Madeleine's War (31 page)

She took hold of her wine glass. “I have a spare bedroom. There are lots of flowers and photographs everywhere. The whole place smells of woman—there are books all over the chairs and tables, newspapers. It's untidy, but lived into—I think I mean ‘lived in.' ” She smiled. “I have wine, Pernod—we can buy some whisky, I can lend you a dressing gown—don't ask whose—and I have a radio tuned to the BBC.”

I was weighing up her offer when she added, “And I share my flat with someone you will find irresistible. He's called Max.”

“Oh? And why is Max so irresistible? Isn't your boyfriend jealous?”

She smiled and squeezed my hand again. “No, not at all. You see, Max is a Cairn—almost a West Highland terrier.”

I
'
LL SAY ONE THING FOR JUSTINE
: she was a good psychologist. I loosened up a lot after I moved into her flat.

It was amazing what a difference flowers and photographs and Max, Justine's Cairn terrier, made. But I was never going to get rid of that solid mass lodged near my heart, which kept me awake into the small hours, however comfortable the bed in which I slept. It woke me early however late I had dropped off.

What most preoccupied me, of course, was exactly
how
I was going to find out whether it was Madeleine who had escaped on her way to Pforzheim. Until I knew, one way or the other, I had put my visit to the Bibliothèque Nationale indefinitely on hold. No point in tempting fate. But I had at last begun to give some thought to my interim report and my little—or not-so-little—deal with Rupert Hathaway.

I knew, for instance, that my target had to be François Perrault. Hard as it might be to kill him and get away with it, he was here in Paris, or so I had been told. Daniel Legros was miles away and would, most likely, only turn up at the last minute before meeting Perrault. No time at all to make any kind of plan.

The window of Justine's spare room looked out on to the slate roofs of Paris, and when it rained, which it did a lot that month, the slates glistened during the day against the metallic grey of the clouds, and glinted in the amber lights of the city at night, like the scales on a giant goldfish.

Justine's flat was only two stops on the Métro from the École Lavoisier—at a pinch, we could have walked.

We fell fairly quickly into a routine. Since I was always awake early,
and since I have always been an early-morning person, I saw to breakfast. I put the kettle on, hurried downstairs to the bakery on the corner, bought four croissants still hot from the oven, stepped across to the newsagent's for that day's paper, and returned in time to make hot coffee—black market, of course. Having prepared everything, I left for the
école
before Justine, while she read the paper (after me) and cleared up. Everybody in the office found out soon enough that I had moved in with Justine and I didn't bother to correct any wrong impressions that news might have created. No one said anything, not even Roland. Even so, I thought it looked better if we arrived at the office separately. I don't know why it felt better—it just did.

Normally, my first task when I arrived at the
école
was to read the telegrams that had come in from London. Cathcart Place sent us a digest every morning of what our forces had accomplished the day before. That day I read that there had been an airborne invasion of Holland. Metz had been surrounded and was expected to fall at any minute, twenty thousand Germans had surrendered at Orléans, Boulogne had finally fallen, but Calais was still holding out. Some of our forces were already
in
Germany now, near Aachen and Trier.

The two decrypters in the office were female, and British. The three secretaries were French, and every day by noon, they prepared a summary of developments inside France, taken from the newspapers. All in all, we did our best to keep up to speed.

Roland Kemp was a taciturn man, a graduate of Cambridge University, where he had read German and French. Before the war he had studied in Dresden but had left in 1936, he told me, when the Nuremburg rallies had begun, and returned to Cambridge to do a second degree, this time in mathematics. He had been co-opted into SC2 on its inception in 1940: he was excellent at breaking codes. He wasn't married, and I didn't know much more about him than that.

After I had been living in Justine's apartment for about a week, we had a breakthrough with Ida Cooper, code name Flame, or Flamme. A cipher from London told us she had not been captured, as we had thought, but had managed to take a ratline all the way down the Atlantic coast of France to Portugal, where, knowing the invasion was imminent, she had lain low. Once she had heard news of D-Day, she had quietly made arrangements to board a ship heading north. She had now reached Southampton safely. That meant only thirteen women now needed accounting for. I was
pleased, of course. But, in my darker moments, I wondered whether, if Ida had at last surfaced, did that not mean that Madeleine should have turned up by now, too? If she had escaped?

