“Guinea pig?”
“Yes.”
“You actually do it—go around and inquire?”
“Are you mad? Half the world is looking for me. I barely go out in the street.” He laughed. “Actually, it’s not so bad. I’ve been on the run for a long time, eventually you get used to it.”
Casson tapped out his cigarette in a saucer on the desk. “There’s something I want to ask you,” he said. “What do you think will happen here?”
“The war will go on. For a few years, anyhow, until the Americans get organized. Then, probably, civil war.”
“Here?”
“Why not? The right is finished, what with Pétain and Vichy. So, after the Germans leave, the Gaullists and the communists will fight it out. For myself, I plan to be somewhere else.”
“When the war ends.”
“Sooner. Maybe a lot sooner. I may see you again, Casson, but there’s a good chance I won’t. In a day or two you’ll be in direct contact with the FTP. They’ll ask about me—how we met, and where. Please, don’t tell them. Not about Melun, and especially not about this office. Can I depend on you for that?”
“Of course.”
Suddenly Casson realized that it was his fault, that Kovar had to leave because of what he’d done. He started to say it, then didn’t.
They stood and shook hands.
“Bon courage,”
Kovar said.
They decided to spend their last weekend in the country. Casson told himself he didn’t care about the money, and they could go to a hotel where travel agents got a discount. Friday after work they took the train up to Vernon, across the river from Giverny, and a taxi down a poplar-lined road to an inn where the
paysagistes
used to stay while painting the valley of the Seine. In the room, blue Louis the Fourteenths bowed to blue courtesans on the wallpaper, and through a tiny window under the eaves they could see, if not the Seine at least the Epte, its tributary. There was a fireplace with a basket of sticks, and a sepia photo of Berthe Morisot, hung slightly askew to hide a hole in the plaster.
They walked by the Epte, had the Norman omelet supper— obligatory for the
demi-pension—
went upstairs to drink the bottle of Algerian wine they’d brought from Paris. Took off their clothes, walked around naked in the firelight, made love.
A little broken, both of them, Casson thought. But that couldn’t be permitted to spoil things. The idyll at the country inn was like meeting for a drink or going to a dinner; you knew how to do it, you were good at it. Away from the husband, the wife, all the vengeful smiling and chattering of Parisian existence, stripping the blanket down to the end of the bed and getting to the urgent sixty-nine with all passionate speed. Once upon a time a cure, he remembered, a cure for almost anything, but different now—more had to be forgotten. There had been a moment, Hélène sprawled luxuriant across the quilt, her colors pale and dark rose in the firelight, when desire suddenly fled and what he saw struck him as fragile, vulnerable.
He wasn’t alone; she was also, sometimes, adrift, he could sense it. She was certainly adept, knew everything there was to know, and if the fire inside her was low she would make sure it was blazing in him. They managed, they managed, enough art to get to pleasure, the gods of the country idyll victorious in the end. She flopped back, her head off the bed and upside down, which made her voice a little strangled.
“Enfin,”
she said. “Something that felt good.”
They stared into the fire for a time. It was quiet on the river at the end of the road, only the old beams of the inn creaking in the winter air. He turned to look at her, saw tears in her eyes.
“Are you all right?”
She nodded, not trusting her voice.
“Scared?”
She was.
“I’ll miss you,” he said.
Again she nodded.
“When you reach Algiers, I want you to write me a postcard. So I know you’re safe.”
“I will. To the hotel?”
“Yes. And just to be on the safe side, write one to Natalie too. Did you ask for vacation?”
“I had to go to the office manager, but he’s always been nice to me. And then to the dragon herself. At first she was suspicious, but I told her I was going to see an old family friend. I didn’t actually say it, but she got the idea he was rolling in money—nothing he wouldn’t do for me.”
“Good.”
“Maybe I’ll send
her
a postcard.”
Casson laughed. “Maybe you should.”
“Will I ever see you again, Jean-Claude?”
“Yes.”
She took a deep breath, let it out slowly. Swung her feet over the edge of the bed, crossed the room, and put a piece of wood on the fire. Her silhouette against the firelight was slim and curved.
“Lovely,” he said.
LUNA PARK
Life came down to money. Something he’d always known and never liked. He’d even tried, for a time, insisting that it wasn’t true. Age twenty, a student at the Sorbonne, he had left home, where money ruled with an iron fist—they had it, they lost it, it didn’t matter, it did—and taken a room under the roof in the 5th Arrondissement. A classic room, the aesthetic sensibility of a thirteenth-century thief, so perfect of its type that his mother wept when she saw it. His father took one step inside, looked around, and said, “If you’re not happy now, Jean-Claude, you never will be.”
On 9 February, 1942, life came down to one thousand, two hundred and sixty-six francs. He laid it out on the bed and counted it twice. What he’d managed to save from his work with Degrave was pretty much gone. He’d given Hélène a thousand francs for Victorine, and another five thousand for the trip to Algiers. He had a cheap watch, a few books, and the Walther pistol, probably worth a few hundred francs but difficult, and dangerous, to sell.
Cold.
He shivered, rubbed his hands, and walked around the room. Winter could be mild in Paris, but not this year. And the Germans had set the coal ration at fifty-five pounds per family a month, enough to heat one room for two hours a day. At the Benoit, that worked out to a few feeble bangs from the radiator at four in the morning and a basin of tepid water in the sink.
He counted the money once more—it hadn’t grown—withdrew a hundred and fifty francs from the account and slid the rest under the mattress. He combed his hair, put on the glasses. A café over on the place Maillart had a wood-fired stove. You couldn’t get all that close to it—a flock of letter writers and book readers occupied all the best chairs, but even over by the wall it was warmer than his room. A fairly genial atmosphere in there—on his last visit he’d shared a table with one of the regulars, an appealing blond woman who wore eyeglasses on a cord and read Balzac novels.
As he passed the hotel desk, the clerk called out to him. “Monsieur Marin?”
“Yes?”
“Could you step in to the
propriétaire
’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 café. 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 Métro 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 café 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.”