“Yes. Five thousand francs would help.”
Vadine nodded. “All right,” he said. “I’ll get it for you. Is there some way we can do this…”
“Without meeting?”
“Yes.”
“Of course.”
The receptionist said, “It would be better if you didn’t come here.”
Weiss agreed, told Vadine that a young woman would contact him in a few days, and left immediately. They didn’t want him there, he didn’t want to be there.
Outside, he headed back toward the Metro. His next call was on the other side of the city-a socially prominent woman whose father owned a coal mine. He had two other donors in mind-add Brasova’s contributors and some money from the unions, and they could survive for another month.
3:30 P.M. Casson and Degrave sat at the bar of a cafe on the place Blanche. Dry snow floated past the window and covered the outdoor tables.
Degrave had spent three days in Vichy. “I couldn’t wait to get out of there,” he said. “It’s like a comic opera. It says it’s a government, it says it’s France, but it’s all a fraud. Everybody in uniform-sashes, medals, gold braid- you expect them to sing and dance.” He ran a hand over his face. “Have a cognac with me.”
“All right.”
Degrave ordered the cognac. “We had meetings that went on for hours. I told them everything about your contact with the FTP, and the demand for guns, but nobody wanted to make a decision.”
The barman set two cognacs in front of them and Degrave paid.
“Is it over?”
“I can go ahead, if I want to, but there won’t be a lot of support. My friends will help us, when they can. We’ll have to do most of it ourselves.”
“They don’t like the idea?”
“They don’t like the risk. The problem is, we need the alliance, it will allow us to do things we can’t do ourselves. But there are difficulties. For example, we don’t have the guns. We’ve been disarmed, which is what happens to defeated nations, and the Germans, using the Armistice Control Commission, are making sure it stays that way.”
“But you-of course you know arms merchants.”
“Out of business. For the moment, anyhow. Put out of business by national industries running twenty-four hours a day. We’ll have to work with the black market.”
“You mean criminals, smugglers.”
“Yes. If we can find somebody, we’ll be allowed to spend whatever it costs. That much I did get. But I want to make sure you understand that this is well beyond what we originally asked you to do. So, if you’re going to say no, say it now.”
Casson hesitated, but he couldn’t say no. “You’ll have to help me get started.”
“The inspector who found you up in Clichy is an old friend. He’ll know somebody-there isn’t much he doesn’t know.”
“How would I find him?”
“He’s at the main prefecture. On Thursday mornings he supervises the office that accepts denunciations.”
Casson nodded.
“This will work,” Degrave said. “It won’t be easy, but it needs to be done. The principle is right, believe me it is, I just couldn’t get the people in Vichy to see it that way.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know-tradition, living in the past. French military officers don’t like secret committees, they believe in chain of command. They don’t like communists, and they don’t believe in partizan operations-assassination, dynamite, luring the enemy into reprisals against civilians. They think of that as terrorism, that it turns the population against the resistance.”
“Are they wrong?”
“They could be right.” His tone was almost sarcastic. “Wait a few months and see what the Germans do here-then let me know what you think.”
They had another cognac. Degrave went to the back of the cafe and made a phone call. When he returned, Casson said, “I want to ask you about Helene.”
“You’re seeing her?”
“Yes. Now and then.”
“She’s been a real friend to Laurette.”
“She mentioned that you offered to help her leave the country.”
“I did. She wanted to go, then decided against it.”
“She’s changed her mind.”
“I don’t blame her,” Degrave said. “It’s a little more complicated now, but we can probably do it. I’m in Paris for the next three weeks, then I go down to Vichy. Unfortunately, there’s a limit to how many people we can move. She may have to wait until February, or March. Tell her I’m working on it. Meanwhile, she should be careful-respect the curfew, avoid the black market.”
The prefecture, on Thursday morning, was a living hell. Mobs of people; some of them scared, all of them uncomfortable. Who knew what buried sins might suddenly spring to life in a place like this?
Daily life in Paris had always churned up business for the flics, but the Occupation, with its curfew, black market, and hundreds of petty rules and regulations, had provoked a tidal surge of activity at police headquarters. A madhouse, Casson thought. Permits and papers to be applied for, changed, renewed. Summonses answered, fines paid. And all of it required standing on line-one of the few Anglo-Saxon perversions that Parisians truly disliked.
Casson had to present his identity card three times; first at the courtyard entry, then in an office, then again in another office, where the information was laboriously copied down in a huge, frightening ledger. Each time his heart pounded, but the false identity held. He also had to show his work permit-Marin was a claims investigator for a large insurance company, a job that allowed him to travel, and explained his presence in any town or neighborhood.
Worst of all, for Casson, was that his progress through the tight-lipped crowds in the maze of corridors turned up two acquaintances from his former life. In one case, a woman who had worked in the office of a film distributor. Their eyes met, Casson turned sharply and walked away. Then he came face to face with a distant social connection of his former wife, a man who called out “Jean Casson!” in a great, rumbling voice. Casson simply said “Pardon?” and glared at the man, who apologized and retreated into the crowd.
Room 15 was off by itself on the second floor, in a cul-de-sac isolated by some ancient renovation. Casson was given a brass disc with a number on it and told to wait. There were two other people on the wooden benches and only later did Casson realize that he never saw their faces. He sat there for almost an hour, staring into space, the monotony broken only by the delivery of the mail, a large canvas sack so heavy it had to be dragged across the floor before being left by the secretary’s desk.
The inspector was just as Casson remembered him. A heavy old man with thick white hair, a battered face, and pale blue eyes. “Monsieur Casson,” he said, jovial as before, apparently quite pleased to see him. “I am sorry you had to wait in that shithouse out there, but we must pretend that all is as usual.”
Casson said he understood.
“Degueulasse!” Sickening. “The boss makes me do this once a week because he knows I hate it. A national illness, this business. We get them all, jilted lovers, angry wives, the petits commercants trying to wreck the competition. And the rather ordinary people who get up one morning and look at their neighbor and say to themselves, see how they live! What right do they have to such good fortune?”
“Sad,” Casson said.
“Yes, I suppose that’s the word.” He paused a moment. “But nothing new. Back when I was young I worked in the countryside, a small town in the Sarthe. We used to get letters from a man whose apple tree had a branch that grew over a neighbor’s fence. When the apples fell on the ground, the neighbor ate them.”
“The scoundrel.”
