He’d raised his new glass. ‘Here’s to you, Rosalie.’
‘And to your seagoing. But how come?’
‘I was fed up to here with the desk job. When all your chums are at sea – you know… In St James’ is where I’ve been working, a department of Naval Intelligence run by an R.N. four-striper, name of Slocum. Some character, I tell you – it’s thanks to him I’m getting back to sea. He’s swung it on the grounds that in Coastal Forces – well, motor gunboats – a navigator doesn’t need sharp ears, not like a skipper and a first lieutenant do. Navigator’s stuck below with his charts. And I’ve done some navigating. So they’re giving me this crash course down at Bursledon – in Hampshire, eh? – and as long as I pass out of it well enough – which believe me I bloody will—’
‘I’m sure you will.’
‘Bet your life, Rosie. And life then begins again.’
‘Congratulations.’
‘Thanks. Must say, Rosie, you’re a peach. Let’s have a drink. I want to hear what these troubles are you said needed drowning. Barman—’
‘Why did you leave Australia in the first place?’
‘Glutton for punishment, aren’t you? Yeah – same, please… Rosie, this will bore you. When you’ve heard enough, shut me up. Answering the question, though – my dad wanted me in his business, which is timber. He had a Master’s ticket in the Merchant Navy – British – settled out there after he’d met and married my Aussie mother. He was going to build boats – her brother was in that business – but he sort of branched off. Cheers, Rosie… Fact, it was the boat interest got me sailing – from about knee-high onwards. That, and painting, I’d wanted to paint since I don’t remember when. So, ’37, when I left College, he said OK, son, give it a go if you have to, take a year off then join the business. I wanted to see England and Europe too, and – you know, Paris being where all the painters go, that’s where I went. Worked my passage cutting up cabbages and stuff in the Strathmore’s kitchens – P. and O. Line – lovely ships, those Straths. And there I was – Paris, London, all over. Mostly Paris. Full of bastard Boches now – doesn’t it make your flesh creep?’
‘Yes, it does.’ She’d sipped at her gin. ‘Ever sell any paintings?’
‘One. Just one damn canvas, ever. I took some to London, they wouldn’t look at ’em. The one I sold was on the Dover-Calais boat – to a Yank. He was pie-eyed, really stewed… So – what you’re wondering – I got jobs now and then. Kitchen work mostly, and a delivery van one time. Family kept writing come on home, and I kept saying yes, on my way next month. Always telling myself, This’ll be breakthrough month – you know?’
‘There must have been a girl.’
‘Painting, is what there was.’
‘And a girl.’
‘You’re really gifted, Rosie. Put a shawl over your head and sling some beads on, crystal ball on the table: I see a girl…’
‘Where is she now?’
‘Oh.’ A shrug. ‘Have it your way. I don’t know. She only slummed for a while, went back to greener pastures.’
‘Poor you.’
‘Poor me, hell. Barman!’
‘Oh, now look—’
* * *
The boat was moving. On her back in this little box of a cabin she’d become aware of a change in the engines’ note and rhythm, and felt some kind of motion. Changing again now: getting clear of the old paddle-steamer’s side, she guessed – trying to visualize it, interpret the variations in sound and vibration. Conscious also that this was the moment of severance of contact, that from here on she’d be on her own. No further refreshing of memory, for instance: code-names, addresses, telephone numbers…
Buckmaster hadn’t mentioned the drops, in his resume this morning, and she was glad he hadn’t. The intention was that she’d tell no-one at all, except the Resistance people who’d receive them. If Buckmaster had remembered it you could bet he’d have said something like, ‘You’ll keep César informed, of course’: and she’d have had to. It was S.O.E.’s own business, no-one else’s. A different thing entirely from the S.I.S. operation. But as he hadn’t issued any such instruction, she could stick to what had been agreed. Even allowing for César being – as Buckmaster had said – ‘gilt-edged’: suppose for instance he decided – wrongly – that it was all right to bring the suspect Romeo into it?
