The World at Night ns-4

by Alan Furst

  She sat across from him, ordered a double brandy with soda, got a Gitane going.

  “I do have somebody joining me,” he said apologetically. “A man I know from Paris.”

  “No,” she said, “he isn’t coming.”

  “Who isn’t?”

  “Your friend. Simic.” She wasn’t joking. He tried to make sense of that but couldn’t.

  She stared at him; worried, angry, tapped her index finger against the table, looked at her watch. “I’m leaving tonight,” she said. “But, before I go, it’s my job to decide about you, monsieur. As to whether you are a knave, or just a fool.”

  He stared at her.

  “So,” she said.

  He didn’t know what to say. His first instinct was to defend himself, to say something reasonably witty and fairly sharp. But he didn’t. She wasn’t joking, to her the choice was precisely described, insulting, but not meant as an insult. And, he somehow knew, it mattered. At last he said quietly, “I am not a knave, Marie-Noelle.”

  “A fool, then.”

  He shrugged. Who in this life hasn’t been a fool?

  She canted her head to one side. Was this something she could believe? She searched his face. “Used?” she said. “Could be.”

  “Used?”

  “By Simic.”

  “How?”

  “To steal from us.”

  “Who is ‘us’?”

  “My employers. The British Secret Intelligence Service. In London.”

  This was a lot to take in but, somehow, not completely a shock. At some level he had understood that she wasn’t just somebody met on a train. “Well,” he said. “You mean, the people in the business of bribing Spanish generals.”

  “They thought they were, but it was a fraud. A confidence scheme- seven hundred thousand pesetas before your delivery, another million to come after that.”

  Casson lit a cigarette, shook his head as if to clear it.

  “Simic was an opportunist,” Marie-Noelle said. “Apparently he’d dabbled with intelligence services before. In Hungary? Romania? France, perhaps. Who knows. He had a good, instinctive sense of how the game is played, of how money changes hands, of what kinds of things people like to hear. When the Germans took over he saw his chance-he could get rich if he came up with an operation that felt really authentic.”

  “And Carabal? Is he a colonel in the Spanish army?”

  “Yes. Also a thief, one of Simic’s partners.”

  “General Arado?”

  “A monster, but not a traitor. Credible-for Simic’s purpose. A history of support for the Bourbon monarchy. But, no inclination to overthrow the Falange. No inclination for politics at all.”

  Casson scowled, stared down at the table. He had assumed he was smarter than Simic, but maybe it was simply that he was above him, socially, professionally. He’d been worse than a fool, he realized. “And me?” he said.

  “You. We are treating that as an open question. You’d been mentioned by a former business associate, and when Simic asked for a name we gave him yours. But then, after that, who knows. Under occupation, people do what they feel they have to do.”

  “You think I took your money.”

  “Did you take it?”

  “No.”

  “Somebody did. Not what you brought down, we have that back, but there was an earlier payment, and some of that is missing.”

  “What happens to Carabal?”

  “Can’t touch him. There’s an office theory that General Arado found the whole business amusing, and that Carabal’s career will not suffer at all.”

  “And Simic?”

  She spread her hands, palms up. What do you think?

  “We went and had a drink,” Casson said. “He explained to me the importance of Gibraltar, it was very persuasive.”

  “It is important.”

  “But they won’t attack it.”

  “No,” she said. “Because of the wind.”

  Casson didn’t understand.

  “It blows hard there, changes direction-it’s tricky. You’ve seen those Greek amphoras in hotel lobbies, they plant geraniums in them. Sometimes they wash up on the beach, from the ocean floor. Well, think how they happened to be down there in the first place-obviously somebody got it wrong. A wind like that, the Germans can’t do what they did with the Belgian forts, they can’t use paratroops, or gliders. As for an attack over land, the peninsula is narrow, and heavily mined from one side to the other. The roads are terrible, and the Spanish-gauge railroad track is different, which means the Wehrmacht can’t run trains through France-they’d have to change over, and we’d know about it right away. That leaves an attack from the sea, which would have to be staged from Spanish Morocco, and the cranes at the port of Ceuta aren’t big enough to lift heavy tanks and artillery onto ships.”

  “So then, why pay Spanish generals to overthrow Franco?”

