by Alan Furst
Well, he supposed it didn’t matter. Likely it was the “important people” who had chosen the restaurant. Whoever they were. Altmann hadn’t been his usual self on the telephone. Upset about Casson’s absence-and something else. Casson drummed his fingers on the desk, stared out the window at the rue Marbeuf. What?
Frightened, he thought.
A bad week.
Spring in the river valleys-tumbled skies and painters’ clouds- seemed like a dream to him now. In Paris, the grisaille, gray light, had descended over the city and it was dusk from morning till night.
He went out to the Montrouge district, beyond the porte de Chatillon and the old cemetery, to the little factory streets around the rue Gabriel, where Bernard Langlade had the workshop that made lightbulbs. The nineteenth century; tiny cobbled streets shadowed by brick factory walls, huge rusted stacks with towers of brown smoke curling slowly into a dead sky.
He trudged past foundries that seemed to go on for miles; the thudding of machines that hammered metal-he could feel each stroke in his heart-the smell, no, he thought, the taste, of nitric acid on brass, showers of orange sparks seen through wire mesh, a man with a mask of soot around his eyes, hauling on a long wrench, sensing Casson’s stare and giving it back to him. Casson looked away. His films had danced on the edges of this world but it was a real place and nobody made movies about these lives.
He got lost in a maze of smoked brick and burnt iron and asked directions of two workmen who answered in a Slavic language he couldn’t understand. He walked for a long time, more than an hour, where oil slicks floated on a canal, then, at last, a narrow opening in a stone wall and a small street sign, raised letters chiseled into the wall in the old Paris style, IMPASSE SAVIER. At the end of the alley, a green metal door-Compagnie Luminex.
Inside it was a beehive, workers sitting at long assembly tables, the line served by a young boy in a cap who, using every ounce of his weight, threw himself against the handle of an industrial cart piled high with metal fittings of various shapes and sizes. In one corner, a milling machine in operation, its motor whining from overuse. It was hot in the workroom-the roar of a kiln on the floor below explained why- and there were huge noisy blowers that vibrated in their mounts.
“Jean-Claude!”
It was Langlade, standing at the door of a factory office and beckoning to him. He wore a gray smock, which made him look like a workshop foreman. In the office, three women clerks, keeping books and typing letters. They were heavily built and dark, wearing old cardigan sweaters against the damp factory air, and had cigarettes burning in ashtrays made from clamshells. Langlade closed the half-glass door to the workshop floor, which reduced the flywheel and grinding noises to whispered versions of themselves. They shook hands, Langlade showed him into a small, private office and closed the door.
“Jean-Claude,” he said fondly, opening the bottom drawer of his desk, taking out a bottle of brandy. “I can only imagine what would get you all the way out here.” He gave Casson a conspiratorial smile- clearly an affair of the heart was to be discussed. “Business?” he said innocently.
“A little talk, Bernard.”
“Ahh, I thought-maybe you just happened to be in the neighborhood.” They both laughed at this. Langlade began working on the cork.
“Well, in fact I called your office, three or four times, and they told me, Monsieur is out at Montrouge, so I figured out this is where I’d have to come. But, Bernard, look at all this.”
Langlade smiled triumphantly, a man who particularly wanted to be admired by his friends. “What did you think?”
“Well, I didn’t know. What I imagined-three or four workmen, maybe. To me, a lightbulb. I never would have guessed it took so much to make a thing like that. But, really, Bernard, the sad fact is I’m an idiot.”
“No, Jean-Claude. You’re just like everybody else-me included. When Yvette’s Papa died, and she told me we had this odd little business, I hadn’t the faintest idea what to do about it. Sell it, I supposed. And we tried, but the country had nothing but labor trouble and inflation that year, and nobody in France would buy any kind of industrial anything. So, we ran it. We made Christmas-tree lights and we had small contracts with Citroen and Renault for the miniature bulbs that light up gas gauges and so forth on automobile dashboards. Actually, Jean-Claude, to make a lightbulb, you have to be able to do all sorts of things. It’s like a simple kitchen match, you never think about it but it takes a lot of different processes, all of them technical, to produce some stupid little nothing.” He grunted, twisted the cork, managed to get it free of the bottle.
