She turned her attention to the other two rooms on the landing. A preliminary peep through each keyhole revealed that neither appeared to be occupied, but she wanted to be sure. She slipped her hand inside her bag and removed her SOE lock picks – the ones Eddie had given her. The gift had been tongue in cheek but the picks had come in handy several times. Recently she had remarked to Vesta that they were so much more useful than face powder or toffees, items that seemed to take up most of the room in Vesta’s handbag.
The hotel’s locks were cheaply made and presented no problem. The first room had definitely not been occupied for days, if not weeks. A thin layer of dust covered the bedside table and the air smelled faintly of turpentine. When Mirabelle put a hand on the single bed it felt damp. The second room must have been used more recently. There was no dust to speak of on the chest of drawers and the window was open an inch. However, there were no personal possessions – not so much as a used match. The wardrobe was empty, and there was nothing under the bed. If the other Russian was staying here he would appear to be travelling light. Perhaps the Brothers Kakarov shared the room next door, using it in shifts.
She let herself out and crept silently back downstairs. She wasn’t sure this was getting her closer to Philip Caine, but even though Christine Moreau had chased her off she didn’t like to think of any woman being under covert surveillance. Besides, the urge to report back was ingrained. The flow of information was vital. An agent in the field couldn’t tell what might be important back at HQ. She’d have to tell someone at home what was going on.
At the reception desk an old man was now perched on a high stool. ‘Madame?’ he said as Mirabelle descended the last flight. His voice betrayed his absent-mindedness. He didn’t recognise her, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t a guest.
‘Bonjour,’ Mirabelle replied and walked straight onto the street, looking for a post office. Working from memory, she took a right turn and was shortly rewarded with a fancy set of railings and a blue sign for La Poste. Inside, she headed for the telegraph desk.
‘To London, please,’ she said. ‘Duke’s Hotel, St James’s.’
The young girl behind the desk sat up straight. ‘What name?’
‘Edward Brandon,’ Mirabelle spelled it out.
She paused a moment as the girl took it down. A telegram was a comparatively public way to convey information. Mirabelle bit her lip. She picked up a pencil to write the message. Miss Moreau serving gin at home but across the road men drinking vodka. It was the best she could come up with and Eddie would know whom to pass it on to, or at least he’d be able to find out. She hadn’t intended to be a sneak but inexplicably she felt sorry for Christine. No one should remain that hurt for so long, and besides, the Russians weren’t allies any more. Neither of the French nor of the British.
‘Just sign it from MB,’ she said. She hadn’t had a code name and she’d never reported to Eddie anyway. Rather wistfully she thought that the last nickname she had had was when her grandmother called her a little plum.
The girl at the desk silently translated the sentence and looked up, raising her brows a fraction. Mirabelle smiled and laid a note on the counter, and the child relaxed, calculating the cost and dispensing change. People often sent inexplicable messages. It was usually because they were trying to keep the telegram as short as possible. Messages were charged by the letter. As things went this was a long one. Mirabelle popped the coins in her purse.
‘Good.’ The girl tried out her English. ‘It goes now. You have a busy day?’
‘Thank you.’ Mirabelle smiled. ‘I’m going to the library.’
Chapter 17
Discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
The National Library of France had an immense and ornate reading room with a vaulted ceiling studded with round skylights that ought to have flooded the place with light even on a dull day such as this, but Mirabelle decided she had never been anywhere so restrained. Even the daylight appeared reticent. Despite the atmosphere, it was pleasant to come in from the cold. She found a desk, laid her handbag to one side, removed her gloves and draped her coat over the back of her chair. The place was busy. Most of the tables were occupied by men wearing tweed suits and glasses, and there was a general air of relaxation. On a Saturday, Mirabelle thought, there were probably lots of hobbyists. The air smelled of musty paper with the vaguest whiff of pipe smoke. The sound of pencils taking notes provided a low scrape and hum, almost like radio interference. Occasionally someone coughed.
Mirabelle left her things at the table and crossed the highly polished floor as quietly as she could to present herself at the counter. She smiled. A wide-faced man of no more than thirty regarded her without lightening his serious demeanour. He nodded curtly and scooped up some small pencils that littered the counter, placing them in a tatty cardboard box to one side. Mirabelle leaned forward and kept her voice low.
‘I’m looking for information on a German who lived in Paris during the war. His name was von der Grün,’ she said in perfect French. She might not be interested in seeing Christine again, but she was drawn to the woman’s wartime activities. If von der Grün had been Christine’s lover, she’d like to know how he fitted into the picture. A good operative would always find out everything she could. In Paris at the same time as Christine and potentially Philip Caine, von der Grün might be connected to the business with Jack and Bulldog Bradley. It was not impossible. If he was alive and she could find him, she’d like to ask him some questions. ‘I think he was in the SS,’ she added. If the librarian had looked serious before, he now emanated an especially frosty air. Mirabelle was undeterred. ‘He must have come from a wealthy family. Von der Grün, you see,’ she said helpfully. ‘Any information you can help me dig up might be useful.’
