Red Gold (Jean Casson Series #2)

Red Gold (Jean Casson Series #2)

by Alan Furst
Red Gold (Jean Casson Series #2)

Red Gold (Jean Casson Series #2)

by Alan Furst

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Overview

“Nothing can be like watching Casablanca for the first time, but Furst comes closer than anyone has in years.”—Time

Autumn 1941: In a shabby hotel off the place Clichy, the course of the war is about to change. German tanks are rolling toward Moscow. Stalin has issued a decree: All partisan operatives are to strike behind enemy lines—from Kiev to Brittany. Set in the back streets of Paris and deep in occupied France, Red Gold moves with quiet menace as predators from the dark edge of war—arms dealers, lawyers, spies, and assassins—emerge from the shadows of the Parisian underworld. In their midst is Jean Casson, once a well-to-do film producer, now a target of the Gestapo living on a few francs a day. As the occupation tightens, Casson is drawn into an ill-fated mission: running guns to combat units of the French Communist Party. Reprisals are brutal. At last the real resistance has begun. Red Gold masterfully re-creates the shadow world of French resistance in the darkest days of World War II.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780307432919
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 12/18/2007
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 288
Sales rank: 208,657
File size: 859 KB

About the Author

Often compared to Graham Greene and Eric Ambler, Alan Furst is a master of the spy thriller and one of the great war novelists of our time. He is the author of Night Soldiers, Dark Star, The Polish Officer, and The World at Night. He lives in Sag Harbor, New York.

Hometown:

Sag Harbor, New York

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Education:

B.A., Oberlin College

Read an Excerpt

Paris. 18 September, 1941.

Casson woke in a room in a cheap hotel and smoked his last cigarette. The window by the bed was open and the shade, yellow and faded, bumped gently against the sill in the morning breeze. When it moved he could see fierce blue sky, a bar of sunlight on the lead sheeting of the roof across the courtyard. Something in the air, he thought, a ghost of something, and the sky was lit a certain way. So then, autumn.

A knock at the door; a woman came in and sat on the edge of the bed. She had a room down the hall and came to see him sometimes. He offered her the cigarette, she inhaled and gave it back. "Thank you," she said. She stood up, pulled her slip over her head and hung it on a nail in the wall, then climbed in next to him. "Tell me," she said, "what is it you see out there?"

"Sky. Nothing much."
She pulled the blanket up so it covered their shoulders. "You live in a dream," she said.
"You think it's wrong?"
He felt her shrug. "I don't know--why bother?"
She settled next to him, so the tips of her breasts brushed the skin of his back, ran a finger down the line of hair from his chest to his stomach, and slid her hand between his legs. He stubbed the cigarette out carefully in a saucer he kept on the windowsill, then closed his eyes. For a time he stayed like that, adrift.
"Well," he said, "maybe you're right."
He turned to face her, she rested a knee on his hip, opening her legs. After a moment she said, "Your hands are always warm."
"Warm hands, cold heart."
She laughed, then kissed him. "Not you," she said. He could smell wine on her breath.
His mind wandered. It was very quiet, all he could hear was her breathing, long and slow, and the yellow shade, bumping against the sill in the morning air.

Place Clichy. He sat at an outside table at a café and sipped the roast barley infusion the waiter brought him. Coffee, he thought, remembering it. Very expensive now, he didn't have the money. He stared out at the square, Clichy a little lost in the daylight, the cheap hotels and dance halls gray and crooked in the morning sun, but Casson didn't mind. He liked it--in the same way he liked deserted movie sets and winter beaches.

On the chair next to him somebody had left a damp copy of yesterday's Le Soir. He spread it out on the table.
. . . the low hills of Lokhvitsa, brooding at nightfall, the steep banks of the river Dnieper, the grumble of distant cannonade. Suddenly, white Very lights fired from flare pistols, sputtering as they float to earth. A signal! Guderian's Third Panzer has linked up with Kleist's Sixteenth Panzer! The Kiev pocket has snapped shut like a trap: 300,000 Russian casualties, 600,000 taken prisoner, five Soviet armies obliterated. Now, Kiev must fall within hours. Victorious Wehrmacht columns burst into song as they prepare to march into the defeated city.

