The World at Night - by Alan Furst

 

In the dining car, the second seating, 10:30. The only light, flickering candles on the white tablecloths. The woman in the tweed suit was shown to his table. “Monsieur, I hope you don’t mind.” No, not at all, he was glad for the company. The waiter brought a bottle of wine, cold vegetable salad with an oily mayonnaise, nameless fish in railroad sauce—to Casson it barely mattered.

“I am called Marie-Noëlle,” she said. “Meeting on a train, you see, we don’t have to wait ten years for first names.”

He smiled, introduced himself. He would be happy to call her Marie-Noëlle, but he did wonder what the rest might be.

She sighed—it always came to this. There was, she confessed, “a thoroughly disreputable person sometimes addressed as Lady Marensohn,” but it wasn’t really her. The title was by marriage—a husband who had died long ago, something in the small nobility of Sweden, a diplomat of minor status. “Terribly concerned with jute,” she said grimly. “Morning and night.” She herself had been born into a family called de Vlaq, from the Dutch–Belgian border, “even smaller nobility, if that’s possible,” and grown up on family estates in Luxembourg—“they called it wine, but, you know, really . . .”

She smoked passionately—Gitane followed Gitane, lit with strong fingers stained yellow by nicotine—and laughed constantly, a laugh that usually ended in a cough. “To hell with everything,” she said, “that’s what it says on my family crest. Citizen of the evening, resident of Paris since time began, and the only nobility I acknowledge is in good works for friends.”

A German officer covered with medals moved down the aisle between tables, his girlfriend followed along behind, vividly rouged and lipsticked, wearing a tight cap of glossy black feathers. When they’d gone by, Marie-Noëlle made a face.

“Don’t care for them?” Casson said.

“Not much.”

“But you can leave, can’t you?”

She shrugged. “Yes. Maybe I will, but, where to go?” “Sweden?”

“Brr.”

“Switzerland, then.”

“Switzerland, Switzerland. Yes, there’s always that. Geneva, gray but possible. On the other hand, the visa. I mean, you have to know . . . God. Well. Not just to nod to. Last September, a friend of mine went through it. She tried the embassies, the Americans, the Portuguese, and the Swiss. Spent hours on the lines but in the end all she could get was a Venezuelan resident card, which cost her a fortune, and, worse yet, the only place she could go with it was Venezuela.”

She stubbed out a Gitane, lit another. “Well, she tries. She does try. She’s positive, she’s cheerful. She’s all the things you’re supposed to be. ‘So different,’ she writes. ‘The Latin culture—sunny one minute, stormy the next. And Caracas—intrigue!’ Of course it’s ghastly, and she’s miserable. It isn’t Paris, it’s a kind of horrid not-Paris. She sees the other émigrés, most of them grateful to be alive, but all they can talk about is when will it end, when can we go back, when can life be what it always was.”

The train slowed, they peered out the window, trying to see past the reflection of the candle flame in the black glass. They were at the edge of a small city, passing the cottages that lined the track. Then came the dark cathedral with tall spires, winding streets, the railway station brasserie, and finally the platform. BOURGES, the sign said. Now a port of entry for the unoccupied part of France governed by Vichy.

The French border police were waiting on the platform, holding their capes tight around them and stomping their feet to keep warm. “More police,” Marie-Noëlle said acidly.

“French, this time.”

“Yes, there’s that to be said for it.” She exhaled smoke through her nose and mouth when she talked. “Tell me,” she said, leaning over the table, her voice lowered, “they didn’t give you too bad of a time, did they? The SS? I was listening, next door, but I couldn’t hear much.”

“Not too bad,” he said.

The train jerked to a stop with a hiss of steam. The gendarmes came down the aisle, asking politely for papers. They knew they were in the first-class dining car, rolled the Madames and Monsieurs off their tongues, had a desultory glance at each passport, then left with a two-fingered salute to the visor of the cap. Only a formality, of course you understand.

“Remarkable,” Marie-Noëlle said, when the police had gone to the next table. “You are perhaps the only person I know who’s ever had a decent photograph in a passport.”

Casson held it up and said “What, this? I wouldn’t let him in my country.”

“Yes, but look here—is this not the aunt kept locked up in the attic?”

He smiled, it was even worse than that.

