Madeleine's War

by Peter Watson

  I heard a door open.

  “Hey, you! Keep the noise down, will you? It’s half past fucking one in the morning.” I recognized the voice of one of the other British officers billeted at the hotel.

  “Okay, okay,” said a voice, in reply. “I’m just taking a bath, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Well, do it with your mouth shut. Got it?”

  “Sure, sure,” said the voice.

  But, at that hour, even the sound of the water running was loud enough.

  The voice in the bath started singing.

  “Shut the fuck up!” shouted the British officer. “Or I’ll shoot you!”

  “Scary,” said the voice. But he shut up.

  I finished my cigarette, drained the whisky glass, and put the newspapers and map on the floor. I put out the light and lay on my back.

  Pforzheim was a long shot, a very long shot. But someone had escaped on the way there.

  —

  “VOILÀ, MON CHER, I PROMISED TO show you someone famous. Unless I am mistaken, that is Mr. ’Emingway over there—no?”

  The lighting in the bar of the Ritz Hotel didn’t actually aid anyone’s sight at the best of times and, given the late hour we had arrived, and the smoke that thickened the atmosphere, visibility was far from ideal.

  I peered across the room. The famous Ritz bar didn’t seem to have suffered at all during the occupation. The crystal chandeliers glistened discreetly, the red-and-gold wallpaper absorbed the light and then returned it, the deep green carpet was as lush as spring wheat, and the small tables, with their paler green tablecloths, boasted diminutive candles that barely helped you distinguish one drink from another.

  We had come on here after another jazz and whisky session at La Pleine Lune.

  “It could be Hemingway,” I replied softly.

  The man in question was tall, and of muscular build, with a round face ringed with a grey beard. I had heard that a lot of literary types—journalists and authors—had flooded into Paris in the wake of the liberation. A lot of the better-heeled ones stayed at the Ritz—the Parisians sarcastically called it “Ritzkreig.”

  “Who’s that with him?” I added.

  “Gertrude Stein?”

  “Better not stare,” I said. “Let’s leave them to their privacy, whoever they are.”

  “You don’t believe it’s Hemingway?” This time she pronounced the “H.”

  “It’s hard to tell at this distance and in this light,” I replied. “And besides, have you never noticed that when you see someone famous in the flesh, they never look exactly like their picture in the paper? It’s close enough—we’ll pretend it’s him.”

  “I shall go and ask.” She made to lift herself out of her seat, but I leaned forward and put my hand on her arm. “Leave them be, Justine. Let them enjoy their drinks. Sit down.”

  She sat down with a pout and a moue all at the same time.

  “Why were you so keen to come here anyway?” I said after a pause. “The drinks are three times the price of those in the Lune.”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “You have been…how shall I say, how do you British put it?…‘off colours’ these past few days. Ever since Colonel Picard visited you. What did he say? What did he tell you, this Gaullist? I see you are thinking thoughts, thoughts that you don’t share with me, that you hardly ever smile, that you never look at me directly. You work in a mechanical way, you don’t joke with people, you don’t gossip, you certainly don’t flirt. You are not happy and you are not much fun. I thought seeing some famous people would give you—how do you say?—an elevation, a lift. Maybe we would have something to talk about. Maybe you would smile.”

  She leaned forward and picked up her drink. “I was wrong.”

  She sat back again.

  I took my time, sipping my Scotch slowly. At Ritz prices I couldn’t afford to go any quicker.

  “Do you have a husband, Justine, a boyfriend, a lover?”

  “I am not married but of course I have a lover.”

  “Is he here in Paris?”

  “No. He is in the east. He leads a union in Nancy.”

  “Do you miss him?”

  She nodded. “Of course. But the war goes on. I know we cannot be together, not for now.”

  “But you love him?”

  A smaller nod this time. “But he loves me more, I think.”

  I turned that over in my mind. An interesting answer—on the cold side, but practical. No doubt they were both members of the Communist Party, though I didn’t want to get into that. It didn’t sound like a great love match.

  I weighed carefully what I could say. “A week ago, you were there—in La Santé prison—when I found out that my lover, Madeleine Dirac, code name Oak, had been captured and therefore almost certainly killed. That is why I am as I am. That is why I have been so…so silent this past week. Part of me is hoping, keeping alive a ridiculous hope that my Madeleine is one of the few—the very few—agents who have been captured but not executed. The other part of me is grieving. I’m sorry but I can’t help it.”

  She leaned in to me so that I could smell the soap she washed with. Her skin, even that close, was unblemished.

  “What is it you miss most? Her beauty? Her skin? Her body? Her talk? Making love? Waking up together?”

  “All of that, of course, all of that. And—”

  “Yes?”

  “This will sound mad, but we have a dog, a West Highland terrier—”

  “Alors. At last you are smiling.”

  It was true. I had noticed that myself.

  “Sometimes, when we are making love, and not wanting to be left out, Zola—that’s the dog—jumps on the bed, to keep us company. That always has us in stitches.”

  “Stitches? What is that, stitches?”

  “It’s slang for making us laugh helplessly. If I thought…if I thought I would never have that again—” I shook my head. “I can’t imagine not having it again.”

