Mr Campion's War

by Mike Ripley

  Only when she had made the sign of the cross and knelt next to me did I realize how young the girl was; a mere ‘slip of a girl’, as my mother and several aunts would have called her, though I had never been quite sure exactly what that meant. I guessed her age at fifteen or sixteen. She wore a short-sleeved cotton dress, clean but frayed around the edges and with numerous sewn repairs, suggesting a hand-me-down from a mother or older sister. Her hair, bunched hurriedly under her headscarf, was black, curly and smelled faintly of olive oil. She displayed neither jewellery nor make-up, and was bare-legged, as most women were in a city where the climate eased the pain of black-market silk stockings costing four or five times their weight in gold dust.

  I resisted the urge to ask why she was not in school, but some instinct told me that would be courting a danger that not even the sanctuary of the church could deflect. I decided to dispense with the pleasantries and put our relationship on a civilized basis of mutual respect.

  ‘How long have you been following me? You seem very good at it.’

  ‘Since you left your hotel disguised in those clothes,’ she said, then shrugged her thin shoulders. ‘It was not difficult.’

  ‘Am I permitted to know why you are following me?’

  ‘I have been ordered to look after you while you are in Marseilles.’ She said it out of the corner of her mouth in that matter-of-fact tone which the young adopt when dealing with the obviously stupid older generation, keeping her eyes closed and her hand clasped in prayer. ‘And from the evidence of last night, you are, M’sieur, in need of a guardian angel.’

  ‘You were wise not to intervene.’

  ‘I was not armed. Next time I will be.’

  I have since thought that to have been an example of sheer youthful bravado, but at the time I was convinced of her sincerity, for such an angelic face in such a pious setting could not possibly be guilty of hubris or braggadocio.

  ‘Why were you following me last night?’ I whispered, curbing an idiotic impulse to suggest that we move into one of the confessional boxes.

  She closed her eyes and rested her forehead on her entwined fingers. ‘I was following the men who followed you. They work for a gangster called Pirani, and they had found you before I did – to rob you, it seems.’

  ‘And they were successful,’ I confessed. ‘It might have been worse for me if the police had not arrived when they did.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said with something of a sneer, ‘that was convenient, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Fortunate, I would say, from my point of view, that is. But why were you following the men who were following me? You said they found me before you did, which suggests that you were expecting me.’

  ‘London told us to expect somebody – a person who might need our help.’

  I put on my best tortured-owl face, an expression I have been told fits me like a glove – or perhaps that should be a slap with a glove.

  ‘London?’ I said, wide-eyed and clearly confused. ‘But mademoiselle, I am from Quebec. I am Canadian.’

  The girl turned her head lightly so that she could aim two very blue and very withering eyes on me from inside the frame of her headscarf.

  ‘Please, M’sieur, this is a house of God. Your lies will not work here.’

  She said I should call her La Pucelle – ‘The Maid’ – and I, of course, asked if that was as in The Maid of Orleans, who we knew from our schoolboy history books as Joan of Arc. Not only was she not flattered by a comparison, however tenuous, with a national heroine, she seemed to take it in her stride, and told me quite casually that her nom de guerre was simply because she came from Orleans, and had I not noticed her accent? She added that her real name was not Jeanne and she was now fighting for the English rather than against them.

  I told her my name was Didier Ducret, although I was only just getting used to it myself, and that I was from Bordeaux (or should that have been Poitiers?), and she pursed her tiny lips and puffed out a breath of disbelief coupled with resignation.

  It was one of the most bizarre discussions I have ever had. There we were, kneeling, hands (if not minds) occupied in prayer, eyes front, looking towards the altar, conversing in terse, sibilant phrases. We must have looked like a demented pair of ventriloquist dummies and, given the setting, I was rather surprised no one called for an exorcism.

