by Mike Ripley
I did not get the opportunity to explore Toulouse’s old town, known as ‘the pink city’ because of its buildings built with terracotta bricks, as Corinne took my hand and dragged me out of the station, across the road and into a small café, which was as dark and dingy on the inside as its soot-encrusted windows suggested it might be. If it had a name, I was not aware of it; it was simply one of those basic, unpretentious and totally anonymous establishments which could be found near factory gates or railway termini in any city of any size. Being France, customers would be more likely to have a glass of red wine rather than a mug of tea in front of them, and the advertising material pasted to the walls was certainly more exotic, but essentially the same sort of ‘caff’ could probably be found in London, Birmingham or Glasgow. Its clientele would be predominantly male and working-class, and strangers would be recognized immediately.
Thankfully Corinne did not seem to be a stranger there and, by dint of the fact that she was still holding my hand, acted as my passport and, judging by the suspicious stares of the rough-looking customers, also my bodyguard.
Through a hanging cloud of blue smoke and the distinctive scent of caporal tobacco, Corinne pulled me through a maze of small tables, each occupied by a lone male customer with a bowl of coffee or soup in front of them, and a packet of Gauloises or Celtiques within easy reach.
Without warning, Corinne released my hand and skipped, positively skipped, the last metre or so to a table near the end of the chrome-topped bar, bending over almost double to throw her arms around a seated figure, with whom she exchanged kisses on both cheeks. When he stood to disentangle himself, I could see that the man being so enthusiastically greeted was perhaps thirty years old; tall, thin, and sporting a healthy tan and a dashing pencil moustache. He had something of the Errol Flynn or the Clark Gable about him, and I think he knew it.
I waited politely for he and Corinne to exchange greetings – or devotions of love – in rapid, whispered French, and discreetly surveyed the café to observe the reaction of the clientele to this overt display of emotion. There was none. Every customer continued to eat, drink or smoke as if nothing untoward had happened. Perhaps nothing untoward had, and it was only my straight-laced English sensibilities which had been disturbed. I tried to look impervious as Corinne snaked an arm around his shoulders and maneuvered herself with considerable wriggling until she was seated on his knees.
‘Do not be alarmed, M’sieur Canadian,’ said the film star, ‘you are among friends. Every man here fights for General de Gaulle and most of them are armed.’
I acknowledged him with a short bow and noticed the pack of cigarettes nesting next to his coffee cup.
‘And you are clearly their officer,’ I said, ‘because you smoke Gitanes. It is something the British – and the Germans – noticed in the last war. French officers smoked Gitanes while enlisted men smoked Gauloises. You must be Captain Courteaux.’
I held out a hand and he shook it without rising from his seat, where he was anchored by Corinne.
‘You come to me from Passy,’ he said, ‘which is a high recommendation.’
‘He recommended you most highly, should I find myself in trouble and in need of a resourceful friend.’
‘And you are in trouble, m’sieur …? I do not think you gave your name.’
‘I did not, which was rude of me. The name Didier Ducret will have to do, I’m afraid, and if I am not yet in trouble, I certainly will be without your help.’
He whispered something in Corinne’s ear and the girl stood up, smoothed her skirt and flounced off behind the bar counter and into the kitchen. Courteaux pushed a chair away from the table with his foot.
‘Sit, and tell me how I can help, which I will if you can convince me that nothing you are involved in is contrary to the honour of a Free France.’
‘On that you have my word, though – as you do not know me – you can put little value on my word.’
Courteaux leaned back in his chair and, with the forefinger of his right hand, stroked the line of his moustache. It was a gesture I suspected he had practised in a bathroom mirror.
‘I may not know you, M’sieur Ducret, but Passy does – and he knows your name is not Ducret. Nor is it Hamelin, for you are neither French nor Canadian. Passy’s view is that you are too well known in London to pretend to be someone and something you are not.’
