The Mistress

by Philippe Tapon Narrated by Roe Kendall

Overview

She is called Simone. She is the illicit lover of Dr. Emile Bastien, who practices medicine on the rue de Maubeuge, treating Parisians and Germans alike. However, Simone is more than his mistress-she is the guardian of all of his most dangerous family secrets. Still, there is one secret the mistress has not been let in on: an ingenious scheme that arouses her suspicions even as others plot to keep it from her at all costs. The mistress retaliates by hatching a plan of her own involving a guilt-ridden SS officer, a suspicious death, and a chilling interrogation. But an unexpected reversal of fortune leads to a confrontation that will have consequences no one could have planned.

Set in a hothouse atmosphere of growing paranoia with stunning twists and turns, this tour de force will haunt you long after the fiendishly clever denouement.

Editorial Reviews

Liam Callanan

...A fine, wicked book.
— The New York Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Proffers a trenchant view of WWII from the vantage point of a French doctor. Emile Bastien's successful method for treating stomach ailments with electroshock brings him patients from both the Reich and the Resistance. His home life is not nearly as healthy as his career, however, with an estranged wife living in the south of France, children whose attitudes toward him seem to waver between resentment and begrudging affection, and a mistress, Simone, who toys constantly with his passions. Emile gets an opportunity to make a strike for the Resistance when a high-ranking Nazi official ends up on his operating table; he takes his chance with a gruesome detour from his normal operating procedure. As Emile hides his crime, he also hides a huge cache of gold from both Nazis and loved ones. Tapon's taut narrative zips along smoothly, though sometimes at the expense of depth. The political implications are sometimes skirted, and Tapon's rushed style can cloud pivotal moments with melodrama--as it does when Simone tries to trade sex for her lover's life after his arrest as a Nazi collaborator. However, Tapon's polished and efficient dialogue is satisfying, and those looking for an entertainment with strong--but not forbidding--doses of moral questioning will not be disappointed.

Library Journal

This intriguing World War II novel is filled with cunning characters. Emile Bastien is a physician who specializes in stomach ailments. His estranged wife, Marie, lives on a farm miles away, where Emile has hidden a cache of gold. Meanwhile, Emile's two children are tended by Simone, his secretary, cook, and lover. Trouble really begins in this already tense household when an SS officer comes to Emile with a bleeding ulcer. Emile decides to exact some revenge against the Nazis by making sure that the major will not recover from his operation. When Emile is executed for being a collaborator, Simone and Marie engage in a lengthy argument before deciding on how to split the gold bars. Even the children play against each other and the adults in order to get what they want. Unfortunately, Tapon (A Parisian from Kansas, LJ 2/1/97) moves his plot along so fast that there is little time for the characters to reflect on their actions; more description could have fleshed out their sketchy portrayals. Recommended for large public libraries.--Lisa Rohrbaugh, East Palestine Memorial P.L., OH

Liam Callanan

...[A] fine, wicked book. -- The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

A nest-of-vipers melodrama set in German-occupied France near the end of WWII, from the young author of last year's debut novel A Parisian from Kansas. The story begins in 1944 in Paris, where "stomach doctor" Emile Bastien, assisted by his beautiful secretary-nurse (and mistress) Simone Givry, maintains a thriving practice during the lean Occupation years by numbering Nazi officers among his patients. Emile is separated from his wife Marie, from whom he has hidden a fortune in gold ingots—presumably somewhere on the family's country vineyard currently occupied by the embittered Marie. An extended flashback to 1942 explicitly links the Bastiens' willful daughter Paulette and resentful son Rene to their parents' past and present machinations—though it interrupts, and somewhat diffuses the main plot, which develops from Emile's vengeful surgical mistreatment of ulcer patient Heinrich Schrodinger, an SS major who has smilingly threatened, while describing his symptoms, to appropriate the stoical Simone. As Paris is liberated, Tapon pours it on: the melodrama rises to—well, risible levels. Emile is arrested by French authorities for having "aided Nazis." Simone, desperate to retrieve the "dowry" she knows he's hidden, contrives to visit Emile in prison by seducing a brainless guard ("She had never felt stronger, had never so dominated a man"). A confrontation during the reading of Emile's will puts Simone and Marie into collusion against the defiant Paulette; a discovery is made in the Bastien country house's cellar; and there's a savage sudden twist at the end. If all this sounds a bit overloaded, be assured that it is: Tapon seems to have intended to marry anironic study of wartime mentality and morality to a sleek, sexy Diabolique-like suspense tale.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169910735
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	07/10/2009
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

My grandfather had a mistress named Simone. She lived with him in the flat adjoining his medical offices, on the rue de Maubeuge; she was his secretary, and wore black skirts that made her legs seem white and fresh.

