The World at Night - by Alan Furst

 

Five days, they had.

After that there would be too much moonlight for crossing the line back into occupied France. They walked by the gray river, swollen in the spring flood. Late in the afternoon they had a fire in the little fireplace in Citrine’s room and drank wine and made love. At night she had to go to the theatre. Casson came along, sat in the wings on a folding chair. He liked backstage life, the dusty flats, paint smells, stagehands intent on their business—plays weren’t about life, plays were about curtains going up and down—actresses in their underwear, the director making everybody nervous. Casson enjoyed being the outsider.

It was a romantic comedy, a small sweet French thing. The cousin from the country, the case of mistaken identity, the secret message sent to the wrong person, well, actually the right person but not until the third act. Citrine played the ingenue’s best friend. The ingenue wasn’t bad, a local girl with carefully done-up hair and a rich father and good diction. But, next to Citrine, very plain. That didn’t matter so much— it only made the boyfriend come off a little more of an idiot than the playwright really intended.

The audience was happy enough. Despite rationing they’d eaten fairly well, a version of traditional Lyonnais cooking, rich and heavy, not unlike the audience. They settled comfortably into the seats of the little theatre and dozed like contented angels through the boring parts.

Five days.

Dark, cool, spring days, sometimes it rained—it was always just about to. The skies stayed heavy; big, slow clouds moving south. Casson and Citrine sat on a bench by the river. “I could come to Paris,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “But the life I live now is going bad.”

She didn’t understand.

“My phone’s no good. I’m followed, sometimes.”

“If the Germans are after you, you better go.”

He shrugged. “I know,” he said. “But I had to come here.”

They stared at the river, a long row of barges moving south, the beat of the tugboat’s engine reaching them over the water. Going to places far away.

She recited in terrible English: “The owl and the pussycat, it went to the sea, in the beautiful pea-green boat.”

He laughed, rested the tips of two fingers against her lips.

The tugboat sounded its horn, it echoed off the hillsides above the river, a fisherman in a rowboat struggled against the current to get out of the way.

Citrine looked at her watch and sighed. “We better go back,” she said.

They walked along the quay, people looked at them—at her. Almond eyes, wide, wide mouth, olive-brown hair with gold tints, worn loose, falling over her shoulders. Long brown leather coat with a belt tied at the waist, cream-colored scarf, brown beret. Casson had his hands shoved deep in the pockets of a black overcoat, no tie, no hat, hair ruffled by the wind. He seemed, as always, a little beat-up by life—knowing eyes, half-smile that said it didn’t matter what you knew.

They walked like lovers, shoulders touching, talking only now and then. Sometimes she put her hand in the pocket of his coat. They wore their collars up, looked theatrical, sure of themselves. Some people didn’t care for that, glanced at them a certain way as they passed by.

They turned into a narrow street that wound up the hill toward the hotel. Casson put his arm around her waist, she leaned against him as they walked. They stopped to look in the window of a boulangerie. Between the panniers of baguettes were a few red jam tarts in flaky crust. He went in and bought two of them, in squares of stiff bakery paper, and they ate them as they climbed the hill.

“How did you find the passeur?” she asked. It meant someone who helped you cross borders.

“Like anything else,” he said. “Like looking for a travel agent or a doctor, you ask friends.”

“Did it take a long time?”

She had crumbs in her hair, he brushed them out. “Yes,” he said. “I was surprised. But then, it turned out my sister-in-law knew somebody. Who knew somebody.”

“Perhaps it’s dangerous now, to ask friends.”

“Yes, it could be,” he said. “But you do what you have to.”

Their last night together he couldn’t sleep.

He lay in the darkness and listened to her breathing. The hotel was quiet, sometimes a cough, now and then footsteps in the hall as somebody walked past their door. Sometimes he could hear a small bird in the park below the window. He smoked a cigarette, went from one part of his life to another, none of it worked, all of it scared him. Careful not to wake her, he got out of bed, went to the window, and stared out into the night. The city was silent and empty, lost in the stars.

