Red Gold

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 Helene 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 cafe 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 proprietaire’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 cafe. 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 Metro 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 cafe 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.”

“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 Deuxieme. One Deuxieme 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 cafe on the place Maillart.

He felt alone and abandoned, and couldn’t stop thinking about Helene, 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 cafe 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 — A 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-Elysees.

Wanted: bicycle messenger. Machinist. Exotic dancer.

In a room on the rue St.-Denis, SS-Unterscharfuhrer 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’Hotel 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 Metro. 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 cafe 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 cafe, 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.

That evening, Casson returned to the office to finish up his work. At nine, a flight of British bombers passed over the city. The air-raid sirens wailed and, as usual, the power was cut off. The rides went dark and the cars coasted to a stop. Casson stared out the window-something so strange about the scene he couldn’t look away. The German soldiers sat patiently in the dead bumper cars, one or two of them lit cigarettes, while airplane engines droned overhead.

Fifteen minutes later, the all-clear sounded, the little orange lights strung around the Dodge-em ride went back on, and the cars clattered around the floor.

The first day of March. Payday. Thank God, Casson thought, he was down to his last fifty francs. He went out to the park and looked for Lamy. “Come back this afternoon,” Lamy said. “I’ll have it for you then.”

That left him with several hours to kill. He took the Metro over to the Benoit, and asked at the desk if he’d received a postcard. No, nothing had come, but he could leave a forwarding address. He said he was still looking for a permanent place to stay, and left the hotel. Where was Helene? By now she should be in Algiers. Could he go see de la Barre, ask for news? Maybe once, he thought. It wasn’t time for that yet. Inter-zonal postcards were slow, he had to wait.

He walked across the city, headed for Saint-Ouen. It took him an hour and a half-the streets glazed with ice-and he was tired by the time he got there. He trudged up the stairs and saw that the door to his room was padlocked. For a time, he stood and stared at it. Then he went back down to the desk.

“I’m in Room 65,” he said. “It’s locked.”

The clerk looked up from his newspaper. “Rent due by noon on the first day of the month.”

“It’s two-thirty.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“I get paid this afternoon,” Casson said.

The clerk nodded. Everybody in the world had money coming. Mostly, in his experience, it didn’t come.

“Isn’t there some way?”

Apparently not. “We must all pay to live, monsieur.”

Over at Luna Park, Lamy was in his office. Casson told him he’d been locked out of his room. “Once they get to know you,” Lamy said, “they ease up a little.” He took a metal cash box from the bottom drawer, wet his index finger, counted the notes, and fanned them out on the desk. Then he put the coins on top. “Everything cash at Luna Park,” he said with a smile.

It wasn’t enough.

Casson could pay two weeks’ rent and eat for a week, but he’d run out before he got paid again.

“We’ll see you Thursday morning,” Lamy said.

Casson thanked him and put the money in his pocket. “Is there something else I can do?” he said. “I could use the money.”

Lamy thought it over. “There might be, remind me next week.”

Casson returned to the hotel and paid the clerk, who climbed the stairs and took the padlock off the door. Casson sat on the sagging bed. This can’t go on. Maybe it was time to see his old friends. Would they help? He wasn’t sure. If they were living as they always had, it was costing them a fortune. The coal and food and clothing they were used to was available on the marche noir, but getting more expensive every day. Parisians lived on nine hundred francs a month-if they did without. Lately, it cost nine hundred francs for two kilos of butter. No, he thought, leave the friends alone. Think of something else.

He reached under the mattress and pulled out the Walther. Its presence had worried him since his return to Paris. Under Occupation law, the ownership of weapons was a serious crime-somebody might find it and turn him in. What could he get? A thousand? A few hundred? At least he’d be rid of the thing, and whatever he made would help.

He put the Walther in his belt and left the hotel.

He walked north, through Clignancourt, most of it boarded up in the late afternoon. Saturdays, before the war, he used to come here. He never bought anything but he liked the feel of the place, dusty drapes and crackled varnish, postcards of Lille in 1904.

Out past the antiquaires’ stalls of Serpette and Biron there was a different market, this one jammed with people. The streets were lined with pushcarts and rickety tables piled with old clothes, rusty pots and pans, shoes and dishes and sheets. The narrow aisles were packed; the crowds shifting and pushing, somebody stopped to bargain, somebody going against traffic. A vendor called out to Casson, “You could use a new tie, monsieur.” He stood by a cart full of spotted horrors, some with painted scenes. “Take a look, anyhow,” he said. He had a beret pulled down over his ears and stamped his feet to keep warm.

“I need to sell something,” Casson said. “Quietly.”

The man blew on his hands. “Quietly,” he said. “Papers? Ration coupons?”

“No. A gun.”

The man looked him over. “Keep going,” he said. “To the end of the row, then right. You’ll see the people you need to talk to.”

He turned right at the end of the aisle and found another market. Hard to see at first, the same carts and tables, the same crowd, poking at clocks and lamps. But, in among them, a different group-hands in pockets, restless eyes.

By a table stacked with army blankets he saw a young man in a leather coat, belt pulled tight. Casson caught his eye and walked toward him. Then somebody-Casson never saw who it was-hurried past and whispered “Rafle.” Roundup. It happened so fast Casson wasn’t sure he’d heard it.

The man in the leather coat had vanished. Somewhere ahead, a sudden commotion-shouts, a dog barking. Then, police. They swarmed through the crowd, shoving people aside with batons, grabbing others and demanding papers.

