Staying Alive Read online

  ‘For instance – you and I might have been parked in some boarding-house. Or if it was to be a short stop and quick change-over, here on this bench say. The agent who’d brought us would have some way of signalling that two parcels were awaiting collection and on-carriage. Could be some object in a shop window, a card on a ‘jobs wanted’ noticeboard or a message in a bar or barber’s shop. We’d be picked up and moved on, by people we’d never seen before and wouldn’t know from bars of soap. The shopkeeper or barman would be nothing but a middleman, he/she’d never meet us or the escorts; if we should be nobbled by Gestapo or Vichy police there’d be nothing they could get out of us, we’d – well—’

  ‘Die screaming?’

  ‘Oh.’ A grimace. ‘Conceivably.’

  ‘You and your kind were extraordinary people, Rosie.’ I corrected that: ‘Are extraordinary, I should say.’ I’d noted down ‘cut-outs’ and ‘colis’, which would be enough to trigger all that stuff and the images it conjured up of Rosie and others like her; and asked her now, to restart the flow of reminiscence, ‘So Voreux’s escape-line was broken into, meaning some arrests, but obviously they didn’t get to him – or to his sister either?’

  ‘By that time he’d transferred himself down here to the south, end of the line, there’d have been dozens of cut-outs between him and his sister at the Paris end. But the Abwehr or Gestapo shortly afterwards got the pianist of a BCRA group in Montpellier, and that was another serious blow to him. From this end, you see, he’d have been sending evaders on the final stages of their journeys either via Narbonne–Perpignan to the border guides – passeurs, Spaniards, mostly smugglers – who’d take them over the Pyrenees, or he’d be escorting them to night-time pick-ups by feluccas that operated out of Gibraltar to and from various places on this coast. To the Riviera generally, I believe, but within our reach from here – Barcarès, for instance, or Canet-Plage. He took them there and saw them away himself. But as it happened, all of this had become rather less than certain at the time of my own arrival, since with Boches taking over from the much less keen-eyed gendarmerie it was on the cards that the feluccas might have to pack it in.’

  ‘Was Voreux still getting escapers out, then – that’s to say after his line had been busted?’

  ‘Call them “evaders” rather than “escapers”. Shot-down aircrew, RAF and USAF evading capture, Jews evading roundups and the gas-chambers. “Escapers” would literally have escaped – from prisons, Gestapo or Vichy police, so forth. The Pétain regime was extremely anti-Semitic, you know. And Narbonne and Perpignan had become dangerous places for anyone in transit long before the Boches took over.’ Rosie shrugged. ‘Anyway, that had been Marc’s business until about the time I joined the réseau. There probably were a few stragglers still en route.’

  ‘For whom he’d still have felt responsible.’

  ‘Well, surely. Some from other BCRA operations maybe. There were incomers too – again, BCRA people, some of whom would have needed to be met wherever they were landed, guided to safe-houses or put on trains, whatever. Hence his need of external communications, i.e. the radio link – not with Gibraltar, only via London – well, Sevenoaks – which in fact was what brought him to us. Actually he went for help to a woman we knew by two code-names, “Germaine” or “Marie”. American, correspondent in Lyon of the New York Post, worked I was told for SIS as well as SOE, knew everyone in Lyon including the police and – well, just everyone. Her apartment was a safe-house for agents on the run, and she had others at her disposal – flats belonging to her friends. She and Jake knew each other, from previous activities of his in and around Lyon; it was an important centre for us, you know, biggest city in the Zone Non-Occupée, Zone No-No as one called it then. Anyway, Germaine a.k.a. Marie was on her skates too, a day or so before the bastards began moving in.’

  ‘Got away all right, did she?’

  ‘Yes. Over the Pyrenees, the route by which she’d sent God knows how many… Memory’s stirring now, though – her real name was Virginia Hall, and before she set up shop in Vichy France she was the Post’s correspondent in Spain. She’d been there during the Civil War, I think.’

  ‘Voreux went to her for help?’

