by Alan Furst
“The trick,” he added, “is actually getting it to go off.”
The town of Houdan. A place Casson had always liked, he’d come here with Marie-Claire for picnics in the forest-long ago and far away. They’d owned a set of chairs and a table that could be folded up and carried in the trunk of the car. She always brought a cloth for the table, he would pick up a pair of langoustes with green mayonnaise from Fauchon, and they’d sit by a field for hours and watch the day.
The road turned north, the sun was up now, light glistening on the wet fields, the last of the ground mist gathered over the streams. The sky had turned a delicate, morning blue, with a rose blush on the horizon. Something world-weary about these dawns in the country around Paris, he’d always felt that-well, all right, one more day if you think it’s going to do you any good. The next village on the road seemed closed up tight, the shutters still pulled down over the front of the cafe. Casson spotted a road marker and decided to take the 839. The town ended, there was a bridge, then a sharp left-hand curve through a wood, which straightened out to reveal some cars and trucks and guards with machine pistols.
Control.
They had a moment, no more. Casson hit the brake, rolled past five or six policemen who waved him on, down a lane formed by portable barriers-crossbraced x‘s of sawn logs strung with barbed wire. Coming up on the control, Casson and the sergeant had turned to each other, exchanged a look: well, too bad. That was all. Then Casson said, “Close your eyes. You’re injured, unconscious, almost gone.”
A young officer-Leutnant-in Wehrmacht gray appeared at the window. “Raus mit uns.” He was impatient, holster unsnapped, hand resting on his sidearm.
Casson got out and stood by the half-open door, nodded toward the passenger side of the car. “There’s a man hurt,” he said.
The Leutnant walked around to have a look, bent over and peered into the car. The sergeant’s eyes were closed, mouth open, head back. A bloody rag around his arm, a dark stain on the upholstery. The Leutnant hesitated, looked in Casson’s direction. Casson saw a possibility. “I don’t really know exactly how he got himself in this condition but it’s important that he see a doctor as soon as he can.” He said it quickly.
The Leutnant froze, then squared his shoulders and walked away.
The road lay in shadow-six in the morning, shafts of sunlight in the pine forest. Five cars had been stopped, as well as two rickety old trucks taking pigs to market. Amid the smell and the squealing, a German officer was trying to make sense of the drivers’ papers while they stood to one side looking sinister and apprehensive. By the car ahead of Casson, four men, dark, unshaven, possibly Gypsies, were trying to communicate with a man in a raincoat, perhaps a German security officer. Suddenly angry he yanked the door open, and a very pregnant, very frightened woman struggled out with hands held high in the air.
The young Leutnant came striding back to Casson’s car, a policeman in tow-an officer of the Gendarmerie Nationale, French military police with a reputation for brutality. The gendarme was angry at being asked to intervene. “All right,” he said to Casson, “what’s going on?”
“This man is injured.”
“How did it happen?”
“I’m taking him to a doctor.”
The gendarme gave him a very cold look. “I asked how.”
“An accident.”
“Where?”
“Working, I believe. In a garage. I wasn’t there.”
The gendarme’s eyes were like steel. Salaud-you bastard-trying to play games with me? In front of a German? I’ll take you behind a tree and break your fucking head. “Open the trunk,” he said.
Casson fumbled with the latch, then got it open. The intense odor of almonds, characteristic of plastic explosive, came rolling out at them. The Leutnant said “Ach,” and stepped back. “What is it?” the gendarme said.
“Almonds.”
The two valises were in plain sight, packed with francs, dollars, radio crystals, and explosive. Tonton Jules, just before they left, had tossed an old blanket over the two crates holding the sten guns and ammunition. Casson, at that moment, had thought it a particularly pointless gesture.
“Almonds,” the gendarme said. He didn’t know it meant explosive. He did know that Casson had been caught in the middle of something. Parisians of a certain class had no business on country roads at dawn, and people didn’t injure their upper arms in garage accidents. This was resistance of some kind, that much he did know, thus his patriotism, his honor, had been called into question and now he, a man with wife and family, had to compromise himself. He stared at Casson with pure hatred.
