Chapter Six
Paris, 1949
When Slim got back to the Marais, she found a message tacked to her door. Michel had called; he was back in town and available to meet that evening. Slim looked at her watch. It was only 7:00 p.m., so she picked up the phone. Exhausted, she tried to push Michel off until the next morning, but he was insistent that they meet. Reluctantly, Slim agreed and took down an address on the Left Bank.
The restaurant Michel had picked was crowded but dark enough to hide the bruises on Slim’s face. They ordered the plat du jour and a bottle of the table wine.
“So, you were at Avenue Foch when Marie Claire was brought in?” Slim asked.
Michel nodded. “Yes, I had been picked up the day before Marie Claire.”
Slim waited for him to say more, but instead, he said, “Did you find anything to lead you to believe that Marie Claire is still alive?”
“I’m inclined to think that Marie Claire is indeed dead,” Slim admitted.
Michel nodded. “She died at Dachau. I know because I was there when she was brought in.”
Slim was about to correct him and say it was the Natzweiler camp but then stopped. Why was Michel lying?
“Dachau?”
“She was brought there in the morning.”
“But how did you know? Dachau was relatively large.”
“Look, ten thousand men were imprisoned there, and believe me, if a woman arrived, it was an event.”
“I thought there was a women’s camp at Dachau.” Slim thought back to her time at the Red Cross; she distinctly remembered a man looking for his sister who had been sent there.
“In 1944, yes. This was 1943. It was still men.”
“How did you know she’d been brought to the camp?”
“The block leader shouted that a woman was being marched through with the commandant. We all gathered at the window to see if we could catch a peek at her.”
“And it was Marie Claire?”
“Yes.”
“You are positive?”
“Completely. Her hair hadn’t been shaved, and she was wearing the same clothes that she had been arrested in.”
“What did the commandant do with her?”
“He dragged her by the hair into the courtyard. I could see that her face had been beaten. He took out his gun, and she shouted, ‘Liberté!’ and he fired. She fell into the snow, and the Sonderkommandos dragged her to the crematorium. It happened in minutes.”
“It was snowing?” Slim asked.
“Yes, in late March; it was said to be the coldest winter in fifty years.”
“I guess she’s gone, then.”
“Miss Moran, we all told you that she was dead.” He pushed away his plate.
“I didn’t know you witnessed her killing.”
“I was going to tell you, but I was called away on business. And it was not something that I wanted to talk about during the luncheon. That commandant was a sadistic fuck, but he got his. After the Americans had liberated the camp, they made him lie on the corpses, and then they turned him over to us.”
“Did you ever tell Miss Chapman this story, about Marie Claire?”
“Of course I did. I’ve been telling her since I was liberated that Marie Claire is dead, and I thought she believed me. Then she hired you.”
“Who do you think is sending Miss Chapman those Morse-code messages?”
“No one is.”
“Why would Miss Chapman lie? Why would she hire me?”
“Miss Moran, she can’t accept the fact that she was responsible for Marie Claire’s death, as well as the eleven others’.”
“How was she responsible?”
“After Marie Claire was picked up, Goetz took control of her wireless set and started playing the Funkspiel with London.”
“And he discussed it with you?” Slim found this a bit hard to believe.
“He bragged about all the money, arms, and agents he had sent to France. All those agents he requested were killed upon arrival. He also told me how he left the safety word out. Chapman should have known Marie Claire had been captured. That’s why we all hate her. She sent our fellow agents to their deaths.”
“So you think she’s desperate for redemption, and that’s why she’s doing this? Not that she was a mole, as Dennis thinks?”
“I don’t believe she was a mole. I think guilt has made that woman lose her mind. Marie Claire’s story has an unhappy ending, but it has an ending. Don’t waste your time looking for someone who’s gone.”
Everything he said to Slim seemed to make sense. Yes, London had dropped the ball when Goetz did not use the safety word initially—but why was Michel lying about seeing Marie Claire in Dachau? Also, the prison director’s ledger and the station agent both said Marie Claire was transferred in the late spring. That winter might have been the coldest on record, but Slim was sure it hadn’t snowed in May.
