She lowered her voice. ‘I want to help you. Colonel von Loringhoven would like to do something to please General Oberg to coincide with the victory parades later this month. He suggested that a concert given by the elusive Simone Fleurier would be appropriate. “When the world thinks of Paris, it thinks of the Eiffel Tower, of food, of love and of Simone Fleurier,” he said. They need you to rally the people.’
My insides tightened. They wanted to use me the same way they had used Pétain, to make their despicable policies palatable to the French people. Karl Oberg was head of the SS in Paris. Under his command was Theodor Danneker, the SS officer overseeing the deportation of Jews. I had refused to sing for the Germans since they had occupied Paris and I had no intention of doing so now. Oberg and Danneker were as evil as the pilots who had slaughtered the Belgian children. They were cold-blooded killers. What message would I be sending out if I sang for them?
‘No!’ I said. They might be able to torture names out of me, but there was no way they could force me to sing.
Camille’s eyes narrowed and she clutched my arm. ‘I told you, I am trying to help you. You don’t seem to understand the situation, Simone. If you refuse, you will be shot.’
‘Then they will have to shoot me,’ I said.
The conviction in my voice shocked me as much as it did Camille. It wasn’t courage that made me say it. It was the thought of trying to live with myself after doing such a cowardly thing for no good reason but to save my own skin.
Camille rose from her chair and paced the room. ‘Oh, there you go! You are so self-righteous, Simone. You always have been. Look at you, sitting there with your matted hair, your dirty clothes. Look what you have become. Look at where your self-righteousness has got you.’
‘And look at you, Camille Casal,’ I retorted. ‘Look at what you have become: a whore for the Nazis!’
We stared each other down. It occurred to me how odd it was that Camille and I had come to this: two opponents with different allegiances, facing each other in a prison cell. Who could have foreseen it back in the days when we were only ever perceived as rivals on the stage? But nothing was normal any more.
Camille clenched her fists but her hands trembled. ‘Perhaps you wouldn’t judge me so harshly if I told you that the father of my daughter was Jewish,’ she whispered. ‘So far, no one knows.’
As I listened to Camille a realisation came to me. The Germans couldn’t shoot me. If they were losing the support of the French people, how would executing a beloved national icon help? Although Maurice Chevalier was performing in Paris, he had avoided performing in Germany, despite repeated demands. And he had a Jewish wife. The strength of my bargaining power began to dawn on me.
I stood up as best I could, limped over to Camille’s chair and sat in it. ‘The woman and child who were arrested with me—’
‘They were sent to Drancy. They will be deported to Poland.’
My heart sank. So Odette and Petite Simone had been found out. Drancy was a French holding camp with a reputation for cruelty. The agonising instant when Odette had been caught at the station flashed before me. I’d had to decide whether to leave her to her fate and serve another cause. I had done that once. Could I abandon her again? I closed my eyes. I was standing on the edge of an abyss. I had a chance to save my friend and her child, but I would have to betray my country to do it.
‘Can they be saved?’ I asked Camille.
‘No,’ she answered, folding her arms. ‘The orders come from Germany.’
I opened my eyes and looked at her. ‘Can they be saved if I agree to sing?’
Camille held my stare long enough for me to know that we understood each other perfectly.
THIRTY-THREE
The day after Camille’s visit, a female guard brought me a bowl of soapy water, a towel and a clean dress. Later, a doctor came to my cell. He cleaned my cuts and diagnosed bruised ribs and a dislocated knee. He snapped my knee back into position, inflicting so much pain that if a Gestapo agent had done it, I was sure I would have confessed to anything. After the doctor left, the guards took me to Colonel von Loringhoven.
‘I hear you have come to your senses,’ he said.
‘I have made a bargain,’ I reminded him. He may have persuaded me to sing but I wanted him to remember that it was not willingly.
