“This doesn’t leave you—I mean . . .”
“No, no! Not at all. Don’t think it.”
“Good, then. I’ll tell Sir Charles. In a year we’ll all be at the screening, drinking champagne.”
“The best!”
“Our treat!”
“Just you try it!”
“Good-bye, Casson. We’ll send along a letter.”
“Yes. Good-bye.”
Merde. Double merde.
Gabriella knocked and opened the door. “Your wife on the line,” she said.
He always had a mental picture of Marie-Claire when he talked to her on the phone. She had tiny eyes and a hard little mouth, which made her seem spiteful and mean. Not a fair portrait, in fact, because there were moments when she wasn’t that way at all.
Of course—Parisienne to the depths of her soul—she made herself beautiful. She smelled delicious, and touched you accidentally. Had you in bed before you knew it, had life her way after that. Knowing Marie-Claire as he did, Casson had always assumed that Bruno, a pompous ass at the dinner table, was a maestro in the bedroom.
“The Pichards cannot come,” Marie-Claire said. “Yet Bruno insists we have this dinner. Françoise called and said that Philippe’s younger brother, an officer, had been wounded, near the town of Namur. A sergeant had actually telephoned, from somewhere in Belgium. It must have been, I don’t know, dreadful. Poor Françoise was in tears, not brave at all. I thought well, that’s that. Cancel the cake, call the domestic agency. But Bruno insisted we go on.”
Casson made a certain Gallic sound—it meant refined horror at a world gone wrong. Again.
Marie-Claire continued, “So, I rationalize. You know me, Jean-Claude. There’s an elephant in the hall closet, I think, oh some circus performer’s been here and forgotten his elephant. Now Yvette Langlade calls, Françoise has just called her—to explain why she and Philippe won’t be there. And Yvette says we are going to cancel, aren’t we? And I say no, life must go on, and she’s horrified, I can tell, but of course she won’t come out and say it.”
Casson stared out the window. He really didn’t know what to do. Marie-Claire had a problem with her lover and her circle of friends— it didn’t have much to do with him. “The important thing is to get through today,” he said, then paused for a moment. The telephone line hissed gently. “Whatever you decide to do, Marie-Claire, I will go along with that.”
“All right.” She took a breath, then sighed. “Will you call me in an hour, Jean-Claude? Please?”
He said yes, they hung up, he held his head in his hands.
He thought about canceling his lunch—with the agent Perlemère—and asked Gabriella to telephone, cautiously, to see if Monsieur Perlemère is able to keep his lunch appointment.
Oh yes. A little thing like war did not deter Perlemère. So the good soldier Casson marched off to Alexandre to eat warm potato-and-beef salad and hear about Perlemère’s stable of lame horses—aging ingenues, actors who drank too much, the Rin-Tin-Tin look-alike, Paco, who had already bitten two directors, and an endless list beyond that. A volume business.
Perlemère ordered two dozen Belons, the strongest of the oysters, now at the very end of their season. He rubbed his hands and attacked with relish, making a thrup sound as he inhaled each oyster, closing his eyes with pleasure, then drinking the juice from the shell, a second thrup, followed by a brief grunt that meant arguments about the meaning of life were irrelevant once you could afford to eat oysters.
Perlemère was fat, with a small but prominent black mustache—a sort of Jewish Oliver Hardy. Perlemère, Perlmutter, mother-of-pearl, Casson thought. Curious names the Jews had. “I saw Harry Fleischer this morning,” he said. “Off to MGM.”
“Mm. Time to run, eh?”
“Maybe for the best.”
Perlemère shrugged. “The Germans hit first. Now we’ll settle with them once and for all.”
Casson nodded polite agreement.
“What’d you do last time?” Perlemère demolished an oyster.
“I graduated lycée in 1916, headed for the Normale.” The Ecole Normale Supérieure the most exclusive college in the Sorbonne, was France’s Harvard, Yale, and Princeton all rolled into one. “My eighteenth birthday, I went down to the recruiters. They asked me a few questions, then sent me off to install cameras on Spads flying reconnaissance over German lines. I changed film, developed it—really the war started me in this business.”
“Normalien, eh?” He meant Casson was well-connected; a member, by university affiliation, of the aristocracy.
Casson shrugged. “I guess it meant something, once upon a time.”
“School of life, over here.” Thrup. “But I haven’t done too badly.”
Casson laughed—as though such a thing could be in question!
“I expect this war business will go on for a while,” Perlemère said. “Your German’s stubborn, I’ll admit that. He doesn’t know when he’s beaten. But we’ll give them a whipping, just watch.”
Casson took a bite of the potato-and-beef salad, which would have been delicious if he’d had an appetite, and a sip of the Graves, which he didn’t care for. “You represent Citrine, Jacques?”
“Not any more. Besides, what do you want with her?”
“Nothing special in mind. I just remembered she used to be with you.”
“Suzy Balcon, Jean-Claude. Remember where you heard that.”
“Oh?”
“I’ll send a photo over. She’s tall and sophisticated—but she puts your mind in the gutter. Mm. Never mind Citrine.”
Two businessmen maneuvered down the packed aisle and managed to squeeze themselves around the tiny table next to Casson. “Two hundred German tanks on fire,” one of them said. “Just imagine that.”
Back at the office, Gabriella: “Your wife called, Monsieur Casson. She said to tell you that the dinner has been canceled, and would you please telephone her when you have a moment. She’s at the beauty parlor until three-thirty, home any time after that.”
“Gabriella, do you think you could find me Le Temps?” For Casson, a day without a newspaper was agony.
“I can go to the tabac.”
“I would really appreciate it.”
“I’ll go, then. Oh, Maître Versol asks that you call him.”
“No.”
“Yes, monsieur. I am afraid so.”
Back in his office, Casson retrieved the swollen dossier from the bottom drawer where he’d hidden it from himself. In 1938, someone at Pathé had woken up one morning with a vision: the world could simply not go on without another remake of Samson and Delilah. And Jean Casson had to produce. Costume epics were not at all his specialty, but Pathé was huge and powerful and deaf—the only word they could hear was yes.
He got a script. Something close to it, anyhow. Signed a Samson who, from medium range in twilight, looked strong, and a reasonable Delilah—overpriced but adequately sultry. Pathé then canceled the project, paid him based on the escape clauses, and went on to new visions. Casson tied up the project, or thought he did.
One small problem: his production manager had ordered four hundred beards. These were for the extras, and were composed of human hair, prepared by the estimable theatrical makeup house LeBeau et cie. Cost: 5,000 francs. Somewhere just about here the problems began. The beards were, or were not, delivered to a warehouse Productions Casson rented in Levallois. Subsequently, they were returned to LeBeau. Or perhaps they weren’t. LeBeau certainly didn’t have the beards—or thought he didn’t. Casson didn’t have them either—as far as he knew. It was all très difficile.