Mistress of the Ritz

by Melanie Benjamin

  Then the horror takes over. Never before has Claude had to pound on the doors of their guests and summon them unceremoniously, with no regard as to what they are doing.

  Starting on the second floor—there are no rooms on the first—they begin, methodically. Claude knocks, doors are either opened or not; and if they aren’t, he inserts his house key and the Germans sweep inside, looking beneath beds, behind draperies, in wardrobes, bathtubs, even outside of windows even though there are no real balconies. They roughly paw through trunks and drawers, tossing silk blouses, satin negligees, houndstooth jackets on the floor like rubbish. They knock over lamps. They grab towels with their dirty hands and throw them into the sink.

  Claude can’t help himself; he automatically starts to calculate the man hours it will require to restore order but gives up, for it is too much.

  If the doors are opened, he is shoved aside by the soldiers who grunt out their questions to startled guests facing the barrel of a Nazi rifle. Guests of the Ritz, questioned at gunpoint; Claude closes his eyes, grateful that César Ritz is no longer alive to see this.

  And as they progress from room to room, German voices that have never been raised inside these walls now barking out threats and warnings, Claude is aware of activity ahead of and behind them. He doesn’t think the Germans notice; they are too intent on the task at hand. But he catches, out of the corner of his eye, the young bellhop, the member of the Resistance (he shall have to be sacked after all this, of course—or perhaps given a raise; at the moment, Claude really can’t decide), darting to and fro. Claude hears frenzied whispers every time he and his Nazi dogs turn a corner. It’s as if this side of the hotel is suddenly an anthill that has been stepped upon, and all the ants are scurrying about, not sure what to do.

  They reach the Auzellos’ suite, and Claude hesitates.

  “Your rooms?” one of the soldiers asks. Claude nods, but the man points his rifle at the door anyway.

  “We still have to search them.”

  Claude knocks and Blanche answers, paling when she sees the soldiers with their weapons drawn. And they allow these vile creatures to ransack their rooms without a word. Claude informs his tense wife, in normal, conversational tones, what happened to Chanel, and why the search is necessary. She nods. She sidles close to him. She opens her mouth, about to whisper something—to tell him about Lily and Lorenzo, Claude realizes, but he shakes his head just in time.

  “I won’t be long,” he says—his voice higher, more artificially unworried, than he’s ever heard it. “Why don’t you just stay here, my dear, and I’ll come back as soon as these fellows are finished?”

  Blanche nods but her fists are clenched by her side. So that the Nazis do not see her this way, Claude takes her in his arms. “Do not worry about your friends,” he whispers.

  Blanche gasps; she looks up at him with eyes that are wide, incredulous—and suddenly shimmering with tears.

  “Claude—”

  He shakes his head, kisses her on the forehead, and follows the Germans out the door with one last glimpse of his wife, who is finally looking at him like he is a man deserving of her. Just to keep that look in her eyes—he hasn’t seen it in so long, this tangible evidence that knocks the breath out of him as if it is a weapon, a blunt instrument of love—he knows, in this moment, that he will do anything to keep it there. Even if it means hurtling himself in front of the Nazis’ guns in order to protect Lily and Lorenzo.

  Although of course he does hope that it won’t come to that—if only because he wants another chance to bask in his wife’s love and admiration, for it washes over him, but gently, soothingly, quenching a thirst he’d grown so used to, he’d never even noticed how his very skin was shriveling, parched. Dying.

  Finally, they reach room four-fourteen.

  “Ah,” Claude says slowly, loudly, consulting his guest list. “A honeymooning couple. Let’s leave them to it, eh, fellows?” Claude winks at them, praying that they—being men, that much they all have in common—will respect lust, and move on.

  But the soldiers shake their heads.

  So he knocks, and when there is no answer, he inserts the key in the lock with a hand that is shaking so violently, he isn’t sure how he manages it, and it takes him a couple of tries to get it right. Holding his breath and shutting his eyes, he throws open the door, steeling himself for shouts, gunshots, he has no idea; they could turn their guns on him before he can get back down to Blanche—

  Claude hears, to his astonishment, laughter. Hearty German laughter.

