The Foundling's War (19 page)

‘You have to be an artist to notice that sort of thing,’ Madeleine said.

The husband of the woman with the fish-eyed stare decided it was time to speak.

‘Monsieur is a painter? I didn’t catch your name.’

‘Rhesús! Rhesús Infante!’

‘He means Jesús, of course,’ Palfy added, his eyes sparkling with pleasure at so much stupidity spread out before him.

‘No one is allowed to call himself Jesús!’ Madame Michette said indignantly. ‘It is … blasphemous.’

‘No’ allowed! No’ allowed!’ Jesús shouted, choking.

Jean saw Madeleine looking desperate. Her dinner was going downhill. He rushed to her rescue.

‘Madame Michette means that in the Auvergne it’s not customary. No one would call their son Jesús. Not even a bishop. But in Spain, and especially in Andalusia, Jesús is a familiar … presence, someone people talk to every day, to praise him, to curse him or pray to him. Is that right, Jesús?’

‘Is true.’

Nelly Tristan leant towards Jean a second time and whispered, ‘Don’t you find a woman who’s drunk disgusting?’

A servant was circulating constantly, a bottle in his hand, each time filling up her glass, which, as soon as it was full, she emptied. She was looking paler and paler. Her gaze shimmered with a general, directionless tenderness.

‘No,’ Jean said quietly.

‘I’m not talking about going to bed, I mean in a general way.’

These private exchanges were arousing the disquiet of a fat, fortyish man in a loud tie seated at the far end of the table. He was unable to hear Nelly’s words but appeared anxious to avoid the scene he felt was on the point of erupting. It came as a visible relief to him when Nelly stood up, pushed back her chair and, addressing Madeleine in an affected voice, said, ‘Where’s the little girls’ room, darling?’

The fortyish man stood up too and asked Madeleine to excuse him.

‘I’ll show her.’

‘As you like.’

He took Nelly’s arm and they left the dining room.

‘You know she’s amazingly talented!’ Madeleine said.

‘She is,’ Julius said, ‘and also very lucky to have a producer like Émile Duzan. He’s like a father to all his stars.’

‘All the same,’ Palfy said, ‘I rather think there’s an age when daddies stop taking their little girls to the toilet, and she’s past it.’

‘Very unhealthy curiosity, I call it!’ Madame Michette said. ‘Now my girls …’

She stopped and looked at Palfy, who smiled back with perfect sweetness, inviting her to go on.

‘You have many girls?’ Julius asked.

‘Quite a few!’ Madame Michette said, embarrassed.

‘I’m sure they’re ravishing!’ Oscar Dulonjé said unpleasantly.

‘That’s not for me to say!’ Madame Michette simpered. ‘All I can tell you is that they’re well brought up …’

The servants changed the plates and the butler carved a joint of roast beef whose arrival monopolised the guests’ attention for some time. A young man with a ferret-like profile who had been silent before grasped the opportunity to say a few words.

‘Did you know that the Schillertheater is coming to Paris next month? The French will finally have a chance to get to know Schiller.’

‘Indeed,’ Julius said, ‘that’s no bad thing. Schiller’s a European writer whose reputation has suffered – though no longer – from the disharmony between France and Germany. Alas, I hear they’re putting on
Kabale und Liebe
,
12
which is far from being one of his best plays. Franco-German relations deserve a little more care.’

Madame Michette helped herself shamelessly to three slices of roast beef, a liberty she would never have allowed herself at Zizi’s table, but in all this warmth and luxury and feeling of being with the right people she was losing her sense of proportion.

‘In return,’ the young man said, ‘you should do Claudel. Apparently he’s very good in German …’

‘I’ve never read Claudel,’ Julius said, ‘but I hear a lot of talk about him. He was a director of Gnome and Rhône,
13
which is working for our new Europe now, and a distinguished ambassador. The Comédie Française has a project it wants my help with. A very large number of costumes. In these times of restriction it’s not easy to lay one’s hands on the necessary fabric, but we’ll do our best. I think the play’s called
The Satin Slipper
…’

Nelly Tristan had just come back into the room with her producer, smiling happily, and pounced on the play’s name.

