God's Formula

by James Lepore

  “I am at your disposal,” the major said.

  “Has Fraulein Weil appeared?”

  “No, Herr Reichsfuhrer. Her passport is still at the front desk of the Meurice. Shall I…?” There was something about the look in Himmler’s beady eyes that caused Kieffer to stop mid-sentence. The SS chief had been in Paris less than twenty-four hours and had asked twice about the mysterious Miss Weil.

  “I will be frank with you, major,” Himmler said. “I have lost contact with an agent who reported to me personally, a woman named Marlene Jaeger.”

  “Fraulein Weil.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think she was the woman in the car with Mr. Hope and the second man?” Kieffer asked.

  “I don’t know,” Himmler replied. “She may not have found an opportunity to contact me.”

  “Shall I initiate a search? I will need a description, perhaps a photograph.”

  Himmler took an envelope from an inside jacket pocket and handed it to Kieffer. “Her picture,” he said. “She’s twenty-five, slender, brunette, with a mole at the top of her left buttock.”

  “And her assignment?” Kieffer asked. “It will help if I knew what she was doing. Was it to do with the Friedeman boy?”

  Himmler was about to answer, but stopped at the sudden sound of sharp knocking on the room’s thick oak door.

  “Come in,” said Kieffer.

  The door swung open and Klaus Schneider was shown in by Kieffer’s adjutant, who stepped back into the anteroom he used as an office, swinging the door shut.

  “Schnieder,” said Kieffer.

  “Herr Sturmbannfuhrer.”

  “You look like you have something to say. Speak.”

  “The boys are heading to Foix with a Mr. and Mrs. Foret.”

  “Who are they?” Kieffer asked.

  “An elderly couple. They own a bakery in the 16th arrondisement.”

  “Where is Foix?” Himmler asked.

  “South,” Schneider replied. “On the Spanish border.”

  “Their contact in Foix?” Kieffer asked.

  “The priest did not know if there was one. They are going to attempt to cross into Spain.”

  “Anything else?” Kieffer asked.

  “No.”

  “Why not? The priest is obviously a member of a resistance cell.”

  “He—”

  “Yes?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Ah.”

  Silence.

  “Agent Schneider,” said Himmler. “You worked out of our embassy on Rue des Lilles?”

  “Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

  “Was there an Abwehr officer there?”

  “Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Major Klien, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

  “Did you tell him about the priest and Mr. Hope?”

  “I made a report.”

  “Our meeting last night? Today’s interrogation? Have you reported them?”

  “No, Herr Reichsfuhrer. I haven’t had the time.”

  “Wait outside.”

  “Kieffer,” Himmler said, when they were alone again. “I have a job for you.”

  “Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

  “I am going to sign an order giving you authority to select two thousand Waffen men, a battalion that you will head, the best of the best, for a mission to Foix, to seal the border there, and to capture the Friedeman boy.”

  “Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

  “You are promoted to lieutenant-colonel, pro tem.”

  “I am honored, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

  “You have, of course, been wondering why this boy is so important.”

  “Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

  “There is a scientist, Kurt Diebner, staying at the Meurice. I have made him an SS captain, but ignore that. He is not a soldier. He will fill you in. He will accompany you to Foix. The Friedeman boy must be captured alive and unhurt. The other one I don’t care about.”

  “Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

  “You will start now. Nothing has more priority.”

  “Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

  “There is one more thing.”

  “Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

  “You will not share anything about this mission with any other agency, military or civilian, particularly the Abwehr and Admiral Canaris.”

  “Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

  “Is that understood?”

  “Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

  “I will stay in Paris. I expect you to bring me the boy in a matter of days, if not hours.”

  “Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

  “Your agent Schneider?”

  “Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer?”

  “He is going to commit suicide. Cyanide will do. You have pills?”

  “Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

  “Immediately. He cannot leave this building alive.”

  “Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

  Chapter 5

  Foix, June 16, 1940, 5:00 a.m.

  “Why are we stopping?” Adrienne Archambeau asked. “The border’s only thirty kilometers away.”

  “I have business in Foix first,” Ian Fleming answered.

  “Business in Foix?”

  “Yes.”

  “What business?” Archambeaux asked.

  Fleming had swept open the olive-green canvas curtain that covered the rear of their truck’s bed. He gazed out now and could see the first glimmer of the new day outlining the steep hills across the small valley at the bottom of which was nestled the town of Foix. On the highest of these hills was a three-towered castle that even in the dark he could see was very old and in total disrepair. Gaps like missing teeth could be seen at the top of each tower. Looking down, he could see jagged stone blocks strewn about the hillside. Some of them appeared to be glowing a dullish, sickly green as the morning light hit them. He and Miss Archambeau were sitting facing each other under the truck’s canvas roof. Professor Tolkien was asleep in the cab.

  “Why were you following me?” the Englishman asked.

  “Ian, please, let’s just cross over,” said Archambeau. “Foix is an obvious gateway. The Germans will be here soon to close all the crossings.”

