by Alan Furst
“No. It can’t be. Of course, we both know people who’d like to ignore the whole thing—just try to get along with them. But you know the saying, le plus on leur baise le cul, le plus ils nous chient sur la tête.” The more you kiss their ass, the more they shit on your head.
“Some people used to say that even before the war,” Casson said.
Lazenac nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Now and then they did.” He poured himself some more wine. “Where are you from, Marin?”
“Paris.”
“I can hear that, but one of the bons quartiers, right?”
“Yes.”
“So what are you doing down here?”
“No money.”
“No friends?”
Casson shrugged and smiled. Of course he had friends and some of them—one or two of them anyhow—would have helped. But if he went anywhere near his old life he was finished, and so were they.
“I’m doing a job tonight,” Lazenac said. “We’re going to take something from the Germans and sell it. There are three or four of us, but we can always use one more. I’m not sure about the money but it’ll be more than you’re earning now. How about it?”
“All right.”
“We’ll meet at the porte de la Chapelle freight yards, the rue Albon bridge, about eight. Have a shave, and give your jacket a brush.”
Casson nodded. Was Lazenac just being kind?
“Some of the people we talk to, maybe you can do a better job than we can. Want to try it?”
Casson said he did.
“Number one hundred and thirty-eight.”
By now the room was warm, a fly buzzing against the grimy window. Casson walked up to the counter, eyes down. The clerk behind the grilled window had a small face, pink scalp, the eyes of a terrier. He looked at Casson a moment longer than he needed to. Well well.
Casson slid the coat across the polished counter. No rueful smiles, no jokes. The urge was powerful but he fought it off. He trudged back to the wooden bench, let his mind wander, tried not to watch the clock on the wall.
“One hundred and thirty-eight?”
Casson stood.
“Monsieur, will you take a hundred and eighty francs?”
What?
“Yes,” he said, headed for the counter before they came to their senses. What in the name of heaven—maybe the thing actually had value. His wife, Marie-Claire—they’d been separated for years— used to suspect the little paintings they bought at the flea markets were lost masterpieces. You don’t know, Jean-Claude, poor Cézanne may have paid his laundress with this, see how the pear reflects the light. But a coat? Was it llama, chamois, something exotic?
The clerk pulled a pin from the corner of a packet of ten-franc notes and, using a practiced thumb and forefinger, snapped eighteen of them into a pile. As he slid the money and the pawn ticket across the counter his eyes met Casson’s: a sad day for us, monsieur, when a gentleman of our class is forced to pawn his overcoat.
Outside, Lazenac was leaning against a wall, smoking a cigarette.
“Let’s go have a little something,” Casson said.
Another liter of Malaga, then he headed back to Clichy. He would eat. A bistro around the corner from his hotel had fried potatoes and the smell drove him crazy every time he went past. With the dinner you got a piece of stewed chicken, called coquelet, a polite way of saying the rooster got old and died.
Shit, he thought, I’m rich. He could pay a week on his hotel, sixty francs, and thirty for a meal. And then there was Lazenac’s “job” out at the porte de la Chapelle. If he didn’t get thrown in jail, he’d have even more. From there, he went on to become one of the wealthiest men in Europe, and today, his portrait hangs in every lycée in France, this beloved entrepreneur who—
Oh the Malaga.
He hadn’t felt this good for a long time. In July, on the run from the Germans, he’d been about to leave the country when love—and love was hardly enough of a word for it—had driven him back to France. Pure madness, a folie de jeunesse at the age of forty-two, and he’d gotten just what he deserved. Because, when he went looking for her, she was gone. Why? He didn’t know. She hadn’t been arrested, and she hadn’t fled in the middle of the night. She had packed her bags and paid her bill and left the hotel. Fin, like the end of a movie.
June 1941, off the Normandy coast, just at the moment of escape, as the fishing boat turned toward England, he had jumped into the sea and swum for the shore, British special operatives waving their Stens and calling him names. Walking all night, he’d made his way to a cottage he owned at the edge of Deauville, rented to an oil-company lawyer and his wife. But they were gone and the Germans had fixed lead seals to the doors, with tags stating that the house, in a strategic area, had been declared off-limits to civilians.
