Part One: The Siege — Chapter 1 - The Barman of the Ritz

PART ONE: THE SIEGE

JUNE 14, 1940

I am trapped in the Nazis’ lair.

It is six thirty in the evening and still there is no sign of the Germans at the Petit Bar.

This morning, the Nazis marched down the Avenue Foch.

Now they are here, in the Hôtel Ritz.

All the luxury hotels in Paris have been commandeered by the occupying forces; the Ritz will be home to a hundred high-ranking officers: the top brass of the Wehrmacht, the armed forces of all Nazi Germany, its army, navy, and air force. The German military commander in France will take a room there too. While his title might almost sound impressive, it is nothing but a bitter reminder of the humiliation suffered by the French Army.

The Hôtel Ritz has been accorded special status. Unlike many of its Parisian counterparts, which have been requisitioned, the hotel is permitted to welcome and serve its usual clientele. Its Swiss owners, their nation neutral in this war, render the hotel a sort of middle ground for officers and civilians alike.

And Frank’s bar, of course, is still open. To help run his establishment, there remain only Frank’s old comrade-in-arms whom he fought alongside during the Great War, Georges Scheuer, and Frank’s young Italian apprentice, Luciano.

All the previous night Frank lay awake in his rooms on the Rue Henri-Rochefort listening to the eerie silence that has fallen since most of his neighbors fled Paris.

Cowards.

As he tossed and turned, he thought of his son, Jean-Jacques. Frank has never really known how to be a father to his only son, born in 1921 during his unfortunate marriage to Maria. They are separated by a yawning chasm. Frank has not had a word from his son for ages, not since Jean-Jacques took a job at the Casino de Nice five years ago.

Where is he now? Has he been mobilized?

Should I seek refuge? Go and join him in Nice?

I’ll be damned if I am going to leave my bar to the Krauts…

Now Frank Meier waits, buttoned into his white jacket, steeling himself for the arrival of his new clientele. He catches a glimpse of his reflection in the Christofle cocktail shaker: the dark circles under his eyes are deeper than ever, his face a frozen mask of fear. As for his stomach, the less said the better: he blows into his cupped hands; his breath is foul. The arrival of the Germans, and with them the memory of the trenches, is eating him up inside.

For the umpteenth time, he glances at the clock. Twenty to seven.

Everything has been prepared: lemons, mint, soft fruits, and brown sugar for the Royal Highballs. Quantities of Perrier-Jouët have been chilled. The victors have a lot to celebrate.

But for now, nothing.

From where he stands behind the solid bar in dark wood, he cannot see customers arriving; the corridor that leads to the Petit Bar is outside his field of vision. This is more than a little inconvenient in the present situation. He gestures to Luciano to go and keep watch by the door.

Where are the damn Krauts?

The ponderous silence before the attack. Georges is keeping his hands busy playing with raspberries.

“Stop that, you’ll spoil them.”

“I’m nervous, Frank.”

We’re all nervous, my friend!

“All we can do is make the best of a difficult situation. Why don’t you run a cloth over the bar, I can see greasy fingerprints.”

Oh, someone is coming. Is it them…?

No, it is only the insufferable Monsieur Bedaux, a customer whose arrival would prompt a contemptuous sneer from Frank were he not so self-controlled…

For a split second, Frank imagines politely but firmly asking the man to leave. But Bedaux belongs to the ranks of their new masters, a fact Frank will have to get used to. Bedaux has always had close friends in high places: from the British royal family to the highest-ranking members of the Nazi Party. In this new world, connections count for far more than character. Something else Frank will have to get used to. He watches as their first customer from the new world approaches.

Charles Bedaux is a curious character. Like Frank, he is in his mid-fifties, with a high forehead and fine features. Their paths have crossed occasionally. In 1906, Bedaux also found himself in the United States as a penniless young man. But whereas in New York Meier learned to serve, Bedaux learned instead to drink. Both men quickly became experts in their field: one a barman, the other a businessman. Bedaux married a wealthy American and set up a management consulting company focused on helping companies become more efficient through “The Bedaux System.” The consultancy proved so successful that it led to the creation of a chain of consultancy firms across the United States, in Europe, and around the world, making him a multimillionaire.

Bedaux loves to talk about his success—but not as much as he loves to talk about his admiration for Nazi Germany.

Frank notes Bedaux’s triumphant smile.

“Your usual glass of Pol Roger, monsieur?” Frank asks.

“Not tonight, Frank. I’ll have one of your Royal Highballs instead, and make it a double. We should celebrate the rebirth of France!” His eyes flick to the corridor in anticipation. “As I always say, if nature is governed by chaos, what saves mankind is order, and nothing else.”

If the art of making cocktails is one of order and measure, running a bar is an art of chaos: allowing life to brim over, testing boundaries, sometimes deciding to go beyond them. This skill, perhaps even more than his celebrated cocktails, is what has made Frank Meier so successful. It also accounts for his divided nature: he has a tidy mind but is drawn to a certain sense of creativity and nonconformity. But Charles Bedaux will never understand this. In him, nothing brims over, except for his own self-interest. Art, people, politics—to Bedaux, life is risk, investment, capital gains. In fact, there is only one subject upon which Frank and Bedaux agree: France needs Maréchal Pétain. Bedaux believes the new leadership will mean increased profits. The barman has a different sort of admiration for Maréchal Pétain; he served as a junior officer under him during the Great War.

