“Yes, it does seem that way,” Fougère said. “But you know how they are.”
He retreated, asking Fougère not to mention that he’d been by. That much he thought he’d won, but nothing else. The party had always been secretive—Lenin and Dzherzhinsky and the Cheka and all the rest of it—communists didn’t chatter, not even in France.
Next he looked for Louis Fischfang, his former screenwriter. They’d said good-bye in the spring of ’41, when Fischfang disappeared into the underground, taking up full-time work for the party. Casson had wished him well, and given him money. He tried the various contacts he remembered—the owner of a newsstand, a furrier in the 13th, but nobody had seen him. One apartment he’d used had a new tenant. A woman he’d lived with had “gone away,” according to the neighbors.
A few days later, he had another meeting with Degrave. He said he’d managed to make a few contacts, but had nothing in particular to report. Degrave was understanding, it was early in the game. After ten minutes, another man joined them. Degrave’s superior, he guessed, though like Degrave he was in civilian clothing. He was introduced as “Michel,” obviously an alias. Casson thought of him as
de Something.
Nobility. He was older than Degrave, white and soft, with small, sharp eyes sparkling with the de Somethings’ ancient amusement at the play of human weakness, and pleasure in what it brought them.
Power and privilege,
Casson thought, but that sounded too much like a tract. “What you are doing is important, monsieur,” the man said to him. He had a high, gentle voice, every word beautifully formed.
Coming out of the Métro that night, Casson was approached by an older woman. “
Pardon,
monsieur, I believe you dropped this.” She handed him a slip of paper:
Citizens of Paris! On 4 November, three militants of the FTP were martyred on behalf of the French people. Eva Perlemère, Leon Szapera, and Natan Kohn died as heroes in action against the Wehrmacht on Route 17 outside Aubervilliers. Follow their example! For Hitler, not a grain of wheat, not a foot of railroad track or an inch of telephone cable, not one hour of peace.
Vive
la France!
Casson had seen this reported on the front page of
Paris-Soir.
TERRORIST ATTACK THWARTED ON ROUTE 17! They were Jews and communists, the story said, “social criminals,” and they didn’t care if they brought down heavy reprisals on the French people in their “blind pursuit of a Bolshevik France.” They were inspired, it turned out, “not by patriotic motives, but by slavish obedience to Article 25 of the Communist Party program drawn up at the Sixth Congress in Moscow in 1928.”
Where are you?
Casson thought. Who do I know who knows where you are? He sat in his room and made lists of names. Radicals from his days at the Sorbonne. Friends from his early twenties in the Latin Quarter. People in the film business—directors, agents, actors, accountants, lawyers, producers, and more. Eventually, he wrote down the name
Alexander Kovar.
Kovar was a writer. Anything you could write, plays, novels, newspaper articles, and pamphlets, Kovar had written, going back fifteen years at least. In 1936, Casson had come across one of his novels,
The House on Calle Alcalà,
based on the outbreak of fighting between monarchists and anarchists in Madrid in 1931, fighting set off when two aristocrats beat a taxi driver to death in front of a monarchist club on the
Calle
Alcalà—beat him for calling out “
Viva
la República!
”
Casson had liked the story—almost unconsciously blanking out the political posturing and the straw men—in the way that film producers like certain novels. He had persuaded himself he might buy it, at least take an option if he could get it for a good price. There was rioting, plotting, passionate conspiracy in the back rooms of cafés and, by the time the book was published and Casson got interested, the novel had proved to be prophetic—it was 1936 and Spain was truly on fire. In fact, and Casson was honest with himself, he was more than anything curious about the writer, who had a knowing hand with action scenes. In the end, however, lunch and a meeting and life went on.
But he’d liked Kovar. And he knew how to find him. If he was alive, if the communists or the fascists or the Germans or the street girls hadn’t already done for him, because they’d certainly all tried it. If he was alive, Casson thought, and not locked up in some dungeon.
He took a train ride to Melun, a little way south of Paris. Found the shoe-repair shop, left a message, for “Anton,” that he was an old friend and could be found by calling at the Hotel Benoit and asking for “Marin.” The following night, a young woman came to his room. “I’m a friend of Anton,” she said. “Who are you?”
“I used to be a film producer, called Casson.”
She glowered at him. “Oh. And now?”
“A fugitive.”