The next morning, Slim stayed in bed. She was exhausted from her trip to Karlsruhe, and the dinner last night with Michel had unnerved her.
Miss Chapman called from London as Slim was sipping her first cup of coffee.
“Miss Moran, do you have any news for me?” she asked, cutting straight to the chase.
“Michel says he saw Marie Claire executed in Dachau in March of 1943, and that he’s told you this already.”
There was a pause on the end of the line. Slim could tell that Miss Chapman was trying to decide what to say. Finally, she said, “I believed him for quite some time. I never questioned him until the messages started to come. And then I looked into his story.”
“And what did you find?”
“Michel was never in Dachau, so he could not have seen her.”
“Why is he lying?”
“I haven’t any idea. Michel was a French agent; I didn’t train him. He was a saboteur Dennis recruited, and I never trusted him. The real reason I am calling is to tell you that Marie Claire’s mother took a turn for the worse yesterday, and she doesn’t have long. So if you have any hope of finding Marie Claire or what happened to her, please do it now.”
Slim bit her tongue. She wanted to tell Miss Chapman what Dennis had told her, about his letter to Marie Claire’s mother being returned marked Recipient deceased. Return to Sender, but she stopped herself. At this point, it seemed like everyone was lying to her, and she didn’t know whom to trust.
“There is one lead I want to follow,” Slim said, thinking of Natzweiler.
“Do you want to tell me what it is?”
“No, I want to see if it’s viable first.”
“We’re running out of time. Soon Marie Claire’s mother will be dead.”
After Slim had hung up the phone, she went downstairs and found Françoise and Remy decorating the bar for Monsieur Nuit, a male-impersonator contest at la Silhouette.
“What do you think?” Françoise held up a sash saying Le Meilleur Monsieur in rhinestones.
“Only you could think of such a thing.” Slim sat down.
“I have to keep it interesting. I don’t want this turning into a bar of regulars.” Françoise rolled her eyes at the thought.
“Just be careful that it doesn’t become a freak show for tourists.” With the dollar high and the war over, Americans were flooding into Paris again. It was like a repeat of the roaring twenties when Paris was populated with would-be writers and artists from Cleveland and Kansas City.
“You’re in a bad mood,” Françoise said, looking up. “Wait, what happened to your face? Did Daniel . . . ?”
“No, in fact, Daniel rescued me. I was attacked by a German in Karlsruhe.”
“Mon dieu! Are you okay?”
“It was my stupid fault. I got lost after dark. Now Daniel is angry at me. It’s all a mess.”
“You need to cut that man loose.”
“I think I love him.”
“You’re obsessed with him. There is a big difference. So, what did you find out about Marie Claire?” Françoise took out two glas
ses and opened a bottle of mineral water while Slim told her.
“The thing I don’t understand is why Marie Claire wasn’t sent to Ravensbrück like the other female agents were.”
“She tried to escape from Avenue Foch, yes?”
“It sounded more like a suicide attempt.”
“Suicide and escape to the Germans; they’re the same thing.”
“What do you mean? How do you even put those two together?”
“If she achieved either one, she would have deprived them of information.”
“Apparently, all she gave them was trouble.”
“Maybe that’s why she was killed instead of sent to Ravensbrück,” Françoise said, throwing a sash around Slim’s shoulder. “Why don’t you compete tonight?”
“Me? Why would I want to be a man?” Slim asked, taken aback.
“With your hair slicked back and a tux, you’ll look just like your dashing papa in his last movie, The Devil’s Hotel.”
“That movie is unwatchable. My dashing papa was completely drunk during the entire filming. Jack Warner had to get someone to dub his lines because he was slurring so much.”