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “I did yesterday, but I will again. The Deuxième Bureau routinely follows foreign agents.”

  “Friendly agents?”

  “Friendly agents who are sleeping with and being watched by enemy agents, yes.”

  “Her revolver was empty.”

  “How could I know that?”

  “You couldn’t, of course. You believed you were saving my life.”

  “Precisely.”

  “And creating a bond of trust between us.”

  “Ian, please, France is chaotic at the moment, but in a day or two, the Germans will be in complete control. If we are caught and identified, we will be hung.”

  Fleming remained silent as he picked the Frenchwoman’s eyes out of the lorry’s interior. Beautiful, violet eyes in pools of pure white, they seemed to glow in the dark. She was, of course, right about the state of things in France at the moment. The Werhmacht had swept down from Holland and Belgium and conquered all of northern France in four weeks. The South remained for the moment untouched, with little sign of war or that the French were no longer a free people. Headlights off on their nine hour overnight drive, they had taken back roads and avoided strategic towns and cities, especially Bordeaux, where the French Parliament was said to be meeting and where refugees were flocking by the thousands. They had come across nothing more ominous than a stray cow or two blocking the road.

  “Tell me about my movements?” Fleming said finally.

  “You went to Le Petite College in Fontainebleau after Jaeger did. You nearly killed one of her people near the Louvre. You took her dancing and then to an apartment on Rue Bonaparte.”

  “Did you talk to the people at the college?”

  “No, orders were
to follow and report.”

  “Report to whom?”

  “A drop box.”

  “What section did you work for?”

  “For Guy Schlesser, 2 Avenue de Tourville.”

  “You could easily be Jaeger’s backup.”

  “What can I do to make you trust me?” Archambeau asked.

  “You can empty your pockets and that bag you carry, strip naked, and get on your hands and knees on the floor.”

  Chapter 6

  Foix, June 16, 1940, 5:00 p.m.

  “How many people, do you think?” Adrienne Archambeau asked.

  “A few thousand,” Ian Fleming replied.

  “Do you see the cloud of dust on the other side of those hills?”

  “I’m afraid I do.”

  Fleming, in his white cotton, button-top underpants, the long and baggy kind he’d been wearing since he was a boy, and Archambeau, in boxy underpants and a silk chemise top, were sitting in the sun on a boulder near a stream. Fleming had his field glasses trained on the town below.

  “The Andorra Passage starts somewhere behind the castle,” Archambeau said. “We could walk it from here.”

  “What about the professor?”

  “We would wait for him, of course.”

  “He’s been gone too long. Over five hours.”

  “That trinket of his must have lost its magic powers. Shall we…?”

  “No. One stranger in a town that small is enough. To them, every new face is a German agent.”

  “I should have gone. I am French. But, of course, that would have required you to tell me what your mission is. To trust me.”

  “You need a few more lessons in compliance,” Fleming said, swiveling the binoculars to the north, where the cloud of dust rising from the next valley over was inching closer. “More obedience training, shall we say.”

  Once Tolkien had set off on foot for the town, they had moved the truck into a copse of tall pine trees, then succumbed to exhaustion, sleeping in the cab like the dead for four hours. Startled awake by nothing more than a hot breeze, they had, in manic succession—as if they had been told they had only a few hours to live—eaten the last of their food, smoked cigarettes, and leapt naked into the cold, crystal clear stream. Shivering, drying each other off with their hands, they had made love in the middle of the pine copse, their bed of needles surprisingly soft and the heady smell of pine sap bringing them, along with their rutting, to a state of exquisite, albeit momentary, ecstasy. Last night, Fleming had used his belt as a makeshift dog collar and leash, putting the wide-eyed but compliant French beauty through a few “exercises” before condescending to fuck her. Today, they had done it the old fashioned way, straightforward except for some firm biting of Archambeau’s large pink nipples. The Englishman glanced quickly at her now, to see if she was bleeding through her chemise. No. Good. The trick was to bruise but not break the skin.

  “You could walk to Spain yourself,” Fleming said. “No one’s stopping you.”

  “Trucks!” said Archambeau. “Put those glasses down!”

  They leaped to the ground and took up positions behind the boulder, where, peering over, they watched as the first of a convoy of German trucks, some open-bedded, some canvas-covered, all carrying armed troops, made the turn on the road below heading into Foix. Interspersed among the forty or so troop carriers were six half-tracks, a dozen large gas tankers, a radio truck, and at least a dozen small, armored Jeep-like vehicles with mounted machine guns. Two hefty staff Daimlers, swastika flags rippling, brought up the rear of this caravan, which took twenty minutes to pass out of site, leaving a diminishing trail of dust behind it.

  “Waffen-SS,” said Archambeau. “Himmler’s rabid dogs.”

  Chapter 7

  Foix, June 16, 1940, 6:00 p.m.

