Red Gold (3 page)

Five minutes later, well out of sight of the guards, they stopped by a wall. Ten feet high, old plaster cracked and peeling. Two handmade ladders lay flat in the weeds. Raton and Victor set one of them against the wall and braced the bottom. Lazenac climbed to the top, took the second ladder as it was handed up, and lowered it carefully down the other side of the wall. He put one foot across, then shifted his weight gracefully and stood on the second ladder. “You’re next,” he called to Casson in a stage whisper. Casson worked his way up the awful thing—barely wide enough to get a foot on each rung. He was scared now, not so much of the Germans, but of being asked to do something he wouldn’t be able to do.

As he neared the top, Lazenac said, “Watch your hands.” A moment later he saw why: broken glass—wine bottles had been cemented into the cap of the wall. Casson took a deep breath, got one foot over, balanced, then swung across. He did it wrong—he knew it an instant before it happened—and began his backward tumble to the ground. Only he didn’t fall, because Lazenac saw it coming, reached up and grabbed him by the belt and forced his weight back on the ladder.
“Merci bien,”
Casson said, breathing hard.

“Je vous en prie.”

On the other side of the wall, Casson knelt by some kind of storm sewer, the open end of a drainage culvert. Over time, the outflow had cut itself a channel, some three feet deep, into the hillside. When the others were down the ladder, Lazenac led them single file, crouched low, along the gulley. “Stay close to the ground,” Raton whispered to him. “If the
schleuh
catch you in here they’ll break your head.”

At the foot of the hill, they waited. A busy night: in the distance, the sound of yard engines chugging up and down the tracks, and the steel clash of boxcars being coupled. Directly in front of them were flatbed cars stacked with peeled logs, probably cut in the forests of the Massif Central and now en route to Germany. After what seemed to Casson like a long time, the red glow of a track lantern moved toward them and Lazenac said, “At last, the
cheminots.
” Railwaymen.

There were two of them. They shook hands all around, then the one with the lantern said, “It’s about two hundred meters up ahead. Third track in.”

“An SNCF car,” the other said. “7112.”

“All right,” Lazenac said. “We’re on our way.”

“Keep an eye out for the yard security.”

“Thanks for everything, we’ll settle up on the weekend—same as before.”

“See you then.
Vive la France.
”

“Yeah,” Lazenac said. They both laughed.

The lantern faded away down the track, Lazenac led them in the other direction. Casually, without stealth
—every
right to be here.
The SNCF car stood high above its cast-iron wheels. A wire seal secured the door handle. From inside his jacket Lazenac produced an iron bar about two feet long. He worked it through the loop and put his weight on it until the wire snapped. Standing on the metal rungs beside the door, he pushed it open and ran the beam of a flashlight up and down the stacked cargo. Cotton sacks piled to the ceiling, stenciled with the name of the company and the label SUCRE DE CANNE. Sugar.

Lazenac swung inside and reappeared a moment later carrying a sack. Victor stood below him. Lazenac dropped the sack on Victor’s shoulder and Victor then headed back toward the hillside. Casson was next. “Don’t worry,” Lazenac said. “You’re stronger than you think.”

Who
was
strong was Lazenac. He swept a sack into the air and lowered it onto Casson’s shoulder. Casson felt his knees buckle and said “
Merde
” under his breath. Raton, leaning against the freight car, laughed, then patted him on the arm.

He moved off, swaying at every step, but he
wasn’t
going to fail. Up ahead, Victor was plodding along at a steady pace. Casson went about ten steps, then, the sour voice of authority: “All right— just where do you think you’re going with that?”

Casson turned to look. Some kind of railroad guard—an official armband, a whistle. He was tapping his palm with a long, wooden
bâton blanc,
a policeman’s club. “Put it down, you,” he said to Casson.

I’ll never be able to pick it up again.
Lazenac leaned out of the open doorway and rapped the man on the head with the iron bar. For a moment there was dead silence.

“More?”

Indignant, the guard rubbed furiously at the spot where he’d been hit. “Are you crazy?” He grabbed the silver whistle around his neck and put it to his lips. Raton kicked him in the stomach and he folded in half. Lazenac jumped down off the boxcar and tore the whistle off his neck, then the two of them beat him senseless. When he lay full length on the cinders and didn’t move, Casson adjusted the sack on his shoulder as best he could and headed for the wall.

