Blue Noon

by Robert Ryan

  It reminded him of the report on his desk from his old Z operative Henry King, explaining that there was a chap in Lille who had successfully been feeding airmen to Marseilles and over the Pyrenees since the summer. The Lille area was a transit point for all German traffic to the Channel defences, which is why it was designated as part of the northern Forbidden Zone, closed to casual travellers, even those from the occupied areas. This was where Dansey desperately needed intelligence. So whoever this Scarlet Pimpernel was, he’d have to be watched, brought under the cosh.

  King was the man for that. Henry King had proved his worth over and over again, to the point that Dansey felt he was an extension of his own arm. When he clenched his fist in London, King delivered the blow across the Channel, with few questions asked. That was Dansey’s kind of agent.

  He suddenly decided to lunch at the Travellers Club on Pall Mall. He usually went to Brooks’s in St James’s, but there were times when the more discreet Travellers was better suited to his needs, such as now, when he needed the space to think. Of course he could have eaten well enough in the SIS executive dining room, but Dansey liked any excuse to get out of the suffocating confines of Broadway Buildings with its gentlemen spies and Old Colonials, not a real professional among them. He’d make an exception for someone like Philby, who had the making of a first-rate agent, but mostly there was a lot of dead wood to cut out.

  Dansey detoured around the two murky brown bomb craters in the park’s lawn, crossed the Mall and started up Marlborough Road, now re-opened after the unexploded incendiary scare of the last few days. There was still a war reserve constable posted at the end of the street, a WW1 veteran with a large drooping moustache who saluted smartly.

  The odd thing about the Lille man, who seemed to be called Mason, was that, according to pilot debriefings at London Cage, a requisitioned mansion in Kensington Palace Gardens, he claimed to be SIS. Yet they had no Mason on their books.

  He was nearly at the Travellers and Dansey began to pull his gloves off in anticipation. He knew that the kitchen had secured some decent game, and he was about ready for a bit of rich, red meat.

  As the ancient doorman hurried to let him in, Dansey made a mental note to get King to give Mason a once-over as soon as possible, see if there was any mileage in him.

  Eleven

  Lille, France, Early Summer 1941

  BERND DIELS STUDIED THE list on his desk and chewed his lower lip. Mines de Dourges, the metalworkers at Compagnie de Fives-Lilies, the textile workers at Stalar mills, the Anzin mines. Every single one on strike. He’d thought that they’d diminish after the winter, but no, women were still turning up at pitheads demanding increased bread and fomenting protest strikes. It wasn’t good enough.

  In fact, it was generally unsatisfactory that he should be bogged down by petty disputes like these at all. His transfer to the Feldpolizei, the plain clothes section of the Abwehr, came with a brief to seek out spies and saboteurs, not deal with strikes over the ration system and distribution of food. But his superiors decided that anything that threatened the flow of goods to the Reich was an Abwehr matter, so he had to pay some attention to the strikers.

  Diels poured himself a glass of water and sipped. He had spent a good weekend in Paris, relaxing at the shows, forgetting, for a while, that his fiefdom was the most boring section of the country—flat, industrial, populated by the miserable and the curmudgeonly. Coal miners, for instance. Was there any nation in the world where they weren’t a pain in the arse? In any other industry, you could threaten to send in replacements. Replacing a miner—finding anyone stupid enough to do the work—was not easy.

  There was a knock at the door and Pieter Wolkers entered. The fair-haired Dutchman was wearing a large grin. Wolkers was a Brandenburger—a volunteer from a conquered nation who instinctively knew where to place his allegiances. Diels had no illusions about the sort of man he was. Before the war in Amsterdam he was probably a petty crook or a horse trader. Maybe even a diamond smuggler, Diels never asked, and he didn’t care. All that concerned him was ensuring that Wolkers used his dubious skills to prise information from a tight-lipped population.

  He threw a folder down on Diels’s desk. ‘You owe me a drink, Bernd.’

  ‘Do I?’ He flicked the corner of the document. ‘What is it?’

