Red Gold

by Alan Furst

Genres: Historical Fiction; Spy Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

In this sequel to the acclaimed The World at Night, reluctant spy Jean Casson returns in another haunting and atmospheric thriller set in the shadows of occupied Paris. In The World at Night, Alan Furst introduced film producer Jean Casson, who is forced by the German occupation of Paris to abandon his civilised lifestyle and falls into the world of espionage and double agents -- until he is forced to flee the country. In Red Gold, Jean Casson returns to Paris under a new identity. As a fugitive from the Gestapo, he must somehow struggle to survive in the shadows and backstreets. He is determined to stay clear of trouble, yet, as the war drags on, Casson begins, inevitably, to drift back into the dangerous world of resistance and sabotage.

Release date: December 18, 2007

Publisher: Random House

Print pages: 288

Sample

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.

Head down on the narrow streets. Baggy flannel pants, suit jacket with the collar up, three days' growth of beard, workman's peaked cap tilted to one side, shadowing the face. Someone who belonged in the quarter if you didn't look too hard, if you missed the melancholy intelligence in the eyes. He was dark; dark hair, coloring like a suntan that never really went away. A small scar on the cheekbone. Lean body, forty or so. Something about Casson had always made him seem a little beat up by life, even in the old days, on the terrasses of the good cafés--knowing eyes, a half-smile that said it didn't matter what you knew. He liked women, women liked him.

Two flics pedaled by on their bicycles, one of the wheels squeaked each time it went around. Casson watched them. Sooner or later, he thought. He would be taken. Sad, but there wasn't much he could do about it, life just went that way. He knew too many people in Paris, at least a few of them on the wrong side. Or maybe it would be some German version of Simenon's Maigret: self-effacing, unprepossessing, looking forward a little too eagerly to lunch. Taking his pipe from clenched teeth and pointing it at his assistant. "Mark my words, Heinrich, he will return to his old haunts, to the city he knows. Of this you may be certain." And, in fact, when all was said and done, that was the way it turned out. He'd gone home--the romans policiers had it just right. Why? He didn't know. Everywhere else felt wrong, was all he knew. Maybe to live the fugitive life you had to start young, for him it was too late. Still, he didn't want to make it easy for them. Sooner or later, went that week's motto on the Casson family crest, but not today.

3rd Arrondissement--the old Jewish quarter. Cobbled lanes and alleys, silence, deep shadow, Hebrew slogans chalked on the walls. Rue du Marché des Blancs-Manteaux, the smell of onions frying in chicken fat made Casson weak in the knees. He'd been living on bread and margarine, and miniature packets of Bouillon Zip when he could afford the fifty centimes.

Between two leaning tenements, the municipal pawnshop. Massive stone portals; Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité carved solemnly into the granite cap above the doors. Inside, a municipal room: flaking gray paint, the fume of disinfectant rising from the wood floor. A few people scattered about, looking like dark bundles forgotten on the high-backed benches. At the front of the room, a counter topped with frosted-glass panels. Casson could see the shadows of clerks, walking back and forth. He took a brass token from a gardien at the door and found an empty bench in the back of the room. An official appeared at the wire grille that covered the cashier's window. He cleared his throat and called out, "Number eighty-one."

A woman stood up.
"Yes, sir."
"Will you take thirty francs?"
"Monsieur! Thirty francs--?"
This was as much argument as he cared to listen to. He waved a dismissive hand and pushed a crystal serving dish out onto the counter.
"Well," the woman said. A change of heart, she would take whatever they offered.
"Too late, madame." The voice polite but firm. Really, he would not be subjected to the whims of these people. "So then, eighty-two? Eighty-two." A bearded man carrying a copper saucepot shuffled toward the counter.

Casson began to worry about the overcoat--unrolled it, tried, surreptitiously, to fluff it up a little so it didn't look so much like a bundle of dirty rags. Remember, he told himself, it's important to make a good impression, confidence is everything. A fine coat! Cosy for winter. God he was hungry. He had to have fifty francs from this coat. He stared up at the lights, yellow globes with shimmering halos, it hurt to look at them. He closed his eyes for a moment, the back of the wooden bench in front of him banged him in the forehead.

A hand gripped his elbow. "Unless you want to see the cops, you better wake up."
Casson shook his head. Apparently he'd fainted. "I'm all right," he said.
"No sleeping allowed."

