Madeleine's War

by Peter Watson

  If I decided that Madeleine was…well, more than she seemed, I had to tell Hilary and he would have to tell his superiors. That might stop me going to France, might stop me having the chance to look for her. My mission might easily be aborted.

  It wasn’t too difficult to rationalise, of course. I had no concrete evidence that Madeleine was not exactly what she said she was. Just an old photograph, with a seemingly innocent explanation; and a coincidence about her mother’s being in Cromer on the day after a German spy had been arrested there.

  On top of which I had now been given an important assignment, far more important than Madeleine’s relationship—or non-relationship—with me, and what else she might or might not be. No doubt Hathaway and the prime minister could replace me, but my withdrawal—whatever the reason—wouldn’t be a popular move. There wouldn’t be much time to find a substitute to stop Legros briefing Perrault. And the prime minister had given me one of his cigars.

  I put the empty whisky glass on the bedside table, and laid my other hand on Zola’s back. He woke up, turned his head, and started licking my hand.

  No, I told myself, I had to keep my thoughts private for the moment, until I had more to go on.

  Given more time, had I not been scheduled to travel to France the very next day, I could have checked out Madeleine’s story—her past history—a bit more thoroughly than our people had been able to do before she arrived at The Farm. As it was, I had no choice but to take what I knew, and didn’t know, or half knew, to France with me, and see what happened.

  I turned on to my side and tried to sleep. Doubt is an awful snake of an emotion. Once it has you in its grip, it won’t let go. It spoils everything.

  I’d never had this kind of feeling with Celestine.

  PARIS

  SEPTEMBER

  · 18 ·

  THE AMERICAN JEEP PARKED OUTSIDE the Café Volnay, on the corner of the avenue Masson and the rue de Faubourg St. Honoré, was surrounded by a gang of boys, and one or two young girls, admiring the vehicle’s spare design and pointing to what looked like a couple of rusting bullet marks disfiguring one of its high mudguards.

  Three GIs—the Jeep’s crew—were taking a break at the café’s small marble-topped tables, drinking beer with their coffee and handing out cigarettes to anyone who cared to ask, including some of the boys who were barely in their teens.

  The avenue Masson was a wide boulevard of horse chestnut trees, off which the rue de Faubourg St. Honoré cut its busy way towards the Elysée Palace in the far distance. Armed with my impressive letter of authority signed by Churchill and a few SC2 bits and pieces provided by Duncan Kennaway, I had set up my headquarters around the corner from the Volnay, in a disused school, the École Lavoisier, in the rue de Troyes. This had been carried out with the aid of Roland Kemp, code name Badger, who had run the Tablet circuit out of Paris for the past three years—one of the very few not to be compromised. In Ardlossan Roland had kept us in touch with the latest developments in French underground life.

  We in SC2 had urged Badger and his circuit to find us some premises as soon as possible, so that no other Allied agency could get its hands on them. The war was a long way from being over.

  The Volnay was not the nearest café to the école, but according to Badger it had formed part of the Resistance during the occupation and so was now used by circuit members out of a sense of loyalty. Not irrelevant either was the fact that, having been part of the Resistance, the Volnay now had a better-than-average supply of foodstuffs—its links to the black market were well established and lunch there, which is what Roland and I were now beginning, was more interesting than elsewhere.

  We were sitting outside under an awning. It had rained not long before but had stopped for now.

  “Patrice,” said Roland when the waiter appeared. “Bonjour. Ça va?” How are you?

  Patrice shrugged in the way that only French people—and French waiters at that—can, but then a smile spread across his face as Roland held out a pack of Camels. Roland liked to roll his own cigarettes when he could, but, as he had told me, the French were short of tobacco and our supplies always made useful gifts, to ease the way with the locals. Patrice took a Camel, lit it with Roland’s shiny lighter, and settled it in between his lips as if he had gone the entire war without a smoke.