“Now, monsieur,” she said, a mock-serious note in her voice, “how am I going to persuade you to allow me to buy us a brandy?”

He would not allow it. He insisted on paying for the brandies, and for those that followed. Meanwhile they smoked and talked and made the dinner last as long as they could. Very late at night, after the stop at Lyons, the train started the long run down the Rhône valley, the sky cleared and the moon ran beside them, a yellow disc on the still river.

She grew tired, and reflective, not so sure about the world. “What do you think,” she asked, “in your heart. Must I leave this country?”

“Perhaps,” he said. Peut-être, could be. In diplomacy it meant yes— yes with regret. “Of course,” he went on, “it’s not something I can do, so maybe I shouldn’t be giving advice.”

“Not something you can do?”

“No.”

“What stops you?”

He looked puzzled.

“In a few hours,” she said, “you’ll be in Spain. Sunny Spain, neutral Spain. From there, ships leave daily, to every port in the world. But why wait for a booking on a ship? There is a ferry, in Algeciras, it goes across to Ceuta. One simply pays and walks on. Then, it takes less than an hour, you are in Spanish Morocco. Once there, well . . .”

It was true. Why hadn’t it occurred to him? He had three hundred thousand pesetas in a suitcase, a travel permit for Spain. A thousand stories began this way—an opportunity, a sudden decision, then freedom, a new life. It took courage, that was all. He saw himself doing it: walking off the ferry with raincoat tossed over one shoulder, hat brim turned down, valise in hand, turning to look back one last time at the dark mass of Europe. Why not? What would he be giving up— a movie that would never be made? A woman who was never going to love him again? A city that would never be the same?

But then, from somewhere deep inside, the sigh of common sense. The man with the raincoat and the hat brim turned down wasn’t him. “Perhaps,” he said, “you will join me for a drink, Madame Marie-Noëlle. At Fouquet’s, one of the tables on the boulevard.”

A corner of her mouth turned up in a grin, she flirted with him a little. “Chilly for the outdoor tables, monsieur. No?”

“I meant, in the spring.”

“Ah.” She considered it. “Probably, I will meet you there,” she said, then shook her head slowly, in gentle despair for both of them. “Charming. The last romantic.”

He sat back in the chair; it was very late at night. “It is the only trick I know,” he said. Then, after a moment, “You’re one too.”

“No, no,” she said. “I’m something else.”

Port Bou, the Spanish frontier, 4:40 P.M.

Here the passengers had to leave the train and wait on lines; customs, border formalities. Casson had been through it before, years earlier, and when he’d thought about the crossing it had seemed to him the second most likely place he might be arrested. The passengers stood quietly, nobody made jokes. Cold, thin air in the Pyrenees, jagged ridges, white mist, snowfields fading in the last light. The Guardia sentries pacing up and down the lines were like ghosts from Napoleon’s wars; leather tricorn hats, greatcoats, long, thin rifles that looked like muskets. He searched everywhere for Marie-Noëlle, but she had disappeared. Left the train, apparently. Where—Narbonne? Perpignan? Would she have said? No, probably not. But it was a loss. He’d planned on going through the frontier with her, somebody to talk to, easier to pretend that you weren’t scared.

The line marked Entrada. Two uniformed officers and a civilian sat at a plank table in a shed heated by a smoky wood stove. The line of passengers was kept back twelve feet from the table—a distance where the tension of the examination could be felt but the questions, and the follow-ups, could not be heard. The final line, Entrada. From here the passengers drifted away, in twos and threes, to a coach on the south-bound local, idling at the far end of the station, that ran on the Spanish-gauge track. They walked briskly—really, how had they allowed themselves to worry like that—and made a point of not looking back. There was one couple, elderly, well-dressed, being returned to the French train, and a young woman, being led away by two men in overcoats, but that was all. The young woman looked at Casson, trying to tell him something with her eyes. The men at her side followed the glance—an accomplice, perhaps?—and Casson had to look away. He hoped she’d had time to see that he understood, that he would remember what had happened to her.

Casson got through. They studied his papers, running an index finger under the important phrases. The civilian wore a coat with a fur collar and a pince-nez. “The reason for your visit, señor?”

“For a film, to look at possible locations.”

“What kind of film?”

“A romantic comedy.”

The man passed his papers to one of the Guardia, who stamped Entrada-27 Enero 1941 in his passport and initialed it.