A hard voice, Casson turned to see who it was. A man perhaps in middle age, not so easy to say because one side of his face had been burned, skin dead white in some places, shiny pink in others. In an attempt to hide the damage he'd let his hair grow long and it hung lank just above a knob of remaining ear. "Ça va?" he said.
"Yes."
"Done this before?"
"No."
"Well, if you don't mind advice, you'll get more out of them if you wait until the afternoon. After they've had their lunch and their little glass of wine. That's the only time to do business with the government."
Casson nodded.
"I'm Lazenac."
"Marin."
Lazenac put out a hand and Casson shook it. It was like gripping a rough-finish board.
"Let's go somewhere else," Lazenac said. "This place . . ."

Deeper into the Marais. Paper-white men in black coats, women who kept their eyes lowered. To a tiny café in what had been a store. Lazenac ordered a flask of Malaga, cheap red wine, and black bread. "It's good strength," he told Casson.
Whatever that meant it was true. The sour wine jolted him back to life. Chased down with a chunk of the mealy bread it made him feel warm.

"Don't mind the neighborhood, do you?"
"No."
"Funny thing, since I had my face blown up I like the Jews."
"What happened?"
"Just the war. Chemin des Dames at Verdun--the second time we tried it, November of '16. My corporal got hit, I turned to see if I could do anything and one of those fucking Nebelwerfers--mine-throwers--got me. But, turning like that saved my eyes, so I suppose I should be grateful." He paused for a sip of wine. "Were you in that?"
"With a film unit," Casson said. "Air reconnaissance."
From Lazenac, a certain kind of smile--the fix is in. "Sweet job," he said.
Casson shrugged. "It wasn't my idea. I just signed up, they told me where to go."
"Way of the world, if you don't mind my saying that."
"No, I don't mind."

Lazenac stared out the window. "I'm not so bad off. With the girls, it's okay as long as you don't ask them to touch it. And I have to keep the conversation on my good side. But then, my grampa did that for twenty years." They both laughed.
Lazenac poured some more wine in Casson's glass. "Go ahead, it's the only way to deal with those assholes on Blancs-Manteaux."
Casson raised his glass. "Thank you," he said.

Lazenac shrugged it off. "Don't bother. I'm rich today, tomorrow it's your turn." He looked around the little room. A very old man in a yarmulke turned the page of his newspaper, squinting to see the print at the top of the column. "The worst of it is," Lazenac said. He paused, shook his head. "Well, what happened to me really didn't matter, if you see what I mean."
"Because, in June of '40, they got what they came for the first time."

"Yes."
"Maybe it isn't forever," Casson said.
"No. It can't be. Of course, we both know people who'd like to ignore the whole thing--just try to get along with them. But you know the saying, le plus on leur baise le cul, le plus ils nous chient sur la tête." The more you kiss their ass, the more they shit on your head.
"Some people used to say that even before the war," Casson said.
Lazenac nodded. "Yes," he said. "Now and then they did." He poured himself some more wine. "Where are you from, Marin?"
"Paris."
"I can hear that, but one of the bons quartiers, right?"
"Yes."
"So what are you doing down here?"
"No money."
"No friends?"

Casson shrugged and smiled. Of course he had friends and some of them--one or two of them anyhow--would have helped. But if he went anywhere near his old life he was finished, and so were they.
"I'm doing a job tonight," Lazenac said. "We're going to take something from the Germans and sell it. There are three or four of us, but we can always use one more. I'm not sure about the money but it'll be more than you're earning now. How about it?"
"All right."
"We'll meet at the porte de la Chapelle freight yards, the rue Albon bridge, about eight. Have a shave, and give your jacket a brush."
Casson nodded. Was Lazenac just being kind?
"Some of the people we talk to, maybe you can do a better job than we can. Want to try it?"
Casson said he did.

