The Heart of the Ritz

by Luke Devenish

  He blinked. ‘You have medical training?’

  ‘No.’ She cleared her throat again. ‘I’d swallowed something – something hard with sharp edges.’

  He was alarmed. ‘You tried to kill yourself?’

  She was tittering. ‘No, honey – I was trying to hide something; something those Frenchie gendarmes had no need to know about when they arrested me.’

  Jürgen stared at her in confusion.

  She uncurled the fingers of her right hand. A magnificent emerald sparkled against the sallowness of her palm.

  Jürgen’s jaw dropped.

  Lana Mae snapped her hand closed on the gem again. ‘It came out in due course – and don’t worry, I sure washed it. But the bleeding didn’t stop like it should have. That’s when the doc diagnosed me.’ She grinned at him wryly. ‘It turns out I have uterine cancer. All those bottles of pink bismuth I used to drink – my belly always ached but I thought it was indigestion. What are the odds?’

  He stared at her in incomprehension. ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘It’s like I said to you: I’m gonna kick this disease.’

  ‘All right . . .’

  Her sallow brow wrinkled. ‘But nothing comes free in this world and that includes cancer.’

  In the little pause that followed, Jürgen wasn’t quite sure what was going to come next.

  Lana Mae’s other hand fluttered at her throat before she began again. ‘You may have heard,’ she started, ‘that from time to time, in order to raise funds, I have been happy to accept offers for my jewels . . .’

  He had certainly heard that.

  ‘Respectable offers, of course,’ she assured him, ‘but all the same, nothing like they charge at Cartier. I’m not a greedy woman. And of course, with the Reichsmark’s excellent exchange rate, I’ve not lacked buyers.’

  ‘I see,’ said Jürgen. He found himself unaccountably sweating.

  ‘My most loyal customer – if that’s the right word for him – has been Reichsmarschall Göring, as it happens.’

  ‘Really?’ Of course, he well knew it; everyone did.

  ‘I was going to send a little message to the Reichsmarschall to see if he might be interested in this emerald,’ said Lana Mae.

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘I’ve no doubt he will be. He collects them, you know?’

  ‘He does?’

  Lana Mae giggled. ‘He’s got so damn many jewels – and not just from me. To him they’re like candy almost. He keeps them in a bowl by his bed so that he can fondle them at night. Isn’t that funny?’

  Jürgen had not seen this bowl for himself but he had certainly heard of it. Such excess was not funny at all; it disgusted him.

  Lana Mae was now looking at him hopefully. ‘But I thought – and it was just a thought, mind, nothing more – that before I approached Herr Göring, perhaps I should offer you the same opportunity?’ She opened her palm again.

  Jürgen felt his mouth go dry. The emerald seemed almost to pulse in the room.

  ‘Are you interested in jewels any?’

  ‘I – ah.’ Words temporarily failed him.

  ‘It’s a real pretty rock,’ said Lana Mae. She angled it and the light from the hospital room window hit it perfectly. ‘It belonged to a Russian grand duchess,’ she went on. ‘Olga her name was. Such a charming woman.’ She shrugged in sympathy. ‘She fell on hard times herself.’

  Jürgen swallowed. ‘Well – I don’t know, Frau Huckstepp.’

  ‘Perhaps there’s a girl who’d like it?’

  Her knowing blue eyes held his.

  ‘A girl?’ Jürgen felt like a schoolboy, exposed at confessional for having impure thoughts.

  ‘There must be,’ said Lana Mae, kidding him. ‘Big, tall hunk of man like you.’ She winked at him again. ‘You must be beating them off with a pole.’

  He blushed to the roots of his hair at this choice of words.

  Her fingers snapped shut on the jewel again. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve embarrassed you, haven’t I? Forgive me.’

  ‘No – no.’ He so badly wanted that uncanny green glow now that she’d hidden it again.

  ‘You can’t afford such a thing – of course, you can’t,’ said Lana Mae. ‘You’re an ordinary man of the Wehrmacht. I’m so sorry, Günther. I forget myself.’