“For a fugitive,” she said, looking around the hotel room, “you don’t do too badly.”
“Quand même,”
he said. Even so.
As she left, Casson was reminded of a rather casual remark Degrave had made in one of their discussions. “When you’re looking for somebody, and you find yourself in contact with people you’ve never met, you’re getting close.”
The next morning he found a message waiting for him at the desk: Gare du Nord, 5:15 P.M., Track 16. He waited there for fifteen minutes, took a few steps toward the exit, then the young woman from the day before appeared at his side and said, “Please come with me.”
He followed her through the rain to a run-down office building a few blocks behind the station on the rue Pétrelle. She turned, came back to him and said, “On the third floor, turn left. It’s at the end of the hall.”
The building was ice-cold and dark. And silent—when he left the staircase at the third floor, his footsteps echoed down the corridor. On the door at the end of the hall, the former tenant’s name, the ghost of lettering scraped off the pebbled glass.
Casson knocked, then entered. Kovar was sitting in a swivel chair behind a desk piled with account ledgers. On the pull-out shelf was an old Remington typewriter.
“Nice to see you again,” Casson said.
Kovar inclined his head and smiled to acknowledge the greeting. He indicated a chair, Casson sat down. “A surprise,” Kovar said. There was faint irony in his voice but, as Casson remembered it, that was true of everything he said. “Sorry I can’t offer you anything. This is somebody else’s office by day, I only use it at night.” His chair creaked as he leaned forward. “You can’t really be a fugitive, can you?” The idea seemed to amuse him.
“I escaped from the rue des Saussaies. Last June.” The address was that of the Gestapo administrative headquarters. “Then I was staying up in place Clichy, here and there, until a week ago.”
Kovar nodded—it might be true. “And now?”
“I’ve been asked to make contact with the FTP.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes.”
Kovar smiled. Casson could just manage to see him in the dark office. He hadn’t changed, had been fifty years old all his life. A shaggy, tobacco-stained mustache on the face of a mole, receding hairline, slumped shoulders. His body small, meager, almost weightless—a rag doll to be punched and kicked and thrown against the wall, which pretty exactly described what had been done to it. Gray shirt, green tie, a shabby jacket. Years earlier, Fischfang had told him Kovar’s story: his father a French citizen of Russian birth, his mother, born in Bratislava, died when he was twelve. He’d been in and out of prison in France, for political crimes, had broken with Stalin, then with Trotsky. The NKVD had tried to assassinate him after he’d been thrown out of the party. He’d essentially raised himself, educated himself, trained himself to write, got himself into trouble, found misfortune wherever he went, and somehow survived it all. “He’s worse than a Marxist,” Fischfang had said in 1936, “he’s an idealist.”
Kovar sighed. “You weren’t such a bad sort,” he said. “A romantic, maybe. But now you’ve gone and—I mean, who asked you to find the FTP?”
“Army officers. A resistance group.”
“They know you’re talking to me?”
“No.”
“But you believe what they tell you.”
Casson thought about that for a moment. “When the occupation began, I tried to do nothing. It worked for a time, then it didn’t. So I decided to do whatever I could, and very quickly came to understand that you can never be sure. Either you put your life in the hands of people you don’t entirely trust, or you hide in a corner.”
“Yes—but army officers?”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. For one thing, they probably hold the FTP responsible, the entire Left for that matter, for what happened here in 1940. What do they want with them now?”
“To talk. A marriage of convenience, perhaps. We’re in trouble, Kovar, that much I know. My friends, the crowd I knew before the war, either do nothing or collaborate. They’ve adapted. It’s reported in the newspapers that one of the city’s most prominent hostesses gives dinner parties for German officers. At each place, for table decoration, are crossed French and German flags. Her toast to the commandant of Paris, the paper said, was dedicated to ‘the most charming of our conquerors.’ Well, it’s not news that some of us are whores in this country. But it’s just possible that some of us aren’t.”
“You’ll pay for that, you know,” Kovar said, rather gently. “If they find out you feel that way.”
“Then I’ll pay.” He paused, then said, “Can you help? Will you?”
