She and the proprietor (who was one of her best contacts) talked cheerfully for a few moments until there was no one else around them. The proprietor then lowered his voice and murmured, ‘Some odd-looking people have been asking questions about you.’
‘What about?’ Nancy asked softly.
‘The gendarme who saw you at your flat after Captain Garrow escaped is the trouble. And I think you’re being followed.’
‘Thanks for the warning,’ she said quietly. Someone else came into the bar and stood close by. ‘Some cigarettes,’ she asked loudly.
‘Sorry, Madame, we have no cigarettes.’
‘No one nowadays has any cigarettes,’ she complained. ‘Ah, well. Goodbye,’ and so she walked home.
As soon as Henri returned she made him sit down and then sat close to him.
‘Henri,’ she said, ‘I think someone is watching me.’
He looked at her carefully before he answered. Then he said quietly, ‘Then we must get you out of Marseille, Nanny.’
This was a solution that had not occurred to her.
‘Do you think so?’ she asked. ‘I don’t know what to do. Don’t you think perhaps I could just lie low for a while?’
Henri was now emphatic. ‘No. No, I do not think so. It’s not safe. You must leave. I tell you what. I’ll get in touch with O’Leary. Somehow we must get you out of France. You’ve done too much. More than your share.’
‘Don’t be silly, Henri,’ she retorted. ‘You know I won’t leave you.’
‘It would be better,’ he said reasonably. ‘And later, perhaps, I could join you.’
‘In England?’
‘In England,’ he promised.
‘Now that,’ she murmured, ‘would be just marvellous.’
‘Good, then, it’s agreed. So now I’ll get in touch with O’Leary. Before you know where you are, you’ll be over in London.’
PART TWO: INTERLUDE
7 ARRESTED
The decision having been taken, everyone now worked swiftly to put it into effect, but dangerous though her situation was, Nancy was still in the mood to take risks.
‘I’m going to send on all my clothes,’ she announced to her startled husband.
‘Send them on?’ he repeated in astonishment. ‘Where?’
‘Spain,’ she answered. ‘Via Cook’s! I’ll send them addressed to “Nancy Wake, c/o Cook’s, Madrid”. No one here knows that I’m Nancy Wake. As far as the Germans are concerned, I’m Nancy Fiocca, and I am French.’
‘But, Nanny, it’s such a risk. Someone at Cook’s is bound to know who you were before we married. Someone will inform on you.’
‘No, they won’t, Henri. Anyway, they’re such beautiful clothes. All bought for me by you. And if they stay here either the Boche will get them or the moths will eat them. And you can hardly bring them out with you when you come!’
Finally, far from convinced, he agreed. The clothes were packed into large trunks and labelled as planned. Ficetole was to call with his cart (drawn by the horse, Picon II) and take the trunk to Cook’s Travel Agency in Marseille after Nancy had left the town.
‘Nanny,’ Henri said, ‘you know that if anything happens to me there’s plenty for you in your safety deposit box here in Marseille, don’t you?’
‘I’m not in the least concerned about money,’ said Nancy. ‘Just you follow me to England as soon as possible.’
‘I will,’ he lied cheerfully, ‘but just you remember the money.’ Indeed, she was well provided for. In the deposit box, in gold, notes, securities and shares, there was a fortune worth about £60,000 3 and Henri’s box contained an equal amount which would also be hers if he died.
Picon was Nancy’s next problem. He always hated her to go away and he always fretted whenever he saw her packing. Consequently, Claire was sent out on long walks with the little terrier whenever such packing had to be done. And when, eventually, Henri would follow her out of France, Nancy had arranged that the dog would be looked after by friends.
In spite of all her cunning, though, when the last moment came Picon knew. He looked at her miserably with brown swimming eyes and he followed her frantically from room to room, never allowing her out of his sight. Unable to bear the deceit any longer, and terrified anyhow that she would break down when she had to say goodbye to him, Nancy dispatched him on yet another walk with Claire.
