Coco at the Ritz, page 15
“My friends are my business.”
“Your friends are my business, too. Another thing—Vaufreland will be accompanying you on the trip.”
“I won’t travel with that horrid man!”
Spatz insisted she needed a chaperone. The Nazi guards at the Spanish border in Hendaye had been alerted to give her safe passage, but he argued that the journey would be dangerous—what if the train was attacked or bombed?
“I agree he’s unpleasant,” Spatz said. “But you’ll be safer if you’re not alone.”
“Why him?”
“I’m afraid there’s no one else.”
Several mornings later, Spatz drove Coco to the Gare Austerlitz himself. The August sky was black and heavy with humidity. Coco walked into the station past the ticket booths and the wooden benches with brass fittings. A red-jacketed porter trailed behind carrying her suitcases, two under each arm. Vaufreland met her on the platform beneath the dirty glass dome.
“Mademoiselle Chanel,” he said, bowing slightly and leading Coco to a first-class compartment. Coco leaned into the plush seats and stared out the window as the train lumbered loudly out of the station, passing utility poles and apartment buildings, then villages, farms, and the open country.
“Are you comfortable?” asked Vaufreland. He sat across from Coco in the red-and-gold jewel box compartment and held out an open cigarette case.
“It’s hot,” said Coco in an icy tone. She took a cigarette, and as she leaned forward to accept a light from Vaufreland’s silver lighter, she got a whiff of Bal à Versailles, a heavy perfume. He smelled like an expensive whore.
“Not as hot as second-class.” Vaufreland smiled tightly.
As the train rolled on, Vaufreland tried to cover the awkwardness between them with small talk. “I missed you and Spatz last night at the Berthelots’ dinner. The champagne flowed, and it was the usual collection of Second Empire old crones.” He leaned conspiratorially toward Coco. “You know, I’ve always thought Pauline Raynard had a touch of something. Last night, I was seated next to her, and I had this overwhelming sense of being in the presence of a Jew. She picked up that I was uncomfortable and looked down that large nose of hers. ‘Why are you staring at me?’ she demanded. And I said, ‘Because in that awful wig, you look like Louis XIV.’ ”
Vaufreland laughed, shaking his whole body. He looked expectantly at Coco, who stared back at him with an arched eyebrow. She said nothing.
“Of course, I didn’t really say that to her. I did tell her, though, that I couldn’t take my eyes off her necklace. It was a stunner of emeralds set in platinum. I was tempted to ask her to sell it to me.”
Coco opened her mouth as if she was about to say something to challenge Vaufreland—Spatz had told her the man was broke—but decided against making a comment.
“I’ve a little money now,” Vaufreland said, as if reading Coco’s mind. “I sold my grandmother’s house on rue de Courcelles. She put it in my name for tax reasons. She’s in Vichy napping and playing pinochle, so why not?”
“And if she finds out?”
“She won’t. And with luck, she won’t last through the war.”
Coco turned and stared out the window.
Vaufreland cleared his throat. “I hear your nephew has tuberculosis.”
Coco whipped her head around to face Vaufreland. “André won’t survive if he’s not released soon.”
Vaufreland examined the nails of his right hand for a moment, then turned his gaze back to Coco. “I’ll see what I can do, if things do go well in Madrid—for us.”
“Us?” Coco said.
“My friends—and von Dincklage’s friends.”
“I know. You want me to keep my eyes and ears open.”
“That would be a start.”
* * *
After parting with Vaufreland at the Atocha rail station in Madrid, Coco made her way by taxi to the Ritz. Brown dust hung in the air; the heat was insufferable. Heavily armed police slouched against the hotel’s towering iron gate. In the lobby—as luxurious as the Paris Ritz—men with swastika armbands, Spanish military officers, and couples speaking a variety of languages milled about. The atmosphere felt tense.
A stack of invitations waited for Coco at the front desk. The next weeks passed in a whirl of dinners, luncheons, receptions, and meetings with the men responsible for distributing her perfume. She continually ran into Vaufreland, and she wondered if this was by chance or if the unsavory man had somehow discovered her schedule so he could follow her around. One afternoon, he asked her to have tea with him in the Ritz restaurant. He wanted to know if she’d “heard anything interesting?”
