Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

by Francine Prose

  Chanac eased himself out of the car. “Mademoiselle Villars! How long has it been?” Both knew precisely how long: Chanac had last seen Lou at her trial. Lou extended her hand to Chanac, but he smiled and demurred. Her palm was black with grease.

  “Sorry,” Lou said, hating him, and herself for apologizing.

  Chanac’s mustache was half pink with the dye he’d used to bring the gray hairs in line with their faded red neighbors. He told Lou he had a problem. A personal problem. Several acquaintances, satisfied customers all, had told him that Lou was his man, ha-ha. The perfect person to fix it. Some liquid had accidentally spilled on the backseat. He’d heard that Lou had a magic touch with upholstery stains.

  Lou leaned into the Delage. On the rear seat were dried smears of thick white fluid. Even if the two cops hadn’t been snickering, Lou would have known that Chanac meant her to think that the crusted substance was semen.

  She forced herself to look again. Too much, too thick. It was library paste. Though Lou had never, strictly speaking, gone to bed with a man, she was sure Chanac could never have shot that much, not in his dreams, not with a dozen Arlettes. It must have been a slow day at the city council. Chanac and his pals were having fun with a woman whose mechanic’s license could be revoked in a heartbeat.

  Lou got a cloth and solvent. The glue spread and stuck to the leather, but she cleaned it all off. The two cops applauded. Lou wanted to grab their guns and shoot them.

  Chanac thanked Lou and said he’d be back. He reached inside his jacket.

  Lou said, Please, it was on the house. It had been her pleasure.

  Everyone who has ever written a biography, everyone who has ever lived, will have noticed how often a dark thread runs through the weave and weft of a life. Clovis Chanac was Lou’s dark thread, almost from the beginning, or at least from the moment Arlette directed her mermaid song at him. And everyone has, at some point, met a man like Chanac: those lucky individuals who continually fail upward, who are fired for incompetence or for some abuse of power and instantly find a better job. We ordinary mortals would have wound up in jail or on the street! But these chosen ones rise higher—in politics, business, or even at a sleepy provincial high school. And so this pattern repeats itself: promotion, crime, exposure, failure, bigger crime, bigger failure, bigger promotion. In Chanac’s case, the skills required for the three phases of his career—police prefect, politician, gangster boss—were so alike that he could excel at all three.

  How unfair that, of all the men in Paris, Chanac kept crossing Lou’s path. When she heard that he had lost his job as the head of the city council, she was at first delighted until she learned that he had gone into partnership with the leader of one of the gangs with whom she was obliged to do business in order to run the garage.

  In an era of shortages and limited import-export trade, auto parts were only available on the black market. Dealing with the racketeers was like buying fan belts and exhaust pipes in a store, except that the store was a bar called Le Hippo, and the salesmen were killers and thieves.

  The gangsters didn’t intimidate Lou. She knew their secrets. She’d slept with the wives they neglected. They knew who she was and what she’d done. They admired her for having balls. A convenient arrangement all around. Lou liked holding her own among the toughest of the tough. And these hardened criminals treated Lou Villars with more civility and respect than certain high school administrators show their teaching staff.

  Lou had private names for them. Carburetor Sammy. Patsy the Piston. Marcel the Manifold. Alex “Tires” the Greek. It was fine with her if they wanted to funnel rich people’s money into their own pockets. The real criminals were in the government, the banks, and the foreign fifth column composed of Communists and Jews.

  For a while she dealt exclusively with the Gasparu gang, led by the petty crook and car thief Pierre “Crazy Pierrot” Gasparu. Then when the government fired Chanac for laundering a fortune in bribes through Arlette’s club, he made a deal with Gasparu, offering his contacts in industry and the police in return for a half share of Gasparu’s business. A group of former police officers whom Chanac took down with him accompanied him to the negotiations, to help persuade Gasparu.