‘
The Satin Slipper!
It’s gorgeous. I’ve read it – it must be at least ten hours long. I love Claudel. I recited his ode to Marshal Pétain for
schoolchildren. Everyone cried. And there was a prayer that reminded me I was one of Mary’s children …’

Suddenly there occurred a miraculous moment, which captivated all the dinner guests as Nelly, whom they hardly knew and whom they looked down on with the bourgeois disdain proper towards actresses and kept women – and Nelly was both – as Nelly lowered her voice and in a tone of unexpected and pure emotion recited Claudel’s very beautiful prayer:

Nelly hiccuped and frowned.

‘Shit! I can’t remember the rest, but it’s really lovely. By the end I was crying too. It’s good that I’ve forgotten it, really, isn’t it? What’s this? Roast. Madeleine darling, we do stuff ourselves with you. I adore you, and Julius too. You know, if you and Julius weren’t having this big thing together, I’d be your girlfriend just like that …’

Émile Duzan was squirming on his chair, pink and embarrassed.

‘Listen, Nelly, just stop drinking, will you?’

‘Poor love, I’m making him uncomfortable. He’s such a sensitive flower.’

‘I like it when people are honest!’ Madame Michette said.

‘I’m flattered!’ Julius declared.

‘Me too!’ Madeleine added.

‘Can I have the mustard?’ the woman with the fish-eyed stare asked.

They gave her her mustard and she said no more for the rest of the evening, except as she was leaving, when she said goodbye and thank you in a tight-lipped way. The remaining guests wondered why she had been invited, and if she had even been aware of being at dinner
with other people, whose wandering conversation never actually appeared to reach her, even when her husband raised his voice to say, ‘My wife and I …’ The rest of the dinner passed off in the same way. Jesús had a spat with the ferret-faced young man when he expressed his scorn for modern painting, and Oscar Dulonjé and Émile Duzan discovered with equal emotion that both had joined the same political party on the same day, the party whose great objective was France’s entry into Hitler’s united Europe.

In the drawing room, where they returned after dinner, Palfy elaborated an interesting theory concerning the curfew and the rise in the birth rate, despite two million men being confined in stalags and oflags. Julius became embarrassed and attempted to change the subject several times; Palfy took no notice. Jean was probably the only guest to discern, behind his friend’s salacious speculations, the ironic and mischievous sense of humour he had cultivated in England during his brief period of splendour. As the hours went by Madame Michette became redder and redder, victim to the high blood pressure she suffered from every time she mixed white wine, claret, champagne and Alsatian cherry brandy. But that was what people had come for: to drink and eat and turn their back on daily hardships. They had drunk and they had eaten. Now their fear of missing the second-to-last Métro and the last connection was beginning to be all-pervasive; Nelly, who, having sobered up once, was well on the way to getting drunk again, provided the last event of the evening. She snagged her stocking, and it ran. Madeleine immediately brought her a new pair and, beneath the concupiscent gaze of the male guests, she hitched up her skirt and changed them. There was a glimpse of frothy white lace knickers, of the sort worn by French cancan dancers.

‘They’re a present from Émile!’ she said. ‘He likes them. It’s a fixation of his. There are worse ones.’

She had good legs. Oscar Dulonjé, forgetting politics for a moment, confessed that he found them ‘very shapely’.

‘Shapely?’ Nelly replied. ‘I trust your willy’s just as shapely, in that case.’

Émile Duzan coughed until he choked. Dulonjé blushed. Jesús had got to his feet, and people noticed that Fräulein Laura Bruckett, who had stayed in the background for most of the evening, had succeeded in attracting enough of his attention to have a fair chance of spending the night with him. Regulations forbade her gaze to linger on a Frenchman. As a Spaniard, Jesús had neutral status. Julius took Jean aside for a moment in the hall.

‘We must meet again. I’m sure you’re getting bored in that gallery of yours. And this La Garenne is a disreputable character. You’re a young man with a future. Europe needs new men. Your friend Palfy interests me a great deal.’