Coco gave him a heavy dollop of gossip she’d picked up (and embellished): The French ambassador to Spain and his wife were rabidly anti-British, while the English ambassador was intensely anti-French. Both were sympathetic to Germany. In the French ambassador’s home, where she attended a cocktail reception, he displayed a picture of himself skiing with high-ranking Nazis. (Actually, they were German businessmen, and the picture had been taken before the war.) Coco had no clue how such trivialities could be useful to the Abwehr. Several times in her conversations with Vaufreland, she brought up the subject of André’s imprisonment, and he assured her that everything would be done to secure the young man’s release.
Coco relied on morphine every night to fall asleep. After injecting herself, she lay on the pillow and looked at the framed photo of André and his family that she always carried with her and that she’d propped up on the hotel nightstand. When she thought of André, though, she saw him as a child, digging in the sand with his little shovel on the beach at Deauville next to the blanket where she lay reading a book. Or André absorbed in putting together a puzzle on the floor at her feet while she draped fabric on a mannequin. When the picture of him coughing and shivering with fever in a dank German cell filled her head, she shoved the image aside.
As the weeks wore on, however, Coco grew increasingly anxious. Her strenuous socializing wasn’t picking up anything she thought would be useful to the Germans. She was running out of gossip and anecdotes, and she feared Vaufreland would punish her inability to provide valuable intelligence by reneging on his promise to help André.
It was in this agitated state on her second-to-last night in Madrid that she attended a dinner at the home of British expatriate Christopher Whittlespoon and his wife, Hermione. He was an art dealer whom Coco knew from his sojourns in Paris over the years. When Coco entered the Whittlespoons’ vine-covered villa on the outskirts of Madrid, she was not surprised to see Louis de Vaufreland. Most of the other guests were British, including the diplomat Brian Wallace.
Vaufreland bowed to Coco, then looked directly at her with a grim expression. He was angry she hadn’t come up with better intelligence. Coco knew he would be watching her, expecting her to draw her friends into making indiscreet confessions. And if she failed? He hadn’t said it in so many words, but she understood that otherwise he wouldn’t help her.
She tried to avoid his gaze for the rest of the evening, which included cocktails on the stone terrace with polite chitchat and no talk of the war. Her anxiety led her to drink too much, and, as usual after several glasses of wine, Coco grew loquacious. During dinner—a traditional British meal that started with a bland pea soup—Hermione Whittlespoon asked Coco what had brought her to Madrid. “I had to get a break from Paris. The situation is very bad,” Coco said.
“We’ve been looking forward to hearing your views, Mademoiselle. You always have the most astute observations,” said Christopher Whittlespoon.
The compliment relaxed her. She reasoned: You have to give something to get something. “The Germans hate the French, even more than the French hate the Germans,” Coco said.
“I wouldn’t expect it to be any different,” said Christopher.
“The French provoke the Occupiers constantly. Humming the Marseillaise in the Métro, scribbling ‘Death to the Occupiers’ on the walls. The Germans are threatening to shut the Métro down completely. Parisians should just leave well enough alone and accept that France has got what she deserves for going soft.”
Coco didn’t notice the amazed expressions on the faces of the other guests and continued talking. “Very few Frenchmen realize they’ve lost the war. ‘You wait until we’ve got rid of the German swine,’ they say. If you point out to them that France has been defeated, they accuse you of being anti-French!”
Coco’s friend Brian Wallace, a bespectacled, smoothly shaven man of fifty, spoke up from the opposite end of the table. “What do the Germans say about us?” he asked.
“They hate and fear Churchill, but aside from him, they are pro-English,” Coco said. “In general, they admire English culture, and they believe the British citizens want peace, unlike the bloodthirsty French.”
