The World at Night (3 page)

Casson stared out the window. He really didn’t know what to do. Marie-Claire had a problem with her lover and her circle of friends— it didn’t have much to do with him. “The important thing is to get through today,” he said, then paused for a moment. The telephone line hissed gently. “Whatever you decide to do, Marie-Claire, I will go along with that.”

“All right.” She took a breath, then sighed. “Will you call me in an hour, Jean-Claude? Please?”

He said yes, they hung up, he held his head in his hands.

He thought about canceling his lunch—with the agent Perlemère—and asked Gabriella to telephone, cautiously,
to see if Monsieur Perlemère
is able to keep his lunch appointment.

Oh yes. A little thing like war did not deter Perlemère. So the good soldier Casson marched off to Alexandre to eat warm potato-and-beef salad and hear about Perlemère’s stable of lame horses—aging ingenues, actors who drank too much, the Rin-Tin-Tin look-alike, Paco, who had already bitten two directors, and an endless list beyond that. A volume business.

Perlemère ordered two dozen Belons, the strongest of the oysters, now at the very end of their season. He rubbed his hands and attacked with relish, making a
thrup
sound as he inhaled each oyster, closing his eyes with pleasure, then drinking the juice from the shell, a second
thrup,
followed by a brief grunt that meant arguments about the meaning of life were irrelevant once you could afford to eat oysters.

Perlemère was fat, with a small but prominent black mustache—a sort of Jewish Oliver Hardy.
Perlemère, Perlmutter, mother-of-pearl,
Casson thought. Curious names the Jews had. “I saw Harry Fleischer this morning,” he said. “Off to MGM.”

“Mm. Time to run, eh?”

“Maybe for the best.”

Perlemère shrugged. “The Germans hit first. Now we’ll settle with them once and for all.”

Casson nodded polite agreement.

“What’d you do last time?” Perlemère demolished an oyster.

“I graduated lycée in 1916, headed for the Normale.” The Ecole Normale Supérieure the most exclusive college in the Sorbonne, was France’s Harvard, Yale, and Princeton all rolled into one. “My eighteenth birthday, I went down to the recruiters. They asked me a few questions, then sent me off to install cameras on Spads flying reconnaissance over German lines. I changed film, developed it—really the war started me in this business.”

“Normalien,
eh?” He meant Casson was well-connected; a member, by university affiliation, of the aristocracy.

Casson shrugged. “I guess it meant something, once upon a time.”

“School of life, over here.”
Thrup.
“But I haven’t done too badly.”

Casson laughed—as though such a thing could be in question!

“I expect this war business will go on for a while,” Perlemère said. “Your German’s stubborn, I’ll admit that. He doesn’t know when he’s beaten. But we’ll give them a whipping, just watch.”

Casson took a bite of the potato-and-beef salad, which would have been delicious if he’d had an appetite, and a sip of the
Graves,
which he didn’t care for. “You represent Citrine, Jacques?”

“Not any more. Besides, what do you want with her?”

“Nothing special in mind. I just remembered she used to be with you.”

“Suzy Balcon, Jean-Claude. Remember where you heard that.”

“Oh?”

“I’ll send a photo over. She’s tall and sophisticated—but she puts your mind in the gutter. Mm. Never mind Citrine.”

Two businessmen maneuvered down the packed aisle and managed to squeeze themselves around the tiny table next to Casson. “Two hundred German tanks on fire,” one of them said. “Just imagine that.”

Back at the office, Gabriella: “Your wife called, Monsieur Casson. She said to tell you that the dinner has been canceled, and would you please telephone her when you have a moment. She’s at the beauty parlor until three-thirty, home any time after that.”

“Gabriella, do you think you could find me
Le Temps
?” For Casson, a day without a newspaper was agony.

“I can go to the
tabac.”

“I would really appreciate it.”

“I’ll go, then. Oh, Maître Versol asks that you call him.”

“No.”

“Yes, monsieur. I am afraid so.”

Back in his office, Casson retrieved the swollen dossier from the bottom drawer where he’d hidden it from himself. In 1938, someone at Pathé had woken up one morning with a vision: the world could simply not go on without another remake of
Samson and Delilah.
And Jean Casson had to produce. Costume epics were not at all his specialty, but Pathé was huge and powerful and deaf—the only word they could hear was
yes.

