Petrelle. She turned, came back to him and said, “On the third floor, turn left. It’s at the end of the hall.”
The building was ice-cold and dark. And silent-when he left the staircase at the third floor, his footsteps echoed down the corridor. On the door at the end of the hall, the former tenant’s name, the ghost of lettering scraped off the pebbled glass.
Casson knocked, then entered. Kovar was sitting in a swivel chair behind a desk piled with account ledgers. On the pull-out shelf was an old Remington typewriter.
“Nice to see you again,” Casson said.
Kovar inclined his head and smiled to acknowledge the greeting. He indicated a chair, Casson sat down. “A surprise,” Kovar said. There was faint irony in his voice but, as Casson remembered it, that was true of everything he said. “Sorry I can’t offer you anything. This is somebody else’s office by day, I only use it at night.” His chair creaked as he leaned forward. “You can’t really be a fugitive, can you?” The idea seemed to amuse him.
“I escaped from the rue des Saussaies. Last June.” The address was that of the Gestapo administrative headquarters. “Then I was staying up in place Clichy, here and there, until a week ago.”
Kovar nodded-it might be true. “And now?”
“I’ve been asked to make contact with the FTP.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes.”
Kovar smiled. Casson could just manage to see him in the dark office. He hadn’t changed, had been fifty years old all his life. A shaggy, tobacco-stained mustache on the face of a mole, receding hairline, slumped shoulders. His body small, meager, almost weightless-a rag doll to be punched and kicked and thrown against the wall, which pretty exactly described what had been done to it. Gray shirt, green tie, a shabby jacket. Years earlier, Fischfang had told him Kovar’s story: his father a French citizen of Russian birth, his mother, born in Bratislava, died when he was twelve. He’d been in and out of prison in France, for political crimes, had broken with Stalin, then with Trotsky. The NKVD had tried to assassinate him after he’d been thrown out of the party. He’d essentially raised himself, educated himself, trained himself to write, got himself into trouble, found misfortune wherever he went, and somehow survived it all. “He’s worse than a Marxist,” Fischfang had said in 1936, “he’s an idealist.”
Kovar sighed. “You weren’t such a bad sort,” he said. “A romantic, maybe. But now you’ve gone and-I mean, who asked you to find the FTP?”
“Army officers. A resistance group.”
“They know you’re talking to me?”
“No.”
“But you believe what they tell you.”
Casson thought about that for a moment. “When the occupation began, I tried to do nothing. It worked for a time, then it didn’t. So I decided to do whatever I could, and very quickly came to understand that you can never be sure. Either you put your life in the hands of people you don’t entirely trust, or you hide in a corner.”
“Yes-but army officers?”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. For one thing, they probably hold the FTP responsible, the entire Left for that matter, for what happened here in 1940. What do they want with them now?”
“To talk. A marriage of convenience, perhaps. We’re in trouble, Kovar, that much I know. My friends, the crowd I knew before the war, either do nothing or collaborate. They’ve adapted. It’s reported in the newspapers that one of the city’s most prominent hostesses gives dinner parties for German officers. At each place, for table decoration, are crossed French and German flags. Her toast to the commandant of Paris, the paper said, was dedicated to ‘the most charming of our conquerors.’ Well, it’s not news that some of us are whores in this country. But it’s just possible that some of us aren’t.”
“You’ll pay for that, you know,” Kovar said, rather gently. “If they find out you feel that way.”
“Then I’ll pay.” He paused, then said, “Can you help? Will you?”
Kovar thought it over. “I understand what you’re doing, looking for party combat units. What your army officers see is action- blood spilled for honor, and that they understand better than anything in the world. Problem is, I don’t think I’m the one to help you. These people, the FTP, are Stalinists, Casson, and they don’t like me. They don’t like anarchists-they were killing them in the fall of ’17, in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. They murdered the POUM leadership in Spain-NKVD operatives did that-and I’m no different. I grew up with a copy of Verhaeren in my pocket. ‘Drunk with the world, and with ourselves, we bring hearts of new men to the old universe.’ By all odds I shouldn’t even be alive, I’ve been living on borrowed time since 1927. I’m sure you know, Casson, I tried being a communist, I managed for ten years but in the end it didn’t work. They saw, finally, that they couldn’t tell me what to do, and that was the end of that.”
“You have friends,” Casson said.
A long pause, and a reluctant nod of the head. “Maybe,” he said. “I have to think about it.”
“Petit conard!” You little jerk. A woman’s voice, furious, held, barely, just below a full-blooded scream, thundered through Casson’s wall.
“No, wait, now look, we never said…” The whine of the falsely accused.
“I hate you.”
“Now look…” He lowered his voice as he told her where to look.
Casson had fallen asleep, face down on Remarque. He looked at his watch, 2:20 in the afternoon.
The middle of the day, offices closed for lunch, a busy time at le Benoit.
Degrave took him to dinner, brought along his mistress, Laurette, and her friend, Helene. Laurette blonde and soft, Helene the prettier one, dark, with a lot of mascara, glossy black hair cut stylishly-expensively-short, wearing bijoux fantasie, gold-painted wooden bracelets, that clacked as she ate. Fortyish, Casson thought. She was tense at first, then talkative and bright. Casson liked her. While Degrave and Laurette were busy with each other, he told her how he’d once been hounded by lawyers when his production company had misplaced four hundred false beards meant for a musical version of Samson and Delilah. She hooted, covered her mouth, then put a hand on his arm and said, “Forgive me, I haven’t done that for a long time.”
Generous of Degrave to take them out, Casson thought. A black-market restaurant, one the Germans hadn’t yet discovered. Roast chicken: months since Casson had tasted anything like that. He wanted to tear it apart and eat it with his fingers, maybe rolling around with it under the table. And a ’27 Meursault. From beneath the table, excited growling and snarling, then silence, then a hand appears, holding an empty glass.
“Je vous remercie,” Casson said, the nicest way to say thank you. Degrave shrugged and smiled. “Why not,” he said.
When the chicken bones were taken away, the owner came to the table. “Mes enfants,” she said.
They looked up expectantly.
“I can make an egg custard for you.”
“Yes, of course,” Degrave said.
“Twenty minutes.”
“All right.”
“Are you going back tonight?” Helene said to Degrave.
“I’m staying over,” he said. “If I can get a train reservation for Friday.”
“He can,” Laurette said. She had moved her chair so she could be close to him. “If he likes.”
Degrave’s smile was tart. “I can do anything.” He rested a hand on Laurette’s shoulder and kissed her on the forehead.
“Salaud,” she said.
Degrave and Laurette went off in a bicycle taxi, Casson and Helene stood in the drizzle. “Can I take you home?” Casson said.
She hesitated.
“See you to the door, then.”
“Could we go to your room?”
Tiens. “Of course.”
The hotel was not far from the restaurant, so they walked. She lived, she explained, in a maid’s room in an apartment owned by an old woman, a family friend. “I am an Alsatian Jew,” she said, “from Strasbourg. Ten years ago I moved to Paris and rented a small apartment. Then, a few weeks after the Germans came, the landlord told
