by Alan Furst
It was going to work. He could feel it, and permitted himself just a bare edge of relief. It was going to work because it wasn’t complicated. He had simply gone to his customary travel agent at the Thomas Cook office on the rue de Bassano, told him an associate named Dubreuil was accompanying him to Spain, and purchased two first-class, roundtrip tickets, checking Dubreuil’s suitcase through to Barcelona. The standard procedure would have been for the agent at Cook’s to demand Dubreuil’s passport, but Casson had done a great deal of business there over seven or eight years and the travel agent wasn’t going to get fussy over details with a valued customer.
Prevailing opinion in Paris had it that checked baggage, stacked high in icy freight cars, was not searched very seriously at the Spanish frontier. If the worst happened, however, and a Spanish customs guard discovered a suitcase full of pesetas and turned it in instead of stealing it, they could look for Dubreuil all they wanted; they’d never find him because he didn’t exist. There was, for Casson, a brief moment of exposure, when he had to pretend to be Dubreuil in order to claim the suitcase, but that was going to be over in a few seconds and he would be on his way.
The clerk returned to the counter, his face bland and satisfied. He handed Casson a slip of paper, and said “Not here,” in Spanish. Casson looked at his hand, he was holding the baggage receipt.
“Pardon?” He hadn’t understood, he’d thought—
“Not here, señor.”
Casson stared at him. “Where is it?”
A shrug. “Who can say?”
Casson heard train whistles in the distance, the clash of couplings, the opera on the clerk’s radio. They would kill him for this.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
The clerk stepped back a pace. His next move, Casson realized, would be to roll down the metal shutter. The man’s face was closed: a suitcase didn’t matter, a passenger didn’t matter, what mattered was the little silver pin on his blue smock. Against that magic, this insistent Señor Dubreuil was powerless.
“The train from Port Bou . . .” Casson said.
The hand started to reach for the shutter, then decided that the moment had not quite arrived and contented itself with sliding casually into a pocket. “Good evening, señor,” the clerk said.
Casson turned away quickly. He didn’t know where to go or what to do but he felt he had to put distance between himself and the baggage room. He trotted back up the corridor, the valise bouncing in his hand, footsteps echoing off the cement walls. Breathing hard, he made himself slow down, then walked through the station buffet and found the platform where the Port Bou train had come in. The track was empty.
“Missed your train?”
English. A huge man with a huge gray beard, sitting on a baggage cart surrounded by two battered wooden boxes, an old carpetbag, and a collapsed easel tied with a cord. “Have you missed your train, monsieur?” Phrasebook French this time, plodding but correct.
Casson shook his head. “Lost baggage.” Perdu. Meant lost, all right, much more so, somehow, than in any other language. That which was perdu joined lost time, lost love, lost opportunity and lost souls in a faraway land where nothing was ever seen again.
“Damn the luck.”
Casson nodded.
“Speak English?”
“Yes.”
“Just come in from the border?”
“Yes.”
“Hm.” The man looked at his watch. “Only left thirty seconds ago. Did you leave it on the train?”
“No. It was checked baggage.”
“Ah-hah! Then there’s hope.”
“There is?”
“Oh yes. Sometimes they don’t take it off. They forget, or they just don’t. They’re Spanish, you see. Life’s so bloody, conditional. ”
“It’s true,” Casson said gloomily.
“You might catch it, you know, if you don’t dawdle. It stops at a village station just south of Barcelona, that train. The 408 local.” The man glowered with conviction and took a much-thumbed little booklet from his coat. Among the English, Casson knew, were people who suffered from a madness of trains. Perhaps this was one of them.
“Yes,” the man said. “I’m right. Here it is, Puydal. A Catalonian name. Arrival, 9:21.” The man looked up. “Well,” he said, “for God’s sake hurry!”
Casson moved quickly. This didn’t happen only in Spain. In France too, your baggage popped up here, disappeared there, sometimes reappeared, sometimes was never heard from again. At the corner of the station, a long line of taxis. He jumped in the first one and said “Puydal station. Please hurry.”