I did my best to appear crestfallen, although I was secretly relieved that Courteaux had had the foresight to check my credentials, probably by radio, with his superiors in England.
‘I always considered that I was rather good at appearing to be something I was not,’ I sighed, ‘but I suppose I should be grateful that Colonel … that Passy … vouched for me. I take it he did vouch for me?’
‘For you personally, yes, but not for your mission here in Vichy, about which he has no knowledge. Why are you in France?’
‘That I cannot tell you, at least not in detail,’ I said, noting that Courteaux stroking or tracing the line of his moustache was probably a nervous tic rather than simple vanity. ‘All I can say is that what I am doing will not harm France; or at least not the France you are fighting for. There are some in Vichy and others in Marseilles who will be harmed if my actions succeed, and they will do anything to stop me.’
‘We have no friends in Vichy and only enemies in Marseilles. How can we be of help here in Toulouse?’
‘I intend to get two people out of France and into Spain. I cannot stress how important it is for France that they do get out. One I will bring from Marseilles, the other will be collected from the Pau area. I have an escape route over the Pyrenees already agreed, but I will need transport, a safe house, and someone I can trust to establish a line of communication with my Spanish contact.’
Courteaux reached for his pack of Gitanes, extracted a cigarette and lit it from a match struck on his thumb nail. It was another move he had practised in front of a mirror.
‘That is all? You do not require my help in Marseilles?’
‘I was assuming that Marseilles was not in your operational area.’
‘It is not, but I have already assigned one of my best men to assist you there.’
‘You have?’
‘But of course, you know Corinne. Where is she? I think we should eat before your train back to Marseilles.’
The girl took her leave of Olivier Courteaux only after an extended bout of hugging and cheek-kissing, and we strolled back to the station, side by side, as the afternoon waned and a chill wind curled down off the distant mountains. From the café, Corinne had collected a sausage-shaped seaman’s bag, which she carried slung across her chest like a bandolier, the crispy ends of two long baguettes protruding from the open end, which she had said were provisions for our return train journey.
Only when we were walking along the platform awaiting the arrival of our train did she raise the subject of my mission.
‘Olivier has ordered me to help you,’ she said seriously. ‘There is someone you have to get out of Marseilles.’
I looked up and down the platform to make sure we were alone. There were policemen at the station entrance checking papers, but none within earshot.
‘A woman,’ I said, pausing to point at a faded timetable peeling off a noticeboard in case we were being observed, ‘who is currently a prisoner of the gangster Paul Pirani.’
‘In the Panier?’
‘I presume so, but that’s where I need your help, to find out where she is being held.’
‘This woman is important?’
‘Vital.’
‘And she is an Israelite?’
I concentrated on the timetable as if it were the most fascinating example of hieroglyphic inscriptions.
‘Yes, she is Jewish. Does it matter?’
I was not sure what answer I should expect, but it was certainly not the one I got.
‘And she is expecting a child.’
‘How did you know that?’ I hissed, resisting the urge to aban
don the charade of examining the timetable, pick the girl up by the shoulders and shake her violently.
‘Pirani sends one of his men to Madame Joubert’s shop every day for milk and eggs. He does not like being treated as a servant to what he calls a “dirty Jewess” who should not be allowed to bring “more of her kind” into the world.’
‘Can we find out where he takes the milk?’
‘I already have. He was easy enough to follow one morning. He goes to one of Pirani’s houses in the Panier. You will need me to find it for you. Alone in the Panier you would be lost in one minute and assassinated in two.’
Now I did tear myself away from the timetable poster and I stared at the girl, lost for words and only vaguely conscious of the fact that our train was pulling into the platform in a cloud of smoke and steam.
I touched Corinne lightly on the shoulder and said, ‘Come on, let’s find a good seat.’ As we walked down the platform, side by side, past the big, black panting engine and heading towards the carriages, a white fog of vented steam engulfed us briefly, and I could not resist adding: ‘You know, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.’
