The World at Night (18 page)

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.