The World at Night - by Alan Furst

 

NEW FRIENDS

FRIDAY NIGHT, 6 MARCH, WE’RE HAVING A COCKTAIL AMÉRICAIN, 5 TO 8. PLEASE COME, JEAN-CLAUDE, IT’ S BEEN FOREVER SINCE WE’’VE SEEN YOU.

Casson stood in Marie-Claire’s living room, talking to Charles Arnaud, the lawyer. Everyone in the room was standing—one didn’t sit down at a cocktail Américain. Casson sipped at his drink. “A cuba libre, they called it. It has rum in it.”

Arnaud rapped a knuckle twice against his temple and made a knocking noise with his tongue. It meant strong drink, and a headache in the morning. Casson offered a sour smile in agreement. “Always the latest thing, with Bruno,” he said.

“Have I seen you since I came back from Belgrade?” Arnaud said.

“No. How was it?”

Arnaud grinned. He had the face, and the white teeth, of a matinee idol, and when he smiled he looked like a crocodile in a cartoon. “Bizarre,” he said. “A visit for a week, a month of stories. At least. I went down there for a client, to buy a boatload of sponges, impounded in Dubrovnik harbor under a Yugoslav tax lien. Actually, at that point, I’d become a part owner.” Arnaud was even less a conventional lawyer than Langlade—had for years been retained by shipping companies, but had a knack for becoming a principal, briefly, in crisis situations where a lot of money moved very quickly.

“I always stay at the Srbski Kralj. You know it?”Arnard said.

“I don’t.”

“King of Serbia, it means. Best hotel in town, wonderful food, if you can eat red peppers, and they’ll send girls up all night. The bartender is a pimp, also a marriage broker—something interesting there if you think about it. Anyhow, what I have to do down there is clear, I have to hand over a certain number of dinar, about half the bill, directly to the tax collector, then they’ll let the ship go, the sponges belong to us, and we know some people who buy sponges. Takes all kinds, right? So, I’m waiting around in the bar one night—these things take the most incredible amount of time to arrange—and I start talking to this fellow. You have to put this in a movie, Jean-Claude—he’s, mmm, enormous, heaven only knows what he weighs, shaved head, mustache like a Turkish wrestler. A munitions dealer, won’t say exactly where he’s from, only that he’s a citizen of Canada, in legal terms, and would love to go there some day.”

Casson smiled, things happened to Arnaud.

“But, what really struck me about this man was, he was wearing an extraordinary suit. Some kind of Balkan homespun material, a shimmering green, the color of a lime. Vast, even on him, a tent. On his feet? Bright yellow shoes—also enormous. He could barely walk. ‘Pity me,’ he says, ‘looking like I do. An hour ago I met with Prince Paul, the leader of Yugoslavia, on the most urgent matters.’

“And then he explains. A day earlier he’d been in Istanbul, closing a deal for Oerlikons, Swedish antiaircraft cannon, with the Turkish navy. Now he’s done with that, and he has to get to Belgrade, but the choice of airlines isn’t very appetizing, so he books a compartment on the Orient Express, Istanbul to Belgrade, should arrive just in time for his meeting. That night he goes to the dining car, sits across the table from a Hungarian actress—she says. A stunner, flaming red hair, eyes like fire. They drink, they talk, she invites him to come to her compartment. So, about ten o’clock our merchant, wearing red pajamas and bathrobe, goes to the next sleeping car and knocks on the lady’s door. Well, he says, it’s even better than advertised, and they make a night of it. He gets up at six the next morning, kisses her hand, and heads back to his room. Opens the door at the end of the car, and what do you think he sees?”

“I don’t know. His, ah, his wife’s mother.”

“Oh no. He sees track. The train had been divided into two sections at the Turkish border, and now his wallet, his money, his passport, and his suitcase are heading for Germany—where he does not want them to go—and he’s off to see Prince Paul in red pajamas. Well, the next stop is in Bulgaria, Sofia, and he gets off. In the station he manages to borrow a coin, and telephones his Bulgarian representative. ‘Buy me a suit!’ he says. ‘The biggest suit in Sofia! And get down to the railroad station in a hurry!’ Also a shirt, and a pair of shoes. Pretty soon the agent shows up and there’s the boss, all three hundred pounds of him, sitting on a bench, surrounded by a crowd of curious Bulgarians. The fellow puts on the suit, drives to the Canadian legation, demands they call the next station, have the baggage taken off the train before it reaches Germany, and have it put on the next train to Belgrade.

“And they did it.”

“He said they did. But he had his meeting in the big suit.”

“The Balkans,” Casson said. “Somehow it’s always—did you ever meet the man who ate the Sunday paper?”

