by Larry Loftis
It was the only way.
She plunged in.
CHAPTER 7
PEARL OF THE FRENCH ALPS
The icy L’Isle snatched her breath as she sank waist deep.
Wading through the current as fast as she could, Odette reached the opposite bank and quietly pulled herself out. Across the river she could hear a man calling after the Shepherd. “Frizi, Frizi!”
Shivering, she wrung as much water as she could from her skirt and shook it from her shoes. The imminent danger now was not the dog, or even the Germans, but freezing to death.
* * *
PETER AND PAUL STOPPED under some trees to catch their wind. They had been running for three miles.
“I wonder how Lise and Jacques got on,” Peter said between gasps.
They were fine, Paul assured. They had a head start, after all.
They continued until they reached the edge of Périgueux and Peter pulled up. Germans were crawling all over the place, he said, and likely had set up a blockade. Better to head in at first light.
They moved away from the road and cleared an area in a thicket. Each taking a long pull on the Armagnac, they curled up next to each other and let sleep come.
Peter awoke as dawn seeped through a milky sky. It had been only four hours since he’d closed his eyes and frost was everywhere, including where Paul was supposed to be. He looked around and saw his companion pacing to keep warm. Paul had been doing so for two hours.
Straightening their hair and cleaning their shoes, they headed into town at half past seven and ordered coffee at a cafe. In theory, Odette and Jacques would be doing the same. Peter and Paul looked around, but no sight of the pair. When they finished a cup, they went to another cafe. Again, one cup and the bill. By nine o’clock they had hit every cafe in town; no sign of Odette or Jacques.
They returned to the Domino and found a table in the enclosed veranda overlooking the square. More coffee. Peter continued to scan the street and sidewalks, refusing to believe that Odette had been arrested. She was too smart.
But there was no one. This was the Marseille trip all over again. Only this time she had soldiers chasing her.
Peter’s mouth went dry and he took a deep breath.
When he looked up, it was them! Odette and Jacques were coming toward the hotel, waving through the window as they entered. Peter smiled; Odette looked immaculate, polished shoes and all.
Before they could whisper what had happened, four Gestapo sat behind them. They spoke in German and Paul—who was from the Alsace region bordering Germany and Switzerland—listened intently. When the agents left, he repeated the gist of their conversation.
Cordons had been set up around the Bassillac airfield, one of them had said, at a radius of five kilometers. Before nightfall, the agent told his colleagues, he was quite certain they would capture the terrorists, or find them frozen to death.
* * *
PAUL AND JACQUES DECIDED to remain in Périgueux for two days, but Odette and Peter could not leave soon enough. By midmorning they were at the station, which was teeming with Germans and people who didn’t look like travelers. Again they’d have to change trains in Toulouse and Marseille before arriving back in Cannes. The train arrived and they boarded, blending in.
At the Marseille station, the Gestapo were waiting.
When the train from Toulouse arrived, all passengers were removed and transported to headquarters for proof of identity and questioning, starting with their reason for the trip.
Peter and Odette were not on it.
Thinking that Marseille and Cannes might be hot, they disembarked at Toulouse and contacted Captain Maurice (code-named “Eugene”) Pertschuk, head of the local circuit. A young Jew of only twenty-two, Eugene was so highly regarded among his Resistance colleagues that Peter thought he could have been a colonel. Eugene provided a safe house, and Peter and Odette awaited the arrival of a courier named Gisèle, who would know more about the situation in Marseille and Cannes.
The meeting could not have been more timely. Peter’s flat at Quai St. Pierre had been raided by the Gestapo, Gisèle said when she arrived. How they had determined Peter’s activity or acquired his address, no one knew. Police had also visited Antoine and again asked about Peter’s whereabouts, but Gisèle had no further details. A Colonel Vautrin and his second in command at the Deuxième Bureau, she added, had fled across the Spanish frontier, and Peter’s commando instructor in Antibes had been arrested, along with a number of agents in Marseille. Arnaud remained active, she said finally, but was in danger if he didn’t change locations immediately. Prudence would have dictated that Peter and Odette remain at the safe house in Toulouse, but Arnaud—who was hiding out with a Corsican croupier named René Casale18—had to be warned, and the work had to continue, albeit in a new location.
