by Gavin Scott
“And remember,” said Forrester, “whatever you were going to do, Doran – we’re not enemies. Good luck with the mine.”
As soon as Arontowitz had gone Forrester tucked the gun into his pocket, slipped out of the cabin, and headed down the corridor away from the bridge, expecting to hear the sound of an explosion at any minute. But no explosion came, and by the time he reached the deck it was clear it had been a false alarm: there was any amount of debris in the water, but this time it was floating wooden boxes rather than rogue World War Two mines. Doubtless the fog had confused the lookout man.
And now, perhaps, it could work to his advantage: this was the perfect moment to slip off the ship and swim for shore. The only question being how far they actually were from shore. Were the outer works of Marseille harbour half a mile away? A quarter-mile? How close had they approached while he had been wrestling with Arontowitz? He began to calculate – and then, before he could make up his mind, the pitch of the engines changed abruptly and the ship was going astern, swinging away from the French coast and back out into the Mediterranean.
What the hell was going on?
For a brief moment Forrester stood, undecided, frustrated that the fog prevented him from seeing whether he would have any chance of reaching Marseille if he jumped now. Then he decided the risk was just too great, and that what he needed more urgently than anything else was information. He could no longer go up to the bridge to get it, but there was one other possibility: the radio shack. And that possibility depended on whether the radio operator was aware that Mossad had ordered Arontowitz to kill him. If Arontowitz had been speaking en clair he might well know that Forrester was a condemned man. But if they had been speaking in code he might get away with it.
Thrusting the gun in the waistband of his trousers he made his way to the radio room, and to his relief saw that Ashmore, with whom he had become friends, was on duty. He leaned against the door and spoke casually.
“What’s going on, Sparks? Don’t tell me we’re going back to New York?”
“Hell, no,” said Ashmore, “but the Brits in Marseille are onto us. We’re heading somewhere quieter.”
“Where?”
“Place called Sète, just along the coast.”
“How long before we get there?”
“By dark, as long as the fog doesn’t slow us down.”
“Sounds good,” said Forrester, and sloped off.
He departed casually, but as soon as he was out of sight he began to make rapid preparations, gathering up rope, items of dark clothing and a pair of leather gloves. Then he used his by now extensive knowledge of the President Garfield’s most obscure corners to hide himself until they docked at Sète.
He knew Sète from Operation Dragoon in the closing stages of the war. Once the Normandy beaches had been taken, the Allies had decided to increase pressure on the Germans from the south, and Forrester had gone in beforehand to work with the French resistance to take out German gun emplacements near Sète before the Americans landed.
Sète itself was a little fishing town built next to a saltwater lake full of oysters and mussels and laced with a network of canals linking it to the Mediterranean. At some point a local publicist had described it, somewhat optimistically, as the Venice of Languedoc, but Forrester remembered it as the gritty, workaday terminus of the Canal du Midi and the Canal du Rhône; its most exotic feature was the daily ferry to Morocco. He had blown up a German armoured car there in 1944, and watched with some satisfaction as it fell, flaming, off the Môle Saint-Louis and into the Golfe du Lion.
He remembered the anchorage as a complicated one, and knew that the President Garfield would have to navigate a narrow channel between the Epi de l’Est and the Avant Port before it could make its way into the Old Basin, which was the first place it would be able to pick up the refugees. This suited him well, because it meant that instead of having to make a dangerous drop into the sea, he could, while everyone was concentrating on navigating their way safely through all the port’s many obstacles, wait until the boat was moving slowly along one of the moles and be halfway down the rope, ready to leap off as soon as movement was slow enough.
Accordingly, he attached the rope to the rail at a suitably obscure point near the stern of the ship, and waited for his moment as the President Garfield slowed, swung first to starboard into the Avant Port, and then again to port as she neared the Saint-Louis lighthouse. It was a tight fit: the Old Basin was crowded with canal barges, fishing boats and coasters and the Garfield had to manoeuvre through a hundred and twenty degrees – pretty much her own length – to moor stern-first to the mole.