Kovar thought it over. “I understand what you’re doing, looking for party combat units. What your army officers see is action— blood spilled for honor, and that they understand better than anything in the world. Problem is, I don’t think I’m the one to help you. These people, the FTP, are Stalinists, Casson, and they don’t like me. They don’t like anarchists—they were killing them in the fall of ’17, in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. They murdered the POUM leadership in Spain—NKVD operatives did that—and I’m no different. I grew up with a copy of Verhaeren in my pocket. ‘Drunk with the world, and with ourselves, we bring hearts of new men to the old universe.’ By all odds I shouldn’t even be alive, I’ve been living on borrowed time since 1927. I’m sure you know, Casson, I
tried
being a communist, I managed for ten years but in the end it didn’t work. They saw, finally, that they couldn’t tell me what to do, and that was the end of that.”
“You have friends,” Casson said.
A long pause, and a reluctant nod of the head. “Maybe,” he said. “I have to think about it.”
“
Petit
conard!
” You little jerk. A woman’s voice, furious, held, barely, just below a full-blooded scream, thundered through Casson’s wall.
“No, wait, now look, we never said . . .” The whine of the falsely accused.
“I hate you.”
“Now look . . .” He lowered his voice as he told her where to look.
Casson had fallen asleep, face down on Remarque. He looked at his watch, 2:20 in the afternoon.
The middle of the day, offices closed for lunch, a busy time at
le
Benoit.
Degrave took him to dinner, brought along his mistress, Laurette, and her friend, Hélène. Laurette blonde and soft, Hélène the prettier one, dark, with a lot of mascara, glossy black hair cut stylishly—expensively—short, wearing
bijoux fantasie,
gold-painted wooden bracelets, that clacked as she ate. Fortyish, Casson thought. She was tense at first, then talkative and bright. Casson liked her. While Degrave and Laurette were busy with each other, he told her how he’d once been hounded by lawyers when his production company had misplaced four hundred false beards meant for a musical version of Samson and Delilah. She hooted, covered her mouth, then put a hand on his arm and said, “Forgive me, I haven’t done that for a long time.”
Generous of Degrave to take them out, Casson thought. A black-market restaurant, one the Germans hadn’t yet discovered. Roast chicken: months since Casson had tasted anything like that. He wanted to tear it apart and eat it with his fingers, maybe rolling around with it under the table. And a ’27 Meursault. From beneath the table, excited growling and snarling, then silence, then a hand appears, holding an empty glass.
“Je vous remercie,”
Casson said, the nicest way to say thank you. Degrave shrugged and smiled. “Why not,” he said.
When the chicken bones were taken away, the owner came to the table.
“Mes enfants,”
she said.
They looked up expectantly.
“I can make an egg custard for you.”
“Yes, of course,” Degrave said.
“Twenty minutes.”
“All right.”
“Are you going back tonight?” Hélène said to Degrave.
“I’m staying over,” he said. “If I can get a train reservation for Friday.”
“He can,” Laurette said. She had moved her chair so she could be close to him. “If he likes.”
Degrave’s smile was tart. “I can do anything.” He rested a hand on Laurette’s shoulder and kissed her on the forehead.
“Salaud,”
she said.
Degrave and Laurette went off in a bicycle taxi, Casson and Hélène stood in the drizzle. “Can I take you home?” Casson said.
She hesitated.
“See you to the door, then.”
“Could we go to your room?”
Tiens.
“Of course.”
The hotel was not far from the restaurant, so they walked. She lived, she explained, in a maid’s room in an apartment owned by an old woman, a family friend. “I am an Alsatian Jew,” she said, “from Strasbourg. Ten years ago I moved to Paris and rented a small apartment. Then, a few weeks after the Germans came, the landlord told me I had to find someplace else—his sister wanted the apartment. I don’t think he has a sister, but at least he was polite about it. I went to see my mother’s old friend, a widow for many years. She was lonely, she said, would I come and stay with her?
“For a few months, everything went well. This woman—who is not Jewish, by the way—had been a teacher in a
lycée.
We talked about books and music, we were good company for each other. But then, she changed. She was ill in the winter of ’41, and she became obsessed with the Germans. She made it clear that she’d like me to leave. The problem is, when they said Jews had to register, I didn’t—something told me not to. Now I can’t get a change of residence permit from the préfecture—if she throws me out I have nowhere to go. So, I stay. I’m very quiet. I don’t cause trouble. She
has
made a point of telling me not to bring strangers there. She’s afraid of being robbed, or murdered, I don’t know exactly what.”