Romeo was the stiffest fence she’d be facing, at the start. He might be perfectly OK but if he had been turned by the Germans – as Baker Street suspected – they’d have her on toast. Unless César had sorted him out before she got there, and decided to stay clear of him. But on the S.I.S. job, ‘La Minette’ was potentially no less dangerous, and there was no way to stay clear of her – no matter what Maurice Buckmaster thought… She’d been the protégée of an independent agent known as ‘La Chatte’, who’d been playing both ends against the middle to no small effect. A year ago, this had been. ‘La Minette’ – meaning kitten – had only been doing odd jobs for her – entertaining men for or with her had been her primary function up to the time of La Chatte’s arrest. La Chatte had then saved her own neck by agreeing to work for the Germans, and at the same time she’d got rid of her part-time employee, presumably because she couldn’t trust her to toe the new line. Otherwise, why sack her – when she (La Chatte) was still in business? ‘La Minette’ might therefore be fundamentally anti-German, and clever enough not to have let the Germans know it. Whether or not S.I.S. had other reasons for believing this, one didn’t know, but it was the basis on which they’d decided she might be useable: her value being solely that she was – allegedly – Colonel Walther’s mistress.
“La Chatte” was out of it. She’d sold the Germans the idea of her working for them right in the heart of S.O.E., in London, the Gestapo had connived at her ‘escape’ from their custody and an S.O.E. agent whom she then contacted had allowed her to believe he’d swallowed her story whole. He’d taken her to England with him on board a gunboat of this 15th Flotilla, and she was now in Holloway women’s prison. But she’d made her mark, all right. German use of her radio, probably with her as the pianist, had convinced S.I.S. and Naval Intelligence that the warships Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen had no intentions of leaving Brest; and in the middle of February of last year – a few days before Johnny’s death and Rosie’s first visit to Baker Street – they’d broken out and escaped up-Channel to German ports.
The engines were fairly deafening now. All four, Rosie guessed. And the gunboat’s angle in the water was changing, its bow lifting as it gathered speed.
3
‘César’ stared back at his interrogator. About his own age – middle thirties. Civilian clothes. He’d introduced himself as an officer of the S.D. – Sicherheitsdienst, intelligence branch of the S.S. – which made sense in a way because although this – the Hotel Terminus – was the Lyon Gestapo headquarters, not S.D., its presiding genius was a fairly notorious thug by name of Klaus Barbie, who was himself an S.S. lieutenant.
Ernst Hauffe, this one’s name was.
‘An absolute fool, Rossier. Think about it!’
About the offer he’d made him: he’d be a fool to turn it down, was the assertion. They knew a great deal about him already, Hauffe had pointed out, there were only a few details to fill in. The conversation was all in French, of course.
‘If we have to get it out of you the hard way – well, we will. But I really would recommend the alternative. Easier for us, and much easier for you. You have my word on it as a German officer: in return for your full cooperation, either you’ll walk free if you agree to be on our payroll, or you’ll go to an ordinary prison here in France – for the duration of the war, of course, but at least you’d be alive to join in the celebrations of our victory. It’s for you to choose, Rossier.’
‘Since when did a German officer keep his word?’
The other one – behind him, behind the heavy timber chair on to which they’d forced him with his wrists chained behind his back – stooped and grasped
his arms just below the elbows. Hauffe checked him with a gesture: the hands loosened as if reluctantly.
Standard gambits, Michel thought. Preliminaries, like lovers’ foreplay.
Not that the analogy was a very good one.
That was one of the things they did to you, though. Hands cuffed behind the back, then the arms forced up. Try it even halfway, you’d begin to know what pain was. On occasion they’d hung prisoners up that way, but it was self-defeating since the victim invariably fainted.
‘Your wife’s in Ireland, it seems.’ Touching her letter: several sheets of blue paper covered with Andrea’s rounded writing. They hadn’t let him read it. Hauffe added, ‘We have our own people in Dublin, you know. Do I have to point out that it may not be only you who suffers?’
Again, par for the course. Bribery, then threats to one’s nearest and dearest.
