Madeleine's War

by Peter Watson

  I didn’t say anything. I knew most of what he was telling me, but confirmation was always useful and you never knew what extra detail he might provide and how important that detail might be.

  “And those who weren’t sent to Ravensbruck?”

  “Those who weren’t sent to Ravensbruck, who cracked early and told us what they knew, whatever it was, were sent to Pforzheim—that’s not far from Karlsruhe, and only just across the border, if you know your German geography.” He leaned forward and laid one arm on the table. “We were entirely within our rights to execute those agents, and of course we could have done it in Paris if we had wanted to. But if we’d done that, their graves might have become known, and could have formed the focus of Resistance activity, or bad propaganda, one way or the other. So they were taken into Germany itself, somewhere remote, near Pforzheim, and executed and buried immediately in unmarked graves. That was the policy laid down by Himmler in Berlin.”

  For a moment, we all sat still, each of us looking at the other, as this news sank in. It squared exactly with what Monique Brèger had told me.

  Kolbe was so matter-of-fact. And, in a way, he was right. Our agents were spies, and the rules of war did allow for them to be executed if captured, as I had told Madeleine and the others at Ardlossan several times. Moreover, these events had taken place at a time when it was becoming clear that Germany would most likely lose the war. What did we expect?

  Then I said, “If I mention some names to you—real names and code names—might you recall some of the people who passed through Paris?”

  He bit his lip but gave a small smile. “I can try, yes. I’ll play that game.”

  I looked at Justine, who reached down into her briefcase and took out a folder. She passed the document to me and I opened it, laying out the sheets of paper between us on the table.

  “I’ll start with proper names. Just say Ravensbruck or Pforzheim, or ‘No,’ if they mean nothing to you.”

  I gave him another cigarette. I went through the same routine as with Claudine Petit and Monique Brèger. When I read out the full names of the women, Kolbe knew the fates of all but four of them, including the fact that Katrine Howard had been sent to Ravensbruck.

  I took a deep breath and said, “Madeleine Dirac.”

  He paused for a moment, then shook his head firmly. “No.”

  My hands were clammy and I wiped them on my trousers before reaching for the paper with the code names on it.

  Rossignol and Poisson, he confirmed, had both been sent to Ravensbruck.

  “Maître” had been sent to Pforzheim.

  “Chêne.”

  A pause. Kolbe went to say something, chewed his cheek, then just said, simply, “Pforzheim.”

  I tried not to show my feelings. Pforzheim meant a quicker death than at Ravensbruck, but that was little comfort. Again, it confirmed what Monique had said.

  “Tell me,” I said, struggling to be as matter-of-fact as I could, “tell me, once these agents had left your office in Paris, did you ever hear from them again? I don’t mean from them personally, obviously, but was any information about them, later, ever relayed back to you? Or, did they simply vanish eastwards, and that was that?”

  He nodded. “Normally, they vanished, and that was that, as you put it. Except, as I remember, on two occasions.”

  “Oh yes?” My pulse quickened, all of its own accord. “And they were?”

  “Let me think. The first time must have been in…I would say…April of this year…yes, that’s right…We had just begun our penetration of your circuits and were intercepting messages from two or three of them. We got word from Ravensbruck that one of the agents there, under—what shall I say?—under their more…sophisticated, more persuasive interrogation techniques, had indicated that your people back in London suspected you had a double agent among you—in SC2, I mean. That one of your senior agents was in fact one of ours, and was leaking intelligence to us. Our people in Ravensbruck, of course, had no idea of what the true situation was—the true situation on our side, I mean—but they just reported their findings to us, as they occurred.”

  “And? What was the true situation?”

  He smiled. “You were there, Colonel. Did you have suspicions?”

  I swallowed. “I am asking the questions, Standartenführer Kolbe. You are in no position to question me. Did this person ever give you an English lighter?”

