by Alan Furst
Closed, the first time he went. No reason, just closed. The blue neon parrot on a red branch was dark. The next time he tried was on Christmas Eve, and it was open. There was a poster by the door, the name Loulou across the bottom. Citrine—though it took him a moment to recognize her—Citrine on a high stool. Top hat, net fabric with rhinestones on top, bare legs crossed down below, spike heels with satin bows, a cabaret smile. Well, what about you, big boy?
A Christmas Eve blizzard. The white flakes swirled and hissed and made drifts in the doorways. Now and then a car came sliding down the street, tires spinning, engine whining as it worked its way around a corner. The blue-painted glass on the street lamps cast Hollywood moonlight on the snow.
Hot inside, steamy, and packed. He tried the stage door, but a doorman dressed like an apache—black sweater and beret and cigarette dangling from the corner of the mouth—ran him off. “You’ll pay. Like the rest of the world, conard.”
He paid. To join a hundred German officers jammed together in a small room, reeking of shaving lotion and stale sweat and spilled wine and all the rest of it. There was a master of ceremonies in a tuxedo, sweating and telling jokes, then zebras, naked girls in zebra masks, bucking and prancing, hoisting their knees up to their foreheads and singing “Paris smells so sweet.” Saluting British style—whistles from the crowd—then turning around and grabbing their ankles—roars of approval. A fat major next to Casson almost died of pleasure, laughed as tears ran down his cheeks, gave Casson a best-pal whack between the shoulder blades that sent him flying into the crowd.
Then the room went dark, the curtain creaked open, a violet spotlight popped on, and there was Loulou. By then he’d worked his way to a position near the stage where he knew she would be able to see him, and, after the second number, she did. He could tell. At first, Jesus it’s Casson, what’s he doing here? Then the corner of her mouth lifted, not much, but a little: he was there to see her, it was no accident.
But he wasn’t going to see her anytime soon. A table of colonels, prominent in the front of the room, demanded the presence of the beautiful Loulou and she was produced, guided to the table by the owner of the Perroquet, an eel in a checked suit. They were merry colonels, they touched her shoulder and told her jokes and tried to speak French and gave her champagne and had quite a time for themselves. Question was, would Hansi be the one to fuck her, or was she going to favor Willi? The battle raged, the competing armies surged back and forth as Casson looked at his watch and realized that the last Métro of the night had left Bastille station.
Finally the owner came around, bowed and scraped and tried to get his chanteuse back. Hansi and Willi were in no mood for that, but the owner had a trick up his checked sleeve and sent a phalanx of zebras into action. They arrived neighing and whinnying, sat on the colonels’ laps and wiggled about, tickled their chins, stole their eyeglasses and fogged them with their breath.
The colonels roared and turned red. Champagne was poured into glasses and everywhere else—to the colonels it seemed that champagne had found its way to places where champagne had never been before. One ingenious soul filled his mouth until his eyes bulged, then punched his cheeks with his index fingers—pfoo!—showering Hansi and Willi, assorted zebras, and Loulou, who wiped her face with her hand as she made her escape and climbed up on the tiny stage.
Most actresses could carry a tune if they had to and Citrine was no different. She simply played the role of a cabaret singer, and she was good at it. The throaty voice, hoarse from cigarettes and drinks in lonely cafés. I always knew you’d leave me, that I’d be alone. You could see her man, the little cockerel with a strut. And there you were, with her, at the table where we used to sit. Of course there was a kid, in military school somewhere. Oh well, perhaps once more, for old times’ sake. The eyes, slowly cast down, a few notes from the battered old piano, the spotlight dimming out. Ahh, Paris.
She sent the doorman in the black sweater to get him and they hurried away down an alley, indignant German shouts—“Loulou! Loulou!”— growing faint as they turned a corner. Which left them in the middle of a blizzard on the wrong end of Paris and no Métro with the curfew hour, one in the morning, long gone.
