by Alan Furst
A fashionable restaurant, once upon a time, but no more. It had fallen into a strange, soft gloom, deserted, with dust motes drifting through a bar of sunlight that had managed to work its way between the drapes. The black lacquer was chipped, the gold dragons faded, the waiter sat at a corner table, chin propped on hand, picking horses from the form sheet in the Chinese newspaper.
“Well, Jean-Claude,” Langlade said, “now we’re really in the shit.”
“It’s true,” Casson said.
“And I worry about you.”
“Me?”
“Yes. Life under German rule is going to be bad, brutal. And it’s going to demand the cold-blooded, practical side of our nature. But you, Jean-Claude, you are a romantic. You sit in a movie theater somewhere, wide-eyed like a child-it’s a street market, in ancient Damascus! A woman takes off her clothes for you-she’s a goddess, you’re in love!”
Casson sighed. His friend wasn’t wrong.
“That must change.”
Langlade took a sip of the rose he’d ordered with lunch and scowled. He was ten years older than Casson, tall and spare and extremely well-dressed, with iron-colored hair going white over the ears, large features, dark complexion, and a mouth set in perpetual irony- life was probably not going to turn out all that well, so one had better learn to be amused by it. He raised an eyebrow as he said, “You have a bicycle?”
“No.”
“We’ll get to work on it. Immediately. Before all the world realizes it’s the one thing they absolutely must have.”
“Not for me, Bernard.”
“Ah-hah, you see? That’s just what I mean.”
Casson poked his fork at a bowl of noodles. It needed sauce, it needed something. “All right, I’ll ride a bicycle, I’ll do what I have to do, which is what I’ve always done. But what worries me is, how am I going to earn a living? What can I do?”
“What’s wrong with what you’ve always done?”
“Make films?”
“Yes.”
“What-The Lost Rhine Maiden? Hitler Goes to Oxford?”
“Now Jean-Claude …”
“I’m not going to collaborate.”
“Why would you? I’m not. I’m making lightbulbs. Your lights will burn out, you’ll need replacements. But they won’t be Nazi lightbulbs, will they?”
Casson hadn’t thought of it quite that way.
“Look,” Langlade said, “your barber-what’s he going to do under the Occupation? He’s going to cut hair. Is that collaboration?”
“No.”
“Well, then, what’s the difference? The barbers will cut hair, the writers will write, and the producers will make films.”
Casson gave up on the noodles and put his fork down by the plate. “I won’t be able to make what I want,” he said.
“Oh shit, Jean-Claude, when did any of us ever do what we wanted?”
The waiter appeared with two plates of diced vegetables. Langlade rubbed his hands with pleasure. “Now this is what I come here for.”
Casson stared at it. A carrot, a mushroom, a scallion, something, something else. As Langlade refilled their glasses he said, “I’ll tell you a secret. Whoever can discover a wine that goes with Chinese food will be very rich.”
They ate in silence. The Chinese waiter gave up on the racing form, and his newspaper rattled as he turned the page. “What was it like here?” Casson said.
“In May and June? Terrible. At first, a great shock. You know, Jean-Claude, the Gallic genius for evasion-we will not think unpleasant thoughts. Well, that’s fine, until the bill comes. What they believed here I don’t know, perhaps it wouldn’t matter if the Germans won. There were women to be made love to, bottles of wine to be opened, questions of life and the universe to be discussed, important things. If we lost a war, well, too bad, but what would it matter? The politicians would change the color of their ties, possibly one would have to learn a new sort of national anthem. After all, the shits that run the country are the shits that run the country-how bad could it be to have a new set?
“Ah but then. We sat here in Paris the second week in May, reading the departmental numbers on the license plates. It started in the extreme north-one day the streets were full of 10s from the Aube. By midweek we had the 55s from the Meuse and, a day or two later, the 52s from the Haute-Marne. And no matter what the radio said, it began to dawn on us that something was moving south. And so on a Thursday, the first week in June, a great mob-can you guess?”
“Marched on the Elysee Palace.”
“Descended on the luggage department at the Galeries Lafayette.”