To his considerable frustration Forrester found no opportunity to make his jump until the ship was tying up to the dock, and as she was secured to the bollards he became aware of the darkened vehicles lined up on the raised roadway that ran along the mole, truck after truck with their lights doused and their engines silent, waiting.
He did not need to be told that each of them was packed with desperate Jewish refugees whose longing for freedom seemed to reach out to him with almost palpable force. But that was not his business now. He pulled on his gloves, grasped the rope and slid neatly down onto the mole, even as the first of the Jews came out of the trucks and began to walk silently down to the dock. Forrester watched them from the shadows, waiting for a chance to vanish into the darkness. Then he realised Bernstein was standing beside him.
“Four and a half thousand,” said Bernstein. “We have to cram four and a half thousand of them in this old tub.”
Forrester concealed his alarm at being spotted. “Don’t worry,” he said, “they’ll fit.”
“Well, I’m glad you’ll be there to help us. I asked Arontowitz if you could come out to the chateau, but he said he had something else in mind for you.” I’ll bet he did, thought Forrester, dismissing the question of what chateau Bernstein was talking about. He was still looking for an excuse to slip away when an empty truck pulled up beside them and Bernstein gestured for Forrester to get in ahead of him. He glanced back up at the ship, saw Arontowitz peering down from the deck, and knew he had no option. He climbed rapidly into the cab beside Bernstein and the driver, a round-faced man smoking a Gauloises.
“Nous n’avons que deux heures,” said the driver. “C’est impossible, mais…” He shrugged, ground the gears noisily and set them bouncing along the cobbles towards the town.
Bernstein turned to Forrester.
“What did he just say?” Forrester translated and Bernstein nodded.
“Ask him how many people there are at the chateau.” And as Forrester did so he realised this was his opportunity to find out what was going on, because he could ask the driver, on Bernstein’s behalf, questions to which, if he was here with Arontowitz’s blessing, he should have already known the answers.
“My American friend wants to know how many people there are at the chateau, and whether they’re expecting us. Will we need to explain anything to them?” To Forrester’s relief, the question set the driver off on a long and voluble explanation, and he realised that the man, full of nervous tension, was eager to talk.
It seemed that in this, the second summer after the war, there were Jewish refugees hidden in villas, chateaux, old army camps and private homes up and down the coast. They had been spirited out of displaced persons camps in Munich, Stuttgart, Frankfurt and Kassel and ferried across Europe by truck and train in a massive operation masterminded by a clandestine Aliyah Bet travel agency in Paris with the secret help of many French officials, including the Sûreté itself. The French Secret Service had even allowed Mossad to set up a broadcasting station in the grounds of a villa on the edge of Paris, with a transmitter powerful enough to reach Tel Aviv. With post and telephone services across Europe still devastated by the war Aliyah Bet effectively had better and more reliable communications than many diplomatic services.
Ernest Bevin had just arrived in Paris for talks with French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault when he wa
s given news by MI6 agents in Marseille that the Garfield was about to pick up thousands of refugees, and had successfully pressured the French to have the ship impounded as soon as it docked. But unknown to Bevin, one of the translators in the meeting was a Jewish agent, and he had immediately passed the word to the Aliyah Bet, which had led to the Garfield abandoning the Marseille rendezvous.
The British, explained the driver, had discounted Sète as an alternative embarkation point because the harbour was simply too difficult for either quick loading or a quick getaway. They had been persuaded that the President Garfield had gone to Porto Venere in Italy, where yet more Jewish refugees were hiding. But, Forrester asked, surely British informants along the coast would have seen the dozens of trucks converging on the area. Would that not have tipped them off?