“You had better be going,” he said. “Your friend ought to see a doctor.” For the benefit of the Leutnant he made a Gallic gesture-eyes shut, shoulders up, hands in the air: Who knows what these people are doing, but it’s clearly nothing that would interest men of our stature.
He waved Casson on, down the road toward Paris.
Salaud. Don’t come back here.
10 June, 1941.
“Hello?”
“Good morning. I was wondering if you might have a life of Verdi, something nice, for a gift.”
“The composer?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not sure, we may very well have something. Can we call you back?”
“Yes. I’m at 63 26 08.”
“All right. We’ll be in touch.”
“Good-bye.”
“Good-bye.”
This time they met in the church of Notre-Dame de Secours, then walked in the Pere-Lachaise cemetery. At the gate, Mathieu bought a bouquet of anemones from an old woman.
They walked up the hill to the older districts, past the crumbling tombs of vanished nobility, past the Polish exiles, past the artists. They left the path at the Twenty-fourth Division and stood before the grave of Corot.
“Are you sure of the doctor?” Mathieu asked.
“No. Not really.”
“But the patient, can return to work?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll want him to work on the twenty-third.”
“It won’t be a problem.”
“His arrangements?”
“He’s up in Belleville, in the Arab district. Above a Moroccan restaurant-Star of the East on rue Pelleport. If he can stand the couscous, from dawn to midnight, he’ll be fine. I suggested to the owner that the wound was received in an affair of family honor, in the south, somewhere below Marseilles.”
“Corsica.”
“Yes.”
Mathieu gave a brief, dry laugh. “Corsica, yes. That’s very good. The owner is someone you know?”
“No. A newspaper advertisement, room for rent. I put on a pair of dark glasses, paid three months in advance.”
Mathieu laughed again. “And for the rest?”
“Hidden. Deep and dark, where it will never be found.”
“I’ll take your word for it. When are you going to make contact?”
“Today.”
“That sounds right. Difficult things-the sooner the better.”
“Difficult-” Casson said. It was a lot worse than difficult.
Mathieu smiled a certain way, he meant it was no easier for him, that he was just as scared as Casson was.
Making sure that nobody was looking at them, Mathieu took a folded square of paper from his pocket and slipped it among the stems of the anemones. Then he leaned over, placed the flowers on the tomb.
“Corot,” Casson said.
“Yes,” Mathieu said. “He’s off by himself, over here.”
They walked back down the hill together, then shook hands at the boulevard corner and said good-bye. “They’ll make you go over it, you know. Again and again. From a number of angles,” Mathieu said.
Casson nodded that he knew that, then turned and walked to the Metro.
It was Singer who picked him up in a black Traction Avant Citroen on the evening of 15 June and drove him out to the brick villa in Vernouillet. The parlor
, even as the weather warmed up, still felt dark and damp and unused. Millau had a technician with him, a man who wore earphones and operated a wire recorder to take down what Casson said.
Millau had just shaved-a tiny nick freshly made on the line of the jaw. He worked in shirtsleeves, his jacket hung in a closet, but despite the suggestion of informality the shirt was freshly pressed and laundered a sparkling white. He was, evidently, going to meet someone important later that evening. Only after they’d greeted each other and made small talk did Casson realize he’d been wrong about that. Jean Casson was the someone important-the shave and the white shirt were for, well, not so much him as an important moment in Millau’s life.
Mathieu had been right. He was made to go over the story again and again. He was comfortable with plots and characters, had spent much of his professional life in meetings where people said things like what if Duval doesn’t return until the following evening? That gave him a slight advantage but not all that much, and the mistakes were always there, waiting for him. Perhaps they wouldn’t be noticed. He’d changed the Alencon names to code names-fish. Merlan drove the car, Rouget the truck, Angouille sat beside him, the shotgun on his lap.
