Red Gold

by Alan Furst

  Casson had liked the story—almost unconsciously blanking out the political posturing and the straw men—in the way that film producers like certain novels. He had persuaded himself he might buy it, at least take an option if he could get it for a good price. There was rioting, plotting, passionate conspiracy in the back rooms of cafés and, by the time the book was published and Casson got interested, the novel had proved to be prophetic—it was 1936 and Spain was truly on fire. In fact, and Casson was honest with himself, he was more than anything curious about the writer, who had a knowing hand with action scenes. In the end, however, lunch and a meeting and life went on.

  But he’d liked Kovar. And he knew how to find him. If he was alive, if the communists or the fascists or the Germans or the street girls hadn’t already done for him, because they’d certainly all tried it. If he was alive, Casson thought, and not locked up in some dungeon.

  He took a train ride to Melun, a little way south of Paris. Found the shoe-repair shop, left a message, for “Anton,” that he was an old friend and could be found by calling at the Hotel Benoit and asking for “Marin.” The following night, a young woman came to his room. “I’m a friend of Anton,” she said. “Who are you?”

  “I used to be a film producer, called Casson.”

  She glowered at him. “Oh. And now?”

  “A fugitive.”

  “For a fugitive,” she said, looking around the hotel room, “you don’t do too badly.”

  “Quand même,” he said. Even so.

  As she left, Casson was reminded of a rather casual remark Degrave had made in one of their discussions. “When you’re looking for somebody, and you find yourself in contact with people you’ve never met, you’re getting close.”

  The next morning he found a message waiting for him at the desk: Gare du Nord, 5:15 P.M., Track 16. He waited there for fifteen minutes, took a few steps toward the exit, then the young woman from the day before appeared at his side and said, “Please come with me.”

  He followed her through the rain to a run-down office building a few blocks behind the station on the rue Pétrelle. She turned, came back to him and said, “On the third floor, turn left. It’s at the end of the hall.”

  The building was ice-cold and dark. And silent—when he left the staircase at the third floor, his footsteps echoed down the corridor. On the door at the end of the hall, the former tenant’s name, the ghost of lettering scraped off the pebbled glass.

  Casson knocked, then entered. Kovar was sitting in a swivel chair behind a desk piled with account ledgers. On the pull-out shelf was an old Remington typewriter.

  “Nice to see you again,” Casson said.

  Kovar inclined his head and smiled to acknowledge the greeting. He indicated a chair, Casson sat down. “A surprise,” Kovar said. There was faint irony in his voice but, as Casson remembered it, that was true of everything he said. “Sorry I can’t offer you anything. This is somebody else’s office by day, I only use it at night.” His chair creaked as he leaned forward. “You can’t really be a fugitive, can you?” The idea seemed to amuse him.

  “I escaped from the rue des Saussaies. Last June.” The address was that of the Gestapo administrative headquarters. “Then I was staying up in place Clichy, here and there, until a week ago.”

  Kovar nodded—it might be true. “And now?”

  “I’ve been asked to make contact with the FTP.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes.”

  Kovar smiled. Casson could just manage to see him in the dark office. He hadn’t changed, had been fifty years old all his life. A shaggy, tobacco-stained mustache on the face of a mole, receding hairline, slumped shoulders. His body small, meager, almost weightless—a rag doll to be punched and kicked and thrown against the wall, which pretty exactly described what had been done to it. Gray shirt, green tie, a shabby jacket. Years earlier, Fischfang had told him Kovar’s story: his father a French citizen of Russian birth, his mother, born in Bratislava, died when he was twelve. He’d been in and out of prison in France, for political crimes, had broken with Stalin, then with Trotsky. The NKVD had tried to assassinate him after he’d been thrown out of the party. He’d essentially raised himself, educated himself, trained himself to write, got himself into trouble, found misfortune wherever he went, and somehow survived it all. “He’s worse than a Marxist,” Fischfang had said in 1936, “he’s an idealist.”