  At first Lou thought it might be awkward to work with a man who had stolen her first love, destroyed her career, and humiliated her in her own garage. But these were challenging times. Slates were being wiped clean. Compromises were required. One climbed into bed with people whom one wouldn’t have spit on before. If Lou had to work with Clovis Chanac, she could let bygones be bygones. The equally pragmatic Chanac was perfectly glad to do business with the cross-dressing Amazonian grease monkey who’d tried to ruin his beloved’s reputation by spreading the ridiculous rumor that they’d once been lovers.

  The Gasparu-Chanac gang had turned Le Hippo into a social club of which they were the only members, an emporium where, despite the absence of visible merchandise, everything was for sale. Chanac had an office in the back, from which he rarely emerged. Even when alcohol and tobacco were not to be found anywhere in Paris, the criminals always had liquor and cigarettes and were willing to share.

  They enjoyed having Lou as an audience when they drank and boasted about how big and bad, how tough and mean they were, and about the less tough, less mean guys they’d bullied into submission. They’d ask Lou what she needed. She’d name an auto part, and the next day a kid would deliver it to the garage. They trusted her to pay them when the client paid her, and she knew not to test their trust. It ground her down to depend on Chanac and his men. And for Lou, every ounce of energy that didn’t go into fixing cars was spent fending off what today would be diagnosed as clinical depression.

  Once Lou had dreamed of being a star. But she was a reasonable person. Meaning, she was French. She could lower her expectations and get through the day. Like Saint Joan, she could accept, even glory in, shame and degradation.

  Looking into the sources of evil, as I have in writing this book, I have developed a profound respect (if respect is the word) for the power of resentment, the corrosive acid produced by the conviction that a person has been overlooked, cheated, or betrayed.

  Lou Villars had plenty to resent, or anyway so she thought. A psychologist colleague has written a monograph proving that each member of the Gasparu-Chanac gang (including Pierrot Gasparu and Clovis Chanac) held some smoldering grudge against the state or a particular cop, a landlord, a woman, someone who’d done him wrong. And with such people, as we know, nothing is ever their fault.

  Lou’s misery lasted through the winter and well into the spring. The election of the Popular Front only made her feel worse. On the night of the election there was dancing in the streets. Lou stayed inside and heard, outside her window, the sounds of a party to which she had not been invited.

  The progressive new laws didn’t apply to her. What good was the promise of a forty-hour week when she worked fourteen hours a day and barely survived on her earnings? So what if French citizens were guaranteed the right to strike and bargain for better conditions? Whom would she have struck against? People whose cars needed fixing? The cars? And when was she supposed to take her two-week paid vacation? Who would run the garage when she was away, and where did Léon Blum and the other powerful government Jews think she would go on vacation?

  The invitations to lecture at the sports clubs had stopped, but Lou didn’t care. She would only have turned them down. The friends she’d made weren’t real friends, the lovers not real lovers but bored provincial housewives, the most daring in each crowd, nervy enough to spend the night with a failed auto racer. Even though whiskey was scarce and expensive, Lou drank more than she had since she and Arlette drank for free at the Chameleon.

  She slept with married women who paid her to hammer out the dings in their fenders. After these amorous afternoons, the women expected Lou’s rates to go down, but not one of them protested when Lou charged them double.

  Sometimes, when Lou drank, she imagined jumping in fron
t of the Métro or joining the desperate citizens who, if one believed the papers, were waiting in line to end it all in the river. She stopped eating and on Sundays rarely left her apartment above the garage. Her existence was shrinking. Maybe her life would grow small enough to disappear on its own.

  One afternoon in late June a cream-colored envelope arrived in the mail. On the top right-hand corner were two German stamps. A runner with the Olympic torch sprinted across one, while, on the other, a diver, a half-naked Greek god, jackknifed in midair.

  Written in brown ink, with only a few mistakes in French, the letter said:

  Dear Mademoiselle Villars!

  I hope you will remember “Little” Inge Wallser. You won the race against me at Brooklands. You deserved to win! I’ll admit!

