The Other Side of Midnight (8 page)

“Do you have any preference in motels?” Ron asked.

Catherine stared up at him, speechless. Gone were the dreams of a genteel musicale evening with his mother and father. The bastard was planning to take her to bed in a motel! Well, that was what she wanted, wasn’t it? Wasn’t that the reason she had written that insane note?

Ron’s hand was on Catherine’s shoulder now, sliding down her arm. She felt a warm sensation in her groin. She swallowed and said, “If you’ve seen one motel, you’ve seen them all.”

Ron looked at her strangely. But all he said was, “OK. Let’s go.”

They got into his car and started driving west. Catherine’s body had turned into a block of ice, but her mind was racing at a feverish pitch. The last time she had stayed in a motel was when she was eight and was driving across country with her mother and father. Now she was going to one to go to bed with a man who was a total stranger. What did she know about him anyway? Only that he was handsome, popular and knew an easy lay when he saw one.

Ron reached over and took her hand. “Your hands are cold,” he said.

“Cold hands, hot legs.”
Oh, Christ
, she thought.
There I go again
. For some reason, the lyrics of “Ah,
Sweet Mystery of Life” started to go through Catherine’s head. Well she was about to solve it. She was on her way to finding out what everything was all about. The books, the sexy advertisements, the thinly veiled love lyrics—“Rock Me in the Cradle of Love,” “Do It Again,” “Birds Do It.”
OK
, she thought.
Now Catherine is going to do it
.

Ron turned south onto Clark Street.

Ahead on both sides of the street were huge blinking red eyes, neon signs that were alive in the night, screaming out their offers of cheap and temporary havens for impatient young lovers. “EASY REST MOTEL,” “OVERNIGHT MOTEL,” “COME INN,”
(Now that had to be Freudian!)
“TRAVELER’S REST.” The paucity of imagination was staggering, but on the other hand the owners of these places were probably too busy bustling fornicating young couples in and out of bed to worry about being literary.

“This is about the best of them,” Ron said, pointing to a sign ahead.

“PARADISE INN—VACANCY.”

It was a symbol. There was a vacancy in Paradise, and she, Catherine Alexander, was going to fill it.

Ron swung the car into the courtyard next to a small whitewashed office with a sign that read: RING BELL AND ENTER. The courtyard consisted of about two dozen numbered wooden bungalows.

“How does this look?” Ron asked.

Like Dante’s Inferno. Like the Colosseum in Rome when the Christians were about to be thrown to the lions. Like the Temple of Delphi when a Vestal Virgin was about to get hers
.

Catherine felt that excited feeling in her groin again. “Terrific,” she said, “Just terrific.”

Ron smiled knowingly. “I’ll be right back.” He put his hand on Catherine’s knee, sliding it up toward her thigh, gave her a quick, impersonal kiss and swung out of the car and went into the office. She sat there, looking after him, trying to make her mind blank.

She heard the wail of a siren in the distance.
Oh, my God
, she thought wildly,
it’s a raid! They’re always raiding these places!

The door to the manager’s office opened and Ron came out. He was carrying a key and apparently was deaf to the siren which was coming closer and closer. He walked over to Catherine’s side of the car and opened the door.

“All set,” he said. The siren was a screaming banshee moving in on them. Could the police arrest them for merely being in the courtyard?

“Come on,” Ron said.

“Don’t you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

The siren passed them and went ululating down the street away from them, receding into the distance. Damn! “The birds,” she said weakly.

There was a look of impatience on Ron’s face.

“If there’s anything wrong—” he said.

“No, no,” Catherine cut in quickly. “I’m coming.” She got out of the car and they moved toward one of the bungalows. “I hope you got my lucky number,” she said brightly.

“What did you say?”

Catherine looked up at him and suddenly realized no words had come out. Her mouth was completely dry. “Nothing,” she croaked.

They reached the door and it said number thirteen. It was exactly what she deserved. It was a sign from heaven that she was going to get pregnant, that God was out to punish Saint Catherine.

Ron unlocked the door and held it open for her. He flicked on the light switch and Catherine stepped inside. She could not believe it. The room seemed to consist of one enormous bed. The only other furniture was an uncomfortable-looking easy chair in a corner, a small dressing table with a mirror over it, and next to the bed, a battered radio with a slot for feeding it quarters. No one would ever walk in here and mistake this
room for anything but what it was: a place where a boy brought a girl to screw her. You couldn’t say, Well, here we are in the ski lodge, or the war games room, or the bridal suite at the Ambassador. No. What this was was a cheap love nest. Catherine turned to see what Ron was doing and he was throwing the bolt on the door.
Good. If the Vice Squad wanted them, they’d have to break down the door first
. She could see herself being carried out in the nude by two policemen while a photographer snapped her picture for the front page of the
Chicago Daily News
.

