Agent in the shadows, p.30
Agent in the Shadows, page 30
Alain spoke first. ‘We know that Madame Madelaine, Michel, Maurice and Georges were all killed by the Germans in Rue Ravat in the raid on twenty-second of March. Gilbert contacted me soon after, he’d been instructed to tell the few of us remaining to go to ground, that Mars was being suspended – is that correct?’
Anna said it was.
‘I saw Gilbert a few times after that: he told me he’d joined the FFI. I found out on Saturday that he’d been killed the previous day in fighting around Part-Dieu. Emile I’m less sure about: Gilbert said something about him helping Siegfried escape to the east, but he was certainly back in Lyon in June and joined an FTP unit, he was always a communist, eh? I’m told he may have been captured by the Gestapo late in July and murdered by them, possibly in Dijon.’
‘You mentioned Siegfried – what news of him?’ It was the first time Sophia had spoken.
‘I saw him in Montluc,’ said Marcel, ‘he arrived there around the middle of August; I can’t be sure of the precise date. But he was one of the group of prisoners taken away on Sunday the twentieth of August: I don’t know what happened to him, but—’
‘I can tell you what happened,’ said Alain. ‘They were taken from Montluc to Saint-Genis-Laval and—’
‘It’s part of Lyon,’ Anna explained to Sophia and Jack. ‘On the left bank of the Saône.’
‘More than one hundred of them – some say as many as one hundred and twenty – were taken into a house at Fort de Côte-Lorette and massacred by the SS and also milice. There was only one survivor, a Frenchman.’
They all looked down and Sophia clutched Jack’s hand.
‘Your brother-in-law, Marcel—’
‘Dupont?’
‘Yes: he was involved, I’m told.’
Marcel nodded.
The gathering ended soon after that: they agreed that Mars had possibly served its purpose, though at a most terrible price. But their work was now done. They would resume their lives. Sophia said they needed to get to Switzerland as soon as possible and Anna asked Marcel if he could help with that?
Marcel said he could find transport, but if someone else could actually take them he’d be grateful. ‘I have some family business to attend to.’
* * *
By the Wednesday after liberation, René Dupont had come to the conclusion that remaining at home – isolated and ignored – was not a good idea. Sooner or later, someone would concoct something against him and he’d be treated as a collaborator. He needed a few days to decide where to go: he could head south and possibly start a new life. Maybe his family would give him some money and help him get some new papers, just to be rid of him.
He was aware of people entering the house and muffled voices downstairs. It was becoming unbearably hot in the room and he was about to leave it when the door opened and his wife Jeanne looked at him pitifully from the corridor and he stood up and smiled and said it was good to see her and it would be good if they could talk and maybe… But she told him to be quiet.
‘Why did you return here: don’t you think you brought enough shame to this family, eh?’
He started to reply but she told him to shut up. ‘You should have disappeared, that would have been best for everyone. But you’re so arrogant and stupid that you’re incapable of making the right decision.’
‘I was going to tell you that I’m leaving, Jeanne, I do so with a heavy heart but I—’
Jeanne had stepped back and it was then that he saw Marcel in the corridor and when he entered the bedroom, two of his wife’s cousins were with him. Dupont was cornered against the boxes, aware he was breathing heavily and panicking. One of the cousins was holding a thin rope with a stick tied to it and when they grabbed his arms and tied his hands he began to struggle and shouted out, demanding to know what was going on, and Marcel said what did he expect – for them to forget and to show him mercy? The two cousins had pinned him down and Marcel was struggling to put something round his neck.
‘My advice is to keep still: let the garotte do its job and it won’t take long; just long enough to think about what you’ve done.’
Chapter 34
Berne, London
September and October 1944
Sophia von Naundorf and Jack Miller arrived in Berne on Thursday 7 September.
Despite their evident exhaustion, Basil Remington-Barber insisted on bringing them into the embassy where he fussed over them in his office until he announced he had some rather unpleasant news to impart, as he put it, which is when he told them about the killing of Barney Allen and the discovery that Noel Moore was a traitor, would you believe it, and how annoying it was that he and that other traitor – Source Armand – had disappeared.
Into thin air.
He sat there shaking his head and muttering about what an unfortunate mess this had all turned out to be.
‘So, we’ve wasted our time, then?’
‘What do you mean, Sophia?’
‘The mission we’ve just been on, everything in Lyon, the deaths, what Jack has been through… you think all this has been just a dreadful mess?’
Basil swept his hand through his silvery hair and managed to look contrite. ‘No, good heavens, no… I’m sorry if you think that. That isn’t what I meant. Your mission was an undoubted success, notwithstanding the casualties along the way, which is the unfortunate but inevitable consequence of any battle. In fact, I was speaking to London only yesterday and they are of the very firm opinion that you helped to keep the Resistance intact and ensured that by the time the Allies landed in Normandy, the Resistance was an effective fighting force. The importance of what you achieved should not be underestimated. There is no doubt you played a vital role in the Liberation of France.’
