by James Lepore
Fleming did not respond.
“The formula, Johnny. We want it, but if we can’t get it, we don’t want the Germans to.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hitler is obsessed with it. I’m sure you know what that means.”
“I do. I’ll be careful.”
“Lindemann tells me an atomic bomb the size of an orange could wipe out London.”
Fleming slowed his stride down involuntarily, as if a stiff wind had blown against his chest.
“Yes,” said Churchill, slowing as well, “that would stop a man in his tracks.” They resumed their prior pace, and the new P.m.—whose blood, sweat, and tears speech had gone round the world in a matter of days since he delivered it to his cabinet and then parliament after he was sworn in—took a leather-covered flask from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. Stopping, he unscrewed the sterling silver cap and handed it to Fleming. “Cognac,” he said. “Don’t be shy.”
Fleming accepted the flask, and took a long drink. Handing it back to Churchill, he felt the blood returning to his brain. A bomb the size of an orange.
“What’s the plan?” Churchill asked, after he had taken a long pull himself, and they resumed their walk.
“We assume the Germans are watching the place,” Fleming replied. “The boys will have to be smuggled out. We’re working on it.”
“Good piece of work, I daresay.”
“No, sir, just luck.”
“But you were alert. Do you know Benjamin Franklin?”
“Benjamin Franklin?”
“The rebel.” Fleming could see Churchill smiling.
“Yes, the American.”
“Diligence is the mother of good luck.”
“I see. Thank you, sir.”
“I didn’t come just to see you, you know. I’m meeting Reynaud at midnight. Things don’t look good, but I suppose you know that.”
“I do.”
“The Belgians surrendered today in mid-battle.”
“I heard.”
“I’d like to stop at Dunkirk, but my watchers won’t let me.”
“May I ask, sir…?”
“You may. The Germans seemed to have paused. We’re getting our people across.”
“Good news.”
“The only bit, really. After Dunkirk, von Kuchler will turn south.”
“Paris.”
“Yes, of course. If you stay, you must be very careful. There will be a roundup.”
“I understand, sir. Not to worry.” Fleming indeed understood. If the Gestapo were to gather him in, his silly wine-merchant cover would not last long. Spies are debriefed and then executed. Execution was the easy part.
“This de Gaulle fellow is fighting like the devil,” said the P.m., “but it won’t be enough.”
Fleming did not respond. He had heard of the defiant Charles de Gaulle, using his tanks as fighting units, the way the Germans did.
“Imagine the French with no plan B.”
Fleming remained silent. They had circled the hut again , and were now back in front.
“Your friend Tolkien arrives tomorrow morning,” Churchill said. “Fought at the Somme.”
“Sir.”
“Good luck, Ian.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Chapter 6
Avon, May 29, 1940, 7:00 a.m.
Lucien Bunel—Father Jacques—was a tall man, but not strapping. Childhood respiratory illnesses, treated with eucalyptus steam and paste, had kept him rail thin. At six feet tall, he weighed no more than 150 pounds. When he died in the Gusen concentration camp in Austria in 1945, at the age of forty-four, of complications from pneumonia, he weighed less than seventy pounds. He took the first step on the road from Avon to Gusen in September of 1939 when he gave Conrad Friedeman and Karl Brauer shelter from the holocaust he knew was about to descend on Europe. A nun from the Congregation of Notre Dame de Sion in Montparnasse had driven the boys over on September 3rd, the day that France declared war on Germany. One of them is a Jew, she said. They are both being hunted by the Nazis. At first, he placed them with a family in a house across the street from his school, then, when the Werhmacht entered France, in an attic dorm room. Today they would leave.
“Come in,” he said when he heard the knocking on the thick oak door of his small bed chamber.
“Jacques,” said the man who entered, a Jesuit priest, the same age as Father Jacques.
“Alain.”
“Are you really ill?”