He wanted to get dressed and go out, go for a long walk until he got tired. But it wasn’t wise to do that any more, the police would demand to see your papers, would ask too many questions. When he got tired of standing, he sat in a big chair. It was three in the morning before he slid back under the covers. Citrine woke up, made a little noise of surprise, then flowed across the bed and pressed tight against him. At last, he thought, the night visitor.

“I don’t want you to go away,” she said by his ear.

He smoothed her hair. “I have to,” he said.

“Because, if you do, I will never see you again.”

“No. It isn’t true.”

“Yes it is. I knew this would happen. Years ago. Like a fortune-teller knows things—in dreams.”

After a time he said, “Citrine, please.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. She took his hand and put it between her legs. “Until we go to sleep,” she said.

29 April, 1941.

She insisted on going to the train with him. A small station to the north of Lyons, they took a cab there. He had to ride local trains all day, to Chassieu and Loyettes and Pont-de-Chéruy, old Roman villages along the Rhône. Then, at dusk, he would join the secret route that ran to a village near the river Allier, where one of the de Malincourts would meet him.

The small engine and four coaches waited on the track. “You have your sandwiches?” she said.

“Yes.”

She looked at her watch. “It’s going to be late.”

“I think it’s usual,” he said.

Passengers waited for the doors to open. Country people—seamed faces, weatherbeaten, closed. The men wore old mufflers stuffed down the fronts of buttoned suit jackets, baggy pants, scuffed boots. The women wore shawls over their heads, carried baskets covered with cloths. Casson stood out—he didn’t belong here, and he wasn’t the only one. He could pick out three others, two men and a woman. They didn’t live in Chassieu either. Taking the little trains was a good idea— until four or five of you tried it at the same time. Well, too bad, he thought, there’s nothing to be done about it now.

“What if you came down here,” she said quietly.

“To live, you mean.”

“Yes.”

He paused a moment. “It isn’t easy,” he said. Clearly he had worked on the idea.

“Maybe you don’t want to,” she said.

“No. I’m going to try.”

She took his arm, there was not much they could say, now. The engine vented steam, a door opened in one of the coaches and a conductor tossed his cigarette away and stationed himself at the bottom of the steps. The people on the platform began to board the train.

“Remember what we talked about last night,” he said, leaning close so she could hear him. “If you have to move, a postcard to Langlade’s office.”

She nodded.

“You’re not to call me, Citrine.”

The conductor climbed to the bottom step and shouted “All aboard for Chassieu.”

He took her in his arms and she held on to him, her head on his chest. “How long?” she said.

“I don’t know. As soon as I can manage it.”

“I don’t want to lose you,” she said.

He kissed her hair. The conductor leaned out of the coach and raised a little red flag that the engineer could see. “All aboard,” he said.

“I love you,” Casson said. “Remember.”

He started to work himself free of her arms, then she let him go. He ran for the train, climbed aboard, looked out the cloudy window. He could see she was searching for him. He rapped on the glass. Then she saw him. She wasn’t crying, her hands were deep in her pockets. She nodded at him, smiled a certain way—I meant everything I said, everything I did. Then she waved. He waved back. A man in a raincoat standing nearby lowered his newspaper to look at her. The train started to pull out, moving very slowly. She couldn’t see the man, he was behind her. She waved again, walked a few paces along with the train. Her face was radiant, strong, she wanted him to know he did not have to worry about her, together they would do what had to be done. The man behind Citrine looked toward the end of the station, Casson followed his eyes and saw another man, with slicked-down hair, who took a pipe out of his mouth, then put it back in.

All day long he rode slow trains that rattled through the countryside and stopped at little stations. Sometimes it rained, droplets running sideways across the window, sometimes a shaft of sunlight broke through a cloud and lit up a hillside, sometimes the cloud blew away and he could see the hard blue spring sky. In the fields the April plowing was over, crumbled black earth ran to the trees in the border groves, oaks and elms, with early leaves that trembled in the wind.

