The World at Night - by Alan Furst

 

Back at the office, Gabriella: “Your wife called, Monsieur Casson. She said to tell you that the dinner has been canceled, and would you please telephone her when you have a moment. She’s at the beauty parlor until three-thirty, home any time after that.”

“Gabriella, do you think you could find me Le Temps?” For Casson, a day without a newspaper was agony.

“I can go to the tabac.”

“I would really appreciate it.”

“I’ll go, then. Oh, Maître Versol asks that you call him.”

“No.”

“Yes, monsieur. I am afraid so.”

Back in his office, Casson retrieved the swollen dossier from the bottom drawer where he’d hidden it from himself. In 1938, someone at Pathé had woken up one morning with a vision: the world could simply not go on without another remake of Samson and Delilah. And Jean Casson had to produce. Costume epics were not at all his specialty, but Pathé was huge and powerful and deaf—the only word they could hear was yes.

He got a script. Something close to it, anyhow. Signed a Samson who, from medium range in twilight, looked strong, and a reasonable Delilah—overpriced but adequately sultry. Pathé then canceled the project, paid him based on the escape clauses, and went on to new visions. Casson tied up the project, or thought he did.

One small problem: his production manager had ordered four hundred beards. These were for the extras, and were composed of human hair, prepared by the estimable theatrical makeup house LeBeau et cie. Cost: 5,000 francs. Somewhere just about here the problems began. The beards were, or were not, delivered to a warehouse Productions Casson rented in Levallois. Subsequently, they were returned to LeBeau. Or perhaps they weren’t. LeBeau certainly didn’t have the beards—or thought he didn’t. Casson didn’t have them either—as far as he knew. It was all très difficile.

Casson made the telephone call, writhing in silent discomfort. LeBeau couldn’t actually sue him—the money was too little, the loss of business too great. And Casson couldn’t tell LeBeau to take his beards and the rest of it—films could not be made without a theatrical makeup supplier. Still, this was an affair of honor, so Casson had to endure Maître Versol’s endless drivel as a weekly punishment. The lawyer didn’t attack or threaten him; the world—a murky, obscure entity—was the villain here, see how it took men of exquisite integrity and set them wandering in a forest of lost beards. Where were they? Who had them? What was to be done? Très difficile.

When he got off the phone, Gabriella came in with a copy of Le Temps. It had a certain puffy quality to it—obviously it had been read, and more than once—but a look in Gabriella’s eye told him to be thankful he had a newspaper and not to raise questions about its history.

There wasn’t all that much to read: Germany had attacked Belgium and the Netherlands and Luxembourg, the French army had advanced to engage the Wehrmacht on Belgian territory, a stunning assortment of world leaders were infuriated, and:

The characteristics of the French soldier are well-known, and he can be followed across the ages, from the heroic fighters of the feudal armies to the companies of the Ancien Régime, and on to the contemporary era. Are they not the characteristics of the French people? Love of glory, bravery, vivacity?

5:20 P.M.

Headed for the one appointment he’d looked forward to all afternoon—drinks at a sidewalk table at Fouquet—Casson left the office ten minutes before he really had to, and told Gabriella he wouldn’t be back.

Marie-Claire had called at four; the dinner was now definitely on for tonight. They had, in a series of telephone calls, talked it out— Yvette Langlade, Françoise, Bruno, and the others—and reached agreement: in her hour of crisis, France must remain France. Here Marie-Claire echoed that season’s popular song, Chevalier’s “Paris Reste Paris.” It was, Casson suspected, the best you could do with a day when your country went to war. Children would be born, bakers would bake bread, lovers would make love, dinner parties would be given, and, in that way, France would go on being France.

And would he, she would be so grateful, stop at Crémerie Boursault on the way home from the office and buy the cheese? “A good vacherin, Jean-Claude. Take a moment to choose—ripe, runny in the middle, French not Swiss. Please don’t let her sell you one that isn’t perfect.”

“And we’re how many?”

“Ten, as planned. Of course Françoise and Philippe will not be there, but she telephoned, very firm and composed, and said it was imperative we go ahead. We must. So I called Bibi Lachette and explained and she agreed to come.”

“All right, then, I’ll see you at eight-thirty.”

