The World at Night (31 page)

“That’s right.”

“I’m Eddie Juin.”

They walked into a maze of little lanes, three feet wide, wash hanging out above their heads. Turned left, right, right, left, down a stairway, through a tunnel, then up a long street of stairs to a garage. It was dark inside, fumes of gasoline and oil heavy in the air, cut by the sharp smell of scorched metal. “I wonder if you could let me have a look at your identity card,” Juin said.

“Not a problem.”

Casson handed over the Bourdon card, Juin clicked on a flashlight and had a look. “A salesman?”

“Yes.”

“What is it you sell, if I can ask?”

“Scientific equipment—to laboratories. Test tubes, flasks, Bunsen burners, all that sort of thing.”

“How do you do, with that?”

“Not too badly. It’s up, it’s down—you know how it is.”

Juin handed the card back, went to a stained and battered desk with a telephone on it, dialed a number. “Seems all right,” he said. “We’re leaving now.”

He hung up, opened a drawer, took out several flashlights, put them in a canvas sack and handed it to Casson.

“Is this your place?” Casson asked.

“Mine? No. Belongs to a friend’s father—he lets us use it.” He ran the beam of the flashlight over the steel tracks above the pit used to work under cars, then a stack of old tires, then showed Casson what he meant him to see. “Better button up your jacket,” he said, voice very proud.

It
was
beautiful. A big motorcycle, front and rear fenders stripped, the paint worn away to a color that was no color at all. “What year?” Casson said.

“1925. It’s English—a Norton ‘Indian.’ ”

Juin climbed on, jiggled the fuel feed on the right handlebar, then rose in the air and drove his weight down hard on the kick starter. The engine grumbled once and died. Juin rose again. Nothing on the second try, or the third. It went on, Juin undaunted. At last, a sputtering roar, a volley of small-arms fire and a cloud of smoke from the trembling exhaust pipe. Casson hauled up the metal shutter, then closed it again after Juin was out, and climbed on the flat seat meant for the passenger. “Don’t try to lean on the curves,” Juin shouted over the engine noise.

They flew through the streets, bouncing over the cobbles, bumping down a stairway, the explosive engine thundering off the ancient walls, announcing to every Frenchman and German in the lower Normandy region that that idiot Eddie Juin was out for a ride.

They sped over a bridge that spanned the Sarthe, then they were out in the countryside, Casson imagining that he could actually smell the fragrant night air through the reek of burned oil that traveled with the machine. They left the Route Nationale for a
route departmentale,
then turned onto a packed dirt road that didn’t have a number but probably had a local name, then to a cowpath, five miles an hour over rocks and roots, across a long hillside on a strip of beaten-down weed and scrub, over the hill to a valley spread out in the moonlight. Juin cut the engine and they rolled silently for a long time, coming to a stop at last on the edge of a flat grassy field.

It seemed very quiet, just a few crickets, once the engine was off. Casson climbed off the motorcycle, half frozen, blowing on his hands. “Where are we?” he asked.

Eddie Juin smiled. “Nowhere,” he said triumphantly. “Absolutely nowhere.”

1:30 A.M. Three-quarter moon. They sat by the motorcycle, smoking, waiting, watching the edge of the woods at the other end of the field.

“Alençon doesn’t seem so bad,” Casson said.

“No, not too bad, and I’m an expert. I grew up in at least six different places, one of those families that never stopped moving. Saves money, my dad said—some bills would never quite catch up with us— and, he’d say, it’s an education for life!” Juin laughed as he remembered. “It’s Lebec who’s from Alençon, and his uncle, who’s called Tonton Jules. Then there’s Angier, and that’s it. Tonton Jules farms over in Mortagne, the rest of us met up in Paris.”

“At the office.”

