The Milliner's Secret (66 page)

The Left Bank streets were quiet, but the Right Bank teemed with cars bearing General von Stülpnagel’s emissaries and army trucks full of dissident Wehrmacht units. News of Hitler’s death had been reverberating between headquarters buildings, Dietrich told her. Stülpnagel was ushering in the new order, fast, to open the way to peace talks with the Allies.

The Rose Noire was packed with German clientele standing in groups on the dance-floor, ignoring a clarinet, trumpet and drum trio sobbing out ‘Bei Mir Bistu Shein’. Perhaps only Dietrich and Coralie felt the irony of a Yiddish tune played with a swing beat for German ears. Serge Martel peeled through the crowd in his white tuxedo, squeezing out smiles.

‘A less greedy man would have left town by now,’ Coralie said.

‘Perhaps he has faith in Hitler still being alive, one devil to another.’ On the journey over, Dietrich had confided that even Berlin seemed confused about how well the coup was succeeding, with conflicting messages coming out of Army Headquarters on Bendlerstrasse. ‘There is a rumour the Führer is not dead, but that’s the sort of counter-message we would expect from Hitler’s stalwarts. Stauffenberg heard the explosion. He saw Hitler being carried out of the building on a stretcher. He must be dead.’

As Martel bowed them to a central table, Dietrich acknowledged the nods and salutes of fellow officers, showing Coralie how much the power-balance had shifted. Dietrich had always been admired and liked by army men, but as a peripheral figure. Now he was at the hub of a new regime. Should be fun, Coralie thought, when eventually we marry . . . She began to understand the seductive tug of power.

Martel offered Dietrich his best champagne.

‘I will choose for myself from your cellar, Martel.’ Félix Peyron was already shuffling over. ‘Show me to the vaults you’re so proud of.’

Martel looked uneasy. ‘Félix can go. Tell him exactly what you want, Monsieur le Comte, and he’ll select the best variety. Why would I employ a sommelier and do his job for him?’

But Félix groaned. ‘I can’t go down those stairs again, Monsieur Martel. My knees are agony. You’ll understand what arthritis is one day.’

With a twitch of disdain, Martel yielded, though he turned to Coralie and said, ‘Mademoiselle de Lirac, I don’t advise you to come with us. The cellar has an uneven floor, and I cannot vouch for the size of the spiders down there.’

‘I’m not frightened of spiders.’ Linking her arm with Dietrich’s, Coralie followed Martel to a side exit. ‘“Armed and glorious”,’ she whispered. ‘If I see a man-eating spider, I’ll shoot it.’

Martel opened the cellar door using keys he’d taken from Félix. He switched on a cobweb-strewn ceiling light and led the way down. Dietrich came last, shutting the door behind him. The cellar was a long room, dug out of rock, its walls lined with racks laden with bottles that mopped up the sound of their footsteps.

‘Monsieur is fond of Pissotte, but may I suggest something equally fine?’ Martel began describing the grape varieties of a particular region.

Dietrich produced his gun and said calmly, ‘Serge Martel, I am placing you under arrest for collaboration with the Gestapo. You have, in return for payment and favours, committed atrocities in contravention of all legal and moral principle. Raise your hands.’

Martel had been reaching for a bottle. He turned to Dietrich, gin-pale eyes flat with shock and fury. ‘By what right?’

Dietrich held the Enfield absolutely still. ‘I act under the authority of General von Stülpnagel.’

Martel pulled his lips back in a vicious smile, measuring Dietrich’s resolve and his own likely fate, Coralie judged. She wanted a gun in her own hand, and was trying to loosen the strings of her evening purse when Martel leaped, fists first. Dietrich fired and, after a moment of strange suspension, Martel crumpled, face down. Blood oozed through the exit hole in his white tuxedo.

‘And so the world is remade afresh.’ It was Félix Peyron, who had stumped down the cellar steps to join them. ‘I guessed your mission, Monsieur le Comte. Nobody saw you leave the club, and no noise escapes this vault. Please, return upstairs and I will lock up. Later, I will throw Martel’s father’s old war pistol down beside him. I know where it’s kept. If the world believes Martel took his own life, it will save you much embarrassment, Monsieur, Madame.’ He bowed to Coralie, then addressed Dietrich. ‘A Pommery grand cru, Monsieur?’