  “Where is this Zola now?”

  “He is staying with my secretary. They too have fallen in love.”

  She let a long pause go by.

  I felt awkward but didn’t know what more to say.

  “So you are not just a colonel clearing up after a messy war, but something else as well. I should have guessed that something very personal was troubling you.”

  “It’s more than that,” I said. And I explained about Madeleine’s affair with Philippe in the Limoges area, and the incomplete newspaper cutting I had encountered in the café on my first night in Paris.

  “That part is easily settled,” she replied. “Old newspapers are by law deposited in the Bibliothèque Nationale. It is in the rue de Richelieu and we can go whenever you want.”

  That was something, a glimmer of a way forward. Maybe.

  She looked at me, smiled, and leaned closer still. “And there’s something else, yes? Now you are worried that because you are grieving it will interfere with your ability to do your job?”

  “That’s one of my worries, yes.”

  “And the other worries?”

  “I can’t tell you everything, Justine. You must know that.” But of course the ambiguity had got to me—not knowing what happened to Madeleine when she suddenly stopped transmitting; was she captured, had she been taken to one of the areas where the Germans were cut off, had she got trapped in a ratline, or had she really been sent east, as Claudine Petit seemed to indicate? I felt out of breath just listing the possibilities that underlay the ambiguities facing me. “Why don’t you tell me something, Justine? Tell me about the Communist Party.”

  “Why? No. You are not really interested.”

  “Do you have meetings? You must do.”

  She looked at me and shrugged. “Of course we have meetings; we are communists. Everything is discussed before we act. Because we discuss everything, and vote on it, we have good discipline. Unlike the Gaullists, who have to do what he says.”

  I didn’t want to get
into that.

  “Tell me about your leaders. What type of people are—?”

  “Not tonight, Englishman.” She nodded, lowered her voice again, and looked directly at me. She leaned forward and put her hand on my arm. “Would you like to sleep in my flat tonight?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t worry. I don’t mean would you like to sleep with me. What I mean is that I am sure the Hotel Séranon is very plain, very sparse, very cold emotionally. You yourself said the jazz people make a lot of noise late at night and stop you sleeping.”

  She took hold of her wine glass. “I have a spare bedroom. There are lots of flowers and photographs everywhere. The whole place smells of woman—there are books all over the chairs and tables, newspapers. It’s untidy, but lived into—I think I mean ‘lived in.’ ” She smiled. “I have wine, Pernod—we can buy some whisky, I can lend you a dressing gown—don’t ask whose—and I have a radio tuned to the BBC.”

  I was weighing up her offer when she added, “And I share my flat with someone you will find irresistible. He’s called Max.”

  “Oh? And why is Max so irresistible? Isn’t your boyfriend jealous?”

  She smiled and squeezed my hand again. “No, not at all. You see, Max is a Cairn—almost a West Highland terrier.”

  · 22 ·

  I’LL SAY ONE THING FOR JUSTINE: she was a good psychologist. I loosened up a lot after I moved into her flat.

  It was amazing what a difference flowers and photographs and Max, Justine’s Cairn terrier, made. But I was never going to get rid of that solid mass lodged near my heart, which kept me awake into the small hours, however comfortable the bed in which I slept. It woke me early however late I had dropped off.

  What most preoccupied me, of course, was exactly how I was going to find out whether it was Madeleine who had escaped on her way to Pforzheim. Until I knew, one way or the other, I had put my visit to the Bibliothèque Nationale indefinitely on hold. No point in tempting fate. But I had at last begun to give some thought to my interim report and my little—or not-so-little—deal with Rupert Hathaway.

  I knew, for instance, that my target had to be François Perrault. Hard as it might be to kill him and get away with it, he was here in Paris, or so I had been told. Daniel Legros was miles away and would, most likely, only turn up at the last minute before meeting Perrault. No time at all to make any kind of plan.

  The window of Justine’s spare room looked out on to the slate roofs of Paris, and when it rained, which it did a lot that month, the slates glistened during the day against the metallic grey of the clouds, and glinted in the amber lights of the city at night, like the scales on a giant goldfish.

  Justine’s flat was only two stops on the Métro from the École Lavoisier—at a pinch, we could have walked.

  We fell fairly quickly into a routine. Since I was always awake early, and since I have always been an early-morning person, I saw to breakfast. I put the kettle on, hurried downstairs to the bakery on the corner, bought four croissants still hot from the oven, stepped across to the newsagent’s for that day’s paper, and returned in time to make hot coffee—black market, of course. Having prepared everything, I left for the école before Justine, while she read the paper (after me) and cleared up. Everybody in the office found out soon enough that I had moved in with Justine and I didn’t bother to correct any wrong impressions that news might have created. No one said anything, not even Roland. Even so, I thought it looked better if we arrived at the office separately. I don’t know why it felt better—it just did.

  Normally, my first task when I arrived at the école was to read the telegrams that had come in from London. Cathcart Place sent us a digest every morning of what our forces had accomplished the day before. That day I read that there had been an airborne invasion of Holland. Metz had been surrounded and was expected to fall at any minute, twenty thousand Germans had surrendered at Orléans, Boulogne had finally fallen, but Calais was still holding out. Some of our forces were already in Germany now, near Aachen and Trier.

