by Alan Furst
“Yes,” Casson said. “Once a week.”
“What they do at Samaritaine is hire people to wear the felt slippers, a dozen or so. The usual crowd who work the night in Paris, each one a little more cracked than the next, ‘the princess,’ ‘the Albanian,’ I suppose I was ‘the novelist.’ The boss wasn’t a bad guy, lost an arm in the 1914 war, he’d play music on a Victrola, usually waltzes, but you could do any step you liked as long as you stayed in contact with the floor. It’s hypnotic, of course. The wood is dull to start with, then glows as you polish. We’d work our way from floor to floor, skating around the towels and the blankets and the brooms. On the sixth, we’d each put on a lady’s hat from the display trees-a little joke-the violins sawing away on The Vienna Woods. Well, I used to think, Cocteau really ought to see this. Truth is, I liked it, it suited me.
“But eight months for somebody in my position was too long, I had to quit. For the moment, I’m writing the occasional newspaper feature, under an alias, of course. It gets me a few francs, mostly from old friends I’ve known for years, mostly the socialists, a very tolerant crowd. Articles on soccer, on sound health, tips for cooking turnips. And then, I’ve always got a novel going.”
“Will you stay in France?”
“Maybe. For one thing, it’s not so easy to get out, now. And you have to find a country that will take you. I can’t go near Spain. Switzerland is out. Hard to say, maybe Mexico. For the moment, I’m here. If I vanish, it’ll mean somebody’s police finally stumbled over me and that was that. What about you?”
“I take it a day at a time,” Casson said. “Count myself lucky to have a roof over my head and something to eat. Beyond that, God only knows.”
This is the BBC, broadcasting from London. Here is the news in French. The Comite Francais de Liberation National announced today in London that, after a trial in absentia and review by the Judicial Section, Hauptsturmfuhrer Karl Kriegler, an SS official at the Sante prison in Paris, has been condemned to death. He was sentenced for the torture and murder of prisoners-of-war under confinement at the Sante, specific instances are cited in the indictment. The sentence is to be carried out at the discretion of the CFLN, at any time after the official declaration of the verdict, by any means necessary, or at the end of the war. Other personnel at French prisons are reminded that all wars eventually do come to an end, records are being kept, and they will be held to account for their actions. In other news…
Damn their eyes.
In a cellar on the outskirts of Paris, Weiss had to acknowledge that he had nothing like the powerful BBC at his disposal, and de Gaulle’s people were using it to full effect. Not that he disagreed with the strategy-the sentence in absentia might have a sobering effect on the Hauptsturmfuhrer, as it had in other cases. It was just that he had an executive’s view of the world, and as an executive he was stung when competitors had resources he didn’t. He could turn out endless editions of the underground Humanite, his best writers storming and threatening, but it didn’t begin to add up to the power of the BBC.
This in a week when things were not going well. He had been reprimanded by Moscow Center for the Aubervilliers raid-dear comrade. They might have moved their wireless operation back to the Urals, but they’d only been out of contact for two days and then-he suspected he was now receiving from a relay station in Sweden-then they’d let him have it. Operational rules specified a second automobile, to provide a getaway after an attack. How could he not have known that the Germans would use a chase car? Why wasn’t it spotted during surveillance?
A second car? From where? How?
They’d obviously seen the French police report, and he hadn’t sent it to them. Somebody after his job, maybe. He leaned on the table he used as a desk and closed his eyes. Just ten minutes. The BBC droned on-a lycee class in Belfort had come to school wearing Cross of Lorraine armbands, the Gaullist symbol. He could do that, out in Montreuil or Boulogne, and tell the world in leaflets, but it would never have the impact of a BBC broadcast. Above his head, the floorboards creaked as people cooked dinner and the aromas drifted down into the cellar; museau-jellied beef muzzle- and cabbage.
A knock at the door. “Comrade Weiss?”
“Yes?”
“Dinner?”
