The World at Night

NEW FRIENDS

FRIDAY NIGHT, 6 MARCH, WE’RE HAVING A COCKTAIL AMÉRICAIN, 5 TO 8. PLEASE COME, JEAN-CLAUDE, IT’ S BEEN FOREVER SINCE WE’’VE SEEN YOU.

Casson stood in Marie-Claire’s living room, talking to Charles Arnaud, the lawyer. Everyone in the room was standing—one didn’t sit down at a cocktail Américain. Casson sipped at his drink. “A cuba libre, they called it. It has rum in it.”

Arnaud rapped a knuckle twice against his temple and made a knocking noise with his tongue. It meant strong drink, and a headache in the morning. Casson offered a sour smile in agreement. “Always the latest thing, with Bruno,” he said.

“Have I seen you since I came back from Belgrade?” Arnaud said.

“No. How was it?”

Arnaud grinned. He had the face, and the white teeth, of a matinee idol, and when he smiled he looked like a crocodile in a cartoon. “Bizarre,” he said. “A visit for a week, a month of stories. At least. I went down there for a client, to buy a boatload of sponges, impounded in Dubrovnik harbor under a Yugoslav tax lien. Actually, at that point, I’d become a part owner.” Arnaud was even less a conventional lawyer than Langlade—had for years been retained by shipping companies, but had a knack for becoming a principal, briefly, in crisis situations where a lot of money moved very quickly.

“I always stay at the Srbski Kralj. You know it?”Arnard said.

“I don’t.”

“King of Serbia, it means. Best hotel in town, wonderful food, if you can eat red peppers, and they’ll send girls up all night. The bartender is a pimp, also a marriage broker—something interesting there if you think about it. Anyhow, what I have to do down there is clear, I have to hand over a certain number of dinar, about half the bill, directly to the tax collector, then they’ll let the ship go, the sponges belong to us, and we know some people who buy sponges. Takes all kinds, right? So, I’m waiting around in the bar one night—these things take the most incredible amount of time to arrange—and I start talking to this fellow. You have to put this in a movie, Jean-Claude—he’s, mmm, enormous, heaven only knows what he weighs, shaved head, mustache like a Turkish wrestler. A munitions dealer, won’t say exactly where he’s from, only that he’s a citizen of Canada, in legal terms, and would love to go there some day.”

Casson smiled, things happened to Arnaud.

“But, what really struck me about this man was, he was wearing an extraordinary suit. Some kind of Balkan homespun material, a shimmering green, the color of a lime. Vast, even on him, a tent. On his feet? Bright yellow shoes—also enormous. He could barely walk. ‘Pity me,’ he says, ‘looking like I do. An hour ago I met with Prince Paul, the leader of Yugoslavia, on the most urgent matters.’

“And then he explains. A day earlier he’d been in Istanbul, closing a deal for Oerlikons, Swedish antiaircraft cannon, with the Turkish navy. Now he’s done with that, and he has to get to Belgrade, but the choice of airlines isn’t very appetizing, so he books a compartment on the Orient Express, Istanbul to Belgrade, should arrive just in time for his meeting. That night he goes to the dining car, sits across the table from a Hungarian actress—she says. A stunner, flaming red hair, eyes like fire. They drink, they talk, she invites him to come to her compartment. So, about ten o’clock our merchant, wearing red pajamas and bathrobe, goes to the next sleeping car and knocks on the lady’s door. Well, he says, it’s even better than advertised, and they make a night of it. He gets up at six the next morning, kisses her hand, and heads back to his room. Opens the door at the end of the car, and what do you think he sees?”

“I don’t know. His, ah, his wife’s mother.”

“Oh no. He sees track. The train had been divided into two sections at the Turkish border, and now his wallet, his money, his passport, and his suitcase are heading for Germany—where he does not want them to go—and he’s off to see Prince Paul in red pajamas. Well, the next stop is in Bulgaria, Sofia, and he gets off. In the station he manages to borrow a coin, and telephones his Bulgarian representative. ‘Buy me a suit!’ he says. ‘The biggest suit in Sofia! And get down to the railroad station in a hurry!’ Also a shirt, and a pair of shoes. Pretty soon the agent shows up and there’s the boss, all three hundred pounds of him, sitting on a bench, surrounded by a crowd of curious Bulgarians. The fellow puts on the suit, drives to the Canadian legation, demands they call the next station, have the baggage taken off the train before it reaches Germany, and have it put on the next train to Belgrade.

“And they did it.”

“He said they did. But he had his meeting in the big suit.”

“The Balkans,” Casson said. “Somehow it’s always—did you ever meet the man who ate the Sunday paper?”

“Savovic! Yes. He ate also a Latin grammar, and a fez.” Véronique, Marie-Claire’s sister who bought costume jewelry for the Galéries Lafayette, came over with a German officer on her arm. “You two are having a good time,” she said. “I would like to present Oberleutnant Hempel.”

“Enchanté,” Hempel said.

“Oberleutnant Hempel is in transport.”

Hempel laughed. He seemed a good-natured man, quite heavy, with thick glasses. “My friend Bruno and me, we are in the automobile business.” His French was ghastly and slow, a comma after every word. “Every kind of automobile, we got garages full of them, out in Levallois.”

Casson smiled politely. Was he going to be offered an opportunity to buy his own car back from Bruno and the Germans? Bruno already had the apartment and the wife—not that Casson begrudged him the latter—but having the car as well seemed excessive.

Arnaud never stopped smiling. One had a few friends, but mostly people were meant to be used, one way or another, and if you weren’t born knowing that you had better learn it somewhere along the way. He nodded encouragement as Hempel spoke, yes, that’s right, even said a few words in return, the Horch, the Audi, Bavarian Motor Works. Now he had a lifelong friend. “Ja! Ja!” the officer said. He was sweating with gratitude. Véronique chose that moment to escape, smiling and backing away. Arnaud caught Casson’s eye—glanced up at the ceiling. Quel cul.

Casson drank some more of the cuba libre. He’d be taking off his clothes and dancing on the table in no time at all. Olé! This was his third concoction and it was getting him good and drunk, perhaps that was acceptable at a real American cocktail party, but not in Passy. Still, maybe it didn’t matter. Hempel laughed at something Arnaud said. Casson looked closer. Had he actually understood the joke? No—a German stage laugh. Very hearty. And this idiot had his car.