“We’ll walk,” she said with determination. “It will keep the blood moving. And something will occur.”
“Walk where?”
“Well, Jean-Claude, I stay at a sort of a not-so-good hotel these days—and even not-so-good as it is, they close it down like the Forbidden City after one-thirty. It usually works to sleep on a couch at the club, but not tonight, I think.”
“No.”
“So, we walk.”
“Passy . . .”
She took his arm with both of hers, her shoulder firmly against him, and they walked through the blizzard. He was happy to be held this way, he really didn’t care if they froze to death; a set of fine ice statues, one with a smile. Citrine, Citrine, he thought. She wore a long black coat and a black beret and a long muffler wound around her neck.
“I want you to be in a movie,” he said.
“Tell me about it.”
“You will star.”
“Ah.”
“You’ll be in most of the scenes. It’s about an old hotel in a little village, somewhere in the Midi. It’s been sold, and people come down from Paris one last time, and you wander in from, ah, from the land of the lost strangers.”
“Ah yes, I know this place, I have lived there. We are forever wandering into movies.”
He laughed, she held his arm tight. Somewhere out in the swirling snow, a car, the engine getting louder. They rushed into the first doorway. Lights cut the dark street—police on the prowl. “Pretend to kiss me,” she said.
They embraced, star-crossed lovers in a doorway. The car—French, German, whoever it was—passed them by. Casson’s heart was hammering, it was all he could do not to press his hand against his chest. And nothing to do with the police. My God, I am fourteen, he thought. When the car was gone they walked in silence, heads down against the wind.
She’d come to Paris from Marseilles at sixteen—it would have been running away if anybody had wanted her to stay there. Her mother had kept a boardinghouse for merchant seamen, mostly Turks and Greeks, and, the way Citrine put it, “one of them was probably my father.” Thus her skin was pale, with a shadow beneath it, she had hair the color of brown olives—worn long—with glints of gold in it, almond-shaped eyes, and to him she’d always smelled like spice—Byzantine, whatever that meant. It meant his fantasy side ascendant, he knew, but he thought about her that way anyhow. Across a room she was tall and slim, distant, just the edge of cold. And she was in fact so exotic, striking—a wide, heavy-lipped mouth below sharp cheekbones, like a runway model—that she looked lean, and hard. But the first time he’d put his arms around her, he had understood that it wasn’t that way; not outside, not inside.
In the course of the love affair she had only once told secrets about her past, about the boardinghouse where she’d grown up. “How much they loved and respected my mother,” she’d said. “They waited with me until I was fourteen, and then there were only two of them, and they made sure I enjoyed it.”
“Did they beat you?”
“Beat me? No, not really.”
That was all. They were on a train, she turned away and looked out the window. She had said what she wanted to: yes, I knew too much too young, you’ll have to go on from there.
He had tried—he thought he’d tried, he remembered it that way. She had, too. But they drifted. A day came, and whatever had been there before wasn’t there anymore. Another Parisian love affair ended, nobody could really explain it, and nobody tried.
They angled away from the river, into the 7th Arrondissement, toward Passy, hurrying across the Pont de Solférino, where white snow spun over the black river and the wind sang in the arches of the bridge. “Jean-Claude?” she said, and he stopped.
She looked up at him, there were white crystals of ice in her eyelashes,
frozen tears at the corners of her eyes, and she was shivering. “I think I need to rest for a moment,” she said.
They found a little shelter, in the shallow portal of an ancient building. She burrowed against his chest. “How can there be nothing?” she said plaintively. She was right, the streets were deserted, no bicycle cabs, no people.
“We’re halfway,” he said.
“Only that?”
“A little more, maybe.”
“Jean-Claude, can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“Is there really a movie? Or is it, you know.”
“A movie. Hotel Dorado, we’re calling it. For Continental, maybe. Of course like always, it’s pure air until the great hand from the sky comes down and writes a check.”