He got a script. Something close to it, anyhow. Signed a Samson who, from medium range in twilight, looked strong, and a reasonable Delilah—overpriced but adequately sultry. Pathé then canceled the project, paid him based on the escape clauses, and went on to new visions. Casson tied up the project, or thought he did.

One small problem: his production manager had ordered four hundred beards. These were for the extras, and were composed of human hair, prepared by the estimable theatrical makeup house LeBeau et cie. Cost: 5,000 francs. Somewhere just about here the problems began. The beards were, or were not, delivered to a warehouse Productions Casson rented in Levallois. Subsequently, they were returned to LeBeau. Or perhaps they weren’t. LeBeau certainly didn’t have the beards—or thought he didn’t. Casson didn’t have them either—as far as he knew. It was all
très difficile.

Casson made the telephone call, writhing in silent discomfort. LeBeau couldn’t actually sue him—the money was too little, the loss of business too great. And Casson couldn’t tell LeBeau to take his beards and the rest of it—films could not be made without a theatrical makeup supplier. Still, this was an affair of honor, so Casson had to endure Maître Versol’s endless drivel as a weekly punishment. The lawyer didn’t attack or threaten him; the world—a murky, obscure entity—was the villain here, see how it took men of exquisite integrity and set them wandering in a forest of lost beards. Where were they? Who had them? What was to be done?
Très difficile.

When he got off the phone, Gabriella came in with a copy of
Le
Temps.
It had a certain puffy quality to it—obviously it had been read, and more than once—but a look in Gabriella’s eye told him to be thankful he had a newspaper and not to raise questions about its history.

There wasn’t all that much to read: Germany had attacked Belgium and the Netherlands and Luxembourg, the French army had advanced to engage the Wehrmacht on Belgian territory, a stunning assortment of world leaders were infuriated, and:

The characteristics of the French soldier are well-known, and he can be followed across the ages, from the heroic fighters of the feudal armies to the companies of the
Ancien Régime,
and on to the contemporary era. Are they not the characteristics of the French people? Love of glory, bravery, vivacity?

5:20 P.M.

Headed for the one appointment he’d looked forward to all afternoon—drinks at a sidewalk table at Fouquet—Casson left the office ten minutes before he really had to, and told Gabriella he wouldn’t be back.

Marie-Claire had called at four; the dinner was now definitely on for tonight. They had, in a series of telephone calls, talked it out— Yvette Langlade, Françoise, Bruno, and the others—and reached agreement: in her hour of crisis, France must remain France. Here Marie-Claire echoed that season’s popular song, Chevalier’s
“Paris
Reste Paris.”
It was, Casson suspected, the best you could do with a day when your country went to war. Children would be born, bakers would bake bread, lovers would make love, dinner parties would be given, and, in that way, France would go on being France.

And would he, she would be so grateful, stop at Crémerie Boursault on the way home from the office and buy the cheese? “A good
vacherin,
Jean-Claude. Take a moment to choose—ripe, runny in the middle, French not Swiss. Please don’t let her sell you one that isn’t perfect.”

“And we’re how many?”

“Ten, as planned. Of course Françoise and Philippe will not be there, but she telephoned, very firm and composed, and said it was imperative we go ahead. We must. So I called Bibi Lachette and explained and she agreed to come.”

“All right, then, I’ll see you at eight-thirty.”

For the best, he thought. He walked down Marbeuf and turned onto the Champs-Elysées. At twilight the city throbbed with life, crowds moving along the avenue, the smells of garlic and frying oil and cologne and Gauloises and the chestnut blossom on the spring breeze all blended together. The cafés glowed with golden light, people at the outdoor tables gazing hypnotized at the passing parade. To Casson, every face—beautiful, ruined, venal, innocent—had to be watched until it disappeared from sight. It was his life, the best part of his life; the night, the street, the crowd. There would always be wars, but the people around him had a strength, an indomitable spirit.
They cannot
be conquered,
he thought. His heart swelled. He’d made love all his life—his father had taken him to a brothel at the age of twelve—but this, a Paris evening, the fading light, was his love affair with the world.