Casson stood in the alcove at the end of the car, staring out the open door, hypnotized by the rhythm of the wheels over the rail points. His mind was already back in Paris, holding imaginary conversations with Hugo Altmann, trying to win him over to some version of René Guillot’s strategy. The objective: move Hotel Dorado to the unoccupied zone, under the auspices of the committee in Vichy rather than the German film board. It would have to be done officially, it would take Guske, or somebody like him, to stamp the papers. But, with Altmann’s help, it might be possible.

On the other hand, Altmann liked the film, really liked it, probably he’d want to keep it in Paris. Was there a way to ruin it for him? Not completely—could they just knock off a corner, maybe, so it wasn’t quite so appealing? No, they’d never get away with it. Then too, what about Fischfang? As a Jew, nobody was going to give him the papers to do anything. But that, at least, could be overcome—he’d have to enter the Zone Non-Occupée, the ZNO, just as Casson had, then slip into a false identity, down in Marseilles perhaps.

No, that wouldn’t work. Fischfang couldn’t just abandon his assorted women and children to the mercies of the Paris Gestapo, they’d have to come along. But not across the river, it probably couldn’t be done that way. New papers. That might work—start the false identity on the German side of the line. How to manage that? Not so difficult— Fischfang was a communist, he must be in contact with Comintern operatives, people experienced in clandestine operations—forging identity papers an everyday affair for them.

Or, the hell with Hotel Dorado. He’d let Altmann have it, in effect would trade it for Citrine. Of course he’d have to find some way to live, to earn a living in the ZNO, but that wouldn’t be impossible. He could, could, do any number of things.

The train slowed, a long curve in the track, then clattered over a road crossing. An old farmer waited on a horse cart, the reins held loosely in his hand, watching the train go past. The tiny road wound off behind him, to nowhere, losing itself in the woods and fields. In some part of Casson’s mind the French countryside went on forever, from little village to little village, as long as you stayed on the train.

Back in Paris, he telephoned Altmann.

“Casson! Where the hell have you been? Everybody’s been looking for you.”

“I just went off to the seashore, to Normandy, for a couple of days.”

“Your secretary didn’t know where you were.”

“That’s impossible! I told her—if Altmann calls, give him the number of my hotel.”

“Well, she didn’t.”

“Hugo, I’m sorry, you’ll have to forgive me. You know what it’s like, these days—she does the best she can.”

“Well . . .”

“Anyhow, here I am.”

“Casson, there are people who want to meet you. Important people.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I have organized a dinner for us. Friday night.”

“All right.”

“Do you know the Brasserie Heininger?”

“In the Seventh?”

“Yes.”

“I know it.”

“Eight-thirty, then. Casson?”

“Yes?”

“Important people.”

“I understand. That’s this Friday, the fourth of May.”

“Yes. Any problem, let me know immediately.”

“I’ll be there,” Casson said.

He hung up, wrote down the time and place in his appointment book.

The Brasserie Heininger—of all places! What had gotten into Altmann? He knew better than that. The Heininger was a garish nightmare of gold mirrors and red plush—packed with Americans and nouveaux riches of every description before the war, now much frequented by German officers and their French “friends.” Long ago, when he was twelve, his aunt—his father’s charmingly demented sister—would take him to the Heininger, confiding in a whisper that one came “only for the crème anglaise, my precious, please remember that.” Then, in the late thirties, there’d been some sort of wretched murder there, a Balkan folly that spread itself across the newspapers for a day or two. His one visit in adult life had been a disaster—a dinner for an RKO executive, his wife, her mother, and Marie-Claire. A platter of Heininger’s best oysters, the evil Belons, had proved too much for the Americans, and it was downhill from there.

Well, he supposed it didn’t matter. Likely it was the “important people” who had chosen the restaurant. Whoever they were. Altmann hadn’t been his usual self on the telephone. Upset about Casson’s absence—and something else. Casson drummed his fingers on the desk, stared out the window at the rue Marbeuf. What?

Frightened, he thought.

 

A bad week.

