Casson in the machine shop; an NKVD officer called Juron, of Polish origin and French nationality; Weiss, as liaison officer with Service B; and, chairing the meeting, Colonel Vassily Antipin, a senior executive sent in by Moscow Center. “By way of Berlin,” he’d said dryly.
Square-faced and solid, with neatly combed brown hair, Antipin was in his late thirties. He had enlisted in the GRU, military intelligence, at the age of twenty and had risen to power on the strength of clandestine operations in difficult countries, including recruitment in Bulgarian river villages in the mid-1930s.
Brasova asked him about Berlin.
“It smells of fire,” he said.
Stacked against the wall were some three hundred dossiers of French army officers who had worked in the SR. “The problem is,” Weiss said early on, “that the officer corps is dispersed. Some are prisoners of war in Germany, some have been deported to North Africa, some have fled to London. Some are dead, a few are in hiding. There may be twenty or thirty in Vichy. As we watch Casson we’ll see at least one of them, but he will represent others, and they will be hidden.”
“And the ones who specialize in the French Communist Party?”
“By May of 1939 we’d identified ten officers. There’s one left in Vichy, a lieutenant-much too junior to run an operation like this.”
“What’s Casson like?”
Brasova shrugged. “Intelligent, a good heart, some professional success, some failure. Would like to believe himself a cynic-‘Que l’humanite se debroulle sans moi,’ the world will just have to muddle through without my help. In fact he isn’t like that, quite the opposite.”
“And Kovar?”
“Impossible.”
They broke for dinner, went back to work at ten. Given the difficulty of moving Antipin through enemy lines, Moscow had put together a long agenda. Sometime after four, they returned to the discussion of the SR. Antipin leaned back and knotted his fingers behind his head. “Are they simply trying to see over the wall, is that it? Trying to find out who’s running the FTP-in particular, who’s running Service B.”
“Of course that’s what it is,” Juron said. He was the youngest there, bald at thirty-five, with thick glasses.
“It’s more than that,” Weiss said. “This is a struggle between de Gaulle’s clandestine service and the old-line SR. In that conflict, a working relationship with the FTP is an asset, potentially of great value.”
“To the British,” Antipin said.
“Yes. Whoever wins gets British guns and British money and the aid of the British secret services. De Gaulle, based in London, is ahead in the race, so this could well be SR’s attempt to catch up.”
“What’s British power to us?” Juron said. “We’ve been at war with them, more or less, since 1917.”
“What would you do, then?” Antipin asked.
“Take what they offer, find out everything we can, then cut the lines.” Antipin nodded. This was, Weiss realized, the Center’s point of view. “Comrade Brasova?” Antipin said.
“I would wait and see,” she said. “They will use us, we will use them, the Germans will suffer.”
Outside, the darkness had begun to fade. The bell in the town church rang five. Weiss met Antipin’s eyes. “I’m going to step outside for some air,” he said.
He waited at the back door, Antipin showed up a moment later. They walked on a gravel pathway at the foot of the wall. “The Center has decided that Juron should take care of this,” Weiss said. “Is that it?”
“That’s their preference, but the final decision is up to me.”
“You know what he’ll do, don’t you?”
“Liquidate.”
“Yes. Their answer to everything.”
“We are at war,” Antipin said.
“Can you give me a month?”
“What for?”
“To do what Moscow wants done here, I need help.”
Antipin thought it over. “I’ll give you a month. But Casson and Kovar may have to be sacrificed-that’s the trade-off. No matter how you put it, spies are spies, and, to the Center, this has all the earmarks of a classic penetration. After all, if the Germans allow some form of SR to exist in Vichy, what would it do? Fight the communists. How to do that? One way is to fake a resistance group, approach the party, and tell them you want to work with them.”
“Maybe,” Weiss said, “but maybe not. I think Brasova is right, what’s proposed is a temporary alliance, and I want to take the next step. For that, I’ll need Casson and Kovar. Can you keep Juron away from them?”
“He stays in Paris, but I won’t let him do anything right now. However, when the time comes, you will have to follow his orders. Agreed?”
Weiss agreed.
They stirred in their sleep, Casson and Helene, gliding spoon-style through the December night in the battered old Benoit. She reached back, pulling him tighter against her, then sighed and, in a moment, fell asleep again, breathing slow and steady, dreaming away, with a muted cry or mumble every now and then.
He had been just too lonely that afternoon, he could not bear it. So he’d found the travel agency she’d said she worked for and, at six in the evening, had waited for her to appear. She came out alone, walking quickly, head down. Carefully put together, he saw. The long black coat that half the women in the city wore, a lavender scarf to improve it, setting off her dark eyes, her dark hair. She was startled to see him. “Did you just happen to be passing by?”
“No,” he said. “I was waiting for you.”
They headed up the boulevard, paused for traffic at a side street. “Perhaps,” he said, “you’d like to come back to the hotel with me.” She didn’t answer, just took his arm, her shoulder pressed against him as the cars and trucks rumbled past.
Back in his room, he watched her undress in the darkness. A little leaner than he might have preferred, but sinuous, with a narrow waist and supple hips. In bed, buried beneath the thin blanket and their overcoats, they waited to get warm. “Do you miss Strasbourg?” he asked.
“Sometimes. I miss living in a home, just the small things that go on all day. And I miss the flowers.”
“In December?”
“Always. Vases everywhere, mostly red gladioli in December. My father was a florist. Actually, my father was the florist. Les Trois Rosiers-his great-grandfather started it, a long time ago.”
“What happened to it?”
“It went, everything went. I miss that too, working in the shop. We did weddings and funerals, banquets, anything important in the city. My uncle had greenhouses in Italy, in San Remo, a little way down the coast from Menton. It’s all gone, now.”
“What made you leave?”
“By the time I was thirty, it was pretty clear I wasn’t going to get married. Not a conventional marriage, anyhow-within the Jewish community in Alsace. I had my chances: a pharmacist, a teacher, but I wasn’t in love. I had affairs, quiet as could be, but people find out. So, I did what all the unmarried girls in France do-or would if they could. I went to Paris.”
“And fell in love.”
“Yes, a real folie, but it didn’t stop there. I was in love with the city, with everything. Of course for you, born here, it would be different.”
“No, the same.”
“Were you rich?”
Casson laughed. “I never could figure that out. We lived among the rich, in Passy, but we never had any money. Somehow, we survived. When I left the Sorbonne I decided to go into the movie business so, once again, I was living without money, or at least living well beyond what I had. But I was young and I didn’t especially care. I was happy to be alive, and I expected I’d get rich someday. And, like you I suspect, I was always in love. First one, then another. Eventually, I got married. She was from a wealthy family, but she didn’t have anything either. We both thought that was funny. After we got engaged, she was summoned to a lunch with her grandparents and they
