Hitler's Girls (10 page)

I think of Clemency Wilsford. A foolish, upper-class girl, in love with the vilest man ever to walk the earth…

I must explain, Jean. I tried to tell Jim Graham down the road, but he is too sure he knows everything and he looked at me as if he thought I’d gone crazy—

The letter shakes in my hand as I read. An attendant passes—tall, young, dark hair held in a pony-tail under his cap, eager to please in this climate of jobs as quickly gone as they are found. I push the letter under the knapsack again. I am not a rich, expensive-looking traveller, and he walks on, descending the
stairs to the First Class Club Lounge. I struggle to lift Monica’s letter, my fingers blue with cold, to read it again. I consider running down to the First Class Club to let them all know: their world is in terrible danger. Whether they believe themselves liberal, or faintly conservative, or even admirers of our Iron Lady, the royal blue Queen who still rules so many hearts, the world they know is about to be irremediably and horribly swept away.

I think Jim does believe me now, Jean—but it is unlikely he can take any steps to prevent the disaster which is on its way. Jean, when you read this you must go to the Prime Minister—you must alert the Foreign Office—only you, with your credentials as a historian, can gain the ear so urgently needed now—

It seems incredible that this tremulous, concerned being, alive and agonising over the future of the human race on paper, should now be dead in real life.

They want Mel. They need her, Jean. It is too vile and wicked to describe
.

Mel, my daughter, the great-granddaughter of Adolf Hitler. She printed out those terrible photographs, from her computer, of the dead Goebbels child in the Bunker. They gave her drugs, and she went with them
.

I entrust Mel to you. You are her goddaughter. Save her from evil
.

While we were playing hopscotch in the playground at Edleston School, they were waiting and planning. Do you know, Jean, just how many Nazis there are in this smug little island of ours? Only in the past few months, since the death of the good doctor and his wife, have I begun to learn
.

And so it went on, page after page of cheap, lined paper. I tried to imagine her desperate attempt to find peace, donning the “negligée” which made Jim Graham sneer. Her panic, as she faced another evening as the secret daughter of the world’s most evil man, her fear for her own granddaughter. Was Mel naturally bad? How much nurture, and how much nature, was there in the violent, aggressive child?

Finally came her unsteady run down the road to Jim’s house; the curtain twitching as Mrs. Walker watches her go by; her return to 109. The shambolic house empty of provisions; the donning of skirt, jumper, and overcoat. Then out to the Banesbury Grove post office, bag strapped across her stomach. Still quite early. A March afternoon shading into evening.

The gang coming down the street.

The shouts.

The pale hand raising the knife.

Monica falling; blood spouting onto the pavement…

“Madame?” A voice from behind made me jump. “Excuse me, Madame, it is the fire drill. You will please go down the ladder to the lower deck.”

The tall attendant who had passed me before looked intently at me as he spoke. Then he moved on, looking back a few times to ensure I obeyed instructions.

It was only as I descended the ladder that I realised a bell was ringing loudly.

The little car ferry universe, with its rude, shouting lorry drivers and angry businessmen, was held up by the bell. A sailor threw us all life belts. No-one put one on.

Then the clanging stopped. There was only the rough slap of the sea and the pull of hawser and chain. One of the French drivers yelled an insult about Algerians to another, and then both of them, cigarettes dangling from their lips, laughed and spat.

I did nothing to remonstrate them. I knew myself a coward. I thought of Monica. She would be ashamed of me. In her mind I stood for good, even if she had found herself to be marked by evil.

I went into the lounge where the humbler ticket holders were permitted to take shelter from the elements. It was nearly empty: just one man in a dark raincoat sat by the spray-lashed plate-glass window.

I returned to the letter.

They want the number, Jean. I turned the house upside down for the number. It has gone. But—I almost remember—that game we played in the playground—how did those numbers go?

That was all. Monica signed off with that tall, neat M I remembered so well.

A short time later, she was dead.

The Rue Danube on Paris’s Left Bank is the unexpected headquarters of Maitre Paul.