  ‘But my family are landowners, Frau Huckstepp. We have owned land for centuries.’

  ‘That’s swell.’

  ‘We are not ordinary.’

  She looked him up and down in his uniform; his Luger in its holster by his side. ‘No. I can see that, honey. Now that you mention it.’

  ‘I have access to funds.’

  She opened her hand again. ‘Do you now?’

  Jürgen felt calm washing over him at restored sight of the jewel. ‘Perhaps there is a girl . . .’

  She was beaming at him. For all her physical suffering her cornfed American teeth were quite perfect, as if nothing was wrong with her at all. ‘How could there not be a girl for you, honey?’

  She tipped the emerald from her palm into his. It was heavier than he would ever have expected it to be. Jürgen somehow managed to pull his gaze from the jewel to look in Lana Mae’s eyes. ‘What sort of offer would be acceptable to you, meine Dame?’

  * * *

  Zita and Hans took their seats in the director’s comfortable office and looked through the tall windows at the snow-dusted Steinhof grounds. The director, they’d been told, would be with them shortly. Zita had given the assistant Lotti’s full name. A large photographic portrait of the Führer watched over them from the wall behind the director’s oak desk.

  Zita shrugged out of her furs in the too-heated room and reached over to squeeze Hans’ arm. He smiled at her but said nothing. It was as strange for him as it was for her, she guessed. Today they were to be happy families together as if those were the parts they’d played always. Zita knew she would not have to play it; the part was wholly real.

  They waited.

  On the low table beside her chair was a little pile of children’s school books, no doubt belonging to patients. Zita picked up a mathematics textbook and opened it randomly. She read a math question:

  The construction of a lunatic asylum costs 6 million Reichsmarks. How many houses at 15,000 Reichsmarks each could have been built for that amount?

  The question struck an ugly chord. She shut the book again.

  An inner door opened and a gaunt, authoritative woman, dressed unexpectedly in English-style tweeds, came into the room, wreathed in toothy smiles and cradling a porcelain vase in her arms. ‘Herr and Frau Metzingen? I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting this long.’

  Zita and Hans stood.

  The woman clocked his rank and placed the vase on her desk to salute him.

  ‘Heil Hitler.’

  ‘Heil Hitler.’

  ‘I am Director Anna Weber, won’t you be seated, please?’

  They sat down again.

  The director smiled compassionately at them. ‘I so commend you for being here. It is admirable.’

  Zita flushed away her guilt at how little she’d been here before. ‘It is not always easy – I live in Paris, you see.’

  Weber needed no explanation from her. ‘Of course, of course. It is even more admirable for that being so. You have come a long way.’

  Zita nodded. She took Metzingen’s huge hand. ‘We have come together.’

  ‘Commendable, as I said. We have seen so few parents since the program began.’

  Zita bit back her guilt again.

  ‘But I do not blame them,’ said Director Weber, ‘of course I don’t. Nobody would. Such matters are not easy.’ She sighed and looked from Zita to Hans. ‘Still, we are fortunate to live under the Führer, are we not, Herr Oberstleutnant?’

  ‘Of course, meine Dame. Fortune favours all Germans.’

  ‘Indeed, indeed.’ She flicked her eyes to Zita apologetically, before continuing again. ‘In lesser countries, among peoples of inferior
race, such acts of mercy are considered unthinkable.’ She sadly shook her head. ‘Sorry displays of weakness. Is it any wonder we’re winning this war?’

  ‘No wonder at all!’ said Metzingen.

  ‘Only our Führer can conceive of such necessary solutions. How lucky we are.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Metzingen.

  Zita had lost the thread of the conversation. ‘Our daughter, Madame Director . . .’

  Weber looked compassionately at her again.

  Zita tried to order her thoughts of what needed to be said. ‘Her birth, it was a terrible –’ She rejected that path and tried another. ‘We had hoped for a healthy child, you see.’

  ‘What parent doesn’t?’

  ‘At first she was healthy.’

  ‘At first,’ said Hans. ‘Only at first.’

