God's Formula (12 page)

“We were watching the British Embassy,” SD agent Klaus Schneider, a man in his early thirties, pale and bland, said. “On June 9, a priest entered in a small farm truck. An unknown individual had entered fifteen minutes prior.” Schneider’s head bobbed like a marionette’s as he nervously referred to the typewritten report he held in his right hand.

“What date?” asked Heinrich Himmler.

“9 June.”

“And?”

“The priest left thirty minutes later, the unknown individual five minutes after. We followed them both. The priest was with two young men. They parked the truck in a small garage on the grounds of a convent in Montparnasse. We later confirmed he is a Jesuit, Father Alain LaToure, assigned to the convent and its chapel.”

“The unknown man?” Himmler asked.

“We followed him to the Meurice. He was registered as Anthony Hope, a librarian at Cambridge, according to the desk clerk, in Paris to acquire rare books.”

“A cover, of course.”

“He was staying in room 314, next to Mr. Fleming in room 312.”

“Did you continue your surveillance?”

“Yes.”

“The results?”

“From 9 June to this morning, he never left his room.”

“Where is he now?”

“He checked out this morning at 6 a.m. A small British car came to the front entrance. There were two people in it, a man and a woman. Hope was waiting with his one piece of luggage. We followed but lost them. I am sorry, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

“Where did you lose them?”

“On Ile Saint-Germaine.”

“The priest?”

“Still at the convent. We are watching him.”

“And you say Fleming and this man Hope had a connecting door between their rooms?”

“Yes, we checked the hotel registry this morning when the first troops arrived.”

“The woman in the car, any description?”

“A kerchief on her head, sunglasses. Indeterminate age.”

Himmler, sitting at a beautiful Louis Quatorze desk in the Meurice Hotel’s penthouse suite, in full dress uniform, drummed his fingers on the polished mahogany desktop, then turned to Sturmbahnfuhrer Josef Kieffer, the head of the
Sicherheitsdienst
—the SD—the SS’s counterintelligence branch.

“Where is your headquarters?” he asked.

“We are assessing buildings on Avenue Foch.”

“Make a decision. Pick up the priest. When you have him, call me. I will fill you in then.”

Himmler looked at the two men facing him—Agent Schneider, standing, notes in hand, sweating; Kieffer sitting in a plush chair, on edge—and smiled. “You are dismissed,” he said.

When they were gone, the SS chief picked up the postcard he had addressed earlier to his mother in Berlin. On its front was a black-and-white picture of the Alexander III bridge over the Seine. “My dear Mummy,” he wrote, humming a childhood tune in his head, “today I am sending you very warm greetings from Paris…”

“You were gone a long time,” said Professor Tolkien.

“I was in a root cellar most of the time.”

“Papers?” Ian Fleming asked. His impatience was reflected in his clipped speech. The firefight at the bridge had reminded him that there was a war on in which he was a noncombatant, a bitter pill for the son of a hero of the first war. He also had his doubts about Mademoiselle Archambeau. He had been trying since he met her to be clear-headed, despite the heady reek of sensuality and deceit that she exuded, a combination of feminine characteristics that aroused him like no other.

“Yes, in the bag.” The Frenchwoman, her face smudged with soot, looking tired and wilted, but still beautiful, nodded toward the canvas bag she had dropped on the floor near the tower room’s arched entrance when she arrived a moment ago. Fleming picked through the bag until he found the papers.

“These were done today?” he asked as he looked intently at two
Cartes d’Identités,
with
Recepissé
—validation receipts signed by a French police official—attached. “They look old.”

“The mayor is a friend,” Archambeau said. “He keeps a cache of identity cards, mostly dead people, some forged.”

“An agent, I presume,” Tolkien said. He had taken one of the cards from Fleming and was looking at it. “Second Bureau?”

“Yes, a colleague. He had burned most of his stash,” Archambeau said. “We’re lucky.”

“We’re Frenchmen, I see,” said Fleming. “I’ll miss old Anthony Harrington. He had great taste in wine.” He had recalibrated his tone of voice.
Keep it light-hearted, old boy, but find a way to verify her story.
Communication with London was impossible for the time being. Who did he know in French intelligence?

“
Pierre Sindarin
,” Tolkien said, looking at his identity card. “Is that French? He looks more Slavic.”

“It was the best I could do,” said Archambeau. “The mayor was arrested while I was in the cellar going through the cards.”

“I’m not complaining,” said Tolkien. “I’m just interested in names.”

“We will have to remove the photos and attach yours,” said Archambeau. “I have brought glue.”

“Have you brought food?” asked Fleming.

“Yes, cheese, bread, apples. In the bottom of the bag. And cigarettes.”

“Not Gaulloises?” Fleming said, reaching back into the bag. “Ghastly.”

“No Morlands to be had, sorry,” the Frenchwoman said, smiling wryly. “I’ll take one.”

Fleming extracted two fat cigarettes from a shiny new pack, lit them both with his gold plated IMCO lighter, and handed one to Archambeau.