“Savovic! Yes. He ate also a Latin grammar, and a fez.” Véronique, Marie-Claire’s sister who bought costume jewelry for the Galéries Lafayette, came over with a German officer on her arm. “You two are having a good time,” she said. “I would like to present Oberleutnant Hempel.”

“Enchanté,” Hempel said.

“Oberleutnant Hempel is in transport.”

Hempel laughed. He seemed a good-natured man, quite heavy, with thick glasses. “My friend Bruno and me, we are in the automobile business.” His French was ghastly and slow, a comma after every word. “Every kind of automobile, we got garages full of them, out in Levallois.”

Casson smiled politely. Was he going to be offered an opportunity to buy his own car back from Bruno and the Germans? Bruno already had the apartment and the wife—not that Casson begrudged him the latter—but having the car as well seemed excessive.

Arnaud never stopped smiling. One had a few friends, but mostly people were meant to be used, one way or another, and if you weren’t born knowing that you had better learn it somewhere along the way. He nodded encouragement as Hempel spoke, yes, that’s right, even said a few words in return, the Horch, the Audi, Bavarian Motor Works. Now he had a lifelong friend. “Ja! Ja!” the officer said. He was sweating with gratitude. Véronique chose that moment to escape, smiling and backing away. Arnaud caught Casson’s eye—glanced up at the ceiling. Quel cul.

Casson drank some more of the cuba libre. He’d be taking off his clothes and dancing on the table in no time at all. Olé! This was his third concoction and it was getting him good and drunk, perhaps that was acceptable at a real American cocktail party, but not in Passy. Still, maybe it didn’t matter. Hempel laughed at something Arnaud said. Casson looked closer. Had he actually understood the joke? No—a German stage laugh. Very hearty. And this idiot had his car.

A hand took his elbow in a hard grip. “Come with me,” Marie-Claire hissed in his ear. He smiled and shrugged as he was towed away. They wound their way through the chattering crowd in the smoky living room, around the corner, into the bedroom—a kidding tiens! from Casson, Marie-Claire whispering “I have to talk to you.” She hauled him into the bathroom and shut the door firmly behind them. He peered around drunkenly. This had once been his, he’d shaved here every morning.

“Jean-Claude,” she said, still whispering, “what am I going to do about this?”

“What?”

“What. This boche, this schleuh. He brings them home, now.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it’s the wise thing to do.”

“You don’t believe that!” A fierce whisper. Then she moved closer to him, an aura of whiskey and perfume hung around her. Suddenly she looked worried. “Do you?”

“No.” After a moment he said, “But,” then sighed like a man who was going to have to tell more of the truth than he wanted to, “I’m afraid that it will turn out that way.”

She looked grim—bad news, but maybe he was right. Someone laughed in the living room. “After all,” he said, “what matters to Bruno is that he does well. Right?”

She nodded.

“Well, that’s how it is with him. If you take that away—what’s left?” She was going to cry. He set his glass carefully on the rim of the sink and put his arms around her. She shuddered once and leaned into him. “Come on,” he said softly. “It’s just the life we live now.”

“I know.”

“So, the hell with it.”

“I’m scared,” she said. “I can’t do it—I’m going to make a mistake.” A tear started at the corner of her eye. “Oh no,” she said, stopping it with her finger.

“We’re all scared,” he said.

“Not you.”

“Yes, me.” He reached over her shoulder, took a washcloth off a peg and, hand behind his back, let cold water run on it. He squeezed it out and gave it to her, saying “Here,” and she held it on her eye.

She looked up at him, shook her head. “What a circus,” she said. She put her free hand on his chest, gave him a wry smile, then kissed him on the mouth, a moment, a little more, and warm. Casson felt something like an electric shock.

A discreet knock on the door. Véronique: “There are people here, Marie-Claire.”

“Thank you.”

In the living room, taking her coat off by the door, Bibi Lachette. “Jean-Claude!” she called out, eyes bright, mouth red and sexy. “This is Albert.”

Fair-haired, pink-cheeked from the cold, a perfectly groomed mustache and goatee. “Ah yes,” he said, unwinding himself from a complicated, capelike overcoat. “The film man.”

10 March, 11 March, 12 March.

Please be spring. If nothing else, that. The trees at the entrances to the Métro, where warm air vented from down below, always bloomed first. Yes, said the newspapers, it had been the coldest winter in a hundred years. Privately, more than one person in Paris—and in Prague and in Warsaw and in Copenhagen—thought that God had punished Europe for setting itself on fire, for murdering the innocent, for evil. But then too there was, particularly in that scheme of things, redemption. And now would be a good time for it. The wind still blew, getting out of bed in the morning still hurt, the skin stayed rough and cracked, but the winter was breaking apart, collapsing, exhausted by its valiant effort to kill every last one of them.