The question tickled the driver enormously, and he sent out a long plume of smoke as he replied. It seems that the Tour de France had just passed through this part of France, and if Forrester and Bernstein examined the sides of the trucks they would see they were plastered with encouraging messages for the competing cyclists. Far from concealing themselves, Jewish Agency volunteers organising the escape had dressed themselves as fanatical supporters of France’s great cycle race, and stood on the truck beds as the vehicles passed through village after village, waving and cheering so enthusiastically no one had imagined they were anything other than sports enthusiasts. As Forrester translated all this for Bernstein, he could not help but admire the sheer determination that lay behind the whole Aliyah Bet operation.
And then the driver said a few words which entirely altered Forrester’s mood. The reason volunteers from the Garfield had been sent along to the chateau was because there were rumours British agents were closing in on it, and there might be trouble. It had been rumoured, he said, that former members of the Special Operations Executive who knew this part of France from the war had been drafted in by MI6, and were prepared to stop at nothing. Great, thought Forrester. Just great. What was he going to do if he found himself confronted by members of his old unit?
Then, without warning, they were off the main road and bouncing along a lane through a thick stand of trees until they saw the chateau on top of a small rise, absurdly romantic towers and pinnacles silhouetted against the stars at every corner.
The truck came to a halt beside a lichen-covered statue of a griffin and once the engine died there was silence except for the chirping of cicadas. Then the driver stubbed out his Gauloises and Forrester became aware of the heady scent of jasmine perfuming the night. They got out and began to crunch across the gravel towards the massive front door.
* * *
Forrester’s first impression as they entered the tall, baronial entrance hall was of chaos. Instead of the silent lines of patiently waiting refugees he had imagined, thirty young people were busy bedding down and making pillows out of their cardboard suitcases amid the coats of arms and heraldic sculpture.
“Qu’est qui arrive, Rosannah?” said the driver. He was addressing a dark-haired Aliyah Bet woman in her thirties who seemed to be in charge. “Devons partir toute de suite.”
But Rosannah shook her head. “We have just had a telephone call from Sète,” she told them. “It’s taking longer to load the ship than they expected. They don’t want us there until at least six.”
The driver looked annoyed. “We’re sitting ducks here,” he said. “You know the British are looking for us.”
“Well,” said the woman, glancing at Forrester and Bernstein, “that’s why they sent these two, isn’t it? In case of trouble?”
Bernstein smiled gamely, and looked at Forrester for reassurance. Forrester shrugged, as if this was all in a day’s work, but as he looked around the crowded hall, his heart sank: they were all children and young women, and if there was trouble none of them would be able to defend themselves. Forrester spoke quietly to Rosannah.
“Where are the kids from? They weren’t in the camps, were they?” Forrester knew all too well how few children had survived the camps. His gaze fixed on a small boy in a ridiculously large overcoat who was clutching a teddy bear.
“They were in hiding,” said Rosannah. “Many Catholic institutions took them in when their parents were arrested. They’re all orphans now, of course, because their parents went to the gas chambers.”
“They were the lucky ones,” said a voice. Forrester turned to see a tall girl in her twenties.
“This is Elizabeth,” said Rosannah.
“You are English, are you not?” said the girl.
“I am,” said Forrester.
“The English want to keep us out of Palestine.”
“Well—” said Forrester, but got no further.
“Then they should hang their heads in shame,” said the girl. She fixed Forrester with a gaze that seethed with anger. “My father was a doctor, my mother was a concert pianist. German soldiers beat them both to death with the butts of their rifles on the first day we entered the concentration camp. And I am glad. You know why? Because that meant they never knew what happened to me.”
“Elizabeth, calm yourself, please,” said Rosannah. “There’s no need to—”
“There is every need to,” said the girl, “until the whole world understands. After my parents were killed, I was forced to become a prostitute for the SS.” Forrester found himself feeling sick. “The guards had the word Hure tattooed across my chest. Hure means ‘whore’. Would you like to see that tattoo?”
Forrester stared at her, unable to speak.
