The World at Night

Gibraltar? No. Why not? Because he’d have to march across Spain, and for that he needs Franco’s permission because Franco is his ally. A neutral ally, but an ally. Don’t forget, Adolf helped Franco win his civil war. So, what will Franco do?”

“I don’t know,” Casson said.

“You’re right! The British don’t know either. But what you want, for your peace of mind, is your own man guarding the back door to your big fortress, not the ally of your enemy. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“So, what I’m working on.” Simic lowered his voice, leaned closer to Casson. “What I’m working on is a nice private Spaniard for the British secret service. A general. An important general, respected. What could he do? What couldn’t he do! He could form a guerrilla force to fight against Franco. Or, better, he could assassinate Franco. Then form a military junta and restore the monarchy. Prince Don Juan, pretender to the Spanish throne, who is tonight living in exile in Switzerland, could be returned to Catalonia and proclaimed king. See, Franco took the country back to 1750, but there’s plenty of Spaniards who want it to go back to 1250. So the junta would abolish the Falangist party, declare amnesty for the five hundred thousand loyalist fighters in prison in Spain, then declare that Spain’s strict neutrality would be maintained for the course of the war. And no German march to Gibraltar.”

Slowly, Casson sorted that out. It had nothing to do with the way he thought about things, and one of the ideas that crossed his mind was a sort of amazement that somewhere there were people who considered the world from this point of view. They had to be on the cold-hearted side to think such things, very close to evil-a brand-new war in Spain, fresh piles of corpses, how nice. But, on the other hand, he had been reduced to crawling around like an insect hunting for crumbs in the city of his birth. It was the same sort of people behind that- who else?

The man and the woman at the next table laughed. She began it, he joined in, one of them had said something truly amusing-the laugh was genuine. You think you know how the world works, Casson thought, but you really don’t. These people are the ones who know how it works.

Several times, over the next few days, he put one hand on the telephone while the other held his address book open at the S-T page. Sartain Freres. Ingrid Solvang. Simic, Erno-Agna Film. Not a complicated situation, he told himself. Very commonplace. Sometimes we believe we can make a certain commitment but then we find that, after all, we can’t. So then, a courteous telephone call: sorry, must decline. It’s just the way things are right now. Or, maybe, It’s just not something I can do. Or, It’s just-in fact, who the hell was Erno Simic that he deserved any kind of explanation at all? So, really, it was Casson explaining to himself.

Out on the boulevard, from the building they’d requisitioned in the first month of the Occupation, the young fascists of the Garde Francaise and the Jeune Front goose- stepped on the packed snow. Across the street, the optician Lissac displayed a sign that said WE ARE LISSAC, NOT ISAAC. A few doors down, broken windows, where an umbrella-and-glove shop had been forced to advertise itself as an Enterprise Juive.

Would murdering Franco stop that?

His heart told him no.

Then do it for France.

Where?

France-was that Petain? The Jeune Front? Those pinched, white, angry little faces, scowling with envy. The patrons of the bar on the avenue Montaigne? The soldiers running away from the battle on the Meuse?

But he didn’t dial the telephone. At least, not all the numbers.

And so, inevitably, he arrived at his office one morning to find that a message had been slipped beneath the door. Hocus-pocus, was how he thought about it. An uncomfortable moment, then on with his day.

Hotel Dorado. That was better medicine than Spanish murder, right? And so, inevitably, the hocus-pocus itself.

Maybe not the best time for it, an icy night in the dead heart of January. Something that day had reached him, some sad nameless thing, and the antidote, when he found her, was blonde-a shimmering peroxide cap above a lopsided grin. Older up close than she’d first seemed-at a gallery opening-and not properly connected to the daily world. Everything about her off center, as though she’d once been bent the wrong way and never quite sprung back.

They sat on the couch and nuzzled for a time. “There is nobody quite like me,” she whispered.

He smiled and said she was right.

She undid a button on his shirt and slid a hand inside. The telephone rang once, then stopped. It bothered her. “Who is it?” she said, as though he could know that.

But, in fact, he did know. And a minute later, sixty seconds later, it did it again. “What’s going on?” she said. Now she was frightened.

“It’s nothing,” he said. Then, to prove it was nothing, “I have to go out for a while.”

“Why?” she said.

He’d always thought, not all that proud of it, that he was a pretty good liar. But not this time. He’d been caught unprepared, no story made up just in case, so he tried to improvise, while she stared at him with hurt eyes and pulled her sweater back down. In the end, she agreed to wait in the apartment until he returned. “Look,” he said, “it’s only business. Sometimes, the movie business, you need to take care of something quietly, secretly.”

She nodded, mouth curved down, wanting to believe him, knowing better.

In the street, it was ten degrees. He walked with lowered head and clenched teeth, the wind cutting through his coat and sweater. He swore at it, out loud, mumbling his way along the rue Chardin like a madman hauling his private menagerie to a new location.

At last, half-frozen, he crept down the ice-coated steps of the Ranelagh Metro and installed himself in front of a poster for the Opera-Comique, a Spanish dancer swirling her skirt. A few minutes later, he heard the rumble of a train approaching through the tunnel. The doors slid open, out came a little man with a briefcase of the type carried under the arm. Casson could have spotted him five miles away, but then, the Germans were “idiots.” And he, Casson, was so brilliant he’d believed Erno Simic when he’d called them that.

The contact was a small man, clearly angry at the world. Peering up and down the station platform he reminded Casson of a character in an English children’s story. The Wind in the Willows? Waxed mustache, derby, fierce eyebrows, ferocious glare above an old-fashioned collar. Following instructions, Casson turned to the wall and stared at the poster. For a time, nothing happened. The dancer smiled at him haughtily and clicked her castanets in the air.

Finally, the man stood beside him. Cleared his throat. “An excellent performance, I’m told.”

That was part one of the password. Part two was the countersign: “Yes. I saw it Thursday,” Casson said.

The contact leaned the briefcase against the wall at his feet and began to button his coat. Then, hands in pockets, he hurried away, his footsteps echoing down the empty platform as he headed into the night. Casson counted to twenty, picked up the briefcase, and went home.

His blonde was bundled in a blanket, snoring gently on the couch. He went into the bedroom and closed the door. Before he put the briefcase on the shelf that ran across the top of his closet-under the bed? behind the refrigerator? — he had a look inside. Three hundred thousand pesetas-about $35,000 in American money-in thirty bundles of hundred-peseta notes, each packet of ten pinned through its upper right-hand corner.

Back in the living room, the blonde opened one eye. “You don’t mind I took a nap,” she said.

“No,” he said.

“Keep me company,” she said, raising the blanket. She’d taken off her skirt and panties.

Casson lay down next to her. It wasn’t so bad, in the end. Two castaways, adrift in the Paris night, three hundred thousand pesetas in a bedroom closet, air-raid sirens at the southern edge of the city, then a long flight of aircraft, south to north, passing above them. On the radio, the BBC. A quintet, swing guitar, violin-maybe Stephane Grappelli-a female vocalist, voice rough with static. The volume had to be very low: radios were supposed to be turned over to the Germans, and Casson was afraid of Madame Fitou-but he loved the thing, couldn’t bear to part with it. It glowed in the dark and played music-he sometimes thought of it as the last small engine of civilization, a