    The Nazis had taken over the city, food was rationed, but Emile Bastien, and his son, and daughter, and his mistress, ate well: eggs, good beef, good bread at a time when everything was stale and hard and hard to find. Emile had devised a treatment for stomach disorders involving something like shock therapy. Patients who had gotten sick on war food would lie down in his cabinet, and he, with long white delicate fingers, would run over their bellies, asking them, Does it hurt here? The patients trusted the soft hands, and by the time they had been conditioned to the soft jokes Emile was making ("How can they win the war if they can't make an éclair au chocolat?") they had not noticed the instruments—the dials, the voltmeters behind them—crackle and glow with an electrical red. Doctor Bastien would apply a light goo, a pink fluid not unlike a woman's fluids—and then he would affix to the skin a disc, shining with all the lights of the office, connected as if by a metallic umbilical cord to a mother-box of electrical batteries.

    "Think of something pleasant now," the doctor said.

    "Pleasant?"

    "Yes, pleasant. The south, for instance."

    "Well, you know, I'm from Aix, and the shittiest thing these pigs have done is stop us from going down there. Fuckers! You'd think that even in agoddamn occupied country we could visit our fucking families, eh, docteur?"

    "Think of something pleasant now."

    "Mighty few pleasant things to think of now. Pleasant? When I was a kid ... I used to live on a farm in Aix ..."

    "Yes—go on" said Emile, ready to crank the current, his hand on the menacing round, smooth knob.

    "Oh, Aix. There were horses. And hay. Oh! the smell of the hay. Do you know it, Doctor, the countryside? Hey! What are you doing?"

    "Relax, please. Tell me about the hay. I don't know the countryside so well. Although my wife, she does.... She lives in Perpignan, you see."

    "It feels awfully sinister, what you're doing down there. Still, my girl—you remember her—pretty girl! wonderful girl!—she said it felt funny, your treatment. Are you really shocking my poor stomach?"

    "Not shocking. A term for vulgarians. In fact what I am actually doing is applying a very low voltage in order to stimulate gastric cells. My theory—you may read about it, if you care to, in Le Journal de Médecine—is that gastric cells, like heart cells or other muscular cells, can be stimulated after arrest by the miracle of electricity. Of course, they can also be silenced, shut down, tranquilized—fascinating variations on a theme. Like Mozart. Do you like Mozart?"

    "No. Where are you from, Doctor?"

    "The west"

    "And you came to Paris—"

    "Only a few years ago. I did my schooling in—"

    "Hey, that hurts!"

    "Now. Ahem! Yes, now is the moment of great tension. Nevertheless, the tension must rise. Higher and higher. Until tissue enervation takes place. You must endeavor to keep calm. At all costs, you must not move, or shift the electrodes. You will damage your stomach or possibly electrocute yourself. Pray, talk to me about something which relaxes you."

    "Oh! God!"

    "Talk, talk, man—about—your girl, say."

    "Oh! God! Easy for you to say! Fellow's frying my stomach and I've got to tell him all about my girl! What do you want to know? You've seen her!"

    "Please—keep talking." The patient was wincing, eyes shut tight, fighting back tears. "Sing a song, if you like."

    "'Ah—vous—di—rai—'" he sang, between gasps. "I can't!" he yelled.

    "Oh, tut-tut-tut. I'll tell your girlfriend what a sissy you are. She held up under much higher voltage. She did not cry or even show pain. Not even in the slightest. Brave girl."

    The man's face became stern as stone. He sang, loudly, clearly: "'Frère Jacques, frère Jacques ... '"

    "Yes, yes! Good, good! Keep singing!"

