by James Philip
Haldeman blinked.
“You could be right, sir,” he shrugged. “But I was under the impression she was at Subic Bay in the Philippines. Do you want me to get you an update on that, sir?”
“Yes. Do that. People think we’re weak because we just sit here and take all this shit.” Richard Nixon waved his arms dismissively. “And because we allow fucking failed movie actors like Reagan and those fucking Kennedy Democrats to slander our great nation, and to make false allegations…”
The President’s voice trailed away.
He appeared to lose his train of thought.
“Not good enough,” he muttered, gesturing angrily at the latest Gallop poll sitting malignantly on his blotter. “Thirty-one percent approval rating! Don’t they know what would have fucking happened back in 1966 if that peacenik excuse for a human being McGovern, or good old Captain Brenckmann and his fucking wife Eleanor had been in the White House?”
Eleanor?
Haldeman shut his eyes, unfortunately when he opened them again it turned out that he had not been having a bad dream.
This, unfortunately, was reality.
The silence festered for several seconds.
And then, Gordon Gray, the US National Security Advisor cleared his throat.
“Er, I think you’ll find that Ambassador Brenckmann’s wife’s name is Joanne, sir,” he murmured apologetically. “It was FDR’s wife who was called Eleanor…”
Chapter 17
Wednesday 8th May, 1968
Hotel de Var, Le Revest-les-Eaux, Military District of Toulon
Jacqueline Faure had surrendered herself to the English in Bordeaux at the end of April last year. Starving, fit to drop from repeated bouts of dysentery she had been almost but not quite beyond caring what happened to her by then.
She had walked up to the checkpoint outside the Headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force on the Place de la Bourse, and before she fainted declaimed: ‘I am Comrade Agnès…I was a member of the Central Committee of the Front Internationale in Clermont Ferrand…I am on your Most Wanted list…’
And then the world had gone dark until she had awakened in a hospital bed with a saline drip in her arm, naked but clean for the first time in months in a crisp, antiseptic-smelling medical gown.
‘If you can sit up, we’ll try to get some broth down you,’ a woman had suggested a little later.
Nobody other than the doctors and nurses, who had fussed over her ceaselessly, had shown any interest in her history or criminal involvement in the heinous atrocities of the FI for the first week as she gradually recovered her strength. In fact, it had not been until she was able to walk unaided again, that she realised that there had probably been armed guards outside her room all the time.
Finally, a woman of about her own age dressed in dowdy civilian clothes had come into her secluded room in the British Wing of the hospital, shown her a rather battered Royal Military Police warrant card and tersely informed her that she was being transferred to the United Kingdom.
Jacqueline had obediently put on the ugly, over-sized blue boiler suit and scuffed, flat-heeled shoes she was provided with, disappeared into the greatcoat she was offered and followed her visitor.
Several British Royal Marines armed with Sterling submachine guns had been waiting for the women in a cobbled courtyard, where two American Jeeps waited, their engines idling and their canvas canopies drawn over the seats to ward off that morning’s spitting rain.
Twelve hours later she was in England, a guest of what her captors described to her as the Joint Services Interrogation Centre (JSIC), at Pirbright in Surrey.
Her first ‘interview’ had commenced at nine o’clock the following morning, in a room situated at one end of a wooden hut in the trees. The building was so newly constructed she imagined she could smell the fresh sawn planking. The summer sunshine had blazed in through the windows and her hosts, a middle-aged, dumpy Englishwoman in tweeds and an elderly Frenchman with a twitching scowl and murder in his eyes, had offered her real coffee.
Just the scent of it almost caused her to faint…
‘During your time in the Auvergne you were known as Comrade Agnès,’ the woman had inquired in French, ‘but you told the people in Bordeaux that your real name was Jacqueline Faure?’