A hand took his elbow in a hard grip. “Come with me,” Marie-Claire hissed in his ear. He smiled and shrugged as he was towed away. They wound their way through the chattering crowd in the smoky living room, around the corner, into the bedroom—a kidding tiens! from Casson, Marie-Claire whispering “I have to talk to you.” She hauled him into the bathroom and shut the door firmly behind them. He peered around drunkenly. This had once been his, he’d shaved here every morning.

“Jean-Claude,” she said, still whispering, “what am I going to do about this?”

“What?”

“What. This boche, this schleuh. He brings them home, now.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it’s the wise thing to do.”

“You don’t believe that!” A fierce whisper. Then she moved closer to him, an aura of whiskey and perfume hung around her. Suddenly she looked worried. “Do you?”

“No.” After a moment he said, “But,” then sighed like a man who was going to have to tell more of the truth than he wanted to, “I’m afraid that it will turn out that way.”

She looked grim—bad news, but maybe he was right. Someone laughed in the living room. “After all,” he said, “what matters to Bruno is that he does well. Right?”

She nodded.

“Well, that’s how it is with him. If you take that away—what’s left?” She was going to cry. He set his glass carefully on the rim of the sink and put his arms around her. She shuddered once and leaned into him. “Come on,” he said softly. “It’s just the life we live now.”

“I know.”

“So, the hell with it.”

“I’m scared,” she said. “I can’t do it—I’m going to make a mistake.” A tear started at the corner of her eye. “Oh no,” she said, stopping it with her finger.

“We’re all scared,” he said.

“Not you.”

“Yes, me.” He reached over her shoulder, took a washcloth off a peg and, hand behind his back, let cold water run on it. He squeezed it out and gave it to her, saying “Here,” and she held it on her eye.

She looked up at him, shook her head. “What a circus,” she said. She put her free hand on his chest, gave him a wry smile, then kissed him on the mouth, a moment, a little more, and warm. Casson felt something like an electric shock.

A discreet knock on the door. Véronique: “There are people here, Marie-Claire.”

“Thank you.”

In the living room, taking her coat off by the door, Bibi Lachette. “Jean-Claude!” she called out, eyes bright, mouth red and sexy. “This is Albert.”

Fair-haired, pink-cheeked from the cold, a perfectly groomed mustache and goatee. “Ah yes,” he said, unwinding himself from a complicated, capelike overcoat. “The film man.”

10 March, 11 March, 12 March.

Please be spring. If nothing else, that. The trees at the entrances to the Métro, where warm air vented from down below, always bloomed first. Yes, said the newspapers, it had been the coldest winter in a hundred years. Privately, more than one person in Paris—and in Prague and in Warsaw and in Copenhagen—thought that God had punished Europe for setting itself on fire, for murdering the innocent, for evil. But then too there was, particularly in that scheme of things, redemption. And now would be a good time for it. The wind still blew, getting out of bed in the morning still hurt, the skin stayed rough and cracked, but the winter was breaking apart, collapsing, exhausted by its valiant effort to kill every last one of them.

Fischfang had barely survived; no coal, too many women and children, never enough to eat. He stared at himself in a mirror hung on a bare wall, his face thin and angry. “Look what they have done to me,” he said to Casson. “They ate all the food while we starved. Sometimes I see one, plump and happy, strutting like a little pigeon. This is the one, I tell myself. This one goes in an alley and he doesn’t come out. I’ve been close, once or twice. I think if I don’t do something my head will explode.”

Casson nodded that he understood, taking wheat flour and milled oats and a can of lard from a sack and setting it on the table. All he could manage but, he thought, probably not enough. He wondered how much more Fischfang could take.

Yet, a mystery. Hotel Dorado was luminous. Not in the plot—somewhere in deepest Fischfang-land there was no real belief in plots. Life wasn’t this, and therefore that, and so, of course, the other. It didn’t work that way. Life was this, and then something, and then something else, and then a kick in the ass from nowhere. In Hotel Dorado anyhow, the theory worked. A miracle. How on earth had Fischfang thought it up? The characters floated about, puzzled ghosts in the corridors of a dream hotel, a little good, a little bad, the usual tenants of life. They shared, all of them, a certain gentle despair. Even the teenager, Hélène, had seen the world for what it was—and love might help, might not. There were six tables in the dining room, the old waiter moved among them, you could hear the hum of conversation, the bump of the door to the kitchen, the clatter of pots and pans as the proprietor cooked dinner. Thank heaven it wasn’t Cocteau! The Game of Life as a provincial hotel—Madame Avarice, Baron Glutton, and Death as the old porter. Fischfang’s little hotel was a little hotel, life was a weekend.

Suddenly he realized that they would applaud in the theatres. He almost shivered at the idea, but they would. They’d sit in the darkness and, despite the fact that nobody who’d worked on the film could hear, they would clap at the end, just to celebrate what it made them feel.

It wasn’t finished, of course—there were fixes that would have to be made—but it was there. Hugo Altmann called him the morning after he’d sent over a copy, demanded to meet the reclusive screenwriter, discovered his lunch appointment that afternoon had canceled.

“Who would you like to direct?” he asked over coffee.

“I’ve thought about it.”

“And?”

Casson hesitated, chose not to open the bidding.

“Well,” Altmann said. “Suppose you could have anybody in the world?”

“Really?”

“Yes. I mean, let’s start there, anyhow.”

Casson nodded. “René Guillot, perhaps, for this.”

“Yes,” Altmann said. His ears reddened. “That might work very well.”

Altmann was looking at him a certain way: here was Jean Casson, CasFilm, No Way Out and Night Run and all that sort of thing. Nothing wrong with it. It put people in the seats. Everybody made a little money—if they were careful. He was easy to work with, not a prima donna. On time, pretty much, on budget, pretty much. Not unsuccessful. But now, Hotel Dorado. This was different.

20 March, 21 March, 22 March.

Maybe, this morning, the window could be opened. Not too much, just a little. After all, this wasn’t exactly a wind, more like a breeze. Somehow, against all odds, spring was coming. One could get used to the rationing, to the Germans, to the way things were, and then one simply did what had to be done. And, if you managed to avoid a trap or two, and kept your wits about you, there were rewards: a draft of Hotel Dorado went into Altmann’s office, money came out. That allowed Casson to eat in black-market restaurants twice a week. His apartment felt comfortable—the warming of the season replacing the heating of the baroness. In general, life seemed to be working better. For example his telephone line had been repaired—Madame Fitou told him the crew had been there—even before he realized it was out of order.