  He looked at me hard. Was he concealing a reaction? But all he did was shrug. “Then I can’t remember what the answer is. It was months ago. There’ve been a lot of…developments in between.”

  He sat back.

  “Very well. Have it your way. I hope this double agent, if he or she exists, will be as loyal to you as you are to him or her, when he or she gets caught.” I looked out at the rain for a moment. “So, what was the other occasion when you heard back from points further east? Can you remember that?”

  “Oh yes. There’s no need to be sarcastic. That was very different—I’m not giving anything away here that you couldn’t find out elsewhere, given time.”

  The sound of the rain on the roof didn’t quite drown out Justine’s scribbling in her notebook.

  “We got word from Pforzheim that, on the way there, two of the agents—a man and a woman—had escaped, escaped and disappeared.”

  Finally.

  The escape was confirmed. All Monique Brèger’s information was confirmed.

  The skin on my neck was damp.

  “When was this? And do you know who they were?”

  “Of course I know. We were very angry in Avenue Foch—spitting blood—that these people had been allowed to get away. It was bad for morale, just after the invasion, and they could have been fed back into the Resistance, knowing what they knew about the layout of our headquarters, our procedures…They would have been well placed to carry out serious sabotage. We kept it from Himmler—he would have had someone shot.”

  “And…as I say, when was this?”

  “About the time of the invasion or just after—June or thereabouts. I remember thinking it was an especially fortunate time to escape, just as eastern France and western Germany would be beginning to…Power would be shifting, people would be on the move in greater numbers than before. The chaos would be worse than ever.”

  It was my turn to nod. “Now,” I said, as calmly as I could. “Tell me…Can you remember the names of the people who escaped?”

  He thought for a moment.

  I held my breath.

  “I can’t remember their real names, but I can remember their code names—yes, because they were so distinctive.”

  I looked at Justine, then back to Kolbe.

  “Okay, go on.”

  Time seemed to slow. I breathed in but didn’t breathe out.

  “The man was called Reynard, Fox; and she was called Nonne, Nun.”

  I was silent. The air in my lungs slipped out slowly but then my throat closed up. The skin under my chin was damp, damp and cold. Nun, Nonne, was nothing like Oak, or Chêne. There was no possibility of a mistake. The names were just too dissimilar.

  I lit a cigarette. I tried to stop my hands from shaking. My throat was still closed up, but I gulped at my cigarette—I had to do something.

  Madeleine had been in Pforzheim since the middle of June at least, ten and more weeks ago. Which meant she was dead, had been dead for weeks by now. The fact that two of our agents had escaped would have made it more likely, not less, that those who did reach Pforzheim would be quickly killed. The Gestapo would have made it clear they would not tolerate any more agents being allowed to escape.

  It was all over. My pulse thundered in my ears. Madeleine wasn’t a German spy, but that was small consolation. I had come to the end of the road.

  But I could grieve later, I told myself, as Hilary had said. I wasn’t unusual in this war in losing someone close to me, closest to me. I could examine my feelings later. My pulse almost drummed out these thoughts.

  I closed th
e file that was still in front of me.

  “That just about wraps it up,” I managed to say, handing him the rest of the cigarette pack. “These are American; I hope you don’t mind.”

  He took the pack and pocketed it. Then he leaned back.

  “You are a civilized man, Colonel Hammond.”

  I didn’t say anything else.

  He patted his pocket. “I don’t mean the cigarettes, though I thank you for these anyway. When I refused to tell you something a moment ago, you didn’t lose your temper, or shout and scream. Or not very much. You left me my dignity.”

  I still didn’t say anything. I hadn’t meant to leave him his dignity, but what he had told me had left me momentarily speechless.

  “May I take it that you will tell the Swiss Red Cross to relay the news to my wife that I have been captured but am safe? And may I take it that…that you won’t mention Monique?”

  I nodded again. “Enough damage has already been done.” I explained about the acid throwing.

