Neptune’s Daughter. Veronica and Perry drinking sidecars in Capri and watching the sun set. “Where do you suppose we’ll be on this day next year?” Veronica asks. “Will we be happy?” The telephone rang again. Marie-Claire, Casson thought, a forgotten detail. “Yes?” he said.
“Hello? Is this Jean Casson?” An English voice, accenting the first syllable of Casson. A voice he knew.
“Yes. Who is this, please?”
“James Templeton.”
The investment banker from London. “It, it’s good to hear from you.” Casson’s English worked at its own pace.
“How are you getting on, over there?” Templeton asked.
“Not so bad, thank you. The best that we can, you know, with the war . . .”
“Yes, well, we haven’t forgotten you.”
Casson’s thoughts were flying past. Why was this man calling him? Could it be that some incredibly complicated arrangement was going to allow British banks to invest in French films? There was a rumor that England and Germany continued to trade, despite the war, using middlemen in neutral nations. Or, maybe, a treaty had been signed, and this was a protocol sprung suddenly to life. Maybe, he thought, his heart quickening, the fucking war is over! “Thank you,” he managed to say. “What, uh . . .”
“Tell me, do you happen to see much of Erno Simic? The Agna Film man?”
“What? I’m sorry, you said?”
“Simic. Has distribution arrangements in Hungary, I believe. Do you see him, ever?”
“Well, yes. I mean, I have seen him.”
“He can be extremely helpful, you know.”
“Yes?”
“Definitely. Certain business we’re doing now, he is somebody we are going to depend on. And since you’re a friend of ours in Paris, we thought you might be willing to lend a hand.”
“Pardon?”
“Sorry. To help, I mean.”
“Oh. Yes, I see. All right. I’ll do what I can.”
“Good. We are grateful. And we’ll be in touch. Good-bye, Casson.”
“Good-bye.”
He knew. And he didn’t know. He could decide, at that point, that he didn’t know. He fretted, waiting until six to walk over to Langlade’s office. “Jean-Claude!” Langlade said. “Come and have a little something.” From a bottom drawer he produced an old wine bottle refilled with calvados. “We went to see the Rouen side of the family on Sunday,” Langlade explained. “So you’ll share in the bounty.”
Casson relaxed, sat back in his chair, the calvados was like soothing fire as it went down.
“This is hard-won, I hope you appreciate it,” Langlade continued. “It took an afternoon of sitting on a couch and listening to a clock tick.”
“Better than what you get in a store,” Casson said.
Langlade refilled the glass. “My good news,” he said, “is that suddenly we’re busy. Some factory in Berlin ordered these tiny little lightbulbs, custom-made, grosses of them. God only knows what they’re for, but, frankly, who cares?” He gave Casson a certain look—it meant he’d been closer to disaster than he’d been willing to let on. “And you, Jean-Claude? Everything all right?”
“A very strange thing, Bernard. Somebody just telephoned me from London.”
“What?”
“A call, from a banker in London.”
Langlade thought hard for a moment, then shook his head. “No, no, Jean-Claude. That’s not possible.”
“It happened. Just now.”
“They’ve cut the lines. There isn’t any way that somebody could call you from London.”
“You’re certain?”
“Yes. Who did you say?”
“An English banker.”
“Not from London, mon ami. What did he want?”
“He wasn’t direct, but he suggested that I do business with a certain distribution company.”
Langlade stared at the ceiling for awhile. When he spoke again, his tone of voice was subtly altered. “He called from France.” Then, “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” Casson said. “He’s in France, you think?”
“Possibly Spain, or Switzerland, but definitely on the Continent— because the lines under the Channel were cut last June.”
“Well,” Casson said.
“You better think it over,” Langlade said.
Someone knocked discreetly on the office door. Langlade, it seemed to Casson, was not sorry to be interrupted.
The apartment was across a courtyard from a dress factory, through a cloudy window Casson could see women working at sewing machines. Fischfang sat at a table in the tiny kitchen, wearing an old sweater, and a blanket around his shoulders. He’d shaved his beard and mustache, the skin looked pale and tender, and his eyes were red, as though he hadn’t slept the night before. Outside, a few snowflakes drifted past the window.
“Do you need anything?” Casson asked.
Fischfang shrugged—everything, nothing. The apartment belonged to his aunt. When she’d opened the door, Fischfang had taken a moment to make sure it was Casson, then used an index finger to close a drawer in the kitchen table. But not before Casson had caught sight of a revolver.
Casson sat at the table, the aunt served them some strange drink— not exactly tea—but at least it was hot. Casson held the cup with both hands to keep warm. “Louis,” he said, “why do you have a gun? Who’s coming through the door?”
Fischfang looked out the window, a muscle in his jaw ticked. Casson had never seen him like this. Angry, of course, but that was nothing new. A communist, he lived on injustice, a vitamin crucial to daily life, and he was always fuming about what X said or Y wrote. But now, something else. This was nothing to do with Marxist fury. Fischfang was scared, and bitter.
“I have been denounced,” he said, as though the words were strange to him.
Casson’s face showed sympathy, but in his heart he wasn’t surprised. The kind of life Fischfang lived, seething with politics—the Association of Revolutionary Artists and Writers, left deviation, rotten liberalism, Stalinists, Trotskyites, Spartacists, and God only knew what else. Denunciation must have been a daily, perhaps hourly, event.
“Maybe you remember,” Fischfang went on, “that last August the Germans demanded that all Jews register.”
“I remember,” Casson said.
“I didn’t.”
Casson nodded once—of course not.
“Someone found that out, I don’t know who it was. They turned me in. For money, perhaps. Or some advantage. I don’t know.”
The aunt closed a bureau drawer in the other room. From across the courtyard Casson could hear the clatter of sewing machines. The women were hunched over their work, their hands moving quickly. “Now I understand,” he said. “You’re certain?”
“No, not completely. But things have happened.”
Casson took a breath. “So then, we’ll have to get you away somewhere.”
Fischfang stared at him for a moment. Will you really? When the time comes? Then he looked down, squared a tablet of lined paper on the table in front of him, laughed a little. “Life goes on,” he said, in a tone that meant he didn’t particularly care if it did or not. Then he passed the tablet across to Casson. “Have a look,” he said.
Spidery writing in blue ink, floating from margin to margin. Hotel Dorado it said on top. A sort of miracle, Casson thought, the way these things started from nothing. Just a few words on a piece of paper. For an instant he could smell movie theatre—figures flickering on the screen, the pitch of the voices, the sound of the projector when there was a pause in the dialogue. He pictured the title. On the marquee of the Graumont, just off the place de l’Opéra. He didn’t know why there, it was just the theatre he always imagined.