Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

by Francine Prose

  Eventually I placed him. He was a friend of Suzanne’s. We’d met at that party, lifetimes ago, when Suzanne took off her clothes. Gabor had taken his portrait, together with his lover, both of them masked, naked, painted silver, and adorned with peacock feathers. For some reason Gabor had refused to sell me a print.

  I thought this when I could think again, when I was able to hear distinct, if disconnected, words. The doctor was saying he was sorry. Sorry for my loss. I asked if my moving Didi inside had hastened his death. The doctor said, No, it hadn’t. Nothing could have saved him or hurt him more. Then the doctor—Ricardo—lowered his voice and said something I wasn’t sure I’d heard. What I thought I heard was that I could contact him at the clinic if I wanted to do something about my husband’s death.

  What did he mean by do something? I would soon find out. But not before I had gone through the ordeal of burying the dead at a time when even the wood for coffins was rationed and funeral permits had to be purchased with promises and bribes. So many were dying, why should anyone care about a middle-aged auto manufacturer? I had to offer a certain bureaucrat a Rossignol sedan in exchange for a permit, a devil’s bargain that history saved me from having to keep.

  There will always be those who venerate the rich, people to whom the wealthy are heroes by virtue of having money. Though everyone knew that Didi had been assassinated by the Germans in reprisal for something he may or may not have done to Jean-Claude Bonnet, he was buried with pomp and ceremony in the family vault in Père Lachaise, beside poor Armand, and next to the mother who was lucky not to have lived to see both sons die violent deaths.

  I have kept the condolence book with the names of those who paid ceremonial visits. Historians might be interested to see that, on that grim roster, are none of the names of the famous collaborators, the Renaults, the owners of the perfume and champagne firms, the guests who used to come for dinner. By then many of those people were afraid to admit they knew us.

  After that, I went mad with grief. I saw Didi everywhere. When I walked into his study and saw him reading in his chair, I almost asked his ghost if it needed more light. Knowing I’d be woken by his voice, I was afraid to fall asleep. I avoided the rooms in which he used to spend time.

  Through the closet door, his cashmere-alpaca overcoat whispered to me when I passed, reproving me for being unable to give it away, especially now when, because of the shortages of wool and warm clothes, dozens of people—children!—were freezing to death on the streets. Someone would perish because I couldn’t touch, let alone get rid of, Didi’s favorite jacket.

  A few months after Didi was shot, the doctor returned. I thought he’d come for some kind of official, state-mandated visit to the bereaved. What state did I imagine mandating something like that?

  Ricardo sat in the parlor, perched on the edge of the sofa, his expression mournful, as if he really had come to pay a condolence call. He asked if anyone else was in the house. I said the cook was downstairs, but she was a heavy sleeper.

  There are only a few reasons why a man asks that question. And I knew this was not about sex or crime. I said, A glass of something expensive?

  No, he said. No, thank you. He was on duty.

  He asked how I was doing. Physically, I felt fine, but mentally . . . He hadn’t come to hear my symptoms. There wasn’t time. He told me that the Resistance was in desperate need of money and of a place to shelter and hide refugees in transit.

  I heard myself say that I had been waiting for someone to ask me that. Ricardo said he knew. I wondered how he knew. I myself hadn’t known until I said it. This of course was Ricardo de la Cadiz Blanca, who not only worked as a doctor in a public clinic but was also one of our boldest and bravest Resistance leaders.

  Later, when such stories could be told, everyone had a story about the moment they decided to do the right thing. Often these stories involve a silent understanding such as the one that took place between myself and Ricardo.

  When he rose to leave, I asked him to wait a minute. I went to Didi’s closet and grabbed an armful of clothes. I made sure that Didi’s cashmere-alpaca was among the garments I took. I wept as I thrust them at Ricardo and told him to give them to someone in need.

  “Thank you,” Ricardo said. I could tell that his background had enabled him to appreciate the value of my husband’s wardrobe. He couldn’t help stroking the cashmere-alpaca, a mannerly calculation of the fortune Didi had spent on a coat he would never wear again.

