Out on the boulevard, from the building they’d requisitioned in the first month of the Occupation, the young fascists of the Garde Française and the Jeune Front goose-stepped on the packed snow. Across the street, the optician Lissac displayed a sign that said WE ARE LISSAC, NOT ISAAC. A few doors down, broken windows, where an umbrella-and-glove shop had been forced to advertise itself as an Enterprise Juive.
Would murdering Franco stop that?
His heart told him no.
Then do it for France.
Where?
France—was that Pétain? The Jeune Front? Those pinched, white, angry little faces, scowling with envy. The patrons of the bar on the avenue Montaigne? The soldiers running away from the battle on the Meuse?
But he didn’t dial the telephone. At least, not all the numbers.
And so, inevitably, he arrived at his office one morning to find that a message had been slipped beneath the door. Hocus-pocus, was how he thought about it. An uncomfortable moment, then on with his day.
Hotel Dorado. That was better medicine than Spanish murder, right? And so, inevitably, the hocus-pocus itself.
Maybe not the best time for it, an icy night in the dead heart of January. Something that day had reached him, some sad nameless thing, and the antidote, when he found her, was blonde—a shimmering peroxide cap above a lopsided grin. Older up close than she’d first seemed—at a gallery opening—and not properly connected to the daily world. Everything about her off center, as though she’d once been bent the wrong way and never quite sprung back.
They sat on the couch and nuzzled for a time. “There is nobody quite like me,” she whispered.
He smiled and said she was right.
She undid a button on his shirt and slid a hand inside. The telephone rang once, then stopped. It bothered her. “Who is it?” she said, as though he could know that.
But, in fact, he did know. And a minute later, sixty seconds later, it did it again. “What’s going on?” she said. Now she was frightened.
“It’s nothing,” he said. Then, to prove it was nothing, “I have to go out for a while.”
“Why?” she said.
He’d always thought, not all that proud of it, that he was a pretty good liar. But not this time. He’d been caught unprepared, no story made up just in case, so he tried to improvise, while she stared at him with hurt eyes and pulled her sweater back down. In the end, she agreed to wait in the apartment until he returned. “Look,” he said, “it’s only business. Sometimes, the movie business, you need to take care of something quietly, secretly.”
She nodded, mouth curved down, wanting to believe him, knowing better.
In the street, it was ten degrees. He walked with lowered head and clenched teeth, the wind cutting through his coat and sweater. He swore at it, out loud, mumbling his way along the rue Chardin like a madman hauling his private menagerie to a new location.
At last, half-frozen, he crept down the ice-coated steps of the Ranelagh Métro and installed himself in front of a poster for the Opéra-Comique, a Spanish dancer swirling her skirt. A few minutes later, he heard the rumble of a train approaching through the tunnel. The doors slid open, out came a little man with a briefcase of the type carried under the arm. Casson could have spotted him five miles away, but then, the Germans were “idiots.” And he, Casson, was so brilliant he’d believed Erno Simic when he’d called them that.
The contact was a small man, clearly angry at the world. Peering up and down the station platform he reminded Casson of a character in an English children’s story. The Wind in the Willows? Waxed mustache, derby, fierce eyebrows, ferocious glare above an old-fashioned collar. Following instructions, Casson turned to the wall and stared at the poster. For a time, nothing happened. The dancer smiled at him haughtily and clicked her castanets in the air.
Finally, the man stood beside him. Cleared his throat. “An excellent performance, I’m told.”
That was part one of the password. Part two was the countersign: “Yes. I saw it Thursday,” Casson said.
The contact leaned the briefcase against the wall at his feet and began to button his coat. Then, hands in pockets, he hurried away, his footsteps echoing down the empty platform as he headed into the night. Casson counted to twenty, picked up the briefcase, and went home.
His blonde was bundled in a blanket, snoring gently on the couch. He went into the bedroom and closed the door. Before he put the briefcase on the shelf that ran across the top of his closet—under the bed? behind the refrigerator?—he had a look inside. Three hundred thousand pesetas—about $35,000 in American money—in thirty bundles of hundred-peseta notes, each packet of ten pinned through its upper right-hand corner.
Back in the living room, the blonde opened one eye. “You don’t mind I took a nap,” she said.
“No,” he said.
“Keep me company,” she said, raising the blanket. She’d taken off her skirt and panties.
Casson lay down next to her. It wasn’t so bad, in the end. Two castaways, adrift in the Paris night, three hundred thousand pesetas in a bedroom closet, air-raid sirens at the southern edge of the city, then a long flight of aircraft, south to north, passing above them. On the radio, the BBC. A quintet, swing guitar, violin—maybe Stephane Grappelli—a female vocalist, voice rough with static. The volume had to be very low: radios were supposed to be turned over to the Germans, and Casson was afraid of Madame Fitou—but he loved the thing, couldn’t bear to part with it. It glowed in the dark and played music—he sometimes thought of it as the last small engine of civilization, a magic device, and he was its keeper, the hermit who hid the sacred ring. Some day, in times to come, the barbarians would break camp and trudge away down the dusty roads and then, starting with a single radio, they would somehow put everything back the way it had been.
Very sensitive to the touch, this blonde. Thin, excitable—she sucked in her breath when something felt good. Still, she was quiet about it. That was just common sense. They even pulled the blanket up over their heads, which made everything seem dark and secret and forbidden. Probably he’d laugh at that some day, but just then it wasn’t funny, because they really were out there, the secret police and their agents, and this was something they probably didn’t approve of. It wasn’t spelled out—just better to be quiet.
When they were done with one thing, and before they moved on to the next, Casson went to the phone, dialed Simic’s number, let it ring once, and hung up. Then he counted to sixty, and did it again. He wondered, as he was counting, if it was a good idea to keep Simic’s number in his address book. In fact, where did Simic keep his number?
He crawled back under the blanket, the blonde yawned and stretched, and they began to resettle themselves on the narrow couch. By his ear she said, “You had better be careful, my friend, doing that sort of thing.”
“Perhaps you prefer I do this sort of thing?”
“I do, yes. Anybody would.” A few minutes later she said, “Oh, you’re sweet, you know. Truly.” Then: “A pity if you invite them to kill you, chéri.”
Lunch, Chez Marcel, rognons de veau, a Hermitage from Jaboulet, 1931.
Hugo Altmann held his glass with three fingers at the top of the stem, canted it slightly to one side, poured it half full, then twisted the bottle as he turned it upright. He looked at the wine in his glass, gave it just a hint of a sniff and a swirl before he drank. “I like the script,” he said. “Pretty damn smooth for a first draft. Who is this Moreau?”