by Alan Furst
The sweat started at his hairline, he jammed the gear shift into first and took off. On his left, a tiny cobbled lane, something dark and lost about it. A place to hide. He turned in, gray plaster walls rose on both sides, there was barely room for a car. He followed a long curve, past an old-fashioned gas lamp, an even narrower alley that opened to his left, a row of shuttered windows. Where was he? It was perpetual twilight in here, the walls so close they amplified the car engine and he could hear every stroke of the pistons.
The street ended at a wall.
Covered with vines and moss, crumbling, twenty feet high. Over the oak and iron doors the chiseled letters on the capstone had been worn almost flat by time—the Abbey of Saint Gervais de Toulouse. Casson turned off the ignition then had to work his way free of the Simca because the walls were so close. He ran to the entry—he thought he could hear the sedan back in the rue du Midi. There was a chain hanging down the portal, he pulled it, heard the clang of an iron bell within the walls. He tried again, then again, glancing back over his shoulder and expecting the Germans at any second.
“Hello!” he called.
From the other side of the door: “What do you want?”
“Let me in. The Germans are after me.”
Silence. Now he was sure he could hear the sedan—the whine of reverse gear, then the sound of idling where the lane opened to the street. “Please,” he said. “Open the door.”
He waited. Finally, a voice: “Monsieur, you cannot come in here.”
“What?”
The silence seemed to last a long time. “Please go away, monsieur.”
For a moment, Casson tried to explain it away—it was a Coptic order, or Greek, something exotic. But the man on the other side of the wall was French. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” Casson said.
Silence.
Casson turned away from the door and ran back down the cobbled lane, in the direction of the rue du Midi, looking for the alley he’d seen. He found it, sprinted into the darkness and right into an iron grille. The shock made him cry out and a trickle of blood ran from his nose. He squatted down, his back against an icy stone wall, and held his hand against his face to stop the blood from getting on his shirt. He was perhaps ten feet down the alley. Out in the lane he heard footsteps, then two shadows moved quickly past the opening where Casson was hidden only by darkness. He forced himself against the wall. One of the soldiers said something, he was short of breath, and his whispered German was excited, perhaps a little frightened. Then the footsteps moved away, and Casson heard a shout as they found the car parked facing the Abbey wall. He could just hear them as they talked it over, then footsteps came back toward the alley, paused, and moved away toward the rue du Midi.
Too French for them in here, Casson thought. It was dark and damp and it smelled of old drains, burnt wood, cat piss, and God knew what else. It was too ancient, too secret. Sitting against the wall and wiping at his bloody nose, Casson felt something like triumph.
He counted to a hundred, then got the Simca backed down the lane and out into the street as quickly as he could. Because if the Germans had lacked the courage to search the alley—and Casson sensed they’d known he was in there—they were certainly brave enough to pick up a telephone once they got to work, and report the Frenchman and his car to the Gestapo, license plate and all.
As for the feeling of triumph, it didn’t last long. In the winding streets of Levallois-Perret—the industrial neighbor of luxurious Neuilly—he stopped the car so a young woman carrying a bread and a bag of leeks could cross the street. A blonde, country-girl-in-Paris, big-boned, with spots of red in her cheeks and heavy legs and hips beneath a thin dress.
Their eyes met. Casson wasn’t going to be stupid about it, but his look was open, I want you. When her lip curled with contempt and she turned away pointedly it surprised him. Eye contact in Paris was a much-practiced art, a great deal of love was made on the streets, some of it even made its way indoors. But she didn’t like him. And she was able, her face mobile and expressive, to tell him why. Anybody driving a car since the requisition was a friend of the Occupier, and no friend of hers. Let him seek out his own kind.
A few minutes later he found the garage. It was enormous, packed with row on row of automobiles, all kinds, old and new, banged-up and shiny, cheap little Renaults and Bugatti sports cars. The German sergeant in charge never said anything about where were you, he simply took the keys. Casson wondered out loud about a receipt, but the sergeant merely shrugged and nodded his head at the door.