Spring in the river valleys—tumbled skies and painters’ clouds— seemed like a dream to him now. In Paris, the grisaille, gray light, had descended over the city and it was dusk from morning till night.

He went out to the Montrouge district, beyond the porte de Châtillon and the old cemetery, to the little factory streets around the rue Gabriel, where Bernard Langlade had the workshop that made lightbulbs. The nineteenth century; tiny cobbled streets shadowed by brick factory walls, huge rusted stacks with towers of brown smoke curling slowly into a dead sky.

He trudged past foundries that seemed to go on for miles; the thudding of machines that hammered metal—he could feel each stroke in his heart—the smell, no, he thought, the taste, of nitric acid on brass, showers of orange sparks seen through wire mesh, a man with a mask of soot around his eyes, hauling on a long wrench, sensing Casson’s stare and giving it back to him. Casson looked away. His films had danced on the edges of this world but it was a real place and nobody made movies about these lives.

He got lost in a maze of smoked brick and burnt iron and asked directions of two workmen who answered in a Slavic language he couldn’t understand. He walked for a long time, more than an hour, where oil slicks floated on a canal, then, at last, a narrow opening in a stone wall and a small street sign, raised letters chiseled into the wall in the old Paris style, IMPASSE SAVIER. At the end of the alley, a green metal door—Compagnie Luminex.

Inside it was a beehive, workers sitting at long assembly tables, the line served by a young boy in a cap who, using every ounce of his weight, threw himself against the handle of an industrial cart piled high with metal fittings of various shapes and sizes. In one corner, a milling machine in operation, its motor whining from overuse. It was hot in the workroom—the roar of a kiln on the floor below explained why— and there were huge noisy blowers that vibrated in their mounts.

“Jean-Claude!”

It was Langlade, standing at the door of a factory office and beckoning to him. He wore a gray smock, which made him look like a workshop foreman. In the office, three women clerks, keeping books and typing letters. They were heavily built and dark, wearing old cardigan sweaters against the damp factory air, and had cigarettes burning in ashtrays made from clamshells. Langlade closed the half-glass door to the workshop floor, which reduced the flywheel and grinding noises to whispered versions of themselves. They shook hands, Langlade showed him into a small, private office and closed the door.

“Jean-Claude,” he said fondly, opening the bottom drawer of his desk, taking out a bottle of brandy. “I can only imagine what would get you all the way out here.” He gave Casson a conspiratorial smile— clearly an affair of the heart was to be discussed. “Business?” he said innocently.

“A little talk, Bernard.”

“Ahh, I thought—maybe you just happened to be in the neighborhood.” They both laughed at this. Langlade began working on the cork.

“Well, in fact I called your office, three or four times, and they told me, Monsieur is out at Montrouge, so I figured out this is where I’d have to come. But, Bernard, look at all this.”

Langlade smiled triumphantly, a man who particularly wanted to be admired by his friends. “What did you think?”

“Well, I didn’t know. What I imagined—three or four workmen, maybe. To me, a lightbulb. I never would have guessed it took so much to make a thing like that. But, really, Bernard, the sad fact is I’m an idiot.”

“No, Jean-Claude. You’re just like everybody else—me included. When Yvette’s Papa died, and she told me we had this odd little business, I hadn’t the faintest idea what to do about it. Sell it, I supposed. And we tried, but the country had nothing but labor trouble and inflation that year, and nobody in France would buy any kind of industrial anything. So, we ran it. We made Christmas-tree lights and we had small contracts with Citroën and Renault for the miniature bulbs that light up gas gauges and so forth on automobile dashboards. Actually, Jean-Claude, to make a lightbulb, you have to be able to do all sorts of things. It’s like a simple kitchen match, you never think about it but it takes a lot of different processes, all of them technical, to produce some stupid little nothing.” He grunted, twisted the cork, managed to get it free of the bottle.

“Bernard,” Casson said, gesturing toward the work area, “Christmas-tree lights? Joyeux Noël!”

Langlade laughed. He searched the bottom drawer, found two good crystal glasses. He held one up to the light and scowled. “Fussy?”

“No.”

