God's Formula (6 page)

“Admiral.”

“Yes, mein Fuhrer?”

Two men, one tall, blond and handsome—Admiral Wilhelm Canaris—the other short, dark, and gnome-like—Adolph Hitler—stood side by side in a corner of a large, chandelier-lit banquet room in the Reich Chancellery. Canaris was wearing his dark blue full dress uniform with the double-breasted jacket and gold-trimmed cuffs. His only decorations were the gold Kreigsmarine Wound Medal and the Iron Cross. Hitler, who had moved to this spot when he saw the second tranche of gifts being brought in by valets and placed on a stage that had been built in the room’s center, was wearing his gray Fuhrer’s jacket with the red, white and black swastika armband on his left bicep. Alone for a brief moment, surveying the room, he had spotted Canaris and beckoned to him.

“Your gift is not the one I was hoping for,” Hitler replied.

“Yes, mein Fuhrer. The Friedeman formula. I am sorry, we have not—”

“It has been eight months,” Adolph Hitler, his voice soft but very sharp and thin, like the sound of a scythe cutting through young wheat, interrupted his subordinate.

Although he felt it, Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence agency, kept the fear from his eyes as he looked at his leader, searching his face for the signs that he knew preceded an eruption of his temper. He was not disappointed. Adolph Hitler’s thin lips had compressed into a mere slash, and his dark eyes were focused directly on Canaris’ light blue, Aryan-perfect orbs.

“Mein Fuhrer…”

“We are about to commence Case Yellow,” Hitler interrupted Canaris again, his voice still sharp and hissing. “It could still be avoided. Are you close at least?”

Canaris took a breath and answered: “One of our agents in Paris has infiltrated a group called the International Agency For Refugees and Orphans. They are a front assisting Jews to escape Germany and Poland through France. The group is approached regularly by people for this purpose. Last month we cleaned out a nest that had sent six girls through to England. We believed they were financed by the Rothschilds.”

“And?”

The admiral was hoping that Hitler would be placated by this news. A nest of Jews, or Jew lovers, killed; an arrogant Jewish banking house exposed. But he had no such luck. The great Fuhrer was shaking his head in the staccato way that the German public seemed to adore, clearly not impressed.

“The pace has picked up,” Canaris replied. “The front group is now being approached by French Jews. They know that occupation is inevitable.”

“They know, but Daladier does not?” the Fuhrer said. “The Jews should be running the French government.”

Canaris risked a wary smile. His leader had made something of a joke.

“Who is approaching them?” Hitler asked.

“Wealthy Jews, likely, orphanages run by the Church, foreign meddlers.”

“You are keeping a list, I presume?”

“A list, mein Fuhrer?”

“For when we occupy France,” Hitler replied, with not the least remnant of humor in his voice. “We will pry them from their rat’s nests.”

“It is usually done by intermediaries, mein Fuhrer. Very careful intermediaries.”

“Are you following them?”

“Yes, mein Fuhrer.”

“
Gut
. And our young Conrad and his Jew friend?”

“Our agent is deep inside the front group. She works in the office and has befriended the head of the organization. He trusts her and has recently put her in a position to know every time an approach is made. There are ten agents in her cell. They are now following every intermediary. We hope one of them will lead us to the boys.”

“How long?” The Fuhrer’s voice was terse now.

How long?
Is he a fool? An idiot political savant? Canaris asked himself these questions not for the first time since he was appointed head of the Abwhehr in 1935 and began having regular contact with the former painter of watercolors who was now the absolute ruler of eighty million Germans.

“Soon,” he replied, lying.

“I do not want to wait until my next birthday for the formula, Herr Admiral.”

“We will have it soon, mein Fuhrer.”

Hitler was now gazing about the spacious room, nodding and smiling. Was the conversation over? If so, it had not gone as badly as the admiral thought it would when his leader, looking like a fancy doorman in his dazzling uniform, gestured to him to approach. He used the pause to look himself at the glittering array of guests gathered for the Fuhrer’s fifty-first birthday, the men in tuxedoes or full dress service uniform, the women in gowns, lustrously coiffed. Many of them, men and women, military and civilian, were looking his way, trying, unsuccessfully, not to stare.
Canaris has the Fuhrer
’
s ear. What state secrets are they discussing?

Canaris now saw that Heinrich Himmler and Reindardt Heydrich, the head of the Gestapo—the SS’s secret police—had spotted them and were heading their way. The crowd separated for them as if they were gods from Mount Olympus walking through the rabble in a local market. Several of them bowed slightly at the waist as they moved aside.

