Disclaimer: I do not own Inglourious Basterds.
Summary: As Col. Landa lives out his "Jew Hunter" moniker and chases the Inglourious Basterds, he has a few run-ins with a young French woman that culminate in the emotionally-charged murder of Bridget von Hammersmark. But the story doesn't end there. Rated for a short sex scene and a few swear words.
Story of the Waitress
Chapter 1: Premise
Maxium's was ironically the brainchild of a young Jewish girl who enjoyed cooking and who wanted to open her own restaurant as a dream career. It was fortunate that she died long before the Nazis began to occupy her beloved France, and before her descendants were forced to sell the place to friends, non-Jewish French individuals who were as accepting as could be, but who were forced to keep their nature a secret.
Still, they made sure to employ as many down-on-their-luck non-Aryans as they could, and while some of the Nazis complained about the service, they did nothing about it – the food they were served was what kept them coming back, after all.
Colonel Hans Landa was quite partial to the strudel, particularly with a spoonful of crème, though he never spoke so frankly about it out loud. He had been stationed in France for a matter of months, along with some of the other high-ranking Nazis, and had only just discovered the little gem that was Maxium's in the heart of the city.
As he ate, he reluctantly tuned into the conversation Goebbels was having with his supposed translator, though it was obvious – to him, at least – that the two had a relationship that far extended the boundaries of dialogue. He could fairly assume that under the table, Goebbels' hand was travelling further than it ought to, especially in such civilized company. But when Goebbels made a joke he thought was funny, Landa laughed, joined in, threw a few witty remarks into the banter.
He did as he ought to, considering the company that he kept.
"Mademoiselle Mimieux," said Goebbels, referring to the young woman whose cinema was to become the meeting place for most of the high-ranking Nazis, "has made quite an impression on young Zoller, has she not? But tsk, tsk, she does not appear to be interested."
"I wonder why," said his interpreter, her job moot in a room of German-speakers. "Perhaps she is not looking at the moment."
"Ha," Goebbels barked out. "The girl would be most fortunate to even fall at his feet – a mere opera house owner, and she –"
"I don't believe that's it," said Landa. "Have you met her projectionist?"
For all the power he held, the influence, Goebbels was not the quickest man. Landa had found himself growing impatient with him many a time.
"The projectionist?" repeated Goebbels. "The Negro?"
"Yes," said Landa. "The Negro."
"But she is a wonderful girl," said Francesca, surprised. "Why on earth –"
"Terribly sorry to interrupt," came a new voice, "sirs, madam, but I must inquire as to your meals. Are they satisfactory?" Standing before them, peeking into the shielded room, was one of the restaurant owners, a slim blonde with rosy lips and a sweet disposition. Unfortunately for many of the men who frequented the restaurant, she was married to another of the owners.
"Quite," said Landa, charismatic as always. "Compliments to the chef, may I add."
"Thank you," she said, smiling.
"I would appreciate a more attractive waitress," called out Goebbels, laughing uproariously. Francesca patted his shoulder, looking the other way with an amused roll of the eyes. The Gestapo major, who remained silent throughout their conversations, smiled indulgently. The rest of the table obliged and joined in the raucousness. Landa raised a brow and kept his amusement to a minimum.
"I will have our most attractive come and clear your plates, then," she said, her smile tightening. Then she left, closing the curtains a little more harshly than was required. Goebbels, too wrapped up in the conversation he was to launch into, did not notice. Landa did.
"I have seen, in this establishment," said Goebbels, "a number of Negroes. Our own waiter was a Negro. Ugh." He took a swig of wine. "Truly disgusting."
"Excusez-moi."
The Gestapo major held open the curtain to let in what appeared to be their new waitress. Dressed in a demure uniform of skirt, blouse, and heels, she was prim and proper. But her beauty wasn't what drew all eyes in the room to her. It was instead the smooth mocha tone of her skin.
"I was told to collect your plates," she said in fluent French. "Are you all finished?"
Landa watched the reactions of the rest of the table. Faces ranged from an expression of shock to disgust to open contemplation. He wasn't immune to the female form, but he didn't often share his true opinion on these sorts of things.
"You are the most attractive waitress?" said Goebbels in German. Out of respect for the girl, Francesca didn't translate.
"I apologize, young lady," she said, handing the girl her empty dish and spoon. Graciously, the waitress took it and, with others, lined them all up on a tray. Landa watched her fingers work, methodical and matter-of-fact. She had been doing her job for a long time; perhaps it was the only sort of position she could land herself in at the moment.
She let herself out without much of a goodbye, but the lingering eyes on her arse didn't care much for dialogue.
"What are you all looking at?" Goebbels demanded. "That Negro?"
"Negroes are of African descent," said Landa patiently. "She does not appear to be."
