by Colin Smith
He had pleaded with his mother to join the civilian evacuation which took place after the British decided not to put up a fight for the Channel Islands. But she was old, and a channel crossing frightened her more than the Germans. So he had been among the Guernsey people who stayed and watched the blond giants of the Wehrmacht, tanned from the summer Blitzkrieg, hold their victory parade in St Peter Port. They had appeared invincible then, said Le Poidevin. They all looked like film-stars. Tall, athletic, good teeth, clear-eyed; so different from the bowlegged British regulars who had garrisoned the island or the groping, pot-bellied petty officers off the visiting destroyers. The local papers, transmogrified into propaganda sheets for Dr Goebbels, chronicled fresh triumphs. The RAF had been shot out of the sky; London was ablaze; the U-boats had drowned half the British Merchant Fleet. Victory was assured. The New Order had arrived.
Before long the waiter had found a friend among these supermen. By 1943, due to unit rotation, there had been several friends, although by then many of the supermen were dead and his friends began to resemble ordinary mortals with round shoulders and fallen arches. The last of these was a private from Hamburg called Werner, who had been wounded in Russia. This time, the waiter explained, it was true love. After the war they planned to start a restaurant together in Bavaria.
They used to meet in his mother's house where they would play cards until his mother tired and went to bed. She had objected at first to having a Boche in the house, and pointedly arranged about their parlour photographs of her husband in service dress and holding a swagger-cane. But Werner charmed her, as he charmed most people, telling her that his own father had been killed in Flanders - which might have been true, because Werner never knew his name.
The only people he failed to charm were the German military police, who raided the house shortly after they had gone to bed one night, suspecting that Werner's frequent visits there had something to do with the black market. At that time the local Commandant was taking an increasingly hard line with black marketeers and there had been threats of execution for any members of the Wehrmacht involved. Unlike the SS, homosexuality was not a capital offence in the army. Since it was quite obvious that the MPs were determined to charge him with something Werner rapidly confessed the true reason for his visits. This saved him from the possibility of a firing squad at the price of being returned to the Eastern Front in a penal battalion of the Dirlewanger Brigade.
It also, of course, implicated Le Poidevin, who was to be handed over to the Guernsey police together with a sworn statement from Werner. In those days sodomites could be birched or sent to prison for a long time. Even worse, as far as Le Poidevin was concerned, was what his appearance in court would do to his mother. He pleaded with the Military Police Hauptmann interrogating him to charge him with almost anything else, but he was quite adamant that nothing could be done.
Nonetheless, the Hauptmann must have talked about the matter, for a few hours before he was about to be delivered to the local constabulary a guardian angel turned up in the form of a Gestapo officer. The Gestapo man was merely visiting the island from his base in Paris. He offered Le Poidevin a deal: all charges would be dropped if he agreed to go to France and work for them. Furthermore, he would arrange it so that it would appear that he was being sent to the Continent for further questioning over a matter of sabotage. This would certainly make him something of a local hero and at the same time they would forward reassuring 'prison letters' to his mother in which he would indicate that he was in some kind of internment camp and was being well treated. Later, said the Gestapo man, he could say that he had been released but, forbidden to return to Guernsey, had found a job in Paris.
Koller listened to all this patiently, as Le Poidevin punctuated his tale with frequent attacks on the Calvados. The German, being on duty as it were, was still on his second glass. Cigarette smoke filled the room and they partially opened the window again. The atmosphere was cosy. The Siamese had reappeared and was faking slumber on the fat man's knee. If the German had not had a gun on his own lap they might have been good friends. The waiter even interrupted his narrative to rummage about in a drawer until he unearthed a well-preserved photograph of Werner, a bull-necked young man in an unbuttoned tunic killed by Polish partisans during the Warsaw Uprising.
Le Poidevin arrived in Paris in September 1943 and his mother died of grief and malnutrition just after Christmas the same year. He was allowed to attend her funeral 'under escort' - thus perpetuating the lie that he had been interned. Shortly afterwards the Gestapo passed him on to the Intelligence section of Joseph Darnand's Milice, the quite recently formed Vichy militia composed of French fascists.
