by Mike Ripley
So, the question was: what had possessed that dear, harmless chap to make a very dangerous journey to Wandsworth, leaving behind the comforts of the Riviera? The only answer he could offer was that he carried an important message – a message just for me.
‘My dear, dear friend,’ he gushed when I found him, ‘I was beginning to despair of ever seeing your kindly visage. It felt as though they were not comprehending me.’
Now, I don’t want to give the impression that Étienne was some sort of end-of-the-pier caricature of a Frenchman. He spoke English well enough when he wasn’t confused or under pressure, and to me he seemed to have all his marbles present and correct, even though he was in a windowless room being guarded by two of MI5’s finest thugs. Certainly, he perked up no end when I told his watchdogs that I could not only identify him but vouch for him, though they didn’t look too pleased when I suggested that old Fleurey be released into my custody. That had to be cleared and authorized in triplicate by their superiors, as they were naturally wary of an MI6 bod throwing his weight around on MI5 turf. There was little love lost between the two sections back then: the chaps in Five thought we in Six were prone to put on airs and generally act above ourselves, while we in Six regarded Five as a sort of jumped-up gendarmerie.
Still, they agreed to let me take Fleurey out for a walk on Wandsworth Common. It wasn’t exactly the promenade along the front at Mentone, because quite a few bombs had been dropped there from a great height by the Luftwaffe aiming at Clapham Junction, but that had not put off the packs of roaring children playing on the swings that had somehow survived intact.
I had gone to Wandsworth well armed with some decent cigarettes and a hip flask of inferior brandy, and these seemed to put Fleurey at his ease, though he’d clearly been put through the mill by his MI5 inquisitors. We chatted about Mentone and the Beauregard Hotel in pre-war days and the larks we’d had there, and it took me ages to persuade him to stop addressing me as ‘milord’, but eventually he got down to business.
‘I was told to speak only to you, M’sieur Campion, and to no one else,’ he said after a healthy swig from my flask. ‘I have a message.’
‘That was brave of you, or very foolish, depending on what you have to say and who the message is from, old chum.’
He thought about that for a minute, or perhaps he was thinking about another belt of brandy, before he took a deep breath and answered.
‘The message I bring you – the message I have carried in fear for my life – comes from an old friend of yours who is’ – Fleurey lowered his voice and even glanced over his shoulder – ‘a German.’
‘I admit I have known Germans in the past,’ I reassured him. ‘Does this one have a name?’
‘Dr Theodre Haberland,’ said Étienne, with just a small touch of awe.
I knew in that instant that old Fleurey was being duped, and that what he was about to propose was almost certainly going to be a trap.
‘There’s no doubt that poor old Fleurey believes the yarn he was spun,’ I said when I reported on our stroll on Wandsworth Common. ‘It’s the story behind the story that could be interesting.’
I was being debriefed – a word I had to learn to say without giggling – by my departmental head, Mr L. C. Corkran, whom we called ‘Elsie’, but only behind his back. He would sit behind a great oak battleship of a desk, trying to look like a headmaster disappointed in his pupils when we made our reports, but he didn’t miss much.
‘Do you trust this Frenchie?’ he asked me in a voice which suggested that six-of-the-best would await me if I gave the wrong answer.
‘As a diligent hotelier and a dedicated Anglophile, yes,’ I said honestly, ‘but that was before the war. Mentone was knocked about a bit during the Italian invasion in ’40, and of course the Germans have trampled over the northern half of his country, neither of which does much for the hotel trade. I got the impression he didn’t like having to suck up to the Italian occupation forces, as they are good at running up bills but not paying them, and he clearly doesn’t have much time for the Vichy government and some of their paramilitary thugs, who seem particularly pusillanimous down in the Alpes-Maritime region. But I’d never have put him down as a Free Frencher or a Resistance man; he just doesn’t seem the fighting type. Still, I knew him before the war and war changes people.’
