The Heart of the Ritz

by Luke Devenish

  Polly glanced at Zita. ‘It’s been busy today.’

  ‘And weird,’ said Odile, meaningfully, ‘all the kraut guests have checked out . . .’

  Zita shuddered.

  ‘Come on, Odile,’ said Blanche, ‘let’s go get some air.’

  ‘See you later then,’ said Odile, grinning.

  But as they passed by, Blanche was unable to stop herself attacking Zita. ‘Your kraut boyfriend was full of so much bullshit.’

  Zita shrank from her.

  ‘Letting me think Odile had been arrested – when she was fine! She was sitting upstairs giggling with her girlfriend!’

  ‘I’m so sorry . . .’ Zita began.

  Polly saw Tommy and Mimi appear in the lobby – both looking up at Odile and her mother on the stairs in bewilderment.

  ‘Sorry won’t cut it,’ Blanche spat at her friend. ‘I think you’re a collabo, Zita.’ The word sliced through the air, nicking at the ears of all in the lobby. More faces turned to stare at them. ‘You hear that, everyone?’ Blanche screamed at this audience. ‘The fabulous Zita is a filthy collabo kraut whore!’

  * * *

  When her accusers had gone, Zita disengaged herself from Polly’s arm to approach the corridor of vitrines. She let Polly watch her walking away, the girl saying nothing.

  Then Zita turned around to cast a last look at her. ‘Puss?’

  The look on Polly’s face told Zita her heart had broken for her collabo guardian. ‘What is it?’ Polly said.

  Zita’s body felt like lead. ‘That time when Lotti’s ashes weren’t even her ashes – and me and Hans were left sitting in that car?’

  Polly had no idea of what she referred to. ‘Yes, Zita?’

  ‘I saw how I could end him then.’

  ‘You did?’ Polly whispered.

  Zita nodded. ‘I saw how I could do it – how I could destroy my Hans and be free of him for good.’

  ‘I see,’ Polly said. Yet Zita could tell she didn’t see at all. Or rather, was it that Polly was only just now seeing what had been so long hidden from her with secrets?

  Zita pushed back her hair. ‘Now I learned that it worked.’

  ‘Good,’ Polly whispered. ‘You did good then, Zita.’

  But Zita’s lashes glistened with tears. ‘You know what they say: be careful what you wish for . . .’ She gulped back a sob. ‘The worst was being told he’s not powerful.’ She shook her head to rid herself of this. ‘That I will never believe.’

  ‘Wait,’ called Polly.

  Zita stopped again.

  Polly took a deep breath, filling her lungs. ‘Did you kill Aunt Marjorie?’

  Zita fell still.

  ‘Did she find out about you? Did she threaten to expose you?’

  Zita tried to make sounds of denial, tried to brazen it out. But her mind went only to where it too often did, on board the Riviera train, where she and Polly’s Aunt Marjorie perched on the gangway together between the two carriages, as they enacted their final exchange:

  First there came Zita’s shame that she’d spied for the Germans. Then came Zita’s greater shame that Marjorie had been told. Then came her desperation to kill herself in atonement for everything. Then her pitiful fury that Alexandrine had snatched the gun from her things.

  Then there was Marjorie’s assurance that, together, the four of them would face Zita’s nightmare and end it, just as they always would in such times, because they were friends. Then came Marjorie’s own confession: she was working for the French Secret Service again and Zita’s act of compromise – even Marjorie couldn’t call it betrayal – meant that, really, given the crisis that was facing the nation, Zita had but one option. She should hand herself in. She should tell the authorities everything. And then she might turn what she knew of the Germans against them – and become a double agent for France.

  She should fool her precious Hans.

  Then came Zita’s promise, heartfelt: she would do this. With the support of her friends she would do what was right.

  Then came Marjorie’s loveliest words: she forgave Zita. She forgave Zita everything. She would always do this because without such forgiveness friendship was meaningless for women in wars.

  Then Zita had thanked her. Overcome with emotion, she had thanked her for such unconditional love. Reaching out, she had made to embrace her friend Marjorie – until Marjorie was racked by great pain.

  Zita had pulled back from her. What was it? What was happening to her friend?