I never quite finished those thoughts.

I was sitting at my desk, rereading the decoded report about Ida/Flame, and having these gloomy ruminations, when Roland knocked on my door and barged in, without waiting for an answer.

I looked up.

“Guess what?” he said.

“Hitler's surrendered.”

“However did you pass the officer's exam, sir?”

We both grinned.

“I give up then,” I said. “What is it?”

He laid a piece of paper on my desk.

“Ulrich Kolbe has been captured. He's in Saarburg Prison. The intelligence exchange system works—he was captured at the weekend.”

Over Roland's shoulder, I could see Justine lurking. She had obviously been given this intelligence before I had.

“That's fantastic news!” I breathed.

This changed things, or it might do. As a high-ranking officer, and if I could persuade him to play ball, Kolbe should know where Madeleine—where all our agents—had been sent. If I could get to him, that should settle things, one way or the other, about the fate of the SC2 agents. Then I could concentrate on Hathaway's problem.

“Today is—what?—Tuesday,” I added, thinking hard. I read the slip of paper he had put on my desk. “There's nothing to stop us leaving tomorrow, is there?”

“None at all,” he said. “Well, that's not quite true. First I need to get you a vehicle and some juice.”

“How soon will you know?”

He shrugged. “An hour. No more than two.”

I nodded. “We have maps?”

“We wouldn't be much of an army without them, would we?”

“I mean a map with the front lines marked on it. According to what I have read, our front line is around Trier—that's no more than twenty miles beyond Saarburg.”

I reached for the phone on my desk. “I'd better check that we can, in fact, get out there.”

Roland got up and went into the outer room to set up the vehicle and petrol.

I had the latest Expeditionary Forces staff sheet in front of me, several pages thick and bang up-to-date. In it were the current numbers of the British and American general staff. I called Tactical Liaison. When a voice answered, I explained who I was, where I was, and what I wanted to do.

“I need to get to Saarburg Prison immediately, to interview a captured officer, who was at one time the chief interrogator of the Gestapo in Paris. In connection with possible war crimes.”

I wasn't sure of the army protocol in these circumstances. The man at the other end of the line had no way of knowing that I was who I said I was, and there was no system of identifying codes—who could keep track, or hold them in his head, with a war on? He either had to believe me or not.

“Hold on,” he said, and the line went dead.

After a moment he was back on. “What rank is this prisoner?”

“
Standartenführer
. A colonel to us.”

“And you say he was head of the Gestapo in Paris?”

“Yes. Well, chief interrogator.”

“Hold on.”

The line went dead again.

There was a longer delay this time.

But then he was back.

“I can't tell you where the front is today, not over the phone. But I can tell you that Metz has fallen at last, and I can tell you that you will need a pass to go beyond Sierck-les-Bains, that's the Franco-German border. Even then you will only be allowed through to Saarburg in an armoured Jeep or Land Rover. And you should know that the area has not yet been de-mined, though that may happen by the weekend. If all that doesn't put you off, and you've already tasted all that Paris has to offer, and you've got the right paperwork, you can be our guest.”

“Thank you, Colonel,” I said and hung up.

“Roland!” I bellowed.

He came running to the door. “Sir?”

“I've checked with Reims. We are only allowed into Germany itself if we have an armoured Land Rover. Does that pose us problems?”

Roland sucked his teeth. “It might—they're not ten-a-penny. Let me see what I can do.”

He disappeared again.

“Justine!”

She appeared in the doorway.

“Yes, Colonel.”

“Two questions,” I said.

She nodded.

“Have you travelled much in the east of the country recently?”

She shook her head. “No, but Gilles has.” Gilles was her boyfriend. “What's it like?”

She gave me one of her French looks.

“What do you think it's like? There's a war on. The roads are choked with military hardware; there are roadblocks every so often; every so often the roads have been bombed or shelled and haven't been repaired, so you have to drive into a field to get round the holes, or take small lanes, where you spend half your time backing up to allow something bigger to go by.”

