Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 (37 page)

From
A Baroness by Night

BY
LILY DE ROSSIGNOL

ONE EVENING, DIDI
came home early from the showroom and filled a wine goblet with whiskey, which by then was hard to obtain, regardless of the fortune one was willing to pay. I asked him what the matter was. He watched himself drink in the mirror.

He said, “Guess who came in today.”

I said, “I can't imagine.”

He said, “Jean-Claude Bonnet.”

I asked what Bonnet wanted. Didi said he was shopping for a car.

“That's too bad,” I said.

“Guess who was with him,” Didi said.

“Heydrich?” I said. “Göring? Hitler?”

“Very funny,” Didi said. “Lou Villars.”

“How is dear Lou?” Her name would have upset me even if I weren't hearing it in the context of her having visited the showroom with the minister of information, a well-known toady and mouthpiece for the Nazis.

I felt guilty for having put Lou out to pasture when she was no longer useful to the Rossignols. Later I tried not to feel responsible for the crimes she committed after she worked for us.
After,
not
because
. Not
as a result
. Lou would have done the same things whether or not we'd fired her. Or anyway, that's what I told myself when I learned what she did.

I asked Didi if Lou was working for Bonnet. It seemed unlikely that they would be friends.

“She knows about cars,” said Didi. “Bonnet brought her along. She liked Bonnet knowing that she knew the head of the firm, and she liked me knowing that she knew Bonnet.”

I asked, “So is Bonnet buying a car?”

Didi mumbled something.

I said, “Tell me you didn't just say that he's buying Armand's sedan.”

“We need the money,” Didi said. “Anyway, I'm not selling it to Bonnet. I'm selling it to Lou. She loved him.”

 

M
INISTER
S
URVIVES
F
ATAL
A
UTO
C
RASH

T
OURS
. A
PRIL
14, 1942

Information Minister Jean-Claude Bonnet was injured yesterday in a one-car accident in which a female companion was killed.

The minister lost control of his Rossignol sedan on a winding road alongside the bank of the Loire. According to eyewitnesses, the car failed to brake at a curve, but sped up, became airborne, and landed in the river. Ejected before the car sank, the minister suffered serious injuries from which he is expected to recover. His companion, the German racing star Inge Wallser, died on her way to the hospital. Mlle. Wallser's funeral service will be held in Berlin.

Given the injured man's position, sabotage cannot be ruled out. The authorities have ordered a thorough investigation.

 

The yellowed scrap of newsprint still exists among my possessions. It is among the few surviving documents from an era when messages were destroyed as soon as one read them, when the price of sentimental hoarding could be death. Fortunately, that item had been written in the most secret of codes, which is to say the most public: notices in the papers, accident reports, and funeral notices that at that time meant something different to us than they would to someone today. They were the newsprint equivalent of the communiqués coded into the personals on the French-language BBC broadcasts.

Among the encrypted items were the daily reports of the suicides. Death by reaching one's boiling point. Death by one insult too many. Many people just vanished, leaving nothing but gossip and rumor. The papers also carried announcements of “official” executions. We reread these obsessively, though at that point most of the Resistants shot by the Germans were younger and more left-wing than the people I knew. Later this would change, though by then the aliases by which I'd called the victims were only rarely the names printed in the papers.

Finally, there were the items like the one about Bonnet's accident. Obituaries of a strange sort: notices of deaths that hadn't yet occurred. Didi and I both knew whose death was being announced when I read him the item about the fatal accident involving Inge Wallser.

During the Occupation, we learned to live with fear and humiliation, anger and insults, the witnessing of horrific scenes one could hardly believe were real. We learned to behave as if this were normal life. People still fell in and out of love, made enemies and friends, went to work, slept and woke the next morning to enjoy a few blessed moments of calm before we remembered the world which we were about to reenter.

Rossignol Motors continued to produce luxury sedans long after the other automobile factories had been seized by the Germans or bombed into rubble. I've often wondered why this was so. I've decided that every German boy, every French and British boy, even some American boys had grown up dreaming of driving a Rossignol. They didn't see why this dream should end just because of a war. We were spared for the same reason that Hitler spared Paris. Why would you destroy something that you longed to possess?

Didi was permitted to go on working even after he made it clear that he would not divert his efforts, as so many of his colleagues and competitors had, into producing vehicles for the German war machine. Apparently Didi told quite a few people, though I was not among them, that if his hand were forced, he preferred suicide to treason. Even the half-witted Germans understood and believed him. Let them make their own Rossignols if they wanted to take control of the firm.

Meanwhile they manipulated the currencies until only powerful Germans and celebrity collaborators could afford our cars. The official policy of the Reich was that their political and military leaders were expected to drive a Mercedes. But nothing prevented them from buying an expensive gift for a girlfriend or boyfriend. They could spend pleasant weekends driving through the countryside with gasoline coupons unavailable to the French.

Didi hated the Germans more each day. But there was, as I've said, the problem of our workers. In addition, my husband believed that he was preserving something French that would survive after the Huns had departed. When a sale was in progress, I offered to accompany Didi to the showroom and to use whatever charm or humor I had to lighten the tension and gloom. He refused to bring me along. He said there was no telling how these transactions would be viewed after the war.

On the evening that the item about Inge's death appeared in the paper, Didi and I were at home, reading in front of the fire. This would have been a rare event before the Occupation, when there were always parties, and we left the house in different directions. Before the war Didi had spent his evenings chasing Swedish boys, while I chased artists. I'd fallen in love—or what I imagined was love—with some of the most dazzling talents in Paris. The most serious of my imaginary romances was with Gabor Tsenyi.