  Marjorie had tried to tell her the answer, but the words wouldn’t come. Her fingers had clutched desperately at her malfunctioning heart.

  And Marjorie had slipped, lifeless, from the train . . .

  ‘Please Zita,’ Polly pleaded. ‘I’ll forgive you for anything. You’re all that I have. Just tell me if it’s true. Did you kill Marjorie?’

  Zita blinked, the memory vanishing.

  ‘Zita,’ Polly begged.

  Marjorie had forgiven her, but Zita had not forgiven herself.

  ‘Sure, I did,’ she lied to Polly, ‘finally you worked it all out . . .’

  * * *

  The idea to kill everyone at the Hôtel Ritz came in a waking dream. That this dream was dope-driven didn’t lessen its majesty any. Hans knew well that, for him, dabbling in the drug came free of ill consequences, thanks to his Aryan constitution. For those of unquestionable Teutonic ancestry like himself, dope brought not the fast road to debasement but the opposite: the autobahn to enlightenment. This, Hans explained to himself, raving in front of the mirror, was why Göring had so pathetically succumbed to it. The Luftwaffe chief had squandered the constitution that the purity of Aryan descent had given him. Göring was obese, effeminate, a pervert, and so, predictably, the dope had claimed him. Hans was as physically perfect now as he had been at twenty, which was why dope was never his scourge but his saviour. He could harness the enhanced awareness it gave him and profit, while lesser types slumped in the gutter. Göring was unmissed at the Ritz. The degenerate’s absence had freed up the Imperial Suite – an absence that Hans had all too happily filled.

  It was his Ritz, after all. It always had been.

  ‘We must kill every last one of them!’ he shouted to Zita from the boudoir bathroom mirror where he had been studying himself. ‘From the very highest to the lowest – scour every floor, every room – we must scrub the place clean! Vermin has infested here. Why didn’t I see this before, Liebchen?’

  But when no reply came from his lover he pulled himself away from the mirror to investigate her silence. She was out cold, naked, face down in their bed, a relief to him. Sometimes he hallucinated her, raving away at her form only to be met by a ghost. This Zita was real. He was sure of it.

  ‘Wake up, Liebchen, wake up and listen to me,’ he pulled the covers from her and slapped at her bare rump. ‘We should have made it completely our own from the start – don’t you see it? It’s not enough just to waltz in and take over – the Ritz must become us, Liebchen. And for that to occur we must kill them – French and German alike. Don’t you see it?’

  But Zita was unresponsive. He contemplated screwing her then and made a token attempt until his prick disappointed him, which it too often did of late. He saw the open dope tin upon the bedside table and re-charged himself with a new spoonful. Then his thoughts of sexual entitlement evaporated as the massacre idea resurged.

  He picked up the telephone and expected the connection to the Vendôme lobby to be instant. Instead, it rang out. Hans struck at the telephone cradle with the receiver as Zita stirred in the bed beside him.

  Doubt pricked. ‘You are real, Liebchen, yes? You wouldn’t trick me like last time?’

  Still she didn’t answer him.

  Hans dialled again, and again the call threatened to go unanswered, until finally it was caught just as Hans was considering smashing the device to pieces.

  ‘This is the Vendôme lobby,’ said Auzello’s voice.

  The man sounded shattered despite the polis
h of his words; an appealing quality that Auzello could only have acquired since Hans had caused his step-daughter to be arrested. Hans only wished he’d been witness to it. ‘Auzello, you turd,’ he purred down the phone, ‘how dare you not answer me at once.’

  ‘Herr Oberstleutnant, please forgive me.’

  ‘I will not – get up here right now. After I’ve kicked you in the balls for it I wish to discuss liquidating the entire hotel. It is well overdue and I’m sure you agree with me. It requires my personal stamp and it disgusts me that you, of all people, Auzello, have not thought to mention it.’

  Hans enjoyed the long pause that followed until it became too long. ‘Auzello! Do you hear me?’

  ‘That sounds like both an excellent prospect and a dire omission on my part,’ said Auzello down the phone. To Hans his voice seemed so broken he could visualise the pieces. ‘But I’m afraid it is not possible for me to leave the lobby at present.’

  Hans had the uncanny experience of flares being exploded inside his head. ‘That you should say that to me will earn you a second kick. If you say it again I shall cut your balls off once I’ve sunk my boot into them.’

