The Keeper of the Walls (40 page)

“You sound like the people who planned this,” Lily remarked. “It wasn't the Communists. It was the Fascist groups. I suppose the others were just retaliating.”

“I don't know and I don't care. The Reds are always wrong, that's what
I
say. The Reds, the politicians, and the Jews.”

Claire said, quietly: “Aunt Marthe, that sort of thinking brought Hitler to Germany. You know that, first of all, those groups are hardly interconnected. You've probably read some of the propaganda papers, which don't explain things well.”

“I have no need for any propaganda, my child. I know what I know. The Reds were fighting at the Madeleine, and on the Boulevard Sébastopol, and they say in some parts, they're still at it. I used up three sachets of smelling salts tonight, didn't I, Claire?”

“There were six burned buses, and they put fire to some private cars that were nearby, by lighting some spilled gasoline. They brought in several wounded people. One of the chambermaids here was killed. The Café Wéber was turned into some kind of ambulance for the wounded.” Jacques poured himself a glass of Hennessy cognac, and asked, suddenly: “Do you know a Baron Charles de Chaynisart? Isn't that the fellow who owns the Rovaro?”

Lily sat up, her pulse beating in her throat. “Yes. One of the brothers. Why?”

“His was one of the cars that was set on fire. Near here somewhere. He and his driver were pulled out, and they lit up his gas tank. He came into the lobby here looking like a madman. We spoke for a few minutes.”

She couldn't resist. All at once the laughter came pouring out of her in hysterical gulps, and she continued laughing while her mother, concerned, tried to contain her. Then she asked: “You mean, the beautiful Duesenberg is no more?”

“He had a
Duesenberg?”
Aunt Marthe cried out. “The abominable devils! Such wonderful cars . . . like shining jewels . . .” Her half-closed eyes reflected a sudden hungry envy.

Ever so slightly, Jacques Walter turned away from her, and took a sip of cognac. “From what he told me, the beautiful Duesenberg is now a pile of charred metal. He said he'd had it specially shipped from the United States. He was almost crying—and here you are, laughing. Probably we would all feel better with a good laugh though, wouldn't we?” And he smiled at Lily and handed her his half-empty glass.

With the back of her hand, his stepdaughter wiped the tears that had been streaming down her face, and then she took the snifter in her long, slender fingers. For a moment their eyes met in unspoken complicity, and then she raised the snifter to him and said, softly: “To the few strong men who still exist in the Republic.”

“Well, they certainly saved the day,” Aunt Marthe exclaimed. “Those King's Servitors and that simply marvelous Colonel de La Rocque! How they helped our good Parisian
gendarmes
to keep up law and order against Maurice Thorez and that damned Blum!”

Lily saw Claire's shoulders rise and then drop in exasperation. Jacques Walter was looking at his wife with a fond, understanding smile. Lily cleared her throat. “I didn't mean them, Aunt Marthe,” she explained. “I was speaking of the few men who can still think for themselves, and who can preserve the rights of man against a sudden flood of mob hysterics.”

“Oh, the French are basically a good, sensible people, like the Swiss,” Jacques remarked. “Here, a Hitler or a Mussolini could never reach a position of power. I still believe in the French, in spite of tonight, in spite of the last two months. These riots were like the revolt of every adolescent democracy. Because, really, Western democracy is still very young, and therefore isn't yet understood by all.”

“I think we should all try to sleep now,” Claire said to her husband. “If you think it's all right, darling, then the three of us will leave you, Aunt Marthe, and walk on back to the Ritz.”

The old woman turned a querulous face at her. “You'll be here tomorrow? For breakfast at seven?”

Claire nodded, wearily, and put on her coat.

T
he year
1935
began strangely
,
like an electric current giving off some small, startling sparks along the way, signaling defective wiring yet not actually causing fear of imminent short circuit. Lily, in the sober objectivity of hindsight, would recall every one of these small explosions, and wonder why she, along with the others, hadn't understood all these telltale warnings and stood far back, to protect herself.

On the thirteenth of January, the rich coal-mining region of the Saar basin, hitherto an independent province administered by France, voted by an overwhelming majority of 477,109 over 46,513 to be returned to Germany. This was hailed across the Rhine by an explosion of martial exhilaration. Flowers were hurled upon the Brown Shirts as they marched. Pierre Laval, the unprepossessing foreign minister from Auvergne, had begun his career as a shrewd lawyer whose cases were most often settled out of court. He had entered the political arena as a Socialist deputy, had long since moved from Left to Right, and, along with Premier Pierre-Etienne Flandin, still thought that Germany was less dangerous than a rapprochement with Communist Russia. Nevertheless, in March, conscription was increased to eighteen months for those entering the army that year, and to two years for the recruits that would enter over the following four. Immediately, cries went up from the Left that this step would provoke the Germans. Daladier and Blum were among the most vociferous.

