stacked on the night table.
Albers had always suspected that the mistress went home to some grim husband, who looked up sharply from his newspaper when she came through the door. “Well, what’s for dinner?”
Casson got up every day and looked for a job. He read the petits annonces and underlined the best possibilities, then set off for the morning search. But he immediately ran into problems. For one, Casson might have found a job, but Marin couldn’t, because Marin didn’t have a past. “And where have you worked, monsieur?” He tried various answers-his own business, a job abroad, but the eyebrows went up and Casson looked for the door.
Once or twice he came close. He applied to be a salesman in the toy department of the Bazaar de l’Hotel de Ville, the BHV. The manager was sympathetic. When Casson started to tell stories, he held up a hand. “Please,” he said, “I understand.” Just what he understood Casson could only imagine, but when he returned to the store that afternoon, the manager told him his candidacy had been vetoed at a higher level.
To save money, he stopped taking the Metro. The weather turned furious in the last days of February, broken clouds rolling like smoke above the rooftops, the western sky black and violet at sunset. Casson walked head down into the wind, one hand clamped to his hat.
He tried hard for a week, then went back to see Charne. Charne had a scarf wound tight around his throat, his eyes were red and watery. “I’m sick as a dog,” he said. Casson sympathized, then said he needed to find work.
“What I used to do, if I needed money between pictures, was go to a cafe near Luna Park. The ride operators had a wall where they pinned up notes, help wanted, whatever they needed. In fact”-he smiled at the memory-“just before we made The Devil’s Bridge I was running a Ferris wheel out there.”
Casson tried it the next day. He found the cafe, read the notes on the wall, and went to see a man called Lamy. “I own the Dodge-em cars,” Lamy said. “I need a bookkeeper, maybe two mornings a week. Can you do it?”
Casson said he could. A strange little man. Lamy sat behind his desk in a soiled homburg and an overcoat with a velvet collar and told Casson stories. Born in Paris but traveled the world. He’d made and lost fortunes, served in the Rumanian navy-by accident, he swore it! Sold wind-up toys on the streets of Shanghai. “Come in tomorrow morning,” he said. “We’ll see how it goes.”
Casson showed up at eight and went to work. The money wasn’t much, but he figured he might just be able to squeak through on it if other opportunities came his way. He decided to leave the Benoit and move into a cheaper hotel, a Gothic old horror out by the Saint-Ouen flea market.
He made contact with Sylvie, the FTP liaison girl, and let her know his new address and the number of the pay phone by the downstairs desk. Then he packed his belongings: an old shirt, a razor, toothbrush, underwear, pencils, a tattered copy of Braudel, the Walther.
He worked in Lamy’s office, writing long neat columns of figures, using an adding machine for the totals. Just outside the window was the Dodge-em ride. As the drivers-mostly German soldiers-stomped on their accelerators, showers of blue sparks rained down from where the cars’ rods made contact with the copper ceiling. The cars bounced and shivered as they hit, the drivers spun their steering wheels like the great Nuvolari, their girlfriends screamed and hung on tight.
That evening, Casson returned to the office to finish up his work. At nine, a flight of British bombers passed over the city. The air-raid sirens wailed and, as usual, the power was cut off. The rides went dark and the cars coasted to a stop. Casson stared out the window-something so strange about the scene he couldn’t look away. The German soldiers sat patiently in the dead bumper cars, one or two of them lit cigarettes, while airplane engines droned overhead.
Fifteen minutes later, the all-clear sounded, the little orange lights strung around the Dodge-em ride went back on, and the cars clattered around the floor.
The first day of March. Payday. Thank God, Casson thought, he was down to his last fifty francs. He went out to the park and looked for Lamy. “Come back this afternoon,” Lamy said. “I’ll have it for you then.”
That left him with several hours to kill. He took the Metro over to the Benoit, and asked at the desk if he’d received a postcard. No, nothing had come, but he could leave a forwarding address. He said he was still looking for a permanent place to stay, and left the hotel. Where was Helene? By now she should be in Algiers. Could he go see de la Barre, ask for news? Maybe once, he thought. It wasn’t time for that yet. Inter-zonal postcards were slow, he had to wait.
He walked across the city, headed for Saint-Ouen. It took him an hour and a half-the streets glazed with ice- and he was tired by the time he got there. He trudged up the stairs and saw that the door to his room was padlocked. For a time, he stood and stared at it. Then he went back down to the desk.
“I’m in Room 65,” he said. “It’s locked.”
The clerk looked up from his newspaper. “Rent due by noon on the first day of the month.”
“It’s two-thirty.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“I get paid this afternoon,” Casson said.
The clerk nodded. Everybody in the world had money coming. Mostly, in his experience, it didn’t come.
“Isn’t there some way?”
Apparently not. “We must all pay to live, monsieur.”
Over at Luna Park, Lamy was in his office. Casson told him he’d been locked out of his room. “Once they get to know you,” Lamy said, “they ease up a little.” He took a metal cash box from the bottom drawer, wet his index finger, counted the notes, and fanned them out on the desk. Then he put the coins on top. “Everything cash at Luna Park,” he said with a smile.
It wasn’t enough.
Casson could pay two weeks’ rent and eat for a week, but he’d run out before he got paid again.
“We’ll see you Thursday morning,” Lamy said.
Casson thanked him and put the money in his pocket. “Is there something else I can do?” he said. “I could use the money.”
Lamy thought it over. “There might be, remind me next week.”
Casson returned to the hotel and paid the clerk, who climbed the stairs and took the padlock off the door. Casson sat on the sagging bed. This can’t go on. Maybe it was time to see his old friends. Would they help? He wasn’t sure. If they were living as they always had, it was costing them a fortune. The coal and food and clothing they were used to was available on the marche noir, but getting more expensive every day. Parisians lived on nine hundred francs a month-if they did without. Lately, it cost nine hundred francs for two kilos of butter. No, he thought, leave the friends alone. Think of something else.
He reached under the mattress and pulled out the Walther. Its presence had worried him since his return to Paris. Under Occupation law, the ownership of weapons was a serious crime-somebody might find it and turn him in. What could he get? A thousand? A few hundred? At least he’d be rid of the thing, and whatever he made would help.
He put the Walther in his belt and left the hotel.
He walked north, through Clignancourt, most of it boarded up in the late afternoon. Saturdays, before the war, he used to come here. He never bought anything but he liked the feel of the place, dusty drapes and crackled varnish, postcards of Lille in 1904.
Out past the antiquaires’ stalls of Serpette and Biron there was a different market, this one jammed with people. The streets were lined with pushcarts and rickety tables piled with old clothes, rusty pots and pans, shoes and dishes and sheets. The narrow aisles were packed; the crowds shifting and pushing, somebody stopped to bargain, somebody going against traffic. A vendor called out to Casson, “You could use a new tie, monsieur.” He stood by a cart full of spotted horrors, some with painted scenes. “Take a look, anyhow,” he said. He had a beret pulled down over his ears and stamped his feet to keep warm.
“I need to sell something,” Casson said. “Quietly.”
The man blew on his hands. “Quietly,” he said. “Papers? Ration coupons?”
“No. A gun.”
The man looked him over. “Keep going,” he said. “To the end of the row, then right. You’ll see the people you need to talk to.”