  Zita still held his hand. ‘But then it became clear that she was not developing like other babies.’

  Director Weber nodded. ‘The imbecilic are never hidden for long.’

  Zita flinched. ‘Well, no. No. And so, we brought her here to the Steinhof. For the very best care she could receive.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘For the very best care I –’ she corrected her narrative for Hans’ sake ‘– we could pay for.’ Zita had always paid for everything, but this was not an occasion for tallying. She took from her purse the photograph of Lotti that Metzingen had given her on the day he returned to the Ritz. She showed it to Director Weber. ‘Here she is, see? Look at the smile on her little face. She’s so happy. I can tell that the care she’s received here has been excellent, Madame Director – the very best in the world.’

  There was not a scrap of recognition on the director’s fleshless face. ‘The child was before my time.’ She handed the photograph back to Zita.

  The words registered to Zita without registering at all. She looked to Hans. His brow had creased as if he’d misheard something. ‘Well, perhaps we might be permitted to see Lotti now?’ Zita suggested.

  Director Weber’s own brow furrowed.

  ‘Visit her in her room?’ said Zita. ‘Or perhaps she’s in the common room this morning, playing with her friends? If so, we’ll go there.’ Zita showed what else she had in her purse: a gift-wrapped doll. ‘I have a little present for her all the way from Paris.’

  The director blanched. She looked to Metzingen. ‘Herr Oberstleutnant – is your wife not familiar with the T-4 Program?’

  Hans stared back at her. ‘Meine Dame, I am not familiar with it.’

  ‘But I thought – because of your Wehrmacht high rank?’

  ‘Tell me, where is our daughter, please?’

  Director Weber swallowed with difficulty. ‘I fear we have been at cross purposes . . .’ She gently pushed the porcelain vase towards him across the desk.

  Zita felt her heart fall out of her. It was not a vase at all, but an urn.

  Weber was grey-faced with the misunderstanding. ‘These are your daughter’s remains. As I said, you are admirable. Few parents come to collect them, you see . . .’

  * * *

  The conversation went on, and Zita participated without participating at all. Her mind had gone to a Steinhof of her own, a Christmas-themed sanctuary, from which she gave thought as to what she would now do. From here she heard the words of fury from Hans at his not having known of the T-4 Program, at his not having been told anything at all, and she wondered for whose benefit these words were intended, suspecting it was for her alone. She heard the denials from the director that such an oversight could ever have occurred with a parent of his rank. Then came patriotic claims from Weber, ideological justifications to which Metzingen listened in silence. These lives had been ‘non-lives’, Weber informed them; Lotti had been one of so many ‘useless eaters’ abandoned at the Steinhof, ‘parasites’ that had sucked the German state dry. The Steinhof was now a rehabilitation hospital for the Fatherland’s superior troops. Only the Führer had such boldness of action. Only the Führer knew solutions to the wrongs that plagued the Aryan race.

  Hans escorted Zita from the former Children’s Pavilion through the Art Nouveau doors, to find the six soldiers were waiting, now joined by some friends. There was a crowd of strapping German boys, all of them wounded, not one of them hurt in their mind. If they had been, Zita knew now, they’d have been euthanised for it; the fate of all useless eaters.

  Zita went through the motions, cracking one-liners, signing more casts, letting them flirt with the star. Hans had been given the urn to carry and when he tripped on the step and it slipped from his hold she didn’t care. It smashed hard on the concrete, spilling Lotti on his shoes. The soldiers were mortified, but not Zita. She didn’t even acknowledge the accident, leading them away from the mess. She looked over her shoulder just once and saw Hans on his knees, scrabbling in the ash. He had discovered something there.

  When Zita sent the boys on their way, Hans wouldn’t show her what he had found. She lost herself then, succumbing to hysteria, until Hans thrust the thing in her hands. It was the twisted remains of a child’s little necklace; a cheap metal locket and chain.

  Zita had never seen the necklace before; neither of them had. The locket’s contents had been incinerated. The back of the locket was engraved. Hans had scratched at it to read what it said.