“You’ve changed your clothes,” said Tolkien.

“Yes, the water.” Tolkien’s gaze was fatherly, but Fleming’s was distinctly not. He recalled the sight of Archambeau as she emerged dripping wet from their swim across the Seine. Her full breasts, slightly protruding tummy, and the rounded flare of her rear end as she turned to wring out her hair in the morning sun, had been wonderfully on display through the soaked fabric of her pale green cotton dress and the flimsy stuff of her underwear. Her clothes were still damp and clinging when, barefoot, having lost her shoes in the river, she left for the village that morning. She now had on a simple black skirt, to below the knee, a white cotton blouse and a navy-blue cardigan sweater, with no-nonsense black flats on her feet. “The mayor’s wife is my size,” she said.

“How did you manage to make your way through an occupied city?” Fleming asked.

“Tunnels, caves, catacombs. Sevres has them, like many French cities. I’ve used them before. I know some of the locals.”

“Are they resisting?” Fleming asked. “Some civilians were killed trying to hold the bridge.”

“No longer,” the woman answered. “The Germans were going door to door, that’s why I had to hide.”

“Door to door—” said Fleming.

He was interrupted by the sound of the word
arret
, spit out harshly in a German accent, coming from the road near the bridge. The bedraggled trio looked at each other, then stepped cautiously to the turret window, where Fleming and Archambeau stood on one side of the small opening and Tolkien on the other. Creeping closer, they saw the backs of perhaps fifteen men in civilian clothes, most of them tradesmen, but several in suits and ties, standing on the edge of the road. They were all blindfolded, their hands tied with rope behind their backs. Behind them was a drainage ditch ablaze with wildflowers catching the golden rays of the late day sun. Facing them, on the opposite side of the road, some twenty German soldiers holding machine guns at the ready were arrayed in a semi-circle. To their left stood a burly sergeant in dirty fatigues. To the right, toward the bridge, the major who had directed the attack earlier, stood smiling, his hands clasped behind his back. He had cleaned up, shaved and brushed off his fatigues. He wore sunglasses now. The gold oak leafs on his cap gleamed in the sunlight, as did his teeth. Next to him was one of his lieutenants.

The major said something to the lieutenant, who nodded to the sergeant, who slowly extended his right arm in the sieg heil salute.

“Is that Monsieur le Maire in the blue suit?” Fleming asked.

“I’m afraid it is,” Archambeau replied.

“Lord save them,” Tolkien said, as the sergeant spit on the ground and abruptly swung his arm to his side.

Stepping back to admire his work, Klaus Schneider took a moment to casually clean his eyeglasses with a silk handkerchief—one of a monogrammed set of six given to him by his fiancée when he completed his SD training last year in Berlin—before peering down at the naked priest, sitting in a metal chair, facing him, his hands and feet manacled, a small length of dull gray picture-hanging wire knotted snugly around his flaccid penis. Knowing that he would once more be meeting Herr Reichsfuhrer Himmler, that something extremely important was afoot, the young intelligence officer had made sure to wear his best dark suit, to shave and pomade his fair, Aryan hair.

“You do understand, as any Jesuit would?” he said, smiling, admiring his callous wit, unaware completely of the moral black hole into which he and most of his countrymen had descended. “If you become aroused, the wire will slice your penis off.”

Father Alain LaToure—unshaven, one eye swollen shut by a large purple bruise, like a prizefighter’s, his lower lip bleeding—nodded.

“Of course priests do not care about women, so there is no need to be fearful,
ja
?” The agent, standing and looking from LaToure’s mangled face to his trussed penis, was astounded at his good fortune. Last year, he was on a vice squad in the Dusseldorf police department, chasing down homosexuals and other perverts. Yesterday, he was an obscure low level counter-intelligence officer working a routine detail. Today, he was much on the minds of not only his immediate boss, Major Josef Kieffer, but the god-like boss of all bosses—except for the Fuhrer, of course—Heinrich Himmler. Himself. In the next room.

“I will bring in a woman in a moment,” Schneider continued. “We arrested her last night at the Folies Bergere. Quite stunning.
Ooh La la
. And very cooperative, I must say. She has given me a preview performance, an
undress
rehearsal, you might say. I gave her rave reviews.”

“Here,” said Schneider, when LaToure did not answer. “Here is a photograph.”

LaToure closed his good eye and turned his head away as Schneider thrust the picture at his face.

“Well then,” the German said, putting the snapshot back into his jacket pocket, “when mademoiselle comes in, shutting your eyes—your
eye
, I should say—will not help. She will get very close, quite
intimately
close. Her perfume, well, one whiff… Her hands, her breasts… So, tell me, where are the boys? I will not ask you again.”

“You have afforded your prisoners quite a view,” said Heinrich Himmler.

“Yes,” Josef Kieffer replied, “but it is more secure up here, and there are no neighbors to disturb.”