Dietrich shook his head. ‘I hardly think—’

‘He is in Hell, Monsieur, atoning for what he did to little Julie and all the other girls he hurt and violated. Go and dance.’

‘Dance?’ Coralie echoed.

‘Did you not see? Our swing band left to join the Resistance and we have a new trio, all as old as me. They have to lie down between sets. Please dance, it will encourage them.’

A mournful tune greeted Coralie and Dietrich on the dance-floor. But they did as Félix wanted, and wound their arms around each other. It was too crowded for them to move much. ‘I’d have put a bullet in Martel if I’d got my gun out,’ Coralie whispered. ‘That Gypsy said I would kill.’

‘She said that only to give you your shilling’s worth.’

‘You may mock, but she also said I’d spend my life making hats.’

‘After you told her you worked in a hat factory, no?’

‘Have it your own way, but I killed Serge Martel in my mind, so I’m off the hook.’

The band struck up ‘Lili Marleen’, the song that had become the favourite of the Afrika Korps, translated into French and English and played everywhere. Dietrich sang the refrain in her ear.

They returned to their table to find champagne. Pouring it, Félix said to Coralie, ‘Would you do us the honour of singing a number with the band?’

‘I haven’t practised,’ she objected. Sing, with gunshot ringing in her ears? ‘I don’t have a repertoire.’

‘Neither have they.’ Félix gloomily indicated the band. ‘Keeping them alive the whole night is a triumph.’

Dietrich said, ‘I have never had the pleasure of hearing you sing.’

So she sang ‘Lili Marlène’, the French translation, and calls of ‘Encore!’ persuaded her to sing it again, in German. Félix came to the edge of the stage, clapping as he walked. ‘Will you sing “The Lambeth Walk”? It made me laugh so much when you did it all those years ago. You trounced the Corsicans!’

That was putting a gloss on it, even given Félix’s penchant for flattery. She’d actually sparked a fist-fight, having pretty much announced to everybody listening that she was a Londoner. Not her finest exhibition. From her place behind the microphone, she saw that Dietrich was talking with a man, a civilian with a coat slung over his arm, wearing the sort of cap sports-car drivers had worn in the 1920s. Talking . . . He should be watching her! ‘D’you know “The Lambeth Walk”?’ she asked the band. They did, just. ‘Play it slow as you like.’

She sang it in German: ‘“Do you know Lambert’s nightclub . . .”’ At the end of each phrase, instead of ‘oi’, she did her best imitation of Marlene Dietrich, purring, ‘Nicht wahr?’

People laughed. But her mind was off her singing because she’d realised that it was Kurt Kleber with Dietrich. Something in his posture drew fingernails down the back of her spine. She held on to the last note for twelve beats, curtsied to the audience, blew a kiss at the band. Hitching up her dress, she hopped off the stage. At the table, Dietrich took both her hands. The scar Hiltrud had carved on his cheek burned red. ‘It is over, Coralie. Hitler survived. My friends in Berlin, Stauffenberg and Olbricht, are dead. Executed. It is over. We have failed.’

Kurt said, ‘I am taking Fritzi away, I can’t risk remaining here. There will be reprisals against anybody seen to be a traitor. Make Dietrich leave, Coralie. Do not wait for arrest.’

Dietrich said fiercely, ‘Stand your ground, man. What have you to fear? You were never part of Valkyrie. You were not even part of Dachterrasse.’

Kleber shook his head. ‘Of course I was. We swore fidelity in the flat on Vaugirard. We were the unbreakable circle.’

‘Unbreakable?’ Dietrich had kept Coralie’s hands and she felt his bitter, bitter anguish. ‘Not you, Kurt. You have been false for a long time. It was you who betrayed me to Reiniger.’

‘This is insane!’ Kleber’s facial scars stretched white, is if they might tear open. ‘Betray you to Reiniger? You are my brother officer!’

‘True. You stooped even lower. You dared not approach Reiniger directly, in case the information kicked back on you. You used Serge Martel as a conduit.’

‘What are you talking about? It was that art-dealer friend of yours who betrayed you. Coralie,’ Kurt appealed to her, ‘you know it was so.’

‘Not any more,’ she came back staunchly. ‘Not for months.’

