Coco at the Ritz, page 13
“No, and neither did Cocteau, but he was in the middle of directing a film,” said Max.
“Those selfish monsters,” said Coco.
“It takes one to know one,” said Misia.
Coco glared at her friend. “Go to hell.”
* * *
The women treated Max to dinner at the hotel next to his rooming house. Afterward, as they settled in the car, Coco rolled down the window and called out, “Please, Max, put on some normal clothes. At least get rid of that big, swinging cross.”
“I still don’t understand what got into Max,” said Misia when they were on the road. “Converting to Catholicism is one thing. But posing as a monk?”
“Max thought it was the only way to repent his sins,” said Coco. “I remember the night he hit bottom, when he landed in jail in Montmartre for drinking and soliciting a male prostitute. The next morning, he called me to meet him for Mass at Sacré Coeur.”
“You went, guilty Catholic that you are.”
“No more guilty than anyone else,” Coco snapped. “Anyway, I found Max in his regular spot in the third pew from the back of the church. I slipped in next to him just as he was having a hallucination. He thought I was the Virgin Mary, scolding him for being a sinner. ‘Mother Mary, Mother Mary, I’m sorry!’ he kept saying.
“After that, Max knew he had to get away from Paris, from the compulsive behavior that was eating his soul and causing his delusions. So, he moved to Saint-Benoît, where the monks took him in. He prayed with them, meditated, and went to Mass twice a day, and because of his devotions, he entered a period of great productivity. In a few months, he completed a new edition of poems, the libretto of a comic opera, and two illustrated novellas.”
“Poor Max, exiled from Paris,” said Misia heavily.
“Max loves Saint-Benoît, where he feels closer to God.”
Coco recalled the many times he’d tried to kindle her faith by urging her to pray and go to church. She wished now she’d taken his advice. Turning to Misia, who was drifting to sleep with her chin on her chest, Coco said, “We should pray more.”
“What are you talking about?” Misia said groggily. “I’ve never seen you pray in your life—not since Venice, anyway.”
Only once had Coco experienced a moment of religious fervor—decades earlier, in 1920, in Venice, where Misia had taken her after Boy Capel died to distract Coco from her grief. While kneeling at the altar of an old medieval church, Coco was blessed by a priest who gave her a card inscribed with the prayer of Saint Thérèse. Later, in Paris, Coco collected more religious cards, which she kept in a small leather case with a handwritten note: “I am a Roman Catholic; in case of serious accident or transportation to hospital, I request a Catholic priest come to me. If I die, I request the blessing of the Catholic Church.” She always carried the case in her purse, but she hadn’t looked at the cards or said the prayers in years. The spiritual was too elusive for Coco—too soft and uncertain. Coco was hard, with sharp edges, and she sliced through life, ignoring every obstacle. She couldn’t help the resentment and bitterness that bubbled up in her and often overflowed, leading her to lash out. She said terrible things about everyone, even her best friends. Especially her best friends. They understood her, and they were the ones most likely to forgive her in the end.
Friends like Misia, who, slumped in her seat, had fallen back asleep and was snoring loudly.
* * *
“Why don’t we have a dinner party at La Pausa?” Spatz suggested that night on the telephone. “I’d like to meet some of your Monaco friends.”
“Who?” Coco heard a drawer opening and closing, then paper rattling.
“I have in mind Stanislao Lepri, Leonor Fini, Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge and his wife.”
Lepri was the Italian consul for Monaco; his lover, Fini, was an Argentine painter. Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge was a wealthy art collector, and his wife, Liliane, a former fashion model. Coco wondered if Spatz had gotten the names from her address book. “Why these four?” she asked.
“They sound interesting. I’d like to meet them.”
Though she’d brushed off all concern after seeing Hélène Dessoffy, Coco realized she’d been unsettled by the woman’s accusations and also the mentions of Spatz in Misia’s book about German spies. It occurred to her that Spatz’s suggested dinner party guests were all German sympathizers, though she wasn’t sure about Liliane. Perhaps Spatz wanted to ingratiate himself with Monaco’s elite. He couldn’t single-handedly move the tiny principality, which so far remained neutral, to the German side. Still, it wouldn’t hurt for him to have friends among Monaco’s most influential citizens.
