by Mike Ripley
I was not out to interrogate old Fleurey. I just wanted him to flesh out his story, pick his brains on a few details; anything which might help. Étienne was quite up for it and played along without making too many faces at the plates of stodge we were presented with, and made all the right noises about the bottle of claret I had scrounged up from somewhere.
It seemed that ‘Theodre Haberland’ had arrived unannounced at the Beauregard earlier in the year, in the company of two other chaps: a rough sort, possibly a Corsican, called Pirani and a middle-aged French Jew called Lunel. Being a good hotelier, Étienne had made sure they had registered legally, even though he had no idea if those were their real names. They had crossed from North Africa on a ship, bound for Marseilles but diverted to Genoa, but had not been travelling together. They were a curious trio. The young, Corsican thug was clearly acting as a bodyguard, or perhaps just a guard, keeping a close eye on the Jew, who looked like some sort of businessman or lawyer. The polite German, called Haberland, was keeping an eye on both of them.
Fleurey had served his guests as well as he could under the circumstances and waved them goodbye the next morning, not expecting to see or hear of any of them again. When the telephone call came from a Marseilles wine importer that had never previously done business with the Beauregard, he was initially confused, and it took a while for the name Haberland to ring any bells. The offer of an expenses-paid trip to Marseilles, along with the required Letter of Transit, however, to discuss a recently arrived consignment of fine wines and sherries from Spain, of which the retail advantages were considerable, proved to be an offer he could not, in straitened times, refuse.
In Marseilles he met with the man he knew as Haberland in what appeared to be a genuine wine warehouse in the Old Port area, and they did indeed discuss, and sample, wine. But then Haberland had showed his hand and played two aces. The first ace was his connection to me, and he reminded Fleurey that I was the common bond between them. It seems the dear man has some holiday snaps of me and my chums pinned up on his office wall as if we were film stars. I had never thought of myself in competition with Betty Grable or Mae West before.
Haberland would have made it sound like the most natural thing in the world to choose Fleurey as his secret courier, and his second ace-in-the-hole was that while Étienne was off on his mission, his wife and children would be spirited away to Switzerland.
Now that really was the ace of trumps, because Haberland then tells Fleurey that the Vichy government, under pressure from their pugnacious Nazi neighbours, are planning a round-up of Jews in the southern zone – and we all know what that might mean. Poor Étienne has the devil’s own choice to make: stick with his family and hope for the best, or trust Haberland and accept a temporary divorce, him sitting out the war in England and his wife and kids in Switzerland.
He chose a divorce which, hopefully, would be of short duration, and put his faith in two foreigners who had fought in a fencing match at Cambridge twenty years before. He was either very desperate or incredibly naïve: possibly both. He had also been incredibly lucky in his journey, and now I had to make some luck for mine.
My first port of call was to the Deuxième Bureau of the Free French Intelligence Service in their pokey little offices round on Duke Street, where I met with the incredibly charming and terribly bright Colonel André Dewavrin. He was known as ‘Passy’, because all their top agents had code names taken from station stops of the Paris Metro, such as Bobigny, Wagram, Tolbiac, and Étoile. I had once suggested that if I ever joined the Second Bureau they could call me whatever the French for ‘Emergency Exit’ was, but they hadn’t seemed terribly impressed.
I had agreed with Mr Corkran that if I was going to pick the brains of the French, then a quid-pro-quo would be expected and, after checking with Room 39 at the Admiralty, I was to offer them the story Fleurey had brought with him about the French navy’s research into aqualungs. I would not, of course, mention the source, and would keep Haberland/Ringer out of the picture.
There were some names I did want to float by Passy, though: Lunel and Pirani, the two guests at the Beauregard whom Robert Ringer had seemed so interested in.
Colonel Dewavrin could not have been more helpful, and even managed to rustle up a decent cup of coffee while one of his minions checked through their files. Monsieur Lunel, whoever he was, did not show up on the Bureau’s radar, but there was a distinct blip when it came to Pirani, who had, for such a young man, a colourful and lengthy police record.