It crossed Mirabelle’s mind that Parisians were not easy to engage in conversation. Perhaps that was why the Resistance had been so successful. Reticence was clearly a national characteristic, even if the other person spoke French. Such an attitude was a disaster for the success of covert operations, which relied on the unguarded slip, the unconscious choosing of one word over another.
‘We do not keep military records here,’ the librarian said. ‘At least not more recent records. We have a Napoleon archive, if that might interest you?’
‘Perhaps there are newspapers from the period? The occupation?’ Mirabelle stuck to the point. ‘Copies of Le Monde?’
The man looked at Mirabelle as if she was a fool. ‘Le Monde was only started at the end of the war. You might like to look at Le Figaro or La Croix. It makes no difference – during the occupation all newspapers were censored. But you can search on microfiche. The man you’re looking for might be mentioned but you will have to keep in mind that the information is unlikely to be accurate. Everything was propaganda.’ He waved a hand dismissively in the direction of the back wall, the arc of his arm elegant as Nijinsky’s. Mirabelle squinted. She could make out a short run of microfiche machines, all of which were currently occupied.
‘What I really need is a Who’s Who,’ she mused.
‘Ah, we keep the reference books over there.’
‘Even for foreigners? A German?’
‘This is la Bibliothèque Nationale de France,’ the man said rather grandly, though Mirabelle noted that he sounded only marginally more optimistic than he had about the material held on microfiche.
‘Thank you.’
Mirabelle regarded the tall bookshelf that had been indicated and decided to start there. The first shelves were stacked with volumes of the encyclopedia – initially in French and then, interestingly, in English. Further along she found a Dictionary of National Biography but the entries only covered the UK. Next to it was a current Who’s Who – the book she had already consulted at the Army and Navy Club in London, though here it was shelved with several previous editions. Mirabelle pulled over a short run of rosewood steps to peruse the higher shelves. Carefully she climbed upwards, awa
re that next to the bookcase one of the men had stopped reading and was eyeing her ankles as they passed his line of sight.
The book titles ran from French and Latin to Norwegian and what looked like Japanese. It’s a veritable Tower of Babel, she thought. Then her finger landed on a publication entitled Wer Ist’s. There were several volumes and she took a moment to find the most recent, which was already almost twenty years old, published in 1935. The book was heavy – as she pulled it from the shelf she tottered uncertainly on the steps, unable to see her own feet as she felt her way back to the floor.
‘Please.’ The reader who had been watching her upwards progress offered his hand, and Mirabelle grasped it. She wished she hadn’t taken off her gloves. Holding hands felt too intimate. She snatched back her fingers as soon as she reached the safety of the floor.
‘You’re German?’ the man enquired in a whisper, seeing the title of the book she was carrying.
Mirabelle felt her cheeks flush with displeasure. ‘I’m English.’ She cursed herself for sounding as prim as a nanny. But really, what a thing to say.
The man smiled and watched as she hurried self-consciously back to her desk. The book landed with a satisfying thump. Mirabelle’s German was rudimentary. Over the years she’d picked up some words and she had a feel for languages. Translation, after all, had been her job before the war. She hoped she’d manage. At first she simply flicked through the pages, realising that the volume was pristine, as if no one had opened it since it had been shelved. But then why should they? It was as Matron Gard had said – material simply sat as fresh as the day it was put away, waiting decades for a single reader, perhaps even centuries.
Reaching the section marked ‘Von’, which was, of necessity, extremely thick, she trailed the margin with her finger. It transpired there were three entries under ‘Von der Grün’. Frederick, Kurt and Wilhelm. Mirabelle discounted Frederick immediately. In 1935 he was already in his late sixties. That put him beyond military service during the war and, she thought, also made it less likely that he was the von der Grün who had been Christine Moreau’s lover.
The other two were more promising. Mirabelle turned her attention to them – Kurt and Wilhelm, who were cousins. Both were married and would have been in their thirties during the war and so of military age. Both had titles and estates in the Rhineland. The Germanic system of inheritance, like the French, she recalled, was different from the one at home where only the eldest son inherited titles or property. In Europe brothers and even cousins shared estates. Nowhere, she sighed, endowed women. These men’s sisters would have had to marry to keep their status – a situation of which it was too easy to fall foul. Wer Ist’s didn’t appear even to list women in their own right. Their names only appeared as the wives of the men who merited inclusion. What happened to the spinsters? The unmarried sisters? The maiden aunts? When Mirabelle’s parents died she had inherited their money, but only because the Bevans were forward thinking, in possession of a private fortune and there were no titles involved. In that she had been lucky.
