“Are you followed?”
“I don’t think so.”
She led him into the hallway of an apartment house and handed him a piece of paper. “Please memorize that,” she said. “It’s my address and telephone number. I’ve been assigned as your liaison with the FTP-all contact is to go through me. Nobody else will know where you live.”
They left the building and walked together for a few blocks, then took the Metro for one stop, crossed over to the other side of the station, let one train go by, and took the next one back to the station they’d started from. They went into a large post office, stood on line for five minutes, and went out another door. On the street, Casson saw two men, at a distance, standing in front of a cafe and looking in their direction.
“Don’t worry,” Sylvie said. “Their job is to watch us.”
They walked to a street off the avenue des Ternes. “You see the automobile parked in front of the pharmacy?”
“Yes.”
“You will be getting into it. In the front seat. Walk to the car as quickly as you can, but don’t run.”
Casson started to say good-bye. “Go,” she said. “Right now.”
The car was a nondescript Renault, one of the cheaper models from before the war, dented and dusty. Casson slid into the front seat. He had barely closed the door when the car took off, not quite speeding.
The driver was tall and pale with a Slavic face and a worker’s cap. Suddenly Casson realized he’d seen him before. In May of 1941, his screenwriter, Louis Fischfang, had decided to go underground. They had met in an empty apartment, on the pretext of wanting to rent it. Casson had said good-bye and given Fischfang as much money as he could. But Fischfang had not come alone. The driver had been with him, a protector, a bodyguard. The driver had also recognized him, Casson saw it in his eyes. But neither of them said a word-they weren’t supposed to know each other and so they didn’t.
The man in the back seat leaned forward so Casson didn’t have to turn around.
“I’m called Weiss,” he said. “Let me ask you right away, is the meeting to hand over merchandise from the Service des Renseignements? Or something else?” The voice was educated, and foreign.
“The guns have been brought into Paris,” Casson said. “Six hundred MAS 38 submachine guns, a thousand rounds of ammunition for each.”
“Where are they?”
“In a garage near the porte d’Italie.”
“Take us out there,” Weiss said to the driver.
As they left the garage, the driver was in the truck with Casson. Weiss took the Renault. They drove for a long time in the midday traffic, circling east just beyond the edge of the city, then turning north into the Montreuil district. Casson followed the Renault into a cinder yard behind a brick building-dark, windows boarded up, perhaps a deserted school. “This is it,” the driver said. “You can give me the key.”
Two men were waiting for them. One of them was short and round-shouldered and spoke with a Spanish accent. The other was young, not long out of school, with steel-rimmed glasses and the severe haircut of a man who doesn’t like to give money to barbers. A polytechnicien, Casson thought. He knew the type from his days at the Sorbonne, serious, square-jawed, wearing a suit meant to last a lifetime. Probably an engineer.
At Weiss’s direction, Casson and the driver moved the sardine boxes to one side, dug down into the load, and set one of the unmarked crates on the floor of the truck. The engineer produced a flashlight, a screwdriver, and a small wrench. He used the screwdriver to pop the boards free, then folded back the sheet of oiled paper. Once again, Casson saw six submachine guns side by side in a beam of light.
The engineer picked up one of the guns and wiped the Cosmoline off it with a clean rag. He studied the gun for a moment, raised it to a firing position, worked the bolt. Next he laid it on the truck bed and disassembled it. This took, to Casson’s amazement, less than thirty seconds. His long fingers flew as they spun the barrel out of its housing. One after another the parts came free-a spring, a slide, a bolt-each of them examined, then set down in a row. Without missing a beat he said, “Meanwhile, maybe somebody could get me the 7.65.”
Casson brought the crate over, broke it open, and took out a box of ammunition. The engineer used a pair of small pliers to open one of the bullets. He smelled the powder, rubbed a few grains gently between his fingers, and dusted it off with his rag. “It’s good,” he said to Weiss. “And the guns haven’t been used.”
“Or tampered with.”
“They’re right off the factory line. Of course, I can’t really guarantee anything until I do a test-firing. Three or four magazines at least.”
“Can they be shortened? To fit under a jacket?”
The engineer shrugged. “A wooden stock, all you need is a saw.”
The engineer laid the gun back in its crate, Weiss turned off the flashlight. “We have a little house in Montreuil,” he said to Casson. “Just a few minutes from here.”
The house stood at one end of a row of cottages. Weiss took a large ring of keys from his pocket and flipped through it twice before he found the one he wanted. He had to ram his shoulder against the door to get it open. Inside it was musty and unused. Cold air rose from the stone floor. At the far end of the room, a window looked out onto a tiny garden-soot-dusted snow in the furrows, sagging poles, and a dining-room chair, left outside far too long to ever be brought in again.
They sat on couches covered with sheets. Weiss put his briefcase aside and made himself comfortable. Outside, the sky was low and the afternoon light had darkened. “Going to snow,” he said. He had the face of an actor, Casson thought. Not precisely handsome, but smooth, and composed. He could be anyone he wanted to be, and what he said you would likely believe. He leaned forward and smiled. “So then,” he said. “What happens next?”
“I don’t know.”
“We expect to be asked for something, of course.”
“It’s up to the people in Vichy,” Casson said. “They may come back to you, they may not.”
“They’ll be back,” Weiss said. “You should contact Sylvie when that happens, she’ll put you in touch with Service B. Meanwhile, make sure she knows where you are, in case we need to talk to you.”
“Service B?”
“The FTP intelligence unit. We call it B, the second letter of the alphabet, rather than Deuxieme. One Deuxieme Bureau was more than enough for us.”
They were silent for a time, then Weiss said, “I understand you were in the film business.”
“I was, yes.”
“Hope to go back to it, after the war?”
“If I can. It’s changed since the Occupation.”
“You’ll find a way,” Weiss said. Something he remembered made him smile. “I imagine it was different here, but where I grew up anybody who’d actually seen a movie was something of a celebrity.”
“Where was that?”
Weiss shrugged. “A small town in central Europe. My father was a shoemaker. First time I ever went anywhere else I was seventeen years old.”
“The war?”
“Yes. And on the wrong side-to begin with, anyhow. I was a conscript, in the Austro-Hungarian infantry. On the eastern front. Eventually my regiment surrendered, and I became a prisoner of war in Russia. So I was there in October of ’17. The Red Army needed soldiers and they recruited us-they were going to change the world, we could help them do it. Not a hard decision. Most of us had grown up in villages, or workers’ districts. Czech, Polish, Hungarian-it was all pretty much the same. Some days there wasn’t anything to eat, we’d see people frozen to death in alleys. We figured we might as well join up, why not? They made me an officer-that never would have happened in Austria-Hungary.”
Weiss stopped, and looked at his watch. Casson got the impression he’d said a little more than he meant to. “Now,” he went on, all business, “when you talk to your people in Vichy, there is one point I’d like you to bring up. Over the last eighteen months, the SR has arrested quite a few of our operatives, they’re in the military prison at Tarbes. We’d like them out, at least some of them.”
“Arrested for what?”
“They’re communists. Accused of working against the government, which is what they’re under orders to do.
