Coco at the Ritz, page 22
“And still you stay with him.”
Coco had no answer.
“Don’t ever bring him near me again!” Misia shouted, and hung up the phone.
Coco felt a heavy shame spreading through her body. Max would have died in any case. He was sick, she told herself.
Misia arranged a service for Max at Église Saint-Roch, the beautiful baroque church on rue Saint-Honoré. The earliest date available was March 21, a week hence. Without consulting Misia, Coco ordered flowers and hired a hearse. I’ll make the funeral beautiful. At least I can do that, she thought.
* * *
The morning of Max’s memorial Mass, Spatz urged Coco to stay home. “It’s a bad idea to draw attention to your friendship with him,” he said, standing in the doorway to their bedroom.
Coco pawed through the hangers in her closet. “I’m going.” She slipped a black silk dress over her head. “If you won’t call a car for me, I’ll take my Rolls out of the garage.”
“I’ll call a damn car.”
A half hour later, as Coco entered the church, dripping melted snow from her fur coat onto the stone floor, the Latin prayer for the dead rang out.
Requiem aeternam dona ei.
Grant unto him eternal rest.
The priest’s low baritone bounced off the towering pillars and climbed to the domed ceiling. He waved a silver chalice, releasing a sharp tang of incense that hovered in a blue haze above him. Coco took a deep breath and fought the urge for a cigarette.
Strolling the long center aisle through bars of gray light slanting in from the vaulted windows, she scanned the pews, spotting Misia and Cocteau in the second row. Coco removed her fur and draped it over her arm. Melted snow seeped through the sleeve of her dress, and she shivered. The past week had been among the coldest of the war, with below-freezing temperatures and mounds of snow, coal in short supply even at the Ritz. She nodded to her friends and slipped into the pew beside them. They stared at the coffin in front of the altar surrounded by flowers and flickering candles.
Coco had designed the service as she’d designed her fashion collections, as a symphony of style with everything working in harmony. She erased all that was black in Max’s death in a service that was all white: white flowers on the pews, white cloths on the altar, and white horses to pull the white coffin to the white eternal light.
It was all for show. There was no body to bury. The coffin was empty. Max’s jailers had placed him in a pine box and lowered him into the ground in the municipal cemetery in a grave marked with a simple wood cross.
After Max’s death, Cocteau never spoke to Coco about his petition. These were wretched times, when selfishness and opportunism collided with history. Who was Cocteau to judge Coco? For the past four years, they’d both been swimming through filthy waters. They’d both howled with the wolves.
Coco knew Misia would never forgive her. She also knew, though, that Misia would never stop loving and needing her. They were locked to the death in a battle of wills.
Ex lux perpetua luceat ei.
Let eternal light shine upon him.
After the service, Coco followed Misia and Cocteau outside into the cold afternoon. They strolled past the Nazi soldier standing guard on the church steps to keep an eye on the proceedings. All was quiet. Only a trickle of mourners had showed up. Pallbearers loaded the empty coffin into the waiting hearse. Pulled by the white horses, it would clatter around the block several times, then head back to the rental stable.
At the curb across the street idled a big black Mercedes with a chauffeur behind the wheel in a brimmed cap and white gloves. In the back seat, Spatz sat in a camel cashmere coat watching Coco through the frosted window. As she parted from her friends and strode toward the Mercedes, a wave of disturbance surrounded her. Women who recognized her stopped to stare. Men hurried away, made uneasy by the familiar Mercedes, the car of the Gestapo and almost the only car still on the streets. Couples folded into each other tightly. Bicycles wobbled by on the icy pavement.
Spatz reached across the seat to open the car door, and Coco stepped inside. He glanced at her for a moment with a blank expression, then looked away, as if she were someone he recognized but no longer wished to know. As the Mercedes glided from the curb, Coco sunk deeply into the dark leather seats. It was like floating on a black cloud, soft and languid, but also ominous.
A storm was coming, a storm against her, and it would be here soon.