Although Frank would never admit as much to Charles Bedaux, it was fighting on the front lines under the command of Pétain that Staff-Sergeant Frank Meier became a proud Frenchman.

Giving the cocktail a final stir, Frank pours the drink into a highball glass filled with ice and places it on the bar.

Bedaux raises the glass to his lips, then sets it back down. He seems about to launch into another monologue but is prevented from doing so by a cacophony of laughing voices.

The Nazis have arrived.

The moment is here. Frank straightens his collar and lays a hand on Georges’s shoulder. It is Frank’s job to welcome them. The laughter and barrack-room banter draws nearer. For a fleeting instant, Frank is transported to the trenches of Verdun. He throws his shoulders back, but he can feel sweat trickling down his spine. Under his jacket, his shirt is soaked and he is chilled to the bone.

The enemy front line advances.

“Good evening, gentlemen. Welcome to the Ritz bar.”

Diary of Frank Meier

I have spent so long running away from my past, running away from the truth of my ancestry. Although danger closes in around me, I feel I have to write this down, since I cannot be sure that I will survive this war as I did the last.

I am a member of the proletariat. And the Jewish proletariat at that. As a boy, I always dreamed of running away.

My whole life has been an escape.

I was born in the Austrian Tyrol on April 3, 1884, the son of Polish workers in exile. In my father’s view, discipline was the greatest of all virtues. The education he gave me was a long lesson in subservience.

Yes, sir! Aye, aye, sir! A mental prison. I quickly realized that there was a kind of mindlessness to the way he lived his life, never questioning anything. I’ve always been suspicious of men who have never known doubt.

My father was born in Łódź during the pogroms. He saw his people hounded down and sometimes hanged by the blond Polish hordes. In the end, he burned everything that could identify him as Jewish and the family emigrated to the mountains of Tyrol. To the utter despair of my mother, the daughter of a rabbi in Budapest, he insisted on giving me an Austrian first name, refused to have me circumcised, or have my birth registered at the synagogue; he decreed that none of his descendants would be Jews. He even went so far as to have me baptized by the village priest the day after I was born. A card-carrying Catholic. I remember my old man shouting at my mother when she wanted to celebrate Pesach or when she let slip three words in Yiddish.

At first, we lived in Kufstein, a little town in the Austrian Tyrol, where my parents lived hand to mouth. My father worked for a shoemaker with wealthy customers. Although he earned a meager salary, he nevertheless hoped one day to open his own shop, and saved the tips given to him by the pretentious customers. The three of us lived in the garret above the shop. Morning and night I would see my father in his big leather apron bedecked with knives, awls, polishers, and a cobbler’s hammer. He wielded his tools with an energy and a precision that impressed me. As a boy, I considered him my hero. And while, as I grew older, my admiration waned, it is from him that I inherit my passion for order and exactness. In a way, I have spent my life imitating his meticulous gestures, not with knives and awls, but with cocktail shakers and bottles.

I adored my mother, her gentleness, her smile, the softness of her skin, and the scent of violets she trailed everywhere. I grew up tied to her apron strings. Of those early years, I have happy, carefree memories. It was shortly afterwards that things took a turn for the worse. My father lost his job in January 1888. He had heard from customers that factory bosses in Vienna were looking for female workers, less well paid, to work the new mechanized looms, a product of the industrial revolution. My mother would quickly find a job, and so would he.

This is how my parents came to be part of the great wave of Tyrolean peasants who moved to the city to work for pennies. Another exodus. My mother’s work at the factory paid a pittance, and my parents’ meager savings melted like snow in sunlight.

Poverty continued to dog our lives, and my old man foundered. Crippled by fatigue, despondent, and short-tempered, he withdrew into himself. Angry with my mother for not earning enough money, he took to drink and became violent. He abandoned his long-held dreams of owning his own shop, of climbing into the middle class. He would spend his days brooding about it, fueled by a mute rage, unable to accept that all his certainty had worked against him. I grew up as best I could. And then, one day, I had the strange realization that he resented my youth. He was jealous of my still unencumbered future.

By the age of twelve, I was working ten hours a day in a wool-combing plant in Vienna. I was mesmerized by the wealthy boys I used to pass every morning on my way to the factory. They were stylish, elegant, and insolent in their starched white shirts. I wanted to have a life like theirs. To extricate myself from a life of poverty. To know the warmth of a bourgeois home. The desire was all-consuming. I tricked my parents. For two years, I secretly set aside part of my salary and managed to amass a considerable sum of money. I dreamed of the land of milk and honey: America. Everyone was talking about it. There, you could try your luck. Make your fortune. My old man was furious, my mother wept, but one morning in early autumn, I left anyway. I began by hopping aboard an old goods train, and spent three days in a cattle truck traveling from Vienna to Munich, from Munich to Brussels, until finally I arrived in Antwerp, in Flanders, where I ended up spending a long time—too long—convalescing from a vicious bout of fever, tormented by the thought of being stuck on the quay. As soon as I recovered, I bought myself a third-class steerage ticket on the Red Star Line: a splendid steamship, a colossal ocean liner, a promise of future excesses. My desire glowed brighter than the day; I was about to embark on a life of my own.