Red Gold ns-5

by Alan Furst

  As he passed the hotel desk, the clerk called out to him. “Monsieur Marin?”

  “Yes?”

  “Could you step in to the proprietaire’s office for a moment?”

  He liked the woman who owned the Benoit. Pretty and fading. Sympathetic, but nobody’s fool. An adventuress, he guessed, in her younger days, and apparently good at it.

  “A small problem, Monsieur Marin. The monthly rent?”

  “Madame?”

  “The deposit has always been made directly into our account at the bank, on the twentieth day of the month. But, according to our statement, there was no payment in January. I’m sure it is an oversight.”

  “Of course, nothing more. The mails perhaps. I’ll have to see about it. However, just to make certain, it is…?”

  “Six hundred francs.”

  “I’ll stop at my bank today.” He looked grim-damn the inconvenience.

  “Thank you. These things happen.”

  “If this is going to take a few days, it might just be simpler to pay you in cash. Tomorrow, madame?”

  “Whatever suits you, monsieur.”

  He never reached the cafe. On a side street near the hotel a young woman appeared out of nowhere and fell in step beside him. “You are Marin?”

  “Yes.”

  She was no more than nineteen, very thin, with silky colorless hair. “I am called Sylvie, monsieur. Do you mind if we go inside for a minute?”

  “No, I don’t mind.”

  “Are you followed?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She led him into the hallway of an apartment house and handed him a piece of paper. “Please memorize that,” she said. “It’s my address and telephone number. I’ve been assigned as your liaison with the FTP-all contact is to go through me. Nobody else will know where you live.”

  They left the building and walked together for a few blocks, then took the Metro for one stop, crossed over to the other side of the station, let one train go by, and took the next one back to the station they’d started from. They went into a large post office, stood on line for five minutes, and went out another door. On the street, Casson saw two men, at a distance, standing in front of a cafe and looking in their direction.

  “Don’t worry,” Sylvie said. “Their job is to watch us.”

  They walked to a street off the avenue des Ternes. “You see the automobile parked in front of the pharmacy?”

  “Yes.”

  “You will be getting into it. In the front seat. Walk to the car as quickly as you can, but don’t run.”

  Casson started to say good-bye. “Go,” she said. “Right now.”

  The car was a nondescript Renault, one of the cheaper models from before the war, dented and dusty. Casson slid into the front seat. He had barely closed the door when the car took off, not quite speeding.

  The driver was tall and pale with a Slavic face and a worker’s cap. Suddenly Casson realized he’d seen him before. In May of 1941, his screenwriter, Louis Fischfang, had decided to go underground. They had met in an empty apartment, on the pretext of wanting to rent it. Casson had said good-bye and given Fischfang as much money as he could. But Fischfang had not come alone. The driver had been with him, a protector, a bodyguard. The driver had also recognized him, Casson saw it in his eyes. But neither of them said a word-they weren’t supposed to know each other and so they didn’t.

  The man in the back seat leaned forward so Casson didn’t have to turn around.

  “I’m called Weiss,” he said. “Let me ask you right away, is the meeting to hand over merchandise from the Service des Renseignements? Or something else?” The voice was educated, and foreign.

  “The guns have been brought into Paris,” Casson said. “Six hundred MAS 38 submachine guns, a thousand rounds of ammunition for each.”

  “Where are they?”

  “In a garage near the porte d’Italie.”

  “Take us out there,” Weiss said to the driver.

  As they left the garage, the driver was in the truck with Casson. Weiss took the Renault. They drove for a long time in the midday traffic, circling east just beyond the edge of the city, then turning north into the Montreuil district. Casson followed the Renault into a cinder yard behind a brick building-dark, windows boarded up, perhaps a deserted school. “This is it,” the driver said. “You can give me the key.”

  Two men were waiting for them. One of them was short and round-shouldered and spoke with a Spanish accent. The other was young, not long out of school, with steel-rimmed glasses and the severe haircut of a man who doesn’t like to give money to barbers. A polytechnicien, Casson thought. He knew the type from his days at the Sorbonne, serious, square-jawed, wearing a suit meant to last a lifetime. Probably an engineer.

