“Maybe it isn’t forever,” Casson said.
“No. It can’t be. Of course, we both know people who’d like to ignore the whole thing-just try to get along with them. But you know the saying, le plus on leur baise le cul, le plus ils nous chient sur la tete.” The more you kiss their ass, the more they shit on your head.
“Some people used to say that even before the war,” Casson said.
Lazenac nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Now and then they did.” He poured himself some more wine. “Where are you from, Marin?”
“Paris.”
“I can hear that, but one of the bons quartiers, right?”
“Yes.”
“So what are you doing down here?”
“No money.”
“No friends?”
Casson shrugged and smiled. Of course he had friends and some of them-one or two of them anyhow-would have helped. But if he went anywhere near his old life he was finished, and so were they.
“I’m doing a job tonight,” Lazenac said. “We’re going to take something from the Germans and sell it. There are three or four of us, but we can always use one more. I’m not sure about the money but it’ll be more than you’re earning now. How about it?”
“All right.”
“We’ll meet at the porte de la Chapelle freight yards, the rue Albon bridge, about eight. Have a shave, and give your jacket a brush.”
Casson nodded. Was Lazenac just being kind?
“Some of the people we talk to, maybe you can do a better job than we can. Want to try it?”
Casson said he did.
“Number one hundred and thirty-eight.”
By now the room was warm, a fly buzzing against the grimy window. Casson walked up to the counter, eyes down. The clerk behind the grilled window had a small face, pink scalp, the eyes of a terrier. He looked at Casson a moment longer than he needed to. Well well.
Casson slid the coat across the polished counter. No rueful smiles, no jokes. The urge was powerful but he fought it off. He trudged back to the wooden bench, let his mind wander, tried not to watch the clock on the wall.
“One hundred and thirty-eight?”
Casson stood.
“Monsieur, will you take a hundred and eighty francs?”
What?
“Yes,” he said, headed for the counter before they came to their senses. What in the name of heaven-maybe the thing actually had value. His wife, Marie-Claire-they’d been separated for years- used to suspect the little paintings they bought at the flea markets were lost masterpieces. You don’t know, Jean-Claude, poor Cezanne may have paid his laundress with this, see how the pear reflects the light. But a coat? Was it llama, chamois, something exotic?
The clerk pulled a pin from the corner of a packet of ten-franc notes and, using a practiced thumb and forefinger, snapped eighteen of them into a pile. As he slid the money and the pawn ticket across the counter his eyes met Casson’s: a sad day for us, monsieur, when a gentleman of our class is forced to pawn his overcoat.
Outside, Lazenac was leaning against a wall, smoking a cigarette.
“Let’s go have a little something,” Casson said.
Another liter of Malaga, then he headed back to Clichy. He would eat. A bistro around the corner from his hotel had fried potatoes and the smell drove him crazy every time he went past. With the dinner you got a piece of stewed chicken, called coquelet, a polite way of saying the rooster got old and died.
Shit, he thought, I’m rich. He could pay a week on his hotel, sixty francs, and thirty for a meal. And then there was Lazenac’s “job” out at the porte de la Chapelle. If he didn’t get thrown in jail, he’d have even more. From there, he went on to become one of the wealthiest men in Europe, and today, his portrait hangs in every lycee in France, this beloved entrepreneur who-
Oh the Malaga.
He hadn’t felt this good for a long time. In July, on the run from the Germans, he’d been about to leave the country when love-and love was hardly enough of a word for it-had driven him back to France. Pure madness, a folie de jeunesse at the age of forty-two, and he’d gotten just what he deserved. Because, when he went looking for her, she was gone. Why? He didn’t know. She hadn’t been arrested, and she hadn’t fled in the middle of the night. She had packed her bags and paid her bill and left the hotel. Fin, like the end of a movie.
June 1941, off the Normandy coast, just at the moment of escape, as the fishing boat turned toward England, he had jumped into the sea and swum for the shore, British special operatives waving their Stens and calling him names. Walking all night, he’d made his way to a cottage he owned at the edge of Deauville, rented to an oil- company lawyer and his wife. But they were gone and the Germans had fixed lead seals to the doors, with tags stating that the house, in a strategic area, had been declared off-limits to civilians.
Too bad, but maybe it didn’t matter. He’d had a thousand francs, faked papers, and love in his heart. Had crossed the line into the Zone Non-Occupee, the ZNO, then south to Lyons, then up the hill to “their” hotel. Then, a clerk: “I’m sorry, monsieur…” She had gone. No mistake in identity possible, she was well known; the film actress called Citrine, not a star exactly but certainly not somebody who could simply fade away. She was just-gone. Did she know he had escaped the Germans? Did she panic when he disappeared? Had she simply fallen in love with somebody else? He didn’t think so, but what he did know was that with her-a life of highs, lows, tears, chaos- anything was possible.
He survived it-maybe he survived it. Wandered north for a time, to Bourges, to Orleans, to Nantes. Where he’d been a stranger. Always a bad thing in France, and now a dangerous thing-just waking up in these places felt wrong.
So he came home to Paris to die.
He was tired, sat on a bench in a little park. A woman strolled over, gave him a look. He shrugged-sorry, I’d like to, but I can’t afford it. She was heavy and matronly, like the headmistress in a school. Fine theatre to be had there, he thought. “Maybe next time,” he said. She looked sad, went off down the street. The sun was low, orange flame in a puddle of dirty water on the cobblestones. What was it, Friday? Maybe. September-he was sure of that, anyhow. He should have asked how much, maybe they could have struck a deal.
8:10 P.M. Porte de la Chapelle freight yards. Casson stood on a pedestrian bridge above the tracks. Rails crisscrossed into the distance, a dull sheen in the last of the twilight. Below him, a train of empty boxcars was being made up by a switching engine. A long whistle echoed off the hillside, a cloud of brown smoke drifted over the tarred beams of the bridge. From where he stood he could see Lazenac and his friends, gray shadows in workers’ clothing, heads down, hands in pockets.
At the end of the bridge Lazenac introduced him to Raton- small and wiry, with sharp eyes and a clever smile-and Victor. He was simply Jean. They walked east, along the edge of the yards. Not taking it easy, exactly, but not in any hurry; going to work, there’d still be plenty left when they got there. Across the street, a row of warehouses, rusty iron gates chained shut. As they passed an alley, Lazenac made a small motion with his hand, a truck’s engine sputtered to life and backed away, deeper into the shadows. Another hundred meters and they reached the main entry to the railyards: a striped barrier bar lowered across the road, an Alsatian shepherd in the alert prone position. Wehrmacht military police lounged around a guard-hut. Nobody said anything, nobody’s eyes met, but the feeling was like Friday night in a workers’ bar-the fight had to happen, the only question was when.
Five minutes later, well out of sight of the guards, they stopped by a wall. Ten feet high, old plaster cracked and peeling. Two handmade ladders lay flat in the weeds. Raton and Victor set one of them against the wall and braced the bottom. Lazenac climbed to the top, took the second ladder as it was handed up, and lowered it carefully down the other side of the wall. He put one foot across, then shifted his weight gracefully and stood on the second ladder. “You’re next,” he called to Casson in a stage whisper. Casson worked his way up the awful thing- barely wide enough to get a foot on each rung. He was scared now, not so much of the Germans, but of being
