by James Lepore
3
Sevres—Foix—Princeton, June 14—June 23, 1940
Chapter 1
Part Three
Sevres—Foix—Princeton, June 14—June 23, 1940
Sevres, June 14, 1940, 11:00 a.m.
“What is this place?” Professor Tolkien asked.
“A safehouse of sorts, according to Madame A,” Ian Fleming replied. “An old tile farm. That’s Sèvres on the left.”
“Where is she?”
“Getting us papers.”
Tolkien and Fleming were sitting on a bench looking out of a turret window in a circular stone tower that rose some thirty feet above a group of squat, one-story buildings on a small hilltop. The tower and outbuildings were all made of the same dusty blond stone. Wild grasses reached nearly to the roofs of some of the outbuildings, in one of which the violet-eyed beauty who called herself Adrienne Archambeau had promised was a small lorry they could use to head south when night fell. Through the high grass could be seen a dozen or so crumbling brick kilns of various sizes. All was in decay.
Below them, less than a kilometer away, the Seine shone in the morning sun. In the middle of the Pont de Sèvres, the bridge that connected Sevres and its sister city, Boulogne-Billancourt, stood a makeshift barricade—two old Renaults with dozens of children’s school desks piled on and around them.
“I thought I heard gunshots,” said Tolkien.
“You did,” Fleming replied, nodding toward a tank that sat haunched, like a large feral cat, on a wide paved road perhaps two hundred meters from the bridge. “Someone was shooting at it from behind the barricade.”
“A Panzer I,” said Tolkien. “Machine-gun only.”
Fleming shook his head. The professor never ceased to amaze him.
“War machines,” Tolkien said. “A new specialty.”
“Sleep well?” Fleming asked. The scene below—bathed in the hot sun of what promised to be another in a long string of beautiful spring days—could have been a staged tableau, it was so still and silent, the occasional swaying of a few leaves from a group of trees near the roadway the only detectable movement.
“Topping.”
“Refreshed?”
“Ready for my fry up.”
Fleming smiled but kept his eyes on the scene below. Tolkien, now forty-seven, desk-bound for the past twenty years, never formally trained for field work, had had the worst of it on the trek south from the Meurice to the outskirts of the ceramic-manufacturing city of Sevres. Squeezed into Archambeau’s Baby Austin, the first leg of the twelve kilometer journey had taken two hours to negotiate—through a deathly silent central Paris, then along secondary avenues and back streets to avoid the advancing Wehrmacht. The southern bridge on the Ile Saint-Germaine had been blown, forcing them to abandon the car and swim across the river, which was thankfully quite narrow at that point. Then the walk through wooded side roads and silent farmland to their current location. On arrival, the professor had fallen immediately asleep on a straw pallet along the tower’s opposite wall.
“More tanks,” said Fleming.
“I see,” Tolkien replied. “Panzer II’s. Those are 50 millimeter guns.”
The two new tanks took positions on either side of the Panzer I, leaving twenty-foot spaces between them.
“They won’t want to blow the bridge,” Fleming said. “It’s a good one, well built, good location for points southwest.”
“Troops,” said Tolkien.
They watched as some two-hundred German regular army soldiers emerged from side streets and gathered in columns of two behind the tanks. They were led by a major, an obvious veteran in traditional gray Wehrmacht field fatigues, blond, handsome, unshaven for several days. At his command, the tanks pushed forward for perhaps fifty meters, then stopped. When they started again, they drew fire from the barricades, rifle rounds that pinged harmlessly off the tanks’ thickly armored fronts and sides.
“It’s hopeless,” said Tolkien.
“Paris is supposed to be open,” said Fleming.
“It appears Boulogne-Billancourt feels otherwise,” said the professor. “Madness.”
The tanks plodded to within twenty meters of the bridge, then stopped.
“This is not good,” said Fleming, who had grabbed his binoculars from his knapsack and trained them on the scene below. “The major is smiling.”
