by Alan Furst
The waiter arrived, carrying a tray with two glasses of beer, dark brown, almost black, a thin layer of mocha-colored foam on top. “Ah-ha,” Gueze sang out. “La bonne biere. ” The good beer-real, honest, ancient, like us peasant French. Gueze beamed at the idea, pleased with himself. Even so, Casson thought, he’s no fool.
Casson’s father had taken him to the park on Sunday afternoons. Neither of them knew what they were supposed to be doing there, but his mother insisted and so they went, sitting on a bench in the Ranelagh gardens until they were allowed back in the apartment. Once, Casson remembered, his father had stared a long time at a horse and carriage. “A noble head on that animal,” he’d said at last. “But, Jean-Claude, do not underestimate the value of his backside.”
They drank the beer, cool and thick and bitter. All around them, the brasserie was getting louder as the evening went on. “This is good,” Casson said. He paused, then, “There is something I wanted to mention, it may not be of interest, but I leave that up to you.”
Gueze raised his eyebrows.
“For some months,” Casson said, “I’ve had to live underground. During that time I came across an old friend, and he asked me to help him. The work we did was political, and covert. In the process, I had conversations with people who are involved in the direction of the Communist Party. The FTP, to be exact. With jobs maybe not so different from yours. We had several meetings, some of their views became clear over time. At the last meeting, I was told they needed weapons, thousands of them, with ammunition, and hand grenades. Would this interest you? Because, if it does, there’s more. They are willing, in return, to undertake specific operations against the Germans.”
“Interesting,” Gueze said. “No doubt about it. Tell me this, are you a believer? I don’t care if you are, I happen to be a socialist, but if you look around this restaurant, at the German uniforms, you’ll see where political divisions have gotten us.”
“No,” Casson said. “And they knew that from the beginning.”
The dinner arrived. What war? Casson thought. Warm sauerkraut, thick bacon on its rind, a pork chop. And a saucisse de Toulouse- he filled the bowl of a tiny spoon with hot mustard and ran it down the burst, blackened skin.
“Not too bad for a cold March night,” Gueze said.
Casson agreed. No, not too bad.
“Of course I can’t give you an answer straight away,” Gueze said. “This will be pawed over by a committee, but something has to be worked out. Naturally we talk to the communists in London, then wait until they wire back to Moscow for permission to blow their nose. It’s terribly slow. However, if we patch something together in Paris it’s on-the-ground, not binding, but at least something will come of it. That’s the attraction of what you’ve told me.”
Gueze picked up the empty bread basket and looked around. A waiter swept it away and returned a moment later with a full one, rounds of fresh bread piled high.
“The fact is,” Gueze said, “we are making an effort to get all the resistance movements-at the moment we count fifteen or so- going in the same direction. At least now and then.” He ate a forkful of sauerkraut, washed it down with beer. “You said you had to live underground?”
“I got into trouble with the Gestapo, June of ’41. At that time, I had some contact with the British special services.”
“Which? The people who blow things up? Or the people who steal blueprints?”
“Blow things up.”
“Well, they’re a lot easier to deal with, that much I can tell you. We do both, in one service. So, the Gestapo wants you. How badly?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“We’ll have to find out. If they’re really hunting for you, you can’t be of much use to us. One thing I should say is that if you come to work for us, we’ll pay you. Not a lot, but enough. Marie-Claire seemed to think that your existence has been, well, day-to-day.”
“It has.”
“You’ll have plenty to worry about, with us, but not that.” He went back to work on the choucroute. “She is, you know, a very attractive woman.”
“I know,” Casson said.
“Do you regret, the, ah…”
“No. We just couldn’t get along. You know how it is.”
“Oh yes. Unfortunately, she lives with that awful man.”
