The Heart of the Ritz

by Luke Devenish

  ‘Darling, please don’t be a fool,’ said Alexandrine. ‘The Germans will be all over the city by now.’

  ‘They’re all over here. They’ll be all over Dreux when we get there. And Saint-Malo, too. What’s the point of us running, Alexandrine? What are we even running to? We need to go home and do something.’

  ‘What on earth can we do?’

  Having lost two fingers, Suzette was in considerable pain, but she gave no hint of it. ‘The kid’s right, Madame. I miss my bed. I want to go home. The Comte will be needing me,’ she said, as if the worst she’d suffered was a bruise. Then she added, for Alexandrine’s benefit, ‘And there’s others I miss – those we left behind. I can’t sleep for worrying these nights.’

  Alexandrine’s face flashed with anger at this oblique statement. She composed herself and turned to Polly. ‘Please, listen to me – we must get to safety.’

  ‘There is no safety,’ said Polly. ‘But there is still self-respect. Isn’t that something that a Comtesse who refused to run even when a plane was shooting at her might know a little about?’

  Alexandrine wrestled with this. ‘Zita, please say something?’

  When Polly looked in Zita’s eyes, she saw a flash of the famed insouciance. ‘Screw it,’ said Zita, tossing her curls. ‘If I’m gonna be shot then I’ll take my bullet in Paris, thanks very much, and so should you.’

  ‘And what if he’s there?’

  Zita gave Alexandrine a blank look. ‘Who?’

  ‘You know very well who . . .’

  Polly realised who she meant: the sender of the telegrams.

  Zita kept her voice and gaze level. ‘That was a joke, remember, puss, some kind of mistake.’

  ‘Was it?’ said Alexandrine, with her eyebrow raised.

  Polly turned to the film star. ‘Who is this man, Zita? A boyfriend?’

  Zita was icy. ‘If he is, then no wonder I don’t remember him. What’s one among hundreds? And if he thinks he’s got a beef with me then he can go and join the queue.’ Her look told Polly she should not risk asking about this again.

  ‘All right then,’ said Alexandrine. She gave Suzette a long and steely look. ‘If the majority wish to go back to Paris, then that’s what we’ll do. We must uphold our own example of French democracy.’

  ‘Good,’ said Zita. But now she seemed less sure.

  ‘I’m worried for Lana Mae,’ said Polly, relieved. ‘She shouldn’t be all alone.’ If they could have read her heart, they would have known she was worried for Tommy, too.

  Suzette said nothing more. There was only gratitude in her eyes for Alexandrine.

  Yet Polly knew that her guardians’ hold on their secrets was loosening. Their efforts made in the name of her safety proved they cared for her. How much longer until they trusted her, too?

  * * *

  They selected new outfits – elegant walking clothes, with appropriate hats and shoes – then, together, the four of them began to walk against the oncoming tide of misery.

  Suzette stumbled once, early on, and looked in danger of collapsing again. Zita suggested they put her inside an abandoned wheelbarrow and trundle her home to the Comte.

  ‘My fucking arse, you will,’ Suzette replied. She recovered then, spurred by a fear of indignity, although Alexandrine kept her arm firmly linked in hers, holding her up, for every exhausting kilometre.

  Polly kept the quilt-wrapped Renoir tightly under her arm, along with the Hermès bag.

  While they had all been careful to take just a single suitcase from the Mercedes each, these grew heavy fast. They gave things away to women they met on the road and kept what was left of the food, and whatever else they could squeeze inside their handbags, which, as Alexandrine said, were pleasingly capacious bags this season, as if their trials on the road had been anticipated by the fashion designers.

  After two days, Zita was the first to declare eating as unnecessary when the last of their provisions grew low. ‘It’s a good opportunity,’ she said. ‘I’ll lose ten kilos while this keeps up. I’ll walk back into the Ritz to wolf whistles.’ But her mind seemed heavy with unspoken thoughts.

