The Seven Letters

by Jan Harvey

  ‘Only I knew, and I wasn’t going to tell anyone.’

  He looked at her, deadpan, his face barely processing the thought. ‘I had to strike her, had to hit her,’ he said. He shook his head. ‘Of all the stupid…’ his voice drifted away. Eventually he looked up at her, beckoning her to come towards him, but she stood absolutely still, though her knees felt weak as if they might collapse under her.

  ‘Come to me,’ he pleaded. ‘I have done my best for you.’

  ‘Your best? For me? What have you done, Fritz? Only beaten her up a little? Only sent a doctor to hurt every woman here? Only killed a beautiful young girl? She was fourteen, Fritz!’ He shook his head once more, his skin was slick with perspiration.

  ‘I have done everything in my power. I had to convince Rechtstein to leave this to me. I told him his job was to manage his own reputation. He had eight Frenchmen shot this morning, one for each prostitute left alive in here. Then I said I would interrogate Madame Odile. Trust me, if he’d done it she would have been suspended by her hands from a beam and her body would have been covered in whiplashes. So yes, I only beat her up a bit. As for the new regime, and that shit of a doctor, I have to look like I am taking strong action. What else would you have me do? Do you think I was given the job of overseer in this house? I had to play the game, make myself available.’

  Claudette stood opposite him, taking it all in.

  ‘Is it my turn now?’ she asked. ‘Am I a pawn in your game?’

  ‘No, my love, you are not. Everything I did, I did to protect you.’ He stood up and took her face in his hands. ‘Nothing matters to me more, nothing. I have fallen in love with you and I care about one thing, and one thing only, and it is you.’

  He reached over and pulled her down into his lap, kissing her softly and tenderly. Then he hugged her tightly and she felt a new urgency about him, a need she had not experienced before and an escalation of her own power. He had done all that for her because he loved her. She arched her body into him, returning his kisses with great intensity, giving herself to him, knowing that as she did she was loving him more deeply than she could ever have imagined.

  When they parted he held her hand in the entrance hall, as if he were scared to let her go. The house felt completely empty, as if there had been no-one living in it for months. No music, no shouts of laughter, no hum of distant sounds. He kissed her beside the reception desk, risking everything. It was as if he needed to taste her right up until the last second, to keep him going.

  ‘I love you, Françoise,’ he whispered softly in her ear and then he turned, opened the door and was gone.

  ‘You little fool!’

  Claudette spun round, her heart completely missing a beat. It was Madame Odile standing at the foot of the stairs. ‘You stupid little fool.’

  Chapter Thirty Nine

  Matt called the waiter over. In French he said, ‘Excuse me, do you have any idea where there might have been a Maison Close on the Rue Ercol?’ The waiter’s eyes widened and he said “no” with some disdain, but ever the professional, he would ask inside. ‘Oh, my goodness,’ said Matt. ‘He probably thinks I need one.’

  ‘Don’t worry, they’ve been closed down in Paris for years, it says here.’ I was scrolling through an article in an English newspaper. ‘Seems the French are a bit more prudey these days.’ The waiter came back, placing Matt’s bill on a little black tray. He told Matt that no one had ever heard of such a thing in this part of the city, even going back some way in time. Matt thanked him, noticing that the waiter was watching them both as he wiped the glasses behind the bar.

  ‘Here,’ I said, ‘listen to this. “Twenty-two well-known Parisian brothels were commandeered by the Wermacht and SS units. Orgies, fuelled by alcohol, were hosted late into the night whilst the rest of the population of Paris was forced to abide by a curfew. There was much debauchery as the German invaders proved to be insatiable clients and consequently it became a golden age for the Maison Closes which had been under threat of closure just prior to the war.”

  ‘This is interesting,’ I said, reading down further.

  ‘“Their outer appearance had to be inconspicuous and quite often even the locals had no idea what they were, often presuming they were gentlemen’s clubs. They were managed by ‘Madams’ who, although usually married, had often been prostitutes themselves. The Nazis produced an official guide to the brothels and all visitors were expected to respect the residents and buy them presents such as champagne, cigarettes and designer clothes. There was an understanding that they would tip generously too and this on top of fees that were often equivalent to an officer’s weekly salary. This meant that the Maison Closes of Paris, during WW2, had some of the highest incomes ever in the sex industry.”’

