“Comes out of the provincial theatre, down by Lyons somewhere. Strange fellow, afraid of his own shadow, keeps to himself pretty much. Has a little cottage out past Orly—lives with his mother, I think. No telephone.”
“Maybe I could meet him, sometime. A very sure hand, Jean-Claude, for the ‘provincial theatre, down by Lyons.’ ”
Casson shrugged and smiled, accepting the compliment, proud of his ability to unearth a secret talent. He suspected Altmann knew how much he’d depended on Louis Fischfang for his scripts, and he’d intended “Moreau” as a fiction convenient for both of them. Altmann, however, seemed to think Moreau actually existed.
“Maybe some day,” he said. “Right now, Hugo, I need him to think about Hotel Dorado and nothing else. If he meets you, he might start having ambitions.”
“Well, all right.” Altmann chased the last of the brown sauce around his plate with a piece of bread. “That banker in the first scene— Lapont? Lapère? Don’t let anything happen to him. He’s magnificent, truly loathsome—I can just see him.”
“I’ll tell Moreau he’s on the right track. Now, make it really good.”
Altmann smiled and took a sip of wine.
“I’ve been thinking,” Casson said. “Maybe we should consider a different location.”
“Not the Côte d’Azur?”
“It’s commonplace, everybody’s been there.”
“That’s the point, no?”
“Mmm—I think we have the plot, Hugo. But it’s the setting I worry about. The feel of a place that’s not the everyday world—come August, you leave your work, you leave the daily life, and you go there. Something special about it. I don’t want anybody thinking, ‘Well, I wouldn’t sell that hotel—I’d put in a damn fine restaurant and put some paint on the façade.’ ”
“No, I guess not.”
The waiter came to take the plates away. “There’s a reblochon today, gentlemen,” he said. “And pears.”
“Bring it,” Altmann said.
“I’ve been thinking about Spain,” Casson said.
“Spain?”
“Yes. Down on the Mediterranean. Someplace dark, and very quiet.
The propriétaires are still French. Expatriates. But the clients are a little more adventurous. They go to Spain for their holidays.”
“Hm.”
“Anyhow, I’d like to go and have a look. Scout locations.”
“All right, it shouldn’t be a problem. But, I don’t know, it doesn’t, somehow—Spain?”
“Could be the key to it all, Hugo.”
Altmann began preparing a cigar, piercing the leaf at the end with a metal pick he took from his pocket. He looked up suddenly, pointed the cigar at Casson. “You’re a liar,” he said. Then he broke out in a wide grin. “Have to take, uh, somebody down there with you, Jean-Claude? Just in case you need help?” He laughed and shook his head— you scoundrel, you almost had me there.
Casson smiled, a little abashed. “Well,” he said.
Altmann snapped his lighter until it lit, then warmed the cigar above the blue flame. “Romantic in Spain, Jean-Claude. Guitars and so forth. And one doesn’t run into every damn soul in the world one knows. You don’t really want to move the story there, do you?”
“No,” Casson said. “There’s a lady involved.”
Altmann nodded to himself in satisfaction, then counted out a sheaf of Occupation reichsmarks on top of the check. For a German in an occupied city, everything was virtually free. “Come take a walk with me, Jean-Claude,” he said. “I want to pick up some cashmere sweaters for my wife.”
The following afternoon Altmann sent over a letter on Continental stationery and, after a phone call, Casson took it to the Gestapo office in the old Interior Ministry building on the rue des Saussaies. The officer he saw there occupied a private room on the top floor. SS-OBERSTURMBANNFÜHRER—lieutenant colonel—Guske wore civilian clothes, an expensively tailored gray suit, and had the glossy look of a successful businessman. A big, imposing head with large ears, sparse black hair—carefully combed for maximum coverage—and the tanned scalp of a man who owns a sailboat or a ski chalet, perhaps both.
His French was extremely good. “So, we are off to sunny Spain. Not so sunny just now, I suppose.”
“No. Not in January.”
“You’ve been there before?”
“Several times. Vacations on the beaches below Barcelona, in the early thirties.”
“But not during the civil war.”
“No, sir.”
“Are you a Jew, Casson?”
“No. Catholic by birth. By practice, not much of anything.”
“I regret having to ask you that, but I’m sure you understand. The film business being what it is, unfortunately . . .”
A knock at the door, a secretary entered and handed Guske a dossier. Casson could see his name, lettered across the top of the cardboard folder, and the official stamp of the Paris Préfecture de Police. Guske opened it on his desk and started reading, idly turning pages, at one point going back in the record and searching for something, running an index finger up and down the margin. Ah yes, there it was.
He moved forward again, making the sort of small gestures—rhythmic bobbing of the head, pursing of the lips—that indicated irritation with petty minds that noted too many details, an inner voice saying yes, yes, then what, come on.
At last he looked up and smiled pleasantly. “All in order.” He squared the sheets of paper, closed the dossier, and tied it shut with its ribbon. Then he took Altmann’s letter and read it over once more. “Will your assistant be coming to see us?” he asked.
“No. Change of plans,” Casson said. “I’m going alone.”
“Very well,” Guske said. He drew a line through a sentence in Altmann’s letter and initialed the margin, wrote a comment at the bottom and initialed that as well, then clipped the letter to the dossier and made a signal—Casson did not see how it was done—that brought the secretary back. When she left he said, “Come by tomorrow, after eleven. Your Ausweis will be waiting for you at the downstairs reception.”
“Thank you,” Casson said.
“You’re welcome,” Guske said. “By the way, what did you do during the May campaign? Were you recalled to military service?”
“No,” Casson said. “I started out to go south, then I gave it up and stayed in Paris. The roads . . .”
“Yes. Too bad, really, this kind of thing has to happen. We’re neighbors, after all, I’m sure we can do better than this.” He stood, offered a hand, he had a warm, powerful grip. “Forgive me, Herr Casson, I must tell you—we do expect you to return, so, please, no wanderlust. Some people here are not so understanding as I am, and they’ll haul you back by your ears.”
He winked at Casson, gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder as he ushered him out of the office.
Casson couldn’t reach Citrine by telephone. A clerk answered at the hotel desk, told him that guests at that establishment did not receive phone calls—maybe he should try the Ritz, and banged the receiver down. So Casson took the Métro, out past the Père-Lachaise cemetery, walked for what seemed like miles through a neighborhood of deserted factories, finally found the place, then read a newspaper in the dark lobby until Citrine came sweeping through the door.
When he suggested they go to his apartment she gave him a look. “It’s work,” he said. “I’m going to Spain tomorrow, and you know what an office is like at night.”
They took a bicycle taxi up to the Passy shopping district, by the La Muette Métro and the Ranelagh gardens. It was just getting dark. “We’ll want something to eat, later on,” he explained.