“Reynaud. Before the boches got him.”
“Reynaud!”
“Really.”
“De Gaulle has his friends.”
“Yes, and what friends to have! Poets and professors, philosophers, the whole St.-Germain-des-Pres crowd, gossiping in the cafes day and night. Resistance indeed! Resistentialists, somebody called them.”
“Oh Michel, that’s funny!”
“It won’t be so funny when the war ends and they end up running the country.”
“Well, better than the British.”
“My dear husband sees always the bright side.”
“Damn it, Yvonne…”
“Conchita, dear? Yoo-hoo! Would you bring Monsieur Marin a little more of the veal?”
When everybody had gone home, Casson and Degrave had a last glass of wine in the living room. “By the way,” Degrave said quietly, “I talked to some people about Helene. They can get her out in March-she has to see a man called de la Barre. He lives in Paris, in the Seventh. You’ll tell her when we get back to the city.”
Casson said he would.
“I just wish it could be sooner.”
“Only two months. She’ll get through it,” Casson said.
14 January.
Tuesday morning, the mistral blowing hard, sea ruffled to white-caps. Casson walked down to the little store that sold everything and bought a copy of La Mediterranee. The Wehrmacht had retaken Feodosiya, in the Crimea, submarines had torpedoed an oil tanker off the coast of North Carolina, the Japanese advanced toward Singapore. Fighting the wind, Casson managed to turn to the Petits Annonces. Widows to marry, a ladder for sale. And, down the column: To sell-small apartment above garage. Inquire at Cafe des Marchands, rue de Rome. Which meant, your guns have arrived.
Later that morning he went to the address the lawyer had given him, the second floor of a building in the Old Port. Inside a highceilinged room with fans and tall shutters was one of the Freres Caniti, chandlers, dealing in rope, tar, varnish, and brass fittings.
A strange face, from another century. A black line for a mouth, eyes so deep-set they hid in shadow, sharp cheekbones, a monk’s fringe of dark hair. Like a medieval Pardoner in a Book of Hours, Casson thought. A face lit with saintly corruption. “You’re the one come for the shipment?”
“Yes.”
“They’ve had to go back out to sea. Off Cap Ferrat this morning.”
“Why is that?”
“There’s a problem.”
“Our understanding was that there wouldn’t be any problems.”
“Well, even so.”
“What’s gone wrong?”
“The customs service. Our person there has gone away.”
“And?”
“The new person will need to be compensated.”
“How much?”
“Forty thousand francs.”
Once this starts, he thought, it doesn’t stop. “I’ll have to see if it’s possible.”
“That’s up to you. But I wouldn’t waste too much time just now.” He nodded at the shutters, which banged and rattled in the wind. “They can’t stay out there forever, not in this. If they have to come into port, and the customs isn’t taken care of, the cargo goes over the side.”
“A few hours, then.”
“As you like, monsieur. We stand ready to assist you.”
Casson tried the telephones at the central post office, but there were too many detectives-dressed variously as sailors and businessmen-standing around the cabinets. He went to a smaller post office. Not perfect, but better.
The lawyer answered immediately.
“What the hell is going on?” Casson said.
“Take it easy, will you? Tell me what happened.”
“We’re being held up for money. ‘Oh yes, one last thing.’ ”
“That’s impossible.”
“No, it just happened.”
“Who’s involved?”
“Someone in the Old Port.”
“Merde.”
“Do something or it’s finished. We’ll send people to get the money back.”
“Let me try to take care of it.”
“Please understand-we don’t have a lot of time.”
“How’s it being put?”
“Somebody who used to help us isn’t helping anymore. Now, a new person has to be taken care of.”
“Hmm. Help in, uh, getting things stamped?”
“Yes.”
“All right. Where can I reach you?”
“I’ll call you. How late are you there, tonight?”
“Seven-thirty. Eight.”
“I’ll call back then. Maybe a little earlier.”
“All right. Don’t worry, I’ll get it taken care of.”
“Let’s hope so. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Good-bye.”
The Paris workshop of Robes Juno was on the second floor of a firetrap factory on the rue de Turenne, in the garment district. Marcel Slevin sat on a stool at his worktable, while up and down the aisles, women worked away at clattering sewing machines.
At twenty, a cutter, an aristocrat of the trade. If he didn’t get the pattern just right, nothing fit, the stores shipped the stuff back, end of season, end of Robes Juno. He took a used piece of yellow tracing paper from the wastebasket, tore off a corner. A little note to Comrade Weiss, he needed to see him.
Tough at twenty, he’d been on his own since he was sixteen and his father threw him out. No use for school, ran with the wrong crowd, gambled, drank, screwed-“Out!” That was all right with him. From then on, he did what he liked and made sure he had the fric to pay for it. He got a job as a delivery boy at Robes Juno, worked hard, played hard, and joined the garment workers’ local of the CGT, the communist labor union.
The family wasn’t completely gone, he had an uncle he kept in touch with, his mother’s brother, who saw life the same way he did. “We’re two of a kind, you and me,” he’d say. Slevin pere was a Talmudic scholar, too holy and righteous to soil his hands making a living. Now and then he would buy and sell used office equipment, but mostly they lived on little bits of money that came their way, which Slevin’s mother managed so ferociously that they never quite starved. The evening of the Big Fight, Slevin had spent his savings to buy a Zazou coat, long and narrow, tres gangster, much in favor among the guys who hung around the Pam-Pam and the Colisee. He wore it home from the store, they told him to take it back, he told them what he thought of them, and out he went.
Well, that was that. But he’d survived, had worked his way up to cutter, and Uncle Misch kept an eye on him. Smart, Uncle Misch. December of 1940, he’d found a way the family could get out of France, an old friend in South Africa was willing to help. But they couldn’t go-his father’s mother and aunt, in their eighties and frail, had to be taken care of, would never have survived the journey. So now they were all stuck.
His uncle always had a few francs. He played the markets, bought and sold goods “that fell off a truck,” and eventually came to own five or six little buildings around the ragged southern edge of Paris. Most of his tenants