  “You have to understand the nature of the business. It has, like everything else, fashion, what the hemline is to the pret-a-porter. So once an idea is, ah, born-memos written, meetings held-it takes on a life of its own. For a time, it’s the local religion, and nobody wants to be the local atheist. Erno Simic understood that, understood how vulnerable we were to big, nasty schemes, and he decided to make his fortune. He would have played us along; the general is thinking, the general is nervous, the general has decided to go ahead, send a sniper rifle and a box of exploding candy. And on, and on. But, you know, somebody found a way to see if General Arado was actually in on it, and he wasn’t.”

  “So everything I did …”

  “Meant nothing. Yes, that’s right. On the other hand, if the Seguridad or the Gestapo had caught you with the money …”

  Casson sat back in the chair, the life in the bar was growing brighter and louder. The Spanish brandy wasn’t very expensive, after a while it inspired a certain optimism. “Tell me something,” he said. “Are you really Lady Marensohn?”

  “Yes. I am pretty much who I said I was. There’s just this one little extra dimension. Of course, I’d prefer you not to talk about it. As in, not ever.”

  “No, I won’t.” He thought a moment. “I hope you understand- Simic was what he was, but I believed in the scheme, I really thought it would damage Germany.”

  Marie-Noelle nodded. “Yes, probably you did. It was my job, on the train, to find out who you were. As far as I can tell, you were drawn in, used. The people I work for, on the other hand …”

  She paused a moment, she wanted to be accurate. “The people I work for,” she said. “You have to understand, Britain is living on the edge of a cliff-and these people were never very nice people in the first place. Now the issue is survival, national survival. So they are, even more-difficult. Cold. Not interested in motive-words don’t matter, what matters is what’s done. So, perhaps, they feel it isn’t over between you and them. Because if you sat down and joined, knowingly, with Simic, what, frankly would be different in your explanation? You’d say exactly what you’ve said.”

  Casson thought about it for a time, to see how that wasn’t actually the case, but it was. “What can I do?” he said.

  “Go back home, Monsieur Casson. Live your life. Hope for British success in 1941, and German failure. If that happens, there is every possibility that, for you, life will simply go back to being what it always was.”

  NEW FRIENDS

  Friday night, 6 March, we’re having a cocktail americain, 5 to 8. Please come, Jean-Claude, it’ s been forever since we”ve seen you.

  Casson stood in Marie-Claire’s living room, talking to Charles Arnaud, the lawyer. Everyone in the room was standing-one didn’t sit down at a cocktail Americain. Casson sipped at his drink. “A cuba libre, they called it. It has rum in it.”

  Arnaud rapped a knuckle twice against his temple and made a knocking noise with his tongue. It meant strong drink, and a headache in the morning. Casson offered a sour smile in agreement. “Always the latest thing, with Bruno,” he said.


  “Have I seen you since I came back from Belgrade?” Arnaud said.

  “No. How was it?”

  Arnaud grinned. He had the face, and the white teeth, of a matinee idol, and when he smiled he looked like a crocodile in a cartoon. “Bizarre,” he said. “A visit for a week, a month of stories. At least. I went down there for a client, to buy a boatload of sponges, impounded in Dubrovnik harbor under a Yugoslav tax lien. Actually, at that point, I’d become a part owner.” Arnaud was even less a conventional lawyer than Langlade-had for years been retained by shipping companies, but had a knack for becoming a principal, briefly, in crisis situations where a lot of money moved very quickly.

  “I always stay at the Srbski Kralj. You know it?“ Arnard said.

  “I don’t.”

  “King of Serbia, it means. Best hotel in town, wonderful food, if you can eat red peppers, and they’ll send girls up all night. The bartender is a pimp, also a marriage broker-something interesting there if you think about it. Anyhow, what I have to do down there is clear, I have to hand over a certain number of dinar, about half the bill, directly to the tax collector, then they’ll let the ship go, the sponges belong to us, and we know some people who buy sponges. Takes all kinds, right? So, I’m waiting around in the bar one night-these things take the most incredible amount of time to arrange-and I start talking to this fellow. You have to put this in a movie, Jean-Claude-he’s, mmm, enormous, heaven only knows what he weighs, shaved head, mustache like a Turkish wrestler. A munitions dealer, won’t say exactly where he’s from, only that he’s a citizen of Canada, in legal terms, and would love to go there some day.”

  Casson smiled, things happened to Arnaud.