  La Pucelle was not giving much away; virtually nothing, actually. I quizzed her about who had sent her and how she had received instructions ‘from London’. Through clenched teeth she hissed that she would not reveal her sources but that the information she had received had been accurate: she was to watch for a British agent who would pose as a Canadian diplomat and be easy to spot as he would appear both lost and stupid. This latter point, I felt, could easily have been withheld to protect my sensitivities, but my new young friend saw no reason to spare my feelings. I did not complain, for at least I now knew who she was working for.

  She did not ask me how I had survived the assault of the previous evening, nor – fortunately – where I had spent the night, which showed either a sweet naïveté or a rather disconcerting lack of interest in my health and well-being. It was left to me to broach the subject, but she had given me an opening by mentioning the name Pirani as the employer of my unwelcome welcome committee, and she seemed happy to whisper fluently on that subject.

  In the time it would have taken to recite a pair of the longer psalms, I learned that Paul Pirani was one of the senior predatory fish swimming in the murky waters of the Marseilles underworld, with a fin or a barbel in every criminal racket going. La Pucelle reeled off a litany of wrong-doings, including: drugs, extortion, smuggling, protection rackets, espionage, gun-running, corrupting policeman and judges, blackmail and ‘slavery of women’, by which I think she meant prostitution, though I certainly did not press one of such tender years for details.

  The two thugs who had attacked me were known to be Pirani’s henchmen, but robbery-with-violence on one of the main streets of the city was hardly normal behaviour for cut-throats such as they, who preferred to practise their trade in the dark passages and alleys abutting the docks. I accepted my cherubic advisor’s assessment of the situation and was honest, if vague, when she asked me what my assailants had got away with: my wallet; some – but not all of – my money, and my papers.

  ‘It was the papers they were after,’ confided La Pucelle, her brow creased in concentration. ‘That is why they did not use the knife.’

  ‘Well, a dead visiting diplomat lying in the street might be embarrassing to the municipality,’ I agreed earnestly, only to find myself quietly but very firmly rebuked.

  ‘Do not be ridiculous! A passeporte diplomatique is a valuable thing, worth much money. They did not want to get blood on it!’

  To say I was lost for words at the calm, matter-of-fact way in which this child had analysed the situation would not be putting too fine a point on it. Rudely, I stared at her, until she turned her head and met my gaze.

  We looked at each other with pity, but we pitied each other for different reasons. She clearly thought she was in the presence of an idiot. I only hoped that, whoever she was, she was on my side.

  Whether she was my guardian angel or my guard dog, The Maid was certainly dedicated to her task, and as following me covertly was now no longer an option, she opted to resume her duties by sticking to my side as if glued there. When I decided that we had stayed kneeling in the cathedral long enough – not for propriety’s sake but rather the need to stretch my legs – she rose to her feet, crossed herself, shuffled to the end of the pew and genuflected with practised rhythm. Somewhat hypocritically, I followed her excellent example and, once outside in the weak but warming sunshine, she removed her headscarf like a conjuror and tucked it though the fabric belt of her cotton dress. Out of my jacket pocket, I pulled the rather greasy beret that the Abwehr’s costume department had provided and placed it on my head at what I considered to be a jaunty angle. The Maid, her expression a cloud of disapproval, r
ose on her toes and reached up to straighten it and pull it down further over my ears. In silence, I deferred to her local fashion sense.

  ‘Come,’ she commanded, ‘let us walk together and I will show you the error of your ways.’

  ‘I thought we had just left the place where I might have received enlightenment,’ I observed, but the girl was both dismissive and eminently practical.

  ‘The church may look after your soul; I am concerned with your safety. We will walk together and when we talk I will call you “Papa” if anyone is close enough to hear us.’

  There seemed little point in debating her orders – and disobeying was clearly out of the question – because as a stratagem it perfectly fitted my immediate needs. I could not, however, resist pointing out a minor flaw in my overconfident young mentor’s plan.

  ‘And should we be asked for our papers? Will it not be embarrassing that father and daughter have different names, not to mention that the father does not know his daughter’s name at all?’

  The thought troubled her only for as long as it took her bottom lip to jut out in a sulk, to quickly retract into an infuriatingly charming crooked smile.

