Field Gray (31 page)

FRANCE, 1954

F
rom the grimy window in the holding cell at Paris’s Cherche-Midi prison I could just see the front of the Hôtel Lutetia, and for a long while I stood pressed into the cobwebbed corner, watching the hotel closely, as if I almost expected to see myself coming out of the door with poor little Renata Matter on my arm. It was hard to know whom I felt more sorry for, her or me, but eventually she edged it. She was dead, after all, when she would have had every reason to expect that she might still be alive. But for me. I didn’t spare myself anything in the way of reproach or blame. If only I hadn’t fixed her up with a job at the Adlon, I told myself, then she wouldn’t have been killed. If only I had left her here in Paris, then there would have been a small but nonetheless real possibility that she could have turned left out of the Lutetia, crossed the boulevard Raspail, and come to see me in the Cherche-Midi. It would have been easy enough. The Cherche-Midi was, after all, no longer a prison but a court, and like many others in Paris—most of them journalists—she might have gone there to see the trial of Carl Oberg and Helmut Knochen and seen me there, too, my hosts in the SDECE—a French counterespionage service—having thought it necessary to remind me that I was in their power, and that like Dreyfus, who had also been imprisoned in the Cherche-Midi, they could do what they liked with me now that I had been extradited to their custody.

Not that custody in Paris was such an enormous hardship. Not after everything else. Not after Mainz and the French Sûreté. They had been a little rough. And it was true that La Santé Prison, where I was currently held, wasn’t exactly the Lutetia, but the SDECE wasn’t so bad. Probably not as bad as the CIA, anyway; and certainly not as bad as the Russians. Besides, the food at La Santé was good and the coffee even better; the cigarettes were tasty and plentiful; and most of the interrogations at the Caserne Mortier—nicknamed “the Swimming Pool”—were conducted politely, often with a bottle of wine and some bread and cheese. Sometimes the French even gave me a newspaper to take back to La Santé. None of this was what I’d been expecting when I left WCPN1 in Landsberg. My French improved—enough to understand what was in the newspapers and a little of the proceedings on the day I went to court, which just happened to be the day when the military tribunal brought in its verdict and handed down the sentences. My hosts in French intelligence had a point they wanted to make, after all. I could hardly blame them for that.

We sat in the public gallery, which was full. A civil judge, M. Boessel du Bourg, and six military judges came into court and took their places in front of a large blackboard, so that I half expected them to write out the verdict and sentence with a piece of chalk. The civil judge wore robes and an extremely silly hat. The military judges were all wearing lots of medals, although it was unclear to me what any of these could have been for. Then the two accused were led into the dock. I hadn’t seen Oberg before, except on the German newsreels during the war. He wore a smart, double-breasted pin-striped suit and light-framed glasses. He looked like Eisenhower’s older brother. Knochen was thinner and grayer than I remembered: Prison does that to a man—that and a death sentence from the British hanging over your head. Knochen looked straight at me without showing any sign of his having recognized me. I wanted to shout at him that he was a damned liar, but, of course, I didn’t. When a man’s on trial for his life, it’s not good manners to bend his ear about something else.

At considerable length M. Boessel du Bourg read the verdict and then delivered the sentence, which was death, of course. This was the cue for lots of people in court to begin shouting at the two defendants, and—a little to my surprise—I found I was almost sorry for them. Once the two most powerful men in Paris, they now looked like two architects receiving the news that they hadn’t won an important contract. Oberg blinked with disbelief. Knochen let out a loud sigh of disappointment. And amid more abuse and jeers from all around me, the two Germans were led out of court. One of my SDECE escorts leaned toward me and said:

“Of course, they will appeal the sentences.”

“Still, I do get the point,” I said. “I am encouraged by Voltaire’s example.”

“You’ve read Voltaire?”

“Not as such, no. But I’d like to. Especially when one considers the alternative.”

“Which is?”

“It’s hard to read anything when your head is lying in a basket,” I said.

“All Germans like Voltaire, yes? Frederick the Great was a great friend of Voltaire, yes?”

“I think he was. At first.”

“Germans and French should be friends now.”

“Yes. Indeed. The Schuman plan. Exactly.”