Lily remembered how, in Vienna, the Steiners had pretended not to be afraid of Hitler. There was something so savage, so unconditional, surrounding this small man and his followers, that when she thought about them, she recoiled and immediately filled her mind with something else. At the end of 1934, he had incorporated the air force into the Wehrmacht, showing Europe that he was blatantly remilitarizing in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. But the days when this treaty had been regarded seriously were so far behind that no one—not the French, not the British—could react with the proper outrage and counter reaction.

A French colonel named Charles de Gaulle spoke out about the need for an army composed of small units ready to act and move very quickly, but he was ignored. The tacticians were smugly relying on the defensive line of forts set up by Andre Maginot, which extended into Belgium across the German frontier.

The German retaliation against France's extension of its military service was to completely renege on the Versailles agreements to keep Maginot's army to one hundred thousand. He reintroduced conscription, and not long afterward, Belgium declared its often-practiced neutrality. The Maginot Line was brought up short at the Belgian border. The Russian newspaper
Pravda
announced that France was no longer able to actively contain the German hordes.

Finally, in early May, Pierre Laval signed a mutual-assistance pact with Joseph Stalin. From Russia, approval came for the extension of military service. Simultaneously, the extreme Left changed its tone, and Misha, pushing an arrangement of straw potatoes around on his plate, said to his wife: “Now doom has really set in.”

“The French can't survive without a strong ally like the Soviet Union,” Lily countered gently.

“France is caught between Scylla and Charybdis,” he said, sullenly throwing down his napkin and standing up. “I'm going downstairs, to see what's going on.”

She nodded, and removed the plates, arranging them on a dinner tray and putting it outside her door for removal. The children were spending a night with Claire, and so she followed Misha to the top of the stairs, feeling an inexplicable pang of anxiety.

“What do you have to do tonight?” she asked.

“The restaurant made twelve thousand francs today—fifteen hundred at
the dansant.
We laid two hundred place settings for lunch and dinner. Not bad for a Monday.”

“Then what's the problem?”

He regarded her circumspectly, and she tried to read the sea-green eyes with their tiny, pinpoint pupils. And she felt herself grow queasy. Putting a hand on his arm, she retained him and said: “Tell me, Misha. It's better to know the truth.”

He shrugged, impatiently. “It's nothing. Just that the De Chaynisarts have been stalling over a new contract. They claim the hotel didn't develop as fully as they'd hoped, and that I disappointed their expectations.”

She cried, outraged: “But that's not true! The general economy is bad—not just the hotel business. And you've done wonders for the Rovaro!”

He sighed. “But not enough wonders. They refused to pay me when Papa died the full amount we'd agreed upon—they kept putting it off, and saying there was a cash-flow problem. Last year they gave me twenty-five thousand francs, without writing up a new contract. And this year, just seven thousand to date. We can't survive this way, Lily.”

She blinked. “But—from the first and second payments ...we should have savings to live on. We've done nothing costly, for eighteen months. The rent is free and food is inexpensive.”

The green in his eyes appeared to freeze over. He loosened her grasp, stood up straight. “Brasilov Enterprises is no more, Lily. What was left were the debts. I had to pay off all the creditors.”

“But . . . Claude? He still has his office, and his clients.”

“He formed a new company, in his own name. And brought in some of our old clients, that trusted him, a Frenchman, and not me—a suspect foreigner.”

She stepped back, stunned. So the Brasilov dynasty had really collapsed, and her own brother, Claude, had made off with the spoils. Overwhelmed, she ran back toward their suite. Misha was a desperate man, and for the first time, she was really afraid, of the future, of destiny. She thought of what he'd said about the De Chaynisarts, and wondered, briefly, whether Charles had done something to influence his brother, in revenge for her rude rejection of his proposition. No—it seemed too much, even for him. And he hadn't come around for such a long time.

It had to be bad luck, and nothing else.

F
or the summer
, Claire and Jacques Walter rented a beautiful villa on the Riviera, in the city of Cannes. Misha seemed almost relieved to send his wife and children there for the summer. The villa had an enormous garden, which the children used for intense, imaginative games played in teams, recruiting neighboring children to form a large, joyful group. Lily read, took walks along the Croisette by the sea, and spent time with her mother and stepfather. In the evenings they dined on the terrace, under the stars, or drove to Nice or Monte Carlo. Lily almost forgot the heavy problems of the city. It was Kira who said it: “With Grandma and Grandpa Jacques, it's as if we were rich again.”

