Madeleine's War (32 page)

JUSTINE REACHED UP AND
,
WITH BOTH HANDS
, pulled back her mane of rust-red hair and shaped it into a ponytail. The music at the Lune was different tonight—guitars and a double bass, softer, easier on the ears. Suggestive.

She was drinking wine, as usual; I had gone straight to the whisky. And—a first—we had eaten dinner in the club. Chicken was the staple in those days, if you could get it, and chicken it was that night.

We had spent dinner discussing the upcoming trip to Reims and points east. Justine had told me that, as soon as the trip was over, and assuming we got more or less what we wanted, she might stop off for a night in Nancy on the way back, to see Gilles.

“Is Gilles a communist, like you?”

“Yes, of course.”

I nodded. “I read those pamphlets you gave me.”

“And?”

“Those three secretaries in the office—the three French girls. Are any of
them
communists?”

“Why do you ask? What has it got to do with the pamphlets I gave you?” I tapped the back of her hand, resting on the table. “Don't be touchy. It's just that their résumé of the newspapers that they prepare every day never has anything in it about the dispute between the Gaullists and the communists. There must be
something
in the papers from time to time—yet they never include it.”

“They are told to include only news directly related to military affairs.”

“Oh? On whose orders?”

“Roland's, I think.”

I nodded. “I'm going to have the briefing changed. We need some understanding of French politics. Not a lot, but some.”

“I'm sure Roland—and the women—will do what you want.”

“And what
is
the latest on the Gaullist-communist tussle? What's going to happen?”

“De Gaulle is still giving himself airs and graces, laying down the law, making proposals as if he is already president of France. Didn't Antoine Picard tell you any of this? If he didn't, what did he tell you?”

I said nothing.

After a pause she went on. “The party is having a conference in seven days' time to consider—and vote on—what de Gaulle proposes.”

“Who actually runs the party now?”

“There is a steering committee of five—they will organize the meeting.”

I sipped some whisky. “Who are the five?”

“Oh, you wouldn't know them.”

“Really? I was here in forty-one and forty-two, remember. I met a lot of Resistance people, some of them communists. Try me.”

Sipping her wine, she put the glass back on the table.

“Jules Pilany?”

I shook my head.

“Francine Adelbert?”

“No.”

“Daniel Longchamp?”

“No.”

“François Perrault?”

I swallowed hard but managed to say “No.”

But then, as Justine's brow puckered into a small frown, I added, “Hold on…Wasn't there a…Wasn't there a François Perrault who…Yes, didn't he win the Nobel Prize…for something…something scientific, before the war?”

She smiled. “Yes, well done. François is a most distinguished party member, who gave up his career for the Resistance. He has a lot of following in the party—”

“And who is the fifth member of the committee?” I didn't want us to dwell too much on Perrault.

“Oh,” she said, temporarily wrong-footed. “Oh, it's…it's…Luc Lippens, who—”

“Ah!” I breathed, “
There
you are, I know Luc, or I did. Wasn't he based in Alsace at one time?”

She nodded, smiling still more. “Yes, yes he was. Well done again. You've got a good memory.”

“Well, well. Where
is
this meeting of yours? Maybe I'll come along and say hello to Luc. If I'm allowed in, of course.”

She swallowed some wine. “Oh, I can get you into the meeting. That's not a problem, though it might be boring for you. It's in the Théâtre Stendhal at rue Pierre au Larde.”

It was my turn to nod. Today had been a good day. Two steps forward and none back.

SAARBURG PRISON WAS VAST
, certainly in comparison with La Santé. Long rows of low, brick-built, single-storey huts with corrugated iron roofs, all surrounded by a high brick wall and, beyond that, a barbed-wire fence patrolled by guards with dogs.

The room where Justine and I were now waiting looked like some kind of classroom. Long wooden tables, long wooden benches, a blackboard at one end, fixed to the wall. A window with a metal mesh on both the outside and the inside. The same smell of chalk in the air that we had in the École Lavoisier.

Justine stood up and rubbed the backs of her thighs. “I need to stretch my legs. Three more days in that bloody Land Rover and I might never walk again.”

I nodded. “I know how you feel.”

Gilles had not exaggerated. The roads in northeastern France could scarcely bear the traffic on them. There was military traffic of all kinds, not just Jeeps and Land Rovers but armoured personnel carriers, endless lines of green-grey army trucks, troop transporters, tank carriers, engineering trucks with cranes, supply trucks, ammunition trucks, ambulances, military police Jeeps. There were also some ordinary cars,
hundreds
of bicycles, a handful of very slow tractors, and a few horse-drawn carts, holding everything up. Many of the roads were narrow, especially when they passed through small towns and villages. All along, at intervals, the roads had been bombed or shelled and not yet fully repaired, and we had to wait in line to carefully negotiate our way around the rubble. In a few places, the road was half closed and the two-way traffic alternated under the supervision of soldiers or the police.

Aircraft flew overhead, keeping low. In addition to everything else, there was the noise.

And then there were the checkpoints, on the outskirts of all the major cities and some of the towns. Mostly, people were just waved through—as we were—but not everyone, and so narrow were the roads that when someone was stopped everyone behind had to stop too.

We had in fact averaged no more than twelve miles an hour on each of the days we had travelled. Paris to Reims was eight hours in the saddle, Reims to Metz much the same, and yesterday, the fifty miles from Metz to Saarburg, across the border, had taken another six and a half hours. In both Reims and Metz, we had eaten in the hotels we had found—we were too exhausted to go out in search of any entertainment. And in Saarburg, so far as we could see, our hotel had the only restaurant in town that was open for business.

