Alan Furst - Red Gold

The trip back to Paris took forty-five minutes. It was dark when he was let out, and for a moment he had no idea where he was, somewhere in the streets of eastern Paris. He eventually found a Metro, and rode back to the place des Ternes. He wanted to walk, to think, but it was too cold, so he headed down the rue Poncelet toward the Benoit. Out on the boulevards, the street lamps had been painted blue, to make them less visible to aircraft, but in the narrow rue Poncelet it was almost completely dark.

Midway down the street, a man was sleeping in a doorway. This was not something Casson was accustomed to seeing, the police didn’t allow it, certainly not in that arrondissement. Casson stopped and peered through the darkness. The man’s back was to the street, his overcoat hiked up, the tails moving in the wind. His hat was halfway off, the brim caught between his head and his forearm. His other arm was flung out behind him.

He was dead, Casson knew that. By the way, are you aware that you were followed? It isn’t important, and we took care of it.

Casson stood there, staring, holding his coat around him. Then he started walking, heading back to the hotel.

Corbeil-Essonnes. 3 December.

It was the safest house they had. Thirty kilometers from Paris, it stood invisible behind twelve-foot walls at the edge of the village, with a separate garage that could hide four cars. The property was nominally owned by a company in Stockholm.

4:50 A.M. On the first floor, Ivanic and three others lounged in the kitchen and read newspapers. Two more men stood watch outside. In a parlor on the second floor, a meeting had been in progress since the previous afternoon. Seated at a dining-room table were: Lila Brasova, political commissar to the FTP, who had questioned Casson in the machine shop; an NKVD officer called Juron, of Polish origin and French nationality; Weiss, as liaison officer with Service B; and, chairing the meeting, Colonel Vassily Antipin, a senior executive sent in by Moscow Center. “By way of Berlin,” he’d said dryly.

Square-faced and solid, with neatly combed brown hair, Antipin was in his late thirties. He had enlisted in the GRU, military intelligence, at the age of twenty and had risen to power on the strength of clandestine operations in difficult countries, including recruitment in Bulgarian river villages in the mid-1930s.

Brasova asked him about Berlin.

“It smells of fire,” he said.

Stacked against the wall were some three hundred dossiers of French army officers who had worked in the SR. “The problem is,” Weiss said early on, “that the officer corps is dispersed. Some are prisoners of war in Germany, some have been deported to North Africa, some have fled to London. Some are dead, a few are in hiding. There may be twenty or thirty in Vichy. As we watch Casson we’ll see at least one of them, but he will represent others, and they will be hidden.”

“And the ones who specialize in the French Communist Party?”

“By May of 1939 we’d identified ten officers. There’s one left in Vichy, a lieutenant-much too junior to run an operation like this.”

“What’s Casson like?”

Brasova shrugged. “Intelligent, a good heart, some professional success, some failure. Would like to believe himself a cynic-‘Que l’humanite se debroulle sans moi,’ the world will just have to muddle through without my help. In fact he isn’t like that, quite the opposite.”

“And Kovar?”

“Impossible.”

They broke for dinner, went back to work at ten. Given the difficulty of moving Antipin through enemy lines, Moscow had put together a long agenda. Sometime after four, they returned to the discussion of the SR. Antipin leaned back and knotted his fingers behind his head. “Are they simply trying to see over the wall, is that it? Trying to find out who’s running the FTP-in particular, who’s running Service B.”

“Of course that’s what it is,” Juron said. He was the youngest there, bald at thirty-five, with thick glasses.

“It’s more than that,” Weiss said. “This is a struggle between de Gaulle’s clandestine service and the old-line SR. In that conflict, a working relationship with the FTP is an asset, potentially of great value.”

“To the British,” Antipin said.

“Yes. Whoever wins gets British guns and British money and the aid of the British secret services. De Gaulle, based in London, is ahead in the race, so this could well be SR’s attempt to catch up.”

“What’s British power to us?” Juron said. “We’ve been at war with them, more or less, since 1917.”

“What would you do, then?” Antipin asked.

“Take what they offer, find out everything we can, then cut the lines.” Antipin nodded. This was, Weiss realized, the Center’s point of view. “Comrade Brasova?” Antipin said.

“I would wait and see,” she said. “They will use us, we will use them, the Germans will suffer.”

Outside, the darkness had begun to fade. The bell in the town church rang five. Weiss met Antipin’s eyes. “I’m going to step outside for some air,” he said.

He waited at the back door, Antipin showed up a moment later. They walked on a gravel pathway at the foot of the wall. “The Center has decided that Juron should take care of this,” Weiss said. “Is that it?”

“That’s their preference, but the final decision is up to me.”

“You know what he’ll do, don’t you?”

“Liquidate.”

“Yes. Their answer to everything.”

“We are at war,” Antipin said.

“Can you give me a month?”

“What for?”

“To do what Moscow wants done here, I need help.”

Antipin thought it over. “I’ll give you a month. But Casson and Kovar may have to be sacrificed-that’s the trade-off. No matter how you put it, spies are spies, and, to the Center, this has all the earmarks of a classic penetration. After all, if the Germans allow some form of SR to exist in Vichy, what would it do? Fight the communists. How to do that? One way is to fake a resistance group, approach the party, and tell them you want to work with them.”

“Maybe,” Weiss said, “but maybe not. I think Brasova is right, what’s proposed is a temporary alliance, and I want to take the next step. For that, I’ll need Casson and Kovar. Can you keep Juron away from them?”

“He stays in Paris, but I won’t let him do anything right now. However, when the time comes, you will have to follow his orders. Agreed?”

Weiss agreed.

They stirred in their sleep, Casson and Helene, gliding spoon-style through the December night in the battered old Benoit. She reached back, pulling him tighter against her, then sighed and, in a moment, fell asleep again, breathing slow and steady, dreaming away, with a muted cry or mumble every now and then.

He had been just too lonely that afternoon, he could not bear it. So he’d found the travel agency she’d said she worked for and, at six in the evening, had waited for her to appear. She came out alone, walking quickly, head down. Carefully put together, he saw. The long black coat that half the women in the city wore, a lavender scarf to improve it, setting off her dark eyes, her dark hair. She was startled to see him. “Did you just happen to be passing by?”

“No,” he said. “I was waiting for you.”

They headed up the boulevard, paused for traffic at a side street. “Perhaps,” he said, “you’d like to come back to the hotel with me.” She didn’t answer, just took his arm, her shoulder pressed against him as the cars and trucks rumbled past.

Back in his room, he watched her undress in the darkness. A little leaner than he might have preferred, but sinuous, with a narrow waist and supple hips. In bed, buried beneath the thin blanket and their overcoats, they waited to get warm. “Do you miss Strasbourg?” he asked.