by Alan Furst
There they were, and I among them. Sad it couldn’t last-de Groux was a spy, really, what else could he be? It scared Casson because somebody was going to a lot of trouble, and Casson didn’t think he was worth it. Or, worse, he was worth it but he just didn’t realize why.
Back at the rue Chardin, a visit to the cellar with a flashlight. Ancient stone walls, a child’s sled, a forgotten steamer trunk, a bicycle frame with no wheels. On one wall, black metal boxes and telephone lines. What was he looking for? He didn’t know. Whatever made that hissing sound. He peered at the wires, seeking a device he could neither name nor describe. But there was nothing there. Or nothing he could see. Or, maybe, nothing at all, it was all in his mind. French phones made noise-why not this noise?
“Tell me,” de Groux said, “a man in your position. You must have influence somewhere-a sympathetic politician, perhaps. It’s hard to get the permissions, all the fiches one must have to do your job. I tell you I’m worried, my friend. All the money we’re going to spend. It’s not that I don’t have it, I have pots of it. It’s these musty old lawyers, and the family. They see an old man having a fling, and they worry I’ll actually open my fist and a sou will fly out. So you see, I don’t want all this to founder on the whim of some little petit fonctionnaire. I want to assure myself that when the great battle of the clerks is fought, we are the ones left standing when the smoke clears.”
Va te faire foutre, I tell him in my heart, Citrine. Go fuck thyself. But, in the real world: “Well, Gilles, frankly I have stood on the lines myself. I have filled in my share of forms. Sometimes an assistant has been there to help but it’s so difficult, you see, crucial, that one must involve oneself. It’s that kind of commitment you must have. In the film business.”
“No. Really? Well.”
A blind reptile, he thought. But it knows there’s a nest, and young, and it senses warmth.
And then, it happened again-it seemed everybody wanted to be his friend that spring. This time he was at the office. Four o’clock on a long, wet, gray afternoon, the street outside shiny with rain. His secretary knocked, then opened the door. “A Madame Duval to see you,” she said, her voice disapproved of the name-who does she think she is, using an alias?
His heart sank. He’d been happily lost in his work, a thousand miles from reality. “Well, send her in,” he said.
She sat across from him, wearing a dark suit and a hat with a veil, knees primly together and canted slightly to one side. One of those fortyish Frenchwomen with a sour face and beautiful legs. “I am,” she said, “the owner of the Hotel Bretagne. Where your friend, the actress called Citrine, was living.” Her voice was tense-this was not an easy visit.
“Yes?”
“Yes. Last Friday, the night clerk happened to tell me that you had written her a letter. By the time it reached the hotel she had left, so he marked it Gone Away and returned it.” She paused a moment, then said, “He was-was not unpleased at this. A film actress, a producer, star-crossed, an unhappy ending. He was delighted, really, he’s a man who takes pleasure in the misfortunes of others, and has reached an age where he’s not shy about letting the world know it. It’s sad, really.”
“I believe he opened the letter and read it,” Casson said angrily. “Shared it with his friends, perhaps, and they all had a good laugh.”
The woman thought for a moment. “Opened it? No, not him, he doesn’t begin to be that bold, he simply marked the envelope and returned it. And, in the normal course of things, that would be that.”
There was more, Casson waited for it.
“However,” she said, taking a breath, “I had, we had, a certain experience. I knew who she was, although she was using another name- I had seen her in the movies, and nobody else looks like that. Now, I do not live at the hotel, of course, but I happened to be there, late one night, and I went to the second-floor bath to wash out a glass. It was very quiet just then, about two in the morning, and, without thinking, I simply walked in. Well, she was taking a bath. Naturally I excused myself, immediately closed the door. But-”
She hesitated.
“What happened?”