    "'Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous? Sonnez les matines! Sonnez les marines! Ding! dang! dong! Ding! dang! dong!'" The man winced again in suppressed agony.

    "Five!" Emile began counting melodramatically, holding a hand up like a starting gun. "Four! Three! Two and a half! Two! One! There! Off! Isn't that better?"

    "Oh-la-la! Oh-la-la!" The man fairly collapsed. "Thought I was going to die there."

    "My dear, poor fellow. You'd better not say more, or people will hear stories about how you were whimpering in here like a little dog."

    "Oh, go on."

    Doctor Bastien went over to his great desk and made some brisk jottings with a fountain pen. Scratch, scratch, scratch went the pen, while horses and autos clippity-clopped and vroomed outside in the street.

    "Did you say your wife was in Perpignan?" asked the man, still bare chested. He tugged gently at the nipples of steel affixed to his chest, as if to encourage the doctor to take them off.

    "Yes, she is" replied the doctor, without looking up or interrupting his notes in the slightest.

    "Have you been down? I mean—since the beginning of the Occupation?"

    "Just once."

    "How was it?"

    Doctor Bastien stopped, looked into space, thinking of the right word. "Rewarding," he finally said.

    "Is it like the old France?" asked the man.

    "Yes" replied the doctor. "It's the same old stupid France. Killing Krauts one minute, half in love with Hitler the next."

    "I'm not."

    Emile looked up. "No,' he said. "I see." Emile put down his pen, drummed his fingers on the tabletop, and steepled his fingers. "Hmmm ... it'd be fascinating, you know, to see the gastric disturbances suffered by the collabos, and the disturbances suffered by the Resistance. I'd bet you they'd be completely different. Hmm. It'd be an interesting study to do, when the war is over of course. Assuming there are any Resistants left. Hmph! Maybe the Nazis should save a few, just for such medical, psychiatric purposes. Would you say a Resistant has a strong stomach? Or no stomach for the Nazis? Tragic. The Reich is doing such a good job eliminating Jews, perhaps they'll take on stomach disorders next. Put me out of business," he added with a half-smile.

    The man stared down at his belly, still coupled to the infernal machine. "Can I take these off?"

    "I'll take them off for you," said Emile, suiting the action to the word. They slid off gently, like hose from a leg, and Emile plunged them into a stainless-steel sink. "For disinfection" he added. "Do you know this is the first stainless-steel sink in Paris? From America. If only the imbeciles here listened to Pasteur, they'd give up their bloody precious porcelain" From a counter he took a spotless rag and wiped his fingers immaculately. Not a thread of his dark suit was soiled. "Mademoiselle Givry!" he called.

    His secretary—his mistress—entered. She wore a dark, austere outfit, and yet moved from side to side like a snake; her lips were arranged like the petals of a rose. There was witchcraft in her walk.

    "Oui, docteur?"

    "Monsieur Andrieux is almost ready." She looked at the man, bare chested on the table. Their gaze was electric for a moment, and then she pulled back.

    "Your wife?" the patient asked after she had gone.

    "No—my secretary."

    "Ah."

    "Your payment."

    "It's—outside, in the bag. The big gray bag."

    "You'll excuse me for a moment."

    In the cabinet the patient thought, What a damn goodlooking woman! And then Emile came back.

    "This bag?"

    "Yes."

    Emile opened it and looked. "Thank you. This cheese is hard to find."

    "Only the best for you, Doctor. My girl told me you were a miracle worker."

    "Piffle. If within three days you are still experiencing difficulty digesting, I shall see you again."

    "Free, of course."

    "No, because your ailment may be of a different nature than I diagnosed, and there is no way to tell besides applying treatment."

    "Times are tough, Doctor."

    "I have to eat as well as you do."

    "I won't come back if I have to pay."

    "If you don't come back when you don't get better, you won't be able to eat, I assure you. Sir. Good day."

    The man stood up and mumbled, "Au revoir."

    As the patient walked down the steps, both doctor and secretary would have sworn he was whistling "La Marseillaise," but then the tune dissolved and became something else.