  * * *

  Some things were so awful it was better not to acknowledge them. This was how it was when they came across the line of black and stiffened bodies sprawled on the road. These were the corpses of women like them – along with others: children, babies. When these Parisiennes and their families had encountered the Messerschmitt it had deployed an incendiary weapon. They’d been burned to death. No words could describe how it was to view these twisted remains, with the lovely summer wildflowers in bloom just metres away, untouched and uncaring, and the birds still singing in the trees. So, Polly and her guardians didn’t attempt any words. The corpses barely stank. The fire that had consumed the women and children had somehow preserved them too – as if the Germans wanted others to learn from such fates.

  When the dreadful sight was behind them, Polly asked Zita to tell her of her life again. Polly knew the shared stories gave strength to those who told them, and strength to those who listened.

  ‘This again, puss?’ said Zita with effort.

  Polly answered with red-rimmed eyes.

  ‘Why should you escape the confessional?’ said Alexandrine, too-brightly, forcibly maintaining their progress along the road again.

  ‘I’ve already told you everything that’s fit to write about,’ Zita went through the motions of complaint.

  ‘Tell me again,’ said Polly, with a wavering voice, ‘to clarify things.’

  Zita theatrically sighed, as if resigning herself to it, but she took Polly’s hand before kissing it, cradling her close.

  ‘You were born very poor,’ Polly started her off.

  ‘Yes, puss,’ said Zita. She seemed to grow in stature, as if walking a stage. ‘I had no mother or any low-life, no-good swine of a father that I can remember. I was raised by my granny, who was a salty old concierge in the shittiest apartment block on the slope of Montmartre.’

  ‘The lower slope,’ said Alexandrine, in a practised line.

  ‘The lowest,’ said Suzette, joining in. ‘Might as well have been Pigalle.’

  Zita sniggered and brushed a tear from Polly’s cheek with her finger.

  Suzette winked at Polly. ‘That’s the red-light district, Mademoiselle. Where all the women of ill-repute can be found.’

  ‘Thank you, Suzette,’ Alexandrine warned her.

  ‘But it wasn’t all brothels and streetwalkers, was it, Zita?’ Polly pressed the film star, finding her own feet again.

  ‘No, puss,’ Zita said, ‘not so far away down the rue Richer was the Folies Bergère.’

  ‘And you had always wanted to act,’ Polly said.

  ‘Act?’ Suzette queried. ‘Is that what’s she’s calling it now?’

  Zita was unfazed, warming to the routine. ‘When they gave me a job it meant posing on stage, smirking half in the nude. And so what? I wasn’t ashamed of my beauty. I was only a little bit older than you when I started doing it.’

  ‘Terrible,’ said Suzette, ‘living proof you can take the girl out of the gutter, but you can’t take the –’

  Zita reached across and pinched Suzette’s nose before she could finish.

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘Stop it, Zita, she’ll bleed on my dress,’ warned Alexandrine.

  They were all starting to laugh now – the kind of laughter heard at a guillotine.

  ‘The Folies Bergère helped me get used to people staring at me,’ Zita continued. ‘I became a star when I was cast in a half-decent film. I went to Berlin to do it. That was before all the films became talkies, of course. In those days it didn’t matter what lousy accent you had because no one could hear it. All that mattered was how you looked. And, puss, I looked divine.’

  Polly was building her strength again. ‘What was the film called?’

  ‘I don’t remember but it was set in a hotel.’

  ‘A famous one?’

  ‘Ha!’ Su
zette started up again.

  ‘Managed to catch it did we, puss?’ Zita asked her, ready to pinch again.

  ‘Five times. Only made me cry the first three.’

  Zita was delighted. ‘Puss!’

  ‘You were shit in it,’ said Suzette. ‘I kept going back just to see if you’d get any worse.’

  Zita predictably guffawed. She turned back to Polly. ‘I played a slut. My first and by no means last such part.’

  ‘Zita was electrifying,’ said Alexandrine, ‘she set all Europe alight with her sex appeal. She was better than Garbo.’

  ‘Just a foot shorter,’ said Suzette.

  ‘It’s true,’ said Zita, ignoring the crack about her height. ‘That’s what made me a star. I’d come from the Pigalle gutter and so did the character they’d written for me. So have all the others they’ve written for me since. I’ll let you into a little secret, puss,’ she squeezed Polly, looking conspiratorial, ‘I don’t act, I just be.’