"Number one hundred and thirty-eight."
By now the room was warm, a fly buzzing against the grimy window. Casson walked up to the counter, eyes down. The clerk behind the grilled window had a small face, pink scalp, the eyes of a terrier. He looked at Casson a moment longer than he needed to. Well well.
Casson slid the coat across the polished counter. No rueful smiles, no jokes. The urge was powerful but he fought it off. He trudged back to the wooden bench, let his mind wander, tried not to watch the clock on the wall.
"One hundred and thirty-eight?"
Casson stood.
"Monsieur, will you take a hundred and eighty francs?"
What?
"Yes," he said, headed for the counter before they came to their senses. What in the name of heaven--maybe the thing actually had value. His wife, Marie-Claire--they'd been separated for years--used to suspect the little paintings they bought at the flea markets were lost masterpieces. You don't know, Jean-Claude, poor Cézanne may have paid his laundress with this, see how the pear reflects the light. But a coat? Was it llama, chamois, something exotic?
The clerk pulled a pin from the corner of a packet of ten-franc notes and, using a practiced thumb and forefinger, snapped eighteen of them into a pile. As he slid the money and the pawn ticket across the counter his eyes met Casson's: a sad day for us, monsieur, when a gentleman of our class is forced to pawn his overcoat.
Outside, Lazenac was leaning against a wall, smoking a cigarette.
"Let's go have a little something," Casson said.

Another liter of Malaga, then he headed back to Clichy. He would eat. A bistro around the corner from his hotel had fried potatoes and the smell drove him crazy every time he went past. With the dinner you got a piece of stewed chicken, called coquelet, a polite way of saying the rooster got old and died.

Shit, he thought, I'm rich. He could pay a week on his hotel, sixty francs, and thirty for a meal. And then there was Lazenac's "job" out at the porte de la Chapelle. If he didn't get thrown in jail, he'd have even more. From there, he went on to become one of the wealthiest men in Europe, and today, his portrait hangs in every lycée in France, this beloved entrepreneur who--Oh the Malaga.
He hadn't felt this good for a long time. In July, on the run from the Germans, he'd been about to leave the country when love--and love was hardly enough of a word for it--had driven him back to France. Pure madness, a folie de jeunesse at the age of forty-two, and he'd gotten just what he deserved. Because, when he went looking for her, she was gone. Why? He didn't know. She hadn't been arrested, and she hadn't fled in the middle of the night. She had packed her bags and paid her bill and left the hotel. Fin, like the end of a movie.

June 1941, off the Normandy coast, just at the moment of escape, as the fishing boat turned toward England, he had jumped into the sea and swum for the shore, British special operatives waving their Stens and calling him names. Walking all night, he'd made his way to a cottage he owned at the edge of Deauville, rented to an oil-company lawyer and his wife. But they were gone and the Germans had fixed lead seals to the doors, with tags stating that the house, in a strategic area, had been declared off-limits to civilians.
Too bad, but maybe it didn't matter. He'd had a thousand francs, faked papers, and love in his heart. Had crossed the line into the Zone Non-Occupée, the ZNO, then south to Lyons, then up the hill to "their" hotel. Then, a clerk: "I'm sorry, monsieur. . . ." She had gone. No mistake in identity possible, she was well known; the film actress called Citrine, not a star exactly but certainly not somebody who could simply fade away. She was just--gone. Did she know he had escaped the Germans? Did she panic when he disappeared? Had she simply fallen in love with somebody else? He didn't think so, but what he did know was that with her--a life of highs, lows, tears, chaos--anything was possible.

He survived it--maybe he survived it. Wandered north for a time, to Bourges, to Orléans, to Nantes. Where he'd been a stranger. Always a bad thing in France, and now a dangerous thing--just waking up in these places felt wrong.
So he came home to Paris to die.

He was tired, sat on a bench in a little park. A woman strolled over, gave him a look. He shrugged--sorry, I'd like to, but I can't afford it. She was heavy and matronly, like the headmistress in a school. Fine theatre to be had there, he thought. "Maybe next time," he said. She looked sad, went off down the street. The sun was low, orange flame in a puddle of dirty water on the cobblestones. What was it, Friday? Maybe. September--he was sure of that, anyhow. He should have asked how much, maybe they could have struck a deal.

8:10 p.m. Porte de la Chapelle freight yards. Casson stood on a pedestrian bridge above the tracks. Rails crisscrossed into the distance, a dull sheen in the last of the twilight. Below him, a train of empty boxcars was being made up by a switching engine. A long whistle echoed off the hillside, a cloud of brown smoke drifted over the tarred beams of the bridge. From where he stood he could see Lazenac and his friends, gray shadows in workers' clothing, heads down, hands in pockets.

