The World at Night

“You might catch it, you know, if you don’t dawdle. It stops at a village station just south of Barcelona, that train. The 408 local.” The man glowered with conviction and took a much-thumbed little booklet from his coat. Among the English, Casson knew, were people who suffered from a madness of trains. Perhaps this was one of them.

“Yes,” the man said. “I’m right. Here it is, Puydal. A Catalonian name. Arrival, 9:21.” The man looked up. “Well,” he said, “for God’s sake hurry!”

Casson moved quickly. This didn’t happen only in Spain. In France too, your baggage popped up here, disappeared there, sometimes reappeared, sometimes was never heard from again. At the corner of the station, a long line of taxis. He jumped in the first one and said “Puydal station. Please hurry.”

The driver turned the key in the ignition. And again. Finally, the engine caught, he gave it a few seconds, then swung slowly out into the street, and accelerated cautiously. Casson glanced at his watch. 9:04. At this rate they would never get there in time.

“Please,” Casson said. Por favor.

“Mmmm-” said the driver: yes, yes, a philosopher’s sigh. Vast forces of destiny, stars and planets, the run of time itself. A candle flickered, the course of life drifted one point south. “-Puydal, Puydal.” Clearly, this was not his first trip to Puydal railroad station.

In the event, the sigh was accurate.

Puydal was where you went when all was lost, Puydal was where fate got a chance to mend its ways and the stationmaster’s spaniel bitch was sitting on the Dubreuil suitcase. Casson had gone to the Galeries Lafayette to buy one, then discovered an Arab in business on a side street selling the homely classic-pebbled tan surface with a dull green and red stripe that half the world seemed to own.

“Ah, so this is yours?” said the stationmaster. “May I just, Senor Dubreuil, have the briefest glance at your passport?”

They don’t ask for the passport, they ask for the ticket.

Casson handed over his passport. “I am Senor Casson,” he said. “The friend of Senor Dubreuil. He is sick, enfermo, I am to collect his baggage.” He dug into his pocket, took out a handful of francs, pesetas, coins of many lands. “He told me, ‘a gratuity,’ in appreciation, he is sick, it’s cold …”

The stationmaster nodded gravely and took the money, shooed his dog off and saluted. “Mil gracias.” Casson grabbed the suitcase and trotted out the door to find the same taxi. “Barcelona station,” he said to the driver, looking at his watch. The express to the southern coast was due to leave in seventeen minutes, they would never make it. “Please hurry,” he said to the driver.

There were no other cars, the taxi bumped along the cracked surface of the old macadam road, one headlight aimed up in the pine trees, the other a faint glow in the darkness. The engine missed, the gears whined, the driver sang to himself under his breath. Casson hoisted the suitcase onto his lap and opened it a crack. Yes, still in there. Thank God. Folded up in threadbare shirts and pants he’d bought at a used-clothes cart out in Clignancourt. He leaned back, closed his eyes, felt clammy and uncomfortable as the sweat dried on his shirt in the cold night air. It was time to admit to himself he had no idea what he was doing-he’d read Eric Ambler, he had a general idea of how it was all supposed to work, but this wasn’t it.

28 January, 1941. The Alhambra Hotel, Malaga.

A Spanish casino in winter. Cold gray sea, storms that blew rain against the window and sang in the stucco minarets. In the dining room, a string orchestra, a the dansant, the songs Viennese, the violins flat. Still, the guests danced, staring into the private distance, the women wearing jewels and glass and Gypsy beads, the men in suits steamed over the green-stained bathtubs. Refugees, fugitives, emigres, immigrants, stateless persons, wanted by this regime or that, rich or shrewd or lucky enough to get this far but no farther, washed up at the end of Europe, talking all night-in Bessarabian Yiddish or Alsatian French-stealing rolls from breakfast trays in the halls, trying to tip the barman with Bulgarian lev.

In the courtyard, a Moorish garden; rusty fountain, archway hung with dead ivy that rustled in the wind. Casson walked there, or by the thundering sea, ruining his shoes in the gray sand. But, anything not to be in the room. He’d placed an advertisement in ABC, the Monarchist daily, in the Noticias section. SWISS GENTLEMAN, COMMERCIAL TRAVELER, SEEKS ROOM IN PRIVATE HOME FOR MONTH OF FEBRUARY. Then, he waited. Three days, four days, a week. Nothing happened. Perhaps the operation had been canceled, and they’d just left him there. On his walks he composed long letters to Citrine, things he would never be able to write down-very beautiful things, he thought. In the casino he gambled listlessly, betting red and black at the roulette table, sticking at seventeen in blackjack, breaking even and walking away. A woman slipped a note in his pocket-Would you like to visit to me? I am in the Room 34. Maybe he would have liked to, but now he didn’t know who anybody was or what they were after.

He was shaving when the telephone rang, two long notes. He ran into the bedroom. “Yes?”

“Are you the gentleman who advertised in the newspaper?”

The number given in the newspaper had not been for the Alhambra. “Yes,” he said.

“I wonder, perhaps we could meet.”

French, spoken well by a Spaniard.

“All right.”

“In an hour? Would that be convenient?”

“It would.”

“The hotel has a bar …”

“Yes.”

“It’s three-twenty. Should we say, four-thirty?”

“Good.”

“I’ll see you then.”

“Good-bye.”

Casson took a table in the corner, ordered a dry sherry. Beyond the curtained window the rain drummed down. At the next table a couple in their thirties was having a conspirators’ argument. He should make the approach, say this, and tomorrow evening was the very last moment they could wait to do it. She was afraid, there was only this one chance, what if they tried and failed. Maybe it would be better not to give themselves away, not just yet.

A bellhop in hotel uniform, silver tray with an envelope on it. “A message for you, sir.”

Casson tipped him, opened the envelope. Expensive notepaper, elegant handwriting. “Please forgive the inconvenience, but the meeting has been moved. To the yacht Estancia, last slip, C dock, in the harbor. Looking forward to meeting you.” Signed with initials.

“May I send a message back?” Casson asked the boy.

“The gentleman has left, sir.”

So be it. They had looked him over in the bar, checked to see if he was alone, and now they were going to do business. He folded the note and put it in his pocket, paid for the sherry, and walked out the front door of the hotel. The rain was running brown in the cobbled street. Well, he’d get wet. No, that wouldn’t work. He’d have to go back upstairs and get a raincoat.

He’d learned to be sensitive to sudden changes of direction-he’d come back to the room unexpectedly one night and heard, thought he heard, some commotion on the balcony just as he got the door unlocked and open. There was nothing to see, the balcony door was locked when he tried it. But somebody had been in the room, then left when they heard him at the door. How did he know? He didn’t know how, he just did. And, more, it was somebody he didn’t want to catch, because he wasn’t exactly sure where that might lead.

He got off the elevator, then paused at the door. Put the key in, turned it, entered. Silent. The damp, still air undisturbed.

Outside it was dusk, low clouds scudding east, patches of yellow sky over the water out toward the African coast. The palm trees lining the Paseo were whipping in the gale, loose fronds blown up against the sea-wall. Casson put his head down, held on to his hat, and hurried toward the harbor. Two women in black shawls ran past, laughing, and a man in a cloth cap rode by on a bicycle, a straw basket hung on one arm.

The harbor, C dock; in the last slip, the Estancia. A small, compact motor yacht, elegant in the 1920s, then