SIXTEEN
Coco awoke to loud shouting from the street. It was still early. The pink light of dawn leeched through her bedroom shutters. Looking out, she saw barricades of broken furniture and cobblestones manned by shirt-sleeved young men and girls in summer dresses, a few wearing old World War I helmets, probably swiped from their grandfathers’ closets. In the distance, gunfire. The low buzz of aircraft. Eleven weeks earlier, Allied troops had stormed the beach at Normandy. Soon, they’d be in Paris.
In the salon, Spatz sat with his suitcase in front of him, puffing frantically on a cigarette. He hadn’t dressed down for the long journey ahead in the August heat. He wore a crisply pressed navy linen suit, a white shirt with gold cuff links, and a silver striped Hermès tie. “Get ready. We have to leave now,” he said.
Coco pulled her robe tight across her body and shook her head.
“I’m tired of arguing with you,” Spatz said. “You can’t stay. You’ll be arrested!” He crushed his cigarette in an ashtray. For two months, he’d been pressing Coco to leave with him when they still had a chance to get out of Paris safely. Though not impossible, it would now be much more difficult. Since the failed plot to assassinate Hitler on July 20 by a group of mutinous Nazis, it had become complicated for Germans to travel across borders, especially with Frenchwomen in tow.
“You know the Resistance has been keeping files on collaborators,” said Spatz gravely.
Coco winced at the word.
Seeing her stricken look, Spatz softened his tone. “Please, darling, come with me.”
For the past four years, he’d been Coco’s constant protector, when she might have been thrown out on the street. Without his help, her nephew would have died in a German POW camp. Spatz had pursued her, and she’d fallen in love with him. But the disaster of Modellhut and Max’s death had chilled her feelings. There was no way she was going with Spatz to Germany. She couldn’t exist outside France. She’d rather be dead. I’d blow my brains out, if I had to live one day in disgraced Deutschland. She’d promised herself not to commit suicide while André was still alive. The young man was recovering steadily from tuberculosis and his ordeal as a prisoner. Coco often lunched with him and never let him know the horrible weight of worry and fear she now carried with her, like a pile of stones in the pit of her stomach. Even so, she’d take her chances in Paris.
Spatz grabbed Coco’s arms and pulled her to him. She smelled the starch in his shirt and felt his heart beating. “We belong together,” he said. He smiled at her, showing his boyish dimples, and for a moment she almost gave in. “I’ll meet you in Switzerland, when everything blows over,” she said.
She wasn’t at all sure, however, that they would ever see each other again, and she saw in Spatz’s narrowed eyes that he sensed the doubt behind her words.
Coco disappeared into her bedroom and returned a minute later with a wad of French money tied with a string. She handed it to Spatz. “This should get you across the border.”
Spatz put a few franc notes in his wallet and slipped the rest in his suitcase, under a pile of neatly folded shirts. “Are you still going to your mother’s home in Kiel?” Coco asked.
“It’s as good as any place to hide out until the war is really over. I’ll get word to you when I reach Lausanne,” he said.
A boom shook the air, followed by whistles. A bomb dropping somewhere in the distance. “I better leave,” Spatz said. He kissed Coco quickly and slipped out the door.
When he was gone, Coco felt a deep breath of freedom. In an instant, her status had changed. She was no longer living with a German. Her sense of solace, though, soon vanished, replaced by a profound emptiness more complete than anything she’d ever known or imagined.
She thought of Spatz lying on his side with his back to her in bed, one smooth, sculpted shoulder moving slightly under the white silk sheet with the rise and fall of his breath. There was nothing as intimate as sleeping with someone. She was old now. Her allure was gone. No one would ever want to sleep with her again. Tears welled behind her shut eyes. Holding her fists to her forehead, she fought the tears back.
She wouldn’t indulge in misery. Her instinct was to act, to do something to cancel her pain. Pierre Reverdy had told her to call if she ever needed him, and now she dialed the number he’d given her. An unfamiliar male voice answered. “Please get a message to Reverdy as soon as you can. Tell him I need to see him,” Coco said.
The man didn’t ask Coco anything else and seemed eager to end the call quickly. “All right,” he said, and hung up.
