The Milliner's Secret

by Natalie Meg Evans

  He kissed her. ‘Nobody can threaten you while you live under my umbrella.’

  Umbrella. Sunshine and flowers. ‘Martel told me to repeat a phrase to you. “A perfect hat for a Dachterrasse”. That means “roof garden”, doesn’t it? Why would he have learned that particular word?’

  ‘God rot that bastard!’ The bedclothes dragged off her as Dietrich rolled off the bed, blasting her in sudden chill. The ceiling light came on, its starfish arms illuminating slowly, like an old-fashioned gas lamp.

  ‘What have I said?’ Dietrich never cursed; not in front of her, anyway. And though she knew the insult had been aimed at Martel, the shift in his manner alarmed her.

  ‘Get up, Coralie.’ He was naked, his body a harsh sculpture in the saffron light.

  She swung her legs off the bed, reaching for the underwear she’d pulled off after their lovemaking. Holding it against herself felt like a parody of modesty so she dropped it and walked into his arms. A test of his love. If he loved her, he would comfort her. She felt his erratic breathing and it stole in on her that he, too, was afraid.

  That word, ‘Dachterrasse’, had affected him.

  He said, ‘Cast your mind back to that July evening at the Expo. Outside the German pavilion, I exchanged friendly words with a photographer. You recall?’

  ‘Yes. And you saluted.’

  ‘Which shocked you. I saw. Inside, I met two men, one was Kurt Kleber, the other a younger man, a mutual friend. All this you remember?’

  ‘You all shouted Heil Hitler! Course I remember. I was upset and I wished I hadn’t seen it.’

  ‘Did you hear what we said among each other, we three men?’

  ‘No. I was too far away and you were speaking in German.’

  ‘But you knew a little German by then.’

  ‘Quite a lot, actually. I’m good at languages.’ It came out defensively. ‘Growing up talking French gave me an ear, and I wanted to learn it for you. On your birthday, I was planning to spend the whole evening talking German to you. It was going to be a surprise.’

  He brushed this aside. ‘Tell me again, did you hear anything of the conversation between me, Kleber and the other man?’

  ‘Not a word, I promise.’

  ‘But sometimes you lie, Coralie.’ His hands circled her throat. No pressure, but she was seeing her father, murder in his face. ‘Dietrich, please—’

  She tried to put her arms around him but he took her to Ottilia’s dressing-table where plain hairbrushes and his Schirmmütze cap were reflected in the multiple mirrors. Keeping hold of her hand, Dietrich opened a drawer and took out some small boxes, the sort that contain cufflinks. From the same drawer, he removed a pistol.

  Her head swam. ‘Please don’t.’

  He put the gun down beside his cap, then opened one of the boxes, shaking it over a cloisonné plate that still had some of Ottilia’s hatpins in it. Two bullets clacked into the dish.

  ‘One each,’ he said.

  ‘You’re going to shoot me?’ And then himself? As the room began to spin, she watched him unscrew the top of one bullet, and tip something out which rolled like a coffee bean. Then the same with the other bullet.

  ‘These are potassium-cyanide ampoules, Coralie. We take one each.’

  ‘I won’t. I can’t! I have a child. I don’t want to die!’ She tried to pull away but his grip did not relent.

  ‘I don’t mean now, and perhaps never. It is a safety measure. A reassurance. We must keep them on our bodies all the time. Even in bed.’

  He looked serious. He was serious.

  ‘You must sew a little pocket into a neck choker, something you can wear each day without attracting notice. Perhaps you would do the same with the ribbon of my Pour le Mérite.’

  She looked at him blankly.

  ‘My Blue Max. The cross I wear always around my neck, the Prussian order of merit. Don’t say you have not noticed it.’

  She nodded.

  ‘So. We will wear them all the time, and if we are taken, we put the ampoule between our teeth,’ he mimed it, ‘and bite down, crushing the glass shell. Death then is quick.’

  ‘If we’re taken? You mean—’

  ‘If the Gestapo come, our lives would be worth nothing and our manner of death atrocious.’

  She stared into his eyes. Dietrich, her protector, was describing her nightmare. ‘You said we were safe! What’s changed? Why would they come now?’

