The World at Night

HOTEL DORADO

9 December, 1940.

Jean Casson sat at his desk at four in the afternoon. He wore an overcoat, a muffler, and gloves. Outside, a winter dusk— thick, gray sky, the lines of the rooftops softened and faded. Looking out his window he could see a corner where the rue Marbeuf met the boulevard. People in dark coats on the stone-colored pavement, like a black-and-white movie. Once upon a time they’d loved this hour in Paris; gold light spilling out on the cobbled streets, people laughing at nothing, whatever you meant to do in the gathering dark, you’d be doing it soon enough. On these boulevards night had never followed day—in between was evening, which began at the first fading of the light and went on as long as it could be made to last. Sometimes until dawn, he thought.

He went back to his book, Neptune’s Daughter, turning the pages awkwardly with his glove, making notes in soft pencil. Work, work. The telephone rang, it was Marie-Claire, organizing a dinner. They were trying hard, his little group of friends, he was proud of them. Rolling the holiday boulder up a long and difficult slope—but at least working together. Christmas in France was not the ritual it was in England, but the New Year réveillon was important, and you were supposed to eat fine things and feel hopeful.

They talked for a time, the same conversation they’d had for years— they must, he thought, somehow or other like having it. And it ended as it always did, with another telephone call planned—a Marie-Claire crisis could not, by definition, be resolved with a single telephone call.

Neptune’s Daughter. Veronica and Perry drinking sidecars in Capri and watching the sun set. “Where do you suppose we’ll be on this day next year?” Veronica asks. “Will we be happy?” The telephone rang again. Marie-Claire, Casson thought, a forgotten detail. “Yes?” he said.

“Hello? Is this Jean Casson?” An English voice, accenting the first syllable of Casson. A voice he knew.

“Yes. Who is this, please?”

“James Templeton.”

The investment banker from London. “It, it’s good to hear from you.” Casson’s English worked at its own pace.

“How are you getting on, over there?” Templeton asked.

“Not so bad, thank you. The best that we can, you know, with the war . . .”

“Yes, well, we haven’t forgotten you.”

Casson’s thoughts were flying past. Why was this man calling him? Could it be that some incredibly complicated arrangement was going to allow British banks to invest in French films? There was a rumor that England and Germany continued to trade, despite the war, using middlemen in neutral nations. Or, maybe, a treaty had been signed, and this was a protocol sprung suddenly to life. Maybe, he thought, his heart quickening, the fucking war is over! “Thank you,” he managed to say. “What, uh . . .”

“Tell me, do you happen to see much of Erno Simic? The Agna Film man?”

“What? I’m sorry, you said?”

“Simic. Has distribution arrangements in Hungary, I believe. Do you see him, ever?”

“Well, yes. I mean, I have seen him.”

“He can be extremely helpful, you know.”

“Yes?”

“Definitely. Certain business we’re doing now, he is somebody we are going to depend on. And since you’re a friend of ours in Paris, we thought you might be willing to lend a hand.”

“Pardon?”

“Sorry. To help, I mean.”

“Oh. Yes, I see. All right. I’ll do what I can.”

“Good. We are grateful. And we’ll be in touch. Good-bye, Casson.”

“Good-bye.”

He knew. And he didn’t know. He could decide, at that point, that he didn’t know. He fretted, waiting until six to walk over to Langlade’s office. “Jean-Claude!” Langlade said. “Come and have a little something.” From a bottom drawer he produced an old wine bottle refilled with calvados. “We went to see the Rouen side of the family on Sunday,” Langlade explained. “So you’ll share in the bounty.”

Casson relaxed, sat back in his chair, the calvados was like soothing fire as it went down.

“This is hard-won, I hope you appreciate it,” Langlade continued. “It took an afternoon of sitting on a couch and listening to a clock tick.”

“Better than what you get in a store,” Casson said.

Langlade refilled the glass. “My good news,” he said, “is that suddenly we’re busy. Some factory in Berlin ordered these tiny little lightbulbs, custom-made, grosses of them. God only knows what they’re for, but, frankly, who cares?” He gave Casson a certain look—it meant he’d been closer to disaster than he’d been willing to let on. “And you, Jean-Claude? Everything all right?”

“A very strange thing, Bernard. Somebody just telephoned me from London.”

“What?”

“A call, from a banker in London.”

Langlade thought hard for a moment, then shook his head. “No, no, Jean-Claude. That’s not possible.”

“It happened. Just now.”

“They’ve cut the lines. There isn’t any way that somebody could call you from London.”

“You’re certain?”

“Yes. Who did you say?”

“An English banker.”

“Not from London, mon ami. What did he want?”

“He wasn’t direct, but he suggested that I do business with a certain distribution company.”

Langlade stared at the ceiling for awhile. When he spoke again, his tone of voice was subtly altered. “He called from France.” Then, “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Casson said. “He’s in France, you think?”

“Possibly Spain, or Switzerland, but definitely on the Continent— because the lines under the Channel were cut last June.”

“Well,” Casson said.

“You better think it over,” Langlade said.

Someone knocked discreetly on the office door. Langlade, it seemed to Casson, was not sorry to be interrupted.

The apartment was across a courtyard from a dress factory, through a cloudy window Casson could see women working at sewing machines. Fischfang sat at a table in the tiny kitchen, wearing an old sweater, and a blanket around his shoulders. He’d shaved his beard and mustache, the skin looked pale and tender, and his eyes were red, as though he hadn’t slept the night before. Outside, a few snowflakes drifted past the window.

“Do you need anything?” Casson asked.

Fischfang shrugged—everything, nothing. The apartment belonged to his aunt. When she’d opened the door, Fischfang had taken a moment to make sure it was Casson, then used an index finger to close a drawer in the kitchen table. But not before Casson had caught sight of a revolver.

Casson sat at the table, the aunt served them some strange drink— not exactly tea—but at least it was hot. Casson held the cup with both hands to keep warm. “Louis,” he said, “why do you have a gun? Who’s coming through the door?”

Fischfang looked out the window, a muscle in his jaw ticked. Casson had never seen him like this. Angry, of course, but that was nothing new. A communist, he lived on injustice, a vitamin crucial to daily life, and he was always fuming about what X said or Y wrote. But now, something else. This was nothing to do with Marxist fury. Fischfang was scared, and bitter.

“I have been denounced,” he said, as though the words were strange to him.

Casson’s face showed sympathy, but in his heart he wasn’t surprised. The kind of life Fischfang lived, seething with politics—the Association of Revolutionary Artists and Writers, left deviation, rotten liberalism, Stalinists, Trotskyites, Spartacists, and God only knew what else. Denunciation must have been a daily, perhaps hourly, event.

“Maybe you remember,” Fischfang went on, “that last August the Germans demanded that all Jews register.”

“I remember,” Casson said.

“I didn’t.”

Casson nodded once—of course not.

“Someone found that out, I don’t know who it was. They turned me in. For money, perhaps. Or some advantage. I don’t know.”

