The Heart of the Ritz

by Luke Devenish

  Tommy had recognised the teenager’s tatty uniform. ‘You’re with the Eclaireurs Israelites,’ he told her, before explaining for Alexandrine’s benefit, ‘they’re the Jewish boy scouts.’

  ‘I know what they are,’ said Alexandrine.

  ‘Girl scouts, too,’ Anaïs corrected him. She looked wary. ‘What are you doing out so late, Madame Suzette?’

  Suzette looked askance at Tommy. ‘My grandson was about to tell me that, sweetheart.’ She looked to the children again. ‘He’s a good Jewish boy, despite him looking like a kraut – we can trust him, girls.’

  Anaïs smiled with relief at Tommy. ‘I’m taking Vidette to the Left Bank to hide her, Monsieur. Are you doing the same with your grand-mère?’

  ‘Yes,’ Tommy told her, after a pause.

  ‘Hide Vidette from what?’ asked Suzette.

  ‘From what’s going to happen tonight,’ said Anaïs. ‘We received a tip-off at our Eclaireurs troupe. So, each of us went in to the Marais to try to save someone.’ She saw Alexandrine’s fearful look. ‘Don’t worry, Madame. Our troupe is from Montparnasse. It’s not being targeted tonight. That’s why we’re taking the risk.’

  When Alexandrine could speak, her voice was tight with emotion. ‘You’re a very good girl . . .’

  Anaïs shrugged this off. ‘Screw the cops. They’ve betrayed our France.’

  No one disagreed.

  ‘What is going to happen tonight?’ Suzette asked, getting terser now.

  Anaïs looked to Tommy.

  ‘I’m asking you, sweetheart,’ said Suzette, ‘I don’t think my grandson is too happy to tell me.’

  It was clear that Anaïs wasn’t sure of who she risked upsetting by answering. ‘The cops are going to round up everyone in the Marais, Madame.’

  Suzette was ashen. ‘Everyone?’

  ‘Everyone who’s a Jew. That’s what the tip-off told us.’

  Suzette turned accusingly to Alexandrine. ‘And that’s what your “tip-off” told you, was it, Madame?’

  Alexandrine could only lower her eyes.

  ‘And even little kids will be caught in this round-up?’ Suzette asked.

  Anaïs’s silence was the answer.

  Alexandrine watched as Suzette battled her panic. ‘But what will they do with all the Jews?’

  Alexandrine stepped forward. ‘They’ll be taken to the Vélodrome d’Hiver.’

  ‘And then what?’ Suzette demanded.

  ‘And then to Poland . . .’

  Suzette stared at her uncomprehendingly. Then Alexandrine saw a change come over her face. The old servant looked to the children again. ‘So, who’s with Granny Alma now, sweetheart?’ she asked Vidette, gently.

  The little girl was distressed. ‘She’s all alone, Madame. She wouldn’t come with us.’

  Suzette nodded. She looked to Tommy. ‘My grandson will take you where you need to go,’ she told the children. ‘He knows what he’s doing – I don’t know how he knows but he knows. He’ll get you there safe. I promise.’ She glared at Tommy. ‘He promises, too, don’t you, little one?’

  Tommy objected. ‘Grand-mère –’

  ‘Don’t you, little one? Say it.’

  Tommy was made shamefaced. ‘Of course, I will.’

  ‘Good.’ Suzette wiped a stray tear from her cheek. ‘My daughter will go with you, too, girls.’ She now looked to Alexandrine. ‘Make sure you listen to her. She’s a very good Jewess, my daughter – the best I’ve ever loved.’

  Alexandrine held Suzette’s eyes with hers.

  ‘You’ll all get there safe together, you’ll see,’ Suzette said, her voice breaking.

  ‘But what about you, Madame?’ asked Vidette, worried.

  The old servant was resolute. ‘You told me Granny Alma’s got no one to talk with. Well, I can’t be having that.’

  Alarm rang for Alexandrine. ‘Suzette, no –’

  She turned on her. ‘You think I could live with myself otherwise?’

  Alexandrine saw what was coming. ‘Darling, please –’

  ‘You think I could still get up in the morning? You think I could hold my fucking head up?’ She turned to the children, apologetically. ‘Forgive my bad language, girls.’

  Tommy tried to take hold of her hands.

