Mistress of the Ritz

by Melanie Benjamin

  “I should have done this. But I have to lay low….I shouldn’t be here.” She glances at the Germans at the end of the bar. “But I had to see you with my eyes. I don’t trust that Lorenzo. He doesn’t care about people. Not at all, not like Robert. Blanche, I’m afraid for you.”

  “Lily, I can take care of myself. I want to do this. I want to help. I want to save, too. You won’t deny me that, will you?” Blanche puts her arm about her friend. Lily shakes her head, but hiccups a little as she tries to stop her tears; suddenly Blanche is crying, too, although she has no idea why—probably the adrenaline draining away, replaced by jangly nerves. And so the two of them are head-down on the bar, weeping softly, as Frank slides another round of martinis toward them.

  “Blanche!”

  Blanche, startled, raises her head and gapes at her husband, who is glaring, with unconcealed disgust, first at Lily, then at her.

  “Blanche, what on earth—where are your clothes?” She looks down at the too-tight housedress with the faded flower print, the raggedy cloth coat in a heap at her feet. She remembers, with a guilty little start, how she gave away her fur coat. His fur coat.

  “I, well—”

  “Blanche, she spilled things on herself so I gave her some clothes to wear. She was a mess—we were having fun, like this!” Lily leans over her, lifting her martini glass in a drunken toast. “Cheers, Claude! Have fun with us!”

  Claude ignores Lily. Instead, he takes Blanche by the arm, preparing to haul her away. “Come lie down. I can’t have you looking like this. Not here.”

  The Germans, Blanche notices—the martinis have not yet kicked in, although she can feel them buzzing a little at the base of her skull, the edges of her vision starting to blur—are enjoying the little drama, their gazes knowing. How typical, how French—the two drunken ladies, one of them the director’s wife, at the end of the bar. That’s all they see—what Claude sees.

  Lily and Blanche—two drunken friends out on a spree.

  She kisses her husband on the cheek—it’s a very moist kiss and she leaves a lipstick smear which she tries unsuccessfully to wipe up with the sleeve of her borrowed dress—and says, “I’m sorry, Claude, but it’s been a hell of a day.”

  She tries to smile at the look on her husband’s face. But it’s far too real—smug, resigned—and so, dizzy, she shuts her eyes against it, knowing she’s going to have to shut her eyes against his disgust, she’s going to have to disappoint him on a daily basis for a long time to come.

  By letting Claude believe what he wants to believe—what he’s so eager to believe about her—she can hide her activities from him. If he thinks she’s just a sloppy drunk, a nuisance, he can’t be questioned, can’t be accused of anything if she’s caught. And it’s how she can hide Lily, too.

  “Popsy wopsy was a bear, Popsy wopsy has no hair,” she murmurs, eyes half-closed, watching her husband’s face as it settles even further into the familiar disgusted grooves. Satisfied, she closes her eyes all the way and giggles. “Ol’ Popsy wopsy. Another round on him!”

  She hears her husband sigh, then leave, as she reaches for another martini.

  It is that woman, of course it is. That Lily.

  This woman! This slender, minuscule person! She is the one who corrupts his Blanche, who awakens and encourages the most irresponsible aspects of his wife’s personality. Oh, yes, Claude knows Blanche enjoys drinking; he’s known it from the moment they met. Her incessant campaign to allow women inside the bar—what was that about, other than her own thirst wanting to be sated? Her pleasure in idling her days swapping drinks and stories with the Hemingways and Fitzgeralds. Drink allows her to forget, Claude believes; forget her family, so far away; forget the life she left behind, the things she gave up to be his wife. But—the defensiveness creeps in, for Claude is only a man, after all—he never asked her to give them up.

  And she did so quite readily.

  But with Lily, his wife’s carousing takes on a more careless aspect, as if she is actively courting danger. As if danger isn’t already lurking everywhere. Even at the Ritz.

  Hans Emliger, his manager, says to him one day, so casually, “Claude, I understand that you—that you are working, late at night, sometimes. If you would like for me to help in any way, I would be glad to. I can keep your secret.”

