by Alan Furst
She felt his eyes, turned to look at him. Dry, weatherbeaten face, pale hair cut short and plain, eight strokes of a brush would put it in place. Skin never touched by makeup. Faded green eyes with laugh wrinkles at the corners her only feature. But more than sufficient. She met his glance; gave a single shake of the head, mouth tight for an instant. How sad this is, she meant. And I don’t know that we can ever do anything about it.
He acknowledged the look, then by mutual agreement they turned back toward the windows. Tanks on flat cars crept past, canvas stiffened by white frost, at that speed the rhythm of the wheels on the rails a measured drumbeat. Then it was over, a single red lantern on the last car fading away into the distance. Casson and his neighbor exchanged a second look—life goes on—and returned to their compartments.
The train got under way slowly, dark hills on the horizon just visible by starlight. The woman reminded him of someone, after a moment he remembered. A brief fling, years ago, one of his wife’s equestrienne pals—whipcord breeches and riding crops. A long time since he’d thought of her. Bold and funny, full of prerogatives, afraid of neither man nor beast, rich as Croesus, cold as ice, victor in a thousand love affairs. She had a white body shaped by twenty years of bobbing up and down in a saddle, hard and angular, and in bed she was all business, no sentimental nonsense allowed. She did, on the other hand, have delicious, fruit-flavored breath, particularly noticeable when she had him make love to her in the missionary position.
He’d wondered about her—connections with diplomats, months spent abroad, nights in exotic clubs one heard about from friends— wondered if she wasn’t, perhaps, involved with the secret services. Just as he’d wondered what sort of hobbies she pursued with the riding crop. But he never asked, and she never offered. Her life belonged only to her; no matter if she spied, whipped, made millions, she didn’t talk about it.
Now, stupidly, he felt better—just being near a woman. But it was true. He dozed, woke up at Auxerre station. The blackout made the station ghostly, the waiting passengers shapes in the darkness. The doors opened, just enough time for people to get on the train, then closed. The locomotive vented white steam that hung still in the freezing air. He waited for the coach to jerk forward as the engine got under way.
Instead: the door at the end of the corridor was thrown open and a voice called out “Kontrol.” Casson sat up so suddenly it hurt his back. In the corridor, German voices, shouting instructions. What? This couldn’t happen. Once the train leaves Paris, nobody bothers you, the Germans can’t be everywhere. In panic, he twisted to look out on the platform: pacing shadows, silhouettes of slung rifles just visible in the darkness. The darkness. He tested the window, no give. Of course, windows in a railway coach, you had to be strong. Strong enough. A door slammed in the passageway, another opened. Jump out the window, crawl under the train. Across the track. Running full speed. Out into the street. Auxerre. Who did he know? Where did they live? Someone, there was always someone, someone would always help you. The door to his compartment opened. “Kontrol.”
He stood up.
Something in German, a wave of the hand. Sit down. He sat. There were two of them, SS officers, leather coats open to black uniforms with lightning insignia, steel-handled Lugers in high-riding leather holsters. They hadn’t been in the train very long—he could feel the cold air on them.
“Papieren.”
A gloved hand extended. Casson fumbled for his identification in the inside pocket of his jacket. His fingers had gone numb. The passport, the Ausweis, the envelope. He took them out. No, not the envelope. Clumsy, maladroit. His arm had no feeling in it, the hand thick and slow. Take back the envelope. He swallowed, there was something caught in the center of his chest.
“Was ist los?”
No, not this, this doesn’t concern you. He placed passport and travel permit on the glove, started to put the envelope back in his pocket. His hand wouldn’t work at all. He folded the envelope in half and stuffed it in, spreading his lips in what he hoped looked like a smile. Sorry to be so stupid, sorry to be trouble, sorry sir, regret, excuse.
Didn’t work.
Something interesting here. The officer now looked closely at him for the first time. Not very old, Casson thought, in his thirties, perhaps. A fleshy face—fat later on—small eyes, cunning. This job was the most important thing that had ever happened to him. Not in a shop. Not in a garage. Casson looked down. The man hooked a gloved index finger under his chin and raised his head to where he could see Casson’s eyes. What are you? What are you to me? Just one more pale Frenchman? Or a fatal error?