Fischfang had barely survived; no coal, too many women and children, never enough to eat. He stared at himself in a mirror hung on a bare wall, his face thin and angry. “Look what they have done to me,” he said to Casson. “They ate all the food while we starved. Sometimes I see one, plump and happy, strutting like a little pigeon. This is the one, I tell myself. This one goes in an alley and he doesn’t come out. I’ve been close, once or twice. I think if I don’t do something my head will explode.”

Casson nodded that he understood, taking wheat flour and milled oats and a can of lard from a sack and setting it on the table. All he could manage but, he thought, probably not enough. He wondered how much more Fischfang could take.

Yet, a mystery. Hotel Dorado was luminous. Not in the plot—somewhere in deepest Fischfang-land there was no real belief in plots. Life wasn’t this, and therefore that, and so, of course, the other. It didn’t work that way. Life was this, and then something, and then something else, and then a kick in the ass from nowhere. In Hotel Dorado anyhow, the theory worked. A miracle. How on earth had Fischfang thought it up? The characters floated about, puzzled ghosts in the corridors of a dream hotel, a little good, a little bad, the usual tenants of life. They shared, all of them, a certain gentle despair. Even the teenager, Hélène, had seen the world for what it was—and love might help, might not. There were six tables in the dining room, the old waiter moved among them, you could hear the hum of conversation, the bump of the door to the kitchen, the clatter of pots and pans as the proprietor cooked dinner. Thank heaven it wasn’t Cocteau! The Game of Life as a provincial hotel—Madame Avarice, Baron Glutton, and Death as the old porter. Fischfang’s little hotel was a little hotel, life was a weekend.

Suddenly he realized that they would applaud in the theatres. He almost shivered at the idea, but they would. They’d sit in the darkness and, despite the fact that nobody who’d worked on the film could hear, they would clap at the end, just to celebrate what it made them feel.

It wasn’t finished, of course—there were fixes that would have to be made—but it was there. Hugo Altmann called him the morning after he’d sent over a copy, demanded to meet the reclusive screenwriter, discovered his lunch appointment that afternoon had canceled.

“Who would you like to direct?” he asked over coffee.

“I’ve thought about it.”

“And?”

Casson hesitated, chose not to open the bidding.

“Well,” Altmann said. “Suppose you could have anybody in the world?”

“Really?”

“Yes. I mean, let’s start there, anyhow.”

Casson nodded. “René Guillot, perhaps, for this.”

“Yes,” Altmann said. His ears reddened. “That might work very well.”

Altmann was looking at him a certain way: here was Jean Casson, CasFilm, No Way Out and Night Run and all that sort of thing. Nothing wrong with it. It put people in the seats. Everybody made a little money—if they were careful. He was easy to work with, not a prima donna. On time, pretty much, on budget, pretty much. Not unsuccessful. But now, Hotel Dorado. This was different.

20 March, 21 March, 22 March.

Maybe, this morning, the window could be opened. Not too much, just a little. After all, this wasn’t exactly a wind, more like a breeze. Somehow, against all odds, spring was coming. One could get used to the rationing, to the Germans, to the way things were, and then one simply did what had to be done. And, if you managed to avoid a trap or two, and kept your wits about you, there were rewards: a draft of Hotel Dorado went into Altmann’s office, money came out. That allowed Casson to eat in black-market restaurants twice a week. His apartment felt comfortable—the warming of the season replacing the heating of the baroness. In general, life seemed to be working better. For example his telephone line had been repaired—Madame Fitou told him the crew had been there—even before he realized it was out of order.

At night, he slept alone.

His friends had always claimed that Parisian women knew when a man was in love. Which meant? He wasn’t sure, but something had changed. He didn’t want the women in the cafés, and, when he decided he did, they didn’t want him. He stared at himself in the mirror, but he looked the same as he had for a long time. So, he thought, it must be happening on the subconscious level—mysterious biology. He was, for the moment, the wrong ant on the wrong leaf.

He didn’t dream about Citrine—he didn’t dream. But he thought about her before he went to sleep. How she looked, certain angles, certain poses, his own private selection. Accidental moments, often—she would as likely be putting on a stocking as taking it off. She ran past a doorway because there was no towel in the bath. Or she made a certain request and there was a tremor in her voice. For him, those nights in early spring, she would do some of the things she’d done when they’d been together, then some things he had always imagined her doing, then some things she’d probably never done and never would. He wondered what she would have felt had she seen the movies he made of her. Of course, she made her own movies, so it wouldn’t be a great shock. Would he like to see those? Yes. He would like to.

