The World at Night

all in his mind. French phones made noise-why not this noise?

“Tell me,” de Groux said, “a man in your position. You must have influence somewhere-a sympathetic politician, perhaps. It’s hard to get the permissions, all the fiches one must have to do your job. I tell you I’m worried, my friend. All the money we’re going to spend. It’s not that I don’t have it, I have pots of it. It’s these musty old lawyers, and the family. They see an old man having a fling, and they worry I’ll actually open my fist and a sou will fly out. So you see, I don’t want all this to founder on the whim of some little petit fonctionnaire. I want to assure myself that when the great battle of the clerks is fought, we are the ones left standing when the smoke clears.”

Va te faire foutre, I tell him in my heart, Citrine. Go fuck thyself. But, in the real world: “Well, Gilles, frankly I have stood on the lines myself. I have filled in my share of forms. Sometimes an assistant has been there to help but it’s so difficult, you see, crucial, that one must involve oneself. It’s that kind of commitment you must have. In the film business.”

“No. Really? Well.”

A blind reptile, he thought. But it knows there’s a nest, and young, and it senses warmth.

And then, it happened again-it seemed everybody wanted to be his friend that spring. This time he was at the office. Four o’clock on a long, wet, gray afternoon, the street outside shiny with rain. His secretary knocked, then opened the door. “A Madame Duval to see you,” she said, her voice disapproved of the name-who does she think she is, using an alias?

His heart sank. He’d been happily lost in his work, a thousand miles from reality. “Well, send her in,” he said.

She sat across from him, wearing a dark suit and a hat with a veil, knees primly together and canted slightly to one side. One of those fortyish Frenchwomen with a sour face and beautiful legs. “I am,” she said, “the owner of the Hotel Bretagne. Where your friend, the actress called Citrine, was living.” Her voice was tense-this was not an easy visit.

“Yes?”

“Yes. Last Friday, the night clerk happened to tell me that you had written her a letter. By the time it reached the hotel she had left, so he marked it Gone Away and returned it.” She paused a moment, then said, “He was-was not unpleased at this. A film actress, a producer, star-crossed, an unhappy ending. He was delighted, really, he’s a man who takes pleasure in the misfortunes of others, and has reached an age where he’s not shy about letting the world know it. It’s sad, really.”

“I believe he opened the letter and read it,” Casson said angrily. “Shared it with his friends, perhaps, and they all had a good laugh.”

The woman thought for a moment. “Opened it? No, not him, he doesn’t begin to be that bold, he simply marked the envelope and returned it. And, in the normal course of things, that would be that.”

There was more, Casson waited for it.

“However,” she said, taking a breath, “I had, we had, a certain experience. I knew who she was, although she was using another name- I had seen her in the movies, and nobody else looks like that. Now, I do not live at the hotel, of course, but I happened to be there, late one night, and I went to the second-floor bath to wash out a glass. It was very quiet just then, about two in the morning, and, without thinking, I simply walked in. Well, she was taking a bath. Naturally I excused myself, immediately closed the door. But-”

She hesitated.

“What happened?”

“Nothing actually happened. It took me a minute to realize what I’d seen. There were tears in her eyes, and on her face. And there was a razor blade resting on the soap dish. That’s all I saw, monsieur, yet you could not be mistaken, there was no question about what was going to happen in that room. I said through the door, ‘Madame, is everything all right?’ After a moment she said ‘Yes.’ That was the end of it, but it’s possible that the intrusion saved a life-not for any reason, you understand, reason wasn’t involved.”

“When was this?”

“Sometime in February. Maybe. Really, I don’t remember. About two weeks later we spoke very briefly. I was working on the book-keeping, she’d come in from doing an errand and asked for her key at the desk. We talked for a minute or two, she never referred to what had happened. She told me she would be leaving at the end of the week, had found something to do in Lyons, in the Zone Non-Occupee, and she mentioned the name of a hotel.”

“Was she unhappy?”

“No. Thoughtful, perhaps. But, mostly, determined.”

“She is that.”

“Then, after I talked to the clerk, I decided I ought to come and see you, to tell you where she is. For a time I wasn’t sure, I didn’t know what to do. I argued back and forth with myself. In the end, I’m doing this not because I insinuate myself in the lives of strangers”-the idea was so unappealing she grimaced-“but because I believe, after thinking about it, that she meant for me to do it.”

They were quiet for a moment. Casson was conscious of the sound of tires on the rainy street below his window.

“The way she spoke to me,” the woman said slowly, “it was as though her emotions, her feelings about life, were uncertain. She didn’t know exactly what to do, so she left matters in the hands of fate. It didn’t mean all that much to me at the time-I have the hotelkeeper’s view of the world, disorder, chaos, stolen towels. I remembered later only because she was who she was, but I did remember. A letter had come, the clerk noticed the return address-he recalled who you were, certainly, and once I was told about it I had to do something. Probably the letter concerns only a forgotten handkerchief.”

“No. More than that.”

She nodded to herself, confirming what she’d believed. Opened her purse, took out a hotel envelope, reached over and placed it on the corner of his desk. Then stood up. “I hope this is the right thing to do,” she said.

Casson stood quickly. “Thank you,” he said. “Madame, thank you. I should have offered you something, forgive me, I, perhaps a coffee, or …”

A gleam of amusement in her eye. “Another time, perhaps.” He was clearly disconcerted-she enjoyed that, particularly in men like Casson. She extended a gloved hand, he took it briefly. Then she was gone.

He tore open the envelope, found the name and telephone number of a hotel in Lyons written on a slip of paper. At the end of the day he met Bernard Langlade for a drink. “Is it hard to find out who owns a hotel?” he said.

“Shouldn’t be.”

Casson told him the name and location. Langlade called him in the morning. “I take it back,” he said. “The Hotel Bretagne, on the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, is owned by a Societe Anonyme, in Switzerland.”

“Is that unusual?”

“No. It’s done, sometimes. For tax purposes, or divorce. And, with time and money, you could probably find a name. Of course, even then-”

“No, thank you for looking, Bernard, but probably best just to let it go.”

Langlade made a sound that meant much the wiser choice. “Especially these days,” he said.

Especially these days. There was no calling Citrine from his infected telephone. Every call a new name on somebody’s list. He could still see Lady Marensohn across the table in the bar of the Alhambra Hotel. Perhaps it was over, perhaps they believed him, perhaps not.

He’d taken the Metro home from work that night, a man got off behind him. Made the first turn with him, then the second. Casson paused at the window of a boulangerie. The man looked at him curiously and walked by. Well, how am I supposed to know? he thought. You’re not, came the answering voice, you’re not.

Merde alors. After all, it wasn’t as though clandestine instincts were unknown in this city. All right, maybe it wasn’t the British Secret Intelligence Service one had to elude. But it was husbands or lovers, wives or landlords or lawyers. Casson let it get to be 7:30 in the evening, then left the apartment. By now, when he went out in the street, everyone he saw was an operative-an anonymous little man in an Eric Ambler novel