The World at Night

could feel it under his arms, even in the chilly compartment, and he tried to be surreptitious about wiping it away from his hairline.

The outskirts of Barcelona. There had been fighting here in 1937. The track was elevated and he could see into apartments; rooms with black flash marks on the walls, charred beams, dressers with drawers pulled out, a bed standing on end. The passengers stared in silence as the train crawled past. Then the fat man woke up and abruptly pulled the curtains closed. Why did he do that? Casson wondered. Was he Spanish? French? Republican? Falangist? Casson swallowed. The man stared at him, daring him to say something. Casson looked at his feet, his fingers touched the envelope in his pocket.

Barcelona station, 8:10 P.M.

The train to the southern coast wasn’t due to leave until 10:20. Casson went to the station buffet, took a dry bun with a crust of pink icing and a tiny cup of black coffee, and found a table by the back wall. Of course he was watched.

For their eyes, he played the traveler. Dug into his valise, retrieved his copy of Le Matin and spread it out on the table-JAPANESE FOREIGN MINISTER WARNS U.S.A. NOT TO INTERFERE IN ASIAN AFFAIRS. Took traveler’s inventory, checking his railway ticket and passport, putting French francs in this pocket, pesetas in that pocket. In fact, he needed to change money, and reminded himself to keep the receipt from the cambio. The border police had recorded the amount of French francs he’d brought into the country and they’d want a piece of paper when he went back out.

And he was going back out.

He’d studied what he intended to do, walked through it in his mind, hour by hour, step by step. So that, if it suddenly felt wrong, he could walk away. A patriot, he reminded himself, not a fool. There would be hell to pay if he abandoned the money. But then, he was a film producer, there’d been hell to pay before in his life, and he’d paid it.

Better now, he calmed down. This was something he could do. Go out the door, if you like, he told himself. He liked hearing that, he could answer by saying no, not yet, nothing’s gone wrong.

He refolded the newspaper and returned it to his valise, next to the torn copy of Bel Ami. Made sure, one last time, of passport, money, and all the rest of it, and, oh yes, a certain envelope in the inside pocket of his jacket. He tore it open, took out a receipt with Thos. Cook Agency printed across the top, and a first-class railway ticket, Paris/Barcelona.

The watchers were probably watching-after all, that’s how they made their living-but there wasn’t very much for them to watch at Casson’s table. Just another traveler, nervous as the rest, fussing with his papers before resuming his journey. He stood, drained the last little sip of coffee, and picked up his valise. On the way out of the buffet he balled up the envelope and tossed it in the trash.

The baggage room was off by itself, at the end of a long corridor with burned-out lamps and NO PASARAN daubed on the walls with red paint. Casson stood at the counter and waited for thirty seconds, then tapped the little bell. For a moment, nothing happened. Then he heard the deliberate, uneven rhythm of somebody walking with a pronounced limp. It went on for a long time, the office was at the other end of the room and the clerk walked slowly, with great difficulty. A short, dark man with a pencil-thin mustache, an angry face, and an eight-inch heel on a built-up shoe. On the breast pocket of his smock was a lapel pin, bright silver, a signal of membership in something, and Casson sensed that this job came from the same place the pin did, it was a reward, given in return for faith and service. To a political party, perhaps, or a government bureau.

Be normal. Casson handed over the receipt. “Baggage for Dubreuil.”

The clerk peered at the number, then said it aloud, slowly. Standing on the other side of the counter, Casson could smell clothes worn for too many days. The clerk nodded to himself; yes, he knew this one, and limped off, disappearing among the rows of wooden shelves piled to the ceiling with trunks and suitcases. Casson could hear him as he searched, up one aisle, down the next, walking, then stopping, walking, then stopping. Somewhere in the back, a radio played faintly, an opera.

It was going to work. He could feel it, and permitted himself just a bare edge of relief. It was going to work because it wasn’t complicated. He had simply gone to his customary travel agent at the Thomas Cook office on the rue de Bassano, told him an associate named Dubreuil was accompanying him to Spain, and purchased two first- class, roundtrip tickets, checking Dubreuil’s suitcase through to Barcelona. The standard procedure would have been for the agent at Cook’s to demand Dubreuil’s passport, but Casson had done a great deal of business there over seven or eight years and the travel agent wasn’t going to get fussy over details with a valued customer.

Prevailing opinion in Paris had it that checked baggage, stacked high in icy freight cars, was not searched very seriously at the Spanish frontier. If the worst happened, however, and a Spanish customs guard discovered a suitcase full of pesetas and turned it in instead of stealing it, they could look for Dubreuil all they wanted; they’d never find him because he didn’t exist. There was, for Casson, a brief moment of exposure, when he had to pretend to be Dubreuil in order to claim the suitcase, but that was going to be over in a few seconds and he would be on his way.

The clerk returned to the counter, his face bland and satisfied. He handed Casson a slip of paper, and said “Not here,” in Spanish. Casson looked at his hand, he was holding the baggage receipt.

“Pardon?” He hadn’t understood, he’d thought-

“Not here, senor.”

Casson stared at him. “Where is it?”

A shrug. “Who can say?”

Casson heard train whistles in the distance, the clash of couplings, the opera on the clerk’s radio. They would kill him for this.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

The clerk stepped back a pace. His next move, Casson realized, would be to roll down the metal shutter. The man’s face was closed: a suitcase didn’t matter, a passenger didn’t matter, what mattered was the little silver pin on his blue smock. Against that magic, this insistent Senor Dubreuil was powerless.

“The train from Port Bou …” Casson said.

The hand started to reach for the shutter, then decided that the moment had not quite arrived and contented itself with sliding casually into a pocket. “Good evening, senor,” the clerk said.

Casson turned away quickly. He didn’t know where to go or what to do but he felt he had to put distance between himself and the baggage room. He trotted back up the corridor, the valise bouncing in his hand, footsteps echoing off the cement walls. Breathing hard, he made himself slow down, then walked through the station buffet and found the platform where the Port Bou train had come in. The track was empty.

“Missed your train?”

English. A huge man with a huge gray beard, sitting on a baggage cart surrounded by two battered wooden boxes, an old carpetbag, and a collapsed easel tied with a cord. “Have you missed your train, monsieur?” Phrasebook French this time, plodding but correct.

Casson shook his head. “Lost baggage.” Perdu. Meant lost, all right, much more so, somehow, than in any other language. That which was perdu joined lost time, lost love, lost opportunity and lost souls in a faraway land where nothing was ever seen again.

“Damn the luck.”

Casson nodded.

“Speak English?”

“Yes.”

“Just come in from the border?”

“Yes.”

“Hm.” The man looked at his watch. “Only left thirty seconds ago. Did you leave it on the train?”

“No. It was checked baggage.”

“Ah-hah! Then there’s hope.”

“There is?”

“Oh yes. Sometimes they don’t take it off. They forget, or they just don’t. They’re Spanish, you see. Life’s so bloody, conditional. “

“It’s true,” Casson said gloomily.