“I wondered. Sometimes, I think, men want to run their lives backward.”
“Not women?”
“No.”
Not women? Not ever? It was warm where he held her against him. Slowly he unwound the long muffler, ran it under her chin and around so that her ears were covered.
“Thank you,” she said. “That’s better.”
“Shall we start out again? Sooner we do . . .”
“Listen!” she whispered.
A car? She canted her head, held the muffler away from one ear. He could hear only the hiss of falling snow, but then, faintly, a violin. And then a cello. He looked up the side of the building, then across the street. But the snow made it hard to locate.
“A trio,” she said.
“Yes.”
He looked at his watch. Oh, France! 3:25 on the morning of Christmas, in an occupied city, three friends determine to stay up all night and play Beethoven trios—in a cold, dark apartment. She looked up at him, mouth set hard as though she refused to cry.
Rue de Grenelle, rue Vaneau, tempting to take Invalides, but better to swing wide of the Ecole Militaire complex. Military and security offices had been there before and they would still be in operation, with new tenants. Plenty of Gestapo and French police in the neighborhood. So, find Grenelle again, and take the next small street, less important, in the same direction.
They never heard the car until they were almost on top of it, then they hugged a wall and froze. It was a Citroën Traction Avant, always a Gestapo car because the front-wheel drive worked on nights like these, with chains on the tires. It was idling—perfectly tuned, it hardly made a sound—the hot exhaust melting the snow behind the rear wheel. Through the back window they could see the silhouette of a man in the passenger seat. The driver had left the car and was standing in front of an apartment building, urinating on the front door.
Casson held his breath. The Germans were only fifty feet from them. The driver had left the Citroën’s door ajar, and the passenger leaned over and called out to him. The driver laughed, said something back. Banter, apparently. Taking a piss in a snowstorm, that was funny. Doing it on some Frenchman’s door, that was even funnier. Jokes, back and forth, guttural, thick, incomprehensible. To Casson, it sounded as though somebody was grinding language into broken words that could never be used again. But, he thought, they are in Paris, we are not in Berlin.
The man at the doorway started buttoning up his fly, then, as he hurried toward the car, he said the words “rue de Vaugirard”—an island of French in the German sentence. So, Casson thought, they were going to the rue de Vaugirard, to arrest somebody on Christmas Eve. Citrine’s hand found his, she’d heard it too.
Suddenly the car moved—backward. Casson pressed frantically against the wall, Citrine’s hand closed like a steel claw. Then the wheels spun, caught, and the car drove off down the street. The Germans hadn’t known they were there, they were just making sure they didn’t get stuck in the snow.
An hour later, the apartment on the rue Chardin. There was no heat, and Casson preferred not to turn on the lights, often faintly visible at the edges of the blackout curtains. They shed their outer clothes in the bathroom, hanging them over the bar that held the shower curtain so they could drip into the tub as the snow and ice melted.
“Bed is the only place,” he said. He was right, they were both trembling with the cold, and they climbed into bed wearing their underwear.
At first the sheets were as cold as they were, then the body heat began to work. She took a deep breath and sighed, coming gently apart as the night’s adventure receded.
“Are you going to sleep?” he said.
“Whether I want to or not.” Her voice was faint, she was barely conscious.
“Oh. All right.”
She smiled. “Jean-Claude, Jean-Claude.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Go to sleep.”
He couldn’t—he ached for her.
She sensed what he was going to do, moved close in a way that made it impossible. “I can’t, Jean-Claude. I can’t. Please.”
Why?
As though she’d heard: “You’re going to think a dozen things, but it’s that I can’t feel that way again, not now. If we were just going to amuse ourselves, well, why not? But it isn’t that way with us, you get inside me, that’s no play on words, I mean to say it. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“If it wasn’t a war, if I had money. If I just had it in me, the strength to live . . .”
“You’re right, I’m sorry. It’s just me, Citrine.”
