Madeleine's War

by Peter Watson

  “What did the Gestapo do?”

  “I don’t know, but I never saw the male nurse again.”

  “And do you have a name for us this time?”

  Claudine nodded. “Someone heard the Gestapo call him Rollo. It’s not a French name, is it?”

  Justine looked at me.

  I nodded. “Rollo Southrop. Part of Archive circuit, near Pontoise.”

  So Rollo had escaped, I told myself. And he hadn’t yet arrived back in Britain, so far as I knew.

  Justine was huddling forward again on her chair, leaning into the table.

  “Now, this is the most important part, Claudine. More names. Names of prisoners, of captured agents, who passed through Gestapo headquarters.”

  “But I told you…there were—I can’t remember—”

  “That’s not how it works.” Justine nodded to me, as I reached into my briefcase. “We have a list here, which we are going to read out to you, slowly. If you remember the name, if it’s a name that you recognise as having been through Avenue Foch, say so. This is very important because we are going to try to trace some of these people, whether they are dead or alive—do you understand?”

  Claudine nodded.

  “Do you have a family, Claudine?” said Justine.

  “Yes, of course. My father is dead, but my mother and sisters are alive. One sister is married with two children.”

  “They will be worried about you now, yes?”

  Claudine nodded. “Very much.”

  “So you will understand why we need to trace the whereabouts of all these agents. Their families need to know what happened to them.”

  Claudine nodded again.

  “One other thing before we begin,” said Justine. “Of all the agents held in the cells at Avenue Foch, how many were men and how many were women?”

  “Oh, far more men, of course. I only saw—what?—about a dozen women in all my time in the building.”

  “They were brave, those women, yes? They weren’t just cleaners.”

  It had the intended effect. Claudine blushed.

  “We are going to start with the women’s names,” said Justine. “Some of the names are real names, some are code names. Just tell us whether you remember any of them. I’ll give you another cigarette when we are finished. Ready?”

  Claudine nodded.

  Justine looked at me.

  I had the papers in front of me and began to read slowly.

  I wasn’t sure just how much we could rely on Claudine Petit’s memory. A great deal depended on the results.

  I began with the women’s names, as Justine had said. Out of the first nine proper names, Claudine recognized three.

  I tried to keep my voice steady when I reached “Madeleine Dirac.” Claudine shook her head.

  I breathed out noisily again, and relaxed.

  I got to the end of the list of proper names and then started on the code names. Just the code names of the women whose proper names she hadn’t recognised.

  “Brasero?” Brazier.

  “No.”

  “Hérisson?” Hedgehog.

  “Yes.”

  “Rossignol?” Nightingale.

  “No.”

  I took a deep breath and held my voice steady.

  “Chêne?” Oak.

  I looked at her hard, trying to see if her body language gave away her answer before she said anything.

  I couldn’t read her.

  Claudine nodded. “Yes—oh yes.”

  My chest bucked.

  Madeleine had been captured. She hadn’t committed suicide, or been held captive on the Atlantic coast—she had been through Avenue Foch and shipped east. That surely meant she was dead.

  Justine had noticed my reaction—she stared at me, wiping her lips with her tongue. But I had to get a hold of myself. This meant at least that Madeleine wasn’t—hadn’t been—a German plant, and in any case I wasn’t the only person to have lost someone in this war. Also, I hadn’t finished with Claudine Petit.

  We went through the men’s names, during which I learned that Ivan Wilde, who had been on the Ardlossan course with Madeleine, had also been through Avenue Foch and then sent east. So he, too, was dead.

  Briefly images of the wide stretches of sand at Ardlossan flooded my mind.

  “Okay,” I said. “That’s the names finished with.”

  I looked across to Justine. “Would you mind waiting outside for a moment? There are one or two confidential things I need to discuss with Madame Petit.”

  Justine frowned. “Are you sure? I thought—”

  “Yes, I’m certain. I won’t be long.”

  Still frowning, not liking this one bit, she scraped back her chair, got to her feet, knocked on the door, and, when it was unlocked, left the room.

  I offered Claudine Petit another cigarette and allowed her a moment to smoke it.

  “When I was in London, a few weeks ago, we heard from one of our agents who had escaped that you had told someone that you thought there was a double agent in Avenue Foch, a British agent who was also a German agent. Is that right? Do you know who the double agent was?”

  She was enjoying her cigarette and was relaxing. She talked more easily now. Maybe it was because Justine was out of the room.

  “Well, I think what I actually said must have got garbled in crossing the Channel.” She examined her fingernails. “What I actually told some of the Resistance people I know was that, one day, I was sitting in the café of the Gestapo headquarters with Jaquine Varennes. She was a widow whose husband had been German. He died before war broke out, but that meant Jaquine spoke some German—though she never let on to the Gestapo because it might come in handy at some point. Anyway, she told me she had overheard two of the Gestapo people talking about a mole. Or, to be more accurate, they had used the word ‘mole.’ What she didn’t know was whether they were referring to a German mole inside the British security services, or to a British agent whose code name was Mole. Her German wasn’t perfect, and she only overheard the conversation, so of course she couldn’t risk showing any interest.”

