by Alex Gerlis
More than once he’d been followed from the police station, and it was only his guile that kept him out of trouble. But he’d avoided the pubs and cafés in the area and spent most of his time in his tiny room, which smelt of gas and mice, marking off the days on a cheap calendar, just as he used to do at boarding school, a constant draught whistling in through a cracked window pane.
One July afternoon in 1944, a letter was grudgingly thrust at him when he checked in, and he was instructed to open it there and then. It told him he was now free to return home: once there, he’d have to report to the local police station twice a week. There was a list of various other restrictions, which he began to read, but the sergeant told him to sign the form agreeing to the conditions before they changed their minds.
His large Victorian house in the country was unchanged. His man had stayed on and kept the house and its grounds in reasonable enough order, and he greeted him as if he’d just returned from a round of golf rather than a few years in prison without trial.
Of course they watched him all the time, and he didn’t doubt his letters and telephone calls were being monitored, so for the rest of 1944 and the early part of 1945 he did nothing. It was a strange existence; one that reminded him of being back at sea on one of those voyages where one would sail hundreds of miles from land for weeks on end with the weather unchanging, and a torpor settled on the ship that led to strange behaviour, particularly among younger officers, who became prone to making wrong decisions, such as altering course for no reason.
He began to spend days sitting in his library, staring out of the long window as the changing light altered the colour and shape of the lawn and the trees bordering it. He became like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner:
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
But around February, he realised he needed to snap out of his torpor. He began to make contact with the remnants of his own organisation, scattered around the country like survivors from a shipwreck. He entrusted his man with letters, giving him strict instructions on how he was to post them from the town he visited on his day off, never using the same postbox. The letters would instruct the recipient to call him at a telephone box at a given time, to hang up if he didn’t answer, to never use their own names and certainly not his. He would slip out of the house at dusk, confident he wasn’t being followed, making his way under the cover of the high hedgerows common in those parts to a telephone box at the crossroads of a country lane and a larger road.
That was how he made contact once more with Myrtle Carter, and with Bourne and Ridgeway. It was how he heard about the murder of Arthur Chapman-Collins, who had been one of the few people he could really rely upon. And it was how he found out about Agent Milton, perhaps his greatest success. He was astonished that Edward Palmer was not only alive but still free and active as an agent. He’d half expected to encounter him on a landing at Brixton prison. Instead, he was operating from the heart of the British War Office.
When he found out about Palmer, he realised that he once again had a purpose. All was not lost. That purpose intensified when one morning his man brought him his breakfast tray and on it was an envelope with his name neatly typed on the front. His man explained he’d found it in the porch when he’d come down that morning. It hadn’t been there when he’d locked up the night before.
The Admiral waited until the man left the bedroom before opening the letter.
Somehow Wolfgang had managed to contact him, which was quite remarkable.
He read the letter three or four times, and once he was sure he’d memorised it, he carefully placed it in the fire and watched it disintegrate.
First Palmer, now Wolfgang.
He most certainly had a purpose now.
He was no longer becalmed.
The man hath penance done,
And penance more will do.
Chapter 8
Paris, September 1945
‘Tom said I’m to help.’
The man on the other side of the table was avoiding looking at them, concentrating instead on sawing through his steak. Much to the horror of the waiter, he’d insisted on it being bien cuit, and it seemed as if the chef had taken revenge for this insult to France.
Prince and Hanne glanced at each other, and she raised her eyebrows. Tom Gilbey had assured them Wilson would do all he could to help, but his attitude could at best be described as grudging. They were in a small restaurant on Avenue Carnot, close to the hotel on Avenue de la Grande Armée where Prince and Hanne were staying. It had indeed felt like a honeymoon until now.
‘By the way…’ Wilson was still chewing a piece of steak as he spoke, jabbing his fork in their direction, ‘I presume you’re on expenses?’
Prince said they were, and Wilson said in that case there was a very decent Côtes du Rhône on the wine list, and would they mind terribly if he ordered a bottle?
‘I suspect the Germans shipped the best wines back home,’ he continued, still chewing as he spoke. ‘Hardly a decent bottle to be found in the city, but for some reason they appear to have left the Côtes du Rhône. Odd, eh?’
They agreed it was odd, and Hanne said something about how maybe they’d poisoned them, and Wilson looked unsure if it was a joke. When the bottle arrived, he insisted on pouring: a large glass for himself, a slightly smaller one for Prince and a half-glass at best for Hanne. He looked annoyed when Prince picked up the bottle and topped up their glasses.
‘Is your hotel all right, by the way?’
‘It’s perfect, thank you.’
‘Jolly good – had to pull a few strings to get you a decent room. Tom tells me you need to find someone. Care to tell me more?’ He was using his steak knife to dislodge a piece of meat from between his teeth.
‘I’m not sure how much he told you…’
Wilson was helping himself to another glass of wine, ignoring theirs. Gilbey had told them he could come across as somewhat brusque, but that he’d had a decent war and had managed to get into Paris before the liberation. Since then he’d been based at the British Embassy in rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, helping to establish the MI6 station there. ‘He’s got a bloody good network of contacts.’
