The World at Night (24 page)

“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?

THE NIGHT VISITOR

24 April, 1941.

4:20 A.M., the wind sighing across the fields, the river white where it shoaled over the gravel islands. Jean Casson lay on his stomach at the top of a low hill, wrapped up in overcoat and muffler, dark hat worn at an angle, a small valise by his side. The damp from the wet earth chilled him to the bone but there was nothing he could do about it. At the foot of the hill, standing at the edge of the river, two border guards, the last of the waning moonlight a pale glow on their helmets, rifles slung over their shoulders. They were sharing a cigarette and talking in low voices, the rough German sounds, the
sch
and
kuh,
drifting up the hillside.

The boy lying next to him, called André, was fifteen, and it was his job to guide Casson across a branch of the river Allier into the
Zone
Non-Occupée.
André stared intensely, angrily, at the
sales Boches
below him. These were
his
hills, this was
his
stream, these teenagers below him—nineteen or so—were intruders, and he would, in time, settle with them. By his side, his brown-and-white Tervueren shepherd waited patiently—Tempête he called her, Storm—her breath steaming as she panted in the icy morning air.

These were in fact his hills—or would be. They belonged to his family, the de Malincourts, resident since the fifteenth century in a rundown chateau just outside the village of Lancy. He raised his hand a few inches, a signal to Casson: be patient, I know these two, they chatter like market ladies but they will, eventually, resume their rounds. Casson gritted his teeth as the wet grass crushed beneath him slowly soaked his clothing. Had they left the chateau as planned, at two in the morning, this would not have happened.

But it was the same old story. He was scheduled to go across with another man, a cattle-dealer from Nevers who couldn’t or wouldn’t get a permit to enter the Vichy zone. The cattle-dealer arrived forty minutes late, carrying a bottle of cognac that he insisted on opening and sharing with various de Malincourts who had chosen to remain awake in honor of the evening crossing—the father, an aunt, a cousin and the local doctor, if Casson remembered correctly. Everybody had some cognac, the fire burned low, then, at 3:20, a telephone call. It was the cattle-dealer’s wife, he’d received a message at his house in Nevers and he didn’t have to go across the line after all. That left Casson and André to make the crossing later than they should have, almost dawn, and that invited tragedy.

The sentries had themselves a final laugh, then parted, heading east and west along the stream. The dog made a faint sound, deep in her throat
—sentries
leaving.
No, Casson told himself, it wasn’t possible. But then, he thought, dogs understand war, its memory lived in them, and this one’s traditional business was herding stock to safety. A small cold wind, just enough to lift the soft hair on the dog’s neck, made Casson shiver. He’d been offered an oilskin, hanging amid shotguns and fishing baskets and rubber boots in the gunroom of the chateau, but he had declined. Well, next time he’d know better.

André, in short pants and sweater, seemed not to notice. “Please, sir,” he whispered, “we will go down the hill now. We will stay low to the ground, and we will run. Now I count one, and two, and three.”

He rose and scrambled down the hill in the classic infantry crouch, the Tervueren in a fast trot just behind his left heel—dogs were always trained left, thus the right side, the gun side, remained unhampered. Casson did the best he could, shocked at how stiff he’d gotten just lying on the damp earth for thirty minutes.

At the foot of the hill, André took his shoes off, tied them at the laces, hung them around his neck, then stuffed his socks in his pockets. Casson followed his example, turning up his trouser cuffs as far as the knee. André stepped into the stream, Casson was right behind him. The water was so close to ice that it was barely liquid. “My God,” he said. André shushed him. Casson couldn’t move, the water washed over his shins. André grabbed his elbow with a bony hand and shoved him forward. The dog turned to make sure of him, soft eyes anxious—did this recalcitrant beast require a nip to get it moving? No, there it went, swearing beneath its breath with every step. Relieved, the Tervueren followed, close by André. For Casson, the sharp gravel of the midstream island was a relief for a few yards, then the water was even deeper and the dog had to swim, her brown ruff floating on the surface. At last, the far bank. The Tervueren shook off a great cloud of icy spray—just in case some part of Casson’s clothing had accidentally remained dry. “Ah, Tempête,” André said in mock disappointment, and the dog smiled at the compliment.

André sat in the grass to put his shoes and socks back on, Casson did the same. Then they ran up the side of a low hill until they reached a grove of poplar trees on the skyline. André stopped to catch his breath. “
Ça
va,
monsieur?”

“
Ça va,
André.”

He was a wiry kid with black hair that fell over his forehead, the latest in a long line of pages and squires that had been going off on one mission or another since the crusades. This was, after all, not really knight’s business, conduction of a fugitive. The knight, red-faced, ham-fisted de Malincourt, was back at the chateau, where he’d settled in to wait for his son with a night-long discussion on the advantages of Charolais over Limousin steers, the price of rye seed, and the national disposition of Americans, who would, he thought, take their time before they got around to deciding they needed to come back over the sea and kill some more Germans.

Casson stayed quiet for a moment, hands on knees. Then a whip cracked the air in the poplar grove. Instinctively, André and Casson flinched. Then two more cracks, close together, this time a spring twig clipped from a branch. The dog—fear had been bred out of her many generations earlier—gave them an inquiring look:
Is this something
you’d like me to see about?
André raised the bottom of his sweater, revealing the cross-hatched wooden grip of a huge, ancient revolver, but it was Casson’s turn to take somebody by the elbow and before this particular war could get fairly underway they were galloping down the reverse slope of the hillside. They took cover for a moment, then headed south, toward a little road that would, eventually, take Casson to Lyons. At the next hilltop there was a view back to the river, a dull silver in the first light of dawn, and very beautiful.