Wild Lavender (56 page)

‘The first time I saw you was in 1930 in Paris,’ he said, sitting down and taking a silver cigarette box from his pocket. ‘At the Folies Bergère. What a voice, I thought. What a magnificent voice. And, of course, you were very beautiful.’

He paused to take out a cigarette, light it and blow out a long puff of smoke. The stink of tobacco scraped down my throat. I did my best not to choke. Wherever this interrogation was going, I had to be careful. It was possible that Odette and Petite Simone had not been identified as Jews and that I had been arrested for something else. After all, Roger had warned me that the Gestapo were becoming suspicious of my activities.

Von Loringhoven gave me a long, considered look, as if he were waiting for me to speak. Roger had once told me that the most important thing was to keep quiet for at least twenty-four hours. That would give the network time to hear of the arrest and go into hiding. I was determined to remain silent for as long as I could.

A shadow appeared in the light. It was a man wearing a leather coat. He stepped forward as if he were going to greet me but instead delivered a blow to my cheek so forceful that my neck cracked and I saw stars.

‘Not on the face,’ growled von Loringhoven.

I looked up in time to see the man swing his fist again. His knuckles slammed into my chest. The chair skidded backwards and I crashed to the floor, falling onto my damaged shoulder. I howled in pain and wriggled backwards. I tried to tell myself that the situation was real and to think quickly. But the thug’s violence was not a part of anything I had ever known or imagined. He made a run for me. I struggled to curl up but I couldn’t defend myself with my ankles chained and my hands cuffed behind me. His foot smashed into my stomach. I heaved and gasped for breath, feeling as though my pelvis had been shattered into pieces. He drew back his foot, ready to strike again. I closed my eyes, sure that the next blow would kill me.

‘Enough!’ ordered von Loringhoven.

The torturer uprighted the chair, with me in it, and left the room.

‘You are a foolish woman, Mademoiselle Fleurier,’ said von Loringhoven. ‘The Germans and French work so well together. And you could have been free to carry on with your life as normal. But perhaps it is the company you have been keeping.’

I could barely hear him above the ringing in my ears. The air in my throat was making a desperate, rasping sound.

‘Now,’ said von Loringhoven, ‘tell me what you know about Yves Fichot.’

‘I don’t know an Yves Fichot,’ I gasped through the pain.

‘What about Murielle Martin then?’

I shook my head.

Von Loringhoven paused. For an awful moment I thought he was going to call in the thug again. But I was telling the truth: I did not know who those people were. I had been deliberately kept in the dark regarding names. I lifted my head. It was the first time I had really seen Colonel von Loringhoven’s eyes. They were dark and beady. The eyes of a snake.

He clucked his tongue. ‘What about your dear friend, Roger Delpierre?’

My mouth turned dry and I swallowed. Von Loringhoven’s face broke into a smile. He was pleased to have got a reaction.

‘You see what I mean about your foolishness in who you choose for friends? Why would a glamorous, talented woman like you trust a lowlife like that?’ he said.

Von Loringhoven stood up and paced around the circle of light. He came to a stop at my right side and reached his hand towards me as if he were going to caress my face. But the side of my cheek was bloody from the fall. He must have thought better of it and withdrew his hand to his pocket.

‘Did Roger Delpierre tell you that he loved you?’ he asked, with a slight chuckle. ‘He has told every woman he has slept with the same thing. He has used you all for his own ambitions. We caught him three days ago trying to escape from Marseilles. We only had to threaten to cut off his balls before he blabbered everything he knew about you and the network.’

There was a taste like metal in my throat. I coughed and the pain racked my ribs. Roger? Roger had used me? The beating had deadened my senses. I forced myself to put one thought logically in front of the other, but the effort was like one of those dreams where you run and run but get nowhere.

