Red Gold by Alan Furst Read Free Book Online Page B

on the wall in the kitchen. It rang, for the first time since Casson had been in the apartment. Madame Kerner looked up from her knitting. Kerner went to answer it. From the parlor, Casson could hear the conversation.
    “Who is it?”
    Kerner listened.
    “Very well. What time?”
    Again.
    “Yes, sir,”
    And again.
    “Yes, sir.”
    And, finally: “At fifteen-thirty, you say. In Courbevoie.”
    An hour later, Casson left. Madame helped him fold “his things”—two books from a secondhand stall, some socks and underwear—into brown paper, which she tied for him with string. “Adieu, monsieur,” she said. And wished him good health.
    Kerner led the way to the meeting. They took several Métros, waited on line at a Gestapo Kontrol, eventually reached Courbevoie, just across the Seine from Neuilly but a separate municipality. They walked to the Hotel de Ville, the town hall, a complicated maze of bureaux with long lines outside offices that handled taxes, licenses, ration coupons, marriage certificates, stamps, and attestations for nearly everything—all the bureaucratic witchcraft of French existence. At the entry to the building, Kerner told him where he was to go, and then they said good-bye.
    “Thank you for letting me stay with you,” Casson said.
    “You’re welcome.” Very formally, they shook hands. Casson entered the building and climbed a staircase to the second floor. The halls were crowded, people everywhere; some wandering lost, some grimly determined, some glancing from the address on an official letter up at the titles on office doors. Is this it?
    Finally, Casson found the Department of Birth Registry, shuffled through the line, gave his name as Marin, and was directed to a small office at the end of the hall. He opened the door, and there at the desk, in a dark suit, was a man he had known as Captain Degrave.
    In May of 1940, when Casson was reactivated as a corporal in the Section Cinématographique of the Forty-fifth Division, Degrave had commanded the unit. They’d taken newsreel footage of the French defense of the fort at Sedan, then headed for the relative quiet of the Maginot line, only to find the roads made virtually impassable by refugees from the fighting in the north. On a fine May morning, in a field near Bouvellement, a Stuka dive-bomber had destroyed both their vehicles and their equipment, and Degrave had disbanded the unit, sending Casson south to Maçon to wait out the end of the war at an isolated army barracks.
    Wherever he’d been since that day, and whatever he’d done, Degrave was as Casson remembered him: a heavy, dark face, thinning hair, perhaps a little old for the rank of captain, with something sorrowful and stubborn in his character. Degrave had always been distant, a man not given to idle conversation. Still, they had served together under fire, in a blockhouse defending the French side of the river Meuse, and they were glad to see each other.
    “So,” Degrave said as they shook hands, “we survived.”
    “We did,” Casson said. “Somehow. What about Meneval?” Meneval had been the unit cameraman. Every day he’d called his wife from phones in village cafés.
    “He returned safely to Paris.” Degrave smiled. “And to married life.”
    “And then, you left the army?”
    “I’m with the Office of Public Works, now, in Vichy. We’re responsible for the maintenance of roads, bridges, that kind of thing.”
    “In the ZNO? ”
    “Yes, but we have projects in the German-administered region as well.”
    Such as hiding film producers in Neuilly apartments, Casson thought.
    Degrave put a packet of Gitanes on the table. “Please,” he said, “help yourself.” Casson took one and lit it, so did Degrave. From the offices around them they could hear a steady murmur of conversation.
    Degrave shook out the match. “In fact, I remain what I always was, a captain in the army, and an intelligence officer.”
    Casson thought that over, recalling what the unit had