Turning back to Wer Ist’s, she kept reading, sounding the words in her head to help her understand. It was like being a schoolgirl again. Kurt, it would seem, was a member of the Nazi party. Wilhelm was not listed as such but then the book was printed four years before war broke out. Mirabelle squinted. She couldn’t quite make out the vocabulary but she thought it said that Wilhelm had a historic claim to estates in a place named Reichsland Elsass-Lothringen. She sounded out the words under her breath. Rhineland was in the south of Germany. It bordered French territory but she hadn’t heard of this other place. With one eye on the man who had accused her of being German, she returned to the reference section, pulled out an atlas and returned to her desk. She flicked to Germany and examined the map carefully. She couldn’t find a place name that corresponded with the entry in Wer Ist’s so she tried Austria. No luck. Mirabelle’s finger hovered. She turned her attention back to the Rhineland. The map was on a workable scale though the place names were given in French. Still, the places that corresponded to Kurt and Wilhelm’s rather fancy titles were discernable. They related to estates very close to the French border and all borders, Mirabelle knew, were fluid. Reichsland Elsass-Lothringen, she repeated under her breath. Elsass. Elsass. Was that Alsace? The French border country had been under German administration in the decades running up to the Great War. Its heartland was not even a hundred miles from Kurt von der Grün’s estate and not much further from Wilhelm’s. It was not unimaginable that Wilhelm von der Grün, and perhaps the whole of his family, had a pre-existing connection with France. If Wer Ist’s listed his claim to titles in what was in fact a foreign country, his forebears might well have been among the occupying forces that had swept into Alsace Lorraine during the Prussian war. Mirabelle smiled. In that case, being brought up close to the border and, particularly in Wilhelm’s case, feeling entitled to claim property in France, might well mean the von der Grüns spoke French. And that was a skill the Nazi machine might have found useful.
Flopping into her seat, Mirabelle eyed the bank of microfiche machines against the back wall. There were only three of them and all still in use. She got up and went over, checking her watch. Getting this far had already taken an hour. This was the kind of job she’d usually delegate to Vesta. She peered over the shoulder of one of the current incumbents, seeing how the machines worked. It had been a while.
‘You pick up the film over there,’ the man hissed. ‘And wait your turn.’
‘Pardon,’ Mirabelle mouthed.
She glanced at the banks of little boxes, one of which no doubt contained what she needed, and with a sigh she moved over to take a closer look. The Nazis had taken Paris in the summer of 1940 and that meant Mirabelle had approximately four years’ worth of newspapers to examine. Occasionally the presses must have stopped – it was wartime after all – but that still left well over a thousand daily issues. And if Le Figaro was anything like The Times or the Daily Telegraph there would be several editions every day as stories developed. Mirabelle paused. Given that kind of challenge, Vesta would simply start reading through the mountain of material from the beginning. The girl was habitually interested in everything, but there had to be another way. What would Matron Gard do, Mirabelle wondered.
She ran back over the material she had already uncovered. Catherine had said that von der Grün was in Paris to amass money for the German war machine so it was fair to assume that he’d been involved in the deportation of Jews to concentration camps. Mirabelle tried to remember when that had happened. She knew the deportations hadn’t started immediately. It had taken a year, perhaps eighteen months, before the first Jews had been sent away in response to Resistance attacks on Nazi units. The French Resistance was largely peopled by Jewish men who had left Germany in the 1930s. Such a measure was well thought out. The Nazis understood cruelty. They knew how to make a punishment hit home. Mirabelle placed the deportations carefully in time. It had been winter – after Christmas in 1941. The British had had to shore up the spirits of the resisters, some of whom watched their families being sent away because of what they had done. More than a few hadn’t been quick enough to hide and were sent to their deaths. As a result there had been a dip in Resistance activities that lasted for months.
Behind her a chair scraped across the floor and a microfiche reader became free. Mirabelle hurriedly picked up copies of Le Figaro for December 1941 and January 1942 and popped the first negative into the machine. This, she realised as she scrolled down, was going to take a while.
The light outside was dimming and she had only reached the summer of 1942 when she decided to take a break. The tone of Le Figaro was upbeat – the paper had published a German’s Guide to Paris and its editorials were eager to support the Nazi ethos when the Marais had been cleared. Mirabelle realised she was grinding her teeth as she took in the words. She stopped, looked up and told herself it was only propaganda, which was certainly not absent from British publications
at the time. But British propaganda had humour – its tongue firmly in its cheek. If the British favoured understatement, the editor at Le Figaro certainly did not. The endless adulation of the Nazi victories of 1941 turned her stomach. She had seen it with her own eyes from the other side of the Channel. She knew people who’d died in the Blitz and men who’d died in action. Her skin prickled as Le Figaro reported British reverses – the retreat into Singapore and its eventual surrender to the Japanese. She remembered a friend of Jack’s who’d cried when he’d found out. He had come into the office. ‘Now, now,’ Jack had said, closing the door to save the man’s embarrassment, ‘we’ll come through it, old boy.’ By contrast Le Figaro was jubilant – Tokyo and Paris were among a brotherhood of cities basking in the sun of Nazi victories. It felt wrong even to read the words and Mirabelle struggled to keep her attention on the point – there had been no mention of von der Grün. When she got to the sinking of the HMS Eagle, Mirabelle looked away. She wondered if there might be somewhere near the library to get a cup of tea. She could do with a break.
British Bulldog Page 14