Casson shook his head--who writes this shit? His eyes wandered to the top of the column. Oh, from their foreign correspondent, Georges Broux. Well, that explained it. Once upon a time, when he'd been Jean Casson, producer of gangster films, with an office near the Champs-Elysées, Georges Broux had sent him a screenplay. Morning Must Come, something like that. Maybe it was Dawn that had to come, or A New Day, but that was the general idea. La Belle France brought to her knees by decadence and socialism. "Dear Georges, thanks for letting us have a look; unfortunately . . ." And did, Casson wondered, the Wehrmacht actually burst into song? Maybe it did.

He searched in his pocket until he found the cigarette stub and lit it, sipped his barley coffee, turned to the movie page. Playing at the Impériale, over on the Champs-Elysées, was Premier Rendezvous--first date--with Danielle Darrieux and Louis Jourdan. If you'd seen that, the Gaumont had "a frothy romantic comedy." Or, if you were really hard to please, you could go out to Neuilly for "a little jewel, bubbling over with mirth! A sly French wink!" Casson read through the listings for the smaller theatres, sometimes they ran revivals and his old films showed up. No Way Out or The Devil's Bridge. Maybe, even, Night Run.

He heard the engine--tuned to a perfect hum--and forced himself to look up casually. A black traction-avant Citroën, a Gestapo car, had pulled to the curb in front of the café. Casson's heart hammered against his ribs. He bent over the newspaper, concealing his face, and turned the page. A goalie leaped toward the edge of his net as the ball sailed past his hands, a jumble of print, this team 2, that team 1. He had an identity card, Marin, Jean Louis, and a ration book. Nothing more. It wasn't a quality fake, he'd bought it from a taxi driver, one phone call and that was the end of him. Casson was wanted by the Gestapo; taken in for questioning at the rue des Saussaies office three months earlier, he had crawled out an unbarred window and escaped over the roof. Dumb luck, Casson thought, the kind that doesn't come a second time.

The driver got out of the Citroën and held the back door open. A tall man in a dark suit, a raincoat worn over his shoulders, came out of the little hotel next to the café. He was young and fair, very white, very drawn. There wasn't much, really there wasn't anything, that you couldn't buy on the place Clichy. Perhaps the German officer had bought something he hadn't liked--or maybe it was just the next morning he didn't like it. He paused at the door, put one hand on the roof, leaned forward. Was he going to be sick? No, he climbed into the car, the driver slammed the door.

Look down. That was barely in time. Casson stared at people--who were they? It was just something he could not stop himself from doing. And the man who'd held the door for his superior had caught him at it. Nantes 0, Lille 0. Caen 3, Rouen 2. Please. The Citroën idled, then the front door closed, the driver put the car in gear and drove off, turning onto the boulevard Batignolles.

His room at the Hotel Victoria. Six floors up, under the roof. Ten by ten, narrow iron bed, a chair, a washstand. Ancient wallpaper, the color of oatmeal, and bare wooden boards. Faint smell of sulfur, burned to get rid of the bugs, faint smell of black tobacco. And all the rest of it. Casson took an overcoat down from a hook in the wall. Not so bad. He rubbed his thumb idly across a small stain above the pocket. He'd bought it back in August, when he still had a little money, from a peddler's cart in the place République. For winter, he'd thought, but he wasn't the one who was going to wear it this winter.

He hunted through the pockets, made sure the Goddess of Luck hadn't left a fifty-franc note in there for him. No, nothing. He rolled the coat up tight, held it to the right side of his body. It was his one possession and La Patronne knew it. He owed three weeks' rent, if the owner caught him taking it out of the hotel, she'd stop him, would make a great scene, would probably call the police. Like a mythic beast she stood behind the hotel desk, keeping guard on the door. Draped always in black, wearing broken carpet slippers for her sore feet. Flabby face, eyes like wet stones. She could smell money in the next block. She truly could, Casson thought.

