by Alan Furst
“Then, good luck.”
He left the station. The train from Paris had just arrived and he found himself in the middle of a crowd, people greeting friends, carrying baskets and suitcases, hurrying their children along. He stood by the truck and took a long look at the map. Route 75 ran north from Voirons, passing well east of Lyons, to Bourg, then to Tournus, where it joined the major north–south road, Route 6, and continued on into Chalon. All he had to do was drive to the edge of town and pick up Route 75. No problem. He started the truck, drove out of the railroad station area, and turned north on the grande rue.
Suddenly, metal ground on metal, the truck leaped forward and his head banged against the windshield. He went to jam the gas pedal to the floor —escape—then held up. Instead he braked hard and the truck rocked to a stop. He was a little dazed, stumbled out onto the street. All around, people had stopped to watch the show. A few feet behind the truck, a delivery van with its front bashed in and one headlight shattered.
The driver of the van was already out. A man in a peaked cap and an apron, his face bright red. He spotted Casson and shouted “Annnnhh”—the there he is! understood. A traditional sound, prelude to Homeric indignation. The crowd was not to be disappointed. The driver ran at Casson, shaking his fist. “You brainless fucking idiot,” he yelled, staggering to a halt.
“Wait—”
“Do you see what you’ve done to me? Dolt! Donkey! Don’t you look where you’re going?” He was so drunk he swayed back and forth as he was cursing.
“Calm down, monsieur,” Casson said. “Please.”
“Calm down?”
From the corner of his eye, Casson could see the approaching flic, walking toward them with that look on his face.
“Ah,” the driver said, glad to see the authorities.
“Shut up a second,” Casson said under his breath. “We can work this out between ourselves. Or maybe you just can’t live another minute without a visit to the police station?”
The man stared at him. What? He was so drunk, so much in the wrong, that he would defend himself like a lion. Casson, acutely aware of the Walther in his belt and the guns in the truck, took a wad of hundred-franc notes from his pocket and pressed it into the man’s hand and, using his other hand, curled the man’s fingers around it. Dumbfounded, the driver peered at the money; none of the catastrophes in his chaotic life had ever turned out this well.
The flic arrived. “It’s all settled,” Casson told him.
“You agree?” he asked the driver.
The driver blinked nervously, bit his lip, looked around for help. He knew there was more money to be had, but how to get it? “Well,” he said.
“So be it,” the flic said. “Your papers, right now.”
“No, no,” the driver said. “Nothing happened.”
The flic looked him over. “Go home, Philippe,” he said. “Go to bed.”
The driver staggered back to his van. With great concentration he managed to get the key in the ignition. He started the engine, the van lurched forward, then stalled. The flic put his hands on his hips. The driver started up again and drove away, with dark smoke pouring from the exhaust pipe. The flic turned to Casson, nodded his head at the truck. “Will it run?” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Then disappear.”
Casson drove slowly through the snow-covered countryside, bleak and silent. Now, there was nothing but the work of driving a truck, and it steadied him. As he got closer to Chalon the traffic increased. By cutting France into two countries, the Germans had created choke points at the border crossings—Moulins, Bourges, Poitiers, all the towns along the rivers. For the moment, Casson didn’t mind; it felt safe, one truck among many, all of them rumbling north together. But it took longer than he thought it would, and it was six-thirty by the time he found the Quai Gambetta and the warehouse of the Coopérative de Beaune.
Henri was waiting for him. Sitting with his legs dangling off the old wooden loading dock and smoking a cigar. “Enfin,” he said. At last you’re here. They stood together in the cold evening.
“What happened to Degrave?”
Casson told him.
“Milice.” He spat the word. “Degrave deserved better.”
He was, in military life, a sergeant. Casson had already guessed that by the time he got around to mentioning it. A sergeant—good at getting things done, by the book so long as it worked, by being crooked if that’s what it took.
He led Casson into the warehouse; wine in bottles, in small casks and huge wooden barrels. The air inside was thick, a cloud of manure, raspberries, vinegar. “We don’t help ourselves,” Henri confided, the smoke of his cigar hanging in the still air. “Hands off the Romanée. But they always put something out for us, over on the table. When you want to sleep, there’s a cot in the broker’s office. Can’t imagine why he put it there. Naps, maybe. Good for a few hours, anyhow—you look like you could use it.”