He reached in his pocket, made sure he had money. Fouquet wasn’t cheap—but, an aperitif or two, not so bad. Then the
vacherin,
but that was all. Marie-Claire’s apartment was a ten-minute walk from the rue Chardin, he wouldn’t need a taxi.

Money was always the issue. His little house in Deauville was rented. Not that he told the world that, but it was. He did
fairly
well with his gangsters and doomed lovers—they paid his bills—but never
very
well. That was, he told himself, just up ahead, around the next bend in life. For the moment, it was enough to pay the bills. Almost all of them, anyhow, and only a month or two after they were due.

But in Paris that was typical, life had to be lived at a certain pitch. His father used to say, “The real artists in Paris are the spenders of money.” He’d laugh and go on, “And their palette is—the shops!” Here he would pause and nod his head wisely, in tune with the philosopher-knave side of his nature. But then, suddenly, the real ending: “And their canvas is life!”

Casson could see the performance in detail—it had been staged often enough—and smiled to himself as he walked down the crowded avenue. Casson wondered why, on the night his country went to war, he was thinking about his father. The father he remembered was old and corrupt, a rogue and a liar, but he’d loved him anyhow.

Casson needed only a moment to search the crowded tables—what he was looking for was easy to find. Amid the elegant patrons of Fouquet, the women with every inch of fabric resting exactly where they wished, the men with each hair exactly where they’d put it that morning, sat a ferocious, Bolshevik spider. Skinny, glaring, with unruly black hair and beard, a worker’s blue suit, an open-collar shirt, and bent wire-frame Trotsky eyeglasses. But this one was no artsy intellectual Trotskyite— you could see that. This one was a Stalinist to his bloody toenails and, momentarily, would produce a sharpened scythe and proceed to dismember half the patronage of Fouquet’s, while the waiters ran about hysterically, trying to present their bills to a dying clientele.

Ah, Fischfang,
Casson thought.
You are my revenge.

Louis Fischfang was Casson’s writer. Every producer had one. Casson told the agents and screenwriters that he spread the work around, and he did—different people were right for different projects. But in the end, when the chips were down, when somebody had to somehow make it all come out right for the people who handed over their hard-earned francs for a seat in a movie theatre, then it was Fischfang and no other.

Though he quivered with political rage, spat and swore like a proletarian, marched and signed and chanted and agitated, none of it mattered, because that fucking Fischfang could write a movie script that would make a banker weep. God-given talent, is what it was. Just the line, just the gesture, just the shot. There could be no Jean Cassons— no Alexander Kordas, no Louis Mayers, no Jean Renoirs or René Clairs—without the Louis Fischfangs of this world.

Fischfang looked up as Casson approached the table. Offered his usual greeting: a few grim nods and a twisted smile.
Yes, here he was,
the devil’s first mate on the ship of corruption. Here was money, nice suits,
ties,
and the haughty 16th Arrondissement, all in one
bon bourgeois
package called Casson.

“Did you order?” Casson asked as he sat down.

“Kir.” White wine with blackcurrent liqueur.

“Good idea.”

“Royale.” Not white wine, champagne.

“Even better.”

The waiter arrived with Fischfang’s drink and Casson ordered the same. “It’s a strange day to work,” he said, “but I really don’t know what else to do.”

“I can’t believe it’s come to this,” Fischfang said angrily. “They”— in Fischfangese this always meant
the government
and
the rich and the
powerful—
“they grew Hitler. Watered him and weeded him and pitch-forked manure all around him. They gave him what he wanted in Czechoslovakia and Poland—now he wants the rest, now he wants what
they
have. Hah!”

“So now they’ll stop him,” Casson said.

Fischfang gave him a look. There was something knowing and serious about it
—you’re
naive—
and it made him uncomfortable. They sat for a time in silence, watched the crowd flowing endlessly down the avenue. Then Casson’s drink came.
“Santé,”
he said. Fischfang acknowledged the toast with a tilt of the tulip-shaped glass and they drank. Fischfang’s grandfather had crawled out of a shtetl in Lithuania and walked to Paris in the 1850s, Casson’s roots went back into Burgundy, but as they drank their Kir they were simply Parisians.