  The two decrypters in the office were female, and British. The three secretaries were French, and every day by noon, they prepared a summary of developments inside France, taken from the newspapers. All in all, we did our best to keep up to speed.

  Roland Kemp was a taciturn man, a graduate of Cambridge University, where he had read German and French. Before the war he had studied in Dresden but had left in 1936, he told me, when the Nuremburg rallies had begun, and returned to Cambridge to do a second degree, this time in mathematics. He had been co-opted into SC2 on its inception in 1940: he was excellent at breaking codes. He wasn’t married, and I didn’t know much more about him than that.

  After I had been living in Justine’s apartment for about a week, we had a breakthrough with Ida Cooper, code name Flame, or Flamme. A cipher from London told us she had not been captured, as we had thought, but had managed to take a ratline all the way down the Atlantic coast of France to Portugal, where, knowing the invasion was imminent, she had lain low. Once she had heard news of D-Day, she had quietly made arrangements to board a ship heading north. She had now reached Southampton safely. That meant only thirteen women now needed accounting for. I was pleased, of course. But, in my darker moments, I wondered whether, if Ida had at last surfaced, did that not mean that Madeleine should have turned up by now, too? If she had escaped?

  I never quite finished those thoughts.

  I was sitting at my desk, rereading the decoded report about Ida/Flame, and having these gloomy ruminations, when Roland knocked on my door and barged in, without waiting for an answer.

  I looked up.

  “Guess what?” he said.

  “Hitler’s surrendered.”

  “However did you pass the officer’s exam, sir?”

  We both grinned.

  “I give up then,” I said. “What is it?”

  He laid a piece of paper on my desk.

  “Ulrich Kolbe has been captured. He’s in Saarburg Prison. The intelligence exchange system works—he was captured at the weekend.”

  Over Roland’s shoulder, I could see Justine lurking. She had obviously been given this intelligence before I had.

  “That’s fantastic news!” I breathed.

  This changed things, or it might do. As a high-ranking officer, and if I could persuade him to play ball, Kolbe should know where Madeleine—where all our agents—had been sent. If I could get to him, that should settle things, one way or the other, about the fate of the SC2 agents. Then I could concentrate on Hathaway’s problem.

  “Today is—what?—Tuesday,” I added, thinking hard. I read the slip of paper he had put on my desk. “There’s nothing to stop us leaving tomorrow, is there?”

  “None at all,” he said. “Well, that’s not quite true. First I need to get you a vehicle and some juice.”

  “How soon will you know?”

  He shrugged. “An hour. No more than two.”

  I nodded. “We have maps?”

  “We wouldn’t be much of an army without them, would we?”

  “I mean a map with the front lines marked on it. According to what I have read, our front line is around Trier—that’s no more than twenty miles beyond Saarburg.”

  I reached for the phone on my desk. “I’d better check that we can, in fact, get out there.”

  Roland got up and went into the outer room to set up the vehicle and petrol.

  I had the latest Expeditionary Forces staff sheet in front of me, several pages thick and bang up-to-date. In it were the current numbers of the British and American general staff. I called Tactical Liaison. When a voice answered, I explained who I was, where I was, and what I wanted to do.

  “I need to get to Saarburg Prison immediately, to interview a captured officer, who was at one time the chief interrogator of the Gestapo in Paris. In connection with possible war crimes.”

  I wasn’t sure of the army protocol in these circumstances. The man at the other end of the line had no
way of knowing that I was who I said I was, and there was no system of identifying codes—who could keep track, or hold them in his head, with a war on? He either had to believe me or not.

  “Hold on,” he said, and the line went dead.

  After a moment he was back on. “What rank is this prisoner?”

  “Standartenführer. A colonel to us.”

  “And you say he was head of the Gestapo in Paris?”

  “Yes. Well, chief interrogator.”

  “Hold on.”

  The line went dead again.

  There was a longer delay this time.

  But then he was back.

  “I can’t tell you where the front is today, not over the phone. But I can tell you that Metz has fallen at last, and I can tell you that you will need a pass to go beyond Sierck-les-Bains, that’s the Franco-German border. Even then you will only be allowed through to Saarburg in an armoured Jeep or Land Rover. And you should know that the area has not yet been de-mined, though that may happen by the weekend. If all that doesn’t put you off, and you’ve already tasted all that Paris has to offer, and you’ve got the right paperwork, you can be our guest.”

  “Thank you, Colonel,” I said and hung up.

  “Roland!” I bellowed.

  He came running to the door. “Sir?”

  “I’ve checked with Reims. We are only allowed into Germany itself if we have an armoured Land Rover. Does that pose us problems?”

  Roland sucked his teeth. “It might—they’re not ten-a-penny. Let me see what I can do.”

  He disappeared again.

  “Justine!”

  She appeared in the doorway.

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  “Two questions,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “Have you travelled much in the east of the country recently?”

  She shook her head. “No, but Gilles has.” Gilles was her boyfriend. “What’s it like?”

  She gave me one of her French looks.