At the end of the bridge Lazenac introduced him to Raton--small and wiry, with sharp eyes and a clever smile--and Victor. He was simply Jean. They walked east, along the edge of the yards. Not taking it easy, exactly, but not in any hurry; going to work, there'd still be plenty left when they got there. Across the street, a row of warehouses, rusty iron gates chained shut. As they passed an alley, Lazenac made a small motion with his hand, a truck's engine sputtered to life and backed away, deeper into the shadows. Another hundred meters and they reached the main entry to the railyards: a striped barrier bar lowered across the road, an Alsatian shepherd in the alert prone position. Wehrmacht military police lounged around a guard-hut. Nobody said anything, nobody's eyes met, but the feeling was like Friday night in a workers' bar--the fight had to happen, the only question was when.

Five minutes later, well out of sight of the guards, they stopped by a wall. Ten feet high, old plaster cracked and peeling. Two handmade ladders lay flat in the weeds. Raton and Victor set one of them against the wall and braced the bottom. Lazenac climbed to the top, took the second ladder as it was handed up, and lowered it carefully down the other side of the wall. He put one foot across, then shifted his weight gracefully and stood on the second ladder. "You're next," he called to Casson in a stage whisper. Casson worked his way up the awful thing--barely wide enough to get a foot on each rung. He was scared now, not so much of the Germans, but of being asked to do something he wouldn't be able to do.

As he neared the top, Lazenac said, "Watch your hands." A moment later he saw why: broken glass--wine bottles had been cemented into the cap of the wall. Casson took a deep breath, got one foot over, balanced, then swung across. He did it wrong--he knew it an instant before it happened--and began his backward tumble to the ground. Only he didn't fall, because Lazenac saw it coming, reached up and grabbed him by the belt and forced his weight back on the ladder. "Merci bien," Casson said, breathing hard.
"Je vous en prie."

On the other side of the wall, Casson knelt by some kind of storm sewer, the open end of a drainage culvert. Over time, the outflow had cut itself a channel, some three feet deep, into the hillside. When the others were down the ladder, Lazenac led them single file, crouched low, along the gulley. "Stay close to the ground," Raton whispered to him. "If the schleuh catch you in here they'll break your head."

At the foot of the hill, they waited. A busy night: in the distance, the sound of yard engines chugging up and down the tracks, and the steel clash of boxcars being coupled. Directly in front of them were flatbed cars stacked with peeled logs, probably cut in the forests of the Massif Central and now en route to Germany. After what seemed to Casson like a long time, the red glow of a track lantern moved toward them and Lazenac said, "At last, the cheminots." Railwaymen.

There were two of them. They shook hands all around, then the one with the lantern said, "It's about two hundred meters up ahead. Third track in."
"An SNCF car," the other said. "7112."
"All right," Lazenac said. "We're on our way."
"Keep an eye out for the yard security."
"Thanks for everything, we'll settle up on the weekend--same as before."
"See you then. Vive la France."
"Yeah," Lazenac said. They both laughed.

The lantern faded away down the track, Lazenac led them in the other direction. Casually, without stealth--every right to be here. The SNCF car stood high above its cast-iron wheels. A wire seal secured the door handle. From inside his jacket Lazenac produced an iron bar about two feet long. He worked it through the loop and put his weight on it until the wire snapped. Standing on the metal rungs beside the door, he pushed it open and ran the beam of a flashlight up and down the stacked cargo. Cotton sacks piled to the ceiling, stenciled with the name of the company and the label sucre de canne. Sugar.

Lazenac swung inside and reappeared a moment later carrying a sack. Victor stood below him. Lazenac dropped the sack on Victor's shoulder and Victor then headed back toward the hillside. Casson was next. "Don't worry," Lazenac said. "You're stronger than you think."
Who was strong was Lazenac. He swept a sack into the air and lowered it onto Casson's shoulder. Casson felt his knees buckle and said "Merde" under his breath. Raton, leaning against the freight car, laughed, then patted him on the arm.
He moved off, swaying at every step, but he wasn't going to fail. Up ahead, Victor was plodding along at a steady pace. Casson went about ten steps, then, the sour voice of authority: "All right--just where do you think you're going with that?"
Casson turned to look. Some kind of railroad guard--an official armband, a whistle. He was tapping his palm with a long, wooden bâton blanc, a policeman's club. "Put it down, you," he said to Casson.

I'll never be able to p