The Milliner's Secret

by Natalie Meg Evans

  ‘She was not in her right mind, and I never wanted her dead. Yet she is, and I am free. Free to marry you, some day. Keep talking, Coralie.’

  A movement caught her eye, and Coralie pushed up the brim of her hat, whispering, ‘Look, Voltaire!’

  ‘Impossible. Voltaire has Swiss nationality now, remember?’ Dietrich lifted his head, but the cat dashed into a patch of shrub. ‘Ah, but could it have been Voltaire’s offspring?’

  ‘Definitely,’ Coralie agreed. ‘And black cats are lucky.’

  ‘I thought they were always misfortune.’

  ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘Lucky.’ She told him about the latest letters from Noëlle and Ottilia. Happy letters, from a different world. ‘I can’t believe my baby’s six and a half. I’ve missed two of her birthdays. Over twenty months since I saw her.’

  ‘Soon you will see her. But you haven’t told me all. Perhaps you don’t realise it but you keep falling silent and staring inwards. Donal told you something before he went. I saw you rock on your feet.’

  ‘My father’s dead.’

  ‘How and when?’

  ‘A year into the war – September 1940. His yard took a hit from an incendiary bomb that was probably meant for the railway. The blast swept away all the buildings, Donal said, and the fire burned so hot, nobody got near for a couple of days. When the firemen checked for bodies, they found the charred bones of a very tall man and he was identified by a half-melted cigarette lighter that must have been in his pocket. Let’s walk.’

  Coralie got up, needing to breathe the moist air of the Medici Fountain. The sun, just beyond its zenith, was bleaching her eyes. She continued as they walked, ‘The blast ripped away the brick floor of his shed and the men found something buried. Something he was desperate should never be found – so desperate, he was willing to kill me to keep me quiet.’

  ‘It was not, I hope, human remains.’

  ‘No.’ A sound broke from her, half laugh, half rage. ‘It was a gold chalice, badly damaged, but somebody recognised it. Stolen from the cathedral where Dad used to go and pray. It used to stand in the light of a stained-glass window, St George’s window. Used to stand . . . Your Luftwaffe bombed the place in 1942. Nothing but rubble now.’ Out came the sobs she’d tried to keep in since Donal told her. ‘I always used to say my dad was a bastard but at least he had some faith. Now I know he was just casing the joint. No good qualities, not a single one. But at least it seems he didn’t kill my mother. Something, I suppose.’

  ‘Oh, my darling.’

  ‘She’s out there somewhere, I’m sure of it. You talk now. Your turn.’

  They sat down in the maple-leaf shade of the fountain and Dietrich told her about afternoons spent fishing on the banks of the Havel with Max von Silberstrom, the childhood friend who was also his half-brother. She placed her hand in his so that their ruby rings ground together. If Valkyrie succeeded, Dietrich and Max would be able to talk openly about their friendship.

  Later in bed she refused again to let Dietrich withdraw before climax, saying, ‘I will get pregnant. I’m ready to make another little life.’

  Her father was dead. Hitler was as good as dead, because Valkyrie consisted of powerful men who were sick to the gullet of Nazi excesses. The Allies were landing in France. Hitler’s armies were hard pressed, his airforce ground down. Light crouched behind the horizon.

  A few days later, Dietrich told her that Reiniger was back in Paris. ‘Stay indoors as much as you can. Don’t let him catch sight of you.’

  Saturday, 15 July

  The Walther PP lay ready on the drinks table and Coralie felt like a tightrope walker, dancing barefoot over a fire-pit.

  Today army officer Claus von Stauffenberg was going to kill Adolf Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair headquarters in East Prussia. Once the call came announcing success, Dietrich would join with the military governor of Paris, Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, and other army officers sympathetic to Valkyrie, and enforce a coup d’état here in Paris. Their first target, the Gestapo.

  The call came. She heard Dietrich give his name. The stretching silence made her twist her hands. Then she heard the telephone receiver dropped back into the cradle.

  He came back into the room. ‘They called it off.’ Driving his fist into the back of an armchair, Dietrich snarled, ‘Reichsführer-SS Himmler was not present. Who cares? He could be dealt with later. Poor Stauffenberg. It is a terrible path, martyrdom with a bomb. To be turned back at the last stride, knowing you must walk it again another day . . . ’ He swore. Then apologised because, unlike her, he guarded his language.