  Opening his eyes, Claude beholds a gloriously naked Lily astride a wheezing but game, equally naked, Lorenzo. Lily twists her torso toward the door, her small breasts exposed, compelling. So compelling, Claude realizes in a flash of admiration, that the Germans will never even look at her face—or poor Lorenzo, who is now gasping as he tries to complete the task at hand.

  “What? You bastards! What you do? Have you no shame? Want a closer look, you guys? Here—look here!” And she cups her breasts, jiggling them, and finally the Germans shut the door and collapse in guffaws.

  Somehow, they do not notice when Claude draws out a handkerchief to mop his sweating brow.

  “Ah, love,” one of the soldiers chortles.

  “Lucky bastard,” another says with a wink. And they talk about their girlfriends back home as they continue down the hall.

  After everything settles down—the Nazis do not, after all, find the two who kidnapped Chanel—Lily and Lorenzo sneak out after midnight in one of the Ritz laundry trucks, driven by the young bellhop.

  Claude is astonished to find that he doesn’t want Lily to go. Instead, he wishes the two of them could sit down somewhere and have a drink and talk about what they’re doing. The desire to share his activities, his accomplishments, with someone is fierce, something buried deep within him, hiding all this time. Until now when it lunges up, almost too forceful for him to contain. And he would like to hear what Lily has been doing, too. He suspects, given the last couple of days, that it’s much more dangerous than what he has done, but Claude, ever the military man, the manager, recognizes that not all soldiers can be in combat; paperwork is also necessary in order to win a war.

  But Lily has gone, gone with her man, who looks as if he will recover. For the first time, Claude hopes she’ll be back. Even if it means more trouble for Blanche. Blanche, who must have known, then, about her friend’s activities? Why else did Lily seek her out when she was in trouble? Blanche must have— Has she done something, in the past, to earn Lily’s trust?

  But no, no, of course not. Claude warned Lily about his wife, how she can’t be trusted. It must merely have been a matter of Blanche happening to reside in a hotel with many rooms, and Lily taking advantage of that.

  Claude returns to their suite, with a bottle of brandy and two glasses, and assures Blanche that Lily and Lorenzo are safe for now. He resists the natural masculine urge to expand his role in the drama, and keeps it at that. She is relieved and grateful—and surprisingly dry-eyed; Claude had expected her to burst into tears, at the very least. She embraces him, and Claude falls into his wife’s arms, welcoming her warmth, her calm assurance.

  Claude realizes this is really the first crisis they’ve weathered together since returning from Nîmes. He has not shared his daily life with her in so long, for fear of upsetting her, of igniting her temper, of endangering her.

  This night, however, Claude and Blanche are allowed an interlude of reconciliation; they retire to bed, they don’t risk words—words can be wounding and they know, too well, how easily each can choose the precise ones to ruin a moment like this. They love each other, they look into each other’s eyes during the loving, they kiss passionately after they’re done. It is as perfect a night as they’ve experienced since returning to the Ritz.

  But neither Claude nor Blanche Auzello is a fool. They both unders
tand that this moment won’t last, not as long as the Germans are still inside the Ritz, patrolling the streets of Paris. Rounding up, mowing down, assaulting. Plotting. Planning.

  What none of them can know, however—neither von Stülpnagel currently tossing and turning in his big bed, his brain churning with code words and checklists, trying to convince himself that he is doing the right thing for his family, for Germany, that he and his fellow conspirators have no other choice, not if they want to preserve the fatherland and its current annexations, because the Führer simply is insane: he wants too much, he is too ruthless, too egomaniacal; nor the blade-like, wrathful Chanel as she paces in her suite, smoking, planning, plotting her future, a future she has just now glimpsed, should the Germans be defeated, unthinkable, but still; nor the bouncing Lily and Lorenzo, trundling down the cobblestone streets in a laundry truck, him groaning but occasionally turning to look at her with a smug grin for having risen to the occasion, so to speak, never suspecting that she is thinking not of him but of Robert, the man she should be risking her life for, the one she would have taken a bullet for happily, not resentfully; nor Martin, sitting in a chair in a room in a building on the outskirts of town, drinking absinthe alone, having sent Michele away for the night, pondering the loneliness of a man whom so many people want to love, but daren’t even try, and so he risks his life daily in order to feel something, anything; nor Blanche and Claude, slumbering deeply in their shared bed, naked beneath the sheets, for the first time since the invasion not feeling compelled to sleep fully clothed in case of horror visiting during the night—

  What none of them can know is that the beginning of the end—no, to quote someone on the other side of the Channel, “the end of the beginning”—is gathering on a distant shore.