“Maybe later.”
“Comrade Somet is waiting to see you.”
“All right. Five minutes.”
What was this, he wondered. Narcisse Somet had been in party work for twenty years. A journalist, cheeks and nose colored by the broken blood vessels of the longtime drinker, eyeglasses with tinted lenses, gray hair cut en brosse. He had always worked for trade weeklies, especially those that covered the mining and metals industries. Secretly, he wrote for Humanite, at one time contributing to its most popular feature-L’Huma consistently picked more winners at the Paris racetracks than any other newspaper.
Weiss went to the door and called upstairs, Somet shuffled in a moment later.
They shook hands. Somet settled himself in a chair, coughed a few times into his fist. They made small talk for a while, then Somet said, “I’ve been contacted by Alexander Kovar.”
Casson took his nightly meal at a small cafe on the place Maillart. The plane trees on the square were bare now, and the branches dripped, but it was at least something to look at. He ate at a table by the front window, a newspaper folded beside his plate. He’d run out of ration coupons for meat or fish, which left him with the only nonrationed dish on the menu, soup. Thin and yellowish, a few lentils, some onion, and a small piece of carrot. Served lukewarm, with a slice of coarse gray bread. The trick was to think about lentils as he used to know them, in a salad with mustard sauce and lean bacon. His father used to say, “You can’t eat dreams!” But, in a way, you could.
He turned to the entertainment section of the newspaper; reviews, ads, and a few brief news stories. Such as-FILM STAR WEDS IN SOUTH. In Villefranche, to be precise, the actress Citrine (Danielle Aubin) had married the director Rene Guillot (The Shoemaker’s Wedding, Blackbeard the Pirate). The newlyweds to honeymoon on Cap Ferrat, then, early next year, to work on Guillot’s new project, Hotel de la Mer. With a photo of the happy couple.
He felt, at that moment, not very much. A flash of sorrow, an iron band around his throat, a small voice saying what did you expect? He paid for dinner, clamped the paper beneath his arm, and headed back to the hotel. Just hope you aren’t in for a night of Wagnerian orgasms from the room next door. See? A joke. He wasn’t going to let this hurt him, he had too many other things to worry about.
It did occur to him to go back up to the little bistro on place Clichy, where he might find the girl who called herself Julie. But that was asking for trouble and he knew it. So he went home, turned the light out, crawled under the thin blanket on the bed in the unheated room, and lay there.
It doesn’t matter, he told himself, you fall in love more than once in life. You’re lucky to have had what you did. Cold. He was already wearing underwear and socks, trousers, and shirt, only one more step he could take. A week earlier, in the Ternes Metro station, he’d managed to buy an overcoat. This one in about the same condition as the one he’d pawned. Shivering, he got out of bed, took the coat down from a peg behind the door, put it on, pulled it tight around himself, and crawled back under the blanket. Not much better. Outside, the wind moaned around the corner of the building, it rained in sheets, then abated.
The first time he kissed her he’d thought she’ll never let me do this. But she did, and kissed him back, passionate, almost a little crazy. That confused him. She seemed desperate, as though she felt somebody like him could never fall for someone like her. What was she then, nineteen? On location for Night Run, down in Auxerre, in a room in the inevitable stucco hotel by the railroad station.
He undressed her, she helped, both of them desperate to get it done. Then it was his turn, and they’d stood there, staring at each other.
Married. It was the intimacy of it that stung him-how could she? With Re
ne Guillot? A crocodile with a winter tan and fine white hair. Famously arrogant, selfish, successful. Who no doubt courted her when he was given the director’s job for the movie that Casson had thought up and Fischfang had written-given the director’s job at the insistence of one Jean Casson.
Thanks for the movie, I’ll just take the woman you love too, as long as I’m at it. He didn’t blame Guillot, a force of nature, an homme de la gauche who swam cleverly through Parisian life and took whatever he wanted. He blamed Citrine. Bitch! Connasse!
