Most actresses could carry a tune if they had to and Citrine was no different. She simply played the role of a cabaret singer, and she was good at it. The throaty voice, hoarse from cigarettes and drinks in lonely cafés. I always knew you’d leave me, that I’d be alone. You could see her man, the little cockerel with a strut. And there you were, with her, at the table where we used to sit. Of course there was a kid, in military school somewhere. Oh well, perhaps once more, for old times’ sake. The eyes, slowly cast down, a few notes from the battered old piano, the spotlight dimming out. Ahh, Paris.
She sent the doorman in the black sweater to get him and they hurried away down an alley, indignant German shouts—“Loulou! Loulou!”— growing faint as they turned a corner. Which left them in the middle of a blizzard on the wrong end of Paris and no Métro with the curfew hour, one in the morning, long gone.
“We’ll walk,” she said with determination. “It will keep the blood moving. And something will occur.”
“Walk where?”
“Well, Jean-Claude, I stay at a sort of a not-so-good hotel these days—and even not-so-good as it is, they close it down like the Forbidden City after one-thirty. It usually works to sleep on a couch at the club, but not tonight, I think.”
“No.”
“So, we walk.”
“Passy . . .”
She took his arm with both of hers, her shoulder firmly against him, and they walked through the blizzard. He was happy to be held this way, he really didn’t care if they froze to death; a set of fine ice statues, one with a smile. Citrine, Citrine, he thought. She wore a long black coat and a black beret and a long muffler wound around her neck.
“I want you to be in a movie,” he said.
“Tell me about it.”
“You will star.”
“Ah.”
“You’ll be in most of the scenes. It’s about an old hotel in a little village, somewhere in the Midi. It’s been sold, and people come down from Paris one last time, and you wander in from, ah, from the land of the lost strangers.”
“Ah yes, I know this place, I have lived there. We are forever wandering into movies.”
He laughed, she held his arm tight. Somewhere out in the swirling snow, a car, the engine getting louder. They rushed into the first doorway. Lights cut the dark street—police on the prowl. “Pretend to kiss me,” she said.
They embraced, star-crossed lovers in a doorway. The car—French, German, whoever it was—passed them by. Casson’s heart was hammering, it was all he could do not to press his hand against his chest. And nothing to do with the police. My God, I am fourteen, he thought. When the car was gone they walked in silence, heads down against the wind.
She’d come to Paris from Marseilles at sixteen—it would have been running away if anybody had wanted her to stay there. Her mother had kept a boardinghouse for merchant seamen, mostly Turks and Greeks, and, the way Citrine put it, “one of them was probably my father.” Thus her skin was pale, with a shadow beneath it, she had hair the color of brown olives—worn long—with glints of gold in it, almond-shaped eyes, and to him she’d always smelled like spice—Byzantine, whatever that meant. It meant his fantasy side ascendant, he knew, but he thought about her that way anyhow. Across a room she was tall and slim, distant, just the edge of cold. And she was in fact so exotic, striking—a wide, heavy-lipped mouth below sharp cheekbones, like a runway model—that she looked lean, and hard. But the first time he’d put his arms around her, he had understood that it wasn’t that way; not outside, not inside.
In the course of the love affair she had only once told secrets about her past, about the boardinghouse where she’d grown up. “How much they loved and respected my mother,” she’d said. “They waited with me until I was fourteen, and then there were only two of them, and they made sure I enjoyed it.”
“Did they beat you?”
“Beat me? No, not really.”
That was all. They were on a train, she turned away and looked out the window. She had said what she wanted to: yes, I knew too much too young, you’ll have to go on from there.
He had tried—he thought he’d tried, he remembered it that way. She had, too. But they drifted. A day came, and whatever had been there before wasn’t there anymore. Another Parisian love affair ended, nobody could really explain it, and nobody tried.
They angled away from the river, into the 7th Arrondissement, toward Passy, hurrying across the Pont de Solférino, where white snow spun over the black river and the wind sang in the arches of the bridge. “Jean-Claude?” she said, and he stopped.
She looked up at him, there were white crystals of ice in her eyelashes, frozen tears at the corners of her eyes, and she was shivering. “I think I need to rest for a moment,” she said.
They found a little shelter, in the shallow portal of an ancient building. She burrowed against his chest. “How can there be nothing?” she said plaintively. She was right, the streets were deserted, no bicycle cabs, no people.
“We’re halfway,” he said.
“Only that?”
“A little more, maybe.”
“Jean-Claude, can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“Is there really a movie? Or is it, you know.”
“A movie. Hotel Dorado, we’re calling it. For Continental, maybe. Of course like always, it’s pure air until the great hand from the sky comes down and writes a check.”
“I wondered. Sometimes, I think, men want to run their lives backward.”
“Not women?”
“No.”
Not women? Not ever? It was warm where he held her against him. Slowly he unwound the long muffler, ran it under her chin and around so that her ears were covered.
“Thank you,” she said. “That’s better.”
“Shall we start out again? Sooner we do . . .”
“Listen!” she whispered.
A car? She canted her head, held the muffler away from one ear. He could hear only the hiss of falling snow, but then, faintly, a violin. And then a cello. He looked up the side of the building, then across the street. But the snow made it hard to locate.
“A trio,” she said.
“Yes.”
He looked at his watch. Oh, France! 3:25 on the morning of Christmas, in an occupied city, three friends determine to stay up all night and play Beethoven trios—in a cold, dark apartment. She looked up at him, mouth set hard as though she refused to cry.
Rue de Grenelle, rue Vaneau, tempting to take Invalides, but better to swing wide of the Ecole Militaire complex. Military and security offices had been there before and they would still be in operation, with new tenants. Plenty of Gestapo and French police in the neighborhood. So, find Grenelle again, and take the next small street, less important, in the same direction.
They never heard the car until they were almost on top of it, then they hugged a wall and froze. It was a Citroën Traction Avant, always a Gestapo car because the front-wheel drive worked on nights like these, with chains on the tires. It was idling—perfectly tuned, it hardly made a sound—the hot exhaust melting the snow behind the rear wheel. Through the back window they could see the silhouette of a man in the passenger seat. The driver had left the car and was standing in front of an apartment building, urinating on the front door.