Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 (43 page)

From
A Baroness by Night

BY
LILY DE ROSSIGNOL

THE PHONE ONLY
worked intermittently and was probably tapped. For the first time since I'd left Hollywood, people arrived unannounced. Before the Occupation no civilized French person would do that. It was such a social taboo, I can recall the exceptions: once, drunk at midnight, Gabor Tsenyi and Lionel Maine threw pebbles at my window—and were turned away. And then there was that evening when I visited Gabor, and he gave me my portrait, and we had our little misunderstanding.

But during the war, at all hours and in every sort of weather, people knocked and were admitted. I never asked how they got there or how they planned to get home, though the house in which I was living was a twenty-minute drive from Paris.

Late one night, Suzanne Dunois showed up at my door.

She was active, as was I, in the anti-Nazi cause. I would never have imagined that Gabor's little friend would become one of my most trusted contacts. I'd thought of her as a silly girl with a pretty body. I'd never wanted to know what she thought of me: a bossy, rich, older woman with designs on her boyfriend. But by then, the fact that two comrades in arms had once been in love with the same man, and that one of them had won—all that was too insignificant to consider. Our history had been wiped clean, or almost clean, by the history around us.

Suzanne told me she knew a woman who needed to leave the country. It was already too late to risk the usual escape routes. They needed me to drive her across the Spanish border.

I asked who it was. Suzanne couldn't say. Did I know her? The maddening girl couldn't tell me that, either. But fine, yes, she could say that much. Yes, she thought I knew her. I offered Suzanne a glass of wine. Perhaps a drop of brandy? She said, Just water, please. Since we'd come back from the south, she'd had so little alcohol that one sip would go straight to her head.

That was typical of what still annoyed me about Suzanne, regardless of how much the war had done to change my opinion. A certain self-righteous quality, earnest, even pious. Holier than thou. But that too was the sort of thing which was no longer supposed to matter.

“One sip?” I said. “Remarkable. I envy you, I do.”

Suzanne said, “Gabor sends his regards.”

Later Gabor would claim that he too aided the Resistance. But as far as I knew then, he was mostly spending his time with Picasso and other celebrity artists, photographing their studios in Paris and in the provinces, where they waited out the war. The images he made during those years were not his best work, though there are some first-rate portraits he took in the process of shooting photos that were used for fake documents and passports.

Had Suzanne meant to hurt me by mentioning him? I hadn't seen Gabor in a while. I asked how he was doing. Suzanne said he was fine, though he was worried about a friend. I said, Gabor is always worried. Suzanne pouted, like a child. She said he had reason to worry. There had been an “incident” at the Chameleon Club, earlier that evening. That was how I knew that Yvonne was the woman who needed to be driven across the border.

I said, “It's a good thing I like to drive.”

I'd always admired Yvonne. Some of my most amusing evenings had been spent at her club. Sentiment overcame me, a longing for the days when Gabor and I scanned the dance floor for clues to the mystery of sex and for photographic subjects. I'd been disappointed when Yvonne let Arlette perform her repulsive routines. But they had helped save the club, where a lot of good was done, in secret, for our cause.

I would have done anything for Yvonne. I adored the idea of rescuing her, regardless of the risk. I didn't adore the idea of being caught and taken prisoner. But I had cyanide capsules. And except for the awfulness of knowing that one's corpse will turn that vile unflattering blue, poison wasn't the worst way to go. That was how I'd been thinking ever since Didi's death. Unhappiness was a great advantage in my Resistance work. Nothing fuels bravery more than the lack of the will to live. I'd come to understand why Didi, mourning Armand, had sabotaged Bonnet's brakes.

Yvonne and I were instructed to travel as many hours a day as we could, respecting local curfews. Suzanne gave us convincingly authentic coupons for gas, which I hadn't been able to get since Didi's death. Given the danger and the seriousness of the mission, I had to repress a shiver of pleasure when I realized I could once again fill up the Juno-Diane and take it on out for a spin.

