by Alan Furst
He went back to his book, Neptune’s Daughter, turning the pages awkwardly with his glove, making notes in soft pencil. Work, work. The telephone rang, it was Marie-Claire, organizing a dinner. They were trying hard, his little group of friends, he was proud of them. Rolling the holiday boulder up a long and difficult slope-but at least working together. Christmas in France was not the ritual it was in England, but the New Year reveillon was important, and you were supposed to eat fine things and feel hopeful.
They talked for a time, the same conversation they’d had for years- they must, he thought, somehow or other like having it. And it ended as it always did, with another telephone call planned-a Marie-Claire crisis could not, by definition, be resolved with a single telephone call.
Neptune’s Daughter. Veronica and Perry drinking sidecars in Capri and watching the sun set. “Where do you suppose we’ll be on this day next year?” Veronica asks. “Will we be happy?” The telephone rang again. Marie-Claire, Casson thought, a forgotten detail. “Yes?” he said.
“Hello? Is this Jean Casson?” An English voice, accenting the first syllable of Casson. A voice he knew.
“Yes. Who is this, please?”
“James Templeton.”
The investment banker from London. “It, it’s good to hear from you.” Casson’s English worked at its own pace.
“How are you getting on, over there?” Templeton asked.
“Not so bad, thank you. The best that we can, you know, with the war …”
“Yes, well, we haven’t forgotten you.”
Casson’s thoughts were flying past. Why was this man calling him? Could it be that some incredibly complicated arrangement was going to allow British banks to invest in French films? There was a rumor that England and Germany continued to trade, despite the war, using middlemen in neutral nations. Or, maybe, a treaty had been signed, and this was a protocol sprung suddenly to life. Maybe, he thought, his heart quickening, the fucking war is over! “Thank you,” he managed to say. “What, uh …”
“Tell me, do you happen to see much of Erno Simic? The Agna Film man?”
“What? I’m sorry, you said?”
“Simic. Has distribution arrangements in Hungary, I believe. Do you see him, ever?”
“Well, yes. I mean, I have seen him.”
“He can be extremely helpful, you know.”
“Yes?”
“Definitely. Certain business we’re doing now, he is somebody we are going to depend on. And since you’re a friend of ours in Paris, we thought you might be willing to lend a hand.”
“Pardon?”
“Sorry. To help, I mean.”
“Oh. Yes, I see. All right. I’ll do what I can.”
“Good. We are grateful. And we’ll be in touch. Good-bye, Casson.”
“Good-bye.”
He knew. And he didn’t know. He could decide, at that point, that he didn’t know. He fretted, waiting until six to walk over to Langlade’s office. “Jean-Claude!” Langlade said. “Come and have a little something.” From a bottom drawer he produced an old wine bottle refilled with calvados. “We went to see the Rouen side of the family on Sunday,” Langlade explained. “So you’ll share in the bounty.”
Casson relaxed, sat back in his chair, the calvados was like soothing fire as it went down.
“This is hard-won, I hope you appreciate it,” Langlade continued. “It took an afternoon of sitting on a couch and listening to a clock tick.”
“Better than what you get in a store,” Casson said.
Langlade refilled the glass. “My good news,” he said, “is that suddenly we’re busy. Some factory in Berlin ordered these tiny little lightbulbs, custom-made, grosses of them. God only knows what they’re for, but, frankly, who cares?” He gave Casson a certain look-it meant he’d been closer to disaster than he’d been willing to let on. “And you, Jean-Claude? Everything all right?”
“A very strange thing, Bernard. Somebody just telephoned me from London.”
“What?”
“A call, from a banker in London.”
Langlade thought hard for a moment, then shook his head. “No, no, Jean-Claude. That’s not possible.”
“It happened. Just now.”
“They’ve cut the lines. There isn’t any way that somebody could call you from London.”
“You’re certain?”
“Yes. Who did you say?”
“An English banker.”
“Not from London, mon ami. What did he want?”
“He wasn’t direct, but he suggested that I do business with a certain distribution company.”