By five the next morning they were on the move, riding bicycles past the docks and warehouses, out to the residential districts. “We’ll go and have a look for ourselves,” Henri said, “to see how things are. But I suspect nothing’s changed.”
They pedaled up a long hill to a staid old neighborhood, plane trees and handsome street lamps, to a park on a bluff overlooking the western side of the city. Henri leaned on an iron railing and the two of them talked casually for a time, making sure they were alone. “Have a look,” Henri said, and handed over a pair of binoculars.
Casson could see out over the rooftops to Route 75. Parked by the road, a long line of trucks. Under the direction of German guards, the merchandise in the trucks was being searched; mounds of potatoes or coal probed with pitchforks, crates stacked on the ground, counted, and checked against shipping manifests.
He shifted the binoculars from scene to scene: a driver pacing and smoking, a soldier using a bayonet to pry open a packing case, an officer checking an upright piano—the panel above the keyboard had been removed, baring the strings and hammers. All of this overseen by a group of officers, standing beside an armored car, its machine gun trained on the search area. It would have taken only a moment of indecision, Casson realized. Staying on the main road instead of turning off on the streets that led to the river docks.
“Quite a show,” Henri said. “It didn’t used to be like this.”
“Anything we can do?”
“Oh there’s a way around it, there always is.”
They rode back down the hill, to a crowded market where they walked the bicycles. “One thing I have to let you know,” Henri said. “This is Degrave’s operation—he wanted it done, he ran it. And his friends are going to make sure it’s completed, we owe him that. But then, my guess is that senior officers won’t get involved. So, when it’s over, don’t be surprised if we disappear.”
They waited at the Coopérative until 8:20 in the evening. Henri killed time with stories—twenty years in the army, Beirut, Dakar, Hanoi, Oran. Then they backed the truck out of the loading area, drove to the edge of Chalon, and parked by a bridge. There they waited again. Casson stared out at the icy river, slow and gray, watched the girls, two by two, going home from work over the bridge. A policeman rode by on his bicycle, glanced at them sitting in the truck, but didn’t care. A tramp went past, possessions in a blanket roll on his back. “There’s the life,” Henri said. “Sleep under the stars, answer to no man.” Later on it began to snow. Henri was pleased. “God’s on our side tonight,” he said.
From the river, Casson heard the steady beat of an engine. A barge appeared, moving slowly against the current. It slid neatly below the bridge, then throttled back. On deck, a man walked up to the bow, a match flared. Henri clamped the cigar in his teeth and buttoned up his coat.
The barge was carrying gravel, a tarpaulin tossed casually over the middle of the load. Henri drove the truck onto the bridge and the man on the barge pulled the tarpaulin back, revealing a deep pit dug in the gravel. Sweating in the
cold, Casson and Henri dropped the crates a few feet down to the man below, who stacked them in the pit. When the truck was empty, they drove it to the end of the bridge and parked.
“Anything in here?” Henri said. “Papers? Marked maps?”
“Nothing.”
They left the truck, climbed over the railing of the bridge, and dropped to the barge. The last crate lay two feet down, and the three men began to shovel gravel in on top. When they were done, Casson walked to the far end of the barge and leaned against the wall of the pilothouse. A young woman at the helm waved to him through the window. Casson lit a cigarette, his shoulders ached and he was breathing hard.
At the foot of the bridge, the door of the truck slammed shut, the sound sharp in the cold air. Then the engine started up, idled for a moment, and faded away in the streets by the river. Henri appeared out of the snow and handed him a coverall, black with grease and oil. “We have a cabin below,” he said. “Put this on when you get a moment. You’re a deckhand now, you have to look like one.”
Slowly, the barge got under way.
“We stay on the Saône up to the Burgundy Canal. That takes us north—to Dijon and Tonnerre, and up the river Yonne all the way to Montereau, near Versailles, where we get on the Seine. About three days, if the rivers don’t freeze.”