Now the major nodded to the lieutenants at the head of the three columns, who nodded to NCO’s at their sides, who raised their right hands, held them up for a second, and then swiftly brought them down. At this command the troopers, crouching, swarmed from behind the tanks and attacked the bridge en masse. Perhaps a dozen of them were mowed down before others could get close enough to hurl hand grenades at the barricades. Within minutes, it was over. German privates were pushing the cars to the other end of the bridge, while other soldiers were throwing the desks over the guardrails and still others tended to the dead and wounded.
On the ground where the barricade had been were the bodies of four men in potholes gouged out by the hand grenades. They could have been sleeping, so composed and comfortable did they appear to be, except that one was missing an arm, another half of his head.
A movement to his left caught Fleming’s eye. Turning his binoculars, he saw the major pointing to the other side of the bridge toward a black Citroen touring car that had emerged from the woods next to the road and was speeding away.
“Fly,” Fleming said, knowing that the Germans would be giving chase.
Chapter 2
Paris, June 14, 1940, 4:00 p.m.
“We were watching the British Embassy,” SD agent Klaus Schneider, a man in his early thirties, pale and bland, said. “On June 9, a priest entered in a small farm truck. An unknown individual had entered fifteen minutes prior.” Schneider’s head bobbed like a marionette’s as he nervously referred to the typewritten report he held in his right hand.
“What date?” asked Heinrich Himmler.
“9 June.”
“And?”
“The priest left thirty minutes later, the unknown individual five minutes after. We followed them both. The priest was with two young men. They parked the truck in a small garage on the grounds of a convent in Montparnasse. We later confirmed he is a Jesuit, Father Alain LaToure, assigned to the convent and its chapel.”
“The unknown man?” Himmler asked.
“We followed him to the Meurice. He was registered as Anthony Hope, a librarian at Cambridge, according to the desk clerk, in Paris to acquire rare books.”
“A cover, of course.”
“He was staying in room 314, next to Mr. Fleming in room 312.”
“Did you continue your surveillance?”
“Yes.”
“The results?”
“From 9 June to this morning, he never left his room.”
“Where is he now?”
“He checked out this morning at 6 a.m. A small British car came to the front entrance. There were two people in it, a man and a woman. Hope was waiting with his one piece of luggage. We followed but lost them. I am sorry, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”
“Where did you lose them?”
“On Ile Saint-Germaine.”
“The priest?”
“Still at the convent. We are watching him.”
“And you say Fleming and this man Hope had a connecting door between their rooms?”
“Yes, we checked the hotel registry this morning when the first troops arrived.”
“The woman in the car, any description?”
“A kerchief on her head, sunglasses. Indeterminate age.”
Himmler, sitting at a beautiful Louis Quatorze desk in the Meurice Hotel’s penthouse suite, in full dress uniform, drummed his fingers on the polished mahogany desktop, then turned to Sturmbahnfuhrer Josef Kieffer, the head of the Sicherheitsdienst—the SD—the SS’s counterintelligence branch.
“Where is your headquarters?” he asked.
“We are assessing buildings on Avenue Foch
.”
“Make a decision. Pick up the priest. When you have him, call me. I will fill you in then.”
Himmler looked at the two men facing him—Agent Schneider, standing, notes in hand, sweating; Kieffer sitting in a plush chair, on edge—and smiled. “You are dismissed,” he said.
When they were gone, the SS chief picked up the postcard he had addressed earlier to his mother in Berlin. On its front was a black-and-white picture of the Alexander III bridge over the Seine. “My dear Mummy,” he wrote, humming a childhood tune in his head, “today I am sending you very warm greetings from Paris…”
Chapter 3
Sevres, June 14, 1940, 6:00 p.m.
“You were gone a long time,” said Professor Tolkien.
“I was in a root cellar most of the time.”
“Papers?” Ian Fleming asked. His impatience was reflected in his clipped speech. The firefight at the bridge had reminded him that there was a war on in which he was a noncombatant, a bitter pill for the son of a hero of the first war. He also had his doubts about Mademoiselle Archambeau. He had been trying since he met her to be clear-headed, despite the heady reek of sensuality and deceit that she exuded, a combination of feminine characteristics that aroused him like no other.