Von Loringhoven returned to his seat, smug in the certainty that he had broken me. There was something about his hastiness that raised my suspicions. As I repeated Roger’s name to myself, images of the work we had carried out together flooded my mind. Roger would never betray the network he had worked so carefully to build, even under torture. He had shown me once the cyanide tablet he kept in his pocket in case he was ever caught and felt himself in danger of ‘giving vital secrets away’. Besides, if von Loringhoven had found out ‘everything’ why wasn’t he using Roger’s real surname?
He must be lying, I thought. He is assuming that if I think all is lost for the network, I will tell everything I know. The idea gave me something to hold on to despite the searing pain. I had to outsmart von Loringhoven at his own game. I tried to emulate Roger when he was under pressure—slowing my breathing, calming my emotions, staying focused on the essentials.

‘Then you know about Bruno and Kira?’ I whimpered. ‘The radio operators I took to Bordeaux.’

Von Loringhoven’s eyes danced over me. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Delpierre told us everything about them.’

Despite the horror of the situation, I had an urge to laugh. I hid it by tucking my head against my shoulder and pretending to weep. The Great Dane and my cat had many talents, but radio operating was not one of them. And I had not been to Bordeaux in years.

Von Loringhoven reached over and patted my arm. ‘Perhaps your visit here will encourage you to make wiser choices in the future,’ he said.

The colonel’s voice prickled my skin. I was sure I was in the presence of the most evil man I had ever met, but his tone was almost fatherly.

Von Loringhoven called in the guards, who dragged me back to my cell. Later, I was given some watery soup and dry crusts of bread. Alone again, I had time to think over what had happened. Von Loringhoven had not asked me many questions about the network and none at all about Odette and Petite Simone. He had not even mentioned them. I had been beaten, true, but I had heard of the Gestapo burning people’s feet, cutting off their fingers and toes, and gouging out their eyes. In the light of those tortures, I had escaped lightly. I wondered if that was a good sign, or whether they were going to keep me until they found an Agent Bruno and Agent Kira in Bordeaux? I could understand why even the most courageous people talked under interrogation. It was the uncertainty and waiting that weakened you as much as the beating.

When I heard the guard unlock my cell door the following morning, dread fell over me. Would today’s beating be worse than the one I had received yesterday?

I glanced up and saw Camille Casal looking back at me. The guard brought her a chair and dusted it off with his handkerchief before allowing her to sit down. She straightened her silk skirt over her legs and nodded to the guard that he should leave. It took me a moment to recover from her appearance. But then I guessed why they had sent her. They were hoping that as an ‘old friend’ she might be able to coax more information out of me.

‘You are wasting your time, Camille,’ I said to her. ‘I don’t know anything about the network. I was never told a thing.’

That wasn’t strictly true; after all, I knew Madame Ibert and Madame Goux, the doctors, André and my family in Pays de Sault. But I was prepared to die rather than give away any of them.

Camille shifted in her seat and pulled her jacket over her shoulders, as if she had just noticed the chill in my cell. I was so numb I could barely feel anything.

‘Your attitude towards the Germans is what has brought you to this, Simone,’ she said. ‘They know that you are nothing but a minor link in any Resistance movement. That you were exploited because you had fallen in love.’

Her statement stunned me. I sat back on the straw bed and leaned against the wall. Was it possible that the Nazis really did not know the extent of my involvement in the network? Perhaps the double agent had been playing a game, hedging his bets either way.

‘You refuse to perform in Paris,’ Camille continued, her voice booming around the cell. ‘You are difficult with the Propagandastaffel, you snubbed Colonel von Loringhoven’s hospitality at Maxim’s and then you refused to share a train compartment with him.’

My sluggish, starved and dehydrated mind tried to keep up with this new development. I was in prison because I had hurt a Nazi’s feelings?

‘Why am I here?’ I asked her.

‘Because of your responsibilities,’ Camille said, as if she were talking to a wilful child. ‘You are a popular entertainer.’