Thought about her. And talked to her. Shared the tour of daily existence. She actually missed quite a bit here—maybe she would have gotten hot over Casson’s images of lovemaking, maybe, but she certainly would have laughed at the comedies he found for her.

At last, in the middle of February, he’d given in and written a love letter. Based on the ones he’d composed in Spain—on the beach and in the railway cars. Wrote it down and put it in an envelope. Citrine, I love you. It wasn’t very long, but it was very honest. Even then, there was a lot he didn’t say—who wants a blue movie in their love letter? Still, the idea came across. He read it over, it was the best he could do. Somewhere between walks-on-the-beach and sixty-nine, a few sentences about life being short, a few more on mystery, mostly just Jean-Claude, wide open, on paper.

 

Casson went out to Billancourt studios, where René Guillot was directing a pirate film.

Seize hommes sur

le coffre d’un mort,

yo ho ho

la bouteille de rhum!

 

Boisson et diable

ont tués les autres,

yo ho ho

buvons le rhum!

 

“Michel?”

“Yes, Monsieur Guillot?”

“Could you move up the mast a little higher?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And, everybody, we need it deeper, more baritone, stronger. Yo ho ho! Let’s run through it once, like that, and Etienne? Hold the bottle of rum up so we can see it—maybe give it a shake, like this. Yes. All right, ‘Seize hommes sur . . .’ ”

Casson stood near Guillot’s canvas chair—Guillot smiled and beckoned him over.

Casson spoke in an undertone. “Jean Lafitte?”

“Blackbeard.”

“Mmm.”

Casson recognized the wooden boat, supported beneath the keel by scaffolding. It had been featured in scores of pirate and adventure films; a Spanish galleon, a British frigate, a seventy-four-gun ship-of-the-line in the Napoleonic navy. It was manned, that afternoon, by singing pirates. Some clung to the mast, there were several at the helmsman’s wheel, one straddling the bowsprit and a score of others, in eyepatch and cutlass, headscarf and earring and striped jersey. Only luck, Casson felt, had so far saved him from working in the genre. Guillot, he’d been told, was there as a favor, to finish a job left undone by a journeyman director who had disappeared.

Later they sat in the canteen, amid electricians and carpenters, and ate sausage sandwiches washed down with thin beer. “It’s a very good screenplay,” Guillot said. “What’s this nonsense about a recluse in the countryside?”

“It’s Louis Fischfang.”

“Oh. Of course. He’s still here?”

“Yes.”

Guillot’s expression said not good. He smoothed back his fine white hair. He’d been famously handsome when he was young. He remained famously arrogant—egotistical, selfish, brilliant. An homme de la gauche consumed with leftist causes, he’d made a passionate speech at the World Congress Against War in Amsterdam in 1933, then denounced Soviet communism after the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939.

“You think Altmann’s a Nazi?” he said quietly.

Casson shrugged.

Guillot thought about it for a moment, then he said, “I should’ve left.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I’m French. Where the hell am I going to go?”

They drank some beer. Guillot spooned mustard onto his sausage. “I wonder about the title,” he said. “Hotel Dorado. What about something like Nights of Autumn? That’s not it, but I’m feeling for loss, a little melancholy, something bittersweet. You know me, I like to go right at things. Then also, it struck me, why is the stranger a woman? Better a man, no?”

“We talked about it,” Casson said. “We like the idea of a woman. Traveling alone, vulnerable, a small part saint but she doesn’t know it. The way the Americans use an angel—always clumsy, or absent-minded. The idea is that strong and good are two different things.”

Guillot stopped chewing—jowls and pouchy eyes immobile—and stared at him for a moment. Then nodded once, all right—I accept that, and went back to his food.

“You know,” Guillot said, “the last time I heard your name was from Raoul Mies. You’d just signed with Continental, in October I think, and Mies decided that maybe he would too.”

“You’re serious?”

Guillot spread his hands, meaning of course.

“Altmann told me that Mies and, ah, Jean Leveque had signed. So, I decided it would be all right for me.”

The electricians at the next table laughed at something. Guillot gave Casson a sour smile. “An old trick,” he said.

Casson pushed his food aside and lit a cigarette.

“I don’t blame you,” Guillot said. “But there’s nothing you can do about it now.”

“I should’ve known better.”

Guillot sighed. “The war,” he said. It explained everything. “It’s fucked us,” he added. “And the bill isn’t even in.”

Casson nodded.