The aunt closed a bureau drawer in the other room. From across the courtyard Casson could hear the clatter of sewing machines. The women were hunched over their work, their hands moving quickly. “Now I understand,” he said. “You’re certain?”

“No, not completely. But things have happened.”

Casson took a breath. “So then, we’ll have to get you away somewhere.”

Fischfang stared at him for a moment. Will you really? When the time comes? Then he looked down, squared a tablet of lined paper on the table in front of him, laughed a little. “Life goes on,” he said, in a tone that meant he didn’t particularly care if it did or not. Then he passed the tablet across to Casson. “Have a look,” he said.

Spidery writing in blue ink, floating from margin to margin. Hotel Dorado it said on top. A sort of miracle, Casson thought, the way these things started from nothing. Just a few words on a piece of paper. For an instant he could smell movie theatre—figures flickering on the screen, the pitch of the voices, the sound of the projector when there was a pause in the dialogue. He pictured the title. On the marquee of the Graumont, just off the place de l’Opéra. He didn’t know why there, it was just the theatre he always imagined.

He read on. A little village in the south of France, on the Mediterranean. A fishing village, where a few Parisians come every August to stay at the Hotel Dorado. Autumn, the season over, the hotel deserted. The owners, an old couple, about to retire. The hotel has been sold to a large combine, they’re going to tear it down and build a new one, modern and expensive. The couple decides to write to their oldest, most faithful clients. “The hotel is going out of business, but come and stay with us the last weekend in October, we’ll have a glass of wine, a few memories.”

Casson looked up. “All in one weekend?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good.”

“A night when they arrive. A day when we meet them, a long night when everything happens, then a little scene where they get on the train to go back to Paris—except for the ones who are going to run off together and start a new life.”

Casson went back to reading. The characters you’d want—the Corps Humaine, the human repertory company—were all there. The banker, the confidence man, the actress, the postal clerk and his wife who scrimp and save all year so they can pretend to be upper class for two weeks, the lovers—their spouses left in Paris—the widow, the couple about to separate, giving it one last chance.

“Who’s the star, Louis?”

“I thought—one of those ideas that’s either a love letter from the gods or a little patch of quicksand meant just for you—it should be a young woman. Lonely, mysterious. Who misses her train and comes there by accident. Not a member of the sentimental company but, finally, its heart. Or, I don’t know, maybe that’s overdoing it.”

Casson waved him off. “No, that’s what I like about this kind of movie, you can’t really overdo it.”

“Who would you want to star?”

Casson watched the falling snow for a time. “Last May, a hundred years ago if you know what I mean, I had lunch with old Perlemère, who used to represent Citrine, and her name came up in the conversation.”

Fischfang’s eyes sparkled. “That’s good. More than one way, if you think about it.”

“Beautiful—not pretty. Mysterious. No virgin. She’s been to the wars, she’s battle-scarred, but maybe she can try one last time, maybe she can love again, but we don’t know until the final scene. It should be—will life let her?”

“A character trying to come back,” Fischfang said. “Played by an actress trying to come back.”

Casson nodded. “Something like that.”

They both smiled. Maybe it would work, maybe it wouldn’t, like everything else. But they were trying, at least. They could see their breath when they talked in the cold kitchen, outside the snow drifted past. “I’ll get it typed up,” Casson said.

Hugo Altmann tilted his chair back and blew a long, slow, meditative plume of smoke at the ceiling of his office. “Citrine, Citrine,” he said. “Do you know, Casson, that she always seemed to me the most elementally French actress. The sort of woman, in bed she gives everything. Yet there is something inside her, a bitterness, a knowledge of the world, that spoils it all—you get everything, but it isn’t what you wanted.” He paused a moment. “You’ve worked with her before?”

“Night Run.”

“Ach, of course. And to direct?”

“Don’t really know yet.”

“Well, let’s find you some development money, and get a screenplay on paper. Who do you have in mind there? Cocteau’s working, lots of others.”

“Louis Moreau, perhaps.”

“Who?”

“Moreau.”

“Never heard of him.”

“He’s new.”

“Hm. Well, all right, give him a try.” He leaned over toward Casson, his expression shrewd and confidential. “So, between us, who saves the hotel at the end, eh? I’m betting on the confidence man,” he said with a wink.

It took two weeks to find Citrine. He trudged across the city, office to office, the world of small-time talent agents, booking agents, press agents—everybody knew somebody. Perlemère helped, offering the names of a few friends. In the end, it turned out that she was performing at a cabaret amid the working-class dance halls on the rue de Lappe, out by Bastille. Le Perroquet, the parrot, it was called. Casson pulled his coat tight around him and kept his eyes down—this was not his district, he didn’t belong here, and he didn’t want a punch in the nose to remind him of it.

Closed, the first time he went. No reason, just closed. The blue neon parrot on a red branch was dark. The next time he tried was on Christmas Eve, and it was open. There was a poster by the door, the name Loulou across the bottom. Citrine—though it took him a moment to recognize her—Citrine on a high stool. Top hat, net fabric with rhinestones on top, bare legs crossed down below, spike heels with satin bows, a cabaret smile. Well, what about you, big boy?

A Christmas Eve blizzard. The white flakes swirled and hissed and made drifts in the doorways. Now and then a car came sliding down the street, tires spinning, engine whining as it worked its way around a corner. The blue-painted glass on the street lamps cast Hollywood moonlight on the snow.

Hot inside, steamy, and packed. He tried the stage door, but a doorman dressed like an apache—black sweater and beret and cigarette dangling from the corner of the mouth—ran him off. “You’ll pay. Like the rest of the world, conard.”

He paid. To join a hundred German officers jammed together in a small room, reeking of shaving lotion and stale sweat and spilled wine and all the rest of it. There was a master of ceremonies in a tuxedo, sweating and telling jokes, then zebras, naked girls in zebra masks, bucking and prancing, hoisting their knees up to their foreheads and singing “Paris smells so sweet.” Saluting British style—whistles from the crowd—then turning around and grabbing their ankles—roars of approval. A fat major next to Casson almost died of pleasure, laughed as tears ran down his cheeks, gave Casson a best-pal whack between the shoulder blades that sent him flying into the crowd.

Then the room went dark, the curtain creaked open, a violet spotlight popped on, and there was Loulou. By then he’d worked his way to a position near the stage where he knew she would be able to see him, and, after the second number, she did. He could tell. At first, Jesus it’s Casson, what’s he doing here? Then the corner of her mouth lifted, not much, but a little: he was there to see her, it was no accident.

But he wasn’t going to see her anytime soon. A table of colonels, prominent in the front of the room, demanded the presence of the beautiful Loulou and she was produced, guided to the table by the owner of the Perroquet, an eel in a checked suit. They were merry colonels, they touched her shoulder and told her jokes and tried to speak French and gave her champagne and had quite a time for themselves. Question was, would Hansi be the one to fuck her, or was she going to favor Willi? The battle raged, the competing armies surged back and forth as Casson looked at his watch and realized that the last Métro of the night had left Bastille station.