Kurt looked at her, then Dietrich in puzzlement. ‘You went after him. You believed in his guilt.’

‘In the heat of the moment,’ Dietrich conceded. ‘You, on the other hand, not only accepted a stranger’s guilt, based upon a casual word, you were instantly fired up to kill him. Such speed is always suspicious. You had a gun ready, no?’

Coralie, always keen to have facts lined up correctly, interrupted, ‘No, Fritzi had the gun.’

‘And when I saw it, I knew that another man’s downfall had been prepared that evening.’ Dietrich looked straight at Kleber. ‘Mine.’

‘You are raving, Dietrich. You are my friend,’ Kurt insisted.

‘Fritzi’s not a woman to go out with a gun in her bag. That sort of thing is for hard-bitten Annie Oakleys.’ Dietrich gave Coralie a smile. ‘She was carrying it on your behalf, and she had it with her at the Rose Noire.’

‘To shoot you?’ Coralie had believed Dietrich to this point, but now her certainty wavered. Hadn’t Kurt Kleber nearly killed himself in his determination to assassinate Hitler?

‘Not to shoot me,’ Dietrich said. ‘For me to shoot myself. The scenario was that Reiniger would take us to Martel’s office, where Martel would make his accusations. We would be damned as conspirators, you and I. You would be dragged away while I would be offered the honourable way out by Kurt. A bullet to my own head, befitting my rank. That way, neither Kurt nor Reiniger could be held responsible for my death. The plan went awry because Martel did not hold to the line, and Julie fell apart at the first question. Reiniger was never sure enough of his ground to arrest a former brother-in-arms of Reichsmarschall Göring, but he has stalked me ever since. You, Kurt, how do you plead?’

Kurt gave a shrug. ‘I plead loyalty to the Führer, except in one thing. I am here in good faith to warn you to leave Paris, or perish. Heil Hitler!’

They watched him go. ‘Why did he do it?’ Coralie asked.

‘In the beginning, before the war, he was violently against Hitler. It was his idea to plant a bomb in a Munich beer cellar where Hitler and his commanders held a rally once a year on November the eighth.’

‘Our birthday.’

‘For so many reasons, an unforgettable date. When we met at the Expo in 1937, Kurt was already laying plans. He thought of the name “Dachterrasse”. He was the leader, the one learning to build explosives, the one who would make the bomb. The third man you saw was Stauffenberg, who was to recruit others, and I was to visit the beer cellar in Munich that November 1937 and make sketches of the interior, the position of pillars and so on. We planned to strike the following year. But when I went that first time, the place was so crowded I couldn’t record anything useful. We agreed instead that I would carry a bomb personally into another event where the Führer was to speak, and detonate it myself.’

‘Kill yourself?’

‘Exactly. Easier, really, than trying to plant a bomb and hope it goes off at the right moment. Then that event was cancelled, and the next. Shortly after those failures, Kurt crossed some wires while working in his cellar and he nearly died, but he recovered. The following year, 1938, I went again to Munich, and this time got a better position and was able to memorise the layout of the room. But Kurt, instead of relishing another attempt, began putting it off. The time wasn’t right, the political mood of the country wasn’t right. I disagreed but did not press. Kurt had been through so much. And, you know, in the first year of war, everything fell to our army. Hitler was invincible and somehow I think that Kurt fell under his spell. Fritzi, who had been solidly behind her husband, lost her nerve too. She did not want to lose her man, and added her voice to the doubts in his head.’

‘So he turned traitor?’

‘Not at first. He kept the pretence of Dachterrasse going well enough to convince me, but I think now he was playing a two-sided game. I see it in hindsight, but it was not until we were in Serge Martel’s office that I realised there was a traitor and that it had to be a man close to us. One who understood the nature of “sacrifice”. That word was spoken several times that night, yet it is not a word ordinary people use.’

‘Admit it, you suspected Teddy. And me, just for a little moment.’

‘Teddy for a moment, but never you. Not even for a second. I am so sorry, Coralie.’

‘Why sorry?’

‘For bringing you into something so treacherous. So final.’

She didn’t like ‘final’. ‘Where now?’

‘To rue de Vaugirard. You will go to Switzerland, my darling, and I will wait in Paris to see what happens next.’