The Spanish train was old and dirty, cold air flowed up through the floorboards. All the way to Barcelona he stared out the window, seeing nothing. His mouth was dry, he swallowed but it did not seem to help. The compartment was crowded; two Luftwaffe officers, two women who might have been sisters, a fat, unshaven man who slept for most of the journey. Casson told himself that nothing would happen. He simply had to believe in himself—the world would always respect a self-confident man, and nothing would happen. He was sweating, he could feel it under his arms, even in the chilly compartment, and he tried to be surreptitious about wiping it away from his hairline.

The outskirts of Barcelona. There had been fighting here in 1937. The track was elevated and he could see into apartments; rooms with black flash marks on the walls, charred beams, dressers with drawers pulled out, a bed standing on end. The passengers stared in silence as the train crawled past. Then the fat man woke up and abruptly pulled the curtains closed. Why did he do that? Casson wondered. Was he Spanish? French? Republican? Falangist? Casson swallowed. The man stared at him, daring him to say something. Casson looked at his feet, his fingers touched the envelope in his pocket.

Barcelona station, 8:10 P.M.

The train to the southern coast wasn’t due to leave until 10:20. Casson went to the station buffet, took a dry bun with a crust of pink icing and a tiny cup of black coffee, and found a table by the back wall. Of course he was watched.

For their eyes, he played the traveler. Dug into his valise, retrieved his copy of Le Matin and spread it out on the table—JAPANESE FOREIGN MINISTER WARNS U.S.A. NOT TO INTERFERE IN ASIAN AFFAIRS. Took traveler’s inventory, checking his railway ticket and passport, putting French francs in this pocket, pesetas in that pocket. In fact, he needed to change money, and reminded himself to keep the receipt from the cambio. The border police had recorded the amount of French francs he’d brought into the country and they’d want a piece of paper when he went back out.

And he was going back out.

He’d studied what he intended to do, walked through it in his mind, hour by hour, step by step. So that, if it suddenly felt wrong, he could walk away. A patriot, he reminded himself, not a fool. There would be hell to pay if he abandoned the money. But then, he was a film producer, there’d been hell to pay before in his life, and he’d paid it.

Better now, he calmed down. This was something he could do. Go out the door, if you like, he told himself. He liked hearing that, he could answer by saying no, not yet, nothing’s gone wrong.

He refolded the newspaper and returned it to his valise, next to the torn copy of Bel Ami. Made sure, one last time, of passport, money, and all the rest of it, and, oh yes, a certain envelope in the inside pocket of his jacket. He tore it open, took out a receipt with Thos. Cook Agency printed across the top, and a first-class railway ticket, Paris/Barcelona.

The watchers were probably watching—after all, that’s how they made their living—but there wasn’t very much for them to watch at Casson’s table. Just another traveler, nervous as the rest, fussing with his papers before resuming his journey. He stood, drained the last little sip of coffee, and picked up his valise. On the way out of the buffet he balled up the envelope and tossed it in the trash.

The baggage room was off by itself, at the end of a long corridor with burned-out lamps and NO PASARÁN daubed on the walls with red paint. Casson stood at the counter and waited for thirty seconds, then tapped the little bell. For a moment, nothing happened. Then he heard the deliberate, uneven rhythm of somebody walking with a pronounced limp. It went on for a long time, the office was at the other end of the room and the clerk walked slowly, with great difficulty. A short, dark man with a pencil-thin mustache, an angry face, and an eight-inch heel on a built-up shoe. On the breast pocket of his smock was a lapel pin, bright silver, a signal of membership in something, and Casson sensed that this job came from the same place the pin did, it was a reward, given in return for faith and service. To a political party, perhaps, or a government bureau.

Be normal. Casson handed over the receipt. “Baggage for Dubreuil.”

The clerk peered at the number, then said it aloud, slowly. Standing on the other side of the counter, Casson could smell clothes worn for too many days. The clerk nodded to himself; yes, he knew this one, and limped off, disappearing among the rows of wooden shelves piled to the ceiling with trunks and suitcases. Casson could hear him as he searched, up one aisle, down the next, walking, then stopping, walking, then stopping. Somewhere in the back, a radio played faintly, an opera.