If I got tired, we were to pull over and hide the car as best we could and sleep by the side of the road. Hotels might have Yvonne's picture. If we were stopped, we should say that Yvonne was a naturalized Swiss citizen of Brazilian-Hungarian descent. Her mother was dying in Rio. She was booked on a boat from Lisbon. She had the necessary papers, including one stamped with the seal of a German admiral who had once been a personal friend.

Suzanne gave me a bottle of pills. She said they were for courage. Nazi drugs the Luftwaffe pilots took to stay awake. For years we'd been hearing about these drugs. They were legendary in our circle. I didn't ask where they'd come from. I assumed from Ricardo.

Later, when I learned that Suzanne was arrested on the night we left, I felt not only guilty but
morally unclean
to think that, while she was being tortured, Yvonne and I were having the time of our lives! I do remember noticing that Suzanne looked stricken as she watched us drive off. For a moment, I considered turning around and asking her to come with us. Though it would have been crowded in the Juno-Diane.

For the first half hour Yvonne kept her eyes closed. I thought,
This
could be a long ride. But after I persuaded her to take one of the pills, she became much friendlier and eventually quite chatty.

We had plenty to talk about. We talked about everything, really. Yvonne's childhood, raising ducks, delivering babies. The grateful new father who paid her way to Paris because she'd saved his child. Anecdotes from the early days of the Chameleon Club. How she'd wanted to be
interesting
, wearing red and keeping pet lizards.

I told her all about Didi, how we met and how he died. She said she was sorry. She'd known some but not all of the story. Her opinion was that Didi had meant to kill Bonnet, which made him a hero. After decades at the Chameleon, Yvonne didn't have to be convinced that Didi and I loved one another as much as any “ordinary” married couple.

I'm not sure why we avoided the subject of our mutual friend Gabor. Nor did I feel I could ask Yvonne why she'd let Arlette sing those wicked songs. Didi had done business with Germans. None of us were clean. I believed, or chose to believe, that not one Jew had been killed because of a luxury sedan, or a song-and-dance routine performed by a lesbian couple dressed as a sailor and a mermaid.

Neither Yvonne nor I had forgotten what had happened to the millions of innocent people who'd been less lucky than we were. We were nervous but fatalistic. We would see what happened. The pills gave us stamina, courage, and hope, which (along with luck) was all we needed.

We flirted and giggled our way through the roadblocks and checkpoints. The guards believed our story. Two attractive middle-aged women, a dying mother, a boat waiting to take the grieving daughter home to Brazil. When she had to, Yvonne looked devastated, which was probably how she felt.

Several times they made us get out so they could admire the car. They walked around it gingerly, as if it were a bomb that might explode. I understand what sort of men they were, these German oppressors, these traitors to the French people. But it is a testament to human decency and civilization that none of them acted on the impulse to shoot us and steal the car.

The weather was good, the road empty except for the convoys of soldiers who honked their horns and whistled at us, or the car, as we passed.

The car ran like a dream. Thank you, Didi. Thank you, Armand. We stayed awake the whole time. The curfews didn't seem to apply to us. No one stopped us for driving at night. The gods were on our side.

This is what I'd been missing! A friend and a bottle of Nazi bomber pills. If only Yvonne and I could have been friends before. I realized those were different times, and we were different people.

Yvonne described the scene with Lou, Bonnet, Arlette, and Chanac in the club. The story went back so far and had so many subplots that it got us all the way to Limoges. There a garage staffed by Resistants checked out the car, gave us food, and even collected a few of our phony petrol coupons.

One night, in a pensive mood, Yvonne said she hated thinking she'd lost her club and might die because of a birthmark on the ass of a tone-deaf, gold-digging slut. I told Yvonne she wasn't going to die. Not now. That was the point. Yvonne said she hoped not. A giant rabbit hopped into the road, caught my headlights, and froze. I swerved and missed it. We laughed until I could hardly see to drive.

