by Walter Ellis
“In that case, are we not just a puppet state?”
“A non-belligerent power is, I think, the correct term.”
“Like Spain, you mean?”
“Exactly. And your comment is opportune, for that is what I wish to discuss with you. Please sit down. You speak Spanish, do you not?”
“Not fluently,” Delacroix confessed, “but well enough. I spent a year as a liaison officer in Spanish Morocco.”
Laval inserted the nail of his little finger into the gap between two of his bottom teeth and drew out the husk of a sunflower seed. “So tell me, what is your view of Franco’s position?”
“He would take everything if he could. He will see the war as an opportunity to scavenge.”
The Minister nodded. “But facts are what count in matters such as this. Speculation is for diplomatic receptions and the mess hall. It cuts no ice with Hitler. That is why I want you to discover for me what exactly is going on in Madrid. I need to be appraised each week of any plans that are being hatched there.”
Delacroix looked faintly alarmed. “You want me to go to Madrid? As a spy?”
Laval smiled to himself, as if he found the very idea of Delacroix as a spy risible. “No, no, my dear fellow. I want you to appoint someone and see to it that he reports to you each day on what is being said, not only in Franco’s government, but in the Falange. He must be your eyes and ears, as you are mine.”
Relief passed across Delacroix’s pale amber eyes. But then a thought occurred to him. “What if the British attack us first? What if De Gaulle should seek to prize the empire from our grasp? What then? You heard his broadcast from London. He said that the French Empire stood behind France and that the British Empire stood behind both. It is obvious he believes himself to have all rightful authority.”
“To the Maréchal,” said Laval, “our colonies are the very touchstone of honour. That is why I have asked you to perform this service for me. Should De Gaulle and the British attack, we will defend. Should Franco try to arrange some back door deal, we will defend. Berlin must know that we are not a subject people, but true allies of the Reich.”
Delacroix considered the world of villainy that surrounded his country. But in his head he saw the bayonet of an SS corporal plunging into the belly of a British infantryman lying wounded on the ground in Paradis. The image sickened him. “I have no doubt we will be tested,” he said. “When the time comes, we must not fail.”
Madrid: Ritz Hotel, Royal Suite, June 27
Bramall was fuming. He had hurried back from the interior ministry, where he had left his card and requested an interview with Serrano, to present himself outside the Duke’s door at exactly eleven o’clock, as instructed. But it was a good fifteen minutes before he was admitted.
“I’m awfully sorry,” said Buchanan-Smith, clearly enjoying every moment of his brief exercise of power, “but His Royal Highness and the Duchess were out until late with friends and aren’t ready to receive visitors. I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait.”
When the door finally opened and he was allowed in, his patience had snapped and he shoved an indignant Buchanan-Smith out of his path.
“It really is a bit much, Sir,” he began.
The Duke wheeled round from the salon mirror in which he had been putting the finishing touches to his famed Windsor knot. “What? What is? What are you talking about?”
Bramall pulled himself up short, aware that he had only just entered the room and already he had blown it. His public role, he had only begun to appreciate, had to be convincing not only to the Germans and Spanish, but to the Duke as well. He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Sir, I don’t mean to be rude. It’s just that I’ve been sitting in the corridor outside for the last quarter of an hour.”
“Really? Sounds like a waste of time to me. Why didn’t you wait in here? Plenty of room.”
“Your equerry felt that …”
“ – Oh, don’t listen to him. Fellow’s an arse – aren’t you, Smith?”
Buchanan-Smith looked as if he might explode with frustration and rage, but said nothing. Bramall fixed him with a glare.
The Duke turned his attention back to his tie, looking pleased as the characteristic dimple appeared in the centre of the knot. “So what have we got today?” he asked brightly.
“Well, Sir …”
At this point, the Duchess entered the salon from the main bedroom, giving the new arrival a knowing look. Over her arm was a bathing suit. “Ah!” she began. “Our latest equerry from London, if I’m not mistaken. Bramall, isn’t it?”
“Spot on, my dear,” said the Duke. “Sent out to make sure we don’t make fools of ourselves in Spain.”
“I see. And are we keeping you busy, Mr Bramall?”
Her voice was American, which for some reason surprised him. “Not overly so, ma’am. Not yet, at any rate.”
“Well, that’s a blessing anyhow.” She assessed him with a practised eye. “So tell me, where do you buy your suits?”
“My suits? Well … I don’t exactly recall. It’s been a while. Some place in Saville Row. My father opened the account years ago.”
“I thought so. Have you ever shopped for suits in New York?”
“No ma’am.”
“You should. They do excellent tailoring for the younger man. Now try not to bore His Royal Highness with too much stuff about keeping Spain neutral in the war. I think we’ve already grasped that particular nettle.”
“With respect, ma’am,” he replied, “I’m not sure that is entirely accurate.”
“Meaning what exactly?”
He paused. “Only that there has been talk in London.”
The Duchess shot him an acerbic glance. He was reminded of an expression used by their cook in Dreenagh, a lovely, fat woman from Cavan – her look would have taken the skin off a rice pudding. “Talk!” she said, huskily. “What sort of talk? I trust you are not referring to the King and Queen?”
