Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

by Francine Prose

  I worked with a counterfeiter known as Cigarette Butt, a moniker he’d had long before the Resistance gave everyone code names. He refused to find another alias. Maybe if he had, his luck would have been better.

  Like most counterfeiters, he considered himself an artist. He would have been delighted to know that the portraits he was sticking with pins to fake an official seal had been taken by his fellow artist Gabor Tsenyi. But we couldn’t tell him that, no more than I could tell Gabor that his photos were being processed by a guy named Cigarette Butt.

  Many of the best pictures my husband took during that time were used on transport visas. Everything he touched turned to art. Except for his book on Picasso, which was work for hire, the images he created during that five-year nightmare reflect his eye, his compositional sense—and the needs of the Resistance.

  Once I told him to pretend to be a private investigator snapping a shot of me and my Moroccan boyfriend meeting for coffee (or the foul brew of acorns roasted and served as coffee) in a café. Then we could crop the picture to replace the photo on Ahmed’s lost sugar ration card.

  Ahmed was a courier from Casablanca. The police were closing in. Subsequent generations have interpreted our transfixed gazes as passion.

  Gabor saw his expression for what it was: urgency and terror. But he never said so, and when he printed the picture, he kissed me and said, “Now your other boyfriend can have sugar in his tea.”

  From The Devil Drives: The Life of Lou Villars

  BY NATHALIE DUNOIS

  Chapter Thirteen: A Shopping Trip

  AS A MECHANIC, Lou Villars should have been glad when Bonnet told her he was getting rid of the Mercedes. No client should hang on to a vehicle that was costing him so much time and money. But as a “community liaison worker,” Lou was concerned. Would selling the car reduce the ease and frequency of Bonnet’s trips to her garage?

  Bonnet reassured her. Lou was doing such a good job that he planned to expand her duties. First he wanted to take advantage of her professional expertise. Would she come along when he shopped for an automobile to replace the Mercedes?

  What kind of car was he thinking about?

  “A Rossignol,” said Bonnet.

  On the evening before their visit to the Rossignol showroom, Lou drank herself unconscious, then sat up in bed at two in the morning. Wide awake, she replayed her association with the Rossignols, from the night when the baroness stopped by her table at the Chameleon to the evening when the baroness, Didi, and Armand came to inform her that she’d been demoted from champion to mechanic. Lou missed Armand—his patient instruction, his rambling lectures, the candy smell of opium on his clothes and his hair. She knew better than to let herself dwell on the loss of her racing career.

  Designed by the modernist architect Alain Park-Joris, the Rossignol showroom’s exterior resembled a Babylonian ziggurat or a rocket ship poised for takeoff. Its sophisticated aesthetic was lost on Lou as Bonnet motioned for her to enter first. The showroom contained half a dozen cars, their glossy beauty emphasized by the proportions of the room and the calculated angles at which the high windows scattered coins of sunlight across the glossy exteriors.

  Amid all the desirable vehicles, the only one that Lou saw was Armand’s green sedan. As she drifted toward it, Didi de Rossignol walked into the room.

  Since she’d last seen him, Didi had grown to look more like Armand, as can happen after the death of a loved one. This glimpse of Armand’s ghost made Lou want to protect Didi, without yet knowing from what.

  Bonnet took out his handkerchief before shaking Didi’s hand. Polite to a fault, Didi gave no sign of thinking that this was abnormal.

  They chatted a while, then Bonnet glanced at Lou, who beckoned him over to Armand’s car. She and Didi knew whose car it had been. They exchanged a freighted look. Didi held Lou’s shoulders and kissed her on both cheeks.

  He said, “Mademoiselle Lou, allow me to say that you are looking terrific.” It was exactly what he’d said the night he’d come to fire her. Then he turned to Bonnet and said, “This is not a new car, as you may have discerned. But I knew its previous owner, and I promise you, it was well taken care of. Cherished, one might say. Thanks to our currently limited access to parts and materials, this sedan, used or not, is far superior to anything we have been able to manufacture since. And the fact that it’s not new allows us to offer it to you at a significant discount. . . .”

