“Why not move to a hotel?”
“Can’t afford it. I work in a travel agency, a good one, on the Champs-Elysées. The offices are splendid, but the pay is low.”
“Can your family help?”
“I don’t think so. The family’s been in Strasbourg since the Middle Ages, but when my parents heard the stories of the refugees coming from Germany, they became frightened. The Germans have always claimed that Alsace rightfully belongs to them. My parents feared, after Chamberlain gave away the Sudetenland in ’38, that France might use it to buy off Hitler. So they sold everything and went to live in Amsterdam. My brother and his family had emigrated just after the first war—he went into business with his in-laws in Montreal. My mother pleaded with me to come to Holland with them, but I wouldn’t. I liked the life in Paris, I was seeing someone, and nothing was going to happen to France and its glorious army.”
It had been a long time, Casson thought, back at the Benoit. For her too, apparently—trembling as he undid her bra and her breasts tumbled out. He almost fell asleep afterward, warm in a way he barely remembered. He propped himself up on one elbow and smoothed the damp hair back off her forehead.
“It’s funny,” she said, “how things happen. Laurette asked me to come along. I said no, she insisted. She’s been kind to me, more than kind, so finally I had to come. I’m going to hate it, I thought. But then . . .” Idly, she ran a fingernail up and down the inside of his thigh. “See?” she said. “I’m flirting with you.”
“Mm.”
“Is your name really Jean?”
“I’m called Jean-Claude.”
“A film producer.”
“Yes, before the war. But I shouldn’t talk about the past.”
“It doesn’t matter. Laurette told me all this has to be kept quiet.” She laid her head on his chest, heavy and warm. “Poor Laurette,” she said. “Degrave’s wife is rich. And mean as a snake. Laurette used to dream of marriage, but it’s not to be.”
Casson put a hand on her hip, smooth down there. “I shouldn’t talk about these things,” she said. “But it all seems like nothing now, with the world the way it is. I never imagined what it would all come to. Never imagined.”
His fingers traced idly along the curve, up and back. “Yes,” she said, “I like that.”
They stopped Weiss at a
Kontrol,
the early evening of 15 November, in the Saint-Michel Métro station. Pulled him out of line and made him open his briefcase. “What’s all this?” the German sergeant said, holding a sheaf of blank paper. “For
leaflets,
maybe, huh?”
Weiss studied the hands; thick fingers, with cracked nails and callus. “I’m a printing salesman,” he explained. “See, it’s the same name and address on each piece of paper, but the lettering is different. Personal stationery. Maybe, ah, maybe you’d like to have something like this for yourself?”
“Me?” the sergeant said. This was something that had never occurred to him. “Well, I don’t know. I mean—what could I have? I stay at a barracks.” He paged through the sheets. “But my wife, in Germany, she would be thrilled to have such a thing.”
Weiss took a pen from his pocket. “Here, just write down your name and address, and I’ll get it made up for you.”
“French stationery?”
“Yes.”
The sergeant began writing, slow but determined, carving the letters onto the paper, then handed it over to Weiss. “Jürgenstrasse,” Weiss said.
“Yes. And it must look exactly that way. Can you print the German alphabet?”
“Oh yes. We have all the German fonts.”
“Well.” He was very pleased. “Could I have it by the twentieth, to send to her?”
“Of course. I’ll see to it.”
“It’s her birthday.”
“You may count on it, sir.”
“It must be quite costly, this kind of thing.”
“With my compliments.”
“Ah, all right then.”
“If you write down your name and address in Paris, I’ll have it sent over in a day or two.”
“Yes, of course.” He started writing. “Meanwhile, maybe I’d better have a look at your work permit.”
Weiss thumbed through the papers in his wallet, took out his work permit, and showed it to the sergeant.
“Good,” the sergeant said. Then, in a stern voice,
“Alles in Ordnung.”
He gave Weiss a friendly wink and a smile, then whispered “She will be so happy.”
PARIS. 16 NOVEMBER.
He had a second meeting with Kovar, this time in response to a note slipped under his door at the Benoit. Late at night he thought he heard something, then decided he didn’t and went back to sleep. They met in the same office, in the early evening. The weather had turned cold, he could see his breath when he talked. This time the shade was up and the moon, in the upper corner of the tall window, cast silver shadows on the walls.
