Madeleine's War (27 page)

Justine leaned forward again. “Did you ever hear screams or clean away blood yourself?”

Claudine shook her head. “I never heard screams, no, but I did once—no, twice—see blood on the floor of the interrogation room. And I once had to clean it up from the floor of the exercise yard.”

“People were tortured in the exercise yard?”

Claudine took a long pull on her cigarette. “No. I think…I think in that case that someone tried to escape, jumped from a cell window at night and didn't realise how far the drop was. I think he killed himself.”

“Did that happen just once?”

“I think so. But others did escape.”

“Yes. Let's come to that.”

Justine's hand closed over the cigarette packet again.

“Tell us about the escapes.”

Claudine hesitated. “There were two escapes that I know about, or I was told about. The first was when a man and a woman escaped from the exercise yard. There had been a delivery that day—I was never told what the delivery was—but it seems that someone, perhaps someone in the Resistance posing as a workman, left the yard gate open and the man and woman spotted it, and simply walked out of the gate into Paris and disappeared.”

“And who were these people?”

“I don't have any names but I was told later, or I overheard, that they arrived on different days. The man worked in Paris, the woman was from somewhere to the west.”

“Can you describe them?”

Claudine closed her eyes. “I can see them better this way. The man was tall and thin with a lot of blond hair—he looked German, but he was English. She was tall too, not as tall as him though, and she was a blonde. Cropped, straw-coloured hair.”

I let out the breath I had been holding. Not Madeleine.

“And the other escape?”

Claudine nodded. “Oh, that was very different. He was ill, or he pretended to be, and a doctor was called. He overwhelmed the doctor, stabbed him with a needle to his heart, and knocked out the male nurse. Then he put on the male nurse's white coat and walked down the main stairs of the building and out by the front door. It was very audacious, I couldn't believe it when I was told. He was very daring.”

“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 the 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?”