For the best, he thought. He walked down Marbeuf and turned onto the Champs-Elysées. At twilight the city throbbed with life, crowds moving along the avenue, the smells of garlic and frying oil and cologne and Gauloises and the chestnut blossom on the spring breeze all blended together. The cafés glowed with golden light, people at the outdoor tables gazing hypnotized at the passing parade. To Casson, every face—beautiful, ruined, venal, innocent—had to be watched until it disappeared from sight. It was his life, the best part of his life; the night, the street, the crowd. There would always be wars, but the people around him had a strength, an indomitable spirit. They cannot be conquered, he thought. His heart swelled. He’d made love all his life—his father had taken him to a brothel at the age of twelve—but this, a Paris evening, the fading light, was his love affair with the world.

He reached in his pocket, made sure he had money. Fouquet wasn’t cheap—but, an aperitif or two, not so bad. Then the vacherin, but that was all. Marie-Claire’s apartment was a ten-minute walk from the rue Chardin, he wouldn’t need a taxi.

Money was always the issue. His little house in Deauville was rented. Not that he told the world that, but it was. He did fairly well with his gangsters and doomed lovers—they paid his bills—but never very well. That was, he told himself, just up ahead, around the next bend in life. For the moment, it was enough to pay the bills. Almost all of them, anyhow, and only a month or two after they were due.

But in Paris that was typical, life had to be lived at a certain pitch. His father used to say, “The real artists in Paris are the spenders of money.” He’d laugh and go on, “And their palette is—the shops!” Here he would pause and nod his head wisely, in tune with the philosopher-knave side of his nature. But then, suddenly, the real ending: “And their canvas is life!”

Casson could see the performance in detail—it had been staged often enough—and smiled to himself as he walked down the crowded avenue. Casson wondered why, on the night his country went to war, he was thinking about his father. The father he remembered was old and corrupt, a rogue and a liar, but he’d loved him anyhow.

Casson needed only a moment to search the crowded tables—what he was looking for was easy to find. Amid the elegant patrons of Fouquet, the women with every inch of fabric resting exactly where they wished, the men with each hair exactly where they’d put it that morning, sat a ferocious, Bolshevik spider. Skinny, glaring, with unruly black hair and beard, a worker’s blue suit, an open-collar shirt, and bent wire-frame Trotsky eyeglasses. But this one was no artsy intellectual Trotskyite— you could see that. This one was a Stalinist to his bloody toenails and, momentarily, would produce a sharpened scythe and proceed to dismember half the patronage of Fouquet’s, while the waiters ran about hysterically, trying to present their bills to a dying clientele.

Ah, Fischfang, Casson thought. You are my revenge.

Louis Fischfang was Casson’s writer. Every producer had one. Casson told the agents and screenwriters that he spread the work around, and he did—different people were right for different projects. But in the end, when the chips were down, when somebody had to somehow make it all come out right for the people who handed over their hard-earned francs for a seat in a movie theatre, then it was Fischfang and no other.

Though he quivered with political rage, spat and swore like a proletarian, marched and signed and chanted and agitated, none of it mattered, because that fucking Fischfang could write a movie script that would make a banker weep. God-given talent, is what it was. Just the line, just the gesture, just the shot. There could be no Jean Cassons— no Alexander Kordas, no Louis Mayers, no Jean Renoirs or René Clairs—without the Louis Fischfangs of this world.

Fischfang looked up as Casson approached the table. Offered his usual greeting: a few grim nods and a twisted smile. Yes, here he was, the devil’s first mate on the ship of corruption. Here was money, nice suits, ties, and the haughty 16th Arrondissement, all in one bon bourgeois package called Casson.

“Did you order?” Casson asked as he sat down.

“Kir.” White wine with blackcurrent liqueur.

“Good idea.”

“Royale.” Not white wine, champagne.

“Even better.”

The waiter arrived with Fischfang’s drink and Casson ordered the same. “It’s a strange day to work,” he said, “but I really don’t know what else to do.”

“I can’t believe it’s come to this,” Fischfang said angrily. “They”— in Fischfangese this always meant the government and the rich and the powerful— “they grew Hitler. Watered him and weeded him and pitch-forked manure all around him. They gave him what he wanted in Czechoslovakia and Poland—now he wants the rest, now he wants what they have. Hah!”

“So now they’ll stop him,” Casson said.

Fischfang gave him a look. There was something knowing and serious about it—you’re naive—and it made him uncomfortable. They sat for a time in silence, watched the crowd flowing endlessly down the avenue. Then Casson’s drink came. “Santé,” he said. Fischfang acknowledged the toast with a tilt of the tulip-shaped glass and they drank. Fischfang’s grandfather had crawled out of a shtetl in Lithuania and walked to Paris in the 1850s, Casson’s roots went back into Burgundy, but as they drank their Kir they were simply Parisians.

“Well,” Casson said acidly, “if the world’s going to burn down we should probably make a movie.”