  Lou watched Didi’s mouth form words. She prayed, Make him say Armand’s name. Make him say that the green car had belonged to his murdered brother. She missed Armand more than she missed Arlette, or Inge, or even Robert. A Bolshevik Jew had killed him. The Israelites deserved their fate. She glared at Didi with something like hatred. Why wouldn’t he say my brother?

  But all that Didi said was, “I’ll leave you two to talk it over.”

  When he left, Bonnet asked Lou what she thought.

  She said, “He’s right. This is the best. The most beautiful and the best.” She would have said anything to drive that car again. It would prove that you could start over, maybe not from the beginning, but at least from a happier moment than the present. This time things would be different, this time—

  Bonnet said, “I’ll go talk to the salesman.” How could Bonnet, who knew everything, not know who Didi de Rossignol was? Or was he pretending for some malicious reason of his own?

  Lou kept one hand on Armand’s car as Didi and Bonnet reached an agreement. It took almost an hour. Lou was afraid to leave the green sedan for fear she would lose it again. She watched them from across the showroom and several times was sure she saw something like anguish on Didi’s face. Why was he selling Armand’s car if it was causing him so much pain?

  At last the two men shook hands again, Bonnet’s handkerchief between them. Bonnet waved Lou over, and she watched them work out the details of how Bonnet would pay for the car and when it would be delivered. Didi wouldn’t look at Lou as they said good-bye.

  As Bonnet got into his Mercedes, Lou felt the impulse to glance back, together with the certainty that she would regret it. She thought of Lot and his daughters fleeing the Cities of the Plain. Of Orpheus, and Eurydice stranded eternally in hell. Arlette used to sing—very badly—an aria in which Orpheus poured out his grief at having lost his beloved forever.

  Lou looked in the window. Didi stood beside the green sedan.

  Staring fixedly at Lou, Didi spat on his brother’s car.

  From A Baroness by Night

  BY LILY DE ROSSIGNOL

  ONE EVENING, DIDI came home early from the showroom and filled a wine goblet with whiskey, which by then was hard to obtain, regardless of the fortune one was willing to pay. I asked him what the matter was. He watched himself drink in the mirror.

  He said, “Guess who came in today.”

  I said, “I can’t imagine.”

  He said, “Jean-Claude Bonnet.”

  I asked what Bonnet wanted. Didi said he was shopping for a car.

  “That’s too bad,” I said.

  “Guess who was with him,” Didi said.

  “Heydrich?” I said. “Göring? Hitler?”

  “Very funny,” Didi said. “Lou Villars.”

  “How is dear Lou?” Her name would have upset me even if I weren’t hearing it in the context of her having visited the showroom with the minister of information, a well-known toady and mouthpiece for the Nazis.

  I felt guilty for having put Lou out to pasture when she was no longer useful to the Rossignols. Later I tried not to feel responsible for the crimes she committed after she worked for us. After, not because. Not as a result. Lou would have done the same things whether or not we’d fired her. Or anyway, that’s what I told myself when I learned what she did.

  I asked Didi if Lou was working for Bonnet. It seemed unlikely that they would be friends.

  “She knows about cars,” said Didi. “Bonnet brought her along. She liked Bonnet knowing that she knew the head of the firm, and she liked
me knowing that she knew Bonnet.”

  I asked, “So is Bonnet buying a car?”

  Didi mumbled something.

  I said, “Tell me you didn’t just say that he’s buying Armand’s sedan.”

  “We need the money,” Didi said. “Anyway, I’m not selling it to Bonnet. I’m selling it to Lou. She loved him.”

  MINISTER SURVIVES FATAL AUTO CRASH

  TOURS. APRIL 14, 1942

  Information Minister Jean-Claude Bonnet was injured yesterday in a one-car accident in which a female companion was killed.

