The World at Night

“Hm. Well, all right, give him a try.” He leaned over toward Casson, his expression shrewd and confidential. “So, between us, who saves the hotel at the end, eh? I’m betting on the confidence man,” he said with a wink.

It took two weeks to find Citrine. He trudged across the city, office to office, the world of small-time talent agents, booking agents, press agents-everybody knew somebody. Perlemere helped, offering the names of a few friends. In the end, it turned out that she was performing at a cabaret amid the working-class dance halls on the rue de Lappe, out by Bastille. Le Perroquet, the parrot, it was called. Casson pulled his coat tight around him and kept his eyes down-this was not his district, he didn’t belong here, and he didn’t want a punch in the nose to remind him of it.

Closed, the first time he went. No reason, just closed. The blue neon parrot on a red branch was dark. The next time he tried was on Christmas Eve, and it was open. There was a poster by the door, the name Loulou across the bottom. Citrine-though it took him a moment to recognize her-Citrine on a high stool. Top hat, net fabric with rhinestones on top, bare legs crossed down below, spike heels with satin bows, a cabaret smile. Well, what about you, big boy?

A Christmas Eve blizzard. The white flakes swirled and hissed and made drifts in the doorways. Now and then a car came sliding down the street, tires spinning, engine whining as it worked its way around a corner. The blue-painted glass on the street lamps cast Hollywood moonlight on the snow.

Hot inside, steamy, and packed. He tried the stage door, but a doorman dressed like an apache-black sweater and beret and cigarette dangling from the corner of the mouth-ran him off. “You’ll pay. Like the rest of the world, conard.”

He paid. To join a hundred German officers jammed together in a small room, reeking of shaving lotion and stale sweat and spilled wine and all the rest of it. There was a master of ceremonies in a tuxedo, sweating and telling jokes, then zebras, naked girls in zebra masks, bucking and prancing, hoisting their knees up to their foreheads and singing “Paris smells so sweet.” Saluting British style-whistles from the crowd-then turning around and grabbing their ankles-roars of approval. A fat major next to Casson almost died of pleasure, laughed as tears ran down his cheeks, gave Casson a best-pal whack between the shoulder blades that sent him flying into the crowd.

Then the room went dark, the curtain creaked open, a violet spotlight popped on, and there was Loulou. By then he’d worked his way to a position near the stage where he knew she would be able to see him, and, after the second number, she did. He could tell. At first, Jesus it’s Casson, what’s he doing here? Then the corner of her mouth lifted, not much, but a little: he was there to see her, it was no accident.

But he wasn’t going to see her anytime soon. A table of colonels, prominent in the front of the room, demanded the presence of the beautiful Loulou and she was produced, guided to the table by the owner of the Perroquet, an eel in a checked suit. They were merry colonels, they touched her shoulder and told her jokes and tried to speak French and gave her champagne and had quite a time for themselves. Question was, would Hansi be the one to fuck her, or was she going to favor Willi? The battle raged, the competing armies surged back and forth as Casson looked at his watch and realized that the last Metro of the night had left Bastille station.

Finally the owner came around, bowed and scraped and tried to get his chanteuse back. Hansi and Willi were in no mood for that, but the owner had a trick up his checked sleeve and sent a phalanx of zebras into action. They arrived neighing and whinnying, sat on the colonels’ laps and wiggled about, tickled their chins, stole their eyeglasses and fogged them with their breath.

The colonels roared and turned red. Champagne was poured into glasses and everywhere else-to the colonels it seemed that champagne had found its way to places where champagne had never been before. One ingenious soul filled his mouth until his eyes bulged, then punched his cheeks with his index fingers-pfoo! — showering Hansi and Willi, assorted zebras, and Loulou, who wiped her face with her hand as she made her escape and climbed up on the tiny stage.

Most actresses could carry a tune if they had to and Citrine was no different. She simply played the role of a cabaret singer, and she was good at it. The throaty voice, hoarse from cigarettes and drinks in lonely cafes. I always knew you’d leave me, that I’d be alone. You could see her man, the little cockerel with a strut. And there you were, with her, at the table where we used to sit. Of course there was a kid, in military school somewhere. Oh well, perhaps once more, for old times’ sake. The eyes, slowly cast down, a few notes from the battered old piano, the spotlight dimming out. Ahh, Paris.

She sent the doorman in the black sweater to get him and they hurried away down an alley, indignant German shouts-“Loulou! Loulou!”- growing faint as they turned a corner. Which left them in the middle of a blizzard on the wrong end of Paris and no Metro with the curfew hour, one in the morning, long gone.

“We’ll walk,” she said with determination. “It will keep the blood moving. And something will occur.”

“Walk where?”

“Well, Jean-Claude, I stay at a sort of a not-so-good hotel these days-and even not-so-good as it is, they close it down like the Forbidden City after one-thirty. It usually works to sleep on a couch at the club, but not tonight, I think.”

“No.”

“So, we walk.”

“Passy …”

She took his arm with both of hers, her shoulder firmly against him, and they walked through the blizzard. He was happy to be held this way, he really didn’t care if they froze to death; a set of fine ice statues, one with a smile. Citrine, Citrine, he thought. She wore a long black coat and a black beret and a long muffler wound around her neck.

“I want you to be in a movie,” he said.

“Tell me about it.”

“You will star.”

“Ah.”

“You’ll be in most of the scenes. It’s about an old hotel in a little village, somewhere in the Midi. It’s been sold, and people come down from Paris one last time, and you wander in from, ah, from the land of the lost strangers.”

“Ah yes, I know this place, I have lived there. We are forever wandering into movies.”

He laughed, she held his arm tight. Somewhere out in the swirling snow, a car, the engine getting louder. They rushed into the first doorway. Lights cut the dark street-police on the prowl. “Pretend to kiss me,” she said.

They embraced, star-crossed lovers in a doorway. The car-French, German, whoever it was-passed them by. Casson’s heart was hammering, it was all he could do not to press his hand against his chest. And nothing to do with the police. My God, I am fourteen, he thought. When the car was gone they walked in silence, heads down against the wind.

She’d come to Paris from Marseilles at sixteen-it would have been running away if anybody had wanted her to stay there. Her mother had kept a boardinghouse for merchant seamen, mostly Turks and Greeks, and, the way Citrine put it, “one of them was probably my father.” Thus her skin was pale, with a shadow beneath it, she had hair the color of brown olives-worn long-with glints of gold in it, almond-shaped eyes, and to him she’d always smelled like spice-Byzantine, whatever that meant. It meant his fantasy side ascendant, he knew, but he thought about her that way anyhow. Across a room she was tall and slim, distant, just the edge of cold. And she was in fact so exotic, striking-a wide, heavy-lipped mouth below sharp cheekbones, like a runway model-that she looked lean, and hard. But the first time he’d put his arms around her, he had understood that it wasn’t that way; not outside, not inside.

In the course of the love affair she had only once told secrets about her past, about the boardinghouse where she’d grown up. “How much they loved and respected my mother,” she’d said. “They waited with me until I was fourteen, and then there were only two of them, and they made sure I enjoyed it.”

“Did they beat you?”

“Beat me? No, not really.”

That was all. They were on a train, she turned away and looked out the window. She had said what she wanted to: yes, I knew too much too young, you’ll have to go on from there.