At night, he slept alone.

His friends had always claimed that Parisian women knew when a man was in love. Which meant? He wasn’t sure, but something had changed. He didn’t want the women in the cafés, and, when he decided he did, they didn’t want him. He stared at himself in the mirror, but he looked the same as he had for a long time. So, he thought, it must be happening on the subconscious level—mysterious biology. He was, for the moment, the wrong ant on the wrong leaf.

He didn’t dream about Citrine—he didn’t dream. But he thought about her before he went to sleep. How she looked, certain angles, certain poses, his own private selection. Accidental moments, often—she would as likely be putting on a stocking as taking it off. She ran past a doorway because there was no towel in the bath. Or she made a certain request and there was a tremor in her voice. For him, those nights in early spring, she would do some of the things she’d done when they’d been together, then some things he had always imagined her doing, then some things she’d probably never done and never would. He wondered what she would have felt had she seen the movies he made of her. Of course, she made her own movies, so it wouldn’t be a great shock. Would he like to see those? Yes. He would like to.

Thought about her. And talked to her. Shared the tour of daily existence. She actually missed quite a bit here—maybe she would have gotten hot over Casson’s images of lovemaking, maybe, but she certainly would have laughed at the comedies he found for her.

At last, in the middle of February, he’d given in and written a love letter. Based on the ones he’d composed in Spain—on the beach and in the railway cars. Wrote it down and put it in an envelope. Citrine, I love you. It wasn’t very long, but it was very honest. Even then, there was a lot he didn’t say—who wants a blue movie in their love letter? Still, the idea came across. He read it over, it was the best he could do. Somewhere between walks-on-the-beach and sixty-nine, a few sentences about life being short, a few more on mystery, mostly just Jean-Claude, wide open, on paper.

Casson went out to Billancourt studios, where René Guillot was directing a pirate film.

Seize hommes sur

le coffre d’un mort,

yo ho ho

la bouteille de rhum!

Boisson et diable

ont tués les autres,

yo ho ho

buvons le rhum!

“Michel?”

“Yes, Monsieur Guillot?”

“Could you move up the mast a little higher?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And, everybody, we need it deeper, more baritone, stronger. Yo ho ho! Let’s run through it once, like that, and Etienne? Hold the bottle of rum up so we can see it—maybe give it a shake, like this. Yes. All right, ‘Seize hommes sur . . .’ ”

Casson stood near Guillot’s canvas chair—Guillot smiled and beckoned him over.

Casson spoke in an undertone. “Jean Lafitte?”

“Blackbeard.”

“Mmm.”

Casson recognized the wooden boat, supported beneath the keel by scaffolding. It had been featured in scores of pirate and adventure films; a Spanish galleon, a British frigate, a seventy-four-gun ship-of-the-line in the Napoleonic navy. It was manned, that afternoon, by singing pirates. Some clung to the mast, there were several at the helmsman’s wheel, one straddling the bowsprit and a score of others, in eyepatch and cutlass, headscarf and earring and striped jersey. Only luck, Casson felt, had so far saved him from working in the genre. Guillot, he’d been told, was there as a favor, to finish a job left undone by a journeyman director who had disappeared.

Later they sat in the canteen, amid electricians and carpenters, and ate sausage sandwiches washed down with thin beer. “It’s a very good screenplay,” Guillot said. “What’s this nonsense about a recluse in the countryside?”

“It’s Louis Fischfang.”

“Oh. Of course. He’s still here?”

“Yes.”

Guillot’s expression said not good. He smoothed back his fine white hair. He’d been famously handsome when he was young. He remained famously arrogant—egotistical, selfish, brilliant. An homme de la gauche consumed with leftist causes, he’d made a passionate speech at the World Congress Against War in Amsterdam in 1933, then denounced Soviet communism after the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939.

“You think Altmann’s a Nazi?” he said quietly.

Casson shrugged.

Guillot thought about it for a moment, then he said, “I should’ve left.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I’m French. Where the hell am I going to go?”

They drank some beer. Guillot spooned mustard onto his sausage. “I wonder about the title,” he said. “Hotel Dorado. What about something like Nights of Autumn? That’s not it, but I’m feeling for loss, a little melancholy, something bittersweet. You know me, I like to go right at things. Then also, it struck me, why is the stranger a woman? Better a man, no?”

“We talked about it,” Casson said. “We like the idea of a woman. Traveling alone, vulnerable, a small part saint but she doesn’t know it. The way the Americans use an angel—always clumsy, or absent-minded. The idea is that strong and good are two different things.”

Guillot stopped chewing—jowls and pouchy eyes immobile—and stared at him for a moment. Then nodded once, all right—I accept that, and went back to his food.

“You know,” Guillot said, “the last time I heard your name was from Raoul Mies. You’d just signed with Continental, in October I think, and Mies decided that maybe he would too.”

“You’re serious?”

Guillot spread his hands, meaning of course.

“Altmann told me that Mies and, ah, Jean Leveque had signed. So, I decided it would be all right for me.”

The electricians at the next table laughed at something. Guillot gave Casson a sour smile. “An old trick,” he said.

Casson pushed his food aside and lit a cigarette.

“I don’t blame you,” Guillot said. “But there’s nothing you can do about it now.”

“I should’ve known better.”

Guillot sighed. “The war,” he said. It explained everything. “It’s fucked us,” he added. “And the bill isn’t even in.”

Casson nodded.

“As for this project,” Guillot said, “one thing we can do is take it south. It’s not heaven, it’s Vichy. Instead of Goebbels’s people at the Hotel Majestic there’s the COIC, the Comité d’Organisation de L’Industrie Cinématographique. It’s not all that different—they won’t give membership cards to Jews—but there are two reasons to consider it. One is that it’s still French, whatever else it is, they don’t mean what they say and as long as you stand there they keep talking, and two, you can get out of the country down there a lot easier than you can here.” He lowered his voice. “That I do know, because I had somebody find out. And maybe that’s what, uhh, your writer ought to hear about.”

“He will,” Casson said.

They sat in silence for a time. Finished the beer. The electricians looked at their watches, stood up and left. “Well,” Guillot said—it meant time to go back to work. “You can stay, of course, if you like.”

