by Alan Furst
Money. He needed money.
Before the war, moving secret funds from Moscow to Paris was easy, using couriers or borrowed bank accounts or phantom companies. In fact, the party had been notorious for its money. On a trip to London during the spy panics of the 1930s, he’d seen tabloid headlines plastered all over the kiosks—HE BETRAYED HIS COUNTRY FOR RED GOLD. Weiss smiled at the recollection. He supposed that calling money gold made it more sinister.
He entered the dentist’s building and climbed the stairs. The receptionist, an attractive woman in her forties, said, “Do you have an appointment, monsieur?”
He waited a moment in silence. The woman was Vadine’s longtime mistress, she’d last seen Weiss in 1939. “No,” he said, “I don’t.” Again he waited. She was pretending she didn’t know him.
“Doctor is very busy today, monsieur.”
“Tell him it’s Monsieur Berg.” Weiss paused a moment. “I’m an old friend. He’ll remember me.”
They stared at each other, she lowered her eyes. “Very well,” she said.
He stood by the desk and waited. Why did he have to spend time on these errands? He needed help, somebody smart who could take orders and get things done. A door opened at the end of the hallway, he heard the whine of a drill, then an urgent, whispered conversation. Vadine came toward him, wiping his hands on a towel. The receptionist was right behind him.
“What do you want?” Vadine said. He was a thin, nervous man, perpetually irritated, and now he was frightened.
“Your help,” Weiss said.
“Can’t we talk about this later?”
Weiss shook his head slowly. “It won’t wait. We’re having difficulty moving funds into the Occupied Zone.”
“Oh,” Vadine said, “money.” He was clearly relieved. Apparently he’d feared they would ask him for more than that.
“Yes. Five thousand francs would help.”
Vadine nodded. “All right,” he said. “I’ll get it for you. Is there some way we can do this . . .”
“Without meeting?”
“Yes.”
“Of course.”
The receptionist said, “It would be better if you didn’t come here.”
Weiss agreed, told Vadine that a young woman would contact him in a few days, and left immediately. They didn’t want him there, he didn’t want to be there.
Outside, he headed back toward the Métro. His next call was on the other side of the city—a socially prominent woman whose father owned a coal mine. He had two other donors in mind—add Brasova’s contributors and some money from the unions, and they could survive for another month.
3:30 P.M. Casson and Degrave sat at the bar of a café on the place Blanche. Dry snow floated past the window and covered the outdoor tables.
Degrave had spent three days in Vichy. “I couldn’t wait to get out of there,” he said. “It’s like a comic opera. It says it’s a government, it says it’s France, but it’s all a fraud. Everybody in uniform—sashes, medals, gold braid—you expect them to sing and dance.” He ran a hand over his face. “Have a cognac with me.”
“All right.”
Degrave ordered the cognac. “We had meetings that went on for hours. I told them everything about your contact with the FTP, and the demand for guns, but nobody wanted to make a decision.”
The barman set two cognacs in front of them and Degrave paid.
“Is it over?”
“I can go ahead, if I want to, but there won’t be a lot of support. My friends will help us, when they can. We’ll have to do most of it ourselves.”
“They don’t like the idea?”
“They don’t like the risk. The problem is, we need the alliance, it will allow us to do things we can’t do ourselves. But there are difficulties. For example, we don’t have the guns. We’ve been disarmed, which is what happens to defeated nations, and the Germans, using the Armistice Control Commission, are making sure it stays that way.”
“But you—of course you know arms merchants.”
“Out of business. For the moment, anyhow. Put out of business by national industries running twenty-four hours a day. We’ll have to work with the black market.”
“You mean criminals, smugglers.”
“Yes. If we can find somebody, we’ll be allowed to spend whatever it costs. That much I did get. But I want to make sure you understand that this is well beyond what we originally asked you to do. So, if you’re going to say no, say it now.”
Casson hesitated, but he couldn’t say no. “You’ll have to help me get started.”
“The inspector who found you up in Clichy is an old friend. He’ll know somebody—there isn’t much he doesn’t know.”
“How would I find him?”