  ‘The names of the Comité Populaire. The ones behind the Stalar Mills and Fives-Lille strikes and I’d wager the others as well. Ten of them.’

  Diels smiled. This would make Generalleutnant Niehoff a very happy man. Already the area commander had closed theatres and cafés, banned alcohol and reduced the bread ration in an attempt to flush out the Comité. Now his little ferret had done the job. ‘Certain?’

  ‘Certain? I spoke at their last meeting.’

  Diels burst out laughing. ‘Very good. Very good.’ He stood up and sat on the edge of his desk.

  ‘But I cannot show my face at the mines again.’

  ‘Don’t worry, we have plenty for you to do. You read English. Look at this …’

  He threw a dog-eared newspaper across to Wolkers. The Daily Mirror.

  ‘Page five. A pilot shot down over Dunkirk, made it back to his squadron two months after he was believed dead. A real morale boost. Now, he must have come through here, down one of these ratlines I keep hearing about. Stories like this make us look bad. And they make the locals think they can thumb their noses at us.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Find me some pilots who need rescuing.’ He paused and then winked. ‘Some friendly pilots.’

  Odile called first at the hairdresser where Harry had a room out back. Annette, despite being in the middle of a permanent wave, greeted her warmly, but Harry wasn’t in, she said. Odile remounted her bike and began pedalling towards Povan, the next village, trying to stop the panic from rising in her chest. Everything was in danger of crashing down around their ears.

  As she rattled over the cobbles, her breath coming hard in the afternoon heat, she wondered where the hell Harry had got to. After twelve long months of operations, he had six or seven safe houses he scuttled between and she had been to four of them now. At the back of her mind, there was always the fear that one day Harry would move on, the way she was sure he’d moved on all his life whenever things got sticky.

  It was sometimes difficult to steer him away from the black market, livestock deals, tobacco smuggling, all the other temptations that would engage the Harry of old. Odile, though, made it clear that wasn’t the Harry she wanted or needed. Sure, there was time for a little dabbling, just to ‘keep his hand in’ as he put it—and to top up their larders—but for the most part she insisted that the Harry she shared her bed with had to be the one who had worked out dozens of dodges to fool the Germans.

  It was Harry who had noticed that ration coupons were issued according to the population size of the towns as they’d been before the Germans arrived. But many people had fled in May 1940, and 300,000 of them had not been allowed back by the Germans. So the surplus ration books provided a means to feed the escapers and evaders—mostly downed Allied airmen—who were slowly filling up the available barns and outhouses across the region.

  He’d come up with ways to forge the identity coupons, blanks of which were available at any tabac, and co-opted a printer to make the stamps. He knew which make of typewriters were used by the Gendarmerie, the Marie and the Offices of the Occupation, purloined one of each make, and taught himself to rattle off letters of authorisation, apparently written by important-sounding bureaucrats with enormous, florid signatures and sealed with brutal, eagle-headed stamps.

  In Paris, he had created two safe houses, one a brothel near les Halles, the other at the rear of a restaurant where the escapers could get a decent meal. Whether they were offered the services of the other establishment, Odile declined to enquire. She had made it clear what would happen if Harry took advantage of such an offer, even if it was on the house.

  From the Marie in Lille,
Harry extracted a card which stated he was deaf and dumb to cover his French which, although improving, still lapsed when he was excited. Harry thrived, she suspected, because fooling the Germans was something he’d been preparing for all his life, albeit unwittingly, with his lies and half-truths.

  She knew there were those in the escaping business who didn’t like Harry: Faucomb and Trotobas, Madame Preyier and old Berclau, the ex-mayor. They’d all expressed their doubts about the cocky little Captain, but they had to face up to one fact—nobody came close to matching Odile and Harry’s track record when it came to hiding and moving pilots and soldiers.

  Odile was beginning to rely on the Englishman far more than was healthy, and she knew that was a bad thing even before she saw his bicycle chained outside the Court Restaurant.

  Harry reached over and poured another glass of Fleurie for the woman opposite. It was late afternoon, they were two bottles down, and even in the gloom of the restaurant—Hugo the owner kept the shades drawn day and night—Harry could see the flush on her cheeks.

