The World at Night

by Alan Furst

  She nodded.

  “You’re not to call me, Citrine.”

  The conductor climbed to the bottom step and shouted “All aboard for Chassieu.”

  He took her in his arms and she held on to him, her head on his chest. “How long?” she said.

  “I don’t know. As soon as I can manage it.”

  “I don’t want to lose you,” she said.

  He kissed her hair. The conductor leaned out of the coach and raised a little red flag that the engineer could see. “All aboard,” he said.

  “I love you,” Casson said. “Remember.”

  He started to work himself free of her arms, then she let him go. He ran for the train, climbed aboard, looked out the cloudy window. He could see she was searching for him. He rapped on the glass. Then she saw him. She wasn’t crying, her hands were deep in her pockets. She nodded at him, smiled a certain way—I meant everything I said, everything I did. Then she waved. He waved back. A man in a raincoat standing nearby lowered his newspaper to look at her. The train started to pull out, moving very slowly. She couldn’t see the man, he was behind her. She waved again, walked a few paces along with the train. Her face was radiant, strong, she wanted him to know he did not have to worry about her, together they would do what had to be done. The man behind Citrine looked toward the end of the station, Casson followed his eyes and saw another man, with slicked-down hair, who took a pipe out of his mouth, then put it back in.

  All day long he rode slow trains that rattled through the countryside and stopped at little stations. Sometimes it rained, droplets running sideways across the window, sometimes a shaft of sunlight broke through a cloud and lit up a hillside, sometimes the cloud blew away and he could see the hard blue spring sky. In the fields the April plowing was over, crumbled black earth ran to the trees in the border groves, oaks and elms, with early leaves that trembled in the wind.

  Casson stood in the alcove at the end of the car, staring out the open door, hypnotized by the rhythm of the wheels over the rail points. His mind was already back in Paris, holding imaginary conversations with Hugo Altmann, trying to win him over to some version of René Guillot’s strategy. The objective: move Hotel Dorado to the unoccupied zone, under the auspices of the committee in Vichy rather than the German film board. It would have to be done officially, it would take Guske, or somebody like him, to stamp the papers. But, with Altmann’s help, it might be possible.

  On the other hand, Altmann liked the film, really liked it, probably he’d want to keep it in Paris. Was there a way to ruin it for him? Not completely—could they just knock off a corner, maybe, so it wasn’t quite so appealing? No, they’d never get away with it. Then too, what about Fischfang? As a Jew, nobody was going to give him the papers to do anything. But that, at least, could be overcome—he’d have to enter the Zone Non-Occupée, the ZNO, just as Casson had, then slip into a false identity, down in Marseilles perhaps.

  No, that wouldn’t work. Fischfang couldn’t just abandon his assorted women and children to the mercies of the Paris Gestapo, they’d have to come along. But not across the river, it probably couldn’t be done that way. New papers. That might work—start the false identity on the German side of the line. How to manage that? Not so difficult— Fischfang was a communist, he must be in contact with Comintern operatives, people experienced in clandestine operations—forging identity papers an everyday affair for them.

  Or, the hell with Hotel Dorado. He’d let Altmann have it, in effect would trade it for Citrine. Of course he’d have to find some way to live, to earn a living in the ZNO, but that wouldn’t be impossible. He could, could, do any number of things.

  The train slowed, a long curve in the track, then clattered over a road crossing. An old farmer waited on a horse cart, the reins held loosely in his hand, watching the train go past. The tiny road wound off behind him, to nowhere, losing itself in the woods and fields. In some part of Casson’s mind the French countryside went on forever, from little village to little village, as long as you stayed on the train.

  Back in Paris, he telephoned Altmann.

  “Casson! Where the hell have you been? Everybody’s been looking for you.”

  “I just went off to the seashore, to Normandy, for a couple of days.”

  “Your secretary didn’t know where you were.”

  “That’s impossible! I told her—if Altmann calls, give him the number of my hotel.”

  “Well, she didn’t.”

