Merlin at War

by Mark Ellis

  King Zog disappeared through the door behind him and his entourage evaporated swiftly, leaving only the original uniformed man to let Fleming out.

  The businessman entered his own room in a state of great satisfaction moments later. It was no mean achievement for Fleming, once a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, to mingle with royalty. Even if it was dispossessed, powerless royalty. It did occur to him that he might have missed a business trick. The King was obviously expecting him to ask a favour. Perhaps the monarch would have agreed to open an account at Sackville? He should have enquired. No matter. He had the contact and the entrée now. There was obviously money around, even if Zog’s Albanian throne had been usurped. He decided to call room service for a bottle of champagne to savour in his suite before going down to the restaurant for lunch. Fleming made the call then picked up the rest of the pile of messages and sat at his desk. Most of the messages appeared to be from Tomlinson.

  * * *

  “So, Olivier, what did you think of Beaulieu?”

  “An ass. I told you that on the night and I haven’t changed my mind.”

  Commandant Angers was standing before his office mirror and attempting to flatten an unsightly crease in his collar with a hot, wet handkerchief. “Damn this thing. I’m going to find another laundry. The service of these places in England is very poor.” He cursed, gave up on his collar and sat down in one of the armchairs by the window. “But a spy? The man is so self-obsessed I doubt he could ever find enough time for spying.”

  “The fact that Beaulieu appears to be an arrogant ass does not preclude it. Arrogance often goes hand in hand with success at espionage.”

  “I thought the typical spy liked to keep a low profile. Blend into the woodwork and so on.”

  “Not necessarily. What about Rudolph Stellman, whom we used before the war and, for all I know, is still being used? He had a pretty healthy opinion of himself that he wasn’t loath to share. And what about English Fred? He was…”

  “All right, all right.” The commandant held up his hands. “You’ve made your point. I still don’t think he’s spying material. What’s happened is that he’s so full of himself because of his close connection with the general that he’s got up everyone’s noses, including some very high-up noses, and Fillon’s suspicion is his payback.”

  “De Gaulle must think highly of him.”

  “De Gaulle? Ha! Another self-obsessive. The general is too busy hating Churchill or the British military or whoever for slights or imagined shifts to his amour propre. He doesn’t take the time to get to know his people. His dislike of you bears witness to the poor quality of his people judgment.”

  Rougemont shrugged and picked up the newspaper he’d been reading before the commandant’s late arrival. “No doubt the general is fuming somewhere over this headline.” He held up the paper. ‘BRITISH FORCES ENTER SYRIA AND LEBANON’.

  Angers looked back in mock perplexity. “What’s wrong with that headline?” Then both men burst out laughing. They knew de Gaulle would be furious at any report of operations against Syria and Lebanon that made no reference to the contribution of the contingent of Free French forces in the Allied army.

  The commandant looked at the story. “I bet he’ll be on the first plane to Damascus from Cairo or Brazzaville or wherever he is when Syria falls. Barging his way to the front of the victory parade.”

  “But, Commandant, back to Beaulieu. Surely it must concern us that he was very close to Darlan?”

  “My dear Rougemont, I venture to say that very few of our fellow officers in London have not had any dealings with Darlan, Pétain or Laval over the years.”

  “I know but those would have been before the occupation. Beaulieu worked for Darlan under Vichy.”

  Angers crossed his legs and puffed out his cheeks. “But, Olivier, we must remember that the transition after defeat was not easy. Many people were placed awkwardly. And do we know exactly what he did for Darlan?” The commandant sniggered. “Perhaps he just cleaned his shoes!”

  “You are not taking this seriously enough, sir.”

  “All right, all right.” He got up and wandered over to his desk, where he sat in the new swivel chair he had just liberated from the office of a fellow officer, who had gone away with the general. “Perhaps we should put a tail on him? How about that Irish fellow? How about Devlin?”

  “Harp, sir.”

  “Sorry, I forgot he has a code name. Anyway, he was useful to us in that Banstead case. You know where to find him?”

  “I know the pub in Kilburn he frequents. He is a useful man. What instructions?”