“I have a meeting back in Paris,” Casson said.

He met Guillot’s eyes, was reassured. They weren’t children, they’d spent their lives in the film business, were not strangers to betrayal and back-stabbing. And they were French, which meant they knew how to evade, to improvise, to reculer pour sauter mieux—to back up in order to get a better jump. “Tell me one thing,” Casson said, “just for curiosity’s sake. Why, of all things, Blackbeard?”

“I think it’s the godchild of some office that Altmann talks to. I mean, it’s just something for the kids on Saturday afternoons, and to play in the countryside, where they’ll watch anything that moves. You see, Blackbeard is English. A pirate, a brute. In this movie, he walks the plank.”

Casson shook his head, in awe at such nonsense. “Mon Dieu,” he said sorrowfully.

Guillot smiled, leaned toward Casson, spoke in a conspirator’s undertone. “Yo ho ho,” he said.

That night when he got home Casson discovered that his letter to Citrine had been returned. He held it in his hands. Somebody had obviously read it, possibly the censors, but, more likely, those bastards at the hotel. He had put the letter in the envelope as he’d been taught in lycée, so that the greeting was the first thing the reader saw when the letter was unfolded. Somebody had put it back in the wrong way. Written across the front of the envelope Gone Away. Left No Address.

He didn’t read it.

He sat on the couch, still wearing his raincoat, the apartment dark and lifeless. Forty-one-year-old producers. Twenty-nine-year-old actresses with a certain smoky look. What, pray tell, had he thought would happen? He leaned his head back against the cushion. She had left, all right. And one reason was to make certain he was locked out of her life. She knew herself, she knew him, she knew better.

Once again he’d been stupid: had decided that what he wanted to be true, was. And it wasn’t. Thus Altmann had deceived him, then Simic, then with Citrine, he’d deceived himself. This couldn’t go on. He heard his father saying “Jean-Claude, Jean-Claude.”

By force of will, he turned himself back toward commerce. Survival, he thought, that’s what matters now. It wasn’t a time for love affairs—maybe that was what Citrine understood better than he ever could, survival was more important than anything. The city had no difficulty with that, at the end of winter it discovered it was somehow still alive, then went back to business with a vengeance. It wasn’t very appealing, some of it, but then it never had been. You work in a whorehouse, Balzac told them. Don’t let anybody see how much you enjoy it and get your money up front.

Casson, that first week in April, had a new friend. An admirer. Perhaps, even, an investor. A certain Monsieur Gilles de Groux. Nobility, the real thing, in fact de Groux de Musigny, Casson checked the listing in Bottin Mondain and the Annuaire des Châteaux. He had a huge, drafty house out in the forest of St.-Germain-en-Laye, just outside Paris, where his family had moved in 1688 in order to commiserate with the Catholic pretender James II, who’d slipped into France earlier that year. William of Orange got the English throne, as it happened, but the de Groux family remained, walking on the miles-long Grande Terrasse that looked out over the city of Paris, breeding Vendéean basset hounds, reading books in leather covers.

It was Arnaud who had suggested his name to de Groux. Casson called him after their first meeting. “He wants to make films, he says.”

“Yes,” Arnaud said. “That’s what he told me.”

“Where did you say you met?”

“Rennaisance Club.”

“How rich is he?”

Arnaud had to take a moment to think about this. All around them, in the 16th Arrondissement, were the world’s great masters of the art of pretending to be rich. “The money, I believe, is from Limoges. China. Since the eighteen-hundreds. Does he live well?”

“Big house in St.-Germain. Creaky floors. Gothic maids.”

“Sounds right.”

“You think he really wants to make films?”

“Perhaps. I can’t say. Maybe he wants to meet film stars. He certainly wanted to meet you. Hello? Jean-Claude?”

“Yes, I’m still on.”

“You ought to get that repaired.”

“Are you going to the Pichards on Friday?”

“I’d planned to.”

“See you there.”

“Yes. Keep me posted on what happens, will you?”

“I will.”

There were film producers who made a living by knowing how to meet rich people and what to say to them, but for Casson it somehow never worked out. Some stubborn dignity always asserted itself, they sensed that, the grand schemes came to nothing. But de Groux was, in Casson’s experience, something completely new. A tall, thin, shambling fellow, no family close by, a shaggy white mustache stained by tobacco, hair that needed cutting, old wool sweaters that smelled like dogs, and a yellow corduroy jacket with buttoned pockets, a survival of the artists-and-models Montparnasse of 1910. No less an aristocrat, of course, for a little eccentricity. A certain drape hung between him and the world; installed at birth, removed with death, never to be shifted in between.

He was, however, very intent on making a film. And it was the apparatus of the business that seemed to fascinate him. He wanted to visit the office on the rue Marbeuf, he insisted they have lunch at the Alsatian brasserie on the corner—assuming that Casson often ate there. He wanted to have a drink at Fouquet—or Rudi’s, or Ubu Roi— wanted to go out to Billancourt, wanted to visit the nightclubs around Bastille. In the process they would talk about very nearly everything before returning, rather dutifully it seemed to Casson, to the business at hand.

“I always come back to The Devil’s Bridge,” he would say. “That same kind of, feeling, the mood of, what would you say?”

“I don’t know. Escape?”

“Yes, well, perhaps. But maybe more. We should be ambitious, I think. That’s what’s wrong with people, these days.”

They talked a great deal, and over time it crossed Casson’s mind that this man had never actually seen a film.

“Tell me, Gilles,” he would say. “What’s your favorite?”

“Oh, I can never keep the titles straight.”

Vague, perhaps, but very accomodating. Any time or place was good for him, and he never missed an appointment. He traveled in a chauffeured Citroën, seemed to have all the gasoline he needed, had lots of money and ration stamps, and an insatiable curiosity. What did Casson think about the Catholic church? What about Pétain? De Gaulle? The Popular Front? England, Churchill, the French Communist Party.

Good talk, intelligent and cultured. De Groux had spent half a century reading and conversing—born to a rich and idle life, your job was to discover the meaning of existence, then to let your friends know what it was. The discussion of the new film was carried on all over Paris, Casson was even invited to a supper party at de Groux’s hunting lodge in the Sologne. Oh Citrine, I wish you could be here to see this. That’s a real oryx head over the fireplace, that’s a real duke by the fire, he’s carrying a stick with a real ivory horse’s head, and he’s wearing a real leather slipper with the little toe cut away to ease his gout.

