The Secret Houses

by John Gardner

  ‘How much did Night Stock tell you?’ one of the lawyers asked, and Felix was meticulous in his reply. Night Stock had given him the message sequence and said that when it was broadcast, the réseau was to steal a German staff car and a truck which they were to drive to the road nearest the dropping zone. ‘He said that parachutists would land. That it was a one-off special operation. He gave me the instructions, showed the layout of the DZ signals – an eight-man cross using the flashlights already in our possession. Time. Need for complete quiet – things like that. After the parachutists had landed we were to take orders from their leader.’

  ‘You did not know the object of Romarin?’

  ‘I have never known it. Though I could, of course, guess – from the need for a staff car and the truck – that it was some special operation mounted directly against the German authorities.’

  He was asked to take them through the events of that night – the night of Romarin – but only after constant questioning to investigate whether or not Felix ever shared Night Stock’s instructions with any other member of Tarot. He denied talking to anyone before the night the message came through. Reading this part of the inquisition made Naldo and Arnold cringe, for the Board were, to a man, hostile, refusing to believe Felix had not talked. When he said he had only passed on the phrase for which the circuit had to listen – the passage from Victor Hugo about suffering – they pounced, yelping at the heels of the Frenchman’s memory: trying to force some fissure which would turn into a crevasse through which a hidden truth would babble. Naldo felt they were pushing it very hard, considering the man had already been through the mill of SIS questioning.

  They got nowhere. Jules Fenice stuck like a leech to his story. He gave details to nobody.

  ‘So what happened once you received the “Suffering” signal?’ The transcript for once failed to identify the questioner.

  ‘I gave instructions. St Christophe and le Teneur de Livres knew where they could pick up the required transport. I told them to kill if necessary. You must realise we were all very, very buoyant since the Normandy landings. Everybody thought freedom would come overnight. It didn’t, of course.’

  ‘So the lads, who had been spectacularly unsuccessful in blowing up aircraft and other things, were instructed to steal transport?’ – the pompous lawyer again.

  ‘Could I remind you, they had not been unsuccessful. They had done the jobs given to them. I was at fault for not checking and double-checking on the locations. Anyway, they stole the car and the truck. They showed great daring and skill. As far as we knew, the vehicles were never found.’

  ‘Really?’ – The lawyer again.

  ‘I had personally instructed them where to hide the vehicles. Deep in a wood some two kilometres from the dropping zone. At about eleven o’clock that night I gave the other instructions. On a map, I showed everyone where to go and what to do. I also issued the flashlights and weapons.’

  ‘This was at your pig farm?’

  ‘Yes. I called the whole circuit in. They were there until we broke curfew at just before midnight.’

  ‘And you went to the dropping zone?’

  ‘We tried, but it was impossible. There were troops everywhere. The roads were sealed off. Nobody could get near. It was then we knew the operation was finished.’

  ‘So you went home to bed?’

  ‘I passed orders that everyone should go back except for the doctor and Monsieur le Curé. Immortel, and Celeste.’

  ‘You saw what happened?’

  ‘Heard more than saw. The activity was enormous, so we got out when the real shooting began. The Curé and myself went back the next morning. We found the man called Dollhiem and managed to get him clear. Then, in the afternoon we went for another walk. The Nazis were moving the bodies. That’s when we found the man Newton. Neither was very badly wounded. Dollhiem had lost a lot of blood, but he was a tough man.’

  ‘Let us turn to Dollhiem. Tarot was rolled up the following week – while you were in Orléans.’ – this last delivered with heavy suspicion by the SOE man. ‘We have accounted for everyone including yourself, except Maxine and Dédé – and Dollhiem. How do you think he got away? Or was he with you in Orléans?’

  The transcript noted a long pause, the Fenice started again. ‘I have already told your investigators. Dollhiem went at the same time as Newton. Two days before the SS hit Tarot.’

  ‘Newton says that he did not. That Dollhiem wanted to stay with Tarot. That he did stay with Tarot.’