  ‘You must make arrangements for Noëlle. I advise you to send her away, perhaps with that girl, Micheline. They should go to the country, or to Teddy’s estate at Dreux.’ The grip on her wrist was becoming painful. ‘You and I are together to the end. Wedded. Adam and Eve.’ The allusion to their nakedness came with a dry laugh. He selected another box from the dressing-table and extracted a ruby ring, slipping it on to her finger. ‘This ring, you gave back to me because it was too big so I had it made smaller. We must live for each other now, trust each other, face every danger together. Yes?’

  He was asking for faith, but without explaining. And I’m meant to be the one with secrets. She closed her eyes and scenes from her life spun through her brain. Noëlle’s birth, her first cry. Ramon saying, ‘I like your spirit and I want your body.’ Rishal, her sailor lover, saying, ‘I cannot believe I have a girl who speaks French.’

  And Donal. Donal calling her name on boulevard de Clichy, finally getting it right. The two of them playing chicken on the railway lines at the end of Shand Street. She’d always cheated, darting back to safety, because she was a coward.

  ‘Dietrich, why are you saying all this now?’

  ‘Because what you have told me tonight tells me that my life is in danger, and yours too – you know more than you think. We must keep faith with each other. That is the only choice.’

  ‘Is it to do with “Dachterrasse”? When Martel said it, I thought of us on the roof terrace at the Expo, and Teddy, and the man I now know to be Kurt Kleber. You always told me you were an art dealer, a middle-man. Are you something else too, Dietrich?’

  ‘I am much else, Coralie, and will say more after I have consulted with Kurt. Until then, be patient and brave.’

  ‘I will try, Dietrich. I do trust you, but don’t ever try to separate me from my daughter.’

  CHAPTER 26

  Fritzi Kleber, Kurt’s wife, was a Nordically fair woman and, on meeting her, Coralie presumed she was a typically glacial German-in-Paris. But Fritzi’s manner was friendly. Over aperitifs in the Ritz bar, she kept telling her husband to slow his speech so Coralie could keep up. ‘Even I cannot follow him sometimes.’

  They dined together at the Ritz, then went on to the Rose Noire. Fritzi desperately wanted to listen to authentic jazz, which was banned in Germany now.

  Sipping her champagne, Coralie stroked the choker of pewter-grey satin around her neck. From it hung a silver bottle the size of a wren’s egg, bought from an antiques shop on the Left Bank. The bottle was hinged like a clam shell and would once have contained a single measure of snuff. Its present cargo was far more lethal.

  Dietrich wore uniform, complete with the Pour le Mérite the Kaiser had awarded him in 1917. She’d done as he’d asked and sewn a false back to the ribbon to provide a secure hiding-place for a bead of potassium cyanide. In the car, she’d whispered, ‘Why are we going anywhere near Serge Martel?’

  ‘Because we are dealing with a wolf, with a wolf’s ruthlessness but also its fear of confrontation. We will show it that it cannot win, and first, we must tempt it from its lair.’

  It was just gone eleven p.m., and the club was thinly populated. Unsurprising, for a Wednesday night. Had her last visit here really been two years ago? The place had changed, the dance floor reduced in size, extra tables crammed in. French clientele huddled near the bar, or sat at the outer tables. The best, predictably, were occupied by German military. A lot of girls about the place, too. Single girls in cheap dresses.

  The Vagabonds were onstage, playing a tune called ‘Swing 42’.
Coralie waved, but they didn’t respond because it was impossible to see beyond the first row of tables.

  Would Dietrich want to dance? How long since she’d really danced? She was dressed for it, in an evening gown of lemon silk jersey, which she’d bought from Una, who was also here. Coralie waved and received a blown kiss in return. Una was with a couple Coralie had met a few times, a husband and wife who worked at the American Hospital.

  ‘We can invite them to join us, if you wish,’ Dietrich offered.

  Coralie shook her head. ‘They work such long hours that they never stay anywhere late and, to be honest, we’re not friends like we used to be.’ That wasn’t true. She and Una were as close as ever but they maintained a show of distance because Una had joined the Resistance, turning the flat on rue de Seine into a safe house. She took in refugees and stranded British airmen, whose planes had come down over Belgium or France, and who had to be moved, stage by stage, to the Spanish border. Coralie sometimes made hats, or altered clothes, to fit these evaders, working covertly, communicating with Una only when strictly necessary.

