Blue Noon Read online

He had re-opened the restaurant six months ago. When the arrests had started following the Cole treachery he had made himself scarce, staying with his cousin in Rheims until it was safe to return. But the Germans had his name, even if they could produce no airmen to prove his complicity. So he bargained for his continued freedom with scraps of information. They were as harmless as he could make them, and occasionally he could use his German contacts to nail a particularly repellent individual, but his collaboration made his skin crawl with shame.

  He put on a pan of water and began skinning the rabbits. An officer of the security services was due any time now, and Gérard had precious little information to give him. He had heard that Jews were hiding out in one of the city’s cemeteries, and he thought about offering that snippet. Too vague. The best he had were the names of the most prominent of the city’s black marketeers, yet he relied on them to source his butter and eggs. He’d be cutting his own throat. Besides, many of them had protection at the highest level of the Occupiers.

  He threw the kidneys and livers of the rabbits into the pot and gave it a stir, just as the bell over the door sounded. He wiped his hands on his apron and grabbed a bottle of Lillet. The discussions always went better with a liqueur.

  The new man was in the full formal uniform of the Sicherheitsdienst, the German security service charged with countering the French Resistance, with high jackboots, jodhpur trousers and tightly tailored jacket. He swept the cap from his head to reveal cropped blond hair, so fair it was nearly white. His face bore duelling scars he was doubtless proud of.

  ‘Ah, Oberleutnant,’ Gérard said, taking a guess at the rank, feeling himself starting to sweat. ‘Too early for a drink?’

  He sloshed the liqueur into two glasses, handed one over, and it was accepted, the drink tossed back. ‘I am afraid I have very little for you, Oberleutnant.’

  ‘I am not an Oberleutnant. I am an SS-Untersturmführer.’ The voice was low, raspy, but something about it made Gérard look closely at the bullet-headed man. No, they weren’t duelling scars. And the blond hair was dyed.

  ‘Christ,’ Gérard said slowly before he knocked back his own drink in one, ‘Harry Cole.’

  ‘Nine days after the Allied landings in North Africa, the Germans moved into the Non-Occupied Zone as a punitive measure. In Lyon, they found various prisoners who had been charged with being German agents. One of them had been sentenced to death. This, they thought, was outrageous.’ Harry took a drag on his cigarette. ‘I was taken to meet Barbie—’

  ‘Barbie?’ repeated Gérard. Word of the SD man’s brutality had reached Paris. The young SS Untersturmführer was awarded his first Iron Cross in Amsterdam for battering to death an ‘enemy of the Reich’— a Jewish ice cream peddler—in public because the man refused to salute him. Now an Obersturmführer, he had been given the job of Sonderbehandlung—special treatment—in Lyon, which meant cleansing the city of the Jews, which he was doing with characteristic zeal. A favourite ploy was the souricière, the mousetrap. Word was put out through the refugee organisations and contacts in the underground that extra food rations or medical care was available on humanitarian grounds to Jews at a certain address. Barbie’s men would open up the phoney clinic on the appointed day and detain anyone who walked through the door. Next stop, Montluc.

  The prison-fortress had been barbaric before, but Barbie had lifted it into another league. He had a new structure, the Baraque aux Juifs, built in the courtyard, and filled it with a ready supply of hostages, who were on tap should anyone dare to attack German soldiers. Or, in fact, for any trivial reason at all. The weekly firing squads became daily, then, it seemed, hourly. People arrived with the most obscene wounds from Barbie’s torture with terrible burns, holes in their heads from repeated blows on the same spot, but there was no medical care. Especially not for those in the Jews’ Hut.

  ‘Such a small, unassuming man,’ said Harry. ‘Not physically large. Mild mannered. But when he gets a truncheon in his hand, watch out. So, Barbie decides that his enemy’s enemy is his friend …’ Harry had been lucky. Barbie and his SD men lived a life of arrest and torture and murder during the day, but at night they caroused through the city’s bars and clubs, always welcomed, always offered treats on the house. Somewhere along the way, Barbie had caught a dose of clap and returned to Germany for treatment. One of his hasty recommendations was for the wrongly imprisoned Harry to be released, on condition that he ‘helped’ now and then. First in Lyon, and when his face became known, a transfer to Paris.

