The World at Night (23 page)

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.