Later that morning he went to his office, but the door was padlocked.
Casson went home and called his lawyer.
Bernard Langlade—whose anniversary he’d celebrated at Marie-Claire’s—was a good friend who happened to be a good lawyer. A personal lawyer, he didn’t represent CasFilm or Productions Casson. Sent a bill only when he was out of pocket and, often enough, not even then. He looked at papers, listened patiently to Casson’s annual tax scheme—taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes—wrote the occasional letter, made the occasional phone call. In fact Langlade, though trained at the Sorbonne, spent his days running a company that manufactured lightbulbs, which his wife had inherited from her family.
“At least you’re home, safe and in one piece,” he said on the phone. “So let’s not worry too much about locked doors. I have a better idea—come and have lunch with me at one-thirty, all right? The Jade Pagoda, upstairs.”
A fashionable restaurant, once upon a time, but no more. It had fallen into a strange, soft gloom, deserted, with dust motes drifting through a bar of sunlight that had managed to work its way between the drapes. The black lacquer was chipped, the gold dragons faded, the waiter sat at a corner table, chin propped on hand, picking horses from the form sheet in the Chinese newspaper.
“Well, Jean-Claude,” Langlade said, “now we’re really in the shit.”
“It’s true,” Casson said.
“And I worry about you.”
“Me?”
“Yes. Life under German rule is going to be bad, brutal. And it’s going to demand the cold-blooded, practical side of our nature. But you, Jean-Claude, you are a romantic. You sit in a movie theater somewhere, wide-eyed like a child—it’s a street market, in ancient Damascus! A woman takes off her clothes for you—she’s a goddess, you’re in love!”
Casson sighed. His friend wasn’t wrong.
“That must change.”
Langlade took a sip of the rosé he’d ordered with lunch and scowled. He was ten years older than Casson, tall and spare and extremely well-dressed, with iron-colored hair going white over the ears, large features, dark complexion, and a mouth set in perpetual irony— life was probably not going to turn out all that well, so one had better learn to be amused by it. He raised an eyebrow as he said, “You have a bicycle?”
“No.”
“We’ll get to work on it. Immediately. Before all the world realizes it’s the one thing they absolutely must have.”
“Not for me, Bernard.”
“Ah-hah, you see? That’s just what I mean.”
Casson poked his fork at a bowl of noodles. It needed sauce, it needed something. “All right, I’ll ride a bicycle, I’ll do what I have to do, which is what I’ve always done. But what worries me is, how am I going to earn a living? What can I do?”
“What’s wrong with what you’ve always done?”
“Make films?”
“Yes.”
“What—The Lost Rhine Maiden? Hitler Goes to Oxford?”
“Now Jean-Claude . . .”
“I’m not going to collaborate.”
“Why would you? I’m not. I’m making lightbulbs. Your lights will burn out, you’ll need replacements. But they won’t be Nazi lightbulbs, will they?”
Casson hadn’t thought of it quite that way.
“Look,” Langlade said, “your barber—what’s he going to do under the Occupation? He’s going to cut hair. Is that collaboration
?”
“No.”
“Well, then, what’s the difference? The barbers will cut hair, the writers will write, and the producers will make films.”
Casson gave up on the noodles and put his fork down by the plate. “I won’t be able to make what I want,” he said.
“Oh shit, Jean-Claude, when did any of us ever do what we wanted?”
The waiter appeared with two plates of diced vegetables. Langlade rubbed his hands with pleasure. “Now this is what I come here for.”
Casson stared at it. A carrot, a mushroom, a scallion, something, something else. As Langlade refilled their glasses he said, “I’ll tell you a secret. Whoever can discover a wine that goes with Chinese food will be very rich.”
They ate in silence. The Chinese waiter gave up on the racing form, and his newspaper rattled as he turned the page. “What was it like here?” Casson said.