The two men, both in SS black, sat in the well-stocked and exquisitely appointed library on the fifth, and top, floor of the grand old town house that Kieffer had commandeered for his counter-intelligence headquarters. They were sipping good African coffee, brewed by a stony-faced old servant the owners had left behind in their haste to flee the dreaded Hun. Workmen, French of course, could be heard removing furniture and affixing bars to doors and windows of adjacent rooms. Over the nearby rooftops they could see the Arc de Triomphe, festooned on four sides with brilliant red, black and white swastika banners, looking glorious in the morning sun. Both men were smiling. Paris had been invested without the loss of one German life. The French were preparing to sign surrender papers. A large swath of them, with Petain at its head, had agreed to be German lackeys. Hitler would be visiting soon. Life could not be better.

“How long will you be staying, Herr Reichsfuhrer?” Kieffer asked.

“No more than a few days, I hope.”

Kieffer, who in 1947 would be hung at Hamelin Prison for the murder of British POW’s after his trial in Nuremburg, remained silent. That Himmler was in Paris was not a surprise, many of the Nazi crème de la crème were visiting the new jewel in the expanding German empire. The best hotels and restaurants were filled with them—and the women they were attracting. Some of those women were already in Kieffer’s employ. But for the SS chief, a notorious man-boy, devoted to his mama, to linger, and to be interested in the interrogation of a lowly priest, that was very interesting.

“I am at your disposal,” the major said.

“Has Fraulein Weil appeared?”

“No, Herr Reichsfuhrer. Her passport is still at the front desk of the Meurice. Shall I…?” There was something about the look in Himmler’s beady eyes that caused Kieffer to stop mid-sentence. The SS chief had been in Paris less than twenty-four hours and had asked twice about the mysterious Miss Weil.

“I will be frank with you, major,” Himmler said. “I have lost contact with an agent who reported to me personally, a woman named Marlene Jaeger.”

“Fraulein Weil.”

“Yes.”

“Do you think she was the woman in the car with Mr. Hope and the second man?” Kieffer asked.

“I don’t know,” Himmler replied. “She may not have found an opportunity to contact me.”

“Shall I initiate a search? I will need a description, perhaps a photograph.”

Himmler took an envelope from an inside jacket pocket and handed it to Kieffer. “Her picture,” he said. “She’s twenty-five, slender, brunette, with a mole at the top of her left buttock.”

“And her assignment?” Kieffer asked. “It will help if I knew what she was doing. Was it to do with the Friedeman boy?”

Himmler was about to answer, but stopped at the sudden sound of sharp knocking on the room’s thick oak door.

“Come in,” said Kieffer.

The door swung open and Klaus Schneider was shown in by Kieffer’s adjutant, who stepped back into the anteroom he used as an office, swinging the door shut.

“Schnieder,” said Kieffer.

“Herr Sturmbannfuhrer.”

“You look like you have something to say. Speak.”

“The boys are heading to Foix with a Mr. and Mrs. Foret.”

“Who are
they
?” Kieffer asked.

“An elderly couple. They own a bakery in the 16th arrondisement.”

“Where is Foix?” Himmler asked.

“South,” Schneider replied. “On the Spanish border.”

“Their contact in Foix?” Kieffer asked.

“The priest did not know if there was one. They are going to attempt to cross into Spain.”

“Anything else?” Kieffer asked.

“No.”

“Why not? The priest is obviously a member of a resistance cell.”

“He—”

“Yes?”

“He’s dead.”

“Ah.”

Silence.

“Agent Schneider,” said Himmler. “You worked out of our embassy on Rue des Lilles?”

“Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

“Was there an Abwehr officer there?”

“Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

“Who was that?”

“Major Klien, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

“Did you tell him about the priest and Mr. Hope?”

“I made a report.”

“Our meeting last night? Today’s interrogation? Have you reported them?”

“No, Herr Reichsfuhrer. I haven’t had the time.”

“Wait outside.”

“Kieffer,” Himmler said, when they were alone again. “I have a job for you.”

“Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

“I am going to sign an order giving you authority to select two thousand Waffen men, a battalion that you will head, the best of the best, for a mission to Foix, to seal the border there, and to capture the Friedeman boy.”

“Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

“You are promoted to lieutenant-colonel, pro tem.”

“I am honored, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

“You have, of course, been wondering why this boy is so important.”

“Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

“There is a scientist, Kurt Diebner, staying at the Meurice. I have made him an SS captain, but ignore that. He is not a soldier. He will fill you in. He will accompany you to Foix. The Friedeman boy must be captured alive and unhurt. The other one I don’t care about.”

“Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

“You will start now. Nothing has more priority.”

“Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

“There is one more thing.”

“Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

“You will not share anything about this mission with any other agency, military or civilian, particularly the Abwehr and Admiral Canaris.”

“Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

“Is that understood?”

“Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

“I will stay in Paris. I expect you to bring me the boy in a matter of days, if not hours.”

“Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

“Your agent Schneider?”

“Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer?”

“He is going to commit suicide. Cyanide will do. You have pills?”

“Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

“Immediately. He cannot leave this building alive.”

“Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”