Coco was so brain-fogged by wine and anxiety that she was completely unaware of how far she’d gotten carried away. Most of the other guests were stunned into silence by her candor and regarded her with stupefied expressions as she nattered on, ignoring the steamed asparagus, roast beef, and biscuits on her plate. “To cover their anxiety, the French fake extreme gaiety,” Coco said. “The Germans want to know, ‘Why are you so happy, since you lost the war?’ And the French want to know, ‘Why are you so sad, since you won?’ Well, the Germans are miserable because they can’t stop fighting among themselves. The civil and military authorities hate each other as much, maybe more, than they hate the French, and they take a perverse pleasure in undoing each other’s work. They are frightened; they are watched, and the watchers themselves are being watched.”
When the plates had been cleared and chocolate cake served with the coffee, Coco stopped talking long enough to light a cigarette. Blowing smoke into the center of the table, she glanced across the flower arrangement to Vaufreland, sitting opposite her. He stared back at her with a hard, unblinking gaze.
* * *
She knew she had talked too much at the Whittlespoons’ dinner. To make up for her careless babbling, she determined to be nice to Spatz’s friend Herman Schmidt, a German candy manufacturer who was living in Madrid. Spatz had asked her to see him, so Coco met Schmidt for lunch at the Embassy, a fashionable tearoom, on her last day in town. They discussed nothing of consequence, though at the end of the meal, Schmidt handed Coco a letter for Spatz, which she promised to deliver. On her way out of the restaurant she noticed Vaufreland at a corner table, drinking coffee and trying to hide behind a newspaper, like a detective in a bad novel.
The next day, Vaufreland accompanied Coco on the train back to Paris. The pudgy chaperone who’d been so garrulous on the arriving trip now stayed largely silent. Coco wondered what he would report back, and she worried that she’d lost a chance to rescue André. The two travelers arrived after midnight. A man in a dark suit driving a black Mercedes met them and took Coco to the Ritz. Spatz was waiting up for her. “I’m exhausted,” said Coco, dropping into a chair.
“Do you want a drink?” Spatz asked.
“That would be nice.”
Spatz poured Coco a glass of red wine from a bottle on the bar cart. “A good trip?” he asked, handing her the glass. His tone was cold and his blue eyes hard and expressionless.
Had Vaufreland already told Spatz that she’d made a fool of herself at the Whittlespoons? That she’d failed to come up with information useful to the Germans? She saw her relationship with Spatz crumbling and along with it her life in Paris. She saw herself exiled from the Ritz, her building on rue Cambon confiscated, and André growing weaker in prison. She took a large sip of wine. Her instinct was to lash out, to put Spatz on the defensive.
“Tell me who you slept with while I was gone,” she said.
He smiled slightly.
“It couldn’t have been here. I’d smell it.”
“There’s no one but you,” said Spatz, his voice coated in irony.
“You don’t seem happy to see me.” Coco took another large sip of wine. “I couldn’t care less if you’re unfaithful. It’s unhygienic. But it means nothing. Are you seeing Hélène Dessoffy again? That nitwit is still mad for you.” Coco paused, as Spatz sat in silence. “Tell me,” she continued. “It would amuse me. I’m not jealous.”
“Your lack of jealousy is the least of your charms.”
“No need to flatter me.”
“What makes you think I’m unfaithful?”
“You’re a man.”
Coco pulled an empty packet of cigarettes from her jacket pocket, crushed it, and tossed it in the trash can under the desk with an angry flick of her wrist. She opened one of the suitcases the porter had left at the door and retrieved a new pack. Fumbling with it, she finally ripped it open. She lit a cigarette. “Tell me, I want to know,” she said.
“Stop it,” said Spatz impatiently. He took a deep breath and spoke again in a calm tone. “Tell me about your trip.”
“I didn’t get any sleep,” said Coco.
“No wonder. People stay up all night in Madrid.”
“I tried to do too much.”
“I heard you also talked too much.”
“You heard that from my chaperone, I suppose.”
“At the Whittlespoons’ dinner, you talked nonstop, apparently, about the bitter divisions among the Germans, how the civil and military authorities are at each other’s throats.”
