The Rich Shall Inherit (68 page)

“Franco,” she said hesitantly. “I wondered … well, I was trying to think who it might be and how they knew. It couldn’t be anyone here, you see.”

“Don’t try to think who it is,” Franco said harshly. “Let me do that. I just don’t want you to worry anymore.” There was a silence and then he said, “Poppy, I’m glad you felt you could call on me to help you.” And then the phone went dead.

Poppy put down the receiver reluctantly, feeling as though she had been cut off from her life force. And then she lay her head on the desk and sobbed her heart out.

Keeping up the charade, she left for Montespan at her usual time. As before, she left the black bag containing the money in the manger. Then she drove on, as if on her way to the farm, but instead she took a circuitous route back to Paris. Once again, she had bought time.

Two weeks later a parcel arrived on her desk. It contained twenty-five thousand dollars in small-denomination bills and a check from Franco Malvasi for five thousand. There was a note from his bankers saying that Signor Malvasi felt responsible for the missing five thousand because he hadn’t acted fast enough. And that Signor Malvasi had said that there was no need to worry, the matter had been dealt with.

Feeling like Atlas when the burden of the world was lifted from his shoulders, Poppy rushed back to the Hotel Bristol and swept young Rogan off to the puppet show in the Bois de Boulogne. Wearing a veiled hat, she pushed him in his smart little carriage through the leafy paths, smiling and nodding to the other mothers and nurses, feeling like a proper
maman.
Then she took him back to the hotel and told the nurse that tomorrow they must return to the farm. She would be home at the weekend, as usual.

Numéro Seize waas flourishing. Poppy was forced to turn away more applications for membership than she liked, simply because there wasn’t enough room, or enough girls. But she was loath to expand because the whole cachet of Numéro Seize was its exclusivity. And besides, she treasured her girls. They were not all the same ones who had been with her since the beginning; Belinda and Solange had married—and married well. Some of the others had made enough money to satisfy their wants and had returned home to their native towns and villages where they’d bought a house, and then, being quite a “catch,” had had their pick of the local gentry. And others had simply gone into business for
themselves as high-class courtesans. But there were still half a dozen of the old guard left and Poppy was surprised when Watkins informed her that Veronique was missing.

“Has there been some trouble at home?” she questioned the other girls. “Is someone in her family sick? Maybe she had to leave immediately and there wasn’t time to tell us.” No one knew.

A week passed and Poppy was really worried. Veronique had always been a loner and had no particular friend among the other girls. And though she was one of her best girls, Poppy realized, surprised, that she didn’t really know her very well. Veronique had never confided in her the way the others did, and she knew nothing of her personal life or her problems.

She was shocked when Watkins brought the police inspector to see her in her study and he asked her to identify a body in the morgue that they suspected was Veronique Salbé. And when she saw poor Veronique’s cold, gray face, which she remembered as alive and beautiful, she was sickened.

“She was found in the Seine, madame, tangled up in a mooring line near the Pont d’léna,” the inspector said. “There are no marks of violence on her body and foul play is not suspected. She just drowned. It’s obvious she committed suicide.”

Poppy cast her mind back to the night Greg had been at Numéro Seize—with Veronique, and she knew that of course it was she who had been the blackmailer. She thought of the packet of dollars and the note saying “the matter has been dealt with by Signor Malvasi …” She thanked the inspector for his trouble and said she was bitterly sorry—Véronique’s suicide was tragic. But now she knew the truth.

She walked the streets of Paris half the night, thinking of what had happened. And in the loneliest part of the night, when even Paris finally slept, she took a cab back to Numéro Seize, rue des Arbres. She had kept her faith in Franco, even when the newspapers had blackened him, calling him “the devil incarnate.” She had told herself that it wasn’t true, that Franco couldn’t do those things. Now she knew different. Franco had dealt with her problem the way he dealt with everyting. Her son’s father was a ruthless, cold-blooded killer.

1914

Rogan was six and a half years old in June 1914 when the Archduke Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist. A month later Austria-Hungary, backed by Germany, declared war on Serbia. The repercussions rumbled around Europe and suddenly all the talk in Paris was of war.