“For this reason—I mean, for the sake of Franco-German relations—I think the appeal will be successful.”

“That’s good news,” I said, although I could hardly have cared less about Knochen’s fate. All the same, I was surprised at this conversational turn of events and I spent the drive back to the Swimming Pool feeling encouraged. Perhaps my prospects were improving after all. Despite the trial of Oberg and Knochen, and the verdict, there was perhaps good reason to imagine that the SDECE was keener on cooperation than coercion, and this suited me very well.

From the Cherche-Midi we drove east to the outskirts of Paris. The Caserne Mortier in the barracks of the Tourelles was a traditional-looking set of buildings near the boulevard Mortier in the Twentieth Arrondissement. Made of red brick and semirusticated sandstone, the C.M. held no obvious affinity with a swimming pool beyond an echo in the corridors and an Olympic-sized courtyard, which, when it rained, resembled an enormous pool of black water.

My interrogators were quiet-spoken but muscular. They wore plain clothes and did not give me their names. No more did they accuse me of anything. To my relief, they weren’t much interested in the events that had happened on the road to Lourdes in the summer of 1940. There were two of them. They had intense, birdlike faces, five-o’clock shadows that appeared just after lunch, damp shirt collars, nicotine-stained fingers, and espresso breath. They were cops, or something very like it. One of the men, the heavier smoker, had very white hair and very black eyebrows that looked like two lost caterpillars. The other was taller, with a whore’s sulky mouth, ears like the handles on a trophy, and an insomniac’s hooded, heavy eyes. The insomniac spoke quite good German, but mostly we spoke in English, and when that failed I took a shot at French and sometimes managed to hit what I was aiming at. But it was more of a conversation than an interrogation, and save for the holsters on their broad shoulders, we could have been three guys in a bar in Montmartre.

“Did you have much to do with the Carlingue?”

“The Carlingue? What’s that?”

“The French Gestapo. They worked out of rue Lauriston. Number ninety-three. Did you ever go there?”

“That must have been after my time.”

“They were criminals recruited by Knochen,” said Eyebrows. “Armenians, Muslims, North Africans, mostly.”

I smiled. This, or something like it, was what the French always said when they didn’t want to admit that almost as many Frenchmen as Germans had been Nazis. And given their postwar record in Vietnam and Algeria, it was tempting to see them as even more racist than we were in Germany. After all, no one had forced them to deport French Jews—including Dreyfus’s own granddaughter—to the death camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Naturally, I hardly wanted to hurt anyone’s feelings by saying so directly, but as the subject remained on the table, I shrugged and said:

“I knew some French policemen. The ones I’ve already told you about. But not any French Gestapo. Now, the French SS, that’s something else again. But none of them were Muslims. As I recall, they were nearly all Catholics.”

“Did you know many from the SS-Charlemagne?”

“A few.”

“Let’s talk about the ones you did know.”

“All right. Mostly they were Frenchmen captured by the Russians during the battle for Berlin in 1945. They were men in the POW camps, like I was. The Russians treated them the same way they treated us Germans. Badly. We were all fascists, as far as they were concerned. But really there was only one Frenchman in the camps I got to know well enough to call him a comrade.”

“What was his name?”

“Edgard,” I said. “Edgard de something or other.”

“Try to remember,” one of the Frenchmen said patiently.

“Boudin?” I shrugged. “De Boudin? I don’t know. It was a long time ago. A lifetime. Not a good lifetime, either. Some of those poor bastards are only just coming home now.”

“It couldn’t have been de Boudin.
Boudin
means ‘sausage’ or ‘pudding.’ That couldn’t have been his name.” He paused. “Try to think.”

I thought for a moment and then shrugged. “Sorry.”

“Maybe if you told us something of what you can remember of him, the name will come back to you,” suggested the other Frenchman. He uncorked a bottle of red wine, poured a little into a small round glass, and then sniffed it carefully before tasting it and pouring some more for me and the two of them. In that room, on that dull summer’s day, this small ritual made me feel civilized again, as if, after months of incarceration and abuse, I amounted to something more than just a name chalked on a little board by a cell door.

