by Alex Gerlis
A message had been waiting for her on Sunday. Lange wanted to see her on the Tuesday morning near the post office. If she left on Monday, she reckoned, she would have a day to get away from all of them.
She waited until Jean left to go to the farm that Monday morning and then packed a few belongings. She had some extra money from Lange and an identity card in the name of Hélène Blanc she had found in the rubble of a house near the factory when she had been helping to dig for survivors a few days ago. The identity card came from the purse of a corpse she had helped carry from the building. Nathalie had made great play of placing the body carefully by the side of the road, removing its coat to cover her and using that opportunity to remove the purse from the coat. The woman was older than her, thirty-seven, but she could just about pass. The glasses were similar. It would have to do. She would just take a knapsack to carry some food, a jumper, some underwear and a spare pair of shoes. And the Webley. She would not be able to take the revolver very far, but she might need it for the first part of her journey.
She paused in the front room and looked at the photograph of Jean with his parents. They were all smiling. He was still a boy. She hesitated and then opened the drawer where Jean kept writing paper. She paused for a while, then closed the drawer. She must not allow sentiment or emotion to get in her way. She was being foolish. She half opened the drawer again and pulled out a yellowy sheet of paper and started writing. She left him a note on the table, under the bottle of wine. He was sure to see it when he got in that evening.
And then she left, not looking back once. She was well used to this, leaving one life behind, plunging uncertainly into another one. Now she realised that it was never without a cost, there was always a small part of her that remained. And the more that a small part of her remained, the more diminished she was as she moved on. She cycled out of the village, heading south east for Samer on the N1, the main Paris road. This was the most dangerous part of the journey. If one of the others had seen her then, she would have probably needed the Webley. The ride took longer than she had expected, her cycling was definitely slower now. After about three miles, with Samer in view, she pulled into a small wood and buried the pistol along with her old identity card, after ripping it up into small pieces. A few weeks ago she had abandoned Nathalie Mercier along with Nathalie Quinn somewhere over the Channel. Now, the remains of Geraldine Leclerc were buried under a tree. The wood was quite dense and showed little sign of being used, so she shoved the bicycle deep into the undergrowth and did her best to cover it.
It was a Hélène Blanc who now walked the last mile into the market town of Samer.
In Grand Place Foch a contingent of grey uniformed Wehrmacht troops were climbing into lorries. She waited in the shadow of the Mairie until the lorries sped off. It was silent in the large square, even though it was still the middle of the day. Outside the church she spotted a woman of her age, struggling to push a pram across the cobbles. ‘If there are any buses today,’ she said in answer to her question, ‘they’ll go from just over there.’
She was worried now. She had not thought what would happen if she couldn’t catch a bus from Samer. Not wanting to draw attention to herself, she walked slowly round the square. After about forty minutes, a bus pulled noisily into the square.
She approached the bus as the driver was changing the destination sign from Samer to St Omer. She asked for a ticket to St Omer.
‘We’ll see,’ said the driver without looking at her. ‘First, we go to Desvres then we’ll see if they let us continue.’ An exhausted-looking gendarme checked her identity card and allowed her onto the bus.
She was lucky. After a short stop in Desvres the bus continued on to St Omer, arriving there in the middle of the afternoon. She had planned to move on as quickly as she could, but the town was teeming with Germans and one of them looked at her and the identity card two or three times before nodding her through a checkpoint. Maybe the card was not good enough. She was concerned that it might attract attention if she caught another bus straight away, so she walked around the town for a short while and sat quietly on a bench in the Square St Bertin. On a bench directly behind her were two women of a similar age to her. One of them not only looked a bit more like her than Hélène Blanc, but even seemed to have a hint of the accent from her own region. No one noticed as she leaned quickly under the bench and swiftly got up, heading back to the bus station, where she was relieved to see that the sentries had been changed.
She was already on the bus to Lille before the woman on the bench in Square St Bertin realised that her handbag had been removed from under it.
When the bus pulled into Lille just after six that evening she had two identity cards on her: Hélène Blanc and Nicole Rougier. She had been having serious doubts on the journey to Lille. Nicole Rougier would almost certainly have reported her handbag missing by now. The French police would have reported the fact that it contained a missing identity card to the Germans. It would be too risky to use. She had become careless. She would have to stick with Hélène Blanc.
She glanced at her watch: Jean would be arriving home around now and would see the note. ‘Go to the forest as soon as you get this. Stay there,’ she had written. ‘Do not tell the others. It is not safe. I will find you.’ The last part was not true, but it ought to keep him away from the village for long enough for her to escape. She owed him that much, but she still found it hard to believe that she had allowed sentiment to get the better of her. So out of character.
She went into the toilet of a small café and looked through the handbag. She took money, a clean lace handkerchief and some perfume from the handbag, tore up the Nicole Rougier card into tiny pieces and flushed it down the lavatory, then stuffed the empty handbag behind the cistern, where it couldn’t be seen.