‘Yes, before the war I was a physicist, I was a leading member of the Republique’s atomic bomb program…’
At that session and in others as the days went by, the Englishwoman had plainly been more interested in her pre-war work than in the historiography and calumnies of the Front Internationale; whereas, her French companion, concentrated almost exclusively on her personal culpability – which he took for granted - in the litany of unspeakable atrocities committed by the FI.
Sometime in her second week in England, the angry Frenchman disappeared. Or rather, he simply no longer attended her interrogation sessions which became sporadic, less stern, more just friendly chats by the woman in tweeds and a succession of men in threadbare suits, several of whom introduced themselves as being members of the ‘Security Service’.
It was all very strange but it was nice to have somebody to talk to and Jacqueline, by that stage, only wanted to be helpful. The British fed her regularly, gave her papers to read and allowed her to listen to the radio in the afternoons and the long summer evenings.
Then, one day late in June last year Vera Bertrand, the woman whom Maxim Machenaud had mistakenly believed was his agent in Vichy in 1964, had knocked on the door to her room – it was hardly a cell, it was never looked although the building she lived in was guarded by armed soldiers twenty-four hours a day - and suggested to Jacqueline that they might go for ‘a walk in the woods’.
By then Jacqueline had confessed everything.
She had never physically participated in any of Maxim Machenaud’s crimes but undeniably, she had been the madman’s secretary, his amanuensis, and his companion. She had tried to tell herself that sometimes she had been able to quieten his rage, ameliorate or forestall some dreadful excess of violence. In reality, she had achieved very little other than her own, personal survival. Nightmares stalked her sleep, and still followed her every waking step in those days.
To Jacqueline’s surprise the other woman had asked her few questions that morning as they walked in the woods. Instead, she had volunteered information. Belatedly, Jacqueline had understood that her interrogation was over and that the British had decided to recruit her to their cause.
‘The White Brigade eventually surrendered to the British in the Poitou,’ Vera Bertrand told her. ‘The British could have killed us all, or just left us to starve in the winter. When Sergey Akhromeyev and I were first brought here; we thought we were going to be disappeared.’
The older woman had laughed softly.
‘How ridiculous was that,’ she sighed, shaking her head. ‘They offered us the opportunity to join with them in liberating France, although in the end, only Sergey took part in the liberation of Bordeaux; the rest of us were still up in Hereford at the time. After that, I don’t think the British knew what to do with us, all the Soviet prisoners of war who switched sides, and we French resistance fighters. Most of my, our compatriots have returned home now but the Vindrey Commando, the British Army’s ‘Russian’ Brigade, is nearly a thousand-strong.’ Another laugh. ‘Well, two thousand strong if you include all its camp followers!’
Jacqueline had replied, diffidently, that Maxim Machenaud had put a huge price on her head, and subsequently upon that of the former Red Army Spetsnaz officer, Akhromeyev.
‘Sergey and I were married when he got back from France in March,’ Vera had confided. ‘Our people expected it, I think. He and I are exiles, as are our people. This,’ she gestured at the trees in full, verdant leaf around them, ‘is not perhaps, the promised land we all dreamed of back in the dark days in France but it is home now, a place where we can hope to be normal.’
‘Things can never be normal, not as they were before for me,’
Jacqueline had objected without self-pity.
‘You killed Machenaud?’
‘Yes, I killed him but two, three years too late!’
The older woman was unnaturally sanguine about it.
‘The British are trying to persuade General de Boissieu to proclaim a national amnesty, a great reconciliation. As always happens, as happened after the Second War, all those brave political heroes who hid in England or quietly acquiesced with the Nazis, are coming out of their holes and demanding war crimes trials and that all collaborators should be punished,’ Vera had complained contemptuously, ‘but they were silent when it mattered most and some of us will always remember that we owe the English…everything.’
‘I do not want to be forgiven or rehabilitated,’ Jacqueline had protested.
‘No, I don’t think you do. You are, after all, the only surviving member of the FI’s inner circle in the Auvergne – well, as far as we know - it is your duty to confess your sins and to accept whatever fate the victors decree.’
