At 7:45 p.m., Taillandier and Alsfasser stepped from the Peugeot’s parking spot onto the nearly pitch-dark street and half walked, half ran to the bushes near the house. Their long, baggy overcoats concealed their Thompsons. Crouching in the thicket, they peered at the street.
Nearly thirty seemingly endless minutes dragged by. Finally, at 8:15, the sweep of headlights washed the street in front of them; the police car appeared first and stopped just past the house. As Barthelet turned into the garage, the Gestapo sedan pulled up in front of the short concrete driveway and waited.
Barthelet got out of his car, walked the few steps to the entrance, and waved at his escort. The two cars slipped down the street.
As Barthelet went back to his car, opened the driver’s door, and removed his briefcase from the passenger seat, Taillandier and Alsfasser sprang from behind the bushes and ran across the street. Barthelet stared for a moment and tried to reach the door from the garage to the house. The two gunmen stopped a few feet from him and leveled their Thompsons. For several moments, they waited, letting Barthelet fully realize it was over for him, daring him to accept it like a man and face them or try to run and get shot in the back like a coward. Just a step from the door, he exhaled and did face them. They opened up with two long bursts, chunks of plaster and wood chips from the door flying in every direction. Bullets raked the traitor from head to toe, nearly cutting him in two.
Sprinting back to the Peugeot, they sped off into the night.
Paillole wrote: “The execution had a huge impact on the region. The authorities ordered a curfew from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. The feeling that no one could hide from [Morhange’s] revenge was now real to the top administrative echelon, including the police, the Abwehr, and the Gestapo leadership. London radio mentioned that execution as a warning to French collaborators that treason carried harsh consequences: the Morhange group was now wound up and ready to continue its retribution.” 11
Over the following weeks, the Gestapo, the Abwehr, and the police scoured Toulouse and the countryside for Ricardo and his operatives, rounding up hundreds of men and women whose neighbors suspected they might be involved with the Resistance, then beating and subjecting them to the same water torture that Lilli had endured. Most were innocent people who were victims of local grudges. No one provided information that led the Germans or the police any closer to unmasking Ricardo and his operatives.
Alsfasser was betrayed by an informer a few weeks later. On the evening of November 26–27, 1943, he left a farm with local Resistance fighters escorting him and several other men to a remote stretch of beach near Saint-Tropez, in southeastern France. There, he was supposed to board a submarine for the return trip to Algiers.
One of the Resistance members, sixteen-year-old Monique Giraud, would tell Paillole what happened on the dark shore: “At 11 p.m. our team, including the intended passengers of the submarine along with the mail carriers [couriers], went out into the night. Two columns of Resistance were on either side, about 40 yards away. That walk through the shadows and the outlines of other people was hallucinating. We stopped from time to time to listen to the faintest of sounds, then we would start walking again, hunkering over. Finally we reached the sea. We thought we were safe, when just 100 feet from the water we heard, ‘Halt!’ cried out in the silence mixed with the sound of waves. Shots rang out. That’s when Alsfasser was killed.” 12
When London informed Taillandier of the grim news, he radioed a terse answer to Paillole and de Gaulle: “He [Alsfasser] will be avenged!” 13
Over the next few months, Taillandier and Morhange eluded the Nazi curfew again and again to kidnap and execute collaborators. Taillandier received a tip in late December that the Toulouse Gestapo, so alarmed by Ricardo’s success and correctly suspicious that his agents had infiltrated the police and the Gestapo, planned to send its most sensitive files for safekeeping to Nice. Five Gestapo cars were scheduled to make the run on the evening of January 1, 1944, under the command of one of Redzeck’s top aides, Obersturmführer Messak. Afraid that a full-fledged convoy with troops and armored vehicles would draw too much attention, the Gestapo opted for a quick and hopefully inconspicuous dash from Toulouse.