“He’s at the main préfecture. On Thursday mornings he supervises the office that accepts denunciations.”
Casson nodded.
“This will work,” Degrave said. “It won’t be easy, but it needs to be done. The principle is right, believe me it is, I just couldn’t get the people in Vichy to see it that way.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know—tradition, living in the past. French military officers don’t like secret committees, they believe in chain of command. They don’t like communists, and they don’t believe in partizan operations—assassination, dynamite, luring the enemy into reprisals against civilians. They think of that as terrorism, that it turns the population against the resistance.”
“Are they wrong?”
“They could be right.” His tone was almost sarcastic. “Wait a few months and see what the Germans do here—then let me know what you think.”
They had another cognac. Degrave went to the back of the café and made a phone call. When he returned, Casson said, “I want to ask you about Hélène.”
“You’re seeing her?”
“Yes. Now and then.”
“She’s been a real friend to Laurette.”
“She mentioned that you offered to help her leave the country.”
“I did. She wanted to go, then decided against it.”
“She’s changed her mind.”
“I don’t blame her,” Degrave said. “It’s a little more complicated now, but we can probably do it. I’m in Paris for the next three weeks, then I go down to Vichy. Unfortunately, there’s a limit to how many people we can move. She may have to wait until February, or March. Tell her I’m working on it. Meanwhile, she should be careful—respect the curfew, avoid the black market.”
The préfecture, on Thursday morning, was a living hell. Mobs of people; some of them scared, all of them uncomfortable. Who knew what buried sins might suddenly spring to life in a place like this?
Daily life in Paris had always churned up business for the flics, but the Occupation, with its curfew, black market, and hundreds of petty rules and regulations, had provoked a tidal surge of activity at police headquarters. A madhouse, Casson thought. Permits and papers to be applied for, changed, renewed. Summonses answered, fines paid. And all of it required standing on line—one of the few Anglo-Saxon perversions that Parisians truly disliked.
Casson had to present his identity card three times; first at the courtyard entry, then in an office, then again in another office, where the information was laboriously copied down in a huge, frightening ledger. Each time his heart pounded, but the false identity held. He also had to show his work permit—Marin was a claims investigator for a large insurance company, a job that allowed him to travel, and explained his presence in any town or neighborhood.
Worst of all, for Casson, was that his progress through the tight-lipped crowds in the maze of corridors turned up two acquaintances from his former life. In one case, a woman who had worked in the office of a film distributor. Their eyes met, Casson turned sharply and walked away. Then he came face to face with a distant social connection of his former wife, a man who called out “Jean Casson!” in a great, rumbling voice. Casson simply said “Pardon?” and glared at the man, who
apologized and retreated into the crowd.
Room 15 was off by itself on the second floor, in a cul-de-sac isolated by some ancient renovation. Casson was given a brass disc with a number on it and told to wait. There were two other people on the wooden benches and only later did Casson realize that he never saw their faces. He sat there for almost an hour, staring into space, the monotony broken only by the delivery of the mail, a large canvas sack so heavy it had to be dragged across the floor before being left by the secretary’s desk.
The inspector was just as Casson remembered him. A heavy old man with thick white hair, a battered face, and pale blue eyes. “Monsieur Casson,” he said, jovial as before, apparently quite pleased to see him. “I am sorry you had to wait in that shithouse out there, but we must pretend that all is as usual.”
Casson said he understood.
“Dégueulasse!” Sickening. “The boss makes me do this once a week because he knows I hate it. A national illness, this business. We get them all, jilted lovers, angry wives, the petits commerçants trying to wreck the competition. And the rather ordinary people who get up one morning and look at their neighbor and say to themselves, see how they live! What right do they have to such good fortune?”
“Sad,” Casson said.
“Yes, I suppose that’s the word.” He paused a moment. “But nothing new. Back when I was young I worked in the countryside, a small town in the Sarthe. We used to get letters from a man whose apple tree had a branch that grew over a neighbor’s fence. When the apples fell on the ground, the neighbor ate them.”
“The scoundrel.”
