The Milliner's Secret (65 page)

‘Does that mean it’s going to be abandoned?’

Dietrich had managed a wan smile. ‘Valkyrie is more than ever necessary. We must show the world that there is resistance to Hitler’s Reich.’

They had come into the park in the guise of carefree lovers, held motionless in a long afternoon, waiting for the clap of thunder announcing the storm. Dietrich held out his hand to her. ‘I have been selfish, wrapped up in my anxieties. Something oppresses you. You are missing your English boy?’

She folded up her letter, which was from Teddy, who always wrote his news in the style of a cascading brook, weeks’ worth of thoughts without punctuation. ‘I’m worried about Donal, course I am.’ And about Ramon, who had taken his amputation ¬stoically, and would be back in the Auvergne, assuming he’d survived all the identity checks on the way. ‘But, like you said, Donal has to take his chances. With luck, the Gestapo and the police will be too overwhelmed by military mobilisation to bother with one lone traveller. Or with us, for that matter.’

Dietrich gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. ‘Reiniger is at Dreux, at the military airfield, snuffing out a conspiracy to dynamite aircraft on the ground. While he chases terrorists over there, we are safe. Soon, if fortune is with us, wolves such as him will be stripped of their power. Now talk to me,Liebchen, in a stream of consciousness like Teddy, or that wretched American woman.’

‘Who, Una?’

‘I mean Gertrude Stein, who writes as she talks as she thinks. Tell me everything.’

Pushing her chair right up to his, she tilted her head so the brim of her straw hat meshed with the brim of his and their faces were hidden. She told him how she’d overseen the changing of locks at La Passerinette, picked up her mail and closed the place. The same at rue de Seine. ‘Can you tell that I mean to concentrate on you, and you alone?’

She told him how, on the way back from La Passerinette, she’d bumped into Loulou, the milliner’s assistant at Henriette Junot, who’d told her about Lorienne’s funeral requiem. ‘Everyone was shocked at her death, and nobody understands why she was out on the street with one of my hatboxes. We know, and so does Georges Blanchard. Robbing me. I haven’t said anything, and I don’t intend to. Lorienne betrayed Violaine from pure malice and it makes me hope there’s a God and a seat of judgement. But I wonder what made her walk into the path of a car.’

Dietrich grunted. ‘The driver claimed she threw herself down in front of him. So it said in the newspaper.’

‘Well, the driver would say that. Some of your lot drive at us as though we’re pigeons. And guess who has stepped into Lorienne’s shoes? It’s now Georges Blanchard pour Henriette Junot. What d’you think of that?’

‘That treachery pays in the short term. But life is a long arc and every betrayal sows the seeds of our separation from all that we love, all that makes us human. Not a happy subject. It reminds me how deeply I failed Hiltrud.’

‘She nearly killed you!’

‘She was not in her right mind, and I never wanted her dead. Yet she is, and I am free. Free to marry you, some day. Keep talking, Coralie.’

A movement caught her eye, and Coralie pushed up the brim of her hat, whispering, ‘Look, Voltaire!’

‘Impossible. Voltaire has Swiss nationality now, remember?’ Dietrich lifted his head, but the cat dashed into a patch of shrub. ‘Ah, but could it have been Voltaire’s offspring?’

‘Definitely,’ Coralie agreed. ‘And black cats are lucky.’

‘I thought they were always misfortune.’

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘Lucky.’ She told him about the latest letters from Noëlle and Ottilia. Happy letters, from a different world. ‘I can’t believe my baby’s six and a half. I’ve missed two of her birthdays. Over twenty months since I saw her.’

‘Soon you will see her. But you haven’t told me all. Perhaps you don’t realise it but you keep falling silent and staring inwards. Donal told you something before he went. I saw you rock on your feet.’

‘My father’s dead.’

‘How and when?’

‘A year into the war – September 1940. His yard took a hit from an incendiary bomb that was probably meant for the railway. The blast swept away all the buildings, Donal said, and the fire burned so hot, nobody got near for a couple of days. When the firemen checked for bodies, they found the charred bones of a very tall man and he was identified by a half-melted cigarette lighter that must have been in his pocket. Let’s walk.’

Coralie got up, needing to breathe the moist air of the Medici Fountain. The sun, just beyond its zenith, was bleaching her eyes. She continued as they walked, ‘The blast ripped away the brick floor of his shed and the men found something buried. Something he was desperate should never be found – so desperate, he was willing to kill me to keep me quiet.’

‘It was not, I hope, human remains.’

‘No.’ A sound broke from her, half laugh, half rage. ‘It was a gold chalice, badly damaged, but somebody recognised it. Stolen from the cathedral where Dad used to go and pray. It used to stand in the light of a stained-glass window, St George’s window. Used to stand . . . Your Luftwaffe bombed the place in 1942. Nothing but rubble now.’ Out came the sobs she’d tried to keep in since Donal told her. ‘I always used to say my dad was a bastard but at least he had some faith. Now I know he was just casing the joint. No good qualities, not a single one. But at least it seems he didn’t kill my mother. Something, I suppose.’

‘Oh, my darling.’

‘She’s out there somewhere, I’m sure of it. You talk now. Your turn.’

They sat down in the maple-leaf shade of the fountain and Dietrich told her about afternoons spent fishing on the banks of the Havel with Max von Silberstrom, the childhood friend who was also his half-brother. She placed her hand in his so that their ruby rings ground together. If Valkyrie succeeded, Dietrich and Max would be able to talk openly about their friendship.

Later in bed she refused again to let Dietrich withdraw before climax, saying, ‘I will get pregnant. I’m ready to make another little life.’