  Claude assures Hans (not German, Dutch, thank heavens!) that he must be mistaken; how is Claude to know if he is friend or foe? How is Claude to know to which secret of his Hans is referring? One cannot take the chance of trusting these days; everyone is an enemy. Until that miraculous liberation they all pray for, when all might be revealed. Although it does not seem possible, not at the present.

  Frank Meier is also troubling Claude. Oh, Frank is as always—large, wary, keeping his own counsel, the way he’s been since Claude first met him, as his service at the Ritz predates Claude’s own. Watching, always watching, behind that mahogany bar; it seems as if he never leaves it, and at times Claude suspects he might be sleeping behind it, this large man from Austria who apparently has no family, no life beyond these walls. In his white jacket, he is inscrutable, both in his manners and his demeanor.

  However.

  Claude knows more about Frank—indeed, about everyone at the Ritz—than he is given credit for. For example, Frank has various ventures on the side—his gambling ring, for one. Claude also knows about that little Turk, his friend Greep, who is famed for his forgery; many passports, death certificates, and other official documents have been altered or created by his hand. What Claude can’t discern is if either Frank or Greep is engaged in the Resistance.

  And what, exactly, is the Resistance? It isn’t a defined group of people, not as some would believe; there is no official insignia, no membership dues. It is more amorphous, popping up now here, now there. Some people who never held a gun are part of it. It is at once cerebral, engaged in false diplomacy, and bloodily violent, intent on blowing up bridges and entire regiments of Nazis. It is more of a mood than an action, Claude sometimes believes; if you do something, however small, to make their “guests” squirm, feel unwelcome, or in danger of their lives, you are resisting.

  Frank is passing on messages, Claude is certain. From whom—agents, double agents, the Resistance, the Allies, the select Germans who, sickened at the squandering of millions of German lives in Russia, are starting to plot against Hitler—that, he doesn’t know. But Frank is also funneling money, money that should rightly be paid to the Ritz, and this is the troubling part. In normal times, Claude would have no choice but to accuse him of embezzlement and sack him.

  However.

  Where is the money going? Is Frank procuring passage to America for those who cannot afford it? Procuring fine clothes for himself from the black market? Who can tell? Who dares to ask? And so Claude must allow him to continue to do this thing, this siphoning off of money that belongs to Madame Ritz, because at the moment the only jury is one comprised of Germans, and Claude will not throw him, nor anyone else in his employ, on their mercy.

  After the incident of the kitchen lights—Claude still doesn’t know who turned them on—Claude himself came under scrutiny; in fact, he spent two days in jail. Two days being treated very pleasantly—the interrogating officer had been von Stülpnagel’s guest at luncheon more than once and so he knew Claude very well, and fondly, because Claude always ensured that the man had his favorite wine, a Burgundy, and an entrée of quenelles, to which the officer was most devoted. While Claude was questioned, naturally, it was done with the good humor and easy camaraderie of dinner companions. He supposes even the Germans find it difficult to torture those who provide them their favorite meals. Claude was asked, gently, about whom he might suspect of having turned on those lights; he was also accused—again, tentatively—of being a Communist; a list had appeared—a list of mysterious origin—and upon that list, in the category of “suspected Communist,
” was the name Auzello. The officer said that, naturally, he might very well be mistaken about that, but one must ask.

  That last accusation, mild as it was, Claude could not stand. He told the officer—after reminding him how very much he loved those quenelles—in no uncertain terms exactly what he thought of Communists, those who would infiltrate society, do away with its structures, all in the name of mischief. He reminded this officer that he himself had swept the Ritz from attic to cellar, getting rid of any employees who were known to sympathize with such rabble.

  Between his gentle interrogations, Claude was held in a cell no bigger than a broom closet at the Ritz, but it was separate from the others, at whom he dared not look lest he recognize any of them; and while the food was swill—mon Dieu, what they called soup!—the cot was comfortable. And it had a window; a window through which he saw her.