“It’s funny, yet it’s not funny. This man brooded over his lost apples, and the idea that someone else might profit from his labor drove him to the edge of madness. Well, in those days it didn’t matter. We’d read his letters, put them in a file—he accused the neighbor of everything he could think of—and forget about them. But now, with the Occupation, and the Gestapo . . .” He looked grim and shook his head in sorrow. “Well, to hell with the things you can’t change, right?”
Casson nodded. “Our mutual friend suggested I come to see you.”
“How can I help?”
“We need to buy—”
The inspector smiled. “I’ve heard it all,” he said.
“Guns.”
“Meaning?”
“Submachine guns, a few hundred.”
The inspector scowled. “Morphine, not a problem. White slaves, maybe. But that—” He let it hang.
“It’s important,” Casson said.
“It may not be possible.”
“We have to try.”
The inspector stared at him. Finally he sighed. “I hope you know what you’re doing.” He took a fountain pen from his pocket and deliberately unscrewed the cap. He hesitated a moment, wrote a few words on a slip of paper, blew the ink dry, and handed it to Casson. Then he stood abruptly and walked to the window.
“We have dinner with our daughter out in Thiais tonight, and I worry about the roads. Snow, it said in the paper. Meanwhile, you can memorize that.”
Casson worked at it, it wasn’t very hard. “Vasilis,” he said. “Greek?”
Staring out the window, the inspector shrugged. “Greek, Turkish, Bulgarian. Just keep asking till you hear one you like.”
The inspector returned to his desk, took the piece of paper from Casson, leaned forward, and said, “Some personal advice. You should keep in mind that these people in Vichy have to walk a certain line. What they are doing with you is all well and good. I don’t know that it matters, but it might. However, the rest of the time, they are part of the government. Which means doing what Pétain and Laval and their friends think they ought to be doing—working against the enemies of France. That’s a big category, a lot fits in it. If the war ended tomorrow, and Britain won, they’d say, ‘Look what we did, we were on the right side.’ On the other hand, if the war ends tomorrow and Germany wins, God forbid, they could say the same thing.”
“All right,” Casson said after a moment. “I understand.”
“I hope you do. Maybe you don’t like it, but that’s the way life is. Not that we’re any better. When the Germans took over, the préfecture went back to work, just like it always had. The files were all in place, and if a call came and somebody said, ‘Send over Pierre’s dossier’ in a German accent, there went Pierre. Comprends?”
“Yes.”
“Still a patriot?”
“Trying,” Casson said.
The inspector smiled.
SS-Unterscharführer—Corporal—Otto Albers strolled up and down the rue St.-Denis, where two or three women were posed in each doorway. From the way he looked them over, casual and thoughtful at once, it was clear that he considered himself a connoisseur, a man who knew precisely what he wanted and would insist on having it. To the women in the doorways there wasn’t much new in that. They smiled or sneered, opened their coats to give him a glimpse of the merchandise, made kisses in the air, or just looked haughty—I have not always been as you see me today. This last was not easy, wearing red panties or nothing at all under a bulky coat, but a proven technique with German customers. “Hey, Fritz, got a big wiener?” one of them called to Albers. But that was an act of spontaneous resistance, she’d already given up on him.
In fact, whores were not really what Albers wanted—there were dangers here, one had to be careful of one’s health—but he had been driven to it. Before the war, life in this area had always gone his way, he’d never had to pay for it. In what the Americans called the Roaring Twenties, he’d done his roaring in the nightclubs of Berlin, where sad days—a war lost, inflation, ruin—led to wild nights. What those girls wouldn’t do! Nothing he’d ever been able to think up. His complicated suggestions had always been met with greedy enthusiasm. Ach ja! How fine to encounter such an ingenious gentleman.
In the thirties, his luck held. Joining the Nazi Party in 1933, he’d made good use of the blond maidens whose patriotic duty it was to fuck his brains out. Usually in a forest, on a carpet of pine needles, but he’d learned to live with that. The fantasies were pretty much the same, only the girls had given up slinking in favor of frolicking, the prescribed form for Aryan womanhood. Sullen ennui gave way to lusty giggles and they saved a bundle on the eye shadow.