  Gérard walked back to the kitchen to check his bubbling stock and returned, wringing his hands. ‘But Harry, you are working for … the Gestapo.’

  ‘SD.’

  ‘Don’t split hairs. There is no difference.’

  ‘I’m not really working for either. I’m working for Harry.’

  ‘Then why the uniform?’

  ‘This?’ He plucked at the tunic. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t really entitled to wear it, as he hadn’t been through the SS school at Bernau, near Berlin, where Barbie had gained his lightning bolts (presented, the man had proudly told him, on April 20, Hitler’s birthday) and dagger. Such was the intimidating power of the outfit, however, he, along with a handful of other trusties, was given dispensation to don it when it was deemed a useful tool. ‘It’s a means to an end. All I do is advise them on certain things. Perhaps have a word in an Englishman’s ear, let them know the score.’

  ‘But Barbie is an animal.’

  ‘I have nothing to do with that,’ Harry said firmly. ‘Not there nor here. And let me tell you, the Allies are not the angels you think they are.’ He outlined what King had engineered, the duping of Odile into handing over the escape routes and his near-lynching on the hill.

  ‘Harry, I agree, that’s a terrible story, but you are playing with fire and damning your soul.’

  ‘Don’t be melodramatic, Gérard. What choice did I have? One side tried to hang me. Look.’ He pulled down his collar to show the crinkled friction scar on his neck. ‘Then the French warders tortured me.’ He showed a scar on his arm from a knife cut. ‘Then sentenced me to death.’ Triffe, his captor, had managed to escape Lyon before Barbie discovered that the Frenchman was in touch with London.

  ‘The Germans at least kept me alive. Gérard, all I do is tell the captured English agents to behave. To co-operate. To save them the bloody pain.’ Gérard was about to interrupt. ‘No, listen. I know terrible things go on. I hear them, for chrissake. Some of them even happened to me. Oh, yes, the Gestapo don’t have a monopoly on torture, Gérard. And remember this. When an English agent not in uniform is captured, the Germans are completely within their rights, under the Geneva Convention, to shoot them.’

  ‘Are they?’ Gérard had not heard this before.

  ‘Yes. Absolutely.’

  ‘And to pull their toenails out? And drown them in bathtubs? I hear your friend Barbie is very fond of that,’ said Gérard quietly.

  Harry banged the table. ‘You are not listening. I try to stop such things.’

  ‘By getting them to betray their friends and colleagues.’

  ‘A German spy caught in England is liable to be hanged, Gérard. Both sides play by the same rules.’

  ‘You have a strange notion of playing, Harry.’

  Harry went quiet. It was hard to make people understand. When he had returned to Paris from Lyon, only Tante Clara hadn’t doubted him, had given him food and drink and her son’s bed once more. When he had appeared, unannounced, at her apartment, she had hugged him for a long time and told him that everyone was making compromises, even if they wouldn’t admit it now and would certainly deny it in the future. She had cupped his face in her hands and kissed him.

  ‘I have been in Paris only a few weeks,’ he said to the restaurateur, holding out his glass for a refill of Lillet. ‘Who knows? Maybe I can do some good?’

  ‘Nobody can do any good in that uniform,’ Gérard said brusquely. ‘So, why come to me, Harry? I have nothing for yo
u. No interesting snippets or rumours. Unless you want to know where to get fresh eggs. Then I can help.’

  ‘I want King.’

  ‘Can’t help you.’

  ‘And I want to see Odile.’

  ‘She’s not here,’ he said. ‘I mean, in Paris.’

  ‘How can you be so sure? She’s not in Madeleine, not in Lille. I think she is here. Isn’t she?’

  Gérard shook his head. ‘She won’t see you.’

  ‘I need to tell her what really happened.’

  ‘You think she’ll believe you?’

  ‘Do you?’

  Gérard hesitated for a beat too many. ‘Of course.’

  Harry laughed. ‘I can do a better job of convincing Odile.’

  ‘You are too convincing all round, Harry. Nobody knows when you are telling the truth.’

