The Keeper of the Walls Read online

  Lily now said: “But if there’s going to be a demonstration, I won’t bring the children. I’ll just drop them off at the Rovaro after school, and come to the Crillon by métro.”

  “That’s just as well. Tell Misha that he’s welcome, of course, but I know he doesn’t enjoy meeting Aunt Marthe. You can spend the night with us: the Ritz is within walking distance, and if there’s a riot, it would be good to have you near us.”

  Lily passed her tongue over her dry lips, and asked: “Claude isn’t coming?”

  This had always been the delicate point between them, now that Lily had returned to Paris. Lily, for a motive unknown to her mother, had made it very clear that she would never, under any circumstance, socialize with her brother’s wife. When Claire, bewildered, had pressed the point, Lily had said to her, quietly but with intense emotion: “It’s a subject best not delved into. I’m happy Claude seems content with his marriage, and I wish the three of them well. But Henriette and I had words long ago, and I will never again be in the same room with her.”

  Reluctantly, Claire accepted the situation.

  In the afternoon, after the children had come home, Lily took her bath and put lotion on her hands. She trimmed her cuticles and polished her nails. Under no circumstance did she want her mother and Jacques—and above all, Aunt Marthe—to guess how strained the Brasilov finances really were. She pinned her hair up in a pompadour, and selected a simple bias-cut dress of dark blue velvet, with shoulder pads. Then she pinned a cameo at her throat and put a blue felt halo hat at the back of her head, to frame her face. “Where are you going?” Kira demanded.

  “To have dinner with Aunt Marthe, at the Crillon.”

  “Papa said there will be a riot,” Nicky said.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll stay close to Grandpa Jacques. And you two will take your baths and eat your dinner with Papa, downstairs.”

  On the ground floor, she went to find her husband in his office. He was standing in front of his desk, deep in conversation with the Baron Charles de Chaynisart. Philippe’s brother was a few years older, a few pounds slimmer, and had a sharper set to his features. But the baby blue eyes were the same. “Well, Princess,” he declared. “You are without doubt the most elegant woman in Paris.”

  Lily couldn’t help feeling that the smooth compliment had been intended as an ironic slight. She didn’t know why, but she was uncomfortable, and blushed. “Thank you, Baron,” she answered. And then: “I’ll be going now, Misha.”

  “I’d rather you skipped that,” her husband said, his voice tight. “I don’t want you out tonight.”

  “But I promised. And I’ll be with Jacques, and Mother.”

  Charles de Chaynisart’s lips curved into a sliver of a smile, and he said to Misha: “My dear man, women today are so ... independent. They aren’t at all like our mothers and grandmothers. They fly over oceans, work in laboratories, and know all about Monsieur Stavisky’s dark past. Let her be! Do not clip her wings, they are too pretty to watch.”

  “I’m sorry, but Lily is my wife. I can’t allow her to go out into what is certain to be one of the most dangerous mob riots of our precarious times.”

  “Well, then, I have an idea. Why don’t you let me escort your fair lady to her destination? I was planning to leave shortly, anyway. There’s a card game tonight, and I must go home to freshen up beforehand. My chauffeur can deposit the Princess on our way.”

  Lily shook her head, confused and embarrassed. “No, no. I can go alone, by métro—”

  “Nonsense. I wouldn’t hear of it.” Charles de Chaynisart grabbed his fitted overcoat from the back of an armchair, and put his hand on Lily’s elbow. She turned, looking at Misha, and saw him nod imperceptibly. But there was a strange, closed look about his face that troubled her.

  Charles de Chaynisart’s car was a magnificent imported silver and blue Duesenberg Model J, spanking new. Lily stepped inside, all at once conscious of the shabbiness of her three-year-old suede shoes, and of the small bag that matched them. She could recall, eons ago in another life, sitting at a fashion show at the Maison Chanel, circling the numbers of the many gowns, dresses, and suits she was selecting. An unseen woman a few rows back had whispered audibly to her companion: “Look! There’s the Princess Brasilova. Isn’t she a beauty? And so rich she could buy every outfit in this collection!” She thought, wryly, that perhaps God punished those who accepted their wealth without a thought to the millions of poor who didn’t have enough to make ends meet in their daily lives.