“No, but why take chances?” The headmaster was in a nightgown and cotton robe, sitting up in bed, his Rosary beads in his right hand, his missal in the left. A pot of eucalyptus leaves immersed in hot water stood on the night table. The room was fragrant with the pungent aroma of this medicinal plant.
“The boys?” Father Alain said.
“They are in the sacristy. Did you see the car out front?”
“Yes.”
“Something is going to happen soon. We have been surrounded by these men in cars since dawn.”
“I am at your service.”
“What do you hear in Paris?”
“Reynaud wants to fight. Petain to…”
“To what?”
“Surrender. Collaborate.”
“How long?”
“A few days, maybe a week. People are fleeing Paris by the thousands.”
“And you?”
“I will stay.”
“What will you do with the boys?”
“Try to get them transportation south.”
“Thank you, Alain.”
Father Alain nodded. “And you?”
“I will stay and do what I can.”
“Good luck, Father Jacques.”
“Bon Chance, Father Alain.”
Chapter 7
Avon, May 29, 1940, 8:00 a.m.
The Petite College d’Avon, though on the grounds of the Fontainebleau palace, was definitely not in the same luxurious Renaissance style as the main buildings. Far from it. A squat, square, one story structure, set apart from the palace proper, it had likely been a stable or warehouse when first built. Surrounded by a patchwork of hardpan and stunted weeds that passed for a lawn, with entrances front and back, it was easy to watch. Which is what the men in nondescript, drab automobiles at both entrances, members of an Abwehr cell dedicated these past nine months to finding Conrad Friedeman, had been doing since the evening before.
“Here comes the priest again,” said the man in the driver’s seat of the car in front. “They must have said their mass.”
“And the alter boys,” his partner replied. “Still in their costumes.”
“Surplices.”
“What?”
“That’s what they’re called. Surplices.”
“Papist nonsense.”
The two men, both young Frenchmen, both former university students, were members of the PCF—the Parti Communiste Francais. They had hated fascist Germany growing up. What communist wouldn’t? But then Molotov and Ribbentrop had signed their non-aggression pact, and their view had changed. What better way to serve Russia, their true mother country, than to say yes when approached by Abwehr agents at the start of the war? Intellectuals, at least in their own minds, they admired Adolph Hitler’s purity of purpose. Was not the Nazi concept of national socialism strikingly similar to Marxism? Had not Hitler’s brilliant German propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, said repeatedly that all property belonged to the state, to be distributed as it saw fit? And of course they hated all religion, but especially the Catholic Church, which had had its foot on France’s throat for a thousand years.
“Will the police really help us?” asked the young man in the passenger seat.
“They are Petain followers here.”
“French soldiers are being killed only ninety kilometers away.”
“All the more reason for them to cooperate.”
“Hard to believe they could be such cowards.”
“Has Mademoiselle Amethyste ever been wrong?”
“Has a man ever said no to her?”
“A eunuch, perhaps, or a homosexual.”
They both smiled. Neither had met their mysterious cell leader, but they had heard things whispered, primarily things about her great beauty, her great seductive beauty.
The two men watched as Father Alain and two young acolytes walked to the priest’s ancient Citroën parked in the school’s bleak courtyard. Their cell leader had assured them that the local gendarmerie would be arriving at nine to roust the Friedeman boy. They were there to make sure there was no attempt to escape under cover of night. As the priest and the boys drove off, they looked at their watches. An hour to go.
Chapter 8
Paris, May 29, 1940, 1:00 p.m.
“We lined up every boy. They were not among them,” said the young Frenchman. He and his colleague were sitting on an overturned steel locker, facing her.
“My contact thought otherwise.”
Silence. Except for the staccato sound of the rain hitting the corrugated steel roof of the warehouse. Boys, she thought, sent to do a woman’s work.
“You say no one came in or out?”
“Just a priest and two alter boys,” the second young Frenchman answered. “We learned when we went in that the head priest was sick. The other priest came to say mass.”