“Bernard,” Casson said, gesturing toward the work area, “Christmas-tree lights? Joyeux Noel!”
Langlade laughed. He searched the bottom drawer, found two good crystal glasses. He held one up to the light and scowled. “Fussy?”
“No.”
“When I’m alone, I clean them with my tie.”
“Fine for me, Bernard.”
Langlade poured each of them a generous portion, swirled his glass and inhaled the fumes. Casson did the same. “Well, well,” he said.
Langlade shrugged, meaning, if you can afford it, why not? “When the Germans got here,” he said, “they began to make big orders, for trucks, and those armored whatnots they drive around in. We did that for five months, then they asked, could you buy some more elaborate equipment, possibly in Switzerland? Well, yes, we could. There wasn’t much point in saying no, the job would just go across the street to somebody else. So, we bought the new machinery, and began to make optical instruments. Like periscopes for submarines, and for field use also, a type of thing where a soldier in a trench can look out over the battlefield without getting his head blown off. We don’t make the really delicate stuff-binoculars, for instance. What we make has to accept hard use, and survive.”
“Is there that much of it?”
Langlade leaned over his desk. “Jean-Claude, I was like you. A civilian, what did I know. I went about my business, got into bed with a woman now and then, saw friends, made a little money, had a family. I never could have imagined the extent of anything like this. These people, army and navy, they think in thousands. As in, thousands and thousands.” Langlade gave him a certain very eloquent and Gallic look-it meant he was making money, and it meant he must never be asked how much, or anything like that, because he was making so much that to say it out loud would be to curse the enterprise-the jealous gods would overhear and throw down some bad-luck lightning bolts from the top of commercial Olympus. Where the tax people also kept an office.
Casson nodded that he understood, then smiled, honestly happy for a friend’s success.
“Now,” Langlade said, “what can I do for you?”
“Citrine,” Casson said.
A certain smile from Langlade. “The actress.”
“Yes.”
“All right.”
“We have become lovers, Bernard. It’s the second time-we had a petite affaire ten years ago, but this is different.”
Langlade made a sympathetic face; yes, he knew how it was. “She’s certainly beautiful, Jean-Claude. For myself, I couldn’t stop looking at her long enough to go to bed.”
Casson smiled. “We just spent a week together, in Lyons-that’s between you and me by the way. Now, I’ve had some kind of problem in the Gestapo office on the rue des Saussaies. Bernard, it’s so stupid- I went up there to get an Ausweis to go to Spain, and they asked me about military service and something told me not to mention that I’d been reactivated in May and gone up to the Meuse. You know, there are thousands of French soldiers still in Germany, in prison camps. I decided it would be safer not to admit anything. So, I didn’t. Well, time went by, somebody sent a paper to somebody else, and they caught me in a lie.”
Langlade shook his head and made a sour face. The Germans were finicky about paper in a way the Latin French found amusing-until the problem settled on their own doorstep.
“The next thing was, they starte
d reading my mail and listening to my phone. So, when I was with Citrine down in Lyons, I told her that if she wanted to get in touch with me she could send a postcard to your office, your law office in the 8th is the address I gave her.”
He waited for Langlade to smile and say it was all right, but he didn’t. Instead, his expression darkened into a certain kind of discomfort.
“Look, Jean-Claude,” he said. “We’ve known each other for twenty years, I’m not going to beat around the bush with you. If Citrine sends me a postcard, well, I’ll see that you get it. On the other hand, next time you have a chance to talk to her, would it be too much to ask for you to find some other way of doing this?”
Casson wasn’t going to show what he felt. “No problem at all, Bernard. In fact, I can take care of it right away.”
“You can understand, can’t you? This work I’m doing matters to them, Jean-Claude. It isn’t like they’re actually watching me, but, you know, I see these military people all the time, from the procurement offices, and all it would take would be for my secretary over in the other office to decide she wasn’t getting enough money, or, or whatever it might be. Look, I have an idea, what about Arnaud? You know, he’s always doing this and that and the other, and it’s just the sort of thing that would appeal to him.”