That would teach him to jump in without looking. The last thing he wanted was to be drawn into the increasingly bitter family quarrel.
“Not at all. Far from it. Their majesties, to the best of my knowledge, are the very souls of discretion.”
“You could have fooled me.”
Bramall shook his head. “I doubt that very much.”
At this, the Duchess smiled. “Very well, then,” she said, in her peculiar, mocking drawl. “Spit it out. Let’s hear it.”
Bramall ran his hand down his mouth. “How shall I put this? Downing Street, the Foreign Office and the intelligence services are anxious that neither you nor the Duke should at any time give … comfort to the enemy.”
This statement was greeted by the Duchess with a stony-faced glare. “Go on.”
He drew a breath, then continued. “Well, it’s just that they are aware of the fact that His Royal Highness and yourself may once have harboured – what shall we say? – sympathies for the National Socialist position. You visited Hitler in Bavaria; you had dinner with Himmler. You met with Ribbentrop on a number of occasions when he was ambassador in London. It goes without saying that there is no suggestion – none whatsoever – that this in any way gives rise to any disloyalty … ”
“ – I am relieved to hear it.”
“I myself, as you know, have spent time in the company of Sir Oswald Mosley – even attended his wedding in Berlin, where I was photographed with the Führer. So it’s not that I …” He let the unspoken thought hang in the air. “Anyway, the fear is that you might, however inadvertently, convey to enemy propagandists monitoring your every move the impression that you favour a negotiated peace rather than any continued prosecution of the war.”
The Duchess raised her eyebrows almost to her hairline as if someone had just insinuated that she liked drinking
claret with oysters. “I see,” she said.
“I’m so glad that you do,” stammered Bramall, “for it means that I don’t have to go on like this, embarrassing us both.”
“That’s the most sensible thing you’ve said in the last two minutes.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
The one-time Mrs Simpson, looking simultaneously radiant and pinched, turned to a fresh vase of roses that had been placed in the royal suite that morning and broke off a single stem, which she then placed in Bramall’s buttonhole. “That’s better,” she said, straightening his lapel. “Please be assured that the Duke and I will bear your concerns very much in mind when we are making chit-chat with our friends.”
Bramall bowed slightly. “I am obliged to you.”
She gazed at him down the sharply defined ridge of her nose. “More than you know, Mr Bramall.”
Vichy, Occupied France: Office of Alain Delacroix, June 27
Thirty-two year-old Dominique de Fourneau, said to bear an uncanny resemblance to the Napoleonic beauty Madame de Récamier, might plausibly have presented herself as a heroic figure, or at least the wife of a hero. On April 28, 12 days before the German attack on France, an agent of the SD had murdered her husband, the Comte de Fourneau, in Bern, Switzerland. He was shot while on his way to a rendezvous with Colonel Paul Paillole, head of the French counter-intelligence service, during which he planned to reveal that the German attack would be launched through the Ardennes in the second week of May. Paillole never discovered what it was that de Fourneau wished to tell him, let alone how he knew, but, by coincidence, he was to learn the same information himself from a different source two days later, causing him to urge upon his superiors immediate reinforcement of the Sedan sector. His advice was ignored. General Maurice Gamelin, commander-in-chief of French land forces, chose to make no special preparations for an Ardennes offensive. Instead, he granted his men home leave and the subsequent battle, launched on May 10, was over almost before it began.
The reason the Comtesse made no claim to heroic status – apart from the fact that such posturing would have struck her as absurd – was that she knew none of this. Her husband, Alexei, was to the best of her knowledge, a gem specialist, employed by Dresdnerbank in Bern. He had been killed, she was informed, by a Polish Jew who resented the fact that his family’s diamond business had been taken over by the Nazis.
Delacroix had known Dominique de Fourneau, née Arland, most of his life, ever since their parents had taken summer homes next door to each other in Biarritz. They were never truly friends. She much preferred his brother, now a naval officer based in Dakar, with whom she had once made love in a sentry box. But there was a tense cordiality between them nonetheless, and when Laval had instructed Delacroix to place an agent in Madrid, Dominique was the name that sprang immediately to mind. There were several reasons for this. First was the fact that she had lived with her husband in Casablanca for two years, from 1935-36, when he had worked in the colonial administration, and spoke fluent Spanish. Second, she had a home in a fashionable district of Madrid, left to her by her father’s older brother, a former financial adviser to King Alfonso XIII. Beyond that, she had at one point been engaged to a prominent Castilian landowner, with an estate in Navarre – a monarchist who later abandoned her for a Romanian princess – and was on excellent terms with a number of Spanish noblemen and generals. Finally, and most important, she possessed one of the sharpest brains he knew and would, he was sure, relish the opportunity to spy for her country.
“What exactly do you want of me, Alain?” she asked him, refusing to sit down, moving instead across his linoleum-floored office to the metal window at the opposite side, with its view of the gardens. She was wearing a long Chanel skirt that billowed out slightly below the knees. Her blonde hair was up and perched coquettishly on her head was a black pillbox hat with just a hint of a widow’s veil. She lit a Black Sobrane cigarette (almost her last one, though she would never tell him that) and twisted round to observe him as he struggled to reply.