The following day Paul and Marsac arrived in Toulouse. Their headquarters in Marseille had been raided, they said, with more arrests. It was time, everyone agreed, to find a new base. Paul and Marsac suggested St. Jorioz, a small village five miles from the medieval town of Annecy in the Haute-Savoie, the French Alps district bordering Switzerland and Italy.
Peter said that he, Odette, and Arnaud would go if Arnaud’s transmitting houses and living quarters were at least six miles from Paul’s and Marsac’s place, and if he and Odette were at least three miles away. Marsac said that Arnaud could set up in Faverges, ten miles from St. Jorioz, and that he and Lise could quarter in the Hôtel de la Poste; Marsac and his crew would rent a house nearby.
Peter thought the setup would work but insisted that no meetings should take place at the hotel; it simply brought too much risk. Paul and Marsac agreed. The task now was convincing Arnaud to leave Cannes. Peter sent word for the radioman to join them in Toulouse and in forty-eight hours, he was there.
Before Peter could explain the danger of remaining in Cannes, Arnaud beat him to the punch. The Gestapo had been to the Villa Diana, he said, asking for information about Monsieur Pierre Chauvet. “You should have caught that Lysander to England,” he said. “If I’d been there, I’d have shot the bastards and made it.”
Peter took Arnaud’s bravado in stride and told him that they were moving to the Savoy Mountains.
“Good God! From the Maritime Alps to the Alps of Savoy. Always these bloody mountains! How I hate them!”
The complaint was reasonable, as Arnaud’s job was difficult enough. To begin, he had to haul around a thirty-five-pound transceiver—transmitter and receiver in one—in a less than subtle suitcase. Added to that was Baker Street’s B Mark II signal; it was so weak (less than twenty watts) that it needed seventy feet of aerial—a Gestapo lightning rod.
Peter assured they’d find a spot where Arnaud would have no issues. Besides, in Savoy Arnaud wouldn’t have to worry about the German radio detector cars.
Arnaud begrudgingly consented, and Peter and Odette said good-bye to Eugene.
Sadly, they would never see him again. Eugene was later arrested and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was executed on March 29, 1945.
* * *
RETURNING TO CANNES BY train was safe enough for Odette, but not for Peter, whose name was surely on every Gestapo list. They decided that Odette would return to Cannes and stay with Catherine, whose safe house had not been compromised, while Peter would entrain to Antibes and from there take a bus to la Bocca, a coastal village two miles west of Cannes. There he would stay with friends who owned a farm and Odette could bike back and forth twice a day, drawing little attention.
As always, Peter thought, Odette was indefatigable, optimistic, and elegant.
After ten days of wrapping up details, they left Cannes in mid-January and headed to the Alps. It was not without regret that Peter left the Côte d’Azur. They had been there for six months, but he had wanted to accomplish so much more; too many aborted landings, too much running around southern France, too little sabotage. Yet he counted his blessings: they began with Arnaud and ended with Lise
. With them he could undertake anything. In short, he thought, the war had reduced itself to the deep-seated loyalty between a Frenchwoman, a Russo-Egyptian, and an Englishman. They were as one.
With the Gestapo searching for him, it seemed only a matter of time that lady luck would succumb and Peter would be arrested. Odette, once again, provided encouragement. As the train to Annecy rolled through the night, Peter glanced at her next to him. Her face was resolute and strong. There was no fear, no apprehension, no hesitation. Her expression was of a landlord traveling to collect rents. In a very real sense, Peter thought, he could feel her strength seeping into him. He closed his eyes and leaned into her.
Hours later he lifted his head from Odette’s shoulder. How long was I out? Peter wondered. Odette simply smiled, thankful that he had rested peacefully. Peter looked at her and it dawned on him that she had remained awake, like a sentry protecting a wounded soldier.
She was indeed a rock.
* * *
WITH THE DAWN OF 1943, foreboding tremors rumbled along the Third Reich’s fault line. On January 27 Americans launched the first Allied raid into Germany at Lower Saxony’s Wilhelmshaven, the country’s only deep-water port. Six days later German forces surrendered at Stalingrad, and days after that the Red Army recaptured Kursk.
