Degrave left a message at the desk for him and on the night of the 26th they met in a nearby hotel.
“You’re comfortable?” Degrave said.
Casson said he was.
Degrave took his jacket off and hung it on the back of the chair. Casson sat on the edge of the bed. “What we are trying to do right now,” Degrave said, “is get in touch with the various resistance groups and establish lines of communication with them. Eventually, we will all have to work together. It’s now clear that Germany will not invade Great Britain, so Great Britain will have to find a way to invade occupied Europe. And they can’t win without aggressive resistance and intelligence networks on the Continent.
“At this moment, the most active resistance group is the FTP, the
Francs-Tireurs et Partisans,
named for the guerrilla fighters in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. The FTP is the clandestine action group of the French Communist Party. We want you to make contact with them, on behalf of the intelligence network we’re operating in Vichy.”
Degrave paused, waiting for Casson to respond. “How would I do that?” Casson said.
“You’ll find a way. We’ll help you, but in the end you will do it by yourself.”
That’s madness,
Casson thought. It would never happen. “You want me to pretend to join them?” he said.
“No, that won’t work. They’re organized in cells, units completely separated from each other, to make penetration agents virtually useless. You will have to approach them as Jean Casson, a former film producer, acting on behalf of the network in Vichy. Honesty is the only way in.”
Casson nodded—that much at least made sense. “Why me?” he said.
“It must be somebody neutral, apolitical, not a socialist, not a conservative. Somebody who has not fought in the political wars. You have certainly had contact with party members in the film industry—incidental, without problems. They will know who you are, they will know you haven’t worked against them.”
That was true. His screenwriter, Louis Fischfang, had been a Marxist—in fact a Stalinist. He wasn’t the only one. There was Fougère, from the electricians’ union; the actor René Morgan, who’d fought in Spain; many others. He’d never cared about their politics as long as they didn’t shut his sets down.
“The fact is, Casson, everybody likes you.”
From Casson, a very hesitant nod. First of all it wasn’t true, there were plenty of people who hated him. Second of all, a certain professional affability wasn’t, he thought, the key to being trusted by gangs of red assassins. But then, Degrave wasn’t exactly wrong either. People did like him—often enough because, when it came to money or social status, to sex lives or politics, he truly did not care.
“The more you think about it,” Degrave said, “the more you’ll see what we see.” He paused a moment. “It’s also true that you will come bearing gifts. What those might be I can’t say, but we know the party, we’ve had agents among them from time to time, and we know how they operate. They will demand concrete evidence of good faith—they couldn’t care less about words. Does all this make sense?”
“Yes.”
“We’ve been fighting the party since 1917, there is no question that their aim is to rule this country. All during the 1930s they established networks in France, particularly in the armament industry. There was the Lydia Stahl case, the Cremet case, operations of all kinds. Some of them made the newspapers, some simply died a quiet death, and some we never uncovered. They tried to steal our codes, they agitated on the docks and in the defense industries, they spied on the scientists.
“The party was declared illegal—driven underground—in ’38. They survived, they
prospered—
for them, secrecy is like water in the desert. And in 1940, when France was invaded and the Hitler-Stalin Pact was still in effect, they urged the workers not to fight their German comrades. After the surrender, the Germans allowed the party to publish
Humanité,
which labeled de Gaulle a tool of British imperialism. Then, when Russia was invaded last June, a somersault.”
“That I do remember.”
“Shameless. But, up to that point, there was virtually no French resistance to German occupation. Oh, you’d see things now and then. In the window of a bookstore on the rue de Rivoli, there was a china figurine of a spaniel lifting its hind leg—it just happened to be adjacent to a copy of
Mein Kampf.
There’d been a few student demonstrations, one of them, in the Bois de Boulogne, was bloody, but not by intention. We saw a few leaflets—‘Frenchmen, you are not the stronger side. Have the wisdom to await the moment’—but that was about it. The French people had adopted
attentisme,
the strategy of waiting. That was tantamount, as far as we could see, to collaboration.”
“I saw it firsthand,” Casson said.
“In Passy?”