  ‘Wow,’ said Matt. ‘I didn’t know any of that.’

  ‘Amazing.’

  ‘Tell you what, Google that place Daniel mentioned.’ He suggested.

  ‘I can’t remember what it was called.’

  ‘Le Beouf….’ He was puffing out his cheeks, ‘Le Beouf…. à la Ficelle, à la Ficelle, that’s it.’

  I discovered on my first search that Beef on a String is a favourite dish of France and England, even though I’d never heard of it. I searched again, inputting Le Beouf à la Ficelle, Paris 1940s.

  ‘“Le Boeuf à la Ficelle was a famous Paris restaurant. Waitresses would serve diners like Cary Grant and Edith Piaf wearing nothing but an apron and high heels. During the Nazi occupation, this x-rated establishment was highly popular among the German officers.”’

  I read on and added ‘…and Miss Marlene Dietrich, I think you’ll find.’

  ‘God, that Cary Grant was cool,’ said Matt. ‘Not sure I could have pulled that off, all those boobs swinging freestyle above my meat and two veg.’

  That made me roar with laughter and the people who had been sitting down around us looked at us as if we were the loud Brits they all dread. Inside, the waiter polishing his glasses peered out again like a nervous bird.

  ‘Try March, Paris 1940s bordellos.’

  There was nothing.

  ‘Try Ercol, Paris, WW2.’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Try Madam, German officers, Ercol, WW2, bordello?’

  ‘I’m offered a haunted American house or some antiques including an early Ercol rocking chair.’

  ‘Damn.’ Matt had a look of defeat about him. He took out his phone and began tapping in words.

  ‘Excuse me.’ The man was tall and very elegant; he had white hair that fell long over his collar. He was wearing a pale lemon jacket and a light blue open necked shirt. He was in his mid to late fifties. ‘I couldn’t help but overhear the waiter inside asking about a bordello in the Rue Ercol, was it you who wanted to know?’

  ‘Er, yes, we were asking because a friend used to know of it,’ Matt replied a little sheepishly.

  ‘A much older friend, I suspect,’ he said with a smile in his eyes. ‘It’s been gone a long, long time.’ He spoke English slowly in a measured way, conjuring each word up from his memory. He had a gentle voice, rich and warm.

  ‘It was number twelve, but it will do you no good to know this. It was a block of offices for a long time and then, for some reason just – how do you say it – left behind?’

  ‘Abandoned?’ I offered.

  ‘Abandoned, yes. It used to be very grand with beautiful scrolling.’

  ‘Do you remember it?’ I asked.

  ‘No, no, I have a picture of it in about 1930 in a frame in my apartment. My wife collected art and it was one of her purchases in a brocante. Would you like to see it?’

  Matt threw me a look of ‘why not?’ and we stood up to shake hands, introducing ourselves properly, which we knew was expected. He was called Theo Arnold and he was an architect. He had a very kind face, handsome too. He walked us
to the site of the bordello, but it was a sad and forlorn place with a flat, faceless glass front door and nineteen seventies metal window frames around dirty panes. Theo pointed upwards. ‘The whole facade has completely changed. I suspect in England you might have stopped the developers, but here in France I’m sad to say that anything goes.’ He walked on past a big shop with a huge pink ammonite hanging outside. I liked the Latin Quarter, it was arty, I could see myself living there.

  Theo’s apartment overlooked Delacroix’s house, which was quite bizarre given that we’d been there so recently. The small square had four tall trees, one at each corner and one or two exclusive shops with dark secretive interiors. Theo waved us through the front door of his apartment. Inside, it was dark, heavily panelled and very old, very similar to the artist’s house across the way. We carried on up some warped wooden stairs and Theo opened the door at the top with a key from his pocket. ‘Come, come inside, I will make something to eat.’ He spoke with gentle, unhurried words.

