The World at Night

enough to overhear what they might be saying. Casson wanted to bark at him, Veronique took his arm and walked him away. “Oh this city,” she said in a low voice.

They stood in front of a barrow filled with dusty beets, the little girl minding the store was no more than eleven. “Ten sous, ‘sieur et ‘dame,” she said hopefully.

Veronique took a breath and let it out slowly. Casson could tell she sensed danger. “So now,” she said quietly, “we’ve done this shopping, and, old friends that we are, it’s time to part. We’ll kiss each other farewell, and then we’ll go.”

Casson turned to her and they kissed left and right. He saw that her eyes were shining. “Good-bye, my friend,” she said.

“Au revoir, Veronique.”

The last he saw of her, she was walking quickly through the crowd in a narrow lane between market stalls. Just as she turned the corner, she gave him a sudden smile and a little wave, then she vanished.

It was the sharp edge of the war on the rue Taine-an apartment of little rooms, all the blinds drawn, above a dark courtyard. There was a.45 automatic on the kitchen table, and a Sten gun in the parlor, candlelight a dull sheen on its oiled barrel. The operative was British, but nothing like Mathieu-this man was born to the vocation, and 1941 was the year of his life.

“You’re going to England,” he said. “We’re closing down the network, saving what we can, but you can’t stay here.”

It was the right, probably the only, thing to do, but Casson felt something tear inside him.

“You’ll like England,” the operative said. “We’ll see you don’t starve, and you’ll be alive. Not everybody is, tonight.”

Casson nodded. “A telephone call?”

“Impossible. Sorry.”

“Perhaps a letter. There’s somebody, in Lyons.”

It was the wrong thing to say. “Help us win the war,” the operative said. “Then you’ll go home. Everything will be wonderful.”

An hour later they brought in a wounded British airman, face the color of chalk. Casson sat with him on a battered sofa and the man showed him a photograph of his dog.

At midnight, two French railwaymen came for the airman.

At 1:30, Casson was escorted to another apartment in the building. His photograph was taken, then, at 2:10, he was handed a new identity-passport with photo, Ausweis, work permit-a thousand francs and a book of ration stamps.

Back at the first apartment, he dozed for a time. The operative never slept, worked over coded transmissions-there was a clandestine radio in another building in the neighborhood, Casson guessed-and listened to the BBC at low volume. Sometimes he made a note of the time- the Messages Personnels were long over for the night, but Casson thought he was being signaled by what songs were played, and the order they were played in.

Casson left at dawn. The woman who took him out was in her fifties, with dark red hair and the hard accents of northeast France. A Pole, perhaps, but she didn’t say. He sat silent in the passenger seat as she drove. The car was a battered old Fiat 1500, but it was fast, and the woman made good time on the empty roads. She swung due east from Bercy, and was out of Paris in under a minute. They stopped for a German control at the porte de Charenton, and a French police roadblock in Montreuil. Both times the driver was addressed-as the passports were handed back by the officers-as “Doctor.”

After that, they virtually disappeared, curved slowly north and west around the city on the back streets of small towns and secondary roads. By eight in the morning they were winding their way toward Rouen on the east- much less traveled-bank of the Seine. Outside a small village the driver worked her way down a hillside of packed dirt streets to the edge of the river, just across from the town of Mantes. The car rolled to a stop at the edge of a clearing, two black-and-white spaniels ran barking up to the driver and she rumpled their ears and called them sweethearts.

Beyond a marsh of tall reeds, Casson could see a houseboat- bleached gray wood with a crooked piece of pipe for the stove-tied up to a pole dock. A young man appeared a moment later, asked the driver if she wanted coffee. “No,” she sighed. “I can’t stop.” She had to be somewhere in an hour, was already going to be late. To Casson she said, “You’ll remain here for thirty hours, then we’ll move you north to Honfleur. These people are responsible for you-please do what they ask.”

“Thank you,” Casson said.

“Good luck,” the driver said. “It won’t be long now.”

A family lived on the houseboat, a young man and his wife and their three little girls. Casson was taken to a bedroom with heavy drapes on the windows. The woman brought him a bowl of lentils with mustard and a piece of bread. “It’s better if you stay inside when it’s daylight,” she said. He spent the day dozing and thumbing through a stack of old magazines. At dusk, they said he could take the air for a half-hour. He was happy for that, sat on the sagging dock and watched birds flying over the river. There was a mackerel sky just before dark, the last red of the sun lighting the clouds, then a dark, starless evening, and a breeze that rustled in the leaves of the willow trees that grew on the river bank.

His heart ached-he could only unwind the past, looking for another road that might have led to a better place, but he could not find it. He tried to tell himself that Citrine would understand, would sense somehow that he’d escaped from the Germans and would come back to her in time.

He really did try.

He went back out again at dawn. Cruel of this countryside, he thought, to be so beautiful when it was being taken from him. The Vexin- above Paris along the river-was fighting country, rather bloodsoaked if you knew the history. But then, people fought over beautiful things, a side of human nature that didn’t quite have a name. The oldest of the little girls, seven perhaps, came out to the dock and said “Maman says the sun is coming up now, and will the monsieur please take coffee with us.”

As good a moment as any to say good-bye, he thought, the little girl standing close to him on the dock. Just a bend in a river, and dawn was always good to a place like this, gray light afloat on the water, a bird calling in the marsh.

Later that day they took him up to the port of Honfleur in a truck. The driver was in charge of the final stage of the escape line and briefed Casson as they drove. “You’ll go out on a fishing boat. We leave at dawn, sail to the mouth of the river with the rest of the fleet and stand to for German inspection. You will be hidden below decks- your chances of passing through the inspection are good, the Germans search one boat in four, and use dogs only now and then. After the inspection the fleet will be fishing-for conger eel-in a group. A German plane flies over periodically, and we are permitted only enough fuel for thirty-five miles of cruising. Sometime during the afternoon, you will be transferred to a trawler allowed to work farther out at sea, a trawler with an overnight permit. These boats are sometimes searched by German minesweepers. At the midpoint of the Channel, between French and British waters, you’ll be taken on a British navy motor launch, and put ashore at Bournemouth.”

He stayed that night in another bedroom with heavy curtains-this time in a house on the outskirts of a coastal village. Then, at 4:30 A.M. on the morning of 28 June, he was taken to a small fishing boat in the port of Honfleur, and led to a secret compartment built behind the belowdecks cabin-entered by removing a section of wall from the back of a storage locker.

He was joined first by a young woman, exhausted but calm, clearly at the end of a long and difficult assignment. They were never to speak, but did exchange a smile-bittersweet, a little hopeless-that said virtually everything there was to say. What sort of world was it, where they, where people like them, did the things they had done?

Moments later, the arrival of an important personage; a tall, distinguished man, his wife, his teenaged sons, and three suitcases. Casson guessed this was a diplomat or senior civil servant, being brought to London at de Gaulle’s request. The man looked around the tiny space with a certain muted displeasure-he’d clearly not been informed that he was going to have to share a hiding place, and it was not at all to his taste.

The compartment was sealed up and they got under way almost immediately, the throb of the engine loud in the small space. Casson, his back resting against the curved wood of the hull, could feel the water sliding past.