“Sooner. Maybe a lot sooner. I may see you again, Casson, but there’s a good chance I won’t. In a day or two you’ll be in direct contact with the FTP. They’ll ask about me-how we met, and where. Please, don’t tell them. Not about Melun, and especially not about this office. Can I depend on you for that?”
“Of course.”
Suddenly Casson realized that it was his fault, that Kovar had to leave because of what he’d done. He started to say it, then didn’t.
They stood and shook hands. “Bon courage,” Kovar said.
They decided to spend their last weekend in the country. Casson told himself he didn’t care about the money, and they could go to a hotel where travel agents got a discount. Friday after work they took the train up to Vernon, across the river from Giverny, and a taxi down a poplar-lined road to an inn where the paysagistes used to stay while painting the valley of the Seine. In the room, blue Louis the Fourteenths bowed to blue courtesans on the wallpaper, and through a tiny window under the eaves they could see, if not the Seine at least the Epte, its tributary. There was a fireplace with a basket of sticks, and a sepia photo of Berthe Morisot, hung slightly askew to hide a hole in the plaster.
They walked by the Epte, had the Norman omelet supper- obligatory for the demi-pension-went upstairs to drink the bottle of Algerian wine they’d brought from Paris. Took off their clothes, walked around naked in the firelight, made love.
A little broken, both of them, Casson thought. But that couldn’t be permitted to spoil things. The idyll at the country inn was like meeting for a drink or going to a dinner; you knew how to do it, you were good at it. Away from the husband, the wife, all the vengeful smiling and chattering of Parisian existence, stripping the blanket down to the end of the bed and getting to the urgent sixty-nine with all passionate speed. Once upon a time a cure, he remembered, a cure for almost anything, but different now-more had to be forgotten. There had been a moment, Helene sprawled luxuriant across the quilt, her colors pale and dark rose in the firelight, when desire suddenly fled and what he saw struck him as fragile, vulnerable.
He wasn’t alone; she was also, sometimes, adrift, he could sense it. She was certainly adept, knew everything there was to know, and if the fire inside her was low she would make sure it was blazing in him. They managed, they managed, enough art to get to pleasure, the gods of the country idyll victorious in the end. She flopped back, her head off the bed and upside down, which made her voice a little strangled. “Enfin,” she said. “Something that felt good.”
They stared into the fire for a time. It was quiet on the river at the end of the road, only the old beams of the inn creaking in the winter air. He turned to look at her, saw tears in her eyes.
“Are you all right?”
She nodded, not trusting her voice.
“Scared?”
She was.
“I’ll miss you,” he said.
Again she nodded.
“When you reach Algiers, I want you to write me a postcard. So I know you’re safe.”
“I will. To the hotel?”
“Yes. And just to be on the safe side, write one to Natalie too. Did you ask for vacation?”
“I had to go to the office manager, but he’s always been nice to me. And then to the dragon herself. At first she was suspicious, but I told her I was going to see an old family friend. I didn’t actually say it, but she got the idea he was rolling in money-nothing he wouldn’t do for me.”
“Good.”
“Maybe I’ll send her a postcard.”
Casson laughed. “Maybe you should.”
“Will I ever see you again, Jean-Claude?”
“Yes.”
She took a deep breath, let it out slowly. Swung her feet over the edge of the bed, crossed the room, and put a piece of wood on the fire. Her silhouette against the firelight was slim and curved.
“Lovely,” he said.
LUNA PARK
Life came down to money. Something he’d always known and never liked. He’d even tried, for a time, insisting that it wasn’t true. Age twenty, a student at the Sorbonne, he had left home, where money ruled with an iron fist-they had it, they lost it, it didn’t matter, it did-and taken a room under the roof in the 5th Arrondissement. A classic room, the aesthetic sensibility of a thirteenth-century thief, so perfect of its type that his mother wept when she saw it. His father took one step inside, looked around, and said, “If you’re not happy now, Jean-Claude, you never will be.”
On 9 February, 1942, life came down to one thousand, two hundred and sixty-six francs. He laid it out on the bed and counted it twice. What he’d managed to save from his work with Degrave was pretty much gone. He’d given Helene a thousand francs for Victorine, and another five thousand for the trip to Algiers. He had a cheap watch, a few books, and the Walther pistol, probably worth a few hundred francs but difficult, and dangerous, to sell.
Cold. He shivered, rubbed his hands, and walked around the room. Winter could be mild in Paris, but not this year. And the Germans had set the coal ration at fifty-five pounds per family a month, enough to heat one room for two hours a day. At the Benoit, that worked out to a few feeble bangs from the radiator at four in the morning and a basin of tepid water in the sink.
He counted the money once more-it hadn’t grown-withdrew a hundred and fifty francs from the account and slid the rest under the mattress. He combed his hair, put on the glasses. A cafe over on the place Maillart had a wood-fired stove. You couldn’t get all that close to it-a flock of letter writers and book readers occupied all the best chairs, but even over by the wall it was warmer than his room. A fairly genial atmosphere in there-on his last visit he’d shared a table with one of the regulars, an appealing blond woman who wore eyeglasses on a cord and read Balzac novels.
As he passed the hotel desk, the clerk called out to him. “Monsieur Marin?”
“Yes?”
“Could you step in to the proprietaire’s office for a moment?”
He liked the woman who owned the Benoit. Pretty and fading. Sympathetic, but nobody’s fool. An adventuress, he guessed, in her younger days, and apparently good at it.
“A small problem, Monsieur Marin. The monthly rent?”
“Madame?”
“The deposit has always been made directly into our account at the bank, on the twentieth day of the month. But, according to our statement, there was no payment in January. I’m sure it is an oversight.”
“Of course, nothing more. The mails perhaps. I’ll have to see about it. However, just to make certain, it is…?”
“Six hundred francs.”
“I’ll stop at my bank today.” He looked grim-damn the inconvenience.
“Thank you. These things happen.”
“If this is going to take a few days, it might just be simpler to pay you in cash. Tomorrow, madame?”
“Whatever suits you, monsieur.”
He never reached the cafe. On a side street near the hotel a young woman appeared out of nowhere and fell in step beside him. “You are Marin?”
“Yes.”
She was no more than nineteen, very thin, with silky colorless hair. “I am called Sylvie, monsieur. Do you mind if we go inside for a minute?”
“No, I don’t mind.”