by Alan Furst
“Thank you,” Casson said.
“Good luck,” the driver said. “It won’t be long now.”
A family lived on the houseboat, a young man and his wife and their three little girls. Casson was taken to a bedroom with heavy drapes on the windows. The woman brought him a bowl of lentils with mustard and a piece of bread. “It’s better if you stay inside when it’s daylight,” she said. He spent the day dozing and thumbing through a stack of old magazines. At dusk, they said he could take the air for a half-hour. He was happy for that, sat on the sagging dock and watched birds flying over the river. There was a mackerel sky just before dark, the last red of the sun lighting the clouds, then a dark, starless evening, and a breeze that rustled in the leaves of the willow trees that grew on the river bank.
His heart ached-he could only unwind the past, looking for another road that might have led to a better place, but he could not find it. He tried to tell himself that Citrine would understand, would sense somehow that he’d escaped from the Germans and would come back to her in time.
He really did try.
He went back out again at dawn. Cruel of this countryside, he thought, to be so beautiful when it was being taken from him. The Vexin- above Paris along the river-was fighting country, rather bloodsoaked if you knew the history. But then, people fought over beautiful things, a side of human nature that didn’t quite have a name. The oldest of the little girls, seven perhaps, came out to the dock and said “Maman says the sun is coming up now, and will the monsieur please take coffee with us.”
As good a moment as any to say good-bye, he thought, the little girl standing close to him on the dock. Just a bend in a river, and dawn was always good to a place like this, gray light afloat on the water, a bird calling in the marsh.
Later that day they took him up to the port of Honfleur in a truck. The driver was in charge of the final stage of the escape line and briefed Casson as they drove. “You’ll go out on a fishing boat. We leave at dawn, sail to the mouth of the river with the rest of the fleet and stand to for German inspection. You will be hidden below decks-your chances of passing through the inspection are good, the Germans search one boat in four, and use dogs only now and then. After the inspection the fleet will be fishing-for conger eel-in a group. A German plane flies over periodically, and we are permitted only enough fuel for thirty-five miles of cruising. Sometime during the afternoon, you will be transferred to a trawler allowed to work farther out at sea, a trawler with an overnight permit. These boats are sometimes searched by German minesweepers. At the midpoint of the Channel, between French and British waters, you’ll be taken on a British navy motor launch, and put ashore at Bournemouth.”
He stayed that night in another bedroom with heavy curtains-this time in a house on the outskirts of a coastal village. Then, at 4:30 A.M. on the morning of 28 June, he was taken to a small fishing boat in the port of Honfleur, and led to a secret compartment built behind the belowdecks cabin-entered by removing a section of wall from the back of a storage locker.
He was joined first by a young woman, exhausted but calm, clearly at the end of a long and difficult assignment. They were never to speak, but did exchange a smile-bittersweet, a little hopeless-that said virtually everything there was to say. What sort of world was it, where they, where people like them, did the things they had done?
Moments later, the arrival of an important personage; a tall, distinguished man, his wife, his teenaged sons, and three suitcases. Casson guessed this was a diplomat or senior civil servant, being brought to London at de Gaulle’s request. The man looked around the tiny space with a certain muted displeasure-he’d clearly not been informed that he was going to have to share a hiding place, and it was not at all to his taste.
The compartment was sealed up and they got under way almost immediately, the throb of the engine loud in the small space. Casson, his back resting against the curved wood of the hull, could feel the water sliding past. There was no light, it was very hot, he could hear the others breathing. The boat slowed, then stopped for inspection, and as the engine idled the smell of gasoline grew stronger and stronger in the compartment. Above them, boots stamping on the deck. The Germans were talking, laughing with each other-they felt really good today, they’d had a triumph of some kind. Time crawled, the boat rising and falling on the heavy swell in the harbor. Casson felt sweat gather at his hairline and run down his face.
Then it ended. The German patrol boat started up with a roar, their own engine accelerated, and the boat moved forward; somebody on the other side of the wall said, “All right, that’s over. We’ll let you out as soon as we clear the harbor.”
On deck, Casson breathed the salt air, gripped the railing, and watched the land fall away as the boat moved out to sea. It was the end of the night, hills dark against the sky, faded moon, white combers rolling in to shore.
Good-bye.
Forever-he knew that. This was what life cost you, you lost what you loved. He closed his eyes and saw her, felt her breath on his face, felt her skin against him. Then he was in the sea.
Cold. The shock of it made him gasp, then swim for his life. Behind him, great volleys of angry threats and curses. Ahead of him, now he could see it, the beach.
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Document ID: fbd-0fe55d-70b5-4945-91bd-43eb-de03-75a9c5
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 09.10.2012
Created using: calibre 0.9.1, Fiction Book Designer, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6.6 software
Document authors :
Alan Furst
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