Then she took a hurried farewell of Henri. ‘See you in England,’ she said. He stroked her black hair, kissed her damp eyes and repeated his lie. ‘In England, Nanny. It won’t be long. Here’s some money and take care.’ She stuffed the wad of notes inside her bra, smiled wanly, kissed him again and so left for Toulouse – there to lie up until the circuit was ready to receive her and put her on her way to the Spanish frontier, Gibraltar and finally London.
In Toulouse she stayed, as ordered, at the Hȏ tel de Paris, which was run by a Mme Montgelard who not only worked with the organisation but was also the least security-minded woman in the whole of France. Mme Montgelard revelled in sheltering both German soldiery and Allied evaders simultaneously under her roof. Although this terrified her friends, it apparently added piquancy to her own life.
Whilst she waited at Toulouse, Nancy also worked. She did several trips as a courier for O’Leary, carrying money and bread tickets to Perpignan near the Spanish frontier. Everything nowadays had to be delivered by hand and Nancy saw nothing wrong in acting as a postman herself at this crucial time in her career. Until her third trip.
On that trip, as she was returning to Toulouse, the train was suddenly stopped and everyone in it was arrested and bundled into trucks. Nancy’s truck was halted by traffic in one of the squares in Toulouse so she promptly leapt out with several others and ran. Blindly she bolted down the first street that offered escape, but fate was against her. A mob of students had been demonstrating in another part of the town and their demonstration had been broken up. They too had bolted. Fleeing students came one way, fleeing train passengers another. They collided, could not move or pass one another and were almost all recaptured by the two pursuing forces. Nancy herself was knocked heavily to the ground and when she stood up found herself facing a rifle. Meekly she went to jail.
Soon she was being interrogated by the Vichy police, an ordeal she had anticipated with no pleasure at all since she had no valid reason for being on any train between Perpignan and Toulouse. However, since they had discovered her identity card and found out that she was Mme Fiocca of Marseille, she decided that that should be the crux – and almost the entirety – of her story.
‘I’ve been on a business trip with my husband,’ she declared. ‘No, I haven’t the faintest idea where we were going to stay in Toulouse. I leave all those arrangements to him.’
‘Where is your husband now, Mme Fiocca?’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea. We had a terrible argument in the train and he left the compartment. Then the train was halted and I haven’t seen him since.’
‘Do you really expect us to believe that?’
‘I don’t care whether you believe it or not. It’s the truth and I have nothing more to say.’
‘But how do you explain the fact that your husband is not here? After all, everyone who was on the train has been brought here.’
‘Not everyone,’ Nancy answered with some relish. ‘Quite a few got away in the square . . . My husband must have been among them.’
She was put in a cell on her own and there, in privacy at last, she admitted to herself that things looked black. She was called out for another interrogation.
‘Mme Fiocca,’ the commandant said, ‘we do not believe your story. In fact, we know that you do not come from Marseille at all, but from Lourdes, and that actually you are a prostitute.’
‘If you check in Marseille you will find that I am well known there,’ Nancy retorted aggressively, ‘and not as a prostitute.’
‘We have checked Marseille,’ the interrogator replied, ‘and they know of no Mme Fiocca.’ Nan
cy knew then that she did not have a chance. If they were prepared to lie about Marseille, then obviously they intended to frame her; and if they intended framing her then they must already have a charge in mind. The whole thing was hopeless – which being the case she determined that henceforth she would say nothing.
A so-called chief of the Lourdes prostitute police appeared and calmly identified her as one of the street girls of that city. Nancy snorted with rage but refused to speak. What was the point? She had never been to Lourdes in her life.
Soon the nature of the offence they wished to pin on her was made apparent. A film featuring the tenor, Tino Rossi, had been showing in Toulouse. Someone had blown up the cinema (obviously not approving of the alleged pro-Fascist sympathies of Tino Rossi). The Vichy police wished to convict Nancy as the person responsible.
For four days they alternately beat her up and questioned her, trying to make her confess to this crime or to admit where she had planned to stay in Toulouse. Knowing exactly what would happen to Mme Montgelard if she mentioned the Hôtel de Paris, Nancy said nothing.