Lazily, the German inclined his head toward the luggage rack. “Valise,” he said softly.
Casson’s hands were shaking so badly he had a hard time getting his suitcase down from the luggage rack. The Germans waited, the heavy-faced one taking a second look at his papers and making a casual remark to his colleague. Casson recognized only one word—Guske. As in, It’s Guske who signed the travel permit, the dossier must be handled in his office. The response was brief, neutral—and something more. Respectful? As in, Well, sometimes you come across these things.
The officer turned on the lamps in the compartment. Whatever was caught in Casson’s chest now swelled, and made it hard to breathe. He fumbled with the lock, finally laying the suitcase open on the seat. It looked harmless enough; two shirts, side by side, one of them fresh from the blanchisserie, the other worn, then folded for packing. There was a nice leather case that held razor and shaving soap. Socks, shorts. The copy of Bel Ami that he’d meant to read on the train.
The heavy-faced officer picked up the book. Held it by the spine and shook it, a slip of paper used as a bookmark fell out and drifted to the floor. Next he felt the front and back covers, riffled the pages, worked a finger down between the spine and the binding and ripped it off, holding it up to the light, checking one side, then the other, then tossing it and the book onto the seat. He reached over, lifted one corner of a shirt, saw nothing very interesting beneath it—a newspaper, perhaps—and dropped it back into place.
They handed Casson back his identity papers and left. He heard them—opening the next door in the passageway, shouting orders— as though they were men in a dream. Very slowly, he slid the papers back into the inside pocket of his jacket. Next to the envelope. His fingers rested on the envelope for a moment. What they would have done to me.
In the dining car, the second seating, 10:30. The only light, flickering candles on the white tablecloths. The woman in the tweed suit was shown to his table. “Monsieur, I hope you don’t mind.” No, not at all, he was glad for the company. The waiter brought a bottle of wine, cold vegetable salad with an oily mayonnaise, nameless fish in railroad sauce—to Casson it barely mattered.
“I am called Marie-Noëlle,” she said. “Meeting on a train, you see, we don’t have to wait ten years for first names.”
He smiled, introduced himself. He would be happy to call her Marie-Noëlle, but he did wonder what the rest might be.
She sighed—it always came to this. There was, she confessed, “a thoroughly disreputable person sometimes addressed as Lady Marensohn,” but it wasn’t really her. The title was by marriage—a husband who had died long ago, something in the small nobility of Sweden, a diplomat of minor status. “Terribly concerned with jute,” she said grimly. “Morning and night.” She herself had been born into a family called de Vlaq, from the Dutch–Belgian border, “even smaller nobility, if that’s possible,” and grown up on family estates in Luxembourg—“they called it wine, but, you know, really . . .”
She smoked passionately—Gitane followed Gitane, lit with strong fingers stained yellow by nicotine—and laughed constantly, a laugh that usually ended in a cough. “To hell with everything,” she said, “that’s what it says on my family crest. Citizen of the evening, resident of Paris since time began, and the only nobility I acknowledge is in good works for friends.”
A German officer covered with medals moved d
own the aisle between tables, his girlfriend followed along behind, vividly rouged and lipsticked, wearing a tight cap of glossy black feathers. When they’d gone by, Marie-Noëlle made a face.
“Don’t care for them?” Casson said.
“Not much.”
“But you can leave, can’t you?”
She shrugged. “Yes. Maybe I will, but, where to go?” “Sweden?”
“Brr.”
“Switzerland, then.”
“Switzerland, Switzerland. Yes, there’s always that. Geneva, gray but possible. On the other hand, the visa. I mean, you have to know . . . God. Well. Not just to nod to. Last September, a friend of mine went through it. She tried the embassies, the Americans, the Portuguese, and the Swiss. Spent hours on the lines but in the end all she could get was a Venezuelan resident card, which cost her a fortune, and, worse yet, the only place she could go with it was Venezuela.”
