Priscilla (35 page)

But his black market dealings constituted Stocklin's gravest crime. This ‘dangerous enemy agent' was none other than ‘the principal agent of “Otto” Brandl'.

Rules prevented the Germans from dealing directly with their French suppliers. Brandl appointed intermediaries like Stocklin to open secret purchasing
offices, all answerable to Bureau Otto. Stocklin camouflaged his as a French industrial research body.

Why did the Germans set up such offices? Why not grab what they wanted? German policy was based on cynicism and deception. While Germany was still trying to win the rest of the war, it needed a docile France on side. To give the impression that Vichy was in charge of France's affairs, everything had to appear above board, and prices were kept fixed to maintain the propaganda of Pétain's programme of ‘German–French economic collaboration'. But this collaboration was a fantasy. The reason that so much food was rationed, eventually making the French among the worst fed in Europe, was because most of France's wheat, fruit, vegetables, butter and meat was syphoned back to Germany. Not only that, the French were financing the operation from the Vichy treasury.

It is impossible to overestimate the spread of Bureau Otto's tentacles. Brandl did not limit his purchases to the needs of the German troops, but was interested in buying ‘absolutely anything the French offered', according to Fabienne Jamet – owner of the lavish brothel One-Two-Two, the windowless seven-storey building in Rue de Provence where many of Brandl's transactions took place. Here, and in the Traveller's Club on the Champs-Elysées, Brandl bought soap, leather, metal, carpets, playing cards: all by the ton. ‘The list of things he required was endless and he paid cash on the nail.'

Near the top of the list were works of art. Brandl's principal agent Stocklin was charged with stealing Matisse's
The Open Window
from the Paul Rosenberg collection, and for selling to Hitler, for 350,000 francs, Matisse's
Female Nude in a Yellow Chair
. And yet looted paintings were not the cornerstone of Stocklin's trafficking. His main concern was to snap up French textiles, alcohol and telegraph wire, and ship these on to Germany, for which he required reliable, fast drivers. This was Cornet's attraction: in his last major race before the war, driving an Alfa Romeo 1.8, Cornet had finished seventh in the 1938 Antwerp Grand Prix.

In October 1940, Stocklin opened a purchasing office at 1 Rue Lord Byron. The Bureau d'Etudes Minières Industrielles et Commerciales (BEMIC) took
over suites 425–427 on the fourth floor and purported to be a company investigating the feasibility of manufacturing electric cars.

Stocklin's car passed Priscilla's entrance, on his way to Brandl's office in Rue Adolphe-Yvon. Between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. every afternoon, representatives of the purchasing offices turned up with samples to be rejected or accepted. Reports speak of about fifty representatives, the majority of them women. They took care not to give their full identities; a pronoun sufficed. There were penalties for revealing names or addresses. Stocklin, calling himself ‘Guy Max', visited often.

His sample accepted, Stocklin received an order form for delivery to a warehouse in the Saint-Ouen docks north of Paris. There was no other paper trail involved, no tax. Payment was made in new-minted French francs.

Bureau Otto's principal cashier has left a picture of how the purchase worked. A trusted agent like Stocklin – or one of his nominees like Cornet – pulled up in a car carrying four men armed with machine guns who guarded the vehicle while Stocklin loaded sacks containing the bank notes. One afternoon in October 1941, the cashier issued 322 million francs, remitted from the daily amount of 400 million francs that Article 18 of the Armstice required the Vichy government to hand over to the occupying forces. This money was used to buy and ferry goods. To any French policeman who stopped his car or lorry, Cornet flashed a special yellow and red striped Ausweis which authorised him to circulate at any time, to carry a gun and to count on the assistance of German police, who could do what they liked. An instruction printed in French and German stated: ‘The French authorities have no jurisdiction over the bearer', and declared that the lorry's contents could not be stopped or inspected by French police. These were the goods, the cars and the lorries, but most of all the money, delivered in one million franc bricks, which passed through Cornet's hands. Priscilla's Belgian lover and former motor-ace was merely pursuing his wartime trade when he wrote to her after Paris was liberated: ‘I've got a job that suits me perfectly. I drive a lot for the Interallied Mission, I drive at least a thousand miles a week, and I'm quite satisfied.'

