Single to Paris

by Single to Paris (retail) (epub)

  ‘Not in the manner or with the intention—’

  ‘You did introduce them though. Jacqui mentioned it. I’ve often wondered about that. Seeing that you and she were already in a close relationship?’

  ‘She came for a weekend with me in Amiens, when he was setting up his headquarters there. There was a celebratory party – all the high-ups, including a few of my people of course, also Gestapo, an Army commander, and – well, I attended, having done a lot of spade-work on the security aspect, and Jacqueline came with me.’

  ‘But left with him?’

  ‘Effectively – you might say that was how it turned out, yes. But this has no relevance—’

  ‘Was she supposed to keep tabs on Walther, for the information of the Gestapo or Sicherheitsdienst? Did they tell you to be a good boy, stand aside and let it rip?’

  ‘That’s a completely unfounded – and insulting—’

  ‘New man – technical man, not a real soldier – and an absolutely vital, top-secret project – something that’s going to win the war for you, even – wouldn’t your top brass be tickled pink to have a head on that pillow, so to speak?’

  Staring at her: but more surprised than resentful. Might have hit the nail on the head, she thought. Explaining, ‘That was guesswork based on the fact that I can’t see why else you’d have passed her on to him. You were crazy about her, and she was certainly in love with you. Is now, was then – I knew it then, from the way she talked about you. She didn’t care much for the colonel.’ Rosie smiled, lifting her shoulders: ‘Heavens. Year-old mystery solved!’

  ‘Aren’t you being a little incautious?’

  ‘It’s you who keep bringing Jacqui into it. You raised the subject of Amiens too. In your mind, Jacqui’s at the centre of all this, isn’t she? Whatever you say, you do seem to distrust her. May I make one more point?’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘Well?’

  ‘The Rouen and Amiens business. I’ve often thought that if I had had longer, however carefully I’d played my cards she’d have turned me down flat because of her feelings for you. And it strikes me now that if there’s any truth in the scenario I just dreamed up – her spying on the colonel, on Gestapo orders – how could she possibly have undertaken to do the same thing for SOE?’

  Spreading her hands, as well as she could manage it in the handcuffs. ‘What do you think she is? Mata Hari?’

  He was watching her: his hands shifting too, clasping each other on the blotter in front of him. A shrug: ‘If there were any validity to your rather colourful imaginings—’

  ‘If I’d put my proposal to her, she’d have gone straight to her Gestapo controller, wouldn’t she? And if by then I hadn’t already been arrested—’

  ‘All right.’ A gesture almost of surrender. ‘I’m prepared to accept that she was not recruited by you.’ He added, ‘In fact I agree that if you’d tried to recruit her she’d have turned you down. So – moving now to the next stage – why go to so much trouble to seek her out again?’

  It was the question that really mattered – to which all that earlier stuff had been building up, and to which she didn’t have any ready answer.

  Had to produce one, though. Looking at him in what she hoped he’d take for feigned surprise: ‘I’d have thought that being such a hotshot investigator you’d have guessed that right away.’

  His telephone had jangled. His eyes stayed on her as he pulled it closer and lifted the earpiece from its hook.

  ‘Clausen.’

  Listening. Frowning then. Her German was so limited as to be almost non-existent, but the next few words, in a tone of irritation, must have been something like, ‘All right, I’ll wait, if it’s not too long.’ As far as she was concerned it could take as long as it liked. The problem being that knowing as much about her as he did, he was not going to believe she was risking her neck to save Jacqueline Clermont from the rough justice of Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur purely on the strength of having found her helpful and companionable in Rouen a year ago. One needed some credible and potentially achievable objective.

  Either to recruit her for something, or to pick her brains. More likely though – because of her closeness to Clausen, to use her to pick his.

  The truth, in fact. But adapted to fit some other line of inquiry…

  He’d snapped into the ’phone, ‘Ja, Clausen!’