Cold, the window rattled in the driving rain. Cold outside, cold inside. Casson rolled out of bed, tore off his overcoat, put on his jacket and shoes. The curfew was in force, he couldn’t actually go anywhere. He went down to the lobby, a gloomy nest of velveteen love seats and occasional chairs, now lit by a single ten-watt bulb in an iron floor lamp that appeared to have been built as a gallows for mice.
Another lost soul had preceded him, a tall man in a blue overcoat, who looked up from his magazine and stood when Casson entered the room. He had the face of a hound; sunken eyes, a drooping mustache. “Da Souza,” he said, handing Casson a card, “fine linens.”
On the card was the name of a large company and an address in Lisbon. After a moment da Souza said, “How are you tonight?”
“I’ve been better.”
“Not too bad, I hope.”
Casson shrugged. “It’s nothing. An histoire de coeur.”
“Oh that.”
Casson nodded.
“What did she do, go off with someone else?”
“Well, yes, that’s what she did.”
Da Souza shook his head, yes, that’s what they did, then went back to reading. After a few minutes he yawned, tossed the magazine aside, and stood up. “I’d offer to buy you a drink, but the curfew…”
“Some other time.”
Da Souza nodded, then gave Casson a gloomy smile. “Still,” he said. He meant it had all happened before and would happen again. “You might as well keep the card.”
Paris. 20 November.
Casson returned from lunch a little after three. The woman at the desk said, “Monsieur, a friend of yours came by. He’s going to wait for you at the Ternes Metro.”
He went back out, taking the rue Poncelet, head down against the sharp wind. The rain had stopped, wet leaves were plastered to the sidewalk. Halfway between the hotel and the Metro station, a van pulled up to the curb, both doors opened.
“Yes?”
“You are Marin?”
“Yes.”
“You’re to come along with us.”
There was no question as to who they were, or where they came from. Heavily built, with battered faces, one had a white scar cutting through both lips. They wore oil-grimed coveralls, and the van was marked as a Metro maintenance vehicle.
“In the back.”
He did what he was told. There were wooden racks bolted to the walls of the van, holding heavy pipe wrenches and a variety of shovels and prybars. The truck smelled of lubricating grease and burnt cinders.
“Lie down,” the driver told him. An old blanket was thrown over him as he lay on his side on the metal plate of the floor. The van started and drove smoothly away. The second man stayed in the back with him, sitting propped against the door.
They drove around for a long time, Casson could hear trucks and cars, and the occasional ringing of bicycle bells. Near his head was a small hole through which he could see the pavement, sometimes stone, sometimes asphalt. When they crossed the Seine, he looked down at the river through the strutwork of a small bridge. The van made several turns after that, on what sounded like narrow lanes. The men didn’t talk. Casson tried to concentrate, to keep himself calm. He’d thought this meeting might be in a little bar somewhere, or in the office of a union local, but apparently it wasn’t going to work like that.
By the time they rolled to a stop the daylight was just about gone. The engine was turned off and someone took the blanket away and said, “You can sit up now.”
He was sore where his ribs had banged against the floor. The man now kneeling next to him reached in his pocket and brought out a black cloth. “Just stay on your knees a moment.”
The man twirled the cloth around until it lapped itself into a blindfold, which he placed across Casson’s eyes and tied firmly at the back of his neck.
“Can you see?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Nothing.”
If they didn’t want him to see where he was being taken, he didn’t want to know where he was. They took his elbow, talked him out of the van, then guided him along a street. The walk seemed to go on forever, but it was probably no more than ten minutes before he was taken into a building-a garage, he thought, with hammers pounding on metal and the smell of tires. He was led out the back and into another building. A door was closed, then barred. He was seated in what felt like an old swivel chair.
“Just stay quiet. Somebody will come for you.”