An hour into our journey, Corinne pulled one of the baguettes from her duffel bag, broke off a chunk and handed it to me. There was a faint sheen of something liquid smeared over parts of the crust and the bread smelled of something other than yeast, a smell I recalled from my enforced Commando training course in Scotland. Many was the time I had dipped fresh French bread into dishes of olive oil, but I had never before eaten it coated with gun oil.
FIFTEEN
After Eight
The Dorchester Hotel, London. 20 May 1970
‘You will not be familiar with the legendary Sten gun and how we thought it would win the war for us,’ said Mr Campion, with the resigned air of a university lecturer addressing an early morning tutorial.
‘What a ridiculous thing to say, Albert. How could Perdita possibly be expected to know about guns and such?’
Mr Campion turned to mollify his wife. ‘You are absolutely right, my dear. Perdita is blissfully young and mercifully ignorant of such things, but I was talking to Robert.’
‘Who I am sure is too well mannered to tell you when you are boring him. I really have no idea what has brought on all this talk about the war, anyway.’
‘Your husband may be a lot of things, Lady Amanda, though rarely boring,’ said the German politely, ‘but I have to disappoint him when I say I was very familiar with the British Sten gun. Unlike Albert, I found myself on the wrong end of one more than once during the war.’
‘Ah, but do you know the story of the genesis of the Sten?’ asked Campion, warming to his theme.
‘I think you’re going to tell us,’ observed Charles Luke.
‘I am, for it is a story of British pluck and ingenuity, and I shall tell it while we have our coffee and fashionably thin chocolate mints.’
Campion leaned back in his chair and signalled the hovering waiters to begin their assault on the empty coffee cups lined up along the table, each saucer already armed with a brace of mints in square paper envelopes.
‘They say necessity is the mother of invention, but an unexpected gift from an unlikely benefactor also helps,’ Campion began. ‘When the war started we – that’s us, the plucky British – were terribly unprepared. We were short of most things, and particularly, if you were in the army, there was a lack of sub-machine guns. We had some American ones, Thompsons, and they were much sought after, as everyone fancied themselves as a Chicago gangster from the Roaring Twenties; even dear old Churchill, who was photographed cuddling one and trying to look like George Raft.’
Unseen by Campion, Perdita mouthed a silent Who? towards her mother-in-law, who raised her eyebrows and quietly shook her head.
‘Just when our need was greatest, a mystery benefactor stepped in to help. Actually, it wasn’t much of a mystery: it was Mussolini; well, in a roundabout way it was. You see, our early victories – our only victories – had been in North Africa against the Italians, and our chaps in the desert had captured not only thousands of Italians, but millions of rounds of Italian ammunition. The problem was that the ammo was nine millimetre, a calibre which didn’t fit any standard-issue British firearm – so there was a need to invent one and thus the Sten was born. It had to be simple to use and able to be mass-produced quickly and cheaply. Almost immediately, a mythology developed around the gun. You could drop it in a river and drag it through mud and it would still fire. On the other hand, there were those who said the Sten was prone to jamming if the magazine was fully loaded and recommended thirteen bullets rather than thirty-two. Famously, a Sten gun jammed during the assassination of Heydrich in Prague in 1942, but millions were made and many thousands dropped to Resistance fighters in occupied Europe.’
Perdita’s jaw dropped, but she glanced across the table to where Corinne Thibus was deep in conversation with Rupert and Astrid Vidal before she spoke and, when she did, she kept her voice low, suppressing both surprise and indignation.
‘Are you telling us that the teenage girl on that train with you was carrying a machine gun in her bag?’
‘Well, she was supposed to be my bodyguard and we were going into a rough district, so it was probably for the best. But it wasn’t just any old Sten gun, it was a prototype of the Sten Mark 2S.’
‘The Silent Sten,’ said Charles Luke involuntarily, blushing as four faces turned to stare at him. ‘We confiscated a batch of them from a firm of Maltese gangsters in Soho in 1947. They’d been lifted from the small-arms factory at Enfield, but thankfully never used in anger. Nasty things.’