  “Follow Beaulieu and why not the other two? A day or two on each. See what, if anything, turns up.”

  “Money?”

  “I’ll leave that to you. Help yourself to my special kitty in the safe over there. You know the number.” Angers swivelled round a couple of times in his chair. He laughed with a child’s pleasure. “I love this chair! That idiot Le Clerc would be apoplectic if he knew I’d filched it.” He swivelled again. “Off you go then. It’s lunchtime. With luck De… Harp might be at his pub. Likes a drink, if I remember correctly.”

  On his way out, Rougemont bumped into a man standing in the reception area. As they exchanged apologies, he heard the man’s colleague introduce himself to the receptionist, saying he was a police officer who wanted to speak to someone in authority about something important. The captain spent most of his taxi journey to Kilburn wondering what that important something might be.

  * * *

  Paris

  The little boy was a fast runner – and needed to be. He stood quietly in the queue at the butcher’s shop on the corner of the rue Mazarine until he heard the ruckus outside. The noise came from his younger brother, François, who was the proud possessor of a particularly ear-piercing scream. All in the shop, behind or in front of the counter, turned to look out of the window to see what was happening. Jules took his chance, squeezed through the line of customers and crept behind the counter. The shop, close as it was to the German Embassy, was one of the better provisioned butchers in Paris at a time of growing scarcity. With commendable efficiency, the boy swept as many pies and cuts of meat as he could into his two sacks and crawled through the customers’ legs out to the street.

  Once outside, he threw one bag to François, who hared off towards the Luxembourg Garden, while Jules raced towards the river. The boy ran along the embankment then over the Pont Royal and into the Louvre Gardens. He slowed down a little, then cut down the rue de Castiglione towards the Place Vendôme. He came to a halt by the column in the centre of the square, sat down on a step and began to recover his breath. Moments later, a group of German soldiers walked by and stopped to admire the towering monument to Napoleon. It was clearly time to move on but, just as he got to his feet, he felt a hand on his shoulder. A voice spoke to him in German-accented French. “Can I see what’s in your bag, sonny?”

  Jules turned to see a tall, solid man in German officer’s uniform. The boy felt a trickle of urine making its way down his leg despite the fact that the officer was smiling pleasantly at him. He handed the sack to the officer. “Hmm. This seems rather a large amount of meat for a small boy like you. Or perhaps you have been sent on a shopping errand by your very rich mama and papa.”

  The officer turned and laughed to the occupants of an open-topped car parked a few yards away. Two soldiers sat in the front and an important-looking man with close-cut fair hair was seated in the back. This man said something in German to the officer holding Jules’ bag, who nodded in response and turned back to the boy.

  “You are unlucky and lucky. Unluckily for you, we saw what you did as we were driving past the butcher’s. We saw you run off, then lost sight of you until we arrived in the square. You must be a very stupid boy to choose this square as a place to stop. Surely it would have been wiser to disappear into a back street closer to wherever you came from?” Jules’ stomach began to make unpleasant noises.

 
; “And yet you are lucky because my boss over there has had a tiresome day and doesn’t want what remains of it ruined by any unpleasantness.” The officer picked out a chicken pie from the boy’s bag then threw the bag to the ground. “I wouldn’t chance your luck again if I were you.”

  He started back to the car. Then, after a few paces, he turned, came back and picked up the bag. He rummaged through it, then looked at the boy. His face didn’t look so kindly now. “No ham, no pork, no sausages. You’re a Jew, aren’t you?”

  The urine now coursed down Jules’ leg. He said nothing.

  “Hmm. I was a bit slow there. I can usually smell a Jew at a hundred paces. I think perhaps you are not so lucky today, little boy.” In one swift and smooth movement, the officer drew his revolver and shot the boy in the head. Jules fell to the ground and the officer kicked the twitching body a couple of times before heading for the car. The fair-haired man shook his head as the officer joined him in the back. “You just couldn’t resist it, could you, Schmidt? Your little bit of fun. That sort of behaviour is not helpful, you know.”