Fischfang hunted through a scuffed leather briefcase at his feet and brought out a sheet of yellow paper crammed with notes and ink splatters. “Fort Sahara,” he said. He took a packet of cheap cigarettes; short, stubby things, from his breast pocket. As the match flared, he screwed up his face, shielding the cigarette with cupped hands as he lit it. “Lisbon,” he said, shaking out the match. “The slums. Down by the docks. Women hanging out washing on a line stretched across the narrow street. They’re dark, heavy, sweating. All in black. The men are coming home, in twos and threes, carrying their oars and their nets. Kids playing soccer in the street—tin can instead of a ball. Now it’s nighttime. Men and women going to the —cantina? Wine’s being poured from a straw-covered jug. There’s a band, people dancing. Here’s a young man, Santo. He’s tough, handsome, sideburns, rolled-up sleeves . . .”

“Michel Ferré.”

“Yes? That’s up to you. For some reason I kept seeing Beneviglia— he speaks French with an Italian accent.”

“Hunh. Not bad. But remember, this is a quota film—life will go smoother if everybody’s French.”

To protect the film industry, the government had decreed that a certain portion of a foreign company’s French earnings be spent on French films—which meant that major studios, in this case Paramount, had frozen francs that had to be used on what had come to be called “quota films.”

“Even so, Michel Ferré is perhaps a little old,” Fischfang said. “Santo is, oh, twenty-five.”

“All right.”

“So he’s taking his girl dancing. There’s a thwarted suitor, a knife fight in the alley. Suitor dies. We hear whistles blowing, the police are on the way. Cut to the train station—Marseilles. All these tough-guy types, Santo looks like an innocent among them, with his cheap little suitcase. But he survives. Among the thieves and the pimps and the deserters, he somehow makes a place for himself. Maybe he works for a carnival.”

“Good.”

“I see him backlit by those strings of little lights, watching the young couples in love—it should be him and his girl, holding hands. But his friend at the carnival is no good. He plans a robbery—asks Santo to keep a revolver for him. So, he’s implicated. They hold up a bank. We see it. The manager runs outside waving his arms, they shoot him—”

“Why not hold up the carnival? The owner’s a cheat with a little mustache . . .”

Fischfang nodded and crossed out a line in his notes. “So they’re not gangsters.”

“No. Men on the run from life. The carnival owner knows that, he thinks he can hold back their wages because they can’t go to the police.”

“So, once again, Santo has to run. We see him staring through the train window, watching the world of everyday life go by. Then he’s someplace, oh, like Béziers. Down to his last sou, he enlists in the Foreign Legion.”

“Then Morocco.” Casson caught the waiter’s eye and raised two fingers.

“Well, the desert anyhow. Last outpost at Sidi-ben-something-or-other. The white buildings, the sun beating down, the tough sergeant with the heart of gold.”

“Camels.”

“Camels.”

A woman in a white cape swept past them, waving at someone, silver bracelets jangling on her wrist. Fischfang said, “Can we do anything about the title, Jean-Claude?”

“It’s from Irving Bressler, at Paramount. It says ‘Foreign Legion,’ it says ‘desert.’ By the way, who are they fighting?”

Fischfang shrugged. “Bandits. Or renegades. Not the good Moroccans.”

“Where’s the girl, Louis?”

“Well, if the fisherman’s daughter goes to Marseilles to be with Santo, she sure as hell can’t go to the desert. Which leaves the slave girl, captured by bandits many years ago . . .”

“Kidnapped heiress. She’s been rescued and is staying at the fort . . .”

“Native girl. ‘I’m glad you liked my dancing, monsieur. Actually, I’m only half-Moroccan, my father was a French officer . . .’ ”

“Merde.”

“This is always hard, Jean-Claude.”

They were silent for a moment, thinking through the possibilities. “Actually,” Casson said, “we’re lucky it’s not worse. Somebody in the meeting mumbled something about the hero singing, but we all pretended not to hear.”

The waiter arrived with the Kirs. “Fort Sahara,” Casson said, and raised his glass in a toast. The sky was darker now, it was almost night. Somewhere down the boulevard a street musician was playing a violin. The crowd at Fouquet’s was several drinks along, the conversation was animated and loud, there were bursts of laughter, a muffled shriek, a gasp of disbelief. The waiters were sweating as they ran between the tables and the bar.

“Ending?” Casson said.

Fischfang sighed. “Well, the big battle. Santo the hero. He lives, he dies . . .”

“Maybe with French financing, he dies. For Paramount, he lives.”

“And he gets the girl.”

“Of course.”