  Kovar sighed. “You weren’t such a bad sort,” he said. “A romantic, maybe. But now you’ve gone and—I mean, who asked you to find the FTP?”

  “Army officers. A resistance group.”

  “They know you’re talking to me?”

  “No.”

  “But you believe what they tell you.”

  Casson thought about that for a moment. “When the occupation began, I tried to do nothing. It worked for a time, then it didn’t. So I decided to do whatever I could, and very quickly came to understand that you can never be sure. Either you put your life in the hands of people you don’t entirely trust, or you hide in a corner.”

  “Yes—but army officers?”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. For one thing, they probably hold the FTP responsible, the entire Left for that matter, for what happened here in 1940. What do they want with them now?”

  “To talk. A marriage of convenience, perhaps. We’re in trouble, Kovar, that much I know. My friends, the crowd I knew before the war, either do nothing or collaborate. They’ve adapted. It’s reported in the newspapers that one of the city’s most prominent hostesses gives dinner parties for German officers. At each place, for table decoration, are crossed French and German flags. Her toast to the commandant of Paris, the paper said, was dedicated to ‘the most charming of our conquerors.’ Well, it’s not news that some of us are whores in this country. But it’s just possible that some of us aren’t.”

  “You’ll pay for that, you know,” Kovar said, rather gently. “If they find out you feel that way.”

  “Then I’ll pay.” He paused, then said, “Can you help? Will you?”

  Kovar thought it over. “I understand what you’re doing, looking for party combat units. What your army officers see is action— blood spilled for honor, and that they understand better than anything in the world. Problem is, I don’t think I’m the one to help you. These people, the FTP, are Stalinists, Casson, and they don’t like me. They don’t like anarchists—they were killing them in the fall of ’17, in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. They murdered the POUM leadership in Spain—NKVD operatives did that—and I’m no different. I grew up with a copy of Verhaeren in my pocket. ‘Drunk with the world, and with ourselves, we bring hearts of new men to the old universe.’ By all odds I shouldn’t even be alive, I’ve been living on borrowed time since 1927. I’m sure you know, Casson, I tried being a communist, I managed for ten years but in the end it didn’t work. They saw, finally, that they couldn’t tell me what to do, and that was the end of that.”

  “You have friends,” Casson said.

  A long pause, and a reluctant nod of the head. “Maybe,” he said. “I have to think about it.”

  “Petit conard!” You little jerk. A woman’s voice, furious, held, barely, just below a full-blooded scream, thundered through Casson’s wall.

  “No, wait, now look, we never said . . .” The whine of the falsely accused.

  “I hate you.”

  “Now look . . .” He lowered his voice as he told her where to look.

  Casson had fallen asleep, face down on Remarque. He looked at his watch, 2:20 in the afternoon.

  The middle of the day, offices closed for lunch, a busy time at le Benoit.

  Degrave took him to dinner, brought along his mistress, Laurette, and her friend, Hélène. Laurette blonde and soft, Hélène the prettier one, dark, with a lot of mascara, glossy black hair cut stylishly—expensively—short, wearing bijoux fantasie, gold-painted wooden bracelets, that clacked as she ate. Fortyish, Casson thought. She was tense
at first, then talkative and bright. Casson liked her. While Degrave and Laurette were busy with each other, he told her how he’d once been hounded by lawyers when his production company had misplaced four hundred false beards meant for a musical version of Samson and Delilah. She hooted, covered her mouth, then put a hand on his arm and said, “Forgive me, I haven’t done that for a long time.”

  Generous of Degrave to take them out, Casson thought. A black-market restaurant, one the Germans hadn’t yet discovered. Roast chicken: months since Casson had tasted anything like that. He wanted to tear it apart and eat it with his fingers, maybe rolling around with it under the table. And a ’27 Meursault. From beneath the table, excited growling and snarling, then silence, then a hand appears, holding an empty glass.

  “Je vous remercie,” Casson said, the nicest way to say thank you. Degrave shrugged and smiled. “Why not,” he said.

  When the chicken bones were taken away, the owner came to the table. “Mes enfants,” she said.