I sensed she was speaking so loudly for the benefit of the guard in the corridor. But she had confirmed what I had been thinking: I was not in prison because of my involvement in the network or because I had tried to smuggle two Jews out of Paris. That didn’t mean her statement stunned me any less.

‘What is it you want, Camille?’

She lowered her voice. ‘I want to help you. Colonel von Loringhoven would like to do something to please General Oberg to coincide with the victory parades later this month. He suggested that a concert given by the elusive Simone Fleurier would be appropriate. “When the world thinks of Paris, it thinks of the Eiffel Tower, of food, of love and of Simone Fleurier,” he said. They need you to rally the people.’

My insides tightened. They wanted to use me the same way they had used Pétain, to make their despicable policies palatable to the French people. Karl Oberg was head of the SS in Paris. Under his command was Theodor Danneker, the SS officer overseeing the deportation of Jews. I had refused to sing for the Germans since they had occupied Paris and I had no intention of doing so now. Oberg and Danneker were as evil as the pilots who had slaughtered the Belgian children. They were cold-blooded killers. What message would I be sending out if I sang for them?

‘No!’ I said. They might be able to torture names out of me, but there was no way they could force me to sing.

Camille’s eyes narrowed and she clutched my arm. ‘I told you, I am trying to help you. You don’t seem to understand the situation, Simone. If you refuse, you will be shot.’

‘Then they will have to shoot me,’ I said.

The conviction in my voice shocked me as much as it did Camille. It wasn’t courage that made me say it. It was the thought of trying to live with myself after doing such a cowardly thing for no good reason but to save my own skin.

Camille rose from her chair and paced the room. ‘Oh, there you go! You are so self-righteous, Simone. You always have been. Look at you, sitting there with your matted hair, your dirty clothes. Look what you have become. Look at where your self-righteousness has got you.’

‘And look at you, Camille Casal,’ I retorted. ‘Look at what you have become: a whore for the Nazis!’

We stared each other down. It occurred to me how odd it was that Camille and I had come to this: two opponents with different allegiances, facing each other in a prison cell. Who could have foreseen it back in the days when we were only ever perceived as rivals on the stage? But nothing was normal any more.

Camille clenched her fists but her hands trembled. ‘Perhaps you wouldn’t judge me so harshly if I told you that the father of my daughter was Jewish,’ she whispered. ‘So far, no one knows.’

As I listened to Camille a realisation came to me. The Germans couldn’t shoot me. If they were losing the support of the French people, how would executing a beloved national icon help? Although Maurice Chevalier was performing in Paris, he had avoided performing in Germany, despite repeated demands. And he had a Jewish wife. The strength of my bargaining power began to dawn on me.

I stood up as best I could, limped over to Camille’s chair and sat in it. ‘The woman and child who were arrested with me—’

‘They were sent to Drancy. They will be deported to Poland.’

My heart sank. So Odette and Petite Simone had been found out. Drancy was a French holding camp with a
reputation for cruelty. The agonising instant when Odette had been caught at the station flashed before me. I’d had to decide whether to leave her to her fate and serve another cause. I had done that once. Could I abandon her again? I closed my eyes. I was standing on the edge of an abyss. I had a chance to save my friend and her child, but I would have to betray my country to do it.

‘Can they be saved?’ I asked Camille.

‘No,’ she answered, folding her arms. ‘The orders come from Germany.’

I opened my eyes and looked at her. ‘Can they be saved if I agree to sing?’

Camille held my stare long enough for me to know that we understood each other perfectly.

T
he day after Camille’s visit, a female guard brought me a bowl of soapy water, a towel and a clean dress. Later, a doctor came to my cell. He cleaned my cuts and diagnosed bruised ribs and a dislocated knee. He snapped my knee back into position, inflicting so much pain that if a Gestapo agent had done it, I was sure I would have confessed to anything. After the doctor left, the guards took me to Colonel von Loringhoven.

‘I hear you have come to your senses,’ he said.

‘I have made a bargain,’ I reminded him. He may have persuaded me to sing but I wanted him to remember that it was not willingly.