Sophia started to reply but stopped as Jack tugged at her sleeve and said he really didn’t feel terribly well and did the embassy have a doctor he could see?
He deteriorated very quickly after that: he was admitted to the university hospital that evening and the following morning Sophia and Basil were called in to a stuffy office where a doctor told them that Herr Miller was very ill: ‘He appears to have damage to his right kidney, which should have been treated some time ago, and he would require an operation but that would only be possible if he pulled through the next twenty-four hours and…’
Sophia remembered breaking down and an embarrassed silence before she composed herself and asked the doctor what were his chances of survival and he said it was impossible to say, but fifty–fifty at best, and Basil asked where was the best place for Jack to have the operation and the doctor asked if there was any chance of him being taken to London?
Basil was most impressive after that: once Jack was stabilised, he was driven by ambulance to Orly airport just outside Paris where the United States Army Air Force flew him to London. That Thursday – exactly one week after Jack and Sophia had arrived in Berne – Jack was propped up in bed in his room at St Mary’s Hospital in London, the late morning sun catching his face, and Sophia realising quite how ill he must have been because for the first time in six months she was looking at the Jack she remembered and loved so much: the life now back in his face, the eyes sparkling and the gentle smile lighting up the room. Piers Devereaux was there too, along with a surgeon who was telling them it had been touch and go and how Jack had survived so long without surgery was really most remarkable.
When the surgeon left, Piers told them the plan was for Jack to remain in hospital for another week and then he’d be taken to a convalescent home that the Service used and which was very private and Sophia would be able to stay there too and of course there would need to be a proper debrief, but all in good time.
By the middle of October Jack was much improved, more or less back to normal, and Sophia was asked to come to London for a series of meetings with a team from British Military Intelligence who wanted to question her about Berlin, given that they hoped to be there soon.
She spent a week in London, staying in a hotel in Victoria. She’d been given Swiss papers and instructed not to tell anyone she was German, or anything else for that matter.
It was an exhausting week in a basement room with maps and photographs spread over a large table and she was questioned in minute detail about Berlin.
They finished with her on a crisp Friday at the end of October, the 27, and when Piers Devereaux arrived, she assumed it was to take her back to the convalescent home and when he said he wanted a chat with her first she hoped it was to discuss where they could live until the war was over, which had already been talked about, and she also hoped that he had an answer on the other sensitive matter she and Jack had raised, namely whether they’d be able to get married even though she had no proof as such of her husband’s death.
He took her to an upstairs room in whatever building it was they were in, with views over the Thames through the grimy window, which Piers sat in front of. For the first time in years, she felt relaxed: Jack was well and her days operating as a clandestine agent were over.
But Piers looked more uncomfortable than she’d ever seen him, standing up, then sitting straight down, shifting in the chair, fiddling with his watch strap and avoiding looking directly at her. He said that despite what he was about to say, she needed to know that she was held in the very highest regard by the Service and the success of their latest mission just proved that she was indeed one of their top agents… and then he paused, lowered his voice and said she was to listen very carefully because what he had to say was not easy and indeed nothing about the war was easy and it was undoubtedly the case that people behaved differently – unconventionally, if the truth were told – and clearly people were the victims of unfortunate circumstances and she was certainly no exception.
He got up and walked over to Sophia, his arm outstretched, and in his hand was an envelope and he said he’d leave her in private to read it and he’d be back in a while but he was sure she’d want some privacy. He couldn’t get out of the room quickly enough.
* * *
My dear Sophia
This is not an easy letter for me to write and I know it will be an even more difficult one for you to read.
By the time you receive this I will have returned to the United States. An official from the US Embassy came to see me and said if I wished to return home then he could arrange it and the thought of ‘home’ had a profound effect on me: I realised that despite my feelings for you, my life has been in the United States and I need to return there to understand how I feel about everything. I need to find where my heart is.
It may well be that I will just be there for a few weeks or it could be for much longer, but I do ask that you give me the time to think about the course of my life.
I have promised Piers that I will keep in touch with him.
I hope you understand, Sophia, that whatever happens, I will always love you.
Jack
Chapter 35
Berlin
September 1945
Considering his predicament, Jeffrey Morgan approached Germany’s imminent defeat and the end of the war with a surprising degree of equanimity.
He and Noel Moore had arrived in Germany in February the previous year, fleeing Switzerland after disposing of Barney Allen. Their debrief lasted one month and once the Gestapo were satisfied they had all they needed from the two men they put them up in an apartment on Roscher Strasse near Charlottenburg U-Bahn station. They were given jobs translating documents, but it was menial work and the atmosphere in the apartment was tense.
At the end of April 1945 Nicholas left Berlin without telling the bothersome Noel Moore. The order which had so typified the city was beginning to break down and he decided to join the stream of refugees heading west.
