Alan Furst - Red Gold

Room 15 was off by itself on the second floor, in a cul-de-sac isolated by some ancient renovation. Casson was given a brass disc with a number on it and told to wait. There were two other people on the wooden benches and only later did Casson realize that he never saw their faces. He sat there for almost an hour, staring into space, the monotony broken only by the delivery of the mail, a large canvas sack so heavy it had to be dragged across the floor before being left by the secretary’s desk.

The inspector was just as Casson remembered him. A heavy old man with thick white hair, a battered face, and pale blue eyes. “Monsieur Casson,” he said, jovial as before, apparently quite pleased to see him. “I am sorry you had to wait in that shithouse out there, but we must pretend that all is as usual.”

Casson said he understood.

“Degueulasse!” Sickening. “The boss makes me do this once a week because he knows I hate it. A national illness, this business. We get them all, jilted lovers, angry wives, the petits commercants trying to wreck the competition. And the rather ordinary people who get up one morning and look at their neighbor and say to themselves, see how they live! What right do they have to such good fortune?”

“Sad,” Casson said.

“Yes, I suppose that’s the word.” He paused a moment. “But nothing new. Back when I was young I worked in the countryside, a small town in the Sarthe. We used to get letters from a man whose apple tree had a branch that grew over a neighbor’s fence. When the apples fell on the ground, the neighbor ate them.”

“The scoundrel.”

“It’s funny, yet it’s not funny. This man brooded over his lost apples, and the idea that someone else might profit from his labor drove him to the edge of madness. Well, in those days it didn’t matter. We’d read his letters, put them in a file-he accused the neighbor of everything he could think of-and forget about them. But now, with the Occupation, and the Gestapo…” He looked grim and shook his head in sorrow. “Well, to hell with the things you can’t change, right?”

Casson nodded. “Our mutual friend suggested I come to see you.”

“How can I help?”

“We need to buy-”

The inspector smiled. “I’ve heard it all,” he said.

“Guns.”

“Meaning?”

“Submachine guns, a few hundred.”

The inspector scowled. “Morphine, not a problem. White slaves, maybe. But that-” He let it hang.

“It’s important,” Casson said.

“It may not be possible.”

“We have to try.”

The inspector stared at him. Finally he sighed. “I hope you know what you’re doing.” He took a fountain pen from his pocket and deliberately unscrewed the cap. He hesitated a moment, wrote a few words on a slip of paper, blew the ink dry, and handed it to Casson. Then he stood abruptly and walked to the window.

“We have dinner with our daughter out in Thiais tonight, and I worry about the roads. Snow, it said in the paper. Meanwhile, you can memorize that.”

Casson worked at it, it wasn’t very hard. “Vasilis,” he said. “Greek?”

Staring out the window, the inspector shrugged. “Greek, Turkish, Bulgarian. Just keep asking till you hear one you like.”

The inspector returned to his desk, took the piece of paper from Casson, leaned forward, and said, “Some personal advice. You should keep in mind that these people in Vichy have to walk a certain line. What they are doing with you is all well and good. I don’t know that it matters, but it might. However, the rest of the time, they are part of the government. Which means doing what Petain and Laval and their friends think they ought to be doing-working against the enemies of France. That’s a big category, a lot fits in it. If the war ended tomorrow, and Britain won, they’d say, ‘Look what we did, we were on the right side.’ On the other hand, if the war ends tomorrow and Germany wins, God forbid, they could say the same thing.”

“All right,” Casson said after a moment. “I understand.”

“I hope you do. Maybe you don’t like it, but that’s the way life is. Not that we’re any better. When the Germans took over, the prefecture went back to work, just like it always had. The files were all in place, and if a call came and somebody said, ‘Send over Pierre’s dossier’ in a German accent, there went Pierre. Comprends?”

“Yes.”

“Still a patriot?”

“Trying,” Casson said.

The inspector smiled.

SS-Unterscharfuhrer-Corporal-Otto Albers strolled up and down the rue St.-Denis, where two or three women were posed in each doorway. From the way he looked them over, casual and thoughtful at once, it was clear that he considered himself a connoisseur, a man who knew precisely what he wanted and would insist on having it. To the women in the doorways there wasn’t much new in that. They smiled or sneered, opened their coats to give him a glimpse of the merchandise, made kisses in the air, or just looked haughty-I have not always been as you see me today. This last was not easy, wearing red panties or nothing at all under a bulky coat, but a proven technique with German customers. “Hey, Fritz, got a big wiener?” one of them called to Albers. But that was an act of spontaneous resistance, she’d already given up on him.

In fact, whores were not really what Albers wanted-there were dangers here, one had to be careful of one’s health-but he had been driven to it. Before the war, life in this area had always gone his way, he’d never had to pay for it. In what the Americans called the Roaring Twenties, he’d done his roaring in the nightclubs of Berlin, where sad days-a war lost, inflation, ruin-led to wild nights. What those girls wouldn’t do! Nothing he’d ever been able to think up. His complicated suggestions had always been met with greedy enthusiasm. Ach ja! How fine to encounter such an ingenious gentleman.

In the thirties, his luck held. Joining the Nazi Party in 1933, he’d made good use of the blond maidens whose patriotic duty it was to fuck his brains out. Usually in a forest, on a carpet of pine needles, but he’d learned to live with that. The fantasies were pretty much the same, only the girls had given up slinking in favor of frolicking, the prescribed form for Aryan womanhood. Sullen ennui gave way to lusty giggles and they saved a bundle on the eye shadow.

But Paris was a different proposition. Stationed at Gestapo headquarters, essentially a military clerk, he discovered that Frenchwomen were not quite as he’d imagined. Many of them wouldn’t have anything to do with Germans, which was understandable, but some would. Unfortunately, the best of those went to the officers, and what remained for the enlisted men was not to Albers’s taste. Very materialistic, he thought. They didn’t want exotic adventures, they wanted little gifts.

For a long time, he tried. A chubby redhead, who worked in a shop; an overworked housewife, her husband off somewhere; but they turned him down. For one thing, there were language difficulties. He wasn’t sure how the French talked about such things, to be subtle or artful was out of the question. “What,” they said, freezing up, “do you want?” Forced to say words from a dictionary, he came off as a boor or a pervert, or both.

But none of this mattered on the rue St.-Denis. You paid for your pleasures and the women were quick to figure out what you wanted and what you would pay to get it.

A gray, bleak afternoon, Albers walked with hands in pockets, past frowzy blondes and swarthy Corsicans, past a fat girl stuffed into a child’s jumper, past a dominatrice wearing a broad leather belt and a fearsome scowl. Past housemaids and Marie Antoinettes and femmes fatales with cigarette holders. Oh the trashy circus of it, he thought, yearning for the giggling pine maidens in their dirndls.