‘Who?’
‘The Führer, for his museum in Linz; the Reichsmarschall, for Karinhall, the villa he has on his estate in East Prussia; the Nazis, Lily. Even Himmler buys.’
‘And you, my husband? What about you?’
He turned away to sit down behind that desk of his. ‘I’ve made my choice. Now you must make yours, but remember, please, that one more outburst like that and I may not be able to protect you. A word, that’s all they’ll need. Why not be sensible? The house is far more comfortable than the internment camp at Besançon. Jean-Guy still needs his mother. You can keep an eye on things for me. Schiller …’
I waited, but he left it unsaid and irritably asked, ‘Why have you come to Paris? How did you convince them and that mayor of ours to give you an Ausweis?’
A laissez-passer. ‘When you had expressly asked them not to?’
‘Why, Lily?’
‘Because I must see André.’
‘What’s the matter with you?’
He was worried now-alarmed. Ah, bon, he needed me to watch that house of his. ‘Ask André.’
‘Lily, wait.’
Out on Place de la Concorde, Jules told me exactly how things stood. ‘Why do you think you’ve been allowed to stay in the house, you with your English passport, your friends, and that sister of yours? It’s only because I’m useful, Lily. If you want to thank somebody, thank Göring. He’s the one who gave the order allowing you to stay.’
Göring … My wife, the sculptress of that little piece I presented to you. My sculpture of Nini, the one that Tommy had bought and that was stolen from him by the Action française thugs and Schiller.
‘Make the best of things. Buy some new clothes, some shoes, a lipstick-whatever you want. Here, let me give you some money.’
There were one-hundred- and one-thousand-franc notes, several five-thousands, and all of them brand-new. If I had thrown them up in the air, they would have floated slowly to the ground and neither of us would have stooped to pick them up.
Like a whore accepting her ‘little gift,’ I took the money. It was far too needed to refuse. We found a café. I let him order something, but what it was, or if I drank it, I have no memory.
He asked about Janine. I said I hadn’t heard.
‘She’s still missing,’ he said. ‘Dupuis thinks she must have gone underground.’
‘Dupuis is an inspector with the Sûreté.’
‘The criminal investigation branch. They’re hand in glove with the Gestapo because they have to be. Someone’s been plastering Résistance notices up all over the place and also printing a newspaper.’
Nini would do this-a start. ‘She must have gone south with all the others. She’ll still be in the zone libre. It’s crazy to think she’d be messed up in anything like that.’
‘Just don’t try to find her. They would only have you followed, Lily. You wouldn’t want to lead them to her, would you?’
‘And Michèle?’ I asked. ‘Have you managed to break into the safe and plunder her little capital? Was it exquisite, my husband? Another virgin?’
‘Your sister wasn’t.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of her. I was thinking of myself.’
‘Michèle is also missing, as are Dmitry Alexandrov and Henri-Philippe Beauclair.’
My sister’s friends. But Dmitry …
I know I asked Jules about the Vuittons, and was he still involved with them. ‘I can never forgive you for what they did to me.’
Immediately, he withdrew, was almost brutal about it. ‘We had to know. Too much was at stake. Besides, those guys were only to have threatened you. It … it got out of hand.’
‘Did it? On your orders or those of the Vuittons?’
I started to get up but heard him saying, ‘Just keep the house in readiness. When the time comes, we’ll be there with Göring. Then you’ll see how things really are.’
‘And Schiller?’ I demanded.
‘Do everything you can to keep him happy since he probably won’t be staying with you much longer. There’s far too much else for him to do.’
What can I say? It’s to my everlasting shame that later I didn’t have the courage to have Jules killed when I could so easily have done so. The others had left the matter entirely to me, yet I always hesitated. There would be no little black pasteboard coffin for him then, only recently, and from Zurich.
Bedrooms are such intimate places. One makes love to one’s husband while dreaming of another. One dwells on the fantasies afterwards, asking of their necessity. One tries to understand, to forgive, but the doubts crowd in, the hopes, the aspirations, and the secrets.
Could I kill him today or tomorrow? This I really don’t know, even after all I’ve been through.
The plaster’s been ripped from the ceiling above me. The flowered linen of the walls is spattered with bloodstains. Heaps of rags become heaps of my clothes, a negligee, a torn stocking-I pull it out and hold it up. I remember saving it, can you imagine that? One silk stocking, the last of them. Such vanity. Ruined at the knee when I fell in the rue Mouffetard as I ran to warn my sister. What was I going to do with it? One never threw anything out in those days.
The wind stirs and I let go of it, ask myself, Why did I fall in love with Jules? Why? Over and over again, I must tell myself, as Tommy insisted once, Jules couldn’t have been that bad or I wouldn’t have married him.
Perhaps that’s so. Perhaps it’s just that in this life some of us are lucky and others aren’t, but like Georges and Tante Marie, like all the local people, I’m inclined to blame the weather and the times. Of course, at that particular time I was also pregnant with Jean-Guy, though not desperate, not destitute, you understand. I could have gone to live with my father in England. Me, I thought I was really in love, and for a time I was.
The gate squeaks. I flatten my back to the wall. An avalanche of broken plaster pours over my shoulder. My heart’s racing. Have they finally come?
A man of about forty is out there-it’s too hard to tell from up here, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before.
Shade from the broken louvres of a shutter falls on my fingers. He wears a grey fedora and grey tweed overcoat, grey scarf, and black leather gloves. There’s no sign of a car on the road. He must have left it some distance away so as not to let me hear it. Then why make that noise at the gate? To let me know, eh?
He’s read the no trespassing notice. In spite of this, he starts up the drive. From time to time he looks up here but can’t possibly have seen me.
He’s not heavy, not overly tall-medium in many ways. Nondescript-that’s what counts. Plainclothes Gestapo? I wonder, even though I know they’ve all gone from here.
His cheeks are fair and closely shaven, the face a smooth oval that is neither too narrow nor too wide, and betrays few if any of the war’s ravages. Is he British? I wonder, but discard the notion as he comes closer and closer before finally passing out of sight below me.
The front door is nudged open. Slowly, cautiously, he steps inside, and I thumb the safety off the Luger. It would be just like Dupuis to send someone from Paris.
Stealthily, he picks his way over the rubbish, is selective, and doesn’t seem to mind the papers. It’s the glass that bothers him, and he avoids it, sending a signal to me. Now only the wind is heard as it slips under the eaves or finds the shattered windows, and I know he’s been sent to kill me.
A cigarette butt has been left to smoulder in the safety of the fireplace of the main dining room, but it’s a classic Gestapo ploy, that gesture. He doesn’t cry out, hardly ever makes a sound. Each step he takes is calculated to bring him closer.
A fleeting shadow leaves me wondering where the hell he is, but now he’s even closer and steps quickly into the kitchen, my kitchen, but there’s more glass, and I hear his shoes scrunch on it as he gives a muted ‘Sacré nom de nom,’ and I know he’s really from Paris, a former gestapiste français.