Hitler's Girls (11 page)

The priest nudges my knee as he leans forward to pocket his beloved toy deep in the folds of his robe. Two schoolgirls decide to come into the compartment and take their seats. The dark, long-haired young man comes along the corridor again and the reason for their entrance is clear: they giggle again at him. Sure enough, the young man pauses. They go scarlet. He frowns. He gives me a quick glance and walks on.

The book was on the sofa, under the arty Indian cushions Monica liked to scatter about. It was by the brooch, but I was too busily excited by that to think anything of a battered book, a primer of skipping games and chants and hopscotch, played by young people all over the world.

“I think,” I said to Jennifer Devant, “that I saw a book with number games with a page torn out.”

“Didn’t you and Monica play those games together?” Jennifer asked. This time she forgot to light a cheroot, and looked dreamily out of the window into Holland Park Avenue, as if expecting to see a whole army of children jumping over the pavement flagstones as they made their way to school. Jennifer could make you remember anything—but that is why, no doubt, she is considered the best barrister we have in the North.

Mel is in the South, near a village whose name I have carefully memorised. She is with Peter Müller.

I shall find Mel and bring her home.

As the train gathers speed, the last words of Monica’s letter haunt me with the rhythm of the playground games we used to wait for so impatiently, through interminable lessons—and sometimes through punishments with a strap of hard leather.

The numbers. How did they go?

Given Maitre Paul’s spidery announcement, at the foot of the missive to Peter Müller, that she was determined to give to another “what I will not give you,” I knew I had to act, and to act quickly.

I did not believe I could escape either arrest from the police or murder at the hands of Muller and his men. I knew my only option was to run. A French prison would have me locked away for the murder of Maitre Paul until their nefarious plans were carried out.

According to the letter, she would do as he requested, or she would die. She would leave “the information” under her door, with a tip of the paper spilling out on the landing.

There was now little time to lose. April 20, the birth date of the Führer, was originally proposed by Maitre Paul herself as the appointed day for the “meltdown.” If she continued to betray the cause, then she would answer for it immediately.

Muller believed Maitre Paul held the secret of the numbers. Also, Monica. They were both now dead.

But one thing became rapidly clear in Maitre Paul’s letter: Maitre Paul had undergone a change of heart. She loathed the Nazis: now she looked back on her life and bitterly regretted her association with them.

She loathed the “Duke and Duchess”—here I wasted a precious five seconds wondering whether the Windsors, with their famous affiliation to the Fascist movements in Germany and Italy, were the royal couple to whom Maitre Paul now turned her contempt. She wished never to hear the name of Adolf Hitler again. And, most vehemently, she would ensure the inheritance the Führer bequeathed to his only child would go to causes set in the world for the promulgation of good, rather than evil; this inheritance, tens of millions in gold, held in a Swiss bank.

Peter Müller must not expect to be admitted by Maitre Paul, to her apartment in the Rue Danube. She would have nothing to do with him in future; nor with his protégée, the offspring of Hitler’s daughter.

Then came Maitre Paul’s shaky signature.

Though there was no mention of Monica in Maitre Paul’s letter, there was much about Mel, seen as a new threat, spearhead of a movement which will thrive on her inheritance. Late in life, though the confidante of Speer, Goebbels, and Hitler himself in his last mad days of illness and collapse, Maitre Paul had not wished to die branded with their names or their cause.

Had she told Jennifer Devant all this while I travelled across the Channel, assuming my visit would come as a surprise?

Again it was impossible to tell. But here I was, straightening the tiny, crumpled body, hearing the sirens on the road below.

And here came the maid. La Bonne, in her frilly apron and shiny, cheap black stockings and skirt. She stopped when she reached my side, at the entrance to the flat, and she stared down at the dead body of Maitre Paul.

I am not accustomed to hitting people. I picked up my knapsack from the floor and brought it down on her head.

I undressed the charming young bonne and I donned her frilly cap. Pushing my own clothes into my haversack with some difficulty, I put on her skirt and her black sateen blouse.

