Madeleine's War (33 page)

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 the 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.

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:

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:

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.

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. “Typhus 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.

I smiled at Roland. “He needs to be taken outside for a moment. Will you do it while I work out these percentages?”

“Sure,” he said, grinning.

The figures didn't take long. Overall, 65.5 per cent of agents had been killed, while 44 per cent of the women agents had been killed; and while 11.7 per cent of agents were unaccounted for overall, 10.7 per cent of the women were unaccounted for. So women had not, as we had feared, fared especially badly. Though the risks they had taken had equalled the risks taken by the men, their fates were broadly similar. That would stand up well in Parliament.

I was just laying out the figures neatly on a sheet of paper when Roland came back from taking Max for his stroll. I showed them to him. “This will form the basis of my interim report.”

He looked at them. “Respectable figures, I would say. The women performed well, without being exposed to disproportionate risk.”

“My thoughts entirely,” I replied. “Did Max behave himself?”

“Oh yes,” said Roland. “Nothing to complain of there. Oh, and this arrived for you, just as I was coming back into the building.”

He handed me a small brown envelope, the kind that contained telegrams, with
TOP SECRET
stencilled at the top right-hand corner.

I felt a weight settle on my shoulders, and for a change it had nothing to do with Madeleine. Who was sending me telegrams other than through our normal transmission office? Who knew I was here in Paris, in this very office?

There was only one answer: Rupert Hathaway.

It was good timing in a way. I was about to file my interim report and I was as certain as could be that Madeleine was dead.

“I'd better open this in my office,” I said to Roland.

He nodded.

I took Max with me, closed the door firmly, and ripped open the flap.

There was a thin, crisp sheet of paper inside.

Holding my breath, I rapidly scanned the contents.

I WENT TO BED EARLY THAT NIGHT
. The weather had turned colder, the temperature had dropped faster than those bombs we were raining on Berlin, and I let Max clamber aboard. He lay against my legs, adding his warmth to what I generated myself.

Not that I slept. How could I, knowing that Madeleine at best was dead and at worst was a German spy? On top of that, I now had to kill a man. A man I didn't know, a man who, to all intents and purposes, had never done anyone any harm, who in fact was a force for good, certainly in his scientific and Resistance life. Yes, I had killed people before, both at a distance with a gun, and close up, in hand-to-hand fighting. But that was at a different stage of the war, and the people I had killed were very definitely the enemy. This man was an ally.

That wasn't quite true, of course, not if you accepted that, as Prime Minister Churchill himself had suggested to me, the post-war world was going to be so different from the world we all knew before.

But the world didn't
feel
very different, not to me anyway. Not yet.

How was I going to steel myself to kill François Perrault? And, arguably more to the point, how was I going to do it in such a way that it would
seem like an accident? How long did I have? If Hathaway's telegram had reached me within a few hours of being sent, then Daniel Legros had just set sail to cross the Atlantic, and would be at sea for four or five days. I had to assume Hathaway's people had reasons for not killing Legros while he was at sea. Add a day travelling from Le Havre to Paris—no more because he would want to contact Perrault at the earliest opportunity. All of which meant I had less than a week to carry out what I had to carry out.

The Communist Party meeting was the day after tomorrow. Then I would lay eyes on Perrault at last. That's all I wanted to do. Justine would no doubt want to introduce me, but if at all possible I wanted to avoid that. I would find what I needed to do easier—or at least less disturbing—if I kept my distance beforehand.

I must have dropped off. For all of a sudden I awoke with a jolt as the bed mattress lurched and a body rolled in beside me.

“God, it's cold,” said Justine hoarsely. “I suppose it often is at three o'clock in the morning. I need warming up.”

She put one arm round my chest and pulled me to her. Through my nightshirt I could feel her breasts. She was naked.

“You would be warmer if you had something on.”

She ignored that. “Sorry if I disturbed you,” she whispered. “But I really am freezing. I missed the last train from Nancy but I got a lift in a lorry bringing vegetables to Les Halles. I was grateful but the lorry had no heating and now I'm a block of ice.”

She put one of her legs over my torso, trying to get closer, to soak up the warmth of my body. Max was dislodged and didn't like it. He growled briefly.

She ran a hand under the cloth of my nightshirt and pressed her cold palm to my warm stomach. Then she kissed the back of my neck.

Her skin was on mine in several places, cold but clean and, as it warmed, her body smell was released.

And suddenly I was turning, turning to face her, my mouth on hers and my stiffening penis scoring along her thigh. Her flesh was still cold but her mouth was warm and she rolled on to her back and opened her legs in one quick movement.

I cannot say that there was any tenderness between us that night. I didn't know what had happened between Justine and Gilles and I didn't ask. Her flesh was soon warm, and damp with the sweat of sexual exertion, her blood near the surface of her skin, the shadows playing in stripes over
her legs and abdomen and neck, making of her a tiger of the night. She took little nips out of my skin, and dug her nails into my back. Her body shook and shuddered, and then collapsed.

Madeleine was in my thoughts. How could she not be? The ocean of grief is constantly shifting.

Justine and I didn't talk, not then. We slept eventually and the next thing I knew it was daylight and she was sitting on the edge of the bed, wearing a black sweater, Max on her lap, and she was handing me a cup of coffee.

“I split up with Gilles. That's why I was late—we had a terrible fight.”

I nodded. “What we did felt a bit like a fight.”

She smiled. “But we were both winners, yes?”

I laughed.

“I have never made love with an Englishman before.”

I looked at her levelly. “You French are the experts, right?”

“Not experts, no. But…making love is half of life,
n'est-ce pas
? Today, and from now on, you and I will be different with each other, yes? Matthew, Colonel Hammond, you know when to take charge, when to surrender.”

“You make our fight sound like a battle.”

“I am paying you a compliment.”

“Thank you.”

“And how was I?”

“All that I imagined.”

She sipped her coffee. “The second time we will be better, you will see. Now we know each other more. Maybe we should use some protection next time, no?”

This was moving a little fast for me. Last night had been what it was: sudden, un-thought-through, full-blooded, loud. I had some thinking to do.

And it was time to change the subject.

“No news on Pforzheim, yet. I am spending today writing up my interim report. We don't need you in the office, if you have other things to do.”

She nodded. “I need to see François, to give him Gilles's news, before the meeting tomorrow.”

I drank some coffee. “Is there broad agreement on what the communists will say to de Gaulle?”

She bit her lip. “Everyone is united in their loathing for de Gaulle, but we must work together, Gilles says. Our strength is in what we have achieved in the Resistance—no communists have had their heads shaved, not one. We were here, when de Gaulle was in London. This is what the main plank of our election strategy will be. We are the nationalists more than de Gaulle. That is Gilles's message.”