Somehow, he got himself up the ladder. How he did it he would never know, but he reached the top, using both hands to haul himself up a rung at a time. When he stopped to rest, panting like an engine, he discovered that Victor was waiting for him at the top of the ladder on the other side. “Now, just lift it across—I’ll help you—and try not to break the glass.”

Casson looked puzzled.

“Why let them know how we did it? There’s a war on, you never know when you might want to get into a railyard.”

The truck was waiting for them a little way up the street. A small Citroën delivery van
—camionette—
with a shutter in the back instead of doors and the name of a bakery painted on the side. Victor rolled the shutter up and tossed his sack in. Casson did the same— secretly very proud of himself when the weight made the truck bounce on its springs. A minute later, Lazenac and Raton showed up. “You know where you’re going?” Lazenac asked the driver.

“The rue Hennequin. In the seventeenth.”

“Out by the Ternes Métro.”

“What’s it called?”

“Ma Petite Auberge.”

The driver snickered—my little country inn.
“Mon petit
cul,”
he said. My little backside.

Lazenac laughed. “Well, when you have a restaurant, that’s what you’ll call it.” He leaned into the cab of the truck and said, “Keep a cool head, Michot. There’ll be Gestapo cars, Germans, a real circus.”

“We’ll be fine.”

Casson and Lazenac rode the Métro out to the 17th. It was sad on the train. Before the war, that time of night, there would have been waiters going home in their black jackets and white aprons, lovers who couldn’t wait to get into bed, and the strange old birds one always saw—Sanskrit professors, stamp collectors—going out to eat cassoulet or heading up to Montmartre to give the girls a bad time. Now, people stared at the floor, their spirit broken.

“For us,” Lazenac said, “getting hold of the stuff is the easy part.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Casson said. “What’s the price?”

“Oh, maybe three hundred francs a kilo—but not for the quantity we’ve got. Tonight we’ll try to sell a hundred kilos.”

“So, two fifty?”

“Tiens!”
Lazenac said with a grin
—wouldn’t
that be nice.

The train stopped at Abbesses, idling for a time in the empty station. Casson smoothed his lapels, trying to make them lie flat. His face burned like fire, he’d shaved close, using a three-month-old razor blade. Cleaned his shoes with a rag, borrowed a tie from the old man down the hall, and that was about the best he could do. At least, he thought, looking down at his feet, his socks were still in decent shape. It was the socks that went first. A whore he knew said she only took customers whose socks were in good condition. One of Casson’s fellow lodgers had shown him how he used a pen to color in the skin that showed white in the holes.

Lazenac dropped a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry too much,” he said, as though reading Casson’s thoughts. “It’s all in your face—who you are.”

“Once upon a time, maybe, but now . . .”

Lazenac smiled, only one side of it really worked. “No,” he said, “life’s not like that.”

10:30 in the evening in the rue Hennequin. Some restaurants lived secret lives, others spread out into their streets. This was the second kind; a green-and-gold façade, a line of handsome automobiles. A Horch, a Lancia Aprilia. In the back seat of an open sedan, a redhead with a dead fox around her neck was smoking like a movie star. On the street: German officers in shiny leather, boots and belts and straps; their girlfriends, wearing plenty of rouge and eye shadow and black stockings; and the strange tidal debris—the Count of Somewhere, Somebody the art dealer—that flowed into conquered cities.

“We go around the back,” Lazenac said.

Down the alley the door to the kitchen was propped open with a chair. The air was thick with clouds of garlicky steam, frying fat, old grease, and lye soap. Lazenac spoke to one of the cooks and a waiter appeared a moment later. “Oh, it’s you,” he said to Lazenac. “You have something for us?”

“Sugar,” Casson said. “As much as you like.”

Their eyes met, the waiter stared at him.

“The
patron
around?” Casson said.

“I’m the one you see.”

“Maybe we’ll come back when he’s around.”

“Don’t be smart.”

“Thursday? How would that be?”