‘I’m not bored at the gallery,’ Jean said. ‘It’s a good place while I wait—’

‘Ah, you waiters! There’s a choice to be made. The workers who turn up at the eleventh hour won’t be the most welcome.’

After Julius, it was Madeleine’s turn to pull Jean into her bedroom. She had got a parcel ready for him, wrapped in pretty paper and tied with a gold ribbon.

‘You told me she has a little boy, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘How old is he?’

‘Four.’

‘They’re still sweet at that age. He must be going without a lot of things. I thought you could put this underneath his Christmas tree.’

Jean kissed Madeleine, who suddenly had tears in her eyes.

‘You can count on me,’ she said. ‘But I understand you’re reluctant … Julius is very good, very generous. He likes the French.’

Madeleine, once so suspicious, had discovered a world of good intentions.

‘I don’t doubt it. How does he know so many things about me, about all of us?’

‘Yes, it’s strange. He knows everything.’

They went back to the others, who were wrapping themselves in furs and scarves to face the freezing December night. A bicycle-taxi was waiting for Nelly and her producer. They separated at the Étoile: Palfy and Madame Michette were staying at a hotel in Avenue Victor-Hugo, Jesús, Jean and Laura got into the second-to-last carriage of the Métro.

Just before Concorde Jean said, ‘I’ll carry on to Châtelet. See you in the morning.’

‘You don’ ’ave to.’

But Jesús did not protest and got off, holding Laura’s arm.

The lights were out on Quai Saint-Michel. The concierge let him in after a peremptory ‘Who is it? Where are you going?’ Jean rang Claude’s bell and she opened the door, clutching the collar of a quilted dressing gown to her throat.

‘I’d given up waiting for you,’ she said.

He bent forward and kissed her cheek.

‘You’re freezing. I can’t light a fire, I haven’t got any more wood. Cyrille is sleeping with two jumpers. Do you want to sleep here?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve only got one spare blanket.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

He sat on the couch that had given him so many sleepless nights, listening to the city’s sounds, peering through the shutters for the dawn that would awaken a slumbering Paris.

‘Why didn’t you come?’

‘I was invited to dinner. Madeleine gave me this parcel to go under Cyrille’s Christmas tree.’

Claude sighed.

‘I felt so badly about not having anything to give him. Who is this good fairy?’

‘She’s not a fairy.’

Claude sat down next to him. He put his arms around her, squeezing
her with a strength that made her anxious.

‘We mustn’t leave each other any more,’ he said.

‘No. Not even for an evening.’

‘Not even for an evening.’

Claude shivered. Jean picked up the blanket and they wrapped it around themselves, huddled against each other. Just before drowsiness overcame them, Claude murmured, ‘You have nothing to fear from me.’

‘I hope so.’

Cyrille woke them at the crack of dawn.

‘Jean, Jean. Don’t you even take your coat off to sleep with Maman?’