  ‘Leave off,’ Suzette spat at him. ‘Try to make me come with you and I’ll jump in the Seine.’

  He was desperate. ‘Grand-mère, please – we must save you.’

  She pressed her palms to his face, tender. ‘You already saved me the day you were born.’

  Alexandrine saw how close this brought Tommy to breaking down.

  Suzette smoothed the yellow star that was still pinned to her coat. ‘It’s not a bad night for a wander, all up.’ She walked unsteadily up the passage towards the rue de Rivoli.

  ‘Suzette!’ Alexandrine screamed out at her.

  The old woman stopped, shocked by the noise, silhouetted in the archway. She waited.

  Alexandrine placed a hand at Tommy’s back as he hid his face against the wall. ‘Darling, listen.’

  ‘They’ll catch her. They’ll catch her.’

  ‘You don’t know that. And these children need you.’

  ‘I can’t let her go. I can’t.’

  ‘Of course, you can – and you will,’ she told him. She smiled at the wide-eyed girls. ‘Anaïs and Vidette are the future now.’

  She waited as Tommy pulled himself together.

  ‘Good.’ She kissed him on the cheek. ‘Good boy.’ She looked into his face for a moment. ‘There’s something I’d like you to do for me, darling. There’s something I’d like you to tell Polly.’

  He looked up at her. ‘Polly?’

  ‘You know who I mean – Mademoiselle Hartford. You’ve spoken to her before, haven’t you?’

  She was testing what she already knew. Tommy nodded, guarded. ‘You can’t tell her yourself?’

  She shook her head. ‘Tell her only when you feel she can cope with it.’

  ‘When I feel?’

  Alexandrine elaborated. ‘Use your good sense. Don’t tell her at once. You’ll know when the time’s right.’

  ‘But what is it?’

  She took a long breath. ‘There was a letter,’ she said, ‘from her late aunt. I want you to tell Polly I wrote it.’

  Tommy rightly looked lost. ‘What letter?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Polly will know. It will devastate her, but she has to hear it. Just tell her it was me and that I was sorrier for doing it than she will ever understand.’

  Alexandrine had to steady herself, feeling suddenly lighter as a burden had lifted. ‘And also add this,’ she said, ‘Polly never needed any letter at all – from Marjorie, from me, from any of us. Her life is her own and she’s living it quite beautifully. Her aunt would be very proud of her.’

  Tommy stared at her in dismay. ‘But we have to go.’

  Alexandrine fiddled at the clasp of her handbag. ‘Indeed.’ She looked to where Suzette had remained at the passage entrance, listening. ‘You mustn’t worry about your grand-mère, darling. I will take care of her tonight.’ She withdrew the package from her handbag, wrapped in its paper from Lanvin.

  He read her intention. ‘Are you going to go back there with her?’

  Alexandrine nodded. She started tearing the paper off. ‘You heard what she said. I don’t much fancy a dip in the Seine. I’ll take her to Alma’s. Vidette’s granny is very good company.’

  He stared at her, stunned. ‘But Alexandrine . . . the round-up.’

  ‘It’s all right.’ She revealed her unpaid-for purchase from Lanvin: an haute couture star, made from appliqued silk in saffron yellow; the word ‘Juif’ beautifully embroidered in a graceful black copperplate, the painstaking work of Madame Lanvin’s own hand. It came with a pretty gold pin, which Alexandrine used now to attach the star to her gown between her breast and her shoulder. ‘There,’ she said, patting it neatly in place. ‘Now I can hold my head up with her.’

&nb
sp; Tommy could only gape as he saw what was happening.

  Alexandrine smiled at the children. ‘Tommy here is very handsome and brave – he’s done courageous things for the sake of France, and he’s going to do more, and more even still, until one day, girls, thanks to his courage – and the courage of others like you – France will be ours again, and it will be France as it should be.’

  ‘Oh, Alexandrine . . .’ Tommy whispered to her, helplessly.

  She pressed a finger to his lips. ‘We’ll be all right.’

  She turned back to the children. ‘Now, should you ever be frightened, girls, should you ever find yourselves feeling scared and alone – don’t be. Just think of Tommy, think of his courage, and let him inspire you. As he inspires me.’

  In her tattered scout’s uniform, Anaïs looked up at Alexandrine with awe. ‘Is Tommy your son, Madame?’