Taillandier, whose reason for being in Lesparre was murky but certainly involved a Resistance matter, was not about to pass up such an opportunity. Eight hours or so after leaving Arthur Meyerowitz at the Barbots’ farm and racing some three hundred kilometers back to Toulouse, he led twelve Morhange operatives in an ambush of the Gestapo contingent on the road between Toulouse and Carcassonne. In what became known as the “Courier de Nice Raid,” he and his men executed five Gestapo agents and made off with a literal treasure trove of Nazi and police files with the names of enemy agents, double agents, and collaborators. For many, their death sentences were imminent from the moment that Morhange seized the documents.
Due in large measure to the savage success of Morhange, the region into which Arthur had parachuted from Harmful Lil Armful had never been more dangerous. His fate rested largely in the hands of Ricardo, the man whom the local Gestapo, Abwehr, and police wanted to unmask and kill more than any other Resistance leader in southwest France. Arthur actually knew the man’s real first name, which was more than the Nazis and their collaborators did.
CHAPTER 9
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AKA GEORGES LAMBERT
On the evening of Friday January 5, 1944, Dr. Pierre and Gisèle Chauvin anxiously awaited a “guest” in their Lesparre home. They knew only that he was an American airman whose aircraft had crashed in flames on the Médoc Peninsula a few miles north of the town on New Year’s Eve. The Chauvins’ home, tucked amid the medieval stone houses, stores, and cafés of Lesparre’s main street, stood directly across from a small Gestapo headquarters; Gisèle, a chemist, ran a pharmacy on their house’s first floor, with the family’s quarters upstairs.
From their back window, which faced Gestapo headquarters, Pierre and Gisèle had watched in silent, helpless fury on January 1, 1944, as the Gestapo stripped five American airmen of all clothing except their undergarments, left them shivering in the snow against a wall across the narrow street for several hours, and finally carted them off in an open truck.
When a courier delivered the Chauvins a coded message from “R”—Ricardo—that the pharmacy would receive a “delivery” on the afternoon of January 5, the Chauvins assumed that their guest was another survivor of the downed bomber. He was hardly the first such visitor. The family had hidden twelve to fifteen Allied pilots and airmen at various times for over a year, and the Chauvins not only fed and clothed the strangers, but also trained them in skills that could save their lives once they attempted to make the grueling, hazardous passage out of Nazi-occupied France to Spain. That Pierre and Gisèle did so literally in plain sight of the Nazis testified to their courage and their contempt for the Gestapo, the couple taking defiant pride in aiding Allied airmen right across the street from the Germans.
Some neighbors supported the Chauvins quietly; potential local collaborators who might have turned in the physician and the pharmacist did not dare to do so because they feared the Resistance—especially Morhange—more than the Nazis and the police.
In November 1943, as Arthur Meyerowitz completed his flight training and still thought he would be fighting in the Pacific theater, Pierre and Gisèle Chauvin were visited in Lesparre by the doctor’s cousin Pierre Dupin. Dupin was a top operative of Réseau Brutus, which until December 1943 was led by André Boyer and operated in and around Bordeaux. Boyer had been arrested by the Gestapo that month and would die in confinement. Now, Dupin recruited patriotic men and women into Brutus throughout southwest France.
The Lesparre-Médoc region seethed with hatred for the Nazi occupation and for French collaborators, and Dupin knew that no one loathed the Germans and the traitors more than the Chauvins, especially Gisèle. At church one Sunday, she bit her lip as the par
ish priest launched into a sermon that tore not only at her faith, but also at her patriotism. As he half implored, half demanded that the locals accept the Nazi occupation and submit to the Germans’ decrees and orders, she stood and shook her head. Then she stepped from the pew into the aisle, turned her back to the priest, and strode out of the church. The surprised stares and frowns of several parishioners followed her; so, too, did suppressed smiles and almost imperceptible nods of approval from others.
