The Keeper of the Walls (39 page)

The noise around them was thick, and he asked: “You aren't afraid?”

She smiled, perfunctorily. “A little, yes.”

He regarded her levelly with his baby blue eyes, in which, she felt with a sudden shiver, there wasn't the slightest trace of babyish naïveté. “Not me,” he said, in a still, slightly bemused voice. “Nothing frightens me. That makes me a mite peculiar, don't you think? My brother, for example, is frightened by mice, and by women who scream, and by wars. But I seem to have been born without the ability to fear. I'm not sure if this is a quality, or a detriment. What is your opinion?”

She felt somewhat confused, and shook her head. “I don't know.”

“That makes two of us, then.”

They were quiet, looking around them as the chauffeur wended his way through the crowd. Charles de Chaynisart bent again toward her, and she could smell the slight odor of vinegar on his breath. She sat perfectly still, waiting, knowing that something she didn't want to happen was about to occur, yet not knowing what this would consist of. He murmured: “I'm glad we had this unexpected opportunity to make friends. I'd never been alone with you, Madame. I've been enjoying the company.”

She answered, almost stammering: “Thank you for bringing me. I would have had a lot of trouble maneuvering alone, on foot.”

“A splendid woman of your type should never have to maneuver alone, anywhere. You deserve a palace, and three footmen, like a fairy princess, rather than the wife of a fallen, decaying prince who doesn't carry the price of a taxi fare in his worn-out pocket.”

She couldn't believe she had heard him correctly. The harsh, crude words rang through her skull, stunning her. He smiled. “You're a desirable woman,” he said in a soft, low voice—a mellifluous voice. “I've observed you many times, from afar. You wear your poverty with dignity and pride, the same way that before, you wore your wealth. But everyone in town knows about your husband. It's a shame, really, that he allowed you to come home and be dragged down with him.”

The shouts and disorder outside were like pellets of sound falling all over her head and ears. There was a ringing noise drilling through her brain. Not knowing whether it came from the people massed on the streets, or from the cacophony within herself, she cried out: “Monsieur de Chaynisart, I don't know what ‘everyone in town' has to say about Misha. He is an honorable man, and if his luck has turned, it's not through any fault of his, but due to the bad faith of others. He works, holding his head up, although now I wish that he were working somewhere else—anywhere, but not for you! And if you can't feel respect for him, then at least you should be gallant enough not to speak badly of him to me, of all people!”

“My dear Princess, I did not think to offend you. Please forgive me if I stepped out of line. But Mikhail Brasilov has a very bad reputation, and it hurts me to see you slandered along with him. It is a shame his father was killed, by that madman. For Prince Ivan was a strength, a power among men, and his son doesn't match him.”

“My husband doesn't have a bad reputation,” Lily said, near tears. “He's simply going through a difficult time. And if he did suffer from the dirt that others might have tossed on him, he suffered inside, like a gentleman. Why, monsieur, did you hire my husband, if you felt that he was a bad man?”

Charles raised his brows. “I never said that he was
evil,
Madame. ‘A bad man . . .' That's too strong a term. But I shall be blunt. My brother hired him, not me. Philippe thought that Prince Mikhail had an excellent head for running businesses. And since I prefer to train my horses and to attend to my card games, I allowed Philippe to hire whom he pleased. But what I know is that Prince Mikhail borrowed a lot of money, when he first arrived here. He set up quite a train of life, and let things slip by him. Then, when the Aisne refinery disaster occurred, a number of influential people lost many hundreds of thousands of francs, along with him and his father.”

“It can't be true,” Lily countered. “He built his firm around the first sugar beets he brought with him from Russia.”

“That's a fact. But people had to invest in this idea. And because—to be quite crude—he spent a great deal of money on the women of this fair city, the businesses began to suffer from attrition. Some say, dear Princess, that his divorce from Jeanne Dalbret isn't even legal, and that she stayed his mistress long after his bigamous marriage to you.”

Lily felt a tremendous urge to vomit, and swallowed several times. Her whole body was shaking. The chauffeur was just coming to the Place de la Concorde, and with a sudden, jerky motion, she opened her door, letting a wave of cold air into the car. Charles de Chaynisart's fingers closed about her elbow, restraining her, and he whispered, urgently: “Don't get out, Liliane, because you are angry with me. But you're hardly a child now, are you? Don't forget that I am your friend. I want to stay your friend. I couldn't care less about Brasilov, but about you, I could care a great deal. And, Liliane, if you allowed me to
really
care for you . . . there would be no limit to what I could and would do, to make your life a little more like the life of the fairy princess we were speaking about before.”

With all the strength that she could work up, Lily wrenched herself free of his hand, and jumped out of the car, which had stopped momentarily. She began to run, her heel catching on a rut in the pavement, and she fell, ripping her silk stocking at the knee. She realized, with a moment of shock, that she had forgotten her small bag inside De Chaynisart's Duesenberg. But it felt so good to be out of there, breathing clean air, that she refused to think about this now.

A policeman had grabbed her arm, and was pushing her back, among the crowd of onlookers that had gathered at the Concorde. She could see the majestic Crillon, where her parents and old aunt were waiting, undoubtedly worried about her. But there was no way to cross the square. Machine guns were stationed in the middle, near the tall, spindly granite obelisk. A man near her said: “It's starting: look! The veterans are coming!”

It was six forty-five. She could see the time on someone's watch, his arm raised in salute to the veterans. They were marching from this very Concorde, with grand old men who had served in 1871, in neat rows, coordinated and in charge. “Where are they going?” Lily asked the man with the watch.