A cast of characters well beyond Jean Renoir. Adèle, the niece from Amboise. Real nobility—look at those awful teeth. Washed-out blue eyes gazed into his, a tiny pulse beat sparrowlike at the pale temple. Wasn’t her uncle the dearest man—insisting that poor old Pierrot be stabled in his horse barns? This proud beast, now retired, who had pounded so faithfully down the paths of the Bois de Fontainebleau after the fleeing hart—would Monsieur care to visit him? Citrine, I confess I wanted to. Go to the stable and wrestle in the straw, hoist the silk evening dress and pull down the noble linen. For the son of a grand-bourgeois crook from the 16th, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. One never met such people, they were rumored to exist, mostly they appeared in plays. There really was game for dinner, dark and strong— perhaps the fabled bear paw, Casson couldn’t bring himself to ask—with black-blood gravy. And real watery vegetables. “Film!” said a cousin from Burgundy. “No. Not really.” Casson assured him it was true. And the man drew back his lips and actually brayed.

There they were, and I among them. Sad it couldn’t last—de Groux was a spy, really, what else could he be? It scared Casson because somebody was going to a lot of trouble, and Casson didn’t think he was worth it. Or, worse, he was worth it but he just didn’t realize why.

Back at the rue Chardin, a visit to the cellar with a flashlight. Ancient stone walls, a child’s sled, a forgotten steamer trunk, a bicycle frame with no wheels. On one wall, black metal boxes and telephone lines. What was he looking for? He didn’t know. Whatever made that hissing sound. He peered at the wires, seeking a device he could neither name nor describe. But there was nothing there. Or nothing he could see. Or, maybe, nothing at all, it was all in his mind. French phones made noise—why not this noise?

“Tell me,” de Groux said, “a man in your position. You must have influence somewhere—a sympathetic politician, perhaps. It’s hard to get the permissions, all the fiches one must have to do your job. I tell you I’m worried, my friend. All the money we’re going to spend. It’s not that I don’t have it, I have pots of it. It’s these musty old lawyers, and the family. They see an old man having a fling, and they worry I’ll actually open my fist and a sou will fly out. So you see, I don’t want all this to founder on the whim of some little petit fonctionnaire. I want to assure myself that when the great battle of the clerks is fought, we are the ones left standing when the smoke clears.”

Va te faire foutre, I tell him in my heart, Citrine. Go fuck thyself. But, in the real world: “Well, Gilles, frankly I have stood on the lines myself. I have filled in my share of forms. Sometimes an assistant has been there to help but it’s so difficult, you see, crucial, that one must involve oneself. It’s that kind of commitment you must have. In the film business.”

“No. Really? Well.”

A blind reptile, he thought. But it knows there’s a nest, and young, and it senses warmth.

And then, it happened again—it seemed everybody wanted to be his friend that spring. This time he was at the office. Four o’clock on a long, wet, gray afternoon, the street outside shiny with rain. His secretary knocked, then opened the door. “A Madame Duval to see you,” she said, her voice disapproved of the name—who does she think she is, using an alias?

His heart sank. He’d been happily lost in his work, a thousand miles from reality. “Well, send her in,” he said.

She sat across from him, wearing a dark suit and a hat with a veil, knees primly together and canted slightly to one side. One of those fortyish Frenchwomen with a sour face and beautiful legs. “I am,” she said, “the owner of the Hotel Bretagne. Where your friend, the actress called Citrine, was living.” Her voice was tense—this was not an easy visit.

“Yes?”

“Yes. Last Friday, the night clerk happened to tell me that you had written her a letter. By the time it reached the hotel she had left, so he marked it Gone Away and returned it.” She paused a moment, then said, “He was—was not unpleased at this. A film actress, a producer, star-crossed, an unhappy ending. He was delighted, really, he’s a man who takes pleasure in the misfortunes of others, and has reached an age where he’s not shy about letting the world know it. It’s sad, really.”

“I believe he opened the letter and read it,” Casson said angrily. “Shared it with his friends, perhaps, and they all had a good laugh.”

The woman thought for a moment. “Opened it? No, not him, he doesn’t begin to be that bold, he simply marked the envelope and returned it. And, in the normal course of things, that would be that.”

There was more, Casson waited for it.

“However,” she said, taking a breath, “I had, we had, a certain experience. I knew who she was, although she was using another name— I had seen her in the movies, and nobody else looks like that. Now, I do not live at the hotel, of course, but I happened to be there, late one night, and I went to the second-floor bath to wash out a glass. It was very quiet just then, about two in the morning, and, without thinking, I simply walked in. Well, she was taking a bath. Naturally I excused myself, immediately closed the door. But—”

She hesitated.

“What happened?”

“Nothing actually happened. It took me a minute to realize what I’d seen. There were tears in her eyes, and on her face. And there was a razor blade resting on the soap dish. That’s all I saw, monsieur, yet you could not be mistaken, there was no question about what was going to happen in that room. I said through the door, ‘Madame, is everything all right?’ After a moment she said ‘Yes.’ That was the end of it, but it’s possible that the intrusion saved a life—not for any reason, you understand, reason wasn’t involved.”

“When was this?”

“Sometime in February. Maybe. Really, I don’t remember. About two weeks later we spoke very briefly. I was working on the book-keeping, she’d come in from doing an errand and asked for her key at the desk. We talked for a minute or two, she never referred to what had happened. She told me she would be leaving at the end of the week, had found something to do in Lyons, in the Zone Non-Occupée, and she mentioned the name of a hotel.”

“Was she unhappy?”

“No. Thoughtful, perhaps. But, mostly, determined.”

“She is that.”

“Then, after I talked to the clerk, I decided I ought to come and see you, to tell you where she is. For a time I wasn’t sure, I didn’t know what to do. I argued back and forth with myself. In the end, I’m doing this not because I insinuate myself in the lives of strangers”—the idea was so unappealing she grimaced—“but because I believe, after thinking about it, that she meant for me to do it.”

They were quiet for a moment. Casson was conscious of the sound of tires on the rainy street below his window.