Gisèle agreed to serve as a sector chief for the Brutus Network. Discovery by the Germans meant death, and with collaborators and the Gestapo everywhere, the slightest mistake or bit of bad luck would prove fatal, as it would for Boyer. Gisèle, however, loved her country fiercely and was determined to do anything that would help her own children grow up in a liberated France. Dr. Pierre Auriac, a key Brutus operative, lauded Gisèle as “dynamic, and [she] never hesitated to host and manage American airmen shot down over the Médoc on the escape route through Spain.” 1
As they always did, the Chauvins made preparations on January 5, 1944, for an Allied airman on the run. Earlier that day, Pierre took their young live-in maid, Simone Blanchard, back to her family’s home on the pretext that her room needed to be cleaned out because it was suddenly rat-infested, yet again. Gisèle and Pierre always told the same story to their two older children, nine-year-old Jean-Claude and six-year-old Monique, warning them to stay away from the maid’s quarters or risk being bitten by rats.
Gisèle and Pierre grew concerned around 8:30 p.m. when there was no sign of their guest and his escort. At nine, the German curfew took effect, and anyone on the street would be stopped and questioned; the airman had no identification papers and stood no chance if he was seized. Having put the children to bed and placed her infant, seven-month-old Patrick, in his crib in his parents’ bedroom, Gisèle set the dinner table. Pierre appeared with two bottles of wine.
As he placed the wine on the table, insistent knocks on the front door pounded upstairs. Gisèle and Pierre exchanged a tense look—everyone in the region understood that any knock could be black-uniformed Gestapo at the door. Pierre walked over to an arched window, pulled up one of the shutters’ slats a little, and peered down at the street. He smiled wanly at Gisèle. Their other dinner guests had arrived. All were Brutus sympathizers or operatives. The group would spend the night at the Chauvins’ due to the curfew. They would also be pivotal in helping with the airman.
Gisèle went downstairs to let them in and scanned the street behind them. It was empty except for a Gestapo agent turning the corner to the headquarters less than fifty feet from her back door.
She checked her watch. It read nearly 8:40 p.m. She shivered and reached for a shawl from a nearby coat stand. Wrapping it around her shoulders, she remained behind the slightly ajar door. She wondered if something had gone wrong, if Gestapo agents were about to spill from the old prison that served as their headquarters and swarm into the house.
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Staff Sergeant Arthur Meyerowitz, in a shabby brown overcoat and a beret pulled low across his brow, was huddled in the backseat of a black Citroën driven by one of Taillandier’s men, a chain smoker with several deep scars gouged across his cheeks and a harsh glint in his dark eyes. The Morhange operative had thrown open the dilapidated door of the woodcutter’s shed an hour earlier. Arthur, lying beneath a scratchy horse blanket against the ramshackle rear wall, never heard the approaching footsteps in the snow and did not have time to do more than stare as the door flew open. He thought that the Germans had found him.
Before Arthur could open his mouth or even stir, the stranger grunted in guttural English, “Come with me, Sergeant.” The man’s hands were hidden in the pockets of his long, belted overcoat.
Arthur did not budge under the blanket except to grasp the handle of the knife he had taken from the farmer’s kitchen near Lesparre before Taillandier brought him to the Barbots.
“I am with Marcel,” the man said, removing his hands from the pockets to show they were empty.
Arthur warily rose to his feet, ignoring the now-familiar pain that ripped through his back anytime he moved suddenly. He followed the slightly stooped but wide-shouldered man in dim twilight through the woods to a car parked along a dirt path wide enough for just one vehicle. Thick stands of trees flanked the sedan. Gnarled, leafless branches that had grown on both sides of the path over the centuries were entwined like giant skeletal fingers above the trail. Arthur shuddered at the sight, which seemed right out of horror movies or even the haunted forest in The Wizard of Oz. He was glad that he was not superstitious; at that moment, however, he wished he had his chai.
When the man opened a rear door, Arthur climbed into the backseat. The nameless operative slid behind the wheel and in a few seconds was speeding without the headlights on down the nearly pitch-black road.
Everything was happening so fast that Arthur had no time to worry as he was jostled around the backseat every time the sedan hit a bump or turned suddenly. At some point, he realized that they must have turned onto a paved road because the ride grew smoother. Then the car started to slow down. Arthur spotted the outlines of a large, square tower, the Tour de l’Honneur, an imposing remnant of a fourteenth-century castle.