How we would love to follow Madame Michette on one of her topsecret missions, and see her employing the most varied methods of propulsion to travel the highways and byways of occupied France! Never will she remind us more strongly of Madame Belazor, paramour of Pancrace Eusèbe Zéphyrin Brioché, alias Cosinus the scientist.
14
Palfy himself, like the scientist, does not leave Paris. From his hotel room in Avenue Victor-Hugo he directs his agent’s escapades, while she is driven on by the sheer force of her romantic folly. But the pursuit of Madame Michette would soon leave us breathless, and divert us too from our subject: the unconsummated, yet so perfect love that binds Jean Arnaud to Claude Chaminadze. All the reader need know, then, is that Madame Michette’s zeal will not falter and that Julius Kapermeister has promised that, by February or March 1941 at the latest, Sergeant-Major Michette is to be released and leave his camp in a contingent of fathers of large families. Does he not have eight industrious girls waiting at home in Clermont-Ferrand? The alert reader will naturally have asked themselves another question: who does Madame Michette think she is working for? She does not know. A secret within a secret makes an endless hall of mirrors, in which Madame Michette only sees her own face repeated in ever diminishing reflections. When she seeks reassurance, Palfy demurs: the golden rule of counterespionage is that agents are acted on, not acting. He assures her that her missions will remain without risk so long as she speaks to no one about them, and that, at present, it is vital for her to stay in training before more serious operations. Despite the suspicion in which female agents are held – ‘their flesh is weak,’ Palfy notes mirthlessly – she is already held in high regard by his superiors. From books purchased at second-hand
hand booksellers’ on the banks of the Seine, she learns the basics of operational work. Hers is an exhilarating adventure. Let us allow it to take its course without exposing Palfy’s intentions too soon. Does he himself know what they are? In all honesty, now he is just having fun, yet with the impressive instinct that has guided him so well in his exploitation of human foolishness he strongly suspects that Madame Michette may one day be genuinely useful to his ambitions. We shall see his suspicion proved right. Meanwhile he has concluded that there is nothing to be gained from a man like La Garenne, a second-division fraud and insatiable overeater, a slob taking advantage of the times but already behind them. True, the gallery’s turnover is continuing to rise, but it is really nothing to do with Louis-Edmond. Let us be honest and admit that Palfy is right: La Garenne has been overtaken, failing to realise that, by dint of his greed and ever-present meanness, he has become dependent on Blanche de Rocroy (whose cousin Rudolf has reappeared, wanting to get hold of some Braques and Derains), and dependent too on Jean, without whom Jesús would refuse to paint either his erotic nudes or the forgeries from which the fat man is piling up a fortune. Ever impatient, from time to time La Garenne buys a fine picture from Jesús at a price that seems madness to him, and one day will turn out to have been absurdly low. The canvas joins the others in a cupboard whose contents no one will think to examine until the war is over and peace has been declared.

Yet a little light has also been shed on the mystery of La Garenne. Blanche, sweeping up and dusting before the gallery opens, selling unspeakably bad pictures with rare refinement, ironing her employer’s trousers and from time to time providing him with oral relief, also deals with the book-keeping and tax returns. Thanks to a document left lying on the table, Jean has learnt that the gallery in fact belongs to a woman named Mercedes del Loreto, of no known profession, living in Rue de la Gaîté, in Paris’s 16th arrondissement. We should say straight away that at first the name meant nothing to him. He thought it sounded attractive and romantic. But Palfy, whose knowledge, at
least in this particular cultural sphere, was vast, was startled by the news.

‘What? She’s still alive! She must be a hundred if she’s a day. Everyone thinks she’s dead. She wasn’t exactly a spring chicken when Edward VII had his way with her, just after Félix Faure. Don’t you realise? Mercedes del Loreto is a truly historic figure! Historic!’

She had modelled for Toulouse-Lautrec (Albi museum still had his portrait of her) and been both high-class courtesan and variously lover and fleeting mistress to a wide circle of rich men. If she owned an art gallery, it raised questions. Palfy set Madame Michette on the trail. Staking out Rue de la Gaîté, she soon discovered La Garenne’s hideout, the den to which he disappeared at night and certain hours of the day: an apartment under the rafters, opposite the Bobino music hall. Allow me to romanticise Madame Michette’s somewhat dry reports a little, while not failing to do justice to their key points.

A dark and sticky staircase filled with choice odours from the toilets on each floor led to the top landing and a single door fitted with security locks. There was not even a concierge to provide the smallest titbit of gossip! The postman left the mail in zinc letterboxes. One of these bore, handwritten, the grandiose name of Mercedes del Loreto. After two days of watching, Madame Michette had initiated a conversation with a little old lady stepping downstairs with her shopping bag in one hand and a cigarette between her lips, her face whitened with powder and grey hair curled with tongs.

‘Ah, Mercedes del Loreto!’ the old lady had said. ‘Of course I know her. It must be fifteen years since I saw her in the building. But she’s still up there, still with us. Only yesterday I heard her shrieking. As if there was a sea lion up there … You know’ – she waved her arms and blew out her cheeks – ‘
arrh
, arrh … oowowoowow
… What would you say to a quick glass of white at the
tabac
on the corner? You wouldn’t
have a cigarette, would you? A proper one! I say, things are looking up. Oh, they’re German. You won’t find the black market flooded with those. The Fritzes keep an eye on things. Plays by the rules, their army.’