Paul Pirani, I was told, had wanted to be a gangster from the day he left school, and in a place like Marseilles that was a perfectly achievable career path if, that is, you had no moral scruples and a talent for fighting dirty with boot, fist and blade. He built himself a reputation as a hard man in the prostitution game, which had always been the core business of the city’s criminal empires, but he had also shown considerable flair in the drug trade, importing opium from French Indo-China and in smuggling that most profitable of commodities, Parmigiano-Reggiano from Italy. I had no idea that a trade in illicit cheese could be so lucrative, but it seems it had been the foundation of several criminal fortunes.
The Bureau could not tell me anything of Pirani’s current activities, although it was known he was an active, and probably enthusiastic, member of SOL – the Service d’Ordre Legionnaire. The SOL, which favoured collaboration with the Nazis, whose policies on race and Jews they particularly liked, was a pro-Vichy militia formed mainly of disillusioned army veterans, malcontents and criminals from the underworlds of Nice and Marseilles. On a scale of general nastiness, SOL was somewhere between Mosley’s Blackshirts and the Gestapo, and was to be avoided if at all possible.
There was one name Passy would trust me with, and that was Olivier Courteaux, whom he described as the most important Resistance leader in Vichy France. Although Courteaux’s base was in Toulouse in Gascony, he was sure to have trusted lieutenants on the Riviera.
Before we parted, the colonel gave me some wise advice: ‘Be careful, M’sieur Campion, if you are planning to visit Vichy, which I think you are, though I will not ask your purpose. You must be aware that it is a strange place. Some call it the Free Zone, but it is not free. In 1940, France was beaten, and beaten well. Thousands of French soldiers were taken prisoner and remain hostages of the Germans. The Occupied Zone, which they control directly, contains seventy-five per cent of French industry, and in addition they demand occupation costs of twenty million Reichsmarks a day. Some say that the creation of the Vichy regime was defeatism, others that it was realism, if the alternative was for France to become another Poland. And now “Liberty, Fraternity, Equality” has been replaced by “Work, Family, Fatherland”, which is much more pleasant to the Nazi ear, just as the laws Vichy have passed also appeal to the Nazis – they have banned women from wearing trousers, having jobs and holding bank accounts without the given permission of a husband or father, and encourage the denunciation of Jews. The Vichy police have a standing reward of one thousand francs for the denunciation of a Jew. Denouncing a communist or, worse, a Gaullist such as myself, earns a reward of three thousand francs.’
At this point, the colonel paused for a moment to brush, with great pride, a speck of imaginary Vichy dust from the collar of his uniform.
‘You will find the Vichy regime cares little for the Allies; it hates General de Gaulle more than it hates Hitler, and there is no special love for the British. You will perhaps have heard the saying that “Britain will fight to the last Frenchman” and so, if you go there, be careful and do not be British. Canada still maintains diplomatic relations with Vichy and as your French is good enough and your accent bad enough, you could easily pass for a Canadian diplomat.’
I called in on the SOE chaps at 64 Baker Street (though they really should have renumbered it 221B in my opinion) to tell them that it was my intention to become a roving Canadian diplomat in order to grab a few weeks of holiday in the south of France. Two extremely young and fresh-faced capt
ains agreed that it was an excellent plan, and quite frankly were astonished that anyone from MI6 had come up with it.
The SOE boys had never held us in high regard since the ‘Great Pigeon Mission’, and they clearly had no intention of letting us forget it. Somebody had had the wizard idea of parachuting crates of pigeons into northern France, not to the Resistance to carry secret messages, but just to the general population as a sort of mass observation study. Ordinary French citizens were asked to fill in a questionnaire about the hardships of life under the Germans and the pigeons would carry them back to the BBC in London where they would provide useful propaganda. The ordinary French citizenry made no effort to fill in the questionnaires and were very grateful for the pigeons, which I am sure they found delicious.