“The way she spoke to me,” the woman said slowly, “it was as though her emotions, her feelings about life, were uncertain. She didn’t know exactly what to do, so she left matters in the hands of fate. It didn’t mean all that much to me at the time—I have the hotelkeeper’s view of the world, disorder, chaos, stolen towels. I remembered later only because she was who she was, but I did remember. A letter had come, the clerk noticed the return address—he recalled who you were, certainly, and once I was told about it I had to do something. Probably the letter concerns only a forgotten handkerchief.”

“No. More than that.”

She nodded to herself, confirming what she’d believed. Opened her purse, took out a hotel envelope, reached over and placed it on the corner of his desk. Then stood up. “I hope this is the right thing to do,” she said.

Casson stood quickly. “Thank you,” he said. “Madame, thank you. I should have offered you something, forgive me, I, perhaps a coffee, or . . .”

A gleam of amusement in her eye. “Another time, perhaps.” He was clearly disconcerted—she enjoyed that, particularly in men like Casson. She extended a gloved hand, he took it briefly. Then she was gone.

He tore open the envelope, found the name and telephone number of a hotel in Lyons written on a slip of paper. At the end of the day he met Bernard Langlade for a drink. “Is it hard to find out who owns a hotel?” he said.

“Shouldn’t be.”

Casson told him the name and location. Langlade called him in the morning. “I take it back,” he said. “The Hotel Bretagne, on the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, is owned by a Société Anonyme, in Switzerland.”

“Is that unusual?”

“No. It’s done, sometimes. For tax purposes, or divorce. And, with time and money, you could probably find a name. Of course, even then—”

“No, thank you for looking, Bernard, but probably best just to let it go.”

Langlade made a sound that meant much the wiser choice. “Especially these days,” he said.

Especially these days. There was no calling Citrine from his infected telephone. Every call a new name on somebody’s list. He could still see Lady Marensohn across the table in the bar of the Alhambra Hotel. Perhaps it was over, perhaps they believed him, perhaps not.

He’d taken the Métro home from work that night, a man got off behind him. Made the first turn with him, then the second. Casson paused at the window of a boulangerie. The man looked at him curiously and walked by. Well, how am I supposed to know? he thought. You’re not, came the answering voice, you’re not.

Merde alors. After all, it wasn’t as though clandestine instincts were unknown in this city. All right, maybe it wasn’t the British Secret Intelligence Service one had to elude. But it was husbands or lovers, wives or landlords or lawyers. Casson let it get to be 7:30 in the evening, then left the apartment. By now, when he went out in the street, everyone he saw was an operative—an anonymous little man in an Eric Ambler novel who lived in a rented room and spied on Jean Casson. So, he thought, is it you—in your tuxedo? Or you, a clerk on the way home? Or you, the lovers embracing on the bridge. He hurried along, head down, through the rainy streets, through the fog that pooled at the base of the park railings. He trotted down the Métro stairs, left at the other end of the platform, reversed direction, doubled back, at last sensed he was unobserved and headed toward the river.

Chez Clément—the little sign gold on green, faded pastel and flaked by time and weather. At the end of a tiny street where nobody went, steamed glass window, the hum of conversation and the clatter of dinnerware faintly heard. Inside the door, the smell of potatoes fried in butter every night since 1890. Clément came out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on a towel. Face scarlet, mustache immense, apron tied at one shoulder. “Monsieur Casson.” It was like being hugged by a wine-drenched onion. How infernally clever, Clément told him, to stop by this evening, all day long they’d been working, at the stove, in the pots, what luck they’d had, one never saw this any more, perhaps the last—

No, alas, not tonight, he couldn’t. Casson inclined his head toward the cloakroom and said delicately, “Le téléphone?”

Not a telephone, the telephone. The one Clément made available to his most cherished customers. Clément smiled, of course. The heart had reasons of its own, they had to be honored, sometimes not at home.

He reached the hotel in Lyons. Madame was out.

Was there a message?

No.

12 April. 11:20 A.M. The rain continued, soft cloudy days, nobody minded. Casson walked down the Champs-Elysées, turned right on avenue Marceau, a few minutes later leaned on the parapet of the Pont d’Alma, looking down into the Seine. A blonde woman walked by; lovely, wearing a yellow raincoat. On the banks, rain beaded along the branches of the chestnut trees and dripped onto the cobblestones. The river had risen to spring tide, lead-colored water curling around the piers of the bridges, crosscurrents black on gray, shoals catching the light, rain dappling the surface, going to Normandy, then to sea. Just a boat, he thought. How hard would it be? Magic, a child’s dream. Carried away to safety on a secret barge.

Casson looked at his watch, lit a cigarette, leaned his weight on the parapet. He could see, at one end of the bridge, a newspaper kiosk— an important day, the headlines thick and black. German planes had set Belgrade on fire, armored columns had entered Zagreb, Skopje had been taken, soon the rest of Macedonia, and the Panzerkorps was driving hard on Salonika.

He crossed to the Left Bank, entered the post office on the avenue Bosquet. It was crowded, people in damp coats standing on line, smoking and grinding out their cigarettes on the wet tile floor. He waited for a long time, finally reached the counter, gave the clerk a telephone number, went to the cabine and waited for the short ring.

“Hotel du Parc.” The voice sounded very far away. “Hello? Are you there?”

Casson gave the name.

“Stay on the line.” The sound of the receiver being set down on a wooden countertop.

He waited. In the next cabine a woman was shouting at some relative somewhere in France. Where was the money, they were supposed to send it, it should have come days ago, no she didn’t want to hear about the problem.

The clerk picked the receiver up. “She’s coming now.” Then: “Hello?”

“Hello.”

A pause. “It’s you.”

“Yes.”

“I had to leave.”

“Yes, I know. How is Lyons?”

“Not so bad. I’m in a play.”

“Really?”

“Yes. A small part.”

“What sort of play?”

“A little comedy. Nothing much.”

“You sound good.”

“Do I?”

“Yes.”

The line hummed softly.

“Citrine, I wrote you a letter.”

“Where is it?”

“It went to the other hotel, but it came back. The woman there told me where you were.”

“What does it say?”

“It’s a love letter.”

“Ah.”

“No, really.”

“I wonder if I might read it, then.”

“Yes, of course. I’ll send it along—I just wanted to hear your voice.”

“The mail isn’t very good, these days.”

“No, that’s true.”

“Perhaps it would be better if you were to bring it.”

“Yes. You’re right. Citrine?”

“Yes?”