“I found a way to talk to some friends,” Kovar said.
“Good.”
“Old friends. We were in the streets together, marching, fighting, and we were in the jails together. One doesn’t toss that away so easily. They follow the line, of course, they are good communists. But then, they are also Frenchmen, some of them anyhow, and for the French, having one’s own opinion is a kind of religion.”
Casson smiled.
“There’s one in particular—he made no promises, simply said he’d see what he could do. I hope you understand that he’s putting himself in danger. The Paris
apparat
is under intense pressure right now, because the Germans are about to take Moscow, they’re close enough to see the last stop on the tram line.”
“Will Stalin fight in the city?”
“To the end. Then he’ll burn it to the ground. But, so what? The reality is, all they have now is the weather. The
rasputitsa,
the autumn rains. The earth turns to mud—some days they have to maneuver their tanks with shovels and logs. And, soon enough, it will snow. Not German snow. Russian snow.”
“General Winter.”
Kovar shrugged. “So-called. But the signs are all bad. The Moscow factories have been moved to the Urals, and the NKVD has packed up and left town. Sometime last week, wireless transmissions broken off in midsentence. What does that say to you?”
“Nothing good.”
Kovar thought for a moment. “Of course, Russian wars always seem to go like this. Chaos and defeat and slaughter. Followed by the execution of those who tried to sound the warning. It’s just the way they are. But then something happens. In Napoleon’s campaign it was winter, and some kind of tick that killed thousands. In 1917 it was revolution. The Russian land defends itself—that’s the mystics’ version.”
“I’ve read it can be sixty below zero in December.”
“And colder. The Wehrmacht will have to heat their machine-gun barrels over a fire before they can use them.” Kovar smiled. “Only the Russians could get themselves into a position, in 1941, where sabers and horses really matter.”
“How do you know all this?” Casson said.
“Oh, it’s talk,” Kovar said. “But it’s good talk.”
Casson was cold; he got up, walked around, rubbed his hands together. “Your friend,” he said. “When do you think he might try?”
“Who knows? He’s a survivor, he’ll wait for the right moment. Of course, he might move a little faster if he knew a little more.”
“I don’t think it’s all laid out. Just French army officers, a center of resistance. I don’t know what they intend to do—spy for the British? Blow up power stations? It could be anything.”
He walked to the window and stared out. “We’re just attorneys, Kovar. We represent two principals who may need to cooperate but cannot be seen to do so. A few years ago I worked with a Swiss lawyer. This man had a particular specialty, back-to-back negotiations. Two parties negotiate entirely through a third party so that they don’t ever know who they’re talking to. We may, eventually, come to something a lot like that—the parties will be known, the individuals invisible.”
Casson could see that this made sense to Kovar. “On the other hand, it may just be a matter of setting up a single meeting, then gracefully leaving the stage.”
Kovar shook his head slowly. “Somehow I doubt it will be that easy.”
Casson laughed. “No, it never is.”
They were silent for a time, then Casson said, “How do you make a living these days?”
“Oh, I survive. Always under false ID, always in some lost corner of the world. For a time I had the perfect job, at Samaritaine, the big department store. Every night, after hours, they wax the floors. First it’s the cleaners, then the waxers and polishers. The wax is rubbed in with cloths and left to dry for a half hour or so. The best way to polish it is with felt slippers—shuffling along from one end of the room to the other. I’m sure somebody used to do it at your house.”
“Yes,” Casson said. “Once a week.”
“What they do at Samaritaine is hire people to wear the felt slippers, a dozen or so. The usual crowd who work the night in Paris, each one a little more cracked than the next, ‘the princess,’ ‘the Albanian,’ I suppose I was ‘the novelist.’ The boss wasn’t a bad guy, lost an arm in the 1914 war, he’d play music on a Victrola, usually waltzes, but you could do any step you liked as long as you stayed in contact with the floor. It’s hypnotic, of course. The wood is dull to start with, then glows as you polish. We’d work our way from floor to floor, skating around the towels and the blankets and the brooms. On the sixth, we’d each put on a lady’s hat from the display trees—a little joke—the violins sawing away on
The Vienna
Woods.