“I know. I know you—you fuck all the girls.” But the way she said it was not unkind.
And even before the sentence ended, she was slipping away. Her breathing changed, and she fell asleep. He watched her for a time. Strange, the way her face worked, she always looked worried when she slept. Sometimes her breathing stopped, for a long moment, then it would start again. She dies, he’d thought years ago. She dies, then she changes her mind.
They woke up in the middle of Christmas Day. The snow had stopped. She wrote the name of a hotel on a scrap of paper, kissed him on the forehead, said “Thank you, Jean-Claude,” and went out into the cold.
29 December, 1940.
He left the office at six-thirty. He had a little money now, from Altmann, and a secretary. A cousin of his named Mireille, from the Morvan, his mother’s side of the family. She was a dark, unhappy woman with three children and an eternally useless husband. She showed up just about the time the money did, so he hired her—it was simply life’s way, he figured, of telling you what you ought to do.
The coldest winter of the century. The price of coal climbed into the sky, the old and the poor got into bed with every scrap of wool they owned and there they found them a week later. German soldiers flooded into Paris, from garrison duty in Warsaw and Prague, and Paris entertained them. Are you tense, poor thing? Have a little of this, and a little of that. England wouldn’t give up. The submarine blockade was starving them, but they had never been reasonable, and they apparently weren’t going to be now. Well, the French would also survive. More or less.
Out on the street, Casson pulled his coat tight around him and turned toward the Métro station at avenue Marceau. Two stops, Iéna and Trocadéro, and he could walk the rest of the way. The Passy station was closer to the rue Chardin, but that involved a correspondance, a change of lines, so if he stayed on the Line 9 train he’d be home in a few minutes. Albertine, tonight. His big, ugly treasure of a farm girl. Something good to eat. Vegetables, cow food—but garlic, salt, a drop of oil, and the cunning way she chopped it all up. Jesus! Was it possible that he’d reached that ghastly moment in life when the belly was more important than the prick? No! Never that! Why, he’d take that Albertine and spread her . . .
“Hey, Casson.”
That voice. He turned, annoyed. Erno Simic, waving his arm and smiling like a well-loathed schoolmate, was trotting to catch up with him. “Wait for me!”
“Simic, hello.”
“I never called—you’re angry?”
“No. Not at all.”
“Well, I been busy. Imagine that. Me. I got phone calls and messages, me
etings and telegrams. Hey, now we know the world is upside down. Still it means a few francs, a few balles, as they say, eh? So we’ll have a drink, on me. I promised a lunch, I’m gonna owe it to you, but now it’s a drink. Okay?”
Paris hadn’t surprised Casson for twenty years but it did now. Simic took him down the Champs-Elysées to avenue Montaigne, one of the most prestigious streets in the city, then turned right toward the river. They worked their way through a busy crowd in front of the Plaza-Athenée, mostly German officers and their plump wives, then walked another block to a residential building. On the top floor a grand apartment with a view to the river had been converted to a very private bar.
Seated at a white piano, an aristocratic woman wearing a black cocktail dress and a pillbox hat with a veil was playing “Begin the Beguine.” Simic and Casson were shown to a table by a fat man in a sharkskin suit draped to hide both him and some sort of weapon. The tables on the teak parquet were set far apart, while the walls were covered with naughty oil paintings of naughty, and exceptionally pink, women. The room was crowded; a beautiful woman at the next table drinking tea, on second glance perhaps a prostitute of the most elevated class. By the window, two French colonels of cavalry. Then a table of dark, mustached men, Armenian or Lebanese, Casson thought. There was a famous ballet master—Russian émigré—sitting alone. In the corner, three men who could have been gangsters or black-market butchers, or both. Simic enjoyed Casson’s amazement, his big smile broadening from ingratiating to triumphant.
“Hah! It’s discreet enough for you, Casson?”
“How long—?”
Simic spread his hands. “Summer, as soon as everything settled down. It belongs to Craveur, right?”