  The trim chauffeur started up the motor, and Charles, impeccable in his gray overcoat and gray homburg, was bending slightly in her direction. “Frankly, Madame, I won’t be a bit sorry if there is an outburst tonight. Our country is going to the wolves—and to Gospodin Stalin. I say, let’s get them all out: Daladier, Chautemps, and Blum, of course. He’s the worst of the lot!”

  “But you can’t put the first two in the same category as Blum. They’re Radicals, middle-of-the-roaders. He’s a much more definite individual, less likely to compromise.”

  “That’s what makes him even more dangerous than the others. If the government should ever go socialist, I’ll move to Italy. I rather like that little dandy over there—Mussolini. At least he knows how to be a man! He knows the meaning of strength.”

  Lily couldn’t help herself, and asked: “And Hitler, Baron? Do you like him, too?”

  He threw back his head and emitted a gurgle of leonine laughter. “Adorable! I must say, you are adorable. . . . Herr Hitler? He’s an efficacious man, a leader. I wish we had someone like that in France. He knows how to get things done. Having admitted this, I do have to add that he strikes me as a touch too humorless. Life without humor can fade into dullness very quickly—don’t you agree?”

  “It depends in which sense you mean it. If the humor doesn’t hurt others, and if it’s gentle, it can be the most healing agent in life. But there is also cruel, abusive humor. The kind that wounds so deeply, that sometimes the butt of the joke never fully recovers.”

  They were slowing down near the Café Marignan, on the Champs-Élysées. It was five thirty, and the demonstration was not expected for another hour and a half. But already the sidewalks were congested, and the streets guarded by a battery of uniformed policemen. Lily shuddered, and was sorry she hadn’t stayed with Misha at the hotel. This would be worse than what she had imagined.

  Charles de Chaynisart picked up her gloved hand in one of his own, and turned it over. She felt a moment of electric shock, and wanted to remove it at once; but the pressure of his fingers was so slight, that she chided herself for reacting like a prude. He was the kind of man who toyed with any object that came into his line of vision. She’d seen him pick up pencils, feel their tips with momentary curiosity, then set them down, only to seize a paperweight next to them and idly fondle its smoothness. There had obviously not been any thought on his part when he had turned her hand over so cavalierly, as if it had been a card left behind on somebody’s sofa.

  The noise around them was thick, and he asked: “You aren’t afraid?”

  She smiled, perfunctorily. “A little, yes.”

  He regarded her levelly with his baby blue eyes, in which, she felt with a sudden shiver, there wasn’t the slightest trace of babyish naïveté. “Not me,” he said, in a still, slightly bemused voice. “Nothing frightens me. That makes me a mite peculiar, don’t you think? My brother, for example, is frightened by mice, and by women who scream, and by wars. But I seem to have been born without the ability to fear. I’m not sure if this is a quality, or a detriment. What is your opinion?”

  She felt somewhat confused, and shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “That makes two of us, then.”

  They were quiet, looking around them as the chauffeur wended his way through the crowd. Charles de Chaynisart bent again toward her, and she could smell the slight odor of vinegar on his breath. She sat perfectly still, waiting, knowing that something she didn’t want to happen was
about to occur, yet not knowing what this would consist of. He murmured: “I’m glad we had this unexpected opportunity to make friends. I’d never been alone with you, Madame. I’ve been enjoying the company.”

  She answered, almost stammering: “Thank you for bringing me. I would have had a lot of trouble maneuvering alone, on foot.”

  “A splendid woman of your type should never have to maneuver alone, anywhere. You deserve a palace, and three footmen, like a fairy princess, rather than the wife of a fallen, decaying prince who doesn’t carry the price of a taxi fare in his worn-out pocket.”