“She’s the colonel’s wife . . .”

“Daughter.”

“Cat.”

“Chicken.”

 

8:30 P.M.

Casson took the long way on his walk from the rue Chardin to Marie-Claire’s apartment on the rue de l’Assomption. A blackout was in effect, and the velvety darkness of the Passy streets was strange but not unpleasant—as though the neighborhood had gone back a hundred years in time. In some apartments there were candles, but that was typical French confusion at work: a blackout didn’t mean you had to cover the light in your windows, it meant you couldn’t turn on the electricity. If you did, it would somehow—one never quite understood these things—help the Germans.

The walk to Marie-Claire’s took less than fifteen minutes, but Casson saw two moving vans working that night. On the rue des Vignes, three men struggled with a huge painting, something eighteenth century, in a gilded frame. On the next street it was a Vuitton steamer trunk.

Rue de l’Assomption stood high above the Bois de Boulogne, and the views were dramatic. Lovely old trees. Meadows and riding paths. Marie-Claire’s horsey friends had their polo club in the Bois, Bruno served in some vaguely official capacity at Le Racing Club de France, there was a season box at the Auteuil racetrack, and a private room could be rented for late supper parties at Pré Catalan, the fin-de-siècle restaurant hidden at the center of the park.

Casson paused at the entry to the building. This had been his apartment when he’d married, but it belonged to Marie-Claire now. Well, that was the way of the world. The history of ownership of apartments in the 16th Arrondissement, Casson thought, would probably make a more exciting epic of France than the Chanson de Roland.

The concierge of the building had always loved him:

“Ah, Monsieur Casson. It’s good to see a friendly face. What a day, eh? What a horror. Oh the vile Boche, why can’t they leave us alone? I’m getting too old for war, monsieur, even to read it in the papers. Let alone the poor souls who have to go and fight, may God protect them. What’s that you have there? A vacherin! For the dinner tonight? How Madame trusts you, monsieur, if I sent my poor—ah, here’s the old elevator; hasn’t killed us yet but there’s still time. A good evening to you, monsieur, we all would love to see more of you, we all would.”

The elevator opened into the foyer of Marie-Claire’s apartment. He had a blurred impression—men in suits, women in bright silk, the aromas of dinner. Marie-Claire hurried to the door and embraced him, grosses bisoux, kisses left and right, left and right, then stepped back so he could see her. Emerald earrings, lime-colored evening gown, hair a richer blonde than usual, tiny eyes scheming away, clouds of perfume rolling over him like fog at the seaside. “Jean-Claude,” she said. “I am glad you’re here.” Something to say to a guest, but Casson could hear that she meant it.

And if any doubt lingered, she took him gently by the arm and drew him into the kitchen, where the maid and the woman hired for the evening were fussing with the pots. “Let’s have a look,” she said. Lifted the lid from a stewpot, shoved tiny potatos and onions aside with an iron ladle and let some of the thick brown sauce flow into it. She blew on it a few times, took a taste, then offered it to Casson. Who made a kind of bear noise, a rumble of pleasure from deep within.

“Ach, you peasant,” she said.

“Navarin of lamb,” Casson said.

Marie-Claire jiggled the top off the vacherin’s wooden box, placed her thumb precisely in the imprint made by the woman in the crémerie, and pressed down. For his effort, Casson was rewarded with a look that said well, at least something went right in the world today.

“Jean-Claude!” It was Bruno, of course, who’d snuck up behind him and brayed in his ear. Casson turned to see the strands of silver hair at the temples, the lemon silk ascot, the Swiss watch, the black onyx ring, the you-old-fox! smile, and a glass full of le scotch whiskey.

Suddenly, the sly smile evaporated. The new look was stern: the hard glare of the warrior. “Vive la France,” Bruno said.

They toasted the Langlades with champagne. Twenty years of marriage, of that-which-makes-the-world-go-round. Twenty years of skirmishes and cease-fires, children raised, gifts the wrong size, birthdays and family dinners survived, and all of it somehow paid for without going to jail.

Another glass, really.