Too bad, but maybe it didn’t matter. He’d had a thousand francs, faked papers, and love in his heart. Had crossed the line into the Zone Non-Occupée, the ZNO, then south to Lyons, then up the hill to “their” hotel. Then, a clerk: “I’m sorry, monsieur. . . .” She had gone. No mistake in identity possible, she was well known; the film actress called Citrine, not a star exactly but certainly not somebody who could simply fade away. She was just—gone. Did she know he had escaped the Germans? Did she panic when he disappeared? Had she simply fallen in love with somebody else? He didn’t think so, but what he did know was that with her—a life of highs, lows, tears, chaos—anything was possible.
He survived it—maybe he survived it. Wandered north for a time, to Bourges, to Orléans, to Nantes. Where he’d been a stranger. Always a bad thing in France, and now a dangerous thing—just waking up in these places felt wrong.
So he came home to Paris to die.
He was tired, sat on a bench in a little park. A woman strolled over, gave him a look. He shrugged—sorry, I’d like to, but I can’t afford it. She was heavy and matronly, like the headmistress in a school. Fine theatre to be had there, he thought. “Maybe next time,” he said. She looked sad, went off down the street. The sun was low, orange flame in a puddle of dirty water on the cobblestones. What was it, Friday? Maybe. September—he was sure of that, anyhow. He should have asked how much, maybe they could have struck a deal.
8:10 P.M. Porte de la Chapelle freight yards. Casson stood on a pedestrian bridge above the tracks. Rails crisscrossed into the distance, a dull sheen in the last of the twilight. Below him, a train of empty boxcars was being made up by a switching engine. A long whistle echoed off the hillside, a cloud of brown smoke drifted over the tarred beams of the bridge. From where he stood he could see Lazenac and his friends, gray shadows in workers’ clothing, heads down, hands in pockets.
At the end of the bridge Lazenac introduced him to Raton— small and wiry, with sharp eyes and a clever smile—and Victor. He was simply Jean. They walked east, along the edge of the yards. Not taking it easy, exactly, but not in any hurry; going to work, there’d still be plenty left when they got there. Across the street, a row of warehouses, rusty iron gates chained shut. As they passed an alley, Lazenac made a small motion with his hand, a truck’s engine sputtered to life and backed away, deeper into the shadows. Another hundred meters and they reached the main entry to the railyards: a striped barrier bar lowered across the road, an Alsatian shepherd in the alert prone position. Wehrmacht military police lounged around a guard-hut. Nobody said anything, nobody’s eyes met, but the feeling was like Friday night in a workers’ bar—the fight had to happen, the only question was when.
Five minutes later, well out of sight of the guards, they stopped by a wall. Ten feet high, old plaster cracked and peeling. Two handmade ladders lay flat in the weeds. Raton and Victor set one of them against the wall and braced the bottom. Lazenac climbed to the top, took the second ladder as it was handed up, and lowered it carefully down the other side of the wall. He put one foot across, then shifted his weight gracefully and stood on the second ladder. “You’re next,” he called to Casson in a stage whisper. Casson worked hi
s way up the awful thing—barely wide enough to get a foot on each rung. He was scared now, not so much of the Germans, but of being asked to do something he wouldn’t be able to do.
As he neared the top, Lazenac said, “Watch your hands.” A moment later he saw why: broken glass—wine bottles had been cemented into the cap of the wall. Casson took a deep breath, got one foot over, balanced, then swung across. He did it wrong—he knew it an instant before it happened—and began his backward tumble to the ground. Only he didn’t fall, because Lazenac saw it coming, reached up and grabbed him by the belt and forced his weight back on the ladder. “Merci bien,” Casson said, breathing hard.
“Je vous en prie.”
On the other side of the wall, Casson knelt by some kind of storm sewer, the open end of a drainage culvert. Over time, the outflow had cut itself a channel, some three feet deep, into the hillside. When the others were down the ladder, Lazenac led them single file, crouched low, along the gulley. “Stay close to the ground,” Raton whispered to him. “If the schleuh catch you in here they’ll break your head.”