The terrorists, as Le Poidevin called them, were going on the offensive in preparation for the Allied invasion. Jean Moulin, de Gaulle's emissary from London, had been captured in June, but the work he had done to co-ordinate the various groups under the National Resistance Council was beginning to pay off. In the Massif Central hundreds of young men were joining the Marquis to dodge the compulsory labour Pierre Laval's government had introduced that February. The waiter recited all this as if it were yesterday's news.
The Milice found him a job in a Left Bank bar patronized almost equally by petty criminals, a few fugitive Jews, and members of the Resistance. Most of the latter belonged to the Milice Patriotique, the Communist terrorists. His task was simply to observe, listen and inform. He communicated through a series of dead-letter-boxes, often in cafes and department stores, or through people such as waiters or small shopkeepers.
'You mean cut-outs like you,' said Koller, making one of his rare interruptions.
'What?'
Koller had used the English word. He couldn't think of the French equivalent.
'A person who passes messages between his agent and his bosses. Like you do to me.'
'Yes, that's right,' beamed Le Poidevin. The Calvados had dispelled all fear. 'My controlling officer, the man the messages went to, was Fouche-Larimand. He was a major then.'
'What sort of messages did you give him?'
'Well, you must understand, I wasn't a very political person,' said Le Poidevin, a note of caution creeping into his voice. 'I didn't want to do this job did I? I was blackmailed into it. I tried to tell them nothing that was very useful, nothing that would do any harm. Let the others get on with the war. That was my motto.'
'But obviously you had to tell them something or they would have been suspicious?'
'Yes.'
'What did you tell them?'
'Well, I'd tell them that so-and-so had been seen talking to so-and-so. Sometimes I'd say that I had overheard somebody had bought a duplicator for an underground newspaper. But I always pretended that I didn't know the fellow's name or that he had been sitting in a dark corner and I wouldn't recognize him again.'
'Always?'
Le Poidevin looked uncomfortable, refilled his glass, lit another Gitane, plucked the medallion out of the jungle on his chest and examined it as if he had never seen it before.
'Always?' repeated Koller.
Still the waiter chose not to answer the question directly. 'It was a strange situation,' he said. 'Even after they had formed their National Council the Resistance people weren't all that united. Some of the Gaullists were very suspicious of the Communists. They really thought that they were going to take over after the Germans had gone, that there would be a revolution. They used to spy on each other, get into one another's organisations.
'The Milice had a man in one of the Communist cells who never knew he was working for them. He thought he was working for the Gaullists. He used to tell me things and then I'd pass them on.'
'He thought you were passing them on to London?'
'I suppose.'
'Why did he think that? Why did he think you were a Gaullist?'
'Because the Milice had given me the right passwords, code-signs and what have you. I think they had arrested somebody the RAF had parachuted in and he had told them what the
y wanted to know.'
'They tortured him?'
'I don't know. Perhaps. I heard some people talked right away. They knew they would sooner or later, anyway, so what was the use?'
'That must have been very funny. This silly bastard meeting you in the bar, telling you things about the Commies, thinking he was working for de Gaulle and all the time he was working for Petain and the Nazis.'
Le Poidevin shuddered. 'I didn't think it was all that funny. I didn't think it was funny at all. I was very scared. I felt I could be shot at any time by either side, but it was impossible to get out.' He paused. 'It still is.'
'Why did you think you were in danger from the Milice?'
'Because I knew they didn't trust me. As far as they were concerned I was some sort of Englishman. Sometimes I considered confessing who I was to the Resistance, but I was too scared. They would probably have killed me without thinking about it. Some of those heroes were real thugs, you know.'
'So what did you do to prove to Fouche-Larimand that you could really be trusted?'
'What do you mean?'
'You had to do something, didn't you, to show you were one hundred per cent on their side. You had to do something to save your own skin?' Koller had been there himself; he knew the sort of questions to ask.