We talked about the war. About the scenes we'd witnessed and couldn't get out of our minds. I told Yvonne how much I admired her for kicking Lou out of her club. Lou Villars was the devil, and so were all her friends. By then all Paris knew what Lou was doing for the Gestapo. But more time would have to pass before historians confirmed the rumor connecting her with the breach of the Maginot Line.

Yvonne said, What a coincidence that Lou had worked for us both! She wondered what had poisoned the heart and mind of that poor girl who only wanted to dress like a boy and find someone to love her. Neither of us blamed ourselves. Why should we? It wasn't our fault.

I wish our conversation could have been recorded. I found it intensely interesting: the jabbering of two women high on Nazi amphetamines and the prospect of freedom. But maybe it would have sounded like those tedious postwar novels about beatnik road trips through the American West.

We talked about Adam and Eve and the Serpent. About the possibility of counting the stars in the sky. About what Jesus meant when he said the poor would always be with us. About politics, economics, love and sex, about the afterlife.

Sometimes we'd be struck silent by the sight of a bombed-out farmhouse. Then one of us would say, The Allies are going to win. The other would say she hoped so. Until the sunshine and the fresh country air, together with the pills, convinced us that the Allies were on their way to save us. We just had to get out of France for a while. We'd soon be back in Paris.

I asked Yvonne if she still sang. She said, No. Never. Not for years. Not even when she was alone. She'd traded her voice for a cigarette, a drink, for anything that promised to help her feel less alone and worry less about the club. It would hurt to hear how she sounded now. The pain of it would kill her.

I said, “Fine. Take another pill and think about it again.”

Outside Bordeaux, she turned away from me, turned her face toward the window. At first I thought she might be crying. But then she began to sing.

Her voice was throatier than when she'd sung in the club. Rougher and sadder, but beautiful. More beautiful, in a way.

I was afraid that she would stop. How strange that this should scare me more than the chance that we might be captured and shot.

She sang,
I salted the waves with my tears. I begged the captain to let me sail with them until I found him beneath the water. None of them could make me believe I would never see him again, never feel the weight of his body or his arms around me. All night I heard the waves. We know where he is, they said. He is sleeping with us. Not with you.

Of course I thought of Gabor. Of being with him in the club. And all the time, all the days and years between now and then seemed not just lost but wasted. With one verse, Yvonne's ballad had dimmed the dazzle of the pills. Dark, unwelcome emotions began to creep back in.

Never again,
she sang.
You will never see him again
. She held the note.
Again
.

I knew I would never hear that song again, never sung that way again. I would never return to this moment. The grief I felt was unbearable. The pills were wearing off.

I said, “If I weren't driving I would give you a standing ovation.”

She said, “Thank you. That wasn't so bad. Now's the part where I welcome you to the Chameleon Club.”

“What happened to the baby?” I said.

“What baby?”

“The one you delivered, the infant whose father paid your way to Paris. The one you just told me about.”

Yvonne said, “Just told you? That was yesterday. These pills must be very strong.”

We each took a swig from the bottle of wine I'd grabbed from the remains of Didi's cellar.

“I have no idea,” said Yvonne. “What happened to the baby.”

Every so often we'd circle back to the subject of Lou. Yvonne said that when she'd been younger and fond of all that drama with her fortune-telling lizards and so forth, her chameleon predicted that Lou Villars would die a violent early death.

Yvonne said, “Let's hope so.”

We were laughing about that when I said, “See those mountains on the horizon? I think that's the Spanish border.”

Yvonne reached inside her purse.

Did she really mean to pay me? What did she think I was? Her hired chauffeur? I thought, She is Hungarian. Who understands them, really?

She handed me the bill. She said, “Look at it. Look at the face.”

I looked at it for as long as I could without driving off the road. I slowed down and looked harder. I said, “Who's the old guy with the eye patch and the long white hair?”

Yvonne said, “The guy who minted the money. It's my lucky charm. It's what got me this far. I have two of them, fifty-franc notes. And I want you to have one.”

I still have that bill among my possessions along with such cherished totems as the newspaper item about Bonnet's accident and the first print of Gabor Tsenyi's portrait of Lou and Arlette.