  ‘Mesdames, messieurs, the Rose Noire welcomes you as it always welcomes beauty.’ Félix Peyron, bent and hobbling after two of the bitterest winters on record, parroted his time-worn salute, and took their order for coffee and brandy. The Klebers got up to dance.

  Félix suddenly remembered something. ‘Monsieur Clisson bids me say good evening to “the Queen of Hats”.’

  ‘Teddy’s here?’ Why hadn’t he come over in person? ‘Mind if I go and say hello?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Dietrich answered. ‘I won’t – he is still angry with me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I persuaded him not to offer for some modern paintings stored at the Jeu de Paume gallery, and now he resents it.’

  Skirting the dance floor, Coralie was touched by the way Fritzi looked into her husband’s disfigured face with steady love as they danced. Dietrich had told her they’d been childhood sweethearts.

  At her approach, Teddy rose with exclamations of pleasure. But even as he planted kisses, she felt his reserve. Was he angry at Dietrich’s most recent interference, or with her because she’d failed to secure those Dürer engravings for him? She’d really tried, but it was one of the subjects upon which Dietrich was utterly immovable.

  Teddy introduced her first to the two women in his group, types Coralie put down as ‘middle-aged sophisticates’. They had deep suntans under their makeup. Before the war, they’d probably lived six months of the year in Nice or Cap d’Antibes. They eyed her cocktail hat, a posy of parachute-silk lilies, acquisitively. Two men in dinner jackets sat with them. Teddy introduced the elder of the two as ‘my firmest of friends’ and the second as ‘a very beautiful boy’.

  Known to be utterly safe in female company, Teddy was always in demand to squire divorced or married women around cabarets and clubs, often so they could meet their lovers. It struck her now that these women might be acting as his smokescreen too, protecting him from gossip. As Coralie shook hands, the two women squabbled good-naturedly over who should buy the lilies directly off her head.

  ‘Not for sale, Mesdames. Come and see me on boulevard de la Madeleine.’ She held out a hand to Teddy. ‘Lunch soon?’

  ‘I’ll be devastated if we don’t. A bientôt! Kiss Noëlle for me.’

  Back at their table, she said to Dietrich, ‘Couldn’t you have let him have one little painting from the Jeu de Paume, to keep him happy?’

  ‘Not mine to give and, anyway, they have been burned.’

  Suddenly she felt weary. ‘Let’s not stay too late.’

  ‘We can’t go yet. This is a special visit for Fritzi, her first to Paris. And, likely, her last.’

  ‘Why her last?’

  ‘Hold tight. Here comes the wolf.’

  Serge Martel approached with a girl on his arm. Not Julie, Coralie noticed.

  ‘Herr Graf von Elbing, Mademoiselle de Lirac.’ Martel’s smile glided over them to rest on the occupants of a table a short distance away. Coralie pressed her foot against Dietrich’s. The same men had tried to arrest Ottilia. Gestapo. They wore loose civilian suits, and while two had forgettable features, the one with the bullet-shaped head she would remember for the rest of her life. He’d been the first to grab Ottilia’s arm. As for the one in charge, she’d never forget the puckered scar running down one cheek or his mean, steel-framed spectacles.

  Martel accepted Dietrich’s offer to join them in a brandy. He didn’t pull out a chair for his companion, Coralie noticed, or offer her a drink. Seeing the Klebers dancing, he asked Dietrich, ‘How did your friend blow his face off?’

  Dietrich let a beat pass, then said, ‘He is – was – an explosives expert with the Luftwaffe and was injured in a laboratory accident. The friends who care for him no longer notice his injuries.’

  Brandy arrived. Martel impatiently waved Félix away as the old man began one of his automatic compliments to the mute female companion who had found herself a seat. ‘Kleber should be careful,’ he said to Dietrich. ‘Didn’t some fellow in Germany try to blow up your leader? He failed and came to a nasty end.’

  ‘You mean Elser, who planted a bomb at the Munich beer cellar in 1939?’

  ‘Imagine if he’d succeeded.’

  ‘Imagine.’

  ‘Do you think there are other conspirators?’ Martel stared at Dietrich over the rim of his brandy glass, as if sharing a dangerous idea. ‘Other plots for your leader to worry about?’

  ‘My friend, you are flirting with the firing-squad, voicing such ideas.’