The two captains who had introduced themselves as Smith and Jones, which I thought slightly unimaginative given their Baker Street address (I had been hoping for a Holmes and a Watson at least), could not, of course, resist raising the subject. I would like to think I took their ribbing with good grace, smiling politely at their feeble witticisms about recipes for pigeon pie and trying not to wince when one of them used, for the hundredth time, the phrase ‘coming home to roost’. Eventually, though, they came up with some valuable background information for me. I did not tell them the reason for my ‘mission’ into Vichy territory, and they knew better than to ask for details about what I would be doing there or how I would get there, but they were certainly the chaps to ask about getting out of France, hopefully in one piece.
I was sworn to several degrees of secrecy, each one accompanied by the fearsome threat that all SOE agents knew a dozen or more ways to kill a man with their bare hands; the fact that I assured them that I had at least two aunts who could boast the same skill did not cut any ice with Messrs Smith and Jones.
Clearly those SOE chaps thought I would need all the help I could get, and confided that should I find myself in trouble in Marseilles or its environs, then I should seek sanctuary in the Protestant Seamen’s Mission and Reading Room, run by a former Royal Navy chaplain called Sandy Nevin.
Although British, or more accurately Scottish, Sandy Nevin had found himself trapped, as many were, on the Riviera, when hostilities had started in earnest. Technically retired from the navy, but still wanting to do his bit for king and country, Chaplain Nevin took over the running of the Mission, sometimes known as the English Seamen’s Hostel, to give comfort and shelter to lost, shipwrecked or cast-adrift sailors. He had not been short of customers, among whom he had numbered several successful authors of popular fiction and numerous academic types, who had all failed to take the war seriously, as well as a brace of Russian émigrés clutching Fabergé eggs, and three Jewish families who had led a nomadic existence floating across Europe for three years before washing up and into Sandy Nevin’s lifeboat.
For the Mission was certainly a lifeboat, which saved those lost in deep and dangerous waters and ferried them to safety, or at least sent them on their way. Sandy Nevin had an enviable record when it came to smuggling people out of Vichy France and, for more than a year, the Mission had acted as a staging post and safe house for downed RAF aircrew who had been shepherded across France by the Resistance.
At that point I was given a stern lecture by those bare-handed killers from SOE, and I sat up straight and listened carefully. While Sandy Nevin’s no doubt brave and charitable activities were much appreciated by the French Resistance and SOE, the chaplain was a member of neither and kept a healthy distance from any of their operations and operatives. It was safer that way. What he did not know could not be tortured out of him in a Vichy prison cell. Therefore, although he might just be the one person who could facilitate an escape should I fall foul of spies, assassins, cut-throats, or policemen – secret or otherwise – while in Marseilles, I was not to approach him under any circumstances.
Thankfully, Captain Smith or perhaps it was Captain Jones – it really was difficult to tell them apart – did not let me stew over this conundrum for too long. Though I must not approach Chaplain Nevin’s Mission directly (not even, it seemed, in the guise of a distressed Protestant seaman in need of reading materials), I could make contact via an intermediary who, this being the world of SOE, was naturally not to be trusted.
The fact that a former Royal Navy chaplain could be openly running a safe house and an escape line in the middle of Marseilles, right under the noses of the Vichy (and other) security services, was extraordinary enough. To be told that Chaplain Nevin’s diary secretary was a leading light in the Marseilles black market and a British army sergeant to boot, was positively flabbergasting.
Needless to say, I was intrigued as to how two members of His Majesty’s armed forces could survive and openly prosper in enemy, or at least unfriendly, territory two years after the fall of France.
To Sandy Nevin, as an ardent Francophile, as well as a man who believed in the power of charity and selfless good works, it had been only natural that he would stay where he thought he could do most good. When on shore leave from postings with the Mediterranean fleet, he had volunteered many times to help in the numerous Seamen’s Missions in various ports, including Marseilles.