  At Weiss’s direction, Casson and the driver moved the sardine boxes to one side, dug down into the load, and set one of the unmarked crates on the floor of the truck. The engineer produced a flashlight, a screwdriver, and a small wrench. He used the screwdriver to pop the boards free, then folded back the sheet of oiled paper. Once again, Casson saw six submachine guns side by side in a beam of light.

  The engineer picked up one of the guns and wiped the Cosmoline off it with a clean rag. He studied the gun for a moment, raised it to a firing position, worked the bolt. Next he laid it on the truck bed and disassembled it. This took, to Casson’s amazement, less than thirty seconds. His long fingers flew as they spun the barrel out of its housing. One after another the parts came free-a spring, a slide, a bolt-each of them examined, then set down in a row. Without missing a beat he said, “Meanwhile, maybe somebody could get me the 7.65.”

  Casson brought the crate over, broke it open, and took out a box of ammunition. The engineer used a pair of small pliers to open one of the bullets. He smelled the powder, rubbed a few grains gently between his fingers, and dusted it off with his rag. “It’s good,” he said to Weiss. “And the guns haven’t been used.”

  “Or tampered with.”

  “They’re right off the factory line. Of course, I can’t really guarantee anything until I do a test-firing. Three or four magazines at least.”

  “Can they be shortened? To fit under a jacket?”

  The engineer shrugged. “A wooden stock, all you need is a saw.”

  The engineer laid the gun back in its crate, Weiss turned off the flashlight. “We have a little house in Montreuil,” he said to Casson. “Just a few minutes from here.”

  The house stood at one end of a row of cottages. Weiss took a large ring of keys from his pocket and flipped through it twice before he found the one he wanted. He had to ram his shoulder against the door to get it open. Inside it was musty and unused. Cold air rose from the stone floor. At the far end of the room, a window looked out onto a tiny garden-soot-dusted snow in the furrows, sagging poles, and a dining-room chair, left outside far too long to ever be brought in again.

  They sat on couches covered with sheets. Weiss put his briefcase aside and made himself comfortable. Outside, the sky was low and the afternoon light had darkened. “Going to snow,” he said. He had the face of an actor, Casson thought. Not precisely handsome, but smooth, and composed. He could be anyone he wanted to be, and what he said you would likely believe. He leaned forward and smiled. “So then,” he said. “What happens next?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We expect to be asked for something, of course.”

  “It’s up to the people in Vichy,” Casson said. “They may come back to you, they may not.”

  “They’ll be back,” Weiss said. “You should contact Sylvie when that happens, she’ll put you in touch with Service B. Meanwhile, make sure she knows where you are, in case we need to talk to you.”

  “Service B?”

  “The FTP intelligence unit. We call it B, the second letter of the alphabet, rather than Deuxieme. One Deuxieme Bureau was more than enough for us.”

  They were silent for a time, then Weiss said, “I understand you were in
the film business.”

  “I was, yes.”

  “Hope to go back to it, after the war?”

  “If I can. It’s changed since the Occupation.”

  “You’ll find a way,” Weiss said. Something he remembered made him smile. “I imagine it was different here, but where I grew up anybody who’d actually seen a movie was something of a celebrity.”

  “Where was that?”

  Weiss shrugged. “A small town in central Europe. My father was a shoemaker. First time I ever went anywhere else I was seventeen years old.”

  “The war?”

  “Yes. And on the wrong side-to begin with, anyhow. I was a conscript, in the Austro-Hungarian infantry. On the eastern front. Eventually my regiment surrendered, and I became a prisoner of war in Russia. So I was there in October of ’17. The Red Army needed soldiers and they recruited us-they were going to change the world, we could help them do it. Not a hard decision. Most of us had grown up in villages, or workers’ districts. Czech, Polish, Hungarian-it was all pretty much the same. Some days there wasn’t anything to eat, we’d see people frozen to death in alleys. We figured we might as well join up, why not? They made me an officer-that never would have happened in Austria-Hungary.”