He ignored my comment and read out a list of conditions. I was to sing at the Adriana, which I knew was now run by a French collaborator. I was to wear a black evening dress and I was not to dance or to sing anything ‘
risqué
’. Even if I had agreed to dance, which I had not, it would have been impossible with an injured knee. To my surprise, he left me to choose my own songs, although I would have to have them cleared by the Propagandastaffel.

‘You can have back-up cabaret artists but no naked chorus girls and no comedians,’ von Loringhoven concluded. Karl Oberg, it seemed, did not have a sense of humour.

‘And my friends?’

‘The woman and child have been taken from Drancy. They will be kept in another location until you have completed your performance to my satisfaction.’

‘I want them released
before
I sing,’ I told him.

‘You are not in a position to bargain,’ answered von Loringhoven, raising his voice a notch. ‘After your performance they will be taken to Marseilles and put on a ship for South America. It makes no difference to me, quite frankly, Mademoiselle Fleurier. Germany will soon rule the world. You have merely bought your acquaintances time.’

He had the same attitude as the Germans who had allowed Odette and Petite Simone to travel from Bordeaux to Paris. But time, I decided, was good enough for now.

‘I will call a driver to take you home,’ he said, standing up from his desk. ‘But let me give you one last word of warning: you must pretend that you are singing of your own free will. If you tell anyone that you have made a bargain with me, your friends will be dead. And I will do it Vichy style. The mother will be beheaded in front of the child. Then I will kill the child too.’

He didn’t have to say any more. I may have thought him stupid, but he was dangerously so. When I looked at him, I saw a mutated beast, something unnatural and without normal logic or restraint. I believed he was capable of carrying out the threat.

I was driven back to my apartment building in a black BMW. The Gestapo agent who chauffeured me kept yawning, sending wafts of stale tobacco through the car’s interior. I wondered if he had been up all night, beating someone to death.

When we pulled up in front of my apartment, he opened the car door, handed me a walking stick and dragged me to the front door.

‘I’ll be right here,’ he said, pointing to the pavement. ‘I’ll be watching you. I’ll see who comes and I’ll see who goes.’ Glancing at my leg, he let out a laugh and treated me to the stench of his breath again. ‘But you won’t be going anywhere with that knee.’

He unlocked the door and pushed me inside. It was gloomy in the foyer. I switched on the light.

‘Madame Goux?’ I called softly. But there was no answer.

I pushed open the door to Monsieur Copeau’s apartment. The secretary and the doctors were not there. The furniture was overturned and papers were scattered over the floor.

‘Who’s there?’ a voice behind me asked.

I turned around to see Madame Goux. Her eyes were black and her nose was crushed and swollen.

‘What have they done to you?’ I limped towards her and grabbed her shoulders. There were cigarette burns on her face and neck.

She shrugged. ‘What have they done to you? You’re a mess.’

I told her about my interrogation, then asked about the others, although I was afraid to know if they were still alive or not.

‘The doctors cleared out in time. Madame Ibert got the warning and went south to your farm. She had tried to get a message to me but I walked straight into the trap. But they didn’t get a thing. I acted the part of an imbecilic old lady.’

There was a burn near her eye that was weeping. I put my arm around her shoulders. The irony wasn’t lost on me that before the war I could barely stand Madame Goux. And now I would be devastated if anything happened to her.

‘It would take more than that to kill me,’ she said, helping me towards the elevator which, by some miracle, was working.

A few days after I returned to my apartment, I heard a man’s muffled voice talking to Madame Goux in the foyer. Madame Goux had ordered me to stay off my knee until it
was better and I was lying on the sofa with my leg propped up on cushions. I strained to listen, trying to discern who the man was.

‘I have only stopped by for a moment,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to intrude. I told them that I was going to manage her for the show.’