He ignored my comment and read out a list of conditions. I was to sing at the Adriana, which I knew was now run by a French collaborator. I was to wear a black evening dress and I was not to dance or to sing anything ‘risqué’. Even if I had agreed to dance, which I had not, it would have been impossible with an injured knee. To my surprise, he left me to choose my own songs, although I would have to have them cleared by the Propagandastaffel.
‘You can have back-up cabaret artists but no naked chorus girls and no comedians,’ von Loringhoven concluded. Karl Oberg, it seemed, did not have a sense of humour.
‘And my friends?’
‘The woman and child have been taken from Drancy. They will be kept in another location until you have completed your performance to my satisfaction.’
‘I want them released before I sing,’ I told him.
‘You are not in a position to bargain,’ answered von Loringhoven, raising his voice a notch. ‘After your performance they will be taken to Marseilles and put on a ship for South America. It makes no difference to me, quite frankly, Mademoiselle Fleurier. Germany will soon rule the world. You have merely bought your acquaintances time.’
He had the same attitude as the Germans who had allowed Odette and Petite Simone to travel from Bordeaux to Paris. But time, I decided, was good enough for now.
‘I will call a driver to take you home,’ he said, standing up from his desk. ‘But let me give you one last word of warning: you must pretend that you are singing of your own free will. If you tell anyone that you have made a bargain with me, your friends will be dead. And I will do it Vichy style. The mother will be beheaded in front of the child. Then I will kill the child too.’
He didn’t have to say any more. I may have thought him stupid, but he was dangerously so. When I looked at him, I saw a mutated beast, something unnatural and without normal logic or restraint. I believed he was capable of carrying out the threat.
I was driven back to my apartment building in a black BMW. The Gestapo agent who chauffeured me kept yawning, sending wafts of stale tobacco through the car’s interior. I wondered if he had been up all night, beating someone to death.
When we pulled up in front of my apartment, he opened the car door, handed me a walking stick and dragged me to the front door.
‘I’ll be right here,’ he said, pointing to the pavement. ‘I’ll be watching you. I’ll see who comes and I’ll see who goes.’ Glancing at my leg, he let out a laugh and treated me to the stench of his breath again. ‘But you won’t be going anywhere with that knee.’
He unlocked the door and pushed me inside. It was gloomy in the foyer. I switched on the light.
‘Madame Goux?’ I called softly. But there was no answer.
I pushed open the door to Monsieur Copeau’s apartment. The secretary and the doctors were not there. The furniture was overturned and papers were scattered over the floor.
‘Who’s there?’ a voice behind me asked.
I turned around to see Madame Goux. Her eyes were black and her nose was crushed and swollen.
‘What have they done to you?’ I limped towards her and grabbed her shoulders. There were cigarette burns on her face and neck.
She shrugged. ‘What have they done to you? You’re a mess.’
I told her about my interrogation, then asked about the others, although I was afraid to know if they were still alive or not.
‘The doctors cleared out in time. Madame Ibert got the warning and went south to your farm. She had tried to get a message to me but I walked straight into the trap. But they didn’t get a thing. I acted the part of an imbecilic old lady.’
There was a burn near her eye that was weeping. I p
ut my arm around her shoulders. The irony wasn’t lost on me that before the war I could barely stand Madame Goux. And now I would be devastated if anything happened to her.
‘It would take more than that to kill me,’ she said, helping me towards the elevator which, by some miracle, was working.
A few days after I returned to my apartment, I heard a man’s muffled voice talking to Madame Goux in the foyer. Madame Goux had ordered me to stay off my knee until it was better and I was lying on the sofa with my leg propped up on cushions. I strained to listen, trying to discern who the man was.
‘I have only stopped by for a moment,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to intrude. I told them that I was going to manage her for the show.’
The concert for the SS was big news around Paris. The Propagandastaffel had not wasted time in having posters made: The Brightest Light Sings for the New Paris. What I didn’t know then, and was later glad that Madame Goux hadn’t told me, was that draped behind my image was the swastika flag.
‘Go on up,’ Madame Goux urged the visitor. ‘She needs someone to brighten her spirits.’