“As for this project,” Guillot said, “one thing we can do is take it south. It’s not heaven, it’s Vichy. Instead of Goebbels’s people at the Hotel Majestic there’s the COIC, the Comité d’Organisation de L’Industrie Cinématographique. It’s not all that different—they won’t give membership cards to Jews—but there are two reasons to consider it. One is that it’s still French, whatever else it is, they don’t mean what they say and as long as you stand there they keep talking, and two, you can get out of the country down there a lot easier than you can here.” He lowered his voice. “That I do know, because I had somebody find out. And maybe that’s what, uhh, your writer ought to hear about.”

“He will,” Casson said.

They sat in silence for a time. Finished the beer. The electricians looked at their watches, stood up and left. “Well,” Guillot said—it meant time to go back to work. “You can stay, of course, if you like.”

“I have a meeting back in Paris,” Casson said.

He met Guillot’s eyes, was reassured. They weren’t children, they’d spent their lives in the film business, were not strangers to betrayal and back-stabbing. And they were French, which meant they knew how to evade, to improvise, to reculer pour sauter mieux—to back up in order to get a better jump. “Tell me one thing,” Casson said, “just for curiosity’s sake. Why, of all things, Blackbeard?”

“I think it’s the godchild of some office that Altmann talks to. I mean, it’s just something for the kids on Saturday afternoons, and to play in the countryside, where they’ll watch anything that moves. You see, Blackbeard is English. A pirate, a brute. In this movie, he walks the plank.”

Casson shook his head, in awe at such nonsense. “Mon Dieu,” he said sorrowfully.

Guillot smiled, leaned toward Casson, spoke in a conspirator’s undertone. “Yo ho ho,” he said.

That night when he got home Casson discovered that his letter to Citrine had been returned. He held it in his hands. Somebody had obviously read it, possibly the censors, but, more likely, those bastards at the hotel. He had put the letter in the envelope as he’d been taught in lycée, so that the greeting was the first thing the reader saw when the letter was unfolded. Somebody had put it back in the wrong way. Written across the front of the envelope Gone Away. Left No Address.

He didn’t read it.

He sat on the couch, still wearing his raincoat, the apartment dark and lifeless. Forty-one-year-old producers. Twenty-nine-year-old actresses with a certain smoky look. What, pray tell, had he thought would happen? He leaned his head back against the cushion. She had left, all right. And one reason was to make certain he was locked out of her life. She knew herself, she knew him, she knew better.

Once again he’d been stupid: had decided that what he wanted to be true, was. And it wasn’t. Thus Altmann had deceived him, then Simic, then with Citrine, he’d deceived himself. This couldn’t go on. He heard his father saying “Jean-Claude, Jean-Claude.”

By force of will, he turned himself back toward commerce. Survival, he thought, that’s what matters now. It wasn’t a time for love affairs—maybe that was what Citrine understood better than he ever could, survival was more important than anything. The city had no difficulty with that, at the end of winter it discovered it was somehow still alive, then went back to business with a vengeance. It wasn’t very appealing, some of it, but then it never had been. You work in a whorehouse, Balzac told them. Don’t let anybody see how much you enjoy it and get your money up front.

Casson, that first week in April, had a new friend. An admirer. Perhaps, even, an investor. A certain Monsieur Gilles de Groux. Nobility, the real thing, in fact de Groux de Musigny, Casson checked the listing in Bottin Mondain and the Annuaire des Châteaux. He had a huge, drafty house out in the forest of St.-Germain-en-Laye, just outside Paris, where his family had moved in 1688 in order to commiserate with the Catholic pretender James II, who’d slipped into France earlier that year. William of Orange got the English throne, as it happened, but the de Groux family remained, walking on the miles-long Grande Terrasse that looked out over the city of Paris, breeding Vendéean basset hounds, reading books in leather covers.

It was Arnaud who had suggested his name to de Groux. Casson called him after their first meeting. “He wants to make films, he says.”

“Yes,” Arnaud said. “That’s what he told me.”

“Where did you say you met?”

“Rennaisance Club.”

“How rich is he?”

Arnaud had to take a moment to think about this. All around them, in the 16th Arrondissement, were the world’s great masters of the art of pretending to be rich. “The money, I believe, is from Limoges. China. Since the eighteen-hundreds. Does he live well?”

“Big house in St.-Germain. Creaky floors. Gothic maids.”

“Sounds right.”

“You think he really wants to make films?”

“Perhaps. I can’t say. Maybe he wants to meet film stars. He certainly wanted to meet you. Hello? Jean-Claude?”

“Yes, I’m still on.”

“You ought to get that repaired.”

“Are you going to the Pichards on Friday?”

“I’d planned to.”

“See you there.”

“Yes. Keep me posted on what happens, will you?”

“I will.”