  ‘All I know is that I returned from seeing Villar, on the afternoon of the day they went. They were both there the night before. I saw neither of them in the morning. I went out – to see Villar. When I returned, Dédé told me they had gone.’

  ‘Did she say they had gone off together?’

  ‘No, she just said they had gone. I presumed they left together. I asked no more questions.’

  ‘You didn’t ask her how or why?’

  ‘Why should I ask? They went. That was all. In their place I also would have gone.’

  ‘So you weren’t surprised?’

  ‘Not at Newton going, no. He obviously wanted to leave very quickly. He was jittery. But Dollhiem surprised me. He had said that he wished to stay and help us.’

  ‘And that was all there was to it? You didn’t ask any further questions?’

  ‘I’ve told you – no. It wasn’t until I was brought to England that I knew they did not leave together.’

  With that, the current batch of transcripts came to an end. Naldo closed his eyes. The Dakota bucked slightly and the engines kept to their steady noise. He wondered what it must have felt like to be a man such as Jules Fenice, living that double secret life under the eyes of the occupying forces. A hall of mirrors, he thought. A fool’s game, like a nightmare amusement-park ride with real fear on your shoulder. Glory and courage did not really enter into it. An unusual job in familiar surroundings. He stood up, steadying himself to the movement of the airplane, and walked forward to hand his transcript to Cherub.

  Arnie had already finished. He dozed in his seat, thinking not of Fenice and Tarot but of his own time at Camp X when he learned how to tell the difference between a Bren gun’s bark and that of an MP38 or 40; how to handle any weapon; encode any message; blow up anything from a railway track to a warehouse, and how to kill, wound, or maim in silence.

  When they got to the air base a few miles outside Munich, he had difficulty in adjusting to the landscape – both to the real and that which stuck as though glued to his mind.

  Munich, he thought, had been through a fragment of hell.

  Chapter Sixteen

  By day and night, during the years between 1940 and 1945, Munich had felt the weight of both the Royal Air Force and the United States Eighth Army Air Force. Over 43 percent of its major buildings had been turned to rubble.

  Then there followed more devastation in the vengeful battles as the Allied armies tightened their grip on Germany.

  When it was over, a ragged force of civilians had crawled from the debris of war and in true German fashion begun to clear up the mess with their bare hands. As in Berlin, chains of black-clothed men and women piled bricks and shifted masonry, sometimes making terrible discoveries beneath: whole families trapped and crushed to death; people caught together in cellars; individuals crammed into pockets of air which, for them, had eventually run out. Some were decaying corpses by the time they were found; others, because of air flow or cold, remained perfectly preserved, like wax effigies.

  When the Symphony team arrived in the late spring of 1946, Munich was still a city of shattered buildings and makeshift living quarters.

  Naldo and Arnie were given accommodation outside the city, on one of the American bases. They had passes and special ID, as did Kruger, whose papers were removed from him when he was taken to one of the camps.

  C had told them to ‘run him through the camps.’ It took six days, with Herbie spending two days in each of the sprawling hutted an
d guarded places, only coming out for twenty-four-hour periods of rest and debriefing.

  ‘More of a race than a run,’ Arnold said when they had finished. Arnie was moderately at ease in Munich, for it gave him the opportunity to see some of his own people and report to them. The Central Intelligence Group, who were still collating information – preparing a full assessment for President Truman – had a three-man team right there on the base. Arnie would slip away and talk with them. To his credit he did not advise them of their true target, but alerted them to a possible former OSS officer being implicated in treachery following the Romarin operation. One of the CIG men was called Fry, a tough, former Military Intelligence officer who now did his snooping in civilian clothes. Fry wore steel-rimmed glasses because, to use his own words, ‘SS guys feel at home when they sit across the table from me.’

  Fry was wooing Arnold Farthing. ‘Arnie,’ he said on the fourth day, ‘there’ll be changes within the year. Plans’re well advanced for setting up the most powerful Intelligence outfit in the world. Dulles himself is doing the spadework – he gave the okay on you liaising with the Brits on whatever you’re up to. Play the right hand and you’ll have a job for life.’