  ‘Then I will be your niece and call you Uncle Didier. You may call me Corinne.’

  ‘That is a good name,’ I said. ‘It means “beautiful maiden”, I believe, from the Greek kora.’

  She seemed satisfied with that, if not impressed, looped an arm through mine and began to lead me away from the sanctuary of the cathedral, leaving me to ponder that if it was necessary for me to hire a temporary niece, why could I not have chosen a less bossy one?

  Without any consultation on which parts of the old port I might wish to go sightseeing in, the girl steered me across the Place de la Major, passing uncomfortably close to the police station, and into the dank warren of streets through which she had followed me earlier. With her head occasionally bouncing off my shoulder in a simulation of filial affection, she chatted away in a sing-song tone which thinly disguised the dressing-down she was giving me.

  ‘The street directly ahead takes you up the hill and into the Panier district. Had you gone that way instead of into the cathedral, you would have found yourself in the dark heart of Marseilles.’

  It was not a phrase, I thought, which would come naturally to a fifteen-or sixteen-year-old who was not a native of the city, and I wondered where she had heard it.

  ‘They call it that,’ said my new niece, showing an uncanny ability to read my thoughts, ‘because the Panier is controlled by the gangsters of Marseilles. Everything up there is owned and run by those rats, and the worst of them is Paul Pirani, whose men attacked you last night. You were close to wandering into their nest this morning, until I allowed you to see me and you ran into the cathedral.’

  ‘That was most considerate of you,’ I conceded, ‘but what if I had scampered the other way, into the Panier?’

  ‘Then I would have known that you were either a fool not to be trusted or we would have to tell London that they needed to send another agent. No one wanders innocently into the Panier; they take no prisoners there, and they hate those of us who resist Vichy most of all, as Vichy is good for business.’

  ‘And you hate the Vichy government?’ I asked.

  ‘I despise the collaborators in Vichy,’ the girl said with venom, ‘but I hate the filthy Boches.’

  The vitriol she put into those words – and hearing them spew from such a young, angelic mouth – gave me pause for thought. How was I going to break it to her that I had a lunch appointment with the filthy Boches?

  ELEVEN

  Flotsam, Possibly Jetsam

  ‘Her name is Corinne Thibus,’ said Robert. ‘She is an orphan and has been wandering around Marseilles for over a year, being a minor irritant to the Vichy authorities and running messages for the communists. She is not considered a person of serious interest.’

  I appreciated the background information but saw no reason to add to Robert’s stock of it. Mademoiselle Thibus was not, I was sure, working for the communists but saw no reason to enlighten the Abwehr. It would be safer for my proxy niece if she remained a person of little interest.

  It had taken all my extensive charm and powers of persuasion, not to mention several whopping great lies, to persuade my young companion to allow me an hour’s furlough from my unexpected, though fascinating, guided tour of the shadowy and pungent backstreets of Marseilles. I spun her a yarn, being as vague as possible, that I had to meet a ‘contact’ (which was true) who might be frightened off (unlikely) if I turned up with a niece they knew I did not have.

  I made her promise not to follow me and, to make sure she did not, I bribed her with a handful of notes and told her to get herself a good lunch and then meet me back at the cathedral in an hour. Hunger trumped duty and she confided that she knew a boulangerie where they would exchange tickets for bread for slices of pizza, though hard cash often did the trick if one wasn’t carrying one’s ration book.

  I had watched until she had disappeared into the narrow streets, then doubled back towards the cathedral, checking every few minutes that she was following her stomach and not me. Skirting the giant building with its multiple Byzantine domes, I hurried on to the Bassin de la Joliette.

  The harbour was working at perhaps a quarter of its peacetime capacity, with the majority of berths along its four piers empty of ships. The few dock workers and seamen drifting along the quayside eyed me suspiciously, probably suspecting I was after one of their jobs, but I pressed on towards the Joliette railway station, beyond sidings where empty goods wagons stood idly rusting, and entered the steam-and smoke-filled café there.