‘It does indeed,’ said Mr Corkran wisely, ‘and usually for the worse. What made him come over to England? It must have been risky for him, though he had the luck of the Devil getting through the Occupied Zone and over the Channel without being picked up.’
‘I suspect he had help; in fact, I know he did. He told me as much.’
‘From the chap who sent the message, I presume.’
‘Indeed, and I think Monsieur Fleurey himself was part of the message. The sender was saying: look, this is an old friend whom you know and can trust. I am sending him to you safely as a sign of good faith.’
‘The sender being this Dr Haberland?’
‘That’s not his name, at least not his real one.’
‘But he has the power to get Fleurey out of Vichy France, across the Occupied Zone and even across the Channel, not to mention the skill to persuade him to make the journey in the first place. That’s impressive.’
‘I would expect nothing less,’ I said, picking my moment carefully, ‘from a Cambridge man of impeccable manners and high intellect, who is now a senior officer in the German military intelligence.’
If I had expected Mr Corkran to bite the stem off his pipe, or his head to simply explode, I was disappointed. He could be a very cool customer, our Mr Corkran; not an eyelid did he bat.
‘This Haberland – he was a friend of yours at Cambridge? Why am I not surprised by that? You do know some rum coves, Albert.’
‘I thought my rummier acquaintances – and I admit I have a bulging address book full of them – were the reason you recruited me, but I can’t count the mysterious Dr Haberland among the rest of the riff-raff. True, he was a year below me at St Ignatius College, which in certain Cambridge circles makes us both riff-raff, but he was, possibly uniquely, both a gentleman and a scholar. His proper name is Robert Albrecht Freiherr von Ringer, but he rarely used the Freiherr title. The Germans went off the whole idea of aristocratic titles after the Armistice and, in these days of National Socialism, a title might be a hindrance rather than a help.’
‘Well you’d know all about that sort of thing,’ Corkran said, rather gruffly I thought. ‘But you’re sure that Haberland and Ringer are one and the same?’
‘Absolutely. Étienne Fleurey confirmed it, though of course he only knows him as Haberland; but from the description of the scar on his face, and the story he told Fleurey of how he got it, then it’s definitely Robert Ringer.’
‘And just how did he get that scar?’
‘Er … that would be my fault, I’m afraid. It was a complete accident during a bout of fencing. It was not, I repeat not, a duel.’
‘So there are no lingering hard feelings there?’
‘Certainly not on my part, and I seriously doubt if there are any on Ringer’s. At the first sight of blood we stopped the fight, called it a draw and shook hands.’
‘That the way you do things at Cambridge?’
‘That’s the way everybody does it on the fencing piste. It’s required behaviour if it’s not in the rules. After trying to stab or slash a chap in the name of sport, the least you can do is shake his hand.’
Mr Corkran did not seem convinced by this and murmured, ‘Mmm …’ in a sort of low kittenish growl before getting back to business.
‘We have a file on Ringer, I presume?’
‘A thin one,’ I admitted. ‘He’s mid-ranking Abwehr, one of Admiral Canaris’s blue-eyed boys, based in Marseilles. That ties in with what Fleurey told me; not that Étienne knows anything about German military intelligence, but he’s not stupid. When the man he knows as Dr Haberland summoned him to Marseilles, provided him with the necessary permit
s and money to travel to the Occupied Zone and even pointed him towards Resistance cells in Brittany, it was fairly clear he was a man of influence if not power. I suspect Haberland had Fleurey’s escape route carefully planned out, and was keeping a fatherly eye on the progress of his private messenger all down the line.’
‘And Fleurey’s motives for volunteering to be a messenger for German intelligence?’
‘Threefold, I think. Étienne was always slightly deferential to, and very trusting of, anyone with good manners—’
‘Clearly,’ said old Corkran, but I ignored him and what I was sure was meant to be a slight.