“Yes, in the bag.” The Frenchwoman, her face smudged with soot, looking tired and wilted, but still beautiful, nodded toward the canvas bag she had dropped on the floor near the tower room’s arched entrance when she arrived a moment ago. Fleming picked through the bag until he found the papers.
“These were done today?” he asked as he looked intently at two Cartes d’Identités, with Recepissé—validation receipts signed by a French police official—attached. “They look old.”
“The mayor is a friend,” Archambeau said. “He keeps a cache of identity cards, mostly dead people, some forged.”
“An agent, I presume,” Tolkien said. He had taken one of the cards from Fleming and was looking at it. “Second Bureau?”
“Yes, a colleague. He had burned most of his stash,” Archambeau said. “We’re lucky.”
“We’re Frenchmen, I see,” said Fleming. “I’ll miss old Anthony Harrington. He had great taste in wine.” He had recalibrated his tone of voice. Keep it light-hearted, old boy, but find a way to verify her story. Communication with London was impossible for the time being. Who did he know in French intelligence?
“Pierre Sindarin,” Tolkien said, looking at his identity card. “Is that French? He looks more Slavic.”
“It was the best I could do,” said Archambeau. “The mayor was arrested while I was in the cellar going through the cards.”
“I’m not complaining,” said Tolkien. “I’m just interested in names.”
“We will have to remove the photos and attach yours,” said Archambeau. “I have brought glue.”
“Have you brought food?” asked Fleming.
“Yes, cheese, bread, apples. In the bottom of the bag. And cigarettes.”
“Not Gaulloises?” Fleming said, reaching back into the bag. “Ghastly.”
“No Morlands to be had, sorry,” the Frenchwoman said, smiling wryly. “I’ll take one.”
Fleming extracted two fat cigarettes from a shiny new pack, lit them both with his gold plated IMCO lighter, and handed one to Archambeau.
“You’ve changed your clothes,” said Tolkien.
“Yes, the water.” Tolkien’s gaze was fatherly, but Fleming’s was distinctly not. He recalled the sight of Archambeau as she emerged dripping wet from their swim across the Seine. Her full breasts, slightly protruding tummy, and the rounded flare of her rear end as she turned to wring out her hair in the morning sun, had been wonderfully on display through the soaked fabric of her pale green cotton dress and the flimsy stuff of her underwear. Her clothes were still damp and clinging when, barefoot, having lost her shoes in the river, she left for the village that morning. She now had on a simple black skirt, to below the knee, a white cotton blouse and a navy-blue cardigan sweater, with no-nonsense black flats on her feet. “The mayor’s wife is my size,” she said.
“How did you manage to make your way through an occupied city?” Fleming asked.
“Tunnels, caves, catacombs. Sevres has them, like many French cities. I’ve used them before. I know some of the locals.”
“Are they resisting?” Fleming asked. “Some civilians were killed trying to hold the bridge.”
“No longer,” the woman answered. “The Germans were going door to door, that’s why I had to hide.”
“Door to door—” said Fleming.
He was interrupted by the sound of the word arret, spit out harshly in a German accent, coming from the road near the bridge. The bedraggled trio looked at each other, then stepped cautiously to the turret window, where Fleming and Archambeau stood on one side of the small opening and Tolkien on the other. Creeping closer, they saw the backs of perhaps fifteen men in civilian clothes, most of them tradesmen, but several in suits and ties, standing on the edge of the road. They were all blindfolded, their hands tied with rope behind their backs. Behind them was a drainage ditch ablaze with wildflowers catching the golden rays of the late day sun. Facing them, on the opposite side of the road, some twenty German soldiers holding machine guns at the ready were arrayed in a semi-circle. To their left stood a burly sergeant in dirty fatigues. To the right, toward the bridge, the major who had directed the attack earlier, stood smiling, his hands clasped behind his back. He had cleaned up, shaved and brushed off his fatigues. He wore sunglasses now. The gold oak leafs on his cap gleamed in the sunlight, as did his teeth. Next to him was one of his lieutenants.
The major said something to the lieutenant, who nodded to the sergeant, who slowly extended his right arm in the sieg heil salute.