  “But, what really struck me about this man was, he was wearing an extraordinary suit. Some kind of Balkan homespun material, a shimmering green, the color of a lime. Vast, even on him, a tent. On his feet? Bright yellow shoes-also enormous. He could barely walk. ‘Pity me,’ he says, ‘looking like I do. An hour ago I met with Prince Paul, the leader of Yugoslavia, on the most urgent matters.’

  “And then he explains. A day earlier he’d been in Istanbul, closing a deal for Oerlikons, Swedish antiaircraft cannon, with the Turkish navy. Now he’s done with that, and he has to get to Belgrade, but the choice of airlines isn’t very appetizing, so he books a compartment on the Orient Express, Istanbul to Belgrade, should arrive just in time for his meeting. That night he goes to the dining car, sits across the table from a Hungarian actress-she says. A stunner, flaming red hair, eyes like fire. They drink, they talk, she invites him to come to her compartment. So, about ten o’clock our merchant, wearing red pajamas and bathrobe, goes to the next sleeping car and knocks on the lady’s door. Well, he says, it’s even better than advertised, and they make a night of it. He gets up at six the next morning, kisses her hand, and heads back to his room. Opens the door at the end of the car, and what do you think he sees?”

  “I don’t know. His, ah, his wife’s mother.”

  “Oh no. He sees track. The train had been divided into two sections at the Turkish border, and now his wallet, his money, his passport, and his suitcase are heading for Germany-where he does not want them to go-and he’s off to see Prince Paul in red pajamas. Well, the next stop is in Bulgaria, Sofia, and he gets off. In the station he manages to borrow a coin, and telephones his Bulgarian representative. ‘Buy me a suit!’ he says. ‘The biggest suit in Sofia! And get down to the railroad station in a hurry!’ Also a shirt, and a pair of shoes. Pretty soon the agent shows up and there’s the boss, all three hundred pounds of him, sitting on a bench, surrounded by a crowd of curious Bulgarians. The fellow puts on the suit, drives to the Canadian legation, demands they call the next station, have the baggage taken off the train before it reaches Germany, and have it put on the next train to Belgrade.

  “And they did it.”

  “He said they did. But he had his meeting in the big suit.”

  “The Balkans,” Casson said. “Somehow it’s always-did you ever meet the man who ate the Sunday paper?”

  “Savovic! Yes. He ate also a Latin grammar, and a fez.” Veronique, Marie-Claire’s sister who bought costume jewelry for the Galeries Lafayette, came over with a German officer on her arm. “You two are having a good time,” she said. “I would like to present Oberleutnant Hempel.”

  “Enchante,” Hempel said.

  “Oberleutnant Hempel is in transport.”

  Hempel laughed. He seemed a good-natured man, quite heavy, with thick glasses. “My friend Bruno and me, we are in the automobile business.” His French was ghastly and slow, a comma after every word. “Every kind of automobile, we got garages full of them, out in Levallois.”

  Casson smiled politely. Was he going to be offered an opportunity to buy his own car back from Bruno and the Germans? Bruno already had the apartment and the wife-not that Casson begrudged him the latter-but having the car as well seemed excessive.

  Arnaud never stopped smiling. One had a few friends, but mostly people were meant to be used, one way or another, and if you weren’t born knowing that you had better learn it somewhere along the way. He nodded encouragement as Hempel spoke, yes, that’s right, even said a few words in return, the Horch, the Audi, Bavarian Motor Works. Now he had a lifelong friend. “Ja! Ja!” the officer said. He was sweating with gratitude. Veronique chose that moment to escape, smiling and backing away. Arnaud caught Casson’s eye-glanced up at the ceiling. Quel cul.

  Casson drank some more of the cuba libre. He’d be taking off his clothes and dancing on the table in no time at all. Ole! This was his third concoction and it was getting him good and drunk, perhaps that was acceptable at a real American cocktail party, but not in Passy. Still, maybe it didn’t matter. Hempel laughed at something Arnaud said. Casson looked closer. Had he actually understood the joke? No-a German stage laugh. Very hearty. And this idiot had his car.

  A hand took his elbow in a hard grip. “Come with me,” Marie-Claire hissed in his ear. He smiled and shrugged as he was towed away. They wound their way through the chattering crowd in the smoky living room, around the corner, into the bedroom-a kidding tiens! from Casson, Marie-Claire whispering “I have to talk to you.” She hauled him into the bathroom and shut the door firmly behind them. He peered around drunkenly. This had once been his, he’d shaved here every morning.