‘Start at the beginning. I say, is your steak a bit tough?’
Prince gestured to Hanne, whom Wilson had ignored until now. She placed her cutlery carefully on her plate, sipped some wine and began; her Danish accent barely noticeable. ‘In December 1943, an SOE circuit in Dijon was broken up by the Germans—’
‘Yes, Tractor I think it was. Chap known as the Captain seems to have betrayed them. He’s on my “must find” list. Carry on.’
‘An SOE agent called Christine Butler was captured; she was using the name Thérèse Dufour. Her radio operator was either killed or killed himself. A Gestapo officer came down from Paris to interrogate her, but she was so badly injured by him she was taken to the infirmary at Dijon prison. A couple of days later, the same Gestapo officer ordered her to be carried out of the prison, where he shot her.’
‘Did he get anything from her?’
‘Nothing of any use to the Germans, no. We need to find this man. Other than his description, the only thing we know about him is that his nickname was the Ferret, and that a few months later he was based in Amsterdam, where he did something similar to what happened in Dijon. A network was captured in Enschede, and he turned up and killed the head of the local resistance. Another of our SOE agents died in his custody.’
‘And you think he’s here in Paris?’ Wilson waved his knife above his head to indicate the city and wiped his face with the large serviette.
‘We don’t know. We do know he was in Munich in August, when the Americans let him slip out of their grasp. I’d be most surprised if he’d returned here, but we think Paris may hold the clue to his real identity.’
‘Tom didn’t go into too much detail, but he did say
you were both first-class agents and had spent a considerable amount of time behind enemy lines.’
They both nodded.
‘This place sometimes feels like it’s still occupied at times.’ Wilson leaned forward as he lowered his voice. ‘It’s bloody difficult working here, to be frank with you. Not easy to know who’s in charge. At first it was the resistance calling all the shots, though now de Gaulle seems to have a firmer hand on the rudder, but it all feels rather anarchic at times. Hardest thing from our point of view is knowing who the hell to believe. Everyone claims to have been in the resistance, but the truth is there was an enormous amount of collaboration: for a long time the German occupation was relatively trouble-free, and the reason for that is the number of French people who went along with it. I call them the passive collaborators – the more active ones were the traitors. I say, do you mind if I order another bottle?’
When the wine arrived, Prince told the sommelier to fill all three glasses, and Wilson looked somewhat put out.
‘Since the liberation, we’ve experienced what the French are calling the épuration. You’ve heard the word?’
Both Richard and Hanne shook their heads.
‘It translates as “purge”, and there are two versions of it – the state purge of collaborators, or épuration légale, and the unofficial version of it, épuration sauvage. That’s what I mean by anarchy. The country has turned on itself to settle scores, and the result is utter chaos. It’s quite unedifying. A French chap I know told me it’s as if the French people resent collaborators far more than they ever did the occupying German forces. The prisons are full of collaborators awaiting trial, and plenty of them are being dealt with unofficially. The resistance groups are still active, and most nights collaborators are taken from their homes and found dead in a ditch the next day. So if you want to know the Ferret’s true identity, you just need to pray that anyone who was aware of it hasn’t been killed yet.’
‘What about the Germans – the Gestapo?’
‘They fled: the general strike in Paris started on the fifteenth of August last year, and the uprising four days later, so they had plenty of opportunity to get out before von Choltitz surrendered the city on the twenty-fifth. Ten days seems to have been ample time for them to destroy any records they were leaving behind and bugger off, if you’ll excuse my language. I think your best chance is to find French citizens who worked for the Gestapo.’
‘Were there many of them?’
‘Enough. Does that surprise you?’
‘It does, actually,’ said Hanne. ‘In Copenhagen, it was almost entirely Germans who worked for the Gestapo.’
‘Well then, this isn’t Copenhagen, is it? Though many of the French citizens who were known to have worked for them and were arrested at the time have since been killed. Do you know where your Ferret worked when he was in Paris?’
‘For the Gestapo.’
‘Yes, yes, I’m aware of that, but they had two main offices here. Their headquarters was in rue des Saussaies in the 8th arrondissement, not far from our embassy actually and close to the Élysée Palace, but they also used 84 Avenue Foch, at the other end of the Champs-Élysées, which in many ways was better known – notorious may be a more accurate way of describing it. It was the SS headquarters, and the Gestapo had the sixth floor, I think. A lot of their interrogations were carried out there. If we had some idea of where the Ferret worked, it would help.’
Again they shook their heads.
‘And you say you have a description of him?’
Prince opened a small black notebook he had by his side. ‘Here we are… late twenties – this was at the end of 1943, remember – thick blonde hair and bright blue eyes.’
‘And that’s really the best you can do? Hardly narrows it down, does it! Never mind, I’ll come up with something. Meet me at noon tomorrow: there’s a bar on rue de Duras called Pierre et Fils; it’s near the embassy but also round the corner from rue des Saussaies. One question, though: there are two routes open to us, the official one and the unofficial one. Which one would you prefer?’