He closed his door silently, went downstairs one cautious step at a time. On the landing of the second floor he became aware of conversation in the lobby, something not right in the tone of it. Halfway down the final flight he stopped. He could see black shoes, blue trousers, the bottom of a cape. Merde. Police. Not an exotic moment in the life of the Hotel Victoria, but Casson could have done without it. He stood still, held his breath, listened intently. About forty years old. Was last seen. If by chance he should.

He went cold. Tried to swallow. The police voice stopped. A long moment. Casson could hear people talking in the street outside the door. Then, finally, the patronne. Mmm, no, she didn't think so. It wasn't anybody she'd seen. Of course she would notify the préfecture if. Jesus, they were looking at a photograph. He counted to three, then clomped down the stairs in a hurry, making all the noise he could. The policeman turned to glance at him as he went by, the patronne looked up from the photograph. "Bonjour, madame," he muttered--busy, tense, angry at the world. She started to say something to him, he could feel her mind working, but he was through the door in three strides and that was that.

He went around the corner, slowed down, got his composure back. Then headed south, toward the 3rd Arrondissement. A bright day, the little ghost of a chill still hung in the morning air. Early autumn this year, he thought. Which meant: early winter. Well, good. Maybe he'd get a few francs more for the overcoat.

He took backstreets, crossing into the 10th Arrondissement. Turgot, Condorcet, d'Abbeville. Then the rue des Petits-Hotels--yes, there were some. On rue Paradis, too many Germans, milling around the Baccarat salesroom. Then, a choice: to cross the boulevard you could take either the rue de la Fidelité or the passage du Désir--street of fidelity or alley of desire. Which? He took the alley, but noted that it ran downhill. Next, he hurried across the broad boulevard Magenta. Too wide, too open. That fucking Haussmann, he thought, rebuilding Paris a hundred years earlier, designing open boulevards to facilitate field-of-fire, cannon shot, against the revolutionary mobs of days to come. A visionary, in his way. He had destroyed the medieval rat's nest of Paris streets, anybody, even a lumbering German, could find his way around. Real Parisians, even those, like Casson, who'd spent their lives in the Passy district of the snob 16th, knew the value of a good maze, rank with crumbling drains and metal pissotières on the corners.

Introduction

Cold outside, but the air felt good after the bistro. She took his arm as they walked. Clichy was busy and raucous, the Paris night rolling along toward the dawn. A fat man with a wildly rouged woman came down the street. He tipped his hat to Casson--good evening, mon vieux. Here we are with our girls and what fine fellows we are. Casson gave him a nod and a smile. Then, panic. Did the man actually know him? Old somebody he'd once met at the somethings' house?

Julie squeezed his arm. "Look at the moon," she said. Half a white disc just north of the river. From a dance hall on the other side of the square, le swing jazz, a trumpet, a saxophone, a spill of yellow light from the open door, then darkness. Behind them, a man laughed.

"The lovebirds."
"Coucou."
Casson turned his head halfway, the two men from the bar, about ten feet behind them.
"Just ignore them," Julie said.
"Gonzesse." Cunt.
Half a block. They walked quickly despite themselves. Then a turn into the side street and the Hotel Victoria. The men came up close, the one in the black shirt put a hand on Casson's elbow. "I think we better have a talk," he said, voice low and charged.
Casson pulled away. "Leave us alone," he said.

It was the other one who hit him first, threw Julie out of his way and punched him in the side of the head. Julie screamed, Casson found himself on one knee. Was it even possible he'd been hit that hard? One side of his face had gone dead. Black-Shirt kicked him--meant to kick him in the head but hit his shoulder, spun him halfway around, and he fell on his back. Julie started to scream again but Black-Shirt said, "Shut up or we'll cut your face," and she was silent.

Casson tried to stand up, got to his knees but that was the best he could do. He felt hands going through his pockets; Black-Shirt was excited, breathing hard, Casson could smell sweat--something like sweat, but much worse--and hair oil. When the man was done he stood up, then kicked Casson in the ribs. Casson heard himself cry out. He fell forward, tried to roll up to protect himself, saw the two men walking away, back toward place Clichy.
Julie knelt by his side, touched his face, her hand was trembling. She took a tiny handkerchief from her purse and held it against his mouth. There were blood drops on the pavement.