Poppy had known that the idyllic private years with her son must come to an end soon. When he was still a baby, she’d kept him tucked away at Montespan, dashing down there on Friday evenings when she would take over from the nurse and devote all her time to him, returning reluctantly to Numéro Seize on Monday afternoon. She hadn’t forgotten her ambition to be the richest woman in the world and she never neglected her business; but now it was even more important because she didn’t want to make money just for herself, she wanted it for Rogan. She had an heir.

When he was four she’d been forced to face the fact that Rogan needed more than the companionship of the local village boys; he needed to be in Paris. She’d bought a small apartment near the Bois de Boulogne and enrolled Rogan in the local school, and from then on Poppy divided her time between her two apartments and the two personas she had invented. At Numéro Seize she was the ever more glamorous businesswoman, Madame Poppy, of the famous tumbling red hair and slinky silvery-gray gowns, whose insolent blue eyes promised everything—and gave nothing. And at the apartment in the Bois de Boulogne she was the demure, widowed mother of a young son and, like all the other proper mamas, she was always there to collect him from school.

She could always pick Rogan out of the crowd of boys charging out of the schoolyard once lessons were over, because he already stood head and shoulders over his classmates and also because of his bright orangy-blond hair. She thought her heart would burst with love and pride when his blue eyes lit up as he saw her, waiting beside the long bottle-green de Courmont—the latest and smartest model. She was always home to see that he had prepared his lessons, and always there for the birthday parties and the fun trips to the parks or the river; and always there for the Christmases together at Montespan, with Netta.

No one could have faulted her in either of her roles, but sometimes Poppy wondered despairingly
who
she really was, and she felt a bitter, creeping envy for the ordinary young mothers with their simple, straightforward lives; she even envied the girls who worked for her at Numéro Seize, because at least they had chosen that role and they knew who they were.

Most of the time all that mattered was Rogan, and she counted the years since he had been born as the happiest of her life. His innocent, childish love was hers instinctively. He loved only her and she adored him. He was her friend and companion; he made her laugh and he made her cry; he made her feel tender and he made her feel protective. Rogan was everything her treacherous lovers had never been. Everything she did was for him. All the time spent at Numéro Seize, all the hard work, all the hours playing the charade of being someone she wasn’t, all were for him. Rogan was her future.

Of course, Numéro Seize counted cabinet ministers and politicians among its clients, as well as financiers and industrialists, and sometimes Poppy would join them at dinner, listening to their talk of mobilization and armaments with fear in her heart for her child. When she understood that war was inevitable, she quietly converted her money into gold. At the beginning of August she took young Rogan to Switzerland, and transferred her gold and the deeds to all her properties to a vault at a bank in Geneva. The following day Germany declared war on France.

She stayed just long enough in Switzerland to settle Rogan into the school she had already chosen—by asking a series of carefully convoluted questions of various clients as to what school they thought would be best for a boy of a good family; and then she returned to France because, for Rogan’s sake, she couldn’t just let her business fall into the hands of the enemy.

Rogan had smiled bravely as they waved good-bye and Poppy thought the matron looked kind and would take care of him, but the memory of the dormitory and his tiny white bed with its lone teddy bear almost broke her heart. All the way back on the train she told herself it was for the best, that she couldn’t let Rogan stay in a country at war, that in his Swiss mountaintop aerie he would be safe no matter what happend to France; but she still had to stop herself from rushing straight back again to get him.

In September the French, together with the British Expeditionary Force, confronted the Germans at the Marne. The battle raged for four days until the enemy was finally forced to retreat across the River Aisne, but the casualties were high and many brave young men failed to return.

Numéro Seize underwent a drastic change; khaki and blue uniforms replaced the dinner jackets and black ties, and the usually quiet country house atmosphere became charged with desperate excitement. The young officers back from the front wanted fun and excitement; they wanted to dance and laugh, and to flirt with a pretty girl; they wanted to forget the war, and they wanted a magical night at the famous Numéro Seize to remember on those cold evil nights in the trenches. And Poppy provided that magic.

She converted the big salon into a nightclub, with one of the best bands in Paris for dancing; she improvised little tables where champagne and canapes were served, and candlelight to add an illusion of romance to the girl’s eyes so that each young man felt she cared only about him.

