Madeleine's War

by Peter Watson

  With all the time I had, and with newsprint being in such short supply, and since a lot of the paper I had was missing, I read everything, all the subjects that I might not read usually, like the chess column, the bridge column (I played bridge badly), even the sports pages, accounts of teams I didn’t know.

  And then I saw something that made me…that made me hunch forward and move the paper into a better light so that I could be doubly certain of what I was reading.

  It was an archaeological report, from Chabanais on the Vienne River in the wider Limoges area, between Bordeaux and St. Nazaire. It said that a major discovery had been made there, in a cave—the discovery of a painting of an ancient wild animal, an ancient form of ox, now extinct. The discovery showed, said the report, that ancient people had lived in that part of France for nearly thirty thousand years and confirmed that this was the earliest form of human habitation in all of Europe. The discoveries had been made, according to the journalist who wrote the article, by a team of five people led by—I turned the page and…nothing. The next page was missing. Whoever had left the paper on the seat outside had taken the rest of the paper with him, or her. As Madeleine might have said, “Bug-ger!”

  I needed to get that paper. I had to get another copy and find out exactly who had made the discovery.

  When I looked at the front of the paper, however, I discovered that it was already three days old. Newsagents would already have returned or burned or destroyed what they had left over.

  I looked at the masthead. Yes, the editorial offices were in Limoges.

  I looked at the top of the article itself. No journalist’s name.

  But I would get there, I told myself.

  Chabanais, I remembered, was near Louzac, which I now recalled was where Madeleine came from, or had said that she came from, and where she had lived with her mother, after her father had died and before they moved to Britain.

  And Louzac was where her husband had made a speciality of caves and the ancient art inside them. Philippe had always hoped to make a major discovery in the area and now someone had. But it couldn’t be him. How could it? If he had ever existed, he was dead.

  · 19 ·

  LA SANTÉ PRISON, TOWARDS THE SOUTHERN edges of Paris, was a brick monster of a building. It was formed of five huge brown-black fingers. Each finger was five stories high, laid out in a line and formed of old bricks, overlooking narrow exercise yards where the sun hardly ever reached. Looking up, I could see that the windows were pitifully small, as if the architect had decided—or been instructed—to offer as little pleasure or hope as the materials would allow. Despite being so massive, the whole ensemble, within huge, fat walls, felt somehow constricting.

  “Follow me,” said Justine Coudehard. “I know the way.”

  We had passed by the main gate and shown our identity papers and, as far as I could see, we were now headed for a set of double doors at the foot of one of the brick fingers.

  I was content to let her lead.

  I already thought of her as Justine, although we had only met earlier that morning.

  She had a mass of thick, flame-coloured hair and freckle-spattered skin. Her eyebrows formed a curved, rust-tinted “V,” like a bird seen in the sky at a distance.

  As for the rest of her…Well, Roland Kemp was right: she was tall, athletic-looking, with a long stretch of body between her hips and her bust. She moved with the slow, loping, languid grace of a gazelle or a giraffe, her feet treading the ground as if she didn’t want to disturb the insect life.

  We had met for breakfast, at the Café Volnay, with Roland. He had explained why I was in Paris. She had agreed immediately to offer what help she could. This trip to La Santé, to see Claudine Petit, was our first foray together.

  We had travelled on the Métro, line 6, as far as the Place de St. Jacques, carrying our bicycles on the train, then ridden to the prison. During the ride, the heavens had opened but we had come prepared: both of us had raincoats and hats. The rain had stopped now. We had left our headgear with the bicycles at the entrance gate of the prison.

  We reached a set of double doors at the end of the building we had been directed to at the main gate, and Justine knocked. There was a delay, the sound of a chain rattling, keys turning in locks, and then the door opened. Justine handed over our documentation. A tall, thin, entirely bald man scrutinised it, wrote something down in a book inside the door, and then we were admitted.

  Ahead of us was another double door, then we were through into the main part of the cell block. A huge corridor lay before us: five rows of cell doors, one row above the other, with netting stretched across the block at every other level and from one balcony to another, to prevent suicides.

  Before I could adjust to the scale of the prison cells, to the fact that there were so many of them, I was overwhelmed by the smell of the place, ingrained into the very fabric of the building.

  We were led off to a small side room. It was clearly not the policy to let visitors get any closer to the realities of prison life.

  We were shown into a small square room, with brick walls painted a dirty green, with an electric light, covered with a metal grille, set into the ceiling. There was a small square metal table, and four chairs. The table had a shallow depression in it at one corner, which I presumed was meant to serve as an ashtray.

  Justine and I were left alone in the room, as the man went out, locking the door behind him. No doubt he would bring the woman we had come to see.

  “Tell me about this Claudine woman. What exactly did she do?”

  Justine wound her hair into a ponytail, using an elastic band she kept around her wrist.

  “We’re not exactly sure,” she said. “She certainly worked at the Gestapo headquarters in avenue Foch. She said she was a cleaner and that she did it because she needed the money. But she’s a little too educated to have been just a cleaner. So the question arises, What else might she have done? Did she sleep with any Germans, for instance?”