  Around that time, the Germans finally seized Didi’s business. They gave me papers to sign and, I must say, a surprisingly decent compensation. Included in our agreement was that I would keep two of our cars for my personal use: Didi’s sedan and of course the black Juno-Diane coupe that appears in Gabor Tsenyi’s portrait of me at Brooklands.

  Maybe they thought I’d see things their way after the war and help them reconstruct what Didi and Armand had built. They said I could hire a lawyer, but they didn’t advise it.

  I sold the house in Paris. I bought all the art I could from artists who needed my help. I leased a large estate in the country nearby, where I entertained Nazis by night, over basements and under attics where Jews, Resistants, and Allied soldiers were hiding. All this has been commented on, documented, noted, and recorded, and was part of the reason why, in those contentious postwar years, I was never faulted for having been married to someone who sold cars to the Germans.

  In fact I was later inducted into the Légion d’Honneur for my generosity and sacrifice during the Occupation. As for those who have criticized me for amassing a priceless art collection so inexpensively, let them search their own hearts and ask themselves what they would have done in my position. I no longer had access to unlimited funds. That art survived because of me. One of my hopes is that the proceeds from this memoir will help me find a way to share that beauty with the world, preferably in an architecturally significant small museum or rural foundation.

  From The Devil Drives: The Life of Lou Villars

  BY NATHALIE DUNOIS

  Chapter Fourteen: Downward

  THIS SECTION IS the most demanding of any that I have written so far. It requires a more incisive mind than mine, a more gifted historian, a more talented storyteller—and an experienced forensic psychiatrist—to describe the final stages of Lou’s descent from auto champion to espionage agent to torturer for the Gestapo.

  Until now I have tried to keep myself out of my work, preferring to let Lou’s fascinating career take precedence over my own comparatively humdrum but reasonably virtuous life. But now that I see that I will probably have to at least partly finance the publication of this book with the help of a modest legacy from my bachelor uncle Emile, who owned a small bank in Auxerre, and who kept his sister, my aunt, at home, as a lifelong unpaid servant, I have decided to turn this setback into an advantage, to convert adversity into freedom, beginning with the freedom (which a more conventional publisher might deny me) to reference my own experience in telling Lou’s story. And so at the risk of sounding like someone better suited to the mental ward than a teaching position in a well-respected high school, I would like to report a phenomenon that I began to notice whenever I attempted to put words on paper.

  For the first and, let us hope, the last time, I experienced what can only be called an aural hallucination. Every time I sat down at my desk, I seemed to hear the hollow plop of a stone falling down a well—a sound such as one hears in the background of early Kurosawa films. It seemed too perfect, even ridiculous, that my subject was falling—plummeting, as it were—and that I should hear something falling. Nor did it strike me as the sort of occurrence that ordinarily happens to writers and scholars like myself, with graduate degrees.

  I consulted an ear specialist, then a neurologist, who performed a battery of tests and found nothing wrong. My friends and colleagues, the few I trusted enough to confide in, must have assumed that my work on this book had finally destroyed my already fragile health.

  The sound recur
red, disturbing and distracting. Paralyzing, to be honest. In desperation, I consulted a psychiatrist who came highly recommended. Dr. G. had studied with someone who had studied with Anna Freud. Best of all, she practiced in Rouen, near the school where I teach.

  At the time I found Dr. G. (who has refused permission to be quoted by name in this book, even going so far as to threaten legal action) to be one of those older women who seem to have made their peace with life—and even manage to find it amusing.

  She listened to my symptoms. She asked what I was working on. I summarized Lou’s story. I asked if she thought it was strange, that I was trying to write about someone who extracted information under torture, and there I was, in her office, not only telling her every personal secret I could dredge up, but also paying her to listen.

  No, she said, it wasn’t strange. It was the opposite of strange. She said that, just as I suspected, what I’d been hearing was the sound of my subject’s soul falling down a well. She said that there was nothing to be done for it. I might continue hearing the echo until I finished the book, and then it would disappear on its own.