The driver turned the key in the ignition. And again. Finally, the engine caught, he gave it a few seconds, then swung slowly out into the street, and accelerated cautiously. Casson glanced at his watch. 9:04. At this rate they would never get there in time.
“Please,” Casson said. Por favor.
“Mmmm—” said the driver: yes, yes, a philosopher’s sigh. Vast forces of destiny, stars and planets, the run of time itself. A candle flickered, the course of life drifted one point south. “—Puydal, Puydal.” Clearly, this was not his first trip to Puydal railroad station.
In the event, the sigh was accurate.
Puydal was where you went when all was lost, Puydal was where fate got a chance to mend its ways and the stationmaster’s spaniel bitch was sitting on the Dubreuil suitcase. Casson had gone to the Galéries Lafayette to buy one, then discovered an Arab in business on a side street selling the homely classic—pebbled tan surface with a dull green and red stripe that half the world seemed to own.
“Ah, so this is yours?” said the stationmaster. “May I just, Señor Dubreuil, have the briefest glance at your passport?”
They don’t ask for the passport, they ask for the ticket.
Casson handed over his passport. “I am Señor Casson,” he said. “The friend of Señor Dubreuil. He is sick, enfermo, I am to collect his baggage.” He dug into his pocket, took out a handful of francs, pesetas, coins of many lands. “He told me, ‘a gratuity,’ in appreciation, he is sick, it’s cold . . .”
The stationmaster nodded gravely and took the money, shooed his dog off and saluted. “Mil gracias.” Casson grabbed the suitcase and trotted out the door to find the same taxi. “Barcelona station,” he said to the driver, looking at his watch. The express to the southern coast was due to leave in seventeen minutes, they would never make it. “Please hurry,” he said to the driver.
There were no other cars, the taxi bumped along the cracked surface of the old macadam road, one headlight aimed up in the pine trees, the other a faint glow in the darkness. The engine missed, the gears whined, the driver sang to himself under his breath. Casson hoisted the suitcase onto his lap and opened it a crack. Yes, still in there. Thank God. Folded up in threadbare shirts and pants he’d bought at a used-clothes cart out in Clignancourt. He leaned back, closed his eyes, felt clammy and uncomfortable as the sweat dried on his shirt in the cold night air. It was time to admit to himself he had no idea what he was doing—he’d read Eric Ambler, he had a general idea of how it was all supposed to work, but this wasn’t it.
28 January, 1941. The Alhambra Hotel, Málaga.
A Spanish casino in winter. Cold gray sea, storms that blew rain against the window and sang in the stucco minarets. In the dining room, a string orchestra, a thé dansant, the songs Viennese, the violins flat. Still, the guests danced, staring into the private distance, the women wearing jewels and glass and Gypsy beads, the men in suits steamed over the green-stained bathtubs. Refugees, fugitives, émigrés, immigrants, stateless persons, wanted by this regime or that, rich or shrewd or lucky enough to get this far but no farther, washed up at the end of Europe, talking all night—in Bessarabian Yiddish or Alsatian French—stealing rolls from breakfast trays in the halls, trying to tip the barman with Bulgarian lev.
In the courtyard, a Moorish garden; rusty fountain, archway hung with dead ivy that rustled in the wind. Casson walked
there, or by the thundering sea, ruining his shoes in the gray sand. But, anything not to be in the room. He’d placed an advertisement in ABC, the Monarchist daily, in the Noticias section. SWISS GENTLEMAN, COMMERCIAL TRAVELER, SEEKS ROOM IN PRIVATE HOME FOR MONTH OF FEBRUARY. Then, he waited. Three days, four days, a week. Nothing happened. Perhaps the operation had been canceled, and they’d just left him there. On his walks he composed long letters to Citrine, things he would never be able to write down—very beautiful things, he thought. In the casino he gambled listlessly, betting red and black at the roulette table, sticking at seventeen in blackjack, breaking even and walking away. A woman slipped a note in his pocket—Would you like to visit to me? I am in the Room 34. Maybe he would have liked to, but now he didn’t know who anybody was or what they were after.
He was shaving when the telephone rang, two long notes. He ran into the bedroom. “Yes?”