  SS Standartenführer Fritz Schmidt looked at his boss with a smirk of amusement. “I’ll put it about that the boy was a Jew terrorist who drew a gun on me and obviously had to be killed. Will that be all right, sir?”

  The car continued across the square and came to a halt outside the Hôtel Ritz. The man in the back of the car was Heinrich Otto Abetz, who was indeed as important as he looked. Abetz, the plenipotentiary Nazi ruler of occupied France, was dubbed King Otto by celebrated French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, among others. Abetz thought of Céline, who had said he might join them later for dinner, and smiled wryly. He never thought he’d find someone who hated the Jews as much as his SS Chief Schmidt but Céline came pretty close.

  Abetz led Schmidt through the swing doors of the Ritz. His day so far had indeed been one of extreme tedium and he was looking forward to some entertainment. The morning had been spent with senior Vichy civil servants, who were trying to finalise the details of the Protocols he had agreed in principle with Admiral Darlan in May. This was, of course, a complete waste of time because Abetz knew that the people back in Berlin didn’t care whether or not the Protocols were finalised. Even if they were finalised, they would not be worth the paper they were written on as far as the Führer was concerned.

  In the afternoon, there had been another long meeting, this time to discuss the first round-up of Parisian Jews, which had taken place the previous month. On 14 May, postcards had been sent to thousands of Jewish men aged between 18 and 40, asking them to present themselves at Paris police stations. More than 5,000 men had been arrested and despatched to detention camps at Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. The afternoon’s meeting had focused on the organisation and condition of these camps. Unsurprisingly to Abetz, the state of the camps was very poor. One or two of his more enlightened civil servants and officers had argued for an improvement in conditions and rationing, but his finance people had balked at the expense and Abetz had certainly not wanted his many enemies back in Berlin to accuse him of being soft on Jews.

  At the Ritz, a private room had been reserved for him and his party. Abetz found he was not the first to arrive – Céline had managed to get there earlier than promised. The call of free champagne was a powerful one. Throw in some caviar and a few potential rounds of Jew-baiting and it was clearly all too hard for Céline to resist. Also there already was the elfin Coco Chanel, the odd-looking writer Jean Cocteau and the ballet impresario Serge Lifar. The same band, more or less, with whom he had just passed an entertaining weekend at his Château de Chantilly.

  Abetz’s spirits rose as he anticipated a stimulating and enjoyable evening. He raised his hand in a restrained version of the Nazi salute to greet the party and took his place at the head of the table. Champagne was poured and Céline rose to propose the toast. “To King Otto and to France, the Kingdom of Otto!”

  * * *

  London

  Merlin and Goldberg were driving back to the Yard from Dorset Square with the chief inspector at the wheel. Their meeting with the French had proved unproductive.

  “Those guys really fancied themselves, huh, Frank?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. The colonel wasn’t too bad.”

  “Maybe, but what about that commandant? Anjou, was that the name?”

  Merlin beeped his horn. He hated driving in London. He had hated it before the war and it was worse now. Bridges normally did all the driving but as he’d gone to Putney, Merlin was stuck with the task. Traffic had backed up all along the Charing Cross Road. A passing pedestrian had mentioned a collapsed building. Merlin put the car into reverse and tried to cut down Shaftesbury Avenue but everyone else had had the same idea. He took his hands off the steering wheel and resigned himself to a wait.

  “No, Angers – pronounced a bit like ‘ballet’. I suppose he was a bit of a peacock.”

  “The only Frenchmen I come across in New York are the maître d’s in the best restaurants, where they always enjoy telling me I can’t get a table. Reckon the commandant would be brilliant at that.”

  In Dorset Square, they had eventually been ushered into the office of Colonel Aubertin, who appeared to be the senior man in the building. The commandant had joined them a few minutes later, exuding superiority and boredom in equal measure. Merlin had told the officers about the murder of Mr White – the pseudonym of a Frenchman, it was thought – and their need to identify him. Merlin’s physical description of White and the photograph of the corpse had been met with blank looks. At the mention of the business Mr White appeared to have been conducting, Aubertin and Angers had registered shock and disgust, reiterated their ignorance of the man’s identity and made it absolutely clear that they could not help. As a minor concession to the policemen, the colonel had grudgingly promised to check whether any colleagues had come across someone fitting White’s description.

