by Alan Furst
Wherever he’d been since that day, and whatever he’d done, Degrave was as Casson remembered him: a heavy, dark face, thinning hair, perhaps a little old for the rank of captain, with something sorrowful and stubborn in his character. Degrave had always been distant, a man not given to idle conversation. Still, they had served together under fire, in a blockhouse defending the French side of the river Meuse, and they were glad to see each other.
“So,” Degrave said as they shook hands, “we survived.”
“We did,” Casson said. “Somehow. What about Meneval?” Meneval had been the unit cameraman. Every day he’d called his wife from phones in village cafes.
“He returned safely to Paris.” Degrave smiled. “And to married life.”
“And then, you left the army?”
“I’m with the Office of Public Works, now, in Vichy. We’re responsible for the maintenance of roads, bridges, that kind of thing.”
“In the ZNO?”
“Yes, but we have projects in the German-administered region as well.”
Such as hiding film producers in Neuilly apartments, Casson thought.
Degrave put a packet of Gitanes on the table. “Please,” he said, “help yourself.” Casson took one and lit it, so did Degrave. From the offices around them they could hear a steady murmur of conversation.
Degrave shook out the match. “In fact, I remain what I always was, a captain in the army, and an intelligence officer.”
Casson thought that over, recalling what the unit had done. “Was the work we did-an intelligence mission of some kind?”
“Yes and no. It wasn’t clandestine, but in time of war there is a great need for documentation. It was a job I, well, the truth is they stuck me with it. You know France, you know bureaucracy, you know politics, so you will understand how I got sent off to make newsreels of forts on the Meuse. In the end it didn’t matter, we lost the war. But life goes on, and some of us continue to serve.”
“With de Gaulle?”
Degrave’s no was emphatic. “The public works office is a cover organization. We have reassembled the former Service des Renseignements, the intelligence service-the operational arm of the Deuxieme Bureau.”
Degrave waited for a response, Casson nodded.
“As for de Gaulle, and the Gaullist resistance, of course we support their objectives. But they are based in London, they exist on British goodwill and British money. And they have close ties- maybe too close-with British intelligence, whereas our service acts solely in the interest of France. That may sound like a fine distinction, but it can make a difference, sometimes a crucial difference. Anyhow, the reason I’m telling you all this is that we want to offer you a job. Certainly difficult, probably dangerous. How would you feel about that?”
Casson shrugged. He had no idea how he felt. “Is it something I can do?”
“We wouldn’t ask if we didn’t think so.”
“What is it?”
“Liaison. Not the traditional form, but close enough.”
“Liaison,” Casson said.
“You would work for me.”
Casson hesitated. “I suspect you know I was involved with espionage. In the first year of the war. It was a disaster. One factory was burnt down, but British agents were arrested, and a friend of mine was killed.”
“Did the factory need to be burnt down?”
“It made war material for the Germans.”
“Then maybe it wasn’t a disaster, maybe getting the job done simply cost more than you felt it should.”
Casson had never thought of it that way. “Maybe,” he said.
“Tell me this, do you have a family? Are there people who depend on you?”
“No. I’m alone.”
“Well,” Degrave said. The word hung in the air, it meant then what do you have to lose? “You can turn us down right away, or you can think it over. Personally, I’d appreciate your doing at least that.”
“All right.”
Degrave looked down. “The sad truth is,” he said quietly, “a country can’t survive unless people fight for it.”
“I know.”
“You’ll think it over, then. Take an hour. More, if you like.”
There was no point in waiting an hour. He took the job; he didn’t have it in his heart to refuse.
Casson walked for a long time, his worldly goods in the brown-paper package under his arm. Degrave had given him a few hundred francs and the name of a hotel, and told him he would be contacted.
He crossed the Seine on the pont de Levallois. Barges moved slowly on the steel-colored water, swastika flags flapping in the autumn breeze. Leaning on the parapet, a few old men fished for barbel with bamboo poles. There was a market street at the foot of the bridge; long lines started at the doors and wound around the corners. Some of the windows had Entreprise Juive painted in white letters, two or three had been smashed, the shattered glass glittering on the floors of the empty shops. On the walls of the buildings, the Germans had posted proclamations: “All acts of violence and sabotage will be punished with the utmost severity. Acts of sabotage are held to include any damage to crops or military installations, as well as the defacing of posters belonging to the occupying powers.” An old poster, Casson saw, dated June of 1940, the heavy print faded in the sun and rain. Newer versions promised death for a long list of violations and, Casson noted with regret, they had not been “defaced”-no cartoons, no slogans.
There was a cafe across the street, he sat at the bar and ordered a glass of wine. Je m’en fous, he thought, fuck it. He didn’t want to fight. He wanted to hide, that was the truth. Find a woman, crawl up into some garret, and wait for the war to end.
He drank the wine, it burned his throat going down. “What is it?” he asked the man behind the bar.
“Sidi Larbi, fourteen percent. From Algeria. Care for another?”
“All right.”
Degrave had been a good officer, up on the Meuse. And when it was clear that the German tanks would cross the river, his friends on the general staff had pulled them out. He owed his life to Degrave.