  Both days around two o’clock, Claude’s wife took a seat at the café directly across the street, smoking Gauloise after Gauloise, pale, nervous. But there. Keeping watch just across from the prison where he was held. Understanding, somehow, that Claude would see her. That he might find strength in her presence, which he did. Much to his surprise. For it had been a very long time since he’d seen his wife as anything other than a headache.

  When he was released—with a clap on the back, a laugh, and a thinly veiled threat that should more unfortunate activity occur at the Ritz, quenelles or no quenelles, he would personally be held accountable—Claude teased his wife about her vigil. Because he couldn’t bring himself to confess how much it had meant to see her there. He couldn’t begin to reveal how frightened he’d really been that these would be the last glimpses of her he would ever have.

  Claude also couldn’t tell her how much her anguish touched him; that he was surprised by it, even. That he was astonished that he could still be deeply affected by her presence, and she by his absence.

  “See?” He kissed her, breezily, on the cheek when he arrived back at the Ritz, and she flung her arms around him with a strangled sob. “Poor Blanchette—you can’t bear to be away from me even for one day!”

  “Don’t flatter yourself, Popsy,” she’d said, pushing herself away and reapplying her lipstick. “I was simply dying to see if your mistress would show up, too.” But her hand shook as she held the lipstick.

  Claude pressed his lips together and returned to his duties.

  When he closed the door, however, he heard her burst into tears, and he, too, felt sadness, like a ponderous, musty overcoat, drape itself over him. What on earth had this war done to them? It had not been perfect before, no; Claude could admit that, and admit his fault. But shouldn’t war draw people together instead of tearing them apart? Didn’t that Hemingway write of these things, of love and passion while bullets rained down, in that book of his about the Spanish Civil War?

  Once, Claude had thought that his and Blanche’s story was the most romantic he’d ever known. Now, he only knew the bitterness of a punctured dream.

  A moment later, Blanche passed him in the hall, on her way out. To drink with Lily.

  Lily.

  Who Claude knew—it was simply only a matter of time—would endanger them all.

  “Jeepers creepers, do I stink. How much gin do you think I poured on myself?”

  “All of it.”

  “You were slurring your words so much, I think you invented a new language.”

  Lily giggles. “I was good, huh, Blanche?”

  “Good. As usual.”

  “So were you.” And Lily immediately turns serious as Blanche changes clothes. As fond as she is of gin, this is too much; she smells like an entire juniper forest.

  “How did it go, Blanche? Tell me. I still don’t like this, although you are proving to be very good at it.”

  “You think so?” Blanche pokes her head around the corner of the door of the suite, pleased beyond reason. She is good at “it”—but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t appreciate hearing it from others. She would love to be able to share this with Claude, to let him see her this way, as she truly is, and not as he thinks she is.

  But she can’t, so she has to make do with Lily’s admiration, instead. As far as Claude is aware, Blanche spends her days—when she’s not here at the Ritz playing dull games of cards with dull women who still are mourning the loss of fashion and not lives—out with Lily. Carousing. Drinking. Making a damned stupid fool of herself, as usual.

  And Blanche lets him think the worst of her. Because this way she won’t enmesh Claude and his damn precious Ritz in her actions; he can remain above the dirty, dangerous work of resistance and keep serving, providing, fetching for these monsters. Sometimes Blanche can’t even bear to look at him, her former brave knight who is now a simpering servant of the most dangerous dragon of all.

  “You can never tell Claude,” Lily cautions. “We can’t trust him. He’s too close to them. Thinking only of his own survival.”

  Blanche nods, but her disappointment isn’t in hearing him discussed this way. Her disenchantment is more intimate: the tragedy of seeing a man she once thought truer to himself than anyone she’d ever known reduced to a puppet.