Finally the owner came around, bowed and scraped and tried to get his chanteuse back. Hansi and Willi were in no mood for that, but the owner had a trick up his checked sleeve and sent a phalanx of zebras into action. They arrived neighing and whinnying, sat on the colonels’ laps and wiggled about, tickled their chins, stole their eyeglasses and fogged them with their breath.

The colonels roared and turned red. Champagne was poured into glasses and everywhere else—to the colonels it seemed that champagne had found its way to places where champagne had never been before. One ingenious soul filled his mouth until his eyes bulged, then punched his cheeks with his index fingers—pfoo!—showering Hansi and Willi, assorted zebras, and Loulou, who wiped her face with her hand as she made her escape and climbed up on the tiny stage.

Most actresses could carry a tune if they had to and Citrine was no different. She simply played the role of a cabaret singer, and she was good at it. The throaty voice, hoarse from cigarettes and drinks in lonely cafés. I always knew you’d leave me, that I’d be alone. You could see her man, the little cockerel with a strut. And there you were, with her, at the table where we used to sit. Of course there was a kid, in military school somewhere. Oh well, perhaps once more, for old times’ sake. The eyes, slowly cast down, a few notes from the battered old piano, the spotlight dimming out. Ahh, Paris.

She sent the doorman in the black sweater to get him and they hurried away down an alley, indignant German shouts—“Loulou! Loulou!”— growing faint as they turned a corner. Which left them in the middle of a blizzard on the wrong end of Paris and no Métro with the curfew hour, one in the morning, long gone.

“We’ll walk,” she said with determination. “It will keep the blood moving. And something will occur.”

“Walk where?”

“Well, Jean-Claude, I stay at a sort of a not-so-good hotel these days—and even not-so-good as it is, they close it down like the Forbidden City after one-thirty. It usually works to sleep on a couch at the club, but not tonight, I think.”

“No.”

“So, we walk.”

“Passy . . .”

She took his arm with both of hers, her shoulder firmly against him, and they walked through the blizzard. He was happy to be held this way, he really didn’t care if they froze to death; a set of fine ice statues, one with a smile. Citrine, Citrine, he thought. She wore a long black coat and a black beret and a long muffler wound around her neck.

“I want you to be in a movie,” he said.

“Tell me about it.”

“You will star.”

“Ah.”

“You’ll be in most of the scenes. It’s about an old hotel in a little village, somewhere in the Midi. It’s been sold, and people come down from Paris one last time, and you wander in from, ah, from the land of the lost strangers.”

“Ah yes, I know this place, I have lived there. We are forever wandering into movies.”

He laughed, she held his arm tight. Somewhere out in the swirling snow, a car, the engine getting louder. They rushed into the first doorway. Lights cut the dark street—police on the prowl. “Pretend to kiss me,” she said.

They embraced, star-crossed lovers in a doorway. The car—French, German, whoever it was—passed them by. Casson’s heart was hammering, it was all he could do not to press his hand against his chest. And nothing to do with the police. My God, I am fourteen, he thought. When the car was gone they walked in silence, heads down against the wind.

She’d come to Paris from Marseilles at sixteen—it would have been running away if anybody had wanted her to stay there. Her mother had kept a boardinghouse for merchant seamen, mostly Turks and Greeks, and, the way Citrine put it, “one of them was probably my father.” Thus her skin was pale, with a shadow beneath it, she had hair the color of brown olives—worn long—with glints of gold in it, almond-shaped eyes, and to him she’d always smelled like spice—Byzantine, whatever that meant. It meant his fantasy side ascendant, he knew, but he thought about her that way anyhow. Across a room she was tall and slim, distant, just the edge of cold. And she was in fact so exotic, striking—a wide, heavy-lipped mouth below sharp cheekbones, like a runway model—that she looked lean, and hard. But the first time he’d put his arms around her, he had understood that it wasn’t that way; not outside, not inside.

In the course of the love affair she had only once told secrets about her past, about the boardinghouse where she’d grown up. “How much they loved and respected my mother,” she’d said. “They waited with me until I was fourteen, and then there were only two of them, and they made sure I enjoyed it.”

“Did they beat you?”

“Beat me? No, not really.”

That was all. They were on a train, she turned away and looked out the window. She had said what she wanted to: yes, I knew too much too young, you’ll have to go on from there.

He had tried—he thought he’d tried, he remembered it that way. She had, too. But they drifted. A day came, and whatever had been there before wasn’t there anymore. Another Parisian love affair ended, nobody could really explain it, and nobody tried.

They angled away from the river, into the 7th Arrondissement, toward Passy, hurrying across the Pont de Solférino, where white snow spun over the black river and the wind sang in the arches of the bridge. “Jean-Claude?” she said, and he stopped.

She looked up at him, there were white crystals of ice in her eyelashes, frozen tears at the corners of her eyes, and she was shivering. “I think I need to rest for a moment,” she said.

They found a little shelter, in the shallow portal of an ancient building. She burrowed against his chest. “How can there be nothing?” she said plaintively. She was right, the streets were deserted, no bicycle cabs, no people.

“We’re halfway,” he said.

“Only that?”

“A little more, maybe.”

“Jean-Claude, can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“Is there really a movie? Or is it, you know.”

“A movie. Hotel Dorado, we’re calling it. For Continental, maybe. Of course like always, it’s pure air until the great hand from the sky comes down and writes a check.”

“I wondered. Sometimes, I think, men want to run their lives backward.”

“Not women?”

“No.”

Not women? Not ever? It was warm where he held her against him. Slowly he unwound the long muffler, ran it under her chin and around so that her ears were covered.

“Thank you,” she said. “That’s better.”

“Shall we start out again? Sooner we do . . .”

“Listen!” she whispered.

A car? She canted her head, held the muffler away from one ear. He could hear only the hiss of falling snow, but then, faintly, a violin. And then a cello. He looked up the side of the building, then across the street. But the snow made it hard to locate.

“A trio,” she said.

“Yes.”

He looked at his watch. Oh, France! 3:25 on the morning of Christmas, in an occupied city, three friends determine to stay up all night and play Beethoven trios—in a cold, dark apartment. She looked up at him, mouth set hard as though she refused to cry.

Rue de Grenelle, rue Vaneau, tempting to take Invalides, but better to swing wide of the Ecole Militaire complex. Military and security offices had been there before and they would still be in operation, with new tenants. Plenty of Gestapo and French police in the neighborhood. So, find Grenelle again, and take the next small street, less important, in the same direction.

They never heard the car until they were almost on top of it, then they hugged a wall and froze. It was a Citroën Traction Avant, always a Gestapo car because the front-wheel drive worked on nights like these, with chains on the tires. It was idling—perfectly tuned, it hardly made a sound—the hot exhaust melting the snow behind the rear wheel. Through the back window they could see the silhouette of a man in the passenger seat. The driver had left the car and was standing in front of an apartment building, urinating on the front door.