‘Obviously you are a saboteur because your papers are false,’ the interrogator snarled. Nancy, knowing her identity as Mme Fiocca to be completely genuine, ignored him and was struck across the face for her insolence.
‘You must be guilty or you would talk,’ he shouted. Still she remained silent, so he hit her again.
Then she did speak. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘if you want to frame me, frame me. Send me to your labour camp. But stop asking silly questions and knocking me about. You call yourself a Frenchman – you’re worse than the Boche.’
Somewhat subdued, the man now took a different line. ‘Whom did you see on the train?’ he asked. Nancy invented the most nondescript travellers possible and then described them with loving detail. France must have held at least ten million people who looked exactly like those she mentioned now.
‘What class did you travel?’
‘First, of course. What other would I travel?’
‘Ladies don’t travel first class without a hat. You wear no hat and you are a prostitute.’
‘My friend,’ she snapped briskly. ‘How much do you earn a month? Almost nothing. You wouldn’t know how a lady dresses or what she does. I shall say no more.’
Although they again beat her up, she did not say any more. She became sullen and they eventually realised that they were wasting their time questioning her further. They put her in a cell with a woman who was a prostitute and left her there till morning. She had no bed and nothing to eat or drink.
In the morning she was dragged into the corridor and told to sit on the floor until the interrogator was again ready for her. Completely resigned to her fate now, numb and indifferent, she leant against the wall. And then, suddenly, standing between two policemen, she was electrified to see O’Leary. Electrified and appalled. ‘So,’ she thought, ‘someone’s talked and they’ve got the lot.’
O’Leary, to her complete astonishment, smiled at her brightly. She ignored him. ‘The idiot,’ she fumed to herself. ‘I get myself bashed up for days on end because I won’t admit knowing anyone round here and he comes in and gives me away smartly by grinning at me.’
O’Leary went into the office and stayed there some time. Wearily Nancy wondered how badly he would be tortured. Later, however, he emerged quite unscathed and had the gall to smile directly at her again. Furiously she cut him dead.
A moment or two later he disengaged himself from the two policemen who accompanied him and walked down the corridor to where she sat. Grinning at her cheerfully, he hissed out of the corner of his mouth, ‘Smile at me, you fool. You’re supposed to be my mistress!’
Completely bewildered, Nancy gave him a brilliantly false white-toothed smile which looked almost as sick as she felt.
He left her and returned some time later with a covered dish on which there was a steaming hot meal.
‘Don’t worry,’ he whispered. ‘Françoise sends her love.’
Unable to understand anything any longer, Nancy contented herself with eating an excellent meal.
When she had finished, she was called into the office of the Commissaire of Police. He ticked her off soundly for having lied to him and then, to her utter astonishment, said, ‘Now go’, whereupon she was handed into O’Leary’s charge and he led her calmly out of the jail and into the street.
Standing in the road, not fifty yards from the jail, she then dragged the truth out of the fair-haired Belgian. This is what happened.
Word reached the circuit three days after Nancy was caught that she had admitted nothing, betrayed no one and told a story which was meaningless. Nevertheless, some of the circuit had still wanted to break up and go under cover.
‘Nancy won’t talk,’ O’Leary had said from the beginning. ‘We’ll wait.’ And when the news had reached them of her stubborn silence he had declared, ‘That settles it. We stay here. And what’s more, if it’s possible, we’ll get Nancy out.’
Quickly O’Leary worked out the details. Then, masquerading as a Frenchman, and a member of the Milice, he sallied boldly into the jail and demanded to be taken into the commissaire’s office. There he told the commissaire that Nancy was Mme Fiocca and that he was her lover. The reason why she had refused to talk, he explained, was to protect him, O’Leary, from the rage of her husband. They had had an assignation, he and Mme Fiocca, in Toulouse.
Knowing that portion of O’Leary’s story which stated that Nancy was Mme Fiocca of Marseille to be true (even though he had himself earlier denied it), the commissaire at once accepted as authentic the whole of this beautifully Gallic situation. O’Leary was not going to leave it at that though.