  The final telephone call came on 19 July. The assassination would happen on the morrow. Coralie coped with Dietrich’s spiralling nerves, massaging his shoulders, agreeing with him each time he said, ‘We cannot let it slip another time. No conspiracy can hold together for ever. The swine has to die tomorrow.’

  ‘He will, I feel it.’ If Valkyrie succeeded, the German Army in France would be ordered to pull back to open the way for the Allies – a form of surrender. France would be liberated. The Gestapo, including their French underlings and the loathed Milice, put under arrest. The worst of them executed. The end of the slaughter would be in sight.

  It had happened. Hitler was dead. Killed by a bomb in his Wolf’s Lair. The news reached General von Stülpnagel’s headquarters at two p.m. on 20 July. Kurt Kleber came in person to rue de Vaugirard, bringing Fritzi. As an aide to the new head of the Luftwaffe, General Sperrle, Kurt had heard the news of Hitler’s death earlier than most in Paris. The uprising had already swung into operation in Berlin, in Prague, in Vienna.

  ‘I feel guilty,’ he told them. ‘I was always sympathetic to Valkyrie, but I never swore the oath of allegiance. Perhaps our new leaders will overlook that. After all, I tried all those years ago to do what Stauffenberg has now succeeded in doing.’

  ‘You are as much a hero as Stauffenberg, Kurt,’ his wife assured him, kissing the puckered side of his face. ‘Everyone knows it.’

  They all four stood together as they had before, and Coralie wondered why Dietrich held himself so stiffly until he asked Kurt, ‘You are sure that Stauffenberg is alive? I must know that our friend survived the blast.’

  The question was answered at six that evening by a call from one of General Stülpnagel’s aides. Stauffenberg had telephoned from Berlin in person to confirm that Hitler was dead.

  Kurt and Fritzi left to return to avenue Marigny. After they’d gone, Dietrich holstered his gun and kissed Coralie, telling her to wait up. The mass arrest of Gestapo leaders was under way and he wanted to play his part.

  Once he was gone, she was unable to read or even think in a straight line. What was this eerie silence? She went to the window. Of course! For the first time in four years, the sentries in rue de Vaugirard had stopped pacing. She was glad when dusk drew roosting birds into the trees and their chirruping filled the void. She fell asleep on the sofa, waking in deep dark, a key turning in the door.

  ‘Dietrich?’

  He came in, turning on the light. Lifting her feet, sitting down on the sofa, laying her legs across his, he said, ‘A sight I shall never forget. Sandbags in the yard of the École Militaire.’

  ‘Sandbags?’

  ‘For those rats from avenue Foch to be laid down on and shot. By tomorrow morning, France will be purged of Gestapo command.’

  ‘Reiniger?’

  ‘Locked up on the fifth floor of his building, in the room where he has tortured and beaten his fellow humans with relish.’ He patted her ankle. ‘Get dressed, my love. We’re going to arrest Serge Martel in his own nightclub.’

  ‘For working as a Gestapo informant?’

  ‘Exactly. He has done so from the day he left prison. They even trained him. You can stay at home, if you wish, but I have asked Kurt to join us again. This is a night on which destinies turn.’

  She chose the pale coffee evening gown she’d worn on the night they’d tried to smuggle Ottilia away. It deserved a n
ight of triumph. Her hair had dropped out of curl, so she covered it with a silk-jersey turban – the wired ties forming an unmistakable Victory sign. Dramatic eyebrows, dramatic lips though her neck felt naked without her choker. She’d heard the cyanide pill fall when Moineau grabbed her, then crunch as she stood on it. Slowly, she smiled at herself. She didn’t need it any more.

  She didn’t want to go out completely unarmed, though. When she’d moved back to rue de Vaugirard, she’d brought two big trunks with her. Reaching into one of them, she extracted a heavy object.

  Entering the bedroom, Dietrich saw what was in her hand. ‘Fritzi Kleber once concealed a weapon in a satin purse, but hers was an old duelling pistol, designed to be hidden in a fur muff. That one is too big for you. Here, swap.’

  She took his Walther PP, secreting it in an evening bag of quilted velvet. Dietrich stuck Donal’s Enfield Mark II into the holster under his jacket. ‘Now you are armed and glorious,’ he told her.

  ‘I’ve been thinking. As soon as peace is declared, I’ll find Ramon and ask for a divorce. I don’t think he’ll make a fuss. He’s bound to have another woman by now and, though he might talk about pride and honour, losing me won’t break his heart.’