‘I’m not sure what you mean.’
‘The official one is rather like the épuration légale – it will mean putting in a request to the French authorities, asking them to start an investigation, et cetera. The unofficial one will be more like the épuration sauvage.’
‘Which one would you suggest?’
‘I think you know the answer to that.’
* * *
‘This is Marguerite.’
They were at the rear of the bar on rue de Duras, sitting in a high-backed banquette with what they assumed were fading ancestors of Pierre and his son staring down at them from the wall. The woman who’d come in with Wilson was perhaps in her mid-thirties; slightly younger than Prince and Hanne. There was some brief chat about the weather as they waited for the coffees to arrive, and Marguerite confirmed she was happy to talk in English. She spoke to the waiter, and soon afterwards, an opened bottle of cognac appeared on the table. She poured some into all their cups without asking.
‘Santé! You need help, I’m told?’
Hanne repeated the story she’d told Wilson the previous evening.
‘We’ll see what we can do. Let me tell you briefly about myself first.’ Marguerite paused as she drank some of her coffee, then topped the cup up with cognac before taking a packet of Gitanes from her handbag and offering them round. She took time to light her own, and soon the group was wreathed in a cloud of the strong tobacco.
‘The Germans occupied Paris on the fourteenth of June 1940: before then, I led the classic life of a bourgeois wife. My husband ran his family business, which manufactures and supplies paper products, and we lived in Saint-Germain in the 7th arrondissement in a beautiful apartment with views over the Champs de Mars. Two or three days a week I helped a friend out in her boutique on Avenue de Friedland.
‘In truth, the occupation did not make a great deal of difference to our lives, although of course we all shook our heads and said how appalling it was. But in our case we were fine. We’d never been political, and my husband’s business prospered considerably, as he gained contracts from the Germans for supplying paper and stationery products. You see, what you must understand is that most people could just continue with their lives and ignore the reality of the situation so long as it was not affecting them directly. But as the war went on, people began to find they needed to come off the fence – is that the correct phrase?’
The others nodded.
‘For me, that happened in July 1942, when more than thirteen thousand Jews were arrested in Paris and taken to deportation centres and from there to Auschwitz – it was known as the grand rafle. Tens of thousands more were to follow them, and of course we now know that hardly any returned. From that point on it was impossible to ignore the situation.
‘Now my husband – his name is Eugène, by the way – had an accountant based in rue Saint-Lazare in the 9th, an old established practice that the business had used for a long while, though Eugène felt they were too old-fashioned for him and was looking to get out of their arrangement.
‘One morning he arrived early for a meeting at their offices and a junior employee let him in. While he was waiting, he went to look for the bathroom but got lost, and to cut a long story short – he recounted it to me in great detail, I promise you – he opened the door to a room where a family was hiding. As he said, it was obvious they were Jews. The accountant pleaded with him to keep it quiet – he said the father was his optician and he was hiding them until the resistance could get them out of Paris – but Eugène ignored him and reported it to the authorities immediately. He said it meant he could kill two birds with one stone: he got rid of more Jews and he was able to get out of his arrangement with the accountants.
‘When he told me this over dinner that evening, he was very pleased with himself, but I was appalled and decided that I had to do something. My younger brother’s in-laws were socialists before the war,
and I suspected some of them might be involved in the resistance. After a few weeks of sending messages and meeting one of them, I became involved too. The organisation I belonged to was Les Mouvements Unis de la Résistance – a group linked with the Armée Secrète. I became active in the unit that covered the 9th arrondissement – they always tried to put you in a unit in a different area from the one you lived in. I delivered messages and money, liaised with other groups and helped people to evade the authorities. I never carried out any actions, but I did take weapons and explosives to people who did. I remained with my husband the whole time, because it was perfect cover, and in any case, by then he had a contract with the German military high command, which was based at the Hotel Majestic on Avenue Kléber. He would often have copies of the material he printed for them in his study, and I was sometimes able to take documents and pass them on to the resistance.
‘Since the liberation, I have maintained my contacts: my main motivation is to ensure that people who collaborated with the Germans should not get away with it.’ She stubbed her cigarette out in a metal ashtray and poured more cognac into her cup.
‘And your husband?’
She laughed bitterly as she lit another Gitanes and began to smoke it as if she was in a hurry. ‘Yes, my husband. He had no idea, of course, about what I’d been up to – he was so arrogant that he assumed I was just another loyal Parisian wife, in awe of him and with no opinion of her own. When the city was liberated, he was terrified – he spent days trying to destroy documents and coaching me on how we were to account for ourselves during the occupation. I arranged for some of my resistance comrades to come to our apartment one evening a week after the liberation. Before they were due to arrive, I sat him down and told him what I’d been up to – how I was so angry at his informing on the Jewish family that I had joined the resistance, and how active I’d been. He was beyond shocked, and pleaded with me to help him, and then, as arranged, my comrades arrived.’ She paused, holding her cigarette in front of her face and watching the smoke spiral towards the ceiling.