“When I’m alone, I clean them with my tie.”

“Fine for me, Bernard.”

Langlade poured each of them a generous portion, swirled his glass and inhaled the fumes. Casson did the same. “Well, well,” he said.

Langlade shrugged, meaning, if you can afford it, why not? “When the Germans got here,” he said, “they began to make big orders, for trucks, and those armored whatnots they drive around in. We did that for five months, then they asked, could you buy some more elaborate equipment, possibly in Switzerland? Well, yes, we could. There wasn’t much point in saying no, the job would just go across the street to somebody else. So, we bought the new machinery, and began to make optical instruments. Like periscopes for submarines, and for field use also, a type of thing where a soldier in a trench can look out over the battlefield without getting his head blown off. We don’t make the really delicate stuff—binoculars, for instance. What we make has to accept hard use, and survive.”

“Is there that much of it?”

Langlade leaned over his desk. “Jean-Claude, I was like you. A civilian, what did I know. I went about my business, got into bed with a woman now and then, saw friends, made a little money, had a family. I never could have imagined the extent of anything like this. These people, army and navy, they think in thousands. As in, thousands and thousands.” Langlade gave him a certain very eloquent and Gallic look—it meant he was making money, and it meant he must never be asked how much, or anything like that, because he was making so much that to say it out loud would be to curse the enterprise—the jealous gods would overhear and throw down some bad-luck lightning bolts from the top of commercial Olympus. Where the tax people also kept an office.

Casson nodded that he understood, then smiled, honestly happy for a friend’s success.

“Now,” Langlade said, “what can I do for you?”

“Citrine,” Casson said.

A certain smile from Langlade. “The actress.”

“Yes.”

“All right.”

“We have become lovers, Bernard. It’s the second time—we had a petite affaire ten years ago, but this is different.”

Langlade made a sympathetic face; yes, he knew how it was. “She’s certainly beautiful, Jean-Claude. For myself, I couldn’t stop looking at her long enough to go to bed.”

Casson smiled. “We just spent a week together, in Lyons—that’s between you and me by the way. Now, I’ve had some kind of problem in the Gestapo office on the rue des Saussaies. Bernard, it’s so stupid— I went up there to get an Ausweis to go to Spain, and they asked me about military service and something told me not to mention that I’d been reactivated in May and gone up to the Meuse. You know, there are thousands of French soldiers still in Germany, in prison camps. I decided it would be safer not to admit anything. So, I didn’t. Well, time went by, somebody sent a paper to somebody else, and they caught me in a lie.”

Langlade shook his head and made a sour face. The Germans were finicky about paper in a way the Latin French found amusing—until the problem settled on their own doorstep.

“The next thing was, they started reading my mail and listening to my phone. So, when I was with Citrine down in Lyons, I told her that if she wanted to get in touch with me she could send a postcard to your office, your law office in the 8th is the address I gave her.”

He waited for Langlade to smile and say it was all right, but he didn’t. Instead, his expression darkened into a certain kind of discomfort.

“Look, Jean-Claude,” he said. “We’ve known each other for twenty years, I’m not going to beat around the bush with you. If Citrine sends me a postcard, well, I’ll see that you get it. On the other hand, next time you have a chance to talk to her, would it be too much to ask for you to find some other way of doing this?”

Casson wasn’t going to show what he felt. “No problem at all, Bernard. In fact, I can take care of it right away.”

“You can understand, can’t you? This work I’m doing matters to them, Jean-Claude. It isn’t like they’re actually watching me, but, you know, I see these military people all the time, from the procurement offices, and all it would take would be for my secretary over in the other office to decide she wasn’t getting enough money, or, or whatever it might be. Look, I have an idea, what about Arnaud? You know, he’s always doing this and that and the other, and it’s just the sort of thing that would appeal to him.”

“You’re right,” Casson said. “A much better idea.”

“So now, here’s what we’ll do. Let’s go back to Paris—I can call a driver and car—and treat ourselves to a hell of a lunch, hey? Jean-Claude, how about it?”