“So what sort of speed can we hope to achieve, assuming I can get the right sort of armoured vehicle in the first place?”

“Twenty to twenty-five kilometers an hour, at the very most.”

“Somewhere between twelve and fifteen miles an hour. That's what I thought.”

I turned and inspected the map on the wall behind me.

“Reims is directly on our route, and a hundred miles away. Say seven or eight hours motoring. We can spend our first night there.” I pointed. “Reims to Metz is about the same distance, so that's our second night. Agreed?”

She nodded.

“Metz to Saarburg is about fifty miles, but we have to cross the border that day, and we're much nearer the front. That may well be another day's motoring.

“Today is Tuesday. If we get the right kind of Land Rover and can leave tomorrow, we should be in Saarburg by Friday night. Meaning we can see Ulrich Kolbe on Saturday—”

“You're in luck, sir,” said Roland, barging back in.

Justine and I turned to face him.

“All available armoured Land Rovers and Jeeps are being shipped east—makes sense when you think about it; that's where the fighting is. You can take one, carry out whatever you have to do, then drop it off in Metz, at the transport depot. You can get a train back from there.”

I looked at Justine.

“If Roland will babysit Max,” she said, “we can leave whenever you like.”

We both looked at Roland.

“I will, I will, of course I will.” He grinned. “But only on condition that you don't tell anyone what I spent the war doing.”

“
G
.?
IS THAT YOU
?
THIS IS MATT
, in Paris. These phones are…It sounds like a gale on the line. Can you hear me?”

Another whooshing sound swept along the wires.

“I can hear you, just. How's Paris? Do you want Hilary?”

“In a moment, yes. Paris…Well, I'm learning to drink wine,” I lied.

“Hmm,” she grunted. “I'll stick to gin, thank you very much.”

“How's Zola?”

“Behaving himself beautifully. He's with me now. Here, I'll put the phone next to him. Say something.”

“Zola!” I cried, feeling foolish. “Zola! It's me—do you recognise your master's voice? Say something: bark or growl.”

There was a rapid barking, then G. was back on the line.

“That confused him totally. What a shock—he didn't know
where
the noise was coming from. He's quite upset. I don't think we'll do
that
again.”

“He's not usually so nervous. You're not overfeeding him, I hope.”

“I am
not
! I probably look after him better than you do. I give him a bath every week.”

I grinned into the receiver. “I'll bet that goes down well.”

G. grunted again. “He likes it well enough, once it's all over. Now, enough of that. I'll put you through to Hilary before the gales on the line make it impossible to hear you.”

There was a short pause, during which the whooshes and gales came and went more than once.

Then, “Matt? Matt? Is that you?”

“Yes, Hilary, here I am.”

“Good, I can hear you. How's Paris?”

“Rainy, a bit battered, but still beautiful.”

“Lucky bugger. How are you getting on?”

I told him about my meetings with Claudine Petit and Monique Brèger, and my upcoming visit to Ulrich Kolbe. “After that I should be able to compile my interim report.”

“Well, that's something. How about—you know—your own mission?”

“Not good. Not good at all. Looks like she was sent east, to the camps. And that means—”

“I know what it means, Matt. What a bugger—I'm so sorry. But you can grieve later. That sounds harsh, but we mustn't lose sight of the wider reason you are in France. And I'm sorry to have to press you, but I do need that interim report. Despite the prime minister's intervention, MI6 haven't totally gone away—they're still a headache. They've been at this game longer than we have, and they've got one or two new MPs in their pockets, making trouble. Do you hear? You've got to put Madeleine to one side. I must insist.”

“Okay, okay. I'll do all I can to act quickly after I've been to Saarburg at the weekend.”

“Good. Good. I'll look out for your report.”

“And how are you, Hilary? How's Crichton?”

“Crichton's okay, not so different from Grieves. And MI6 is not our only headache—I've got a blinder, had it for a week. But I'll live.”

We rang off.

I felt pretty glum. It looked as though I'd lost Madeleine. Foolishly, I wondered whether Zola would even know me when I did get home. How long is a dog's memory?