It ran, he hoped, seamlessly into the truth: the single-engine Lysander a single-engine Lysander, the pilot young and gangling and rather awkward, and the navigation guides were as they’d been: signal lights along the track, locomotive fireboxes, and the glow of moonlight on the steel rails. They had come in at 8,000 feet over St.-Malo, were later hit by an antiaircraft burst-Millau nodded at that. The copilot was slightly wounded. The shipment included radio crystals and money, Sten guns and plastique.
“And where is it now?” Millau asked.
“In the store room of an empty shop, down among the old furniture workshops in the faubourg St.-Antoine. I bought the droit de bail- the lease-from an old couple who retired to Canada just at the beginning of the war. It was for a long time a cremerie-you can still smell the cheese. The address is eighty-eight, rue des Citeaux, just off the avenue St.-Antoine, about a minute’s walk from the hospital. In the back of the shop is a storage locker, lead lined, no doubt for cold storage using blocks of ice. The shipment is in there, I’ve padlocked the door, here are the keys.”
“You bought it direct? From Canada?”
“From a broker in Paris. LaMontaine.”
“Who is expected to come there?”
“They haven’t told me that. Only that it must be kept safe and secure.”
“Who said that, exactly?”
“Merlan.”
“Beard and spectacles.”
“No, the tall one who drove the car.”
“When did he say it?”
“The last thing, before I left. I would be contacted, he said.”
“How?”
“At home.”
“The Bourdon address?”
“Yes.”
“Good. That simplifies things for us. It will be of great interest, of course, to see who collects the explosive and spends the money, who uses the radio crystals-to send what information. It’s like a complicated web, that reaches here and there, and grows constantly. It may be a long time before we do anything. In these operations you must be thorough, you have to get it all. You’ll see-before it’s done it will involve husbands and wives, lovers and childhood friends, brothers and sisters, and the local florist. Love finds a way, you see. And we find out.”
“Clearly, you are experienced.”
Millau permitted himself a brief, tight smile of pleasure in his achievement. “Practice makes perfect,” he said. “We’ve been taking these networks apart since 1933, in Germany. Now in France, we’ve had one or two-we’ll have more. No offense meant, my friend, but the French, compared to the German communist cells, well, what can one say.”
He would remember the evening as a certain moment, almost a freeze-frame; three men looking up at him from a table on the crowded terrasse of a restaurant, Fouquet as it happened, on a warm evening. All around them, a sea of faces, the world at night-desire and cunning, love and greed, the usual. A Brueghel of Paris in the second spring of the war.
Casson had been driven back to the city by Singer, asked by Millau to join him “and some friends” for a drink. As he approached, the men at the table-Millau with his fine eyeglasses and cigar, and two pale bulky northern men, Herr X and Herr Y, looked up and smiled. Ah, here he is! Superbly faked smiles-how much we admire you.
They chatted for a time, nothing all that important, a conversation among men of the world, no fools, long past idealism. Poor Europe, decadent and weak, very nearly gobbled up by the Bolshevik monster. But for them. Not said, but clearly understood.
The champagne arrived, brought by a waiter who had served him many times in the past. “Good evening, Monsieur Casson.” Three menus in German, one in French.
Herr X wore a small pin, a black-and-gold swastika, in his lapel. “One thing we wonder,” he said, leaning forward, speaking confidentially. “We were talking to Millau here before you arrived and you told him that there was a copilot on the flight. We hear it a little differently, that the Lysander brought in an agent. Can you see any reason why somebody would say that?”
“No,” Casson said. “That’s not what happened.”
Millau raised his glass. “Enough work!” he said.
For a time it was true. Herr Y was from East Prussia, the Masurian lakes, where stag was still hunted from horseback every autumn. “And then, what a feast!” Herr X worked over in Strasbourg. “Some problems,” he said reflectively, “but it is at heart a reasonable part of the world.” Then, a fine idea: “I’ll tell you what, I’ll get in touch with you through Millau and you’ll come over there for a day or two. Be a change of pace from Paris, right?”