  A nod. ‘She put him on to Jake – messages passed through London, so all above-board, bona fides vouched for and in any case guaranteed by her, Voreux presumably checked out with BCRA. And Jake arranged for the pianist he had then – man with the code-name “Wiggy” – to send and receive Marc’s stuff as well as our own. In fact there wasn’t all that much, most of it preceded or coincided with visits from the feluccas. Requests for pick-ups, dates, times, locations, numbers arriving and/or waiting. Freight too, on occasion.’

  She’d paused, with a hand on my arm: ‘I haven’t yet mentioned how Marc Voreux had established himself as something of a specialist on the coast – as long as the feluccas kept coming. Guess what he dealt in?’

  ‘Save time, tell me?’

  ‘The answer’s fish, which he bought from fishermen along that stretch of coast. He’d got to know them all and had acquired this van, supplied restaurants and hotels and had some private, well-off customers too, even Vichy establishment clientèle, gendarmerie barracks for instance. How he got away with it – well, you might say just his bloody nerve, together with a sharp eye for the main chance – source of excellent food in a hungry, rationed country – and having what you might call a way with him. Charm, I suppose – which he certainly did have – combined with a thick skin. Gendarmes seemed to treat him as a bit of a joke, a card… For instance, the fact he could live on his fish business – well, lobsters mostly, and crabs, and – oh, anchovies from Collioure – and ran a petrol-driven van, which meant the huge overhead of black-market petrol – well, he let them guess that he was into smuggling – Pyrenean, of which there was plenty, cigarettes and believe it or not saccharin being the prime commodities – also maybe by his friends the fishermen, their boats meeting larger ones a few miles out – that sort of thing. Gendarmes would stop him sometimes and search him and the van – and the place he lived in – forget its name – and he’d laugh at them, give them a crab or something to take home. They’d say “Ah, c’est un gars, celui-ci” – one with a heart, you know?’

  ‘In fact he’d have been funded by the réseau?’

  ‘Sure. By Jake. Partly by the lobsters etcetera, but Jake stumped up when he had to, apparently. Seemed worth it, after all, Marc’s usefulness actually no less than Déclan’s. In fact after a while Jake decided it was costing too much, and over Marc’s protests he got Déclan to convert the van from petrol to gazo. So then, distance was no object – and in regard to me for instance, Jake’s thinking was that both of them, but probably Voreux more than Déclan, would cart me around to suitably remote places from which to do my stuff. Not bad thinking either – in theory anyway – using both of them and places as far apart as possible, so that the Boche radio interceptors might get to think there had to be more than one of me – and no sound reason to assume either of us was based in Toulouse. Except – well, brings me back to what I was saying about Marc making use of Jake’s pianist – name on the ground here Roger St Droix, code-name Wiggy. When he came to grief – vanished overnight, complete with his transceiver and bicycle – Jake then having no pianist and needing one quite badly, first of all to report Wiggy’s disappearance and ask for a new pianist to be sent out, which of course is where I come into it – but also to arrange para-chutages of weaponry for which certain Maquis bands were clamouring. So he – Jake – paid a visit to “Germaine” in Lyon, and she fixed up for his stuff to be handled for the time being by some pianist in that area. Which became Jake’s only link with Baker Street until I dropped in, so Jake himself and then couriers Déclan and Voreux had a good deal of toing and froing over a period of – well, I think, several weeks.’

  ‘Must have been glad to see you.’

  ‘Sure they were. Toulouse to Lyon being more than five hundred kilometres, and even without Boches
in the Zone No-No the train journey would have had its anxious moments. Checks not only at both ends but just about anywhere else along the route – and the Vichy security police, DST, weren’t amateurs. For that matter there were Gestapo at work right there in Lyon. Shouldn’t have been, but were; that bastard Laval colluded heavily with the Germans, of course – mainly through the Vichy chief of police, René Bousquet. Who as you may remember was a buddy of François Mitterrand.’

  ‘And was admired by Himmler, I read somewhere. Anyone ever get to know what had happened to Wiggy?’