  Dietrich gave an uncharitable grunt. ‘Are you ready? We have a car waiting.’

  The Left Bank streets were quiet, but the Right Bank teemed with cars bearing General von Stülpnagel’s emissaries and army trucks full of dissident Wehrmacht units. News of Hitler’s death had been reverberating between headquarters buildings, Dietrich told her. Stülpnagel was ushering in the new order, fast, to open the way to peace talks with the Allies.

  The Rose Noire was packed with German clientele standing in groups on the dance-floor, ignoring a clarinet, trumpet and drum trio sobbing out ‘Bei Mir Bistu Shein’. Perhaps only Dietrich and Coralie felt the irony of a Yiddish tune played with a swing beat for German ears. Serge Martel peeled through the crowd in his white tuxedo, squeezing out smiles.

  ‘A less greedy man would have left town by now,’ Coralie said.

  ‘Perhaps he has faith in Hitler still being alive, one devil to another.’ On the journey over, Dietrich had confided that even Berlin seemed confused about how well the coup was succeeding, with conflicting messages coming out of Army Headquarters on Bendlerstrasse. ‘There is a rumour the Führer is not dead, but that’s the sort of counter-message we would expect from Hitler’s stalwarts. Stauffenberg heard the explosion. He saw Hitler being carried out of the building on a stretcher. He must be dead.’

  As Martel bowed them to a central table, Dietrich acknowledged the nods and salutes of fellow officers, showing Coralie how much the power-balance had shifted. Dietrich had always been admired and liked by army men, but as a peripheral figure. Now he was at the hub of a new regime. Should be fun, Coralie thought, when eventually we marry . . . She began to understand the seductive tug of power.

  Martel offered Dietrich his best champagne.

  ‘I will choose for myself from your cellar, Martel.’ Félix Peyron was already shuffling over. ‘Show me to the vaults you’re so proud of.’

  Martel looked uneasy. ‘Félix can go. Tell him exactly what you want, Monsieur le Comte, and he’ll select the best variety. Why would I employ a sommelier and do his job for him?’

  But Félix groaned. ‘I can’t go down those stairs again, Monsieur Martel. My knees are agony. You’ll understand what arthritis is one day.’

  With a twitch of disdain, Martel yielded, though he turned to Coralie and said, ‘Mademoiselle de Lirac, I don’t advise you to come with us. The cellar has an uneven floor, and I cannot vouch for the size of the spiders down there.’

  ‘I’m not frightened of spiders.’ Linking her arm with Dietrich’s, Coralie followed Martel to a side exit. ‘“Armed and glorious”,’ she whispered. ‘If I see a man-eating spider, I’ll shoot it.’

  Martel opened the cellar door using keys he’d taken from Félix. He switched on a cobweb-strewn ceiling light and led the way down. Dietrich came last, shutting the door behind him. The cellar was a long room, dug out of rock, its walls lined with racks laden with bottles that mopped up the sound of their footsteps.

  ‘Monsieur is fond of Pissotte, but may I suggest something equally fine?’ Martel began describing the grape varieties of a particular region.

  Dietrich produced his gun and said calmly, ‘Serge Martel, I am placing you under arrest for collaboration with the Gestapo. You have, in return for payment and favours, committed atrocities in contravention of all legal and moral principle. Raise your hands.’

  Martel had been reaching for a bottle. He turned to Dietrich, gin-pale eyes flat with shock and fury. ‘By what right?’

  Dietrich held the Enfield absolutely still. ‘I act under the authority of General von Stülpnagel.’

  Martel pulled his lips back in a vicious smile, measuring Dietrich’s resolve and his own likely fate, Coralie judged. She wanted a gun in her own hand, and was trying to loosen the strings of her evening purse when Martel leaped, fists first. Dietrich fired and, after a moment of strange suspension, Martel crumpled, face down. Blood oozed through the exit hole in his white tuxedo.

  ‘And so the world is remade afresh.’ It was Félix Peyron, who had stumped down the cellar steps to join them. ‘I guessed your mission, Monsieur le Comte. Nobody saw you leave the club, and no noise escapes this vault. Please, return upstairs and I will lock up. Later, I will throw Martel’s father’s old war pistol down beside him. I know where it’s kept. If the world believes Martel took his own life, it will save you much embarrassment, Monsieur, Madame.’ He bowed to Coralie, then addressed Dietrich. ‘A Pommery grand cru, Monsieur?’