The area is more affluent than in the sixties when I studied at the Sorbonne. There are boutiques and art galleries where once there had been shabby cafés and little shops selling candles and soap. Tourists have clearly taken over the Deux Magots and the Flore, where pseudo-philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir used to air their pretentious views.

I crossed the Boulevard St Germain and set off in search of Rue Jacob. The street was restored and smartened, fit for a prominent lawyer’s office, rather than the garret life of Jean-Luc Godard (another bête noire).

I prepared myself for what I might discover. Jennifer Devant, after scribbling the name and number on a legal pad, warned me of Maitre Paul’s almost supernatural quickness of mind, and of her extreme rudeness should she perceive herself to be in the presence of a “dolt.”

I needed to know the facts surrounding Monica’s parentage. I must be shown birth certificates and proof of Clemency Wilsford’s actual relationship with Hitler (if any such relationship could exist: Jennifer’s caustic comments on the Führer’s testicular condition were both crude and specific).

Most of all, as my barrister friend insisted, I must discover what financial arrangements Hitler made for his child. “The will, Jean,” said Jennifer Devant, QC. “If there was an arrangement for Monica, the sum must be gigantic by now! Nazi gold!” And my incorrigible friend had rolled her eyes and lit a cheroot, always a sign of pleasure on her part.

My intentions, on meeting Maitre Paul, must be clear: I would not be deflected from the answers I so badly needed, however unusual the speed of this octogenarian’s mind.

I had to know how and where I could find Mel. The car that had nearly run me down in Banesbury Road was as long gone as the infamous Fiat Uno allegedly responsible for the death of Princess Diana, just a stone’s throw away from here. There would be no hope of finding Mel unless Maitre Paul co-operated with me.

The building in the Rue Danube was at first impossible to locate. Private
hotels particuliers
, dingy from the outside but boasting fine courtyards and showing glimpses of Aubusson tapestries and discreetly lit oil paintings, served as reminders
of the hidden life in France. What if Maitre Paul’s address had simply vanished? What if the ancient lawyer was in fact dead? Questioning any surviving relatives would be tricky: I saw, in my mind’s eye, first scorn, then disbelief, and then anger, at my requests for information on the private life of Adolf Hitler.

Yet, there is something of the dogged, the Scottish, in my character. It was worth the while of Maitre Paul to collaborate (an undesirable word: I banished it as soon as it came) with me in the matter of Mel. Unlike my friend the hard-nosed barrister, I was not out for retribution at all costs.

None of this, as it transpired, was of the slightest use to me when it came to finding Maitre Paul. After finally entering the foyer of a shabby building which had HOTEL DANUBE in faded letters above the door, rising in an ancient lift at the side of one of those twisting staircases in which Paris seems to specialise, and walking to a door of thick oak with the words MAITRE PAUL in gold lettering on a plaque beside it, I was annoyed to find that there was no-one there to answer my ring.

The boy at the reception desk had yawned when I asked him for the lawyer. A chambermaid, in a full black-and-white outfit with frilly apron, waved a feather duster in the direction of the Maitre’s suite with much the same combination of silence (my least favourite characteristic of the French, I own, a maddening
je m’en foutisme
).

This was a hotel with surprising touches of comfort. As my eyes became acclimatised to the gloom I noted that a splendid pair of
fauteuils
, almost certainly genuine Louis XVI, stood along the passageway; and an oval portrait of a wistful girl, definitely by Greuze, hung on the wall near the Maitre’s formidable and impressive oak door. Were these from her collection? For a moment, thoughts of Hitler’s looted treasures filled my mind, and a sense of repugnance at the expropriation of Europe’s finest works of art made it difficult for me to concentrate on the interview ahead. Were there lost masterpieces waiting behind the door by the Impressionists, by Cézanne, Monet, and Van Gogh?

A very slight sound behind the door roused me to the importance of my errand here in Paris. There was the smell of urine.

The noise behind the door—first a rubbing, sliding sound and then a series of muffled bumps—stopped abruptly. Then the lights all went out.

Now I began to feel alarmed. Even the head of the balustrade was unlit and the lift door totally invisible in the blackness. There was nothing else to do. I pushed my knee against the heavy oak and threw my body against it at the same time. The door swung open with ease. I was in Maitre Paul’s apartment—her “chambers,” her bureau, her private art gallery.