  He almost choked on his cigarette, coughing and heaving.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’ve seen her.” I described the crimson mark on her face, the damaged follicles.

  Justine stared at me again as I told the story.

  Kolbe squashed out his cigarette, looking chastened and shocked. “And you don’t blame me?”

  I looked at Justine and back to Kolbe.

  “Monique Brèger doesn’t blame you.”

  I half wished I hadn’t said that. I wasn’t there to comfort him.

  He stared at me, wiping his lips with his tongue, but he didn’t speak for quite a while.

  We heard the guard dogs bark outside.

  Then he nodded.

  “This is a big moment, Colonel Hammond. My father was in the First World War and was on the western front in 1914 when, at Christmastime, as I am sure you know, the troops fraternised. He always remembered it as…as…the most natural episode of his war. By luck he had a lot in common with the English soldier he met. He had more in common with that man, he used to say, than with his superior officers.”

  He wiped his lips with his tongue again.

  “This is my moment, Colonel, my moment to show I am not just a soldier, as you have just shown me you are not vindictive merely because we are on different sides.”

  I am not sure he had summed me up correctly, but I still said nothing. It is sometimes the best way in interrogation.

  He leaned forward and lowered his voice.

  “So…Colonel Hammond, I will tell you something that I would not have told you had you lost your temper, or maybe even tortured me, or not been so understanding about Monique Brèger. Something for nothing—isn’t that what you say? Well…I will tell you that we did have an agent high up in your organisation. In fact, we had two.”

  Justine put her hand to her mouth. She knew the French agents better than I did. Was he about to deliver a great shock?

  Then he shook his head. “But I will not tell you their names—you will have to work that out for yourself.”

  I shrugged irritably. “If you won’t give me names, how can I know whether you are telling the truth?”

  He leaned forward again.

  “Do you know what the truth is, Colonel Hammond? I won’t tell you the names of these persons for two reasons. One, I will not betray the Reich, any more than I have done already. But second, these persons, whoever they may be, may not have been double agents. Yes, they betrayed some of your secrets, they knew all about your training methods, but who is to say if they did not betray some of our secrets too? These persons may simply have been working to survive, by making themselves indispensable to you, and indispensable to us at the same time. It can—and does—happen, in a war. You will have to identify these persons and then decide if they are double agents, or double double agents. I wish you luck in finding their names.”

  I stood up. “And I wish you luck, Standartenführer Kolbe. Germany is going to lose this war, and I think you’ll need rather more luck than I will.”

  He shrugged again and wiped his lips on the back of his hand.

  At that moment he seemed more self-possessed than I did.

  If what he had just told me was true, there were two moles inside SC2, not one.

  If MI6 found out, they would have a field day.

  And there was another—even more disturbing—possibility. If Madeleine was one of the two moles inside SC2, had Kolbe and his Nazi colleagues deliberately protected her, pretending that Chêne, Oak, had been sent to the camps and executed, when in fact she had been sent back safely to Berlin? All Kolbe’s talk about double double agents could be flimflam.

  Madeleine was dead. Or…she wasn’t. And if she wasn’t…I had been made a fool of.

  · 24 ·

  THERE HAD BEEN A DERAILING of the Métro while I had been away, and on my first morning back in Paris I had to walk to work. At several places along the way I noticed what I should perhaps have noticed before—bunches of flowers laid against buildings, against kiosks, against railings, at the entrance to small parks. I asked people who were standing over them, and looking at cards that accompanied the flowers, what they meant. I should have guessed. They were sites where Resistance heroes had been killed, or arrested before being taken away and never seen again.

  Looking through the digest of newspapers that Colette and the other secretaries still put together, I registered that at St. Nazaire and La Rochelle the Germans were still holding out. That might have interested me more at one point, but not now.

  I also read that General Patton had had a narrow escape, when a shell had landed near him but failed to explode. Now there was someone with luck.