“I love you.”

“When can you come here?”

“As soon as I can.”

“I’ll wait for you.”

“I’ll let you know when.”

“I’ll wait.”

“I have to say good-bye.”

“Yes. Until then.”

“Until then.”

16 April, 1941.

Now the trees had little leaves and clouds of soft air rolled down the boulevards at dusk and people swore they could smell the fields in the countryside north of the city. Casson bought a train ticket, and made an appointment at the rue des Saussaies to get an Ausweis to leave the occupied zone and cross over to the area controlled by Vichy.

A warm day, the girls were out. Nothing better than Frenchwomen, he thought. Even with rationing, they insisted on spring—new scarves, cut from last year’s whatever, a little hat, made from a piece of felt somebody had left in a closet, something, at least something, to say that love was your reward for agreeing to live another day and walk around in the world.

On the top floor of the old Interior Ministry building, even SS-OBERSTURMBANNFÜHRER Guske knew it was spring. He came around the desk to shake hands, as tanned and well-oiled as ever, every one of his forty hairs in its proper place, a big leathery smile. Then, with a sigh, he got down to business. Made himself comfortable in his chair and studied the dossier before him, a sort of now where were we feeling in the air. “Ah yes,” he said. “You went last to Spain to see about locations for a film. So, how did it go for you?”

“Very well. One or two villages were, I can say, perfect. Extremely Spanish. The church and the tile roofs, and the little whitewashed houses.”

“Indeed! You’re making me want to go.”

“It’s a change, certainly. Very different from France.”

“Yes, here it is, Málaga. My wife and I used to go to Lloret-de-Mar every summer, until they started fighting. Find a pension in a little fishing village. What dinners! Besugo, espadon, delicious. If you can persuade them to hold back a little on the garlic, excellent!” He laughed, showing big white teeth. Looked back down at the dossier. Read for a moment, then a slight discomfort appeared on his face. “Hmm. Here’s a memorandum I’d forgotten all about.”

He read carefully, perhaps for three or four minutes. Shook his head in pique at something small and irritating. “I know you are famous for petty bureaucrats in France, but I tell you, Herr Casson, we Germans don’t do so badly. Look at this nonsense.”

“Sir?”

“I don’t have the faintest recollection of anything, you understand, I see people from dawn to dusk, of course, and I only remember the, well, the bad ones, if you know what I mean.” He raised his eyebrows to see if Casson had understood.

“What’s happened is,” he continued, “you told me, or, I thought you told me, that your army service was back in the 1914 war, but here it says that you—well, the people down at the Vincennes military base sent on to us a record that says you were transferred to a unit that was reactivated in May of 1940. Could that be right?”

“Yes. I was.”

“Well, I apparently got it wrong the last time we talked because now somebody’s gone and written a memorandum in your file saying that you, well, that you didn’t actually tell the truth.”

“I don’t really know what I . . .” Casson felt something flutter in his stomach.

“Ach,” Guske said, quite annoyed now. He stood up, walked toward the door. “I’m going to go down the hall and have this put right. I’ll be back in a minute.” He opened the door and gestured toward a chair in the hall. “Please,” he said. “I’ll have to ask you to wait in the corridor.”

Guske marched off down the hall. Casson wanted to get up and run out of the building, but he knew he’d never make it, and when they caught him he wouldn’t be able to explain. He wasn’t being threatened, exactly. It was something else—he didn’t know what it was, but he could feel it reaching for him.

Hold on, he told himself.

He very nearly couldn’t. He closed his eyes, heard typewriters, muted conversations, doors opening and closing, telephones. It was just an office.

Forty minutes later, Guske came back down the hall shaking his head. In a bad humor, he waved Casson into his office. “This is extraordinarily irritating, Herr Casson, but this man at the other end of the hall is acting in a very unreasonable fashion. I mean, here we’ve had a simple misunderstanding, you gave me some information and it didn’t happen to hold with some piece of paper that somebody sent here, and now he’s going to be difficult about it.”

Casson started to speak, Guske held up his hand for silence.

“Please, there’s nothing you can say that will help. I am certainly going to take care of this problem—you can have every confidence in me—but it’s going to take a day or two, maybe even a little more. Your trip to Lyons, is it so very urgent?”

“No.”

“Good. Then I’m relieved. And you’ll appreciate I have to work with this fellow, I can’t be getting around him every five minutes. But he’s going to have to learn to separate these things—here is something that must concern us, over there is just a nuisance, a little pebble in the shoe. Eh?”

Guske stood and offered his hand. “Why don’t you call me back a week from today? Yes? I’m sure I’ll be able to give you the answer you want. These telephone numbers in your file, for home and office, they’re correct?”

“Yes.”

“Very good. Then I’ll see you in a week or so. Good day, Herr Casson. Please don’t think too badly of us, it will all be made right in the end.

Two days later, a Friday afternoon, a commotion in the réception of his office. Casson threw open his door, then stared with astonishment. It was a man called Bouffo—a comic actor, he used only that name. A huge man, gloriously fat, with three chins and merry little eyes— “France’s beloved Bouffo,” the publicity people said. Casson’s secretary, Mireille, was standing at her desk, vaguely horrified, uncertain what to do. Bouffo, as always in a white, tentlike suit and a gray fedora, was leaning against the wall, fanning himself with a newspaper, his face the color of chalk. “Please, my friends,” he said. “I beg you. Something to drink.”

“Will you take a glass of water, monsieur?” Mireille asked.

“God no.”

“Mireille,” Casson said. “Please go down to the brasserie and bring back a carafe of wine, tell them it’s an emergency.” He handed her some money.

“Now Bouffo,” he said, “let’s get you sat down.” Casson was terrified the man was going to die in his office.

“Forgive me Casson—I’ve had the most terrible experience.” Casson took his arm—he was trembling—and helped him onto the couch. Up close, the smell of lilac-scented talcum powder and sweat. “Please,” Casson said, “try to calm yourself.”

“What a horror,” Bouffo said.

“What happened?”

“Well. You know Perlemère?”

“Yes. The agent?”

“Yes. Well, some time ago he represented me, and he owed me a little money, and I thought I’d just kind of drop in on him, unannounced, and see if I could collect some of it, you know how things are, lately. So, I went over to his office, which is just the other side of the boulevard. I was in that little lobby there, waiting for the elevator, when there was a commotion on the staircase. It’s Perlemère, and there are three men with him, a short one, very well-dressed, and two tough types. Detectives, is what they were.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. One knows.”