"No police." He tried to say it but it came out a mumble.
"Your mouth is hurt," she said.
Somehow he got up. Very shaky, but on his feet. He had to get off the street. She took his arm, helped him walk. In the lobby of the hotel, a night clerk was behind the counter.
"I'm taking him to his room," Julie said.
The clerk hesitated a moment, then said, "The patronne comes in at eight--just be out before then."
They started up the stairs. Casson said, "My key."
"I have it," she said. "And your papers. They only wanted money."
He held the little handkerchief against his mouth so he didn't bleed on his shirt. She took his arm, helped him up each step.

It took a long time to climb to the sixth floor. She got most of his clothes off, he fell onto the bed, faded out. He woke later, she was sitting on the bed in the dark room. He reached out, rested a hand on her knee. "Are you all right?" he said.
"Yes," she said. But she had been crying.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"You couldn't help it." She paused a moment. "Somebody like you . . ."
They were quiet for a time. "They should be shot," she said.
"You know them?"
"They are always in that place. You see them next week, they'll smile at you. Up here, nobody goes to the police, that only makes it worse."
He turned toward her. His side throbbed, his face was numb. She smoothed his hair back. "Go to sleep," she said. "I'll be here."

He didn't want to sleep but he couldn't stop it. For a few seconds he came back awake, felt how warm she was, sitting on the bed. Sometimes jagged and plummeting, sometimes about Citrine. Just before making love, when together they took her clothes off. She had once said that when a woman goes with a man, and for the first time he sees her with nothing on, that it is the best at that moment that it will ever be. Later he tried to turn in his sleep and a sharp pain under his arm woke him up. He reached out, felt nothing, opened his eyes. The first gray light of dawn was in the room and the girl was gone.

An hour later, the knock on the door.
"Police, open up."
My revolver, he thought. Drawing it from beneath his pillow, firing through the door, pounding down the stairs. In the lobby, the patronne, eyes wide with horror. "No! Please! Have mercy!" Shots ring out in the Hotel Victoria.
"I'm coming," he called out, struggling to stand up. There was no revolver. When he got the door open he saw it was the same flic from the day before. So, he thought, it had been his photograph after all--he had been betrayed. By the patronne? Somebody else? He didn't know.
"Is your name Marin? Jean Louis?"
"Yes."
"You're wanted for questioning."

Not arrested, not handcuffed. He thought about making a run for it, but he was too banged up--the flic had to wait for him as he worked at getting dressed.
"Let's go, eh?"
"I'm trying."
"Have you been fighting, Marin?"
He touched the swollen side of his face and winced. "I was robbed. They beat me up."
"Report the crime?"
"No."
Probably that's a crime too, he thought. He managed to get into his jacket, looked around the room one last time. Not so bad. Now that he'd never see it again he started to like it.
In the lobby, the patronne glanced up from the register she kept on the counter, then looked down, finding an entry, holding her place with a steel finger. "Monsieur l'agent?" she said.
"Yes?"
"Is this one coming back?"
"Couldn't say."
The patronne's finger, stuck on Room 28, began to tap. Her eyes were shining with fury.
Small--a very small victory, he thought. But likely the only one of the day. Outside, a battered Renault police car. A detective sitting in the passenger seat was reading a dossier as Casson got in the back.
"You're Marin?"

Casson nodded. Closed his eyes for a moment. He was, more than anything, tired, in every way you could be. Tired of his life, of clumsy deception, of the world he had to live in. Shoot me and get it over with.
The old engine whined, turned over, and finally caught, missing and backfiring on the low-grade gasoline the Germans gave the police. The flic said, "To the préfecture?"

The detective turned, rested his arm on the top of the seat, and looked him over. He was an old man, heavy, with a head of thick, white hair and deep lines carved in his face. He had a big nose with a dent near the bridge and very pale blue eyes, wore an ancient black suit beneath his overcoat, a loose wool muffler, and a weatherbeaten hat with the brim snapped down in front.