Casson held his breath. The Germans were only fifty feet from them. The driver had left the Citroën’s door ajar, and the passenger leaned over and called out to him. The driver laughed, said something back. Banter, apparently. Taking a piss in a snowstorm, that was funny. Doing it on some Frenchman’s door, that was even funnier. Jokes, back and forth, guttural, thick, incomprehensible. To Casson, it sounded as though somebody was grinding language into broken words that could never be used again. But, he thought, they are in Paris, we are not in Berlin.

The man at the doorway started buttoning up his fly, then, as he hurried toward the car, he said the words “rue de Vaugirard”—an island of French in the German sentence. So, Casson thought, they were going to the rue de Vaugirard, to arrest somebody on Christmas Eve. Citrine’s hand found his, she’d heard it too.

Suddenly the car moved—backward. Casson pressed frantically against the wall, Citrine’s hand closed like a steel claw. Then the wheels spun, caught, and the car drove off down the street. The Germans hadn’t known they were there, they were just making sure they didn’t get stuck in the snow.

An hour later, the apartment on the rue Chardin. There was no heat, and Casson preferred not to turn on the lights, often faintly visible at the edges of the blackout curtains. They shed their outer clothes in the bathroom, hanging them over the bar that held the shower curtain so they could drip into the tub as the snow and ice melted.

“Bed is the only place,” he said. He was right, they were both trembling with the cold, and they climbed into bed wearing their underwear.

At first the sheets were as cold as they were, then the body heat began to work. She took a deep breath and sighed, coming gently apart as the night’s adventure receded.

“Are you going to sleep?” he said.

“Whether I want to or not.” Her voice was faint, she was barely conscious.

“Oh. All right.”

She smiled. “Jean-Claude, Jean-Claude.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Go to sleep.”

He couldn’t—he ached for her.

She sensed what he was going to do, moved close in a way that made it impossible. “I can’t, Jean-Claude. I can’t. Please.”

Why?

As though she’d heard: “You’re going to think a dozen things, but it’s that I can’t feel that way again, not now. If we were just going to amuse ourselves, well, why not? But it isn’t that way with us, you get inside me, that’s no play on words, I mean to say it. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“If it wasn’t a war, if I had money. If I just had it in me, the strength to live . . .”

“You’re right, I’m sorry. It’s just me, Citrine.”

“I know. I know you—you fuck all the girls.” But the way she said it was not unkind.

And even before the sentence ended, she was slipping away. Her breathing changed, and she fell asleep. He watched her for a time. Strange, the way her face worked, she always looked worried when she slept. Sometimes her breathing stopped, for a long moment, then it would start again. She dies, he’d thought years ago. She dies, then she changes her mind.

They woke up in the middle of Christmas Day. The snow had stopped. She wrote the name of a hotel on a scrap of paper, kissed him on the forehead, said “Thank you, Jean-Claude,” and went out into the cold.

29 December, 1940.

He left the office at six-thirty. He had a little money now, from Altmann, and a secretary. A cousin of his named Mireille, from the Morvan, his mother’s side of the family. She was a dark, unhappy woman with three children and an eternally useless husband. She showed up just about the time the money did, so he hired her—it was simply life’s way, he figured, of telling you what you ought to do.

The coldest winter of the century. The price of coal climbed into the sky, the old and the poor got into bed with every scrap of wool they owned and there they found them a week later. German soldiers flooded into Paris, from garrison duty in Warsaw and Prague, and Paris entertained them. Are you tense, poor thing? Have a little of this, and a little of that. England wouldn’t give up. The submarine blockade was starving them, but they had never been reasonable, and they apparently weren’t going to be now. Well, the French would also survive. More or less.

Out on the street, Casson pulled his coat tight around him and turned toward the Métro station at avenue Marceau. Two stops, Iéna and Trocadéro, and he could walk the rest of the way. The Passy station was closer to the rue Chardin, but that involved a correspondance, a change of lines, so if he stayed on the Line 9 train he’d be home in a few minutes. Albertine, tonight. His big, ugly treasure of a farm girl. Something good to eat. Vegetables, cow food—but garlic, salt, a drop of oil, and the cunning way she chopped it all up. Jesus! Was it possible that he’d reached that ghastly moment in life when the belly was more important than the prick? No! Never that! Why, he’d take that Albertine and spread her . . .

“Hey, Casson.”

That voice. He turned, annoyed. Erno Simic, waving his arm and smiling like a well-loathed schoolmate, was trotting to catch up with him. “Wait for me!”

“Simic, hello.”

“I never called—you’re angry?”

“No. Not at all.”

“Well, I been busy. Imagine that. Me. I got phone calls and messages, meetings and telegrams. Hey, now we know the world is upside down. Still it means a few francs, a few balles, as they say, eh? So we’ll have a drink, on me. I promised a lunch, I’m gonna owe it to you, but now it’s a drink. Okay?”

Paris hadn’t surprised Casson for twenty years but it did now. Simic took him down the Champs-Elysées to avenue Montaigne, one of the most prestigious streets in the city, then turned right toward the river. They worked their way through a busy crowd in front of the Plaza-Athenée, mostly German officers and their plump wives, then walked another block to a residential building. On the top floor a grand apartment with a view to the river had been converted to a very private bar.

Seated at a white piano, an aristocratic woman wearing a black cocktail dress and a pillbox hat with a veil was playing “Begin the Beguine.” Simic and Casson were shown to a table by a fat man in a sharkskin suit draped to hide both him and some sort of weapon. The tables on the teak parquet were set far apart, while the walls were covered with naughty oil paintings of naughty, and exceptionally pink, women. The room was crowded; a beautiful woman at the next table drinking tea, on second glance perhaps a prostitute of the most elevated class. By the window, two French colonels of cavalry. Then a table of dark, mustached men, Armenian or Lebanese, Casson thought. There was a famous ballet master—Russian émigré—sitting alone. In the corner, three men who could have been gangsters or black-market butchers, or both. Simic enjoyed Casson’s amazement, his big smile broadening from ingratiating to triumphant.

“Hah! It’s discreet enough for you, Casson?”

“How long—?”

Simic spread his hands. “Summer, as soon as everything settled down. It belongs to Craveur, right?”

Craveur was a famous restaurant owner, his family had been in the business since 1790, when the first restaurants were opened. Simic signaled to a waiter, a plate of petits fours salées—herring paste, oysters, or smoked salmon on puff pastry—appeared along with two large whiskey-and-sodas.

“It’s what I always have,” Simic confided. “Mm, take all you want,” he said, mouth full.

Casson sipped the whiskey-and-soda, lit up one of Simic’s Camel cigarettes, and sat back on a little gold chair with a gold cushion.

“Your name came up in a conversation I had,” Simic said. “With a man called Templeton. You know him, right? Works in a bank?”

“Yes.”

“He vouches for you.”

“He does?”

“Yes. And that’s important. Because, Casson, I still got Agna Film, but now I’m also a British spy.”

“Oh?”

“That’s how it is. You’re surprised?”