“I w-want you to do a service for your country,” Delacroix said after a nervous pause. There was just a hint of a stammer in his voice that he knew she would at once detect. She had always overawed him, causing him to feel inadequate and gauche. Today was no exception.
“And which country would that be, exactly?”
“Dominique, p-please don’t be difficult.”
“I’m not sure I approve of the new dispensation,” she continued. “Vichy is like a sub-branch of the Reich. The Marshal is manager, Laval is his deputy. But where does that leave you?”
“Chief cashier,” said Delacroix, suddenly inspired.
Her eyes opened wide. “Ah! Interesting. Go on, then, I’m listening.”
It was the card Delacroix had been waiting to play – the only one certain to trump Dominique’s overarching contempt for small-town values. The De Fourneau family had once been among the greatest landowners in France. Their estates, on both banks of the Loire, east of Angers, were known for their dairy cattle and their wine. But bad investments at the end of the 1920s resulted in a dramatic fall from grace, so that Dominique’s husband was obliged to take a series of jobs in commerce, latterly with Dresdnerbank, commuting each month between Lyon and Zurich. His murder in Bern was a double blow. She had been fond of Émile, even if he was 20 years her senior, and in recent years had made a special effort to be faithful, at least when he was home from Switzerland. But more to the point, his death had robbed her of a handsome income, leaving her with a villa in Lyon and an apartment in the Rue du Bac in Paris, together with her own house in Madrid – and virtually no money to pay for any of them. Her father, Maurice Arland, a prosperous wine producer from Saumur, had agreed to provide her with a modest sum each month until she decided what the best approach would be to clearing her debts He and Dominique’s mother had also agreed to take responsibility for her two young children, Céline and Antony, on condition that both were sent away to school. But the family vineyards were unlikely to prosper under the Germans. The manoir itself was currently shared with a Wehrmacht colonel two of whose senior staff had displaced M. de Fourneau’s son and Jean-François, their chief winemaker, from their homes on the estate. Dominique would never show it, but she was desperate and ready to jump at almost any offer that came her way.
Delacroix, who in fact already knew this, sat back in his chair and twisted a pencil round and round between finger and thumb. It felt good at last to be on the dominant side of the argument with his formidable childhood friend. He was not, he assured her, asking her to do anything disagreeable or dangerous. What he wanted was accurate, well-sourced information on Spain’s war plans and, in particular, Franco’s attitude towards Vichy and its African empire. Surely that would not be too much for her. In return, an amount in Swiss francs would be lodged each quarter in her account in Bern. Expenses in Spain would also be met, including the cost of a cook and personal maid. All she had to do in return was talk to the right people at the right time, reporting each week to the French embassy.
“Tell me, how exactly am I supposed to know what’s happening in the Caudillo’s innermost circles?” she inquired. “I am neither a politician nor a mind reader.”
“No,” said Delacroix, “but you are well-connected and, if it is not impertinent of me to say so, still beautiful and certain to turn heads in Madrid.” He looked at her through hooded eyes. “I’m sure you will think of something.”
“Just so long, Alain, as you are not expecting payment in kind.”
“I d-don’t know what you mean, Dominique.”
“No,” she said, drawing a strand of hair back from her eyes. “Wasn’t that always the problem?”
Delacroix was stung by her reply, but decided not to show it. “So you will do it?”
“How will I get there?”
“It will be arranged.”
> “I will need money straight away.”
“That, too, can be provided.”
She hesitated for a second, then said: “Very well. I shall leave tomorrow. All that remains is for me to pack and speak on the telephone to my children.”
“Excellent. I will arrange at once for funds to meet your immediate needs. I presume you would prefer cash …”
“In Swiss francs and pesetas. Future payments should be deposited in Madrid and Bern.”
“Very good. I cannot tell you how pleased I am that you have decided to answer your country’s call.”
Dominique rose from her chair and proffered her cheek to Delacroix. “My dear Alain, how could I possibly refuse?”
Madrid: Restaurant Casa Gallega, June 27
The restaurant was full almost to capacity when the cars bringing the royal party and the Spanish Foreign Minister drew up outside. Two beefy-looking men with bulges under their jackets stood by the door. A squad of Guardia Civil, with machine pistols, patrolled the street. A large table, set into an alcove, had been prepared, surrounded by uniformed waiters. Diners stood up and broke into spontaneous applause as the Duke and Duchess entered, to be greeted by a fawning Maitre d’. The Duke, moved by the warmth of his reception, raised his right hand close to the side of his face in an almost pontifical gesture. The Duchess offered her standard regal smile. Beigbeder, accompanied by his French wife, was simply delighted.
Once the fuss had died down and the seating organised, Bramall – who had been invited to the lunch at the last minute at the request of the Duchess – found himself sat next to Miguel Primo de Rivera, whom he had met in the Duke’s suite on the night of his arrival in Madrid. They exchanged polite nods, but it was clear to Bramall that he could expect no conversation from the capital’s civil governor, a snob as well as a roué. All eyes were on the Duchess, who was at her sparkling best.