He paid the bill and headed west, toward the 17th. It was almost dark. It had been gray all afternoon, the autumn grisaille settled down on the stone city. Now, just at dusk, the sun came out, lighting fires in the clouds on the horizon as it set.
Paris. 26 October.
The Hotel Benoit. It was a place, as it happened, that he’d visited more than once, though he’d never actually slept there. The hotel was a monument to the midday love affair. The proprietors were discreet, and had an ancient well-seasoned arrangement with the police, so identity cards were never too carefully scrutinized and generations of “Duvals” and “Durands” had found comforting anonymity at the Benoit. “Society must have laws,” his lawyer friend Arnaud used to say, “and society must have convenient means to evade them.”
Casson’s room looked out over the street and a small park-the sound of dead leaves rattling in the wind put him to sleep at night. The secret life of the hotel sometimes reminded him too much of his past-couples with averted eyes, the scent of perfume in the air, and now and then, in the afternoon, a lover’s cry.
Degrave left a message at the desk for him and on the night of the 26th they met in a nearby hotel.
“You’re comfortable?” Degrave said.
Casson said he was.
Degrave took his jacket off and hung it on the back of the chair. Casson sat on the edge of the bed. “What we are trying to do right now,” Degrave said, “is get in touch with the various resistance groups and establish lines of communication with them. Eventually, we will all have to work together. It’s now clear that Germany will not invade Great Britain, so Great Britain will have to find a way to invade occupied Europe. And they can’t win without aggressive resistance and intelligence networks on the Continent.
“At this moment, the most active resistance group is the FTP, the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, named for the guerrilla fighters in the Fr
anco-Prussian war of 1870. The FTP is the clandestine action group of the French Communist Party. We want you to make contact with them, on behalf of the intelligence network we’re operating in Vichy.”
Degrave paused, waiting for Casson to respond. “How would I do that?” Casson said.
“You’ll find a way. We’ll help you, but in the end you will do it by yourself.”
That’s madness, Casson thought. It would never happen. “You want me to pretend to join them?” he said.
“No, that won’t work. They’re organized in cells, units completely separated from each other, to make penetration agents virtually useless. You will have to approach them as Jean Casson, a former film producer, acting on behalf of the network in Vichy. Honesty is the only way in.”
Casson nodded-that much at least made sense. “Why me?” he said.
“It must be somebody neutral, apolitical, not a socialist, not a conservative. Somebody who has not fought in the political wars. You have certainly had contact with party members in the film industry-incidental, without problems. They will know who you are, they will know you haven’t worked against them.”
That was true. His screenwriter, Louis Fischfang, had been a Marxist-in fact a Stalinist. He wasn’t the only one. There was Fougere, from the electricians’ union; the actor Rene Morgan, who’d fought in Spain; many others. He’d never cared about their politics as long as they didn’t shut his sets down.
“The fact is, Casson, everybody likes you.”
From Casson, a very hesitant nod. First of all it wasn’t true, there were plenty of people who hated him. Second of all, a certain professional affability wasn’t, he thought, the key to being trusted by gangs of red assassins. But then, Degrave wasn’t exactly wrong either. People did like him-often enough because, when it came to money or social status, to sex lives or politics, he truly did not care.
“The more you think about it,” Degrave said, “the more you’ll see what we see.” He paused a moment. “It’s also true that you will come bearing gifts. What those might be I can’t say, but we know the party, we’ve had agents among them from time to time, and we know how they operate. They will demand concrete evidence of good faith-they couldn’t care less about words. Does all this make sense?”
“Yes.”
“We’ve been fighting the party since 1917, there is no question that their aim is to rule this country. All during the 1930s they established networks in France, particularly in the armament industry. There was the Lydia Stahl case, the Cremet case, operations of all kinds. Some of them made the newspapers, some simply died a quiet death, and some we never uncovered. They tried to steal our codes, they agitated on the docks and in the defense industries, they spied on the scientists.
“The party was declared illegal-driven underground-in ’38. They survived, they prospered-for them, secrecy is like water in the desert. And in 1940, when France was invaded and the Hitler-Stalin Pact was still in effect, they urged the workers not to fight their German comrades. After the surrender, the Germans allowed the party to publish Humanite, which labeled de Gaulle a tool of British imperialism. Then, when Russia was invaded last June, a somersault.”
“That I do remember.”
“Shameless. But, up to that point, there was virtually no French resistance to German occupation. Oh, you’d see things now and then. In the window of a bookstore on the rue de Rivoli, there was a china figurine of a spaniel lifting its hind leg-it just happened to be adjacent to a copy of Mein Kampf. There’d been a few student demonstrations, one of them, in the Bois de Boulogne, was bloody, but not by intention. We saw a few leaflets-‘Frenchmen, you are not the stronger side. Have the wisdom to await the moment’-but that was about it. The French people had adopted attentisme, the strategy of waiting. That was tantamount, as far as we could see, to collaboration.”
“I saw it firsthand,” Casson said.
“In Passy?”
“Yes. Most people were afraid to do anything.”