“Ah,” said Hitler, “I see Himmler and Heydrich want my attention.”

“Yes, mein Fuhrer.”

“Have you kept Himmler informed?”

“Yes, mein Fuhrer.”

“Leave us.”

Canaris
sieg heiled
Hitler and moved away.

From across the crowded room, Admiral Canaris discretely watched the sycophantic display being put on by Himmler and Heydrich, who, in unison, nodded when the watercolorist nodded and smiled when he smiled. Both were in their best, deep black SS uniforms, their jackboots gleaming like black ice, their left breasts covered with medals and decorations, mostly unearned. Hitler’s last birthday celebration, his fiftieth, had been held on a scale to rival a Roman circus. Tens of thousands of marching soldiers, fireworks in every city and town, and a national cry of joy at midnight. This year’s celebration was quieter. The French and the British would not talk of the ceding of Belgium or Holland. Their sniveling days were over. They would fight. There would be war.

“So your agent needs orders?” said Heinrich Himmler.

“Yes,” Admiral Wilhelm Canaris replied.

“Are you sure this is the school?”

“No. We think so, but we need to go in to verify.”

“What do we know?”

“Our agent befriended a teacher. Showed him photographs of the boys. He thought they looked like two boys who were admitted in September. He wasn’t positive. The photographs were taken a few years ago.”

“Befriended?”

“Bedded.”

Canaris hid his contempt. If there was sex involved, Himmler wanted to know about it, especially exotic, that is to say, perverse, sex. Were the rumors true? Will he pursue this?

“I see,” said Himmler. “What was her story?”

Not interested in the heterosexual, Canaris thought, then answered, “She was looking for her nephews, German boys, runaways from their school in Strasbourg.”

“Why can’t she go in?”

“She eliminated the teacher when he became suspicious. She has been out in public with the him. If she was seen…we cannot take the chance.”

“What is the name of the school? Where is it?”

“The Petit Collège Sainte-Thérèse de l’ Enfant-Jésus. Near Fontainebleau. Locally it is known as Le Petit Collège d’Avon. Avon and Fontainebleau are basically one small town.”

Himmler grimaced at the papist nomenclature. “Who is the headmaster?” he asked.

“A Jesuit priest. Father Jacques. Born Lucien Bunel.”

“A troublemaker, no doubt,” said Himmler. “They are all subversives, the Jesuits. What do we know about him?”

“He has recently hired a Jew as a teacher. This man previously worked at a refugee organization in Paris. We believe there are students at the school under assumed names.”

“How do you know this?”

“The dead teacher was not a Jew lover. He said some of the students did not participate at mass, did not know their catechism. He spoke his mind to our agent.”

“What do you suggest?” Himmler asked.

“We could wait until we take Paris and then remove the boys, by force if necessary. It won’t be long. A week or two.”

“The Fuhrer wants the formula now,” said the bespectacled Himmler. “We are about to take Reims. He is concerned the boys will run. He is waiting for me to report our plan to him.”

Himmler looked pointedly at the telephone on his desk.

“I can send in another agent,” Canaris said. “We have a reporter at
Le Monde
. He can say he is doing a story on the school. It is in the old palace at Fontainebleau. It has historical significance.”

“And this Jesuit who is harboring students under assumed names, probably Jews, do you think he will cooperate?”

Canaris cringed inwardly at Himmler’s sarcasm. His agent in Paris had killed the teacher at three p.m. and reported to him at 3:15. He had relayed her report to the SS chief at 3:16. He took no chances when it came to Hitler, Himmler and the Friedeman formula. He had immediately been summoned here, where he was introduced to the woman sitting next to him, SS intelligence agent Marlene Jaeger. They sat facing the SS chief in his throne-like leather chair behind his massive, glass-topped desk.

“I—” said Canaris.

“Marlene?” said Himmler, interrupting, and turning to Marlene Jaeger.

“When was the last time the boys were seen?” said Marlene. This question she directed to Canaris, a naval hero of the first war and, she knew, a man of high courage and intelligence.
And also pride
, she said to herself, as she watched his reaction to her, a lowly SS field agent, putting a question directly to him, the head of the Abwehr.
“Yesterday,” Canaris replied, his eyes narrowing as they focused on Jaeger.

“What do you suggest?” Himmler asked Jaeger.