The dinner party would be the following week. Coco’s vendeuse in Paris took care of the invitations. Spatz said he’d bring wine, champagne, and flowers. Coco was in the salon discussing the menu with Céline a few evenings later, when she looked out the window and saw Pierre Reverdy pedaling a bicycle up her driveway. He parked the bike at the side of the house next to an empty garden shed. Coco met him at the door.
Reverdy looked shocked to see her. “You’re here.… I thought you’d be in Paris,” he stammered.
“What are you doing here?” Coco asked.
“Business.” He smiled slyly.
“What business?”
“I’m expecting a drop tonight.”
“On my property?”
“If all goes well.”
“Usually there’s a German guard in the gatehouse. It’s your luck he’s not here tonight.”
For a moment, Reverdy’s eyes flared; then he smiled. “I guess I did pick the right night.”
Inside, Coco showed Reverdy to a guest room where he could wash up and change. Twenty minutes later the two friends were sitting on the terrace eating a ham frittata prepared by Céline.
“I’m happy to feed you and give you a bed, but I don’t want you using my place for Resistance work,” Coco said.
Reverdy paused between bites. “Are you afraid your spy will find out?”
“Spatz is not a spy!”
“Don’t be naïve. His textile production job is just a shield. It’s classic espionage. He picks up secrets from you and your friends and reports them to his superiors.”
“What secrets?”
“Let’s say I tell you that I’m using your garden as a staging post for Jewish refugees escaping from France to the Spanish border. You tell Spatz. He tells his boss. That’s it. That’s spying.”
“I’d never betray you.”
“Good.”
“You’re not using my garden, are you?”
Reverdy regarded Coco with an intense, meaningful look but said nothing.
“God, is Céline helping you?”
“Better you don’t know what goes on when you’re not here.”
“How does she get you past the guard?”
“As I said, better you don’t know.”
“It has to stop. And you can’t stay. Spatz will be here in a couple of days.”
“I’ll be gone tomorrow morning.”
Reverdy explained that he was on the run. A week before, he’d fled the Left Bank apartment he shared with two radio operators. One evening when he was alone cooking potatoes on the stove, he glanced out the window and saw two Gestapo agents in black leather trench coats exit a beat-up Citroën and head for the apartment entrance. “I slipped out the bedroom window down the fire escape,” he told Coco. As he clattered down the narrow iron steps, white rectangles of windows flashed by, and muffled chatter from behind the windows trailed his descent.
Then he was on the ground. His eyes darted around like a trapped animal’s, looking for an exit. He saw a gravel pathway leading to a tall wrought iron gate. He expected soldiers to appear, sirens to wail. He listened for boots running behind him, for shots ringing out. But the streets were clear. He walked toward a sliver of brightness leeching from the sidewalk—the entrance to the Métro. With the last of the change in his pocket, he bought a ticket. He switched lines several times and dashed out at Les Gobelins. He begged a few coins off a passerby and from a phone booth called a friend who had long been part of the Resistance. The man met him at a café on rue Berbier du Mets, where he handed Reverdy a rucksack with clean clothes, money, a flashlight, a small shovel, a flask of whiskey, and new identity papers.
Reverdy changed in the alley and set out for Gare Austerlitz, where he bought a ticket to Saint-Benoît. “I was to receive my instructions from my contact—one of the priests. I thought I might see Max, but he never showed up for Mass. There was a Nazi guard at the door. I’m worried. Maybe Max has been arrested.”
“I just saw him.”
“He’s a Jew, and the Nazis in Saint-Benoît know it, no matter how he dresses.”
Coco felt a stab of guilt. She should go back to Saint-Benoît and check again on Max. Tell him to hide himself.
A plane buzzed overhead, and Reverdy jumped up. He pulled a flashlight out of his rucksack and beamed it at the black sky. “There it is,” he said.
In the flashlight’s white trail, Coco saw a parachute slowly falling from the sky. A moment later it landed in her garden with a heavy clonk. Reverdy dashed to the bushes, and Coco watched as he disentangled a large suitcase from the parachute. Inside were two wireless radios wrapped in rubber. Miraculously, they’d survived the fall. “What in God’s name are you going to do with those?” Coco asked.