  Harry sat down and lit himself another cigarette. ‘Gérard. This is simple. You get a message to Odile for me and I’ll call off the dogs.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means you can give up working for the Gestapo, Gérard. No more information, names, rumours. You can take back the moral high ground.’

  There was a long pause before Gérard said: ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  Twenty-five

  Paris, early 1943

  HARRY SAT CLOSE TO the door at Le Rosebud café off Boulevard Montparnasse, nursing a coffee that tasted only of roasted barley. He was back in civvies, as usual, the suit carefully chosen, well cut, but clearly of a decent age. Newer threads would mark him out as a familiar at Foch or the Lutetia or one of the other security outposts. Unlike most Brandenburgers, he didn’t like to advertise the fact that circumstances had brought him to the Germans’ door.

  Harry took a sip of coffee and a man at the bar—another of those Parisians who made desperate efforts to stay elegant in increasingly threadbare clothes—noticed him curl his nose.

  ‘You know, I can dream the taste of real coffee,’ said his neighbour. ‘I can’t summon it during the day, but some mornings I wake up with the smell in my nose.’

  ‘Is that good or bad?’ asked Harry.

  The man laughed. ‘Bad. I spend the morning trying to recapture the sensation.’ He pointed at his own empty cup. ‘Only to be disappointed every time.’ He looked over at the proprietor. ‘And he burnt the barley. I think I’ll go and see what’s in the Lies today.’

  He stood up, adjusted his green bowtie and walked across to the street where he thumbed the stack of newspapers—the Lies as they were now universally known—trying to find the one with the fewest untruths.

  Harry saw her from the corner of his eye. She must have come out of the Metro, crossed Boulevard Montparnasse, and was now standing on the opposite side of Delambre, looking left to right, clutching a cheap handbag in front of her. The fresh-faced girl, the feisty nurse, had gone, replaced by this nervous creature, with its sharp cheek bones and sad eyes, but, after he had stared at her for a few moments, he could see his Odile shining through.

  He stood and stepped, feeling his jitters affect his stride.

  Mr Green Bowtie at the kiosk had bought his paper and was standing with it spread wide. Next to him, browsing the magazines, was a rougher sort, in blue overalls. To the left, a couple of German soldiers were walking imperiously through their city, chatting with an officer. There was an ease between the ranks that would shock the British, thought Harry; they sometimes even ate the same food in the same messes. Ahead, to the right, was his Odile, still unmoving at the kerbside.

  The Bowtie man with the taste for good coffee let the newspaper flutter to the ground. Odile had seen Harry now, but her face did not change expression. He glimpsed the sorrow in her eyes, moments before she squeezed them tight shut.

  Harry heard the snick of a handgun’s slide being drawn back directly in front of him. Green Bowtie man was standing legs akimbo, a Browning automatic raised and aimed in his right hand, the left bracing the wrist.

  The blue-overalled man had produced a Sten gun and was pointing it from waist height. Harry looked back at Le Rosebud, thinking the Resistance was about to hit someone within the café; half a dozen faces stared back at him, open-mouthed.

  Harry was the target.

  She’d told them.

  Harry tried shouting to Odile, to tell her she had it wrong, to call them off, but the first shot snatched the words away as the bullet plunged into his flesh and spun him around.

  There was a rapid chatter from the Sten and more punches into his body, this time across his shoulders, sending him crashing into Le Rosebud’s window, which wobbled and shattered around him. Harry lay still, listening to the blood roar out of him.

  There were shouts, and more shots as the German soldiers opened fire and the screech of locked brakes as a car swept up to take the assassins away. He was aware of someone kneeling next to him, talking.

  As more figures crowded around him, he managed to raise his head and look up across the street, at the empty space where Odile had stood only a few moments previously, before he slumped back into blackness.

  Twenty-six

  London, June 1943

  IT IS ODD HOW the death of strangers can affect you, thought Anthony Neave. He had never been a fan of actors or movie stars, but he had heard Leslie Howard on the Brains Trust and enjoyed some of his rousing patriotic speeches, and when the news came that the BOAC DC-3 carrying him from Lisbon had been shot down over the Bay of Biscay, he was strangely moved.