My guide books to France had served as excellent weapons. I had stolen them quite brazenly from the Avondale Club library (two volumes of the meanderings of Augustus Hare in the early years of the century). I pushed the heavy haversack into a rubbish bag and stepped over the bodies of Maitre Paul and the servant in order to make my way from the narrow hall onto the landing of the Hotel Danube.

I knew where I had to go. The heading on Peter Müller’s abusive return note to the lawyer had given me the department in Southern France.

I counted on Augustus Hare to do the rest, for there was certainly no time to buy modern guides and maps, with both the police and the Muller gang on my tail. I would have to count on the unchanging character of rural France: somehow, while
disregarding instructions to “take a chaise” or “enjoy for one franc the excellent fare at this auberge or that.”

I must get to the village, maybe the fortified chateau, where Mel is, I am convinced, incarcerated, and waiting for the final day.

I haven’t had time to reflect on the “European Disunion” to which Muller briefly alluded in his blackmailing missive to Maitre Paul. I wonder if there might not be some connection with the coming elections to the European Parliament?

The date given in the letter, while being obviously familiar by reason of its being the birth date of Adolf Hitler, also rings another obscure bell with me.

At that point I could not ponder this, any more than I could dwell on fugitive memories somehow connected with the mysterious numbers to which Monica piteously referred in her last cry of help to me.

It is a race against time. I forced myself to go at a steady pace down the corkscrew staircase of the hotel, mop and bin bag in one hand, dustpan and brush tucked under my arm in readiness for a necessary stooping pose in the foyer, should the
gendarmerie
of the
7ème arrondissement
rush in as I descended.

I thanked my Maker for the calm and presence of mind with which I have been blessed since birth (though intelligence, prudence, and an excellent education have also been constituents of my “unflappable” nature).

An old woman sat at the desk of the Hotel Danube. She stared vacantly at me before returning to the magazine open on her knee. I looked to right and left and then froze in my tracks.

On my right, here came the
gendarmerie
. Police sirens sounded in the nearest main thoroughfare to the Rue Danube. The hotel was clearly their destination: they charged along the Rue Danube as if there were no other habitations in the miserable thoroughfare at all.

On my left, where the unimportant road crosses another within a hundred yards of the hotel entrance, a group of men in business attire walked purposefully along, led by Peter Müller.

He made no effort whatsoever to conceal his identity. His fair hair, which appeared to have grown more luxuriant since the glimpse I caught of him in the fast car in Banesbury Road, brushed the collar of an English tweed overcoat of an expensive cut. A brown trilby sat at an angle on his head.

What was I to do?

I dislike to draw any parallel between the workings of the intellect of a superior member of the human race such as myself (a woman in her prime, highly qualified) and a man engaged in the business of indulging in sexual relations.

However, I have read that, in order to postpone ejaculation, such a man learns to distract himself: to count, to conjugate
verbs, or whatever he prefers. Forcing myself to walk at an unconcerned pace down the narrow street was much like that process.

If I hurried, either the police or Muller and his colleagues would have me dead before I had reached the crossroads no more than fifty metres distant.

My first thoughts, in this effort at distraction, concentrated on the significance of uniform in the history of warfare, oppression, and occupation.

Life consists of an alternation between reflection and action: surely there is no better example than the innkeeper’s wife’s story in Diderot’s
Jacques le Fataliste
.

At this point, to my annoyance, I see that there is only one shop on the corner. I walk with casual indifference towards it. Behind me, the police storm into the Hotel. In front of the Hotel, the group assigned to relieve me of the “numbers” which will in turn release an unimaginable sum of money from the vaults of a Swiss bank, slow their pace and watch the police. They act like innocent bystanders, expensively dressed gentlemen of assorted nationalities out for a stroll, unpleasantly surprised by a raid on the neighbourhood hostelry.

