Berlin Duet (eBook)

One

11 November 1942 Languedoc-Roussillon, Vichy France

Dismounting half a mile short of the rendezvous, Harry Taverner began to wheel his bicycle up the track that led into the hills above the village. The late autumn sky was bright and clear and as the path steepened, the view offered itself to him. Ahead, the Corbières rose in folds of arid scrub, dotted with olive trees and rocky defiles. To his right was the sea, flecked with white foam; at his back, the snow-capped Pyrénées. An almost perfect world, he thought. Certainly too perfect to be at war.

To ease the climb and to calm his nerves he sang the jaunty ‘Paris Sera Toujours Paris’ that had been popular before the city fell. And because there was no one to hear him, he sang the lyrics softly but in English – his own little act of defiance against an imagined chorus of marching jackboots. ‘Paris will always be Paris… despite the deep darkness, its brilliance cannot be darkened… Paris will always be Paris!’

His destination was a dilapidated capitelle, a shepherd’s shelter of dry stone with a missing roof. From there you could look down to the village, which lay in a narrow col between this hill and the one to the north, where a ruined castle stood.

Harry had rejected the castle as a rendezvous because it was favoured by courting couples – which he and Anna Cantrell had long ago assured each other they were most definitely not. Not in Paris. Not in Berlin. Not in Vienna. Not now, not ever. The world could wait until it turned to dust and nobody bothered with love any more, because Harry Taverner and Anna Cantrell had a war to win. Besides, the gendarmes in Narbonne were in the habit of raiding the place, searching for contraband wine the village hadn’t already sent to Paris for German consumption.

By the time Harry reached the crest he was sweating heavily inside his coat. He propped the cycle against the crumbling stone wall of the capitelle and glanced at his watch. He was half an hour early.

Dipping into his pannier pack, he retrieved a canvas binocular case and an apple. Squatting down amongst the clumps of wild thyme, he set the apple between his feet. With his hands free he removed the Air Ministry field glasses from their stowage, put them to his eyes and adjusted the focus. Then he began to study the scene in the col below – to pass the time as much as for security – breaking off every now and then for a bite of the apple.

Harry Taverner had taken the coastal road north from Perpignan in slow time because a speeding cyclist drew attention anywhere. Once it wouldn’t have mattered: since the fall of France, two and a half years before, the Germans had left the Zone Libre, the unoccupied sector run by the puppet government in Vichy, pretty much to its own devices. And while the gendarmerie was happy to do the Nazis’ dirty work for them, Harry was confident his name was not to be found on any list in the Gestapo’s headquarters on the Avenue Foch in Paris.

But, three days ago, everything had changed. An Allied army had landed in French North Africa. Now the Germans had responded by invading Vichy France. Since crossing the Spanish border, Harry had passed a steady stream of frightened people heading south. Whenever his gaze met theirs, he saw the same taut expressions, the same anxious eyes he’d seen in 1940 when France had fallen. Some travelled on foot, others in donkey carts, on horseback, or even in motorcars, though God alone knew where they’d found the petrol. He’d seen men in the suits they wore to Sunday Mass, feigning cheerfulness for the sake of nervous wives and children. He’d seen the elderly hiding their fear behind a brittle stoicism, while they wondered if they’d live long enough to see home again.

It must be like this after an earthquake, he thought.

If any of them had wondered why a young man on a bicycle was heading in the opposite direction, they were too preoccupied to call out and enquire. They must surely have recognized him as a foreigner. Tall, long-limbed and with a grace that bordered on the balletic, a loose fringe of flaxen hair habitually falling over the right temple at inappropriate moments but otherwise cut high around the ears and nape, Harry had no need to call out in his well-modulated voice, ‘I say, old chap, what a dreadfully rum do’, to identify his Anglo-Saxon origins. He might as well have carried a tag tied to his lapel that read: If found, please return to the green and pleasant shires of England.