Weekends, the doctor, his son, his daughter, and his mistress would go to a semi-country house in the suburbs, in La Varenne. The house and its plot covered several hectares. Going in and out of the city in Grandfather's immense Chenard-Walker sixty-horsepower engine—quite a vroom in those days—the four would have to present Occupation papers to the Nazis at the city gates: and they were out of the city for a weekend rest. Grandfather always drove: Simone put on a hat, sometimes with white flowers on the brim, almost drooping like a bridal veil into her eyes, and René and Paulette bickered in the back.

    "Mine!"

    "No!"

    "Maman!" René wailed.

    Grandfather would watch the road unfurl, imperturbable. Simone wore a nearly-smiling mouth almost like a brooch. Emile had always imagined that kept women wore hard faces, imperious chins, had demanding cheekbones; but Simone's face was like a toughening adolescent's: like a very brave girl about to dive into a cold pool, hoping by sheer hard joy to keep the cold from her heart.

    "So—we're going to swim, eh, kids?" Grandfather said.

    "Eh?" René said, almost neighing with incredulity.

    "René speak with more respect to your father," said Simone.

    Grandfather's gaze had become as hard and long as the road.

    "Eh?" René said again.

    "Don't say 'Eh!'" said Paulette.

    "Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"

    "That's enough!" said the doctor. Silence. "Sometimes, I do

    not know what to do with this ... clown."

    "Emile, he's a child. It's normal."

    "I was not this way."

    "He is different from you. Right, René?"

    "Eeeeeeeeeeeeee!"

    "Enough!" bellowed Grandfather. He pulled the Chenard-Walker over to the side of the road. His face was dark as thunderclouds, and he raised a large white pale hand in front of his face.

    "Une fois de plus et je te gifle. Tu as compris?" One more time and ... you understand?

    René nodded his little head three little times to indicate that yes, he understood. Grandfather shot a gaze full of Jesuitical persecution, full of imaginary blows and fire, and then turned forward and re-entered the road.

    René crossed his arms and sulked to show he wasn't going to say anything, and that he hated not being able to say anything. Paulette, beside him, leaned back in her seat, put her hand beneath her chin, let the wind play with the front of her hair, and smiled sardonically into the wind. She waited until her brother saw her in this attitude. It was an imitation of Simone's attitude in front.

    "You see?" said Emile, to the boy. "Why can't you be like your sister?"

    Because I'm a boy, thought René, but he pointedly said nothing.

    "She is always so quiet and thoughtful, eh? Why can't you be more like that?"

    Paulette went on being the damnable princess, continuing with her Simone imitation. She brushed her hair with her hands, opening and closing her mouth, primping, primping.

    "Quit it!" hissed René to his sister.

    "C'est bien, ma fille." That's good, my daughter, said the doctor.

In the dining room at La Varenne, an inscription ran round the room. "Toi, quiconque soit, bienvenu. Prends place à table, boit, et raconte-nous les choses merveilleuses." Meaning, "You, whosoever you are, welcome. Take your place at table, drink, and tell us wonderful things."

    There were two thronelike chairs in which Paulette and René, in their children's games, would play king and queen. The crown of each chair had a carving that looked like two sperm chasing each other; on each handrest a lion crouched, head blazing, teeth drawn back. A child could run his fingers through the wooden jaw, through the harmless fangs. Buttons like metal flowers ran round the sides and back of the throne, holding the velours in place; when you ran your hand over the fabric one way, it felt bristly, rough, and fought back; the other way, it was smooth and surrendered. The eyes of the lions had no pupils; it was easy to pretend they were buttons activating long, far-off things. The chairs were each in corners, dark and mysterious, and were good hiding places from adults. Children could see each other easily, though.

    Cache-cache—hide-and-seek—was a game played almost every weekend, winter weekends especially, while the war wore on on the radio. Simone and Emile would listen to the radio.... Bulletins came in from Pétain, from Vichy, from Berlin, blared, and blared on, and on, but once—

    Général de Gaulle entered the room through the wireless, staticky, haughty, and defiant. René was hiding in a closet. He was waiting for his sister to give up, and then to come out bursting at her, when he heard this voice fill the house, as if a stranger had entered.

    "> > >"

    He heard Paulette ask, "Who is it?" Emile turned down the volume. René knew then it was the wireless.