  In those early days of the liberation, in our part of Paris at least, restaurants didn’t have menus. There was so little food, even at the Volnay, that you just took what was on offer—there was rarely a choice.

  “What have you got for us today?” said Roland in French.

  “Quiche,” said Patrice, “or there’s quiche. Quiche with spinach.”

  “No meat?”

  Patrice shook his head. Ash that had formed on the end of his cigarette fell on to his white jacket. He brushed it off, leaving a smudge. “There’s egg in the quiche, I assume.”

  “Quiche it is, then,” said Roland. “And I think we’ve got some of that Bandol white left over in our bottle from yesterday. We’ll have that.”

  Patrice nodded and disappeared.

  The GIs were paying for their coffees and preparing to leave.

  It was amazing how quickly life had moved on since the liberation. De Gaulle had arrived back at the end of August, barely three weeks ago now. To begin with, the Americans had been welcomed with open arms, and that was still mainly true. But some things—like the liberation currency with which I could see the three GIs in front of us were paying—did not go down at all well with some Parisians. De Gaulle liked to pretend that it had been the French who had liberated Paris, as if the Americans and British (and Canadians and Poles) had had no hand in it, and some Parisians felt the same way. The liberation currency reminded them of the reality—the part played by other Allied soldiers.

  Still, the money was accepted: the soldiers knew their rights, and had risked their lives in getting to the avenue Masson. They weren’t about to stand for any nonsense.

  Roland I and watched them get back into their Jeep, offering yet more Camels to the boys and girls gathered around the vehicle, and then they zoomed off to L’Étoile and the Arc de Triomphe.

  As we watched the GIs go, the wine arrived. The Volnay operated a very sensible system of charging customers only for the wine they drank. If you were regulars, as Roland was, and I was becoming—it was my third day in France—any wine left over in a bottle had your name scribbled on the label. The bottle was then left on the back shelf of the bar for when you next appeared. It also encouraged customers to come back.

  Roland poured two glasses and passed one to me. We toasted each other.

  I was just acquiring a taste for wine. In the UK I had always drunk beer or whisky, but Roland had insisted on introducing me to wine and I was trying to like it.

  We sipped our drinks for a few minutes in silence.

  The horse chestnut trees in the avenue Masson were now bearing fruit, bright brown conkers, shiny as a Sam Browne belt. Shiny as whisky. I remembered reading how, in World War One, many of the chestnut trees in Paris had been cut down to burn as fuel. At least that hadn’t happened this time round.

  Still without definite news of Madeleine, one way or the other, I hadn’t given up hope completely. The British and American armies at least—being fighting organisations, used to the chaos of war and the requirements of post-battle life—had special departments to help track down missing persons. But the Resistance, especially now, with only half of the country liberated, and the other half not, was more interested in taking the fight to the Germans—settling a few old scores, and sorting out their own post-war positions—than in tidying up. In the same way, ratlines were being disbanded, and they were not at all bothered about telling anyone else. The situation was half orderly and half chaotic.

  I searched the faces of everyone on the pavements of Paris, just in case. During my three days in the newly liberated capital so far, I had bought her another small bracelet, this time from Cartier, as a gift for when w
e met. And as a show of optimism.

  I had never had the chance to buy Celestine any jewellery and I wasn’t going to make that mistake again.

  “Now,” said Roland, setting his glass down on the table before us. “I have a couple of pieces of news today, but before I tell you what I know, can we just get some basic figures agreed? Things have been moving so fast in the past few days that I need to clear my head if I am to set things straight.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Go ahead.”

  “Right, well. Am I correct in saying that there are, just now, September 1944, some fifty-seven circuits in France, thirty-two in what was until very recently the occupied zone, and twenty-five in what was Vichy France?”

  “That’s correct. With six circuits in Paris itself.”