He ended up in Marburg, in the area occupied by the Americans, and by the time he got there he’d assumed the identity of Gottfried Schäfer, courtesy of a rotting corpse he’d come across on the journey. No one would be able to connect him with Jeffrey Morgan or Nicholas. Gottfried Schäfer was just one of millions of displaced people in Germany.
He’d got away with murder.
And a whole lot more.
* * *
But it was an altogether different matter for Noel Moore. He knew he was a wanted man. Returning to England was out of the question, as was remaining in Germany as an Englishman.
He was relieved when Nicholas disappeared from Berlin: he’d never trusted the man and the fact that he knew his real identity was always something that worried him. He was forced to enlist in the Volkssturm – the militia made up of the wounded, old men, boys and anyone else they could press-gang into action, and soon realised it could be his salvation. By now his German was much improved: he wasn’t fluent, but his accent was good and he was familiar with the rough Berlin slang. His uniform helped too, not that the Volkssturm had much of a uniform, but he had the black Volkssturm armband and that meant he looked much like anyone else.
In the last week of April, he was assigned to a battalion in Kreuzberg and they’d come across an abandoned house with the bodies of a dozen fellow Volkssturm in one of the rooms. They’d searched the bodies for weapons and that was when he found a kennkarte for an Ernst Hauff and assumed the dead man’s identity.
In the final days of the battle his Volkssturm unit merged with another and then split up again and he was sent with a dozen others to Moabit. On Wednesday 2 May he found himself in the basement of a house on Rostocker Strasse, along with a man in his seventies and a terrified boy of around fourteen. The old man was in no mood for fighting. The war was over, he told them – and it was never his war anyway. We’ll hide here until it’s over.
The building shook the rest of that day and night and Noel Moore had no idea how it didn’t collapse on them. At one stage he dozed off and when he awoke it was quiet: the shelling had stopped, and when the boy came back from looking outside, he said there were Russians everywhere and the old man burst into tears of joy and announced he’d always been a communist anyway.
* * *
It could have been worse: they’d surrendered to a Red Army unit who’d roughed them up a bit but they’d spotted Ernst Hauff’s railwayman’s uniform, so he was sent to help clear the railway lines around Friedrichstrasse and although it was hard work, he felt strangely safe: no one suspected him. As far as the Red Army were concerned, Ernst Hauff was just another German and as far as the other Germans were concerned, they weren’t especially concerned with him or indeed with anyone else. Everyone kept to themselves and no one talked very much and when they weren’t working, they tried to sleep in the rubble of the bombed-out factory where they were garrisoned.
There was a lot of talk about trying to head west, away from the Red Army and towards the British and the Americans, but Ernst Hauff was in no hurry. Living under the Russians was far more preferable than being a prisoner of the British.
The more he thought about it, the more it seemed to be a good idea.
And it was.
Until that fateful Friday.
* * *
It began as a fine mid-September day.
For the past month Ernst Hauff had been part of a gang repairing the Zoologischer Garten station, known to everyone in the city as Zoo station, and one of the only railway stations in Berlin not completely destroyed. The previous month Berlin had been divided into four sectors: the east controlled by the Soviet Union; the United States in the south of the city; the French in the north; and the British in the west, which included Tiergarten where Noel Moore was working.
At first this had concerned him, but it quickly became apparent that the British occupation forces had far more important matters to worry about than gangs of filthy and broken workmen. And the conditions were better than they had been in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Berlin. His gang were living on the ground floor of an abandoned shop on Ranke Strasse and over a period of weeks they’d made it almost comfortable and they were getting food and it was only a few minutes’ walk to and from the station.
And it was on this fine Friday afternoon that Ernst Hauff was returning to Ranke Strasse after a ten-hour shift at the station, which had begun at six that morning and it was now just after four o’clock, and he’d just been told that they were having the following day off and he was feeling quite upbeat. And earlier that day he’d found a pack of Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes in the gutter, which must have been dropped by a British soldier. There were eight remaining in the pack, a fortune on the black market.
There was a notable spring to his step as he crossed Kurfürstendamm. He was heading for a cake shop that had recently re-opened where he’d be able to exchange two cigarettes for a large bun with jam, which didn’t taste of sawdust, and a cold lemonade.
He was at the junction with Meineke Strasse when he heard his name and then for some inexplicable reason he paused and when his name was repeated, he turned round.
At which point, his world crumpled.
* * *
The seven months after Jack Miller had returned to the United States had passed in a strange kind of daze for Sophia. If at any point during that time she’d been asked what she’d been up to the previous day, let alone the previous week, she wouldn’t have had a clue.
Which wasn’t to say she wasn’t functioning. She worked in a unit at the War Office preparing for the occupation of Germany, helping prepare what were called ‘Occupation Guides’ for each town and city. Once a fortnight Piers Devereaux would stop by her office and suggest they have a chat and though he had little to say she knew it was his way of keeping an eye on her and though they never discussed Jack, he’d always make a point of saying there was ‘no news – not yet, at any rate’ and sometimes he’d tell her not to despair and who knows what the future holds for any of us?