But Paris was a different proposition. Stationed at Gestapo headquarters, essentially a military clerk, he discovered that Frenchwomen were not quite as he’d imagined. Many of them wouldn’t have anything to do with Germans, which was understandable, but some would. Unfortunately, the best of those went to the officers, and what remained for the enlisted men was not to Albers’s taste. Very materialistic, he thought. They didn’t want exotic adventures, they wanted little gifts.
For a long time, he tried. A chubby redhead, who worked in a shop; an overworked housewife, her husband off somewhere; but they turned him down. For one thing, there were language difficulties. He wasn’t sure how the French talked about such things, to be subtle or artful was out of the question. “What,” they said, freezing up, “do you want?” Forced to say words from a dictionary, he came off as a boor or a pervert, or both.
But none of this mattered on the rue St.-Denis. You paid for your pleasures and the women were quick to figure out what you wanted and what you would pay to get it.
A gray, bleak afternoon, Albers walked with hands in pockets, past frowzy blondes and swarthy Corsicans, past a fat girl stuffed into a child’s jumper, past a dominatrice wearing a broad leather belt and a fearsome scowl. Past housemaids and Marie Antoinettes and femmes fatales with cigarette holders. Oh the trashy circus of it, he thought, yearning for the giggling pine maidens in their dirndls.
But wait, wait one minute, what have we here? Brown hair snipped off in a pageboy, tatty old coat, submissive little smile, spectacles, and holding no less than a Bible in both hands. Both mittens. A mouse! Why not? It was, Albers thought, at least a beginning.
EVREUX. 14 DECEMBER.
They drov
e north in the late afternoon, slowly. With snow and ice on the roads, the old Renault skidded now and then. Bare trees, empty fields. Weiss did not like the countryside in the winter.
He was a doctor that day, which allowed him, under Occupation rules, to drive the car. A pediatrician, working in the factory districts. Surprising, the number of doctors and nurses in the party— a year or two working with the poor and they joined up. But, of course, nothing guaranteed anything; the doctor who wrote under the name Céline had worked with the poor, and now shrieked against the Jews on the radio.
Outside the town of Mantes he had to apply the brakes and slid to a stop behind a Wehrmacht truck. Troops with rifles between their knees sat on facing benches.
“Look at them,” Ivanic said.
“Better not,” Weiss said. “They don’t like to be looked at.”
Slow truck, Weiss thought, maybe he should pass. But there was possibly a motorcycle in front, or a staff car, and they might stop him. His papers were good. A doctor’s black bag was on the seat in the back, and Ivanic would be explained as a patient. This man has tuberculosis, please don’t get too close to him. Sir.
Weiss looked at the men in the truck. A sergeant sat on the end of the bench, his white face vacant, almost hypnotized. Weiss pulled out to pass, the Renault coughed and sputtered. Slowly, he overtook the truck. Then he saw a car speeding toward him. Now this, he thought. The other driver saw he was stuck in the passing lane and slowed to a crawl, but the driver of the truck never touched his brakes. Weiss finally pulled back in—behind another Wehrmacht truck. Apparently he was in the middle of a convoy.
“Where are they going, do you think?” Ivanic said.
“One of the ports, Caen or Antwerp. Off to Russia, maybe.”
“That must be it,” Ivanic said. Then, softly, to the men looking out the opening in the canvas cover, “Good-bye.”
The Russians were fighting back now, finally. It took forever to get anything organized in that place, Weiss thought. With them, chaos was fine art. He’d been there twice—more than enough. Ordered to Moscow in 1934 and again in ’37, he’d somehow survived both purges. He’d made a point of staying away from the cliques, the khvosts, and luck had handed him one or two of the right bosses. Also, he kept his mouth shut, kept his opinions to himself. In Paris, before the war, he’d met Willi Muenzenberg, who ran magazines and cultural events for the Comintern. A law unto himself, Muenzenberg—Moscow could say what it wanted, he was a citizen of the world. “We should get together sometime,” he told Weiss. “And talk things over.” It never happened, Weiss made sure it never happened. In the days after the Germans reached Paris, amid the general disorder, Muenzenberg was beaten up and hanged from a tree.