  Claudine herself risked a smile. “She could hardly ask them to repeat what they had said.”

  I nodded. “You and I are speaking French, Madame Petit, and you used the French word, taupe, for what we in English call a mole. Can you remember what the German is for ‘mole’?”

  “No. Because I didn’t hear it, Jaquine did.”

  “It’s easy for me to check whether any of our agents were code-named Mole, but even so I’d like to talk to Madame Varennes personally. Do you know where she is?”

  She squashed out the remains of her cigarette in the depression in the table.

  “Not precisely, no. After the Gestapo left Paris, she went south, to near Dijon where her son was in the Resistance. I haven’t heard from her since.”

  “Who would know where she is?”

  “I can’t help you, I am afraid.”

  I waited for a few moments in case she changed her mind or remembered something else.

  But all she offered was “Please tell the Resistance how helpful I’ve been. I didn’t sleep with a single German. I want to get out of here and I don’t want my head shaved.”

  —

  THE SMOKE WAS SO THICK you could have bottled it. The many candles didn’t help—they made the shadows that moved across the dance floor, in slow time to the music, as fuzzy as the reedy saxophone sounds on the edge of dissonance. The curvature of the ceiling, originally an arch beneath a railway embankment near the Seine, held in the sound as it did the smoke which rose, kissed the brickwork—and then hung there. Waiters in long black aprons swiveled their hips between the tables, trays held high on splayed fingertips, bottles and glasses balanced miraculously as they angled and swerved this way and that. Beneath the saxophone sounds, and the smoke, the urgent hubbub of voices—clotted with Gitanes and Gauloises—lay like a sediment.

  La Pleine Lune—the Full Moon—had been a secret nightclub during th
e occupation, Justine told me, its entrance a small shed between the lines of a raised railway track that led from La Villette to Clignancourt. While the Germans had been in town, the club had opened only after midnight and, as it was nowhere near anywhere else, the noise it generated had attracted no attention. Now that the Germans had gone, a new entrance had been opened up, directly on the street. The club’s name referred to the need for a full moon for supplies to be dropped to the Resistance.

  It had been Justine’s idea to come to the club the evening after we had stopped off at La Santé. Although she hadn’t appreciated being excluded from the last part of the interview, she could see the mood I was in, that I had received the news about Madeleine like a kick from a horse. Anyone could. For me it was as if La Santé extended right across the city, now a grey, concrete barrenness that had entirely lost its charm, had lost every advantage—a place that had it in for me.

  But Justine had forced me to come, found us some seats and a table, and sat me down. She had ordered some wine and filled my glass for me.

  “Isn’t there any whisky?” I had growled ungraciously.

  “Later,” she had said. “You can get drunk later. We need to talk first.”

  “I don’t feel like talking,” I said. “I feel like…butchering a few Germans.”

  She smiled. “There’s a queue for that. You’ll have to take your place at the back.” She looked around her. “Everyone in this club would like to butcher Germans.” After a pause, she added. “It might not be as bad as you think.”

  I was sitting slumped on a hard stool. I reached out, took hold of my wine glass, and brought it to my lips. It was red and tasted…not bad.

  “On the other hand, it might be every bit as disastrous as I think.” I looked at Justine. “You know better than I do that…all our agents who were captured were shipped east, after being interrogated—they were removed to Germany and the prisoner-of-war camps. All of our agents were in civilian clothes, acting behind enemy lines, as spies. The rules of war—not that the Nazis adhere to many rules of war—allow for spies to be shot.”

  She held her cigarette between long fingers. “Yes, I know. But that doesn’t mean they actually were shot, or not yet. Our troops are making rapid headway. They may get to the camps before…before some of the agents are killed.”

  I shook my head and gave her a grim smile. “We are talking of what in overall terms is a small number of people. Well under a hundred. How long does it take to murder that number?” I shook my head again. “Being captured as a spy is the same as being executed. There are just a few days between the one and the other.

  “Why don’t they play something more cheerful?” I growled again. “They’ve all just been liberated, for pity’s sake.”

  She made one of those French faces, a pout but where the corners of her mouth turned down at the same time. “Ouf. Now we are free to say what we like, happy or sad. Maybe, like you, the saxophone player has lost someone—or thinks that he has.”

  I didn’t say anything immediately. We Allies were not quite as bloodthirsty as the Nazis—we didn’t invariably execute the German spies we captured. So far as the British government was concerned, it was our policy rather to try to “turn” spies, a process that had become easier, not more difficult, as it had become obvious to many that the war was going against Germany, and being “turned” offered more of a future once the war was over. But the losers in any conflict are usually more vicious than the victors. So I couldn’t harbour any doubts about Madeleine’s fate.

  “Let’s change the subject,” I said eventually, gripping the stem of my wine glass. “How are you communists going to get on with de Gaulle when the war is over?”

  She made another French face. “How did you know I was a communist?”

  “Roland told me.”

  “Are you a communist?”

  I shook my head.

  “Does it worry you that I am?”

  Now I made a face. “Too early to say. At the moment, I’m more worried about having only Gitanes and Gauloises to smoke. My throat feels like scorched earth.”