  I won at Montverre after your government prevented you from doing what you worked so hard to accomplish. Otherwise you would have won. I know an athlete should never say that, but when you get to know me, you will find out that I value truth above all things! Even above my career! I live for truth . . . and love.

  We spoke at Brooklands, remember? I would have liked to talk more. But you were “busy” that evening! Too bad!

  Never a fast reader, Lou decoded the words she’d already smudged with oily black smears. Of course she remembered Inge flirting with her at Brooklands. How pathetic Lou had been, how many chances she had wasted with her ridiculous principles about mixing romance and racing.

  For a German, Lou thought, Inge used a lot of exclamation points. Well, sure. To be an auto racer you had to be a passionate person.

  Inge wrote,

  I have thought about you since then, and I followed your case with interest, in the German papers. I am not a poet! So I will put it simply: your story obsessed me. It moved me to tears. Remember that interview in which you said you’d always loved France, but you wished you lived in a country that respected its athletes. Since then I have wanted to write you a million times, to send you my warmest wishes, assure you of my faith and support, and say,

  “Dear Mademoiselle Villars, Germany under the Führer is the country of your dreams!”

  I have told your story to government officials I’ve been lucky enough to meet through my (modest!) fame as a driver. I say, Look who this woman is! And look how the French treat her! Such stories travel upward, and (are you sitting down?) your story has reached the Führer!

  At a recent reception the Führer remarked that (meaning no insult) it was just like the French to worship nightclub singers no better than prostitutes and let their taste in art be dictated by Jewish dealers. Yet they mistreat their athletes, whom they’re too blind to appreciate as symbols of national pride. If only Lou Villars could see the glory the Reich heaps on its sports stars!

  To say nothing of our government program, Strength through Joy, which encourages every worker, every student and village housewife to develop powerful bodies along with healthy minds. In the past there has been some prejudice, here as elsewhere, against female athletes whose destiny as wives and mothers might be harmed by strenuous exercise. But our Führer so opposes this ignorant thinking that he has formed a commission to reeducate our population.

  I’m digressing. Let me get to the point: would you consider joining us at the upcoming Olympics as the Führer’s special guest?

  This is a real invitation! We hope you will say yes.

  As with every little thing that concerns the Führer, many people are now taking credit for the idea to invite you. Let the censors object, but I assure you, I thought of it first! And yet I could only imagine such a thing, only dare to come up with such a plan, because the Führer believes that this is how we will change the world: one heart and mind at a time.

  We hope you will come and see for yourself how our athletes live under the Reich! Please write back if you are interested. I hope to hear from you soon! Until then I remain your loyal fan,

  Inge Wallser

  Already conscious of the role she would play in history, Inge Wallser kept copies of her letters. This one can be found in the State Archive in Berlin, though the original is believed to have been lost with Lou’s possessions, after her death.

  Between the day she got Inge’s letter and her trip to Berlin in August, Lou lost the fifteen pounds she’d gained from drinking. She closed the garage for an hour each day and ran in the Bois de Boulogne. She lifted weights every morning. She lived on salad and rice. She corresponded with Inge, who sent her sports news and political gossip, train tickets, schedules, and practical information.

  Lou would stay at the Hotel Kaiserhof, where the Führer used to go at teatime for milk and linzer torte, though he had given up this simple pleasure, because Hess was paranoid about pastry. Besides, the Führer wanted to look trim in his uniform for the Olympics.

  Inge would be Lou’s host at the games and guide her through the busy social calendar that she described in detail so Lou would bring the right clothes. Several times Inge mentioned how much the Führer liked pretty girls. And though Inge didn’t—and, Lou felt, would never—suggest that Lou dress more like a woman, Lou was inspired to have a tailor alter her suits to look less masculine, more like the sexually ambiguous but still fetching clothes of Marlene Dietrich.

  Lou could pretend to be pretty. She could crimp a wave in her hair. Painting her lips red was harder than it looked. It had to be mastered, like a sport.