  Weiss stopped, and looked at his watch. Casson got the impression he’d said a little more than he meant to. “Now,” he went on, all business, “when you talk to your people in Vichy, there is one point I’d like you to bring up. Over the last eighteen months, the SR has arrested quite a few of our operatives, they’re in the military prison at Tarbes. We’d like them out, at least some of them.”

  “Arrested for what?”

  “They’re communists. Accused of working against the government, which is what they’re under orders to do. In general it’s for leaflets, illegal printing presses, agitation-strikes and labor actions. I’m not saying some of them weren’t involved in secret cells, spying, or sabotage, but if they were, it had to do with operations run against the war effort.”

  “Technically crimes, according to French law.”

  “Crimes against Vichy. To us that means Germany. Look, we know the SR has to function under the eyes of the Germans, it can’t just sit there and do nothing. But, in our case, it’s been a little too successful. So, maybe they could arrange to leave a few doors open, let a few people walk away.”

  Casson nodded, it made sense.

  “We have a lot to offer, Casson. Help with field operations, intelligence-but they have to ask. From the first contact we felt that no matter how hard we’ve fought against each other in the past, we now have a common enemy, so it’s time for us to be allies.”

  “War changes everything.”

  Weiss smiled. “It should, logically it should. But the world doesn’t run on logic, it runs on the seven deadly sins and the weather. Even so, we have to try to do what we can.”

  “And it helps,” Casson said, “to have machine guns.”

  “It does.”

  “I expect I’ll be reading about them in the papers.”

  “Maybe not next week, but yes, you will.”

  Why not next week? But that wasn’t up to him. He called the contact number for the SR about an hour after he left Weiss, using a public telephone at the Gare d’Austerlitz. And did his best-reported that the guns had been delivered, reported what Weiss had suggested.

  And heard it rejected. That was, at least, his impression. The voice on the other end of the phone was polite, and businesslike. Pure deflection, Casson thought. He knew in his heart that if he ever called again the phone would not be answered. “Thank you for letting us know,” the voice said. That was it-nothing about the future. Henri had told him he was out of a job, the telephone call confirmed it.

  That afternoon he paid his hotel bill. It would give him at least ten days more at the Benoit. Meanwhile, he’d better start looking for a job. He bought a Paris-Soir, which had more petits annonces than any other paper, and took it to the cafe on the place Maillart.

  He felt alone and abandoned, and couldn’t stop thinking about Helene, due to leave in a few hours. Of course she had to go, he told himself. But, whatever else was true, a love affair was over. He had said he would see her off at the station, but she’d turned him down. She wanted to remember their last time together in the country hotel, she said, not pushing through the crowds at the Gare de Lyon.

  The cafe was jammed, Casson had to wait for a chair. The unaccustomed warmth had put some of the patrons to sleep, but nobody bothered them. Casson ordered a coffee and read the newspaper. The French liner Normandie, now a war transport for the USA, was shown burning at its pier in New York. The accompanying story was sly, but suggested German sabotage as the cause of the fire. On the next page, a photograph of an Afrika Korps platoon lounging around a white fountain, a few camels in the background. In Libya, victorious troops take a break from the fighting after capturing the town of Derna. Below that, a headline: ANTI-DRAFT RIOTS IN MONTREAL — A BAS LA CONSCRIPTION! No news from the Eastern Front, Casson noted, which probably meant a Russian offensive was under way.

  He read everything, trying to make the newspaper last-the horoscope, the births and deaths-and fooled with the crossword puzzle while his patience held out. But, finally, he had to turn, pencil in hand, to the help-wanted columns. Wanted: mechanics, electricians, bakers. Merde, it was an encyclopedia of things he couldn’t do.

  This is not going to work. He’d sensed it that morning, when his remaining funds were laid out on the bed. The employment ads in the newspaper seemed remote, mysterious-Fischfang used to say the editors wrote them. In Casson’s life, work came through friends. Didn’t he know somebody who could help him? All those years of making films, churning up money for casts and crews- there had to be someone in the city who felt gratitude, somebody who would pay him to do something.