  Switching into French then: ‘Yes. I am working late. So—’

  Listening. Nodding repetitively then, as if bored by whatever information he was getting. ‘All thirty-four. Very well. Thank you. I appreciate that you were obliged to inform me – although it’s not my operation; I’ve had no part in it.’

  She could hear the quick gabble of French from the other end, but not well enough to make anything of it. It was a shorter speech this time – and Clausen reacted to it more positively. ‘Yes, you could – as it happens. Yes, virtually at once. Tell them, please, one. Female. In’ – checking his watch – ‘an hour, say… Well, too bad, have to wait up, won’t they?’ A snort of amusement. ‘Ja. A big help – thank you.’

  He’d hung up, pushed the ’phone away.

  ‘You thought I’d have guessed what?’

  ‘Well.’ She shrugged, with a clink of the handcuffs. Seeing it now, or beginning to. Thank God. Or please, God. She tried, ‘What motive could I have had, other than to get close to you?’

  ‘In that case you’ve achieved your aim.’ No smile. Probably thinking he had her on toast now, which logically might not be good for Jacqui either: then there’d be no question of any smiles – or for that matter of avoiding Ravensbrück. Sardonic tone: ‘Would you say it’s been worthwhile?’

  ‘Not yet.’ She thought of adding, ‘Well, I had a good lunch out of it’, but decided not to rely too heavily on his sense of humour. Instead: ‘In fact – no. It was a long-odds gamble, in any case. But I was back in England, after a rather long deployment – some of which you know about—’

  ‘Stick to the immediate present, your aim here now.’

  ‘All right. Agents have disappeared – SOE agents. Arrested, obviously, but then – disposed of, and in a number of cases we don’t know where or how – crucially, whether they’re alive or dead. You’d have all those answers, we thought, anyway most of them, and you were of interest because we knew you had Jacqui with you, somewhere here in Paris. Also that once you’ve left Paris, which of course one realised might be quite soon—’

  ‘Two questions: first, how did you know Jacqui was with me? Second, what advantage did you see in it for yourselves?’

  ‘How - were told so by SIS. How they got to know, I can’t tell you. A report from one of their agents, surely. What advantage – we’d hoped to recruit her earlier on, as I’ve been telling you, and – well, it had seemed worth trying then, hadn’t been put to the test and here was fresh motivation – to get not at the colonel of engineers but at Gerhardt Clausen, Sicherheitsdienst genius at the very centre of counter-espionage. And since Jacqui and I had got on rather well—’

  ‘So the idea was—’ He’d checked himself. ‘No. Ridiculous. You thought you’d persuade her to get the information out of me.’

  ‘That was one possibility. The other was that with things breaking up here – plus your concern for her – there might be some chance of a deal. It was a matter of seeing how the land lay, then playing it off the cuff.’

  ‘Which is what you’re doing now?’

  ‘Now, I’ve been answering your questions – in the hope of not being sent to the slaughterhouse.’

  ‘As to that, we’ve some way to go yet, I think. But to regress yet again – when it was decided a year or more ago that Jacqui should be approached – what reason did your controllers have for believing she might betray us?’

  ‘Excuse me. She’s French. A French person who might be persuaded to work for the freedom of France is not betraying anyone.’

  ‘Answer the question.’

  ‘No clear or positive reason that I reme
mber. But you’ll remember that earlier in her career Jacqui – known to some of us then as La Minette – worked for an independent intelligence gatherer we called La Chatte?’

  ‘La Chatte who was trapped by a colleague of mine by name of Bleicher.’

  ‘Trapped and turned – although she was never an agent of ours, worked only for herself, for money. She had contacts with SOE but no more than she had with you.’

  ‘And she’s in gaol in England now?’

  Rosie nodded. ‘She was counting on being taken on by SOE, then acting as a double agent, with you people – Abwehr - pulling the strings and dishing out the Deutschmarks. Anyway – Jacqui was her employee. In fact – perhaps I shouldn’t mention this, but you must know it, in any case it’s water under the bridge now – La Chatte used her solely to entertain men. And by the time we were thinking about her, she’d dropped out of sight – her employer having been taken out of circulation, she’d become a hairdresser, and – SIS got wind of this – was spotted weekending in Amiens with the colonel.’

