The World at Night

by Alan Furst

  The café where he’d met Véronique earlier that spring was deserted, the proprietor rubbing a dry glass with a towel and staring hypnotized into the street. Casson stood at the bar and ordered a coffee. The owner jiggled the handle on the nickel-plated machine, produced a loud hiss and a column of steam, the smell of burnt chicory, and a trickle of dark liquid.

  “Seen Véronique today?” Casson asked.

  In return, an eyebrow lifted in the who-wants-to-know look. “Not today.”

  “Think she might be in later?”

  “She might.”

  “Mind if I wait?”

  “Fine with me.”

  He waited all day. He took his coffee to the last table in the back, kept the cup in front of him, pored over yesterday’s newspaper, and, at last, broke down and spent three francs in a tabac for a packet of Bulgarian cigarettes.

  A workers’ café, Véronique had called it. Yellow walls dyed amber with smoke, slow, steady stream of customers—a red wine, a beer, a coffee, a marc, a fine, elbows on the bar. At six, some students came down the hill and stood in a crowd by the door, imitating one of their professors and having a good loud laugh. Casson looked a second time, and there was Véronique, in the middle of it, getting an envelope from the owner.

  She was startled when he appeared next to her. Then she nodded her head toward the square. “Let’s go for a walk, Jean-Claude.”

  They walked from cart to cart in the Maubert market, pretending to shop, staring at baskets of eels and mounds of leeks. Casson told her what had happened to him, Véronique said he’d been lucky. As for her, she’d been warned in person, at the office. “I’m leaving tonight, Jean-Claude. I just stopped at the café for a final message.”

  “Leaving for where?”

  “South. Over the mountains.”

  They were standing in front of a mound of spring potatoes, red ones, the smell of wet earth still on them.

  “Jean-Claude,” she said. “I want you to go to number seven, in the rue Taine. Immediately. The man there will take care of you. You know where it is?”

  “No.”

  “Bercy. Near the wine warehouses.”

  “All right.”

  An old man in an ancient, chalk-striped suit strolled over to the potato cart and stood near them, just close enough to overhear what they might be saying. Casson wanted to bark at him, Véronique took his arm and walked him away. “Oh this city,” she said in a low voice.

  They stood in front of a barrow filled with dusty beets, the little girl minding the store was no more than eleven. “Ten sous, ’sieur et ’dame,” she said hopefully.

  Véronique took a breath and let it out slowly. Casson could tell she sensed danger. “So now,” she said quietly, “we’ve done this shopping, and, old friends that we are, it’s time to part. We’ll kiss each other farewell, and then we’ll go.”

  Casson turned to her and they kissed left and right. He saw that her eyes were shining. “Good-bye, my friend,” she said.

  “Au revoir, Véronique.”

  The last he saw of her, she was walking quickly through the crowd in a narrow lane between market stalls. Just as she turned the corner, she gave him a sudden smile and a little wave, then she vanished.

  It was the sharp edge of the war on the rue Taine—an apartment of little rooms, all the blinds drawn, above a dark courtyard. There was a .45 automatic on the kitchen table, and a Sten gun in the parlor, candlelight a dull sheen on its oiled barrel. The operative was British, but nothing like Mathieu—this man was born to the vocation, and 1941 was the year of his life.

  “You’re going to England,” he said. “We’re closing down the network, saving what we can, but you can’t stay here.”

  It was the right, probably the only, thing to do, but Casson felt something tear inside him.

  “You’ll like England,” the operative said. “We’ll see you don’t starve, and you’ll be alive. Not everybody is, tonight.”

  Casson nodded. “A telephone call?”

  “Impossible. Sorry.”

  “Perhaps a letter. There’s somebody, in Lyons.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. “Help us win the war,” the operative said. “Then you’ll go home. Everything will be wonderful.”

  An hour later they brought in a wounded British airman, face the color of chalk. Casson sat with him on a battered sofa and the man showed him a photograph of his dog.