“German?”

“French.”

“And?”

“They’re arresting Perlemère.”

“What?”

“He’s telling them he knows this one and that one and there’ll be hell to pay once his important friends find out how he’s being treated and all this kind of thing. But, clearly, they don’t care. Perlemère tries to stop on the staircase and says ‘Now see here, this has gone far enough’ and they hit him. I mean, they really hit him, it’s not like the movies. And he cried out.”

Bouffo stopped a moment and caught his breath. “I’ll be all right,” he said. “Then, one of them called him a Jew this and a Jew that, and they hit him again. It was sickening. The sound of it. There were tears on Perlemère’s face. Then, they saw me. And one of them says, ‘Hey look, it’s Bouffo!’ ”

“What did you do?”

“Casson, I was terrified. I gave a sort of nervous laugh, and I tipped my hat. Then they brushed by me. Perlemère looked in my eyes, he was pleading with me. There was blood on his mouth. I held the door open a crack after they went out—they threw him in a car, then they drove away. I didn’t know what to do. I started to go home, then I remembered your office was over here and I thought I better go someplace where I could sit down for a moment.”

Mireille returned, carrying a carafe of wine. Casson poured some in a water glass and gave it to Bouffo. “No good, Casson.” He wasn’t talking about the wine. Shook his head, tried to take deep breaths. “No good. I mean, who do you go to?”

Sunday night, late—one-thirty in the morning when he looked at his watch. He was reading, wearing an old shirt and slacks. Restless, not ready to sleep. Blackout curtains drawn, light of a single lamp, a very battered Maigret novel, The Nightclub, he’d bought at a stall on the Seine. The buzzer by his door startled him. Now what? He laid the book face down on the chair, turned off the lamp, went out onto the terrace. Down below, a dark shape waited at the door. Then a white face turned up toward him, and a stage whisper: “Jean-Claude, let me in.” Gabriella, with a small suitcase.

He hurried down the stairs, the marble steps cold on his feet because he was wearing only socks. He unlocked the door and pushed it open. He heard a stirring from the concierge apartment, called out, “It’s just a friend, Madame Fitou.”

Back in the apartment he poured a glass of red wine and set out some bread and blackcurrant jam. Gabriella was exhausted and pale, a smudge on the elbow of her coat. “It happened on one of the trains,” she told him. “Really I can’t remember which one it was. I had a first-class compartment, Milan to Turin, then I took the night train to Geneva, eventually the Dijon/Paris express. Then I just barely managed to catch the last Métro from the Gare de Lyon.”

“Gabriella, why?”

“I told my husband I was coming up here to see an old girlfriend— as far as anybody knows I arrive tomorrow morning, eight-thirty, on the train from Milan. Do you see what I did?”

“Yes.”

“Jean-Claude, could I have a cigarette?”

He lit it for her. She took a deep breath and sat back in the chair. “I had to see you,” she said.

This was not the same Gabriella. She’d changed the way she looked—had her hair cut short, then set. She wore three rings: a diamond, a wide gold wedding band with filigree, and an antique, a dull green stone in a worn silver setting, ancient, a family treasure. Clearly she had a new life.

Their eyes met, a look only possible between people who’ve made love, then she looked away. No, he thought, it isn’t that. They’d had one night together, it had been intimate, very intimate. He had wanted her—long legs, pure face—for months, but she turned out not to be someone who lost herself, or maybe just not his to excite. As for her, he’d realized later that she’d been in love with him, the real thing. So, in the end, neither one got what they wanted.

She sighed, met his eyes again, ran a hand through her hair. “I’m married now,” she said softly.

“Gabriella, are you in trouble?”

She shook her head. “No,” she said, “it’s you.”

“Me?”

“Yes. One morning last week, after my husband left for work, two men came to the house. One was from the security service, in Rome, and the other was German. Educated, soft-spoken, reasonably good Italian. The German asked the questions—first about my time in Paris, then about you. ‘Please, do not worry yourself, signora, this is simply routine, just a few things we need to know.’ He asked about your politics, how did you vote, did you belong to a political party. It was very thorough, carefully done. They knew a great deal about your business, about the films you’d made, about Marie-Claire and your friends. He asked what sorts of foreigners did you know. Did you travel abroad? Often? Where to?

“I made a great show of trying to be helpful, but I tried to persuade them that most of my work was typing letters and filing and answering the telephone. I just didn’t know much about your personal life. They seemed to accept that. ‘And signora, please, if it’s all the same to you, we’d rather he didn’t know we’d been around asking questions.’ That was a threat. The Italian looked at me a certain way. Not brutal, but it could not be misunderstood.”

“But you came here anyhow.”

She shrugged. “Well, that was the only way. You can’t say anything on the phone, they read your mail. We’ve had Mussolini and the fascisti since 1922, so we do what we have to do.”

“Not everybody,” he said.

“Well, no, there are always—you learn who they are.”

They talked for a long time, closer than they’d ever been. Trains and borders, special permits, passports. It wasn’t about resistance, it was about secret police and day-to-day life. What had it been, he thought, since the May night they’d spent together—ten months? Back then, this gossip would have been about books, or vacations. “At the line for the railroad controls,” she said, “they always have somebody watching to see who decides to turn back.”

She yawned, he took her by the hand into the bedroom. She washed up, changed into silk pajamas, slid under the blankets. “Talk to me a minute more,” she said. He turned the lights off, sat on the floor and leaned back against the bed. They kept their voices low in the darkness. “It is very strange at home now,” she told him. “The Milanese don’t believe they live in Italy. You mention Mussolini and they look to heaven—yet one more of life’s afflictions that has to be tolerated. If you say ‘what if we are bombed?’ they become indignant. What, here, in Milan? Are you crazy?”

It felt good to talk to a friend, he thought, never better than when your enemies are gathering. It felt good to conspire. “It’s hard to imagine—” he said, then stopped. Above him, a gentle snore. Good night, Gabriella. Ration coupons—did he have enough to take her for coffee in the morning? Yes, he would have a demitasse, it would just work out.

Really, he thought, who was this Guske to tell him what to do with his life? How did it happen that some German sat in an office and told Jean Casson whether or not he could have a love affair with a woman who lived in Lyons?