  Boarding transport ships, climbing into bombers.

  Getting ready to step foot on French soil, for the first time since 1940.

  The Allies have arrived! The Americans are on their way—the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming, she sings it in her heart, over and over, that catchy little ditty from the previous war. Soon, they will be here—everyone in Paris knows it, prays it, breathes it.

  The Germans know it, too, and are even more paranoid than before, just like the cornered animals they are. More executions of citizens to retaliate against the increasingly brazen acts against them; more trucks screeching in front of buildings, removing people—Jews or not—from their very beds, throwing them into the backs of those trucks, and then disappearing into the night. For there is a spark in the people of Paris and it is only now, now that it has been rekindled—they walk more sprightly, smile frequently, dare to hum bits of “La Marseillaise,” dare to cluster in the streets to whisper rumors, good rumors, not rumors of death but rumors of liberation—that they realize how it has been missing these long, cowed years since 1940. June 1940, to be exact.

  It was precisely four years ago that the horror began.

  And the Yanks are coming. They have to be! The Allies landed at Normandy, up the coast, on the sixth of June. Today is the tenth. And Blanche feels like celebrating.

  Claude, naturally, is more cautious. But again, he always is. “Blanchette, we mustn’t assume. The Allies are on our soil, yes. But if I were them, I would bypass Paris and go straight to Germany. Paris is out of the way, you see—they would waste precious petroleum, not to mention men and munitions, to liberate Paris when the true objective is Berlin.”

  “You’re nuts, Popsy!” It seems like ages since she’s called him this. For some reason, when the world turned dark and dangerous, pet names rarely seemed appropriate. “The Americans are coming! Of course they’ll liberate Paris. It’s a symbol, you know. It would definitely give the world the message: The damned Nazis are over. Defeated!”

  “Yes, it’s a symbol.” Claude looks worried; he rubs his nose with his forefinger. His hair is thinner now, Blanche notices as if for the first time; graying at the temples. There are lines bracketing his mouth. Well, hell. He is older. Four years older. A lifetime older.

  She must be, too—but she refuses to gaze too closely at the mirror today. Now is not a time to take stock, to sum up, to account for—that will come later. Now is a time to celebrate, not mourn.

  “A symbol,” Claude continues, thoughtfully. “A symbol the Nazis might want to destroy, actually. If the Allies don’t get here first. Think what a statement that would be, Blanche. For the Nazis to blow up the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre. Leave the city in ashes, for no one to liberate. I wouldn’t put that past Hitler.”

  “Oh, Popsy.” Blanche refuses to allow him to dampen her spirits. She hasn’t felt this gay in years. “You’re not going to ruin this day for me. I’m going to Maxim’s to celebrate. Will you come with me?”

  “Maxim’s?” He frowns. “Blanche, are you serious? You know the Nazis have made it a headquarters. It’s too dangerous there.”

  “How is it more dangerous than here? After all, the Ritz is their headquarters, too.”

  “I…It—it just is, Blanche!”

  “Oh, Claude, you pompous old darling! You still can’t let anyone say a word against your precious Ritz, can you?” But she kisses him on the cheek so he won’t be angry. “Champagne and caviar at Maxim’s! I haven’t had caviar in forever, and I’m going to have some today, even if it takes every last ration card and my feminine wiles. I’m going to have some fun, goddammit! I deserve it—we all deserve it. Are you in or are you out?”

  “Out.” He shakes his head in that prim little way of his. “I have work to do. For despite your enthusiasm, the Germans are indeed still here, and more demanding than before. Be careful, Blanche, please? Promise me?”