‘Monsieur,’ he said, producing the false papers which declared him to be a member of the Milice, ‘I am a personal friend of Monsieur Laval’s and I know that he would appreciate it very much if you did not inconvenience Madame Fiocca any further.’ The mention of the name of the arch-tyrant of Vichy convinced the commissaire still further, but he was officially minded enough to seize on this very feature of O’Leary’s story as one upon which he could safely check and so cover himself against the responsibility of releasing Nancy.
‘If you will just wait whilst I ring Monsieur Laval’s office and confirm what you say, I shall be happy to release Madame,’ he offered at once. O’Leary’s answer was furious.
‘You cannot ring Monsieur Laval,’ he stormed, ‘because Monsieur Laval has gone to Paris and will not be back for weeks.’ He had ascertained this invaluable fact before he invented his story. ‘And I hope you do not doubt the word of a friend of Monsieur Laval, because, if you do, you will find that things will go very badly with you indeed.’
There was a lot more that he was prepared to say but it was unnecessary. Convinced of the truth of O’Leary’s outrageous story, and terrified by the mention of Laval’s non-existent friendship with this man, the commissaire had at once promised to release Nancy.
Nancy was momentarily stunned by the sheer audacity of the action. ‘You shouldn’t have done it, Pat,’ she said. ‘Thank you, my dear, but you should never have done it.’
‘I decide that,’ he replied seriously. ‘And if you hadn’t been worth it to us, I shouldn’t have worried.’
‘Well,’ she declared simply, ‘someday I might know how to thank you. Right now I can’t think of a single thing.’
Silently they walked along the road together, then suddenly Nancy halted.
‘Pat,’ she exploded, ‘they’ve still got my papers.’
‘Doesn’t matter. We’ll make you a better set.’ He grinned.
‘I don’t care about that,’ she shouted. ‘But they now say I’m innocent so they should have given me back my papers. Let’s go back and get them – it’s the principle of the thing!’
With the utmost difficulty O’Leary managed to persuade her to forget her principles and not to go storming back into the jail from which she had so recently escaped, but instead to return with him t
o the hiding place he had prepared for her.
Nancy was taken to the flat of the Françoise who had cooked the hot meal she had just eaten in jail and whose love O’Leary had sent her.
Françoise Dissard was about sixty years old, wonderfully ugly, wore her grey hair in two uncompromising plaits over her head, sported old-fashioned clothes and spent all her time raging at the Boche.
She was the spinster aunt of a young man who languished in a POW camp in Germany; this nephew and her cat were her two chief passions in life. She spent hours each week preserving food and then actually canning it for her nephew. Amazed at her skill, Nancy would watch the old lady (round-shouldered, a cigarette in a bamboo holder always clenched between her broken teeth) as she plodded round her shambles of a flat with a soldering iron in her hand and tin after tin of food to be sealed.
As far as Nancy could see, Françoise never slept. When she was not cooking she was soldering, or drinking the blackest of black coffee, or slanging the Germans – her eyes glinting with hatred through her glasses – or stroking her cat and lighting another cigarette. A very indomitable old lady was Françoise.
In the next few weeks Nancy made five unsuccessful attempts to cross into Spain but a series of inexplicable arrests foiled her on each occasion by breaking up the circuit and sending both contacts and guides to ground. After each attempt Nancy would return to Françoise’s flat and sleep on the floor whilst fresh plans were laid.
The sixth attempt was delayed for three days whilst Françoise engineered the escape of ten men – American and Canadian servicemen, a big man from Nîmes called Gaston and one of the guards himself – from a nearby jail.
The guard, who was to join the escape, was provided with a bottle of doped wine. This was administered to the jail commissaire, who soon passed out. The cells were unlocked by the guard, who had all the required keys. He then handed the keys to Gaston whilst he himself coolly and confidently took command of the actual break-out from the jail.
Nancy Wake: World War Two’s Most Rebellious Spy Page 7