  To Emma with love from Mutti

  The ashes weren’t even Lotti’s.

  They’d been given the remains of a generic deceased, something that was no doubt prepared in readiness to give to anyone.

  * * *

  In the big Wehrmacht car, as Zita listened to Metzingen’s sobs without listening, and spoke comforting words without saying anything at all, she embraced rationality, picking over the inconsistencies in everything she had formerly half-believed to be real. When had her daughter been murdered? Was it recently, or had it been many years before? And was it even her Lotti in the photograph, or some other poor girl, so easily accepted because children with Lotti’s condition all look the same? And had Lotti been alive at all when Metzingen had used Zita’s shame and guilt at abandoning their daughter to make her his willing Ritz spy?

  Zita decided that she would never ask these questions of Hans. She would never voice them aloud. She didn’t want to hear the answers. She believed she already knew them in her heart.

  Hans had made a spy of her, he had promoted her from being his whore. But with her daughter dead she had nothing left to be taken. She could kill herself, certainly, as she’d so often threatened to do, or she could take a different path – one that would only open for her if she accepted she was long dead already.

  In the rear of the car, cushioned by her furs, Zita accepted it. With death she had freedom, if only she’d realised it before. She was still the spy. She was still the whore. She would use the skills of both to screw the bastard. It would be all the more beautiful because she loved him.

  She fumbled at the catch of her purse and opened it. She rummaged around and found what she’d put in there when they’d left Paris. She marvelled at her foresight; it was as if she’d already known Lotti’s fate. She took out a little enamel tin and prized the lid off it.

  ‘What are you doing?’ said Hans, looking up from his hands.

  ‘What I need to,’ Zita said.

  The tin was full of powder. She had a little silver spoon for the purpose. She scooped up a mound of it but didn’t place it to her nose. Instead, she offered it to him.

  Hans stared at what she proffered. ‘How can I possibly?’

  She shrugged. ‘It is like breathing in air – like breathing in happiness. It makes pain go away.’

  ‘And when the happiness wears off?’

  ‘You just snort more.’ She regarded him with pity in her face. ‘Christ, are you really such a rube?’

  His pride trembled, as had been her intention. He stared at the spoon.

  ‘Suit yourself then,’ said Zita. She took the spoon away.

  Hans grabbed at her wrist.

  ‘Changed y
our mind now?’ She watched him teeter at the edge.

  ‘You’ll tell no one of it?’

  She smiled at him, lovingly. ‘You keep my secrets, don’t you?’

  He couldn’t return her smile.

  ‘Well then,’ she said, ‘why ask me?’

  Zita watched Metzingen take his first hit of dope. She had some herself then and very soon her brightest smile, as unreal as the movies she was famous for, was reflected in his.

  Hans was smiling like they’d never even had a daughter.

  * * *

  Alexandrine had secretly feared they might find conditions icy in the uppermost reaches of the Ritz, high in the attic rooms, tucked under the mansard roofs, where guests never went. She’d been wrong. The Ritz fifth floor was pleasingly snug thanks to all the heated spaces below, which was a considerable relief, sparing her as it did Suzette’s expected condemnation. Alexandrine was only glad the old woman was giving no thought as to what the temperatures might be in August.

  Yet the Suzette on her arm was a very different Suzette to the salty old crone who had spent decades berating her madame. Here, she was lifted with love, a miraculous transformation that pricked Alexandrine twice: one, because she had so delayed in bringing Suzette to the Ritz; and two, because it only made her think of the love the old woman might have given Alexandrine’s child, had it lived.

  They reached the top of the final stair and Suzette paused, surely exhausted, catching at her rattling breath. But Alexandrine well knew she would never admit to it.

  ‘Where is he?’ Suzette asked.

  ‘Down this corridor,’ she said, feigning certainty. She had the room number at least, given to her by Blanche.

  Suzette unexpectedly clutched at her.

  She was alarmed. ‘Suzette – what’s wrong?’ She looked worriedly around her, fearing there might be Boches nearby.

  But Suzette had tears in her eyes. ‘Thank you, Madame . . .’