The real reason why Slim hated the movie was a far more personal one. In The Devil’s Hotel, her father played a dissolute playboy who reconciles with his teenage daughter when he discovers he has weeks to live. It pained Slim to watch him interact so tenderly with his teenage costar. (Slim later learned that he had seduced her.) But what made it all the more bittersweet was the fact that it was released six months after Tyrone’s death from cirrhosis. Had she not run off to Paris to try to find her beloved Patrick and left her father dying in his penthouse surrounded by nurses, maybe there would have been that Hollywood ending to their relationship. But she had left, and for that, she had a nagging feeling of guilt whenever she thought of her father.
After helping Françoise hang streamers, Slim went back up to her room and opened the stack of mail her father’s lawyer, now her lawyer, had forwarded from America. Most were quarterly reports from her father’s trusts. It still mystified Slim that such a profligate man had been so frugal, but then she remembered the story he’d told when she’d asked for an increase in her allowance at school. He’d written back a rambling letter, recounting how as a child in Tipperary, Ireland, he’d watch his drunken father beg for more time to pay the rent. How he swore he’d never be in that position, nor would his daughter. Her request for an allowance increase had been denied. Why did Françoise have to bring up The Devil’s Hotel and send her into this spiral of memory and regret?
Slim suddenly felt exhausted again and curled up on her bed and fell asleep. A faint knock awakened her. She opened the door to find Remy, holding what appeared to be a black suit. “Mademoiselle, Françoise would like you to put this on and come down to the bar,” she asked timidly in her German-accented French.
“I already told her no, Remy. I’m exhausted from my trip. I want to have a light dinner and go back to sleep.”
“She needs you to be the judge of the contest. She said it would be good for business if the daughter of—how did she put it?—‘one of the world’s most notorious playboys’ chooses the best monsieur,” she said as she handed Slim the well-cut tuxedo. “Madame Dietrich gave it to Françoise. She thinks it will fit you.”
“Remy, can I ask you something?”
“The contest starts at ten, mademoiselle.”
“It’s not about the contest. What camp were you and your family imprisoned in during the war?” Slim knew that Remy and her family had been rounded up for being Gypsies, but no more details.
“We were in the family camp in Auschwitz called Zigeunerlager. For a while, it wasn’t so bad because we could all stay together. We could wear our clothes. They even set up a kindergarten for the children. Dr. Mengele promised me that since I was a German and my husband a Gypsy that nothing would happen to my two children and me.”
Slim looked at Remy and said, “But something did happen.”
“Yes. The night they took everyone, I stayed behind with the children. My husband disappeared into the masses marching toward the gas chambers. An hour later, the guards came and said, ‘We will let you go, but the children must go with us.’
“And I said, ‘No, Dr. Mengele promised that the children could stay with me.’ They told me they were taking the children to him and he would keep them safe. I didn’t believe them, and then the doctor came himself and said, ‘Give me the children, and I will make sure nothing happens to them.’ So I did. And they went up the chimney,” Remy said without a hint of emotion.
“How could you live after that?”
“How? Everyone I knew was gone. All my people were gone. But I needed to live because I know I was saved for one reason.”
“What’s that?” Slim asked.
“When they capture Mengele, I will be at his trial, and I will tell the world how he picked up my children and led them to slaughter.”
“Slim, is Remy up there?” Françoise shouted from below.
“Coming, Madame,” Remy said, handing Slim the tuxedo. Before Slim could respond, Remy ran downstairs.
Slim sat down on her bed and remembered when she’d first hired Remy to work at the Hôtel Lutetia. Almost mute, with the aura of an abused dog, Remy had mopped the floors and cleaned the bathrooms. After she had heard the hotel was to be turned over to a developer who promised to return it to its former glory, Remy asked if Slim needed someone to work for her. Did the mademoiselle need a maid, a cook, anything? Slim had hired her without hesitation. She may not have been able to find her first love, Patrick, or reunite families decimated by barbarity, but she could say yes to this one simple request. Before tonight, she had never asked Remy what had happened to her family because she hadn’t wanted to pry.