  On my desk, I found a mound of telegrams, mostly about personnel: people who had turned up; people who had worked for SC2 and whose bodies had been found in various regions of France; details of new recruits in the pipeline. Based on this information, and as soon as I could get my head around the figures, I now had enough material to compile my interim report. That should keep them quiet in Cathcart Place, and in Parliament, too.

  In fact, one of my telegrams was from G., with news of Zola:

  +ALL·WELL·WITH·THOUGH·HE·IS·OFF·HIS·FOOD+STOP+IS·HE·MISSING·YOU–OR·MADELEINE? +LOVE=GERALDINE+STOP+

  I stuffed that telegram in my pocket. Soon I’d have to tell G. the news about Madeleine. But not yet. And not all of it. I was still digesting what I could tell to whom—and when.

  There was another telegram, this time from Hilary:

  +NEED·AMMO·FOR·PARLIAMENT·URGENT+STOP+PLEASE·SHOW·PROOF·OF·LIFE=HILARY+STOP+

  Yes, yes, I said to myself tetchily. I’ll get on it. It was all very well for Hilary to say—as he had said, the last time we spoke—that I should “grieve later,” but grief isn’t like that. Grief is an ocean where the waves obey their own rhythm, their own tide, where we are just thrown about to stay afloat as best we can. Where there is in fact no guarantee that we will keep our heads above water. Surely he knew that, damn him.

  I reached for my typewriter and angrily took it out on the keys.

  HILARY, JUST BACK FROM SAARBURG PRISON. INTERIM REPORT IN 24 HOURS. REGARDS=MATT

  Someone else could key it into the telegraph machine.

  I got up and went through into the outer room.

  “Right,” I said to Roland, trying to calm down. “Fill me in on what’s been happening since I’ve been gone.”

  He rubbed ink from his fingers with a wet paper napkin. “Well, there’s been quite a bit of activity in southern and central France. An uprising in Clermont-Ferrand, led by the Resistance, with some SC2 help, and around Dijon. The Germans are making a run for it near Besançon. Three of our male agents were in hiding north of Marseilles, but are safe now, one body has been found dead in the Pyrenees, one woman is in hospital in Clermont-Ferrand—Nancy Pargetter. She’s still alive but I’m told she’s dying—from typhus.”

  He threw the napkin into a waste bin. “Typh
us is a problem in prisons, by the way. Be careful if you have to do any more prison-visiting.”

  I nodded, trying hard not to let my anger with Hilary pass over to Roland. “Do I smell burning?”

  He leaned forward and looked into the waste bin. “You’re right!” he said sharply. “Christ, a cigarette stub has set the napkin on fire.”

  He got up and put his entire foot into the wastebasket and stamped the flames out.

  “Now,” I said, “I’ve seen some of the telegrams, but I haven’t collated them—have you?”

  He nodded. “I’ve started. By my calculations, we can now account for ninety-four out of one hundred and sixteen agents. That means twenty-five are dead or still missing. Out of that ninety-four, sixty-seven are dead, and twenty-seven are alive, either here in France or back in Britain. Of the twenty-seven survivors, fourteen are women. Of the twenty-five still missing, thirteen are women.”

  “Okay, I have more information about the women. I found out at Saarburg that seven women were sent from here in Paris to a camp north of Berlin—that’s the Ravensbruck I referred to, where they have almost certainly been executed. Here are their names.” I handed him a piece of paper.

  “On that list, also, are five women who were sent to the other camp, Pforzheim. One escaped on the way there—code name Nonne, or Nun—but the others will have been executed. That makes eleven names in all, to add to the ninety-four, meaning we now know the fate of one hundred and five agents out of the one hundred and sixteen, and that only three of those unaccounted for are women.”

  “What’s all this in percentage terms?” said Roland. “Parliament will want to know things like that.”

  “You’re right,” I said as I felt a nudge against my leg.

  I looked down. During Justine’s absence in Nancy, I had brought Max with me into the office just as I had with Zola in London. Max was looking up and panting.