  She couldn’t believe she had heard him correctly. The harsh, crude words rang through her skull, stunning her. He smiled. “You’re a desirable woman,” he said in a soft, low voice—a mellifluous voice. “I’ve observed you many times, from afar. You wear your poverty with dignity and pride, the same way that before, you wore your wealth. But everyone in town knows about your husband. It’s a shame, really, that he allowed you to come home and be dragged down with him.”

  The shouts and disorder outside were like pellets of sound falling all over her head and ears. There was a ringing noise drilling through her brain. Not knowing whether it came from the people massed on the streets, or from the cacophony within herself, she cried out: “Monsieur de Chaynisart, I don’t know what ‘everyone in town’ has to say about Misha. He is an honorable man, and if his luck has turned, it’s not through any fault of his, but due to the bad faith of others. He works, holding his head up, although now I wish that he were working somewhere else—anywhere, but not for you! And if you can’t feel respect for him, then at least you should be gallant enough not to speak badly of him to me, of all people!”

  “My dear Princess, I did not think to offend you. Please forgive me if I stepped out of line. But Mikhail Brasilov has a very bad reputation, and it hurts me to see you slandered along with him. It is a shame his father was killed, by that madman. For Prince Ivan was a strength, a power among men, and his son doesn’t match him.”

  “My husband doesn’t have a bad reputation,” Lily said, near tears. “He’s simply going through a difficult time. And if he did suffer from the dirt that others might have tossed on him, he suffered inside, like a gentleman. Why, monsieur, did you hire my husband, if you felt that he was a bad man?”

  Charles raised his brows. “I never said that he was evil, Madame. ‘A bad man . . .’ That’s too strong a term. But I shall be blunt. My brother hired him, not me. Philippe thought that Prince Mikhail had an excellent head for running businesses. And since I prefer to train my horses and to attend to my card games, I allowed Philippe to hire whom he pleased. But what I know is that Prince Mikhail borrowed a lot of money, when he first arrived here. He set up quite a train of life, and let things slip by him. Then, when the Aisne refinery disaster occurred, a number of influential people lost many hundreds of thousands of francs, along with him and his father.”

  “It can’t be true,” Lily countered. “He built his firm around the first sugar beets he brought with him from Russia.”

  “That’s a fact. But people had to invest in this idea. And because—to be quite crude—he spent a great deal of money on the women of this fair city, the businesses began to suffer from attrition. Some say, dear Princess, that his divorce from Jeanne Dalbret isn’t even legal, and that she stayed his mistress long after his bigamous marriage to you.”

  Lily felt a tremendous urge to vomit, and swallowed several times. Her whole body was shaking. The chauffeur was just coming to the Place de la Concorde, and with a sudden, jerky motion, she opened her door, letting a wave of cold air into the car. Charles de Chaynisart’s fingers closed about her elbow, restraining her, and he whispered, urgently: “Don’t get out, Liliane, because you are angry with me. But you’re hardly a child now, are you? Don’t forget that I am your friend. I want to stay your friend. I couldn’t care less about Brasilov, but about you, I could care a great deal. And, Liliane, if you allowed me to really care for you . . . there would be no limit to what I could and would do, to make your life a little more like the life of the fairy princess we were speaking about before.”

  With all the strength that she could work up, Lily wrenched herself free of his hand, and jumped out of the car, which had stopped momentarily. She began to run, her heel catching on a rut in the pavement, and she fell, ripping her silk stocking at the knee. She realized, with a moment of shock, that she had forgotten her small bag inside De Chaynisart’s Duesenberg. But it felt so good to be out of there, breathing clean air, that she refused to think about this now.

  A policeman had grabbed her arm, and was pushing her back, among the crowd of onlookers that had gathered at the Concorde. She could see the majestic Crillon, where her parents and old aunt were waiting, undoubtedly worried about her. But there was no way to cross the square. Machine guns were stationed in the middle, near the tall, spindly granite obelisk. A man near her said: “It’s starting: look! The veterans are coming!”

  It was six forty-five. She could see the time on someone’s watch, his arm raised in salute to the veterans. They were marching from this very Concorde, with grand old men who had served in 1871, in neat rows, coordinated and in charge. “Where are they going?” Lily asked the man with the watch.