  “How…?”

  “How do we know? Is that what you are asking?”

  I nodded.

  She shook her head vigorously, as if she was trying to get the prison smell out of her hair. “There are others who worked in the same building. Some are in this prison, some in other prisons—some are still free. We have a team looking into all these people who were or may have been collaborators, checking one story against another. If we find any inconsistencies…Well, that’s where it gets interesting.”

  “Isn’t it all very chaotic?”

  She shook her head. “Less than you would think. The Germans were very methodical, but we in the Resistance have been keeping our eyes on rumoured collaborators, large and small, for some time. There’s going to be quite a bit of score-settling in the weeks and months ahead. That’s why I’ll be interested to see what this Claudine woman says.”

  There was some sort of banging outside, metal on metal, and for a few moments her voice was almost drowned out.

  “She knows that if she fails to help us, then she is at risk, so I’m hopeful our visit today won’t be wasted.”

  “You sound as though you know her.”

  “I know her type.” Justine shrugged. “Don’t forget, I know a lot of people who were collaborators. Claudine is safer in prison now than she would be out on the street. On the street she might have her head shaved. Épuration, it’s called.”

  We heard footsteps outside; a key turned in the lock and the door opened.

  Claudine Petit came in.

  She looked frightened. She was a small woman, as befitted her name, with short dark hair, like a basin or a helmet over her head. She had tiny dark suspicious eyes that were never still in their sockets. Her face was drawn, thin, and bird-like. She wore a smock, its sleeves cut off well above the elbow.

  She looked at me rather than Justine, and so I waved her to a seat.

  She sat on the edge of it and leaned forward, nervous now. Her eyes jerked around from side to side without
stopping.

  We waited while the guard left us, and again locked the door behind him.

  I waited some more, without saying anything. That would unnerve her.

  Then I nodded to Justine.

  “We know that you worked in the headquarters of the Gestapo,” she said. “In avenue Foch. When did you start?”

  “Why? Why do you want to know? Who are you?” She had a small voice, a small person’s voice, high-pitched, almost a whine.

  Justine nodded at me. “Special Command Two, from England. They sent agents into France, undercover, many women agents, to help us. It doesn’t matter who I am. Many agents were betrayed and this man is here to try to find them, or what happened to them. How long were you at Avenue Foch?”

  Claudine Petit was shaking her head. “I…I don’t know anything—”

  “Answer the question! How long were you at Avenue Foch? We’ll get to what you know, or don’t know, when we get to it.” Justine slapped the table with her open palm. “Answer the fucking question!”

  Claudine Petit held her hand to her throat. “The end of forty-two, November.”

  “That’s better.” Justine left her hand on the table between us, her fingers splayed. “And what did you do? What was your job?”

  “I was a cleaner.”

  “Cleaning what?”

  “The offices, the bathrooms, the kitchen.”

  “The bedrooms?”

  Claudine Petit nodded.

  “The cells?”

  She hesitated. Then she nodded.

  “And you worked there until…when, exactly?”

  Claudine hesitated again, clearly calculating where this was going, where her best interests lay. Should she come clean with all that she knew, or feign ignorance? But she didn’t know what we knew already, and that was her problem. She wanted us to trust her, she wanted us to be on her side, but she wasn’t sure how to make that happen.

  Justine was insistent. “When was the last time you worked at Avenue Foch? It’s important that we know.”

  “Until…until the end of July.”

  Justine nodded. “That fits with what we know already. It will be better for you if you tell us the truth. If you do, then…we can tell the Resistance you are being helpful. Am I making myself understood?” She withdrew her hand from the table.

  Claudine Petit nodded. She looked at me. She was uncomfortable with my silence. But then I spoke.

  “Very well. Remember this, when you answer the next questions. Quite a few Germans have been captured already, here in Paris and in towns to the east. So we know certain things from them, from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Not everything, but enough, perhaps.”

  Justine leaned forward, paused, then growled, “When you cleaned the cells, did you see the inmates?”

  Claudine Petit nodded and said, quietly, “Sometimes.”

  “What does that mean, ‘sometimes’?”

  “Sometimes not all the cells were full, sometimes the people who had been captured had been taken for interrogation in the interrogation room, and we were asked to clean the cells while they were away.”

  “And at other times?”

  “We cleaned the cells while they were in the exercise yard. They had an hour’s exercise every morning. We sometimes saw them being taken in or out of the cells.”

  “How many cells were there?”

  “Five.”

  “Were they usually full?”

  “Not always, no. People came and went.”

  “How long did people stay? How long, on average?”

  Claudine Petit shrugged. “A few days. Up to two weeks. Never more.”

  “Then what happened to them?”

  “They were shipped east.”

  “You know that for certain?”

  Another shrug. “I was a cleaner, for pity’s sake, a French cleaner. No one told us anything. It’s what I heard, overheard, it’s what the rumour was. Where else would they have gone?”

  Justine leaned forward. “This is important. Was anyone killed in Avenue Foch?”

  Claudine Petit shook her head. “I don’t think so, no. Not that I heard. But I was only there in the mornings.”

