End of Spies, Alex Gerlis [important of reading books txt] 📗

Faubourg Saint-Honoré, helping to establish the MI6 station there. ‘He’s got a bloody good network of contacts.’

‘Start at the beginning. I say, is your steak a bit tough?’

Prince gestured to Hanne, whom Wilson had ignored until now. She placed her cutlery carefully on her plate, sipped some wine and began; her Danish accent barely noticeable. ‘In December 1943, an SOE circuit in Dijon was broken up by the Germans—’

‘Yes, Tractor I think it was. Chap known as the Captain seems to have betrayed them. He’s on my “must find” list. Carry on.’

‘An SOE agent called Christine Butler was captured; she was using the name Thérèse Dufour. Her radio operator was either killed or killed himself. A Gestapo officer came down from Paris to interrogate her, but she was so badly injured by him she was taken to the infirmary at Dijon prison. A couple of days later, the same Gestapo officer ordered her to be carried out of the prison, where he shot her.’

‘Did he get anything from her?’

‘Nothing of any use to the Germans, no. We need to find this man. Other than his description, the only thing we know about him is that his nickname was the Ferret, and that a few months later he was based in Amsterdam, where he did something similar to what happened in Dijon. A network was captured in Enschede, and he turned up and killed the head of the local resistance. Another of our SOE agents died in his custody.’

‘And you think he’s here in Paris?’ Wilson waved his knife above his head to indicate the city and wiped his face with the large serviette.

‘We don’t know. We do know he was in Munich in August, when the Americans let him slip out of their grasp. I’d be most surprised if he’d returned here, but we think Paris may hold the clue to his real identity.’

‘Tom didn’t go into too much detail, but he did say you were both first-class agents and had spent a considerable amount of time behind enemy lines.’

They both nodded.

‘This place sometimes feels like it’s still occupied at times.’ Wilson leaned forward as he lowered his voice. ‘It’s bloody difficult working here, to be frank with you. Not easy to know who’s in charge. At first it was the resistance calling all the shots, though now de Gaulle seems to have a firmer hand on the rudder, but it all feels rather anarchic at times. Hardest thing from our point of view is knowing who the hell to believe. Everyone claims to have been in the resistance, but the truth is there was an enormous amount of collaboration: for a long time the German occupation was relatively trouble-free, and the reason for that is the number of French people who went along with it. I call them the passive collaborators – the more active ones were the traitors. I say, do you mind if I order another bottle?’

When the wine arrived, Prince told the sommelier to fill all three glasses, and Wilson looked somewhat put out.

‘Since the liberation, we’ve experienced what the French are calling the épuration. You’ve heard the word?’

Both Richard and Hanne shook their heads.

‘It translates as “purge”, and there are two versions of it – the state purge of collaborators, or épuration légale, and the unofficial version of it, épuration sauvage. That’s what I mean by anarchy. The country has turned on itself to settle scores, and the result is utter chaos. It’s quite unedifying. A French chap I know told me it’s as if the French people resent collaborators far more than they ever did the occupying German forces. The prisons are full of collaborators awaiting trial, and plenty of them are being dealt with unofficially. The resistance groups are still active, and most nights collaborators are taken from their homes and found dead in a ditch the next day. So if you want to know the Ferret’s true identity, you just need to pray that anyone who was aware of it hasn’t been killed yet.’

‘What about the Germans – the Gestapo?’

‘They fled: the general strike in Paris started on the fifteenth of August last year, and the uprising four days later, so they had plenty of opportunity to get out before von Choltitz surrendered the city on the twenty-fifth. Ten days seems to have been ample time for them to destroy any records they were leaving behind and bugger off, if you’ll excuse my language. I think your best chance is to find French citizens who worked for the Gestapo.’

‘Were there many of them?’

‘Enough. Does that surprise you?’

‘It does, actually,’ said Hanne. ‘In Copenhagen, it was almost entirely Germans who worked for the Gestapo.’

‘Well then, this isn’t Copenhagen, is it? Though many of the French citizens who were known to have worked for them and were arrested at the time have since been killed. Do you know where your Ferret worked when he was in Paris?’

‘For the Gestapo.’

‘Yes, yes, I’m aware of that, but they had two main offices here. Their headquarters was in rue des Saussaies in the 8th arrondissement, not far from our embassy actually and close to the Élysée Palace, but they also used 84 Avenue Foch, at the other end of the Champs-Élysées, which in many ways was better known – notorious may be a more accurate way of describing it. It was the SS headquarters, and the Gestapo had the sixth floor, I think. A lot of their interrogations were carried out there. If we had some idea of where the Ferret worked, it would help.’

Again they shook their heads.

‘And you say you have a description of him?’

Prince opened a small black notebook he had by his side. ‘Here we are… late twenties – this was at the end of 1943, remember – thick blonde hair and bright blue eyes.’

‘And that’s really the best you can do? Hardly narrows it down, does it! Never mind, I’ll come up with something. Meet me at noon tomorrow: there’s a bar