by Alan Furst
“Ah yes, I know this place, I have lived there. We are forever wandering into movies.”
He laughed, she held his arm tight. Somewhere out in the swirling snow, a car, the engine getting louder. They rushed into the first doorway. Lights cut the dark street-police on the prowl. “Pretend to kiss me,” she said.
They embraced, star-crossed lovers in a doorway. The car-French, German, whoever it was-passed them by. Casson’s heart was hammering, it was all he could do not to press his hand against his chest. And nothing to do with the police. My God, I am fourteen, he thought. When the car was gone they walked in silence, heads down against the wind.
She’d come to Paris from Marseilles at sixteen-it would have been running away if anybody had wanted her to stay there. Her mother had kept a boardinghouse for merchant seamen, mostly Turks and Greeks, and, the way Citrine put it, “one of them was probably my father.” Thus her skin was pale, with a shadow beneath it, she had hair the color of brown olives-worn long-with glints of gold in it, almond-shaped eyes, and to him she’d always smelled like spice-Byzantine, whatever that meant. It meant his fantasy side ascendant, he knew, but he thought about her that way anyhow. Across a room she was tall and slim, distant, just the edge of cold. And she was in fact so exotic, striking-a wide, heavy-lipped mouth below sharp cheekbones, like a runway model-that she looked lean, and hard. But the first time he’d put his arms around her, he had understood that it wasn’t that way; not outside, not inside.
In the course of the love affair she had only once told secrets about her past, about the boardinghouse where she’d grown up. “How much they loved and respected my mother,” she’d said. “They waited with me until I was fourteen, and then there were only two of them, and they made sure I enjoyed it.”
“Did they beat you?”
“Beat me? No, not really.”
That was all. They were on a train, she turned away and looked out the window. She had said what she wanted to: yes, I knew too much too young, you’ll have to go on from there.
He had tried-he thought he’d tried, he remembered it that way. She had, too. But they drifted. A day came, and whatever had been there before wasn’t there anymore. Another Parisian love affair ended, nobody could really explain it, and nobody tried.
They angled away from the river, into the 7th Arrondissement, toward Passy, hurrying across the Pont de Solferino, where white snow spun over the black river and the wind sang in the arches of the bridge. “Jean-Claude?” she said, and he stopped.
She looked up at him, there were white crystals of ice in her eyelashes, frozen tears at the corners of her eyes, and she was shivering. “I think I need to rest for a moment,” she said.
They found a little shelter, in the shallow portal of an ancient building. She burrowed against his chest. “How can there be nothing?” she said plaintively. She was right, the streets were deserted, no bicycle cabs, no people.
“We’re halfway,” he said.
“Only that?”
“A little more, maybe.”
“Jean-Claude, can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“Is there really a movie? Or is it, you know.”
“A movie. Hotel Dorado, we’re calling it. For Continental, maybe. Of course like always, it’s pure air until the great hand from the sky comes down and writes a check.”
“I wondered. Sometimes, I think, men want to run their lives backward.”
“Not women?”
“No.”
Not women? Not ever? It was warm where he held her against him. Slowly he unwound the long muffler, ran it under her chin and around so that her ears were covered.
“Thank you,” she said. “That’s better.”
“Shall we start out again? Sooner we do …”
“Listen!” she whispered.
A car? She canted her head, held the muffler away from one ear. He could hear only the hiss of falling snow, but then, faintly, a violin. And then a cello. He looked up the side of the building, then across the street. But the snow made it hard to locate.
“A trio,” she said.
“Yes.”
He looked at his watch. Oh, France! 3:25 on the morning of Christmas, in an occupied city, three friends determine to stay up all night and play Beethoven trios-in a cold, dark apartment. She looked up at him, mouth set hard as though she refused to cry.
Rue de Grenelle, rue Vaneau, tempting to take Invalides, but better to swing wide of the Ecole Militaire complex. Military and security offices had been there before and they would still be in operation, with new tenants. Plenty of Gestapo and French police in the neighborhood. So, find Grenelle again, and take the next small street, less important, in the same direction.