They ate in silence for a time. “Communists, you know,” Gueze said, “turn out to be crucial. The British have to bleed the Germans to death-they can’t absorb the number of casualties the Russians can. Their strategy is to shut down the power stations, the railroads, the phones and the telegraph, keep the important metals away, blow up the tool-and-die works. It’s not easy, because the Germans are ingenious, they wire it all back together, and they’ve learned to put things underground. But, if you’re going to deliver the explosives by hand, rather than by plane, you need the railwaymen, the telephone workers, the lathe operators. That’s the working class-labor unions, communists. And they’ve been in clandestine operations for twenty years.”
“One thing did occur to me,” Casson said. “What if we help the FTP to get arms and then they don’t do all that much. They simply wait till the end of the war. They’re armed, and well organized. They demand a share of the government-or else.”
Gueze shrugged. “That’s what we’re doing, why shouldn’t they?”
Later, Casson mentioned Helene, and the San Lorenzo. Gueze was waiting for the tarte Tatin he’d ordered. “Tell me what happened,” he said. Casson told the story in detail, from the beginning. Gueze listened attentively. “I’m not sure how we can help,” he said at the end. “But there may be something we can do. Let me think it over.”
Helene called him at the hotel in the late afternoon-she’d arrived in Paris at dawn, and gone to work. Casson offered to take her out to dinner and they met at a restaurant. As she came toward the table, he could see a dark bruise on one side of her jaw, and when he embraced her she winced.
“You’re hurt,” he said.
“Not much, a little sore.”
She sat next to him on a banquette, he ordered a bottle of red wine. The trip down wasn’t bad, she said, a few identity checks and the train was cold. She’d spent two weeks in Nice, de la Barre’s people had arranged for her to stay at an apartment in the old city. “Day and night,” she said. “We were not permitted to leave.”
She didn’t get out the first time. “The next sailing was delayed but, finally, they let us on board. I was in a cabin on the deck, with eight other passengers. It was after midnight, nobody said a word, we just waited to get under way. Then there was an explosion below deck-maybe more than one-it was like a wind hit the floor. The lights went out, we heard people screaming that the boat was on fire. Everybody ran, somebody pushed me out of the way and I fell flat on my face on the steel deck, but I got up, and a sailor grabbed me by the elbow and led me down the gangplank. Then we all just stood there, watching the ship burn.”
She paused a moment. Casson poured wine in her glass and she drank some. “Finally,” she said, “the police came and took everybody to the station. We were questioned most of the night-the police were Italian, but the people asking the questions were German. Later on we heard that somebody had been arrested.”
Casson told her about his attempt to see de la Barre. “We’ll just have to find another way.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “We’ll see.”
Back at Casson’s hotel, she folded her skirt and sweater over the back of a chair and lay down on the bed in her slip. There were bruises down one side of her leg. Casson stretched out next to her. “How was work?” he asked.
She shrugged. “It doesn’t change.”
“Victorine?”
“We talked about Strasbourg. She went once to Buerehiesel for dinner, she always tells me what a good time she had.”
“Did she-”
“Not today. Let’s not talk about it.”
Casson stubbed out his cigarette and put his arms around her. “W
here are you staying?”
“Same place. Today it felt like I never left-maybe I’m fated to be here.”
“Don’t say that, Helene.”
“I could find another job. In a shop, perhaps. I just have to live quietly, I’ll be all right.”
As gently as he could, Casson said, “We have to try again.”
She didn’t answer. Casson told her about Lamy and his stories, about the Dodge-em cars. Then they were quiet for a time, and Casson realized she had fallen asleep. Carefully, he slipped off the bed and covered her with a blanket. He sat by the window and read for a time. She called him softly when she woke up. “Is it curfew yet?”
“In about an hour.”
“I should go back to the room. Tonight, anyhow.”
“All right. You know you can stay with me, as long as you like.”
“I know.”
She sat up, held her face in her hands.
“I’ll take you back to the apartment,” he said.
They rode the Metro together in silence. He kissed her at the door of her building, then waited while she went upstairs.
For SS-Unterscharfuhrer Otto Albers, it was perhaps the worst day of his life. One of them, anyhow. There had been the time he was caught stealing rolls from the baker, the time caught cheating in school. He’d had the same knot in his stomach.