‘Sometimes too trusting, especially when it came to unpaid bar bills. Whatever else he may be, and I have not seen him for several years, Robert Ringer is a gentleman and impeccably polite. Fleurey would have trusted him, and certainly so once he’d declared that he was a former sparring partner of mine.
‘Secondly, Fleurey is also an unapologetic Anglophile, not to mention a great rugby fan. They play rugby down in Mentone, you know, and his hotel was very popular with English tourists. He was clearly not happy living under Italian occupation, though I doubt he would be much happier living under the Vichy regime. The chance to get to England, albeit via a journey fraught with danger, would have been very tempting. The third factor which clinched it was that if he agreed to be Haberland’s personal carrier pigeon, then Haberland would ensure that Étienne’s wife and children were spirited away to Switzerland. That was an important consideration for the poor chap; you see, his wife’s half-Jewish.’
‘Yes, well that would be,’ agreed Mr Corkran in his headmaster’s voice. ‘So that’s the messenger sorted, what about the message?’
‘Now that’s what’s interesting,’ I gushed, perhaps playing the schoolboy trying to gain house points too much. ‘Haberland told Fleurey to speak to no one but me, which is why he clammed up when faced with his MI5 interrogators.’
‘Those buggers from Five …’ grumbled Mr C., as he often did.
‘His reasoning was that anything Fleurey told them would get straight to de Gaulle and the Free French and they would almost certainly muck things up.’
‘That’s a bit harsh. We are fighting on the same side, after all.’
‘True, but there are plenty in Vichy who trust the Germans more than the Gaullists, though I don’t pretend to be an expert on French politics.’
‘Winston calls them “caitiffs”.’
‘Who?’
‘The Vichy leaders. I had to look it up.’
‘It means contemptible cowards,’ I said before I could stop myself.
‘I knew you’d know. Now stop showing off and get on with your report.’
‘Yes, sir. Fleurey went along with it and wouldn’t say a word until he had the shell-like of yours truly at his beck and call. The message Haberland was sending was an offer of intelligence on some secret research being done on the Riviera, out of the French navy base in Toulon. A team of their naval officers under a Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau are experimenting with a new compressed air aqualung, which would give their underwater divers a greater range and more flexibility than anything anyone’s seen before. They are conducting tests in a cove near a place called Bandol, which is between Toulon and Marseilles, and Haberland seems to be offering me a ringside seat for the proceedings.’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘Because he knows I would appreciate a spot of spear-fishing or a paddle in the wine-dark sea – or is that the Aegean? No, perhaps not. I can tell from the look on your face you’re not happy with that theory, but really, I think it’s the most plausible.’
Mr Corkran aimed his frozen face at me in one of his famous ‘looks’, usually reserved for the receiving of bad news at inter-departmental meetings.
‘Stop blathering, Albert. What’s this Ringer feller up to?’
‘He’s inviting me to the south of France, but quite why I do not know. One thing’s for sure, it’s got nothing to do with the French navy’s underwater experiments.’
‘Why not? Sounds to me as if the chocolate sailors over in room thirty-nine at the Admiralty would choke on their pink gins over something like that.’
‘Exactly, and Robert Ringer and his Abwehr colleagues would know that. They wouldn’t try and give – or sell – me such a secret, they’d approach someone in naval intelligence. I’m sure they have channels for doing that.’
‘Which begs the question of why the Abwehr is offering such intelligence to the enemy in the first place. Could this be an elaborate plot to get one over on the SD?’
Mr Corkran, as usual, had a point. It was common knowledge that there was no love lost between German military intelligence, the Abwehr, run by that cunning old fox Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and SD or Sicherheitsdienst, the Security Service of Himmler’s SS, run until recently by the late and unlamented Reinhard Heydrich. The two organizations were constantly jostling for power and doing each other down in a bloody rivalry which made the internecine sniping between MI5 and MI6 seem positively childish.
‘At the end of the day, I suppose it could, though how getting little old me to go to Marseilles would score points for the Abwehr is a mystery.’