They never heard the car until they were almost on top of it, then they hugged a wall and froze. It was a Citroen Traction Avant, always a Gestapo car because the front-wheel drive worked on nights like these, with chains on the tires. It was idling-perfectly tuned, it hardly made a sound-the hot exhaust melting the snow behind the rear wheel. Through the back window they could see the silhouette of a man in the passenger seat. The driver had left the car and was standing in front of an apartment building, urinating on the front door.
Casson held his breath. The Germans were only fifty feet from them. The driver had left the Citroen’s door ajar, and the passenger leaned over and called out to him. The driver laughed, said something back. Banter, apparently. Taking a piss in a snowstorm, that was funny. Doing it on some Frenchman’s door, that was even funnier. Jokes, back and forth, guttural, thick, incomprehensible. To Casson, it sounded as though somebody was grinding language into broken words that could never be used again. But, he thought, they are in Paris, we are not in Berlin.
The man at the doorway started buttoning up his fly, then, as he hurried toward the car, he said the words “rue de Vaugirard”-an island of French in the German sentence. So, Casson thought, they were going to the rue de Vaugirard, to arrest somebody on Christmas Eve. Citrine’s hand found his, she’d heard it too.
Suddenly the car moved-backward. Casson pressed frantically against the wall, Citrine’s hand closed like a steel claw. Then the wheels spun, caught, and the car drove off down the street. The Germans hadn’t known they were there, they were just making sure they didn’t get stuck in the snow.
An hour later, the apartment on the rue Chardin. There was no heat, and Casson preferred not to turn on the lights, often faintly visible at the edges of the blackout curtains. They shed their outer clothes in the bathroom, hanging them over the bar that held the shower curtain so they could drip into the tub as the snow and ice melted.
“Bed is the only place,” he said. He was right, they were both trembling with the cold, and they climbed into bed wearing their underwear.
At first the sheets were as cold as they were, then the body heat began to work. She took a deep breath and sighed, coming gently apart as the night’s adventure receded.
“Are you going to sleep?” he said.
“Whether I want to or not.” Her voice was faint, she was barely conscious.
“Oh. All right.”
She smiled. “Jean-Claude, Jean-Claude.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Go to sleep.”
He couldn’t-he ached for her.
She sensed what he was going to do, moved close in a way that made it impossible. “I can’t, Jean-Claude. I can’t. Please.”
Why?
As though she’d heard: “You’re going to think a dozen things, but it’s that I can’t feel that way again, not now. If we were just going to amuse ourselves, well, why not? But it isn’t that way with us, you get inside me, that’s no play on words, I mean to say it. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“If it wasn’t a war, if I had money. If I just had it in me, the strength to live …”
“You’re right, I’m sorry. It’s just me, Citrine.”
“I know. I know you-you fuck all the gi
rls.” But the way she said it was not unkind.
And even before the sentence ended, she was slipping away. Her breathing changed, and she fell asleep. He watched her for a time. Strange, the way her face worked, she always looked worried when she slept. Sometimes her breathing stopped, for a long moment, then it would start again. She dies, he’d thought years ago. She dies, then she changes her mind.
They woke up in the middle of Christmas Day. The snow had stopped. She wrote the name of a hotel on a scrap of paper, kissed him on the forehead, said “Thank you, Jean-Claude,” and went out into the cold.
29 December, 1940.
He left the office at six-thirty. He had a little money now, from Altmann, and a secretary. A cousin of his named Mireille, from the Morvan, his mother’s side of the family. She was a dark, unhappy woman with three children and an eternally useless husband. She showed up just about the time the money did, so he hired her-it was simply life’s way, he figured, of telling you what you ought to do.
The coldest winter of the century. The price of coal climbed into the sky, the old and the poor got into bed with every scrap of wool they owned and there they found them a week later. German soldiers flooded into Paris, from garrison duty in Warsaw and Prague, and Paris entertained them. Are you tense, poor thing? Have a little of this, and a little of that. England wouldn’t give up. The submarine blockade was starving them, but they had never been reasonable, and they apparently weren’t going to be now. Well, the French would also survive. More or less.