It was going to work. He could feel it, and permitted himself just a bare edge of relief. It was going to work because it wasn’t complicated. He had simply gone to his customary travel agent at the Thomas Cook office on the rue de Bassano, told him an associate named Dubreuil was accompanying him to Spain, and purchased two first-class, roundtrip tickets, checking Dubreuil’s suitcase through to Barcelona. The standard procedure would have been for the agent at Cook’s to demand Dubreuil’s passport, but Casson had done a great deal of business there over seven or eight years and the travel agent wasn’t going to get fussy over details with a valued customer.

Prevailing opinion in Paris had it that checked baggage, stacked high in icy freight cars, was not searched very seriously at the Spanish frontier. If the worst happened, however, and a Spanish customs guard discovered a suitcase full of pesetas and turned it in instead of stealing it, they could look for Dubreuil all they wanted; they’d never find him because he didn’t exist. There was, for Casson, a brief moment of exposure, when he had to pretend to be Dubreuil in order to claim the suitcase, but that was going to be over in a few seconds and he would be on his way.

The clerk returned to the counter, his face bland and satisfied. He handed Casson a slip of paper, and said “Not here,” in Spanish. Casson looked at his hand, he was holding the baggage receipt.

“Pardon?” He hadn’t understood, he’d thought—

“Not here, señor.”

Casson stared at him. “Where is it?”

A shrug. “Who can say?”

Casson heard train whistles in the distance, the clash of couplings, the opera on the clerk’s radio. They would kill him for this.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

The clerk stepped back a pace. His next move, Casson realized, would be to roll down the metal shutter. The man’s face was closed: a suitcase didn’t matter, a passenger didn’t matter, what mattered was the little silver pin on his blue smock. Against that magic, this insistent Señor Dubreuil was powerless.

“The train from Port Bou . . .” Casson said.

The hand started to reach for the shutter, then decided that the moment had not quite arrived and contented itself with sliding casually into a pocket. “Good evening, señor,” the clerk said.

Casson turned away quickly. He didn’t know where to go or what to do but he felt he had to put distance between himself and the baggage room. He trotted back up the corridor, the valise bouncing in his hand, footsteps echoing off the cement walls. Breathing hard, he made himself slow down, then walked through the station buffet and found the platform where the Port Bou train had come in. The track was empty.

“Missed your train?”

English. A huge man with a huge gray beard, sitting on a baggage cart surrounded by two battered wooden boxes, an old carpetbag, and a collapsed easel tied with a cord. “Have you missed your train, monsieur?” Phrasebook French this time, plodding but correct.

Casson shook his head. “Lost baggage.” Perdu. Meant lost, all right, much more so, somehow, than in any other language. That which was perdu joined lost time, lost love, lost opportunity and lost souls in a faraway land where nothing was ever seen again.

“Damn the luck.”

Casson nodded.

“Speak English?”

“Yes.”

“Just come in from the border?”

“Yes.”

“Hm.” The man looked at his watch. “Only left thirty seconds ago. Did you leave it on the train?”

“No. It was checked baggage.”

“Ah-hah! Then there’s hope.”

“There is?”

“Oh yes. Sometimes they don’t take it off. They forget, or they just don’t. They’re Spanish, you see. Life’s so bloody, conditional. ”

“It’s true,” Casson said gloomily.

“You might catch it, you know, if you don’t dawdle. It stops at a village station just south of Barcelona, that train. The 408 local.” The man glowered with conviction and took a much-thumbed little booklet from his coat. Among the English, Casson knew, were people who suffered from a madness of trains. Perhaps this was one of them.

“Yes,” the man said. “I’m right. Here it is, Puydal. A Catalonian name. Arrival, 9:21.” The man looked up. “Well,” he said, “for God’s sake hurry!”

Casson moved quickly. This didn’t happen only in Spain. In France too, your baggage popped up here, disappeared there, sometimes reappeared, sometimes was never heard from again. At the corner of the station, a long line of taxis. He jumped in the first one and said “Puydal station. Please hurry.”

The driver turned the key in the ignition. And again. Finally, the engine caught, he gave it a few seconds, then swung slowly out into the street, and accelerated cautiously. Casson glanced at his watch. 9:04. At this rate they would never get there in time.

“Please,” Casson said. Por favor.

