An Infinity of Mirrors by Richard Condon
Paul-Alain had his grandfather’s great gifts. He could throw the whole household into convulsions of laughter when he entertained them with his imitations of the world he saw every day. Like his grandfather he was a great eater, and he never grew tired of the story of the trick played on Lesrois. He made it a point to tell people that he was a German and that his father was a colonel in the German Army. Paule made sure that he knew all of the von Rhode family tales of glory and prowess, of the historic battles they had led and won, of the great horses they had mastered and the medals they had been awarded, but she always thought of him as a French boy. They spoke French throughout the day but talked in German every evening until his bedtime. Paul-Alain was his mother’s universe, her garden, her song, her food, and her meaning.
In March, 1940, Rufin Portu telephoned Paule. She had had a standard, short-term affair with Portu during the Christmas season of 1938. Portu was impersonal about everything except his work. In painting her she had become a part of his work and he had made love to her much as the librettist of Aïda would have made love to Amneris—not to the actress who was playing Amneris. Then, after the portrait had been finished, Portu undertook to paint a likeness of the daughter of a purple chieftain from Lake Chad, and, as always, he extended the art of his art, and Paule had found another man.
“Paule?”
“Yes.”
“Rufin.”
“Who?”
“Rufin Portu. Can you come by for a drink this afternoon?”
“Why?”
“Isn’t a surprise better than a reason?”
“No.”
“Well … Now don’t be angry.”
“Now there are two whys. Why should I be angry?”
“I am not procuring you for someone.”
“Why not?”
“Paule, listen. There is this man. He knows painting—I mean it. Have I ever said that? He knows the problems and he knows the results. So I like him. He saw a photograph of your portrait and said, ‘I have to meet that woman.’ I said, ‘Well, maybe, perhaps.’ I didn’t say yes, of course. You know? He squatted and stared at the picture. I have it in half-size, in black and white, and it is very good for black and white. I thought that he was just posing, and I didn’t say anything. But he stared at it for so long that I asked him why. I suppose that I was waiting for him to say that it was a wonderful painting, which of course I like to hear. But he said, ‘Why is the hair blond?’ ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘She is not intended to be blond,’ he said. ‘You have found the wounds behind her mask,’ he said. ‘If we could retrace the way and collect all this woman’s tears, we could swim in them,’ he said.”
“Who is he, Portu?”
“My countryman, José Zorra, Duke of Miral. Good bones, wonderful nose, very silent eyes like a manager of matadors.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes, yes. But I have said enough.”
“Not what he said about me. About him.”
“How can a man tell a woman about a man? Come to my house and see him. Observe his tailoring. Guess his age, which I would put at about fifty. Feel the texture of his hand when he greets you. Eat with him, hear him talk. Then, if the signals are good, sleep with him, and count a few more minutes saved from the moments after you are dead.”
Miral was waiting in Portu’s high-ceilinged studio in the rue Lavoisier. Against the baseboards there stood brightly colored portraits and scrapbooks of photographs of portraits. Paule had dressed carefully in a white wool suit and a white wool cape trimmed with silver fox. Portu introduced them, excused himself to make a drink, and never came back.
Paule could feel Miral’s eyes on her like warm hands. She leaned into his silence, and they sat, facing each other, but not speaking, for many minutes.
Finally he spoke, mocking her gently. “Well? Tell me about despair.”
“Mine, your Grace, or yours?”
“If you could tell me about someone else’s despair you would not be desperate.”
“If I am desperate it is because I know others’ desperation. I lived in Germany for six years.” I see.
“Why have you decided I am desperate, your Grace?”
“Why did you dye your hair such a color?”
“You say that as though I were more villainous than desperate.”
“Villainy is a state of grace. It believes in its own deeds for their own sake. Consider the lives of the saints, each of them struck down by their most terrible egos. That is villainy. To create a state of mind which pursues the abstract until it burns or stones one to death—that must be villainy in God’s sight. For the saints were his creatures and forbidden to take vengeance against themselves. Vengeance was His, He saith.”
“Do you say now that I am desperate because I am a villain, and that I am a villain because I take vengeance upon myself by dyeing my hair?”
“Something like that.”
“You don’t like blondes?”
“I adore blondes. My late wife was a blonde. Incredible and very beautiful. But I would not have liked it if she had dyed her hair green.”
They dined late. He started by amusing her, became fascinating, then learned, then protectively prescient. He had a long memory, a good mind, a jauntily egotistical manner, and could make her laugh.
As they strolled along the Avenue Marceau toward Cours Albert I the street light fell at an angle upon the silver of his bared head, as he walked hat in hand. The effect of this image on her was gone instantly, but it had been there long enough to save her and she never forgot it. He was like her father. She thought she saw a sanctuary.