  Dietrich shook his head. ‘I hardly think—’

  ‘He is in Hell, Monsieur, atoning for what he did to little Julie and all the other girls he hurt and violated. Go and dance.’

  ‘Dance?’ Coralie echoed.

  ‘Did you not see? Our swing band left to join the Resistance and we have a new trio, all as old as me. They have to lie down between sets. Please dance, it will encourage them.’

  A mournful tune greeted Coralie and Dietrich on the dance-floor. But they did as Félix wanted, and wound their arms around each other. It was too crowded for them to move much. ‘I’d have put a bullet in Martel if I’d got my gun out,’ Coralie whispered. ‘That Gypsy said I would kill.’

  ‘She said that only to give you your shilling’s worth.’

  ‘You may mock, but she also said I’d spend my life making hats.’

  ‘After you told her you worked in a hat factory, no?’

  ‘Have it your own way, but I killed Serge Martel in my mind, so I’m off the hook.’

  The band struck up ‘Lili Marleen’, the song that had become the favourite of the Afrika Korps, translated into French and English and played everywhere. Dietrich sang the refrain in her ear.

  They returned to their table to find champagne. Pouring it, Félix said to Coralie, ‘Would you do us the honour of singing a number with the band?’

  ‘I haven’t practised,’ she objected. Sing, with gunshot ringing in her ears? ‘I don’t have a repertoire.’

  ‘Neither have they.’ Félix gloomily indicated the band. ‘Keeping them alive the whole night is a triumph.’

  Dietrich said, ‘I have never had the pleasure of hearing you sing.’

  So she sang ‘Lili Marlène’, the French translation, and calls of ‘Encore!’ persuaded her to sing it again, in German. Félix came to the edge of the stage, clapping as he walked. ‘Will you sing “The Lambeth Walk”? It made me laugh so much when you did it all those years ago. You trounced the Corsicans!’

  That was putting a gloss on it, even given Félix’s penchant for flattery. She’d actually sparked a fist-fight, having pretty much announced to everybody listening that she was a Londoner. Not her finest exhibition. From her place behind the microphone, she saw that Dietrich was talking with a man, a civilian with a coat slung over his arm, wearing the so
rt of cap sports-car drivers had worn in the 1920s. Talking . . . He should be watching her! ‘D’you know “The Lambeth Walk”?’ she asked the band. They did, just. ‘Play it slow as you like.’

  She sang it in German: ‘“Do you know Lambert’s nightclub . . .”’ At the end of each phrase, instead of ‘oi’, she did her best imitation of Marlene Dietrich, purring, ‘Nicht wahr?’

  People laughed. But her mind was off her singing because she’d realised that it was Kurt Kleber with Dietrich. Something in his posture drew fingernails down the back of her spine. She held on to the last note for twelve beats, curtsied to the audience, blew a kiss at the band. Hitching up her dress, she hopped off the stage. At the table, Dietrich took both her hands. The scar Hiltrud had carved on his cheek burned red. ‘It is over, Coralie. Hitler survived. My friends in Berlin, Stauffenberg and Olbricht, are dead. Executed. It is over. We have failed.’

  Kurt said, ‘I am taking Fritzi away, I can’t risk remaining here. There will be reprisals against anybody seen to be a traitor. Make Dietrich leave, Coralie. Do not wait for arrest.’

  Dietrich said fiercely, ‘Stand your ground, man. What have you to fear? You were never part of Valkyrie. You were not even part of Dachterrasse.’

  Kleber shook his head. ‘Of course I was. We swore fidelity in the flat on Vaugirard. We were the unbreakable circle.’

  ‘Unbreakable?’ Dietrich had kept Coralie’s hands and she felt his bitter, bitter anguish. ‘Not you, Kurt. You have been false for a long time. It was you who betrayed me to Reiniger.’

  ‘This is insane!’ Kleber’s facial scars stretched white, is if they might tear open. ‘Betray you to Reiniger? You are my brother officer!’

  ‘True. You stooped even lower. You dared not approach Reiniger directly, in case the information kicked back on you. You used Serge Martel as a conduit.’

  ‘What are you talking about? It was that art-dealer friend of yours who betrayed you. Coralie,’ Kurt appealed to her, ‘you know it was so.’