by Alan Furst
“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?”
“No specific offer—but they are waiting to hear from you, and they will do whatever they can.”
“Monsieur Casson, are you a spy?”
“No, I’m not.”
“We shoot spies. Certainly you know that.”
Casson nodded.
“We’re going to send you back now. You can report this conversation to your army officers. And tell them that if they wish to pursue any kind of dialogue, the first step will be to provide evidence of good faith. What we want is this: weapons. Guns, Monsieur Casson. Do you think they will accept that condition?”
“I can’t say. But, why not?”
“What we want are automatic weapons, short-range, rapid-fire machine guns. Six hundred. With a thousand rounds of ammunition for each weapon. The terms of delivery will be spelled out when we receive your signal that the negotiation will go ahead. Do you understand?”
The trip back to Paris took forty-five minutes. It was dark when he was let out, and for a moment he had no idea where he was, somewhere in the streets of eastern Paris. He eventually found a Métro, and rode back to the place des Ternes. He wanted to walk, to think, but it was too cold, so he headed down the rue Poncelet toward the Benoit. Out on the boulevards, the street lamps had been painted blue, to make them less visible to aircraft, but in the narrow rue Poncelet it was almost completely dark.
Midway down the street, a man was sleeping in a doorway. This was not something Casson was accustomed to seeing, the police didn’t allow it, certainly not in that arrondissement. Casson stopped and peered through the darkness. The man’s back was to the street, his overcoat hiked up, the tails moving in the wind. His hat was halfway off, the brim caught between his head and his forearm. His other arm was flung out behind him.
He was dead, Casson knew that. By the way, are you aware that you were followed? It isn’t important, and we took care of it.
Casson stood there, staring, holding his coat around him. Then he started walking, heading back to the hotel.
THE LAWYER
CORBEIL–ESSONNES. 3 DECEMBER.
It was the safest house they had. Thirty kilometers from Paris, it stood invisible behind twelve-foot walls at the edge of the village, with a separate garage that could hide four cars. The property was nominally owned by a company in Stockholm.
4:50 A.M. On the first floor, Ivanic and three others lounged in the kitchen and read newspapers. Two more men stood watch outside. In a parlor on the second floor, a meeting had been in progress since the previous afternoon. Seated at a dining-room table were: Lila Brasova, political commissar to the FTP, who had questioned Casson in the machine shop; an NKVD officer called Juron, of Polish origin and French nationality; Weiss, as liaison officer with Service B; and, chairing the meeting, Colonel Vassily Antipin, a senior executive sent in by Moscow Center. “By way of Berlin,” he’d said dryly.
Square-faced and solid, with neatly combed brown hair, Antipin was in his late thirties. He had enlisted in the GRU, military intelligence, at the age of twenty and had risen to power on the strength of clandestine operations in difficult countries, including recruitment in Bulgarian river villages in the mid-1930s.
Brasova asked him about Berlin.
“It smells of fire,” he said.
Stacked against the wall were some three hundred dossiers of French army officers who had worked in the SR. “The problem is,” Weiss said early on, “that the officer corps is dispersed. Some are prisoners of war in Germany, some have been deported to North Africa, some have fled to London. Some are dead, a few are in hiding. There may be twenty or thirty in Vichy. As we watch Casson we’ll see at least one of them, but he will represent others, and they will be hidden.”
“And the ones who specialize in the French Communist Party?”
“By May of 1939 we’d identified ten officers. There’s one left in Vichy, a lieutenant—much too junior to run an operation like this.”
“What’s Casson like?”
Brasova shrugged. “Intelligent, a good heart, some professional success, some failure. Would like to believe himself a cynic—‘Que l’humanité se débroulle sans moi,’ the world will just have to muddle through without my help. In fact he isn’t like that, quite the opposite.”
“And Kovar?”
“Impossible.”
They broke for dinner, went back to work at ten. Given the difficulty of moving Antipin through enemy lines, Moscow had put together a long agenda. Sometime after four, they returned to the discussion of the SR. Antipin leaned back and knotted his fingers behind his head. “Are they simply trying to see over the wall, is that it? Trying to find out who’s running the FTP—in particular, who’s running Service B.”
“Of course that’s what it is,” Juron said. He was the youngest there, bald at thirty-five, with thick glasses.
“It’s more than that,” Weiss said. “This is a struggle between de Gaulle’s clandestine service and the old-line SR. In that conflict, a working relationship with the FTP is an asset, potentially of great value.”
“To the British,” Antipin said.
“Yes. Whoever wins gets British guns and British money and the aid of the British secret services. De Gaulle, based in London, is ahead in the race, so this could well be SR’s attempt to catch up.”
“What’s British power to us?” Juron said. “We’ve been at war with them, more or less, since 1917.”