I toasted his courtesy, drank some wine, and said, “I first met him here in Paris in 1940. I think it must have been Herbert Hagen who introduced us. Something to do with the policy on Jews in Paris, I don’t know. I never really cared about that sort of thing. Well, we all say that now, don’t we? The Germans. Anyway, Edgard de something or other was almost as anti-Semitic as Hagen, if such a thing was possible, but in spite of that, I quite liked him. He had been a captain in the Great War, after which he’d failed in civvy street, and this had led him to join the French Foreign Legion. I think he was stationed in Morocco before being sent to Indochina. And of course, he hated the communists, so that was all right. We had that much in common, anyway.

“Well, that was 1940, and when I left Paris I didn’t expect to see him again, and certainly never as soon as November 1941 in the Ukraine. Edgard was part of this French unit in the German army—not the SS, that was later, but the Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism, or some such nonsense. That’s what the French called it. I think we just called it the something infantry. The 638th. Yes. That was it. Mostly, the men were Vichy fascists, or even French POWs who didn’t fancy being sent to Germany as forced labor with the Todt organization. There were probably about six thousand of them. Poor bastards.”

“Why do you say that?”

I sipped some wine and helped myself to a cigarette from the packet on the table. Outside the window, in the central courtyard, someone was trying to start a motorcar without success; somewhere farther away, de Gaulle was waiting or sulking, depending on how you looked at it; and the French army was licking its wounds after getting its ass kicked—again—in Vietnam.

“Because they couldn’t have known what they were letting themselves in for,” I said. “Fighting partisans sounds fair enough back here in Paris. But out there, in Byelorussia, it meant something very different.” I shook my head sadly. “There was no honor in it. No glory. Not what they were looking for, anyway.”

“So what
did
it mean?” asked Eyebrows. “On the ground.”

I shrugged. “That kind of action was, quite often, nothing more than murder. Mass murder. Of Jews. All sorts of police actions and antipartisan activities were merely a euphemism for killing Jews. To be frank with you, the Wehrmacht High Command in Russia wouldn’t have trusted the 638th with any other kind of task but murder.”

“The name of the unit commander. Can you remember that?”

“Labonne. Colonel Labonne. After the winter of 1941, I lost touch with Edgard.” I clicked my fingers. “De Boudel. That was his name. Edgard de Boudel.”

“You’re quite sure of that?”

“I’m sure.”

“Go on.”

“Well, then. Let’s see. A couple of years later, I was briefly back in that theater to investigate an alleged war crime. That was when I heard that the 638th was now attached to an SS division in Galicia. And that it was pretty bad there. But I didn’t see de Boudel again until 1945, when the war was over and we were both at a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp called Krasno-Armeesk. As a matter of fact, there were quite a few French and Belgian SS there. And Edgard told me something of what he’d been up to. How the 638th ended up as a part of a French brigade of the SS and that kind of thing. Apparently, there was a recruiting drive here in Paris in July 1943. The French who joined had to prove the usual Himmler rubbish about not having any Jewish blood, and then they were in. A few weeks of basic training in Alsace and then at a place near Prague. By the late summer of 1944, the war in France was almost over, but there was a whole brigade of French SS ready to fight the Ivans. About ten thousand of them, he said. And they were called the SS-Charlemagne.

“The brigade got sent by train to the Eastern Front, in Pomerania, which wasn’t very far from where I was. Edgard said that as the train carrying the brigade pulled into the railhead at Hammerstein they came under attack by the Soviet First Byelorussian and were divided up into three groups. One group, commanded by General Krukenberg, made it north to the Baltic coast, near Danzig. Of these, quite a few managed to get themselves evacuated to Denmark. But some, like Edgard, fought on until they were captured. The rest were wiped out or fell back to Berlin.

“There were other French at Krasno-Armeesk who’d been captured at Berlin. I can’t say I remember any names. By all accounts, it was the SS-Charlemagne who were the last defenders of Hitler’s bunker in Berlin. I think they were the only SS happy to be caught by the Soviets rather than the Americans, because the Amis handed them over to the Free French, who shot them immediately.”

“Tell us about Edgard de Boudel.”

“In the camp?”

“Yes.”