The two women had halted, looked one to the other.
Jacqueline had still been painfully thin, her formerly lousy hair cropped short by the hospital in Bordeaux, a young woman seemingly old after the travails of the last five years. Yet not beaten, not yet defeated, confused.
‘I don’t know when, or if, the English will send you back to France,” Vera had explained. “All I know is that they won’t send you back until the Provisional Government guarantees that you will not face execution. In the meantime, it is hoped that you will continue to fully co-operate with the authorities; there is much we still do not know about the crimes of the Front Internationale, or of the activities of the various fighting bands, or of those free companies, the evil mercenaries and écorcheurs who raped our country after the October War.’
‘I am not to be tried for my crimes?’
Vera Bertrand-Akhromeyev shook her head.
‘I don’t think so. The English have no appetite for revenge. For them the war is over, or that at least, is what they yearn for.’ A wry smile crossed the older woman’s face, and an unlikely hint of mischief twinkled in her dark eyes. She reached out and touched Jacqueline’s left elbow. ‘Once upon a time I ran a whore house in Vichy, yet a few days ago I was invited to sit down with the British Prime Minister for tea. Madame Thatcher wished to know my opinion on a matter of great consequence. We talked for a little while, and then it was agreed that your sister has a right to know that you are alive and well, safe in England…’
Jacqueline had nearly swooned.
“Aurélie is alive?”
Vera told her that her ‘little’ sister was not only alive but a hero of the liberation, and the wife of Admiral Rene Leguay, the Minister of the Navy of the newly proclaimed Sixth Republique, and at that time, the Provisional Military Governor of the South of France.
Aurélie’s husband had recently relinquished that latter post to devote his energies to his naval duties. It seemed the couple had been married on Malta shortly after the French Mediterranean Fleet had escaped from Villefranche-sur-Mer, immediately prior to the final battles of what most French men and women were now calling the post-October 1962 ‘Civil War’.
Jacqueline was also informed that the British Prime Minister wished, at some stage, to meet her, although her companion was unclear as to the object of such an interview.
After her walk in the woods with Vera Bertrand-Akhromeyev, Jacqueline had remained a guest of JSIC for several more weeks. Subsequent interrogations had been relaxed, friendly, collegiate de-briefing sessions with a variety of military, and later, civilian scientists. It occurred to her that she might, in some way be betraying state secrets; albeit, secrets of the old pre-cataclysm French Republic but then, if her country no longer had a bomb program how could that be in any way injurious to her homeland?
The anticipated encounter with the British Prime Minister had not actually materialised that summer until, early in August, Jacqueline was installed – by this time guarded only to ensure her own personal safety – in a picturesque cottage within the boundaries of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at RAF Harwell, where, in effect, after a short delay during which she was brought up to speed by her new British colleagues, she had resumed her pre-war career as a bomb scientist.
By the time she finally met Margaret Thatcher, her English had improved to the level whereby she could, with very occasional hesitations, converse ‘like a native’.
None of her fellow scientists at Harwell knew; or seemed to care about the FI, or who she had been – Comrade Agnès - in Clermont Ferrand, and the Prime Minister had not alluded to that part of her past either, other than obliquely.
Jacqueline got the impression that the British Premier was simply curious to meet her; the other woman was pleasant, solicitous of her wellbeing but otherwise, seemed to have no particular agenda, as if she was merely passing through on the way to another engagement.
‘We are so glad that you have decided to join our team at Harwell,’ her visitor had said in farewell.
Jacqueline had not judged it appropriate to point out that she had not volunteered, she had been co-opted onto the British atomic bomb program without a say in it, either way. Not that she had considered for a second, rejecting the invitation to return to the work which had become her whole life in the years before October 1962. In many ways, it was a dream come true and she struggled to come to terms with her fate.