Out on the street, Casson pulled his coat tight around him and turned toward the Metro station at avenue Marceau. Two stops, Iena and Trocadero, and he could walk the rest of the way. The Passy station was closer to the rue Chardin, but that involved a correspondance, a change of lines, so if he stayed on the Line 9 train he’d be home in a few minutes. Albertine, tonight. His big, ugly treasure of a farm girl. Something good to eat. Vegetables, cow food-but garlic, salt, a drop of oil, and the cunning way she chopped it all up. Jesus! Was it possible that he’d reached that ghastly moment in life when the belly was more important than the prick? No! Never that! Why, he’d take that Albertine and spread her …
“Hey, Casson.”
That voice. He turned, annoyed. Erno Simic, waving his arm and smiling like a well-loathed schoolmate, was trotting to catch up with him. “Wait for me!”
“Simic, hello.”
“I never called-you’re angry?”
“No. Not at all.”
“Well, I been busy. Imagine that. Me. I got phone calls and messages, meetings and telegrams. Hey, now we know the world is upside down. Still it means a few francs, a few balles, as they say, eh? So we’ll have a drink, on me. I promised a lunch, I’m gonna owe it to you, but now it’s a drink. Okay?”
Paris hadn’t surprised Casson for twenty years but it did now. Simic took him down the Champs-Elysees to avenue Montaigne, one of the most prestigious streets in the city, then turned right toward the river. They worked their way through a busy crowd in front of the Plaza-Athenee, mostly German officers and their plump wives, then walked another block to a residential building. On the top floor a grand apartment with a view to the river had been converted to a very private bar.
Seated at a white piano, an aristocratic woman wearing a black cocktail dress and a pillbox hat with a veil was playing “Begin the Beguine.” Simic and Casson were shown to a table by a fat man in a sharkskin suit draped to hide both him and some sort of weapon. The tables on the teak parquet were set far apart, while the walls were covered with naughty oil paintings of naughty, and exceptionally pink, women. The room was crowded; a beautiful woman at the next table drinking tea, on second glance perhaps a prostitute of the most elevated class. By the window, two French colonels of cavalry. Then a table of dark, mustached men, Armenian or Lebanese, Casson thought. There was a famous ballet master-Russian emigre-sitting alone. In the corner, three men who could have been gangsters or black-market butchers, or both. Simic enjoyed Casson’s amazement, his big smile broadening from ingratiating to triumphant.
“Hah! It’s discreet enough for you, Casson?”
“How long-?”
Simic spread his hands. “Summer, as soon as everything settled down. It belongs to Craveur, right?”
Craveur was a famous restaurant owner, his family had been in the business since 1790, when the first restaurants were opened. Simic signaled to a waiter, a plate of petits fours salees-herring paste, oysters, or smoked salmon on puff pastry-appeared along with two large whiskey-and-sodas.
“It’s what I always have,” Simic confided. “Mm, take all you want,” he said, mouth full.
Casson sipped the whiskey-and-soda, lit up one of Simic’s Camel cigarettes, and sat back on a little gold chair with a gold cushion.
“Your name came up in a conversation I had,” Simic said. “With a man called Templeton. You know him, right? Works in a bank?”
“Yes.”
“He vouches for you.”
“He does?”
“Yes. And that’s important. Because, Casson, I still got Agna Film, but now I’m also a British spy.”
“Oh?”
“That’s how it is. You’re surprised?”
“Maybe a little.” Casson ate an oyster petit four.
“I’m a Hungarian, Casson. Not exactly by birth, you understand, but by nationality at birth. Still, Mitteleuropa, central Europe, is the world I understand, just like Adolf-so I see clearly certain things. Some people say that Adolf is a devil, but he’s not, he’s the head of a central European political party, no more, no less. And what he means to do in France is to destroy you, to ruin your soul, to make you despise yourselves, that’s the plan. He wants you to collaborate, he makes it easy for you. He wants you to denounce each other, he makes it easy for you. He wants you to feel that there’s no nation, just you, and everybody has to look out for themselves. You think I’m wrong? Look at the Poles. He kills them, because they come from the same part of the world that he does, and they see through his tricks. You understand?”