“The gravel goes to Paris?”
“Normandy. They’re building like crazy on the coast. Big stuff. Sand and gravel and cement, barged in from all over Europe.”
PARIS. 28 JANUARY.
Hands in pockets, face numbed by the wind, Marcel Slevin waited in a doorway on the rue Daguerre. Across the street, in an apartment owned by his uncle Misch, a Luftwaffe officer was getting ready to go out for the evening. A bomber pilot, a Nazi. Who would not see the sun rise again—if only he would get a move on before his assassin froze to death. Calm down, Slevin told himself, don’t let it get to you.
They had watched the German for three weeks—Slevin and the people who worked for Weiss. Learned where he went, and what he did. At one point, he’d disappeared. He was picked up by a friend at 8:32 and didn’t come home that night or the next. Gone to work, no doubt.
That had worried Slevin—maybe some Spitfire pilot had beaten them to it, setting Fritz on fire over Liverpool. Merde. But he was also secretly relieved. Lately he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, maybe he just wasn’t cut out for murder. Or maybe just not this murder. For one thing, the German pilot wasn’t what he’d expected. Not young, and no blond superman. He was tall and spindly, with sparse hair and a hawk nose, and to Slevin he seemed more like a pilot for Lufthansa than the Luftwaffe.
The first night of surveillance, Slevin thought his prey might be going off to the nightclubs to meet “Bébé” or “Doucette,” but who he went to see was Lohengrin. And then, the next night, back for seconds. Ten days later it was Rigoletto. He would take the Métro to the Opéra station, join a milling crowd of officers and diplomats, wives and girlfriends, all smiling and jabbering away in that godawful language. He would say hello to this one or that one, then take a seat in the balcony. And, when the opera was over, back he went to the rue Daguerre.
Slevin waited, stamping his feet to keep warm. In his pocket he had a small revolver, bought from a friend in the garment district who loaned out money at a very high rate of interest. He’d taken a long, careful look at his prey and had his escape route well planned out. The streets around the rue Daguerre weren’t so different from the Marais, passages and tunnels and alleys—some blind, some not. After the shot he would scoot, a ten-second sprint to a shed where he’d hidden a bicycle. A few seconds more and he’d be just one more Parisian on the street.
Slevin’s plan had been drawn up after careful study of the terrain, and depended on a particular feature of the pilot’s Métro stop, Denfert-Rochereau. The staircase went down twenty steps, to a landing hidden from the street, then turned back and continued down forty steps to the platform. That landing, once the crowds thinned out after 7:00 P.M., was invisible from above and below. The pilot would, for a moment, be alone and unseen. And then, no more Lohengrin.
Hurry up.
Slevin stared angrily at the door across the street. He was scared. He didn’t want to do this. Weiss and the guys in the FTP were tough—worth your life to fuck around with them—but he wasn’t, not really. He was all talk and he knew it. Well, now look what he’d talked himself into.
The pilot came out of the apartment and stopped for a moment as the door swung closed behind him. Topcoat, white silk scarf, tuxedo. He looked up at the sky and took a deep, satisfied breath, glanced at his watch, and strolled off toward the Métro.
Slevin waited a moment, then followed, moving among the last few shoppers and the merchants rolling down their shutters for the night. The pilot took his time, obviously enjoying the street life.
Denfert-Rochereau was a large, busy station, a major correspondance where several lines came together and riders could transfer from one to another. But this was not the main entry—the staircase simply led to the end of the platform, useful if you wanted to ride in the last car.
The pilot dropped a jeton in the turnstile and headed for the staircase. He was one of those people who run down stairs, letting their momentum do the work, sliding a hand down the banister.
“Hey.”
The pilot stopped on the landing, turned halfway around. Yes? A young Frenchman behind him. Short, a real monkey. What did he want?
Slevin drew the revolver from his pocket and fired. Down on the platform, a woman screamed. Slevin and the pilot stared at each other. What?
