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

on rue de Duras called Pierre et Fils; it’s near the embassy but also round the corner from rue des Saussaies. One question, though: there are two routes open to us, the official one and the unofficial one. Which one would you prefer?’

‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

‘The official one is rather like the épuration légale – it will mean putting in a request to the French authorities, asking them to start an investigation, et cetera. The unofficial one will be more like the épuration sauvage.’

‘Which one would you suggest?’

‘I think you know the answer to that.’

‘This is Marguerite.’

They were at the rear of the bar on rue de Duras, sitting in a high-backed banquette with what they assumed were fading ancestors of Pierre and his son staring down at them from the wall. The woman who’d come in with Wilson was perhaps in her mid-thirties; slightly younger than Prince and Hanne. There was some brief chat about the weather as they waited for the coffees to arrive, and Marguerite confirmed she was happy to talk in English. She spoke to the waiter, and soon afterwards, an opened bottle of cognac appeared on the table. She poured some into all their cups without asking.

‘Santé! You need help, I’m told?’

Hanne repeated the story she’d told Wilson the previous evening.

‘We’ll see what we can do. Let me tell you briefly about myself first.’ Marguerite paused as she drank some of her coffee, then topped the cup up with cognac before taking a packet of Gitanes from her handbag and offering them round. She took time to light her own, and soon the group was wreathed in a cloud of the strong tobacco.

‘The Germans occupied Paris on the fourteenth of June 1940: before then, I led the classic life of a bourgeois wife. My husband ran his family business, which manufactures and supplies paper products, and we lived in Saint-Germain in the 7th arrondissement in a beautiful apartment with views over the Champs de Mars. Two or three days a week I helped a friend out in her boutique on Avenue de Friedland.

‘In truth, the occupation did not make a great deal of difference to our lives, although of course we all shook our heads and said how appalling it was. But in our case we were fine. We’d never been political, and my husband’s business prospered considerably, as he gained contracts from the Germans for supplying paper and stationery products. You see, what you must understand is that most people could just continue with their lives and ignore the reality of the situation so long as it was not affecting them directly. But as the war went on, people began to find they needed to come off the fence – is that the correct phrase?’

The others nodded.

‘For me, that happened in July 1942, when more than thirteen thousand Jews were arrested in Paris and taken to deportation centres and from there to Auschwitz – it was known as the grand rafle. Tens of thousands more were to follow them, and of course we now know that hardly any returned. From that point on it was impossible to ignore the situation.

‘Now my husband – his name is Eugène, by the way – had an accountant based in rue Saint-Lazare in the 9th, an old established practice that the business had used for a long while, though Eugène felt they were too old-fashioned for him and was looking to get out of their arrangement.

‘One morning he arrived early for a meeting at their offices and a junior employee let him in. While he was waiting, he went to look for the bathroom but got lost, and to cut a long story short – he recounted it to me in great detail, I promise you – he opened the door to a room where a family was hiding. As he said, it was obvious they were Jews. The accountant pleaded with him to keep it quiet – he said the father was his optician and he was hiding them until the resistance could get them out of Paris – but Eugène ignored him and reported it to the authorities immediately. He said it meant he could kill two birds with one stone: he got rid of more Jews and he was able to get out of his arrangement with the accountants.

‘When he told me this over dinner that evening, he was very pleased with himself, but I was appalled and decided that I had to do something. My younger brother’s in-laws were socialists before the war, and I suspected some of them might be involved in the resistance. After a few weeks of sending messages and meeting one of them, I became involved too. The organisation I belonged to was Les Mouvements Unis de la Résistance – a group linked with the Armée Secrète. I became active in the unit that covered the 9th arrondissement – they always tried to put you in a unit in a different area from the one you lived in. I delivered messages and money, liaised with other groups and helped people to evade the authorities. I never carried out any actions, but I did take weapons and explosives to people who did. I remained with my husband the whole time, because it was perfect cover, and in any case, by then he had a contract with the German military high command, which was based at the Hotel Majestic on Avenue Kléber. He would often have copies of the material he printed for them in his study, and I was sometimes able to take documents and pass them on to the resistance.

‘Since the liberation, I have maintained my contacts: my main motivation is to ensure that people who collaborated with the Germans should not get away with it.’ She stubbed her cigarette out in a metal ashtray and poured more cognac into her cup.

‘And your husband?’

She laughed bitterly as she lit another Gitanes and began to smoke it as