  ‘Lunch?’ he asked when we were in his dining area. ‘I have bread and cheese and some fruit.’

  It sounded lovely. We sat at a table in the open window of the apartment, which was full of polished uneven floors, and bookcases made to fit the strangest of spaces under beams and between doorjambs.

  ‘I am an avid book collector,’ Theo told us. ‘I always have been, it’s my downfall. Without my library I’d be a very rich man.’ He nodded sagely, then added, ‘and also very bored.’

  ‘I know exactly what you mean,’ I told him, ‘me too. Freddy had some brand new editions of the classics. Treasure Island was one and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.’

  ‘And Freddy is?’ he asked.

  ‘My friend, that is, he died recently. I’ve been clearing out his house with Matt’s help and we have been sort of drawn into something of a mystery.’

  Because Theo was the type of person who listened without interruption, we found ourselves telling him the whole story. Even recounting the list of things I had found in the shed and Freddy’s letters.

  Theo raised his eyebrows when I mentioned the little pink book. ‘Le Guide Rose is a collector’s item,’ he told us. ‘You will occasionally see one on the Internet, but less and less now. When I was a child I remember them being about here and there, always in bookshops scattered about, but when they closed down the Maison Closes they purged the city of all the ephemera of the seedy Parisian lifestyles.’

  ‘And what do you know of the bordello in Rue Ercol?’

  ‘I’m afraid all I can offer is the picture I have.’ He disappeared into a sunlit salon next door and came back with a small painting of the street, a very fine water-colour. The dominant house was an elegant mansion with tall windows, a large front door and ornate railings.

  ‘Can you see how they have desecrated her?’ asked Theo, he looked quite forlorn. ‘She was once home to a musician, a man known for his great knowledge of Berlioz. I can imagine the sound ringing out of the windows.’ He sighed. ‘Now everywhere has changed so much. You say you are leaving this weekend?’

  ‘Well, that’s the plan,’ said Matt. ‘Though it’s the big French Getaway Weekend, so we’re going to struggle to get tickets.’

  ‘It’s just that I might be able to make a phone call, an acquaintance of mine who knows about The Maison Closes in Paris. Let me phone him. I have an idea, the faintest recollection that he knew someone who worked at a local bordello a very long time ago.’

  Chapter Forty

  Madame Odile’s face was burning with anger. ‘How long has that been going on?’ she asked. ‘No, don’t tell me, all the times he’s booked the Private Room, the errands you’ve supposedly been on, the rumours amongst the girls that he had someone…’ She stood leaning heavily against her office desk. ‘And all along it was my maid, my stupid, fucking maid. ’

  ‘It’s not my fault, I –’

  ‘No, of course it’s not your stupid, fucking fault. It’s him, he’s charmed you, you have been completely won over by him. I’ve heard it all before.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to fall in love with him.’ Claudette spoke up for herself, but Madame Odile was having none of it.

  ‘Fall in love? You don’t know the meaning of the word. You’re a stripling, a fool. You know nothing of men, especially evil men and that man is one of them.’ Claudette hung her head, she had nothing to say, except she knew in her heart Keber was not evil. She could not love a man who was that bad.

  ‘When you came here they called you The Virgin. I remember that I had to pull Pollo up for making fun of you. It’s ironic, isn’t it, the virgin in the whore house has been bedded by one of the evil monsters who now, in effect, runs the place?’ She leaned forward and pulled a cigarette from the enamel box on her desk. She lit it with a large alabaster lighter and threaded the fingers from her other hand through her hair. ‘I simply cannot believe this, anyone else, even Perrine, I would have found it believable, but not you.’

  ‘He’s not evil.’ Claudette sunk her head into her chest; her head felt heavy on her shoulders as if someone was pressing a weight on top of it.

  ‘Oh really.’ Madame Odile stepped around to the front of her desk. ‘Really?’ She stubbed the cigarette into an ashtray and taking her blouse in both hands tore it open. The tiny silk buttons popped one after the other in rapid succession and scattered across the floor, bouncing everywhere. Her chest was slashed with red lines, the colour clashing against the whiteness of her bra. The welts were angry, weeping. She had pushed cotton wadding on top of the injuries and there was a smell of antiseptic as it fell away. ‘This is Fritz Keber. You know nothing of him.’