They walked to the nearest bistro and stood at the counter.

‘Two medium-dry whites, Amédée. Anjou, please.’

The barman raised his eyebrows.

‘Madame Berthe, I don’t know if you’ve noticed … there’s a war on. Shortages. Anjou is hard to get hold of.’

‘Oh, do stop pretending. Get the bottle out. She’s a friend.’

The Anjou appeared. Madame Berthe sipped and clucked with her tongue.

‘She moved in in 1920. I know because I was a
diseuse
at the Bobino then. Did you see me?’

‘No,’ Madame Michette said, ‘I wasn’t living in Paris. You can’t be everywhere.’

‘I quit in 1925. Went to Gaston Baty. Do you know him?’

‘Gaston who?’

‘Baty. Théâtre Montparnasse, you know.’

‘And you’re a
diseuse
?’ Madame Michette repeated worriedly, a provincial who had no idea what a
diseuse
was.

‘No, I’m a dresser now. Marguerite Jamois, I dressed her. I did. Oh, there were plenty of actors who couldn’t do without me: Lucien Nat, Georges Vitray. There wasn’t a button out of place in
Maya
, in
Simoom
, in The
Shadow of Evil
. That was great theatre, Madame. What’s your name?’

‘Marceline, Marceline Michette.’

‘If you told me you were from the Auvergne it wouldn’t surprise me.’

‘I am.’

‘Like him. Monsieur Baty’s from Pélussin. Do you know it?’

‘No, I’m more from Montaigut-le-Blanc.’

‘Don’t know it. Anyway, it can’t be far. What do you want from old Mercedes?’

‘It’s for a newspaper.’

‘Journalists, I’m used to them. Always hanging round me, waiting for gossip. I suppose everyone’s got to live.’

Madame Michette ignored the jibe. What would this stupid old woman have said if she had found out she was talking to a secret agent?

‘Mercedes has paid the price for her adventures. Hasn’t gone out since 1925. In the beginning you’d hear her walking on her peg leg: knock, knock, knock … Just like Sarah Bernhardt. She was at Saint-Gervais when Bertha sent over one of her big ones.
15
Bang … no more leg. A terrible thing for a lady who liked to lead the men a merry dance,’ she giggled, knocking back her white wine, ‘and then she took to her bed. Been there for fifteen years. There’s a chap who lives with her. Some say he’s her last husband, others that he’s her son. As disreputable as they come, I can tell you. One evening I found him pissing on the stairs; it was running all the way down. He looked very sheepish. Don’t say anything, don’t say a word, he begged me. He was afraid I’d tell the old girl, his old girl … I don’t know. He goes up to feed her every night and every lunchtime, and if he’s late she starts shrieking:
arrh, arrh
…
oowowoowow
…’

The barman, washing glasses behind the counter, grinned.

‘All right, Madame Berthe, still doing your impressions?’

‘My dear Amédée,’ the dresser said, ‘you’re such a peasant. I’m not doing an impression. I am Mercedes del Loreto; I do her better than she does. By the way, your wine is watered down.’

She had drunk her half-glass in a single gulp. Madame Michette bought her another. At the end of each mission she provided Palfy with a list of her expenses, which he signed and passed on to higher quarters. When peace was declared she would be reimbursed.

‘They haven’t got any facilities up there,’ Madame Berthe went on, ‘so he empties the chamber pots. He does it very discreetly, but I’ve seen him. He’s devoted to her. He’s not a bad lad, deep down. People aren’t all good or all bad, generally. There’s degrees. What did you say your paper’s name was?’

‘It’s published in the unoccupied zone.’

‘Oh, down in the free! Some folk think they’re clever, but it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other wherever you go. We’re free here too. We’re chatting, aren’t we?’

‘We are,’ Madame Michette said.

‘So that Mercedes del Loreto, she had a fine old time, I’ll say. Bankers and princes. All right, fine … but in the end we’re all the same … same pussy, up and down, not side to side … even the Chinese. Then one day a wooden overcoat … That chap who lives with the old girl, there’s one or two who knew him around here. Before the war – I mean the 14–18, not the last one; that was a joke. Yes, he used to hang around the cafés at Montparnasse. Did caricatures. Went from table to table with a sketch pad and pencil. Portrait? he’d say. People let him get on with it. They called him Léonard Twenty-Sous. That’s all I know.’