Langlade stared at the ceiling for awhile. When he spoke again, his tone of voice was subtly altered. “He called from France.” Then, “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” Casson said. “He’s in France, you think?”
“Possibly Spain, or Switzerland, but definitely on the Continent- because the lines under the Channel were cut last June.”
“Well,” Casson said.
“You better think it over,” Langlade said.
Someone knocked discreetly on the office door. Langlade, it seemed to Casson, was not sorry to be interrupted.
The apartment was across a courtyard from a dress factory, through a cloudy window Casson could see women working at sewing machines. Fischfang sat at a table in the tiny kitchen, wearing an old sweater, and a blanket around his shoulders. He’d shaved his beard and mustache, the skin looked pale and tender, and his eyes were red, as though he hadn’t slept the night before. Outside, a few snowflakes drifted past the window.
“Do you need anything?” Casson asked.
Fischfang shrugged-everything, nothing. The apartment belonged to his aunt. When she’d opened the door, Fischfang had taken a moment to make sure it was Casson, then used an index finger to close a drawer in the kitchen table. But not before Casson had caught sight of a revolver.
Casson sat at the table, the aunt served them some strange drink- not exactly tea-but at least it was hot. Casson held the cup with both hands to keep warm. “Louis,” he said, “why do you have a gun? Who’s coming through the door?”
Fischfang looked out the window, a muscle in his jaw ticked. Casson had never seen him like this. Angry, of course, but that was nothing new. A communist, he lived on injustice, a vitamin crucial to daily life, and he was always fuming about what X said or Y wrote. But now, something else. This was nothing to do with Marxist fury. Fischfang was scared, and bitter.
“I have been denounced,” he said, as though the words were strange to him.
Casson’s face showed sympathy, but in his heart he wasn’t surprised. The kind of life Fischfang lived, seething with politics-the Association of Revolutionary Artists and Writers, left deviation, rotten liberalism, Stalinists, Trotskyites, Spartacists, and God only knew what else. Denunciation must have been a daily, perhaps hourly, event.
“Maybe you remember,” Fischfang went on, “that last August the Germans demanded that all Jews register.”
“I remember,” Casson said.
“I didn’t.”
Casson nodded once-of course not.
“Someone found that out, I don’t know who it was. They turned me in. For money, perhaps. Or some advantage. I don’t know.”
The aunt closed a bureau drawer in the other room. From across the courtyard Casson could hear the clatter of sewing machines. The women were hunched over their work, their hands moving quickly. “Now I understand,” he said. “You’re certain?”
“No, not completely. But things have happened.”
Casson took a breath. “So then, we’ll have to get you away somewhere.”
Fischfang stared at him for a moment. Will you really? When the time comes? Then he looked down, squared a tablet of lined paper on the table in front of him, laughed a little. “Life goes on,” he said, in a tone that meant he didn’t particularly care if it did or not. Then he passed the tablet across to Casson. “Have a look,” he said.
/>
Spidery writing in blue ink, floating from margin to margin. Hotel Dorado it said on top. A sort of miracle, Casson thought, the way these things started from nothing. Just a few words on a piece of paper. For an instant he could smell movie theatre-figures flickering on the screen, the pitch of the voices, the sound of the projector when there was a pause in the dialogue. He pictured the title. On the marquee of the Graumont, just off the place de l’Opera. He didn’t know why there, it was just the theatre he always imagined.
He read on. A little village in the south of France, on the Mediterranean. A fishing village, where a few Parisians come every August to stay at the Hotel Dorado. Autumn, the season over, the hotel deserted. The owners, an old couple, about to retire. The hotel has been sold to a large combine, they’re going to tear it down and build a new one, modern and expensive. The couple decides to write to their oldest, most faithful clients. “The hotel is going out of business, but come and stay with us the last weekend in October, we’ll have a glass of wine, a few memories.”
Casson looked up. “All in one weekend?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good.”
