The Best of Our Spies (50 page)

‘André Koln. Hello.’

‘Owen Quinn, I am glad to meet you.’

‘Come in.’

The main room of the flat was chaotic, books and papers were piled everywhere. On the sofa was a stack of framed pictures and photographs. The floor around the sofa was dotted with used cups and wine glasses. The table by the window was piled high with papers and a typewriter. Those surfaces that were still surfaces were covered with a veneer of dust. One wall of the room was dominated by a large glass fronted cabinet, part covered by a dust sheet. Where that sheet had slipped down, ornaments were visible. On the walls he spotted a series of square and rectangular dark patches, outlining where pictures or mirrors had once been.

Yet despite the chaos and the untidiness there was a quality to the room. ‘A woman must have lived here,’ Quinn thought. The curtains were clearly good quality and they matched the carpets and the wallpaper.

André sat at the table, next to a large ashtray which contained the remains of a number of packets of cigarettes. His hand slightly shook as he took one out of a packet and he had to use two hands to light it, closing his eyes briefly as he inhaled deeply.

‘What’s the uniform?’ He pointed at Quinn with the now lit cigarette.

‘The Royal Navy. The British Royal Navy.’

‘Really?’ He laughed. ‘The Royal Navy. Have you jumped ship?’

‘Not exactly. Nicole gave me your name. She said you could help me.’

‘The reason I didn’t answer the door when you kept ringing is that I have a problem with uniforms – I could see you through the spy hole, you see. When you have been through what I have been through, you’ll understand.’

‘Can I ask what have you been through?’

A long stare at Owen through the white smoke.

‘When I know you a bit better. You obviously need help. I can help. It is what I do. It is all I can do now. Nicole would not have sent you along if I was not the right person. So you tell me what you need. But I warn you. Tell me everything. If you miss something out, then it is your problem.’

‘Can I ask first what it is you do? What is your job?’ Owen risked.

‘I have had many jobs, you can choose which one you want. I’m a lawyer. And a journalist. Now I put all these skills together and I find people. Go on, tell me your story.’

It took Owen Quinn an hour to tell his story to André Koln. The whole story. He left nothing out. He had no idea why he had been able to open up so freely to a stranger. And not just a stranger. André Koln was a strange man. Sitting in his peculiar flat, in a foreign city, with his distrusting eyes which darted around as if there were things that only he could sense. Possibly it was because Owen was in such a different environment that he felt able to let down his defences, for the first time since June. At one stage, he found himself weeping and not feeling the need to apologise for it. Only once in that hour did Koln react, which was when he told him that Nathalie, which was the name he was using for the want of anything else, was pregnant.

When he finished, Koln disappeared into the kitchen and came back a few minutes later with a strong pot of coffee and poured them each a cup.

‘So your child will be born very soon?’

‘Yes. She was two months’ pregnant at the beginning of April, so nine months is the end of October. So, yes. Any day now. It may have been born already.’

‘So, you are going to be a father. Congratulations. It is good. It’s the best thing in the world.’

It was an unusual reaction. Not the one he was expecting. In return for being so frank over the past hour, he was expecting a bit more than this.
How can I help
, was what he had in mind. Or better still,
I can help, I know how to find her
.

Koln walked over to the window which looked onto the Rue Taitbout and flung it open. It was now noon and it had turned grey outside and a cold blast swept into the room.

‘I’ll tell you my story, Owen. Then you can decide whether you want me to help you.’

He pulled his chair directly in front of Owen’s, so the two men were sitting virtually knee to knee.

‘You are in the ninth arrondissement. A lot of Jews lived here before the war. Some still do – you may have seen them going to synagogue as you walked here. But not as many live here now as did before the war. It’s not a ghetto like you have in other parts of Europe, or used to have. We don’t have these in France. No need for it. Not everyone is religious. My family is not religious, I’m certainly not. My family have lived here for over a hundred years, they came from Germany originally. My wife, her family came here more recently, from Poland. Sophie.’ André paused, taking a sip of coffee before concentrating on his cigarette for a moment or two.

