The World at Night (15 page)

But he didn’t dial the telephone. At least, not all the numbers.

And so, inevitably, he arrived at his office one morning to find that a message had been slipped beneath the door. Hocus-pocus, was how he thought about it. An uncomfortable moment, then on with his day.

Hotel Dorado.
That was better medicine than Spanish murder, right? And so, inevitably, the hocus-pocus itself.

Maybe not the best time for it, an icy night in the dead heart of January. Something that day had reached him, some sad nameless thing, and the antidote, when he found her, was blonde—a shimmering peroxide cap above a lopsided grin. Older up close than she’d first seemed—at a gallery opening—and not properly connected to the daily world. Everything about her off center, as though she’d once been bent the wrong way and never quite sprung back.

They sat on the couch and nuzzled for a time. “There is nobody quite like me,” she whispered.

He smiled and said she was right.

She undid a button on his shirt and slid a hand inside. The telephone rang once, then stopped. It bothered her. “Who is it?” she said, as though he could know that.

But, in fact, he did know. And a minute later, sixty seconds later, it did it again. “What’s going on?” she said. Now she was frightened.

“It’s nothing,” he said. Then, to prove it was nothing, “I have to go out for a while.”

“Why?” she said.

He’d always thought, not all that proud of it, that he was a pretty good liar. But not this time. He’d been caught unprepared, no story made up just in case, so he tried to improvise, while she stared at him with hurt eyes and pulled her sweater back down. In the end, she agreed to wait in the apartment until he returned. “Look,” he said, “it’s only business. Sometimes, the movie business, you need to take care of something quietly, secretly.”

She nodded, mouth curved down, wanting to believe him, knowing better.

In the street, it was ten degrees. He walked with lowered head and clenched teeth, the wind cutting through his coat and sweater. He swore at it, out loud, mumbling his way along the rue Chardin like a madman hauling his private menagerie to a new location.

At last, half-frozen, he crept down the ice-coated steps of the Ranelagh Métro and installed himself in front of a poster for the Opéra-Comique, a Spanish dancer swirling her skirt. A few minutes later, he heard the rumble of a train approaching through the tunnel. The doors slid open, out came a little man with a briefcase of the type carried under the arm. Casson could have spotted him five miles away, but then, the Germans were “idiots.” And he, Casson, was so brilliant he’d believed
Erno Simic
when he’d called them that.

The contact was a small man, clearly angry at the world. Peering up and down the station platform he reminded Casson of a character in an English children’s story.
The Wind in the Willows
? Waxed mustache, derby, fierce eyebrows, ferocious glare above an old-fashioned collar. Following instructions, Casson turned to the wall and stared at the poster. For a time, nothing happened. The dancer smiled at him haughtily and clicked her castanets in the air.

Finally, the man stood beside him. Cleared his throat. “An excellent performance, I’m told.”

That was part one of the password. Part two was the countersign: “Yes. I saw it Thursday,” Casson said.

The contact leaned the briefcase against the wall at his feet and began to button his coat. Then, hands in pockets, he hurried away, his footsteps echoing down the empty platform as he headed into the night. Casson counted to twenty, picked up the briefcase, and went home.

His blonde was bundled in a blanket, snoring gently on the couch. He went into the bedroom and closed the door. Before he put the briefcase on the shelf that ran across the top of his closet—under the bed? behind the refrigerator?—he had a look inside. Three hundred thousand pesetas—about $35,000 in American money—in thirty bundles of hundred-peseta notes, each packet of ten pinned through its upper right-hand corner.

Back in the living room, the blonde opened one eye. “You don’t mind I took a nap,” she said.

“No,” he said.

“Keep me company,” she said, raising the blanket. She’d taken off her skirt and panties.

Casson lay down next to her. It wasn’t so bad, in the end. Two castaways, adrift in the Paris night, three hundred thousand pesetas in a bedroom closet, air-raid sirens at the southern edge of the city, then a long flight of aircraft, south to north, passing above them. On the radio, the BBC. A quintet, swing guitar, violin—maybe Stephane Grappelli—a female vocalist, voice rough with static. The volume had to be very low: radios were supposed to be turned over to the Germans, and Casson was afraid of Madame Fitou—but he loved the thing, couldn’t bear to part with it. It glowed in the dark and played music—he sometimes thought of it as the last small engine of civilization, a magic device, and he was its keeper, the hermit who hid the sacred ring. Some day, in times to come, the barbarians would break camp and trudge away down the dusty roads and then, starting with a single radio, they would somehow put everything back the way it had been.