Casson shook his head, ate some of the diced vegetables, poured himself some more rose. By the end of the second glass it wasn’t too bad. “Tell me, Bernard, in your opinion, how long is this going to go on?”
“Years.”
“Two years?”
“More like twenty.”
Casson was stunned. If that were true, life could not be suspended, left in limbo until the Germans went home. It would have to be lived, and one would have to decide how. “Twenty years?” he said, as much to himself as Langlade.
“Who is going to defeat them? I mean really defeat them-throw them out. The answer hasn’t changed since 1917-the Americans. Look what happened here, a German army of five hundred thousand attacked a nation with armed forces of five and a half million and beat them in five days. Only the Americans can deal with that, Jean-Claude. But you know, I don’t see it happening. Even if Roosevelt decided tomorrow that America had to be involved, even if the senators saw any point in spilling Texas blood for some froggy with a waxed mustache, even then, it’s years to build the tanks. And get them here-how? Flown by Babar? No, everything has changed, the rules are different. Your life is your country now, my friend. You are a citizen of the nation Jean-Claude, and you will have to learn to live on those terms or you will not survive.”
Langlade had shaken his fork at Casson as he was making his point, now he caught himself doing it and put it down on his plate. Cleared his throat. Took a sip of wine. The waiter turned another page of the newspaper. Casson looked up to see one corner of Langlade’s mouth twist up in a sudden smile. “Hitler Goes to Oxford indeed!” he said under his breath, laughing to himself.
“And there he meets Laurel and Hardy,” Casson said. “The college servants.”
It was not the first time he’d had to glue his life back together.
The banks had resumed operations in July, but there had been problems, confusion, and for some reason the checks to the landlord for the office on the rue Marbeuf had not gone through. The landlord, a fat little creature, shoulders back, tummy sucked in, said “Such difficult times, Monsieur Casson, how was one to know … anything? Perhaps now, life will become, ah, a little more orderly.”
He meant: you attempted to take advantage of war and Occupation by not paying your rent promptly, but I’m smarter than that, monsieur!
And he also meant: Orderly.
Which was to say, Petain and everything he believed in-by September Casson had learned to recognize it from the slightest inflection. France, the theory went, deserved to be conquered by Germany because it was such a corrupt, wicked nation, with a national character so degenerate it had stormed the Bastille in 1789, a national character deformed by alcohol, by promiscuity, by loss of the old moral values.
He’s right, Casson thought, one September evening, gently improving the angle of a pair of legs in silk stockings. The radio was playing dance music, then Petain came on, from Vichy. The usual phrases: “We, Philippe Petain,” and “France, the country of which I am the incarnation.”
“Ah, the old general,” she said.
“Mmm,” Casson answered.
They waited, idling, while Petain spoke. Waiting was a style just then-it will all go away, eventually.
“You have warm hands,” she said.
“Mmm.”
Lazy and slow, just barely touching each other. Could there be a bet
ter way, Casson wondered, to get through a speech? When the dance music returned-French dance music, plinky-plinky-plink, none of this depraved “jazz,” but upright, honest music, so Maman and Papa could take a two-step around the parlor after dinner-he was almost sorry.
He missed Gabriella. Once the padlock was removed he’d found the note she’d left for him. It was dated 11 June-the day after Italy had declared war on an already defeated France. “I cannot stay here now,” she’d written. Casson remembered the barracks where he’d heard the news. The soldiers were bitter, enraged-what cowardice! The Germans had brutal souls, they did what they did, but the Italians were a Latin people, like them, and had rushed in to attack a fallen neighbor.
“I will miss you, I will miss everything,” Gabriella wrote. She would always remember him, she would pray for his safety. Now she would go back to Milan. The Paris she had longed for, it was gone forever.
Otherwise there was nothing. Mounds of pointless mail, the rooms dusty and silent. Casson sat at his desk, opened files, read papers. What to do next?
Late September it began to rain, he met a girl called Albertine, the daughter of the concierge of a building on the rue Beethoven. On market day, Thursday in Passy, he’d stood at the vegetable cart, staring balefully at a mound of broad yellow beans-there was nothing else. A conversation started, he wondered what one did to prepare these things, she offered to show him.
