The Milliner's Secret (30 page)

‘Please get in, Fräulein.’

It was a long time since she’d ridden so comfortably, but all she could do was envisage a series of ever more menacing destinations. Every street now had a German name sign. She took stock of them as they drove towards the river. At pont de la Concorde, a motorcycle sentry signalled them on. Once over the bridge, they swept down boulevard Saint-Germain.

Then they were on boulevard Raspail and in a moment, they’d reach the intersection with rue de Vaugirard. The hairs rose on the back of her neck. Had Dietrich come to Paris to deal with Ottilia’s art collection? Had he found signs of Ottilia living in the house? And . . . Oh, God. What if Ottilia had given more pictures away and Dietrich thought she, Coralie, was to blame? That would account for his frigidity.

To her relief, the car stopped in boulevard Raspail, in front of the Hôtel Lutetia. A swish place. She’d been there a couple of times with Teddy and, suddenly, she was glad she’d worn high heels and a snazzy hat. If Dietrich meant to meet her here for a drink, she didn’t want to look like a drab who had spent two years pining for him. She intended to rage at him, let him know what she thought of him, while appearing peerlessly groomed.

A haven for foreign refugee artists, the Lutetia had been very much Teddy’s kind of place. But as she climbed out of the car, she saw that it had suffered the same fate as other grand hotels. From its windows spewed elongated swastikas, like stair carpet spat out to dry.

In the marble foyer, icons of Nazism were everywhere, superimposed on the lush decor. An immaculately suited man was being walked towards them in the grip of two soldiers, and for a moment, Coralie thought they’d collide. His face was sheened with sweat. She’d seen such a face once on Tooley Street, when a man had been knocked down by a tram. Shock. Shock and a haywire heartbeat. As he was dragged past, the stranger mumbled in a strong Spanish accent, ‘This is wrong! So wrong!’

‘Come.’ One of her escorts urged her forward. From the heart of the building came the clink of crockery, the growl of voices, alerting her to the fact that the dining room was nearby and she was hungry – until the smell of baked fish collided with the recent memory of Violaine’s shopping basket.
Those flies
. Her gorge rose and she wasn’t sure she’d hold it down if they took her nearer the kitchen.

No – they were ushering her up the central staircase, then up another set of stairs, and another, to where the decor was plainer, the corridors narrower. She felt every passing stranger’s scrutiny and wondered how she looked to them. Flushed pink, probably, to match her outfit. She’d walked, then run, on a hot June day and sat in a stuffy room without a mouthful of water. And another thing – ‘Gentlemen, if you don’t mind, I need the Ladies.’

Instead, she found herself in a room whose single window was blanked out with brown paper. One of the men switched on a light, revealing two chairs and a desk. Not wasting money on furniture, obviously. They hadn’t even run to a lampshade.

A moment later, the door closed and she was alone.

Locked in. Hammering, she shouted, ‘My friend is dying. Let me out!’

She was still shouting when a key turned and Dietrich came into the room. He was still in uniform, his cap under his arm. ‘Sit down,’ he said.

What happened to ‘please’? She’d comply when he asked nicely.

He took the seat at the far side of the desk and laid a book in front of him. It reminded Coralie of the ledger they’d compiled together in rue de Vaugirard.

He said in French, ‘Stand, if you like, but you will be here longer.’

‘Did you call an ambulance?’

‘Sit down, Fräulein.’

Fräulein? Had he forgotten their hours in bed together? But she sat, making a show of smoothing her skirt so he’d think she was irritated, not scared. Dietrich leaned forward, clasping his hands in front of him. He had on the same watch as before, an aviator’s watch, with its well-worn strap. Bare light sucked definition from his face and she couldn’t tell if he’d aged in the thirty-five months they’d been apart. Only that his hair seemed a little greyer.

‘Who’s going to start the conversation?’

‘This is not a conversation. Your full name, Fräulein.’

All right. Silly games it is. She opened her bag, to extract her identity card. The bag he’d bought her, from Hermès.

‘I said, state your name.’