So La Garenne ceased to be a mystery. He was Mercedes del Loreto’s son, and at one time in his life had felt he was an artist. All that was left of his ambition was the way he dressed and an unrelenting meanness from his hungry years. Jean told Jesús. He was unexpectedly moved. La Garenne a failure? The old shit had at last won his sympathy. Jesús vowed not to insult him quite so coarsely in future. Palfy also appeared to be touched.

‘The thought of him emptying his mother’s chamber pots makes me want to cry. I wouldn’t have done as much for mine. Let’s leave him to his little rackets. He’ll never hit the big time. But you, my dear Jean, it’s about time you stood on your own two feet. In the space of a few months you’ve learnt most of the tricks of the most crooked trade in Paris. You should open a gallery.’

‘What with? I don’t have a sou.’

‘Our dear Marceline will provide for you. She’s from the Auvergne. A saver.’

‘Precisely. She’s from the Auvergne, so she’s not stupid.’

‘To do her duty as a patriot she’d happily hand over every franc. I’ll take care of it.’

In barely two months Palfy had gathered together what he continued to call the best capital there was: contacts. Almost nightly his place was laid at Avenue Foch, in an apartment that had become one of the most sought-after destinations in Paris. Soon after midday he was to be found at Maxim’s or Lapérouse’s or in one of those bistros at Les Halles whose doors were only opened to a select few. Paris could no longer do without Julius and Madeleine, and they could no longer do without Palfy. Thanks to Julius, the theatres effortlessly managed to get hold of the cloth and materials they needed for their costumes and sets, which, with unconscious competitiveness, had never seemed quite so sumptuous. Stagehands, judged to be indispensable for the resumption of the economic life of the country, were released from their POW camps. Sergeant-Major Michette was freed as promised. His brief period of captivity had transformed him. Glimpsed as he passed through Paris, he was greatly slimmed down; like Samson losing his hair, in losing his paunch he had lost his authority. Madame Michette was pitiless: she kept him for a few days, then sent him back to Clermont-Ferrand alone to look after the running of the Sirène. She had no use for a clod like her husband in the giddy exhilaration of her Parisian existence and her secret missions. He belonged to another epoch, a bygone era. She explained the situation to Palfy.

‘I can’t concentrate with him here. He’s only interested in himself. He’s like a horse with blinkers on, he only sees what’s in front of him.’

Hadn’t she read in a work describing espionage for the general public that a spy must be asexual? The truth was that, being very used to the sight of human unhappiness and its several forms of relief in her ‘establishment’, she felt repugnance for the practical matters to which Monsieur Michette attempted to draw her back after his extended state of celibacy. She intended to remain chaste, convinced that in ‘high places’ close attention was being paid to her slightest
actions prior to her selection for her great mission. The rigorous morals she had imposed on the girls at the Sirène, the attention she paid to their futures when they grew too old, matched a need in her to be respected for the work she did. Hadn’t she dismissed two girls who had confessed to falling in love, one with a soldier, the other – worse still – with a town councillor who was a freemason?

Through the offices of Blanche de Rocroy, Palfy had befriended Colonel von Rocroy in the course of mutually flaunting an exchange of entries from the
Almanach de Gotha
. In the belief that he had found someone from ‘his own world’ Rudolf had explained his Paris mission: to protect works of art abandoned by their owners when they had fled abroad. A mission to be performed quite disinterestedly by the Great Reich, which desired to maintain order in the new Europe, plus a redistribution of its riches among those who deserved them. Hadn’t Napoleon (who remained one of Hitler’s historical role models) acted very similarly in the creation of his own Europe? Rocroy had been put in charge of a depository at Boulogne-Billancourt where paintings and furniture were stored. He also happened occasionally to buy the odd contemporary master for himself and a few close friends, excellent investments at the exchange rate fixed by the victorious power.