  “Well, I don’t mind your not being a communist.” She smiled. “And, to answer your question, we will get on—how do you say in English?—‘like houses on fire.’ I am being ironic, Englishman! De Gaulle thinks he won the war all by himself, without the Americans, without the British, without the Canadians. He thinks he has a divine right to govern France, simply because he didn’t give in—”

  “Doesn’t he have a point?”

  She leaned forward and placed a finger on the table between us. “Non! De Gaulle was in London, hundreds of miles away, or in North Africa, even farther away. Who do you think was here, in this club, in the city, in the country? Who do you think organised the Resistance, the sabotage, the ratlines? We did, the communists. More than anyone else, anyway. Nothing could have happened without us—nothing, do you understand, Englishman? Our explosives people were the best—still are. We have our own code system—very sophisticated. And we—we communists—have assassinated more Germans than anyone else. We have earned our position.”

  The saxophone fell silent. A rustle of applause swept around the club. Dancers left the floor and, temporarily, the room—the thick fug—was lighter, less striated by shadow.

  “De Gaulle was in exile. That means he was able to celebrate his return. You communists stayed and never went anywhere, so you weren’t able to do what he did. Whether you like him or not, he knows how to put on a show, and he knows when a show is necessary.”

  She shrugged. “De Gaulle divides people. He will divide the country.”

  “You think?”

  “Of course. Look at your Mr. Churchill—he hates de Gaulle. So too does Mr. Roosevelt. De Gaulle cannot lead France.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on it.”

  She eyed me. “Let us change the subject again, Mr. Hammond, or we shall argue. We have to work together, so we should not argue, no?”

  I nodded. “What shall we talk about now?”

  “Must I always call you Mr. Hammond, Englishman? Or Colonel Hammond?”

  I smiled. “Matt will do.”

  “In the Bible, the apostle Matthew was a tax collector, no?”

  “Yes.”

  “And his father was a tax collector, too.”

  “Yes. Is this the change of subject?”

  “Why not? What does your father do, Matt?”

  “He was a doctor.”

  “Was? He is no longer alive?”

  “No, he was killed in the great polio epidemic of 1933 when I was twenty-one.”

  “No! My father, too! The same year.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” She tugged the elastic band free of her hair and it fell down onto her shoulders. She wound the band around her wrist. “He wasn’t a doctor, of course, but a schoolteacher.”

  I hesitated. This was turning into a bizarre—even macabre—exchange. But she meant well, and it took my mind off Madeleine.

  Not quite.

  The band had started up again, but this time it was a piano playing, a bass and some drums. Dancers reoccupied the floor.

  Justine shook her head. “I don’t believe it. My father was part of an experiment with a new vaccine. It killed him.” She paused. “How much do doctors really know?”

  I didn’t know what to say. Then I did.

  “That calls for some whisky, don’t you think?”

  “You don’t like the wine?”

  I shrugged. “You grew up with wine, Justine, I’m sure, just as you grew up with Gitanes. I grew up with mild English cigarettes and with Scotch. We’ve been drinking French all evening. Now it’s my turn.”

  “Okay,” she said, catching the eye of the black-aproned waiter and waving to him.

  He came over and she ordered two whiskies.

  “And your mother, Matt, did she remarry?”

  I nodded. “About three years after my father died.”

  “And do you like h
im, your stepfather? Are you friends?”

  I shrugged again. I preferred the piano to the saxophone. But the dancers obviously didn’t. They had all left the floor again.

  “I didn’t have much to do with him. I think my mother was more content having a man around than not having one. Then she was widowed for a second time and lives now in a small hotel. But she is content, I think. Mostly. Why do you ask?”

  Another French face. I was coming to like it.

  “Because I hate my mother’s second husband. He is a businessman, a capitalist. My mother had a child with him and they spend much more time with his child than with me. I was always older, of course, but he is a very selfish man, very—how do you say?—very right wing, quite unlike my father, who was a teacher and very gentle, always helping others.”

  “Is that why you are a communist?”

  “That’s one reason, maybe, but there are many others. I—”

  “No,” I said, chuckling, to defuse the tension, “We’ve changed the subject, remember?”

  She was about to launch into some sort of lecture, or harangue, or…I don’t know what, but instead she sat back, allowed herself to laugh, and then visibly relaxed.

  On cue, the whiskies arrived. I mixed water with mine, offered her some, which she declined, and then let the firewater slip down my throat. “That’s better.”

  She sniffed her drink, then sipped it. Then took a longer sip.

  “It’s not as subtle as wine, is it?”

  “Maybe that’s its point. It gives you a kick, not a kiss.”

  She pushed her glass across the table.

  “You have mine.”

  I pushed my wine glass in the opposite direction.

  “This is like a dance, a dance of drinks.”

  She poured the wine from my wine glass into hers. She lifted it to her lips, drank, and lowered it back to the table. Her eyes never left mine.

  “Would you like to dance, Matt?”

  I hid behind my whisky glass for a moment.

  Then I shook my head. “Not just yet, Justine. Not until…I need to find out about Madeleine.”