“Is that Monsieur le Maire in the blue suit?” Fleming asked.
“I’m afraid it is,” Archambeau replied.
“Lord save them,” Tolkien said, as the sergeant spit on the ground and abruptly swung his arm to his side.
Chapter 4
84 Avenue Foch, Paris, June 15, 1940, 8:00 a.m.
Stepping back to admire his work, Klaus Schneider took a moment to casually clean his eyeglasses with a silk handkerchief—one of a monogrammed set of six given to him by his fiancée when he completed his SD training last year in Berlin—before peering down at the naked priest, sitting in a metal chair, facing him, his hands and feet manacled, a small length of dull gray picture-hanging wire knotted snugly around his flaccid penis. Knowing that he would once more be meeting Herr Reichsfuhrer Himmler, that something extremely important was afoot, the young intelligence officer had made sure to wear his best dark suit, to shave and pomade his fair, Aryan hair.
“You do understand, as any Jesuit would?” he said, smiling, admiring his callous wit, unaware completely of the moral black hole into which he and most of his countrymen had descended. “If you become aroused, the wire will slice your penis off.”
Father Alain LaToure—unshaven, one eye swollen shut by a large purple bruise, like a prizefighter’s, his lower lip bleeding—nodded.
“Of course priests do not care about women, so there is no need to be fearful, ja?” The agent, standing and looking from LaToure’s mangled face to his trussed penis, was astounded at his good fortune. Last year, he was on a vice squad in the Dusseldorf police department, chasing down homosexuals and other perverts. Yesterday, he was an obscure low level counter-intelligence officer working a routine detail. Today, he was much on the minds of not only his immediate boss, Major Josef Kieffer, but the god-like boss of all bosses—except for the Fuhrer, of course—Heinrich Himmler. Himself. In the next room.
“I will bring in a woman in a moment,” Schneider continued. “We arrested her last night at the Folies Bergere. Quite stunning. Ooh La la. And very cooperative, I must say. She has given me a preview performance, an undress rehearsal, you might say. I gave her rave reviews.”
“Here,” said Schneider, when LaToure did not answer. “Here is
a photograph.”
LaToure closed his good eye and turned his head away as Schneider thrust the picture at his face.
“Well then,” the German said, putting the snapshot back into his jacket pocket, “when mademoiselle comes in, shutting your eyes—your eye, I should say—will not help. She will get very close, quite intimately close. Her perfume, well, one whiff… Her hands, her breasts… So, tell me, where are the boys? I will not ask you again.”
“You have afforded your prisoners quite a view,” said Heinrich Himmler.
“Yes,” Josef Kieffer replied, “but it is more secure up here, and there are no neighbors to disturb.”
The two men, both in SS black, sat in the well-stocked and exquisitely appointed library on the fifth, and top, floor of the grand old town house that Kieffer had commandeered for his counter-intelligence headquarters. They were sipping good African coffee, brewed by a stony-faced old servant the owners had left behind in their haste to flee the dreaded Hun. Workmen, French of course, could be heard removing furniture and affixing bars to doors and windows of adjacent rooms. Over the nearby rooftops they could see the Arc de Triomphe, festooned on four sides with brilliant red, black and white swastika banners, looking glorious in the morning sun. Both men were smiling. Paris had been invested without the loss of one German life. The French were preparing to sign surrender papers. A large swath of them, with Petain at its head, had agreed to be German lackeys. Hitler would be visiting soon. Life could not be better.
“How long will you be staying, Herr Reichsfuhrer?” Kieffer asked.
“No more than a few days, I hope.”
Kieffer, who in 1947 would be hung at Hamelin Prison for the murder of British POW’s after his trial in Nuremburg, remained silent. That Himmler was in Paris was not a surprise, many of the Nazi crème de la crème were visiting the new jewel in the expanding German empire. The best hotels and restaurants were filled with them—and the women they were attracting. Some of those women were already in Kieffer’s employ. But for the SS chief, a notorious man-boy, devoted to his mama, to linger, and to be interested in the interrogation of a lowly priest, that was very interesting.