The concert for the SS was big news around Paris. The Propagandastaffel had not wasted time in having posters made:
The Brightest Light Sings for the New Paris
. What I didn’t know then, and was later glad that Madame Goux hadn’t told me, was that draped behind my image was the swastika flag.

‘Go on up,’ Madame Goux urged the visitor. ‘She needs someone to brighten her spirits.’

It took me a few moments to register that the voice was André’s. There had only been a few occasions when our Resistance work had brought us into direct contact. For the most part, we communicated through messengers. Being seen together could have started rumours that may have aroused Guillemette’s suspicions. André’s footsteps drew closer. I smoothed my hair and rearranged my dressing gown. The door to my apartment had been left ajar in case I needed to call Madame Goux, but André knocked on it anyway.

‘Come in,’ I told him.

‘Simone!’ he said, rushing towards me. ‘I am glad to see you are alive. I lost ten years off my life worrying about you!’

I was taken aback by his appearance. In his teal blue suit and red tie he looked dashingly handsome. His hair was slightly greyer than it been the last time I had seen him, but his eyes were as bright as ever. I told him that I was improving every day. He looked at me in a searching way, and I knew he was hoping for an explanation of why I was singing for the Nazis. I was heartsick that the people in the network would think that I was betraying them. I dared not imagine how Roger would feel if he ever found out. I could trust André with my life, but the dictum of our network was ‘The less
others know, the better’. None of us could say for sure what we would or would not reveal under torture. And after von Loringhoven’s threat about beheading Odette and Petite Simone, I couldn’t take the risk of telling anyone my reasons.

‘Make yourself a drink,’ I said, pointing to the bar. ‘And please pour me a soda water.’

As I intended, André had to turn his back on me to walk to the bar and take the glasses out of the cabinet. It gave me a reprieve from having to look him in the eye when I felt so sullied. I could see him making the drinks in the reflection of the mirror on the opposite wall. The line of his shoulders and his straight broad back stirred an ache of longing that surprised me. Now I had promised myself to Roger, I had assumed those sensations were gone for ever.

‘How are your wife and children?’ I asked, astounded that I had brought up the subject so casually. Perhaps I was trying to change my focus. I loved Roger with all my heart and would never betray him. Why then did I feel the guilt of a wife who has been unfaithful to her husband?

‘They are all well, thank you for asking,’ said André, passing me the soda water and returning to his seat. ‘And now, tell me, is there anything I can do for you?’

‘Can you find out about Roger Delpierre?’ I asked. ‘I want to know if it is true that he was arrested.’

André stared at me but didn’t say anything.

‘You know the man I am talking about, don’t you? The one who first made contact with you when you joined the network?’

‘Yes,’ said André. ‘I remember.’

He looked at his drink for so long that my mind drifted to the night at the Hotel Adlon when he had told me about his relationship with his father. One minute André and I had been ribbing each other about my language lessons, and the next the mood had turned sombre. André glanced up. He was searching my face again, but this time he was asking a different question. His gaze glided down my neck and along the line of my body. I was taken aback by what I had failed to see in all the years since he had married the
Princesse de Letellier. The lightning bolt of it pierced my heart. André Blanchard still loved me.

After a week, the swelling around my knee subsided and I regained some of my strength. I realised that if I was going to perform to von Loringhoven’s ‘satisfaction’, then I needed to rehearse. I sent a note to the artistic director of the Adriana telling him that I had a piano in my apartment and would begin rehearsing as soon as he could organise a pianist. As there would be no costume fittings and I chose to perform alone, there was no need for me to attend the theatre until the final rehearsal. I received a reply that afternoon, along with a bouquet of roses so profuse that the Gestapo agent had trouble fitting it through the door. The note read:

Dear Mademoiselle Fleurier,

It will be my greatest pleasure to have you sing at the Adriana to celebrate the union of France and Germany in the New Europe.

Maxime Gaveau

I ripped the note in two. I had worked with Martin Meyer, Michel Gyarmathy and Erté. Who was this upstart named Maxime Gaveau? I threw the flowers in the kitchen sink, then remembered that the Gestapo man might come back to my apartment so I stuck them in a bucket instead.