  The traffic began to move again and Goldberg looked out at the theatres lining Shaftesbury Avenue. “Guess I should try to see a show while I’m here. Any recommendations?”

  “I went with a friend to see a revue on Saturday. Very funny but very English. It might not appeal to you.”

  Goldberg shrugged. “I’ve listened to some of your radio shows and you may be right. That Tommy Handley fellow, can’t really understand a word he’s saying. And everyone creases up when that lady says: ‘Can I do you now, sir?’ What the heck’s all that about?”

  Merlin laughed, thinking of Sonia. “Some foreigners get it. We don’t seem to have any problem with your comedians. Have you listened to Hi, Gang!? That’s got plenty of American humour in it and it’s very popular here.”

  “Oh, yeah. Ben Lyon and his wife you mean? They’re good.” They turned into Whitehall and drove past Horse Guards Parade and Downing Street.

  “One of the comics in Hi, Gang! is the son-in-law of our prime minister. I bet you didn’t know that.”

  “You don’t say!”

  “Name of Vic Oliver. He’s an Austrian, married to Churchill’s daughter, Sarah.”

  “Now that is amazing. A vaudeville star and someone born in the same place as Hitler. I doubt Mr Roosevelt would allow anything like that.”

  Merlin drove through the gates of Scotland Yard and came to a halt. “Puts Churchill in quite a good light, I think. Does Roosevelt have any daughters?”

  “One. Anne Roosevelt. She’s a journalist.”

  “Interesting. Journalists aren’t very highly regarded here. A lot of people in Britain might prefer their daughter to marry a foreign music-hall artist than a journalist.”

  “Really, Frank?”

  “Really.”

  * * *

  Buenos Aires

  Alexander Pulos felt a little under the weather when he woke that morning. He looked in the mirror. His pointy little nose was unnaturally red and his face appeared pasty and sallow through heavy-lidded eyes. Pulos decided to take the day off. His young wife was still at their new chal
et in Bariloche with friends. He had wondered why she wanted to go this early in June – the main ski season didn’t start for another couple of weeks – but had said nothing. He didn’t ask too many questions about her social arrangements in case she started to ask too many about his. He lay in bed dozing all morning and by one o’clock was feeling much better. He rang for his valet, Victor, who laid out his dressing gown and slippers then ran him a bath. Downstairs, Pulos ate a light lunch of cold meats and cheese then planted himself in the high-backed armchair that overlooked the immaculately manicured lawn of his spacious villa in Recoleta, one of Buenos Aires’ most expensive barrios.

  After another little doze in his chair, he called his secretary and asked her to come to the house. She began to tell him something but he stopped her. “Save it for when you get here, Paula.” Pulos went upstairs to change out of his silk pyjamas and dressing gown and into his favourite baggy cream trousers, check shirt and tweed jacket, and was back in his chair when Victor let Paula in. The secretary was a little, sparrow-like woman of Italian extraction, who adored her boss with a passion. Pulos could see that she was agitated.

  Paula drew up a chair beside him. She had with her a large file of papers from which she withdrew a telegram. “You had better look at this first, señor.”

  Pulos took it from her and scanned it. He suddenly felt a little faint. He had been half expecting bad news like this for some time but it was still a big shock. “Very sad, Paula. Very sad indeed. Mr Arbuthnot was a great man.”

  Pulos was someone who could switch off the worries of work relatively easily. The problems of Enterprisas Simal had not disturbed him at all during his morning of recuperation. Now, back in business mode, the wheels of his refreshed brain began running as normal. The death of his partner would create substantial new problems to add to those already existing. Chief among them would be those of control and leadership – the ownership of the company and its command structure would have to be resolved and this would be no easy matter. The pressing old problems concerning the origin of the company remained and Arbuthnot’s death would not make them go away. The litigation would grind on, although thankfully the Argentinian courts were notoriously slow and corrupt and their opponents were weak.