He even had a dimple in the centre of his otherwise strong chin – put there, so his mother told him when he was ten, to remind him that God gives blemishes just as He gives perfections: to see what people’s characters will make of them. At prep school, being by nature a solitary boy with an imagination, he’d told his classmates it was a scar inflicted in Australia by Ned Kelly’s outlaws, who’d shot him with a pearl-handled revolver. They had believed him without question, until the maths master, Mr Foreman, on learning of his preposterous claim, had slippered Harry into confession and repentance. It had been his first lesson in the art of the covert: even a single crack in your cover makes it no cover at all.

Like many an English prep-school teacher of that era, Mr Foreman could have taught the Nazis a thing or two, Harry reckoned with a wry smile. But to give him his due, were it not for his appetite for punishing schoolboy sins, Harry might never have perfected the skill of lying through his teeth while maintaining a straight face.

Take as evidence his presence there today. Although his French was good, it was nowhere near good enough to support the Carte d’Identité de Français he carried. To help him out, the forgers in London had included amongst the thirteen digits on its front cover that recorded his civil status (sex, place and date of birth) two that also identified him as foreign-born. On the inside page, the box recording his place of birth stated Île de Guernesey.

The island of Guernsey – British but occupied – with a centuries-long connection with France, would account for the English-accented French. And if all else failed, as a last resort, he carried in the pack strapped to the pannier of his cycle a rolled-up dark blue blouse. It bore the insignia of an RAF wireless operator/ air-gunner. If the Vichy police caught him and sent him to Paris for the Gestapo to gnaw over, he’d claim to be a downed flier. With a bit of luck, he’d end up in a Stalag.

The alternative didn’t bear thinking about.

In London’s ideal world, Harry would never have been their pick for Anna Cantrell’s case officer. Certainly not as her courier. The Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, would have picked a native-born Frenchman, or a Spaniard antithetical to the fascists. But Anna was his. Anna Cantrell – la photojournaliste Américaine – was his star.

Harry had recruited her in Berlin before the war. Born to an American mother and an English father, her US passport was her protection. It gave her the freedom to live unmolested in Vichy France, because Pétain’s regime had not yet declared war on America. But that protection had vanished two days ago, when the first German Panzer rolled across Vichy’s border.

It was time for Anna to get out. And Harry was on his way to deliver the news in person.

‘What about a radio?’ Anna had once suggested to him over a cognac in an almost empty bar in Port Leucate. Harry had almost had a coronary on the spot. ‘Out of the question!’ he’d told her in a harsh whisper. Wireless sets were as precious as gold dust. Most were earmarked for the networks in the occupied zone. Besides, the Gestapo monitored the ether for suspicious transmissions. And they weren’t listening to Tommy Handley on It’s That Man Again. They could triangulate the approximate location of a sender in minutes.

And so Harry had appointed himself to the post of His Britannic Majesty’s secret ambassador to the court of Queen Anna. With a little help from the British consulate in neutral Spain, and favourable-minded officials of the Spanish Ministry of the Interior, he had rented a house in Portbou on the Spanish side of the border, from which he could make his stately embassies northwards on his black-framed Motobécane, returning with Anna’s secret state papers rolled up in the piston of his bicycle pump.

Observing the village through his binoculars, Harry once again saw how it lay astride a single road that sliced inland from the coast, splitting the terracotta-roofed houses into two opposing ranks that faced each other across the cobbles like Napoleonic regiments awaiting the order to fire their muskets.

At the foot of the village the street parted around a small island where a café stood, and an old plane tree that in summer provided shade for the customers sitting at their tables. Although hidden from him now, Harry knew that beside the café door the Vichy authorities had plastered a poster of a joyful-looking, sun-kissed teenager with a pickaxe over one shoulder: Français! Allez travailler en Allemagne, invited the slogan. Frenchmen! Go to work in Germany. It mentioned nothing about becoming a slave labourer.

His gaze took in the simple stone houses. It lingered on their arched entrances, checking for doors cracked open just enough to give a...