Casson nodded.
“So we got to stop that-or else. Right? Myself, I’m betting on the English, and I am going to work with them, and I want you to work with me, to help me do what I have to do.”
“Why me?”
“Why you. You’re known to the English-James Templeton has spoken for you, he knows you don’t have sympathy with the Germans. It also helps that you’re a film producer. You can go anywhere, you can meet anybody, of any class. You handle money, sometimes in large amounts, sometimes in cash. You might take ten people on a train. You might charter a freighter. You might use several telephone numbers, bank accounts-even in other countries. For us, it’s a good profession. Do you see?”
“Yes.”
“Want to help?”
Casson thought a moment, he didn’t really know what to say. He did want to help. Left to himself he would never have done anything, just gone on trying to live his life as best he could. But he hadn’t been left to himself, so, now, he had to decide if he wanted to become involved in something like this.
Yes, he said to himself. But it was what they called un petit oui-a little yes. Not that he was afraid of the Germans-he was afraid of them, but that wouldn’t stop him-he was afraid of not being any good at it.
“I will help you, if I can,” he said slowly. “I don’t know exactly what it is you want me to do, and I don’t know if I’d do it right. Maybe for myself that wouldn’t matter, but there would be people depending on me, isn’t that true in something like this?”
A backhand sweep of the arm, Simic knocked the uncertainty across the room. “Ach-don’t worry! The Germans are idiots. Not in Germany, mind you-there you can’t spit on the street, because they got everybody watching their neighbor. But here? What they got is a counterespionage service, which is lawyers, that’s who they hire. But not the Jewish lawyers, they’re all gone. And not the top lawyers, they’re high up, or they’re hiding. Found themselves a
little something in this bureau or that office-hiding. So, you don’t have to worry. Of course, you can’t be stupid, but we wouldn’t be talking if you were. And, oh yes, you’ll make some money in this. We can’t have you poor. And you’ll get all the ration coupons you need, the British print them in Tottenham.”
“Where?”
“A place in London. But they’re very good, never a problem. Suits, food, gasoline, whatever you want.”
In a dark corner, the piano player was hard at work: “Mood Indigo,” “Body and Soul,” “Time on My Hands.” Cocktail hour in Paris- heavy drapes drawn over the windows so the world outside didn’t exist. The bar filled up, the hum of conversation getting louder as the drinks arrived. The expensive whore at the next table was joined by a well-dressed man, Casson had seen him around Passy for years, who wore the gold seal ring that meant nobility. He was just out of the barber’s chair, Casson could smell the talcum powder. The woman was stunning, in a gray Chanel suit.
The waiter brought two more whiskey-and-sodas. “Chin-chin,” Simic said and clinked Casson’s glass.
“Tell me what,” Casson said, “exactly what, it is that you want me to do.”
Simic looked serious, the big head on the narrow shoulders nodding up and down. “A proper question, Casson. It’s just, I have to be cautious.”
Casson waited.
“Well, to those who know, the place that matters most in this war is Gibraltar. Sits there, controls the entrance to the Mediterranean, means that the British can go into North Africa if they want, then up to Sicily, or Greece. Or Syria. That means Iraqi and Persian oil-you can’t fight without that-and the Suez Canal. Can Adolf take Gibraltar? No. Why not? Because he’d have to march across Spain, and for that he needs Franco’s permission because Franco is his ally. A neutral ally, but an ally. Don’t forget, Adolf helped Franco win his civil war. So, what will Franco do?”
“I don’t know,” Casson said.
“You’re right! The British don’t know either. But what you want, for your peace of mind, is your own man guarding the back door to your big fortress, not the ally of your enemy. Understand?”