Her eyes opened wide with feigned innocence. “And look! A bottle of wine. Someone must have left it here.”
“Work and supper, my love. Home before curfew.”
Truce. She walked with him in the way he’d always liked, hand curled around his arm, pressed tight to his side, yet gliding along the street like a dancer. That was good, but not best. Best was how she used to slip her hand in his coat pocket as they walked together. That would make him so happy he would forget to talk, and she would say, innocent as dawn, “Yes? And?”
For a winter evening La Muette wasn’t so bad. The little merry-go-round wouldn’t be back until the spring, but there was an organ-grinder, a blind man who smiled up at the sky as he turned the handle. Casson gave him all his change. The snow drifted down, a flake at a time, through the blue lamplight.
He’d stored up a hoard of ration coupons, even buying some on the black-market bourse that now functioned at a local café. So, for a half-hour, he could once again be the provident man-about-town. “The smoked salmon looks good, doesn’t it.” They decided on a galantine of vegetables. “A little more, please,” he said as the clerk rested her knife on the loaf and raised an eyebrow. For dessert, two beautiful oranges, chosen after long deliberation and a frank exchange between Citrine and the fruit man. Also, a very small, very expensive piece of chocolate.
There was a long line in front of the boulangerie. The smell of the fresh bread hung in the cold air, people stamped their feet to keep the circulation going. This line was always the slowest—portions had to be weighed, ration coupons cut out with a scissors—and sometimes a discussion started up. “Has anybody heard about North Africa?” Casson looked around to see who was speaking. A small, attractive woman wearing a coat with a Persian-lamb collar. “They say,” she continued, “an important city has been captured by the English.” She sounded hopeful—there’d been no good news for a long time. “Perhaps it’s just a rumor.”
It was not a rumor. Casson had heard the report on the French service of the BBC. The city was Tobruk, in Libya. Twenty-five thousand Italian troops taken prisoner, eighty-seven tanks captured by Australian and British soldiers. He started to answer, Citrine gave him a sharp tug on the arm and hissed in his ear, “Tais-toi!” Shut up.
Nobody on the line spoke, they waited, in their own worlds. On the way home to the rue Chardin, Citrine said, “You must be born yesterday. Don’t you know there are informers on the food lines? They get money for each radio the Germans find, they have only to persuade some fool to say he heard the news on the BBC. Jean-Claude, please, come down from the clouds.”
“I didn’t realize,” he said.
He had almost spoken, he had actually started to speak when Citrine stopped him. They would have searched the apartment. Looked in the closet.
“You must be careful,” she said gently.
On the rue Chardin, a gleaming black Mercedes was idling at the curb. The radio! No, he told himself. Then the door opened and out came the baroness, smothered in furs, who lived in the apartment below him. “Oh, monsieur, good evening,” she said, startled into courtesy.
The man who’d held the door for her, a German naval officer, stepped to her side and made a certain motion, a slight stiffening of the posture, a barely perceptible inclination of the head; a bow due the very tiniest of the petit bourgeois. He was pale and featureless, one of those aristocrats, Casson thought, so refined by ages of breeding they are invisible in front of a white wall. There was an awkward moment— introduction was both unavoidable and unthinkable. The baroness solved the problem with a small, meaningless sound, the officer with a second stiffening, then both rushed toward the Mercedes.
“What was that?” Citrine asked, once they were in the apartment.
“The baroness. She lives down below.”
“Well, well. She’s rather pretty. Do you—?”
“Are you crazy?”
They took off their coats. Citrine walked around the small living room, moved the drape aside and stared out over the rooftops. The Eiffel Tower was a dim shape in the darkness on the other side of the river. “It’s all the same,” she said. “Except for the lights.”
“Oh look,” he said. “A bottle of wine. Someone must have left it here.”
For the occasion, a pack of Gauloises. They smoked, drank wine, played the radio at its lowest volume. Citrine paged through the script, following the trail of SYLVIE as it wound from scene to scene. Casson watched her face carefully—this was Fischfang’s first real test. Altmann could be fooled, not Citrine. She scowled, sighed, flipped pages when she grew impatient. “How old is this Sylvie, do you think?”
“Young, but experienced. In the important moments, much older than her years. She wants very much to be frivolous—her life carried her past those times too quickly—but she can’t forget what she’s seen, and what she knows.”
Citrine concentrated on a certain passage, then closed the script, keeping the place with her index finger. She met Casson’s eyes, became another person. “ ‘My dreams? No, I don’t remember them. Oh, sometimes I’m running. But we all run away at night, don’t we.’ ”
Casson opened his copy. “Where are you?”
“Page fifty-five, in the attic. With Paul, we’re . . .” She hunted for a moment. “We’re . . . we’ve opened a trunk full of old costumes.”
“For the carnival, at Lent.”
“Oh.” She turned to the wall, crossed her arms. “ ‘My dreams.’ ” She shook her head. “ ‘No. I don’t remember them.’ ” I don’t want to remember them. And somehow she bent the word dreams back toward its other meaning. She relaxed, dropped out of character. “Too much?”
“I wish Louis were here. He’d like it that way.”
“You?”
“Maybe.”
“You want to direct this, don’t you.”
“I always want to, Citrine. But I know not to.”
8:30. A second bottle of wine. Scarlatti from the BBC. The room smelled like smoke, wine, and perfume. “Did you know,” she said, “I made a movie in Finland?”
“In Finnish?”
“No. They dubbed it later. I just went ba-ba-ba with whatever feeling they told me to have and the other actors spoke Finnish.”
“That doesn’t work,” Casson said. “We did a German version that way, for The Devil’s Bridge.”
Citrine’s eyes filled with soft passion, she leaned forward on the couch, her voice a whisper. “Ba, ba-ba. Ba-ba-ba?”
Casson extended the wine bottle, holding it over Citrine’s glass. “Ba ba?”
“Don’t,” she said, laughing.
He smiled at her, poured the wine. Happiness rolled over him, he felt suddenly warm. Perhaps, he thought, paradise goes by in an instant. When you’re not looking.
“I’m almost asleep,” she said.
Or was it? Warmth rolled over him, he felt suddenly happy. He went to the radiator and put a hand on it. “A miracle,” he said. The apartment hadn’t been like this for months. From somewhere, coal, apparently abundant coal, had appeared, and Madame Fitou had decided, against all precedent, to use a great deal of it. This was, he realized, a rather complicated miracle.
“Suddenly,” he said, “there’s heat.”
Citrine spread her hands, meaning obvious conclusion. “Don’t you see?”
“No.”
“A beautiful baroness, a dashing German officer, coal is delivered.”
It felt good in the apartment, they were in no hurry to leave. The Occupation authority, grateful for a compliant population, had given Paris a Christmas present: extension of curfew to 3:00 A.M. Casson and Citrine talked—Hotel Dorado, life and times, the way of the world. They’d never disagreed about big things, it had gone wrong between them somewhere else. They liked eccentricity, they liked kindness, coincidence, people who lost themselves in the study of planets or bugs. They liked people with big hearts. They wanted to hear that in the end it all turned out for the best.