‘But before the war, it was fine. I was a lawyer and I was also a journalist. I was active in politics too, with the socialists. My wife taught literature at the Sorbonne. We had a good life. Our son was born in 1940. Daniel.’

He leaned over to the sofa and selected a picture from the pile stacked there and showed it to Owen. André Koln looked ten years younger, with a beaming smile, standing next to a beautiful woman with long dark wavy hair and amazing eyes. She looked not unlike Nathalie and was holding a tiny baby.

‘A happy family, eh? That’s what I thought. You should know that something is going to go wrong when everything is going right. We were very happy, but not for long. The Germans entered Paris in June 1940. It all happened so fast, we couldn’t believe it. Half the population left the city, but where could we go? To Germany? In any case, we had a young child. Look Owen, I am an intelligent man. I am resourceful. I know what to do. I know people. I’m not religious, I didn’t think everything will be fine, God will sort it out. But in this case, we had no idea what to do. We were like rabbits caught in lights. We just stood still. And by the time the shock had worn off, there was nothing we could do. We were trapped in the city. There was nowhere to go.

‘Life became difficult, but then it was for everyone in this city, apart from those who collaborated with the Germans. And let me tell you something, Owen, there were plenty of those. Everyone you meet in France now was in the resistance and for most of them that is a lie. Most people did nothing, perhaps you can’t blame people for that. But those who helped the Germans, they deserve everything they’re getting.

‘Sophie lost her job at the Sorbonne, so she stayed at home to look after Daniel. I was not allowed to work as a lawyer and funnily enough there was not much demand for a socialist journalist, so I worked for my uncle. He had an electrical repair workshop in the Marais and I used to help him in the holidays when I was a student. I had my one stroke of luck, if you can call it that. I had to get a new identity card to show that I was a Jew and on it I made sure that my occupation was shown as “electrician”. So, I was no longer a troublesome lawyer or journalist, but I was an electrician.

‘Then in 1942 things got worse. In May we were told that we had to wear yellow stars to show that we were Jewish. Everyone over the age of six. We had to buy them from the police station, three each. Let me show you.’ He opened a drawer in the cabinet and took out an envelope and put two pieces of cloth on the table.

‘Here we are. This was one of mine – “
Juif
”, and this was one of Sophie’s – “
Juive
”.’

Owen noticed that André’s hands were trembling slightly.

‘But worse was to come. In July that year they started the deportation of the Jews. They called it the
grande rafle
. It was terrible. That first day, they rounded up more than ten thousand people. After that, hundreds more every day. Old men who had fought at Verdun, babies, everyone. Some people did not go. In the next block, a woman threw herself and her baby out of a top floor window as the police hammered at the door.

‘I made plans for us to escape to the country. A lawyer friend of mine had moved his family to his family’s farm in the Loire and he said we could stay there too. It was complicated, it was in a different zone, but I managed to sort papers and as long as we could get there, we would stand a chance.

‘We were going to go on the nineteenth of August. They came for us on the seventeenth. I don’t know why. Maybe someone informed, maybe it was our turn. I will find out one day. I had made plans for when they came. I thought we would hear them coming and I would hide Sophie and Daniel in the apartment next door; they were away and we had the key. I would be able to get out across the roof. But they hammered on the door at four in the morning and by five o’clock we were in Drancy.’

‘Drancy?’

‘It was a housing estate they were building near Le Bourget airport. It was only half built, so there was no sanitation, no electricity. It was very primitive, the conditions were terrible. Everyone was sick. People died. One morning they put us on trains. Not ordinary trains, these were like cattle trucks. Thousands of people stuffed together. We were on them for days. When we got out, we were in a place called Auschwitz. Have you heard of it?’

Owen shook his head.

‘You will do. It is in Poland. It is a death camp, where Germans murdered the Jews and other prisoners. I will tell you something now, Owen. It was only when we fell out of the train at this terrible place that I saw German soldiers. Until then, from the moment we were arrested here, to when we were taken to Drancy and to when we were put on the train to Poland, it was all French policemen.