“A night when they arrive. A day when we meet them, a long night when everything happens, then a little scene where they get on the train to go back to Paris-except for the ones who are going to run off together and start a new life.”
Casson went back to reading. The characters you’d want-the Corps Humaine, the human repertory company-were all there. The banker, the confidence man, the actress, the postal clerk and his wife who scrimp and save all year so they can pretend to be upper class for two weeks, the lovers-their spouses left in Paris-the widow, the couple about to separate, giving it one last chance.
“Who’s the star, Louis?”
“I thought-one of those ideas that’s either a love letter from the gods or a little patch of quicksand meant just for you-it should be a young woman. Lonely, mysterious. Who misses her train and comes there by accident. Not a member of the sentimental company but, finally, its heart. Or, I don’t know, maybe that’s overdoing it.”
Casson waved him off. “No, that’s what I like about this kind of movie, you can’t really overdo it.”
“Who would you want to star?”
Casson watched the falling snow for a time. “Last May, a hundred years ago if you know what I mean, I had lunch with old Perlemere, who used to represent Citrine, and her name came up in the conversation.”
Fischfang’s eyes sparkled. “That’s good. More than one way, if you think about it.”
“Beautiful-not pretty. Mysterious. No virgin. She’s been to the wars, she’s battle-scarred, but maybe she can try one last time, maybe she can love again, but we don’t know until the final scene. It should be-will life let her?”
“A character trying to come back,” Fischfang said. “Played by an actress trying to come back.”
Casson nodded. “Something like that.”
They both smiled. Maybe it would work, maybe it wouldn’t, like everything else. But they were trying, at least. They could see their breath when they talked in the cold kitchen, outside the snow drifted past. “I’ll get it typed up,” Casson said.
Hugo Altmann tilted his chair back and blew a long, slow, meditative plume of smoke at the ceiling of his office. “Citrine, Citrine,” he said. “Do you know, Casson, that she always seemed to me the most elementally French actress. The sort of woman, in bed she gives everything. Yet there is something inside her, a bitterness, a knowledge of the world, that spoils it all-you get everything, but it isn’t what you wanted.” He paused a moment. “You’ve worked with her before?”
“Night Run.”
“Ach, of course. And to direct?”
“Don’t really know yet.”
“Well, let’s find you some development money, and get a screenplay on paper. Who do you have in mind there? Cocteau’s working, lots of others.”
“Louis Moreau, perhaps.”
“Who?”
“Moreau.”
“Never heard of him.”
“He’s new.”
“Hm. Well, all right, give him a try.” He leaned over toward Casson, his expression shrewd and confidential. “So, between us, who saves the hotel at the end, eh? I’m betting on the confidence man,” he said with a wink.
It took two weeks to find Citrine. He trudged across the city, office to office, the world of small-time talent agents, booking agents, press agents-everybody knew somebody. Perlemere helped, offering the names of a few friends. In the end, it turned out that she was performing at a cabaret amid the working-class dance halls on the rue de Lappe, out by Bastille. Le Perroquet, the parrot, it was called. Casson pulled his coat tight around him and kept his eyes down-this was not his district, he didn’t belong here, and he didn’t want a punch in the nose to remind him of it.
Closed, the first time he went. No reason, just closed. The blue neon parrot on a red branch was dark. The next time he tried was on Christmas Eve, and it was open. There was a poster by the door, the name Loulou across the bottom. Citrine-though it took him a moment to recognize her-Citrine on a high stool. Top hat, net fabric with rhinestones on top, bare legs crossed down below, spike heels with satin bows, a cabaret smile. Well, what about you, big boy?
A Christmas Eve blizzard. The white flakes swirled and hissed and made drifts in the doorways. Now and then a car came sliding down the street, tires spinning, engine whining as it worked its way around a corner. The blue-painted glass on the street lamps cast Hollywood moonlight on the snow.
Hot inside, steamy, and packed. He tried the stage door, but a doorman dressed like an apache-black sweater and beret and cigarette dangling from the corner of the mouth-ran him off. “You’ll pay. Like the rest of the world, conard.”