Shocked, she stammered, ‘Coralie de—’
No, stop
. He meant her real name, the one he’d invented for her. ‘Marie-Caroline de—’
Stop again
. Her card bore a different identity, these days. ‘Cazaubon. I am Madame Cazaubon.’

Hazel eyes that had so often laughed with her, so often dilated with excitement or softened in passion, bored into her. ‘You are married but you wear no ring.’

Stupid to look down, as if a gold band might materialise. ‘It lives in a drawer. We’re separated.’

‘Your husband’s name?’

Ah . . . was this about Ramon’s political affiliations?
Some of the groups he’d supported in Paris had been quite extreme. ‘I told you, we’re not together.’

‘If you don’t tell me his name, it will be easy enough to find out, but it might take several hours. If you are content to remain—’

‘Ramon. Ramon Cazaubon.’

‘Has he a middle name?’

‘Course he has. He’s French, isn’t he?’ She hadn’t meant to sound quite so insolent, but her mouth was so dry she could taste her tongue. A glass of water would be nice, if a cup of tea was out of the question. ‘Maurice André.’ Or was it the other way round? She’d only heard Ramon’s full set of names on their wedding day and when registering Noëlle’s birth.

Dietrich unscrewed the top of a fountain pen and wrote down her reply. ‘Your date of birth?’

‘I shouldn’t have to tell you that.’

‘Date of birth.’

‘Eighth of November, 19 . . .’ Her mind went blank. In the end, she had to look at her identity card. ‘1915. You’re making me nervous and I’m worried about Mademoiselle Beaumont. I need a drink, too. I mean, a glass—’

‘Your place of birth?’

‘Um, Nivelles.’ Or was it Tubize? ‘Nivelles, in Brabant, Belgium. But you know that already, Dietrich!’

‘Address me as Generalmajor von Elbing.’

She stared at him. Were they playing a game of pretending to be strangers?

More rapid questions followed. Her parents’ professions, her place of baptism, her schooling, her training. After that, questions about Ramon. Age, date of birth – thank God that was easy to remember, being 31 October, All Saints’ Eve. Hallowe’en. She’d often told Ramon he was her nightmare.

‘His profession?’

‘Um . . . the army, just now.’ Ramon’s civilian job had carried a long-winded title which she’d never managed to capture. ‘Before, he worked for SNCF – for the railways? He was an engineer. To do with bridges and tunnels.’

‘A maintenance engineer?’

‘He . . . No. He made drawings with calculations . . . I didn’t really understand it.’

Something touched Dietrich’s lips. A smile? ‘Shall we say he is a structural surveyor, Frau Cazaubon?’

‘Yes. Sorry. I don’t know where he’s posted, I swear it. We don’t hear from him.’

The shutters fell back down. ‘
We?
’

‘I have a daughter.’

‘Name.’

‘Noëlle Una.’ Watching Dietrich’s pen, fear spread to her nerve endings. Her child’s existence was now on paper. ‘Why are you writing that down? Who are you now?’

‘What I always was.’ Dietrich wrote on for a minute or so, then laid down his pen. ‘Why, if you live south of the river, were you at the Hôtel de Crillon?’

She told him that La Passerinette now belonged to her. ‘You know it’s on Madeleine, so when I needed a working telephone, I ran to place de la Concorde. I told your people that.’

‘You bought La Passerinette from the Baronne von Silberstrom? Where is she?’

A warning bell tolled. Dietrich’s features remained smooth, but what of the soul within? As Teddy had once brutally pointed out, she knew nothing about this man.

This interview might not be about Ramon at all. Perhaps Dietrich wanted Ottilia, who had been on a Nazi death-list since the mid-1930s. Stranded in Paris, Jewish and a refugee, her situation was fragile.
We’ll get her out
, Coralie decided there and then. Back to England, God knows how. ‘I’ve no idea where she is.’

Dietrich’s gaze roamed to Coralie’s neck, then her face, then to ‘Daytime Seduction’, so named because its silky tassels entwined with the wearer’s curls. ‘So you did not buy the hat shop from her?’

‘No, from Lorienne Royer. She’s moved away, though.’ And could therefore not be roped in to contradict. ‘Can I have a drink of water, before I faint?’