  “Hugo, I’m sorry, you’ll have to forgive me. You know what it’s like, these days—she does the best she can.”

  “Well . . .”

  “Anyhow, here I am.”

  “Casson, there are people who want to meet you. Important people.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. I have organized a dinner for us. Friday night.”

  “All right.”

  “Do you know the Brasserie Heininger?”

  “In the Seventh?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know it.”

  “Eight-thirty, then. Casson?”

  “Yes?”

  “Important people.”

  “I understand. That’s this Friday, the fourth of May.”

  “Yes. Any problem, let me know immediately.”

  “I’ll be there,” Casson said.

  He hung up, wrote down the time and place in his appointment book.

  The Brasserie Heininger—of all places! What had gotten into Altmann? He knew better than that. The Heininger was a garish nightmare of gold mirrors and red plush—packed with Americans and nouveaux riches of every description before the war, now much frequented by German officers and their French “friends.” Long ago, when he was twelve, his aunt—his father’s charmingly demented sister—would take him to the Heininger, confiding in a whisper that one came “only for the crème anglaise, my precious, please remember that.” Then, in the late thirties, there’d been some sort of wretched murder there, a Balkan folly that spread itself across the newspapers for a day or two. His one visit in adult life had been a disaster—a dinner for an RKO executive, his wife, her mother, and Marie-Claire. A platter of Heininger’s best oysters, the evil Belons, had proved too much for the Americans, and it was downhill from there.

  Well, he supposed it didn’t matter. Likely it was the “important people” who had chosen the restaurant. Whoever they were. Altmann hadn’t been his usual self on the telephone. Upset about Casson’s absence—and something else. Casson drummed his fingers on the desk, stared out the window at the rue Marbeuf. What?

  Frightened, he thought.

  A bad week.

  Spring in the river valleys—tumbled skies and painters’ clouds— seemed like a dream to him now. In Paris, the grisaille, gray light, had descended over the city and it was dusk from morning till night.

  He went out to the Montrouge district, beyond the porte de Châtillon and the old cemetery, to the little factory streets around the rue Gabriel, where Bernard Langlade had the workshop that made lightbulbs. The nineteenth century; tiny cobbled streets shadowed by brick factory walls, huge rusted stacks with towers of brown smoke curling slowly into a dead sky.

  He trudged past foundries that seemed to go on for miles; the thudding of machines that hammered metal—he could feel each stroke in his heart—the smell, no, he thought, the taste, of nitric acid on brass, showers of orange sparks seen through wire mesh, a man with a mask of soot around his eyes, hauling on a long wrench, sensing Casson’s stare and giving it back to him. Casson looked away. His films had danced on the edges of this world but it was a real place and nobody made movies about these lives.

  He got lost in a maze of smoked brick and burnt iron and asked directions of two workmen who answered in a Slavic language he couldn’t understand. He walked for a long time, more than an hour, where oil slicks floated on a canal, then, at last, a narrow opening in a stone wall and a small street sign, raised letters chiseled into the wall in the old Paris style, IMPASSE SAVIER. At the end of the a
lley, a green metal door—Compagnie Luminex.

  Inside it was a beehive, workers sitting at long assembly tables, the line served by a young boy in a cap who, using every ounce of his weight, threw himself against the handle of an industrial cart piled high with metal fittings of various shapes and sizes. In one corner, a milling machine in operation, its motor whining from overuse. It was hot in the workroom—the roar of a kiln on the floor below explained why— and there were huge noisy blowers that vibrated in their mounts.

  “Jean-Claude!”

  It was Langlade, standing at the door of a factory office and beckoning to him. He wore a gray smock, which made him look like a workshop foreman. In the office, three women clerks, keeping books and typing letters. They were heavily built and dark, wearing old cardigan sweaters against the damp factory air, and had cigarettes burning in ashtrays made from clamshells. Langlade closed the half-glass door to the workshop floor, which reduced the flywheel and grinding noises to whispered versions of themselves. They shook hands, Langlade showed him into a small, private office and closed the door.