Very sensitive to the touch, this blonde. Thin, excitable—she sucked in her breath when something felt good. Still, she was quiet about it. That was just common sense. They even pulled the blanket up over their heads, which made everything seem dark and secret and forbidden. Probably he’d laugh at that some day, but just then it wasn’t funny, because they really
were
out there, the secret police and their agents, and this was something they probably didn’t approve of. It wasn’t spelled out—just better to be quiet.

When they were done with one thing, and before they moved on to the next, Casson went to the phone, dialed Simic’s number, let it ring once, and hung up. Then he counted to sixty, and did it again. He wondered, as he was counting, if it was a good idea to keep Simic’s number in his address book. In fact, where did Simic keep his number?

He crawled back under the blanket, the blonde yawned and stretched, and they began to resettle themselves on the narrow couch. By his ear she said, “You had better be careful, my friend, doing that sort of thing.”

“Perhaps you prefer I do this sort of thing?”

“I do, yes. Anybody would.” A few minutes later she said, “Oh, you’re sweet, you know. Truly.” Then: “A pity if you invite them to kill you,
chéri.
”

Lunch, Chez Marcel,
rognons de veau,
a Hermitage from Jaboulet, 1931.

Hugo Altmann held his glass with three fingers at the top of the stem, canted it slightly to one side, poured it half full, then twisted the bottle as he turned it upright. He looked at the wine in his glass, gave it just a hint of a sniff and a swirl before he drank. “I like the script,” he said. “Pretty damn smooth for a first draft. Who is this Moreau?”

“Comes out of the provincial theatre, down by Lyons somewhere. Strange fellow, afraid of his own shadow, keeps to himself pretty much. Has a little cottage out past Orly—lives with his mother, I think. No telephone.”

“Maybe I could meet him, sometime. A very sure hand, Jean-Claude, for the ‘provincial theatre, down by Lyons.’ ”

Casson shrugged and smiled, accepting the compliment, proud of his ability to unearth a secret talent. He suspected Altmann knew how much he’d depended on Louis Fischfang for his scripts, and he’d intended “Moreau” as a fiction convenient for both of them. Altmann, however, seemed to think Moreau actually existed.

“Maybe some day,” he said. “Right now, Hugo, I need him to think about
Hotel Dorado
and nothing else. If he meets you, he might start having
ambitions.
”

“Well, all right.” Altmann chased the last of the brown sauce around his plate with a piece of bread. “That banker in the first scene— Lapont? Lapère? Don’t let anything happen to him. He’s magnificent, truly loathsome—I can just see him.”

“I’ll tell Moreau he’s on the right track. Now, make it
really
good.”

Altmann smiled and took a sip of wine.

“I’ve been thinking,” Casson said. “Maybe we should consider a different location.”

“Not the Côte d’Azur?”

“It’s commonplace, everybody’s been there.”

“That’s the point, no?”

“Mmm—I think we have the plot, Hugo. But it’s the setting I worry about. The feel of a place that’s not the everyday world—come August, you leave your work, you leave the daily life, and you go there. Something special about it. I don’t want anybody thinking, ‘Well,
I
wouldn’t sell that hotel—I’d put in a damn fine restaurant and put some paint on the façade.’ ”

“No, I guess not.”

The waiter came to take the plates away. “There’s a
reblochon
today, gentlemen,” he said. “And pears.”

“Bring it,” Altmann said.

“I’ve been thinking about Spain,” Casson said.

“Spain?”

“Yes. Down on the Mediterranean. Someplace dark, and very quiet.

The
propriétaires
are still French. Expatriates. But the clients are a little more adventurous. They go to Spain for their holidays.”

“Hm.”

“Anyhow, I’d like to go and have a look. Scout locations.”

“All right, it shouldn’t be a problem. But, I don’t know, it doesn’t, somehow—Spain?”

“Could be the key to it all, Hugo.”