  At midnight, two French railwaymen came for the airman.

  At 1:30, Casson was escorted to another apartment in the building. His photograph was taken, then, at 2:10, he was handed a new identity—passport with photo, Ausweis, work permit—a thousand francs and a book of ration stamps.

  Back at the first apartment, he dozed for a time. The operative never slept, worked over coded transmissions—there was a clandestine radio in another building in the neighborhood, Casson guessed—and listened to the BBC at low volume. Sometimes he made a note of the time— the Messages Personnels were long over for the night, but Casson thought he was being signaled by what songs were played, and the order they were played in.

  Casson left at dawn. The woman who took him out was in her fifties, with dark red hair and the hard accents of northeast France. A Pole, perhaps, but she didn’t say. He sat silent in the passenger seat as she drove. The car was a battered old Fiat 1500, but it was fast, and the woman made good time on the empty roads. She swung due east from Bercy, and was out of Paris in under a minute. They stopped for a German control at the porte de Charenton, and a French police roadblock in Montreuil. Both times the driver was addressed—as the passports were handed back by the officers—as “Doctor.”

  After that, they virtually disappeared, curved slowly north and west around the city on the back streets of small towns and secondary roads. By eight in the morning they were winding their way toward Rouen on the east—much less traveled—bank of the Seine. Outside a small village the driver worked her way down a hillside of packed dirt streets to the edge of the river, just across from the town of Mantes. The car rolled to a stop at the edge of a clearing, two black-and-white spaniels ran barking up to the driver and she rumpled their ears and called them sweethearts.

  Beyond a marsh of tall reeds, Casson could see a houseboat— bleached gray wood with a crooked piece of pipe for the stove—tied up to a pole dock. A young man appeared a moment later, asked the driver if she wanted coffee. “No,” she sighed. “I can’t stop.” She had to be somewhere in an hour, was already going to be late. To Casson she said, “You’ll remain here for thirty hours, then we’ll move you north to Honfleur. These people are responsible for you—please do what they ask.”

  “Thank you,” Casson said.

  “Good luck,” the driver said. “It won’t be long now.”

  A family lived on the houseboat, a young man and his wife and their three little girls. Casson was taken to a bedroom with heavy drapes on the windows. The woman brought him a bowl of lentils with mustard and a piece of bread. “It’s better if you stay inside when it’s daylight,” she said. He spent the day dozing and thumbing through a stack of old magazines. At dusk, they said he could take the air for a half-hour. He was happy for that, sat on the sagging dock and watched birds flying over the river. There was a mackerel sky just before dark, the last red of the sun lighting the clouds, then a dark, starless evening, and a breeze that rustled in the leaves of the willow trees that grew on the river bank.

  His heart ached—he could only unwind the past, looking for another road that might have led to a better place, but he could not find it. He tried to tell himself that Citrine would understand, would sense somehow that he’d escaped from the Germans and would come back to her in time.

  He really did try.

  He went back out again at dawn. Cruel of this countryside, he thought, to be so beautiful when it was being taken from him. The Vexin— above Paris along the river—was fighting country, rather bloodsoaked if you knew the history. But then, people fought over beautiful t
hings, a side of human nature that didn’t quite have a name. The oldest of the little girls, seven perhaps, came out to the dock and said “Maman says the sun is coming up now, and will the monsieur please take coffee with us.”

  As good a moment as any to say good-bye, he thought, the little girl standing close to him on the dock. Just a bend in a river, and dawn was always good to a place like this, gray light afloat on the water, a bird calling in the marsh.