“The priest was in his sickroom,” said the first young man. “He said a German woman was there yesterday. Was that you?” He had been relaxed, a meeting with his superior in an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of Paris nothing to be concerned about. But now a shadow passed over his eyes. The child is worried.
“Two alter boys? How old?”
“Teenagers perhaps,” replied number two. “Not older.”
“No, they were young,” said number one. “Nine or ten.”
Lying. “Are you surprised to be meeting me?”
“Honored,” said number two.
“Do you know the rule about meeting me?”
Both young agents shook their heads. No.
“You don’t live to identify me. No one knows what I look like.”
Madame Amethyste walked behind the two men, took the nine millimeter Luger from her purse and shot each in the back of the head.
Outside, the rain continued to fall steadily. She had draped her stylish raincoat over the back of a rickety chair. She put it on and went out to her car.
Chapter 9
Paris, May 29, 1940, 2:00 p.m.
“How was your flight?”
“Nasty. Delayed at Northolt, trouble landing.”
“Who are you?”
“Who am I?”
“What’s your cover?”
“Ah yes, my cover. The Oxford University Library. Here to grab up some first editions before the Nazis arrive and gather them all up for themselves.”
“Or burn them.”
“Yes. That’s what I told Father James. The school has a first edition of Montaigne’s Essays, circa 1580.”
“Really?”
“Yes. It was donated by the parents of a student who went in a snob and came out a scholar. I offered to take it back to England for safekeeping.”
“What’s that worth?”
“Priceless.”
“What did he say?”
“It’s gone to a family in Canada. Last month.”
Professor Tolkien and Ian Fleming sat facing each other in armchairs in the sitting room of Fleming’s fifth-floor suite at the Hotel Meurice. Tolkien was staying in an adjoining room. Outside, the rain was pelting. Tolkien, who had had a rough, windswept flight over the Channel, got up to stretch his legs. As he neared one of the corner room’s two, large, heavily-draped windows, thinking of uncramping his muscles and getting a glimpse of the Tuileries Gardens from above at the same time, he was stopped by Fleming. “Don’t,” his partner in espionage said as the professor was about to part the drapes. “I’m being watched. There’s a chap in a mack with a blue umbrella pretending to be looking at the Rodins.”
Tolkien pivoted and returned to his chair. “That explains it,” he said.
“Explains what?”
“The boys are gone. You must have been followed to the school.”
“Gone?”
“Yes.”
“Damn. How did you—?”
“I went to confession.”
“Confession?”
Professor Tolkien thought back to his brief meeting with the headmaster at the Petit College d’Avon. Bless me father, for I have sinned…I lied to you. I am here to bring two of your students to England…
“Seriously?”
“Yes.”
“You bonded. He trusted you.”
“Yes. How could he not? He said that after you left, cars appeared front and rear, two men in each. They were there all night. He called a fellow priest and they got the boys out.
“Amazing. How?”
Tolkien watched Fleming’s frown turn into a smile as he told him the story of the switched alter boys.
“Excellent,” Fleming said when Tolkien was finished. “He did our work for us. Where are they?”
“He gave me the name of a priest in Montparnasse. Father Alain.”
“Are they with this Father Alain?”
“He doesn’t know.”
“Doesn’t know?”
“No. Father Alain has connections to people who are preparing to stay in Paris and fight the Germans. The boys may be with them. I’m going this afternoon to visit him.”
“I doubt you’re being followed, but be careful.”
“Of course.”
“Go one stop past Montparnasse, then come back. You missed your stop. It happens. Use the car windows, whatever’s handy.”
Tolkien nodded. “What will you do?”
“I’m not sure. I can’t sit around. Makes me crazy. I may introduce myself to whoever’s following me.”
“Don’t get killed. I need you.”
“Not a chance. I haven’t had my share yet.”
“Your share of what?”
“Women, whiskey, gin, handmade suits, good cigarettes. Adventure.”
“I see,” Tolkien said, thinking what about love? Nevertheless, he acknowledged, with a smile, the ironic respect that the traditionalist will pay to the rake.