He sat there, scared. He knew that from where he was now he could disappear off the face of the earth. A few minutes crawled by. The door opened and shut, a chair leg scraped on cement, and a woman’s voice, heavily accented, said, “All right, you can take that thing off him.”
He was in a small workshop, from what he could see, with a blanket over the window. It was almost completely dark. Ten feet away from him, a woman sat at a table near a lamp with a very bright bulb. Its position made it hard for him to see her clearly, or anything beyond her, although he sensed that there were people in the darkness.
The woman was perhaps in her fifties, with gray hair pulled back and pinned up, a dark suit, and, beneath the table, lace-up shoes with low heels. A university professor or a doctor, he would have thought, seeing her on the street. “Very well,” she said, taking a few sheets of paper and squaring them up in front of her. She unscrewed a cap from a pen, making sure it worked on one corner of the paper. “You’re called Marin, these days-correct? And you stay at the Hotel Benoit?”
Probably the accent was Russian, but he wasn’t completely sure. “Yes, that’s right.”
“In fact you are Jean Casson, formerly a film producer.”
“Yes.”
“Born in Paris? Of French nationality?”
“Yes.”
“Your military service?”
“In the first war, I served as a corporal with an air reconnaissance squadron, changing film canisters on Spad aircraft and sometimes supervising the development of the negatives. In May 1940, I was reactivated and returned to service as a member of the Section Cinematographique of the Third Regiment, Forty-fifth Division. I saw action on the Meuse River, near Sedan, and was discharged from the unit later that month, when its cameras and equipment were destroyed in a bombing raid.”
“Then you eventually returned to Paris.”
“That’s right.”
“By the way, are you aware that you were followed, as you set off for this meeting?”
“Followed? No, I don’t think so.”
“It isn’t important, and we took care of it, but we wondered if you knew.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Now, monsieur, why have you been looking for us?”
“To offer you the opportunity to meet with members of a resistance group.”
“Why would we want to do that?”
“To discuss matters of mutual concern.”
“Such as?”
“I have no idea.”
She stared down, read a note she’d written. “Are you sympathetic to the objectives and programs of the Communist Party?”
“Sympathetic? Well, I’m certainly aware that there are poor people, and that they suffer. On the other hand, I don’t believe in the revolution of the working masses, or the dictatorship of the proletariat.” He paused, then said, “Or, in fact, the dictatorship of anybody.”
She didn’t smile, but it crossed his mind that a young and long-ago version of he
r might have. “You are naive, monsieur,” she said quietly.
Casson shrugged.
“Why do you live as a fugitive?”
“Last May, I was taken in for questioning by the Gestapo, held for a few hours in a cell in the basement of the old Ministry of the Interior on the rue des Saussaies, then brought up to the top floor for questioning. I was led down a hall to use the WC and left alone. I saw that the window wasn’t barred. I crawled out on the roof, and escaped.”
“Why were you taken in for questioning?”
“I lied on a form and they caught me.” That was, technically speaking, true. But it was also the story he’d been told to follow, and he followed it.
“What lie was that?”
“That I had not returned to military service in 1940-working with a film unit would have been seen as an intelligence function.”
She read through the papers for a moment, looking over what she’d written. In the shadows behind her, somebody lit a pipe, he could see the rise and fall of the yellow flame held above the bowl.
“The people who sent you here,” she said. “Who are they?”
“Army officers.”
“Members of the intelligence service? The former Service des Renseignements?”
“Yes. I believe so.”
“What do they want, information?”
“I don’t know what they want.”
“Then what do you believe their objectives are?”
“To resist the German occupation.”
“Are they in Vichy?”
“Yes.”
“Officers of the present service?”
“Yes.”
“And why did they choose you as their representative?”
“Because I’m neutral.”
“What does that mean?”
“Unaffiliated. With no aims of my own.”
“And what do you bring, Monsieur Casson, to this negotiation? What do you offer us, as an incentive for discussions, or doing business together, or whatever it might turn out to be?”