Four
The Vichy Government gave to the Germans first four hundred million, then five hundred million francs a day to pay for the costs of the Occupation. Paris was now a provincial German city, it pleased the Fuehrer to say. German country boys were brought to the Eiffel Tower every day on excursion buses. The elevators were not running but their cameras weren’t heavy, and from dawn until night they climbed up and down. Below the tower the Champ de Mars was a carpet of Algerian nut peddlers and pimps; where green grass had grown there now grew orange peels, candy papers, and army-issue contraceptives. At curfew five-man patrols, armed with carbines and walking in the middle of the streets, succeeded each other at short intervals. Indomitable fishermen still sat motionless along the quais. Swastikas on a field of blood flew from all public monuments. The twelve thousand French policemen still on duty had been retaught to control traffic with stiff, mechanical, Teutonic hand signals.
In 1939 France had used three million tons of gasoline. In 1941 fifty thousand tons were available for all official and civilian use. Doctors used bicycles or gasogene cars driven by gas distilled from charcoal burning in a huge stove on a trailer behind the vehicle. The Paris bus system broke down in October, 1940. Of the two hundred and sixty thousand buses and trucks, one hundred and five thousand were destroyed or diverted to the Germans. A few gasogene buses, whose gigantic stoves on their roofs made them resemble triple deckers, were in use. Over two and a half million Métro tickets were sold each working day in 1941, an increase of fifty-four percent over 1940. Horse-drawn fiacres were available, but they were perilously expensive and there were too few of them even for the new-rich class which had appeared almost simultaneously with the Germans. Almost eleven million bicycle licenses were issued in 1942, and so many gangs of thieves were at work that people would carry their bicycles up many flights of stairs whenever they visited. The brothels opened at three P.M. Military bands, consisting mostly of tubas, splayed oompahs into the Place de l’Opéra, in the Tuileries, in front of Notre Dame. Actors and actresses seemed to be the only civilians who still drove cars, a fact not entirely appreciated by the public.
A new bourgeoisie was being born, the result of a plan within a plan within a plan which had been painstakingly evolved in drab Berlin buildings many years before. Hard-eyed people were buying real estate cheaply from soft-eyed, frightened people. With the hard cash coming
Vichy floundered from one bit of reckless mindlessness to the next. To ingratiate themselves with their new hosts, the French government dismissed and discredited Jewish doctors, teachers, architects, artists, and professors because the German design insisted upon the elimination of intellectuals—who, after all, only criticized things. Almost at once Vichy lost its power of independent thought; just as quickly it moved vigorously to eradicate any independent thinking by the French people, hopefully to replace it with a mystique of obedience.
“What is a Gaullist?” Claire Grimaux asked with sincere interest. “I go all over Paris constantly and I have never met one.”
Almost all of the guests at the evening reception given by Charles and Claire Grimaux arrived in their own cars.
Grimaux was forty-one and adored intrigue. Like Goering, he was a man of pretentious but frequently endearing charm. He had an ingenuous stutter to his speech and a slight cast in one eye which won sympathy. In spite of the stutter he spoke very rapidly, in imitation of certain American business executives whom he had admired when he met them in prison in the years before the war. His beautiful new wife, Claire, was twenty-six; before the war she had been a film star and the mistress of a high churchman. Grimaux had been convicted twelve years before for having issued a quantity of checks without funds. Upon his release from prison he had come to Paris from his native Clermont-Ferrand and, by dint of a prison education which had instructed him in the procurement of false papers, had been able to change his name. The German police organization had selected him from its exhaustive files; contrary to his impression, no one had lost sight of him for long.
When Grimaux was established in his new identity as a serious but most available businessman, he published a newspaper for which friends on the Quai d’Orsay—who were also friends of the German cause—were able to obtain a subsidy of twenty-five thousand francs a month. When the Occupation began and he had been favored with an interview with Colonel Drayst, Grimaux changed the name of his newspaper and the subsidy for its publication was increased to one hundred and eighty-three thousand francs a month. His conscientiousness in merchandising the German ideal, in spite of the increasing harshness of the German occupation, had been rewarded with a codirectorship in yet another newspaper with still another subsidy.
The Grimaux were delighted to see Paule again, though they had never seen her before, and they were absolutely thrilled to receive a genuine Spanish duke. Mme. Grimaux whirled them off to meet the other guests, a special wartime congregation elite only by reason of money. They came from everywhere: Dominican diplomats, Hungarian espionage agents, three thrilled Americans accompanied by two jaded Swiss mistresses, three Japanese policemen on a professional exchange, many pro-German Parisians, and assorted Nazi industrialists, and members of the German Army and SS. Grimaux actually served pink champagne because it impressed the Germans. The caviar was excellent. Most of the conversational noises in the salon came from the pro-German Parisians who, moved by the ideal of order and one Europe, were talking earnestly to uniformed Germans about the chances of obtaining a larger supply of petrol—though oddly enough, the prettier women seemed to talk about nothing but obtaining bulkier industrial authorizations.