  The minister lost control of his Rossignol sedan on a winding road alongside the bank of the Loire. According to eyewitnesses, the car failed to brake at a curve, but sped up, became airborne, and landed in the river. Ejected before the car sank, the minister suffered serious injuries from which he is expected to recover. His companion, the German racing star Inge Wallser, died on her way to the hospital. Mlle. Wallser’s funeral service will be held in Berlin.

  Given the injured man’s position, sabotage cannot be ruled out. The authorities have ordered a thorough investigation.

  The yellowed scrap of newsprint still exists among my possessions. It is among the few surviving documents from an era when messages were destroyed as soon as one read them, when the price of sentimental hoarding could be death. Fortunately, that item had been written in the most secret of codes, which is to say the most public: notices in the papers, accident reports, and funeral notices that at that time meant something different to us than they would to someone today. They were the newsprint equivalent of the communiqués coded into the personals on the French-language BBC broadcasts.

  Among the encrypted items were the daily reports of the suicides. Death by reaching one’s boiling point. Death by one insult too many. Many people just vanished, leaving nothing but gossip and rumor. The papers also carried announcements of “official” executions. We reread these obsessively, though at that point most of the Resistants shot by the Germans were younger and more left-wing than the people I knew. Later this would change, though by then the aliases by which I’d called the victims were only rarely the names printed in the papers.

  Finally, there were the items like the one about Bonnet’s accident. Obituaries of a strange sort: notices of deaths that hadn’t yet occurred. Didi and I both knew whose death was being announced when I read him the item about the fatal accident involving Inge Wallser.

  During the Occupation, we learned to live with fear and humiliation, anger and insults, the witnessing of horrific scenes one could hardly believe were real. We learned to behave as if this were normal life. People still fell in and out of love, made enemies and friends, went to work, slept and woke the next morning to enjoy a few blessed moments of calm before we remembered the world which we were about to reenter.

  Rossignol Motors continued to produce luxury sedans long after the other automobile factories had been seized by the Germans or bombed into rubble. I’ve often wondered why this was so. I’ve decided that every German boy, every French and British boy, even some American boys had grown up dreaming of driving a Rossignol. They didn’t see why this dream should end just because of a war. We were spared for the same reason that Hitler spared Paris. Why would you destroy something that you longed to possess?

  Didi was permitted to go on working even after he made it clear that he would not divert his efforts, as so many of his colleagues and competitors had, into producing vehicles for the German war machine. Apparently Didi told quite a few people, though I was not among them, that if his hand were forced, he preferred suicide to treason. Even the half-witted Germans understood and believed him. Let them make their own Rossignols if they wanted to take control of the firm.

  Meanwhile they manipulated the currencies until only powerful Germans and celebrity collaborators could afford our cars. The official policy of the Reich was that their political and military leaders were expected to drive a Mercedes. But nothing prevented them from buying an expensive gift for a girlfriend or boyfriend. They could spend pleasant weekends driving through the countryside with gasoline coupons unavailable to the French.

  Didi hated the Germans more each day. But there was, as I’ve said, the problem of our workers. In addition, my husband believed that he was preserving something French that would survive after the Huns had departed. When a sale was in progress, I offered to accompany Didi to the showroom and to use whatever charm or humor I had to lighten the tension and gloom. He refused to bring me along. He said there was no telling how these transactions would be viewed after the war.

  On the evening that the item about Inge’s death appeared in the paper, Didi and I were at home, reading in front of the fire. This would have been a rare event before the Occupation, when there were always parties, and we left the house in different directions. Before the war Didi had spent his evenings chasing Swedish boys, while I chased artists. I’d fallen in love—or what I imagined was love—with some of the most dazzling talents in Paris. The most serious of my imaginary romances was with Gabor Tsenyi.

  But all that had ended. The Swedish boys had gone home, and it had long since become clear that Gabor and I would never be more than friends. My husband and I loved each other, as we had from that night we drove down from the Hollywood Hills. My affair with the driver, Frank, had been sweet, but he had returned to Italy to wait for the Allies to invade. Some people swore that the social life had never been more fun. But it no longer mattered to us. That sort of fun was over.