  They looked up expectantly.

  “I can make an egg custard for you.”

  “Yes, of course,” Degrave said.

  “Twenty minutes.”

  “All right.”

  “Are you going back tonight?” Hélène said to Degrave.

  “I’m staying over,” he said. “If I can get a train reservation for Friday.”

  “He can,” Laurette said. She had moved her chair so she could be close to him. “If he likes.”

  Degrave’s smile was tart. “I can do anything.” He rested a hand on Laurette’s shoulder and kissed her on the forehead.

  “Salaud,” she said.

  Degrave and Laurette went off in a bicycle taxi, Casson and Hélène stood in the drizzle. “Can I take you home?” Casson said.

  She hesitated.

  “See you to the door, then.”

  “Could we go to your room?”

  Tiens. “Of course.”

  The hotel was not far from the restaurant, so they walked. She lived, she explained, in a maid’s room in an apartment owned by an old woman, a family friend. “I am an Alsatian Jew,” she said, “from Strasbourg. Ten years ago I moved to Paris and rented a small apartment. Then, a few weeks after the Germans came, the landlord told me I had to find someplace else—his sister wanted the apartment. I don’t think he has a sister, but at least he was polite about it. I went to see my mother’s old friend, a widow for many years. She was lonely, she said, would I come and stay with her?

  “For a few months, everything went well. This woman—who is not Jewish, by the way—had been a teacher in a lycée. We talked about books and music, we were good company for each other. But then, she changed. She was ill in the winter of ’41, and she became obsessed with the Germans. She made it clear that she’d like me to leave. The problem is, when they said Jews had to register, I didn’t—something told me not to. Now I can’t get a change of residence permit from the préfecture—if she throws me out I have nowhere to go. So, I stay. I’m very quiet. I don’t cause trouble. She has made a point of telling me not to bring strangers there. She’s afraid of being robbed, or murdered, I don’t know exactly what.”

  “Why not move to a hotel?”

  “Can’t afford it. I work in a travel agency, a good one, on the Champs-Elysées. The offices are splendid, but the pay is low.”

  “Can your family help?”

  “I don’t think so. The family’s been in Strasbourg since the Middle Ages, but when my parents heard the stories of the refugees coming from Germany, they became frightened. The Germans have always claimed that Alsace rightfully belongs to them. My parents feared, after Chamberlain gave away the Sudetenland in ’38, that France might use it to buy off Hitler. So they sold everything and went to live in Amsterdam. My brother and his family had emigrated just after the first war—he went into business with his in-laws in Montreal. My mother pleaded with me to come to Holland with them, but I wouldn’t. I liked the life in Paris, I was seeing someone, and nothing was going to happen to France and its glorious army.”

  It had been a long time, Casson thought, back at the Benoit. For her too, apparently—trembling as he undid her bra and her breasts tumbled out. He almost fell asleep afterward, warm in a way he barely remembered. He propped himself up on one elbow and smoothed the damp hair back off her forehead.

  “It’s funny,” she said, “how things happen. Laurette asked me to come along. I said no, she insisted. She’s been kind to me, more than kind, so finally I had to come. I’m going to hate it, I thought. But then . . .” Idly, she ran a fingernail up and down the inside of his thigh. “See?” she said. “I’m flirting with you.”

  “Mm.”

  “Is your name really Jean?”

  “I’m called Jean-Claude.”

  “A film producer.”

  “Yes, before the war. But I shouldn’t talk about the past.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Laurette told me all this has to be kept quiet.” She laid her head on his chest, heavy and warm. “Poor Laurette,” she said. “Degrave’s wife is rich. And mean as a snake. Laurette used to dream of marriage, but it’s not to be.”

  Casson put a hand on her hip, smooth down there. “I shouldn’t talk about these things,” she said. “But it all seems like nothing now, with the world the way it is. I never imagined what it would all come to. Never imagined.”

  His fingers traced idly along the curve, up and back. “Yes,” she said, “I like that.”