  He nodded, reached forward again, took up his glass, and sipped some wine. “Well, the first thing I have to tell you is that, according to what I have been able to gather now that the Germans have retreated very nearly to Aachen, out of the thirty-two circuits in the occupied zone, nine were penetrated, four of them in Paris. So far as we can make out, the penetration began in Paris, with the Boxer, Carpenter, Ladder, and Anchor circuits.”

  I nodded my agreement. “The only ones not penetrated in Paris were yours, Tablet, and Flagon, near Versailles—am I right?”

  “Correct,” he said. “Then the penetration spread east to Cobbler around Reims, and west to Starling near Chartres, Mountain near Le Mans, and Crossbow, inland from St. Nazaire.”

  It was my turn to nod.

  “That fits—more or less—with what we know in Cathcart Place. How many people have we lost?”

  “I’ll come to that. You, I understand, are particularly interested in women agents—right?”

  “Yes.”

  Roland took a piece of paper from his pocket and put it on the table in front of me. “This is just a set of numbers if anyone finds it, but I know what the numbers refer to. Look.”

  He pointed to a column of figures, taking out a cigarette from his pack as he did so.

  “This top figure, two hundred and seven, is the total number of people in the nine penetrated circuits. Of that total, one hundred and sixteen are your people—our people—and the rest are locals. A few of these may have got away, but the great majority will have been captured, interrogated, and then either executed or shipped east to the camps. Most likely they would have been executed there too.”

  He pointed to the next figure down and lit his cigarette.

  “This figure, forty-one, is your figure—I mean it comes from your people in London. It’s the number of agents in all circuits, in all of France, on D-Day, still unaccounted for. Of that number, twenty-seven are men and fourteen are women.”

  He looked at me. “We haven’t heard from any of them.”

  “Do we know if any of them have been executed yet? Do we know anything for certain in any individual case?”

  “I’m working on that. One of the Parisians, Claudine Petit, who worked in the Gestapo headquarters, is now in prison at La Santé—that’s the big maximum-security penitentiary in the south of the city. You have an appointment there tomorrow afternoon. It’s in her interest to talk—otherwise, as a collaborator, all sorts of things may happen to her—so I’m hopeful she will be able to shed light on some of those agents who passed through Avenue Foch. And we know from the prison cells within Avenue Foch that captured agents were brought there for interrogation.

  “The other possibility is Justine Coudehard. She was a member of the Boxer circuit but was away on Resistance business when the penetration first happened, and she was alerted and stayed undercover. She is a very brave woman, a communist but a sensible one, able to put France before her beliefs when it matters, and she is known to have killed two collaborators. Her character is not in doubt, even if her politics are.

  “She also happens to be—Well, let’s just say that you and I have both seen plainer women. She has a shape like Veronica Lake. I was thinking that she might work with you, as your assistant, so to speak. She is a native Parisienne, she knows the country, the Resistance underground—she might be very useful when you are interrogating people. She can help you grasp whether what they are saying is plausible, whether it fits with what she knows about the way the Resistance—and the Gestapo—work and worked—Aah! Here’s the quiche.”

  We sat back as it was served.

  Roland held up the empty bottle of Bandol.

  “Bring us another of these, Patrice, please.”

  “Any more Camels?” Patrice asked, bluntly.

  “Sure.” Roland took out his packet and shook one free.

  Patrice nodded his thanks. “If I forget to put the next bottle on the bill, don’t make a fuss, okay? You know what Madame Cabris can be like.”

  Roland put his finger to his lips, looked at me, and winked. “That’s Paris today, quid pro quo all round.” After Patrice had ambled back inside the café, Roland leaned forward. “That’s a first,” he whispered. “He must like the look of your ugly mug.”

  We tucked in. The pastry was good, the spinach less so. But, after a few glasses of wine, it is amazing how things like that matter less and less. As the French say, “Only the first bottle is expensive.”