“Mmmm—” said the driver: yes, yes, a philosopher’s sigh. Vast forces of destiny, stars and planets, the run of time itself. A candle flickered, the course of life drifted one point south. “—Puydal, Puydal.” Clearly, this was not his first trip to Puydal railroad station.

In the event, the sigh was accurate.

Puydal was where you went when all was lost, Puydal was where fate got a chance to mend its ways and the stationmaster’s spaniel bitch was sitting on the Dubreuil suitcase. Casson had gone to the Galéries Lafayette to buy one, then discovered an Arab in business on a side street selling the homely classic—pebbled tan surface with a dull green and red stripe that half the world seemed to own.

“Ah, so this is yours?” said the stationmaster. “May I just, Señor Dubreuil, have the briefest glance at your passport?”

They don’t ask for the passport, they ask for the ticket.

Casson handed over his passport. “I am Señor Casson,” he said. “The friend of Señor Dubreuil. He is sick, enfermo, I am to collect his baggage.” He dug into his pocket, took out a handful of francs, pesetas, coins of many lands. “He told me, ‘a gratuity,’ in appreciation, he is sick, it’s cold . . .”

The stationmaster nodded gravely and took the money, shooed his dog off and saluted. “Mil gracias.” Casson grabbed the suitcase and trotted out the door to find the same taxi. “Barcelona station,” he said to the driver, looking at his watch. The express to the southern coast was due to leave in seventeen minutes, they would never make it. “Please hurry,” he said to the driver.

There were no other cars, the taxi bumped along the cracked surface of the old macadam road, one headlight aimed up in the pine trees, the other a faint glow in the darkness. The engine missed, the gears whined, the driver sang to himself under his breath. Casson hoisted the suitcase onto his lap and opened it a crack. Yes, still in there. Thank God. Folded up in threadbare shirts and pants he’d bought at a used-clothes cart out in Clignancourt. He leaned back, closed his eyes, felt clammy and uncomfortable as the sweat dried on his shirt in the cold night air. It was time to admit to himself he had no idea what he was doing—he’d read Eric Ambler, he had a general idea of how it was all supposed to work, but this wasn’t it.

28 January, 1941. The Alhambra Hotel, Málaga.

A Spanish casino in winter. Cold gray sea, storms that blew rain against the window and sang in the stucco minarets. In the dining room, a string orchestra, a thé dansant, the songs Viennese, the violins flat. Still, the guests danced, staring into the private distance, the women wearing jewels and glass and Gypsy beads, the men in suits steamed over the green-stained bathtubs. Refugees, fugitives, émigrés, immigrants, stateless persons, wanted by this regime or that, rich or shrewd or lucky enough to get this far but no farther, washed up at the end of Europe, talking all night—in Bessarabian Yiddish or Alsatian French—stealing rolls from breakfast trays in the halls, trying to tip the barman with Bulgarian lev.

In the courtyard, a Moorish garden; rusty fountain, archway hung with dead ivy that rustled in the wind. Casson walked there, or by the thundering sea, ruining his shoes in the gray sand. But, anything not to be in the room. He’d placed an advertisement in ABC, the Monarchist daily, in the Noticias section. SWISS GENTLEMAN, COMMERCIAL TRAVELER, SEEKS ROOM IN PRIVATE HOME FOR MONTH OF FEBRUARY. Then, he waited. Three days, four days, a week. Nothing happened. Perhaps the operation had been canceled, and they’d just left him there. On his walks he composed long letters to Citrine, things he would never be able to write down—very beautiful things, he thought. In the casino he gambled listlessly, betting red and black at the roulette table, sticking at seventeen in blackjack, breaking even and walking away. A woman slipped a note in his pocket—Would you like to visit to me? I am in the Room 34. Maybe he would have liked to, but now he didn’t know who anybody was or what they were after.

He was shaving when the telephone rang, two long notes. He ran into the bedroom. “Yes?”

“Are you the gentleman who advertised in the newspaper?”

The number given in the newspaper had not been for the Alhambra. “Yes,” he said.

“I wonder, perhaps we could meet.”

French, spoken well by a Spaniard.

“All right.”

“In an hour? Would that be convenient?”

“It would.”

“The hotel has a bar . . .”

“Yes.”

“It’s three-twenty. Should we say, four-thirty?”

“Good.”

“I’ll see you then.”

“Good-bye.”