Brandl's system was failsafe. The French provided the funds for the Germans to pillage their country. That is why the Germans were not worried, initially, when the situation created both a French and a German black market competing for the same items. The price was driven up, but the French were paying anyway. The daily turnover of the offices under Brandl's control made ‘Doctor Otto' the uncontested Godfather of this combined black market. Few benefited more from Brandl's patronage than Cornet and Priscilla's friend Max Stocklin.

Soon, Stocklin had opened offices in Switzerland, Belgium, Spain and Portugal. His lorries transported textiles from all over Europe to the docks in Saint-Ouen. He sold on his textiles at mark-ups of five times the original price and pocketed the commission. Between 1940 and 1943, BEMIC/‘Bureau Guy Max' generated 200 million francs, ‘making important profits for the SS, the Todt organisation and the German navy' – and personally earning Stocklin an estimated 20 million francs.

In 1941, Stocklin expanded his operation into silk stockings and perfumes. He controlled a multitude of companies, including ‘Bas Marny' stockings and ‘Parfums Marny' – bought for a derisory sum off a Jewish owner who had fled Paris. The prosecution maintained that an office opened by Stocklin in Monaco to sell these perfumes was a cover for money-laundering (Cornet's decision to move to Monaco after the war may be explained by his familiarity with the Principality when working for this office). Stocklin's partner Jacques Horteur was one witness who might have corroborated the charge, but he had been murdered in front of 74 Champs-Elysées on the night of 17 August 1945 ‘in circumstances we have not not been able to elucidate'. If you knew about Stocklin's operations, you did not tell. But did Priscilla know?

Priscilla in a fur coat on the slopes of Megève. Priscilla dining at the cabaret restaurant Le Baccara. Priscilla speeding up Rue Lord Byron. According to the journalist Alfred Fabre-Luce: ‘Anyone with a car is under suspicion of having dealings with the enemy . . .'

It is not possible from existing sources to get hold of a detailed idea of Priscilla's knowledge or involvement. The only way to gauge this is to see who she mixed with. The prosecution asserted that leading a similar elite lifestyle, while the rest of the population queued in the cold streets for ten ounces of bread, was another associate of Stocklin, a haughty young Moscow-born aristocrat called Marie. ‘Stocklin had in his service for some time la Comtesse Marie Tchernycheff-Bezobrazoff who installed a purchasing agency in the next two rooms, mainly of rubber products that were transported in German lorries driven by a member of the Gestapo.'

Marie had moved in the same pre-war circles as Priscilla and Gillian. A former mistress of the young Philippe de Rothschild, she had modelled for Chanel and worked as a vendeuse for Schiaparelli, before turning to film, acting an unremarkable part in Marc Allegret's
Zouzou
, as a music-hall singer who takes a Brazilian lover. By the end of 1941, she was a divorcee living in Rio. Fact had imitated the dowdy cinematic fiction.

Boredom returned her to France. She was intelligent. She was attractive. Nostalgic for her days as a future film star, she pined to be at the centre of things. In December 1941, this was Nazi-occupied Paris. That winter at the Hôtel Lutétia, she met an agent working for Brandl. When she asked who was this Max Stocklin everyone was talking about, he led her up four flights of stairs to the BEMIC office and introduced her to its dandyish chairman, whom she found elegant ‘in the gangster mode'.

Stocklin rented Marie a room next door to set up her own purchasing agency. Alternately known as ‘the Red Princess' or ‘Mara', and often to be observed tugging behind her a poodle that answered to the name of Dingo, she proved to be a more talented businesswoman than actress. She was extending her reach into alcohol and textiles when Stocklin took her to a reception at 93 Rue Lauriston hosted by his former cell mate from Cépoy, the tall cunning man with the startling girlish voice.