“Nothing actually happened. It took me a minute to realize what I’d seen. There were tears in her eyes, and on her face. And there was a razor blade resting on the soap dish. That’s all I saw, monsieur, yet you could not be mistaken, there was no question about what was going to happen in that room. I said through the door, ‘Madame, is everything all right?’ After a moment she said ‘Yes.’ That was the end of it, but it’s possible that the intrusion saved a life-not for any reason, you understand, reason wasn’t involved.”
“When was this?”
“Sometime in February. Maybe. Really, I don’t remember. About two weeks later we spoke very briefly. I was working on the book-keeping, she’d come in from doing an errand and asked for her key at the desk. We talked for a minute or two, she never referred to what had happened. She told me she would be leaving at the end of the week, had found something to do in Lyons, in the Zone Non-Occupee, and she mentioned the name of a hotel.”
“Was she unhappy?”
“No. Thoughtful, perhaps. But, mostly, determined.”
“She is that.”
“Then, after I talked to the clerk, I decided I ought to come and see you, to tell you where she is. For a time I wasn’t sure, I didn’t know what to do. I argued back and forth with myself. In the end, I’m doing this not because I insinuate myself in the lives of strangers”-the idea was so unappealing she grimaced-“but because I believe, after thinking about it, that she meant for me to do it.”
They were quiet for a moment. Casson was conscious of the sound of tires on the rainy street below his window.
“The way she spoke to me,” the woman said slowly, “it was as though her emotions, her feelings about life, were uncertain. She didn’t know exactly what to do, so she left matters in the hands of fate. It didn’t mean all that much to me at the time-I have the hotelkeeper’s view of the world, disorder, chaos, stolen towels. I remembered later only because she was who she was, but I did remember. A letter had come, the clerk noticed the return address-he recalled who you were, certainly, and once I was told about it I had to do something. Probably the letter concerns only a forgotten handkerchief.”
“No. More than that.”
She nodded to herself, confirming what she’d believed. Opened her purse, took out a hotel envelope, reached over and placed it on the corner of his desk. Then stood up. “I hope this is the right thing to do,” she said.
Casson stood quickly. “Thank you,” he said. “Madame, thank you. I should have offered you something, forgive me, I, perhaps a coffee, or …”
A gleam of amusement in her eye. “Another time, perhaps.” He was clearly disconcerted-she enjoyed that, particularly in men like Casson. She extended a gloved hand, he took it briefly. Then she was gone.
He tore open the envelope, found the name and telephone number of a hotel in Lyons written on a slip of paper. At the end of the day he met Bernard Langlade for a drink. “Is it hard to find out who owns a hotel?” he said.
“Shouldn’t be.”
Casson told him the name and location. Langlade called him in the morning. “I take it back,” he said. “The Hotel Bretagne, on the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, is owned by a Societe Anonyme, in Switzerland.”
“Is that unusual?”
“No. It’s done, sometimes. For tax purposes, or divorce. And, with time and money, you could probably find a name. Of course, even then-”
“No, thank you for looking, Bernard, but probably best just to let it go.”
Langlade made a sound that meant much the wiser choice. “Especially these days,” he said.
Especially these days. There was no calling Citrine from his infected telephone. Every call a new name on somebody’s list. He could still see Lady Marensohn across the table in the bar of the Alhambra Hotel. Perhaps it was over, perhaps they believed him, perhaps not.
He’d taken the Metro home from work that night, a man got off behind him. Made the first turn with him, then the second. Casson paused at the window of a boulangerie. The man looked at him curiously and walked by. Well, how am I supposed to know? he thought. You’re not, came the answering voice, you’re not.
Merde alors. After all, it wasn’t as though clandestine instincts were unknown in this city. All right, maybe it wasn’t the British Secret Intelligence Service one had to elude. But it was husbands or lovers, wives or landlords or lawyers. Casson let it get to be 7:30 in the evening, then left the apartment. By now, when he went out in the street, everyone he saw was an operative-an anonymous little man in an Eric Ambler novel who lived in a rented room and spied on Jean Casson. So, he thought, is it you-in your tuxedo? Or you, a clerk on the way home? Or you, the lovers embracing on the bridge. He hurried along, head down, through the rainy streets, through the fog that pooled at the base of the park railings. He trotted down the Metro stairs, left at the other end of the platform, reversed direction, doubled back, at last sensed he was unobserved and headed toward the river.