She stubbed out a Gitane, lit another. “Well, she tries. She does try. She’s positive, she’s cheerful. She’s all the things you’re supposed to be. ‘So different,’ she writes. ‘The Latin culture—sunny one minute, stormy the next. And Caracas—intrigue!’ Of course it’s ghastly, and she’s miserable. It isn’t Paris, it’s a kind of horrid not-Paris. She sees the other émigrés, most of them grateful to be alive, but all they can talk about is when will it end, when can we go back, when can life be what it always was.”
The train slowed, they peered out the window, trying to see past the reflection of the candle flame in the black glass. They were at the edge of a small city, passing the cottages that lined the track. Then came the dark cathedral with tall spires, winding streets, the railway station brasserie, and finally the platform. BOURGES, the sign said. Now a port of entry for the unoccupied part of France governed by Vichy.
The French border police were waiting on the platform, holding their capes tight around them and stomping their feet to keep warm. “More police,” Marie-Noëlle said acidly.
“French, this time.”
“Yes, there’s that to be said for it.” She exhaled smoke through her nose and mouth when she talked. “Tell me,” she said, leaning over the table, her voice lowered, “they didn’t give you too bad of a time, did they? The SS? I was listening, next door, but I couldn’t hear much.”
“Not too bad,” he said.
The train jerked to a stop with a hiss of steam. The gendarmes came down the aisle, asking politely for papers. They knew they were in the first-class dining car, rolled the Madames and Monsieurs off their tongues, had a desultory glance at each passport, then left with a two-fingered salute to the visor of the cap. Only a formality, of course you understand.
“Remarkable,” Marie-Noëlle said, when the police had gone to the next table. “You are perhaps the only person I know who’s ever had a decent photograph in a passport.”
Casson held it up and said “What, this? I wouldn’t let him in my country.”
“Yes, but look here—is this not the aunt kept locked up in the attic?”
He smiled, it was even worse than that.
“Now, monsieur,” she said, a mock-serious note in her voice, “how am I going to persuade you to allow me to buy us a brandy?”
He would not allow it. He insisted on paying for the brandies, and for those that followed. Meanwhile they smoked and talked and made the dinner last as long as they could. Very late at night, after the stop at Lyons, the train started the long run down the Rhône valley, the sky cleared and the moon ran beside them, a yellow disc on the still river.
She grew tired, and reflective, not so sure about the world. “What do you think,” she asked, “in your heart. Must I leave this country?”
“Perhaps,” he said. Peut-être, could be. In diplomacy it meant yes— yes with regret. “Of course,” he went on, “it’s not something I can do, so maybe I shouldn’t be giving advice.”
“Not something you can do?”
“No.”
“What stops you?”
He looked puzzled.
“In a few hours,” she said, “you’ll be in Spain. Sunny Spain, neutral Spain. From there, ships leave daily, to every port in the world. But why wait for a booking on a ship? There is a ferry, in Algeciras, it goes across to Ceuta. One simply pays and walks on. Then, it takes less than an hour, you are in Spanish Morocco. Once there, well . . .”
It was true. Why hadn’t it occurred to him? He had three hundred thousand pesetas in a suitcase, a travel permit for Spain. A thousand stories began this way—an opportunity, a sudden decision, then freedom, a new life. It took courage, that was all. He saw himself doing it: walking off the ferry with raincoat tossed over one shoulder, hat brim turned down, valise in hand, turning to look back one last time at the dark mass of Europe. Why not? What would he be giving up— a movie that would never be made? A woman who was never going to love him again? A city that would never be the same?
But then, from somewhere deep inside, the sigh of common sense. The man with the raincoat and the hat brim turned down wasn’t him. “Perhaps,” he said, “you will join me for a drink, Madame Marie-Noëlle. At Fouquet’s, one of the tables on the boulevard.”
A corner of her mouth turned up in a grin, she flirted with him a little. “Chilly for the outdoor tables, monsieur. No?”
“I meant, in the spring.”
“Ah.” She considered it. “Probably, I will meet you there,” she said, then shook her head slowly, in gentle despair for both of them. “Charming. The last romantic.”