Her father was dead. Hitler was as good as dead, because Valkyrie consisted of powerful men who were sick to the gullet of Nazi excesses. The Allies were landing in France. Hitler’s armies were hard pressed, his airforce ground down. Light crouched behind the horizon.

A few days later, Dietrich told her that Reiniger was back in Paris. ‘Stay indoors as much as you can. Don’t let him catch sight of you.’

Saturday, 15 July

The Walther PP lay ready on the drinks table and Coralie felt like a tightrope walker, dancing barefoot over a fire-pit.

Today army officer Claus von Stauffenberg was going to kill Adolf Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair headquarters in East Prussia. Once the call came announcing success, Dietrich would join with the military governor of Paris, Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, and other army officers sympathetic to Valkyrie, and enforce a coup d’état here in Paris. Their first target, the Gestapo.

The call came. She heard Dietrich give his name. The stretching silence made her twist her hands. Then she heard the telephone receiver dropped back into the cradle.

He came back into the room. ‘They called it off.’ Driving his fist into the back of an armchair, Dietrich snarled, ‘Reichsführer-SS Himmler was not present. Who cares? He could be dealt with later. Poor Stauffenberg. It is a terrible path, martyrdom with a bomb. To be turned back at the last stride, knowing you must walk it again another day . . . ’ He swore. Then apologised because, unlike her, he guarded his language.

The final telephone call came on 19 July. The assassination would happen on the morrow. Coralie coped with Dietrich’s spiralling nerves, massaging his shoulders, agreeing with him each time he said, ‘We cannot let it slip another time. No conspiracy can hold together for ever. The swine has to die tomorrow.’

‘He will, I feel it.’ If Valkyrie succeeded, the German Army in France would be ordered to pull back to open the way for the Allies – a form of surrender. France would be liberated. The Gestapo, including their French underlings and the loathed Milice, put under arrest. The worst of them executed. The end of the slaughter would be in sight.

It had happened. Hitler was dead. Killed by a bomb in his Wolf’s Lair. The news reached General von Stülpnagel’s headquarters at two p.m. on 20 July. Kurt Kleber came in person to rue de Vaugirard, bringing Fritzi. As an aide to the new head of the Luftwaffe, General Sperrle, Kurt had heard the news of Hitler’s death earlier than most in Paris. The uprising had already swung into operation in Berlin, in Prague, in Vienna.

‘I feel guilty,’ he told them. ‘I was always sympathetic to Valkyrie, but I never swore the oath of allegiance. Perhaps our new leaders will overlook that. After all, I tried all those years ago to do what Stauffenberg has now succeeded in doing.’

‘You are as much a hero as Stauffenberg, Kurt,’ his wife assured him, kissing the puckered side of his face. ‘Everyone knows it.’

They all four stood together as they had before, and Coralie wondered why Dietrich held himself so stiffly until he asked Kurt, ‘You are sure that Stauffenberg is alive? I must know that our friend survived the blast.’

The question was answered at six that evening by a call from one of General Stülpnagel’s aides. Stauffenberg had telephoned from Berlin in person to confirm that Hitler was dead.

Kurt and Fritzi left to return to avenue Marigny. After they’d gone, Dietrich holstered his gun and kissed Coralie, telling her to wait up. The mass arrest of Gestapo leaders was under way and he wanted to play his part.

Once he was gone, she was unable to read or even think in a straight line. What was this eerie silence? She went to the window. Of course! For the first time in four years, the sentries in rue de Vaugirard had stopped pacing. She was glad when dusk drew roosting birds into the trees and their chirruping filled the void. She fell asleep on the sofa, waking in deep dark, a key turning in the door.

‘Dietrich?’

He came in, turning on the light. Lifting her feet, sitting down on the sofa, laying her legs across his, he said, ‘A sight I shall never forget. Sandbags in the yard of the École Militaire.’

‘Sandbags?’

‘For those rats from avenue Foch to be laid down on and shot. By tomorrow morning, France will be purged of Gestapo command.’

‘Reiniger?’

‘Locked up on the fifth floor of his building, in the room where he has tortured and beaten his fellow humans with relish.’ He patted her ankle. ‘Get dressed, my love. We’re going to arrest Serge Martel in his own nightclub.’

‘For working as a Gestapo informant?’

‘Exactly. He has done so from the day he left prison. They even trained him. You can stay at home, if you wish, but I have asked Kurt to join us again. This is a night on which destinies turn.’

She chose the pale coffee evening gown she’d worn on the night they’d tried to smuggle Ottilia away. It deserved a night of triumph. Her hair had dropped out of curl, so she covered it with a silk-jersey turban – the wired ties forming an unmistakable Victory sign. Dramatic eyebrows, dramatic lips though her neck felt naked without her choker. She’d heard the cyanide pill fall when Moineau grabbed her, then crunch as she stood on it. Slowly, she smiled at herself. She didn’t need it any more.

She didn’t want to go out completely unarmed, though. When she’d moved back to rue de Vaugirard, she’d brought two big trunks with her. Reaching into one of them, she extracted a heavy object.

Entering the bedroom, Dietrich saw what was in her hand. ‘Fritzi Kleber once concealed a weapon in a satin purse, but hers was an old duelling pistol, designed to be hidden in a fur muff. That one is too big for you. Here, swap.’

She took his Walther PP, secreting it in an evening bag of quilted velvet. Dietrich stuck Donal’s Enfield Mark II into the holster under his jacket. ‘Now you are armed and glorious,’ he told her.

‘I’ve been thinking. As soon as peace is declared, I’ll find Ramon and ask for a divorce. I don’t think he’ll make a fuss. He’s bound to have another woman by now and, though he might talk about pride and honour, losing me won’t break his heart.’

Dietrich gave an uncharitable grunt. ‘Are you ready? We have a car waiting.’