Chez Clement-the little sign gold on green, faded pastel and flaked by time and weather. At the end of a tiny street where nobody went, steamed glass window, the hum of conversation and the clatter of dinnerware faintly heard. Inside the door, the smell of potatoes fried in butter every night since 1890. Clement came out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on a towel. Face scarlet, mustache immense, apron tied at one shoulder. “Monsieur Casson.” It was like being hugged by a wine-drenched onion. How infernally clever, Clement told him, to stop by this evening, all day long they’d been working, at the stove, in the pots, what luck they’d had, one never saw this any more, perhaps the last-
No, alas, not tonight, he couldn’t. Casson inclined his head toward the cloakroom and said delicately, “Le telephone?”
Not a telephone, the telephone. The one Clement made available to his most cherished customers. Clement smiled, of course. The heart had reasons of its own, they had to be honored, sometimes not at home.
He reached the hotel in Lyons. Madame was out.
Was there a message?
No.
12 April. 11:20 A.M.
The rain continued, soft cloudy days, nobody minded. Casson walked down the Champs-Elysees, turned right on avenue Marceau, a few minutes later leaned on the parapet of the Pont d’Alma, looking down into the Seine. A blonde woman walked by; lovely, wearing a yellow raincoat. On the banks, rain beaded along the branches of the chestnut trees and dripped onto the cobblestones. The river had risen to spring tide, lead-colored water curling around the piers of the bridges, crosscurrents black on gray, shoals catching the light, rain dappling the surface, going to Normandy, then to sea. Just a boat, he thought. How hard would it be? Magic, a child’s dream. Carried away to safety on a secret barge.
Casson looked at his watch, lit a cigarette, leaned his weight on the parapet. He could see, at one end of the bridge, a newspaper kiosk- an important day, the headlines thick and black. German planes had set Belgrade on fire, armored columns had entered Zagreb, Skopje had been taken, soon the rest of Macedonia, and the Panzerkorps was driving hard on Salonika.
He crossed to the Left Bank, entered the post office on the avenue Bosquet. It was crowded, people in damp coats standing on line, smoking and grinding out their cigarettes on the wet tile floor. He waited for a long time, finally reached the counter, gave the clerk a telephone number, went to the cabine and waited for the short ring.
“Hotel du Parc.” The voice sounded very far away. “Hello? Are you there?”
Casson gave the name.
“Stay on the line.” The sound of the receiver being set down on a wooden countertop.
He waited. In the next cabine a woman was shouting at some relative somewhere in France. Where was the money, they were supposed to send it, it should have come days ago, no she didn’t want to hear about the problem.
The clerk picked the receiver up. “She’s coming now.” Then: “Hello?”
“Hello.”
A pause. “It’s you.”
“Yes.”
“I had to leave.”
“Yes, I know. How is Lyons?”
“Not so bad. I’m in a play.”
“Really?”
“Yes. A small part.”
“What sort of play?”
“A little comedy. Nothing much.”
“You sound good.”
“Do I?”
“Yes.”
The line hummed softly.
“Citrine, I wrote you a letter.”
“Where is it?”
“It went to the other hotel, but it came back. The woman there told me where you were.”
“What does it say?”
“It’s a love letter.”
“Ah.”
“No, really.”
“I wonder if I might read it, then.”
“Yes, of course. I’ll send it along-I just wanted to hear your voice.”
“The mail isn’t very good, these days.”
“No, that’s true.”
“Perhaps it would be better if you were to bring it.”
“Yes. You’re right. Citrine?”
“Yes?”
“I love you.”
“When can you come here?”
“As soon as I can.”