“You’re right,” Casson said. “A much better idea.”
“So now, here’s what we’ll do. Let’s go back to Paris-I can call a driver and car-and treat ourselves to a hell of a lunch, hey? Jean-Claude, how about it?”
Friday, 4 May. 4:20 P.M.
End of the week, a slow day in the office, Casson kept looking at his watch. Seven hours-and the dinner at Brasserie Heininger would be over. Of course, he lied to himself, he didn’t have to go, the world wouldn’t come to an end. No, he thought, don’t do that. “Mireille?” he called out. “Could you come in for a minute?”
“Monsieur?”
“Why don’t you go home early, Mireille-it won’t be so crowded on the train.”
“Thank you, Monsieur Casson.”
“Could you mail this for me, on the way?”
Of course.
A postcard-the people who watched the mail supposedly didn’t bother with postcards-telling Citrine to write him care of a cafe where they knew him. He had to assume Mireille wasn’t followed, that she could mail a postcard without somebody retrieving it. It meant he could save an anonymous telephone he’d discovered, in an office at one of the soundstages out at Billancourt, for a call he might want to make later on.
Mireille called out good night and left, Casson returned to the folder on his desk. Best to prepare for an important meeting. The folder held various pencil budgets for Hotel Dorado, a list of possible changes to the story line, names of actors and actresses and scenic designers-they were just now reaching the stage where certain individuals were, almost mystically, exactly right for the film. Also in the folder, a list of new projects Altmann had mentioned over the last few months; you never knew when one of these “ideas” was going to leap out of its coffin and start dancing around the crypt.
Casson read down the page and sighed out loud. Ah yes, the Boer War. The whole industry was planning movies about the noble Boers that spring, somebody in Berlin-Goebbels? — had decided to make them fashionable. A group of farmers, not exactly German but at least Dutch, thus Nordic and sincere, had carried out guerrilla actions and given the British army fits in South Africa. A war, according to German thinking, that made England look bad: imperialist, power-hungry, and cruel. One German company, Casson had heard, was about to go into production on something called President Kruger, a Boer War spectacle employing 40,000 extras.
The phone.
Now what?
Maybe he shouldn’t answer. No, it might be Altmann, some change of plans, or even, gift from heaven, dinner canceled. “Hello?”
“Monsieur Casson?”
“Yes?”
“Maitre Versol here.”
What? Who? Oh Jesus! The lawyer for the LeBeau company!
Versol cleared his throat, then continued. “I thought I would telephone to see if any progress has been made on locating our missing inventory. You will recall, monsieur, some four hundred beards, fashioned from human hair and of a superior quality, provided for your use in the film Samson and Delilah.”
“Yes, Maitre Versol, I do remember.”
“We feel we have been very patient, monsieur.”
“Yes,” Casson said. “That is true.”
He let Versol go on for a time, as he always did, until the lawyer felt honor had been satisfied and he could hang up.
Casson looked at his watch again. Almost five. He lifted the top from a fancy yellow box, unfolded the tissue paper, studied the tie he’d bought on the boulevard earlier that day. Navy blue with a beige stripe, very austere and conservative. Just the thing, he hoped, for the “important people” who had inspired that strange little note in Altmann’s voice. Probably it wouldn’t matter at all, it would simply mean he had done the best he could.
On the way home, between the La Muette Metro and the rue Chardin, he stopped at the busy cafe where they saw him every morning. He leaned on the copper-covered bar and drank a coffee. “I may get a postcard here,” he confided to the proprietor. “It’s from somebody-you understand. I’d rather my wife didn’t see it.”
The proprietor smiled, rubbing a glass with a bar towel. “I understand, monsieur. You may depend on me.”
8:40 P.M.
The Brasserie Heininger, throbbing with Parisian life on a Friday night. Once past the blackout curtains: polished wood, golden light, waiters in fancy whiskers and green aprons. Very fin-de-siecle, Casson thought. Fin-de-something, anyhow.