“What would you do, then?” Antipin asked.
“Take what they offer, find out everything we can, then cut the lines.” Antipin nodded. This was, Weiss realized, the Center’s point of view. “Comrade Brasova?” Antipin said.
“I would wait and see,” she said. “They will use us, we will use them, the Germans will suffer.”
Outside, the darkness had begun to fade. The bell in the town church rang five. Weiss met Antipin’s eyes. “I’m going to step outside for some air,” he said.
He waited at the back door, Antipin showed up a moment later. They walked on a gravel pathway at the foot of the wall. “The Center has decided that Juron should take care of this,” Weiss said. “Is that it?”
“That’s their preference, but the final decision is up to me.”
“You know what he’ll do, don’t you?”
“Liquidate.”
“Yes. Their answer to everything.”
“We are at war,” Antipin said.
“Can you give me a month
?”
“What for?”
“To do what Moscow wants done here, I need help.”
Antipin thought it over. “I’ll give you a month. But Casson and Kovar may have to be sacrificed—that’s the trade-off. No matter how you put it, spies are spies, and, to the Center, this has all the earmarks of a classic penetration. After all, if the Germans allow some form of SR to exist in Vichy, what would it do? Fight the communists. How to do that? One way is to fake a resistance group, approach the party, and tell them you want to work with them.”
“Maybe,” Weiss said, “but maybe not. I think Brasova is right, what’s proposed is a temporary alliance, and I want to take the next step. For that, I’ll need Casson and Kovar. Can you keep Juron away from them?”
“He stays in Paris, but I won’t let him do anything right now. However, when the time comes, you will have to follow his orders. Agreed?”
Weiss agreed.
They stirred in their sleep, Casson and Hélène, gliding spoon-style through the December night in the battered old Benoit. She reached back, pulling him tighter against her, then sighed and, in a moment, fell asleep again, breathing slow and steady, dreaming away, with a muted cry or mumble every now and then.
He had been just too lonely that afternoon, he could not bear it. So he’d found the travel agency she’d said she worked for and, at six in the evening, had waited for her to appear. She came out alone, walking quickly, head down. Carefully put together, he saw. The long black coat that half the women in the city wore, a lavender scarf to improve it, setting off her dark eyes, her dark hair. She was startled to see him. “Did you just happen to be passing by?”
“No,” he said. “I was waiting for you.”
They headed up the boulevard, paused for traffic at a side street. “Perhaps,” he said, “you’d like to come back to the hotel with me.” She didn’t answer, just took his arm, her shoulder pressed against him as the cars and trucks rumbled past.
Back in his room, he watched her undress in the darkness. A little leaner than he might have preferred, but sinuous, with a narrow waist and supple hips. In bed, buried beneath the thin blanket and their overcoats, they waited to get warm. “Do you miss Strasbourg?” he asked.
“Sometimes. I miss living in a home, just the small things that go on all day. And I miss the flowers.”
“In December?”
“Always. Vases everywhere, mostly red gladioli in December. My father was a florist. Actually, my father was the florist. Les Trois Rosiers—his great-grandfather started it, a long time ago.”
“What happened to it?”
“It went, everything went. I miss that too, working in the shop. We did weddings and funerals, banquets, anything important in the city. My uncle had greenhouses in Italy, in San Remo, a little way down the coast from Menton. It’s all gone, now.”
“What made you leave?”
“By the time I was thirty, it was pretty clear I wasn’t going to get married. Not a conventional marriage, anyhow—within the Jewish community in Alsace. I had my chances: a pharmacist, a teacher, but I wasn’t in love. I had affairs, quiet as could be, but people find out. So, I did what all the unmarried girls in France do—or would if they could. I went to Paris.”
“And fell in love.”
“Yes, a real folie, but it didn’t stop there. I was in love with the city, with everything. Of course for you, born here, it would be different.”
“No, the same.”
“Were you rich?”
Casson laughed. “I never could figure that out. We lived among the rich, in Passy, but we never had any money. Somehow, we survived. When I left the Sorbonne I decided to go into the movie business so, once again, I was living without money, or at least living well beyond what I had. But I was young and I didn’t especially care. I was happy to be alive, and I expected I’d get rich someday. And, like you I suspect, I was always in love. First one, then another. Eventually, I got married. She was from a wealthy family, but she didn’t have anything either. We both thought that was funny. After we got engaged, she was summoned to a lunch with her grandparents and they gave her the bad news. She came to my apartment that afternoon, we told each other it didn’t matter, made love, went out and ate at Fouquet.”
“But later, it didn’t work out.”
“It was good for a few years, then we separated. With the way life went on in the sixteenth, maybe it was inevitable. We started seeing other people—everybody we knew did that so we did it too. Drifted apart, fought too often, decided we’d both be happier if we didn’t live together.”