“Maybe a little.” Casson ate an oyster petit four.

“I’m a Hungarian, Casson. Not exactly by birth, you understand, but by nationality at birth. Still, Mitteleuropa, central Europe, is the world I understand, just like Adolf—so I see clearly certain things. Some people say that Adolf is a devil, but he’s not, he’s the head of a central European political party, no more, no less. And what he means to do in France is to destroy you, to ruin your soul, to make you despise yourselves, that’s the plan. He wants you to collaborate, he makes it easy for you. He wants you to denounce each other, he makes it easy for you. He wants you to feel that there’s no nation, just you, and everybody has to look out for themselves. You think I’m wrong? Look at the Poles. He kills them, because they come from the same part of the world that he does, and they see through his tricks. You understand?”

Casson nodded.

“So we got to stop that—or else. Right? Myself, I’m betting on the English, and I am going to work with them, and I want you to work with me, to help me do what I have to do.”

“Why me?”

“Why you. You’re known to the English—James Templeton has spoken for you, he knows you don’t have sympathy with the Germans. It also helps that you’re a film producer. You can go anywhere, you can meet anybody, of any class. You handle money, sometimes in large amounts, sometimes in cash. You might take ten people on a train. You might charter a freighter. You might use several telephone numbers, bank accounts—even in other countries. For us, it’s a good profession. Do you see?”

“Yes.”

“Want to help?”

Casson thought a moment, he didn’t really know what to say. He did want to help. Left to himself he would never have done anything, just gone on trying to live his life as best he could. But he hadn’t been left to himself, so, now, he had to decide if he wanted to become involved in something like this.

Yes, he said to himself. But it was what they called un petit oui—a little yes. Not that he was afraid of the Germans—he was afraid of them, but that wouldn’t stop him—he was afraid of not being any good at it.

“I will help you, if I can,” he said slowly. “I don’t know exactly what it is you want me to do, and I don’t know if I’d do it right. Maybe for myself that wouldn’t matter, but there would be people depending on me, isn’t that true in something like this?”

A backhand sweep of the arm, Simic knocked the uncertainty across the room. “Ach—don’t worry! The Germans are idiots. Not in Germany, mind you—there you can’t spit on the street, because they got everybody watching their neighbor. But here? What they got is a counterespionage service, which is lawyers, that’s who they hire. But not the Jewish lawyers, they’re all gone. And not the top lawyers, they’re high up, or they’re hiding. Found themselves a little something in this bureau or that office—hiding. So, you don’t have to worry. Of course, you can’t be stupid, but we wouldn’t be talking if you were. And, oh yes, you’ll make some money in this. We can’t have you poor. And you’ll get all the ration coupons you need, the British print them in Tottenham.”

“Where?”

“A place in London. But they’re very good, never a problem. Suits, food, gasoline, whatever you want.”

In a dark corner, the piano player was hard at work: “Mood Indigo,” “Body and Soul,” “Time on My Hands.” Cocktail hour in Paris— heavy drapes drawn over the windows so the world outside didn’t exist. The bar filled up, the hum of conversation getting louder as the drinks arrived. The expensive whore at the next table was joined by a well-dressed man, Casson had seen him around Passy for years, who wore the gold seal ring that meant nobility. He was just out of the barber’s chair, Casson could smell the talcum powder. The woman was stunning, in a gray Chanel suit.

The waiter brought two more whiskey-and-sodas. “Chin-chin,” Simic said and clinked Casson’s glass.

“Tell me what,” Casson said, “exactly what, it is that you want me to do.”

Simic looked serious, the big head on the narrow shoulders nodding up and down. “A proper question, Casson. It’s just, I have to be cautious.”

Casson waited.

“Well, to those who know, the place that matters most in this war is Gibraltar. Sits there, controls the entrance to the Mediterranean, means that the British can go into North Africa if they want, then up to Sicily, or Greece. Or Syria. That means Iraqi and Persian oil—you can’t fight without that—and the Suez Canal. Can Adolf take Gibraltar? No. Why not? Because he’d have to march across Spain, and for that he needs Franco’s permission because Franco is his ally. A neutral ally, but an ally. Don’t forget, Adolf helped Franco win his civil war. So, what will Franco do?”

“I don’t know,” Casson said.

“You’re right! The British don’t know either. But what you want, for your peace of mind, is your own man guarding the back door to your big fortress, not the ally of your enemy. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“So, what I’m working on.” Simic lowered his voice, leaned closer to Casson. “What I’m working on is a nice private Spaniard for the British secret service. A general. An important general, respected. What could he do? What couldn’t he do! He could form a guerrilla force to fight against Franco. Or, better, he could assassinate Franco. Then form a military junta and restore the monarchy. Prince Don Juan, pretender to the Spanish throne, who is tonight living in exile in Switzerland, could be returned to Catalonia and proclaimed king. See, Franco took the country back to 1750, but there’s plenty of Spaniards who want it to go back to 1250. So the junta would abolish the Falangist party, declare amnesty for the five hundred thousand loyalist fighters in prison in Spain, then declare that Spain’s strict neutrality would be maintained for the course of the war. And no German march to Gibraltar.”

Slowly, Casson sorted that out. It had nothing to do with the way he thought about things, and one of the ideas that crossed his mind was a sort of amazement that somewhere there were people who considered the world from this point of view. They had to be on the cold-hearted side to think such things, very close to evil—a brand-new war in Spain, fresh piles of corpses, how nice. But, on the other hand, he had been reduced to crawling around like an insect hunting for crumbs in the city of his birth. It was the same sort of people behind that— who else?

The man and the woman at the next table laughed. She began it, he joined in, one of them had said something truly amusing—the laugh was genuine. You think you know how the world works, Casson thought, but you really don’t. These people are the ones who know how it works.

Several times, over the next few days, he put one hand on the telephone while the other held his address book open at the S–T page. Sartain Frères. Ingrid Solvang. Simic, Erno—Agna Film. Not a complicated situation, he told himself. Very commonplace. Sometimes we believe we can make a certain commitment but then we find that, after all, we can’t. So then, a courteous telephone call: sorry, must decline. It’s just the way things are right now. Or, maybe, It’s just not something I can do. Or, It’s just—in fact, who the hell was Erno Simic that he deserved any kind of explanation at all? So, really, it was Casson explaining to himself.

Out on the boulevard, from the building they’d requisitioned in the first month of the Occupation, the young fascists of the Garde Française and the Jeune Front goose-stepped on the packed snow. Across the street, the optician Lissac displayed a sign that said WE ARE LISSAC, NOT ISAAC. A few doors down, broken windows, where an umbrella-and-glove shop had been forced to advertise itself as an Enterprise Juive.

Would murdering Franco stop that?

His heart told him no.

Then do it for France.

Where?

France—was that Pétain? The Jeune Front? Those pinched, white, angry little faces, scowling with envy. The patrons of the bar on the avenue Montaigne? The soldiers running away from the battle on the Meuse?

But he didn’t dial the telephone. At least, not all the numbers.