  They stopped Weiss at a Kontrol, the early evening of 15 November, in the Saint-Michel Métro station. Pulled him out of line and made him open his briefcase. “What’s all this?” the German sergeant said, holding a sheaf of blank paper. “For leaflets, maybe, huh?”

  Weiss studied the hands; thick fingers, with cracked nails and callus. “I’m a printing salesman,” he explained. “See, it’s the same name and address on each piece of paper, but the lettering is different. Personal stationery. Maybe, ah, maybe you’d like to have something like this for yourself?”

  “Me?” the sergeant said. This was something that had never occurred to him. “Well, I don’t know. I mean—what could I have? I stay at a barracks.” He paged through the sheets. “But my wife, in Germany, she would be thrilled to have such a thing.”

  Weiss took a pen from his pocket. “Here, just write down your name and address, and I’ll get it made up for you.”

  “French stationery?”

  “Yes.”

  The sergeant began writing, slow but determined, carving the letters onto the paper, then handed it over to Weiss. “Jürgenstrasse,” Weiss said.

  “Yes. And it must look exactly that way. Can you print the German alphabet?”

  “Oh yes. We have all the German fonts.”

  “Well.” He was very pleased. “Could I have it by the twentieth, to send to her?”

  “Of course. I’ll see to it.”

  “It’s her birthday.”

  “You may count on it, sir.”

  “It must be quite costly, this kind of thing.”

  “With my compliments.”

  “Ah, all right then.”

  “If you write down your name and address in Paris, I’ll have it sent over in a day or two.”

  “Yes, of course.” He started writing. “Meanwhile, maybe I’d better have a look at your work permit.”

  Weiss thumbed through the papers in his wallet, took out his work permit, and showed it to the sergeant.

  “Good,” the sergeant said. Then, in a stern voice, “Alles in Ordnung.” He gave Weiss a friendly wink and a smile, then whispered “She will be so happy.”

  PARIS. 16 NOVEMBER.

  He had a second meeting with Kovar, this time in response to a note slipped under his door at the Benoit. Late at night he thought he heard something, then decided he didn’t and went back to sleep. They met in the same office, in the early evening. The weather had turned cold, he could see his breath when he talked. This time the shade was up and the moon, in the uppe
r corner of the tall window, cast silver shadows on the walls.

  “I found a way to talk to some friends,” Kovar said.

  “Good.”

  “Old friends. We were in the streets together, marching, fighting, and we were in the jails together. One doesn’t toss that away so easily. They follow the line, of course, they are good communists. But then, they are also Frenchmen, some of them anyhow, and for the French, having one’s own opinion is a kind of religion.”

  Casson smiled.

  “There’s one in particular—he made no promises, simply said he’d see what he could do. I hope you understand that he’s putting himself in danger. The Paris apparat is under intense pressure right now, because the Germans are about to take Moscow, they’re close enough to see the last stop on the tram line.”

  “Will Stalin fight in the city?”

  “To the end. Then he’ll burn it to the ground. But, so what? The reality is, all they have now is the weather. The rasputitsa, the autumn rains. The earth turns to mud—some days they have to maneuver their tanks with shovels and logs. And, soon enough, it will snow. Not German snow. Russian snow.”

  “General Winter.”

  Kovar shrugged. “So-called. But the signs are all bad. The Moscow factories have been moved to the Urals, and the NKVD has packed up and left town. Sometime last week, wireless transmissions broken off in midsentence. What does that say to you?”

  “Nothing good.”

  Kovar thought for a moment. “Of course, Russian wars always seem to go like this. Chaos and defeat and slaughter. Followed by the execution of those who tried to sound the warning. It’s just the way they are. But then something happens. In Napoleon’s campaign it was winter, and some kind of tick that killed thousands. In 1917 it was revolution. The Russian land defends itself—that’s the mystics’ version.”

  “I’ve read it can be sixty below zero in December.”

  “And colder. The Wehrmacht will have to heat their machine-gun barrels over a fire before they can use them.” Kovar smiled. “Only the Russians could get themselves into a position, in 1941, where sabers and horses really matter.”