The World at Night (14 page)

“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?