  Wanted: a room-service waiter at the Bristol. Wanted: an experienced salesman of luxury automobiles, must speak German. Probably Bruno, he guessed, his former wife’s live-in boyfriend. Where was it? Avenue Suffern. No, Bruno was on the Champs-Elysees.

  Wanted: bicycle messenger. Machinist. Exotic dancer.

  In a room on the rue St.-Denis, SS-Unterscharfuhrer Otto Albers sat on a sofa in his underwear and waited for the show to begin. A young woman wearing spectacles and a ragged cardigan sweater made herself busy dusting a lamp, then a table, with a handkerchief. He had discovered her on a corner in the red-light district, clutching a Bible, looking scared. The mouse-as he thought of her-now appeared as The Maid in his weekly drama.

  He yawned and leaned back, the waiting was not unpleasurable. Albers’s day had begun at dawn. He had stood for a long time in front of the urinal in the hotel where SS men were billeted. A long time. On the wall, somebody had written:

  Vorne Russen Hintern Russen Und dazwischen Wird geschussen

  Obviously, Albers thought, somebody transferred to Paris from the Russian front. “Russians ahead / Russians behind/And in between/ Shooting.”

  Not so funny, the little poem. And if what he heard from other soldiers was true, a rather polite version of what really went on. Not only the partizan sniping mentioned in the verse, but midnight raids-Mongolian cavalry armed with sabers, emerging like phantoms from the ice fog, riding silent to the edge of the encampment, then war cries, somebody sliced just about in half, screams, shots, havoc.

  At dawn, Soviet punishment battalions attacked with NKVD machine-gunners aiming at their backs. Since they couldn’t run away, since they were going to die, they might as well take you along. Thousands of them. They just kept coming.

  Waiting in front of the urinal, Albers had shivered, remembering the stories. That wasn’t for him. He preferred Paris, and the mouse. Ach! What pleasure she gave him. He didn’t mind at all that he had to pay for it. What he did mind was the other thing she’d given him, which made him stand so long in front of the urinal. He would have to get that taken care of, and he would have to be rather clever about how he did it. But he’d alwa
ys been rather clever-thus he found himself waiting for a private exhibition, and not for Mongolian cavalry.

  Again he yawned. A long day, the Gestapo worked hard. He labored in a chilly basement, in charge of a platoon of clerks, fetching dossiers, stacking them on metal carts, distributing them to offices all over the building. Then, picking them up at the end of the day, back on the carts, back on the shelves. In the proper sequence. Woe betide the careless soul who filed Boudreau behind Boudret-they might never find poor Boudreau again!

  A knock at the door, sharp and authoritative. Oh! The poor maid had been startled. “Yes?”

  “Open up. Be quick about it.”

  Timidly, the maid opened the door. Enter, The Mistress of the House. Not a professional, Albers thought, an old friend of the mouse. Always he imagined her at work in an office, then home in one of the better neighborhoods. Small and fair, tight slacks, a thin, angry face. “Well, have you cleaned up the room? It doesn’t look very clean to me.” A thumb swiped across a tabletop. “What’s this?”

  A tiny voice. “Dust.”

  “So!”

  “Oh madame, please forgive me. Please.”

  A cheek taken between thumb and forefinger. “Always I forgive you. This time, I think not.”

  It went on-why hurry? The director Otto Albers was not loath to let a scene develop as it should. For a moment, it seemed the mistress might relent-the maid was down on her knees, hands clasped, she would do better next time.

  But no. The maid was lazy and deceitful, she had neglected this, that, and the other thing. The mistress-a little overheated-peeled down to black corset and stockings. “Right over here, you. You know how it’s done.” Poor maid, bent over the arm of the sofa, skirt up, panties down, white skin glowing in the lamplight, peeking horrified over her shoulder as the mistress punished her.

  At this point, both women glanced expectantly at Albers, because it was just about here that he usually took an active role. But not tonight. Until he felt better he had no desire to participate. “Continue,” he said, and settled back in his chair. When they were done, the two women got dressed and shared out the hundred-franc notes stacked on the night table.