“Now look—”

“
Au
revoir.
”

It took a minute for the waiter to run off and get the owner. A true
beauf,
Casson thought—from
beau-frère,
brother-in-law. Stocky and pink and mean. He framed himself in the doorway and put his hands on his hips. “So, what’s the big problem?”

“No problem,” Casson said. “What’s the price for sugar tonight?”

“I don’t know. What do you want?”

“Lebec is offering two fifty. And next week we’ll have butter.”

“Butter.”

“Yes.”

“How much sugar?”

“A hundred kilos.”

“Hmm. That’s, ah, twenty-five thousand francs.”

“That’s what Lebec said.”

“Then go see Lebec.”

“If you like.”

“No, wait a minute, I’m only kidding. Save yourself the Métro ticket—I’ll give you twenty-two five for the whole thing. That’s fair, isn’t it?”

“How about twenty-three. C’mon, be a good guy.”

“You’re taking advantage of my good nature, you know.”

“I know. But, what the hell.”

“All right. Where is it?”

“Out in front.”

“Have them bring it around.”

Le Diable Vert. Midnight.

Twelve hundred francs!

In times gone by he’d spent more than that on a suit, but life changed, didn’t it, and by moonlight mathematics he was richer than he’d ever been. And, oddly enough, people—some people anyhow—seemed to sense it. Certainly the working girls knew—smiles, whistles, coats thrown open from every doorway on the rue Moncey—but it was their vocation to see into men’s souls and on the way they would naturally stop to count what was in their pockets.

Le Diable Vert.

He’d always liked a good hellhole and it was surely that. A tiny bistro, set a half-story below the street, through the open door of which he could see feet hurrying through the rain.
Diable Vert—
a leering green devil with a pitchfork and a splendid tail on a sign that swung on its chains and creaked in the wind. Ten tables, brick floor cured in wine, a sign by the cash register had a photograph of a funeral and the legend LE CRÉDIT EST MORT. And, packed in, wall-to-wall, what seemed like the whole neighborhood—laughing, shouting, arguing, and knocking back half-liters in a dense fog of cigarette smoke.

Twelve hundred francs.

So the death of credit was no problem for Casson—not tonight. Tonight he was the local sultan. Lazenac had laid it all out, plainer than any of the merchant bankers Casson used to deal with in the movie business. The twenty-three thousand francs was to be split with the railwaymen, the remainder shared out by Lazenac and his crew. The man who drove the
camionette
received a share, and so did his van, that was traditional. Then there was a handsome slice carved out for a certain Monsieur X, nameless but clearly important.

“Marin, may I join you?”

It was a man named Bruc. Casson wasn’t sure exactly what he did, but he worked nights and headed for the Métro wearing green rubber boots.

“Please,” Casson said.

Bruc took the empty chair, Casson filled his glass and offered him a packet of Gauloises Bleues, a luxury in that part of town. Bruc drew a cigarette from the pack with care, holding it in his mouth with thumb and forefinger while Casson struck a match and lit it for him. “Thank you very much, Marin,” he said formally.

The crowd surged around them. Two girls wearing the neighborhood dance-hall uniform—satin shirts, suspenders holding up wool trousers, and tweed workers’ caps—gave Casson a glance over the shoulder.

“My night off,” Bruc said. “I like to be where people are.”

“What’s your work?” Casson asked.

“I’m part of the crew on a pumper truck. Out in the old quarters on the edge of the city. We pump out the cesspools.”

“I thought it all went in the sewers.”

“No. Not out there it doesn’t. Some nights we do apartment houses, some nights the office buildings. They take a lot longer.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes, a lot longer.”

Bruc took a sip of wine and a long drag on his Gauloise. A man had jumped up on a table and started to sing, people were clapping to keep time.

“Why does it take longer?” Casson said.

“Well, the cesspools are the same size, but the stuff in the office buildings is harder, really hell to pump out.”

Casson stared. A peculiarity of office life?

The owner worked his way through the crowd, a full
chopine
in his hand. He poured the last of the old flask into the two glasses. “You’ll take a little more?” he asked Casson.

“Yes,” Casson said. “Certainly we will.”

“Generous of you,” Bruc said.

“Monsieur Bruc,” Casson said. “How is it different?”

“The water, monsieur. In the apartment buildings they are forever cooking and cleaning and washing the laundry.”