“Yes, that’s it. We all worked for the Merchant Marine Ministry, first in Paris, then over on the coast, in Lorient. We didn’t have it too bad—snuck out early on Friday afternoons, chased the girls, caught our share. But when the Germans came they tossed us out, of course, because they put their submarine pens in over there, for the blockade on the English. So that left us, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis from the fourth floor, with time on our hands. Well, what better than to find a way to fuck life up for the
schleuh
? Return the favor, right? And as for Tonton Jules, they captured him on the Marne in 1915, sent him to Germany in a cattle car. Apparently he didn’t care for it.”

He paused for a moment and they both listened for engines but it was very quiet. “So,” he said, “how is it in Paris these days?”

“You miss it?”

“Who wouldn’t.”

“People are fed up,” Casson said. “Hungry, tired, can’t get tobacco, there’s no coffee. In the beginning they thought they could live with it. Then they thought they could ignore it. Now they want it to go away.”

“Wait a minute.” Juin stood up. Casson heard the faint throb of a machine in the distance. Juin reached inside his coat and took out a snub-nosed automatic.

A farm tractor towing a haywagon materialized at the end of the field, Casson and Eddie Juin went to meet it. Tonton Jules swayed in the driver’s seat. He was a fat man with one arm, and he was drunk. His nephew Lebec was dark and clever, could have been Eddie Juin’s brother. Angier had an appealing rat face, Casson guessed he would go anywhere, do anything. Easy to imagine him as a kid jumping off railway trestles on a dare.
“Salut,
Eddie,” he said. “Are we on time?”

Juin just laughed.

They heard the plane at 3:12 A.M., headed south of east. They each took a flashlight and stood in a line with Juin to one side to make the letter L. This showed wind direction when, as the plane came closer, they turned on the lights. Juin then blinked the Morse letter
J—
a recognition signal for that night only, which meant
we’re not a bunch of
Germans trying to get you to land in this field.
The plane did not respond, flew straight ahead, vanished. Then, a minute later, they heard him coming back. Juin tried again, and this time the pilot confirmed the signal, using the airplane’s landing lights to flash back a Morse countersign.

The plane touched down at the other end of the field, then taxied toward them, bouncing over the uneven ground. No savoir-faire now, they ran to meet it, Tonton Jules wheezing as he tried to keep up. It wasn’t much to look at, a single propeller, fixed landing wheels in oversized hubs, biplane wings above and below the pilot’s compartment. On the fuselage, next to a freshly painted RAF roundel, was a black flash mark and a peppering of tiny holes. With difficulty the pilot forced back the Perspex window panel, then tore the leather flying cap from his head. He allowed himself a single deep breath, then called out over the noise of the engine. “Can somebody help? Ahh,
peut-être,
can you
—aidez-mah
?”

“You are hurted?” Lebec said.

“No. Not me.”

He was very young, Casson thought, not much more than nineteen. And he certainly didn’t look the hero—tall and gangly, unruly hair, big ears, freckles. The man sitting behind him grabbed the edge of the cockpit with his left hand and clumsily struggled to his feet. Clearly his right arm had been damaged. He appeared to be cursing under his breath. Angier used the tail fin to scramble up on the back of the plane, then slid himself forward to a point where he could help the man get down to the ground.

The pilot looked at his watch. “We should move along,” he said to Casson. “I’m to leave here in three minutes.”

“All right.”

“You’ll have to help me get the tail swung round. And, don’t forget,
n’oublah
thing, the two, uh
—deux
caisses, deux valises
.” The last burst forth with the fluency of the determinedly memorized.

Lebec climbed onto the wing, then helped the pilot work two suitcases and two small wooden crates free of the cockpit. “Damned amazing, what you can get in here,” the pilot said. Lebec smiled—no idea what the pilot was saying but an ally was an ally.

They handed down the cargo—carried off to Tonton Jules’s wagon—then Lebec jumped to the ground and saluted the pilot, who returned the salute with a smile, then tossed his flying cap back on and tried a parting wave, devil-may-care, as he revved the engine. “Best of luck, then,” he shouted.
“Bonne shan!”

