Red Gold by Alan Furst Read Free Book Online Page A

ribbons and medals on a framed black velvet cloth hung on the wall, and a tiny Croix de Guerre in the lapel of his blue suit. One of the pictures was inscribed: The Brotherhood of the IX Commando. Casson could see some sort of insignia on the uniforms, but he had no idea what it meant.
    The suit was worn only on Sundays, when the Kerners took turns going to Mass—they would not leave him alone in the apartment. Even so, life had improved. From time to time he insisted on going out. He couldn’t go by himself, Kerner had to come along, but at least he could spend a few hours away from the stuffy apartment and its ticking clocks. The detective had supplied him with better identity papers, the real thing, made by the préfecture. Perhaps made “during lunch,” when the supervisors were not in the office, but the effect was the same. He remained Jean Louis Marin. He’d also been given some money and ration coupons, enough for cigarettes and a few small necessities.
    One afternoon, special dispensation, he went to the movies, to the little Régence out by Auteuil. The second feature was his own Night Run. It was heaven to Casson to lose himself in the fragrant darkness of a movie theatre, even with Kerner sitting beside him. Three minutes in, Citrine, as Dany, a clerk in her parents’ drapery shop. She is sitting in a crowded train compartment with Valmas, the small-time hood who, eighty minutes later, will die for love of her. Dany: in her new suit bought in Auxerre’s best shop, hopeful, shy, burning.
    They find each other immediately, as the train to Paris is leaving the platform. On Valmas’s face, the smile of a predator —If I want you, I can have you. After a moment, Dany looks away. Yes, I know. They pass a small station north of the town. The camera cuts to the passenger next to Dany: a middle-aged lady with a gimlet eye, a mouth tight with disapproval, and a hat laden with artificial fruit.
    Bernadine Chouette, Casson thought. Who had disapproved of every imaginable thing in twenty films. How good she was, a stage actress with years of character roles. She’d been horrified when the director, old Marchand, had produced the ghastly hat. “Oh no, you can’t be serious!” But he was—serious, and right. She had the pickle face and the vinegar stare, but the hat made it all work. Of course real life didn’t play that way. Chouette, a cigar-smoking habitué of garter-belt parties at the Monocle Club, was famous for exquisitely filthy songs, music-hall routines that caused tears of laughter to ruin mascara.
    Toward the end of the movie, a scene in a hotel room—a hide-out. For Dany and Valmas it’s the last time and they know it. Citrine sits on the edge of the bed, her lovely breasts in a soft sweater. “No one else,” she says, shaking her head, slow and resolute. “Not ever again.” Casson bit his lip. She’d been eighteen when Night Run was shot. Later she became an actress, but not that day, not that day.
    As good as it was to be in a movie theatre it was just as bad to come out, into the brutal daylight. “Did you like it?” Casson asked.
    “Well, that sort of thing . . .”
    Casson nodded. He’d guessed that Kerner didn’t know who he was, just a fugitive that had to be hidden. “Would you like to walk? It’s not so far.”
    “No,” Kerner said. “We must go home now.”
    The rain had started again, it was a different city when it rained. They walked to the Métro. That day, Gestapo troops had begun to burn the synagogues of Paris; brown smoke drifted across the gray afternoon, sometimes visible above the rooftops.
    PARIS. 20 OCTOBER.
    Madame Kerner was knitting, her needles clicking as she worked. Casson stared out a window at the apartment across the way, whose curtains were always drawn. The boredom of being hidden gnawed at him, he was ready to escape. By now his life at the Hotel Victoria glowed in recollection—he’d been hungry but he’d been free.
    The Kerners’ telephone was