  Alexandrine placed her hand at Tommy’s cheek. ‘Yes, darling, he is. And perhaps tonight I’ll be something like a mother to him.’ She leaned in to kiss him again. ‘We’ll all meet again, Tommy,’ she whispered. ‘I know it.’

  With that she moved swiftly to Suzette at the rue de Rivoli. The old woman turned to look at Tommy one last time with her eyes shining. ‘We love you, little one,’ she called to him.

  Then the two Jewish women were gone.

  * * *

  Unable to sleep with her stolen knowledge of what had been planned for the Marais, Zita found herself wandering the corridors of the slumbering hotel. She passed Polly’s suite and saw from the thin band of light that glowed from beneath the door that she was not the only one awake. She gently tapped and Polly opened and invited Zita inside. Neither discussed the reasons for their insomnia. Then another tap came at the door while they sat, and Polly reacted with a mixture of excitement and dread.

  Zita knew all the signs: Polly had a lover. It was he who kept her awake. Perhaps it was Jürgen, despite Alexandrine’s conviction that it was not. The perverse part of Zita hoped that the Comtesse was wrong. If Polly was romantically entangled with a handsome kraut, then perhaps Zita’s own filthy compromise wouldn’t seem quite so wrong.

  ‘Are you going to answer the door, puss?’

  Polly seemed frozen with indecision.

  Zita guessed the reason for her state. If she let her lover inside, then Zita would see him, and a secret affair would be secret no more. Yet if she left him standing outside in the corridor, he’d likely go away, and whatever it was that he’d come here to tell Polly would be gone, too, unsaid.

  ‘Let me run into the bathroom,’ Zita whispered to her, smiling. ‘I’ll cover my ears while he says what he wants to say, and then you can tell him to come back in five minutes while you make yourself lovelier – and that’ll give me time to run away.’

  Polly looked exposed. ‘But – but I don’t know who it is out there.’

  Zita shook her head at her, indulgently. ‘Cling to that if you want to, but I think you should stop wasting time.’ She winked at Polly as she went into the bathroom, pulling the door shut behind her.

  For a moment, Zita did indeed make a show of covering her ears – a show for her own benefit – before burning curiosity got the better of her and she uncovered them. Zita perched on the lavvy for some minutes as she heard the sound of the door to the hallway opening and someone being let inside. There was a low murmur of voices, one of them Polly’s and the other undeniably male. Zita craned to hear if she recognised Jürgen’s baritone, but the sounds were too indistinct to make out from where she sat, until suddenly they weren’t. Zita realised that Polly was weeping.

  Zita stood up alarmed. She crept to the door and tried to listen, until she felt too ashamed and went back to the lavvy again. When this only proved to be more tormenting, Zita steeled herself.

  She tapped on the inside of the bathroom door. ‘What’s going on out there, Polly?’ she called out. ‘Are you in trouble?’

  Zita took a deep breath during the abrupt pause that followed and then carefully opened the door. The identity of Polly’s visitor was both wholly unexpected and completely understandable: it was Comte Eduarde’s bastard son. He was seated on Polly’s bed in an attitude of urgency. Zita gazed approvingly and thought of how easy it must have been for Polly to fall for someone with hair like his; Zita would have done so, too, had she been younger. And then she thought of Hans and remembered that long ago she already had.

  ‘Hullo Tommy,’ said Zita. She gave him a comic look, hoping the ice might break between them. ‘So, I guess those phony rumours about you and old Blanche fooled no one?’

  He gaped at her and stood up.

  ‘Tommy,’ Polly implored him, ‘we can trust Zita. She knows who you are – Alexandrine tells her everything.’

  He shook his head in bewilderment. ‘We can’t trust anyone.’

  ‘We can,’ Polly insisted, ‘we have to now.’ And then she added, ‘Zita loves them both, too.’

  Certainty flooded Zita that something was indeed very wrong between them – far more than a lover’s tiff.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking about Tommy and me,’ Polly whispered to her. ‘But it’s not what you think.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  Tommy’s face fell with indescribable grief.

  Zita knew then, without knowing anything of how Tommy was part of it, that the crisis involved the horrific plans for the Marais Jews, and the gutless anonymous letter she’d left in Alexandrine’s bag to warn her of it. These things had been bought with her spy whore’s wages, earned with her love for Metzingen.

  Zita went very still. ‘What has happened, puss?’

  Tommy looked to Polly.