Ron moved up to Catherine and put his arms around her. “Are you nervous?” he asked.

She looked up at him and forced a laugh that would have made Margaret Sullavan proud. “Nervous? Ron, don’t be silly.”

He was still studying her, unsure. “You’ve done this before, haven’t you, Cathy?”

“I don’t keep a scorecard.”

“I’ve had a strange feeling about you all evening.”

Here it comes. He was going to throw her out on her virgin ass and tell her to get lost in a cold shower. Well, she wasn’t going to let that happen. Not tonight
. “What kind of feeling?”

“I don’t know.” Ron’s voice was perplexed. “One minute you’re kind of sexy and, you know,
with
it, and the next minute your mind is way off somewhere and you’re as frigid as ice. It’s like you’re two people. Which one is the real Catherine Alexander?”

Frigid as ice
, she automatically said to herself. Aloud she said, “I’ll show you.” She put her arms around him and kissed him on the lips and she could smell egg foo young.

He kissed her harder and pulled her close to him. He ran his hands over her breasts, caressing them, pushing his tongue into her mouth. Catherine felt a hot moisture deep down inside her and she could feel her pants dampen.
Here I go
, she thought.
It’s really going to happen! It’s really going to happen!
She clung to him
harder, filled with a growing, almost unbearable excitement.

“Let’s get undressed,” Ron said hoarsely. He stepped back from her and started to take off his jacket.

“No,” she said. “Let me.” There was a new confidence in her voice. If this was the night of nights, she was going to do it right. She was going to remember everything she had ever read or heard. Ron wasn’t going back to school to snicker to the girls about how he had made love to a dumb little virgin. Catherine might not have Jean-Anne’s bust measurement, but she had a brain ten times as useful, and she was going to put it to work to make Ron so happy in bed he wouldn’t be able to stand it. She took off his jacket and laid it on the bed, then reached for his tie.

“Hold it,” Ron said. “I want to see you undress.”

Catherine stared at him, swallowed, slowly reached for her zipper and got out of her dress. She was standing in her bra, slip, pants, shoes and stockings.

“Go on.”

She hesitated a moment, then reached down and stepped out of her slip.
Lions, 2—Christians, 0
, she thought.

“Hey, great! Keep going.”

Catherine slowly sat down on the bed and carefully removed her shoes and stockings, trying to make it look as sexy as she could. Suddenly she felt Ron behind her, undoing her bra. She let it fall to the bed. He lifted Catherine to her feet and started sliding her pants down. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, wishing that she were in another place with another man, a human being who loved her, whom she loved, who would father splendid children to bear his name, who would fight for her and kill for her and for whom she would be an adoring helpmate.
A whore in his bed, a great cook in his kitchen, a charming hostess in his living room
…a man who would kill a son of a bitch like Ron Peterson for daring to bring her to this tacky,
degrading room. Her pants fell to the floor. Catherine opened her eyes.

Ron was staring at her, his face filled with admiration. “My God, Cathy, you’re beautiful,” he said. “You’re really beautiful.” He bent down and kissed her breast. She caught a glimpse in the dressing-table mirror. It looked like a French farce, sordid and dirty. Everything inside her except the hot pain in her groin told her that this was dreary and ugly and wrong, but there was no way to stop it now. Ron was whipping off his tie and unbuttoning his shirt, his face flushed. He undid his belt and stripped down to his shorts, then sat down on the bed and started to take off his shoes and socks. “I mean it, Catherine,” he said, his voice tight with emotion. “You’re the most beautiful goddamn thing I’ve ever laid eyes on.”

His words only increased Catherine’s panic. Ron stood up, a broad, anticipatory grin on his face, and let his shorts drop to the floor. His male organ was standing out stiffly, like an enormous, inflated salami with hair around it. It was the largest, most incredible thing Catherine had ever seen in her life.

“How do you like that?” he said, looking down at it proudly.

Without thinking, Catherine said, “Sliced on rye. Hold the mustard and lettuce.”

And she stood there, watching it go down.

In Catherine’s sophomore year there was a change in the atmosphere of the campus.