    "Go to the window, Paulette. Make sure no one is outside. Keep watching," Emile commanded.

    Oh, Paulette thought, this is far more fun than any childish game! This is real! "No one," she said, keeping watch by the window.

    "> > >"

    Precisely at this moment, René, feeling the moment could not be better, burst from his closet hiding place, screaming, "Here I am!"

    Simone cried out; she thought it was the Gestapo. Even Emile yelled, and he flushed, slapped René across the face, and yelled, "What the hell! What's wrong with you?! Eh?!"

    René started crying. Emile, furious, yelled, "Get out! Get out of here! This is de Gaulle we're trying to listen to!"

    "Emile, shut up!" Simone screamed. "Someone will hear!"

    René, crying, wailing like an ambulance siren, ran from the room, from the radio reading commands.

    "Coast is clear," said Paulette, still at the window.

    "What is wrong with your brother? Paulette?"

    "My brother?" she answered incredulously. "He wants his mother."

    Simone looked at Paulette defiantly. "Don't say that," she said.

    "Listen!" ordered Emile.

    "> > >."

Dinner that night, by wartime standards, was extraordinary. Because customers—patients—thought a stomach doctor would be particularly careful about what he ate, and because of the shortage of cash and coupons, they often paid him with choice, fatty cuts of beef, Chateaubriands, sometimes veal; or difficult-to-get cheeses, like Brie or Camembert or Roquefort. Plus, the house at La Varenne had a forty-hectare garden, and during the week, the single, aged, widowed servant—dressed in black, perhaps because it stirred less excitement from the SS—watered the potatoes, the vegetables, the lettuce, the fennel, the beans. The garden was never as productive as Emile thought it should be, and small wonder: his servant ripped up the best vegetables to sell on the black market.

    "Paulette, go get your brother. The food is going to get cold."

    "Are you still playing cache-cache?" asked Simone.

    "No, we stopped playing hours ago,' said Paulette. She went up to René's bedroom. "René?" She knocked. "It's dinnertime, so if you want to eat, Papa says to come down at once."

    "I don't want to eat," said René.

    "He doesn't want to eat," said his sister, back down at table.

    "More for us," said Emile.

    Emile said grace—so as to be heard upstairs: "FOR WHAT WE ARE ABOUT TO RECEIVE, LET US BE GRATEFUL!" And they began eating, Emile deliberately helping himself to the meat which would have been his son's.

    "What did you think of de Gaulle?" the father asked Paulette.

    "Wait, let me close the shades," said Simone.

    And on they talked, in excited whispers, about de Gaulle's crackling transmission. Upstairs, René's stomach was cursing his pride. He put his ear to the door; hearing nothing, he dared to steal into the carpeted corridor: he peered over the balustrade of the staircase, once, quickly, furtively, like a spy, then slid around like a snake to the first steps and as gently as water dribbling down started to move down the staircase' Suddenly, he was face to face with his father!

    "Nothing for you. Hunger till tomorrow."

    But René had already run up the stairs, gone to his room, locked himself in tight, as if he were running from the SS.

    That was a long night of hunger. In his sheets he twisted; pushed in the cavity of his stomach, to see if hunger could be squeezed out; he thought of food, to see if that would help, but his belly growled at that torture; he tried not to think of that food, but he couldn't help it.

    The house was quiet. He had heard his father and Simone kiss Paulette goodnight, and Paulette kiss them, and their respective doors clack shut. Very carefully, very slowly, after the light from the hall had stopped seeping in, he creaked open the door, peered outside, and on mouse feet pattered over the carpet to the bathroom. He ran the water a minute and then drank several bellyfuls of warm water. That would be food tonight. Then, as if returning to prison, he crept back like a gray shadow to his room, shut the door, thought of his mother.

Emile was staring at the lamp fixture in the ceilings, its circles of light, its plaster configurations, its molded decorative dance. He hardened his mouth, twitched his lips like an iron shuttle from side to side. A bolt came down in his soul. "What shall I do with him?"

    "Maybe you could send him to boarding school."