“I’m not going to tell you.” Reverdy dug a hole behind an olive tree with his shovel and buried the parachute. He carried the radio transmitters into the house and laid them on the kitchen table. “Go to bed, Coco. You don’t need to worry about this.”
But she did worry. Obviously, she did.
* * *
Coco awoke before sunrise and found Reverdy gone. So were his transmitters. He’s buried them in the cellar somewhere, and he’s planning to use them to send messages to his pals in the Resistance when I’m not here. She hadn’t ventured into the vast cellars of La Pausa for years, not since the house was first built and the architect wanted her to see every inch of his masterpiece. Now she took the narrow stairs behind the pantry and made her way through the dank, low-ceilinged rooms, past the wine cellar, the laundry, the furnace closet. She found the transmitters in a remote corner, buried under a stack of old newspapers. They were heavy, but she managed to carry them upstairs and put them in the trunk of her Rolls.
When Coco returned to the house, Céline was in the kitchen preparing to bake bread. “You’re a fool to help Reverdy,” Coco snapped.
“I’m sorry, Mademoiselle,” said the maid. She twisted her apron between her fists and began to cry softly.
“Never again let him in when I’m not here. You could get yourself killed.”
Céline hung her head. “Yes, Mademoiselle.”
Coco roused her driver from the gatekeeper’s cottage where he bunked, and they took off for Saint-Benoît. A dense fog lingered in the morning air. There were no cars on the road, only a couple of mangy dogs. The Rolls passed a one-legged young man hobbling along on crutches. Coco wondered if he’d lost his limb in the war. She felt a wave of pity for the boy and wondered if he wished that the bullet had killed him and released him from all worldly pain. Death wouldn’t be so bad—it would be the end of suffering and misery. The thought passed, though, as soon as the young man faded from her sight. No doubt he wanted to live. Coco wanted to live, too. She couldn’t bear for the world to go on without her.
Outside Saint-Benoît, Coco saw a gravel path that led to the river and directed her driver to take it. He was forty, with thinning brown hair, gentle hazel eyes, and a timid manner. “Stop here, and open the trunk,” she told him when they reached the riverbank. They each carried a transmitter to the river. Coco heaved hers into the water, but the driver hung back. He wore a faded black suit that sagged on his lanky frame. “These are worth a lot of money,” he said.
“Get rid of it!” Coco commanded.
“What if someone sees us?” His eyes darted around.
Coco recalled when she and the driver had left Paris at the start of the war. As his old Cadillac rounded a corner, they confronted a shiny pair of eyes—a big yellow cheetah stood in a pool of light from a streetlamp. A bomb must have hit the zoo, and the big cat had escaped. He stood perfectly still in the middle of the road, his head erect and his body tense. He stared at Coco with his glowing eyes, and she stared back, willing him to run away. But he wouldn’t move. So Coco got out of the car. The driver screamed for her to get back in. Men were such cowards! But she wasn’t going to let that animal hold her up. “Go on, get out of here!” she yelled at the big cat, and the beast ran off. “You see?” she said, when she was back in the Cadillac. “I know how to give orders.”
Sometimes, though, you had to do things yourself. She grabbed the transmitter from the driver’s arms and hurled it into the water.
* * *
By midmorning, the fog had lifted, and the sky was a bright, hard blue.
At the abbey, a priest told Coco that Max had, indeed, been arrested, but he was released after a few days. She found her old friend in the courtyard reading the Bible. “Let’s go somewhere to talk,” Max said.
They drove to a secluded park, where a sign warned DOGS AND JEWS PROHIBITED. Max hesitated in front of it. “Come on, you’re with me,” Coco said. She’d brought a wicker hamper with food she’d found in the pantry at La Pausa: bread, cheese, apples, pastries, and wine. As Coco arranged the white china and silverware on a cotton blanket, Max told her about the frightening incident that had led to his arrest.