“Are you the gentleman who advertised in the newspaper?”
The number given in the newspaper had not been for the Alhambra. “Yes,” he said.
“I wonder, perhaps we could meet.”
French, spoken well by a Spaniard.
“All right.”
“In an hour? Would that be convenient?”
“It would.”
“The hotel has a bar . . .”
“Yes.”
“It’s three-twenty. Should we say, four-thirty?”
“Good.”
“I’ll see you then.”
“Good-bye.”
Casson took a table in the corner, ordered a dry sherry. Beyond the curtained window the rain drummed down. At the next table a couple in their thirties was having a conspirators’ argument. He should make the approach, say this, and tomorrow evening was the very last moment they could wait to do it. She was afraid, there was only this one chance, what if they tried and failed. Maybe it would be better not to give themselves away, not just yet.
A bellhop in hotel uniform, silver tray with an envelope on it. “A message for you, sir.”
Casson tipped him, opened the envelope. Expensive notepaper, elegant handwriting. “Please forgive the inconvenience, but the meeting has been moved. To the yacht Estancia, last slip, C dock, in the harbor. Looking forward to meeting you.” Signed with initials.
“May I send a message back?” Casson asked the boy.
“The gentleman has left, sir.”
So be it. They had looked him over in the bar, checked to see if he was alone, and now they were going to do business. He folded the note and put it in his pocket, paid for the sherry, and walked out the front door of the hotel. The rain was running brown in the cobbled street. Well, he’d get wet. No, that wouldn’t work. He’d have to go back upstairs and get a raincoat.
He’d learned to be sensitive to sudden changes of direction—he’d come back to the room unexpectedly one night and heard, thought he heard, some commotion on the balcony just as he got the door unlocked and open. There was nothing to see, the balcony door was locked when he tried it. But somebody had been in the room, then left when they heard him at the door. How did he know? He didn’t know how, he just did. And, more, it was somebody he didn’t want to catch, because he wasn’t exactly sure where that might lead.
He got off the elevator, then paused at the door. Put the key in, turned it, entered. Silent. The damp, still air undisturbed.
Outside it was dusk, low clouds scudding east, patches of yellow sky over the water out toward the African coast. The palm trees lining the Paseo were whipping in the gale, loose fronds blown up against the sea-wall. Casson put his head down, held on to his hat, and hurried toward the harbor. Two women in black shawls ran past, laughing, and a man in a cloth cap rode by on a bicycle, a straw basket hung on one arm.
The harbor, C dock; in the last slip, the Estancia. A small, compact motor yacht, elegant in the 1920s, then used hard over the years and now beginning to age—varnish worn off the teak in places, brasswork showing the first bloom of verdigris. The portholes were shuttered, the boat seemed deserted, bobbing up and down on the harbor swell amid the orange peels and tarred wood. Casson stood for a moment, rain dripping off the brim of his hat. Somewhere in his heart he turned and went back to Paris, a man who’d lived, for a moment, the wrong life. A wave broke over the end of the dock, white spray blown sideways by the wind. He took a deep breath, crossed the gangplank, rapped sharply on the door to the stateroom.
The door swung open immediately, he stepped inside and it closed behind him. The room was dark, and silent, except for creaking planks as the Estancia strained against its moorage. The man who had opened the door watched him carefully, his fingers resting on a table by a large revolver. Apparently this was Carabal—described to Casson as a Spanish army officer, a colonel. But no braid or epaulets. Pale gray suit and spectacles; sparse, carefully combed hair, and the bland face of a diplomat, reddened by excitement and winter weather. In his forties, Casson thought.
“I’m to say to you that we met, at the Prado, last April,” Casson said.
Carabal nodded, acknowledging the password. “It was July”—countersign—“in Lisbon.”
There was someone else on the boat—he changed position, and Casson could feel the shift of weight in the floorboards. Casson reached into the pocket of his raincoat, took out a key, handed it to Carabal. “It’s on the sixth floor,” he said. “Room forty-two. The suitcase is in the closet.”
Carabal took the key. “Three hundred thousand?”
“Yes.”