  With the present so full of fears, and the future an abyss, Didi and I took comfort in talking about the past. Our past. It calmed us to recall that gauzy dream of youth and pleasure, regardless of how the gauze had been shredded by discord and misunderstanding. We would say, Remember Hollywood, and it was as if we were watching a film of a young couple in a sports car on a winding road, leaving a party at Douglas Fairbanks’s mansion. Sometimes we would congratulate ourselves, marveling that a husband and wife could have gone through as much as we did, stayed together as long as we had, and arrived at a feeling that was love. Pure love. As we reminisced, or just sat there in companionable silence, a new tenderness sprang up between us. We made jokes and laughed. Didi was always funny, but he had stopped trying with me.

  I’d tell myself, Enjoy this, Lily. Enjoy it as long as you can. It seemed almost indecent to be finding domestic harmony in the depths of a ferocious war and a heartless Occupation. Money, social position, and beautiful cars had so far spared us the worst. And whom would it have helped if we’d started suffering before we had to? Grief would find us when it wanted, which would be soon enough. For a while, I’m embarrassed to say, the war was good for my marriage.

  After I read the newspaper item aloud, Didi said, “What a pity.” His dear face, normally so pink, had turned chalky, as if brushed by a killing frost. “Armand’s car was in such good condition.”

  I’d always thought he should never have sold it to Bonnet.

  I said, “Poor Little Inge. How we despised her for winning Montverre. All that seems so silly now: everything depending on whether a driver, our driver, was allowed to compete in a race.” Those memories brought us closer. When Didi and I said we and our, we were including Armand. By then I’d resigned myself to the fact that Didi might never recover from his brother’s death.

  My husband found despair liberating; it loosened his ties to the world. He enjoyed being with me, but he would have been just as content to give up and join Armand.

  I have never known if Bonnet’s accident was deliberately engineered by my husband. The possibility might not have occurred to me if I hadn’t seen something—a flicker of something—on Didi’s face when I read him the notice. Had there been a problem with the car? Had Didi reached his limit, dealing with the Germans? Was my husband a saboteur, a one-man Resistance cell? It’s my opinion that he was, but I will never know. However strong my curiosity, it was better not to ask. It was less risky to keep loved ones in the dark, and Didi and I had plenty
of practice, keeping secrets.

  When that story appeared in the newspaper, I knew the honeymoon was over. That is, our second honeymoon, happier than the first. I begged Didi to go away with me, to Portugal or Morocco. We had the money and the connections to travel wherever we wanted. But Didi was determined to stay in Paris. His cars were here. His brother was buried here. He would never change his mind.

  I am thankful that, so near the end, Didi and I discovered what it meant to have a long and, in our own way, happy marriage. We knew things about each other that no one else could understand. I looked at Didi and saw the total of everything he had been through, the handsome French boy in Hollywood, the heir, the successful manufacturer, the troubled brother of the troubled brother. I knew that this would end badly. But it is a tribute to Didi, to his courage and grace, that I never predicted what the consequences would be until I read about Bonnet’s accident. And even then I wasn’t sure.

  Still, I was constantly worried. When he left the house for work, I’d say, “Have a safe trip!” It must have seemed odd, considering that he was only going a few blocks away. I meant it as a magic spell, an incantation to keep him from harm. But I knew that no prayer of mine, however heartfelt, would save him.

  One morning, not long after the newspaper item appeared, Didi left for the showroom.

  “Have a safe trip,” I said.

  Seconds after the door closed, there was a crackle of shots. I ran outside to find Didi bleeding, fallen across our front steps. I told the servants to move him—gently! gently!—inside. It was probably the wrong thing to do. Only when I picked up the phone did I recall that our Jewish physician had been deported. I phoned the American hospital and asked them to send a doctor at once.

  My calmness took its toll. Even now, I cannot write about that morning without a torrent of tears.

  I knew the doctor from somewhere. He seemed to recognize me too. He was young. Homosexual. Was he one of Didi’s friends? He was nicer than Didi’s friends. He was tall, handsome, and dark. A regular Rudolph Valentino. Not at all Didi’s type.