  John Ronald Tolkien, blindfolded, his hands tied behind his back, felt the sharp tug on the rope that tethered him to the person who was leading him through what he surmised was a narrow subterranean tunnel. He had stumbled on the rough hewn steps leading down, bumping his head with a painful thud against a stone lintel. He could feel the blood oozing slowly below his hairline onto the bridge of his nose. Through the cotton handkerchief covering his eyes, he could see the glow of a torch ahead, moving apace with him. Thank God. Total darkness would have been a frightful thing, too frightful to contemplate. Mixed in with the smell of damp earth and sweating stone in the tunnel was the odor of something else, something foul and cloying, and at the same time disgustingly sweet. Was it Grendel? Is this his cave? Now you can really teach Beowulf, the professor said to himself, trying to quell his fears.

  His head throbbing, losing his bearings, he had stopped to get his breath. When he did, he felt the tug and pitched forward.

  “ Se depeche! ”

  “Who are you?” Tolkien said, planting his feet and using his midsection to pull back on the rope in a movement like something he vaguely knew a belly dancer might do. He couldn’t believe his nerve, but then again, he was angry—that he had been betrayed by a Catholic priest, that he had so suddenly become a manacled slave in a dank and dirty underground cavern. Humility was one thing, humiliation quite another.

  “Move,” his kidnapper said in English.

  Tolkien’s mouth was dry, but he gathered up the last of his saliva and spit it in the direction of his jailer, who immediately pulled fiercely on the rope. Yanked forward, the Englishman stumbled on the wet floor and struck his head with a whump against his kidnapper’s chest. The force of this collision tumbled them to the ground. As they wrestled, each trying to gain dominance, the professor’s head hit the hard dirt floor with a thump. Breathless, unable to move, he heard a female voice saying something quite sharply in a language he could not understand. He rolled quickly onto his back and looking up saw fire all around him. He was more blinded by this fire, or whatever it was, than he had been by his blindfold, which he now realized had been scraped off in the melee. He could not use his hands, so he shut and then opened his eyes several times until the scene above him came into focus.

  Standing looking down at him, each holding a torch, were three Elvish princesses, each with large luminous eyes and long, flowing, dark tresses. The princess in the center wore a glowing, emerald pendant on a silver chain around her neck. Arwen? Idril? Luthien? Behind them was an array of tiny, brilliant stars, millions of them it seemed, against a black velvet night sky such that he never could have imagined: a sky in a cave.

  “Síla lúmenn…,” Tolkien said, softly, in a voice he hardly recognized as his own. “A million stars shine upon our meeting.”

  The princess in the center was taller than the other two, perhaps older as well, her bearing more erect and regal. She was, to John Tolkien’s dazed mind, the luminous and timeless Arwen Undomiel he had been writing about on Northmoor Drive just two weeks ago come miraculously to life. Arwen leaned forward now and placed her hand on the Englishman’s forehead. “You are hurt, Monsieur,” she said in French. “Let us help you.” She nodded to her younger consorts, who stepped forward and gently lifted the professor to his feet. His head clearing, Tolkien could now see that the starlit sky was a wall of mica and that his jailer was a portly man of about sixty. This man was using Tolkien’s blindfold to wipe the dirt and spittle from his face. When this was done, his eyes dark with anger, he approached the professor with the blindfold.

  “No,” Arwen said. “That will not be necessary. He does not know the way in or out.”

  Chapter 8

  Foix, June 16, 1949, 8:00 p.m.

  Father Raymond Esclarmonde had been born and raised in Foix, leaving only to attend seminary in Bordeaux for four years, followed by two years as a parish priest in Toulouse. In 1935, at the age of 70, he had succeeded to the pastorship of the Church of St. Volusien, which he could see from where he stood on the walkway of Foix Castle’s middle tower. Next to it was the Chapel of Our Lady of the Mount of Joy. The drop down to the roofs of the church and chapel and the surrounding shops and houses was a
sheer one hundred feet of jagged rock. Foix Rock was where the town had started. He knew its history, particularly as it related to the rise and fall of the Cathars in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Cathar blood ran through his own veins, and the veins of his three nieces and one nephew. Philippa, the oldest, had already been inducted as a Perfect in the sacrament of Consolamentum. She had taken the strictest of vows and would have no children, nor ever sleep with a man. If the other girls and their brother followed her example, then Catharism would die with them. So be it. What then, was one more life? Nothing.

  A staff car and five trucks were parked in front of the Mary Chapel. The trucks had arrived full of German troops, who had spilled out and now could be seen taking up positions along the church’s outer wall and on the steep, narrow streets behind. Several had taken up positions on nearby rooftops. The officers from the staff car had entered the chapel. He watched as they emerged. He doubted they had discovered the secret entrance to the caves below. No one except Father Raymond knew of its existence. He could have entered the cave and hidden there with Phillpppa and the others, but had decided on another course of action. His dead body would perhaps put an end to their search.

  Looking down, he hoped he would land on the roof of the staff car.

  Chapter 9

  Foix, June 17, 1940, 1:00 a.m.

  “Meinseelowen.”