He had been standing in the nave with a group of high school boys, ready to lead them on a tour of the Benedictine abbey. The sun slanted through the plain glass windows, splashing pale gold light over the mosaic floor and up the vaulted columns. A few monks scurried about, their brown robes whipping around their ankles. The students squirmed and giggled, then fell into a sullen silence as Max began his introductory history. “Saint Benoît was born in 480 A.D. to a wealthy family. He studied—” A commotion stopped him in mid-sentence.
German soldiers with guns drawn stormed up the long aisle, the harsh clicking of their boots echoing off every surface of the vast basilica. Soldiers grabbed each of Max’s arms and led him outside. As he looked into their smooth, youthful faces, their light eyes, gold hair, and rosy cheeks, they resembled the angels romping around Christ in the painting above the altar. “The war wasn’t their fault. They were just performing their duty,” Max said. “A parent in town had probably complained that a Jew was giving tours of the abbey to Christian children. In the courtyard, a soldier aimed his rifle at my back and marched me off to jail. The priests convinced them to release me. I was forbidden to give any more tours. The Germans posted a policeman at the gate to keep me out, but the officer tired of this vigil after just a day, and I resumed my tours with no further incident.”
In the village, Max told Coco, the soldiers saluted and clicked their heels. They were virile and strong, and the local girls took note. Some of the German boy-warriors were billeted in private homes, in bedrooms next to the girls’ bedrooms. They passed each other in the corridors at night on the way to the toilet, the girls in diaphanous nightgowns, and the boys admired the lovely bodies underneath the clingy fabric. They could hear each other breathing through the thin walls. In the morning, the girls passed the Germans’ bedrooms, and if the doors were ajar, they saw them shirtless, shaving in front of their mirrors. The girls served the soldiers breakfast—eggs and freshly baked bread—and the Germans were grateful. They brought presents to the girls, flowers and chocolates, and sat with them in the gardens behind the hedges where no one could see. Max watched love unfold with the roses and hydrangeas, and he loved, too.
“I loved my incredible, astonishing Lord, and alone in my room I prayed,” said Max. He took Coco’s hand. “I want you to pray with me now.” Coco closed her eyes and bowed her head as Max implored, “Since You are God, and since You know all, tell us when this war will end.”
As they finished their lunch, sitting on a blanket spread on the ground, the sky blackened, and wind churned the air. Soon a hard rain began to fall. “I know a place we can go,” Max said. He helped Coco to her feet.
They drove in Coco’s car to a deserted mansion, which sat atop a wooded hill five kilometers out of Saint-Benoît, in the village of Bonne. The stone Italianate house, painted gray with burgundy trim, had seen better days. The paint was peeling, the windows were dirty. It looked dismal even as the rain stopped and bright sunshine burst through the clouds. What had once been a lovely garden behind a tall wrought iron fence was now a brown jumble of weeds and dry earth. “I heard the priests talking about this place. It’s one of several deserted homes in the area—the Jewish owners forced out by the Nazis,” said Max.
Coco’s driver dropped them at the front door, then left to find a farmer with an air pump—the pressure was low in the tires.
As he drove off, Coco and Max pushed open the front door and entered a high-ceilinged marble hall. Soft sunlight angled in through the open windows. A few pieces of antique furniture were scattered about, and an intricately woven Turkish carpet covered the floor. On the walls hung large paintings in gilt frames—mostly impressionistic landscapes and sentimental, idealized nudes.
Max led them up three flights of stairs—past the rooms displaying more mediocre art and antiques—to an attic studio. The large space, sun-drenched from an immense skylight, held a dressmaker’s form and an old sewing machine. For a moment Coco was back in her atelier and not in the attic of an abandoned house. She sank into an old armchair, and the cushion released a cloud of dust. “What’s wrong?” asked Max.
“It reminds me of my workrooms,” said Coco. “I miss them.”
“Maybe you can reopen after the war.”
“I can’t think about that now.”
They heard the crunch of gravel outside and went to the small oval window that looked out on the garden and the driveway. A group of men in dark suits, a couple of them wearing swastika armbands, stepped out of a white van parked near the entrance. An attractive woman with upswept reddish hair followed the men. “Oh God, that’s Fraulein Lichten,” said Coco.