“I’ll wait for you.”
“I’ll let you know when.”
“I’ll wait.”
“I have to say good-bye.”
“Yes. Until then.”
“Until then.”
16 April, 1941.
Now the trees had little leaves and clouds of soft air rolled down the boulevards at dusk and people swore they could smell the fields in the countryside north of the city. Casson bought a train ticket, and made an appointment at the rue des Saussaies to get an Ausweis to leave the occupied zone and cross over to the area controlled by Vichy.
A warm day, the girls were out. Nothing better than Frenchwomen, he thought. Even with rationing, they insisted on spring-new scarves, cut from last year’s whatever, a little hat, made from a piece of felt somebody had left in a closet, something, at least something, to say that love was your reward for agreeing to live another day and walk around in the world.
On the top floor of the old Interior Ministry building, even SS-OBERSTURMBANNFUHRER Guske knew it was spring. He came around the desk to shake hands, as tanned and well-oiled as ever, every one of his forty hairs in its proper place, a big leathery smile. Then, with a sigh, he got down to business. Made himself comfortable in his chair and studied the dossier before him, a sort of now where were we feeling in the air. “Ah yes,” he said. “You went last to Spain to see about locations for a film. So, how did it go for you?”
“Very well. One or two villages were, I can say, perfect. Extremely Spanish. The church and the tile roofs, and the little whitewashed houses.”
“Indeed! You’re making me want to go.”
“It’s a change, certainly. Very different from France.”
“Yes, here it is, Malaga. My wife and I used to go to Lloret-de-Mar every summer, until they started fighting. Find a pension in a little fishing village. What dinners! Besugo, espadon, delicious. If you can persuade them to hold back a little on the garlic, excellent!” He laughed, showing big white teeth. Looked back down at the dossier. Read for a moment, then a slight discomfort appeared on his face. “Hmm. Here’s a memorandum I’d forgotten all about.”
He read carefully, perhaps for three or four minutes. Shook his head in pique at something small and irritating. “I know you are famous for petty bureaucrats in France, but I tell you, Herr Casson, we Germans don’t do so badly. Look at this nonsense.”
“Sir?”
“I don’t have the faintest recollection of anything, you understand, I see people from dawn to dusk, of course, and I only remember the, well, the bad ones, if you know what I mean.” He raised his eyebrows to see if Casson had understo
od.
“What’s happened is,” he continued, “you told me, or, I thought you told me, that your army service was back in the 1914 war, but here it says that you-well, the people down at the Vincennes military base sent on to us a record that says you were transferred to a unit that was reactivated in May of 1940. Could that be right?”
“Yes. I was.”
“Well, I apparently got it wrong the last time we talked because now somebody’s gone and written a memorandum in your file saying that you, well, that you didn’t actually tell the truth.”
“I don’t really know what I …” Casson felt something flutter in his stomach.
“Ach,” Guske said, quite annoyed now. He stood up, walked toward the door. “I’m going to go down the hall and have this put right. I’ll be back in a minute.” He opened the door and gestured toward a chair in the hall. “Please,” he said. “I’ll have to ask you to wait in the corridor.”
Guske marched off down the hall. Casson wanted to get up and run out of the building, but he knew he’d never make it, and when they caught him he wouldn’t be able to explain. He wasn’t being threatened, exactly. It was something else-he didn’t know what it was, but he could feel it reaching for him.
Hold on, he told himself.
He very nearly couldn’t. He closed his eyes, heard typewriters, muted conversations, doors opening and closing, telephones. It was just an office.
Forty minutes later, Guske came back down the hall shaking his head. In a bad humor, he waved Casson into his office. “This is extraordinarily irritating, Herr Casson, but this man at the other end of the hall is acting in a very unreasonable fashion. I mean, here we’ve had a simple misunderstanding, you gave me some information and it didn’t happen to hold with some piece of paper that somebody sent here, and now he’s going to be difficult about it.”