“Good. General Arado will contact your principals.”
“How will that happen?”
“By letter. Hand-delivered in Paris on the fifteenth of February.”
“All right.”
“We will go forward.”
“Yes.”
“Good luck to all of us,” Carabal said, opening the door.
Casson turned and left. On the dock, he raised his face to the wind-blown rain. Thank God that’s over.
The walk back along the Paseo was glorious. Shattered cloud over the sea, puddles like miniature lakes—surface water ruffled by the gusting wind, a priest on a mule, the street lamps coming on in first darkness. Golden light, fluttering palm trees. “Buenas noches,” said the priest.
Back in the Alhambra, he felt the weight lift. Thank God it was over, now he could go back to his own life. After the war, a good story. A revolver! He took his wet shoes off, jacket and pants and shirt and socks, crawled into bed in his underwear. The pillow felt cool and smooth against the skin of his face. What was it, seven in the evening? So what. He didn’t care. He would order from room service if he felt like eating.
An omelet. They could manage that. He had captured, by means of lavish tips, the allegiance of the room-service waiter, a man not without influence in the kitchen. That meant the omelet did not have to swim in oil and garlic and tomato sauce, it could be dry, with salt and parsley. He needed something like that now.
Oatmeal! He’d discovered it during a trip to Scotland. Steel-cut, they’d say, meaning the best, with yellow cream from an earthenware pitcher. He’d ordered it every morning; dense, gooey stuff—delicious, soothing. Of course down here they would never have such a thing.
Who had put the little slip of paper in his pocket? The redhead, he was almost sure of it. Pearl earrings, dancer’s legs. Haughty, the chin tilted up toward heaven. Passionate, he thought, that kind of a sneer could turn into a very different expression, an O—surprised by pleasure. Or playful indignation. How dare you. He liked that, an excellent trick. Jesus, women. They thought up all these things, a man had no chance at all. And then, like Citrine, they turned away from you. How long could he mourn? It wasn’t good not to make love. Unhealthy, there were all sorts of theories.
Tired. It scared him, what this little enterprise had taken from him in strength and spirit. Oh Lord, he was so tired. No redhead for him, not tonight. She wouldn’t do it anyhow, not now, not after he’d ignored the note. What? Monsieur! How dare you presum
e. Ah, but, even better, the redhead says yes, they go to his room. She likes to kiss, that hard mouth softens against his. White skin, blue veins, taut nipples. Then later he admits the note excited him. “Note?” she says.
For a moment he was gone, then he came back. A strange little dream—a hallway in a house. Somebody he’d known, something had happened. It meant nothing, and he could not stay awake any longer. He took a deep breath and let it out very slowly to tell himself that the world was slipping back into place.
Oatmeal.
The phone. Those two sustained notes, again and again. He clawed at it, knocked the receiver off the cradle, groped around the night table until he found it, finally mumbled “What? Hello?”
“Jean-Claude! Hey it’s me. I’m here. I owe you a drink, right? So now I got to pay up. Hello?”
Simic.
“Jean-Claude? What goes on there? Not asleep. Hey, shit, it’s nine-thirty. Wait a minute, now I see, you’re getting a little, right?”
“No, I’m alone.”
“Oh. So, well, then, we’ll have a drink. Say, in twenty minutes.”
Casson’s mind wasn’t working at all. All he could say was yes.
“In the bar downstairs. Champagne cocktail—what about it?”
“All right.”
“A bientôt!” Triumphant, Simic very nearly sang the words.
Don’t be a rat, Casson told himself. He’s happy, you be happy too. Not everything needs to fit in with your mood about it.
He staggered into the bathroom. What was Simic doing in Málaga? If he’d been intending to come, why hadn’t he brought the money himself? Well, there was, no doubt, a reason, he would know it soon enough. He stood in the tub, pulled the linen curtain closed, inhaled the damp-drain odor of Spanish beach hotels. Five showerheads poked from the green tile—maybe in summer you’d be splendidly doused from every side. Not now. Five tepid drizzles and the smell of sulphur. Putain de merde. He threw handfuls of water on himself, then rubbed his face with a towel.
