The Winter Agent

by Gareth Rubin

  ‘He picked me up on the road,’ Charlotte replied in heavily accented English. The soldier raised his eyebrows. She shrugged.

  It was such a Gallic response Reece had to smile to himself. He saluted the guard and drove in. In front of the wide house itself, they were met by another, older soldier. Although he wore civvies, Reece could tell by the keen way he studied them on their approach that he was one of the conducting officers. ‘Maxime, Charlotte, nice to see you both here. And you have met, I see.’ Reece hadn’t asked her name, but it seemed to suit her somehow. Usually service names started with the same letter as the agent’s real name, to make them easier to remember. So what was her real name? Camille? Clarice? Cécile?

  ‘Come on in, we’ll get you settled.’

  She went on ahead, not looking at him. He watched her calves as she ascended the stone steps and wondered about the cool, sad air that seemed to envelop her. Of course, many of her compatriots had arrived surrounded more by grief than by anger, and yet there was something that said her sadness was deeper even than theirs.

  The first day was dedicated only to outlining what they would learn on the course. There would be detailed instruction on the German intelligence services they would encounter: the Gestapo; the Abwehr and the SS’s intelligence division, the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD. Of the three, the SD were the most dangerous for Allied agents, the Gestapo the worst for the occupied people. Both were drawn from fanatical supporters of National Socialism. Most Gestapo men were former police officers, with a substantial number of convicted criminals recruited especially as auxiliaries for the more brutal duties. Many SD had been brought up under the Nazi system and were now ready to dedicate their talents to maintaining the racial superiority of the German people.

  In contrast to those bodies, the SOE recruits were told, the Abwehr, the armed forces’ intelligence service, paid some respect to laws of arms. They had existed long before the Party’s appearance and intended to exist long afterwards.

  As often happened with overlapping intelligence services, those three bodies were often locked in rivalry and mutual loathing. And that meant a circuit could slip between the cracks.

  ‘Who is in the ascendency?’ Reece had asked the conducting officer.

  ‘Without doubt, the SD. Himmler’s wolves,’ the officer replied. ‘As brutal as the rest of the SS, but with some brains to them. The Gestapo are holding their own but they’re overstretched in terms of manpower and we predict they’re going to come under direct SS control sooner or later. The Abwehr are running out of steam. They’re too old-fashioned.’

  After that there would be instruction in use of codes for scheduled – sked – transmissions, rendez-vous patterns, explosives and infiltration into enemy locations. There would be specialist training at other centres after this one, they were told, to teach them the skills for their specific roles within their networks.

  In the evening they congregated in the school’s bar. Reece sat next to Charlotte and pushed a glass of brandy across the table. She took it and drank.

  ‘It’s to see how we behave when we’re drunk,’ he told her.

  ‘Yes, I thought so.’ When she spoke English, it was with all the tip-of-the-tongue delicacy of her own language.

  ‘They’ll keep plying us with it until we’re legless.’

  ‘Let them.’

  ‘Fine by me.’ He tried to identify and understand her. Yes, she would have been at parties, never giving herself away. Perhaps she had once given too much away and had learned her lesson. He swapped to French. ‘Which arrondissement?’

  She looked at him without blinking. ‘The eighteenth.’

  ‘Ah.’ So she was from a modest background. ‘Your family?’

  She screwed a cigarette into a wooden holder, lit it and blew a line of blue smoke to the ceiling. ‘My mother’s in Geneva.’

  ‘I’m glad. Your father?’

  ‘He died three days before the Germans arrived in Paris.’

  ‘Maybe it was a blessing he missed it.’

  ‘Maybe it was. His grave overlooks the Eiffel Tower.’

  ‘Was he a soldier?’

  ‘An engraver. Too ill to fight.’ She tapped ash into a tin ashtray on the table. ‘Do you think I am telling the truth?’ she asked.

  ‘Good question. I have been wondering. But yes, I think you are.’

  ‘Then, from now on, I will lie,’ she said quietly.