And so, inevitably, he arrived at his office one morning to find that a message had been slipped beneath the door. Hocus-pocus, was how he thought about it. An uncomfortable moment, then on with his day.

Hotel Dorado. That was better medicine than Spanish murder, right? And so, inevitably, the hocus-pocus itself.

Maybe not the best time for it, an icy night in the dead heart of January. Something that day had reached him, some sad nameless thing, and the antidote, when he found her, was blonde—a shimmering peroxide cap above a lopsided grin. Older up close than she’d first seemed—at a gallery opening—and not properly connected to the daily world. Everything about her off center, as though she’d once been bent the wrong way and never quite sprung back.

They sat on the couch and nuzzled for a time. “There is nobody quite like me,” she whispered.

He smiled and said she was right.

She undid a button on his shirt and slid a hand inside. The telephone rang once, then stopped. It bothered her. “Who is it?” she said, as though he could know that.

But, in fact, he did know. And a minute later, sixty seconds later, it did it again. “What’s going on?” she said. Now she was frightened.

“It’s nothing,” he said. Then, to prove it was nothing, “I have to go out for a while.”

“Why?” she said.

He’d always thought, not all that proud of it, that he was a pretty good liar. But not this time. He’d been caught unprepared, no story made up just in case, so he tried to improvise, while she stared at him with hurt eyes and pulled her sweater back down. In the end, she agreed to wait in the apartment until he returned. “Look,” he said, “it’s only business. Sometimes, the movie business, you need to take care of something quietly, secretly.”

She nodded, mouth curved down, wanting to believe him, knowing better.

In the street, it was ten degrees. He walked with lowered head and clenched teeth, the wind cutting through his coat and sweater. He swore at it, out loud, mumbling his way along the rue Chardin like a madman hauling his private menagerie to a new location.

At last, half-frozen, he crept down the ice-coated steps of the Ranelagh Métro and installed himself in front of a poster for the Opéra-Comique, a Spanish dancer swirling her skirt. A few minutes later, he heard the rumble of a train approaching through the tunnel. The doors slid open, out came a little man with a briefcase of the type carried under the arm. Casson could have spotted him five miles away, but then, the Germans were “idiots.” And he, Casson, was so brilliant he’d believed Erno Simic when he’d called them that.

The contact was a small man, clearly angry at the world. Peering up and down the station platform he reminded Casson of a character in an English children’s story. The Wind in the Willows? Waxed mustache, derby, fierce eyebrows, ferocious glare above an old-fashioned collar. Following instructions, Casson turned to the wall and stared at the poster. For a time, nothing happened. The dancer smiled at him haughtily and clicked her castanets in the air.

Finally, the man stood beside him. Cleared his throat. “An excellent performance, I’m told.”

That was part one of the password. Part two was the countersign: “Yes. I saw it Thursday,” Casson said.

The contact leaned the briefcase against the wall at his feet and began to button his coat. Then, hands in pockets, he hurried away, his footsteps echoing down the empty platform as he headed into the night. Casson counted to twenty, picked up the briefcase, and went home.

His blonde was bundled in a blanket, snoring gently on the couch. He went into the bedroom and closed the door. Before he put the briefcase on the shelf that ran across the top of his closet—under the bed? behind the refrigerator?—he had a look inside. Three hundred thousand pesetas—about $35,000 in American money—in thirty bundles of hundred-peseta notes, each packet of ten pinned through its upper right-hand corner.

Back in the living room, the blonde opened one eye. “You don’t mind I took a nap,” she said.

“No,” he said.

“Keep me company,” she said, raising the blanket. She’d taken off her skirt and panties.

Casson lay down next to her. It wasn’t so bad, in the end. Two castaways, adrift in the Paris night, three hundred thousand pesetas in a bedroom closet, air-raid sirens at the southern edge of the city, then a long flight of aircraft, south to north, passing above them. On the radio, the BBC. A quintet, swing guitar, violin—maybe Stephane Grappelli—a female vocalist, voice rough with static. The volume had to be very low: radios were supposed to be turned over to the Germans, and Casson was afraid of Madame Fitou—but he loved the thing, couldn’t bear to part with it. It glowed in the dark and played music—he sometimes thought of it as the last small engine of civilization, a magic device, and he was its keeper, the hermit who hid the sacred ring. Some day, in times to come, the barbarians would break camp and trudge away down the dusty roads and then, starting with a single radio, they would somehow put everything back the way it had been.

Very sensitive to the touch, this blonde. Thin, excitable—she sucked in her breath when something felt good. Still, she was quiet about it. That was just common sense. They even pulled the blanket up over their heads, which made everything seem dark and secret and forbidden. Probably he’d laugh at that some day, but just then it wasn’t funny, because they really were out there, the secret police and their agents, and this was something they probably didn’t approve of. It wasn’t spelled out—just better to be quiet.

When they were done with one thing, and before they moved on to the next, Casson went to the phone, dialed Simic’s number, let it ring once, and hung up. Then he counted to sixty, and did it again. He wondered, as he was counting, if it was a good idea to keep Simic’s number in his address book. In fact, where did Simic keep his number?

He crawled back under the blanket, the blonde yawned and stretched, and they began to resettle themselves on the narrow couch. By his ear she said, “You had better be careful, my friend, doing that sort of thing.”

“Perhaps you prefer I do this sort of thing?”

“I do, yes. Anybody would.” A few minutes later she said, “Oh, you’re sweet, you know. Truly.” Then: “A pity if you invite them to kill you, chéri.”

Lunch, Chez Marcel, rognons de veau, a Hermitage from Jaboulet, 1931.

Hugo Altmann held his glass with three fingers at the top of the stem, canted it slightly to one side, poured it half full, then twisted the bottle as he turned it upright. He looked at the wine in his glass, gave it just a hint of a sniff and a swirl before he drank. “I like the script,” he said. “Pretty damn smooth for a first draft. Who is this Moreau?”

“Comes out of the provincial theatre, down by Lyons somewhere. Strange fellow, afraid of his own shadow, keeps to himself pretty much. Has a little cottage out past Orly—lives with his mother, I think. No telephone.”

“Maybe I could meet him, sometime. A very sure hand, Jean-Claude, for the ‘provincial theatre, down by Lyons.’ ”

Casson shrugged and smiled, accepting the compliment, proud of his ability to unearth a secret talent. He suspected Altmann knew how much he’d depended on Louis Fischfang for his scripts, and he’d intended “Moreau” as a fiction convenient for both of them. Altmann, however, seemed to think Moreau actually existed.

“Maybe some day,” he said. “Right now, Hugo, I need him to think about Hotel Dorado and nothing else. If he meets you, he might start having ambitions.”

“Well, all right.” Altmann chased the last of the brown sauce around his plate with a piece of bread. “That banker in the first scene— Lapont? Lapère? Don’t let anything happen to him. He’s magnificent, truly loathsome—I can just see him.”

“I’ll tell Moreau he’s on the right track. Now, make it really good.”