* * *
Two days later, on August 24, the French army marched into Paris, liberating the city. German General Dietrich von Choltitz surrendered, mercifully deciding not to destroy the City of Light, as his troops departed. Looking out the window, Coco saw young men tearing down the swastika from the entrance of a bank and hoisting a tricolor flag in its place. She watched a boy clamber up the pole at the corner of rue Cambon and rip the German street sign from its post.
Coco decided to view de Gaulle’s victory parade from the balcony of José Maria Sert’s apartment, which had a perfect view of the Arc de Triomphe. Leaving her suite on the morning of the parade, she found the lift out of service and took the front stairs. The hotel had been steadily emptying for several weeks. In their haste to flee, the Germans had left behind a mountain of clothes and documents, and hotel employees were burning them in the bathtubs. Snowfalls of gray ash swirled through the long carpeted halls. The lobby resembled a train station—porters hauling luggage, trunks stacked near the entrance. At the checkout desk, lines had formed twenty deep.
Outside, the streets were unpassable. Not even a bicycle could get through the raucous crowds. People talked about the twenties as les années folles, yet Coco had never seen anything as crazy as what she witnessed now. In the doorway of an elegant hat shop, a couple was having energetic sex. When Coco looked away, she saw a dozen women stripped to their underwear and shackled together being led up the street by two laughing FFI soldiers.
Coco crossed the Place de la Concorde just ahead of the victory parade. In Sert’s apartment she found Misia and the artist on the balcony, with a small group of friends waving little French flags. Coco leaned against the iron railing and saw de Gaulle, exceptionally tall and regal, standing in an open car. The crowd below roared, and the little party on the balcony cheered. “Everything about him is larger than life—his ears, his nose, his hands,” said Misia.
“How do you know? You can’t see in front of your face, let alone to the street,” said Coco.
“I feel his presence,” said Misia.
“De Gaulle’s speech yesterday was so stirring.” A man’s voice came from behind. Coco turned and saw the lawyer Michel Pelissier. He looked elegant in a crisply pressed linen suit and a tricolor cockade pinned to his lapel. “I caught the speech on the BBC, and it almost made me cry. ‘Paris ravaged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris free!’ I was glad the general gave credit to the Resistance, and all the sons and daughters of France, except, as de Gaulle put it, a few unhappy traitors who gave themselves over to the enemy.” He looked directly at Coco, and she felt her face burn.
“Everyone’s in the Resistance now!” she blurted. She knew she should have kept her mouth shut, but she couldn’t help bludgeoning her way through arguments. “Every outlaw in town has taken up arms in the name of the FFI. It’s just an excuse to raise hell.”
Misia frowned at her. “I wonder if Cocteau and Marais are getting a better view than us. They’re watching the parade at the Crillon.”
Shots rang out from a nearby rooftop, and the tanks surrounding de Gaulle fired back, violently shaking the air. The cigarette dangling from Coco’s lips fell to the floor.
* * *
At the Ritz, the concierge handed Coco a message from Pierre Reverdy. She was to meet him at the statue of Hannibal in the Tuileries at two. It was now one forty-five.
Coco hurried through the streets under a lurid blue sky. The blazing heat took on a sinister feel. Her blouse was soaked, and her skirt clung to her legs. She found Reverdy sitting on a bench in the shade of a chestnut tree. Great shafts of white sun slanting through the branches cast his face in a saintly glow. He stood as Coco approached. “You wanted to see me?” He looked sharply at her.
“You’ve heard of Baron Louis de Vaufreland?” Coco said.
“We’ve been looking for him for four years. He was responsible for the arrest of ten of our men in Morocco. The Gestapo shot them all,” Reverdy said.
“I know where he is.”
Reverdy’s eyes widened, and Coco continued. “He’s staying with Count Jean-René de Gaigneron.”
Coco handed Reverdy a slip of paper with an address. He studied it a moment, then ripped the paper in tiny pieces and dropped them in his pocket. “I have to go,” he said. No “merci.” No kiss. He stood, and, turning quickly on his heel, walked away.