He sat back in the chair; it was very late at night. “It is the only trick I know,” he said. Then, after a moment, “You’re one too.”
“No, no,” she said. “I’m something else.”
Port Bou, the Spanish frontier, 4:40 P.M.
Here the passengers had to leave the train and wait on lines; customs, border formalities. Casson had been through it before, years earlier, and when he’d thought about the crossing it had seemed to him the second most likely place he might be arrested. The passengers stood quietly, nobody made jokes. Cold, thin air in the Pyrenees, jagged ridges, white mist, snowfields fading in the last light. The Guardia sentries pacing up and down the lines were like ghosts from Napoleon’s wars; leather tricorn hats, greatcoats, long, thin rifles that looked like muskets. He searched everywhere for Marie-Noëlle, but she had disappeared. Left the train, apparently. Where—Narbonne? Perpignan? Would she have said? No, probably not. But it was a loss. He’d planned on going through the frontier with her, somebody to talk to, easier to pretend that you weren’t scared.
The line marked Entrada. Two uniformed officers and a civilian sat at a plank table in a shed heated by a smoky wood stove. The line of passengers was kept back twelve feet from the table—a distance where the tension of the examination could be felt but the questions, and the follow-ups, could not be heard. The final line, Entrada. From here the passengers drifted away, in twos and threes, to a coach on the south-bound local, idling at the far end of the station, that ran on the Spanish-gauge track. They walked briskly—really, how had they allowed themselves to worry like that—and made a point of not looking back. There was one couple, elderly, well-dressed, being returned to the French train, and a young woman, being led away by two men in overcoats, but that was all. The young woman looked at Casson, trying to tell him something with her eyes. The men at her side followed the glance—an accomplice, perhaps?—and Casson had to look away. He hoped she’d had time to see that he understood, that he would remember what had happened to her.
Casson got through. They studied his papers, running an index finger under the important phrases. The civilian wore a coat with a fur collar and a pince-nez. “The reason for your visit, señor?”
“For a film, to look at possible locations.”
“What kind of film?”
“A romantic comedy.”
The man passed his papers to one of the Guardia, who stamped Entrada-27 Enero 1941 in his passport and initialed it.
The Spani
sh train was old and dirty, cold air flowed up through the floorboards. All the way to Barcelona he stared out the window, seeing nothing. His mouth was dry, he swallowed but it did not seem to help. The compartment was crowded; two Luftwaffe officers, two women who might have been sisters, a fat, unshaven man who slept for most of the journey. Casson told himself that nothing would happen. He simply had to believe in himself—the world would always respect a self-confident man, and nothing would happen. He was sweating, he could feel it under his arms, even in the chilly compartment, and he tried to be surreptitious about wiping it away from his hairline.
The outskirts of Barcelona. There had been fighting here in 1937. The track was elevated and he could see into apartments; rooms with black flash marks on the walls, charred beams, dressers with drawers pulled out, a bed standing on end. The passengers stared in silence as the train crawled past. Then the fat man woke up and abruptly pulled the curtains closed. Why did he do that? Casson wondered. Was he Spanish? French? Republican? Falangist? Casson swallowed. The man stared at him, daring him to say something. Casson looked at his feet, his fingers touched the envelope in his pocket.
Barcelona station, 8:10 P.M.
The train to the southern coast wasn’t due to leave until 10:20. Casson went to the station buffet, took a dry bun with a crust of pink icing and a tiny cup of black coffee, and found a table by the back wall. Of course he was watched.
For their eyes, he played the traveler. Dug into his valise, retrieved his copy of Le Matin and spread it out on the table—JAPANESE FOREIGN MINISTER WARNS U.S.A. NOT TO INTERFERE IN ASIAN AFFAIRS. Took traveler’s inventory, checking his railway ticket and passport, putting French francs in this pocket, pesetas in that pocket. In fact, he needed to change money, and reminded himself to keep the receipt from the cambio. The border police had recorded the amount of French francs he’d brought into the country and they’d want a piece of paper when he went back out.