Papa Heininger, the fabled proprietor, greeted him at the door, then passed him along to the maitre d’. The man said good evening with a certain subtle approval, more to do with what he wasn’t than what he was-he wasn’t Romanian, wasn’t wearing a bright-blue suit, wasn’t a coal merchant or a black-market dealer or a pimp.
“Monsieur Altmann’s table, please.”
A polite nod. A German, true, but a German executive. Not so bad, for that spring. Party of four, all men, thus ashes on the tablecloth but at least a vigorous attack on the wine list. “That will be table fourteen, monsieur. This way, please.”
Not the best table but certainly the most requested: a small hole in the mirror where an assassin had fired a submachine gun the night the Bulgarian headwaiter was murdered in the ladies’ WC. The table where an aristocratic Englishwoman had once recruited Russian spies. The table where, only a few nights earlier, the companion of a German naval officer had been shooting peas at other diners, using a rolled-up carte des vins as a blowpipe.
The three men at the table rose, Altmann made the introductions. Clearly they’d been there for a while, most of the way through a bottle of champagne. Herr Schepper-something like that-gestured to the waiter for another to be brought. He had fine white hair and a fine face, a pink shave and shining eyes. One of a class of men, Casson thought, who are given money all their lives because people don’t really know what else to do with them. This one was, if Casson understood Altmann correctly, a very senior something at UFA, the Continental Film parent company in Berlin.
The other man waited his turn, then smiled as he was introduced. They shook hands, shared a brief reniflement-the term came from the world of dogs, where it meant a mutual sniff on first meeting-then settled back down at the table. Herr Franz Millau. Something in the way Altmann articulated the name enabled Casson to hear it perfectly.
He was-nobody exactly said. Perhaps he was “our friend” or “my associate” or one of those. Not a particularly impressive exterior. High domed forehead; sandy hair. An old thirty-five or a young forty-five. Eyeglasses in thin silver frames, lawyer eyeglasses, worn in a way that suggested he only took them off before he went to sleep. And a small, predatory mouth, prominent against a fair complexion that made his lips seem brightly colored. He
was not unpleasant in any way Casson could put a name to, so, what was wrong with him? Perhaps, Casson thought, it was a certain gap, between an unremarkable presence, and, just below, a glittering and pungent arrogance that radiated from him like the noonday sun. Herr Millau was powerful, and believed it was in the natural order of things that he should be.
Herr Schepper did not speak French. That kept them busy, with Altmann as translator, discovering that he loved Paris, had attended the opera, was fond of Monet, liked pate de foie gras. A fresh bottle of Veuve Clicquot arrived, and, a moment later, an astonishing seafood platter. Everyone said ah. A masterpiece on a huge silver tray: every kind of clam and oyster, cockle and mussel, whelk and crayfish-Judgment Day on the ocean floor. “Bon appetit!” the waiter cried out.
One small complication.
Altmann and Schepper had to go on to a certain club in a distant arrondissement, where they were to have a late supper with a banker. Schepper said something in German. “He says,” Altmann translated, ” ‘you must take good care of the people with the money.’ ” Schepper nodded to help make the point.
“That’s certainly true,” Casson said.
“Well then,” Millau said, “you two should be going. Perhaps Monsieur Casson will be kind enough to keep me company while I eat my supper.”
Merde. But everybody else seemed to agree that this was the perfect solution, and Casson was effectively trapped. A glass of champagne, a few creatures from the sea, some additional travelogue from Herr Schepper, then everybody stood up to shake hands and begin the complicated business of departure.
At which moment, from the corner of his eye, Casson spotted Bruno. A party of six or seven swept past like ships in the night, Casson had only a blurred impression. Some German uniforms, a cloud of perfume, a woman laughing at something that wasn’t funny, and, in the middle of it-Bruno in a silk tie and blinding white shirt, a young woman- blonde, green-eyed-on his arm. Their eyes met, Bruno winked. Good to see you getting about with the right people, at last-glad you’ve seen the light. Then they went around the corner of a wall of banquettes and disappeared.