“After
that
journey, I'm rather pleased we are returning by train—”

The door flew open, and there stood Standartenführer Ulrich Kolbe.

Almost six feet tall, barrel-chested, with close-cropped but glistening silver hair, brown eyes—his softest feature. Chin thrust out, badly in need of a shave, grey uniform trousers, loose brown knitted sweater that had seen better days.

I thought: We had all seen better days.

Here was the man who might have interrogated Madeleine. Who might have tortured her, or given the order for her to be harmed. And who might well have issued the order to have her sent east, to her death. What he had done—if he had done it—was not directed at me personally, but it didn't matter. The effect was the same. If I couldn't hate Kolbe, who
could
I hate?

He took one pace forward and stopped, just inside the door. His two armed guards remained outside.

“You are Colonel Hammond, really?” he said in English.

I nodded.

“Do we shake hands?” He smiled.

I didn't say anything. Why was he smiling? What did he have to smile about?

“It was nothing personal, Colonel. It was the war.”

I wasn't getting into that. This was my show, our show. He was the prisoner.

“This is Lieutenant Colonel Justine Coudehard,” I said, giving her a
rank she didn't have but which might just help intimidate him. “Do you want to do this in French or English? My German's no good.”

“My French is better than my English,” he replied, nodding at Justine. “What is it you want?”

“Sit down and I'll tell you. Cigarette?”

As he sat down, Justine closed the door.

We sat around the end of one long table, he and I on the benches, Justine on what seemed to be the teacher's chair.

I waited a few moments, so he could enjoy his cigarette. It had begun to rain outside—autumn was here.

“Where are you from, Standartenführer? Where did you grow up?”

“Weimar. Do you know Germany? Does that mean anything to you?”

“Goethe, Schiller, Herder. I go that far.”

He nodded. “That's something.”

“Have your family been told you have been captured?”

“I don't know. The war is moving so fast.”

“What family do you have? A wife—?”

“And two boys, eight and six.”

“Still in Weimar?”

“No, Berlin now.”

“Address?”

“Fifteen Schliemannplatz.”

I made a careful note, implying I would help get word to them if he played ball.

“How long were you in Paris, at Avenue Foch?”

He didn't reply.

“We have information that you were chief interrogator there. Is that true?”

He didn't move. Then he nodded briefly.

“When exactly did you first start impersonating one of our agents, sending back messages to us?”

“That's operational detail. The rules of war say I don't have to answer. Why should I tell you? Why should I tell you anything?”

“Cigarettes,” I replied, smiling.

He just kept looking at me.

“All right then.” I tapped my fingers on the table. “Later in this interview, we may move on to war crimes. If we bring charges and you are found guilty, you could hang. If, however, you are cooperative, helpful…
Well, it could make a difference to what we recommend for you. It could make a difference between life and death.”

“So you think Germany will lose this war?”

“The British are about to take Aachen. Calais has finally fallen, with five thousand German prisoners captured. In Germany itself sixteen-year-olds have just been called up. Goebbels made a speech on the radio the other day saying that—and I quote—‘every German house is now a fortress.' Three thousand bombers hit Berlin two nights ago—more than ever before—and the Luftwaffe has disappeared. It's just a matter of time, Standartenführer—months, not years. You are an officer, an educated man. You must know that what I say is true.”

“I know we have some secret weapons that could make all the difference.”

“Is that what you've been told? Do you
believe
what you are saying, or are we playing a game?”

He was coming to the end of his cigarette. I let the packet lie on the table between us.

“Let's forget about when you penetrated our network, at least for now. I am interested in the fate of our agents in F Section; all of them, but especially the women. You can help me there. You are not putting the future of the Reich at risk by telling us what you know. And I can get word to your family, via the Red Cross, that you are alive and well, without mentioning”—deliberately I paused—“Monique Brèger.”

His head jerked back and he glared at me.

Justine was looking at me too. This was a name she didn't know. What was I playing at?

Kolbe scratched his chin. He had gone days without a shave and his stubble was clearly irritating him.

I broke the silence. “Let me ask you a general question.”

I hunched forward over the table and spoke quietly.

“When you captured one of our people and brought them back to Avenue Foch, how long did you keep them there?”

He took his time answering. But then, “Two or three days usually. Some up to a week.”

“Did you torture them?”

He eyed me levelly. “We roughed them up, yes. That's how I'd put it. We knew that their circuits would have been alerted when they were captured and disappeared from circulation, so unless we got information
quickly, we would be too late. Also, we knew that people who are going to crack do so sooner rather than later. Avenue Foch was a kind of forward station, a first line of attack, so to speak. If they didn't crack straightaway, we didn't keep at them; we sent them east where the interrogators had more time, more space, and more…equipment. Paris wasn't the place for that.”

I nodded.

Justine was taking notes now.

“When you say you ‘sent them east,' what exactly did that entail? What did that mean?”

“You must understand that all your agents—your British agents, I mean—were operating in plain clothes, as
spies
. They had a different status from, say, the French who worked for and with them. The Frenchies were Resistance people and, in some cases that we thought were suitable, we tried to ‘turn' them, persuade them to work for us. But for the British agents, being sent east meant one of two things. Those who were interrogated and revealed nothing were sent to Ravensbruck. That's a prison camp north of Berlin where, as I understand it, they would be interrogated more intensely and then executed by firing squad, whether they revealed anything or not. Usually, they were kept in the camp for a week or two before the end came. Anyway, not long.”

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.”