  ‘But I will know the truth by a process of elimination.’

  ‘That doesn’t always work.’

  He sipped the beer he had poured for himself. ‘You don’t want to know about me?’

  ‘No. I choose not to.’

  ‘Yes, that is your prerogative. How did they find you?’ he said, lighting a Gold Flake.

  ‘They just did.’

  He shook the flame from his match and tossed it on to the table. ‘I would have thought you would be hard to find.’

  ‘I thought that too.’

  They sat for a while, watching the other recruits. Some bore excited expressions; others looked serious and dour. A few were already drunk. ‘All so ready for it,’ Reece said. He felt more determined than ready. He had a strategy, but not yet the plan and the tools.

  ‘All to fall to earth.’

  ‘With a bump.’ She was perceptive, of course, but those who never joined in were always perceptive. What else were they to do while they stood on the sidelines but watch the players in the game and try to discern the patterns in their movements? It was hard to say how much of her now was a product of the war and how much was a product of her parentage, her upbringing and all the other influences benign and malign that shape one’s character. Reece himself had often felt peripheral to others. He put it down to his childhood, split between the bold enterprise of Manhattan and the pleasure-stews of Paris. He rested his cigarette on the edge of the ashtray. ‘I need some fresh air. Shall we go for a walk?’ She stared into the corner of the room, allowed a line of smoke to drift from her mouth and pressed the cigarette into the ashtray with force. She turned her eyes on him. Dark green, freckled with brown.

  Outside, dusk was coming down like muslin cloth. An autumnal dampness was in the air and she took his arm. There was a cool breeze that smelled of slowly rotting leaves. She came closer to him and he felt the heat radiating from her. She wore a thin wool jumper.

  ‘How honest do you think they’ll be?’ he asked. ‘I mean, will they tell us what the Gestapo will do to us if we’re caught? Or will they leave that to our imagination?’

  ‘I’ve heard things that I would not have imagined.’ The timbre of her words told him that her thoughts were still across the English Channel.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. He had too. Some of it had happened to his parents’ friends. He often wondered about the Jewish artists he had known. He had been named after Marc Chagall, a friend of his father’s. Chagall and Max Ernst had got out in time. Others hadn’t. ‘Do you have Jewish friends?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s happened to them?’ She shrugged, and gazed at the ground. They walked through the woods in which the six large houses and numerous smaller buildings of the Beaulieu estate sat. The trees were still mostly clothed in leaves, although there was a moist mush below their feet that cushioned them and prevented any sound. ‘Your shoes will get damp,’ he said.

  ‘They will get a lot worse when we parachute into farmers’ fields.’

  ‘Or into the arms of the Gestapo.’ The joke fell a little flat.

  Her voice was soft now. ‘Why are you prepared to do it?’

  He stopped and turned to her. Mottled shadows were falling across the delicate pale oval of her face. She would have been a muse for one of the painters whom she found interesting. ‘You’re not actually French, are you?’ she asked. ‘Your language is perfect, of course, you know that. But there’s something …’ She drifted off, looking into his face.

  ‘I was born there.’

  ‘Where did you grow up?’


  ‘Some there. Some in New York.’

  ‘Then you have a choice. About where you’re from.’

  ‘It doesn’t feel like it.’ He leaned back against a tree. The rippled bark of the trunk had a film of evening dew. ‘I hate them,’ he said. There was no malice in his voice. It was a simple statement of fact. ‘For what they’ve done. What they’re going to do. I would shoot every one I could. Officers, other ranks. Not one is innocent. I would enjoy seeing them suffer. Which arrondissement are you really from?’

  She gazed up into the sky. It was overcast and there were no stars to see. ‘The seventh.’ There were dots moving in the sky. ‘Yours or theirs?’ she asked.

  He narrowed his eyes, although it didn’t help much. ‘Ours, I think. Could be Hurricanes. Intercepting.’

  ‘I hope they come back.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘What are they training you for?’ she asked, tracing the movement of the planes across the sky.

  ‘Circuit organizer. You?’