Paule and Miral met a former faiseuse d’anges who was now the favorite couturière. They met seven actresses and four actors from the Comédie Française. They met General Koltrastt, who was very drunk, and the affable Captain Sperrena. An Italian infantry general remembered Paule’s father with exquisite emotion, and Prince Marcelin de Fontoyon was ecstatic over the silver lace of her dress and the Peruvian silver ornaments in her hair. “Silver lace under a face means good gold bars in some safe place,” the Prince said. “I am perhaps the most abjectly sentimental man you have ever met where money is concerned. It’s not a royal quality, I suppose—though I’ve never known a royal who wasn’t swept away by money’s charm—but there you are.”
The Prince had been an early and easy target of the German parallel police organization. He had an expensive narcotics habit and lived quite desperately until the Occupation delivered him. Now he was the dowsing rod which the SD used to tap French economic resources. He was a bagman for Koltrastt, Drayst, and Sperrena, and one of the pillars of the SS financial structure in France. Through him, enormous fortunes were transferred from business partner to business partner, with the SS always sharing. The Prince’s title had great appeal to the new ruling class. With SS assistance he learned how to divine the true make-up of corporations, how stock issues had been divided, and the several unseen means by which corporate control of a company could be obtained. Through the Prince, Drayst had become a very, very rich man, and in turn, the Prince earned enough to corner half the narcotics in France if he had wished to. Because he seemed so innocuous, and because he frequently was able to trade some surprising information himself, merchants were delighted to tell him which firms were actually controlled by Jews and to give accurate estimates of the probable fruits of confiscation. Women well-placed in the upper berths of politics, who frequently found themselves short of money because of gambling reverses or the expense of keeping young men who were hard enough to find, would sell him information about the extra-legal business affiliations of the statesmen they served from the flats of their backs.
Paule and the Duke also met Charles Piocher, who, in direct partnership with the SS, controlled twenty-seven percent of the black market of Occupied France. Piocher was a stocky, violent-looking man, with a shock of black hair and a very red face, whose voice was harsher and twenty decibels louder than anyone else’s, and who had two gold teeth which glittered wealthily in his mouth.
Piocher’s dossier had been thoroughly examined in Berlin in April, 1940. It showed that Piocher had spent a total of six years for theft and assault in various nha-pha, the prisons of Indo-China, at Thai-Mouyen and Lai Chau; and in Poulo-Condore in Cochin China. He spoke Tonkinese, Chinese, and Cambodian. There was reason to believe that he placed no value on human life. He had been deported to Paris in 1937 and had been arrested for living off the earnings of prostitutes—in contravention of Article 334 of the law of April 13, 1936—his sole profession until Colonel Drayst had found him and had moved him into the black market. He had enormous strength as a result of the hard-labor regimens of the nha-pha, and an insensate temper, which was a help in a profession in which he had to beat up farmers and field hands and keep a gaggle of amateur competitors constantly in line.
“To think that we go back together all the way to Salamanca!” Martin Kroner Schute said to the Duke of Miral, including Paule in the conversation as they stood apart from the other guests in the corner of the large room. “That is not so terribly long in time, but in terms of history—ach! It was the summer of 1936, Frau General, and what a time that was. On the last day of summer Generalissimo Franco was made head of the Provisional Government, and at that moment, Salamanca became the capital of Spain. Germans, Americans, Rumanians, Italians, French, and British filled the place to the attics. What a mix-up! The Japanese mission actually accused us of stealing their papers! There were farces everywhere! A French captain caught an Italian colonel in bed with his wife and shot him dead. Then, because I happened to be passing by in the hotel corridor,
“At that time, as always, my job was in the service of the Reichsmarschall. I have been advising him on all art matters since 1934—though I can assure you, Frau von Rhode, that I am by no means an exalted expert like our Duke here. Salamanca was really my first big field trip. In those days, of course, it was still possible to move Spanish art out of the country, which is one thing we can say for the Republicans—I am only making my little joke, of course. Well, as you can imagine, the first thing I did on arriving in Salamanca was to look for this man right here. I found him having tea at the Grand Hotel—I have a fantastic memory—with two of the most exquisite Filipino women. They were so beautiful that even now, such a long time afterward, I can feel excited as I talk about them. Rosa and Fernanda. Wonderful little women. So tiny. Feet like little pork chops. We talked about the Reichsmarschall—you remember, your Grace?—and the times you had enjoyed with him at Mulhausen. He often speaks of them when I bring it up. I was so pleased—even may I say thrilled, sir—that you remembered those days that I cabled at once, and let me say the Reichsmarschall was flattered—yes, totally flattered—that you had remembered him so kindly. That shows what a remarkable sort of man he is.