“In May and June? Terrible. At first, a great shock. You know, Jean-Claude, the Gallic genius for evasion—we will not think unpleasant thoughts. Well, that’s fine, until the bill comes. What they believed here I don’t know, perhaps it wouldn’t matter if the Germans won. There were women to be made love to, bottles of wine to be opened, questions of life and the universe to be discussed, important things. If we lost a war, well, too bad, but what would it matter? The politicians would change the color of their ties, possibly one would have to learn a new sort of national anthem. After all, the shits that run the country are the shits that run the country—how bad could it be to have a new set?
“Ah but then. We sat here in Paris the second week in May, reading the departmental numbers on the license plates. It started in the extreme north—one day the streets were full of 10s from the Aube. By midweek we had the 55s from the Meuse and, a day or two later, the 52s from the Haute-Marne. And no matter what the radio said, it began to dawn on us that something was moving south. And so on a Thursday, the first week in June, a great mob—can you guess?”
“Marched on the Elysée Palace.”
“Descended on the luggage department at the Galéries Lafayette.”
Casson shook his head, ate some of the diced vegetables, poured himself some more rosé. By the end of the second glass it wasn’t too bad. “Tell me, Bernard, in your opinion, how long is this going to go on?”
“Years.”
“Two years?”
“More like twenty.”
Casson was stunned. If that were true, life could not be suspended, left in limbo until the Germans went home. It would have to be lived, and one would have to decide how. “Twenty years?” he said, as much to himself as Langlade.
“Who is going to defeat them? I mean really defeat them—throw them out. The answer hasn’t changed since 1917—the Americans. Look what happened here, a German army of five hundred thousand attacked a nation with armed forces of five and a half million and beat them in five days. Only the Americans can deal with that, Jean-Claude. But you know, I don’t see it happening. Even if Roosevelt decided tomorrow that America had to be involved, even if the senators saw any point in spilling Texas blood for some froggy with a waxed mustache, even then, it’s years to build the tanks. And get them here—how? Flown by Babar? No, everything has changed, the rules are different. Your life is your country now, my friend. You are a citizen of the nation Jean-Claude, and you will have to learn to live on those terms or you will not survive.”
Langlade had shaken his fork at Casson as he was making his point, now he caught himself doing it and put it down on his plate. Cleared his throat. Took a sip of wine. The waiter turned another page of the newspaper. Casson looked up to see one corner of Langlade’s mouth twist up in a sudden smile. “Hitler Goes to Oxford indeed!” he said under his breath, laughing to himself.
“And there he meets Laurel and Hardy,” Casson said. “The college servants.”
It was not the first time he’d had to glue his life back together.
The banks had resumed operations in July, but there had been problems, confusion, and for some reason the checks to the landlord for the office on the rue Marbeuf had not gone through. The landlord, a fat little creature, shoulders back, tummy sucked in, said “Such difficult times, Monsieur Casson, how was one to know . . . anything? Perhaps now, life will become, ah, a little more orderly.”
He meant: you attempted to take advantage of war and Occupation by not paying your rent promptly, but I’m smarter than that, monsieur!
And he also meant: Orderly.
Which was to say, Pétain and everything he believed in—by September Casson had learned to recognize it from the slightest inflection. France, the theory went, deserved to be conquered by Germany because it was such a corrupt, wicked nation, with a national character so degenerate it had stormed the Bastille in 1789, a national character deformed by alcohol, by promiscuity, by loss of the old moral values.
He’s right, Casson thought, one September evening, gently improving the angle of a pair of legs in silk stockings. The radio was playing dance music, then Pétain came on, from Vichy. The usual phrases: “We, Philippe Pétain,” and “France, the country of which I am the incarnation.”
“Ah, the old general,” she said.
“Mmm,” Casson answered.
They waited, idling, while Pétain spoke. Waiting was a style just then—it will all go away, eventually.
“You have warm hands,” she said.
“Mmm.”
Lazy and slow, just barely touching each other. Could there be a better way, Casson wondered, to get through a speech? When the dance music returned—French dance music, plinky-plinky-plink, none of this depraved “jazz,” but upright, honest music, so Maman and Papa could take a two-step around the parlor after dinner—he was almost sorry.
