Part Four: War of Attrition — Chapter 11 - The Barman of the Ritz

JULY 17, 1942

Blanche was released from custody this morning. Frank heard the news when Elmiger briefly took him aside at lunchtime, and is still trying to take it in.

For the past three nights, Frank has not slept a wink, but every evening at the bar he has had to keep up appearances in front of the customers, who are thankfully few. He worries most about the news leaking to Luciano, for fear of scaring the boy; and Georges, who has been singing the praises of the Laval administration. It was Georges who told Frank that the thousands of Jews who were rounded up yesterday are being held at the Vélodrome d’Hiver.

Where are they going to be sent?

To Germany, according to Georges.

“Laval is just negotiating, Frank, that’s all. He’s negotiated the return of French prisoners of war in exchange for workers to carry out forced labor. And most of these Jews are foreigners anyway.”

“Workers? Are you joking? You know what I saw this morning? An eight-year-old boy taking the hand of his five-year-old sister to help her onto a crowded bus. These children are not workers. It makes me sick to my stomach. Do you know what, Georges, I’ve had it up to here with you.”

“Hang on a minute, I’m as disgusted as you are about the kids…”

“I’ll leave you to close up. I’m going home.”

Outside, the deserted street is still sweltering. A torrid summer night. It is so quiet that Frank can hear the creaking pedals of a bicycle patrol in the distance. A German soldier with a magnificent voice is singing “Lili Marleen.” Frank loves this song, although it makes him melancholy. He thinks of the thousands of poor souls imprisoned beneath the blue glass roof of the velodrome. He could be one of them, huddled next to his mother, lost and frightened…

Does the past always catch up with exiles?

Absorbed in his thoughts, he almost doesn’t hear the clacking of heels on the cobblestones in front of him.

“Frank! Good evening.” Blanche has stepped out from the shadows of a nearby building and is directly in his path. She is wearing a stunning blue damask dress, but her face is still gaunt and haggard. Frank’s heart aches looking at the sunken face, the strained smile. He is so overjoyed to see her that he cannot bring himself to say anything. “Are you crying, Frank? Would you like a little nip of gin?”

“No, thank you.”

“Go on,” Blanche insists. “Tonight, I am the bartender.”

A muggy Paris night, a park bench, a bottle of Gordon’s, and Blanche Auzello. Suddenly, Frank feels like a young man again, imagining the countless young lovers who he used to see embrace each other on benches just like this throughout the city. But Frank is not a young man, and the lukewarm gin does not even taste good. They are in Paris in July 1942, two Jews not wearing yellow stars, exhausted and shell-shocked by the roundup that has shaken the whole city.

“People say there are at least ten thousand of them,” Blanche says, staring straight ahead. “Ten thousand, not counting the children. And they were arrested by French police. There have been rumors of a roundup in Belleville for several days, but nobody believed them.”

Blanche carries on talking and Frank listens. Would he have believed the rumors if he were a Jew living in Belleville or the Marais? Blanche’s voice breaks. It is a tone with which Frank is only too familiar.

Is she back on the morphine?

“What the hell were you thinking, doing what you did at Maxim’s on Tuesday night?”

Even Frank is surprised by the bluntness of his question. And by Blanche’s answer.

“I was completely lost. I was drunk, I couldn’t take it anymore. But don’t worry, Frank, spending three days in a jail cell has knocked a lot of sense into me. One night, while we were there, Lily asked me a strange question.”

“What did she say?”

“ ‘If God exists, Blanche, what would you like him to say when you finally stand before him?’ Strange, isn’t it? What about you, what would you want God to say when your time comes?”

“Let me think. I’d like him to say to me: ‘Sorry, Frank, the place is full, come back later.’ That would suit me just fine.”

Blanche’s laughter warms Frank’s heart, which has been frozen hard despite the sweltering summer.

“So, you’re saying you’d like a second helping of life?”

“Sort of. What about you?”

“I’d like God to say: ‘You did as much as you could, Blanche, you can come in now.’ ”

“Your answer sounds a lot wiser than mine, even if you did manage to get yourself arrested by the Gestapo for incitement. And now you’re sitting on a bench with a bottle of gin at eleven o’clock at night, long past curfew!”

“Oh, please, Frank, don’t lecture me, I’m exhausted.”

“Come on, get up,” Frank says, offering her his arm. “I’ll walk you back to the Ritz.”

She clings to his arm but refuses to meet his eyes. Frank can tell she is drifting off course again. She reminds him of the crescent moon barely visible in the sky: there is a thin sliver of Blanche Auzello shimmering in the darkness, like an illusion. The rest is plunged into shadows, invisible to everyone else, even Frank.

Just before they reach the Ritz, Blanche stops and stares down at the pavement.

“I don’t suppose you know anywhere I could get a fix for tonight?”

He could have bet on it. The morphine has won out.

“No, Blanche. It wouldn’t be doing you any favors.”

For the first time this evening, she looks him in the eye.

“Oh, don’t call me by my first name, I’m not a child anymore!” By the end of the sentence she is shouting. The fragile intimacy between them dissolves into the skies over Paris. A passing police officer stops.

“Is everything all right, madame?”

“Good evening, Officer,” Frank says. “Everything is fine.”

“Could I see your curfew passes, please?”

“Here you are.” Frank holds out his pass. “I was just walking Madame Auzello back to the Ritz.”

“Well, it looks to me as though Madame has arrived safely. You’d better go home, Monsieur Meier, it’s late.”

“Of course, Officer. Goodnight, madame.”

Blanche shoots him the same angry look she did in the summer of 1939, when she could no longer stand the fact he had become a reminder of her relapse. At times like these, Frank knows she hates him. Now, he is crippled by fear and sadness. And guilt. If Blanche becomes hooked on morphine again, it will reawaken the demon that fuels her worst excesses. To say nothing of the part he played, the part he felt powerless not to play. He can’t truly judge Blanche for her lack of willpower, when he is partially responsible. Didn’t he, after all, feed her bottomless cravings?

“I am so sorry, madame,” he says, but Blanche is already walking away.

Standing on the pavement of the Rue Cambon, in the dim glow of the streetlamps that have been painted blue to fool the British Spitfires, Frank Meier watches her shadow receding.