‘Shall I read this to you?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘She was Irish-born, one gathers – from these references to various family connections. Also to some man who seems to have – shall we say, engaged her affections. Well, well…’ He turned that page over, read a line or two more, and shrugged. ‘Leave ’em too long, it’s bound to happen, isn’t it? And typically, she can’t even see it coming – so blind to it she’s even telling you about him.’ He’d sat back, moving the letter aside. ‘When you finally persuade yourself to start talking, you mustn’t forget to tell me how that letter got to Lyon without a stamp on it. My guess is that it might have come via London. So who brought it here, and by what route? Eh? Well, never mind, you’ll tell me later. Here’s an idea, though – what about sending her a recent portrait of yourself?’
Some silly game. He stared at Hauffe, expressionless, ignoring it. Knowing that he’d lied about Andrea, who if she was contemplating or indulging in some kind of an affaire wouldn’t be either so stupid or so cruel as to drop hints to him about it. She wasn’t Irish-born either: the Irish relations were all his – and distant, from way back. The family name had been Mullins, but when Grandfather had settled in Bordeaux and married into the wine trade he’d added a ‘de’ and an ‘o’ and dropped one ‘I’ to make the name de Moulins. That was César’s real name, Michel de Moulins: while the name on his papers was Michel Rossier. Also among his papers was a certificate to the effect that he’d been honourably discharged from the French army – cavalry – in 1938, following injury when a horse had fallen on him. This accounted for his limp, although in fact it was the result of a parachuting accident in England in 1940.
Hauffe had picked up his telephone and asked someone – in German – where the photographer had got to. Hanging up, he explained, ‘Before we ruin your good looks, Rossier. It does seem to be inevitable.’
* * *
He’d arrived from Marseille late yesterday afternoon, and called the planque – safe house – in the Rue Bonnel from a telephone in the Café de la Gare. A male voice had answered, and in reply to the question was Jacques Deschamps at home the answer had been ‘Deschamps?’ – and then after a second’s hesitation, ‘Oh, him. He’s out, at this instant. But he’ll be back in half an hour. Why don’t you come along? Can I say what time you’ll be here?’ It had been enough to tell Michel that the Pension d’Alsace was a safe house no longer, in fact was obviously staked out: he’d never heard of anyone called Jacques Deschamps.
It was a major setback. There was to have been a mail drop at the pension, and he’d been hoping to have a letter – or two, or three – from Andrea. Brought by hand and addressed to him as Michel Rossier: ‘Mick, ma cher’, or ‘Mick, mon amour’… No danger in it: He’d had letters from her before, elsewhere, and she was meticulous in mentioning nothing but family and other entirely personal matters. Touch wood, there’d have been no other communications – nothing from Baker Street. Arrangements for contacting Romeo and/or Angel – which was what he’d stopped off in Lyon for – were to be passed to him verbally by a silk merchant on the Quai Perrache.
He’d visit him in the morning, he’d decided. If they’d shut up shop for the night before he got there he’d have gone a long way for nothing; he knew nowhere to stay the night in that immediate area, and there was the curfew to think about. So he’d walked – too long a hike for his gammy leg – to the Grand Nouvel Hotel, which he’d used once before, and had an early meal – again, because of the curfew – at a Greek restaurant close by.
He’d woken at about two in the morning, and sweated for a couple of hours, thinking about the pension stake-out and the possible ramifications, the mail drop and how much they might have learnt from it. That ‘come along’ invitation proved it was a stake-out, but whether they’d have been waiting for him personally was guesswork. If there’d been a letter or letters from Andrea, they might well have been. But there’d have been nothing to tell them that Michel Rossier’s ultimate destination was Rouen. Not even if they’d caught others in the planque who’d talked. The silk merchant – code-named ‘Fabien’ – was the one and only contact to be made here, the pension only a place to stay and to pick up any mail.
He’d make the approach to Fabien’s establishment very carefully, all the same.
Go to the famous Monique’s first?
Park the luggage, and ask for a bed there for the night. It was a brothel, in the Old Town, Vieux Lyon. He’d never been there, but he’d been told she always had room for people like himself. And two nights in this hotel would be one too many. Suspicions were easily aroused – in night porters, cleaning women, any of them. Plenty of potential informers around, interested in both ingratiating and enriching themselves.