She only thought briefly about what she had left behind her. There was too much that she had left behind too many times to give much thought to it.
ooo000ooo
All would have worked out if Georg Lange had not been so impatient and Lange was only so impatient because Berlin was so impatient. Now that the show was being run by the SD there seemed to be a sense of panic about everything. They had been on the phone that Monday morning. He knew it was urgent as they were communicating in clear, no attempt at code.
‘We must know what is going on... situation in Normandy is desperate... what is she being told?... can we still trust her?… what do you mean you were waiting until Tuesday?’
So he agreed he couldn’t wait until the Tuesday as they had arranged, he would go and see her now, in the village. He would pretend to be an official from the factory. They had reopened he would say, in another location and needed her. That would be his cover if he saw anyone else. But she was not in. A woman in a cottage at the end of the row said she had seen her heading east on her bike earlier in the morning. He began to get concerned, so let himself into the house. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told the neighbour, ‘I’m from the factory.’ She did not look reassured. Inside the house there was no sign of anything. Maybe she had just gone out.
He was about to leave when he noticed the bottle of wine on the table and under it a sheet of paper. His hands shook when he read her note. Apart from any other consideration, this could mean the end of him. He realised that somewhere very deep down inside him he had never completely trusted that woman.
Long before Hélène Blanc arrived in Lille, the Gestapo had got to work.
Jean was arrested as he walked home from the farm: a Traction-Avant Citroen slewed across his path and he was bundled into the back before he could react. Lucien was arrested at the station: in the noise of the engine shed he never heard when they came up to him from behind. They never arrested Pierre. He was in an upstairs room when he saw the Traction-Avant pull up in front of his house. He knew this was the favoured car of the Gestapo. He reached for his pistol as five men rushed into the house. He heard his wife scream. If he had been able to get to his Sten sub-machine gun, he may have st
ood a chance, but he must have known that this was hopeless. He put the barrel of the pistol into his mouth and pulled the trigger as the first Gestapo man reached the top of the stairs. He was not quite dead when they found him, but he was by the time they carried him downstairs.
Françoise and her father had been visiting her sister who had just given birth in Samer. When they raided her parents’ house in the village, she was not there, so the Gestapo took her mother and her two boys. When it became apparent what had happened, a neighbour went to tell the priest. Father Raymonde cycled all the way to Samer where he told Father Pierre, who was able to warn Françoise just in time. Father Raymonde was back at church in Hesdin in time to say Mass that evening to a larger than normal congregation.
ooo000ooo
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Berlin
August 1944
Admiral Wilhelm Canaris had seen it coming. It was inevitable, which did not make it any easier. The irony of his situation now was that he had always found visits to 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse distasteful enough when he was head of German military intelligence and had to deal with the SD on a regular basis. However unpleasant, it was part of his job. After his meetings, he was free to leave, even if it was with an unpleasant taste in his mouth.
And now he was back here. This time, it was not for meetings on the ornate top floor. Now it was as a prisoner of the SS in the cellars.
The truth was that he had been playing a dangerous game since the beginning of the war. If there was one event that set him off on the path that led to this cell then it was in Będzin in Poland in 1939. He had been in Poland just after the start of the war to visit the front line. And it was in the small town of Będzin that he witnessed SS troops push two hundred of the town’s Jewish population into the synagogue and burn it down, killing everyone inside.
After that, he made sure to appoint non-Nazi Party members to the senior positions in the Abwehr. He did not stop there. There was discreet support for non-Nazi Wehrmacht officers who had got into trouble. He helped some Jews to flee Germany. Earlier in the war, his intelligence reports overstated Britain’s defences, which some in Berlin believed helped delay and eventually stop any German invasion of the British Isles. There were discreet contacts with the British. Some of these were through trusted intermediaries, others direct. He used his frequent visits to Spain to meet with British Intelligence. He passed on information. And then in 1943, he started to co-operate with other senior non-Nazi officers who knew that the only way to save Germany from utter humiliation and ruin was to get rid of Hitler and his cohorts.
And that was his motivation. He wanted to save Germany. He could see what would happen. Germany would career madly towards total defeat and then the communists would take over. The sooner the war ended the better.
The SS and the SD had their eyes on him, of course. The beginning of the end was in February 1944. Hitler sacked him and most of the work of the Abwehr then came under the SD and General Schellenberg. He ended up with a desk in some anonymous ministry, but it was only a matter of time. He could have escaped, but he stayed. The plots against Hitler were thickening now. The big one was Operation Valkyrie on 20 July, but somehow Hitler survived a bomb planted under a table in the Wolf’s Lair. Canaris was arrested three days later, along with dozens of others and taken to the Border Police Academy at Fürstenberg. To add to the irony, he was not even directly involved in the 20 July plot. Maybe if he had been, he thought, it would not have failed.
He had been roughed up a bit in Fürstenberg, nothing too bad. Maybe he would be able to cope with it; there might even be a chance to escape. But once they brought him here to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, he knew there was no chance.