Nevin was a popular and trusted figure in the dingy back streets and pungent alleys around the Old Port area and the Bassin de la Joliette, and his dog collar seemed to protect him even in the dangerous Panier district, which was ruled by the Marseilles underworld. Because he made no attempt to preach or proselytize, Nevin was looked on kindly by the Catholic priests of the city, and he performed a useful service in return, as any lost and wandering soul, unable to speak adequate French and seeking sanctuary in an English accent, was quietly directed to the Chaplain’s Mission.
If Sandy Nevin survived by keeping his head down and doing good works, the man who would supply me with an introduction should I need it seemed to specialize in exactly the opposite.
The one definite thing known about Magnus Asher was that, as a sergeant of a despatch-rider unit in a county infantry regiment, he had been part of the British Expeditionary Force, which saw action on the Belgian/French border in 1940. In the retreat to Dunkirk, Asher had either become separated from his unit or deserted; the jury was still out on that one. He had been listed as Missing in Action but then, according to a report from the Resistance there, had turned up in Lyons in early 1941, wearing an expensive suit and driving a hardly inconspicuous Bugatti roadster. His luggage included one leather suitcase bulging with paper money in at least four different currencies.
The expected scenario was that any British soldier (or deserter) trying to evade capture by the enemy and make his way home, would seek out the local Resistance and plead for assistance. In Lyons, Magnus Asher sought out the Resistance, seemingly unconcerned as to whether they were communist or not, and offered to help them. Sergeant Asher may have been missing in action for eight months, but he had certainly not been inactive. Somehow, in those eight months, he had abandoned his identity as a British army sergeant and reinvented himself as a successful black marketeer, apparently able to operate with impunity in both the Occupied Zone and Vichy. One SOE report contained the phrase that he had arrived in Lyons wearing ‘the last good suit made in Paris’.
The Lyons Resistance members that Asher contacted at first treated him with the utmost suspicion and were determined to keep him on the circumference of their circle, but gradually began to do business with the shady Englishman. If they required supplies – batteries, torches, tools, boots, blankets, petrol, even occasionally weapons – Asher could supply them, if payment could be made in cash and delivery taken under cover of darkness.
With an extensive supply of official documents offering him the security of several identities, plus an inexhaustible supply of cash and tradable goods, he lived in numerous mid-range hotels in Lyons for six months, being arrested and released without charge at least twice. He then disappeared, and it was assumed he had sought refuge with his ill-gotten profits in Switzerland, only for him
to reappear, with a spring in his step, in Marseilles towards the end of the year.
No one knew how he did it, certainly not my new young friends at SOE, nor any of their chaps on the ground in France. They had not, of course, asked our allies in the Free French’s Second Bureau, as it would be terribly embarrassing to admit that we had lost track of one of our non-commissioned officers, who now appeared to be a leading light in the black market.
Army records had been checked and provided a few indications, though no definite clues. Magnus Asher had joined the Territorials at the age of twenty-two in 1936, while working as a clerk in the accounts office of a light engineering firm in Sheffield. An unblemished if undramatic military career had led to one stripe and then two, and the outbreak of war accelerated the award of a third on his unit’s incorporation into the regular army. The only distinguishing feature on Asher’s curriculum vitae up to Dunkirk was that, from a working-class background (his father was a foundry-man, his mother sewed cricket gloves on a piece-work basis), he had won a place at a respectable grammar school where he had excelled in French and German.
Such an aptitude, I felt, must have put him in line for a position in intelligence or field security once the army crossed the Channel on a war footing, perhaps even a field commission, but Asher remained an infantry sergeant. Statements taken from members of his platoon who had been rescued from the beaches of Dunkirk indicated that Asher had performed well enough under fire, but on the confused and chaotic retreat towards the Channel ports, the platoon’s unity had been shattered during a sustained Stuka attack. When their sirens had stopped their screaming and the smoke had cleared, Asher had disappeared. Without their NCO – their officer had been killed, foolishly attempting to disable a Mark IV Panzer with a Webley revolver – the leaderless platoon wearily followed their noses towards the sea, few of them caring what had happened to their sergeant and none of them having the energy or inclination to search for him or his body.