He reached up, pulled the housing shut. Eddie Juin took hold of the tail assembly and started to turn the plane into the wind, everybody else ran to help him. The plane accelerated suddenly, there was a blast of hot exhaust as it pulled away, then a roar of fuel fed to the engine as it struggled into the air. It flopped back down, bounced off the field, touched one wheel a second time, then caught the wind and climbed into the darkness. The people on the ground listened for a time, peering into the dark sky, then lost the whine of the receding engine among the night sounds of the countryside.

Verneuil, Brézolles, Laons—Casson drove east toward Paris in the spring dawn.

The end of the operation had been complicated.
Système D,
Casson thought, always
Système D,
make do, use your ingenuity, improvise— it was simply the way life was lived. They’d left the field headed for a small village nearby, where a man who drove a milk truck to Paris twice a week was supposed to pick up the supplies delivered from England, leaving Casson and the operative free to take the train into the city. But the truck never appeared, so Eddie Juin had to come up with an alternative. Off they went to another village, where a barn on the outskirts hid a Renault—a four-year-old Juvequatre model, slow, steady, inexpensive, a family car.

Casson drove through first light, staying on the 839. The two crates and two valises were in the trunk. Next to him, the man he had come to think of as the sergeant—though he used the name Jerome—bled slowly into the pale-gray upholstery.

“It’s not so bad,” he said. “You could hardly call it shrapnel. More like, specks. But, iron specks, so I’ll have to see a doctor, sooner or later. Still, not bad enough for me to go back to England—no point at all to that.”

“What happened?”

“Well, at first everything went perfectly. We came in at eight thousand feet over the coast at St.-Malo—no problem. Picked up the rail line to Alençon a minute later—we spotted the firebox on a locomotive going east and we just flew along with him. Next we had yellow signal lights, for ten miles or so, coming out of the big freight junction in Fougères. After that, the track was between us and the moon and we just followed the glow on the rails. But somebody heard us, because ten minutes later a searchlight came on and they started shooting. Nothing very serious, a few ack-ack rounds, and Charley thought maybe a machine gun. Then it was over, but my arm had gone numb and I realized we’d been hit.”

Casson slowed down for a hairpin turn at the center of a sleeping village, then they were back among the fields.

He saw now how they worked it. First came Mathieu, the university man, getting the system organized. Next came the sergeant—almost certainly a technician. Why else bring him in? Short and muscular, working-class face, speaking French in a way that would fool nobody. Not his fault, Casson thought. Likely something he’d taken up years ago in hopes it would advance him in the military. So he’d put in his time in classrooms, dutifully rolled his
r
’s and nasalized his
n
’s, but finally to very little purpose—he might as well have worn a derby with a Union Jack stuck in the band and whistled “God Save the King” for all the good it was going to do him.

Casson slowed for a one-lane bridge, the stream below running full in spring flood, water dark blue in the early light. The sergeant had winced when he tapped the brake. “Sorry,” Casson said.

“Oh, it’s nothing. Twenty minutes with a doctor and I’ll be fine.”

“It won’t be a problem,” Casson said.

Well, he didn’t think it would be. What doctor? He only knew one doctor, his doctor. Old Dr. Genoux. What were his politics? Casson had no idea. He was brusque, forever vaguely irritated by something or other, and smelled eternally of eucalyptus. He’d been Casson’s doctor for twenty years, since university. One day Casson had noticed his hair was white. Good heavens! He couldn’t be a Vichyite or a Fascist, could he? Well, if not him, who else? The dentist? The professor at the Sorbonne faculty of medicine who lived across the street? Arnaud had once had a girlfriend who was a nurse. No, that wasn’t going to work, old Genoux would just have to do the job.

He worked his way through the medieval town of Dreux, intending to pick up the 932 that wound aimlessly into the Chevreuse valley. But then he somehow made a mistake and, a little way beyond the town, found himself instead on the N 12, with a sprinkling of early traffic headed for Paris. Well, all the roads went to the capital, the N 12 was as good as any other.