Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 (30 page)

From
The Devil Drives: The Life of Lou Villars

BY
NATHALIE DUNOIS

Chapter Eleven: A Deadly Duo

 

COUNTLESS ACCOUNTS HAVE
tracked the careers of murderers and thieves who might have gone to their graves with clean hands, had fate not thrown them together with the one person who could awaken the fiend inside them. Often serial killers prowl their corpse-strewn landscapes in pairs, the strong and the weak, the merciful and the merciless, each playing the agreed-upon role, sometimes trading off. The result is like a laboratory experiment gone hideously awry, an explosion set off by an accidental mixing of chemicals, volatile and deadly, but only in combination.

That was what happened when Lou Villars fell in love with Inge Wallser. No one can say for certain whether Lou would have done what she did without Inge. But the reports of people who knew them at the time, and of those Lou met later, suggest that the lovers were energized by a sense of themselves as an outlaw couple, desperados on a crime spree that would leave Europe in ruins.

This was not what they said aloud. Out loud they were helping their countries.

The spring of 1938 was the sunniest season in Lou's life. The warm weather arrived early. Pollen blew in on the breezes that rattled the plane trees and covered the pavement with pearlescent chartreuse dust. Overnight, the daffodils and forget-me-nots bloomed, followed, hours later, by purple drifts of Siberian iris. When no one was looking, Lou knelt to admire the red tracery on the yellow tulips in the park. Who had given the flowers these capillaries filled with blood? What inspired artist had selected the pink of the apple blossoms, the scarlet of the poppies? Armand would have said that God painted the tulips, but Armand was dead. Did he wonder, at the last minute, why a merciful Christian God had sent a Bolshevik Jew to shoot him? Armand believed in martyrs. Was he surprised to become one?

Everywhere lovers kissed and embraced. But their shameless self-display no longer irritated Lou. She too was in love. It was all the sweeter that her love involved a hidden intrigue. She and Inge shared important secrets. The thought of what they alone knew made life seem doubly delicious.

Inge stayed for long weekends and sometimes into the week. The Germans paid Lou enough to hire an assistant, Marcel, whom she'd known at the track. Competent and incurious, he was ideally qualified to take over the garage when Lou was away.

Lou and Inge traveled in the restored Rossignol sedan that Lou had bought from Didi at a discount, though it annoyed her that, after the sacrifices she'd made, her former employer had the nerve to charge her for a wreck. She and Didi had embraced at Armand's memorial service, even as the baroness pretended not to see her.

Sometimes Lou and Inge drove to distant parts of France. In July, they watched the Grand Prix from their hotel room near Lyons. How could Lou have minded not competing in the race when she was struggling to catch her breath between Inge's kisses?

In the past, Lou had never let anyone drive her car. But she let Inge take the wheel, a gesture of trusting surrender, intoxicating and naughty. Inge drove too fast, and the formerly safety-conscious Lou began to do the same. Once Lou ran over a duck; once Inge struck a goose. Both times they took out some cash and weighed the bills down with a stone beside the mangled poultry. Once a low-flying guinea hen nearly hit them. It was hilarious, really! A bird had tried to kill them, but they survived because they'd been chosen for the destiny they were fulfilling.

Every new experience brought them closer. The game they played for the Germans heightened their pleasure in being together. Their happiness was infectious. Around them, women who might have been jealous of their love convinced themselves that their own hard lives were easier, their chilly marriages warmer. They were often shocked to go home to discover the same old grumpy husband instead of the doting prince they'd imagined. It was thrilling to ferret out vital information that friends, acquaintances, and strangers vied to confide in two good-time girls: a couple of glamorous lady auto racers who appeared one day and vanished the next, in a fancy car.

Everywhere they went, Lou knew women she'd met when she'd lectured the sports clubs. Everyone was delighted to see her, even former lovers, who gracefully withdrew when they sensed the strength of the bond between Lou and Inge. Their arrival was like the circus coming to town. These bored provincial Emma Bovarys could enjoy themselves and have fun, even though, in their regular lives, fun was scarce or nonexistent.