"No. The rue Rondelet."
Casson looked out the window as the car drove off. In May of 1940, recalled to military service, assigned to a Section Cinématographique, he'd seen the streets of eastern Paris through the windshield of a truck. Different than the back of a taxi, he'd thought then. Now, the same streets, from the window of a police car.
Blood will tell. It was a deep Gallic conviction, especially among women over forty. Casson's father had been a rogue, and his mother had been employed full-time as the wife of a rogue: long-suffering, humiliated by unpaid butchers, terrified of the phone. But, often enough, his father's shield. Casson père had more than once been spared by creditors who could not bear to hurt "his poor wife." Wealth had always been just around the corner; shares in Venezuelan lead mines, a scheme to import herring from Peru, a powder that kept lettuce from spoiling, tonics, treasure maps, mechanical pens. And, late in life, one honorable and very productive venture--a wool brokerage--which he'd been done out of by men he called "licensed thieves who work in paneled offices."

The rue Rondelet was a little street in a factory district with a small poste de police. Not the kind of place Parisian detectives usually worked. "Go back to the préfecture," the detective told his driver. "If anyone asks, tell them I'll be in later." The flic touched the visor of his cap with two fingers and drove off. Inside the station, a desk sergeant wearing a knitted green sweater under his uniform jacket greeted the detective like an old friend.
Upstairs, a small office used for interrogation--two chairs, a desk scarred with cigarette burns, tall windows opaque with dirt, a floor of narrow boards. The station backed up to a schoolyard, it was recess, and Casson could hear the kids, playing tag and yelling. The detective leaned on his elbows and read the dossier, now and then shaking his head.

"Casson, Casson," he said at last, with a sigh in his voice. Casson flinched despite himself. The detective seemed not to notice. He turned the pages slowly, sometimes puzzling over the cramped handwriting. Suddenly he looked up and said, "You're not going to insist on this Marin business, are you?"

"No."
"Gr'ce à Dieu--I already fought with my wife this morning."
"Will you turn me over to the Germans?"
"Worse than that, Casson, worse than that."
The detective read further. "Here's your concierge," he said. "Kindly old Madame Fitou, in 1933. Hmm. Secret doings, something buried in the cellar."
"What?"
"That's what it says here. Imagine, a man like you, a cat murderer."
"It's madness, monsieur."
"So, you deny it! Seems there was quite a ring operating back then. In league with the neighborhood baker, I see. And the priest."
"She really said such things?"
"And more. You don't believe, I hope, that these women can actually live on what the tenants pay them?" He read on for a time, turning pages of handwritten paragraphs. "1937. Some considerable entertaining. Angélique, Franoise, Madame de Levallier." He squared the stack of pages with his palms and closed the folder.
"What will happen to me?" Casson said.
The detective shook his head--God only knows. "When I started to look for you, it gave me an excuse to see a movie or two. I must tell you that your policemen are a disgrace. Venal, brutal, and, worst of all, stupid. And when they shoot they don't hit anything."
"It's just the movies."
The detective leaned forward in his chair and spoke quietly. "Tell me, Casson, why did you come back to France?"
"A woman."
The detective nodded. "Not patriotism?"
"No, monsieur."

The detective smiled--somebody had told the truth! He glanced at his watch, went to a window, took the brass handles and shoved it up a few inches. "The morning concert. Come and listen, Casson. It's the latest thing from Vichy--a hymn to Pétain."

Casson went to the window. Down in the schoolyard, the children--eight- and nine-year-olds--were lined up in rows. Facing them, a music teacher, conducting with a stern finger: "And one, and two, and . . ." They sang with high voices, an angels' choir.

All the children who love you
and hold your years dear
to your supreme call
have answered smartly, "Here!"
Marshal, here are we
before you, O savior of France.
We your little buddies swear
to follow where you advance.
For France is Pétain,
and Pétain is France.

They began the next song, the detective closed the window, then went to the door and started to open it, giving Casson a nod of the head that meant let's go. "Well, Casson," he said, "perhaps you're in luck. You may not have found patriotism, but it appears, God save us all, to have found you."

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