With the exception of Bruno, they had all known each other forever, were all from old 16th-Arrondissement families. Marie-Claire’s grandfather had carried on a famous, virtually lifelong lawsuit against Yvette Langlade’s great-aunt. In their common history all the sins had been sinned, all the alliances broken and eventually mended. Now they were simply old friends. To Casson’s left was Marie-Claire’s younger sister, Véronique, always his partner at these affairs. She was a buyer of costume jewelry for the Galéries Lafayette, had married and separated very young, was known to be a serious practicing Catholic, and kept her private life resolutely sealed from view. She saw the plays and read the books, she loved to laugh, was always a charming dinner companion, and Casson was grateful for her presence. To his right was Bibi Lachette—the Lachettes had been summer friends of the Cassons in Deauville—the last-minute stand-in for Françoise and Philippe Pichard. Her last-minute escort was a cousin (nephew?), in Paris on business from Lyons (Mâcon?), who held a minor position in the postal administration, or perhaps he had to do with bridges. Bibi had been a great beauty in her twenties, a dark and mysterious heartbreaker, like a Spanish dancer. The cousin, however, turned out to be pale and reticent, apparently cultivated on a rather remote branch of the family tree.

With the warm leeks in vinaigrette came a powerful Latour Pomerol—Bruno on the attack. Casson would have preferred something simple with the navarin, which was one of those Parisian dishes that really did have a farmhouse ancestry. But he made the proper appreciative noise when Bruno showed the label around, and for his politeness was rewarded with a covert grin from Bibi, who knew Casson didn’t do that sort of thing.

They tried not to let the Germans join them at dinner. They talked about the fine spring, some nonsense to do with a balloon race in Switzerland that had gone wrong in amusing ways. But it was not easy. Somebody had a story about Reynaud’s mistress, one of those what does he see in her women, ungainly and homely and absurdly powerful. That led back to the government, and that led back to the Germans. “Perhaps it’s just a social problem,” Bernard Langlade said gloomily. “We never invited them to dinner. Now they’re going to insist.”

“They insisted in 1914, and they were sorry they did.” That was Véronique.

“I don’t think they’ve ever been sorry,” said Arnaud, a lawyer for shipping companies. “They bleed and they die and they sign a paper. Then they start all over again.”

“I have three MGs on the Antwerp docks,” Bruno said. “Paid for. Then today, no answer on the telephone.”

This stopped the conversation dead while everybody tried to figure out just exactly how much money had been lost. When the silence had gone on too long, Casson said, “I have a friend in Antwerp, Bruno. He owns movie theatres, and seems to know everybody. With your permission, I’ll just give him a call tomorrow morning.”

It helped. Madame Arnaud began a story, Bernard Langlade asked Véronique if he could pour her some more wine. Bibi Lachette leaned toward him and said confidentially, “You know, Jean-Claude, everybody loves you.”

Casson laughed it off, but the way Bibi moved her breast against his arm clearly suggested that somebody loved him.

“Well,” Marie-Claire said, “one can only hope it doesn’t go on too long. The British are here, thank heaven, and the Belgians are giving the Germans a very bad time of it, according to the radio this evening.”

Murmurs of agreement around the table, but they knew their history all too well. Paris was occupied in 1814, after the loss at Waterloo. The Germans had built themselves an encampment in the Tuileries, and when they left it had taken two years to clean up after them. Then they’d occupied a second time, in 1870, after that idiot Napoleon III lost an entire army at Sedan. In 1914 it had been a close thing—you could drive to the battlefields of the Marne from Paris in less than an hour.

“What are the Americans saying?” asked Madame Arnaud. But nobody seemed to know, and Marie-Claire shooed the conversation over into sunnier climes.

They laughed and smoked and drank enough so that, by midnight, they really didn’t care what the Germans did. Bibi rested two fingers on Casson’s thigh when he filled her glass. The vacherin was spooned out onto glass plates—a smelly, runny, delicious success. Made by a natural fermentation process from cow’s milk, it killed a few gourmets every year and greatly delighted everyone else. Some sort of a lesson there, Casson thought. At midnight, time for cake and coffee, the maid appeared in consternation and Marie-Claire hurried off to the kitchen.

“Well,” she sighed when she reappeared, “life apparently will go on its own particular way.”

A grand production from Ponthieu; feathery light, moist white cake, apricot-and-hazlenut filling, curlicues of pastry cream on top, and the message in blue icing: “Happy Birthday Little Gérard.”

A moment of shock, then Yvette Langlade started to laugh. Bernard was next, and the couple embraced as everyone else joined in. Madame Arnaud laughed so hard she actually had tears running down her cheeks. “I can’t help thinking of poor ‘Little Gérard,’ ” she gasped.

“Having his twentieth wedding anniversary!”

“And so young!”

“Can you imagine the parents?”

“Dreadful!”

“Truly—to call a child that on his very own birthday cake!”

“He’ll never recover—scarred for life.”

“My God it’s perfect,” Yvette Langlade panted. “The day of our twentieth anniversary; Germany invades the country and Ponthieu sends the wrong cake.”