In the bars and cafés, Inge bought round after round. No one seemed bothered by the fact that a German had all the money. Actually, they liked the idea, and with every beer Inge bought, Lou's old and new friends felt more secure that a war with Germany was unlikely.

Lou and Inge's passion
proved
that the two nations could coexist. These visits became a currency that the local women could spend after Lou and Inge left, and the talk turned, as it often did, to the threat of war. There was not going to be a war, except in the minds of their paranoid leaders. And the women had proof: the relaxed and enjoyable evening they'd spent with a celebrity racer from Paris and her famous German friend.

While they spoke to these women, Lou and Inge conducted a parallel conversation in glances. Who would ask the first casual question? Who would follow up with another? They felt like a pair of historic swindlers from the glorious annals of crime. The confidences they won and betrayed had a noble purpose, a selfless goal. Their playful little con games would forge a lasting peace and begin the hard work of making France as healthy as her next-door neighbor.

The electricity between Lou and Inge lasted long after the parties ended and they were back in their hotel room. They went over what they'd learned, the information they'd gathered. It was like counting stolen loot. Theirs was a bandit romance.

It was amazing, how much people would say, and how rapidly Lou learned to interpret and evaluate tidbits of gossip. The women had husbands, and the husbands talked, and the wives wanted something interesting to add to the conversation. The wife of the man who manufactured truck tires remarked that she hadn't seen her husband for months, he had so many orders to fill. A woman confided that she was making pocket money bringing sandwiches to the workers building additional landing strips at an airfield nearby.

The universe seemed to
want
them to know certain things. When Lou took a detour near the Normandy coast, they were stopped on the highway by a soldier, beyond whom they glimpsed a traffic jam of tanks and military vehicles. Once they were sunning themselves on the beach near Caen and Inge said, “Look, out there!”

“Where?” said Lou.

“There,” Inge said. “It's a submarine. Poking out of the water.”

Lou wasn't sure she saw it, but she agreed that she did, and the submarine went into the suede-bound notebook that Inge carried everywhere. A girl in Alsace told them that her boyfriend's hunting club was called out on a secret mission, to shoot all the carrier pigeons trained by the communications squad of the local army regiment. The pigeons had finally been replaced with radio and telegraph, and it was feared that the homeless, unemployed birds would betray the squadron's location.

Taking turns, like a loving couple, Lou and Inge described how the pigeons shit on the athletes at the Berlin Games. The Alsatian girl laughed. Imagine that! They'd been to the Olympics!

For the Alsatian girl's boyfriend, it was a hunter's dream. The girl wrinkled her nose. Feathers and blood and death. But here was the punch line: the radio and telegraph didn't work, and it was too late to fix it. All the carrier pigeons were dead. And the funniest part was: the communications system along the segment of the French line of defense ran on electricity from the German side of the border! By that point the French were glad that the pigeons were dead, so they couldn't carry information about this unfortunate situation.

To mark their six-month anniversary, Inge brought Lou an expensive Leica camera that, Inge said, might prove useful in their work. Lou said she wanted to practice taking pictures on her own. She was ashamed to let Inge know that she had no idea how to use it.

Inge also gave Lou a silver cigarette lighter: elegant, slim, old fashioned, engraved with Lou's initials.

After Inge left, Lou went to see her old friend Gabor Tsenyi, who had gotten rich and famous, partly thanks to his portrait of Lou and Arlette. But this old debt meant nothing to him. When Lou asked to see certain photographs and suggested he might give her some pointers on photography—lessons for which she was willing to pay—he practically kicked her out of his studio. What was Gabor's problem? His problem was not being French. A problem that would soon be solved, for him and many others, whether they liked it or not.

When Inge was in Germany, Lou worked diligently in the garage. But now she was cheerful and patient, with endless sympathy for her customers' concerns. Her business did better than it had when the garage was all she lived for. Now her secret life held her aloft, like Papa, just before he'd tried to teach her to swim by throwing her into a pond, from which she'd been rescued by her grandma just before she drowned. Or like Robert, before he let her drop to the ground.