  “Okay, okay.” Justine picked up my cigarette case and opened it. She took out two cigarettes, put them both in her mouth and lit them. Then she gave one to me.

  “Now, think…Have you any idea how many people, how many agents—captured people—passed through those cells while you were there?”

  Claudine hesitated, but she was clearly thinking.

  At this, Justine reached over, took a cigarette from my case, and laid it on the table in front of Claudine.

  Claudine snatched at it, and I offered my matches.

  “There were usually one or two prisoners in the cells. They were rarely full until the early part of this year; then they began to fill up.”

  “So,” said Justine, “if we say the average stay was about a week, and if we say there were three prisoners at any one time, that makes three a week—that part’s easy. Three a week for, say, thirty weeks, makes ninety overall—would that be about right?”

  Claudine picked tobacco from her tongue. “That sounds a lot. I wouldn’t have said that many. Half that maybe—” She shook her head. “That’s just this year, of course.”

  Justine nodded. “How many were French and how many other nationalities?”

  Another shake of Claudine’s head. “Everyone spoke French. A few were obviously foreigners, to judge by their accents, but some foreigners spoke French without an accent. I noticed that.”

  Justine pulled her chair closer to the table.

  “Now we get to the real details, Claudine. This is where you can really earn your freedom. We need names.”

  Claudine, who had been visibly relaxing under the influence of the cigarette, suddenly became tense again. I noticed that the skin on her upper lip was damp.

  “Names? I—”

  “Who employed you?”

  “I…I…”

  “Who employed you?”

  Claudine cleared her throat. “A man called Major Himmelweit.”

  “And he was…?”

  “He was…He ran all the domestic side, the support staff.”

  “And he reported to…?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do. Think.”

  A pause. The cigarette was finished.

  Justine held her hand over the pack.

  “I think the deputy director at Avenue Foch was a Colonel Springer.”

  “There you are, you see. Your memory is fine. Have another Camel.” Claudine grabbed at the pack greedily.

  I spoke, keeping my tone gruff. “We know that the man in charge at Avenue Foch was Brigadier Wolf Grundmann, but who—and think carefully now—was the chief interrogator, who was the chief, the most active man on the payroll? Who was the real power in Gestapo headquarters?”

  Claudine shook her head. “That was way beyond me. I was a cleaner.”

  Justine leaned forward again. “You were a cleaner who worked there for more than eighteen months. A cleaner with an education—oh, yes, we know about that. The Germans learned that they could trust you. You were a piece of the furniture. At times they would have talked in front of you as if you weren’t there. This isn’t the most difficult question we are going to ask you, Claudine, but I repeat: Who was the real power?”

  Claudine savoured her cigarette. “I don’t know for certain—you understand? But what I heard was that a Colonel Kolbe handled the interrogations. Everyone was a little scared of him because, they said—the other Germans, I mean—they said that he was very close to Grundmann, who in turn was a favourite of Himmler and had a direct line to Berlin. I was told that he did all the interrogations and authorised the…you know, the beatings and the other—the other things that went on.”

  “Did you personally witness any beatings?”

  “No, of course not. The Germans never let the French near the interrogation room, not whi
le there was anyone in it, but I was told by others, who worked different hours from me, that they heard the screams of the prisoners and sometimes had to clean away blood.”

  Justine leaned forward again. “Did you ever hear screams or clean away blood yourself?”

  Claudine shook her head. “I never heard screams, no, but I did once—no, twice—see blood on the floor of the interrogation room. And I once had to clean it up from the floor of the exercise yard.”

  “People were tortured in the exercise yard?”

  Claudine took a long pull on her cigarette. “No. I think…I think in that case that someone tried to escape, jumped from a cell window at night and didn’t realise how far the drop was. I think he killed himself.”

  “Did that happen just once?”

  “I think so. But others did escape.”

  “Yes. Let’s come to that.”

  Justine’s hand closed over the cigarette packet again.

  “Tell us about the escapes.”

  Claudine hesitated. “There were two escapes that I know about, or I was told about. The first was when a man and a woman escaped from the exercise yard. There had been a delivery that day—I was never told what the delivery was—but it seems that someone, perhaps someone in the Resistance posing as a workman, left the yard gate open and the man and woman spotted it, and simply walked out of the gate into Paris and disappeared.”

  “And who were these people?”

  “I don’t have any names but I was told later, or I overheard, that they arrived on different days. The man worked in Paris, the woman was from somewhere to the west.”

  “Can you describe them?”

  Claudine closed her eyes. “I can see them better this way. The man was tall and thin with a lot of blond hair—he looked German, but he was English. She was tall too, not as tall as him though, and she was a blonde. Cropped, straw-coloured hair.”

  I let out the breath I had been holding. Not Madeleine.

  “And the other escape?”

  Claudine nodded. “Oh, that was very different. He was ill, or he pretended to be, and a doctor was called. He overwhelmed the doctor, stabbed him with a needle to his heart, and knocked out the male nurse. Then he put on the male nurse’s white coat and walked down the main stairs of the building and out by the front door. It was very audacious, I couldn’t believe it when I was told. He was very daring.”