'Why do you want to know these things?'
'Because you fascinate me, Monsieur Le Poidevin. I want to know everything about you.'
The German stroked the pistol on his lap with his left hand, almost as if it were a wild animal that had to be calmed.
'You are young,' sighed Le Poidevin. 'I don't know what you are up to with Fouche-Larimand. I don't want to know. Perhaps it's dangerous for you, but I doubt whether it is as dangerous as things were then. Many people did things they were to regret.'
'So what did you do to convince the Milice you were their man?'
'I betrayed a Jewish family who had befriended me.' Le Poidevin's voice was drained of emotion. He might have been the speaking clock.
'They were sent to Germany?'
'Yes. They were Hungarians. They had been in Paris since 1938. They went into hiding in 1942 when the French rounded up their own Jews. The Parisian police were so enthusiastic they included four thousand children. Even the Germans had told them they didn't want anyone under sixteen. I had an affair with their son, a wonderful boy. Then he ... left me. I was cross.'
'You were cross,' said Koller in a low voice.
'No, not cross. Heartbroken. I didn't know what I was doing. You must believe me, I didn't know anything about the camps, not the concentration camps. I just thought they would be interned somewhere in Germany. Perhaps made to do a bit of work. Of course, they didn't come back.'
'Of course,' said Koller.
Le Poidevin went silent. A presentiment, something that had started to evolve minutes before in the soggy chemistry of his brain, suddenly took horrid form. 'You're an Israeli agent, aren't you?' he said in his frozen voice. 'You've come to kill me.' There was even a little genuine humour in the sound of Koller's laughter. Him, with his big fat file in Jerusalem, a Zionist gunman? It was really quite funny. 'No,' he said, 'not an Israeli. Just go on with your story. Tell the truth and you've nothing to worry about. How did you meet Fouche-Larimand again?'
They lost contact a month or so after the Allies had landed in Normandy, Le Poidevin explained, about the time of the July bomb plot against Hitler. For a few weeks some of them had thought that the fighting might stay up there, that there would be trench warfare like in the First War and Paris would remain well behind the lines. But Fouche-Larimand obviously saw the writing on the wall, he said, because he wangled himself a transfer to the Charlemagne Division, the French contingent of the Waffen SS. There were a few thousand West Europeans in the SS by then. Dutchmen and Scandinavians in the Viking Division had been crusading against Bolshevism on the Eastern Front for over two years. The Charlemagne Division was one of the last foreign units to be formed.
Before he left Fouche-Larimand had handed Le Poidevin the Milice's file on him, which he had promptly destroyed. He had also tried to persuade him to go with him, but Le Poidevin refused. He was still in the capital at the end of August 1944 when de Gaulle arrived, and a few crazed miliciens sniped at the Free French soldiers from the roof-tops around the Place de la Concorde.
The Gestapo's original cover story to explain his presence in Paris had been that he was working by St Malo when the islands were occupied and was unable to get back home. It had been out of the question to give him a French identity because his accent was too strong.
The months after the liberation of Paris had been a particularly nerve-wracking time for Le Poidevin. He could not, even if he dared, return to Guernsey because the Allies had bypassed the islands and they were still occupied. Before proper courts were set up collaborators were being shot out of hand. People who had never said as much as boo to a German were running around with sten-guns denouncing everybody else. Poor little whores who had made their living under the Wehrmacht were paraded naked through the streets by the mob, their heads shaved until their scalps bled and swastikas painted on their chests.
He had been given his file, but he didn't know how many others were in existence that might, at any moment, fall into the wrong hands. The Gestapo, for instance, must have had one on him and he had no idea how many of their records they had managed to destroy before they fled Paris. As far as he knew the Comte was the only member of the Milice aware of his existence, but he could not be certain that somebody else had not seen his file or that the Comte had not spoken about him among his colleagues. Some of the miliciens who had survived summary execution were still being interrogated and others were being flushed out of their hiding-places. There were new arrests every day. He lived in terror that, even if all the documentary evidence had been destroyed, he might be betrayed by some wretched milicien trying to save his own skin.