The gun. He backed up, working his way around the table, took the Walther from his belt and slid it into the pile of blankets. Then squeezed between carts into the next aisle, jammed up against two women with shopping baskets who were blocked by the crowd. He stood still and watched, a bystander. The police were everywhere, thirty or forty of them. He saw a couple-foreign-looking, the man bearded, the woman in a head scarf-questioned, then led away. A kid, maybe fifteen, tried to run for it. The flics chased him down, he broke free and crawled under a table. Casson heard the batons as they landed.

He felt a hand close on his elbow. When he turned, the flic said, “Get your papers out.” As Casson reached under his coat, the man glanced at somebody behind his back, a question in his eyes — is it him? He got his answer, took Casson’s identity card without bothering to read it, and slid it in his pocket. “This one,” he called out. Casson was surrounded. One of them jerked his elbows together, another snapped handcuffs on his wrists.

They were taken to the far end of the market, Casson and ten others, shackled to a chain and led off to the Saint-Ouen police station. The men were separated from the women and pushed into a holding cell-yellowed tile, the ammoniac reek of Javelle water, a bucket in the corner. The bearded man he’d seen arrested paced around the cell for a few minutes, then squeezed in next to him, sitting with his back against the wall.

He was balding, heavy in the shoulders, and smelled of woodsmoke and clothing worn too long. “Listen, my friend,” he said. He had a thick accent, Polish or Russian, stared straight ahead and barely moved his lips when he spoke. A prison voice, Casson thought. “We can’t stay here.”

Casson made a half-gesture-nothing to be done.

“This is a little police station, not a prison. One door and you’re out. We can take the guard when he comes in-I’ll do it. You grab his keys and open the cells. Let everybody go, will give us a better chance to get away.”

“They’ll shoot us,” Casson said.

“Maybe not.”

“It won’t work.”

“Listen to me.” The man leaned hard against Casson, his shoulder was like a rock. “We started running in Lithuania in ’40-we didn’t come this far to die here.” He paused. “You know what happens next?”

Casson didn’t answer.

“Do you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“I know. We saw it done.”

Casson heard footsteps, the man beside him tensed. A flic stood at the barred door of the cell, a key in his hand.

“Jean Marin?”

“Yes?”

From the man beside him, a fierce whisper. “Don’t be a fool!”

“Come to the door,” the flic said.

Casson stood up. So did the bearded man.

“Not you,” the flic said. “You sit down.”

The flic turned the key in the lock. As Casson walked to the door, he looked over his shoulder. The bearded man saw he wasn’t going to try it, sat down, let his head fall back against the wall.

Casson stepped into the corridor, heard the door slam shut behind him.

“Straight ahead,” the flic said. He took the shoulder of Casson’s coat and shoved him forward. To the desk, and beyond. Down a long hallway to the end, then a second hallway to a heavy door in an alcove. The flic let him go, and faced him. “Back in the market, somebody got rid of a pistol in a pile of blankets. That was you.”

Casson was silent.

The flic leaned close to him. “Perhaps you’d like to tell me, what would this Monsieur Marin, the insurance adjuster, be doing with a Walther pistol?”

No answer.

“You better tell me something,” the flic said, his voice low. “There are forty agents in this station-some of them would be calling the Gestapo right now.”

But you aren’t one of them. “You know what I am,” Casson said.

The flic watched his eyes. Truth or lie? He handed Casson his identity papers, went to the door, ran the bolt back, and pushed it open. It was dark outside, Casson could see a long alley that ran to the street. The flic looked at his watch. “End of shift,” he said. “Things to be done.” He turned abruptly and walked down the hall.

Corbeil-Essonnes. 1 March.

At 11:30 A.M., Brasova, Weiss, and Juron met in the FTP safe house. They worked their way through several points on the agenda, then Brasova said, “The Center’s transmission of 27 February transfers the case of Alexander Kovar to the French section of the Foreign Directorate.” That meant Juron.

Weiss had seen the message. He didn’t like it. He met Brasova’s eyes-any chance? They’d known each other for a long time, since Weiss’s service in the Comintern in the 1930s. “Can we be absolutely sure we won’t need him again?” he said.

“It’s up to the Center,” Juron said. “Their decision is final.”

“I have to agree,” Brasova said. “Of course,” she said to Weiss, “Casson will remain your responsibility.” She meant, you got half of what you wanted, don’t be greedy.

Weiss turned to Juron. “What do you plan to do?”

“He’s become a liability,” Juron said.

To Weiss, Brasova said, “It’s my understanding that the last time we met on this subject, you promised Colonel Antipin your cooperation.”

“I did,” Weiss said.

“Do you know Kovar’s whereabouts?” Brasova asked.

Weiss started to say that the investigation was ongoing.

“We know,” Juron said impatiently. “Casson was followed to an office on the rue Petrelle. Kovar goes there at night.”

Weiss gave up. “Is there anything else you need?”

“Tell your people I have a job for them.”

Later, after Juron left, Weiss said to Brasova, “It’s wrong to do this, Lila. He acted against the Germans, nothing more.”

“I know it’s wrong,” Brasova said. “I’d guess that Antipin did the best he could. He horse-traded-saved Casson, gave up Kovar. So that’s the way it has to be.”

Weiss drummed his fingers on the table.

Brasova’s voice softened. “Let it go,” she said.