Slevin pulled the trigger again but this time, click, nothing at all. The pilot’s reflexes kicked in and he turned and ran, flying down the stairs toward the platform. Slevin took off after him, cursing under his breath, tears in his eyes. He skidded around the landing, ran halfway down the staircase, now in full view of the passengers below. They saw the pistol, some screamed, some ran, some went to the floor. The pilot leaped over them, head down, running with long, loping strides. Slevin steadied himself, aimed, pulled the trigger. The shot echoed up the tunnel, a tile in the wall beside him shattered as the cylinder was blown into it.
Slevin stared at the pistol, stared through it.
He turned and ran back up the stairs. Out the entrance, down a narrow passage between two high walls, and into a weedy yard behind a workshop. He reached into the shed, grabbed the bicycle, and pedaled for his life, throwing the pistol over a wall into somebody’s garden. He stood on the pedals, racing down a cobbled lane and out into the avenue. A few people were riding along in a group. He drew even with them and slowed down. Just then, the sirens started up.
The bicyclists looked around to see what was going on. A fire? An accident? Always something, around here.
Hour by hour, the barge pushed its way north. It wound through fields, always, it seemed to Casson, distant from houses and people. The sky stayed heavy, with thick, tumbled cloud rolling west, and gray light from dawn to dusk. Sometimes it snowed, a January that would never end.
He had almost nothing to do. He read a pile of old newspapers; the Red Army had been repulsed in its efforts to break the siege of Sevastopol. The Wehrmacht was fully engaged in the Mozhaisk sector, sixty-five miles from Moscow, where the temperature was −70° Fahrenheit. Sometimes he talked to Jean-Paul and his wife, who took turns steering the barge. They usually brought the kids, they said, but not this trip. Sometimes he talked to Henri. At night, a bottle or two of sour red wine broke the monotony. “We fill these up every fall at a little cave down in Languedoc. Not so bad, eh?”
They had gone through the German border Kontrol just north of Chalon. Twelve barges had to be processed, and the Germans didn’t get around to them until midnight. Then another hour, while the border guards poked around and looked under things. A German corporal drove a steel rod into the gravel, tried three or four places, and that was that. The barge was doing Third Reich business—the load en route to a French contrac
tor working for the German construction authority—so the papers got a fast once-over and they were sent on their way.
Ten hours upstream, in Dijon, they docked for an hour and re-fueled. Jean-Paul went off to buy bread and haricots blancs, a little oil, and a newspaper. They turned west on the Langres plateau and then north, the next morning, toward Montbard, barges hauling fuel—Casson could smell it—headed south on the other side of the canal. “Gasoline,” Jean-Paul said. “Going across the Mediterranean, for Rommel’s tanks.”
At night, Casson slept on a burlap mattress stuffed with straw in the small cabin he shared with Henri. There was no heat, and, as tired as he was, the cold kept waking him up. Finally he went out on deck. No stars, just dark fields stretching out to the edge of the world, and willow trees along the bank, their branches hanging limp in the frozen air. He stared out into the night and thought about his movies, about Citrine, about Marie-Claire. His old life. Finished, he thought, he couldn’t go back. He’d played the part of someone else for too long, now he was someone else. He thought about Hélène, about the things they did together in his hotel room.
He got up and walked back toward the pilothouse. Jean-Paul’s wife was heating water on the woodstove. “Come in,” she said. “At least it’s warm. I’m making chicory, if you’d like some.”
He waited at the table, lighting a candle and reading the newspaper they’d bought in Dijon. Attack in Paris Métro. An attempt on the life of a German flying officer had failed. In reprisal, a thousand Jewish doctors and lawyers had been deported.
31 JANUARY.
The Seine, south of Paris. A hard, bright dawn, the sun on frost-whitened trees. Factories and docks and sheds, half-sunk rowboats, workers’ garden plots—stakes pulled over by bare vines. The Michelin factory, one end of it charred, windows broken out, old glass and burnt boards piled in a yard. Bombed, and bombed again. The smell of burned rubber hung in the morning air.
The river Kontrol was at Alfortville, just upstream from the madhouse at Charenton. Very brisk, dozens of soldiers with machine guns, Casson could feel the tension. The Germans weren’t fooling around, but they had no interest in gravel barges that morning. A sergeant waved them through after just a glance.