Altmann smiled and took a sip of wine.

“I’ve been thinking,” Casson said. “Maybe we should consider a different location.”

“Not the Côte d’Azur?”

“It’s commonplace, everybody’s been there.”

“That’s the point, no?”

“Mmm—I think we have the plot, Hugo. But it’s the setting I worry about. The feel of a place that’s not the everyday world—come August, you leave your work, you leave the daily life, and you go there. Something special about it. I don’t want anybody thinking, ‘Well, I wouldn’t sell that hotel—I’d put in a damn fine restaurant and put some paint on the façade.’ ”

“No, I guess not.”

The waiter came to take the plates away. “There’s a reblochon today, gentlemen,” he said. “And pears.”

“Bring it,” Altmann said.

“I’ve been thinking about Spain,” Casson said.

“Spain?”

“Yes. Down on the Mediterranean. Someplace dark, and very quiet.

The propriétaires are still French. Expatriates. But the clients are a little more adventurous. They go to Spain for their holidays.”

“Hm.”

“Anyhow, I’d like to go and have a look. Scout locations.”

“All right, it shouldn’t be a problem. But, I don’t know, it doesn’t, somehow—Spain?”

“Could be the key to it all, Hugo.”

Altmann began preparing a cigar, piercing the leaf at the end with a metal pick he took from his pocket. He looked up suddenly, pointed the cigar at Casson. “You’re a liar,” he said. Then he broke out in a wide grin. “Have to take, uh, somebody down there with you, Jean-Claude? Just in case you need help?” He laughed and shook his head— you scoundrel, you almost had me there.

Casson smiled, a little abashed. “Well,” he said.

Altmann snapped his lighter until it lit, then warmed the cigar above the blue flame. “Romantic in Spain, Jean-Claude. Guitars and so forth. And one doesn’t run into every damn soul in the world one knows. You don’t really want to move the story there, do you?”

“No,” Casson said. “There’s a lady involved.”

Altmann nodded to himself in satisfaction, then counted out a sheaf of Occupation reichsmarks on top of the check. For a German in an occupied city, everything was virtually free. “Come take a walk with me, Jean-Claude,” he said. “I want to pick up some cashmere sweaters for my wife.”

The following afternoon Altmann sent over a letter on Continental stationery and, after a phone call, Casson took it to the Gestapo office in the old Interior Ministry building on the rue des Saussaies. The officer he saw there occupied a private room on the top floor. SS-OBERSTURMBANNFÜHRER—lieutenant colonel—Guske wore civilian clothes, an expensively tailored gray suit, and had the glossy look of a successful businessman. A big, imposing head with large ears, sparse black hair—carefully combed for maximum coverage—and the tanned scalp of a man who owns a sailboat or a ski chalet, perhaps both.

His French was extremely good. “So, we are off to sunny Spain. Not so sunny just now, I suppose.”

“No. Not in January.”

“You’ve been there before?”

“Several times. Vacations on the beaches below Barcelona, in the early thirties.”

“But not during the civil war.”

“No, sir.”

“Are you a Jew, Casson?”

“No. Catholic by birth. By practice, not much of anything.”

“I regret having to ask you that, but I’m sure you understand. The film business being what it is, unfortunately . . .”

A knock at the door, a secretary entered and handed Guske a dossier. Casson could see his name, lettered across the top of the cardboard folder, and the official stamp of the Paris Préfecture de Police. Guske opened it on his desk and started reading, idly turning pages, at one point going back in the record and searching for something, running an index finger up and down the margin. Ah yes, there it was.

He moved forward again, making the sort of small gestures—rhythmic bobbing of the head, pursing of the lips—that indicated irritation with petty minds that noted too many details, an inner voice saying yes, yes, then what, come on.

At last he looked up and smiled pleasantly. “All in order.” He squared the sheets of paper, closed the dossier, and tied it shut with its ribbon. Then he took Altmann’s letter and read it over once more. “Will your assistant be coming to see us?” he asked.

“No. Change of plans,” Casson said. “I’m going alone.”

“Very well,” Guske said. He drew a line through a sentence in Altmann’s letter and initialed the margin, wrote a comment at the bottom and initialed that as well, then clipped the letter to the dossier and made a signal—Casson did not see how it was done—that brought the secretary back. When she left he said, “Come by tomorrow, after eleven. Your Ausweis will be waiting for you at the downstairs reception.”

“Thank you,” Casson said.

“You’re welcome,” Guske said. “By the way, what did you do during the May campaign? Were you recalled to military service?”

“No,” Casson said. “I started out to go south, then I gave it up and stayed in Paris. The roads . . .”

“Yes. Too bad, really, this kind of thing has to happen. We’re neighbors, after all, I’m sure we can do better than this.” He stood, offered a hand, he had a warm, powerful grip. “Forgive me, Herr Casson, I must tell you—we do expect you to return, so, please, no wanderlust. Some people here are not so understanding as I am, and they’ll haul you back by your ears.”

He winked at Casson, gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder as he ushered him out of the office.

Casson couldn’t reach Citrine by telephone. A clerk answered at the hotel desk, told him that guests at that establishment did not receive phone calls—maybe he should try the Ritz, and banged the receiver down. So Casson took the Métro, out past the Père-Lachaise cemetery, walked for what seemed like miles through a neighborhood of deserted factories, finally found the place, then read a newspaper in the dark lobby until Citrine came sweeping through the door.

When he suggested they go to his apartment she gave him a look. “It’s work,” he said. “I’m going to Spain tomorrow, and you know what an office is like at night.”

They took a bicycle taxi up to the Passy shopping district, by the La Muette Métro and the Ranelagh gardens. It was just getting dark. “We’ll want something to eat, later on,” he explained.

Her eyes opened wide with feigned innocence. “And look! A bottle of wine. Someone must have left it here.”

“Work and supper, my love. Home before curfew.”

Truce. She walked with him in the way he’d always liked, hand curled around his arm, pressed tight to his side, yet gliding along the street like a dancer. That was good, but not best. Best was how she used to slip her hand in his coat pocket as they walked together. That would make him so happy he would forget to talk, and she would say, innocent as dawn, “Yes? And?”

For a winter evening La Muette wasn’t so bad. The little merry-go-round wouldn’t be back until the spring, but there was an organ-grinder, a blind man who smiled up at the sky as he turned the handle. Casson gave him all his change. The snow drifted down, a flake at a time, through the blue lamplight.

He’d stored up a hoard of ration coupons, even buying some on the black-market bourse that now functioned at a local café. So, for a half-hour, he could once again be the provident man-about-town. “The smoked salmon looks good, doesn’t it.” They decided on a galantine of vegetables. “A little more, please,” he said as the clerk rested her knife on the loaf and raised an eyebrow. For dessert, two beautiful oranges, chosen after long deliberation and a frank exchange between Citrine and the fruit man. Also, a very small, very expensive piece of chocolate.