  Later that day they took him up to the port of Honfleur in a truck. The driver was in charge of the final stage of the escape line and briefed Casson as they drove. “You’ll go out on a fishing boat. We leave at dawn, sail to the mouth of the river with the rest of the fleet and stand to for German inspection. You will be hidden below decks—your chances of passing through the inspection are good, the Germans search one boat in four, and use dogs only now and then. After the inspection the fleet will be fishing—for conger eel—in a group. A German plane flies over periodically, and we are permitted only enough fuel for thirty-five miles of cruising. Sometime during the afternoon, you will be transferred to a trawler allowed to work farther out at sea, a trawler with an overnight permit. These boats are sometimes searched by German minesweepers. At the midpoint of the Channel, between French and British waters, you’ll be taken on a British navy motor launch, and put ashore at Bournemouth.”

  He stayed that night in another bedroom with heavy curtains—this time in a house on the outskirts of a coastal village. Then, at 4:30 A.M. on the morning of 28 June, he was taken to a small fishing boat in the port of Honfleur, and led to a secret compartment built behind the belowdecks cabin—entered by removing a section of wall from the back of a storage locker.

  He was joined first by a young woman, exhausted but calm, clearly at the end of a long and difficult assignment. They were never to speak, but did exchange a smile—bittersweet, a little hopeless—that said virtually everything there was to say. What sort of world was it, where they, where people like them, did the things they had done?

  Moments later, the arrival of an important personage; a tall, distinguished man, his wife, his teenaged sons, and three suitcases. Casson guessed this was a diplomat or senior civil servant, being brought to London at de Gaulle’s request. The man looked around the tiny space with a certain muted displeasure—he’d clearly not been informed that he was going to have to share a hiding place, and it was not at all to his taste.

  The compartment was sealed up and they got under way almost immediately, the throb of the engine loud in the small space. Casson, his back resting against the curved wood of the hull, could feel the water sliding past. There was no light, it was very hot, he could hear the others breathing. The boat slowed, then stopped for inspection, and as the engine idled the smell of gasoline grew stronger and stronger in the compartment. Above them, boots stamping on the deck. The Germans were talking, laughing with each other—they felt really good today, they’d had a triumph of some kind. Time crawled, the boat rising and falling on the heavy swell in the harbor. Casson felt sweat gather at his hairline and run down his face.

  Then it ended. The German patrol boat started up with a roar, their own engine accelerated, and the boat moved forward; somebody on the other side of the wall said, “All right, that’s over. We’ll let you out as soon as we clear the harbor.”

  On deck, Casson breathed the salt air, gripped the railing, and watched the land fall away as the boat moved out to sea. It was the end of the night, hills dark against the sky, faded moon, white combers rolling in to shore.

  Good-bye.

  Forever—he knew that. This was what life cost you, you lost what you loved. He closed his eyes and saw her, felt her breath on his face, felt her skin against him. Then he was in the sea.

  Cold. The shock of it made him gasp, then swim for his life. Behind him, great volleys of angry threats and curses. Ahead of him, now he could see it, the beach.

  Citrine.

  HOTEL DU MER (1944)

  Brilliantly written and directed by

  René Guillot, the last weekend of a small seaside

  hotel in the south of France. Danielle Aubin (Citrine)

  is ravishing as a mysterious stranger.

  THE WORLD AT NIGHT

  ALAN FURST

  A Reader’s Guide

  To print out copies of this or other Random House Reader’s Guides,

  visit us at www.atrandom.com/rgg

  The Research of Alan Furst’s Novels

  Alan Furst describes the area of his interest as “near history.” His novels are set between 1933—the date of Adolf Hitler’s ascent, with the first Stalinist purges in Moscow coming a year later—and 1945, which saw the end of the war in Europe. The history of this period is well documented. Furst uses books by journalists of the time, personal memoirs—some privately published—autobiographies (many of the prominent individuals of the period wrote them), war and political histories, and characteristic novels written during those years.

  “But,” he says, “there is a lot more”—for example, period newsreels, magazines, and newspapers, as well as films and music, especially swing and jazz. “I buy old books,” Furst says, “and old maps, and I once bought, while living in Paris, the photo archive of a French stock house that served the newspapers of Paris during the Occupation, all the prints marked as cleared by the German censorship.” In addition, Furst uses intelligence histories of the time, many of them by British writers.