‘The SD have a fondness for kidnapping the upper classes. They had a go for the Duke of Windsor not that long ago. That’s why he was packed off to the Bahamas.’
‘I hardly think I’d be a prize catch, and not worth more than half-a-crown in ransom money. No, given the trouble he’s taken to send me the invitation, I think Robert Ringer wants to see me about something important. But I also think it has nothing to do with the aquatic adventures of the French navy.’
‘Do you intend sharing your evidence for that theory?’ asked Mr Corkran, as if awaiting a flimsy excuse for homework not handed in.
‘Simply this. Robert is a clever chap; he was far brighter than I at Cambridge, though I admit that doesn’t set the bar too high. Given the business he’s in and the government he reports to, he has to be clever to survive. He has just taken a French citizen out of a zone of Italian occupation, sent him across Vichy France and then the Occupied Zone, and then helped him across the Channel into the arms of an enemy power, not to mention smuggling a wife with Jewish blood, as the Nazis would put it, and her children into neutral Switzerland.
‘Now in doing all that, he was taking an enormous risk. The Vichy police, the SD, the Gestapo or traitors within the local population could have wrecked his little scheme at any number of points; even his own organization, as I’m pretty sure he’s acting off his own bat. Fleurey might even have given himself away. In which case, Ringer would need a cover story, a story to cover himself should Fleurey be picked up and asked some difficult questions.’
‘In which case, Fleurey could only give the cover story because he didn’t know the real one.’
‘Exactly, and Ringer would have prepared a position of deniability or some plausible excuse for his actions, should anyone demand an accounting.’
‘So what’s behind all this?’
‘The whole point, I think, was to get Fleurey safely to England, where he would demand to speak only to me and give me a message which I would know could be trusted.’
‘But you just said the message about these French deep-sea divers was a red herring – if that’s not one of your silly puns.’
‘It was – it is, and I do rather like the idea of it being a herring of any colour. The real message Fleurey carried was one that only a few people in England – perhaps just me – would pick up on.’
‘So there’s a message within the message, eh? Well, don’t keep it to yourself.’
‘It’s not so much in the message as in the name of the sender,’ I said, perhaps a little too smugly. ‘Ringer knew I would know who sent the message because he’d told Fleurey about our little fencing accident at Cambridge and to make sure he mentioned it. But he never told Fleurey his real name, and Fleurey is convinced he’s called Theodre Haberland, which is the name of
a character known as ‘the Professor’ in the children’s book Emil and the Detectives. It’s one of my favourite novels as it happens, and years ago Robert sent me a German first edition, for which I never thanked him properly now I think of it.’
‘If that’s a clue, what’s it supposed to mean?’ Mr Corkran bristled to the extent that I feared for his blood pressure.
‘It means that whatever Ringer’s up to, it will be to our advantage rather than Hitler’s.’
‘How do you work that out from a kids’ book?’
‘Because that particular book was one of Robert’s favourites too, and it was also one of the books that the Nazis made a point of burning publicly.’
FIVE
Second Bureau
London. June – July 1942
Naturally I couldn’t just throw my swimming togs and my bucket and spade into the back of the Lagonda and tootle down to the Riviera, even though Mr Corkran had approved the idea. There was a war on, after all, and that meant getting clearances and permissions in triplicate from all and sundry, but first I did the decent thing and took Étienne Fleurey up the West End for a slap-up meal.
It wasn’t what any self-respecting Frenchman would have called a gastronomic experience, except perhaps ironically, but it was the best London had to offer at the time. Got the idea from a chap in naval intelligence who took two captured U-boat crew out on the razzle in an attempt to wheedle some secrets out of them as he got them squiffy. The wheeze didn’t work, and at the end of the evening he ended up with two very drunk Nazis in the back of a taxi and no secret information. I think he got into a spot of bother with the Lords of the Admiralty over that.