  “Jean-Claude,” he said fondly, opening the bottom drawer of his desk, taking out a bottle of brandy. “I can only imagine what would get you all the way out here.” He gave Casson a conspiratorial smile— clearly an affair of the heart was to be discussed. “Business?” he said innocently.

  “A little talk, Bernard.”

  “Ahh, I thought—maybe you just happened to be in the neighborhood.” They both laughed at this. Langlade began working on the cork.

  “Well, in fact I called your office, three or four times, and they told me, Monsieur is out at Montrouge, so I figured out this is where I’d have to come. But, Bernard, look at all this.”

  Langlade smiled triumphantly, a man who particularly wanted to be admired by his friends. “What did you think?”

  “Well, I didn’t know. What I imagined—three or four workmen, maybe. To me, a lightbulb. I never would have guessed it took so much to make a thing like that. But, really, Bernard, the sad fact is I’m an idiot.”

  “No, Jean-Claude. You’re just like everybody else—me included. When Yvette’s Papa died, and she told me we had this odd little business, I hadn’t the faintest idea what to do about it. Sell it, I supposed. And we tried, but the country had nothing but labor trouble and inflation that year, and nobody in France would buy any kind of industrial anything. So, we ran it. We made Christmas-tree lights and we had small contracts with Citroën and Renault for the miniature bulbs that light up gas gauges and so forth on automobile dashboards. Actually, Jean-Claude, to make a lightbulb, you have to be able to do all sorts of things. It’s like a simple kitchen match, you never think about it but it takes a lot of different processes, all of them technical, to produce some stupid little nothing.” He grunted, twisted the cork, managed to get it free of the bottle.

  “Bernard,” Casson said, gesturing toward the work area, “Christmas-tree lights? Joyeux Noël!”

  Langlade laughed. He searched the bottom drawer, found two good crystal glasses. He held one up to the light and scowled. “Fussy?”

  “No.”

  “When I’m alone, I clean them with my tie.”

  “Fine for me, Bernard.”

  Langlade poured each of them a generous portion, swirled his glass and inhaled the fumes. Casson did the same. “Well, well,” he said.

  Langlade shrugged, meaning, if you can afford it, why not? “When the Germans got here,” he said, “they began to make big orders, for trucks, and those armored whatnots they drive around in. We did that for five months, then they asked, could you buy some more elaborate equipment, possibly in Switzerland? Well, yes, we could. There wasn’t much point in saying no, the job would just go across the street to somebody else. So, we bought the new machinery, and began to make optical instruments. Like periscopes for submarines, and for field use also, a type of thing where a soldier in a trench can look out over the battlefield without getting his head blown off. We don’t make the really delicate stuff—binoculars, for instance. What we make has to accept hard use, and survive.”

  “Is there that much of it?”

  Langlade leaned over his desk. “Jean-Claude, I was like you. A civilian, what did I know. I went about my business, got into bed with a woman now and then, saw friends, made a little money, had a family. I never could have imagined the extent of anything like this. These people, army and navy, they think in thousands. As in, thousands and thousands.” Langlade gave him a certain very eloquent and Gallic look—it meant he was making money, and it meant he must never be asked how much, or anything like that, because he was making so much that to say it out loud would be to curse the enterprise—the jealous gods would overhear and throw down some bad-luck lightning bolts from the top of commercial Olympus. Where the tax people also kept an office.

  Casson nodded that he understood, then smiled, honestly happy for a friend’s success.

  “Now,” Langlade said, “what can I do for you?”

  “Citrine,” Casson said.

  A certain smile from Langlade. “The actress.”

  “Yes.”

  “All right.”

  “We have become lovers, Bernard. It’s the second time—we had a petite affaire ten years ago, but this is different.”

  Langlade made a sympathetic face; yes, he knew how it was. “She’s certainly beautiful, Jean-Claude. For myself, I couldn’t stop looking at her long enough to go to bed.”