“But there were plenty worse off than me. Some of the girls here were used for medical experiments.” She indicated a slight, fair-haired girl who had her arms around a tiny child of six, who was in turn clutching a doll. “Margarete had her womb removed.” Next to her lay a girl with her leg in a kind of iron cage. “They used Hannah to find out how often the human femur could be broken before it ceased to heal.”
Cold sweat broke on out Forrester’s forehead and for the first time in a long time he felt good about the number of Germans he had killed. It was not a worthy thought but suddenly he was overwhelmed by hatred for the nation that had perpetrated these obscenities. Now Elizabeth had fallen silent and Rosannah was speaking again, her eyes hard.
“I will never forgive myself,” she said, “for not doing more to stop this happening before it was too late. For not saving more before those swine could do what they did.”
“And at least now you’re giving them a future,” said Forrester.
“Am I?” said Rosannah. “I am sending them into more danger. I know those refugee ships. They’re manned by fanatics and packed like cattle trains. The British Navy will do anything to stop them and most of these children will probably end up in camps in Cyprus. And the ones who do make it through to Palestine have to face the Arabs.”
“But you want to go, don’t you?” said Forrester, looking at Elizabeth.
“Where else is there to go?” she replied. “You think we want to stay here in Europe, where our neighbours betrayed us at every turn? I’d go to America in a heartbeat, but the Americans won’t have us. So we will go to Zion.”
“You see?” said Rosannah. “Palestine is the only place they have to dream of, so as far as I’m concerned Palestine is where we have to get them to – whatever the reality.”
“We will make it our own reality,” said Elizabeth, and walked away.
Gradually the room fell silent as the children and the young women drifted off to sleep, and soon only the occasional cry from a child’s nightmare broke the stillness. As Forrester waited he thought of Ernest Bevin, a man he admired, a hero since childhood, a great man who had helped Britain win the war, who was now trying to stop these children from getting to the only place in the world they could call home, and he knew that whatever strategic logic lay behind Bevin’s position, whatever dilemmas he had to deal with in balancing the interests of Arab oil and British global reach, that he, Forrester, was no longer on Bevin’s side.
> He knew he would do whatever it took to get this little huddled group down to Sète and onto that ship, whatever it cost him. And he knew the price might be high. Until this moment Ernest Bevin had been in his debt, asking him to use his knowledge to help protect him from Jewish terrorists. If Forrester now went up against agents of the British Secret Service, possibly even some of his own former wartime colleagues, he would be defying one of the most powerful men in Britain today; he would be seen as betraying him, and he knew that Bevin hated nothing worse than disloyalty. Far from being a useful ally of the establishment, someone whose recent exploits had won him the gratitude of a government he supported, Forrester would become, in their eyes, an enemy of the State, with all that followed from that designation. Quite probably including his Oxford fellowship.
Common sense dictated that he make an excuse to check the perimeter and simply slip away into the night. He didn’t need to betray these people, but he didn’t need to actively assist them either. That would have been the sensible thing to do. And then he listened to the children breathing, and looked at Elizabeth, the girl with Hure tattooed on her chest, with her arms around a small child, and he knew he could not do it.
He remembered Conrad’s lines: “They talk of a man betraying his country. All a man can betray is his conscience.” And he knew what his conscience was telling him. It was ironic, he thought, that all his efforts to uncover a murderer and help protect one of his country’s great men should have led to this – the moment when he defied him.
But whatever the larger picture, somebody should go out and check the grounds of the chateau, and the most logical person to do it was him. He explained his plan to Bernstein and Rosannah and she gave him a torch and showed him a small door in a corner tower through which he could leave discreetly.
He knew they were there the moment he stepped out into the night; he couldn’t see them yet but he felt their presence. And he knew, instinctively, they were his own people. He stood in the shadows for a long time, scarcely breathing, as his eyes became accustomed to the night, and then he saw the dark shapes moving around the truck. Of course! That was the logical thing for them to do. No violence, no direct confrontation, simply disable the mode of transport and leave the refugees stuck here while the ship sailed.
