but as long as the call was local you couldn’t really tell. By now, Casson had decided that maybe a celebration was a good idea. After all, they’d done it, hadn’t they. Run money over the border, bribed a Spanish general. Despite the Gestapo and the vagaries of Spanish railroads. Strange-what was an English artist doing at Barcelona station?
10:22. Casson stood up, peered around at the other tables. That had happened to him once at Fouquet-his lunch appointment waiting at one table, he at another, both of them very irritated by the time they’d discovered what they’d done.
Well then, all right. A few minutes more and he was going back upstairs. The war was over for the night. Let the Germans rule the French for a thousand years, if they could stand it that long, he was going back to the room. Now, of course, he was hungry, but he wasn’t going to sit alone in the dining room. He ate another almond. 10:28. He watched the second hand crawl around the face of his watch, then he stood up. Just as somebody was coming toward him, weaving among the tables. Well, finally. But, not Simic. Marie-Noelle-of all people.
What a coincidence.
She sat across from him, ordered a double brandy with soda, got a Gitane going.
“I do have somebody joining me,” he said apologetically. “A man I know from Paris.”
“No,” she said, “he isn’t coming.”
“Who isn’t?”
“Your friend. Simic.” She wasn’t joking. He tried to make sense of that but couldn’t.
She stared at him; worried, angry, tapped her index finger against the table, looked at her watch. “I’m leaving tonight,” she said. “But, before I go, it’s my job to decide about you, monsieur. As to whether you are a knave, or just a fool.”
He stared at her.
“So,” she said.
He didn’t know what to say. His first instinct was to defend himself, to say something reasonably witty and fairly sharp. But he didn’t. She wasn’t joking, to her the choice was precisely described, insulting, but not meant as an insult. And, he somehow knew, it mattered. At last he said quietly, “I am not a knave, Marie-Noelle.”
“A fool, then.”
He shrugged. Who in this life hasn’t been a fool?
She canted her head to one side. Was this something she could believe? She searched his face. “Used?” she said. “Could be.”
“Used?”
“By Simic.”
“How?”
“To steal from us.”
“Who is ‘us’?”
“My employers. The British Secret Intelligence Service. In London.”
This was a lot to take in but, somehow, not completely a shock. At some level he had understood that she wasn’t just somebody met on a train. “Well,” he said. “You mean, the people in the business of bribing Spanish generals.”
“They thought they were, but it was a fraud. A confidence scheme- seven hundred thousand pesetas before your delivery, another million to come after that.”
Casson lit a cigarette, shook his head as if to clear it.
“Simic was an opportunist,” Marie-Noelle said. “Apparently he’d dabbled with intelligence services before. In Hungary? Romania? France, perhaps. Who knows. He had a good, instinctive sense of how the game is played, of how money changes hands, of what kinds of things people like to hear. When the Germans took over he saw his chance-he could get rich if he came up with an operation that felt really authentic.”
“And Carabal? Is he a colonel in the Spanish army?”
“Yes. Also a thief, one of Simic’s partners.”
“General Arado?”
“A monster, but not a traitor. Credible-for Simic’s purpose. A history of support for the Bourbon monarchy. But, no inclination to overthrow the Falange. No inclination for politics at all.”
Casson scowled, stared down at the table. He had assumed he was smarter than Simic, but maybe it was simply that he was above him, socially, professionally. He’d been worse than a fool, he realized. “And me?” he said.
“You. We are treating that as an open question. You’d been mentioned by a former business associate, and when Simic asked for a name we gave him yours. But then, after that, who knows. Under occupation, people do what they feel they have to do.”
“You think I took your money.”
“Did you take it?”
“No.”
“Somebody did. Not what you brought down, we have that back, but there was an earlier payment, and some of that is missing.”
“What happens to Carabal?”
“Can’t touch him. There’s an office theory that General Arado found the whole business amusing, and that Carabal’s career will not suffer at all.”
“And Simic?”
She spread her hands, palms up.
“We went and had a drink,” Casson said. “He explained to me the importance of Gibraltar, it was very persuasive.”
“It is important.”
“But they won’t attack it.”
“No,” she said. “Because of the wind.”
Casson didn’t understand.
“It blows hard there, changes direction-it’s tricky. You’ve seen those Greek amphoras in hotel lobbies, they plant geraniums in them. Sometimes they wash up on the beach, from the ocean floor. Well, think how they happened to be down there in the first place-obviously somebody got it wrong. A wind like that, the Germans can’t do what they did with the Belgian forts, they can’t use paratroops, or gliders. As for an attack over land, the peninsula is narrow, and heavily mined from one side to the other. The roads are terrible, and the Spanish-gauge railroad track is different, which means the Wehrmacht can’t run trains through France-they’d have to change over, and we’d know about it right away. That leaves an attack from the sea, which would have to be staged from Spanish Morocco, and the cranes at the port of Ceuta aren’t big enough to lift heavy tanks and artillery onto ships.”
“So then, why pay Spanish generals to overthrow Franco?”
“You have to understand the nature of the business. It has, like everything else, fashion, what the hemline is to the pret-a-porter. So once an idea is, ah, born-memos written, meetings held-it takes on a life of its own. For a time, it’s the local religion, and nobody wants to be the local atheist. Erno Simic understood that, understood how vulnerable we were to big, nasty schemes, and he decided to make his fortune. He would have played us along; the general is thinking, the general is nervous, the general has decided to go ahead, send a sniper rifle and a box of exploding candy. And on, and on. But, you know, somebody found a way to see if General Arado was actually in on it, and he wasn’t.”
“So everything I did …”
“Meant nothing. Yes, that’s right. On the other hand, if the Seguridad or the Gestapo had caught you with the money …”
Casson sat back in the chair, the life in the bar was growing brighter and louder. The Spanish brandy wasn’t very expensive, after a while it inspired a certain optimism. “Tell me something,” he said. “Are you really Lady Marensohn?”
“Yes. I am pretty much who I said I was. There’s just this one little extra dimension. Of course, I’d
“No, I won’t.” He thought a moment. “I hope you understand- Simic was what he was, but I believed in the scheme, I really thought it would damage Germany.”