It was after midnight when Casson got home. He tore his jacket off and threw it on the bed. He’d sweated through his shirt, it was wringing wet. He took it off, then went into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. God. It was black under his eyes. A dark, clever, exhausted man.
THE ESCAPE
18 June, 1941.
He met Mathieu at dusk, in the waiting room of the Gare d’Austerlitz. They walked in the Jardin des Plantes.
“They know what happened,” Casson said. “That an agent was brought in.”
Mathieu walked in silence for a moment. “Who is it?” he said at last.
Eddie Juin? Lebec? Angier? “I don’t know.”
“It will have to be shut down.” Mathieu was very angry.
“Yes. Perhaps it’s only-you know, the French talk too much. Somebody told somebody, they told somebody else. Each time, ‘now, don’t tell anybody.’ Or, just maybe, it could have happened in London. People in offices, people who work at airfields.”
“Yes, it could have,” Mathieu admitted. Too many people, too many possibilities. “At least we found out. They would have taken over the network and run it.”
The gravel path was bordered by spring beds, tulip and daffodil, poet’s narcissus, the air heavy with manure and perfume.
“They want me to go to Strasbourg,” Casson said.
“Did they say why?”
“No.”
“Will you go?”
“I have to think about it, probably I will.”
They walked in silence for a minute or two, then Casson said, “Mathieu, how long does this go on?”
“I can’t say.”
“There’s a record being built-a wire recording they made in Vernouillet, I’ve been seen with them. What if the war ends?”
“We’ll vouch for you.”
They reached the end of the path, a wire fence. Beyond were rakes and shovels and wheelbarrows. Mathieu took his hat off, ran a thumb around the lining to secure it, then put it back on, pulling the brim down with thumb and forefinger. “Don’t do anything until the twenty-third, then we’ll talk again. That’s the night-all hell’s going to break loose and we’re using that to get our job done. Meanwhile, you should
go on as usual.”
They came to the gate, shook hands. “Be careful,” Mathieu said.
Casson couldn’t sleep the night of the twenty-third. He went to an after-curfew bar and drank wine. The bar was in a cellar off an alley, it had a packed-earth floor and stone walls. A long time ago, some madman had managed to coax an upright piano down the narrow staircase-perhaps he’d taken it apart. Clearly it was never going anywhere again, and that gave somebody the idea for a nightclub. The piano’s sounding board was muffled with a blanket, and an old woman in a gown played love songs and sang in a whispery voice. The cigarette smoke was thick, the only light from a single candle. Casson paused at the bottom of the stairs, then a woman took him in her arms and danced with him.
She smelled of cleaning bleach and brilliantine, had stiff hair that scratched against his cheek. They never spoke. She didn’t press herself into him as they danced, just brushed against him, touched him enough so he could feel everything about her. When the sirens started up, she froze. A man nearby called out in a hushed voice, “No, please. One must continue,” as though that were a rule of the house.
The rumbling went on for a long time, sharply felt in the cellar because stone foundations built in the Middle Ages carried the vibrations of the bombs and the gunnery beneath the city. A plane went down that night on the rue St.-Honore, a Lancaster bomber made a fiery cart-wheel along the street, sliced through a jeweler’s and a millinery shop, then came to rest in the workroom of a dress designer.
Walking home after curfew, Casson stayed alert for patrols, kept to the walls of the buildings. The streets rang with sirens and ambulance bells, searchlights swept the sky, there was a second wave of bombers, then a third. The southern horizon flickered orange just as he slipped into the rue Chardin, and he felt the concussions in the marble stairs as he climbed to his apartment.
Later the telephone rang. He’d fallen asleep on top of the covers, still dressed. “Yes?” he said, looking at his watch. It was twenty minutes past five.