There were those who said that what went on at Numéro Seize was immoral, but in Poppy’s eyes it would have been immoral to profit on men who were prepared to give their lives to save hers and her son’s. The girls earned the same extravagant amount they always did, but Poppy took no money for herself. Of course, Numéro Seize kept its exclusivity; the same politicians and financiers, the arms dealers and the industrialists, all paid exorbitantly to subsidize the cost of entertaining the fighting men, and her accounts still balanced out. She was still a good businesswoman.

She sold the flat in the Bois de Boulogne, but she kept the farm and old Monsieur and Madame Joliot looked after it. Her whole life became Numéro Seize and she spent all her waking moments supervising every detail, from searching out fresh supplies of the
food that was becoming steadily scarcer as every man and boy was called to fight, leaving the farms neglected in the strife-torn countryside; to ensuring that the girls’ wardrobes were kept as extravagantly glamorous as restrictions would permit. Female cooks replaced the chefs in the kitchens and there were now maids instead of valets. And if Numéro Seize got a little shabbier, no one noticed in the candlelight.

It was only in the few short hours she permitted herself for sleep that Poppy allowed herself to think about her boy. And about Franco. Because no matter how she forbade it, he still crept into her dreams. And to her shame, in those dreams he made love to her.

Poppy had taken no lovers since Franco; she had never had a lover as such, only the two men she had been in love with. Though she sold sex, she wasn’t promiscuous and the idea of sex without love filled her with despair. Celibacy was her only answer and though she adorned herself each night, it wasn’t for any one man—it was for all the young men who came to her house expecting to find beauty and glamor.

As the months passed, the brave hopes for an early victory faded and the fighting settled into a bitter line of trenches stretching from Ostend to the borders of Switzerland. Poppy was desperate to see Rogan, but the only way she could have obtained a travel permit was by asking someone in a position of power to pull strings. She knew a dozen men who could do it, but when she asked they said they would need to know her reason. After all, they said, she was a notorious woman. Everyone knew she was making a fortune; and they would suspect her of smuggling money out of the country. Naturally,
they
didn’t suspect her, but she must see their point … Now, if only she could give them a legitimate reason …

But of course she couldn’t; no one must know about Rogan. All she could do was pray that her letters reached him occasionally, and that she would hear from him, via the address of her bank. He wrote, too, now and then, small, scribbled notes saying he was well, that he was busy and school was fun and his friends terrific. Oh, and that he missed her … sorry, he had to rush, a group of them were going climbing—not the north face of the Eiger yet but he hoped to scale that one day and make her proud of him.

Poppy was so proud already of his prowess at sports as well as his studies, that she couldn’t imagine being any prouder. One
day, she promised herself, when she had made enough money and Rogan was old enough to be aware of certain things, she would close Numéro Seize and go to live in Switzerland, or England—or maybe even California—with her boy.

The year 1915 passed under a banner of mourning for the huge loss of lives at Neuve-Chapelle and Ypres, sliding miserably into 1916 with a crippling attack on the French at Verdun and then the ferocious and crucial battle of the Somme, where the Allies suffered some 600,000 casualties and the Germans, more than 650,000.

There was a new philosophy of life at Numéro Seize; no one spoke about it, but it was there. Today you were alive and therefore you lived for today. Who knew about tomorrow? And who cared? The aura of gaiety became a little more brittle, the pace a little more frenetic, and the lovemaking a little more necessary. Poppy felt like an illusionist, conjuring up a facsimile of prewar times for her soldiers. When they came to Numéro Seize, she looked after them like a mother, finding rooms for them in the crowded hotels, sending them to the best barber in Paris for a haircut and a shave, seeing that their laundry was taken care of and their uniforms cleaned and pressed. Their shoes were shined for them, food and drink was placed in front of them—free of charge—and when they finally left it was with one of Poppy’s little “care packages” of cigarettes and chocolates and homemade pate de foie gras. “Come back soon” she’d say, relaxing her own rules and kissing them good-bye, watching the expression in their eyes change and their young faces set in remembered lines of strain as they faced the future again. And she thanked God it wasn’t her own son she was sending off to the war.