She nodded that she was.
He put a hand on her cheek. “You’re like ice,” he said.
“I’m scared.”
He went looking for a cigarette, probing an empty packet of Gitanes on the night table. “I have some,” she said, glad for something to do. She rolled off the bed and went into the living room. Merde, Casson said to himself. War was the last thing he needed. Hitler had taken Austria, Czechoslovakia, then Poland. France had declared war, but it meant nothing. Germany and France couldn’t fight again, they’d just done that—ten million dead, not much else accomplished. It was simply not, everybody agreed, logique.
Gabriella returned, lit a cigarette and handed it to him. “May I take a bath?” she asked.
“Of course. There are towels—”
“I know.”
Casson found his watch on the night table. 5:22. Water splashed into the bathtub. The tenant on the floor below was a baroness—she didn’t like noise. Well, too bad. She already hated him anyhow.
He got out of bed, walked to the glass door that opened on the little balcony. He pushed the drape aside; you could see the Eiffel Tower across the river. The rue Chardin was quiet—the 16th Arrondissement was always quiet, and Passy, its heart and soul, quieter still. One or two lights on, people didn’t know yet. So beautiful, his street. Trees in clouds of white blossom, dawn shadow playing on the stone buildings, a lovely gloom. He’d shot a scene from No Way Out here. The hero knows the cops are onto him, but he leaves his hideout anyhow, to see his rich girlfriend one last time.
The telephone rang; two brief whirring jingles. Paused a few seconds. Rang again. Jesus, the baroness. Gingerly, Casson picked up the receiver.
“Yes?”
“Have you heard?”
It was his wife. They had been separated for years, living their own lives in their own apartments. But they remained married, and shared a set of old friends.
“Yes,” he said.
“I’m not disturbing you, am I?”
“No, Marie-Claire. I was up.”
“Well, what shall we do?”
Fight, he thought. Support the troops, hold rallies, you had to—
“About tonight, I mean.”
Now he understood. They were giving a dinner party at her apartment. “Well, I don’t see how, I mean, it’s war.”
“Bruno says we must go on. We must not give in to Hitler.”
Bruno was Marie-Claire’s boyfriend. He owned an agency that sold British motorcars, had his hair cut twice a week, and spent a fortune on silk dressing gowns.
“He’s not wrong,” Casson said.
“And the cake has been ordered.” The twentieth wedding anniversary of the Langlades—a cake from Ponthieu.
“All right. Let’s go ahead. Really, what else is there to do?”
“Are you going to the office?”
“Of course.”
“Can you telephone later on?”
“I will.”
He hung up. The door to the bathroom was half-open, the water had stopped. Casson paused at the threshold.
“You can come in,” Gabriella said.
Her skin was flushed from the heat of the bath, wet strands of hair curled at the back of her neck, her breasts and shoulders were shiny with soapsuds. “They are going to arrest me,” she said, as though it were hard for her to believe.
“Why would they do that?”
She shrugged. “I am Italian. An Italian citizen.”
Enemy alien. It was absurd, he wanted to laugh, but then he didn’t. Mussolini was Hitler’s ally, a treaty had been signed in 1939. The Pact of Steel, no less. But it was only ridiculous until police came to the door. Gabriella looked up at him, biting her lip. “Now look,” he said. “It’s too early for tears. This is Paris—there’s always somebody you can talk to, always special arrangements. Nothing’s final here.”
Gabriella nodded gratefully, she wanted to believe he was right.
Casson caught a glimpse of himself in the steamy mirror. Dark—like a suntan that never really went away—naked, lean, with a line of hair up the center and shoulders a little heavier than his suits suggested. Not so bad—for forty-two. Still, if he were going to be authoritative, he’d better get dressed.
He stood in front of his closet, gazed pensively at a row of suits. In the distance, a two-note siren, high/low. Police or ambulance, and coming nearer. Casson went to the balcony and looked out. An ambulance, rolling to a stop just up the block. Two women ran into the street, one clutching a robe against her chest, the other in the black dress of a concierge. Frantically, they urged the men from the ambulance into the building.
Casson went back to the closet. On the radio, the premier of France, Paul Reynaud, was reading a statement: “The French army has drawn its sword; France is gathering herself.”
A little after ten, Casson left for the office. In the streets of Passy, the war had not yet been acknowledged—life went on as always; très snob, the women in gloves, the men’s chins held at a certain angle. Casson wore a dark suit, sober and strong, and a red-and-blue tie with a white shirt—the colors of France. But the blue was teal, the red faded, and the shirt a color the clerk had called “linen”. He stopped at a newspaper kiosk for Le Temps, but it was not to be. A huge crowd was clamoring for papers, he would have to wait.
The day was fine, cool and sunny, and he liked to walk to his office, just off the Champs-Elysées on the rue Marbeuf. Like it or not, his usual cabdriver was not at his customary spot on the place Iéna so it was walk or take the Métro, and this was no morning to be underground. Somewhere along the way, he would stop for a coffee.
He was, to all appearances, a typical Parisian male on his way to the office. Dark hair, dark eyes—France a Latin country after all—some concealed softness in the face, but then, before you could think about that, a small scar beneath one eye, the proud battle trophy of soccer played with working-class kids when he was young, in fact the most violent moment he’d ever experienced.
In real life, anyhow. Last Train to Athens had a murder in an alley in the Balkans, pretty nasty by the time they’d got it cut. Emil Cravec! What a ferocious mug on him—where the hell was he, anyhow? No Way Out was tame by comparison, except for the ending. Michel Faynberg had directed for him, and Michel had never really left the Sorbonne. He’d had the hero clubbed to death at the base of a statue of Blind Justice—what a load of horseshit! No Way to Make Money the exhibitor Benouchian called it. Yet, in all fairness, that hadn’t really turned out to be true. The students went.
He liked Night Run best of all, he loved that movie. It was better than The Devil’s Bridge, which had got him the little house in Deauville. He’d almost directed Night Run, stood with old Marchand all day long, watched rushes with him every night. Marchand was a legend in the industry, and the great thing about stature, Casson had discovered, was that egoism was no longer the issue—now and then, anyhow. Even a producer, despised moneyman, might have an idea that was worth something. Marchand had been in his seventies by then, was never going to get the acclaim he deserved. White hair, white beard, eyes like a falcon. “Tiens, Casson,” he’d said. “You really want it right.”
It was, too. The smoke that billowed from the locomotive, the little cello figure, the village scenes they shot around Auxerre—every frame was right. A small story: beginning, middle, end. And Marchand had found him Citrine. She’d had other names then, what she’d come north with, from Marseilles. But that was eleven years ago, 1929, and she’d been eighteen. Or so she said.