The World at Night

“Not from London, mon ami. What did he want?”

“He wasn’t direct, but he suggested that I do business with a certain distribution company.”

Langlade stared at the ceiling for awhile. When he spoke again, his tone of voice was subtly altered. “He called from France.” Then, “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Casson said. “He’s in France, you think?”

“Possibly Spain, or Switzerland, but definitely on the Continent- because the lines under the Channel were cut last June.”

“Well,” Casson said.

“You better think it over,” Langlade said.

Someone knocked discreetly on the office door. Langlade, it seemed to Casson, was not sorry to be interrupted.

The apartment was across a courtyard from a dress factory, through a cloudy window Casson could see women working at sewing machines. Fischfang sat at a table in the tiny kitchen, wearing an old sweater, and a blanket around his shoulders. He’d shaved his beard and mustache, the skin looked pale and tender, and his eyes were red, as though he hadn’t slept the night before. Outside, a few snowflakes drifted past the window.

“Do you need anything?” Casson asked.

Fischfang shrugged-everything, nothing. The apartment belonged to his aunt. When she’d opened the door, Fischfang had taken a moment to make sure it was Casson, then used an index finger to close a drawer in the kitchen table. But not before Casson had caught sight of a revolver.

Casson sat at the table, the aunt served them some strange drink- not exactly tea-but at least it was hot. Casson held the cup with both hands to keep warm. “Louis,” he said, “why do you have a gun? Who’s coming through the door?”

Fischfang looked out the window, a muscle in his jaw ticked. Casson had never seen him like this. Angry, of course, but that was nothing new. A communist, he lived on injustice, a vitamin crucial to daily life, and he was always fuming about what X said or Y wrote. But now, something else. This was nothing to do with Marxist fury. Fischfang was scared, and bitter.

“I have been denounced,” he said, as though the words were strange to him.

Casson’s face showed sympathy, but in his heart he wasn’t surprised. The kind of life Fischfang lived, seething with politics-the Association of Revolutionary Artists and Writers, left deviation, rotten liberalism, Stalinists, Trotskyites, Spartacists, and God only knew what else. Denunciation must have been a daily, perhaps hourly, event.

“Maybe you remember,” Fischfang went on, “that last August the Germans demanded that all Jews register.”

“I remember,” Casson said.

“I didn’t.”

Casson nodded once-of course not.

“Someone found that out, I don’t know who it was. They turned me in. For money, perhaps. Or some advantage. I don’t know.”

The aunt closed a bureau drawer in the other room. From across the courtyard Casson could hear the clatter of sewing machines. The women were hunched over their work, their hands moving quickly. “Now I understand,” he said. “You’re certain?”

“No, not completely. But things have happened.”

Casson took a breath. “So then, we’ll have to get you away somewhere.”

Fischfang stared at him for a moment. Will you really? When the time comes? Then he looked down, squared a tablet of lined paper on the table in front of him, laughed a little. “Life goes on,” he said, in a tone that meant he didn’t particularly care if it did or not. Then he passed the tablet across to Casson. “Have a look,” he said.

Spidery writing in blue ink, floating from margin to margin. Hotel Dorado it said on top. A sort of miracle, Casson thought, the way these things started from nothing. Just a few words on a piece of paper. For an instant he could smell movie theatre-figures flickering on the screen, the pitch of the voices, the sound of the projector when there was a pause in the dialogue. He pictured the title. On the marquee of the Graumont, just off the place de l’Opera. He didn’t know why there, it was just the theatre he always imagined.

He read on. A little village in the south of France, on the Mediterranean. A fishing village, where a few Parisians come every August to stay at the Hotel Dorado. Autumn, the season over, the hotel deserted. The owners, an old couple, about to retire. The hotel has been sold to a large combine, they’re going to tear it down and build a new one, modern and expensive. The couple decides to write to their oldest, most faithful clients. “The hotel is going out of business, but come and stay with us the last weekend in October, we’ll have a glass of wine, a few memories.”

Casson looked up. “All in one weekend?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good.”

“A night when they arrive. A day when we meet them, a long night when everything happens, then a little scene where they get on the train to go back to Paris-except for the ones who are going to run off together and start a new life.”

Casson went back to reading. The characters you’d want-the Corps Humaine, the human repertory company-were all there. The banker, the confidence man, the actress, the postal clerk and his wife who scrimp and save all year so they can pretend to be upper class for two weeks, the lovers-their spouses left in Paris-the widow, the couple about to separate, giving it one last chance.

“Who’s the star, Louis?”

“I thought-one of those ideas that’s either a love letter from the gods or a little patch of quicksand meant just for you-it should be a young woman. Lonely, mysterious. Who misses her train and comes there by accident. Not a member of the sentimental company but, finally, its heart. Or, I don’t know, maybe that’s overdoing it.”

Casson waved him off. “No, that’s what I like about this kind of movie, you can’t really overdo it.”

“Who would you want to star?”

Casson watched the falling snow for a time. “Last May, a hundred years ago if you know what I mean, I had lunch with old Perlemere, who used to represent Citrine, and her name came up in the conversation.”

Fischfang’s eyes sparkled. “That’s good. More than one way, if you think about it.”

“Beautiful-not pretty. Mysterious. No virgin. She’s been to the wars, she’s battle-scarred, but maybe she can try one last time, maybe she can love again, but we don’t know until the final scene. It should be-will life let her?”

“A character trying to come back,” Fischfang said. “Played by an actress trying to come back.”

Casson nodded. “Something like that.”

They both smiled. Maybe it would work, maybe it wouldn’t, like everything else. But they were trying, at least. They could see their breath when they talked in the cold kitchen, outside the snow drifted past. “I’ll get it typed up,” Casson said.

Hugo Altmann tilted his chair back and blew a long, slow, meditative plume of smoke at the ceiling of his office. “Citrine, Citrine,” he said. “Do you know, Casson, that she always seemed to me the most elementally French actress. The sort of woman, in bed she gives everything. Yet there is something inside her, a bitterness, a knowledge of the world, that spoils it all-you get everything, but it isn’t what you wanted.” He paused a moment. “You’ve worked with her before?”

“Night Run.”

“Ach, of course. And to direct?”

“Don’t really know yet.”

“Well, let’s find you some development money, and get a screenplay on paper. Who do you have in mind there? Cocteau’s working, lots of others.”

“Louis Moreau, perhaps.”

“Who?”

“Moreau.”

“Never heard of him.”

“He’s new.”