Altmann began preparing a cigar, piercing the leaf at the end with a metal pick he took from his pocket. He looked up suddenly, pointed the cigar at Casson. “You’re a liar,” he said. Then he broke out in a wide grin. “Have to take, uh, somebody down there with you, Jean-Claude? Just in case you need help?” He laughed and shook his head
—
you scoundrel, you almost had me there.

Casson smiled, a little abashed. “Well,” he said.

Altmann snapped his lighter until it lit, then warmed the cigar above the blue flame. “Romantic in Spain, Jean-Claude. Guitars and so forth. And one doesn’t run into every damn soul in the world one knows. You don’t really want to move the story there, do you?”

“No,” Casson said. “There’s a lady involved.”

Altmann nodded to himself in satisfaction, then counted out a sheaf of Occupation reichsmarks on top of the check. For a German in an occupied city, everything was virtually free. “Come take a walk with me, Jean-Claude,” he said. “I want to pick up some cashmere sweaters for my wife.”

The following afternoon Altmann sent over a letter on Continental stationery and, after a phone call, Casson took it to the Gestapo office in the old Interior Ministry building on the rue des Saussaies. The officer he saw there occupied a private room on the top floor.
SS-OBERSTURMBANNFÜHRER—
lieutenant colonel—Guske wore civilian clothes, an expensively tailored gray suit, and had the glossy look of a successful businessman. A big, imposing head with large ears, sparse black hair—carefully combed for maximum coverage—and the tanned scalp of a man who owns a sailboat or a ski chalet, perhaps both.

His French was extremely good. “So, we are off to sunny Spain. Not so sunny just now, I suppose.”

“No. Not in January.”

“You’ve been there before?”

“Several times. Vacations on the beaches below Barcelona, in the early thirties.”

“But not during the civil war.”

“No, sir.”

“Are you a Jew, Casson?”

“No. Catholic by birth. By practice, not much of anything.”

“I regret having to ask you that, but I’m sure you understand. The film business being what it is, unfortunately . . .”

A knock at the door, a secretary entered and handed Guske a dossier. Casson could see his name, lettered across the top of the cardboard folder, and the official stamp of the Paris Préfecture de Police. Guske opened it on his desk and started reading, idly turning pages, at one point going back in the record and searching for something, running an index finger up and down the margin. Ah yes, there it was.

He moved forward again, making the sort of small gestures—rhythmic bobbing of the head, pursing of the lips—that indicated irritation with petty minds that noted too many details, an inner voice saying
yes, yes, then what, come on.

At last he looked up and smiled pleasantly. “All in order.” He squared the sheets of paper, closed the dossier, and tied it shut with its ribbon. Then he took Altmann’s letter and read it over once more. “Will your assistant be coming to see us?” he asked.

“No. Change of plans,” Casson said. “I’m going alone.”

“Very well,” Guske said. He drew a line through a sentence in Altmann’s letter and initialed the margin, wrote a comment at the bottom and initialed that as well, then clipped the letter to the dossier and made a signal—Casson did not see how it was done—that brought the secretary back. When she left he said, “Come by tomorrow, after eleven. Your
Ausweis
will be waiting for you at the downstairs reception.”

“Thank you,” Casson said.

“You’re welcome,” Guske said. “By the way, what did you do during the May campaign? Were you recalled to military service?”

“No,” Casson said. “I started out to go south, then I gave it up and stayed in Paris. The roads . . .”

“Yes. Too bad, really, this kind of thing has to happen. We’re neighbors, after all, I’m sure we can do better than this.” He stood, offered a hand, he had a warm, powerful grip. “Forgive me, Herr Casson, I must tell you—we do expect you to return, so, please, no
wanderlust.
Some people here are not so understanding as I am, and they’ll haul you back by your ears.”

He winked at Casson, gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder as he ushered him out of the office.

Casson couldn’t reach Citrine by telephone. A clerk answered at the hotel desk, told him that guests at that establishment did not receive phone calls—maybe he should try the Ritz, and banged the receiver down. So Casson took the Métro, out past the Père-Lachaise cemetery, walked for what seemed like miles through a neighborhood of deserted factories, finally found the place, then read a newspaper in the dark lobby until Citrine came sweeping through the door.