For the first time there was a growing concern about what was happening in Europe and an increasing feeling that America was going to get involved. Hitler’s dream of the thousand-year rule of the Third Reich was on its way to becoming a reality. The Nazis had occupied Denmark and invaded Norway.

Over the past six months the talk on campuses across the country had shifted from sex and clothes
and proms to the ROTC and the draft and lend-lease. More and more college boys were appearing in army and navy uniforms.

One day Susie Roberts, a classmate from Senn, stopped Catherine in the corridor. “I want to say good-bye, Cathy. I’m leaving.”

“Where are you going?”

“The Klondike.”

“The
Klondike?
”

“Washington, D.C. All the girls are striking gold there. They say for every girl there are at least a hundred men. I like those odds.” She looked at Catherine. “What do you want to stick around this place for? School’s a drag. There’s a whole big world waiting out there.”

“I can’t leave just now,” Catherine said. She was not sure why: She had no real ties in Chicago. She corresponded regularly with her father in Omaha and talked to him on the telephone once or twice a month and each time he sounded as though he were in prison.

Catherine was on her own now. The more she thought about Washington, the more exciting it seemed. That evening she phoned her father and told him she wanted to quit school and go to work in Washington. He asked her if she would like to come to Omaha, but Catherine could sense the reluctance in his voice. He did not want her to be trapped, as he had been.

The next morning Catherine went to the dean of women and informed her she was quitting school. Catherine sent a telegram to Susie Roberts and the next day she was on a train to Washington, D.C.

On Saturday, June 14, 1940, the German Fifth Army marched into a stunned Paris. The Maginot Line had turned out to be the biggest fiasco in the history of warfare and France lay defenseless before one of the most powerful military machines the world had ever known.

The day had begun with a strange gray pall that lay over the city, a terrifying cloud of unknown origin. For the last forty-eight hours sounds of intermittent gunfire had broken the unnatural, frightened silence of Paris. The roar of the cannons was outside the city, but the echoes reverberated into the heart of Paris. There had been a flood of rumors carried like a tidal wave over the radio, in newspapers and by word of mouth. The Boche were invading the French coast…London had been destroyed…Hitler had reached an accord with the British government…The Germans were going to wipe out Paris with a deadly new bomb. At first each rumor had been taken as gospel, creating its own panic, but constant crises finally exert a soporific effect, as though the mind and body, unable to absorb any further terror, retreat into a protective shell of apathy. Now the rumor mills had ground to a complete halt, newspaper presses had stopped printing and radio stations had stopped broadcasting. Human instinct had taken over from the machines, and the Parisians sensed that this was a day of decision. The gray cloud was an omen.

And then the German locusts began to swarm in.

Suddenly Paris was a city filled with foreign uniforms and alien people, speaking a strange, guttural tongue, speeding down the wide, tree-lined avenues in large Mercedes limousines flying Nazi flags or pushing their way along the sidewalks that now belonged to them. They were truly the
über Mensch
, and it was their destiny to conquer and rule the world.

Within two weeks an amazing transformation had taken place. Signs in German appeared everywhere. Statues of French heroes had been knocked down and the swastika flew from all state buildings. German efforts to eradicate everything Gallic reached ridiculous proportions. The markings on hot and cold water taps were changed from
chaud
and
froid
to
heiss
and
kalt
. The place de Broglie in Strasbourg became Adolf Hitler Platz. Statues of Lafayette, Ney and Kleber were dynamited by squadrons of Nazis. Inscriptions on the monuments for the dead were replaced by “GEFALLEN FUR DEUTSCHLAND.”

The German occupation troops were enjoying themselves. While French food was too rich and covered with too many sauces, it was still a pleasant change from war rations. The soldiers neither knew nor cared that Paris was the city of Baudelaire, Dumas and Molière. To them Paris was a garish, eager, overpainted whore with her skirts pulled up over her hips and they raped her, each in his own way. The Storm-troopers forced young French girls to go to bed with them, sometimes at the point of a bayonet, while their leaders like Goering and Himmler raped the Louvre and the rich private estates they greedily confiscated from the newly created enemies of the Reich.

If French corruption and opportunism rose to the surface in the time of France’s crisis, so did the heroism. One of the underground’s secret weapons was the
Pompiers
, the fire department, which in France is under the jurisdiction of the army. The Germans had
confiscated dozens of buildings for the use of the army, the Gestapo and various ministries, and the location of these buildings was of course no secret. At an underground resistance headquarters in St. Remy resistance leaders pored over large maps detailing the location of each building. Experts were then assigned their targets, and the following day a speeding car or an innocent-looking bicyclist would pass by one of the buildings and fling a homemade bomb through the window. Up to that point the damage was slight. The ingenuity of the plan lay in what followed next.