“Golf.” Fleming said, not smiling, his face a mask of faux seriousness. “I should include golf. And bridge.”
“For money.”
“Not worth the time otherwise. I say, professor, if I may change the subject. How does the priest know you’re actually sorry for your sins?”
“He doesn’t. If he has any doubt, he errs on the side of saving a soul. A good policy, don’t you think?”
Fleming’s answer was a wry smile, an acknowledgement of the ironic respect that the rake will pay to the man of faith.
Chapter 10
Paris, May 29, 1940, 3:00 p.m.
In the Tuileries, as the sun began to break through scattering clouds, the lemonade and snack stalls that were shuttered were beginning to reopen and the park’s acrobats and mimes to reappear. The urgency of this redeployment—the rain had only stopped a few minutes ago—struck Ian Fleming as sad. Walking along a wide cinder path toward the Grand Basin in his blazer and bow tie, the late May sun warm on his bare head, the sense of desperation in the air was hard for the Englishman to miss. In April, just a month ago, the drole de guerre, as the French liked to call it, was at its apex. The cafes and restaurants were busy, the British officer corps was fox-hunting in the suburbs on the weekends, and everyone in the City of Light seemed happy to fight a defensive war, to ignore a thousand years of Teutonic aggression. But now the Wehrmach was sixty kilometers away, and Paris about to be declared an open city. It would not be burned, but it would be occupied. Each of the two million adults left would have to decide how best to negotiate the swarm of uniformed brutes that was about to take control of their lives. Resist? Collaborate? Profit? Subsist? It struck Fleming as he walked that there was a great novel in
each of those two million stories.
Fleming circled the basin twice, once slowly and the second time a beat faster. The blue umbrella had been discarded, but the man who had been using it was still following him. At the completion of the second trip around the water, Fleming turned onto the Grand Allée in the direction of the Louvre. Halfway there, he stopped to pick up a paper hat that had blown off the head of one of the few children left in Paris. Lucky me, thought Fleming. Crouching, he turned and saw his tail—slender, short brown hair, middle height, thirties, gray suit—still behind him by perhaps fifty meters.
On the plaza that fronted the Louvre, a squad of gendarmes carrying rifles were forcing a crowd of perhaps two hundred people away from the museum’s entrance, as a French army officer was climbing onto the hood of a canvas-covered lorry. Through a megaphone, the officer was informing the crowd, many of whom were clutching cheap luggage or children, or both, that the plaza could no longer be used for gatherings of any kind. The crowd listened and quietly murmured, except for one bedraggled woman straddling a bicycle, with a child in her arms and a parrot cage at her feet, who shouted in broken French, “We are not spies. We are not your enemy!”
The city, Fleming knew, was bloated with tens of thousands of Dutch, Belgians, and Frenchmen from the North, all fleeing the dreaded blitzkrieg. So paranoid were the Parisians who themselves had not fled that many believed there to be thousands of German spies hidden in this mass of homeless people. Rumors of German paratroopers descending on the city’s suburbs dressed as priests and nuns were rampant. The chaos had begun.
Walking around to the back of the Louvre, Fleming noticed a line of twenty or so lorries lined up, and a steady stream of soldiers carrying crated artwork out of the famous museum and loading it into them. He stopped to chat with the lieutenant supervising this operation, who looked at him as if he had two heads, possibly three. Allez! he spit out. Fleming, bowing, backed away, then turned and walked behind the line of lorries. The last dozen, curling backwards into an alley, were empty. He stood at the transom of the last lorry, slipped the strap of his palm sap around his wrist and waited. When the tail passed, Fleming stepped quietly forward and whacked him in the back of the head, knocking him abruptly to the ground. The leather-covered lead cylinder that fit so nicely in the palm of Fleming’s hand had done its work. The man was out cold, with a lump the size of a tennis ball rising on his head. A quick search yielded a Carte d’Identité Scolaire issued by the University of France to Polish-born Julien Molewski, and a billfold containing two thousand francs.