  “To the Palais-Bourbon, to get the idiots out of the Chamber.”

  She was quiet, overwhelmed. A woman behind her cried: “Down with Stavisky! Down with the Jewish Masonic Mafia! Down with Leon Blum and the barbaric Soviets! Down with the government!”

  “What do they want?” Lily asked, perspiration wetting her forehead.

  “They want an end to this hocus parliamentary government, that does nothing but take bribes,” the man with the watch said. His eyes were strangely vacant, the pupils tiny dots. She could see a vein throbbing on his right temple.

  The marchers kept coming, like well-ordered battalions that didn’t stop. The daylight was giving way to night, and soon Lily could see the veterans outlined by the yellow glow of a multitude of streetlamps. She realized that thousands of men had passed through, and that it was probably eight o’clock. She hadn’t eaten since noon, and now her stomach grumbled. She thought with mixed apprehension of Aunt Marthe’s certain outrage, and of the moment they were all living through.

  From the Concorde, she could see the Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées on one side, ending the great avenue, and, on the other, the Concorde Bridge that led right to the Chamber of Deputies. The man with the watch, now a warm blur at her side, was saying: “It was terrible over there, but they deserved it. They beat up Herriot, the President of the Chamber, and they say Daladier escaped through the back, on foot. They burst in, shouting cries of ‘Murderers!’ and ‘Thieves!’ “

  But the well-kept order of the veterans was starting to break up in all directions. Mounted police with cocked hats and feathers were rushing up to bar the entrance to the bridge, and to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The veterans were assaulting the police with the same kind of brutality she would have expected from anarchists. “Who is leading these people?” she asked in a hushed voice.

  “There are many right-wing groups, lady. The Colonel de La Rocque with his Cross of Fire; the Jeunesses Patriotes; the assault section of the secretive Hood. And the King’s Servitors, an old Royalist organization.”

  She shivered, thinking of the day the Communists of Berlin had attacked the Reichstag, and its bloody aftermath. The mounted cavalry, feathers flying in the air, was rushing at a group of men in uniform, swords brandished and swishing. “Those are the King’s Servitors,” the man told her. He seemed to have appointed himself her interpreter of current events.

  “Look!” someone to the left of them cried. “On the terrace of the Tuileries Gardens!”

  Old men in military uniforms were up there, throwing bricks at the cavalry, which, in turn, was assaulting young men in boots and berets. Lily could feel the tension all around her, and the tremendous sense of exhilaration. It was a kind of demented joy t
hat something, at last, was being done out in the open, airing out all the anger within the hearts and minds of the Parisians.

  A chant had risen, to the right of her, way in the distance. She could hardly distinguish the men who were coming down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, but they seemed to be singing the Marseillaise. After what seemed an eternity, she made out stronger sounds of breaking glass and clicking boots. There were men in all the trees, helping the veterans fight the police, who had finally opened fire. Lily realized that she had seized the sleeve of the man with the watch, and that she was hanging on to it for dear life. Her hat had fallen off and was hanging down her back.

  She thought, suddenly, that she heard a muffled voice, among the thousands raised close to her, calling out hoarsely, “Lily! Lily!” She turned, and a man’s elbow came crashing down on her head, sending the hat catapulting among the caterpillar legs of the crowd. She raised herself on tiptoes, trying to make out who might be calling her—if, indeed, someone had said her name, and if he had been looking for her and not another person by the same name. She saw, fighting his way through to her, a tall, thin man with disheveled white hair, and, with an outpour of relief, screamed out: “Jacques! Here, near the front!”

  The men marching down the Champs-Élysées had reached the Rond-Point, and now she could see that their chests were studded with metallic spikes, and that the canes they were using to walk with had knives on their ends. They were coming closer and closer, singing the national anthem at the top of their lungs. She didn’t care who they were: the fact was that she was truly terrified, as she had never been in her twenty-eight years of existence. “Yeah,” the man next to her murmured, as if he were drugged, “that’s exactly what France needs. Law and order.”