“Yes. Most people were afraid to do anything.”
“Not the communists. Last June, when Russia was invaded, it was as though somebody had kicked a hornets’ nest. Suddenly, German officers were being shot down—it wasn’t hard, they walked around the town as though they owned it. In October, the German commandant of Nantes was assassinated. In reprisal, forty-eight hostages were killed. Other attacks followed, the Germans retaliated. They guillotined Jean Catelas, a member of the party’s central committee, they executed communist lawyers and Polish Jews—forty for one, fifty for one. The FTP never blinked. According to the old Bolshevik maxim, reprisal killing simply brings in new recruits, so it wasn’t hurting them.”
“Is that true?”
“It is. But for some, a little too cold-blooded. The policy of the Gaullist resistance is to assassinate French traitors, but they don’t attack German nationals. The people in Moscow, who run the French Communist Party, no doubt find that a rather dainty distinction, but then their war is much worse than anything that goes on over here. We’ve heard, for instance, that the Germans around Smolensk were having hunting parties, like English county fox-hunts, with beaters flushing Jews and peasants from the woods and soldiers shooting them down.
“The Russians retaliated. An SS
Obergruppenführer
heard a rumor about buried gold at the Polyakovo state farm. He led a unit to the farm and they started to rip the buildings apart, looking for it. The manager begged them to stop, explained that without shelter the peasants would die of cold when winter arrived. Please, he said, give me twenty-four hours to produce the gold. The SS officer agreed, and left a detachment of four men there to ensure the manager didn’t make a run for the forest. The next day, the SS unit returned. All the buildings had been burned down, only the office was left standing. Inside, on a desk, was a large leather box with the word
Gelb,
gold, written on it in white paint. When they opened the box, they found the heads of the four soldiers they’d left on guard.”
Degrave paused, waited for Casson to respond.
“And this is just the beginning,” he said.
“That’s right, and it may go on for twenty years. The FTP leadership is certainly under intense pressure from Moscow—do
something,
anything—which is why we feel they can be approached.”
He went for a walk after the meeting, to clear his head in the night air, and thought about what Degrave
hadn’t
said. The war between the secret services and the French communists went back a long way—maybe all the way to 1789. The working class and the aristocracy had been at it for at least that long. Casson remembered a time when he was at university, at the
École Normale Supérieure
. Some of the conservative
normaliens,
wearing white gloves, had taken over the running of the buildings to break a strike by the maintenance workers. Degrave, and no doubt his colleagues, came from that class, which had always provided officers for military service. Not so much rich as old, very old, a landed aristocracy that took its names from the villages it had named in the Middle Ages. What, Casson wondered, were they doing with somebody like him? He wasn’t a leftist, but he wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t a Jew, but he’d worked in a Jewish profession. He was, when all was said and done, a Parisian. And not a Parisian from the
deux-cents
familles.
He stopped at a café, stood at the bar, and ordered a beer—it would do for dinner. He’d told Degrave the story of his escape from the Gestapo office. “Don’t worry about it,” Degrave said. “Their list of wanted suspects runs into the thousands. We think you’ll be safe if you stay out of trouble—most of the people arrested these days are betrayed. Jealous neighbors, jilted mistresses, that kind of thing.”
No danger there,
Casson thought.
More than likely, the communists would kill him. These people didn’t spend time brooding about your motives. If they sensed a threat, they shot you. They were idealogues, at war with anyone who stood in their way. One of Casson’s university friends used to say, with a flicker of contempt, “They believe everything they can prove, and they can prove everything they believe.” True. But they’d fought in Spain, and they died for what they believed in.
He left the café, headed away from the hotel. He was restless, wanted to avoid the small, silent room as long as he could. Suddenly, the streets were familiar, somehow he had worked his way back to his old neighborhood, the Passy district of the 16th. He crossed the rue de l’Assomption, where his wife, Marie-Claire, lived with her boyfriend, Bruno, the owner of an automobile dealership. Casson stared up at the blackout curtains. Were they home? You could usually tell if there was a light on. No, he thought not. They were out, probably at a dinner party. He moved on. Coming toward him, a Luftwaffe officer with a Frenchwoman on his arm. A handsome man, hawk-nosed, with proud bearing, the brim of his hat shadowing his eyes. “Oh but no,” the woman said, “that can’t possibly be true.” Then she laughed—apparently it was true.