The truth was that Gaveau’s note had brought home the gravity of what I was doing. I could not snub him when I had agreed to collaborate with the Germans too. He might be cooperating for his own self-seeking ambition, but I was giving my public name and face to the legitimacy of the Third Reich. Even worse, as a ‘PS’ to the note, Gaveau had informed me that the performance was going to be broadcast on Radio France, so not only would my betrayal of the Resistance be known in Paris but all over the country as well.

Later that afternoon, Madame Goux called from downstairs to tell me that André was on his way up to see me. My heart leapt at the thought that he might be bringing me good news about Roger. I limped to the door and swung it open. But André’s grim expression hit me like a blow to the stomach.

‘You had better sit down,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you a drink.’

For a second I couldn’t move. ‘Don’t keep me in suspense,’ I said.

André gripped my shoulders. ‘Roger Delpierre was arrested in Marseilles. But he wouldn’t talk. So they shot him.’

I stared at André. At worst, I had been expecting to hear that Roger had been arrested. I had never considered that he might be dead. My legs buckled. André helped me to the sofa. Roger? Shot? The smell of lavender wafted around me; I felt Roger’s caresses on my thigh.
Don’t put up barriers to happiness, Simone.

André gripped my hands. I sensed that I was tumbling down a dark tunnel. I remembered the first trip Roger and I had made down south with Mouse, the Judge and the others. We had all been on that dangerous mission together but each one of us had faced our own personal terror of being caught and executed. That loneliness was what I was feeling now. André could hold me as tightly as he wanted, but he couldn’t save me from descending into the nightmare.

‘I am sorry,’ he said, tears in his eyes.

I knew that, whatever pang of jealousy he had felt the previous week, he was sincere.

‘Could there be a mistake?’ I asked.

‘Roger Delpierre was head of the network,’ he said. ‘I cross-checked the story with two contacts. To the best of everyone’s knowledge, the report is true.’

I thought of Roger sleeping, his arms folded like an angel’s wings across his chest, and tried to get a grip of myself. Roger was a true military man, he would have told me that there was still a war to be fought and it was my
duty to be strong no matter the sacrifice. I turned to André. ‘The children and the Allied soldiers Roger had with him? Were they caught too?’

André shook his head. ‘He was arrested alone, in a bar. It is believed he went there as a decoy. So the others could get away.’

I swiped at my eyes but was unable to stop the tears. This was what war did. It took good people from us. One of the pilots I had accompanied over the line had told me that he had lost so many friends that he never wanted to be close to anyone again.

André poured me a drink then called Madame Goux from downstairs. ‘Simone,’ he said, bending down to kiss my cheek, ‘I have to go but I will come back to see you tomorrow. The best thing we can do to honour Delpierre’s memory is to finish what he started. To defeat the Germans and win this war.’

For the next few days, I lay in my bedroom listening to the sound of my lungs struggling for air. André had said that the best way to honour Roger’s memory was to finish what he had started. But I had agreed to sing for the SS high command. Could my betrayal of Roger be any worse? Somewhere in the audience would be the man who had given the order for his execution. What was the point of winning this war if I had lost Roger? He had opened doors in my heart that I had thought were shut for ever. After loving and losing him, what kind of life would there be to live? I stared at the ceiling, at the floorboards, at the furniture. But they had no answers for me.

‘Maman!’
I cried in the night. I was now under house arrest and asked André to tell my family what had happened. I begged him to instruct them, for their own safety and that of the agents in their care, not to contact me. ‘Tell Maman, Aunt Yvette, Bernard, Madame Ibert and the Meyers that not a day goes by when I do not think of them.’

I was a ship breaking apart, full of leaks. There was no chance of retreating to the farm for comfort this time. I had to sail on. I had to sing for the lives of Odette and Petite Simone.