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
“You were supposed to listen, not talk.”
“You had the wrong woman for that job. I was trying to get the British to relax so they’d express their opinions.”
“You went on for three hours, I’m told. Wallace and the other diplomats heard all about how scared and wretched and disorganized we are.”
“You’re spying on me?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“It’s confusing. I don’t like confusion.”
Spatz refilled his wineglass, then held the bottle up. “More?”
Coco shook her head and put her hand on Spatz’s groin. He pulled away and walked across the room. “Did you see Schmidt?” he asked.
Coco sighed. “He took me to lunch. He was a bore, talked about nothing but his real estate interests in Baden-Württemberg.”
“Did he give you something for me? A letter?”
“It’s in one of my bags—somewhere.”
“Would you get it?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Now—please.”
Coco shot Spatz a murderous look. She rummaged through her largest suitcase, pulled out a white envelope, and tossed it toward Spatz. He picked it up from where it landed at his feet, then disappeared into the bedroom to read the contents alone.
* * *
Coco never found out what was in the Schmidt letter, or whether the information she provided Vaufreland was useful. But one afternoon soon after she returned from Madrid, Spatz showed up at the Ritz with the best possible news: André was on his way home. Her nephew had been released from a German prison after two years in captivity.
Coco was on the platform standing at the Gare du Nord when André’s train pulled in from Germany. The young man stumbled from the car coughing, his emaciated body hidden under ragged clothes. He was ravaged but alive. André stepped onto French soil at exactly nine in the morning, as church bells marking the hour rang out across Paris. Coco would always remember this moment. It felt as if the bells were chiming deep within her own heart.
“Aunt Gabby,” André said in a quavering voice.
“My darling, you’re home!” Coco cried, drawing the young man to her. His arms were as thin as a child’s. A sob rose in Coco’s throat with a sharp memory of André as a little boy. She managed to choke it back.
Coco drove with André in a car supplied by Spatz to a clinic in Versailles where she’d arranged a private room for him. It was a cool Friday in late fall. Maple trees waved them up the winding drive to the clinic, a large stone building with cheerful blue shutters. Redstarts and sparrows perched on the wrought iron gate, while a party of blackbirds slanted and tipped above the slate roof. Coco couldn’t recall the last time she’d seen a bird in Paris. A new population had not replaced those asphyxiated at the start of the war. Perhaps the birds were as afraid to return to the city as the thousands of Parisians who remained in exile. She thought of lines from a poem by Emily Dickinson, an American whose work Pierre Reverdy had introduced her to: Hope is a thing with feathers. André was home, and now here were the birds.
Coco escorted André past the Nazi guard at the door. A doctor met them in the front office. He was a kindly, elderly man in a spanking white coat with a stethoscope around his neck. “Monsieur Palasse is in good hands,” he said, taking André by the elbow and leading him toward a double door with a sign reading NO VISITORS BEYOND THIS POINT.
André hugged Coco tightly. “Merci pour tous,” he said.
“Catharina and the girls are on their way. I’ve rented a house for them nearby,” said Coco, kissing her nephew on each cheek.
She stepped out into the bright afternoon, her heart feeling lighter than it had in two years. As she walked toward the Mercedes, she heard a gunshot, then another. The Nazi guard had moved a few yards from the entrance and was shooting birds out of the sky. Lifeless black clumps fell to the asphalt, like coal dropped from the clouds. One landed on the Mercedes windshield. The driver removed it with a gloved hand and tossed it in the bushes. Sore must be the storm that could abash the little bird, Dickinson had written. Horrific is more apt, thought Coco. As the car pulled away, the call and response of popping sounds grew fainter and fainter, then stopped as they reached the main road out of town.
TEN
Bonjour, Westminster.” Baron Vaufreland smiled demonically at Coco. He was sitting in a chair near the entry to her boutique and had been waiting for an hour for her to come downstairs.
“What did you call me?” Coco scowled at the nasty man. With her purse crooked in her right arm, she tugged at the hem of her gloves, pulling them tighter over her fingers.