  The initial scare that Winston Churchill was on board had caused a terrible panic but Dansey had quickly doused that rumour. What was peculiar was that no airliner on the Lisbon-London route had ever been attacked before, and this one was blown out of the sky by a whole squadron of Junkers 88s.

  Neave, still pondering the tragedy of Howard’s death, managed to find Kim Philby’s Chelsea house easily enough. There was a loud burble of conversation and laughter spilling out of the open doors and windows. He didn’t have to knock, but pushed open the door and stepped into a Technicolored world, far removed from monotone London. The women wore bright floral dresses or blouses and most of the men were out of uniform, many wearing sweaters Neave thought more suited to the golf course. Expensive art adorned the brightly painted walls and glasses were so full that the contents were being slopped onto the wooden floor. He felt stiff and overdressed in his Major’s outfit.

  The air was heavy with cigarette smoke and garbled, almost hysterical talk, with a rich seam of American accents running through the babble, which probably explained the informality. The house itself was light, airy and grand. The flooring was oak, the doorknobs crystal, the chairs Hepplewhite. Philby must have married well to afford all this, Neave thought, as SIS salaries didn’t usually run to Hepplewhites.

  Neave pushed his way through to the rear, where French windows had been thrown open into the garden. He could smell food, proper sausages cooking, and there were bought biscuits, not misshapen homemade efforts, and a bowl of oranges that he stared at for a second, as if they were something alien, the dimpled skin almost obscenely lurid. And there were great decadent piles of chocolate on the sideboard, another contribution from Uncle Sam, no doubt.

  He found Philby opening a bottle of champagne in the kitchen. None of that awful South African sherry which had become the party staple for everyone else. Philby had yet another promotion to celebrate, and he was doing it in war-be-damned style. ‘Neave! Glad you could make it. H-here, hold this glass.’ The stutter was much diminished from the odd occasions when he had bumped into the man around Broadway Buildings or the Foreign Office. In fact, so casual was their acquaintance, Neave had been surprised at the invitation.

  ‘Diana here?’ Philby remembered the name of Neave’s wife.

  ‘No, bit under the weather I’m afraid. Sends her apologies.’ In fact they had had one of their first rows. Neave had foolishly let slip he wanted to go on one of the Motor Torpedo Boat runs across to Brittany and she had exploded at the thought of him
being captured again. He’d tried to explain the feeling of cowardice that overtook him when he had to send others into the field, but she would have none of it.

  Diana knew all about covert operations, as she worked for the Political Warfare Executive on the black propaganda broadcasts to Occupied Europe that came out of Bush House—a fact that Dansey must have known when he recommended at the racecourse that Neave tell her what he did. He never did get round to clarifying the nature of his work to his new wife, and neither did she, and they had only discovered that they were both in intelligence when they bumped into each other on a restricted floor of the War Office.

  The argument had ended in a stalemate, mainly because she knew the PWE had lost agents on those MTB runs. The evening had been soured by the unfamiliar hostility, and she had decided to skip Philby’s summer party.

  ‘Bit of a shock about Leslie Howard,’ said Neave by way of conversation.

  ‘What? Yes. Imagine the Krauts’ faces when they thought they had killed Churchill and it turns out it’s the manager of that chap from Gone With The Wind. Dead ringer for Winnie, apparently. Shame, but it was all in a good cause.’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘Well, letting it get shot down,’ said Philby. ‘It meant they weren’t looking for Winston elsewhere and he got back into the country safely.’

  ‘You mean …’ Neave lowered his voice as someone pushed by. ‘It was a deliberate decoy?’

  Philby also dropped down to a whisper. ‘Yes. We knew the Germans had targeted the flight, but couldn’t let on, or they might have rumbled the source.’

  Neave swallowed hard. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Look, two people were taken off that plane at the last minute. Just so happens, strangest coincidence, they were Dansey’s agents.’ He winked.

  Before the scale of this monstrosity could sink in, Philby reached over and tugged at someone’s sleeve, dragging him across. ‘Ah, Graham, yes, come here, come here … Anthony Neave, Graham Greene. You two know each other?’