  —

  THE HOTEL SÉRANON, WHERE I HAD billeted myself, was in the rue de Beaufort, two or three streets away from the avenue Masson and the École Lavoisier, south towards the River Seine. The hotel was small and quiet, with a central courtyard that was a riot of flowers and one or two small trees. There were a couple of other British army types, like me, and the management only accepted commissioned officers, all of which made for an agreeable and fairly calm environment. I had two rooms, right next to the washrooms, on the second floor, overlooking the courtyard.

  I could have stayed nearer the school had I preferred. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to live too near the shop, so to speak. If I was to kill Perrault, and get away with it, my anonymity might be crucial. I had to keep myself to myself.

  On top of that, having been in France in 1941 and 1942, I had made my own contacts, people I hadn’t seen since then and who might very well be dead by now, but who—if they were not—could possibly help me in my search for Madeleine. Especially as Madeleine might not be…what everyone else thought she was.

  That evening, after my lunch with Roland, I put the finishing touches to the list of half a dozen French people with whom I had worked back in 1942, and who I remembered as being Paris-based or Paris-connected.

  As I saw it, I had two routes to take. The very fact that the Gestapo headquarters in Paris had five prison cells, in the basement, as Roland had told me, was proof enough that captured agents were brought there and, presumably, interrogated in the first hours and days after their capture, while the information they possessed was still fresh. And we knew from our own experience, as I had explained to Madeleine and many others at Ardlossan, that if captives are going to “crack,” they do so early on, in the first few days after capture. Presumably, people spent a few days in the Paris prison cells before being shipped onward to the east. But I’d have to check that out.

  My second route was west, towards Nantes and the Atlantic coast. I knew about the Crossbow circuit, which Madeleine had been about to join. Crossbow would certainly have had links to the ratline which I had heard went down the Atlantic coast through Fontenay, La Rochelle, Cognac, Bordeaux, and on into northern Spain near Bayonne. If Madeleine had got on to the ratline, and travelled some way along it, before being captured, or injured, it would be difficult for me to follow her path and fulfill my other obligations. France was a big country—Bordeaux, say, was more than five hundred kilometres from Paris.

  If she had been captured and was being held in the German enclaves of St. Nazaire or La Rochelle, then I was stymied. Presumably, there was no way into or out of those redoubts, not yet, anyway.

  And there was always the chance she had used her pill. Or that she was—I had to say it—a German spy, who was
now back with her masters in Berlin.

  I took an early bath. You could never be sure in those days that hotels would have enough hot water for all their guests, so an early hot tub was safer than a later one. I put on a fresh shirt and socks and underwear and went out on to the street, staying away from the wide thoroughfares and keeping to the narrow backstreets that Paris does so well.

  In the rue Leroux I found a bar-cum-bistro where I sat outside to begin with, for a pre-dinner drink. A previous occupant of the table had left a newspaper on his chair and I picked it up. Newspapers had sprung up like mushrooms in the wake of the liberation. There was still a paper shortage and the print quality left a lot to be desired, and left a lot of printer’s ink on your fingers, but it was still good to have free newspapers again in the French capital.

  In those first days in Paris I had to pinch myself several times. Ahead of me—it was as certain as anything—lay a series of very unpleasant and possibly dangerous duties. I would, I was sure, discover that several colleagues whom I knew well had been executed. Among that number Madeleine might well be included. Or I would discover that she was…a German agent. And on top of it all, I had to murder an ally.

  But for now, here I was in beautiful Paris, enjoying an aperitif and anticipating dinner in civilized surroundings. In a curious upside-down wartime way, for the moment I felt lucky.

  I looked about me, to remind myself one more time how beautiful Paris was. I ordered an experimental glass of red wine and settled down to read the paper. It was called Limoges Matin, a provincial rag that I didn’t know, and no doubt it wouldn’t last very long. Also, this copy that had been left on the seat where I was sitting was torn and incomplete; some pages were missing. But it was all I had.

  About eight o’clock I left my seat outside, as it was getting chilly, and went inside to have dinner. There wasn’t much choice but there was chicken, so I didn’t delay, ordering that and a half-bottle of red wine.