The Germans would call in the
Pompiers
to put out the fire. Now it is instinctive in all countries that when there is a conflagration the firemen are in complete charge: And so it was in Paris. The
Pompiers
raced into the building while the Germans stood meekly aside and watched them destroy everything in sight with high-pressure hoses, axes and—when the opportunity presented itself—their own incendiary bombs. In this way the underground managed to destroy priceless German records locked away in the fortresses of the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo. It took almost six months for the German high command to figure out what was happening, and by that time irreparable damage had been done. The Gestapo could prove nothing, but every member of the
Pompiers
was rounded up and sent to the Russian front to fight.

There was a shortage of everything from food to soap. There was no gasoline, no meat, no dairy products. The Germans had confiscated everything. Stores that carried luxury goods stayed open, but their only customers were the soldiers who paid in occupation marks which were identical with the regular marks except that they lacked the white strip at the edge and the printed promise to pay was not signed.

“Who will redeem these?” the French shopkeepers moaned.

And the Germans grinned, “The Bank of England.”

Not all Frenchmen suffered, however. For those
with money and connections there was always the Black Market.

Noelle Page’s life was changed very little by the occupation. She was working as a model at Chanel’s on rue Canbon in a hundred-and-fifty-year-old graystone building that looked ordinary on the outside, but was very smartly decorated within. The war, like all wars, had created overnight millionaires, and there was no shortage of customers. The propositions that came to Noelle were more numerous than ever; the only difference was that most of them were now in German. When she was not working, she would sit for hours at small outdoor cafés on the Champs-Élysées, or on the Left Bank near the Pont Neuf. There were hundreds of men in German uniforms, many of them with young French girls. The French civilian men were either too old or lame, and Noelle supposed that the younger ones had been sent to camps or conscripted for military duty. She could tell the Germans at a glance, even when they were not in uniform. They had a look of arrogance stamped on their faces, the look that conquerors have had since the days of Alexander and Hadrian. Noelle did not hate them, nor did she like them. They simply did not touch her.

She was filled with a busy inner life, carefully planning out each move. She knew exactly what her goal was, and she knew that nothing could stop her. As soon as she was able to afford it, she engaged a private detective who had handled a divorce for a model with whom she worked. The detective’s name was Christian Barbet, and he operated out of a small, shabby office on the rue St. Lazare. The sign on the door read:

ENQUÊTES
PRIVÉES ET COMMERCIALES
RECHERCHES
RENSEIGNEMENTS
CONFIDENTIELS
FILATURES
PREUVES

The sign was almost larger than the office. Barbet was short and bald with yellow, broken teeth, narrow squinting eyes and nicotine-stained fingers.

“What can I do for you?” he asked Noelle.

“I want information about someone in England.”

He blinked suspiciously. “What kind of information?”

“Anything. Whether he’s married, who he sees. Anything at all. I want to start a scrapbook on him.”

Barbet gingerly scratched his crotch and stared at her.

“Is he an Englishman?”

“An American. He’s a pilot with the Eagle Squadron of the RAF.”

Barbet rubbed the top of his head, uneasily. “I don’t know,” he grumbled. “We’re at war. If they caught me trying to get information out of England about a flyer—”

His voice trailed off and he shrugged expressively. “The Germans shoot first and ask questions afterward.”

“I don’t want any military information,” Noelle assured him. She opened her purse and took out a wad of franc notes. Barbet studied them hungrily.

“I have connections in England,” he said cautiously, “but it will be expensive.”

And so it began. It was three months before the little detective telephoned Noelle. She went to his office, and her first words were: “Is he alive?” and when Barbet nodded, her body sagged with relief and Barbet thought,
It must be wonderful to have someone love you that much
.

“Your boyfriend has been transferred,” Barbet told her.

“Where?”

He looked down at a pad on his desk. “He was attached to the 609th Squadron of the RAF. He’s been transferred to the 121st Squadron at Martlesham East, in East Anglia. He’s flying Hurri—”

“I don’t care about that.”

“You’re paying for it,” he said. “You might as well get your money’s worth.” He looked down at his notes again. “He’s flying Hurricanes. Before that he was flying American Buffaloes.”

He turned over a page and added, “It becomes a little personal here.”

“Go on,” Noelle said.

Barbet shrugged. “There’s a list of girls he is sleeping with. I didn’t know whether you wanted—”

“I told you—everything.”