  The fighters disappeared and she dropped her gaze. ‘Wireless operator.’

  ‘A pianist,’ he said.

  ‘I really was one once.’ Through the haze of a slight mist coming down he could just make out a thin, rueful smile. It was the first he had seen break on her. ‘I played in bars full of arrogant Sorbonne students.’ Then the lips relaxed into the shapeless semi-pout that had occupied them before. She walked a few steps deeper into the woods. He followed her. ‘It seemed to matter then.’

  ‘It will matter again.’

  She looked at him in the same unblinking way. ‘Do you really think so?’

  ‘I do,’ he said.

  She paused, considering. ‘I hope you are right.’ Then she walked into the forest.

  Reece looked up at the sky over Paris now. It was heavy with clouds. As he pushed open the back door to the tabac he saw Charlotte making ersatz coffee on a tiny stove fuelled by sawdust. The thin brew was strained from roast acorns – it would be barely drinkable even in these days when hot drinks were vital to stave off the bleak weather. In the corner of the room a radio was whispering a broadcast from the BBC’s French service, Radio Londres. A man with a nasal voice was calling on Frenchmen to oppose their occupiers and make any collaborators pay.

  She saw the look on his face. ‘What happened?’

  He closed the door and without a word went into the shop to check through the windows, looking for any sign he had been followed. He returned heavily. ‘Luc’s been taken.’

  She removed the pot from the stove. ‘When?’

  ‘Just now.’ Reece thumped the wood of the staircase.

  ‘Gestapo?’

  ‘And their French friends.’

  ‘The Carlingue? How much do they know?’

  ‘I can’t say,’ he replied, sitting on a pile of sacks, his muscles exhausted. ‘They didn’t arrest me too, so they can’t know everything. Maybe they don’t know much at all. But we might have to leave this place.’

  ‘Do we go now?’

  ‘No. We should have a day at least before he breaks – if he breaks. They’re taking him to prison in Amiens.’

  ‘Why Amiens?’

  ‘They’ve done it before – to spread prisoners around the country, or something. I don’t know.’

  ‘So what now?’

  ‘We set a watch on their transports. We need to know exactly when they’re leaving. And I need to contact the others right away,’ he said. ‘We can’t give him up.’

  Her glance told him she knew what he was planning. ‘You’re going to hit the convoy?’

  ‘I’m not going to abandon him. I need you to transmit tonight. Priority channel. Tell them Luc has been taken with the photographs. We’ll intercept the convoy tomorrow night.’

  ‘Do you want me in the op?’

  ‘I can’t risk you.’ There was a pause. ‘You’re harder to replace than the rest of us. There’s a shortage of wireless operators.’

  ‘I understand,’ she said. She probably did understand. There was a shortage of pianists, sure enough, but that was not the true reason he wanted her to stay away from an assault that had, at best, a fifty–fifty chance of coming right.

  ‘Tell the others to be here at nine. Then get to your safe house, stay alert and don’t come back until I send word. If the op is successful, I’ll go with Luc to recover the film – if it’s safe – and then straight to London.’

  ‘And if it’s not a success?’

  ‘Then those who are left disperse and try to get home independently by any means possible,’ he told her. ‘You too.’

  She gazed at him with her dark eyes. ‘Is this the kiss goodbye?’ The air seemed to slip around them. It whistled through the bricks like breath through a flute.

  ‘You need to get to your safe house.’

  She lifted a pink woollen coat and pillbox hat from a brass hook beside the rear window. ‘Goodbye, Maxime,’ she said as she opened the door, letting a cold gust of wind enter.

  CHAPTER 5

  Emergency action

  If an agent has been arrested, find out the reason for his arrest and whether he has talked. Help the arrested agent to escape if it can be done without prejudicing the security of the organization.