  “You old fussbudget.” She kisses his cheek. “But then again, you were a young fussbudget. I’ll call—I’ll find someone.”

  “Not Lily,” Claude warns. Even though Blanche admits he was so, well, gallant about Lily and Lorenzo, weeks have passed since. And Claude is back to his old dislike of her friend, and how she so easily corrupts Blanche. And how easily Blanche is corrupted.

  Although there have been several moments—unexpected tender moments between her and her husband—when she has been tempted to reveal to him just what she and Lily have been up to. But tempering that desire is a new, surprisingly fierce resolution that she—in an unexpected turnabout of their previous roles—must protect him.

  Once, she wanted to punish her husband. Now—perhaps it is because the phone calls are much fewer and far between—she knows she has to protect him. She has to keep him safe, so that when this is all over, their marriage might finally have a chance. There is a promise—she glimpsed it that day when he saved Lily and Lorenzo—that she must follow up on.

  So Blanche smiles, very sweetly and properly, like a good little French wife. “Of course not, Claude. I told you I wouldn’t.”

  “Good. Find someone else suitable. Or stay here?” Claude gazes at her, hope softening his stern eyes.

  And she knows—in a giddy rush of discovery—that he recognized it, too, that promise. That must be why, all of a sudden, they are nice to each other, so carefully attentive. He looks shy around her at times; she’s making more of an effort to look pretty for him, to comb her hair a certain way, to not spend so much time in the bar. While there is still wariness between them, it’s a wariness that is flexible; not the brittle suspicion and disillusionment that existed before.

  “I’ll find someone suitable.” Blanche begins to dress, pulling out a silk blouse she hasn’t worn in months; searching for a pair of stockings without ladders in them, but that’s impossible, so she does what every woman in Paris has been doing for the last couple of years: She draws a line down the back of her legs with an eyebrow pencil. Taking her least worn shoes out of the bottom of the wardrobe, she examines them; despite a tear in the leather that the Ritz cobbler attempted to repair with glue, they’re her most presentable sh
oes—the only pair she has left that doesn’t have wooden soles. She’s destroyed all her shoes in the last couple of years, wearing them out in her wanderings, her work. Now she’s just like everyone else in Paris—all the leather has gone to the Germans, so citizens have had to make do with wooden soles, and that hollow clomping over the streets mingles with the steel boots of the Nazis until sometimes Blanche’s ears ring from the din. Despite the shocked acquiescence of these last years, Paris is still quite a noisy city. Just in different ways than it used to be; it’s changed, too.

  They all have.

  Deciding to dress defiantly—the colors of the tricolor flag; the colors of the Star-Spangled Banner—Blanche pairs a red scarf with a white silk blouse and chooses a blue skirt. Then she leaves the Ritz—after a surprisingly healthy kiss from Claude that makes her toes curl up in those patched shoes—to try to find Lily at one of the various rooms she uses to “hang her hat.”

  But Blanche knows she’ll turn up somehow. That girl has a pure genius for sniffing out a free meal.

  * * *

  —

  “AH, BLANCHE, IS NICE,” Lily whispers, her eyes enormous as she takes in the resplendence that is Maxim’s. Blanche is pleased to be the one to introduce her friend to it, for before the war it had been one of her favorite spots.

  “It sure is.” Blanche relaxes into the plush banquette, luxuriating in the Belle Époque splendor—heavy Art Nouveau lamps with Tiffany glass lampshades, mirrors everywhere, dark wood paneling. It’s a little faded, a little patched—the carpet is worn, the tablecloths still pristine white but mended—just like everyone who has survived thus far.

  After a glass of champagne—Blanche orders in confident German to get better service—Lily loses her awe of her surroundings and begins to relax. Blanche insisted on dressing her for the occasion; she couldn’t take her here looking as she usually did. So Lily is wearing a decent skirt, pinned up so she won’t trip on the hem, and a short-sleeved cashmere sweater that had shrunk too small for Blanche, but fits Lily just right. She found a pair of flat shoes that are actually made for women, not men, in a size small enough for her childish feet. Her hair is growing out; it’s shiny, straight, about chin length.