He missed Gabriella. Once the padlock was removed he’d found the note she’d left for him. It was dated 11 June—the day after Italy had declared war on an already defeated France. “I cannot stay here now,” she’d written. Casson remembered the barracks where he’d heard the news. The soldiers were bitter, enraged—what cowardice! The Germans had brutal souls, they did what they did, but the Italians were a Latin people, like them, and had rushed in to attack a fallen neighbor.
“I will miss you, I will miss everything,” Gabriella wrote. She would always remember him, she would pray for his safety. Now she would go back to Milan. The Paris she had longed for, it was gone forever.
Otherwise there was nothing. Mounds of pointless mail, the rooms dusty and silent. Casson sat at his desk, opened files, read papers. What to do next?
Late September it began to rain, he met a girl called Albertine, the daughter of the concierge of a building on the rue Beethoven. On market day, Thursday in Passy, he’d stood at the vegetable cart, staring balefully at a mound of broad yellow beans—there was nothing else. A conversation started, he wondered what one did to prepare these things, she offered to show him.
The affair floated in the broad gray area between commerce and appetite. Albertine was not beautiful, quite the opposite. Some day, perhaps, she would glow with motherhood, but not now. At nineteen she was pinched and red, with hen-strangler’s hands and the squint of an angry farmwife. That was, Casson thought, the root of the problem: there was a good deal of Norman peasant blood in the population of Paris and in big Albertine it ran true to type. She came to his apartment, revealed the mystery of the yellow beans—one boiled them, voilà!—took off her dress, sat on the edge of the bed, folded her arms, and glared at him.
The time with Albertine was late afternoon, usually Thursday. Then, before she went home, she would make them something to eat. In the old days his dinners had drifted down from heaven, like manna. Life was easy, attractive men were fed. There were dinner parties, or a woman to take to a restaurant, or he’d go to a bistro, Chez Louis or Mère Louise, where they knew him and made a fuss when he came in the door.
That was over. Now the Germans ate the chickens and the cream, and food was rationed for the French. The coupons C
asson was issued would buy 3 1/2 ounces of rice a month, 7 ounces of margarine, 8 ounces of pasta, and a pound of sugar. The sugar he divided—most to Albertine, the remainder for coffee. One had to take the ration stamps to the café in the morning.
So mostly it was vegetables—potatoes, onions, beets, cabbages. No butter, and only a little salt, but one survived. Of course there was butter, what the Germans didn’t want—one sometimes saw a soldier eating a stick of it, like an ice-cream cone, while walking down the street—could be bought on the black market. He would give Albertine some money and she would return with cheese, or a piece of ham, or a small square of chocolate. He never asked for an accounting and she never offered. What she kept for herself she earned, he felt, by thrift and ingenuity.
The women he usually made love to were sophisticated, adept. Not Albertine. A virgin, she demanded to be taught “all these things” and other than an occasional What?!! turned out to be an exceptionally diligent student. She had rough skin and smelled like laundry soap, but she held nothing back, gasped with pleasure, was irresistibly shameless, and hugged him savagely so that he wouldn’t drift up through the ceiling and out into the night. “Only in war,” she said, “does this happen between people like us.”
Casson went to the office but the phone didn’t ring.
It didn’t ring, and it didn’t ring, and it didn’t ring. The big studios were gone, there was no money, nobody knew what to do next. Weddings? The director Berthot claimed to have filmed three since July. Rich provincials, he claimed, that was the secret. Watch the engagement announcements in places like Lyons. The couple arrive separately. The nervous papa looks at his watch. The flowers are delivered. The priest, humble and serious, greets the grandmother. Then, the kiss. Then, the restaurant. A toast!
Casson glued two papers together by licking the edges and rolling tobacco into a cigarette. Working carefully, he managed to get it lit with a single match. “Can you make me one of those?” Berthot asked hungrily.