  He’d forgotten just how much he enjoyed this particular chase, the hare and the dog, and the hare was slowing, he could sense it. Lucienne Dievart had something he wanted and today, she was going to give it up. Which was just as well, because the black-market lunch had cost him a small fortune.

  He sipped his own wine. ‘In return, Lucienne, I can get you a travel permit to Paris. Hell, I will even come with you.’

  ‘But they are gold dust.’

  Harry laughed. Ausweise could be forged, copied, stolen, or even used several times over—they bore no photograph, and he had used a single pass to get as many as a dozen pilots across the Abbeville bridge in the course of two days.

  ‘And I am a gold mine.’

  ‘So I have heard …’

  Harry bristled slightly. ‘What have you heard?’

  ‘Oh, things. That you have a mother and her daughter as lovers …’

  No, that was Keiller the Scotsman, who had been living in Madeleine for six months and was lucky not to have been caught.

  ‘That you had a treacherous woman shot in her hospital bed.’

  No, that was Trotobas, who arranged for two bogus doctors to finish off a woman who had been turning in downed airmen.

  ‘That you have a young French fiancée. A very young fiancée. Some might say, too young.’

  No, Odile may be French but she was neither too young nor a fiancée. He shook his head.

  ‘That there is a reward of ten thousand francs on your head.’

  This was news to him. He was about to ask Lucienne where she had gleaned this last gem of gossip when he saw her eyes widen.

  He knew the look. It was the terror that showed whenever Germans walked into a room. Always stay calm, he reminded himself. He had papers, he had his deaf-and-dumb certificate to fall back on, and he had more front than Barker’s of Kensington.

  The blow stung his left ear and he couldn’t help but cry out. He half-turned and feathers filled his mouth and face, the quills leaving red weals on his cheeks. He rose from the chair but the pheasant hit him again, sending him staggering back.

  Odile was being restrained by Hugo, who was appalled to see one of his expensive birds plucked off the rack and used for common assault. Now she was hitting the restaurateur, and he started to retreat under the rain of feathery blows.

  ‘Odile—’ Harry took a step back to avoid another faceful of feathers. ‘For God’s sake.’ Odile held up her hands, signalling for quiet. The only other remaining diners were two bloated executives from the coalmines at Bethune, pigging out on the proceeds of their own black-market operations, now staring at this impromptu floorshow in disbelief.

  ‘You …’ She pointed at Lucienne and flung the bird at her, smashing the wine glass and drenching the woman with Fleurie. Lucienne leapt up, staring down open mouthed at her ruined clothes, and began to scream. Hugo panicked and pushed Odile towards the door. She shrugged him off, turned on her heel and swept out. One of the coalmen began to laugh but a glance from Harry silenced him.

  ‘Lucienne, I’m sorry, I’ll be back. I must …’

  ‘You can forget your damned house! And keep your precious travel passes …’

  ‘Ssshhh. No. Please, Hugo.’ He held his hands, pleadingly, out to the owner. ‘Help me out here.’

  As Hugo took over, trying to calm the hysterical Lucienne, Harry raced outside just in time to find Odile cycling off. With no time to unlock his own bicycle, he ran in pursuit, arms and legs pumping.

  Odile was furious with herself. She had let a petty jealousy, a moment of anger, swamp her judgement. She knew better than to draw attention to herself, to them. It was even possible, it dawned on her, that she had misjudged the situation. She slowed when she saw the German staff car, a swastika fluttering on its bonnet, approaching and pulled the bike to a halt at the kerbside. A breathless Harry appeared beside her, took in the Opel and leaned over and kissed her as hard as he could. As soon as the slow-moving Opel had purred past she pulled away and spat into the road, her anger flooding back.

  ‘For God’s sake, woman.’

  ‘For God’s sake? What about my sake?’

  ‘What the bloody hell was all that about?’

  ‘What? How can you ask me that? You are in there with that whore, eating and drinking black market—’

  ‘Keep your voice down.’

  ‘How much will all that cost?’