The rue Chardin. His old building, his apartment on the fifth floor with a small balcony. Through the glass doors he had looked out at the top third of the Eiffel Tower. From the telltale glow at the edge of the curtains he was pretty sure somebody was home.
A silhouette moved toward him through the darkness. A woman, bent over slightly, walking quickly. “Madame Fitou!” It was out before he could stop it—his old concierge.
She stopped, peered at him, then clapped a hand over her heart and breathed, “Monsieur Casson?”
He crossed the street. Madame Fitou, in a long black coat with a black kerchief tied under her chin, clearly dressed for night raiding. A string bag of potatoes suggested a visit to the black-market grocer, or maybe one of her countless sisters, all of whom lived in the country and grew vegetables. As he approached she said, “Can it be you?”
“
Bon
soir,
madame,” he said.
“I knew you would return,” she said.
“As you see.”
“Oh, monsieur.”
“Everything going well, madame? With you and your family?”
“I cannot complain, monsieur, and, if I did . . .”
“Not so easy, these days.”
“No, we must—Monsieur Casson, you are here for the shirts!”
“Shirts?”
“I told . . . well, it was a year ago, but I thought, well certainly Monsieur Casson will hear of it.”
“Madame?”
She came closer. “When the German came, Colonel Schaff— Schuff—well, something.” She snorted with contempt—these foreigners and their bizarre names! “However you say it, he had his driver throw your things out in the street. I was able to save, well monsieur, it was raining that day, but I did manage to save some shirts, two of them, good ones. I kept them for you. In a box.”
“Madame Fitou, thank you.”
“But a moment!” she said, very excited, disappearing into the building. Casson stepped back against the wall. He could hear keys in locks, doors opening, then closing. Overhead, a flight of aircraft—no air-raid sirens had sounded so they must be German, he thought. Heading west, to bomb Coventry or the Liverpool docks. The bombers droned away for what seemed like a long time, then Madame Fitou reappeared, very excited still and breathing hard. “Yes,” she said in triumph. “Here they are.”
He took the package, wrapped in a sheet of newspaper, and thanked her again. “Madame Fitou, you must not tell anybody you’ve seen me. It would be very dangerous if you did. For both of us. Do you understand?”
“Ahh”—she said, her expression conspiratorial—“of course.”
A secret mission.
“You may depend on me, monsieur. Not a word.”
He wished her good evening, then hurried off into the night, damning himself for a fool. What was the
matter
with him? A few blocks away, in the shadows, he peeled back the newspaper. His dress shirt, for a tuxedo—he used to wear it with mother-of-pearl studs and cufflinks that came to him when his father died. Well, it didn’t matter, he could sell it, there was a used-clothing market on the rue des Francs-Bourgeois. And then, a soft gray shirt he’d worn with sweaters on weekends. It smelled of the cologne he used to wear.
EVREUX. 27 OCTOBER.
Six-thirty in the morning, the night shift at Manufacture d’Armes d’Evreux rode through the factory gates on their bicycles, heading home to the workers’ districts at the edge of the city. Weiss moved along with them, pedaling slowly, his briefcase under one arm. Down a cobbled street—mostly dirt now—past a few ancient buildings and into a small square with a church and a café. He chained his bicycle to the fence in front of the church and went into the café. It was crowded, wet dogs asleep under the tables, a smoky fire in the fireplace, two women, their makeup much too bright, served chicory infusions to the men at the bar.
Weiss looked around the room and spotted Renan in the corner, playing chess. A hard head with a fringe of gray hair, a worn face, maybe handsome long ago. He rested his chin on folded hands and concentrated on the board. When he saw Weiss, he spoke quietly to his opponent, who rose and left the table. Weiss sat down and studied the board for a moment. “So, Maurice,” he said, “it looks like I’ve just about got you.”