  Martel laughed and leaned back, his white tuxedo gaping. He was putting on weight, Coralie saw. About the only person in Paris who was. She turned to the girl beside him, who had still not spoken, and said, ‘I like your dress. Lovely colour.’

  The girl stared, sullen, fearful.

  ‘Is it green or blue? Hard to tell in this light.’

  The girl blinked and Coralie realised she didn’t understand. She had butter-blonde hair – natural, not peroxide – and round cheeks. The paint on her nails was chipped, as if she gnawed them.

  Martel downed his brandy with showy machismo. ‘I don’t fear the firing-squad. I work with your boys. Look.’

  Dietrich looked. ‘Not with them, Martel. For them. The Gestapo do not team up with such as you.’

  Coralie tried to kick Dietrich under the table because this game scared her, but the girl squealed in pain instead, and squealed again as another woman came up behind her and twisted her ear.

  ‘Get upstairs.’ Julie Fourcade tipped the chair sideways and the butter-blonde girl said something angry. Flemish, Coralie reckoned.

  Martel jerked a thumb. ‘She’s right. Get upstairs, Marijke.’

  Julie took the girl’s chair, snuggling up to Martel. She wore a greenish orchid as a corsage. The flower could only have come from Spain – another of the luxury goods defying borders – and Coralie felt a rush of outrage. Children were being taken into hospitals perilously underweight. Everyone had dry skin due to the lack of fats in the diet. Yet fuel was being wasted to ship in fancy flowers.

  Even as she let her outrage flow, the honest part of her soul acknowledged that she was doing better than most. Her child got meat four times a week, courtesy of the Luftwaffe HQ kitchen.

  ‘Married now, you two?’ she asked Julie.

  Martel answered, without looking at her, ‘Not yet.’ He turned back to Dietrich. ‘You know, von Elbing, I think you’re one of those aristocrats who want Germany to lose the war.’

  ‘Which aristocrats are those?’

  ‘The ones who want to replace Hitler with one of your own kind. Dachterrasse.’

  Dietrich had picked up his brandy, but now he put the glass down. Looked first at Serge, then at Julie. ‘If you believe you have something on me, turn me in.’ He held them in an unblinking stare. ‘My only regret would be to have wasted a fine evening in a badly run brothel.’

  ‘I run no brothel.’ Martel�
�s colour rose.

  ‘That this is a whorehouse would be obvious to a fifteen-year-old farm boy on his first visit to the city.’

  ‘I am not running a brothel.’ Martel spoke through clenched teeth.

  Dietrich concentrated his gaze on Julie. ‘Do you live here with this man?’

  Julie squeaked, ‘What are you suggesting?’

  ‘That you should do a better job of protecting him. It is illegal for a man to be in charge of a brothel. To be so would render him a pimp. It follows that, if you are Martel’s fiancée, his consort, you are the madame. That makes you liable for the good order of the place.’

  ‘What’s he saying, Serge?’ Julie hooked a curl off her brow and twisted it nervously.

  Martel muttered something. A threat, a denial.

  ‘You are breaking two laws, Mademoiselle Fourcade.’ Dietrich took a long sip of brandy and Coralie thought, He’s good at making people squirm. I can vouch for that. ‘One, you employ foreign girls. That is verboten. Second, you have not subjected them to the required medical checks.’

  ‘How d’you know?’ Martel flashed back.

  ‘Because I consulted with the chief medical superintendent of Paris only yesterday. You are violating every law there is.’

  Serge Martel searched inside his tuxedo and, a moment later, handed Dietrich a card.

  Dietrich glanced at it. ‘Gestapo membership. I heard they are taking anybody, these days.’ He held the card in the candle flame, even as the flame bent around his fingers.

  Martel stood up and shouted.

  ‘He’s bringing those buggers over,’ Coralie warned.

  ‘Let them come.’ Dietrich dropped the flaming card into an ashtray, and clicked his fingers at Félix Peyron, who had stayed close by and seemed to be enjoying the spectacle of his employer trying to put out the flames.

  Seeing him, Martel roared, ‘Do something, you old fool!’

  To Martel’s horror, Félix pointed a soda siphon, spraying liquid and ash everywhere.

  ‘Idiot. Get out of my sight!’ Martel screamed first at Félix, then at Dietrich. ‘You will answer for this, von Elbing. I have friends who will make you answer.’