  ‘Not in any detail, but broadly, yes. That night he’d been transmitting from somewhere near Albi, Déclan told Jake. Albi’s about seventy-five kilometres from Toulouse; it’s where Toulouse-Lautrec came from, also has a cathedral and a palace of great antiquity and it was going to feature in the book Wiggy was writing, a history of the area. First thing next morning he’d intended visiting the Mairie for purposes of research. Déclan, who the evening before had brought him from Montauban and dropped him and his bike a few miles outside the town, was going to meet him at noon and bring him back. But Wiggy didn’t show up, hadn’t been in touch with the Mairie either, they’d never heard of him or of his book, and Déclan found no clues or traces anywhere around the place he’d left him. All one can say is he’d somehow come to grief during the dark hours – and before you ask, Sevenoaks had no record of his having been on the air that night. Must’ve been caught or killed before getting down to it – which suggests they’d been on his tail, except that in that case they’d also have been on Déclan’s – and weren’t. Poor old Wiggy, though. Jake had become fond of him – a jolly, roly-poly character, he said he was. He’d come in originally by felucca, by the way.’

  ‘Met by Voreux?’

  ‘No, silly. Marc wasn’t anywhere near us at that stage, he’d still have been running his escape-line. No, Wiggy would have been put down on some beach, got himself here under his own power so to speak, and gone through a contact-making procedure with Jake, the sort of charade I was telling you I went through with him.’ She asked me, ‘D’you know what a felucca is, by the way?’

  ‘The only ones I ever encountered were in Egypt – Alexandria and Port Said. Small craft with a lateen sail or two.’

  ‘These weren’t all that small. Twenty-tonners. Sails, yes, but an engine too. One of them had an engine taken out of an old lorry. And they were crewed and skippered by Poles. Two of them – I did know the skippers’ names, but—’

  ‘Sort of job one could imagine your Ben being attracted to.’

  ‘Maybe. But that pair were described as being too rough even for the Polish navy.’

  ‘What I meant was – you know, small, cranky ships, hostile coast – bloody dangerous—’

  ‘Ben’s milieu, all right.’

  ‘Perfect match for you, Rosie, wasn’t he.’ I checked the time. ‘Coming up four-thirty. How about we start back at five, and I collect you at your hotel again at – what, seven-thirty, then the Colombier again?’

  ‘Using taxis for that bit?’

  ‘Certainly using taxis!’

  ‘You’re on, then. Where was I… Oh, yes – Jake and I prowling around that wooded area, Jake limping along talking about – oh, everything under the sun. For instance I was going to need a bicycle – and bless him, he’d already got me one…’

  * * *

  Jake – whom she was going to have to get used to calling ‘Jean’, since that was his field-name, although ‘Jake’ for some reason sprang more readily to mind – Jake/Jean had told her, ‘Haven’t paid for it yet. Been a bit short, tell you the truth, and they’re like gold-dust. Now I can use some of the cash you’ve brought. The bike’s at Berthe Devrèque’s house, did belong to one of her colleagues, has quite a large panier on it as well as a baggage thing at the back.’

  ‘And I can receive from the attic, you said.’

  ‘You’ll want to confirm you’ve arrived on station, won’t you – and establish a schedule for receiving – say an hour around midnight on certain days, two or three nights a week? You won’t need skeds for transmitting, they’ll be listening-out for you round the clock in any case – especially now, with these jobs pending, when you’ve something to send, just bung it out. From suitably distant locations, preferably, and using Voreux and Déclan when available – bike in the vehicle, transceiver ditto – stashed in Déclan’s toolkit or Voreux’s fish-boxes?’

  She’d been waiting for him to draw breath. OK, she was a novice in the field, but she had learnt the rudiments of the business, and knew all the radio stuff backwards. She told him, ‘I’ll make my first transmission tomorrow or the day after, and independently – by which I mean I’ll have a squint at the map, load the set on the bike and shove off, solo. Is whatever you’ve got encoded yet?’