Only the clothes were different, Lily thought, walking one August day on the famous Croisette and watching the elegant women, pencil thin, as was the fashion, with their clown's hats by Schiaparelli, and their men's tailored summer pants, by Chanel. She was wearing a loose-draped dress of soft green linen, left over from Vienna, and had tied her straw hat down with a silk scarf, to protect her from the sand and too much sun. She was, she decided, definitely out of the picture; her figure was wrong, her clothes not quite chic enough—and she worried that a touch of tan would turn her sultry skin unbecomingly dark. The Jewish strain, from Eastern Europe, she thought.

A gentleman she hadn't noticed tipped his hat to her. She met his eye on a level, for they were almost the same height. She stopped in her tracks, suddenly cold on this hot day, her skin rising in delicate goose bumps.
“Chère Princesse,
” Charles de Chaynisart said, with that slight ironic tone, and his somewhat twisted smile. “So you too are vacationing at this charming resort? I didn't know. Did you take a villa?”

She could feel the ice in the sharp blue of his eyes, although he was as polite as ever. “No,” she demurred. “My children and I are staying with my parents.”

“How very agreeable. Monsieur and Madame Walter, am I not correct? Tell me,” he added, bending forward just a little to look directly into her face:
‘Walter.'
What kind of name
is
that, my dear Princess? We were wondering the other day, my friends and I, over a game of poker. I voted for Alsatian. Was I right?”

Lily's stomach contracted, and she noticed, rather than felt, her knees begin to shake. To steady herself and work away from this most profound dismay, she pretended to adjust the scarf around her hat, thereby shielding her dead-white face from Charles de Chaynisart. Then she looked at him, and smiled. “I'm afraid you were wrong. My stepfather is a Swiss-German.”

She could hear her own heartbeat in the moment that followed. De Chaynisart, up-to-the-minute elegant in his white duck suit, inclined his head in mock sadness. “Oh, dear, dear. Well, you win some, you lose some. I shall simply have to tell my friends that the most lovely woman in Paris has declared me lacking.”

She wondered then who these “friends” might be, and felt the purest fear of her life. “Swiss-German.” That had sounded good enough, she wagered. Now she knew that she had to acknowledge the compliment. How she hated this man! But she replied easily enough. “Hardly ‘lacking,' monsieur. For indeed, the Swiss names often have the same Germanic resonance as those from Alsace. And I'm afraid you're laughing at me. I'm in no way the loveliest woman in Paris.” She motioned with her chin to the sandy beach below, where long-limbed beauties were reclining in the sun. “To others belong that title.”

His eyes narrowed for a split second, and then he was once more the debonair man of the world that it had always been his affectation to expose. “Do you believe that Mussolini will take his troops on that ‘African adventure' he promised them?” he asked casually.

Lily let her shoulders rise and fall, and held out her hands palms up. “I don't know. I've never been very clever at politics. But . . .” She hesitated, remembering with acid clarity that he had spoken of the Italian dictator with a certain unabashed admiration that day of the February riots. “I heard that today, Leon Blum spoke out quite strongly against Italian aggression in Abyssinia. He said that no one would be able to limit its damage.”

The Baron's eyebrows shot up, and he chuckled. “My, my. And do you remember, dear Princess Brasilova, what Maurras wrote back in April, concerning Monsieur Blum? That he should be shot in the back, to get rid of him.”

Lily said nothing. The words seemed caught in her throat. And so he shrugged lightly, and remarked softly:
“La France aux Français.
France belongs to its own, don't you think? Have you heard this slogan? It was coined by François Coty, I believe—the owner of
Le Figaro,
a fine newspaper if ever we had one. It has such a nice clear resonance, don't you agree?
La France aux Français
. . .”

“And Monsieur Blum isn't French?” she couldn't help interjecting, feeling a sudden anger filling her.

“Who knows,
chère Madame.
You and I, we are pure French, that is for sure. But some of the others? One never knows, does one now?”

The blue eyes reflected the sun, the beach with its gaily colored umbrellas, and the dancing waves: symbols of a peaceful summer that nobody wanted to ruin on account of the broken Treaty of Versailles. Lily held on to her hat as a gust of wind rose unexpectedly, and declared: “I must be getting home now, if you'll excuse me.”

“Why, certainly, beautiful Princess Brasilova.”

As she walked away with hurried footsteps, she knocked his words about in her head.
France belongs to its own. Beautiful Princess Brasilova.
He had rolled his
r
's with a humorous hint of drama, but now she remembered this with awe. When he had spoken of foreigners . . . whom had he meant? Jacques Walter, about whose name bets had been placed? Or her husband, Prince Mikhail, whose contract still had not been written?
La France aux Français.
And in January, forty-eight hundred foreign residents of Paris had been suddenly expelled, without trial, without explanation.

Lily ran toward the first taxi that she saw, and gave the name of her parents' villa, lying back against the cushions with relief.