“To the Palais-Bourbon, to get the idiots out of the Chamber.”

She was quiet, overwhelmed. A woman behind her cried: “Down with Stavisky! Down with the Jewish Masonic Mafia! Down with Leon Blum and the barbaric Soviets! Down with the government!”

“What do they want?” Lily asked, perspiration wetting her forehead.

“They want an end to this hocus parliamentary government, that does nothing but take bribes,” the man with the watch said. His eyes were strangely vacant, the pupils tiny dots. She could see a vein throbbing on his right temple.

The marchers kept coming, like well-ordered battalions that didn't stop. The daylight was giving way to night, and soon Lily could see the veterans outlined by the yellow glow of a multitude of streetlamps. She realized that thousands of men had passed through, and that it was probably eight o'clock. She hadn't eaten since noon, and now her stomach grumbled. She thought with mixed apprehension of Aunt Marthe's certain outrage, and of the moment they were all living through.

From the Concorde, she could see the Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées on one side, ending the great avenue, and, on the other, the Concorde Bridge that led right to the Chamber of Deputies. The man with the watch, now a warm blur at her side, was saying: “It was terrible over there, but they deserved it. They beat up Herriot, the President of the Chamber, and they say Daladier escaped through the back, on foot. They burst in, shouting cries of ‘Murderers!' and ‘Thieves!' “

But the well-kept order of the veterans was starting to break up in all directions. Mounted police with cocked hats and feathers were rushing up to bar the entrance to the bridge, and to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The veterans were assaulting the police with the same kind of brutality she would have expected from anarchists. “Who is leading these people?” she asked in a hushed voice.

“There are many right-wing groups, lady. The Colonel de La Rocque with his Cross of Fire; the Jeunesses Patriotes; the assault section of the secretive Hood. And the King's Servitors, an old Royalist organization.”

She shivered, thinking of the day the Communists of Berlin had attacked the Reichstag, and its bloody aftermath. The mounted cavalry, feathers flying in the air, was rushing at a group of men in uniform, swords brandished and swishing. “Those are the King's Servitors,” the man told her. He seemed to have appointed himself her interpreter of current events.

“Look!” someone to the left of them cried. “On the terrace of the Tuileries Gardens!”

Old men in military uniforms were up there, throwing bricks at the cavalry, which, in turn, was assaulting young men in boots and berets. Lily could feel the tension all around her, and the tremendous sense of exhilaration. It was a kind of demented joy that something, at last, was being done out in the open, airing out all the anger within the hearts and minds of the Parisians.

A chant had risen, to the right of her, way in the distance. She could hardly distinguish the men who were coming down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, but they seemed to be singing the
Marseillaise.
After what seemed an eternity, she made out stronger sounds of breaking glass and clicking boots. There were men in all the trees, helping the veterans fight the police, who had finally opened fire. Lily realized that she had seized the sleeve of the man with the watch, and that she was hanging on to it for dear life. Her hat had fallen off and was hanging down her back.

She thought, suddenly, that she heard a muffled voice, among the thousands raised close to her, calling out hoarsely, “Lily! Lily!” She turned, and a man's elbow came crashing down on her head, sending the hat catapulting among the caterpillar legs of the crowd. She raised herself on tiptoes, trying to make out who might be calling her—if, indeed, someone had said her name, and if he had been looking for her and not another person by the same name. She saw, fighting his way through to her, a tall, thin man with disheveled white hair, and, with an outpour of relief, screamed out: “Jacques! Here, near the front!”

The men marching down the Champs-Élysées had reached the Rond-Point, and now she could see that their chests were studded with metallic spikes, and that the canes they were using to walk with had knives on their ends. They were coming closer and closer, singing the national anthem at the top of their lungs. She didn't care who they were: the fact was that she was truly terrified, as she had never been in her twenty-eight years of existence. “Yeah,” the man next to her murmured, as if he were drugged, “that's exactly what France needs. Law and order.”

She stared at him, bewildered. But he continued: “Ah, Hitler could hurt us. But you've got to take your hat off to the fellow. He knows how to
control.
”

Hadn't she heard nearly the same words, just recently? Then it came to her: Charles de Chaynisart. She began to tremble again, recalling what he'd said, about Misha, about her—and how she'd been forced to jump from the car into this great, greasy, animal crowd. A hand grabbed her, and her heart flew into her throat, her legs turning to puddles of warm gelatin, but, just in time, she felt herself being steadied and held up, and a man's strong arms about her. “It's all right, darling,” Jacques Walter said. “It's all right. I'm here, and we're going to get you out into a safe room with warm food and a glass of brandy.”

“
T
here were at least forty
, maybe up to one hundred thousand people at the Concorde,” Claire was saying.

Lily was lying on a velvet divan in a large, elegant suite at the Hotel Crillon. She couldn't really remember how she had gotten there. She did recall being in Jacques's arms, feeling bounced around, and then, a deep, deep sleep. “You lost consciousness, poor little lamb,” Aunt Marthe explained, bending her head toward her.

“What time is it now?” Lily asked.

“Three in the morning. An officer
of the gendarmerie,
a Colonel Simon, finally managed to break up the riots. There was shooting in the Faubourg, and the men with metallic breastplates stormed the Palace of the Élysée to eject President Lebrun, but his guards held up. There were seventeen people killed, and about sixteen hundred dead policemen.”

“I should have stayed in Nantes,” Aunt Marthe wailed. “This is preposterous. I knew the Communists had to be at the bottom of this. They took the métro to the Étoile, and then walked down the avenue breaking windows and looting. They made a real mess at the Claridge, where Stavisky had lived—but that's more understandable. Damned Reds!”