“Lay down,” the driver ordered in his hard-to-follow English. The car snaked down a long street, Arthur certain that he could hear the staccato thumps of his own heart. The car slowed and stopped.
“Wait here,” the Frenchman muttered.
As the operative slipped out of the car and closed the door carefully and quietly, Arthur’s heart raced even faster, and his temples suddenly pulsed with pain and pressure. The door nearest his head opened slightly, and the man hissed, “Out.”
Arthur shifted into a crouch, suppressed a cry as his back flared again, and pushed himself out the half-open door. A few steps across a tiny sidewalk stood a three-story, stone building with a ground-floor, plate-glass window with the words Pharmacie, 33, Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau painted in red.
The door rested slightly ajar, a shaft of light spearing the front steps and sidewalk. A woman’s voice said, “Come inside now.”
Without hesitation Arthur entered the house and stepped into a foyer where framed photographs and several small paintings adorned wallpaper with a delicate floral pattern. He grimaced at the mud stains his boots tracked on an expensive-looking Oriental carpet.
The door closed softly behind him, and the woman turned, smiled at him, and told him in almost flawless English not to worry. In the Bronx, everyone would have called her “a stunner,” Arthur thought. She was perhaps in her late twenties or early thirties, with dark hair and eyes and delicately contoured cheekbones.
He was right about thirty-three-year-old Gisèle Chauvin’s age, but he would never have guessed that she was the regional chief of Réseau Brutus.
As she took Arthur’s arm and guided him upstairs, his stomach growled at the unmistakable scent of a simmering stew and fresh-baked bread. Smiling again at the American, Gisèle explained in her fluent English that fresh bread was hard to come by because of Nazi food rationing, but that if one knew one’s way around the black market, there were ways to obtain a little meat and bread to augment the usual fare of hard biscuits, eggs, old vegetables, and bruised fruit. Butter was nearly impossible to come by since the German Army had seized and slaughtered nearly every cow in the region.
Arthur balked for an instant as she nudged him into a dining room where a group of people rose from chairs behind the table set with elegant china and crystal and several bottles of wine. Gisèle assured him that everyone there was his friend now. A tall man with neatly parted black hair and a serious expression walked up with his hand extended and introduced himself as Dr. Pierre Chauvin. Pierre guided him to a chair at the long dinner table, where recognition and relief flowed through Arthur at the sight of the Chauvins’ neighbors Charlotte and
Christiane Michel. Martial Michel—Charlotte’s husband and Christiane’s father—and Charlotte’s brother and sister, Pierre and Mimi Delude, who shared Charlotte’s good looks, also welcomed the American with wide smiles.
He could not help but note that despite the occupation and its privations, everyone in the dining room was well dressed, the men in jackets and ties, the woman and young Christiane in skirts and blouses. His hosts looked as though the war had changed nothing in Lesparre and as though the Gestapo were not coming and going across the street.
Arthur winced as he considered his threadbare sweater and baggy trousers. As if reading his thoughts, Charlotte said in her limited English that they had dressed up for a “special guest.”
Gisèle disappeared for a moment when a baby’s squalls echoed from down the main hallway, and soon returned with little Patrick in her arms. She sat at one end of the table, gently rocking him, and urged Arthur to eat.
He needed little prompting. As he tried not to gulp his first genuine dinner—a beef stew with just enough meat for flavor but teeming with potatoes, onions, and carrots—since the mess hall at Seething, he started to relax. His hosts, all of whom knew at least a smattering of English, regaled him with conversation about themselves and questions about him and his family back in the States. They made sure his wineglass, as well as their own, was refilled several times.
Eventually Gisèle turned serious and told Arthur that he would need to become “deaf and dumb” if he was to have any chance of escape. Puzzled, he asked what she meant. It was Pierre who answered that they planned to teach him how to behave like a mute if he was spotted and questioned by Germans or collaborators. Meanwhile, Gisèle slipped from the table to place the baby back in his crib.
Arthur listened half dreamily and with bemusement, aglow both from the wine and from his relief at the camaraderie of the dinner table.
The Lost Airman Page 10