“No.”
“When I’m alone, I clean them with my tie.”
“Fine for me, Bernard.”
Langlade poured each of them a generous portion, swirled his glass and inhaled the fumes. Casson did the same. “Well, well,” he said.
Langlade shrugged, meaning, if you can afford it, why not? “When the Germans got here,” he said, “they began to make big orders, for trucks, and those armored whatnots they drive around in. We did that for five months, then they asked, could you buy some more elaborate equipment, possibly in Switzerland? Well, yes, we could. There wasn’t much point in saying no, the job would just go across the street to somebody else. So, we bought the new machinery, and began to make optical instruments. Like periscopes for submarines, and for field use also, a type of thing where a soldier in a trench can look out over the battlefield without getting his head blown off. We don’t make the really delicate stuff—binoculars, for instance. What we make has to accept hard use, and survive.”
“Is there that much of it?”
Langlade leaned over his desk. “Jean-Claude, I was like you. A civilian, what did I know. I went about my business, got into bed with a woman now and then, saw friends, made a little money, had a family. I never could have imagined the extent of anything like this. These people, army and navy, they think in thousands. As in, thousands and thousands.” Langlade gave him a certain very eloquent and Gallic look—it meant he was making money, and it meant he must never be asked how much, or anything like that, because he was making so much that to say it out loud would be to curse the enterprise—the jealous gods would overhear and throw down some bad-luck lightning bolts from the top of commercial Olympus. Where the tax people also kept an office.
Casson nodded that he understood, then smiled, honestly happy for a friend’s success.
“Now,” Langlade said, “what can I do for you?”
“Citrine,” Casson said.
A certain smile from Langlade. “The actress.”
“Yes.”
“All right.”
“We have become lovers, Bernard. It’s the second time—we had a petite affaire ten years ago, but this is different.”
Langlade made a sympathetic face; yes, he knew how it was. “She’s certainly beautiful, Jean-Claude. For myself, I couldn’t stop looking at her long enough to go to bed.”
Casson smiled. “We just spent a week together, in Lyons—that’s between you and me by the way. Now, I’ve had some kind of problem in the Gestapo office on the rue des Saussaies. Bernard, it’s so stupid— I went up there to get an Ausweis to go to Spain, and they asked me about military service and something told me not to mention that I’d been reactivated in May and gone up to the Meuse. You know, there are thousands of French soldiers still in Germany, in prison camps. I decided it would be safer not to admit anything. So, I didn’t. Well, time went by, somebody sent a paper to somebody else, and they caught me in a lie.”
Langlade shook his head and made a sour face. The Germans were finicky about paper in a way the Latin French found amusing—until the problem settled on their own doorstep.
“The next thing was, they started reading my mail and listening to my phone. So, when I was with Citrine down in Lyons, I told her that if she wanted to get in touch with me she could send a postcard to your office, your law office in the 8th is the address I gave her.”
He waited for Langlade to smile and say it was all right, but he didn’t. Instead, his expression darkened into a certain kind of discomfort.
“Look, Jean-Claude,” he said. “We’ve known each other for twenty years, I’m not going to beat around the bush with you. If Citrine sends me a postcard, well, I’ll see that you get it. On the other hand, next time you have a chance to talk to her, would it be too much to ask for you to find some other way of doing this?”
Casson wasn’t going to show what he felt. “No problem at all, Bernard. In fact, I can take care of it right away.”
“You can understand, can’t you? This work I’m doing matters to them, Jean-Claude. It isn’t like they’re actually watching me, but, you know, I see these military people all the time, from the procurement offices, and all it would take would be for my secretary over in the other office to decide she wasn’t getting enough money, or, or whatever it might be. Look, I have an idea, what about Arnaud? You know, he’s always doing this and that and the other, and it’s just the sort of thing that would appeal to him.”
“You’re right,” Casson said. “A much better idea.”
“So now, here’s what we’ll do. Let’s go back to Paris—I can call a driver and car—and treat ourselves to a hell of a lunch, hey? Jean-Claude, how about it?”
Friday, 4 May. 4:20 P.M.
End of the week, a slow day in the office, Casson kept looking at his watch. Seven hours—and the dinner at Brasserie Heininger would be over. Of course, he lied to himself, he didn’t have to go, the world wouldn’t come to an end. No, he thought, don’t do that. “Mireille?” he called out. “Could you come in for a minute?”
“Monsieur?”
“Why don’t you go home early, Mireille—it won’t be so crowded on the train.”
“Thank you, Monsieur Casson.”
“Could you mail this for me, on the way?”
Of course.
A postcard—the people who watched the mail supposedly didn’t bother with postcards—telling Citrine to write him care of a café where they knew him. He had to assume Mireille wasn’t followed, that she could mail a postcard without somebody retrieving it. It meant he could save an anonymous telephone he’d discovered, in an office at one of the soundstages out at Billancourt, for a call he might want to make later on.
Mireille called out good night and left, Casson returned to the folder on his desk. Best to prepare for an important meeting. The folder held various pencil budgets for Hotel Dorado, a list of possible changes to the story line, names of actors and actresses and scenic designers—they were just now reaching the stage where certain individuals were, almost mystically, exactly right for the film. Also in the folder, a list of new projects Altmann had mentioned over the last few months; you never knew when one of these “ideas” was going to leap out of its coffin and start dancing around the crypt.
Casson read down the page and sighed out loud. Ah yes, the Boer War. The whole industry was planning movies about the noble Boers that spring, somebody in Berlin—Goebbels?—had decided to make them fashionable. A group of farmers, not exactly German but at least Dutch, thus Nordic and sincere, had carried out guerrilla actions and given the British army fits in South Africa. A war, according to German thinking, that made England look bad: imperialist, power-hungry, and cruel. One German company, Casson had heard, was about to go into production on something called President Kruger, a Boer War spectacle employing 40,000 extras.
The phone.
Now what?
Maybe he shouldn’t answer. No, it might be Altmann, some change of plans, or even, gift from heaven, dinner canceled. “Hello?”
“Monsieur Casson?”
“Yes?”
“Maître Versol here.”
What? Who? Oh Jesus! The lawyer for the LeBeau company!
Versol cleared his throat, then continued. “I thought I would telephone to see if any progress has been made on locating our missing inventory. You will recall, monsieur, some four hundred beards, fashioned from human hair and of a superior quality, provided for your use in the film Samson and Delilah.”
“Yes, Maître Versol, I do remember.”
“We feel we have been very patient, monsieur.”
“Yes,” Casson said. “That is true.”