It took me a few moments to register that the voice was André’s. There had only been a few occasions when our Resistance work had brought us into direct contact. For the most part, we communicated through messengers. Being seen together could have started rumours that may have aroused Guillemette’s suspicions. André’s footsteps drew closer. I smoothed my hair and rearranged my dressing gown. The door to my apartment had been left ajar in case I needed to call Madame Goux, but André knocked on it anyway.
‘Come in,’ I told him.
‘Simone!’ he said, rushing towards me. ‘I am glad to see you are alive. I lost ten years off my life worrying about you!’
I was taken aback by his appearance. In his teal blue suit and red tie he looked dashingly handsome. His hair was slightly greyer than it been the last time I had seen him, but his eyes were as bright as ever. I told him that I was improving every day. He looked at me in a searching way, and I knew he was hoping for an explanation of why I was singing for the Nazis. I was heartsick that the people in the network would think that I was betraying them. I dared not imagine how Roger would feel if he ever found out. I could trust André with my life, but the dictum of our network was ‘The less others know, the better’. None of us could say for sure what we would or would not reveal under torture. And after von Loringhoven’s threat about beheading Odette and Petite Simone, I couldn’t take the risk of telling anyone my reasons.
‘Make yourself a drink,’ I said, pointing to the bar. ‘And please pour me a soda water.’
As I intended, André had to turn his back on me to walk to the bar and take the glasses out of the cabinet. It gave me a reprieve from having to look him in the eye when I felt so sullied. I could see him making the drinks in the reflection of the mirror on the opposite wall. The line of his shoulders and his straight broad back stirred an ache of longing that surprised me. Now I had promised myself to Roger, I had assumed those sensations were gone for ever.
‘How are your wife and children?’ I asked, astounded that I had brought up the subject so casually. Perhaps I was trying to change my focus. I loved Roger with all my heart and would never betray him. Why then did I feel the guilt of a wife who has been unfaithful to her husband?
‘They are all well, thank you for asking,’ said André, passing me the soda water and returning to his seat. ‘And now, tell me, is there anything I can do for you?’
‘Can you find out about Roger Delpierre?’ I asked. ‘I want to know if it is true that he was arrested.’
André stared at me but didn’t say anything.
‘You know the man I am talking about, don’t you? The one who first made contact with you when you joined the network?’
‘Yes,’ said André. ‘I remember.’
He looked at his drink for so long that my mind drifted to the night at the Hotel Adlon when he had told me about his relationship with his father. One minute André and I had been ribbing each other about my language lessons, and the next the mood had turned sombre. André glanced up. He was searching my face again, but this time he was asking a different question. His gaze glided down my neck and along the line of my body. I was taken aback by what I had failed to see in all the years since he had married the Princesse de Letellier. The lightning bolt of it pierced my heart. André Blanchard still loved me.
After a week, the swelling around my knee subsided and I regained some of my strength. I realised that if I was going to perform to von Loringhoven’s ‘satisfaction’, then I needed to rehearse. I sent a note to the artistic director of the Adriana telling him that I had a piano in my apartment and would begin rehearsing as soon as he could organise a pianist. As there would be no costume fittings and I chose to perform alone, there was no need for me to attend the theatre until the final rehearsal. I received a reply that afternoon, along with a bouquet of roses so profuse that the Gestapo agent had trouble fitting it through the door. The note read:
Dear Mademoiselle Fleurier,
It will be my greatest pleasure to have you sing at the Adriana to celebrate the union of France and Germany in the New Europe.
Maxime Gaveau
I ripped the note in two. I had worked with Martin Meyer, Michel Gyarmathy and Erté. Who was this upstart named Maxime Gaveau? I threw the flowers in the kitchen sink, then remembered that the Gestapo man might come back to my apartment so I stuck them in a bucket instead.