Monique’s, therefore, then the silk emporium. It was going to entail a lot of legwork, but using taxis was as risky as putting up at small hotels.
Long telephone calls too. Some lines were tapped.
He’d slept, eventually. Woken, bathed in tepid water, breakfasted on rolls and chemical-tasting jam, and on an impulse – because his knee still ached from over-use the day before – taken a taxi to the Old Town. It was such a hell of a long haul: across the town and over both rivers, the Rhône and the Saône: wouldn’t be exactly a short step after that, either, down to the Quai Perrache. And then back again… He’d been thinking about it – that there was a time factor as well – when a gazo taxi had come bumbling out of the Gare La Part Dieu, and that had clinched it.
‘Vieux Lyon. Rue Saint Jean.’
The driver had a face like a rat, teeth like a rat’s too when he smiled, which he did when Michel paid him off just short of a corner and then waited, immobile – partly so as not to demonstrate his limp – until he’d got going again and was out of sight. Guessing, maybe: although this was hardly a time of day for brothels. He’d have brought solitary men here before, though, he might well have made that assumption. Good thing if he had – the Germans would hardly pay for that sort of information.
It certainly wasn’t the right time of day for Monique or her girls. He’d located the house, finally, some way up a near-vertical flight of stairs that led up from the place at the top of the road, and having hauled himself up there, step by step, had more than enough time to get his breath back before his ring was answered. It was Monique herself who came down. Fiftyish, built like a prize-fighter, swathed in a purple robe de chambre and highly suspicious at first, then alarmed – for which you could hardly blame her, when the penalty for helping a British agent was death – but less so, although still cautious, once he was inside with the door securely bolted.
‘Have you been here before, monsieur?’
‘No, but friends of mine have. You don’t let your Boche customers up to the top floor, they told me.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’
‘Madame—’
‘How can I be certain you’re not a Boche – trying to set me up, hunh?’
After he’d satisfied her that he wasn’t, she’d shown him to an attic room, where he’d left his suitcase. It would be safe, she assured him, he
could take the key of the room with him if he liked. He did like – not that it made much difference, there’d be other keys – and told her he’d be back some time later – please God. She’d repeated that plea soundlessly with her eyes shut, then taken him down and let him out. And having now established his temporary base, he’d been thinking about the silk merchant: in essence, the simple truth was that however carefully he made the approach, since he’d eventually have to walk in and ask for ‘Fabien’ – well, if they’d got there ahead of him, he’d have had it.
Chances about evens, maybe. Obviously they’d have made a few arrests in the Pension d’Alsace: and having only limited faith in his fellow beings he could only hope and pray that none of them had ever heard of ‘Fabien’. Limping southward, down the Quai Fulchiron – the shortest route, he’d decided, would be to stay this side of the river down as far as the Kitchener bridge – he made himself stroll, not hurry, and not limp more noticeably than he could help. It was the start of a beautiful day: mist on the river rising and dissipating as the early sun burnt through.
He was still thinking about Fabien’s place: that ‘care’ in the approach could only amount to keeping his eyes open for Germans who might be hanging around or waiting in parked vehicles.
Which you could bet they wouldn’t be. They were a lot of things but they weren’t fools.
He’d paused on the bridge, leaning on the parapet with his weight off that leg, gazing down at the sun’s sparkle on the water and also back the way he’d come – looking for any face or figure he might have noticed earlier and might still be with him. Two girls in summer dresses passed close, arm in arm; the dark one smiled at him – the kind of small, private smile that was infinitely more interesting than mere bonhomie. She’d probably thought he’d been giving her the eye. But he did have an alternative, he’d realized: to play this really cautiously, he could stay away from Fabien, make contact with some other réseau – through Monique perhaps, it was known she had Resistance links – and get a message sent to Baker Street informing them of the debacle in the Rue Bonnel and asking for the Rouen rendezvous arrangements to be wirelessed to him.
Into the Fire Page 4
