Casson held his breath. The Germans were only fifty feet from them. The driver had left the Citroën’s door ajar, and the passenger leaned over and called out to him. The driver laughed, said something back. Banter, apparently. Taking a piss in a snowstorm, that was funny. Doing it on some Frenchman’s door, that was even funnier. Jokes, back and forth, guttural, thick, incomprehensible. To Casson, it sounded as though somebody was grinding language into broken words that could never be used again. But, he thought, they are in Paris, we are not in Berlin.
The man at the doorway started buttoning up his fly, then, as he hurried toward the car, he said the words “rue de Vaugirard”—an island of French in the German sentence. So, Casson thought, they were going to the rue de Vaugirard, to arrest somebody on Christmas Eve. Citrine’s hand found his, she’d heard it too.
Suddenly the car moved—backward. Casson pressed frantically against the wall, Citrine’s hand closed like a steel claw. Then the wheels spun, caught, and the car drove off down the street. The Germans hadn’t known they were there, they were just making sure they didn’t get stuck in the snow.
An hour later, the apartment on the rue Chardin. There was no heat, and Casson preferred not to turn on the lights, often faintly visible at the edges of the blackout curtains. They shed their outer clothes in the bathroom, hanging them over the bar that held the shower curtain so they could drip into the tub as the snow and ice melted.
“Bed is the only place,” he said. He was right, they were both trembling with the cold, and they climbed into bed wearing their underwear.
At first the sheets were as cold as they were, then the body heat began to work. She took a deep breath and sighed, coming gently apart as the night’s adventure receded.
“Are you going to sleep?” he said.
“Whether I want to or not.” Her voice was faint, she was barely conscious.
“Oh. All right.”
She smiled. “Jean-Claude, Jean-Claude.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Go to sleep.”
He couldn’t—he ached for her.
She sensed what he was going to do, moved close in a way that made it impossible. “I can’t, Jean-Claude. I can’t. Please.”
Why?
As though she’d heard: “You’re going to think a dozen things, but it’s that I can’t feel that way again, not now. If we were just going to amuse ourselves, well, why not? But it isn’t that way with us, you get inside me, that’s no play on words, I mean to say it. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“If it wasn’t a war, if I had money. If I just had it in me, the strength to live . . .”
“You’re right, I’m sorry. It’s just me, Citrine.”
“I know. I know you—you fuck all the girls.” But the way she said it was not unkind.
And even before the sentence ended, she was slipping away. Her breathing changed, and she fell asleep. He watched her for a time. Strange, the way her face worked, she always looked worried when she slept. Sometimes her breathing stopped, for a long moment, then it would start again. She dies, he’d thought years ago. She dies, then she changes her mind.
They woke up in the middle of Christmas Day. The snow had stopped. She wrote the name of a hotel on a scrap of paper, kissed him on the forehead, said “Thank you, Jean-Claude,” and went out into the cold.
29 December, 1940.
He left the office at six-thirty. He had a little money now, from Altmann, and a secretary. A cousin of his named Mireille, from the Morvan, his mother’s side of the family. She was a dark, unhappy woman with three children and an eternally useless husband. She showed up just about the time the money did, so he hired her—it was simply life’s way, he figured, of telling you what you ought to do.
The coldest winter of the century. The price of coal climbed into the sky, the old and the poor got into bed with every scrap of wool they owned and there they found them a week later. German soldiers flooded into Paris, from garrison duty in Warsaw and Prague, and Paris entertained them. Are you tense, poor thing? Have a little of this, and a little of that. England wouldn’t give up. The submarine blockade was starving them, but they had never been reasonable, and they apparently weren’t going to be now. Well, the French would also survive. More or less.
Out on the street, Casson pulled his coat tight around him and turned toward the Métro station at avenue Marceau. Two stops, Iéna and Trocadéro, and he could walk the rest of the way. The Passy station was closer to the rue Chardin, but that involved a correspondance, a change of lines, so if he stayed on the Line 9 train he’d be home in a few minutes. Albertine, tonight. His big, ugly treasure of a farm girl. Something good to eat. Vegetables, cow food—but garlic, salt, a drop of oil, and the cunning way she chopped it all up. Jesus! Was it possible that he’d reached that ghastly moment in life when the belly was more important than the prick? No! Never that! Why, he’d take that Albertine and spread her . . .
“Hey, Casson.”
That voice. He turned, annoyed. Erno Simic, waving his arm and smiling like a well-loathed schoolmate, was trotting to catch up with him. “Wait for me!”
“Simic, hello.”
“I never called—you’re angry?”
“No. Not at all.”
“Well, I been busy. Imagine that. Me. I got phone calls and messages, meetings and telegrams. Hey, now we know the world is upside down. Still it means a few francs, a few balles, as they say, eh? So we’ll have a drink, on me. I promised a lunch, I’m gonna owe it to you, but now it’s a drink. Okay?”
Paris hadn’t surprised Casson for twenty years but it did now. Simic took him down the Champs-Elysées to avenue Montaigne, one of the most prestigious streets in the city, then turned right toward the river. They worked their way through a busy crowd in front of the Plaza-Athenée, mostly German officers and their plump wives, then walked another block to a residential building. On the top floor a grand apartment with a view to the river had been converted to a very private bar.
Seated at a white piano, an aristocratic woman wearing a black cocktail dress and a pillbox hat with a veil was playing “Begin the Beguine.” Simic and Casson were shown to a table by a fat man in a sharkskin suit draped to hide both him and some sort of weapon. The tables on the teak parquet were set far apart, while the walls were covered with naughty oil paintings of naughty, and exceptionally pink, women. The room was crowded; a beautiful woman at the next table drinking tea, on second glance perhaps a prostitute of the most elevated class. By the window, two French colonels of cavalry. Then a table of dark, mustached men, Armenian or Lebanese, Casson thought. There was a famous ballet master—Russian émigré—sitting alone. In the corner, three men who could have been gangsters or black-market butchers, or both. Simic enjoyed Casson’s amazement, his big smile broadening from ingratiating to triumphant.
“Hah! It’s discreet enough for you, Casson?”
“How long—?”
Simic spread his hands. “Summer, as soon as everything settled down. It belongs to Craveur, right?”
Craveur was a famous restaurant owner, his family had been in the business since 1790, when the first restaurants were opened. Simic signaled to a waiter, a plate of petits fours salées—herring paste, oysters, or smoked salmon on puff pastry—appeared along with two large whiskey-and-sodas.
“It’s what I always have,” Simic confided. “Mm, take all you want,” he said, mouth full.
Casson sipped the whiskey-and-soda, lit up one of Simic’s Camel cigarettes, and sat back on a little gold chair with a gold cushion.
“Your name came up in a conversation I had,” Simic said. “With a man called Templeton. You know him, right? Works in a bank?”