Henri Chamberlin was the French criminal who had guided Stocklin safely to Paris. A mere draft-dodger and thief when he befriended Stocklin, he had become, thanks to Stocklin, the undisputed chief of the French Gestapo – and for the French Resistance, Public Enemy Number One. Aged thirty-eight, the multi-aliased Chamberlin was the person on whom the film director Louis Malle later based the character of Lucien Lacombe.

Chamberlin, or ‘Monsieur Henri' as he was respectfully addressed, has a place in Priscilla's story because he embodied the milieu into which she was swept up – first by Cornet and then by her important friend Max Stocklin and his blonde sidekick Marie. It is only surmise, but due to the small size of this community, both geographically, encompassing no more than a few streets near the Etoile, and in the number of individuals involved, it is inconceivable that Priscilla and Chamberlin did not know each other. One of Chamberlin's mistresses lived directly below Priscilla in 11 bis Rue Lord Byron. Chamberlin's right-hand man lived in the same building as Daniel Vernier, to which Priscilla was a regular visitor. Gillian Sutro had little doubt that Priscilla met Chamberlin.

If not Stocklin, Chamberlin was the second of three likely candidates with the clout to strong-arm the French and German authorities to leave Priscilla alone.

‘Is there anything more horrible than the French Gestapo?' asked Raymond Aron in his four-volume
Histoire de L'Epuration
. Who they were and how they fitted into the power ladder was encapsulated by the chief of the ‘Gestapistes français' or ‘Lauristondienst'.

On arriving with Stocklin in Paris, Chamberlin had initially recoiled from working for the enemy. He tried to get back his old job as manager at the Préfecture canteen, but an inspector there – Albert Priolet, who in 1917 had arrested the German spy Mata Hari – threatened to charge him for desertion. ‘He threw me out like something dirty,' Chamberlin complained at his trial in December 1944. If in that moment the Resistance had made Chamberlin an offer, he would have seized it. ‘But in the summer of 1940, the Resistance, there wasn't any. The word didn't exist!' In that moment, ‘I simply had the desire not to die, to live.' He had to survive as he could. ‘There was the Hôtel Lutétia, where I had made friends, thanks to my Swiss chum, Max Stocklin. I paid him a visit and he said: “Let's see, we'll find something for you.”'

Chamberlin had even more reasons than Cornet to be grateful to Stocklin. Without Max Stocklin, there would have been no Henri Lafont, as Chamberlin now became known in what was his most lethal incarnation. After Chamberlin boasted that he could track down goods not available on the open market, Stocklin installed him with his new alias in a shop in Rue Tiquetonne to buy food, clothes and furniture for the Abwehr.

The instinctive revulsion of the French towards anything associated with Germany made it hard for German outsiders to procure goods and negotiate with suppliers. They depended on native informers with local knowledge, and Chamberlin became one of these quintessential French middle-men, protected by the Gestapo and doing the dodgy work.

As Henri Lafont, Chamberlin prospered. To nourish the Reich, he bought wheat in Normandy, butter by the lorry-load, furs, cattle. But he lacked henchmen, and so, with the Abwehr's connivance, he released from the cells
of Fresnes prison 27 convicted felons to act as extortioners. Chamberlin's gang soon exceeded a hundred in number. Stealing, intimidating, making unauthorised house-searches of the wealthy, and buying only when necessary, his ‘auxiliary police' chivvied out merchandise which the French population had attempted to conceal, and stored it in shops, garages, abandoned apartments. His Abwehr bosses were impressed. He flaunted a gun and a German police identity card, and eventually forty-four uniformed German officers were detailed to assist him. Six months on, he was indispensable to the Abwehr and exercised more power than Max Stocklin – it would be Chamberlin, on Brandl's orders, who sent Stocklin to Algeria with a radio transmitter. He had grown ruthless, rich.

Chamberlin's HQ was a three-storeyed hôtel particulier in Rue Lauriston, a short walk from Cornet and Priscilla's apartment. A clutch of receipts rescued from the premises during the Liberation showed that between April and December 1941, Chamberlin's gang amassed goods worth 142 million francs. Among the valuables were nine necklaces, seventeen gold bars and 159 kilos of children's clothes.