Meanwhile, few places manifested peace more than Savoy. Annecy—“Pearl of the French Alps,” as it is called—is indistinguishable from a Swiss village. Situated on the northwest border of Lake Annecy, an alpine loch with crystalline turquoise waters, it lies twenty-five miles south of Geneva and forty miles west of Western Europe’s highest mountain, Mont Blanc. Through the middle of town meanders the Thiou River, its cafe-lined canals rivaled only by those of Venice and Amsterdam.
When Odette and Peter arrived they were welcomed by the snow-covered grandeur of Mont Veyrier, La Tournette, and the Dents de Lanfon. There was no war here, anyone could see; no, this was a place for bike rides and canal strolls, sailing and rowing—an alpine sanctuary to forget your troubles and disappear.
And so it was. For a time.
* * *
MARSAC’S WIFE, MICHELLE, MET Peter and Odette at the station and escorted them to the bus, which drove five miles south along the lake to St. Jorioz. It stopped directly in front of the Hôtel de la Poste, where Marsac joined them. The four had coffee and Marsac handed Peter and Odette new identity cards.
It was best to start under new names, he said, since Pierre Chauvet surely had quite a police file now.
Peter looked at his card and there, with his photo, was the name Pierre Chambrun. Odette would pose as his wife, they said, and they had a new identity for Arnaud as well: Monsieur Guy Lebouton—appropriate for the guy who turned the radio knobs, or buttons, as the word is understood in French.
Marsac ushered Peter and Odette into a private room and introduced them to the hotel owner, Jean Cottet. The proprietor seemed too young—late twenties or early thirties—to own a hotel, they thought, but Cottet’s shrewd, watchful eyes revealed maturity beyond his years.
“These are my friends,” Marsac said to Jean. “Although you might never think so, Monsieur Chambrun is a British Officer.”
Peter glared at Marsac. In town less than thirty minutes and already his cover was exposed.
Jean asked how Marsac knew that he and the hotel were safe.
“Oh, we have ways and means of checking up on people’s loyalties,” Marsac replied, “and we know that you think as we do.”
Jean introduced his wife, Simone, and the small group returned to the lounge, where Jacques Langlois and Jacques Latour had joined Michelle. Marsac pointed to a house through the window—the Tilleuls—and said that’s where he and his wife were staying.
Peter asked who else was staying there and Marsac rattled off his group: Michelle and their son; his secretary, Suzanne; Roger Bardet; Jacques Riquet; the Lejeunes; and a French captain. Couriers, he added, including Jacques Latour, Jacques Langlois, and Louis le Belge, would be in and out. Paul Frager, he said, had also arrived and was staying with his wife in a house in Talloires across the lake.
The large group, coupled with Marsac’s disclosure to Jean and Simone, meant that even the Hôtel de la Poste—seemingly a sanctuary in an alpine village of one hundred—no longer held airtight security. Odette’s cover, which would ameliorate most inquiries, was that she had a medical condition which required her to reside at an altitude of at least twelve hundred feet. St. Jorioz, at fourteen hundred feet, was her prescription. If anyone questioned the veracity of the claim, she carried a forged medical certificate from a physician in Toulouse.
What none of the SPINDLE team knew, though, was that the influx of new residents was likely to draw the attention of the OVRA—Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell’Antifascismo, the Italian Fascist secret police—which had a district office in Annecy. And since the Germans didn’t trust the Italians, the Gestapo supplemented its staff with liaison officers.
Odette settled into the hotel and Peter and Riquet headed off on borrowed bikes to hunt for an alpine hideout where Arnaud could set up his radio. About twelve miles southeast of St. Jorioz they found their place: a forest ranger’s house two thousand feet up the mountain near the village of Seythenex, just south of Faverges. It would provide Arnaud with an unobstructed line of communication and, equally important, unparalleled safety.
Riquet fetched Arnaud from his hideout in Montréjeau and within days Arnaud was in communication with London. When Peter caught up with him, the radioman said he was thrilled to be back with his team, and relieved that his new hideout would have no issues. London, however, was another matter.