  Alan Furst has lived for long periods in Paris and in the south of France. “In Europe,” he says, “the past is still available. I remember a blue neon sign, in the Eleventh Arrondissement in Paris, that had possibly been there since the 1930s.” He recalls that on the French holiday le jour des morts (All Saints’ Day, November 1) it is customary for Parisians to go to the Père Lachaise Cemetery. “Before the collapse of Polish communism, the Polish émigrés used to gather at the tomb of Maria Walewska. They would burn rows of votive candles and play Chopin on a portable stereo. It was always raining on that day, and a dozen or so Poles would stand there, under black umbrellas, with the music playing, as a kind of silent protest against the communist regime. The spirit of this action was history alive—as though the entire past of that country, conquered again and again, was being brought back to life.”

  The heroes of Alan Furst’s novels include a Bulgarian defector from the Soviet intelligence service, a foreign correspondent for Pravda, a Polish cartographer who works for the army general staff, a French producer of gangster films, and a Hungarian émigré who works with a diplomat at the Hungarian legation in Paris. “These are characters in novels,” Furst says, “but people like them existed; people like them were courageous people with ordinary lives and, when the moment came, they acted with bravery and determination. I simply make it possible for them to tell their stories.”

  Questions for Discussion

  1. If you asked Jean Casson to define the word honor, what would he say? Which, if any, of the following would be included: Loyalty to friends? Loyalty to country? Loyalty in love? Loyalty to self?

  2. After his meeting with Simic, in which he is first offered the chance to work for British intelligence, Casson thinks to himself, “You think you know how the world works, but you really don’t. These people are the ones who know how it works.” How would you say Casson’s understanding of the world has changed by the novel’s conclusion? Has he become one of the people who know how the world “really works”?

  3. To what extent is Casson culpable for the death of his friend Langlade?

  4. During the early years of the German Occupation of France, a common question, which Langlade poses to Casson, was this: “If your barber cuts hair under the Occupation, does that make him a collaborator?” How would you respond? What would you have done in similar circumstances?

  5. Alan Furst has said that his books are written from the point of view of the nation where the story takes place. Describe the French point of view as it appears in The World at N
ight.

  6. Critics praise Furst’s ability to re-create the atmosphere of World War II–era Europe. What elements of description make the setting come alive? How can you account for the fact that the settings seem authentic even though you probably have no firsthand knowledge of the times and places he writes about?

  7. Furst’s novels have been described as “historical novels,” and as “spy novels.” He calls them “historical spy novels.” Some critics have insisted that they are, simply, novels. How does his work compare with other spy novels you’ve read? What does he do that is the same? Different? If you owned a bookstore, in what section would you display his books?

  8. Furst is often praised for his minor characters, which have been described as “sketched out in a few strokes.” Do you have a favorite in this book? Characters in his books often take part in the action for a few pages and then disappear. What do you think becomes of them? How do you know?

  9. At the end of an Alan Furst novel, the hero is always still alive. What becomes of Furst’s heroes? Will they survive the war? Does Furst know what becomes of them? Would it be better if they were somewhere safe and sound, to live out the war in comfort? If not, why not?

  10. How do the notions of good and evil work in The World at Night? Would you prefer a confrontation between villain and hero? Describe Furst’s use of realism in this regard.

  Suggested Reading

  There is an enormous body of literature, fiction and nonfiction, written about the period 1933–1945, so Alan Furst’s recommendations for reading in that era are very specific. He often uses characters who are idealistic intellectuals, particularly French and Russian, who become disillusioned with the Soviet Union but still find themselves caught up in the political warfare of the period. “Among the historical figures who wrote about that time,” Furst says, “Arthur Koestler may well be ‘first among equals.’ ” Furst suggests Koestler’s Darkness at Noon as a classic story of the European intellectual at midcentury.