Paris. 26 October.
The Hotel Benoit. It was a place, as it happened, that he’d visited more than once, though he’d never actually slept there. The hotel was a monument to the midday love affair. The proprietors were discreet, and had an ancient well-seasoned arrangement with the police, so identity cards were never too carefully scrutinized and generations of “Duvals” and “Durands” had found comforting anonymity at the Benoit. “Society must have laws,” his lawyer friend Arnaud used to say, “and society must have convenient means to evade them.”
Casson’s room looked out over the street and a small park-the sound of dead leaves rattling in the wind put him to sleep at night. The secret life of the hotel sometimes reminded him too much of his past-couples with averted eyes, the scent of perfume in the air, and now and then, in the afternoon, a lover’s cry.
Degrave left a message at the desk for him and on the night of the 26th they met in a nearby hotel.
“You’re comfortable?” Degrave said.
Casson said he was.
Degrave took his jacket off and hung it on the back of the chair. Casson sat on the edge of the bed. “What we are trying to do right now,” Degrave said, “is get in touch with the various resistance groups and establish lines of communication with them. Eventually, we will all have to work together. It’s now clear that Germany will not invade Great Britain, so Great Britain will have to find a way to invade occupied Europe. And they can’t win without aggressive resistance and intelligence networks on the Continent.
“At this moment, the most active resistance group is the FTP, the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, named for the guerrilla fighters in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. The FTP is the clandestine action group of the French Communist Party. We want you to make contact with them, on behalf of the intelligence network we’re operating in Vichy.”
Degrave paused, waiting for Casson to respond. “How would I do that?” Casson said.
“You’ll find a way. We’ll help you, but in the end you will do it by yourself.”
That’s madness, Casson thought. It would never happen. “You want me to pretend to join them?” he said.
“No, that won’t work. They’re organized in cells, units completely separated from each other, to make penetration agents virtually useless. You will have to approach them as Jean Casson, a former film producer, acting on behalf of the network in Vichy. Honesty is the only way in.”
Casson nodded-that much at least made sense. “Why me?” he said.
“It must be somebody neutral, apolitical, not a socialist, not a conservative. Somebody who has not fought in the political wars. You have certainly had contact with party members in the film industry-incidental, without problems. They will know who you are, they will know you haven’t worked against them.”
That was true. His screenwriter, Louis Fischfang, had been a Marxist-in fact a Stalinist. He wasn’t the only one. There was Fougere, from the electricians’ union; the actor Rene Morgan, who’d fought in Spain; many others. He’d never cared about their politics as long as they didn’t shut his sets down.
“The fact is, Casson, everybody likes you.”
From Casson, a very hesitant nod. First of all it wasn’t true, there were plenty of people who hated him. Second of all, a certain professional affability wasn’t, he thought, the key to being trusted by gangs of red assassins. But then, Degrave wasn’t exactly wrong either. People did like him-often enough because, when it came to money or social status, to sex lives or politics, he truly did not care.
“The more you think about it,” Degrave said, “the more you’ll see what we see.” He paused a moment. “It’s also true that you will come bearing gifts. What those might be I can’t say, but we know the party, we’ve had agents among them from time to time, and we know how they operate. They will demand concrete evidence of good faith-they couldn’t care less about words. Does all this make sense?”
“Yes.”
“We’ve been fighting the party since 1917, there is no question that their aim is to rule this country. All during the 1930s they established networks in France, particularly in the armament industry. There was the Lydia Stahl case, the Cremet case, operations of all kinds. Some of them made the newspapers, some simply died a quiet death, and some we never uncovered. They tried to steal our codes, they agitated on the docks and in the defense industries, they spied on the scientists.
“The party was declared illegal-driven underground-in ’38. They survived, they prospered-for them, secrecy is like water in the desert. And in 1940, when France was invaded and the Hitler-Stalin Pact was still in effect, they urged the workers not to fight their German comrades. After the surrender, the Germans allowed the party to publish Humanite, which labeled de Gaulle a tool of British imperialism. Then, when Russia was invaded last June, a somersault.”
“That I do remember.”
“Shameless. But, up to that point, there was virtually no French resistance to German occupation. Oh, you’d see things now and then. In the window of a bookstore on the rue de Rivoli, there was a china figurine of a spaniel lifting its hind leg-it just happened to be adjacent to a copy of Mein Kampf. There’d been a few student demonstrations, one of them, in the Bois de Boulogne, was bloody, but not by intention. We saw a few leaflets-‘Frenchmen, you are not the stronger side. Have the wisdom to await the moment’-but that was about it. The French people had adopted attentisme, the strategy of waiting. That was tantamount, as far as we could see, to collaboration.”
“I saw it firsthand,” Casson said.
“In Passy?”
“Yes. Most people were afraid to do anything.”
“Not the communists. Last June, when Russia was invaded, it was as though somebody had kicked a hornets’ nest. Suddenly, German officers were being shot down-it wasn’t hard, they walked around the town as though they owned it. In October, the German commandant of Nantes was assassinated. In reprisal, forty-eight hostages were killed. Other attacks followed, the Germans retaliated. They guillotined Jean Catelas, a member of the party’s central committee, they executed communist lawyers and Polish Jews-forty for one, fifty for one. The FTP never blinked. According to the old Bolshevik maxim, reprisal killing simply brings in new recruits, so it wasn’t hurting them.”
“Is that true?”
“It is. But for some, a little too cold-blooded. The policy of the Gaullist resistance is to assassinate French traitors, but they don’t attack German nationals. The people in Moscow, who run the French Communist Party, no doubt find that a rather dainty distinction, but then their war is much worse than anything that goes on over here. We’ve heard, for instance, that the Germans around Smolensk were having hunting parties, like English county fox- hunts, with beaters flushing Jews and peasants from the woods and soldiers shooting them down.
“The Russians retaliated. An SS Obergruppenfuhrer heard a rumor about buried gold at the Polyakovo state farm. He led a unit to the farm and they started to rip the buildings apart, looking for it. The manager begged them to stop, explained that without shelter the peasants would die of cold when winter arrived. Please, he said, give me twenty-four hours to produce the gold. The SS officer agreed, and left a detachment of four men there to ensure the manager didn’t make a run for the forest. The next day, the SS unit returned. All the buildings had been burned down, only the office was left standing. Inside, on a desk, was a large leather box with the word Gelb, gold, written on it in white paint. When they opened the box, they found the heads of the four soldiers they’d left on guard.”
Degrave paused, waited for Casson to respond.
“And this is just the beginning,” he said.
“That’s right, and it may go on for twenty years. The FTP leadership is certainly under intense pressure from Moscow-do something, anything-which is why we feel they can be approached.”
He went for a walk after the meeting, to clear his head in the night air, and thought about what Degrave hadn’t said. The war between the secret services and the French communists went back a long way-maybe all the way to 1789. The working class and the aristocracy had been at it for at least that long. Casson remembered a time when he was at university, at the Ecole Normale Superieure. Some of the conservative normaliens, wearing white gloves, had taken over the running of the buildings to break a strike by the maintenance workers. Degrave, and no doubt his colleagues, came from that class, which had always provided officers for military service. Not so much rich as old, very old, a landed aristocracy that took its names from the villages it had named in the Middle Ages. What, Casson wondered, were they doing with somebody like him? He wasn’t a leftist, but he wasn’t one of them. He