  In the second camp, Kruger caught a whiff of Klaubert, and that was a second-hand story which pointed them straight towards France. Of the three camps there, given to them by C, only two were now operating. They had not strictly been camps for displaced persons, but for displaced prisoners who were in the process of being sorted out: the relatively innocent going home; the suspects – SS, SD, and foreign collaborators – undergoing constant interrogation. ‘It’s hell’s crossroads for some of those men,’ C had told Naldo during the private briefing at the Northolt house.

  France was exactly where Naldo wanted to be, if only to carry out C’s special, most private, instructions.

  They got Kruger’s piece of information on the fifth evening. ‘It’s a scent,’ the lad had said. ‘Just a tiny smell in my left nostril.’ He placed a long chubby forefinger beside his nose. ‘The man I talked to worked in Orléans. He came through DPW-14, one of the camps you mentioned – one in France. This man’s name is Defoe – he made a joke about a book called Gulliver’s Travels. I did not understand it.’ Herbie shrugged, his broad shoulders rippling. Naldo and Arnie sat waiting for more. ‘This Defoe worked as a cleaner, I think – ’

  ‘He was a cleaner at the SS HQ in Orléans? What nationality was he, Herb?’

  ‘Difficult. Mixed blood. French and German. Father was French, I think.’

  ‘Sure it was Defoe? Not De Foe, or De Faux?’ Naldo spelled out the variants.

  ‘I didn’t see it written down. He is displaced because of the two nationalities. The authorities cannot work out if he should be in France or Germany. He was originally brought from Germany, I think, to work in Orléans.’

  ‘I wonder?’ Naldo said to nobody in particular.

  ‘This is why he was trusted to clean around papers and things – you know how the SS and Abwehr were about locals working in their offices.’

  ‘What did he tell you, then, Herb?’ – from Arnold.

  ‘When he was in the French camp – DPW-14 – this man said he was certain the former Orléans SS Commandant was there. Klaubert. Said he had dyed his hair black, but he was sure. Even spoke to him, and Klaubert said his name was Klausen. Told Defoe he was an Unterscharführer in the Norges Waffen SS – a Norwegian who had joined in 1941, like some of them did in occupied Europe. Defoe didn’t believe him.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he did.’ Naldo looked out of the window of the hut they called home. Lights burned along the regimented paths of the base. Shadows of men crossed and recrossed under the lights. In the distance was the city, almost unlit, just a few fires glowing in the streets where groups of men and women kept warm. The spring weather had not yet put heat into stones and pavements. ‘I think we should have a word with Defoe,’ he said. ‘If Herbie’s correct, then it’s off to France to find this Klausen.’

  Arnold sighed. ‘France isn’t going to be that easy now the General’s in charge. You never know who you’re talking to.’ The BCRAM – Central Bureau for Information and Military Action – had been formed in London under General de Gaulle. Once France was liberated, the organisation became top-heavy with agents and operators. It also became riddled with factions, both pro- and anti-British or American.

  ‘It’s okay. Nothing to worry about.’ Naldo cheerily left the hut, calm in the knowledge that C had given him at least six names, four in Orléans itself, who could be trusted to let them shuffle through the displaced and suspect prisoners and do the other job he had ordered.

  Within the hour the man from the camp – whose name turned out to be Ernst de Faux – was seated in the Symphony team’s hut, smiling happily after being fed sausages, potatoes, and a large glass of brandy. They gave him cigarettes as well and made the usual extravagant promises.

  Yes, he said. Yes, the man claiming to be a Norwegian was Klaubert. He would stake his life on it. Of course he knew Klaubert, hadn’t he seen him often enough? Hadn’t he stood as close as this to him almost every day? The Norwegian was Klaubert, no doubt about it.

