“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
Deuxième.
One
Deuxième 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 café on the place Maillart.
He felt alone and abandoned, and couldn’t stop thinking about Hélène, 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 café 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
—À
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-Elysées.
Wanted: bicycle messenger. Machinist. Exotic dancer.
In a room on the rue St.-Denis, SS-
Unterscharführer
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 always 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.
Albers had always suspected that the mistress went home to some grim husband, who looked up sharply from his newspaper when she came through the door. “Well, what’s for dinner?”
Casson got up every day and looked for a job. He read the
petits
annonces
and underlined the best possibilities, then set off for the morning search. But he immediately ran into problems. For one, Casson might have found a job, but Marin couldn’t, because Marin didn’t have a past. “And where have you worked, monsieur?” He tried various answers—his own business, a job abroad, but the eyebrows went up and Casson looked for the door.
Once or twice he came close. He applied to be a salesman in the toy department of the Bazaar de l’Hôtel de Ville, the BHV. The manager was sympathetic. When Casson started to tell stories, he held up a hand. “Please,” he said, “I understand.” Just what he understood Casson could only imagine, but when he returned to the store that afternoon, the manager told him his candidacy had been vetoed at a higher level.
To save money, he stopped taking the Métro. The weather turned furious in the last days of February, broken clouds rolling like smoke above the rooftops, the western sky black and violet at sunset. Casson walked head down into the wind, one hand clamped to his hat.
He tried hard for a week, then went back to see Charne. Charne had a scarf wound tight around his throat, his eyes were red and watery. “I’m sick as a dog,” he said. Casson sympathized, then said he needed to find work.
“What I used to do, if I needed money between pictures, was go to a café near Luna Park. The ride operators had a wall where they pinned up notes,
help wanted,
whatever they needed. In fact”—he smiled at the memory—“just before we made
The Devil’s Bridge
I was running a Ferris wheel out there.”
Casson tried it the next day. He found the café, read the notes on the wall, and went to see a man called Lamy. “I own the Dodge-em cars,” Lamy said. “I need a bookkeeper, maybe two mornings a week. Can you do it?”
Casson said he could. A strange little man. Lamy sat behind his desk in a soiled homburg and an overcoat with a velvet collar and told Casson stories. Born in Paris but traveled the world. He’d made and lost fortunes, served in the Rumanian navy—by accident, he swore it! Sold wind-up toys on the streets of Shanghai. “Come in tomorrow morning,” he said. “We’ll see how it goes.”
Casson showed up at eight and went to work. The money wasn’t much, but he figured he might just be able to squeak through on it if other opportunities came his way. He decided to leave the Benoit and move into a cheaper hotel, a Gothic old horror out by the Saint-Ouen flea market.
He made contact with Sylvie, the FTP liaison girl, and let her know his new address and the number of the pay phone by the downstairs desk. Then he packed his belongings: an old shirt, a razor, toothbrush, underwear, pencils, a tattered copy of Braudel, the Walther.
He worked in Lamy’s office, writing long neat columns of figures, using an adding machine for the totals. Just outside the window was the Dodge-em ride. As the drivers—mostly German soldiers—stomped on their accelerators, showers of blue sparks rained down from where the cars’ rods made contact with the copper ceiling. The cars bounced and shivered as they hit, the drivers spun their steering wheels like the great Nuvolari, their girlfriends screamed and hung on tight.