The affair floated in the broad gray area between commerce and appetite. Albertine was not beautiful, quite the opposite. Some day, perhaps, she would glow with motherhood, but not now. At nineteen she was pinched and red, with hen-strangler’s hands and the squint of an angry farmwife. That was, Casson thought, the root of the problem: there was a good deal of Norman peasant blood in the population of Paris and in big Albertine it ran true to type. She came to his apartment, revealed the mystery of the yellow beans-one boiled them, voila! — took off her dress, sat on the edge of the bed, folded her arms, and glared at him.
The time with Albertine was late afternoon, usually Thursday. Then, before she went home, she would make them something to eat. In the old days his dinners had drifted down from heaven, like manna. Life was easy, attractive men were fed. There were dinner parties, or a woman to take to a restaurant, or he’d go to a bistro, Chez Louis or Mere Louise, where they knew him and made a fuss when he came in the door.
That was over. Now the Germans ate the chickens and the cream, and food was rationed for the French. The coupons Casson was issued would buy 3 1/2 ounces of rice a month, 7 ounces of margarine, 8 ounces of pasta, and a pound of sugar. The sugar he divided-most to Albertine, the remainder for coffee. One had to take the ration stamps to the cafe in the morning.
So mostly it was vegetables-potatoes, onions, beets, cabbages. No butter, and only a little salt, but one survived. Of course there was butter, what the Germans didn’t want-one sometimes saw a soldier eating a stick of it, like an ice-cream cone, while walking down the street-could be bought on the black market. He would give Albertine some money and she would return with cheese, or a piece of ham, or a small square of chocolate. He never asked for an accounting and she never offered. What she kept for herself she earned, he felt, by thrift and ingenuity.
The women he usually made love to were sophisticated, adept. Not Albertine. A virgin, she demanded to be taught “all these things” and other than an occasional What?!! turned out to be an exceptionally diligent student. She had rough skin and smelled like laundry soap, but she held nothing back, gasped with pleasure, was irresistibly shameless, and hugged him savagely so that he wouldn’t drift up through the ceiling and out into the night. “Only in war,” she said, “does this happen between people like us.”
Casson went to the office but the phone didn’t ring.
It didn’t ring, and it didn’t ring, and it didn’t ring. The big studios were gone, there was no money, nobody knew what to do next. Weddings? The director Berthot claimed to have filmed three since July. Rich provincials, he claimed, that was the secret. Watch the engagement announcements in places like Lyons. The couple arrive separately. The nervous papa looks at his watch. The flowers are delivered. The priest, humble and serious, greets the grandmother. Then, the kiss. Then, the restaurant. A toast!
Casson glued two papers together by licking the edges and rolling tobacco into a cigarette. Working carefully, he managed to get it lit with a single match. “Can you make me one of those?” Berthot asked hungrily.
Casson, that devil-may-care man-about-town, did it. When it took two tries to light the ragged thing, Casson smiled bravely-matches were no problem for him. “I had an uncle,” Berthot said, “up in Caen. Wanted to turn me into a shoemaker when I was a kid.” He didn’t have to go on, Casson understood, the shoemakers had plenty of work now.
The October rains sluiced down, there was no heat on the rue Marbeuf. He had enough in the bank to last through November’s rent, then, that was that. What was what? Christ, he didn’t know. Sit behind his desk and hold his breath until someone ran in shaking a fistful of money or he died of failure. He went to the movies in the afternoon, the German newsreels were ghastly. A London street on fire, the German narrator’s voice arrogant and cocksure: “Look at the destruction, the houses going up in flames! This is what happens to those who oppose Germany’s might.” Going back out into the gray street in mid-afternoon, the Parisians were morose. The narrator of the newsreel had told the truth.
He answered an advertisement in Le Matin. “Distribute copies of a daily bulletin to newsstands.” It was called Aujourd’hui a Paris and listed all the movies and plays and nightclubs and musical performances. The editor was a Russian out in Neuilly who called himself Bob. “You’ll need a bicycle,” he said. Casson said, “It’s not a problem,” remembering his conversation with Langlade. But he never went back-inevitably he would encounter people he knew, they would turn away, pretend they hadn’t seen him.