  Meanwhile, I should keep working. She suggested I play music loud enough to drown out the distracting sound. Given the nature of my project, she recommended Beethoven’s Late Quartets.

  Numerous incidents from this period in Lou Villars’s life are documented in police reports and files. It is probably unnecessary to describe how challenging it was to prize this material from the paws of the human watchdogs patrolling libraries and sensitive archives. The dirty little secret of every historian of that era is that we are grateful for the Nazis’ diabolical and (to borrow a term from psychoanalysis) anal-retentive passion for keeping meticulous records.

  In one such ledger, housed in a section of the Bibliothèque Nationale so off-limits to the general public that even the serious scholar has to sleep with the right curator or bribe the right librarian to gain access, are several neatly handwritten lines on a mildewed page, awaiting conservation. A brief entry notes the presence of Lou Villars at the scene of an auto accident that injured Minister Jean-Claude Bonnet and killed a female passenger listed as—a slight but atypical error—Mlle. Inge Walther.

  The least imaginative biographer will find it all too easy to imagine the scene in which Lou Villars was brought to the crash site to give her expert opinion concerning the causes of the accident, a judgment based partly on her career as an auto racer and mechanic, and partly on her extensive knowledge of the Rossignol brand.

  On the day after the crash, Lou Villars was driven by the police to the place where the love of her life had just died. The riverbank had already been trampled into a mucky swamp. Lou focused on her white shoes sinking in the mud until she reached the waterlogged green sedan. Heavily armed and exuding menace, French policemen and Gestapo officers patrolled the riverbank.

  Lou was so shocked and angry that at first she was almost glad that Inge was dead. Serves the little bitch right! But she soon became very gloomy.

  Considering the damage and pain that Lou Villars inflicted, can we even briefly allow ourselves to think, Poor Lou! At what point does a monster cease being human, or human enough to feel the heartbreak that is the unavoidable lot of humankind, human enough for us to feel the compassion we owe the most devilish member of our species?

  Ankle-deep in mud, with rain sluicing down her face, Lou recalled those warm nights in Berlin and the trips she had taken with Inge. Had any of it been real? What did it say about her that she fell in love with women who didn’t care about love, but only about power, meaning: men.

  However overwhelmed she was by sorrow, confusion, and rage, Lou was still canny enough to wonder: didn’t the Germans have their own auto mechanics? Why were they asking her to explain why the accident had happened? What could she contribute to a criminal investigation?

  She had to crawl under the car with the soldiers and police watching. She liked being covered with sand and mud, even though she was wearing a costly suit. Immersing herself in the puddle of filth felt at once dirty and cleansing. She’d been chosen, singled out, humiliated, and at the same time elevated and set free. Let them watch. She was the one who’d been called on for her expertise.

  The car had missed a curve and rolled over. That’s what Lou told the police. The report can be found in the archives. The sedan’s brakes had failed. The brakes on Rossignols were generally first-rate, so in Lou’s opinion foul play couldn’t be ruled out. Don’t even trust the mechanics.

  Lou said, “Someone tampered with the brakes.”

  “Who could that be?” the officers said.

  Lou waited a while to answer. Finally she cocked her head like a stout, ungainly bird in a mud-covered, pin-striped suit. “Snitches disgust me. They should all be shot. I’d rather die than be a snitch. But I don’t mind saving lives. And if you don’t want this sort of thing happening again, I’d say look to the top. You may need to do some . . . pruning. It wouldn’t be the worst thing for Rossignol Motors to pass into German hands.” She went on to say that a German would never be careless enough to allow a car to leave the shop with brakes like these—brakes that killed a racing champion and almost killed the French official who was probably the target of the attack.

  Lou hated to finger Didi de Rossignol. He’d been good to her, or good enough, for as long as it served his purpose. She was simply telling the truth. Someone had frayed the brake line. She remembered how Didi had spit on Armand’s car. Deconsecrating it, she understood now.