Lou tried not to think about her brother. For a long time she let Inge believe that she was an only child, but one night, feeling especially close, Lou told her the whole story—and Inge wept real tears. Several times since then, Lou had mentioned Robert, but Inge changed the subject, looking bored and fretful in a way that made Lou reluctant to spoil an otherwise amicable conversation.

Once in a while she wished that she could tell someone what she and Inge were doing. How she could have brightened the worried faces around her, how she could have comforted her anxious French neighbors! She and Inge were making sure that their worst fantasies didn't come true. But for now it was essential to keep their mission secret.

Inge seemed pleased by the quality of the information they were gathering. And Lou was also satisfied, even when she judged herself by the standards she imagined had been set for her by the Führer. How much faith he had shown in her! What a sacred duty he had entrusted her with! Even when she was tired, the memory of that dinner made her feel rested and ready for whatever was required.

One brilliant autumn Saturday, Lou and Inge were driving through the Ardennes near the Belgian border.

Inge said, “Shakespeare's magic forest.”

Luckily, Lou was behind the wheel and could smile and nod without betraying the fact that she had no idea what Inge meant.

In a café halfway between Sedan and Longuyon, Inge and Lou had arranged to meet a middle-aged woman named Elise Becker, who had briefly been Lou's lover when Lou was the darling of the Northeastern Women's Sports Club.

Lou and Inge had worked out a system. They always arrived late, and they always called ahead and told the café owners to let their friends drink on their tab until they arrived. At first, some owners hesitated, but Inge made it worth their while. By the time Lou and Inge showed up, the women were so tipsy that no one had to waste time getting them into a state in which they would say things they ordinarily might keep quiet.

When Lou spotted Elise Becker sitting alone at the table in back, Lou tried to recall how long it had been since their brief affair. Surely less than two years. But how could Elise have so totally lost her looks since then? Nothing like an unhappy marriage to ruin a girl's complexion. Elise's face was pale and covered with blotches and welts. Lou searched for a memory of something, anything: a smell, a touch, a caress. But the nights she'd spent with Elise merged with so many others, and the effort to retrieve it made Lou feel irritable and guilty.

Lou and Inge had met with Elise twice in the last six months. Each time, Lou was saddened by how Elise had aged.

Elise looked up when they came in, overjoyed and puzzled by Lou's desire to see her again and to bring along her lovely German companion. Elise's husband, on whom she'd cheated with Lou, was in the cement, earth, and stonework business, with a special interest in sewers and excavations. She'd already dropped several intriguing hints about his new job, building some sort of fortification.

A nearly empty bottle of red wine sat on the table in front of Elise, and it seemed to Lou that the whites of her eyes were lightly stained pink. Elise half rose to kiss them, and then asked, as she had the last time, if she smelled like a latrine. She laughed a little hysterically when they assured her she didn't. The stench was in her house, her bed, her husband's clothes. Elise smelled it and tasted it no matter how often she did the laundry. All of her husband's business these days involved digging sewers and trenches. As always, before going out, she'd bathed three times, then doused herself in lavender water to kill the odor of Pascal's hands and breath.

As they sipped their drinks, white wine for Inge, whiskey neat for Lou, Elise reported on her husband's latest business misadventure. He'd been hired to dig the latrines and sewer lines for the Maginot Line, the French border fortifications. He'd calculated the mileage, then ordered supplies and hired workers based on his calculations. He'd been surprised and, frankly, put out to find himself with tons of extra cement, dozens of shovels and unemployed laborers, lazy bastards who expected to get paid for doing nothing.

The government had decided to end the defense line at Sedan and to rely for protection on the dense Ardennes forest. Not only was this foolish, and, speaking personally, bad for business, not only had Pascal been left with idle workers and unusable cement, but the idiots in Paris were leaving the country undefended. And how had Elise's husband reacted? As he did to all business setbacks. He got drunk and beat Elise.

Elise was crying so pitifully that Lou wanted to console her. But she didn't know how, and besides, it would have angered Inge if Lou had somehow caused Elise to stop talking. None of this was her fault. Why should she feel responsible and ashamed? Then she saw Inge's look of exultation. This was news that the fellows back home would be pleased to hear!