Langlade. Of course that was always the answer, one’s friends. He’d heard that Bruno and Marie-Claire were doing very well, that Bruno had in fact received delivery of the MGs left on the Antwerp docks, that he now supplied French and Italian cars to German officers serving in Paris. But something kept him from going to his friends-not least that they were the sort of friends who really wouldn’t have any idea how to help him. They’d always looked up to him. They did the most conventional things: manufactured lightbulbs, imported cars, wrote contracts, bought costume jewelry, while he made movies. No, that just wouldn’t work. They would offer him money-how much? they’d wonder. And, after it was gone, what then?
28 October, 1940.
He’d brought his copy of Bel Ami to the rue Marbeuf as office reading-he’d always wanted to make a film of de Maupassant, everyone did. Then too, he simply had to accept the fact that one didn’t find abandoned newspapers in the cafes until after three.
11:35. He could now leave the office, headed for a cafe he’d discovered back in the Eighth near the St.-Augustin Metro, where they had decent coffee and particularly good bread. Where he could pretend-until noon but not a minute later-that he was taking a late casse-croute, midmorning snack, when in fact it was lunch. And the waiter was an old man who remembered Night Run and The Devil’s Bridge. “Ah, now those,” he’d say, “were movies. Perhaps a little more of the bread, Monsieur Casson.”
Casson’s hand was on the doorknob when the telephone rang.
He ran to the desk, then forced himself to wait for the end of the second ring before he picked it up and said “Hello?” Not disturbed, exactly, simply unable to hide the fact that his concentration had been elsewhere, that he’d been busy-perhaps in a meeting, perhaps in mid-sentence as he reached back for the receiver.
“Jean Casson?”
“Yes.”
“Hugo Altmann.” The line hummed for a moment. “Yes? Hello?”
“Altmann, well, of course.”
“Perhaps you don’t-remember me.”
“No, no. I was just …”
/> “Tell me, Casson, can you possibly cancel your lunch today?”
“Well. Yes, I could. It’s not anything I can’t reschedule.”
“Perfect! You’re still on the rue Marbeuf?”
“Yes. Twenty-six, just off the boulevard.”
“Save me parking, will you? And wait for me downstairs?”
“All right.”
“Good. Ten minutes, no more.”
“See you then.”
He ran into the bathroom down the hall and stared into the mirror above the sink. Shit! Well, not much he could do about it now-his shirt was tired, his jacket unpressed. But he’d shaved carefully that morning-he always did-his hair simply looked vaguely arty when he avoided the barber, and his shoes had been good long ago and still were. It was, he thought, his good fortune to be one of those men who couldn’t look seedy if he tried.
Altmann he remembered well. He worked for Continental, the largest of the German production companies, with offices out by Paramount in Billancourt. A film executive, typical of the breed. The practical, plodding French of the long-term expatriate-nothing fancy but nothing really wrong. Smooth manners, smooth exterior, but not sly. He was, one felt, constitutionally neat, and courtly by upbringing. Well-dressed, favoring muted tweed suits and very good ties in rich colors. The kind of hair that faded from blond to no color at all in the mid-forties, combed back at the age of seven and still in place. Scandinavian complexion, blue eyes-like a frozen lake-and a smile. Always a second drink, always enthusiastic-even about the most godawful trash because you just never knew what people were going to like-always at work. Casson had been at several meetings with him out at Continental, a lunch or two a few years ago, it was all a little hazy.
A last look in the mirror; he ran his fingers through his hair, splashed water on his face, that was the best he could do. Glancing at his watch he hurried out of the bathroom and down the stairs.
Outside, the sun was just fighting its way out of the clouds. Omen? An exquisite Horch 853 swept to the curb, Altmann waved from behind the wheel. Casson wasn’t impressed by cars, but still … Silvery-green coachmaker’s body, graceful lines, spare tire-silvery-green metal center-snugged into the curve of the running board just forward of the driver’s door. Casson slid into the leather seat, they shook hands, said hello.