She looked at the tuxedo and then thought about what Remy had said. She’d heard so many of these stories when she’d worked at the Red Cross, and by now, one would think, she’d be used to them. But this one was different. Remy had told it in such a dispassionate manner, it gave Slim the chills. Maybe Remy had become what Françoise called one of the soap people.
The contest was just starting when Slim walked into la Silhouette. The long, mahogany bar Slim had salvaged from a defunct brothel in le Pigalle, the red-light district of Paris, had been cleared off to make a stage. Françoise saw Slim and waved her over. She made her way through the throngs of women, and Françoise patted the back of a chair next to the bar. Slim sat down and noticed the slender and elegant silver-haired woman next to her framed in a plume of cigarette smoke.
“Slim, I want you to meet Janet Flanner. She writes the ‘Letter from Paris’ for The New Yorker.”
Slim had been reading Flanner’s column for years and found herself tongue-tied in the presence of such a renowned literary light. She could barely manage, “How do you do?”
“I’m well. I’ve been hearing about la Silhouette since you opened it six months ago.” She looked around admiringly. “I knew your father in Paris, Miss Moran. He was quite something also. He tried to pick me up once. I told him he was barking up the wrong tree.” Flanner was nearing sixty and had the practical manner of a schoolmistress. “I think he wanted a ménage à trois with Solita and me,” Flanner said, referencing her beautiful lover from the time. Like Slim’s father, she was rather notorious for leaving behind a never-ending trail of broken-hearted women.
“Will you put Le Meilleur Monsieur contest in your ‘Letter from Paris’?” Slim asked as she watched Flanner survey the room.
“I might. It’s certainly more interesting than talking about the big Coca-Cola crisis,” Flanner said. “Do the French think that the national drink of America can usurp French wine? I haven’t heard this much outrage since the Nazis hung the swastika from the Eiffel Tower.”
Françoise handed them each a paper mustache with a piece of elastic to attach to their faces.
“For the judges,” she said, helping Flanner on with hers.
“How
do I look?” Flanner asked, grinning like a kid in a candy store.
“Dashing.” Slim smiled back.
“You look like the ghost of your father in that tuxedo. It’s a bit eerie. I saw a male impersonator once, Vesta Tilley, singing ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’ at Royal Albert Hall in London. She was dressed like a fop named Burlington Bertie. I’ve never understood why women want to be men, but I have to say, the evening was one of the most confusing of my life,” Flannery noted wryly.
“Why, if I may ask?”
“Because, my dear, I found her/him/whatever oddly attractive.” Flanner laughed. “Gender sometimes confounds.”
The lights blinked, signaling that the show was about to begin, and the judges—Françoise, Flanner, and Slim—picked up their pencils. The contestants were to be judged in three areas: originality of their acts, the believability of their virility, and costume.
A spotlight lit up the all-female jazz trio Françoise had hired away from the Mars Club. Accompanied by a zaftig accordion player dressed as a Marseille fisherman, the scantily clad women struck up the melodious song of “Mademoiselle de Paris.” Remy, outfitted as a jaunty sailor, pulled back the makeshift curtain and revealed the diminutive figure of Edith Piaf sporting a pasted-on mustache. The crowd in the bar roared, and for a moment, the most famous chanteuse in the world could barely be heard. Finally, the crowd settled down, and Piaf continued. When she got to the refrain, she waved her arms and invited everyone to join in.
Elle chante un air de son faubourg,
Elle rêve à des serments d’amour,
Elle pleure et plus souvent qu’à son tour
Mademoiselle de Paris!
When she finished, Piaf noticed Flanner acknowledging her with a smile and a nod of respect. Then, before the rowdy crowd could demand an encore, the frail chanteuse was whisked out the back door to her next engagement.
“Quite the coup, your getting Piaf, Slim,” Janet noted, clearly impressed.
“I’m afraid that I cannot take any credit. It’s all Françoise.” Slim wondered how much Françoise had to pay to get Piaf on stage. Whatever it was, she knew it was worth it. People would be talking about Piaf’s appearance at la Silhouette for weeks.
The Lost Spy (Slim Moran Mysteries) Page 10