As soon as he decently could he left his job in the bar and found work in a French officers' mess, where his status as a refugee from one of the few bits of Europe still under German occupation won him a certain sympathy. It also gave him the idea to bury himself even deeper into the Allied cause by enlisting in the reconstituted French Army as an artilleryman.
During a skirmish against the Nazi rear-guard in the Black Forest a mortar splinter wounded him in the leg. When he had recovered the European war was over and, after a few months' occupation duty in Berlin, his regiment was re-fitted and sent to Indo-China. It was here, in 1947, that he met the Comte again in a bar in Saigon. He was in the uniform of a sergeant in the Legion and drinking with a bunch of German-speaking Legionnaires. Artillerymen and Legionnaires were not normally on speaking terms. Especially, added Le Poidevin, who had now decided that his best chance with Koller lay in self-denigration, an overweight gunner who had secured himself a cushy number serving drinks in a rear-echelon mess.
His immediate reaction had been to beat a hasty retreat, but Fouche-Larimand recognized him at once, called him over, and introduced him as 'an old comrade'. The Comte said that it was good to see they were still fighting 'the real enemy'. By this he meant International Communism, currently in the uniform of the Viet Minh, and from his brief conversation with the other gentlemen seated around the bar Le Poidevin gathered that most of them had been engaged in this worthy struggle since Guernica. After a couple of beers Le Poidevin had pleaded that he had to return to the mess. He was sent back to France shortly afterwards and his army discharge papers made his French citizenship automatic.
His past did not catch up with him again for almost thirty years, although on a couple of occasions he had noticed the Comte's name in the newspapers. The first time, he said, was in 1959 when he was one of several Legion officers court-martialled for their role in the mutiny over de Gaulle's Algerian policy. Subsequent press stories indicated he had somehow escaped prison, become involved with the OAS and gone underground. Then in 1967the waiter had noticed his name among a list of people, inc
luding de Gaulle's old Resistance chief Georges Bidault, who had been amnestied.
For the next decade he had heard nothing of him and indeed had almost forgotten his existence until, about a year ago, he had been taking an order at the cafe when he had found himself staring down at a familiar face. At least, said Le Poidevin, it was what was left of a familiar face.
He wore a black leather patch over his left eye and on the same side the skin from cheekbone to jaw was a shiny, beardless yellow. They had greeted each other like old friends - although the waiter said that inside he felt as if he had just come across a walking corpse. A couple of nights later the Comte had taken him out to dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant. At the time it had seemed to Le Poidevin that their conversation was almost exclusively about 'the old days'. Later he realised that the aristocrat had soon established that he lived alone and was without close friends.
After that he called at the cafe at least once a week, usually in the tired hours of the afternoon before the evening rush started. But it was another nine months before he asked the waiter if he would mind doing him a favour, a small job of work. He would not discuss the matter in the cafe. Another dinner was arranged at the Vietnamese restaurant. Le Poidevin remembered that, throughout the meal, Fouche-Larimand was very excited. He spoke of a group of old comrades getting together and 'trying to do something for this damn Continent of ours'. To Le Poidevin's amazement he even sang a verse from a sentimental German song popular towards the end of the war.
'Es geht alles voriiber, Es geht alles vorbei.' (Everything passes, One day it'll be over.)
Koller finished it: 'Nach jedem Dezember,' he sang softly. 'Gibts wieder ein Mai.' (After every December, There's always a May.)
'My father used to sing it,' the terrorist said.
'Go on.'
Fouche-Larimand had outlined the details of his organisation. Their Grand Jules, he said, was called Roland-Grand Jules, explained Le Poidevin, was the Milice's nickname for Hitler - and Roland had asked Fouche-Larimand if he would find out if their old comrade from Guernsey would be willing to act as Mercury - 'that was the expression he used' - between the inner circle and certain field agents.