Harwell was just about the most secret place in England, a closed enclave as the United Kingdom planned to reactivate its mothballed bomb factories at Burghfield and Aldermaston, and to re-commence its stalled nuclear power station program. It was also the ideal place to hide Jacqueline away. Inevitably, she could not help but ask herself, if the apparent leniency of the British and their Free French allies towards her had more to do with not wishing to do anything to undermine Rene Leguay, the man who was, she had been given to understand, General de Boissieu’s key politico-military supporter south of the Loire Valley.
It was just one of the conundrums that preoccupied her in those first months she was in England.
In understanding the undercurrents swirling beneath the British sponsored victory in France, and the as yet, brittle national peace in her homeland, Jacqueline had been unsurprised by her sister’s apparent reluctance to renew personal contact. She had received no letters, nor had there been any telephone calls, or even messages, or sentiments passed via proxies.
In fact, as the anniversary of her surrender to the British in Bordeaux approached, and passed, she had got used to the idea that she and her sister would be, and perhaps, could only be, strangers going forward in their separate lives.
And then the head of her department – the Bomb Geometry Research and Modelling Section, responsible for the miniaturisation of kiloton-range tactical battlefield warhead design – had taken her aside and explained that arrangements had been made ‘at the request of the French authorities’ by the Royal Air Force to fly her to France for a quote: ‘personal break’.
Thus, twenty-four hours ago, she had been flown from Brize Norton in Oxfordshire to Marseilles on a regular C-130 RAF Hercules shuttle flight. On arrival in the south of France, the other passengers, mainly Royal Marines, naval personnel and a clutch of Foreign and Commonwealth Office staffers, had headed straight into the airport reception hall. She had been intercepted by a French Navy security detail under the command of a youthful capitaine de corvette – equivalent to a lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy – and driven along the coast and up into the hills above Toulon.
‘I am to impress upon you that you are not under arrest, Madame Faure,’ the officer had assured her. ‘But feelings are still a little, shall we say, raw about the rule of the Front Internationale, and your safety is our first concern.’
She had thought about making light of things: ‘Should I be wearing a mask?’
But she had kept the thought to herself.
Likewise, she had denied herself the lu
xury of asking her guardian angels – troops and gendarmes seemed to be everywhere – what was going on.
All this was a bonus; more than she deserved.
On arrival, she discovered that she was the only guest at the Hotel de Var, a small mansion in the style of a pre-Second War bolthole for the rich and famous who had once roamed the Riviera, situated in the relatively undamaged hillside commune of Le Revest-les-Eaux. From the balcony of her airy first floor room she had a marvellous view of the great port of Toulon to the south.
Needless to say, she had slept hardly a wink last night.
Nor had she been able to eat more than a few morsels of the meal served to her in her large, airy room, a mouth-watering crepe, lightly braised sea bass, and a lemony sorbet. Embarrassed by her lack of appetite she had forced feeble quips about her constitution having become too accustomed to stolid ‘English cuisine’.
Having refused to seek clarification for her unexpected recall to French soil yesterday on the tarmac at the airport, or during her drive along the coast to the hotel, she had bitten her tongue yet again that morning when her breakfast was served – croissant, real butter and several fruit conserves, fresh coffee – and thus, been in a state of near-twitching anxiety when she heard movement in the corridor, and a quiet knock at her door.
The last time she had seen her half-sister, Aurélie had been a plump, newly-wed bubbling with her job as an ecole primaire – primary school – teacher in Lyons.
Aurélie had married a handsome, distracted man, Pierre, who longed to return to the Paris of his childhood, and even early in their marriage they had been edgy, unsettled. At the time, Jacqueline had tacitly assumed that Pierre was still ‘playing the field’; and that Aurélie was too busy, wrapped up in her life at the school and running their claustrophobic apartment to notice.
But that was over six years ago, and for a moment Jacqueline hardly recognised her little sister, who was no longer a girlish, nervously laughing adolescent just stumbling into womanhood, rather a twenty-eight-year-old mother cradling her four-month-old baby son in her arms in the doorway.