  ‘Short answer therefore, it was because of her previous association with La Chatte. The rest doesn’t matter. But – all right, back to the current situation now. Your idea was that through her you’d get information out of me on what had happened to your missing agents. Or she would, on your behalf. Have you made your long-delayed approach to her on that?’

  ‘No. I was harping on the danger she’ll be in when you pull out. You know all that, though. I’d heard those awful women gossiping in the salon, and—’

  ‘You persuaded her first to meet you at a restaurant, then to invite you to lunch with us. Believing I’d tell you or her what you want to know?’

  ‘When I hinted at – I don’t recall exactly, I asked some question relating to your work – first she said she knew nothing at all about what you did, then came back on it quite fiercely, told me she’d never let you down. Wait – exact words were she’d “never do the dirty on Gerhardt”.’

  ‘Must have been quite a leading question?’

  ‘I thought I was being careful.’

  ‘So…’ Fingertips massaging his temples… ‘When you called at the house – Lafont was there. You met outside…’

  ‘He was leaving, yes. Look, do I have to wear these things?’ Holding her cuffed wrists up where he could see them. ‘Am I such a danger to you?’

  ‘Potentially so, yes. Of course you have to wear them. If it weren’t that a lot of this interview is of a confidential nature I’d have an armed subordinate behind that chair as well. You’re a British agent, your record includes murder, there’s a death sentence on you and you’ve been on our “Wanted” lists for some considerable time. Frankly I wouldn’t want to raise your hopes in any way at all. We can talk like this because we have a common interest in Jacqueline – but in the longer term—’

  ‘We have a common interest in Jacqui’s safety – but if you were to send me to Ravensbrück—’

  ‘Why did she agree to have lunch with you the next day?’

  ‘I persuaded her. I wanted to talk, there and then. I’d come by bike all the way from Rouen – and you might have arrived home at any minute—’

  ‘But you were keen to meet me?’

  ‘Not on the stairs, me going down and you coming up, feeling and looking like God knows what. In any case I wanted to sound her out first.’

  ‘Which in the event didn’t get you far – except for the invitation to lunch with us. What persuaded her to go that far?’

  ‘Have you thought of asking her?’

  ‘Answer the question!’

  ‘You know the bloody answer! To talk with you both about getting her out of Paris!’

  ‘Weren’t you discussing that anyway?’

  ‘No practical details, no. She didn’t want to go into it without your being there too. A good reason for having me to lunch, I’d have thought.’

  ‘If she knew nothing of your true motive, maybe.’

  ‘God’s sake, she did know nothing!’

  ‘Accepted without question that simply out of the goodness of your heart, you’d come like some guardian angel—’

  ‘Be as sarcastic as you like, the fact is we do get on. Yes, I’ve been trading on that, using it, but I do quite genuinely—’

  ‘On Friday, was it agreed she wouldn’t tell me you’d been there, or that you were meeting next day?’

  ‘Yes. I thought it would be better if you didn’t know I’d come to Paris looking for her. If we’d met – on Saturday by chance, lunched together, talked about how things might be for her when you left – then she’d have asked me to lunch with you in order to continue that discussion. But it occurred to me – actually in the restaurant on Saturday – that having met Lafont there, if he’d seen you and mentioned it, and she hadn’t—’

  ‘Yes. Wise, but too late. She told me on Saturday evening. She’d forgotten to mention it the night before, she said. Or that morning – despite having it in mind that she was meeting you, which I must say I found difficult to swallow – so much so that I came back here that same night and… initiated my inquiries.’

  He thought he’d got her on this point, she realised. His aim in fact being less to get her – he’d already got her – than through her to double-check on Jacqui, with whom he was undoubtedly in love but would cut off his nose to spite his face to know for certain that she was or wasn’t, had or never had been making a fool of him.

  Reasonable, she thought. In his shoes, she’d want to know. Her own blunder too: should have let Jacqui tell him on Friday night that she’d been there.

