Alan Furst - Red Gold

“Good,” the sergeant said. Then, in a stern voice, “Alles in Ordnung.” He gave Weiss a friendly wink and a smile, then whispered “She will be so happy.”

Paris. 16 November.

He had a second meeting with Kovar, this time in response to a note slipped under his door at the Benoit. Late at night he thought he heard something, then decided he didn’t and went back to sleep. They met in the same office, in the early evening. The weather had turned cold, he could see his breath when he talked. This time the shade was up and the moon, in the upper corner of the tall window, cast silver shadows on the walls.

“I found a way to talk to some friends,” Kovar said.

“Good.”

“Old friends. We were in the streets together, marching, fighting, and we were in the jails together. One doesn’t toss that away so easily. They follow the line, of course, they are good communists. But then, they are also Frenchmen, some of them anyhow, and for the French, having one’s own opinion is a kind of religion.”

Casson smiled.

“There’s one in particular-he made no promises, simply said he’d see what he could do. I hope you understand that he’s putting himself in danger. The Paris apparat is under intense pressure right now, because the Germans are about to take Moscow, they’re close enough to see the last stop on the tram line.”

“Will Stalin fight in the city?”

“To the end. Then he’ll burn it to the ground. But, so what? The reality is, all they have now is the weather. The rasputitsa, the autumn rains. The earth turns to mud-some days they have to maneuver their tanks with shovels and logs. And, soon enough, it will snow. Not German snow. Russian snow.”

“General Winter.”

Kovar shrugged. “So-called. But the signs are all bad. The Moscow factories have been moved to the Urals, and the NKVD has packed up and left town. Sometime last week, wireless transmissions broken off in midsentence. What does that say to you?”

“Nothing good.”

Kovar thought for a moment. “Of course, Russian wars always seem to go like this. Chaos and defeat and slaughter. Followed by the execution of those who tried to sound the warning. It’s just the way they are. But then something happens. In Napoleon’s campaign it was winter, and some kind of tick that killed thousands. In 1917 it was revolution. The Russian land defends itself-that’s the mystics’ version.”

“I’ve read it can be sixty below zero in December.”

“And colder. The Wehrmacht will have to heat their machine-gun barrels over a fire before they can use them.” Kovar smiled. “Only the Russians could get themselves into a position, in 1941, where sabers and horses really matter.”

“How do you know all this?” Casson said.

“Oh, it’s talk,” Kovar said. “But it’s good talk.”

Casson was cold; he got up, walked around, rubbed his hands together. “Your friend,” he said. “When do you think he might try?”

“Who knows? He’s a survivor, he’ll wait for the right moment. Of course, he might move a little faster if he knew a little more.”

“I don’t think it’s all laid out. Just French army officers, a center of resistance. I don’t know what they intend to do-spy for the British? Blow up power stations? It could be anything.”

He walked to the window and stared out. “We’re just attorneys, Kovar. We represent two principals who may need to cooperate but cannot be seen to do so. A few years ago I worked with a Swiss lawyer. This man had a particular specialty, back-to-back negotiations. Two parties negotiate entirely through a third party so that they don’t ever know who they’re talking to. We may, eventually, come to something a lot like that-the parties will be known, the individuals invisible.”

Casson could see that this made sense to Kovar. “On the other hand, it may just be a matter of setting up a single meeting, then gracefully leaving the stage.”

Kovar shook his head slowly. “Somehow I doubt it will be that easy.”

Casson laughed. “No, it never is.”

They were silent for a time, then Casson said, “How do you make a living these days?”

“Oh, I survive. Always under false ID, always in some lost corner of the world. For a time I had the perfect job, at Samaritaine, the big department store. Every night, after hours, they wax the floors. First it’s the cleaners, then the waxers and polishers. The wax is rubbed in with cloths and left to dry for a half hour or so. The best way to polish it is with felt slippers-shuffling along from one end of the room to the other. I’m sure somebody used to do it at your house.”

“Yes,” Casson said. “Once a week.”

“What they do at Samaritaine is hire people to wear the felt slippers, a dozen or so. The usual crowd who work the night in Paris, each one a little more cracked than the next, ‘the princess,’ ‘the Albanian,’ I suppose I was ‘the novelist.’ The boss wasn’t a bad guy, lost an arm in the 1914 war, he’d play music on a Victrola, usually waltzes, but you could do any step you liked as long as you stayed in contact with the floor. It’s hypnotic, of course. The wood is dull to start with, then glows as you polish. We’d work our way from floor to floor, skating around the towels and the blankets and the brooms. On the sixth, we’d each put on a lady’s hat from the display trees-a little joke-the violins sawing away on The Vienna Woods. Well, I used to think, Cocteau really ought to see this. Truth is, I liked it, it suited me.

“But eight months for somebody in my position was too long, I had to quit. For the moment, I’m writing the occasional newspaper feature, under an alias, of course. It gets me a few francs, mostly from old friends I’ve known for years, mostly the socialists, a very tolerant crowd. Articles on soccer, on sound health, tips for cooking turnips. And then, I’ve always got a novel going.”

“Will you stay in France?”

“Maybe. For one thing, it’s not so easy to get out, now. And you have to find a country that will take you. I can’t go near Spain. Switzerland is out. Hard to say, maybe Mexico. For the moment, I’m here. If I vanish, it’ll mean somebody’s police finally stumbled over me and that was that. What about you?”

“I take it a day at a time,” Casson said. “Count myself lucky to have a roof over my head and something to eat. Beyond that, God only knows.”

This is the BBC, broadcasting from London. Here is the news in French. The Comite Francais de Liberation National announced today in London that, after a trial in absentia and review by the Judicial Section, Hauptsturmfuhrer Karl Kriegler, an SS official at the Sante prison in Paris, has been condemned to death. He was sentenced for the torture and murder of prisoners-of-war under confinement at the Sante, specific instances are cited in the indictment. The sentence is to be carried out at the discretion of the CFLN, at any time after the official declaration of the verdict, by any means necessary, or at the end of the war. Other personnel at French prisons are reminded that all wars eventually do come to an end, records are being kept, and they will be held to account for their actions. In other news…

Damn their eyes.

In a cellar on the outskirts of Paris, Weiss had to acknowledge that he had nothing like the powerful BBC at his disposal, and de Gaulle’s people were using it to full effect. Not that he disagreed with the strategy-the sentence in absentia might have a sobering effect on the Hauptsturmfuhrer, as it had in other cases. It was just that he had an executive’s view of the world, and as an executive he was stung when competitors had resources he didn’t. He could turn out endless editions of the underground Humanite, his best writers storming and threatening, but it didn’t begin to add up to the power of the BBC.