  The café was cheap and popular, and clearly the majority of patrons were not there for the menu, rather to exchange or take delivery of suspicious packages wrapped in newspaper under the tables. It seemed it was a regular and blatant black-market palace, and I must have fitted in perfectly as none of the clientele gave me a second look. Robert too blended right in when he arrived dressed in oil-stained overalls, a patched and threadbare seaman’s pea-coat and a dark blue fisherman’s cap pulled down over his ears. He had a rectangular parcel wrapped in newspaper which he placed on the table between us.

  He nodded a greeting and asked, in French, if the fish soup I had ordered was worth eating or ‘the usual filth’? I shrugged non-committedly – it was not the sort of restaurant which received lengthy reviews – and he called towards the bar for a bowl of the same.

  Scraping a rickety chair to the wobbly table, which I was trying to steady with my elbows and knees, Robert sat down and leaned in towards me.

  ‘Speak French and speak it quietly.’ He inched the parcel towards me. ‘At some point give me some money and take them – it’s a pack of cigarettes. Try and look suspicious.’

  ‘I will do my best,’ I said. ‘I may need them, I’ve had a very stressful morning.’

  I began what was no doubt a garbled account of how my shadow had turned into a fellow penitent and emerged as my niece-cum-guardian angel. Robert, of course, had known exactly of whom I was talking.

  ‘She could be useful,’ he said after he had told me her name and his suspicions of her political beliefs, ‘if you think you can trust her.’

  ‘I cannot believe that she means me any harm.’

  ‘It is your life at stake, Albert. Do not be fooled by her age. In the northern zone we have taken casualties because many a careless soldier has seen a pretty young face and not the grenade she carries behind her back.’

  ‘I am not a German soldier occupying her country,’ I pointed out, ‘but I promise to keep an eye on her handbag for unsightly bulges.’

  ‘Do not joke about such things,’ he scolded, ‘but use the girl. She can take you to places in Marseilles which I cannot. Are you meeting her again?’

  When I nodded, he said, ‘Then ask her if she knows the English Seamen’s Mission, because that is where you need to go as soon as possible.’

  ‘Why?’

&nbs
p; ‘Because my sources say that is where a certain gentleman with a nasty shoulder wound is in hiding.’

  ‘That was quick work,’ I said, giving credit where it was due.

  ‘I told you, we pay very well. You must see if the man still has your diplomatic passport, because you are going to need it.’

  ‘I am?’

  ‘Most certainly. It will help you get into the concentration camp.’

  ‘Excuse me, did you just say “into”?’

  I made sure I was hidden in the shadows of the arches around the cathedral’s west door, before my hour’s grace from my guardian angel expired, so that I was able to observe her as she strolled casually across the place, tying on her headscarf as she walked. She was less than ten feet from where I was skulking when she stopped and turned slowly on her heels, scouring the faces of the passing pedestrians as if waiting for someone – an uncle, perhaps – to escort her inside.

  It had been my intention to disabuse her of the view that I was the easiest of pigeons to follow, and also, perhaps, to sneak up behind her and give her a bit of a fright. Standing within the aura of that magnificent church, though, I decided not to be so childish – and just possibly what Robert von Ringer had said about hand grenades also affected my judgement. And so I compromised on a discreet cough and a friendly ‘Mademoiselle?’ when I was within two yards of her.

  She still reacted as if stung as she turned to face me, and I could not help but smile at the fact that the front of her dress was spotted with pastry crumbs, which completed the picture of a guilty schoolgirl.

  Before she could speak, I said, ‘I need your help, Corinne.’

  Although Robert had told me roughly where the English Seamen’s Mission was situated, near the Joliette Basin not more than five hundred yards from where we had met at the station, I doubt I could have found it without Corinne Thibus, and certainly not gained entry so quickly or so easily. Not that she was keen to take me there at first. She was rightly suspicious of my mysterious private lunch; in her position I would have been too. I was also aware of the warnings I had received in London about the need to be circumspect about approaching or drawing attention to the Mission.