  ‘Herr Oberstleutnant knows best, of course,’ said Auzello from the lobby, ‘and despite the risk to me physically I am afraid I must repeat that I am unable to leave the Vendôme lobby now, or I suspect, for some time longer. It is because we are seeing to our next wave of visitors.’

  Hans snatched the lamp from the bedside table and hurled it into the bathroom where it shattered against the bath. ‘Did you hear that, Auzello?’ he said. ‘That was the sound of your puny frog nuts disintegrating. Don’t bother coming up here, I shall come down to you to sort out this ineptitude.’

  Auzello remained smooth. ‘Of course, Herr Oberstleutnant – and perhaps you will be pleased to greet our new visitors personally?’

  ‘What visitors?’

  ‘Has the Oberstleutnant looked outside his Imperial Suite window?’

  ‘How much time do you imagine I have at my disposal, turd? Of course, I have not. The Führer has our victory to clinch.’

  ‘The Oberstleutnant knows best,’ said Auzello. He hung up.

  Hans stared at the receiver, incredulous. The urge to smash the thing surged once more, then passed. Hans helped himself to another heaped spoonful of dope. Then the remnants of his fury disappeared altogether. He tried to remember what it was he’d been talking about. He recalled it and sneered to Zita. ‘That I should be expected to look out of my own window, Liebchen – that’s what we use others for!’

  But there were no others.

  Hans crept to the window and flicked at the muslin curtain.

  What he saw in the square filled him first with panic and then with unaccountable hilarity. This was short lived. When he turned to the bed again, Zita was gone. ‘Liebchen?’

  Her side of the bed was unslept upon. She’d never even been there.

  Hans’ eyes filled with dread. These hallucinations were starting to unnerve him.

  Just then Zita let herself quietly into the Imperial Suite from the corridor, fully clothed. When he saw her, he was overcome no less.

  ‘What is it, Hans?’ But the look on her face told him she already knew.

  ‘The Gestapo,’ he hissed, ‘they are out there in the square . . .’

  She nodded, bleak.

  ‘They have come for the blind girl?’

  She moved gently towards him. ‘You know they haven’t, Hans . . .’

  ‘But I reported the girl. She’s a Resister.’

  Zita had taken his hand. ‘They are not here for Odile, my love. They’re not interested in Resisters today.’

  He gaped at her. ‘Then who are they here for, Liebchen?’

  She kissed him, eyes open, filled with great sadness.

  ‘Who?’ he repeated. ‘Who is it they want?’

  She led him towards the boudoir.

  ‘Please answer me, Liebchen – you’re frightening me!’

  She placed a finger to his lips. ‘They want Germans . . .’

  Hans felt like a tiny child with her now; a boy with his Mutti. It was comforting. He watched as Zita now ran soft hands along the smooth, polished surface of the great rosewood armoire, once pierced by her bullet.

  ‘I’m not going to let them get you,’ she whispered, ‘you’re too powerful to be insulted by their hands. I’m going to hide you . . .’

  ‘Hide me? Hide me where, Mutti?’

  Zita kissed him again. ‘Safe and secure in the womb . . .’

  16

  25 August 1944

  Polly watched with supreme satisfaction as the last of the mimeographed handbills rolled off the once-secret machine. She glanced out the high windows of Mimi’s suite and sighed with pleasure at the dawn of a breathless, blue summer morning. Then she grinned for sheer joy. ‘Well then. The day has arrived, Madame.’

  Mimi beamed back. ‘Not one cloud in the sky to mar the dawning of this day of glory, my dear – not one.’

  ‘It is so, so beautiful out there,’ said Polly, ‘the most perfect of days.’

  ‘Nature and history would seem to have cooperated for Paris,’ said Mimi.

  ‘Still, the day is not quite with us, yet,’ said Polly. ‘There’s work to be done before we start any celebrating.’

  Mimi didn’t need to be told.

  Polly took the stack of purple-inked papers from the press: instructions on how to make Molotov cocktails.

  Mimi took up the other pile: instructions on making barricades. ‘God willing, my dear, this will be the final time we need to print such things.’