He reached over to the night table, lit a cigarette and shared it with her. “Looking back now, of course, those days seem like paradise. Even the bad times.”
She nodded. “Yes, for me too. Now I’ll be happy if I can hang on to what I have.”
“The job?”
“Yes. It isn’t so bad, it makes the day pass. What’s extraordinary is that there is an entire class of people who don’t seem to be affected by the war. Some of them French, a few Americans, Argentines, Syrians. They book staterooms; mostly to resorts, in sunny countries. They know about the submarines, but they don’t seem to care.”
“Have you thought about getting out yourself?”
“Yes.” She paused. “Laurette came to me one day, after the registration of Jews last October, and said that Degrave would help me get out. I could go to Algiers.”
“And you didn’t go?”
Slowly, she shook her head. “I thought about it for days, but I was afraid. What could I do? How would I survive? Also, I felt I was abandoning my parents. I’d been able to talk to them once, the day after the invasion. They actually had visas to go to Canada, my brother managed to get them, and space on a steamship—on May tenth. But Rotterdam was being bombed, the city was in a panic, and the dock area was mobbed. They could see the steamship, but they couldn’t get on it. I tried again, two days later, but by then the telephone lines had been cut. Still, I felt that if I stayed in Paris, somehow they would contact me, but they never did.”
“Hélène, what if I asked Degrave again, would you go?”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Now I would.”
Casson woke for a moment—had he heard voices in the hall? No, it was silent. God he was cold, the window was white with frost flowers. He pulled Hélène tighter against him. Crazy to take off all our clothes—to make love like aristocrats. Sirens in the distance, south of them somewhere. It didn’t mean anything. He drifted back toward sleep.
Suddenly, a door opened, another slammed, somebody called out “Odette!” in a shouted stage whisper, and footsteps pounded down the hall.
Hélène sat bolt upright, a hand pressed against her heart. “What time is it?”
Casson rolled out of bed, put on pants and shirt, opened the door a crack, and peered down the corridor. At the end of the hall, the woman who worked nights at the desk was talking to a heavy woman in a nightdress, her hair gathered up into blond tufts and tied with ribbons. When Casson appeared they turned and glared at him for a moment, then went back to whispering.
“Madame, s’il vous plaît, what’s going on?”
“The Japanese, monsieur.”
“The Japanese? Here?”
“No—not here! Over there somewhere. They have sunk the American navy.”
They all stared at one another for a moment, the clerk in a smock and two sweaters, the blond woman barefoot, toenails painted pink, Casson in his shirt and pants, hair still rumpled with sleep.
“It is the end, monsieur,” the blond woman said dramatically. Her eyes were shining with tears.
“What is it?” Hélène called softly.
Casson went back to the room, got undressed, and burrowed under the covers.
“The Japanese have attacked America,” he said. “Defeated their navy.”
“Oh no.”
“It’s for the best. Now they will come into the war.”
“How will they get here?
”
“They will build another navy.”
“A long time, then.”
He had no idea. “A year,” he said, in order to say something.
She held on to him, he could tell she was crying. “It’s too long,” she said.
How long, Casson wondered, would it really take? The Americans would have to land somewhere in Europe. He had no idea what it would take to do that—a million men? Hundreds of ships? What he did know, as a film producer, was what it took to assemble a fifty-guest wedding party. So, the Americans weren’t coming anytime soon.
They lay awake in the darkness. Casson imagined he could almost sense the news as it made its way through the hotel. He had experienced a surge of hope, now he felt it drain away. In the morning, he would have to be Jean Marin again, and for many mornings after that.
“I can’t sleep,” she said. “What time is it?”
“Two-thirty.”
She moved closer, rested her head on his shoulder. He whispered to her, she laughed. Suddenly, a drunk started singing in the hall, somebody opened a door and yelled at him to shut up.
Weiss got off the Métro a stop short of his destination, then walked around for a time, making sure he hadn’t been followed. Soon he’d have to get somebody to watch his back. Now that they’d started to kill Germans, the security noose around Paris was being drawn tight. A new permit needed here, a new rule there, a form in the mail that directed you, in ten days, to call at an office you’d never heard of. It was the same technique the Germans had used against the Jews in the 1930s. But, he thought, not the worst thing that could happen, at least it would drive the sheep his way.
He turned down a tiny passage, stepped over a dead cat—they weren’t eating them yet, but they would—and out onto the fashionable rue Guynemer that bordered the Jardins du Luxembourg. Home and office to one Dr. Vadine, a dentist of genteel Bolshevik sympathies who had, from time to time, assisted Comintern operatives. I hope he’s still in business, Weiss thought. And doing well.