“Not the communists. Last June, when Russia was invaded, it was as though somebody had kicked a hornets’ nest. Suddenly, German officers were being shot down-it wasn’t hard, they walked around the town as though they owned it. In October, the German commandant of Nantes was assassinated. In reprisal, forty-eight hostages were killed. Other attacks followed, the Germans retaliated. They guillotined Jean Catelas, a member of the party’s central committee, they executed communist lawyers and Polish Jews-forty for one, fifty for one. The FTP never blinked. According to the old Bolshevik maxim, reprisal killing simply brings in new recruits, so it wasn’t hurting them.”
“Is that true?”
“It is. But for some, a little too cold-blooded. The policy of the Gaullist resistance is to assassinate French traitors, but they don’t attack German nationals. The people in Moscow, who run the French Communist Party, no doubt find that a rather dainty distinction, but then their war is much worse than anything that goes on over here. We’ve heard, for instance, that the Germans around Smolensk were having hunting parties, like English county fox-hunts, with beaters flushing Jews and peasants from the woods and soldiers shooting them down.
“The Russians retaliated. An SS Obergruppenfuhrer heard a rumor about buried gold at the Polyakovo state farm. He led a unit to the farm and they started to rip the buildings apart, looking for it. The manager begged them to stop, explained that without shelter the peasants would die of cold when winter arrived. Please, he said, give me twenty-four hours to produce the gold. The SS officer agreed, and left a detachment of four men there to ensure the manager didn’t make a run for the forest. The next day, the SS unit returned. All the buildings had been burned down, only the office was left standing. Inside, on a desk, was a large leather box with the word Gelb, gold, written on it in white paint. When they opened the box, they found the heads of the four soldiers they’d left on guard.”
Degrave paused, waited for Casson to respond.
“And this is just the beginning,” he said.
“That’s right, and it may go on for twenty years. The FTP leadership is certainly under intense pressure from Moscow-do something, anything-which is why we feel they can be approached.”
He went for a walk after the meeting, to clear his head in the night air, and thought about what Degrave hadn’t said. The war between the secret services and the French communists went back a long way-maybe all the way to 1789. The working class and the aristocracy had been at it for at least that long. Casson remembered a time when he was at university, at the Ecole Normale Superieure. Some of the conservative normaliens, wearing white gloves, had taken over the running of the buildings to break a strike by the maintenance workers. Degrave, and no doubt his colleagues, came from that class, which had always provided officers for military service. Not so much rich as old, very old, a landed aristocracy that took its names from the villages it had named in the Middle Ages. What, Casson wondered, were they doing with somebody like him? He wasn’t a leftist, but he wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t a Jew, but he’d worked in a Jewish profession. He was, when all was said and done, a Parisian. And not a Parisian from the deux-cents familles.
He stopped at a cafe, stood at the bar, and ordered a beer-it would do for dinner. He’d told Degrave the story of his escape from the Gestapo office. “Don’t worry about it,” Degrave said. “Their list of wanted suspects runs into the thousands. We think you’ll be safe if you stay out of trouble-most of the people arrested these days are betrayed. Jealous neighbors, jilted mistresses, that kind of thing.”
No danger there, Casson thought.
More than likely, the communists would kill him. These people didn’t spend time brooding about your motives. If they sensed a threat, they shot you. They were idealogues, at war with anyone who stood in their way. One of Casson’s university friends used to say, with a flicker of contempt, “They believe everything they can prove, and they can prove everything they believe.” True. But they’d fought in Spain, and they died for what the
y believed in.
He left the cafe, headed away from the hotel. He was restless, wanted to avoid the small, silent room as long as he could. Suddenly, the streets were familiar, somehow he had worked his way back to his old neighborhood, the Passy district of the 16th. He crossed the rue de l’Assomption, where his wife, Marie-Claire, lived with her boyfriend, Bruno, the owner of an automobile dealership. Casson stared up at the blackout curtains. Were they home? You could usually tell if there was a light on. No, he thought not. They were out, probably at a dinner party. He moved on. Coming toward him, a Luftwaffe officer with a Frenchwoman on his arm. A handsome man, hawk-nosed, with proud bearing, the brim of his hat shadowing his eyes. “Oh but no,” the woman said, “that can’t possibly be true.” Then she laughed-apparently it was true.
The rue Chardin. His old building, his apartment on the fifth floor with a small balcony. Through the glass doors he had looked out at the top third of the Eiffel Tower. From the telltale glow at the edge of the curtains he was pretty sure somebody was home.
A silhouette moved toward him through the darkness. A woman, bent over slightly, walking quickly. “Madame Fitou!” It was out before he could stop it-his old concierge.
She stopped, peered at him, then clapped a hand over her heart and breathed, “Monsieur Casson?”
He crossed the street. Madame Fitou, in a long black coat with a black kerchief tied under her chin, clearly dressed for night raiding. A string bag of potatoes suggested a visit to the black-market grocer, or maybe one of her countless sisters, all of whom lived in the country and grew vegetables. As he approached she said, “Can it be you?”
“Bon soir, madame,” he said.
“I knew you would return,” she said.
“As you see.”
“Oh, monsieur.”