  ‘They’ve served us well,’ said Polly, proud. ‘They’ve served Paris well.’

  Mimi clutched them to her chest. ‘The distributors will be waiting downstairs,’ she said. ‘Best we join them at once.’

  With Mimi’s griffons at their heels, they stepped into the corridor. ‘Most of these will go straight to the pharmacists’ network,’ said Polly of her Molotov cocktail papers. ‘They’re the ones running lowest because everyone’s been coming to them for potassium chlorate.’

  ‘Good,’ said Mimi, ‘but hold some back for the emergency clinics – they’ve sprung up all over the 1st arrondissement like mushrooms. Those volunteer stretcher-bearers and medical students are so young. I fear they are hopelessly underprepared for today.’

  Polly gave her a dry look.

  ‘Or not,’ said Mimi, corrected.

  ‘Most definitely not,’ said Polly, amused. ‘They’ve all been resisting for years, Madame!’ She patted the paper pile. ‘Still, it will be very buoying for them to learn that others are just as well organised and that we are thinking fondly of them.’

  Mimi agreed.

  They passed the open doors of a neighbouring suite in the corridor. Inside they saw a frantic Doctor Kahle dashing between two blazing fireplaces at the opposite ends of his rooms. Polly and Mimi cast a contemptuous look at each other.

  ‘Are you feeling a chill, Herr Doctor?’ Mimi enquired from the doors. ‘A rare thing in August.’

  Kahle stopped with a shout, spilling his own pile of papers across the carpeted floor. ‘Madame Ritz!’ He looked pitifully exposed. ‘I am disposing of rubbish – you understand, meine Dame. Nothing of value. Nothing of consequence.’

  Polly glanced at the papers that had fluttered to her feet. She picked one up. ‘But this is a medical document about Reichsmarschall Göring. Do you mean to tell us your most celebrated patient is no longer valued?’

  Kahle snatched it from her. ‘Please, I beg of you – I have been an exemplary guest – unlike all the others.’

  ‘All the others who were arrested by the Gestapo?’ Mimi wondered. ‘Or all the others who subsequently fled?’

  ‘You’re just about the last German left at the Ritz,’ said Polly. ‘They’ve all gone now.’

  ‘Even Oberstleutnant Metzingen,’ said Mimi. ‘He vanished in a puff of air. Not one person saw him running down the rue Cambon – if th
at’s where he went. A shame, really. I, for one, would have much enjoyed seeing it.’

  Mimi glanced at the tiny watch at her wrist. ‘Some might see this as cutting it rather fine now, Doctor Kahle.’

  He looked stricken. He ran to the window and looked out on the square. ‘Don’t tell me they’re here so soon. Where are they, meine Dame!’

  ‘They’re not here yet, but we’re expecting them imminently,’ Polly informed him, now smiling at him brightly.

  ‘I shall ask Monsieur Auzello to prepare your bill at once then, Herr Doctor,’ said Mimi.

  He stumbled. ‘But the French Government will take care of that.’

  ‘What French Government?’ said Mimi. ‘Not the one that fled Paris days ago?’ She made a show of looking deeply apologetic. ‘If you’re hoping Marshal Pétain will assist you, then I’m afraid he’s disappointed both you and France, Doctor Kahle.’

  The German had to feel his way to a chair.

  ‘Perhaps the new French Government will listen to you with a kinder heart?’ Polly suggested.

  He looked up, hopefully. ‘The new one?’

  ‘Led by General de Gaulle . . .’

  They left him among the ashes of his Göring files.

  * * *

  When Polly and Mimi, escorted by the griffons, reached the Vendôme lobby, they were in time to see a beaming young messenger bound through the doors from the square to throw a hastily wrapped bundle on Claude’s welcome desk. The force was enough to knock the ivory telephone to the floor. ‘Long live France!’ the boy declared, elated.

  ‘Long live France!’ returned every person inside the hall. The crush of people was considerable – ordinary folk from every walk of life – each one of them a fighter for the resistance. Polly and Mimi gave the piles of mimeographed papers to those who would see to their distribution across the 1st arrondissement.

  ‘Give priority to the pharmacists,’ Polly shouted above the din to the uniformed schoolgirls who were overseeing this task. ‘And save plenty for the emergency clinics, too.’