But all that had ended. The Swedish boys had gone home, and it had long since become clear that Gabor and I would never be more than friends. My husband and I loved each other, as we had from that night we drove down from the Hollywood Hills. My affair with the driver, Frank, had been sweet, but he had returned to Italy to wait for the Allies to invade. Some people swore that the social life had never been more fun. But it no longer mattered to us. That sort of fun was over.

With the present so full of fears, and the future an abyss, Didi and I took comfort in talking about the past.
Our
past. It calmed us to recall that gauzy dream of youth and pleasure, regardless of how the gauze had been shredded by discord and misunderstanding. We would say, Remember Hollywood, and it was as if we were watching a film of a young couple in a sports car on a winding road, leaving a party at Douglas Fairbanks's mansion. Sometimes we would congratulate ourselves, marveling that a husband and wife could have gone through as much as we did, stayed together as long as we had, and arrived at a feeling that was love. Pure love. As we reminisced, or just sat there in companionable silence, a new tenderness sprang up between us. We made jokes and laughed. Didi was always funny, but he had stopped trying with me.

I'd tell myself, Enjoy this, Lily. Enjoy it as long as you can. It seemed almost indecent to be finding domestic harmony in the depths of a ferocious war and a heartless Occupation. Money, social position, and beautiful cars had so far spared us the worst. And whom would it have helped if we'd started suffering before we had to? Grief would find us when it wanted, which would be soon enough. For a while, I'm embarrassed to say, the war was good for my marriage.

After I read the newspaper item aloud, Didi said, “What a pity.” His dear face, normally so pink, had turned chalky, as if brushed by a killing frost. “Armand's car was in such good condition.”

I'd always thought he should never have sold it to Bonnet.

I said, “Poor Little Inge. How we despised her for winning Montverre. All that seems so silly now:
everything
depending on whether a driver,
our
driver, was allowed to compete in a race.” Those memories brought us closer. When Didi and I said
we
and
our,
we were including Armand. By then I'd resigned myself to the fact that Didi might never recover from his brother's death.

My husband found despair liberating; it loosened his ties to the world. He enjoyed being with me, but he would have been just as content to give up and join Armand.

I have never known if Bonnet's accident was deliberately engineered by my husband. The possibility might not have occurred to me if I hadn't seen something—a
flicker
of something—on Didi's face when I read him the notice.
Had
there been a problem with the car? Had Didi reached his limit, dealing with the Germans? Was my husband a saboteur, a one-man Resistance cell? It's my opinion that he was, but I will never know. However strong my curiosity, it was better not to ask. It was less risky to keep loved ones in the dark, and Didi and I had plenty of practice, keeping secrets.

When that story appeared in the newspaper, I knew the honeymoon was over. That is, our second honeymoon, happier than the first. I begged Didi to go away with me, to Portugal or Morocco. We had the money and the connections to travel wherever we wanted. But Didi was determined to stay in Paris. His cars were here. His brother was buried here. He would never change his mind.

 

I am thankful that, so near the end, Didi and I discovered what it meant to have a long and, in our own way, happy marriage. We knew things about each other that no one else could understand. I looked at Didi and saw the total of everything he had been through, the handsome French boy in Hollywood, the heir, the successful manufacturer, the troubled brother of the troubled brother. I knew that this would end badly. But it is a tribute to Didi, to his courage and grace, that I never predicted what the consequences would be until I read about Bonnet's accident. And even then I wasn't sure.

Still, I was constantly worried. When he left the house for work, I'd say, “Have a safe trip!” It must have seemed odd, considering that he was only going a few blocks away. I meant it as a magic spell, an incantation to keep him from harm. But I knew that no prayer of mine, however heartfelt, would save him.

One morning, not long after the newspaper item appeared, Didi left for the showroom.

“Have a safe trip,” I said.

Seconds after the door closed, there was a crackle of shots. I ran outside to find Didi bleeding, fallen across our front steps. I told the servants to move him—gently! gently!—inside. It was probably the wrong thing to do. Only when I picked up the phone did I recall that our Jewish physician had been deported. I phoned the American hospital and asked them to send a doctor at once.

My calmness took its toll. Even now, I cannot write about that morning without a torrent of tears.

I knew the doctor from somewhere. He seemed to recognize me too. He was young. Homosexual. Was he one of Didi's friends? He was nicer than Didi's friends. He was tall, handsome, and dark. A regular Rudolph Valentino. Not at all Didi's type.

Eventually I placed him. He was a friend of Suzanne's. We'd met at that party, lifetimes ago, when Suzanne took off her clothes. Gabor had taken his portrait, together with his lover, both of them masked, naked, painted silver, and adorned with peacock feathers. For some reason Gabor had refused to sell me a print.

I thought this when I
could
think again, when I was able to hear distinct, if disconnected, words. The doctor was saying he was sorry. Sorry for my loss. I asked if my moving Didi inside had hastened his death. The doctor said, No, it hadn't. Nothing could have saved him or hurt him more. Then the doctor—Ricardo—lowered his voice and said something I wasn't sure I'd heard. What I
thought
I heard was that I could contact him at the clinic if I wanted to
do something
about my husband's death.

What did he mean by
do something
? I would soon find out. But not before I had gone through the ordeal of burying the dead at a time when even the wood for coffins was rationed and funeral permits had to be purchased with promises and bribes. So many were dying, why should anyone care about a middle-aged auto manufacturer? I had to offer a certain bureaucrat a Rossignol sedan in exchange for a permit, a devil's bargain that history saved me from having to keep.

There will always be those who venerate the rich, people to whom the wealthy are heroes by virtue of having money. Though everyone knew that Didi had been assassinated by the Germans in reprisal for something he may or may not have done to Jean-Claude Bonnet, he was buried with pomp and ceremony in the family vault in Père Lachaise, beside poor Armand, and next to the mother who was lucky not to have lived to see both sons die violent deaths.