"She is still coloured," said Goebbels. "Filth. Unworthy."
"Perhaps," conceded Landa, inclining his head slightly. Francesca lit a cigarette.
"Why on earth didn't you tell me I would be serving Nazis?" hissed Mischa, when she returned to the kitchen. "What if they had asked for my papers?"
Madame Broussard smiled hesitantly. "I apologize, dear. I don't know why I obeyed Goebbels' request. I suppose it was nerves." She rubbed Mischa's back comfortingly. "Did he say anything to you?"
"Yes," said Mischa, sighing, "but it was in German."
"You really ought to learn the language," said Madame, "while the Nazis occupy France."
"Then I would be caught between a rock and a hard place," said Mischa. "Either I learn the language and conform to their take-over-the-world doctrine, or I don't and remain in the dark. I don't think he was saying anything nice, anyway. The woman sitting beside him didn't translate."
Madame blinked. "Sometimes, you are far too intelligent for your own good, Mischa. Go."
"Oh, no, I cannot. I promised Marcel I would show him my jazz routine today," said Mischa. "In case it is ever brought back."
"Alright, darling. Be careful," warned Madame.
Marcel was a friend of Mischa's from school, when they were still allowed to attend. They had not been given the opportunity to see each other for quite a while, what with their respective careers and the suspiciousness of a couple of coloured people on the streets, but once she had been to the movie theatre at which he worked, reconnected with him, and met his girlfriend Shosanna Dreyfus, a Jewish girl who had escaped a massacre that had killed the rest of her family, a good friendship bloomed between them once again.
Shosanna, apprehensive, which Mischa expected, disclosed her true identity a few months into it, but was quickly rewarded with praise as to her bravery when it came to working out in the open.
"I find the whole 'master race' belief ridiculous," said Mischa over a shared dinner one night. "You have blonde hair and blue eyes, exactly what Hitler supposedly wants. I don't see what your personal beliefs have to do with it."
"You don't have to convince me," said Shosanna wearily. Marcel chuckled and massaged her shoulder.
After that dinner was when Mischa first introduced the concept of jazz music to them. She prefaced it with a warning about its illegality, but they brushed it aside and instead joined her in dance.
"I've been teaching myself," she explained, "with my parents' old tapes. Shall I teach you, also?"
"Yes, please," said Marcel, grinning.
And now, they were a trio who weren't so much a trio as a couple and a third wheel, but Mischa could understand that, she supposed. While news of a troupe called the Inglourious Basterds plagued most of France, with tales of their Nazi-scalping, take-no-prisoners attitude spreading like a virus, the three misfits spoke of nothing but their own lives.
Secretly, Mischa kept up with the news, waiting for them to show up in their village, hopefully to purge it of the Nazis who so often traipsed through, bringing their bigoted, terrifying views with them. Though Mischa no longer cried herself to sleep – she had heard too many stories of the concentration camps to tear up every time it happened – she hated listening to them relate the events as if they were happy and worthy of celebration. During her time at Maxium's, Mischa had seen the worst of humanity.
Though she worked in public, had a job that required a fair bit of interaction with Nazis, she did not have the proper documentation, or rather, much of it was falsified. Usually, Madame Broussard was there to validate her story, but alone, when she walked home in the night, or perhaps even as she cut across the street to the restaurant each morning, Mischa was gripped with fear. Fear that once more, she would be caught, her papers discredited, and she herself would become another horror story to be told around the table at Maxium's.
The last time it had happened, she had been assisting a young French boy who had fallen off his scooter and whose parents were too far off to notice. She didn't have any experience with mechanics, but was managing to figure out the simple device that had malfunctioned, when she had been accosted by three Nazi soldiers. At that time, she wasn't yet aware of the German occupation of France – she thought that they were warded off – and was so shocked upon their demanding her documentation that she had had to come up with a ridiculous excuse.
The boy defended her, surprisingly, saying in a childish, innocent tone that she lived down the road from him, that he could show them her house and meet her parents, who at that time, had been alive. They didn't die until 1941, one year into the German occupation, and it was because of the car accident they had gotten into, that resulted in her mother's death.
Her father was arrested by Nazi soldiers, who quickly gathered that it had been on purpose, her death, and shot him point-blank – vigilante justice. When Mischa found out what had happened, she had taken up arms, prepared to die for their names so long as she could kill the Nazi soldier who had killed her father, but was stopped by Madame Broussard.
Now, her anger burbled innocuously beneath the surface, not quite ready to explode again, but in the background. If confronted with the soldier who had shot her father, now, Mischa thought that she would bring him to justice, once the Allies won the War. If they won the War. Unlike World War I, which she had studied extensively in hopes of gaining more insight into this one, there was no clear winner. Hitler was intelligent, Germany was well-armed, and Europe was being overtaken by a torrent of Aryan-believers.