  ‘That’s not true at all,’ said Alexandrine. ‘Zita is so good at her craft she makes it look too easy.’

  ‘I’ve tied up every part that calls for an insouciant tart,’ said Zita, with a smirk.

  ‘What is your surname, Zita?’ Polly wondered. ‘I don’t think you’ve ever told me.’

  Zita sniffed. ‘I don’t need a surname. When people see my name on posters, they know what they’re getting, and they flock to it. I am the mistress of my own creation. Something I recommend to you, puss.’

  ‘Aren’t you gonna ask Zita about her men?’ Suzette wondered. ‘It only seems right.’

  Polly turned back to the actress. ‘When did you get married?’

  Zita gave a dry look. ‘I didn’t, puss. And won’t. As Suzette well knows, I prefer affairs.’

  Thrilled at such candour, Polly glanced to Alexandrine, who was making a study of looking away, as if this topic of conversation had not arisen.

  ‘And if my lover of the moment is married, then so be it,’ said Zita, shrugging again. ‘I always go shopping for absolution at the confessional. I place high value on my feminine independence, puss, which is a value we all share.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Suzette.

  Alexandrine turned back to Polly and nodded.

  ‘I want to work, I like getting paid for it, and being a star is not only a source of cash, it’s liberating,’ said Zita. ‘It doesn’t require any professional qualification, or even better, any class. The perfect career choice for a woman who more than anything else likes being the centre of attention.’ Zita smiled brilliantly, showing every one of her unreal teeth.

  * * *

  After several days’ walking, sleeping at night in the fields, Polly’s little group encountered landmarks they better recognised. They had returned to the outskirts of Paris again. Polly was more exhausted than she had ever thought it possible to be, but she was not yet dead, and for that she was grateful. She was deeply anxious, however, as were they all, although none of them voiced their individual fears.

  Paris, initially at least, seemed as it had been when they’d left it. The differences only grew clearer to Polly the closer they came to the centre. There were hundreds – thousands – of Wehrmacht soldiers in grey-green uniforms marching in formation up the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Polly watched, stunned, recalling French Government missives that had made her believe that the soldiers of Germany were weak and incompetent. File after file of sharp, smart, goose-stepping young men made the French Government’s lies pitiable. A brass band led the soldiers on, playing an unlistenable dirge called ‘Preussens Glorie’ – Prussia’s Glory. Polly felt sick just hearing it.

  There were tanks. There were motorcycles. There were military vehicles. There were no cars driven by Frenchmen at all. What Parisians there were in residence were travelling on foot, just as Polly and her companions were, which made their return to the capital seem unremarkable amongst so many others who were covered in dust, stained with sweat, and still wearing perfectly applied make-up.

  There was a red and black swastika flying from the Eiffel Tower.

  There were red and black swastikas flying everywhere.

  The garish symbol of occupation made the beautiful city look vile. The newly hung flags didn’t waft in the breeze from rooftops and towers like the colours of a civilized nation should, asking a person to raise their eyes to see them. The gaudy logos of Hitler’s hate hung in every line of vision, impossible to avoid, suspended from famous façades like cheap, foreign-made curtains wanting only to be washed.

  There were distressing numbers of cats and dogs in the streets, abandoned by owners, left to fend for themselves.

  There was not one bird left in the trees; a heartbreaking absence of birdsong. Rotting wads of feathers choked the gutters, providing scraps for the cats. Polly learned from a passer-by that the French Army had set fire to the oil reserves at the industrial edge of the city, just as the Germans entered. The acrid cloud of smoke from the blaze had killed every bird that flew near it.

  It was when they crossed the Seine by the ancient Pont Neuf at the western tip of the Île de la Cité that Polly saw the strangest change. Dozens of Germans, handsome and strong, were arrayed in nakedness on the little scrap of park that was the Square du Vert-Galant. Dozens more unclothed Germans sprawled on the quay below that sloped to the river’s edge. Unburdened by self-consciousness, some played football, while most just lay in the sun.