  They took de Faux – a man of twenty-seven years who looked nearer forty-six – through his own story, testing his linguistic ability. He spoke both perfect French and German – the German with the singsong accent of Berlin. His mother was German, married to a French businessman who had offices in Berlin. Neither of them bothered much about politics – until it was too late. Charles de Faux had disappeared into the camps in 1939. His wife and son were given the chance to deny their French marital connections, and young Ernst was tested for a clerical job. ‘At heart I was French,’ he said. ‘I’m still French. All I want to do is be sent back there.’ In 1943 they told him there was an opening for a French-speaking clerk in Orléans. ‘I jumped at the chance, but what do you expect from those bastards? When I arrived they kept me in German barracks. I was employed as a cleaner. I dealt with the wastepaper from the offices and they told me to keep my ears open when locals were about and report back. I wasn’t allowed to let anyone know I was half French.’

  Naldo asked the questions. Where was the headquarters? What did he know about the staff? Name some of the other officers? De Faux included Otto Buelow’s name. Did the word Romarin mean anything to him? It did not. Could he recall an operation mounted against parachutists in the week of Sunday, 1st July 1944? He did – and gave the place and details. Did the name Tarot mean anything to him? It was a Resistance group. They were all caught and executed in the second week of July 1944. What did the man who called himself Klausen want? Not to be returned to Norway, that was for sure. Where did Klausen want to go? When de Faux told them, Naldo made up his mind.

  It was all very pat, but certainly worth following up. They did not recommend that de Faux be returned to France for the time being, and the next day the three of them got a ride to the airfield nearest Orléans – on yet another Dakota.

  *

  The safe house C had provided for them in the Rue Jeanne d’ Arc, Orléans, was safe in name only. ‘They must call this a safe house because nobody’s fool enough to come near it,’ Arnie said. The house was small – four rooms – set back from the street, which meant it had probably been in another street altogether. It leaned more drastically than the one Naldo had occupied in Berlin, and was surrounded by a clearing which sprouted old bricks and masonry.

  Orléans had not only been subjected to the Royal Air Force raids but also to the thunder of shells from General Patton’s advancing Third Army. Over a year later, the French – like their enemies in Munich – were picking up the pieces.

  There was still a very small American presence in France – mainly Red Cross workers and Military Intelligence officers, helping those French who would accept their assistance. Through one of the Red Cross units, Naldo managed to telelephone C in London and report progress, speaking in a double-talk he hoped C could follow, as the line was
far from secure.

  He returned to the Tower of Pisa, as they had christened the house, and gave Arnie instructions on how to get Herbie into the camp – which lay fifteen kilometers to the west. ‘You’ll be taking a risk, Herb, but it’s the only way,’ Arnold told the big German.

  ‘All life is a risk. You take a risk being born; taking a crap, anything. It’s all risk.’

  ‘Where’s the risk in taking a crap, Herb?’ Naldo asked.

  ‘Like what I’m doing now.’ Herbie gave a huge boyish smile. ‘Dressing up in the rags of an SS officer and going in there is like taking a crap. You don’t know who you’re crapping on. The guy you might crap on might be able to crap better on you. It’s how life is.’

  Naldo turned away and smiled, covering his face. He went out, letting Arnold get on with the serious business of infiltrating Herbie into DPW-14.

  At a quiet bistro he used the telephone and dialed one of the numbers C had given him. In his good French he asked for Inspecteur Joubert. They exchanged code words and Joubert set a time and place for a meeting. It was in four days’ time. No, Joubert said, it could not be sooner. ‘We must be circumspect, my friend,’ he told Naldo, hanging up abruptly.

  When Naldo got back to the safe house, Cherub was there, looking as deadly as ever and with Otto Buelow’s evidence in the fat briefcase handcuffed to his wrist.

  ‘The Chief says I have to sit with you like an invigilator until you’ve read it.’ He did not seem to have the usual muscles that would allow him to smile.

  Arnold came in an hour later, nodding to Naldo. The nod implied that all had gone well. Herbie was now an inmate of the camp. Ways had been arranged so they could be told when he was ready to come out again.

  Otto Buelow’s evidence was straightforward and interesting. Both of them found it odd to read the transcripts so close to where the action had taken place.