I have heard it said that contact with a stranger when half-asleep in the dark is the most disturbing experience it is possible to have. At first, there is familiarity. Then the organism rouses itself to fight. What has been unthinkingly fondled must be kicked or stabbed: disposed of straight away.

This was my experience, except for the added complication of a fragrance so strong that the creeping smell of urine was quite vanquished. What was this fragrance?
Muguets, bleuets de champs?
I only knew it to be overpowering and expensive. At first, I found it welcoming. As if the luxurious ambience provided by the scent (later, I was to discover, Guerlain’s
Après l’Ondée
, a blend of wild iris root and gentian) meant I had done no more than step on a rug, a fur maybe, or an ineffably soft needlework carpet.

My hand reached for a light switch. A chandelier blazed suddenly overhead, in the rose-muralled, over-scented passage of the lawyer’s private rooms. A cat—a Russian blue, with unpleasantly slanting eyes—strolled from the end of the corridor.

An ancient, painted, sequin-jacketed woman lay dead at my feet. In her hands: a long piece of paper. Even as I stood there, standing quite literally on top of her, I could read the words: “To Peter Miller from Maitre Paul.”

I write this in the train. A group of English schoolgirls giggle as a long-haired, dark young man passes them in the corridor and refuses to return their cheeky glances. A priest, opposite me, is deeply engaged in fondling some kind of electronic object. Does it give him comfort? Do Catholics lavish their care on imaginary beings such as a Tamagotchi more readily than Protestants?

She was small. Maitre Paul was as shrunken and simian as an exhibit in a museum of past wonders: a dwarf at a Sicilian court, perhaps. Her suit was Chanel, circa 1968. In such an outfit the
bonnes bourgeoises
of Paris and its outlying suburbs cried out in dismay at the “Revolution” brought about by the students. I saw their little gilt chains rattling on TV as they spoke against the preposterous notions of freedom, equality, and individual libertarianism which those foolish months fostered.

Maitre Paul’s suit had once been raspberry tweed. Now the fruit has turned a darker hue from blood spilled down over the
elaborate frogging with which Mme Coco Chanel distinguished her otherwise unremarkable suits.

Blood, from such a bloodless corpse. To steal from the Scottish play: who would have thought the old woman had so much blood in her?

But of course I am in shock. Trauma. Yes, I am traumatised. The word is as bland and meaningless as all the other politically correct phrases we are fed by the social services these days.

My quandary: I should find the police, and I should go to them in London.

Then the words of Jennifer Devant come back to me: “Never apologise, never explain. Not that you ever do, of course. Hard to tell what beats in that breast of yours.”

Why do I think of her now, as the TGV heads like a great reptile through the banlieus of the world’s most corrupt, most civilised city? Am I urging her to make me abandon the train, my mission, everything?

For it is a mission by now. I know I should return to London and tell the police. I should tell them why Monica died: because a gang of children were sent to find something in her possession, and, panicking at her resistance, killed her.

I should tell them the gang was paid in drugs. That Chris Bradley died because he wanted to tell me the truth.

Peter Miller. Peter Müller. He presented himself to me as an estate agent. But who is he really?

I left his letter in Maitre Paul’s hands, but not before I read what was inside. Replacing it was the hard part: the tiny fingers brittle as twigs, snapping as I forced the paper back into the tiny palm.

I should be on a train back to London.

Instead I am on a train to the South of France.

I called Jennifer Devant before I left, but there wasn’t time to tell her much.

My mission remains the same: to find Mel and make her safe.

Come with me, Mel. All this is a ridiculous mistake. Come and live with me in Edinburgh and I will teach you to trust again, even to love…

How dull and flat France is! Mile after mile of factory chimneys, of grass as winter-grey as the withered cheeks of

Maitre Paul!

Jennifer Devant again: “You left Monica’s house the last time quite certain that she ransacked it herself, searching for something. Why did you say you thought it might be a number? Your number, Jean? The number of someone who could help her? The number of the police? Try and think, Jean…”