  Lou’s rules could be bent without breaking. She was not about to waste her chance to meet the Führer by insisting on wearing fireproof racing boots to a formal dinner. She bought new shoes laced like a man’s, broad in the toe, but with thick high heels. And she learned to walk in them: more athletic training. How impressive that women balanced on stilts—for beauty! She found it practically effortless to make the concessions for Hitler that she had so ferociously refused to make for her mother.

  A muscular gamine edged her way into the mirror, and the tough garage mechanic stepped aside to make room. Lou worried about Inge, who’d flirted with the more masculine Lou. What if she preferred that type? Lou would take her chances.

  She would have liked to tell the baroness about her upcoming journey, but something warned her against it. Armand would have been happy for her, but maybe also jealous that she was the one meeting Hitler. If Armand was still capable of understanding who anyone was. She considered writing and asking her friends in the sports clubs along the route—Lola the soccer player from Liege, who pretended to be Portuguese, Astrid from Alsace, who liked Lou to squeeze her around the waist till she fainted—to come to the station and wave to her as her train to Berlin sped by.

  But because she feared that the ticket Inge sent her wouldn’t work, and that she would be laughed at when she presented it at the station, she told no one. She was genuinely surprised when the conductor smiled and showed her to a sleeping compartment that made her thankful she’d lost weight. Even so, she was glad that she’d kept her plans secret, so she could sit undisturbed by the window of the dining car, sipping whiskey and smoking. However bleak Lou’s future had seemed, something must have been guiding her. Everything in her life so far must have followed some grand design if fate had engineered this moment precisely halfway between perfect calm and wild excitement.

  When Inge met her at the station in Berlin, Lou could tell that Inge liked her new, girlish look—or anyway, girlish for Lou. Inge wore a summer dress, stitched from the palest pink petals of beaded silk. Inge kissed Lou’s cheek and lightly encircled Lou’s wrist with her fingers.

  Lou had made a new rule for this trip. She would take whatever was offered.

  Secretly she suspected that she hadn’t been asked to Berlin just so the Führer could win one more heart and mind. A more logical explanation was: she was being interviewed for a job. Maybe the Germans wanted her to race. Would a patriotic Frenchwoman, mistreated by her country, consider driving for Germany, if only to show her deluded homeland that it had made a mistake? She couldn’t race a Mercedes, which would always be Inge’s. But
maybe she could test-drive some newer, muscular model, better suited for someone like Lou. She would push it to victory until France fell to its knees and begged its prodigal daughter to come home.

  In person, Inge was, like her letters, a fountain of exclamation points. But her punctuation was oddly timed, and her voice rose in the wrong places. How wonderful to see . . . you!

  Inge chattered nonstop. In the chauffeured Mercedes that took them from the station, she told Lou how lonely life was at the top, without another auto racer—another woman racer—to talk to, a friend who could sympathize with her losses and celebrate her successes. Lou wanted to say: I’m that person! as she had to Armand. But she felt inhibited by the presence of the chauffeur, a pretty young woman in an army uniform, watching them in the mirror.

  They sped along a boulevard hung with giant red and black flags. Streamers hung from the plane trees that canopied the road. How much pride and hope and energy the banners exuded, beating in the hot wind so their swastikas spun, an optical illusion one can see in films from that time.

  Lou was not given to flights of imagination, probably because, as she and Inge had agreed in one exchange of letters, their work, their lives, depended on staying focused. In the moment. Even so, Lou told Inge, she almost felt as if she were traveling back in time. Their Mercedes was a chariot whisking her into the thumping heart of an empire as great as Greece or Rome.

  A page in a history book—from the convent?—turned over in Lou’s mind. Pillars and temples, horses, drivers with garlands encircling their foreheads. The male charioteers wore dresses. Lou remembered that.

  Encouraged by Lou’s enthusiasm, Inge leaned across her so that her breasts, beneath her silky dress, brushed against Lou’s arm. She pointed out the landmarks, and the improvements the Führer had made. How wide the boulevards were!