  ‘We can trust her,’ Polly said again.

  So, Tommy told Zita everything.

  Afterwards, as Zita wept there with both of them, promising she’d protect them, promising she’d never betray what she’d learned, her mind travelled straight to the powder, untouched for too long while she’d diverted herself digging for useless secrets.

  Those secrets had claimed her friends – friends that were good as dead now, like she was.

  Polly’s emotion receded, Tommy’s guilt-ridden grief. All that mattered now to Zita was the powder, and she told herself that as soon as she could she would embrace it again with all the blinkered fervour with which one embraced an abuser.

  * * *

  Much later, when the door to Alexandrine’s suite was opened for her by Claude, Polly found the letter from Lana Mae where the Comtesse had left it on her bed.

  When Polly turned the paper over and saw the additional message on the back, she was confused by it; not only because it was practically illegible, but because Lana Mae hadn’t written it. Why would someone else put an addendum to Lana Mae’s letter?

  She showed it to Claude, who, to Polly’s surprise, recognised the handwriting at once. ‘That’s Doctor Mandel,’ he said.

  ‘You can read what it says?’ Polly asked him.

  Familiar with the doctor’s near-indecipherability, Claude could. With Polly seated beside him on the bed, they picked through what had been written there together.

  Afterwards, when all that Doctor Mandel had told them was clear, Polly found she had no tears left. She knew she should have cried at what the message revealed – and so badly she wanted to – but nothing came. It would have been easy, she thought, when trying to explain this reaction to Tommy, to say that she had simply gone numb – but that would be untrue. Numbness implied that she had felt nothing, when really it was as if she felt everything, every emotion there was, and had felt it for everyone who had been crushed by this war. Yet this too seemed nonsensical when put into words, so in the end, once Alexandrine’s suite had been locked again and Polly went up to see Tommy in his room, what she told him was far simpler.

  Doctor Mandel’s message had made her feel certain that the path they had chosen was true.

  Comtesse Alexandrine. It is with the very deepest regret that I must inform you of the death of your fri
end, Mrs Lana Mae Huckstepp – an extraordinary lady who, over the course of the months that we shared in internment, I had come to love utterly. So utterly, in fact, did I love Lana Mae, that I asked her to marry me. To my joy she accepted. When she went to her rest, she went as my wife, Mrs Mandel.

  Lana Mae died of uterine cancer. She experienced great difficulty in accepting the truth of her illness, and the reason for this, I believe, was because lately her life had acquired rich purpose. Where once she’d been selfish, she was driven to serve. Lana Mae wanted those who most cared for her to believe that her illness wasn’t real – that it was somehow put on, an elaborate theatre that would allow her to sell her last jewels to the Occupiers. She did sell her jewels, and many lives in Vittel benefited from the medical supplies she bought with the proceeds. But Lana Mae’s cancer took her from us.

  Among those she spoke about fondly in her final hours were yourself, my dear Comtesse, and Zita, her great film star friend, and young Polly Hartford. At the very end, Lana Mae’s last lucid words were for the girl. I fear they’ll mean as little to you as they did to me but they may well mean more to Polly, so here they are:

  ‘Tell Polly I guessed what she’s up to with Jürgen – and tell her I think it’s swell.’

  Please give my own regards to the girl. Until we meet again, Comtesse, I am your servant.

  Doctor Paul Mandel

  14

  1 August 1942

  Over the happy run of months during which Polly had given him signs she was willing to be formally courted, Jürgen had experienced something like an epiphany. It was not of the religious sort, for he had no religion, blind faith in the Führer having replaced his once blinder faith in God. Nor was it the epiphany of love, even though Jürgen was very deeply in love with Polly, in a way he’d not known with any other girl that he’d been with before. Rather, Jürgen’s epiphany was one that had come as a slow dawning of truth. He still had faith in the Führer but it was his faith in those who were subordinate to the Führer that had crumbled to dust. It had become impossible for Jürgen to work in proximity to a degenerate like Göring without seeing such a man for what he was. In a similar way, it had grown unendurable to see the other great princes of National Socialism in the soft pink light the Ritz cast upon them. Heinrich Himmler; Reinhard Heydrich; Adolf Eichmann; Martin Bormann, the Führer’s secretary. And with this enlightenment had grown a nagging fear deep in Jürgen’s conscience that he was quite unable to turn off.