He paid. To join a hundred German officers jammed together in a small room, reeking of shaving lotion and stale sweat and spilled wine and all the rest of it. There was a master of ceremonies in a tuxedo, sweating and telling jokes, then zebras, naked girls in zebra masks, bucking and prancing, hoisting their knees up to their foreheads and singing “Paris smells so sweet.” Saluting British style-whistles from the crowd-then turning around and grabbing their ankles-roars of approval. A fat major next to Casson almost died of pleasure, laughed as tears ran down his cheeks, gave Casson a best-pal whack between the shoulder blades that sent him flying into the crowd.
Then the room went dark, the curtain creaked open, a violet spotlight popped on, and there was Loulou. By then he’d worked his way to a position near the stage where he knew she would be able to see him, and, after the second number, she did. He could tell. At first, Jesus it’s Casson, what’s he doing here? Then the corner of her mouth lifted, not much, but a little: he was there to see her, it was no accident.
But he wasn’t going to see her anytime soon. A table of colonels, prominent in the front of the room, demanded the presence of the beautiful Loulou and she was produced, guided to the table by the owner of the Perroquet, an eel in a checked suit. They were merry colonels, they touched her shoulder and told her jokes and tried to speak French and gave her champagne and had quite a time for themselves. Question was, would Hansi be the one to fuck her, or was she going to favor Willi? The battle raged, the competing armies surged back and forth as Casson looked at his watch and realized that the last Metro of the night had left Bastille station.
Finally the owner came around, bowed and scraped and tried to get his chanteuse back. Hansi and Willi were in no mood for that, but the owner had a trick up his checked sleeve and sent a phalanx of zebras into action. They arrived neighing and whinnying, sat on the colonels’ laps and wiggled about, tickled their chins, stole their eyeglasses and fogged them with their breath.
The colonels roared and turned red. Champagne was poured into glasses and everywhere else-to the colonels it seemed that champagne had found its way to places where champagne had never been before. One ingenious soul filled his mouth until his eyes bulged, then
punched his cheeks with his index fingers-pfoo! — showering Hansi and Willi, assorted zebras, and Loulou, who wiped her face with her hand as she made her escape and climbed up on the tiny stage.
Most actresses could carry a tune if they had to and Citrine was no different. She simply played the role of a cabaret singer, and she was good at it. The throaty voice, hoarse from cigarettes and drinks in lonely cafes. I always knew you’d leave me, that I’d be alone. You could see her man, the little cockerel with a strut. And there you were, with her, at the table where we used to sit. Of course there was a kid, in military school somewhere. Oh well, perhaps once more, for old times’ sake. The eyes, slowly cast down, a few notes from the battered old piano, the spotlight dimming out. Ahh, Paris.
She sent the doorman in the black sweater to get him and they hurried away down an alley, indignant German shouts-“Loulou! Loulou!”- growing faint as they turned a corner. Which left them in the middle of a blizzard on the wrong end of Paris and no Metro with the curfew hour, one in the morning, long gone.
“We’ll walk,” she said with determination. “It will keep the blood moving. And something will occur.”
“Walk where?”
“Well, Jean-Claude, I stay at a sort of a not-so-good hotel these days-and even not-so-good as it is, they close it down like the Forbidden City after one-thirty. It usually works to sleep on a couch at the club, but not tonight, I think.”
“No.”
“So, we walk.”
“Passy …”
She took his arm with both of hers, her shoulder firmly against him, and they walked through the blizzard. He was happy to be held this way, he really didn’t care if they froze to death; a set of fine ice statues, one with a smile. Citrine, Citrine, he thought. She wore a long black coat and a black beret and a long muffler wound around her neck.
“I want you to be in a movie,” he said.
“Tell me about it.”
“You will star.”
“Ah.”
“You’ll be in most of the scenes. It’s about an old hotel in a little village, somewhere in the Midi. It’s been sold, and people come down from Paris one last time, and you wander in from, ah, from the land of the lost strangers.”