Dietrich leaned back in his chair and she waited for the words that would bring the interrogation to a close, and allow her to escape to the lavatory, which was becoming even more urgent than the need for water. The silence went on so long, she broke it.

‘What else can I tell you? My shoe size? You already know how many sugars I put in my tea and which side of the bed I like to sleep on.’

A twitch. A reaction. So, he wasn’t a completely frozen fish. Without taking her eyes from him, she summoned a picture of their Duet bed, placed herself on it wearing nothing at all, and brought him into the scene. She remembered how he had sighed her name as she caressed his body from breastbone to navel and lower . . . She watched the real Dietrich and knew that he was fighting arousal. The muscles of his face and neck were taut as piano wire. She leaned across the desk, laid her hand over his and said, ‘Boo!’

She waited for the smile, the surrender. It was so close. When he picked up his pen, she wondered that it didn’t snap in two. But all he said was ‘Let us go through these questions again.’

‘How utterly dreadful. Oh, darling, how fearfully humiliating. Dietrich von Elbing did this to you? Ottilia’s hero? Should we tell her?’

Coralie gulped down the tea Una had made for her. ‘I don’t want to think of him ever again. Though I say it myself, I performed one of the great heroic walks of history. I finally got through to him that I was about to burst, and never did a man shift so fast.’

If she ever recovered from her fright, Coralie believed she might one day smile at the memory of Dietrich flinging open doors along the corridor, only to discover that every room was a stationery cupboard or an office. ‘I followed behind like chief mourner at a very slow funeral.’

‘You shamed him. Good for you.’

‘More likely he was protecting the carpets. When I came out of the lavatory, he sort of shrugged and let me go. I still don’t know what it was all about, and you must never tell Ottilia. We have to get her to safety, though, before he finds her.’

Una nodded.

Coralie shuddered. ‘You think, when they come for you, that you’ll fight back . . . but you don’t. You drop like a dog. There was a man at the Lutetia, Spanish, I think . . .’ But she didn’t want to speculate on his fate.

Violaine’s fate, on the other hand, would hopefully be revealed shortly. Coralie had been too scared to go back to La Passerinette, so Arkady had gone for her. The air in the flat vibrated with shock. Noëlle had cried herself to sleep, apparently. Una had described playing interminable games with the little girl, promising every minute, ‘Maman’s coming home real soon, honey.’

Ottilia had cried, too, when Coralie appeared, shaking and dishevelled. She was still emitting muffled sobs in her room. Una fidgeted, then picked up Coralie’s cup, taking it through to the kitchen.

‘Arkady’s been such a long time,’ she fretted when she came back into the sitting room.

‘Not if he keeps having his papers checked.’

Una seized on that. ‘Yes, he’s Hungarian. They’ll wave him through.’

‘Except he’s a Gypsy,’ Coralie pointed out.

‘His papers don’t say that.’

No, but his features do, and I shouldn’t have let him run my errand.
Though her legs were ready to buckle, Coralie stood up to prepare supper. ‘Keep busy, girls, that’s the ticket,’ she said, in Miss Lucilla Lofthouse’s voice.

Una called after her, ‘I’ve said it before, you do the darnedest English accent, honey. How long did you live there in all?’

‘Oh . . . a few years. I pick up accents. Coralie, the human parrot. Shall I do my Marlene Dietrich impression of a woman throwing together vegetable stew and salt beef?’

Arkady arrived home minutes before curfew. He’d been stopped eight times, he said, but his papers had held up. A German guard had even given him a cigarette.

‘What about Violaine?’

‘She is at the American Hospital in Neuilly.’

Neuilly was to the north-west, a well-heeled suburb of Paris.

There had been a note, Arkady told Coralie, stuck through La Passerinette’s letterbox. ‘With a signature I am not reading.’ And everything else from the salon had gone, he said.

Coralie had temporarily forgotten about her ransacked workroom. A little voice nagged,
Now what will you do?
Buy more stuff, she told it.

Arkady couldn’t tell her who had organised Violaine’s transfer to the American Hospital and Coralie gave up caring because Noëlle suddenly woke, screaming for
Maman
.