"Shosanna, I saw you at the restaurant a few days ago."
When it was mentioned, the petite blonde lifted her head from the soup she was drinking. "I was escorted to Maxium's for a chat."
Mischa raised a brow. "What sort of chat?"
"That soldier – Zoller – convinced Goebbels to hold the premiere of his new film at our theatre," the other woman shrugged. Mischa's eyes widened.
"And you didn't have a choice," she said emphatically. Shosanna shook her head.
"But that isn't all." She gathered some broth in her spoon, but didn't lift it to her lips. Mischa surmised from this that she had, in some way, been frightened. Usually, her appetite was healthy and illustrious.
"I saw that you were speaking with one of the soldiers," said Mischa. "Well, rather, he was speaking and you were still. Was he –?"
"The soldier that ordered my family's deaths? Yes." And with that one word, the dam broke.
Mischa held Shosanna as she cried. And when Marcel returned later from his errands, their group was complete. Each of them had lost something because of this war, because of who the Germans had allowed to move into power. All three of them became orphans long before their time, forced to rely on themselves when they were unsure of who in the world cared.
When Shosanna recovered enough to retell the story of the afternoon, her expression changed from that of raw grief to that of a fear similar to what she experienced four years ago, when the cruel Colonel Hans Landa first confronted her. Her sudden departure from the theatre in the form of a pseudo-kidnapping, to the five minutes of torture she shared with the man who killed her parents, over a plate of German strudel, to her return, Shosanna recounted everything.
Both Mischa and Marcel listened intently, and it was clear from the look on his face to the anger that boiled within her that they were ready to exact revenge, if not for themselves, then for Shosanna, who they both cared for deeply.
"Thank you," she said after, quietly, revealing the softer side of her often harsh personality, "for listening."
Her friends didn't acknowledge the gratitude.
"I think I served them – that group you spoke of. Landa was dressed in his S.S. uniform, was he not?" said Mischa. Shosanna nodded. "And Goebbels is distinguishable from anyone, with that nasally voice and harsh accent. He was with that French translator – Mondino?"
"Right," said Shosanna. "And the head of the Gestapo and two black dogs."
Marcel's mouth hitched on one side. "Strange, isn't it – Nazis with innocent dogs."
Shosanna returned the smile with a wry one of her own. "Innocent – I'm sure they have been trained to kill on command."
"Are you truly alright, Shosanna?" asked Mischa with concern, looking to Marcel for quiet confirmation. "If I had been in your place, I would have certainly had a difficult time choosing between murdering Landa and –"
"Losing myself completely?" said Shosanna, eyes tearing once more. "You have no idea, Mischa. It was awful. Horrible."
Mischa nodded sympathetically. "How long are they going to be here?"
"Tomorrow," said Shosanna. "That is when I am to be hosting their little premiere."
Marcel snorted. "They are coming later today, are they not?"
"They want to watch a film, at the theatre itself," nodded Shosanna, "to make sure it is adequate." Her mouth twisted.
Mischa guessed that, despite her obvious disgust towards the idea of it, Shosanna was willing to comply with their orders, undoubtedly because she was planning to carry out her own little surprises. In addition, like Mischa's initial reaction to her parents' deaths, it was going to involve murder the likes of which the public would be unable to ignore.
Shosanna was rocked to the core by what had happened to her family, far more than Mischa was, at least by outward glance. Where Mischa and Marcel had made peace with their personal tragedies, Shosanna was committed to seeing revenge through, and it was clear that she was going to use this premiere as a method of doing it.
"How attached are you to the theatre?" asked Mischa, carefully. Shosanna blinked in apparent surprise.
"At the moment, not very," she answered. Clearly, Shosanna did not trust her enough to tell her the plans she had for the Nazis, but Mischa had already drawn a conclusion from her personal inferences.
"I see," she said nonchalantly, and Marcel could only look back and forth between the two women with confusion – confusion that wouldn't be explained until much later, after the showing, when he and his love were alone in the foyer, when they could freely discuss their sordid, final plans.
Plans that would, as they would discover later, involve more deaths than they imagined.
Three things:
1) Just a note about the epithets and such that are thrown around. They are characteristic of the time period we are presented with (both in terms of WWII and Tarantino's ideas), not my personal views.
2) The fact that people of the non-Caucasian persuasion were allowed to work in public was posited by IB itself (Marcel the projectionist) so I simply extended it a little to allow restaurant workers.
3) Landa as a character was very difficult to write (as I'm sure fanfic writers who've attempted are aware) so if he sounds a little OOC, please let me know. I tried my best to make him authentic and do him justice.
Aside from the aforementioned, I hope you enjoyed - thanks for reading!
- dp