But he was no child now, and what had happened was his own fault. Another corporal worked alongside him in the basement vaults of the Gestapo headquarters on the rue des Saussaies, Corporal Prost. Prost had been in Russia, had fought there, had barely escaped with his life. He was missing an eye and most of a foot, and more than that, to hear him tell it. “I don’t care about it anymore,” he told Albers sadly. “It just doesn’t come to me.”
He was a good storyteller, Prost. He’d seen action around Nikopol, in the Ukraine, with a Waffen-SS unit. They’d beaten back days of Soviet counterattacks, then dealt with partizans-shot most of them, hanged the ones they caught alive. But it didn’t seem to matter-there were always more. Prost was wounded when a rigged mortar shell was set off in the latrine. Then the partizans stopped the hospital train and burned it with kerosene. Most of the wounded died, Prost crawled away. As the partizans withdrew, a little boy, maybe eleven, shot Prost in the face. Because the shot was fired at an angle, Prost survived. “Do whatever you need to do,” he told Albers. “But don’t go to that place.”
Albers didn’t want to go. But the problem he’d picked up from his “mouse” on the rue St.-Denis was getting worse. He’d considered going to the infirmary, but the penalty for catching a venereal disease was immediate transfer to the eastern front. So he asked a friend for the name of a doctor and was sent to a wretched old man out in the northern suburbs. He muttered something in French, which Albers couldn’t understand, then resorted to sign language, explaining how to apply the precious ointment. Albers returned to Paris feeling enormous relief-thank heaven that was over.
But it wasn’t. Over lunch ten days later, in a cafe near Gestapo headquarters, a young man rather boldly sat himself down at Albers’s table. He was apologetic at first-Albers thought he might be a student, but he was a few years too old for that. A fair-haired Frenchman, with cold eyes. The young man finished his soup, then leaned over and said, “ Unterscharfuhrer Albers?” Shocked, Albers nodded. “Here is a little something for you.” Excellent German, clipped and confidently spoken. Then he was gone, leaving an envelope on the table.
Albers was almost sick. They had his medical record, knew the doctor, knew everything. His choice: do what they said to do, or his superiors would be informed that he’d had a venereal disease. The letter said he had to signal his intentions immediately. If he put the envelope back on the table and left it there, he would cooperate. If he left with it, he might as well show it to his boss.
Albers looked frantically around the room but all he saw were people eating lunch. He left the envelope on the table, the waiter swept it away with the dishes. The waiter! Yes? he asked himself. Just what would he do to the waiter? It would only get him in deeper.
He spent the day frozen, terrified, trying somehow to find the courage to carry out their orders. He took no satisfaction that afternoon in the soothing rhythm of his work, rolling the metal cart up and down the endless rows of files. He replaced twenty-eight folders, took out forty new ones.
Just names, Albers told himself. French names-it took some time to get used to them, with their strange accents-and Jewish names, with difficult Polish spellings. Maybe life wouldn’t be so good for them tomorrow, or in a week, whenever the people upstairs got around to arresting them, but that wasn’t his fault.
He worked in a fury. How could he have allowed these sneaky Frenchmen to get power over him! Hitler was right, they had no sense of fair play-no instinctive, no Aryan sense of justice. You could never trust them. Albers returned the files of Levagne, Pierre and Levi, Anna to the shelf. The people upstairs were done with them.
He heard Prost, clumping along in his special shoe, as he came around the corner, pushing a file cart. He gave Albers a smile. “So, Otto, what’s for you tonight?”
“Nothing much. Tired, lately.”
“It’s the cold weather. But spring is coming, soon you’ll be bounding around like a new lamb.” He laughed.
Albers joined in as best he could. But then, Prost was right. If he took care of this, he could stay in Paris, go back to his Parisian pleasures. The mouse, cured of her malady, her friend, maybe another friend-a new character for his little theatre. Prost slipped a file back into the D section-just the end of it on the top shelf, Dybinski, a few others-then he went around the corner. “Klaus,” Albers called out, following him.