  Didi wasn’t to blame for the loss of her athletic license. Nor was it his fault that Chanac and the sports associations had won their case against her. But Didi shouldn’t have fired her. They should have found another way.

  In the end, things worked out for the best. If the Rossignols hadn’t let her go, maybe Inge and the Germans wouldn’t have been touched by her story and moved to invite her to the Berlin games. Had things worked out? Lou didn’t know. Right now she just wanted someone dead. Her former employer would do.

  And really, what did it matter? Everything would improve when the Germans beat the Allies and France was a full partner in the New Europe. The hell with Inge, the hell with them all. Lou had no one but herself and nothing but the mission she’d been given by the Führer.

  Lou was present not only at the accident scene but also later at a high-level meeting, at which it was ordered that Didi de Rossignol be brought in for questioning. Regrettably, the automaker was shot for resisting arrest.

  During the eight weeks that, hospital records show, Bonnet spent recovering from his injuries, Lou confronted the drawbacks of their secret arrangement. Choice bits of information still came her way, but there was no one to report them to, and worse, no one to pay her. Once more she was obliged to depend on the increasingly inadequate income generated by the garage, and, for cigarettes and whiskey, on the boozy charity of the Gasparu-Chanac gang. She had to fire her assistant, Marcel, whom she promised to rehire if her business recovered.

  As she sat in her office for hour after idle hour, she had plenty of time to wonder: What was the relationship between Inge and Bonnet? Had they known one another when Lou “introduced” them? Did Inge ever love her? Or had Lou been her assignment? Had some bureaucrat in Berlin decided to pass Lou along from Inge to Bonnet, from one handler to another?

  Perhaps Lou had underestimated Bonnet as a sexual rival, partly because of his terror of germs. Did he use his handkerchief while making love to a woman? And Inge had hardly been the cleanest girl. No one could smoke around Bonnet, and Inge had been such a heavy smoker that Lou, who liked her tobacco, used to worry that Inge’s bad habits might shorten her life. Oh, Inge!

  Two months after the accident, a cop appeared at the garage and told Lou that a car would come for her tomorrow morning at nine. A chauffeur would give her the keys. She would then drive to the hospital to pick up Minister Bonnet, who was eager to resume their professional association.

  Lou considered the offer. Could she g
o back to work for a man who might have been Inge’s lover, and who was partly responsible for her death? Had Lou been driving, she could have saved Inge, even in a car without brakes.

  She told the policeman that she would be ready and waiting at nine.

  When Bonnet was discharged from the hospital, Lou Villars drove him home. Lou expressed her sympathy for the suffering he had endured. She was glad that he had recovered. Bonnet said his right knee and left elbow still weren’t right. Neither of them mentioned Inge.

  Only pride kept Lou from asking Bonnet if Inge had ever loved her. Was it true that the Führer had called the French a Negroid, Yiddified nation, and that children like her brother Robert were being killed lest they drain the vital energies of the strong and healthy?

  The strain of keeping silent wore down Lou’s defenses. It chafed at whatever restraint had prevented her from turning into the ogre that she was about to become.

  I realize that the long, convoluted intimacy of the biographical process—the years spent delving into the life of one’s subject, exploring the secret corners of another’s psyche—should foster understanding, compassion, and even perhaps forgiveness. But how is the most sympathetic biographer supposed to pardon a woman, however mistreated in childhood and thwarted in work and love, for becoming a German spy and a torturer for the Gestapo?

  My readers will excuse me if I take a short break because I am hearing that sound again, the splash, the echo, the dying fall of a pebble falling down a well.

  From the Gabor Tsenyi Archive

  January 12, 1943

  My darling son Gabor,

  I write in the almost impossible hope of reaching you. Telephone service no longer exists in our forgotten corner of the world. It will be a miracle if this letter finds its way across battlefields and borders. I know of no other way to contact you. Yet I must try, because I have sad news to report.