Just hope you aren’t in for a night of Wagnerian orgasms from the room next door. See? A joke. He wasn’t going to let this hurt him, he had too many other things to worry about.
It did occur to him to go back up to the little bistro on place Clichy, where he might find the girl who called herself Julie. But that was asking for trouble and he knew it. So he went home, turned the light out, crawled under the thin blanket on the bed in the unheated room, and lay there.
It doesn’t matter, he told himself, you fall in love more than once in life. You’re lucky to have had what you did. Cold. He was already wearing underwear and socks, trousers, and shirt, only one more step he could take. A week earlier, in the Ternes Metro station, he’d managed to buy an overcoat. This one in about the same condition as the one he’d pawned. Shivering, he got out of bed, took the coat down from a peg behind the door, put it on, pulled it tight around himself, and crawled back under the blanket. Not much better. Outside, the wind moaned around the corner of the building, it rained in sheets, then abated.
The first time he kissed her he’d thought she’ll never let me do this. But she did, and kissed him back, passionate, almost a little crazy. That confused him. She seemed desperate, as though she felt somebody like him could never fall for someone like her. What was she then, nineteen? On location for Night Run, down in Auxerre, in a room in the inevitable stucco hotel by the railroad station.
He undressed her, she helped, both of them desperate to get it done. Then it was his turn, and they’d stood there, staring at each other.
Married. It was the intimacy of it that stung him-how could she? With Rene Guillot? A crocodile with a winter tan and fine white hair. Famously arrogant, selfish, successful. Who no doubt courted her when he was given the director’s job for the movie that Casson had thought up and Fischfang had written-given the director’s job at the insistence of one Jean Casson.
Thanks for the movie, I’ll just take the woman you love too, as long as I’m at it. He didn’t blame Guillot, a force of nature, an homme de la gauche who swam cleverly through Parisian life and took whatever he wanted. He blamed Citrine. Bitch! Connasse!
Cold, the window rattled in the driving rain. Cold outside, cold inside. Casson rolled out of bed, tore off his overcoat, put on his jacket and shoes. The curfew was in force, he couldn’t actually go anywhere. He went down to the lobby, a gloomy nest of velveteen love seats and occasional chairs, now lit by a single ten-watt bulb in an iron floor lamp that appeared to have been built as a gallows for mice.
Another lost soul had preceded him, a tall man in a blue overcoat, who looked up from his magazine and stood when Casson entered the room. He had the face of a hound; sunken eyes, a drooping mustache. “Da Souza,” he said, handing Casson a card, “fine linens.”
On the card was the name of a large company and an address in Lisbon. After a moment da Souza said, “How are you tonight?”
“I’ve been better.”
“Not too bad, I hope.”
Casson shrugged. “It’s nothing. An histoire de coeur.”
“Oh that.”
Casson nodded.
“What did she do, go off with someone else?”
“Well, yes, that’s what she did.”
Da Souza shook his head, yes, that’s what they did, then went back to reading. After a few minutes he yawned, tossed the magazine aside, and stood up. “I’d offer to buy you a drink, but the curfew…”
“Some other time.”
Da Souza nodded, then gave Casson a gloomy smile. “Still,” he said. He meant it had all happened before and would happen again. “You might as well keep the card.”
Paris. 20 November.
Casson returned from lunch a little after three. The woman at the desk said, “Monsieur, a friend of yours came by. He’s going to wait for you at the Ternes Metro.”
He went back out, taking the rue Poncelet, head down against the sharp wind. The rain had stopped, wet leaves were plastered to the sidewalk. Halfway between the hotel and the Metro station, a van pulled up to the curb, both doors opened.
“Yes?”
“You are Marin?”
“Yes.”
“You’re to come along with us.”
There was no question as to who they were, or where they came from. Heavily built, with battered faces, one had a white scar cutting through both lips. They wore oil-grimed coveralls, and the van was marked as a Metro maintenance vehicle.
“In the back.”
He did what he was told. There were wooden racks bolted to the walls of the van, holding heavy pipe wrenches and a variety of shovels and prybars. The truck smelled of lubricating grease and burnt cinders.
“Lie down,” the driver told him. An old blanket was thrown over him as he lay on his side on the metal plate of the floor. The van started and drove smoothly away. The second man stayed in the back with him, sitting propped against the door.
They drove around for a long time, Casson could hear trucks and cars, and the occasional ringing of bicycle bells. Near his head was a small hole through which he could see the pavement, sometimes stone, sometimes asphalt. When they crossed the Seine, he looked down at the river through the strutwork of a small bridge. The van made several turns after that, on what sounded like narrow lanes. The men didn’t talk. Casson tried to concentrate, to keep himself calm. He’d thought this meeting might be in a little bar somewhere, or in the office of a union local, but apparently it wasn’t going to work like that.
By the time they rolled to a stop the daylight was just about gone. The engine was turned off and someone took the blanket away and said, “You can sit up now.”
He was sore where his ribs had banged against the floor. The man now kneeling next to him reached in his pocket and brought out a black cloth. “Just stay on your knees a moment.”
The man twirled the cloth around until it lapped itself into a blindfold, which he placed across Casson’s eyes and tied firmly at the back of his neck.
“Can you see?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Nothing.”
If they didn’t want him to see where he was being taken, he didn’t want to know where he was. They took his elbow, talked him out of the van, then guided him along a street. The walk seemed to go on forever, but it was probably no more than ten minutes before he was taken into a building-a garage, he thought, with hammers pounding on metal and the smell of tires. He was led out the back and into another building. A door was closed, then barred. He was seated in what felt like an old swivel chair.
“Just stay quiet. Somebody will come for you.”
He sat there, scared. He knew that from where he was now he could disappear off the face of the earth. A few minutes crawled by. The door opened and shut, a chair leg scraped on cement, and a woman’s voice, heavily accented, said, “All right, you can take that thing off him.”
He was in a small workshop, from what he could see, with a blanket over the window. It was almost completely dark. Ten feet away from him, a woman sat at a table near a lamp with a very bright bulb. Its position made it hard for him to see her clearly, or anything beyond her, although he sensed that there were people in the darkness.
The woman was perhaps in her fifties, with gray hair pulled back and pinned up, a dark suit, and, beneath the table, lace-up shoes with low heels. A university professor or a doctor, he would have thought, seeing her on the street. “Very well,” she said, taking a few sheets of paper and squaring them up in front of her. She unscrewed a cap from a pen, making sure it worked on one corner of the paper. “You’re called Marin, these days-correct? And you stay at the Hotel Benoit?”
