch and kuh, drifting up the hillside.
The boy lying next to him, called André, was fifteen, and it was his job to guide Casson across a branch of the river Allier into the Zone Non-Occupée. André stared intensely, angrily, at the sales Boches below him. These were his hills, this was his stream, these teenagers below him—nineteen or so—were intruders, and he would, in time, settle with them. By his side, his brown-and-white Tervueren shepherd waited patiently—Tempête he called her, Storm—her breath steaming as she panted in the icy morning air.
These were in fact his hills—or would be. They belonged to his family, the de Malincourts, resident since the fifteenth century in a rundown chateau just outside the village of Lancy. He raised his hand a few inches, a signal to Casson: be patient, I know these two, they chatter like market ladies but they will, eventually, resume their rounds. Casson gritted his teeth as the wet grass crushed beneath him slowly soaked his clothing. Had they left the chateau as planned, at two in the morning, this would not have happened.
But it was the same old story. He was scheduled to go across with another man, a cattle-dealer from Nevers who couldn’t or wouldn’t get a permit to enter the Vichy zone. The cattle-dealer arrived forty minutes late, carrying a bottle of cognac that he insisted on opening and sharing with various de Malincourts who had chosen to remain awake in honor of the evening crossing—the father, an aunt, a cousin and the local doctor, if Casson remembered correctly. Everybody had some cognac, the fire burned low, then, at 3:20, a telephone call. It was the cattle-dealer’s wife, he’d received a message at his house in Nevers and he didn’t have to go across the line after all. That left Casson and André to make the crossing later than they should have, almost dawn, and that invited tragedy.