There was a strange note in her voice that baffled him. There was something not quite normal here, something that did not ring true. Christian Barbet was a third-rate investigator handling third-rate clients, but because of that he had developed a feral instinct for truth, a nose for smelling out facts. The beautiful girl standing in his office disturbed him. At first Barbet had thought she might be trying to involve him in some kind of espionage. Then he decided that she was a deserted wife seeking evidence against her husband. He had been wrong about that, he admitted, and now he was at a loss to figure out what his client wanted or why. He handed Noelle the list of Larry Douglas’ girl friends and watched her face as she read it. She might have been reading a laundry list.

She finished and looked up. Christian Barbet was totally unprepared for her next words. “I’m very pleased,” Noelle said.

He looked at her and blinked rapidly.

“Please call me when you have something more to report.”

Long after Noelle Page had gone, Barbet sat in his
office staring out the window, trying to puzzle out what his client was really after.

The theaters of Paris were beginning to boom again. The Germans attended to celebrate the glory of their victories and to show off the beautiful Frenchwomen they wore on their arms like trophies. The French attended to forget for a few hours that they were an unhappy, defeated people.

Noelle had attended the theater in Marseille a few times, but she had seen sleazy amateur plays acted out by fourth-rate performers for indifferent audiences. The theater in Paris was something else again. It was alive and sparkling and filled with the wit and grace of Molière, Racine and Colette. The incomparable Sacha Guitry had opened his theater and Noelle went to see him perform. She attended a revival of Büchner’s
La Morte de Danton
and a play called
Asmodée
by a promising new young writer named François Mauriac. She went to the Comédie Française to see Pirandello’s
Chacun La Verité
and Rostand’s
Cyrano de Bergerac
. Noelle always went alone, oblivious of the admiring stares of those around her, completely lost in the drama taking place on the stage. Something in the magic that went on behind the footlights struck a responsive chord in her. She was playing a part just like the actors on stage, pretending to be something that she wasn’t, hiding behind a mask.

One play in particular,
Huis Clos
by Jean Paul Sartre, affected her deeply. It starred Philippe Sorel, one of the idols of Europe. Sorel was ugly, short and beefy, with a broken nose and the face of a boxer. But the moment he spoke, a magic took place. He was transformed into a sensitive handsome man.
It’s like the story of the Prince and the Frog
, Noelle thought, watching him perform.
Only he is both
. She went back to watch him again and again, sitting in the front row studying his performance, trying to learn the secret of his magnetism.

One evening during intermission an usher handed Noelle a note. It read, “I have seen you in the audience night after night. Please come backstage this evening and let me meet you. P.S.” Noelle read it over, savoring it. Not because she gave a damn about Philippe Sorel, but because she knew that this was the beginning she had been looking for.

She went backstage after the performance. An old man at the stage door ushered her into Sorel’s dressing room. He was seated before a makeup mirror, wearing only shorts, wiping off his makeup. He studied Noelle in the mirror. “It’s unbelievable,” he said finally. “You’re even more beautiful up close.”

“Thank you, Monsieur Sorel.”

“Where are you from?”

“Marseille.”

Sorel swung around to look at her more closely. His eyes moved to her feet and slowly worked their way up to the top of her head, missing nothing. Noelle stood there under his scrutiny, not moving. “Looking for a job?” he asked.

“No.”

“I never pay for it,” Sorel said. “All you’ll get from me is a pass to my play. If you want money, fuck a banker.”

Noelle stood there quietly watching him. Finally Sorel said, “What
are
you looking for?”

“I think I’m looking for you.”

They had supper and afterward went back to Sorel’s apartment in the beautiful rue Maurice-Barres, overlooking the corner where it became the Bois de Boulogne. Philippe Sorel was a skillful lover, surprisingly considerate and unselfish. Sorel had expected nothing from Noelle but her beauty, and he was astonished by her versatility in bed.

“Christ!” he said. “You’re fantastic. Where did you learn all that?”

Noelle thought about it a moment. It was really not
a question of learning. It was a matter of feeling. To her a man’s body was an instrument to be played on, to explore to its innermost depths, finding the responsive chords and building upon them, using her own body to help create exquisite harmonies.

“I was born with it,” she said simply.

Her fingertips began to lightly play around his lips, quick little butterfly touches, and then moved down to his chest and stomach. She saw him starting to grow hard and erect again. She arose and went into the bathroom and returned a moment later and slid his hard penis into her mouth. Her mouth was hot, filled with warm water.