  She offered – into a few moments’ silence – ‘I can explain some of it. I suggested keeping it to herself, but her main reason for going along with that was that I was telling her she ought to get away before you leave – and, you see, her reluctance even to discuss it, go behind your back, a part of that – this is what I think, she didn’t actually say it – is that if she made too much of – well, being left in the lurch, you might think she was trying to blackmail you into taking her with you. Which she knows you can’t do. It’s – an impression I had, that’s all.’

  ‘All right. But you said her main reason. Is there another?’

  In for a penny… She sighed, letting him see she’d much sooner not tell him this. Shrugging: ‘The other reason is Lafont.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘After I’d met him out there I was thinking – there was something odd – oh, there is, of course, but – odder still after I’d told him I was there to visit Jacqueline Clermont. Something – secretive but also boastful. I did guess what it might be – and I asked her and it’s a fact, he’s chasing her. Not getting anywhere – she’s in love with you and dislikes him. She hasn’t told you, although she’d like to, because she doesn’t want to cause what might be very serious ructions between you and him – apart from the fact that if you’re suddenly recalled to Germany, leaving her here – he’d still be here, wouldn’t he, ruling the roost? One way and another, anyway, she’s not finding any of it very easy.’

  ‘She wouldn’t. No.’ A gesture… ‘As to Lafont – I knew it. But I trust her, you see. Although that may surprise you.’

  ‘What surprises me most is that we’re having this conversation at all.’

  ‘But why she couldn’t tell me…’

  ‘How she is, Gerhardt. And so many uncertainties. Not knowing how she’ll cope – or whether she’ll ever see you again – whether after some space of time and completely changed circumstances you’ll even want—’

  ‘For your private and personal information, I not only want, I intend – subject to remaining alive—’

  ‘You’re married, of course.’

  ‘That’s one impediment, but – not insurmountable. The other is the war: damn near finished here, but won’t be over for me for – for quite some time, at least.’

  ‘I dare say not.’ Fleeting thought of Ben… Clausen with an elbow on the desk, chin in hand, looking at her sombrely
while he thought about it. Nodding and sitting back then.

  ‘It’s a bit woolly, what you’ve been telling me, but it holds together and it’s not untypical of Jacqui.’

  Reaching into the cigar-box, picking one up, looking at it for a moment, dropping it back in. ‘I believe that by and large you’ve been telling me the truth. “By and large” because it must be in the front of your mind – should be – that to be put on a train to Germany is very much on the cards for you; also that what scores points is often less the truth itself than a general ring of truth, its details may be obfuscated. An example of this is what you were telling me half an hour ago – that you’re here with the aim of tracing agents. Any old agents, more or less?’

  ‘Well. Not exactly.’

  ‘Ah.’ Raised eyebrows, and heightened interest. ‘The whole truth coming now?’

  ‘Why not?’

  Because she wasn’t getting anywhere this way – beyond reassuring him of Jacqui’s devotion to him. Whereas if she could persuade him to strike a deal and then trust him to keep his word, as distinct from congratulating himself on having wrapped up this little investigation – another feather in his cap – and packing her off to Ravensbrück… Léonie as well maybe, Rouquet more likely to Büchenwald or Natzweiler – if either of them were (a) still alive and (b) still here in Paris. She began – like diving from a height into water that might have rocks just below the surface – ‘I could do better than the farm at St Saven – Nantes – for Jacqui. I could take her to England. That is, if she and I are both alive and free when the Allies get here. In England I or others might keep an eye on her until – well, if you meant what you said just now, eventually you’d be in a position to send for her, or fetch her?’

  Watching her while it sank in. Questioning and evaluating it, obviously. A frown then: ‘In return for what, this unprecedented offer?’

  ‘Two agents who were caught about a fortnight ago. I’d want to take them back with me too. With us, I should say. A man and a girl – he’s Guillaume Rouquet and she’s Léonie Garnier.’

  ’That pair.’ A shrug. ‘I know of them of course, but…’