  ‘A damn sight more now I’ll have to pay for the pheasant,’ he said with feeling. ‘And probably a new dress for Lucienne.’

  Odile cracked a sardonic smile. ‘Well, at least something good came of it. That was a hideous outfit.’ Then the burning feeling in her stomach again. ‘You are a shit, Harry.’

  ‘I was working—’

  ‘Oh, yes, nice work if you can get it, Harry. Look, I could get all kinds of information by fucking a few Germans. You want me to do that?’

  ‘I wasn’t fucking her.’

  ‘Not yet …’ She began to act out him stroking her hand. ‘Oh, chérie, just let me slip this in, you won’t feel a thing …’

  ‘Yes, she damn well would,’ he said with mock indignation.

  ‘Darling, why don’t you just put your lips round this big fat sausage … Oh, yes, darling …’

  Harry suddenly felt his own temper flaring. He grabbed her upper arm. ‘Lucienne’s father has a house near the Somme bridge. It’s not used. It would be perfect. We could hide ten, twenty men there at a time. It would mean not exposing ourselves so often between here and there …’

  ‘Harry. Harry. Look at me. It’s Odile. Not some tart with her brains in her buttocks. Odile. Don’t give me any more of your shit. You start fucking around, I start fucking around. What’s the expression? Good for the goose …?’

  Harry raised his hands in surrender. ‘Agreed. But I wasn’t going to fuck her.’ Odile moved with the speed of a snake and grabbed his balls, giving one of them a painful squeeze between thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Ow, shit.’

  ‘If you did, you wouldn’t have anything left to do it a second time. Chéri.’

  ‘Bloody hell, you bitch. Let’s get off the street before someone takes too much notice.’

  Odile nodded, feeling her eyes fill up, the fury replaced by remorse at her impulsiveness. ‘I’m sorry, Harry. I don’t know …’

  He pulled her head onto his shoulder. ‘It’s OK. This bloody war makes us all do stupid things.’

  She looked at him. ‘It’s this bloody war I came to see you about. There’s a problem at Goutard.’

  ‘I’ll get my bike.’

  As Harry walked back to the restaurant, Odile watched him go, annoyed with herself that, despite her best efforts, she’d gone and fallen in love with him.

  As the pair pedalled away they passed the Café Central, where Dansey’s Henry King was sitting on the terrace, sipping bad coffee, pretending to read the newspaper. From his vantage point he could see right into the Court R
estaurant, and he had witnessed the whole performance with a mixture of curiosity and horror.

  ‘He can’t stay here. He can’t stay here. He can’t stay here.’ The old woman was beginning to fray Harry’s nerves. They were in the gloomy living room of a farmhouse near Goutard where the pilot before him had turned up unannounced, asking for sanctuary. Madame’s husband was a prisoner of war in Germany, and clearly she thought it would go badly for him if she were discovered to be harbouring an Allied prisoner. She’d been threatening to turf him out all day; only Leverin, the young boy they used as a runner, had prevented her, while Odile went off to fetch Harry.

  ‘Be quiet, Madame,’ Harry snapped. ‘Get us a drink, please. Anything.’ The woman went off to the kitchen, still grumbling. He turned to the glum-looking pilot. ‘Your name is …?’

  ‘Rola. Jan Rola.’ It was a thick, indeterminate accent. He was dressed in a mixture of civilian and RAF clothes. His flight jacket had been replaced by a coarse wool coat a couple of sizes too small, but the blue trousers with their sharp creases would have him singled out as a downed pilot within ten minutes on the street. No matter what happened, Harry knew they had to get him a fresh outfit.

  ‘And you are based at …?’

  The pilot raised an eyebrow. ‘I cannot tell you that.’

  ‘You are going to have to.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Look, I hand you over to the Germans, you are a prisoner of war, no harm done. I feed you into the system and you are a stooge …’

  ‘I am no stooge!’ Rola said angrily. ‘I flew Potez bombers for the French. I was shot down, got across the Channel. I am with …’ he tailed off. ‘The Free Polish Air Force.’