Coco sat on the stone bench and lit a cigarette. Her eyes followed Reverdy as he hurried down the long, tree-lined allée, until he was nothing but a black dot in the distance. When she finished her cigarette, she smashed it on the ground and started home.
It felt good to turn over Vaufreland to the Resistance. If he rats me out, it’ll be his word against mine, Coco thought, and who will believe a nasty parasite like him? With Vaufreland out of the way, she could breathe easier. She had helped the Resistance nab a reviled enemy! They wouldn’t dare arrest her now.
Coco skipped dinner, swallowed two Seconals—she was running out of morphine—and went to bed early. As she drifted off, she thought of Spatz. She wouldn’t worry about him. His perfect French, his sunny charm, his extraordinary good looks would carry him safely across the border. In a few months, they’d rendezvous in Switzerland, where they’d enjoy a lovely, romantic holiday. She let herself feel comforted, safe.
Six days later, the doorbell rang.
AUGUST 30, 1944
Behind the table in the dingy room at the Prefecture of Police, the Interrogator pressed his mustache with his lower lip. Nazis had occupied the building until a few weeks before, and the pungent smell of the black goop they used to shine their boots still hung in the air. Coco puffed on a cigarette and with her free hand worried the gold buttons on her jacket. Finally, the Interrogator asked, “Did you and von Dincklage first become intimate that night in July 1940 when you returned to Paris?”
Coco couldn’t believe his rudeness. The Germans had been chased out of Paris, only to see French brutes like this man take control. With no real authority and no higher power to answer to except his God, he could do anything to her he wanted: shave her head, strip her, beat her, shoot her. A cold current of panic coursed through her. She felt dizzy, as if she might pass out. Fighting to steady herself, she took a deep breath and willed herself to be strong. “Do you know Pierre Reverdy?” she asked. “He’s a close friend of mine, and a member of the Resistance. I gave him some very important information recently, and he’ll vouch for me.”
“Never heard of him,” the Interrogator said.
The Resistance was a jumble of separate organizations with no central control. Reverdy wasn’t part of the FFI. “You have heard of Winston Churchill, though.” Coco rummaged through her handbag and pulled out a small, framed photograph of herself with the prime minister. “That’s Winston and me boar hunting in the Aquitaine,” she said, setting the silver frame on the table.
On her way out that morning, she’d grabbed the photograph off her bedroom bookshelf. She’d also jotted down the prime minister’s private phone number from her personal address book and taken a cache of his letters from her lingerie drawer. “Winston will tell you. I’m as much of a patriot as de Gaulle.”
Coco dropped the packet of letters on the table and pushed it toward the Interrogator. “Please, look at the letters.”
The Interrogator frowned but took the packet.
“We were good friends, as you’ll see from our correspondence,” Coco said confidently.
The Interrogator opened the top letter, read it quickly, and tossed it aside. “This is nothing—a thank-you note for gifts you sent Churchill’s wife—typed by a secretary, probably.”
“There are many notes handwritten by Winston himself.” Coco’s voice came out more shrilly than she intended.
The Interrogator glanced through several other letters.
“Churchill loves me,” Coco continued. “He admires smart women. I was a change from all those British snobs he was meeting at country house parties, those silly women who did nothing but get drunk and sleep with other people’s husbands. English men are different. They’re gentleman, civilized. Spatz got his polish from his English mother. To me, he was an Englishman.”
“I suppose you thought those other Nazis who stayed at the Ritz—they were Englishmen, too? Goering, Goebbels, Himmler. You passed them every day, in the lobby, in the dining room, on the stairs.”
“I didn’t see them. For me, they weren’t there.”
“You could have gone to another hotel.”
“All the best hotels in Paris were taken over by the Germans.”
“But not every hotel had a giant swastika hung over the entrance.”
“The Eiffel Tower had a giant swastika hanging off it! It was impossible to avoid the damn swastika!”
“But you didn’t even try to avoid Nazis. You and Spatz dined out every week at Bignon’s, the Gestapo’s favorite restaurant.”