  “Jean-Claude,” she said, still whispering, “what am I going to do about this?”

  “What?”

  “What. This boche, this schleuh. He brings them home, now.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it’s the wise thing to do.”

  “You don’t believe that!” A fierce whisper. Then she moved closer to him, an aura of whiskey and perfume hung around her. Suddenly she looked worried. “Do you?”

  “No.” After a moment he said, “But,” then sighed like a man who was going to have to tell more of the truth than he wanted to, “I’m afraid that it will turn out that way.”

  She looked grim-bad news, but maybe he was right. Someone laughed in the living room. “After all,” he said, “what matters to Bruno is that he does well. Right?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, that’s how it is with him. If you take that away-what’s left?” She was going to cry. He set his glass carefully on the rim of the sink and put his arms around her. She shuddered once and leaned into him. “Come on,” he said softly. “It’s just the life we live now.”

  “I know.”

  “So, the hell with it.”

  “I’m scared,” she said. “I can’t do it-I’m going to make a mistake.” A tear started at the corner of her eye. “Oh no,” she said, stopping it with her finger.

  “We’re all scared,” he said.

  “Not you.”

  “Yes, me.” He reached over her shoulder, took a washcloth off a peg and, hand behind his back, let cold water run on it. He squeezed it out and gave it to her, saying “Here,” and she held it on her eye.

  She looked up at him, shook her hea
d. “What a circus,” she said. She put her free hand on his chest, gave him a wry smile, then kissed him on the mouth, a moment, a little more, and warm. Casson felt something like an electric shock.

  A discreet knock on the door. Veronique: “There are people here, Marie-Claire.”

  “Thank you.”

  In the living room, taking her coat off by the door, Bibi Lachette. “Jean-Claude!” she called out, eyes bright, mouth red and sexy. “This is Albert.”

  Fair-haired, pink-cheeked from the cold, a perfectly groomed mustache and goatee. “Ah yes,” he said, unwinding himself from a complicated, capelike overcoat. “The film man.”

  10 March, 11 March, 12 March.

  Please be spring. If nothing else, that. The trees at the entrances to the Metro, where warm air vented from down below, always bloomed first. Yes, said the newspapers, it had been the coldest winter in a hundred years. Privately, more than one person in Paris-and in Prague and in Warsaw and in Copenhagen-thought that God had punished Europe for setting itself on fire, for murdering the innocent, for evil. But then too there was, particularly in that scheme of things, redemption. And now would be a good time for it. The wind still blew, getting out of bed in the morning still hurt, the skin stayed rough and cracked, but the winter was breaking apart, collapsing, exhausted by its valiant effort to kill every last one of them.

  Fischfang had barely survived; no coal, too many women and children, never enough to eat. He stared at himself in a mirror hung on a bare wall, his face thin and angry. “Look what they have done to me,” he said to Casson. “They ate all the food while we starved. Sometimes I see one, plump and happy, strutting like a little pigeon. This is the one, I tell myself. This one goes in an alley and he doesn’t come out. I’ve been close, once or twice. I think if I don’t do something my head will explode.”

  Casson nodded that he understood, taking wheat flour and milled oats and a can of lard from a sack and setting it on the table. All he could manage but, he thought, probably not enough. He wondered how much more Fischfang could take.

  Yet, a mystery. Hotel Dorado was luminous. Not in the plot-somewhere in deepest Fischfang-land there was no real belief in plots. Life wasn’t this, and therefore that, and so, of course, the other. It didn’t work that way. Life was this, and then something, and then something else, and then a kick in the ass from nowhere. In Hotel Dorado anyhow, the theory worked. A miracle. How on earth had Fischfang thought it up? The characters floated about, puzzled ghosts in the corridors of a dream hotel, a little good, a little bad, the usual tenants of life. They shared, all of them, a certain gentle despair. Even the teenager, Helene, had seen the world for what it was-and love might help, might not. There were six tables in the dining room, the old waiter moved among them, you could hear the hum of conversation, the bump of the door to the kitchen, the clatter of pots and pans as the proprietor cooked dinner. Thank heaven it wasn’t Cocteau! The Game of Life as a provincial hotel-Madame Avarice, Baron Glutton, and Death as the old porter. Fischfang’s little hotel was a little hotel, life was a weekend.