The lovely and innocent looking Marlene Jaeger had advanced in the SS on the strength of two things: her beauty and her contacts with a certain underground Berlin community, from which she supplied Himmler with sexual playthings. In return, he gave her special assignments, like spying on the scientists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, and searching the Friedeman apartment in Dahlem immediately after the explosion on the morning of August 31. There she had found, in plain sight on Conrad Friedeman’s desk, the first two stanzas of a poem of some sort, written in a bizarre language, with certain words circled and translated on the adjacent margin into German. Those words included
uranium, heavy water,
and
hexafloride.
Marlene, now a favorite of both Himmler and Hitler, had been credited, rightly, with discovering that Conrad had taken his father’s acceleration formula, written in code, with him to Paris and then disappeared. Until now.

“I should go,” she replied. “I will tell the priest I am from a small but well-funded refugee organization. Can he help me place German Jewish children? Also, I am looking for certain runaways. We would like to move them out of France, reunite them with their families in England and America. We are happy to make a donation to the school. Money is no object.”

Jaeger, in evening dress, had been having a drink with an American journalist at the bar at one of Berlin’s grand hotels when the head waiter told her she was wanted on the phone. Fifteen minutes later, here she was. She looked from Himmler to Canaris. Canaris, a Prussian aristocrat as well as a war hero, was very powerful. But Himmler was a god, with power second only to Hitler in the Nazi pantheon. He could have her killed or elevated to goddesshood with the snap of a finger and with or without a reason, whereas Canaris could do neither without some verifiable justification.

“I agree,” said Canaris.

Marlene thanked him with one of her most dazzling smiles.

“Good,” said Himmler, whose prim, cramped smile was not so dazzling. “You will leave tonight. And you will take Herr Professor Deibner with you. Do you know him?”

“No.”

“He is a nuclear physicist who works for me. Perhaps you will be his wife or his mistress. I will leave that to you spies to decide. Herr Deibner will know if what you get from the Friedeman boy is genuine.”

“And the boys?” asked Marlene. “Once we have the formula, what do we do with them?”

“They are garbage,” replied Himmler. “A Jew and a traitor. Dispose of them.”

“Open city,
merde
,” said Rickie de la Croix, the bartender at Maxim’s; disbelief, shock, anger, sadness—all of these things registering in swift succession in his soft brown eyes.

“Not quite yet,” replied Ian Fleming. “But it’s coming. You’ve seen the papers?”

“Yes.”

“Quite a day,” said Fleming.

“My son,” said Rickie, hesitating, “he was in Reims, but I hear he may be at Dunkirk. It is chaotic, to say the least.”

The banner front page headline that morning in
Le Figaro
had read,
Reims Falls.
It was a scream of pain, really, not a headline. Below the fold was a piece reporting on the talk in the defense ministry of declaring Paris an open city. Reims was only ninety miles to the northeast. In a few days, the Wehrmacht would roll triumphantly into an undefended City of Light. Fleming had listened to the BBC on and off that afternoon and evening. The reports from Reims were of a city nearly destroyed by German air and armored forces, with heavy French casualties preceding a disorganized retreat. The only good news, also on
Le Figaro’
s
front page, was the massive evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk.

“What will you do?” the Englishman asked.

“I will stay.
La resistance
has begun. I will join it. And you?”

“I am not a wine merchant on a work visa,” replied Fleming. “But, of course, you know that. I will await orders.”

Frederique de la Croix had been working at Maxim’s since coming home from the first world war in 1918. He had a jagged welt on the right side of his neck, from ear to collar bone, the result of a fumite bomb detonated by his own squadron just before a charge from their trench. Something had caught fire and the smokescreen had turned to a wall of flames ten feet high. A buried bomb had gone off. Others less fortunate had burned to various degrees of crisp or been killed instantly. Rickie, as Maxim’s regulars called him, had been stumbling blindly when a piece of burning shrapnel glanced off his neck. He had had his eyebrows singed off as well, but they had grown back. He raised them now, slightly.

“Not too surprised, I take it?” Fleming asked.

“Only that you’d acknowledge it.”

“We may need each other, now that Hell is empty.”

“My son…?”

“What unit?”

“First Moroccan. They were at Dyle before Reims.”

“I will try.”

“Your man,” said Rickie, nodding a silent
merci
, “is at his usual table.”

“I see him,” said Fleming. “Thank you for calling me.”

“There’s an American at the table tonight,” said Rickie.

“Yes,” the Englishman replied. “The movie star. In harm’s way.”

“Stuffing his face.”