While Peter and Odette were off finding a new headquarters, he said, he had assisted Eugene with transmissions since the Toulouse radio was inoperable. Not that it mattered, he grumbled, since London acted so slowly on his messages that many weren’t worth sending.
“Another little trick they tried on me,” he added, “was putting on a new pancake last Sunday who couldn’t receive at more than twelve. Just imagine, Michel, twelve —— words a —— minute while I sit there sweating with the ‘cars’ closing in on me like hornets!”
Arnaud wasn’t being melodramatic. The Germans had perfected radio direction finding and had mobile D/F units—Funkpeilwagens—which were disguised commercial vans with antennas mounted on the roof. If an SOE radio operator stayed on too long—perhaps as little as thirty minutes—or signaled too often from the same location, it was only a matter of time before the goons arrived. Almost all early operators were captured because of these D/F units, and of the 107 F Section wireless operators, 31 were executed or died in captivity.
Most operators in the field could process Morse and take down an incoming message at a rate of fifteen to seventeen words a minute. If the pancake in London could process only twelve—coupled with call sign recognition and repeats—an operator in the field might be on the wire for an hour; plenty long for the hornets to home in. If caught, the radioman was assured of death as the Vichy government had made it a capital crime to be found with a transmitter, but the Gestapo would utilize its various tortures to squeeze the lemon dry first.
Arnaud had little intention of being drawn and quartered because Baker Street was training a rookie. He handed Peter a message he was planning to send:
IF YOU PUT THAT ***** ON AGAIN NEXT SUNDAY I QUIT.
Peter chuckled and handed it back. “You can send that with my blessings, Arnaud.”
Arnaud had good reason to make a stink, and everyone in Codes knew it. He was an outstanding radio operator, perhaps SOE’s best, but when reception was bad, when D/F cars were closing in, every operator had to cut corners or cut bait.
* * *
WITH EVERYONE IN PLACE, the St. Jorioz group was soon running on all cylinders: Marsac was liaising with Paris, Riquet with Eugene in Toulouse, and Roger Bardet—Paul Frager’s lieutenant and courier in the CARTE circuit—was busy with errands. Jacques Latour, Jacques Langlois, and
other couriers, meanwhile, were traveling to Marseille, Lyon, Nice, Grenoble, Aix-en-Provence, Antibes, St. Raphaël, Clermont-Ferrand, and Cannes. During February 1943 alone, SPINDLE established forty new drop zones and, as shipments arrived, passed the weapons on to the French Resistance fighters known as the Maquis of Glières. With the newly acquired supplies, the Maquis sabotaged Nazi trains, railways, bridges, and barges, and raided German troops in hit-and-run guerilla warfare. SPINDLE and its net were finally wreaking havoc on the Germans.
About this time, Roger Bardet collected from Annecy station the bicycles Peter and Odette had sent from Cannes. The three met on a side street to conduct the transfer and Odette inspected him carefully: tall, thin, raven hair, and black hooded eyes that never came to rest. He was only about twenty-six, but had the facial lines of someone much older. He didn’t smile, she noticed, and seemed to be worried, like a man hunted.
Perhaps for good reason. Bardet had been arrested on the Riviera in November, and again in Aix-en-Provence in January. On both occasions he escaped, he said, almost immediately.
“I don’t like that man,” Odette said to Peter after Roger left. “He’s got shifty eyes.”
“What d’you want me to do? Drop him in the lake?”
“Mark my words, Michel. That man’s no good.”
Paris
ONE DAY IN MID-MARCH Hugo Bleicher was shuffling through his files when he was summoned to the Hôtel Lutétia. Hugo thought it strange since he had met with Colonel Reile for two hours just that morning.
“I’ve got a complicated case here, Bleicher,” the colonel said, “which you must take over.” There was a Resistance leader coming to Paris the next day, Reile said, and the Abwehr had come up with a trap to arrest him. The Frenchman would be meeting a woman, he explained, who was an Abwehr confederate posing as an anti-Nazi activist. With limited information, Hugo thought the action was premature, possibly counterproductive. “We know next to nothing of this fellow and his organization, Herr Colonel! If we catch him, it is still uncertain that we can get him to talk. And if he does not talk, the arrest is a signal that will put all of his gang on their guard.”