  9 February 1944

  At half past one the following afternoon, a few kilometres north of the village of Chambly, two hours’ cycle ride from Paris, the chain of Reece’s bike rattled and clanked in a country road that was more mud than tarmac. He had passed a hamlet and a few farmhouses with horses leaning over broken fences. From the lining of his jacket he took a map, printed on silk in order to go undetected if he were to be patted down, and a compass hardly bigger than a large postage stamp. He traced his route and confirmed his position by checking the bearing to a church spire in the distance. The bend he had just come around was the right one. He was on the main road, with a forest on one side and open fields on the other.

  Two hundred metres from where he stood, a slim lane branched away into the woods. He took that turning and hid his bike in some bushes. It would be there if he had to get away through the forest – if they had dogs, it would at least give him a chance. His last lines of defence would be the Colt, hidden under the bicycle seat with his leather shoulder holster, and a stiletto knife in a sheath strapped to his forearm. He took the gun, checked there was a .32 hollow-point round in the chamber and covered the bike with branches and scrub. Then he climbed down into a frost-glazed ditch beside the main road, wrapped his arms around himself and tried to picture another life.

  After an hour of dreaming of the easy days he had left far behind, a low hum seemed to sweep through the landscape. He crouched lower, straining to see around the bend in the road. It could be the truck. It must be by now.

  First there was a rumble on the road, then an old factory delivery vehicle caked in debris, fit for little more than scrap, chugged into sight, its engine creaking noisily – with petrol so scarce the van had been converted to burn woodchips, sending it back fifty years in engineering development. Behind it was a civilian car, a Peugeot with a metal charcoal-gas tank attached to the roof. The two vehicles turned up the side road where Reece had stashed his bike, but he didn’t move, instead carefully watching both directions on the main road to see that neither he nor they had been followed.

  Satisfied that there was nothing else in the vicinity, he took the Colt in his hand, pushed himself to his feet and cut through the woods to where the vehicles sat silently in the lane.

  Still among the trees, he called over. ‘Are you having problems?’

  ‘Trouble with the wheels,’ a man’s voice returned.

  Reece emerged from the treeline and walked quickly over. The door of the van opened and a slim man in his twenties with a neat black beard emerged.

  ‘Why are you late?’ Reece asked, sliding the pistol back into the holster.

  ‘Checkpoint. Have you started without us?’ Thomas, the circuit saboteur, who wrecked train axles and poured ball b
earings into tank fuel lines, often seemed to enjoy these occasions. Some agents had joined up for the excitement, and Reece suspected Thomas was one of them.

  Another face appeared from the passenger side: Hélène, the network courier, who carried messages. ‘Hello, Maxime,’ she said. Her voice, usually warm, was stern now. ‘We’re ready.’

  From the small green car, Richard, the final member of Beggar, emerged. The weapons instructor, who showed the local resistants how to use firearms and explosives, stretched and shook out his long, powerful limbs. Clearly, cramp had been his enemy on the journey.

  As circuit organizer, Reece’s role was to recruit and cultivate sources of information on German troop movements and operations. He also directed the Resistance groups as much as he could, leveraging munitions supplies from Britain for influence over their use. The major réseaux were far better these days than they had been at co-ordinating their actions – nominally now having a united overall council – but still the Communist Francs-Tireurs, the apolitical Libération Nord, de Gaulle’s Free French and the smaller non-aligned forces viewed each other with suspicion, impeding their effectiveness. At least it meant that when one group was infiltrated by the Gestapo the disease didn’t immediately spread to the others.

  For a moment Reece watched the backs of his agents as they unloaded their weapons and equipment from the van, praying that they would all be there at the end to load it back in again. Ops like this – face to face, small-arms fire – were rare, especially for Beggar. It was like being on the front line. To quell the worry, he focused on what Luc had had in his possession: a set of photographs that could prevent another ocean of sinking bodies, worse than the carnage he had seen at Dunkirk.

  ‘This way,’ he said.

  He took them quietly through the woods to the spot where he had been watching the road and pointed out the terrain and vantage points. A heavy sound high above made them all look up. The trees’ bare branches became damp. ‘It’s good,’ Reece said. ‘The rain will slow them down, distract them too.’