Well, I used to think, Cocteau really ought to see this. Truth is, I liked it, it
suited
me.
“But eight months for somebody in my position was too long, I had to quit. For the moment, I’m writing the occasional newspaper feature, under an alias, of course. It gets me a few francs, mostly from old friends I’ve known for years, mostly the socialists, a very tolerant crowd. Articles on soccer, on sound health, tips for cooking turnips. And then, I’ve always got a novel going.”
“Will you stay in France?”
“Maybe. For one thing, it’s not so easy to get out, now. And you have to find a country that will take you. I can’t go near Spain. Switzerland is out. Hard to say, maybe Mexico. For the moment, I’m here. If I vanish, it’ll mean somebody’s police finally stumbled over me and that was that. What about you?”
“I take it a day at a time,” Casson said. “Count myself lucky to have a roof over my head and something to eat. Beyond that, God only knows.”
This is the BBC, broadcasting from London. Here is the news in French. The Comité Français de Libération National announced today in London that, after a trial
in absentia
and review by the Judicial Section,
Hauptsturmführer
Karl Kriegler, an SS official at the Santé prison in Paris, has been condemned to death. He was sentenced for the torture and murder of prisoners-of-war under confinement at the Santé, specific instances are cited in the indictment. The sentence is to be carried out at the discretion of the CFLN, at any time after the official declaration of the verdict, by any means necessary, or at the end of the war. Other personnel at French prisons are reminded that all wars eventually do come to an end, records are being kept, and they will be held to account for their actions. In other news . . .
Damn their eyes.
In a cellar on the outskirts of Paris, Weiss had to acknowledge that he had nothing like the powerful BBC at his disposal, and de Gaulle’s people were using it to full effect. Not that he disagreed with the strategy—the sentence
in absentia
might have a sobering effect on the
Hauptsturmführer,
as it had in other cases. It was just that he had an executive’s view of the world, and as an executive he was stung when competitors had resources he didn’t. He could turn out endless editions of the underground
Humanité,
his best writers storming and threatening, but it didn’t begin to add up to the power of the BBC.
This in a week when things were not going well. He had been reprimanded by Moscow Center for the Aubervilliers raid
—dear
comrade.
They might have moved their wireless operation back to the Urals, but they’d only been out of contact for two days and then—he suspected he was now receiving from a relay station in Sweden—then they’d let him have it. Operational rules specified a second automobile, to provide a getaway after an attack. How could he not have known that the Germans would use a chase car? Why wasn’t it spotted during surveillance?
A
second
car? From where? How?
They’d obviously seen the French police report, and he hadn’t sent it to them. Somebody after his job, maybe. He leaned on the table he used as a desk and closed his eyes.
Just ten minutes.
The BBC droned on—a
lycée
class in Belfort had come to school wearing Cross of Lorraine armbands, the Gaullist symbol. He could do that, out in Montreuil or Boulogne, and tell the world in leaflets, but it would never have the impact of a BBC broadcast. Above his head, the floorboards creaked as people cooked dinner and the aromas drifted down into the cellar;
museau—
jellied beef muzzle— and cabbage.
A knock at the door. “Comrade Weiss?”
“Yes?”
“Dinner?”
“Maybe later.”
“Comrade Somet is waiting to see you.”
“All right. Five minutes.”
What was this, he wondered. Narcisse Somet had been in party work for twenty years. A journalist, cheeks and nose colored by the broken blood vessels of the longtime drinker, eyeglasses with tinted lenses, gray hair cut
en brosse.
He had always worked for trade weeklies, especially those that covered the mining and metals industries. Secretly, he wrote for
Humanité,
at one time contributing to its most popular feature—L’Huma consistently picked more winners at the Paris racetracks than any other newspaper.
Weiss went to the door and called upstairs, Somet shuffled in a moment later.
They shook hands. Somet settled himself in a chair, coughed a few times into his fist. They made small talk for a while, then Somet said, “I’ve been contacted by Alexander Kovar.”