  So Claude doesn’t know. He can’t know that the night he thought Blanche was too soused to come home at all and had to crash at Lily’s was the night she was actually on a train to Le Mans, another forged passport in her handbag, chatting fatuously with two German soldiers who would not leave her alone while she pretended to be, once more, a German nursemaid, accompanying another downed flyer disguised as a convalescing soldier. (They were dropping from the skies like flies these days, as the Allies stepped up their bombing of Germany.) These two soldiers took a shine to her—they flirted, they tried to get her to agree to an assignation once they got to the town. She couldn’t shake them, no matter what she said, and all the while the American airman sat with his head between his knees, vomiting steadily into a knapsack, and still the Germans wouldn’t walk away. She finally managed to evade them at the station, when she shoved the young Yank, now too weak to walk, into a convenient wheelbarrow, and pushed him through the crowd—attracting fascinated stares but no questions, perhaps because they were so brazen; by the time she got him to his contact, a farmer peddling vegetables in the market, she was wrung out with the exertion of pushing a six-foot-tall American.

  This was the first time she’d been allowed to carry a firearm; she had a small pistol, given to her by Lorenzo, in a handbag. It was not that different from Claude’s gun—the gun that he thought she didn’t know about.

  But she did; she’d found it in his desk drawer one evening when she was rummaging through it (of course, she had a key; again, something he wasn’t aware of), looking for the passkey to the wine cellar, where she’d hidden some stolen German uniforms behind a lot of thirty-year-old Burgundy. She’d been startled; Claude was not the kind of man to walk around with a pistol in his pocket, especially at the Ritz where anyone, no matter their title, was at the risk of being stopped and frisked. She’d picked up the pistol, admired how clean it was, how polished, cool in her hand.

  And she tried—and failed—to imagine a scenario in which her husband would use it.

  Claude will never suspect that the time he berated both Lily and Blanche for being thrown out of the Brasserie Lipp for being too rowdy, they were actually creating a diversion that allowed Lorenzo and Heifer—the big girl with braids—to steal a German military ID from an officer. The officer was extremely interested in the spectacle of two beautiful women (Blanche had pinned one of her evening dresses to fit Lily’s more delicate frame) engaged in a spirited catfight over an astonished young Nazi lieutenant, who had no idea who either of them were but enjoyed the attention.

  Claude, Blanche is sure, also never dreams that Frank Meier is passing coded messages to double agents in the bar. He never realizes that Blanche turned the lights on in the kitchen one night
, to aid the Allied bombers trying to find a particular dock on the outskirts of Paris during a night raid.

  Claude doesn’t know—anything. Of that, Blanche is certain. He doesn’t see anything, know anything, think of anything—other than his goddamned beloved Ritz.

  The deceptions work, too well, and she’s exhilarated—who doesn’t enjoy the pleasure of a lie well told?—and determined not to plumb her disappointment in Claude. Blanche is thrilled to be of use; thrilled to do something against these Nazis more devastating than kicking them in the balls. Her activities allow her to resume her old insouciance at the Ritz; once again, she can play cards with Spatzy and Chanel and never once want to throw a glass at him or call her a skinny collaborating bitch. She even jokes with von Stülpnagel—as much as one could joke with such a humorless pig; they have an ongoing bet as to which of his officers will get the clap first because, according to him, all French prostitutes naturally are diseased.

  Blanche still has her favorites among the men who are posted as sentries, although she misses Friedrich who, like most of the German boys, has been assigned to the Russian front. Most of the soldiers now posted to the Ritz are older, surlier. Easier to see as merely Nazis instead of people.

  Blanche can sit next to these Haricots Verts in cafés, and instead of wanting to kick them in the balls, she demurely sips her coffee and laughs at their stupid jokes.

  And every time she receives a delivery of violets, she has another opportunity to strike a blow.

  Does it pierce her heart that Claude is so easily deceived; that he so readily believes the worst of her? Will they ever be able to recover from this, once the war is over?

  Because it is growing more and more evident that there is no room, in wartime, for tending to a marriage.

  “Monsieur Auzello! Monsieur Auzello!” No courtesy knock; he bursts in, this young bellhop who joined the staff only a couple of weeks before. Claude has his suspicions about the youth—he has no references, seems to have no family or background—but took him on anyway. The boy is young and able-bodied and not too stupid, and they are no longer favored with many of that kind in Paris. Most young men are conscripted and sent to labor camps to make arms for the Germans (they wouldn’t trust a native Frenchman with a gun, which is the only reason they’re not sent to the front).