‘There was a selection process once you came off the train. Old people, children, anyone who looked less than fit and healthy, they were sent to the gas chambers and murdered. You looked shocked, Owen? I know. You don’t understand? You will do. I never saw Sophie and Daniel again, I did not even get a chance for a last look, it was so chaotic as they sorted everyone out, but I know they were murdered that day.’

Owen was aware that he was rigid, as if any movement might appear inappropriate. There was a pause as André flicked the long piece of the ash off his cigarette, checked whether it was still alight and then lit another one. Owen noticed that André had to hold the lighter with both hands to steady it.

‘I was fine, which sounds odd to say. I was fit and I was an electrician, so I was able to work. At first, I didn’t care actually. I knew that my wife and my child had been murdered so what was the point of struggling to stay alive? But there was a man from Lyons in the bunk next to me; he was about ten years older. He had lost his wife and all four of his children and he looked after me. He said that I had a simple choice to make, whether to give up or to carry on and he said that we owed it to our families to carry on. So, I made that choice and I decided I had to carry on. I worked in a quarry like everyone else and then I was sent to work as a slave labourer for a company called Siemens – they were using a lot of the prisoners at Auschwitz. I survived that first winter and then in late summer of 1943 myself and some other prisoners who were electricians, or so they thought, were moved. We were taken to a place called Nordhausen, which is in the centre of Germany. And there they were building another concentration camp, which they called Dora. This was also a factory to make rockets. So I became a rocket engineer, can you imagine!

‘I had the advantage of speaking very good German; remember my family were originally from Germany. My friends and I were clever; we had to be to have survived so long. We did our best to ensure they were not very good rockets. But then at the beginning of this year, a few of us were moved again, this time back to France. The Germans were building a new rocket factory underground at a place called Helfaut-Wizernes. It is in northern France, very near to where you were yesterday in St Omer. So, the Germans brought me back to France. They abandoned the site in July and we managed to escape. I returned to Paris.

‘The concierge, she had moved her nephew into this apartment. She assumed we weren’t coming back. They looked like they had seen a ghost when I returned. He said he was looking after it for me. So I threw him out, literally. Down the stairs. He broke his shoulder and both his legs. The concierge does not like me and I do not like her. I suspect she may have tipped off the police that we were leaving the apartment. If I find that out, I will deal with her too.

‘So, let me finish my story. I remembered the policeman who came to arrest us. He was a sergeant. I remembered his number, I memorised it. When I got back here, I decided to look for him. It seems that I was not the only person who was looking for him, the SOE were too. He had arrested one of their agents who had then disappeared. This is how I came to meet Nicole. When I found him, I handed him over to her. By the time she had finished with him, they found out what had happened to their agent. He was murdered by the Gestapo, apparently. I am not sure what happened then, but this policeman is not around any more. I now use my skills as a lawyer and a journalist to find people. I have good contacts, but the truth is that people feel obliged to help me. I seem to have acquired a certain moral authority; I don’t know how long that will last. Perhaps one day, I will find myself. I can’t live here properly, there are too many memories. That is why everything is piled up, I don’t want the apartment to look or feel like it did before. One day, I will move out, but at the moment I can’t do that either. So you see, Owen, our stories are similar!’

‘Not at all, André, I cannot begin to compare what I have been through with what you have.’

‘Maybe not, but we have both lost a woman we loved and a child ...’ He shook his head then looked up. ‘That is why I will help you. You need to find your child. Come, let’s get to work.’

André soon realised that there was precious little to go on. Owen gave André a photograph of Nathalie and the cameo brooch and they went through all the details again. It was agreed that Owen would return to England and see what he could dig out and then return to Paris, perhaps in December. ‘You need to find one small fact to help me, Owen. Anything, just one decent clue to help me.’

Owen started to write down his address in London and then decided better of it and gave him his parents’ address in Surrey. He had no special reason to, but it did no harm to be cautious.