At the foot of the hill, they waited. A busy night: in the distance, the sound of yard engines chugging up and down the tracks, and the steel clash of boxcars being coupled. Directly in front of them were flatbed cars stacked with peeled logs, probably cut in the forests of the Massif Central and now en route to Germany. After what seemed to Casson like a long time, the red glow of a track lantern moved toward them and Lazenac said, “At last, the cheminots.” Railwaymen.
There were two of them. They shook hands all around, then the one with the lantern said, “It’s about two hundred meters up ahead. Third track in.”
“An SNCF car,” the other said. “7112.”
“All right,” Lazenac said. “We’re on our way.”
“Keep an eye out for the yard security.”
“Thanks for everything, we’ll settle up on the weekend—same as before.”
“See you then. Vive la France.”
“Yeah,” Lazenac said. They both laughed.
The lantern faded away down the track, Lazenac led them in the other direction. Casually, without stealth—every right to be here. The SNCF car stood high above its cast-iron wheels. A wire seal secured the door handle. From inside his jacket Lazenac produced an iron bar about two feet long. He worked it through the loop and put his weight on it until the wire snapped. Standing on the metal rungs beside the door, he pushed it open and ran the beam of a flashlight up and down the stacked cargo. Cotton sacks piled to the ceiling, stenciled with the name of the company and the label SUCRE DE CANNE. Sugar.
Lazenac swung inside and reappeared a moment later carrying a sack. Victor stood below him. Lazenac dropped the sack on Victor’s shoulder and Victor then headed back toward the hillside. Casson was next. “Don’t worry,” Lazenac said. “You’re stronger than you think.”
Who was strong was Lazenac. He swept a sack into the air and lowered it onto Casson’s shoulder. Casson felt his knees buckle and said “Merde” under his breath. Raton, leaning against the freight car, laughed, then patted him on the arm.
He moved off, swaying at every step, but he wasn’t going to fail. Up ahead, Victor was plodding along at a steady pace. Casson went about ten steps, then, the sour voice of authority: “All right— just where do you think you’re going with that?”
Casson turned to look. Some kind of railroad guard—an official armband, a whistle. He was tapping his palm with a long, wooden bâton blanc, a policeman’s club. “Put it down, you,” he said to Casson.
I’ll never be able to pick it up again. Lazenac leaned out of the open doorway and rapped the man on the head with the iron bar. For a moment there was dead silence.
“More?”
Indignant, the guard rubbed furiously at the spot where he’d been hit. “Are you crazy?” He grabbed the silver whistle around his neck and put it to his lips. Raton kicked him in the stomach and he folded in half. Lazenac jumped down off the boxcar and tore the whistle off his neck, then the two of them beat him senseless. When he lay full length on the cinders and didn’t move, Casson adjusted the sack on his shoulder as best he could and headed for the wall.
Somehow, he got himself up the ladder. How he did it he would never know, but he reached the top, using both hands to haul himself up a rung at a time. When he stopped to rest, panting like an engine, he discovered that Victor was waiting for him at the top of the ladder on the other side. “Now, just lift it across—I’ll help you—and try not to break the glass.”
Casson looked puzzled.
“Why let them know how we did it? There’s a war on, you never know when you might want to get into a railyard.”
The truck was waiting for them a little way up the street. A small Citroën delivery van—camionette—with a shutter in the back instead of doors and the name of a bakery painted on the side. Victor rolled the shutter up and tossed his sack in. Casson did the same— secretly very proud of himself when the weight made the truck bounce on its springs. A minute later, Lazenac and Raton showed up. “You know where you’re going?” Lazenac asked the driver.
“The rue Hennequin. In the seventeenth.”
“Out by the Ternes Métro.”
“What’s it called?”
“Ma Petite Auberge.”
The driver snickered—my little country inn. “Mon petit cul,” he said. My little backside.
Lazenac laughed. “Well, when you have a restaurant, that’s what you’ll call it.” He leaned into the cab of the truck and said, “Keep a cool head, Michot. There’ll be Gestapo cars, Germans, a real circus.”
“We’ll be fine.”