The truth was that Gaveau’s note had brought home the gravity of what I was doing. I could not snub him when I had agreed to collaborate with the Germans too. He might be cooperating for his own self-seeking ambition, but I was giving my public name and face to the legitimacy of the Third Reich. Even worse, as a ‘PS’ to the note, Gaveau had informed me that the performance was going to be broadcast on Radio France, so not only would my betrayal of the Resistance be known in Paris but all over the country as well.
Later that afternoon, Madame Goux called from downstairs to tell me that André was on his way up to see me. My heart leapt at the thought that he might be bringing me good news about Roger. I limped to the door and swung it open. But André’s grim expression hit me like a blow to the stomach.
‘You had better sit down,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you a drink.’
For a second I couldn’t move. ‘Don’t keep me in suspense,’ I said.
André gripped my shoulders. ‘Roger Delpierre was arrested in Marseilles. But he wouldn’t talk. So they shot him.’
I stared at André. At worst, I had been expecting to hear that Roger had been arrested. I had never considered that he might be dead. My legs buckled. André helped me to the sofa. Roger? Shot? The smell of lavender wafted around me; I felt Roger’s caresses on my thigh. Don’t put up barriers to happiness, Simone.
André gripped my hands. I sensed that I was tumbling down a dark tunnel. I remembered the first trip Roger and I had made down south with Mouse, the Judge and the others. We had all been on that dangerous mission together but each one of us had faced our own personal terror of being caught and executed. That loneliness was what I was feeling now. André could hold me as tightly as he wanted, but he couldn’t save me from descending into the nightmare.
‘I am sorry,’ he said, tears in his eyes.
I knew that, whatever pang of jealousy he had felt the previous week, he was sincere.
‘Could there be a mistake?’ I asked.
‘Roger Delpierre was head of the network,’ he said. ‘I cross-checked the story with two contacts. To the best of everyone’s knowledge, the report is true.’
I thought of Roger sleeping, his arms folded like an angel’s wings across his chest, and tried to get a grip of myself. Roger was a true military man, he would have told me that there was still a war to be fought and it was my duty to be strong no matter the sacrifice. I turned to André. ‘The children and the Allied soldiers Roger had with him? Were they caught too?’
André
shook his head. ‘He was arrested alone, in a bar. It is believed he went there as a decoy. So the others could get away.’
I swiped at my eyes but was unable to stop the tears. This was what war did. It took good people from us. One of the pilots I had accompanied over the line had told me that he had lost so many friends that he never wanted to be close to anyone again.
André poured me a drink then called Madame Goux from downstairs. ‘Simone,’ he said, bending down to kiss my cheek, ‘I have to go but I will come back to see you tomorrow. The best thing we can do to honour Delpierre’s memory is to finish what he started. To defeat the Germans and win this war.’
For the next few days, I lay in my bedroom listening to the sound of my lungs struggling for air. André had said that the best way to honour Roger’s memory was to finish what he had started. But I had agreed to sing for the SS high command. Could my betrayal of Roger be any worse? Somewhere in the audience would be the man who had given the order for his execution. What was the point of winning this war if I had lost Roger? He had opened doors in my heart that I had thought were shut for ever. After loving and losing him, what kind of life would there be to live? I stared at the ceiling, at the floorboards, at the furniture. But they had no answers for me.
‘Maman!’ I cried in the night. I was now under house arrest and asked André to tell my family what had happened. I begged him to instruct them, for their own safety and that of the agents in their care, not to contact me. ‘Tell Maman, Aunt Yvette, Bernard, Madame Ibert and the Meyers that not a day goes by when I do not think of them.’
I was a ship breaking apart, full of leaks. There was no chance of retreating to the farm for comfort this time. I had to sail on. I had to sing for the lives of Odette and Petite Simone.
When Madame Goux announced that the rehearsal pianist from the Adriana had arrived, I was shocked to see Monsieur Dargent walk into my drawing room.
Nothing about him had changed since the last time I had seen him at the Le Chat Espiègle, sixteen years before. He was wearing a white suit with a pink carnation in his buttonhole and his curlicue moustache was as stiff and black as ever.
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