  ‘No, because—’

  ‘I’ll do it tonight. Either in the one first transmission or split up, depending on how much there is and where I am, how things look and feel. Mark your stuff according to priority? Because it has to be my decision, Jean – every time. What I mean is I’m not going to do a Wiggy.’

  ‘We might do the encoding together this evening. Actually there isn’t so much of it, I’m sure you’ll make it in one transmission. But – do a Wiggy?’

  ‘Get caught on the job. You’re the boss, sure, but the radio’s my business and I’m set on staying in business.’

  ‘Glad to hear that, Suzie.’

  Drily, as if humouring a child. She pressed on: Is any other réseau who may have lost their pianist likely to be leaning on us for help?’

  ‘No question of it.’

  ‘Good. All that stuff about Raoul and BCRA – frankly, I’d opt out.’

  ‘Don’t worry. That was a crisis situation that won’t repeat itself.’

  ‘What about Voreux’s escape-line – if it got to be reactivated?’

  ‘By the sister, you mean. Well, that might be tricky, but (a) it’s not at all likely, (b) if anything of the sort was proposed I’d both resist it and discuss it with you.’

  ‘And definitely no outsiders.’

  ‘Count on it. Anything else?’

  ‘Yes. I need two more transceiver sets, and batteries for them. Having to lump one set around from place to place really isn’t on. OK for now, can’t do anything else, but – you’ll agree, I’m sure, three is really minimal, keeping one in Berthe Whatsit’s attic for receiving?’

  ‘If they’ll give us two more sets.’

  ‘They will. I nagged them about it before I left, and they promised.’

  ‘Only bear in mind that when you’re receiving you still have to put out an “OK, go ahead” and finally a “Right, message received” – so you’re not completely detector-proof – huh?’

  She smiled at him. ‘Before I went into training for fieldwork, Jean, I worked in Sevenoaks as a radio operator for the best part of two years.’

  A smile. ‘So I’m teaching my granddaughter to suck eggs.’

  ‘If the inward traffic ever got dangerously heavy, granddad, I’d have to shift elsewhere for receiving too.’

  ‘Ask for the extra sets in your first transmission, will you?’

  ‘And hope they’ll come in the next drop. But what about this now. Wiggy had two sets – didn’t he? One vanished with him, the other must have been stashed elsewhere – wherever he was living, or maybe in Voreux’s keeping?’

  ‘No such luck. You’re right that he had two sets, but neither Déclan nor Voreux knew where the second one might be, and I visited his digs myself – two rooms over a greengrocer’s shop – and the answer you might say was a lemon.’

  She’d shrugged. ‘Hidden in some cowshed. Anyway I’ll ask for two.’

  ‘If they do get them into this parachutage, won’t be so bad – maybe no more than a week or so.’

  He’d told her there were probably to be two parachutages, the first dropping-site and lists of contents already agreed, but that for the time being it was only possible to
concentrate on the first – settle on a date for it, with time enough to warn the Maquis bands who’d be on the receiving end, then confirm to London. Ideally he’d have liked more of an interval between the drop and the operation – ‘Hardball’, Baker Street was calling it – for training purposes. ‘OK, most of the boys in those Maquis bands have had military experience, but some not enough and a few none at all. There’s also the fact British weaponry will be new to a lot of them.’

  ‘These being people you’ve worked with before?’

  ‘Yes. But they’ve had a lot joining them just lately – and with the arrival of the Boches, that’s likely to speed up, if anything. In fact it’s bound to. Actually one of the bands is led by a very experienced soldier, former legionnaire, so—’

  ‘Who’d be doing the training, if there was time for it?’

  ‘Well, I would. Assisted by Déclan, and if possible I’d use that guy too. It’s mostly Sten guns and ammo they need. The nub of it though is that the job itself will be done by a visiting team of French commandos, Maquis as backup, while our part in it’s to look after them – meet, accommodate, arrange transport, arrange the Maquis collaboration, then touch wood get the commandos away home again.’