Casson and Lazenac rode the Métro out to the 17th. It was sad on the train. Before the war, that time of night, there would have been waiters going home in their black jackets and white aprons, lovers who couldn’t wait to get into bed, and the strange old birds one always saw—Sanskrit professors, stamp collectors—going out to eat cassoulet or heading up to Montmartre to give the girls a bad time. Now, people stared at the floor, their spirit broken.
“For us,” Lazenac said, “getting hold of the stuff is the easy part.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Casson said. “What’s the price?”
“Oh, maybe three hundred francs a kilo—but not for the quantity we’ve got. Tonight we’ll try to sell a hundred kilos.”
“So, two fifty?”
“Tiens!” Lazenac said with a grin—wouldn’t that be nice.
The train stopped at Abbesses, idling for a time in the empty station. Casson smoothed his lapels, trying to make them lie flat. His face burned like fire, he’d shaved close, using a three-month-old razor blade. Cleaned his shoes with a rag, borrowed a tie from the old man down the hall, and that was about the best he could do. At least, he thought, looking down at his feet, his socks were still in decent shape. It was the socks that went first. A whore he knew said she only took customers whose socks were in good condition. One of Casson’s fellow lodgers had shown him how he used a pen to color in the skin that showed white in the holes.
Lazenac dropped a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry too much,” he said, as though reading Casson’s thoughts. “It’s all in your face—who you are.”
“Once upon a time, maybe, but now . . .”
Lazenac smiled, only one side of it really worked. “No,” he said, “life’s not like that.”
10:30 in the evening in the rue Hennequin. Some restaurants lived secret lives, others spread out into their streets. This was the second kind; a green-and-gold façade, a line of handsome automobiles. A Horch, a Lancia Aprilia. In the back seat of an open sedan, a redhead with a dead fox around her neck was smoking like a movie star. On the street: German officers in shiny leather, boots and belts and straps; their girlfriends, wearing plenty of rouge and eye shadow and black stockings; and the strange tidal debris—the Count of Somewhere, Somebody the art dealer—that flowed into conquered cities.
“We go around the b
ack,” Lazenac said.
Down the alley the door to the kitchen was propped open with a chair. The air was thick with clouds of garlicky steam, frying fat, old grease, and lye soap. Lazenac spoke to one of the cooks and a waiter appeared a moment later. “Oh, it’s you,” he said to Lazenac. “You have something for us?”
“Sugar,” Casson said. “As much as you like.”
Their eyes met, the waiter stared at him.
“The patron around?” Casson said.
“I’m the one you see.”
“Maybe we’ll come back when he’s around.”
“Don’t be smart.”
“Thursday? How would that be?”
“Now look—”
“Au revoir.”
It took a minute for the waiter to run off and get the owner. A true beauf, Casson thought—from beau-frère, brother-in-law. Stocky and pink and mean. He framed himself in the doorway and put his hands on his hips. “So, what’s the big problem?”
“No problem,” Casson said. “What’s the price for sugar tonight?”
“I don’t know. What do you want?”
“Lebec is offering two fifty. And next week we’ll have butter.”
“Butter.”
“Yes.”
“How much sugar?”
“A hundred kilos.”
“Hmm. That’s, ah, twenty-five thousand francs.”
“That’s what Lebec said.”
“Then go see Lebec.”
“If you like.”
“No, wait a minute, I’m only kidding. Save yourself the Métro ticket—I’ll give you twenty-two five for the whole thing. That’s fair, isn’t it?”
“How about twenty-three. C’mon, be a good guy.”
“You’re taking advantage of my good nature, you know.”
“I know. But, what the hell.”
“All right. Where is it?”
“Out in front.”
“Have them bring it around.”
Le Diable Vert. Midnight.
Twelve hundred francs!
In times gone by he’d spent more than that on a suit, but life changed, didn’t it, and by moonlight mathematics he was richer than he’d ever been. And, oddly enough, people—some people anyhow—seemed to sense it. Certainly the working girls knew—smiles, whistles, coats thrown open from every doorway on the rue Moncey—but it was their vocation to see into men’s souls and on the way they would naturally stop to count what was in their pockets.