  ‘Sweet Mary and Christ,’ said Zita.

  The Germans knew that Polly and her companions were frozen there, staring at them, and couldn’t have cared less. There were a few whistles from the men, some waves, but none of the Germans moved; none of the men tried to accost them. They were orderly, well-behaved.

  The reposing soldiers issued a glow of masculine beauty and virile healthiness that was mesmerising to Polly, who had never before seen a man without clothes. Uniformed German bodies that were threatening when marching up the Boulevard Saint-Michel, now displayed naked were desirable, and disturbingly so. Polly made an unspoken comparison with the defeated, emasculated, still absent Parisian men of the glorious French Army.

  ‘They’re dirty perverts,’ said Suzette, spitting on the pavement at her feet. Yet she couldn’t look away either.

  * * *

  ‘Halt, meine Damen, may I see your identification papers, please?’

  A pair of Wehrmacht soldiers, both in full uniform, were stationed at a black and red sentry box that now stood at the northern end of the Pont Neuf.

  Polly and her companions had been expecting this and had prepared for it as best they could. But Polly had known there could be no preparation for the Germans discovering what she had hidden in the Hermès bag. She wished she had left the gun behind, her mind filled with images of the black, burned corpses. What would these men do to them all if it was found?

  ‘Of course, Monsieur,’ said Alexandrine, handing her paper to the soldier who held out his hand. He read what it said of her details while his colleague looked at all four of them knowingly, aware of what they had until a moment before been gazing upon in the park. Only Zita held his gaze.

  The first soldier gave Alexandrine’s identification back to her. ‘Thank you, Comtesse, all is in order,’ he said, polite. He looked to Zita. ‘Frau . . .’

  ‘Fräulein,’ she corrected, handing him her identification.

  He saw her name and seemed to be trying to make a connection between it and her haughty face. ‘You remind me of someone from the Kino, Fräulein.’

  ‘Yes?’ said Zita.

  Polly realised that whatever name Zita had down on her papers was almost certainly her real one.

  ‘But your name, it is not the same as the woman you resemble?’

  ‘But that is my name, Monsieur,’ said Zita.

  He returned her identification. ‘All is in order then.’ He clicked his fingers at Suzette. ‘Meine Dame?’

  Alexandrine feared that Suzette was about to repeat Zita’s ‘Fräulein’ crack and
pinched her elbow in warning not to try it. Suzette handed her identification over in silence.

  The soldier read it and frowned. He showed it to the other man. ‘Jewess?’ asked the second.

  Suzette puffed out her chest. ‘I am the housekeeper for the Comte Ducru-Batailley,’ she said, ‘a very important man. You’ll want to watch yourselves, boys.’

  There was an almost unbearable moment of stillness during which Polly felt the hard steel of the gun barrel press against her chest through the bag.

  The first soldier gave Suzette’s identification back to her. ‘You will no doubt find that that is already known to us, meine Dame,’ he told her.

  They came to Polly last, and she realised then, as she tried to stare guilelessly at their unlined faces, that they were barely older than she was. She realised, too, that despite the grime and dust that covered every inch of her, she was actually pretty in their eyes. Their manner was different with her. Their instinctive respectfulness was tinged with a keen frisson of sexual interest that was as arresting to Polly to experience for the very first time from men as it was also confronting. She knew for certain then: they would never think to ask what was in her bag. Zita and Alexandrine placed protective hands at Polly’s waist.

  The second soldier smiled at Polly, as the other read her identification. This soldier then looked up at her, surprised, when he’d made sense of it. ‘Australien?’

  She clutched the covered Renoir on one side, the bag on the other. ‘Yes, I was born in Australia, Monsieur.’

  The two Germans traded a look. ‘British Empire?’

  Polly swallowed, but held her ground. ‘That’s right, Monsieur.’

  ‘Germany is at war with Great Britain,’ said the first soldier. ‘Not for much longer, but still, we are enemies today.’

  ‘The child is a resident of France,’ said Alexandrine.

  Ordinarily, Polly would have rankled at hearing the word ‘child’ used about her, but here she stayed calm.