    "René? In a boarding school? No, I don't trust them." A long sigh of sadness came up from his chest, like a saw rending an old tree. The bed felt damp and hot. "Besides, all the French boarding schools would be controlled by the Nazis, and I'm not sure I want René there, much as he needs to be disciplined. Switzerland? Oh, it must be heaven! Real mountains instead of the imbecile Maginot Line. Switzerland! The entire rest of the continent is in love with war. What do Germans and French do, except quarrel? Like a marriage that isn't working? Oh, Simone, Simone, why, why did I ever marry?"

    "Emile ..."

    "These children were a mistake. Better they had never been born. I was tricked, Simone, like a peasant! Oh, of all my mistakes that was the worst. Is that why it's sacred? Because it's always a mistake? Not like ..."

    Simone looked at him; her black hair framed her face; she took his hand. "We've come a long way since the Jesuits, yes?" She stroked his hand softly. "Wretched man, you've had a lot to suffer."

    He said nothing. "My suffering is so little next to the good I know."

    Simone looked up, then away, into the brown darkness of the bedroom. She heard the light pitter-patter of feet, ghostly feet, moving in darkness outside the door.

    "I think it's a ghost" she said, thinking of someone else.

    "Has it gone downstairs, this ghost?"

    "No ..." she said. She looked at Emile; his face was set like stone and his eyes were dry as dirt. Simone thought: she has gone south, this ghost. She is waiting alone. The ghost wonders what has happened to her children. The ghost haunts her house, her vineyards, her gardens, alone, with flat faces like more ghosts looking out from every corner of the phantom house: phantom, because she had never visited it.

    "Do you think René understands?"

    "Paulette understands."

    "What do you think she thinks?"

    "Well, she doesn't much like her mother anyway. I think she prefers you," he said, laughing quickly.

    "And René?"

    "René must understand."

    "Is that a fact? Or a command?"

    "How can he not understand? That would be the last straw, having to explain you."

    Simone fixed him with a cold stare. An Antarctic wind blew over the conversation.

    "Marvelous how you never feel ready to explain me. Fabulous, how your feelings can never be justified. Whatever happens in your life has to be rational."

    "Simone ... don't get started."

    "Who's starting anything? I'm just your secretary. I start your coffee. I start all sorts of things. Not children, though. That I leave for other women."

    Emile turned around crisply. "Simone ..."

    "Maybe the poor child wants his poor mother. Maybe he's unhappy here? Maybe he doesn't like me?"

    "Oh, Simone, don't be ridiculous."

    "Marvelous how he never speaks to me. Flattering how he ignores me, pretends I don't exist. I suppose all secretaries get treated so by their bosses' sons; yet there is a particular intensity in his noninterest which really is rather commendable. Maybe beneath the clownish demeanor there's a bourgeois snob waiting to come out."

    Emile's face turned to granite.

    "Are you listening, Emile?"

    "Yes, Simone, I'm listening. Go on. It's fascinating."

    She looked at him, and her lips quivered, quickened an instant. "You don't love me, do you, letting your awful son treat me as if I were some slut. Some pretty whore that you picked up off the street, some little wounded clever girl, some pretty piece of ... snatch...."

    She started crying.

    "Oh, shush, shush, shush," Emile said. She went on crying. "Oh, God," Emile groaned, looking toward the crucifix that hung in his bedroom.

    Simone went on crying, sobbing, gasping. "It's all I ask of you ... all I ask of him. No one takes care of you like I do. How, where, do I fail?" She continued sobbing, her face hidden by a slanted hand, her fingers wrenched, curled. "Emile ... the boy is impossible. Not just difficult—impossible! He's poisoning the house with his sick tricks, his boyish whisperings. He steals money and sends it to his mother!"

    "Money?"

    Simone was breathing more steadily now; her breath was shooting like weaponry finally deployed; there was satisfaction in having launched this accusation, as if the tight bowstrings of her resentments had snapped back to relaxation.

    "Money. I can't prove it. But I suspect."

    "My money! You're sure?"

    Simone looked doubtful, intimidated, beneath this interrogation. "I can't—be sure."

    "But—you suspect?"

    She looked down.

    "You have reason to believe—?"

    She couldn't lie—but she nodded: the falsest yes.

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