There was a long line in front of the boulangerie. The smell of the fresh bread hung in the cold air, people stamped their feet to keep the circulation going. This line was always the slowest—portions had to be weighed, ration coupons cut out with a scissors—and sometimes a discussion started up. “Has anybody heard about North Africa?” Casson looked around to see who was speaking. A small, attractive woman wearing a coat with a Persian-lamb collar. “They say,” she continued, “an important city has been captured by the English.” She sounded hopeful—there’d been no good news for a long time. “Perhaps it’s just a rumor.”

It was not a rumor. Casson had heard the report on the French service of the BBC. The city was Tobruk, in Libya. Twenty-five thousand Italian troops taken prisoner, eighty-seven tanks captured by Australian and British soldiers. He started to answer, Citrine gave him a sharp tug on the arm and hissed in his ear, “Tais-toi!” Shut up.

Nobody on the line spoke, they waited, in their own worlds. On the way home to the rue Chardin, Citrine said, “You must be born yesterday. Don’t you know there are informers on the food lines? They get money for each radio the Germans find, they have only to persuade some fool to say he heard the news on the BBC. Jean-Claude, please, come down from the clouds.”

“I didn’t realize,” he said.

He had almost spoken, he had actually started to speak when Citrine stopped him. They would have searched the apartment. Looked in the closet.

“You must be careful,” she said gently.

On the rue Chardin, a gleaming black Mercedes was idling at the curb. The radio! No, he told himself. Then the door opened and out came the baroness, smothered in furs, who lived in the apartment below him. “Oh, monsieur, good evening,” she said, startled into courtesy.

The man who’d held the door for her, a German naval officer, stepped to her side and made a certain motion, a slight stiffening of the posture, a barely perceptible inclination of the head; a bow due the very tiniest of the petit bourgeois. He was pale and featureless, one of those aristocrats, Casson thought, so refined by ages of breeding they are invisible in front of a white wall. There was an awkward moment— introduction was both unavoidable and unthinkable. The baroness solved the problem with a small, meaningless sound, the officer with a second stiffening, then both rushed toward the Mercedes.

“What was that?” Citrine asked, once they were in the apartment.

“The baroness. She lives down below.”

“Well, well. She’s rather pretty. Do you—?”

“Are you crazy?”

They took off their coats. Citrine walked around the small living room, moved the drape aside and stared out over the rooftops. The Eiffel Tower was a dim shape in the darkness on the other side of the river. “It’s all the same,” she said. “Except for the lights.”

“Oh look,” he said. “A bottle of wine. Someone must have left it here.”

For the occasion, a pack of Gauloises. They smoked, drank wine, played the radio at its lowest volume. Citrine paged through the script, following the trail of SYLVIE as it wound from scene to scene. Casson watched her face carefully—this was Fischfang’s first real test. Altmann could be fooled, not Citrine. She scowled, sighed, flipped pages when she grew impatient. “How old is this Sylvie, do you think?”

“Young, but experienced. In the important moments, much older than her years. She wants very much to be frivolous—her life carried her past those times too quickly—but she can’t forget what she’s seen, and what she knows.”

Citrine concentrated on a certain passage, then closed the script, keeping the place with her index finger. She met Casson’s eyes, became another person. “ ‘My dreams? No, I don’t remember them. Oh, sometimes I’m running. But we all run away at night, don’t we.’ ”

Casson opened his copy. “Where are you?”

“Page fifty-five, in the attic. With Paul, we’re . . .” She hunted for a moment. “We’re . . . we’ve opened a trunk full of old costumes.”

“For the carnival, at Lent.”

“Oh.” She turned to the wall, crossed her arms. “ ‘My dreams.’ ” She shook her head. “ ‘No. I don’t remember them.’ ” I don’t want to remember them. And somehow she bent the word dreams back toward its other meaning. She relaxed, dropped out of character. “Too much?”

“I wish Louis were here. He’d like it that way.”

“You?”

“Maybe.”

“You want to direct this, don’t you.”

“I always want to, Citrine. But I know not to.”

8:30. A second bottle of wine. Scarlatti from the BBC. The room smelled like smoke, wine, and perfume. “Did you know,” she said, “I made a movie in Finland?”

“In Finnish?”

“No. They dubbed it later. I just went ba-ba-ba with whatever feeling they told me to have and the other actors spoke Finnish.”

“That doesn’t work,” Casson said. “We did a German version that way, for The Devil’s Bridge.”

Citrine’s eyes filled with soft passion, she leaned forward on the couch, her voice a whisper. “Ba, ba-ba. Ba-ba-ba?”

Casson extended the wine bottle, holding it over Citrine’s glass. “Ba ba?”

“Don’t,” she said, laughing.

He smiled at her, poured the wine. Happiness rolled over him, he felt suddenly warm. Perhaps, he thought, paradise goes by in an instant. When you’re not looking.

“I’m almost asleep,” she said.

Or was it? Warmth rolled over him, he felt suddenly happy. He went to the radiator and put a hand on it. “A miracle,” he said. The apartment hadn’t been like this for months. From somewhere, coal, apparently abundant coal, had appeared, and Madame Fitou had decided, against all precedent, to use a great deal of it. This was, he realized, a rather complicated miracle.

“Suddenly,” he said, “there’s heat.”

Citrine spread her hands, meaning obvious conclusion. “Don’t you see?”

“No.”

“A beautiful baroness, a dashing German officer, coal is delivered.”

It felt good in the apartment, they were in no hurry to leave. The Occupation authority, grateful for a compliant population, had given Paris a Christmas present: extension of curfew to 3:00 A.M. Casson and Citrine talked—Hotel Dorado, life and times, the way of the world. They’d never disagreed about big things, it had gone wrong between them somewhere else. They liked eccentricity, they liked kindness, coincidence, people who lost themselves in the study of planets or bugs. They liked people with big hearts. They wanted to hear that in the end it all turned out for the best.

Just after midnight she wandered into the kitchen, dabbed her finger in some galantine gelatin left on a plate and licked it off. A moment later Casson came in to see what she was doing, found her standing by the pipe that ran, mysteriously, through the corners of all the kitchens in the building. She was listening to something, hand pressed over her mouth, like a schoolgirl, to keep from giggling.

“What—?” he said.

She touched a finger to her lips, then pointed to the pipe. He listened, heard faint sounds from below. It made no sense at first.

“Your baroness?” she whispered.

“Yes?”

“Is getting a red bottom.”

Sharp reports—slow and deliberate, demure little cries. There was only one thing in the world that sounded like that.

“Tiens,” Casson said, amazed. “And in the kitchen.”

Citrine listened for a time. “Well,” she said, “I predict you’ll have a warm winter.”

Later he walked her to the Métro—she wouldn’t let him take her back to the hotel. “Good night,” he said.

She kissed him on the lips, very quickly and lightly, it was over before he realized it was happening. “Jean-Claude,” she said. “I had a good time tonight. Thank you.”

“I’ll call you,” he said.

She nodded, waved at him, turned and went down the stairs of the Métro. She’s gone, he thought.