“Yes?”
“If you’re going down that way, could you take care of this?”
Prost looked at the folder Albers had given him. Vignon. “Be happy to do it,” he said.
Albers listened to the wheels of the cart, rolling over the cement floor, headed off to the other end of the alphabet.
Now.
Cascone, Caseda, Casselot, Cassignier, Cassignol.
Casson. There were several, what he needed was-
Casson, Jean.
As he’d practiced: undo three buttons of the shirt, take the dossier, slip it inside, then around under the arm, hidden beneath the uniform jacket. Button the buttons. Now, keep it there for thirty minutes, then it was time to leave the building. That wouldn’t be a problem.
Done, he thought.
MONSIEUR MARIN
28 March, 1942.
The apartment was in the 7th, on the avenue Bosquet, above a small and very expensive restaurant. It was well used; smelled of Gauloises and wet overcoats, and too much time spent indoors with the windows shut. “It belongs to a wealthy family,” Gueze explained. “They’ve left the country, but we can use it for as long as the war goes on. The best way to come in is down the hallway from a door inside the restaurant, then up the stairs.” He paused, then said, “We think it’s safe, but look around before you enter the building. It’s like everything else.”
He had a sheet of paper in front of him, which he tapped with the end of his pen. “We got hold of your dossier. Not too bad. They want to question you again, but there’s nothing about an escape.”
“How is that possible?”
“Apparently they’ve protected themselves. The Gestapo is unforgiving-in their view, accidents don’t happen. So, they called you in for questioning, then you left.”
“A man chased me. Fell off the roof into the courtyard.”
“If it happened, it isn’t in here. They may have reported it separately, as an accident, or a suicide. There is a cross-reference to the files of the SD, the SS intelligence service, we don’t know what’s in there. It seems to us that the case against you is obscure, not appealing to most investigators. You were certainly suspected of involvement with the British, but so were a lot of other people. And now the dossier is missing, perhaps misfiled.”
“You’re just as well off as Marin. You can’t be rehabilitated. Not now. Major Guske, the officer who called you in for questioning, is still in Paris. I would, if I were you, try to avoid him.”
“I’ll try.”
They both smiled. “As I said, we’re all new to this. We’ve suffered losses, but we’re learning as we go along. I think I may have to concede that perhaps the Brasserie Heininger wasn’t such a good idea after all. When you went to the WC, a man came over-I knew him slightly-and asked if you were the film producer Jean Casson.”
“What did you say?”
“That you were an insurance executive.”
“Claims investigator, is what my papers say.”
“Yes, but I wouldn’t be having dinner with somebody like that. Anyhow, you can stay in Paris for the time being, but you must be careful.” He paused, cleared his throat, put his notes away. “Now,” he said, “the British have come to the London office with a problem. Of course we agreed to help, and it’s up to us, to you and me, to show them we can do it.
“According to their intelligence, during the period January-February of this year, fifty-five hundred tons of gasoline and aviation fuel went from France to Rommel’s Afrika Korps in Libya. A war in the desert is a war of gasoline-for warplanes, for the tanks. In this kind of expanse-thousands of square miles-whoever can cover more ground, whoever can stay in the air longer, wins. What they want is for somebody to slow down the fuel deliveries. Some of it moves by rail, a good deal of it goes south on the rivers and canals, from the refineries in Rouen. Some of it must be coming from the Toulon refineries in the south, but the tonnage is well beyond what they produce. That’s more or less the situation, do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” Gueze said. “Now do something about it.”
5 April.
3:40 A.M., raining hard. The dockyards at Ablon, just south of Paris.
The union office was in a wooden shack-a few desks and chairs, a cold woodstove with a zigzag pipe to the roof. Weiss flinched as he entered, water dripping on him from the doorframe. Inside, the two men in bleu de travail grinned. “We’ve been meaning to do something about that,” one of them said.