  Casson smiled. “We just spent a week together, in Lyons—that’s between you and me by the way. Now, I’ve had some kind of problem in the Gestapo office on the rue des Saussaies. Bernard, it’s so stupid— I went up there to get an Ausweis to go to Spain, and they asked me about military service and something told me not to mention that I’d been reactivated in May and gone up to the Meuse. You know, there are thousands of French soldiers still in Germany, in prison camps. I decided it would be safer not to admit anything. So, I didn’t. Well, time went by, somebody sent a paper to somebody else, and they caught me in a lie.”

  Langlade shook his head and made a sour face. The Germans were finicky about paper in a way the Latin French found amusing—until the problem settled on their own doorstep.

  “The next thing was, they started reading my mail and listening to my phone. So, when I was with Citrine down in Lyons, I told her that if she wanted to get in touch with me she could send a postcard to your office, your law office in the 8th is the address I gave her.”

  He waited for Langlade to smile and say it was all right, but he didn’t. Instead, his expression darkened into a certain kind of discomfort.

  “Look, Jean-Claude,” he said. “We’ve known each other for twenty years, I’m not going to beat around the bush with you. If Citrine sends me a postcard, well, I’ll see that you get it. On the other hand, next time you have a chance to talk to her, would it be too much to ask for you to find some other way of doing this?”

  Casson wasn’t going to show what he felt. “No problem at all, Bernard. In fact, I can take care of it right away.”

  “You can understand, can’t you? This work I’m doing matters to them, Jean-Claude. It isn’t like they’re actually watching me, but, you know, I see these military people all the time, from the procurement offices, and all it would take would be for my secretary over in the other office to decide she wasn’t getting enough money, or, or whatever it might be. Look, I have an idea, what about Arnaud? You know, he’s always doing this and that and the other, and it’s just the sort of thing that would appeal to him.”

  “You’re right,” Casson said. “A much better idea.”

  “So now, here’s what we’ll do. Let’s go back to Paris—I can call a driver and car—and treat ourselves to a hell of a lunch, hey? Jean-Claude, how about it?”

  Friday, 4 May. 4:20 P.M.

  End of the week, a slow day in the office, Casson kept looking at his watch. Seven hours—and the dinner at Brasserie Heininger would be over. Of course, he
lied to himself, he didn’t have to go, the world wouldn’t come to an end. No, he thought, don’t do that. “Mireille?” he called out. “Could you come in for a minute?”

  “Monsieur?”

  “Why don’t you go home early, Mireille—it won’t be so crowded on the train.”

  “Thank you, Monsieur Casson.”

  “Could you mail this for me, on the way?”

  Of course.

  A postcard—the people who watched the mail supposedly didn’t bother with postcards—telling Citrine to write him care of a café where they knew him. He had to assume Mireille wasn’t followed, that she could mail a postcard without somebody retrieving it. It meant he could save an anonymous telephone he’d discovered, in an office at one of the soundstages out at Billancourt, for a call he might want to make later on.

  Mireille called out good night and left, Casson returned to the folder on his desk. Best to prepare for an important meeting. The folder held various pencil budgets for Hotel Dorado, a list of possible changes to the story line, names of actors and actresses and scenic designers—they were just now reaching the stage where certain individuals were, almost mystically, exactly right for the film. Also in the folder, a list of new projects Altmann had mentioned over the last few months; you never knew when one of these “ideas” was going to leap out of its coffin and start dancing around the crypt.

  Casson read down the page and sighed out loud. Ah yes, the Boer War. The whole industry was planning movies about the noble Boers that spring, somebody in Berlin—Goebbels?—had decided to make them fashionable. A group of farmers, not exactly German but at least Dutch, thus Nordic and sincere, had carried out guerrilla actions and given the British army fits in South Africa. A war, according to German thinking, that made England look bad: imperialist, power-hungry, and cruel. One German company, Casson had heard, was about to go into production on something called President Kruger, a Boer War spectacle employing 40,000 extras.