Above the nineteenth-century facade of the shop on the corner, there is the word
Parfumerie
in Belle Epoche gilt. I had hoped for vegetable stands, or at the very least a
patisserie:
quickly overturning shelves bearing such goods can cause
enough mayhem to aid an escape, preferably into a waiting
camion
on the pavement of the intersecting street.

I was not so fortunate. Surely when the Germans marched into Paris, the effect of their tunic-clad uniforms must have inspired awe, instigating the necessity for surrender, which would not have been caused by a motley crowd—some poorly clothed, others in fine garments—all demanding the right to take over the city?

I walk into the
Parfumerie
. I feel the eyes of Muller and his “Europeans” on me.

I was fully aware, as I went along the street and into the delightful old-fashioned shop gleaming with glass phials of every conceivable fragrance, of the reason that no-one had attacked me yet.

I was in uniform—the uniform of a chambermaid—and the fact I walked sedately down the street, perhaps on an assignation, more probably to buy cleaning materials so badly needed for the much-neglected water closet at the Hotel Danube, caused neither comment nor alarm from Muller or the
gendarmerie
. To demonstrate more forcefully my role as a menial, I carried a large black rubbish bag. However, I made a mistake.

A chambermaid may walk about in the street, but she is not expected to go into an exclusive
parfumerie
in the heart of Paris’s
Rive Gauche
. She must content herself with the purchase of cheap perfumes, from the Galeries Lafayette or some
such department store. She may carry a rubbish bag—or, as it is inelegantly termed in Britain, a bin liner—but she certainly must not take this bag into an establishment which boasts that it has served discriminating tastes for more than a century.

Muller and his men followed me in.

The lady standing behind the counter stares straight at me as I approach. I first feel her incredulity: how did this middle-aged chambermaid have the effrontery to enter her shop? Then I feel her anger: she summons her voice to enquire in a steely tone if I have mistaken the address. She indicates a humble haberdasher’s visible halfway down the street. Her arm shoots out as she speaks.

I am reminded of the Nazi salute. I stumble, my hand sweeping across the counter.

The bottles break. The samples, with their grotesquely large spray attachments and fraying rubber, suggest ancient afternoons of passion ignited and then quenched in clouds of “Joy” and “
Sous le Vent
” and “Jicky”—names dancing up at me from the glass containers.

The shop proprietor comes out from the back room. A short, stocky man, he sees the police as they run into the Hotel Danube.

I fall to my knees. One last large chartreuse bottle smashes on the tiles.

Muller and his men stop behind me. I hear them fidget and cough.

The proprietor runs past my prone form to the door, pushing past them to catch the
gendarmes
.

The fragrance—so strong that it overwhelms even the assistant still paralysed behind the counter—sweeps across the airless space that is the
Parfumerie
, provoking a sense of renewal, of winter followed by the first shoots of spring. Wild iris roots, the smell of Monet’s garden, flowers young and rain-drenched that hold within them the seeds of their own decay. The scent is
Après l’Ondée
, the scent that dominates Maitre Paul’s claustrophobic apartment in the Hotel Danube. Her murderers hold back, fearing a trick, an arrest, unconsciously reminded of their most recent evil deed.

And while they stand there, I crawl along the far side of the mahogany late Empire
vitrine
and into the back room.

I shed my uniform and extract my haversack from the black rubbish bag.

Next: an eminently respectable Scottish lady walks briskly down the street behind the
Parfumerie
and enters a haberdashery shop.

Both police and Muller’s men race past me, as I deliberate between one type of thread and another. My hands, I am happy to note, are steady enough to experiment with threading a needle. For good luck, I purchase a charming little thimble, probably late eighteenth century, from the collection of the Marquise de Crécy. In any case, it is enamel, with a motif of forget-me-nots around the base.

They said I looked like a baby. So innocent. Hitler loved the look of youth around him. I was a flaxen-haired Brunhilde with a swastika brooch pinned to my bosom… and they were all so kind to me, though it took days to appease him at Berchtesgaden after the English were so rude about us. .
.