‘I’m still not sure what we’re talking about,’ complained Perdita.
‘What Charles means,’ said Campion, ‘is a Sten gun with a built-in silencer, which made it a particularly dangerous weapon in the right – or should that be wrong? – hands.’
Perdita was suitably horrified. ‘You mean a teenage girl was walking around with a machine gun which could kill people quietly?’
‘There was a war on,’ said Robert Ringer before Mr Campion could.
‘But do we have to talk about it?’ Amanda’s voice sent a chill eddying down the crisp white tablecloth. ‘This is supposed to be a birthday party, not a regimental reunion. You really must pay more attention to your other guests, Albert, especially the younger ones. Look, young Edward is trying to attract your attention, almost certainly to tell you how bored he is with proceedings.’
‘Oh, I very much doubt that,’ smiled her husband. ‘Young Master Longfox has been anything but bored, making googly-eyes at Precious Aird all evening.’
However reluctantly, Edward Longfox had abandoned his place at the table near the American girl and was making his way down the room to the top table.
‘He looks to me a very serious young man,’ observed Robert Ringer.
‘Oh, he is,’ agreed Mr Campion, ‘and he looks to be a young man on a mission.’
It was clear that Master Longfox was steering a course directly for the Campions, carefully avoiding the other diners, and the waiting staff performing acrobatics trying to pour coffee into cups rather than over guests. When he reached the top table, he placed himself squarely behind the senior Campions and coughed politely, just in case they had not noticed his looming presence.
‘Happy birthday, Great Uncle,’ he said with great solemnity.
‘Thank you, Edward. Have you eaten well?’
‘Very well, thank you.’
‘Not having coffee?’
‘I do not take stimulants of any sort,’ said the young man with the seriousness of a junior funeral director. ‘Which is why I am currently free to act as Mr Lugg’s messenger boy.’
Campion focused on the far end of the left wing of the table.
‘Ah, yes, Lugg – a man who has never stinted on stimulants, at least not the liquid ones. Where is the old rogue? He seems to have disappeared, which is quite a trick for a man of his bulk. In his dinner su
it and dress shirt he might blend in to a pod of orcas, but otherwise he’s usually hard to miss.’
‘He’s with the kitchen staff … something to do with checking the cutlery. He was rather preoccupied, but he wanted me to tell you that the dis-koh-thee-kway, and he pronounced it like that, is being set up in the reception room.’
‘I will translate for Robert’s benefit,’ said Mr Campion.
‘Robert speaks perfect English,’ said Amanda pointedly.
‘Yes, but Lugg doesn’t. He was referring to the discothèque which I have hired to entertain the younger members of the party or those, like myself, who are not necessarily sound in wind and limb, but are young at heart. The music will be raucous and loud enough so that even Guffy Randall can hear it.’
Campion beamed beatifically into the silent, slightly stunned faces of his immediate audience.
‘Did you know,’ he began, as though the thought had just occurred to him, ‘that we get the word discothèque from the French? Well, obviously; but the original ones, during the war, were places where people met to dance to music which had been banned by the Vichy government.’
‘And we’re back to the war!’ said Amanda, shaking her head in mock despair.
SIXTEEN
Commando Raid
Marseilles. Late October – early November 1942
Our train eventually stumbled and wheezed back into Marseilles several hours after dark. We were tired and hungry, and I had no wish to visit the Panier before I had a chance to do some reconnaissance in daylight. To my surprise, Corinne agreed with me. Perhaps the euphoria and spring-in-her-step, so obvious in Toulouse when in the presence of her beloved Olivier, had dissipated on the long, slow train journey in my company, but she opted to return to her bed in the back of Madame Joubert’s shop in the Rue des Honneurs. That way she could get a few hours’ sleep and be on hand in the shop in the morning if Pirani’s man came to buy milk.