  ‘He said he had to, Rechtstein would have done far worse to you.’

  Madame Odile lurched forward, her hair spooling out of its combs and pins. She was looking more manic by the minute. She grabbed Claudette’s wrist in her left hand and dragged her to the door. Claudette tried to fight her off, but the clasp she had, with her now ragged scarlet nails, was too tight.

  Madame Odile called the lift and within seconds it clunked and clattered up from the ground floor. She pulled back the gate and threw Claudette in, shielding the exit with her body. The lift began to chug and Madame Odile closed the brass filigree gate across to seal them in.

  Claudette counted third, fourth, fifth floor, it stopped. Madame Odile pushed her out and through the double doors. Within seconds they were in the corridor. ‘Go on, go to the door at the end. Go!’ Madame Odile pushed her in the back until they reached a door, then she opened it with a key from her pocket and shoved her maid inside.

  The smell was foul, it made Claudette’s eyes water. It was a small room ten feet square, if that. There was a rocking chair, a threadbare rug and a pail with what looked like soiled white rags submerged in water. Opposite, there was a small door. Madame Odile stepped forward and opened it, the key rattled in the lock, but it was not locked. The room ran the entire depth of the house, long and thin. There was a bed and a figure lying on it, unmoving; beyond that, a baby’s crib. There were no windows, no light from outside at all, only the glow of embers in a dying fire and a lamp dangling into the gloom from a sloping beam.

  Claudette stepped forward as Madame Odile moved out of her way. On the bed was Lilia, her eyes almost glazed over, her hair straggled behind her, her skin ghostly. Claudette was horrified. The room was in turmoil, a tray of food on the floor, a child’s toys strewn across the dirty mat.

  The child was a little boy. He sat in his playpen sucking on a red rubber ball, his eyes brown, hair blond. He was thin, a small, skinny face atop a grubby playsuit. He looked at Claudette, but made no attempt to be lifted up or even to draw her attention.

  Lilia groaned and moved her legs. ‘She’s always up here like this these days,’ said Madame Odile. ‘You see she can’t cope any more.’ Lilia didn’t respond to the sound of voices.

&n
bsp; ‘She’s got you, her sister,’ said Claudette, sounding more assertive than she felt. Madame Odile’s eyes narrowed, her hair looked as though she’d been ravaged.

  ‘How do you know that?’ she asked.

  ‘I heard you say it the day she was overdosing.’

  ‘And can you guess who the father is?’ Her words were scornful. Claudette felt her heart hammering against her ribcage. ‘Yes, that’s right, Fredrik Keber, your lover. This is the kind of debris he leaves in his wake.’ Claudette stood looking around the room at the mess, the squalor and the child with his sandy hair and lost eyes.

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Daniel.’ Madame Odile replied. For a moment she looked at the toddler with pity then she took a sharp intake of breath. ‘So from now on this is your problem. I have looked after this child, I have tried endlessly to stop my sister’s habit and now she is useless, a complete waste of my time and effort.’

  ‘My problem, how?’

  ‘You’ll look after the boy as well as your normal duties. She,’ Madame Odile looked at Lilia, ‘is incapable.’

  ‘What about Agnès?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I’m guessing she comes in to sit with the child when Lilia is working, doesn’t she? She always arrives in the evening.’

  ‘Yes.’ There was a pause. ‘Yes, and I will make her come earlier while you serve dinner, but from the morning until five o’clock you will be here when the child is awake, unless Lilia is feeling better.’

  ‘So I’m a nanny?’

  ‘Exactly, I can’t afford anyone extra now, Keber will see to that.’

  ‘And he visits?’

  ‘Yes, whenever he has the time or the inclination.’

  ‘So he knows what Agnès does, he knows she doesn’t do your accounts?’

  ‘Yes, of course he knows, but that is neither here nor there. Except that it shows you what a good liar and actor he is.’