He had been here a couple of weeks. Every day and sometimes at night, he was tortured. It was never clear what they wanted him to tell them. Perhaps everything, but the secret of surviving interrogation was to work out what the interrogators did not know. Once you knew that, you knew what not to tell them. And when you knew what they did know, there was no harm to be done in telling them that. That is what they had taught the Abwehr agents. But what makes sense in theory was difficult in practice.
It did not take into account what the lack of sleep did to your mind. They kept the sharp lights blazing day and night and if he ever fell into a deep sleep, he would be woken up with slaps or by cold water being chucked over him. Then there was the hunger. They must have put him on reduced rations, because there was hardly anything to eat. If you had any chance of getting through an interrogation you had to concentrate and it was difficult to concentrate when all you could think about was food.
Nothing, of course, that the SS did came as a shock. Since that day in Poland when he had seen them herding men, women and children into the synagogue without a flicker of emotion on their faces, he knew that these people were capable of anything.
They kept him in chains and on occasions, to amuse themselves, the SS guards would take him into the corridor and force him onto all fours and walk him around like a dog.
For most of the time, he was in solitary confinement. Some of the 20 July plotters were being interrogated there too and Generalmajor Oster, his former deputy in the Abwehr, was also a prisoner.
But from time to time, there was contact with other prisoners. Such contact as there was tended to be fleeting, but two mumbled sentences could sustain you for days. You had to be careful, of course, make sure they weren’t SS stooges, planted there to get you to reveal something.
This man hunched on the floor next to him was no SS stooge, he was certain of that. He had known Franz Hermann before the war. A very clever lawyer, an expert in banking law as far as Canaris could recall. Canaris was aware that Hermann had been a social democrat in the early thirties, but not very active. He had continued to practise during the war and had kept a low profile, but Canaris knew that he was involved with the resistance in Berlin. The last time he had come across him was when he was sent a report suggesting that Hermann had arranged for a Jewish family in hiding in Berlin to escape to Switzerland. Luckily the report had come to the Abwehr rather than the Gestapo, which is really where it should have gone. It was conveniently filed in the wrong place and forgotten.
Now Hermann was slumped next to him, his face badly bruised and blood crusted around his nose and mouth. He was trembling.
‘When did you get here, Hermann?’
The lawyer turned and looked at Canaris through swollen eyes.
‘Canaris? I didn’t recognise you. They brought me here two days ago, maybe three. I don’t know. I have no idea anymore.’
‘What for?’
‘Better to ask what not for.’
‘What is happening outside?’
An ironic laugh from Hermann.
‘Haven’t you heard? We’ve won the war and Hitler is calling free elections. The Social Democrats are favourites to win.’
Canaris pulled a wry smile. Hermann dropped his voice and through broken teeth and a badly split lip he spoke urgently.
‘The last I heard was that the Allies have broken out of Normandy. They’re racing through France now. Our defences aren’t holding. All this talk about the main Allied invasion being further east along the French coast, apparently it was not true. It was never going to happen.’
Canaris nodded his head. A guard had spotted them talking and was marching over, twirling a long truncheon in his hand.
‘Of course not,’ said Canaris. ‘It was a clever deception all along. It is a good job we persuaded Hitler to believe it as long as we did, eh?’
ooo000ooo
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
London
August–September 1944
There was no single moment when Owen Quinn knew for sure that it was over. There was no single moment when he knew that there would be no Allied landings in the Pas de Calais, even though he had been told as much on D-Day. There was no single moment when he finally realised that Edgar had not made a dreadful mistake. There was no si
ngle moment when he knew that his wife had indeed deceived him, as had the Allies. In short, there was no single moment when he gave up hoping he was having a nightmare and realised he was living through one instead.
He remained in Dover until the end of July, which was far longer than he had anticipated. Edgar came down to see him once a week, visits which were certainly not occasioned by concern for his welfare. Quinn got the impression that Edgar came to check that he was neither being too difficult nor going mad. He felt quite close to the latter. He had precious little to do in Dover Castle. The Royal Navy were perfectly happy to have him there and he was able to help with the weather reports, but it was obvious that work was being created for him.
He had far too much time to contemplate his pitiful predicament. After a while, he realised he must have been in shock for the first few days. If he had his time again, he would have attacked Edgar or tried to do something about it. Quite what, he didn’t know, but he resented himself for the way he had sleepwalked home from the park and allowed Roger and his friends to remove all traces of Nathalie from the flat and then be lead like a compliant beast to Dover.
His visits to the edge of insanity were driven in part by the sheer injustice of his situation. He was a loyal Royal Navy officer who had come within minutes of losing his life on active service and who was then denied the opportunity to return to sea so that he could be used as part of some secret scheme, the efficacy of which was uncertain. He had been deceived by the people whose side he was meant to be on. But far worse than this injustice was the grief that he felt. Had Nathalie had been killed, that would have been bad enough. But now, not only had he lost her, he knew that she too had deceived him. He doubted that she ever loved him, she probably never even cared for him and her only interest in him was for the information she could supply to the enemy.