Fleming let this pass. Rickie was angry at the Americans for not helping defend France. He had been obsessed lately with what he called the blood oath his country had had to sign to get a line of credit from Roosevelt to buy airplanes from the Americans, airplanes that would have saved France, but that were not scheduled to arrive until 1941.

“Rickie,” said Ian Fleming, “who is that dazzling young thing in the corner?”
Change the subject, old man.
“She could be Mademoiselle Leigh’s sister,” he went on, when he saw Rickie’s half smile.

The L-shaped bar at Maxim’s took up a spacious alcove off of the restaurant’s rectangular main salon. It was separated from the dining room by only a few yards of thick maroon carpet and a line of gilded stanchions strung with red, velour-covered rope. Its plush maroon velvet stools were trimmed in gold epaulettes, a row of little headless Napoleons at attention at the walnut paneled bar. The Englishman, tall, thin, and darkly handsome in his trademark dark blue suit and striped knit tie, sat on one of these as he and Rickie chatted. Three large mirrors in swirling ormolu frames hung over each of the bar’s two walls, surrounded by shelves filled with exquisitely labeled bottles of liquor. The mirrors were admirable additions to the Versailles-like opulence of the famous Maxim’s, but they were also useful. From any seat at the bar, one could survey the entire restaurant, a good thing—for jealous lovers, the occasional police detective—and spies, like Fleming, who could chat casually with Rickie and still be working. And drinking, of course.

“Miss Leigh?” Freddie replied.

“The actress.
Gone With The Wind
. Come on, Rickie.”

“Ah, yes,” Rickie said. “
L
’affaire d’
Olivier
. A Frenchman,
non
?”

“English, Rickie, but you know that. Who is she?”

“The mistress of Monsieur Malle, the president of the Banque de France. He always arrives thirty minutes after her.”

“Young.”

“
Oui
, twenty-five, twenty-six.”

“New?”

“Yes, perhaps three weeks. Maison Lacloche Frères is very happy.”

They both eyed the ruby and diamond butterfly broach at the nether region of the raven-haired beauty’s ample décolletage, and the cleavage thus revealed, it goes without saying.

“It could be glass,” said Fleming.

“No, I think not,” said Rickie. “Value for value. Look at her.”

They not only looked, they stared.

A second or two later, their trance was broken abruptly by the sound of roaring laughter at a large round table at the far end of the room. Another beautiful woman, this one fair, also in her mid-twenties, was dabbing at her ample bosom with a napkin. Her face was bright red, but her smile self-deprecating, even naïve, as she beamed across the table at a handsome, sandy-haired man in his forties. The woman sitting next to this man, her face angular, her black hair severely cut, was not smiling.

“If looks could kill,” said Rickie quietly, pretending to be looking elsewhere.

“Or seduce,” said Fleming, his eyes on the young woman.

“You think she’s an
agent provocateur
?”

“She’s been laughing at David’s stupid jokes all night.”

“This is what comes of having kings and queens,” said Rickie.

Fleming did not answer. Instead, he turned to survey the room frontally. He had an excuse. Everyone in the restaurant was looking at the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s table. Coco Chanel, who usually sat at table number five, was there, sitting next to a sternly handsome middle-aged man who looked suspicious to Fleming, which meant, of course, German. The English playwright and actor Ivor Novelo was at the table, as was an American movie star whom Fleming could not place, a tall, dashing man with devil-may-care eyes and a mustache. The fair young beauty with the wet breasts was sitting between them. From the snippets of conversation that Fleming could hear, he gathered that each was handing her a glass of bubbly when they collided at just the right spot. Or wrong spot. One could not say for sure

“Should we slice their heads off then?” Fleming asked, turning back to face the bartender. His tone was not heavy, but not quite lighthearted either. He did not, in fact, like the turn the conversation had taken. First the Americans and now the Brits. His family of bankers, and the Windsors, as the royals had been known since 1917, moved in the same intersecting circles—military, finance, and politics—the three national playing fields that had been dominated by the British aristocracy since the nation began. And though he thought his former king a thorough fool, Fleming could not bring himself to be disloyal in public, and to a Frenchman no less. The fool was
his
fool. Hence the quiet warning he intended to convey by a certain undertone in his voice.

“No,
mon ami
,” the bartender replied.

“Or line them up, like the Bolsheviks did?” Again the Englishman’s tone was half serious, half lighthearted.

Rickie did not answer.

At the round table, the man sitting next to Mademoiselle Chanel had risen and handed a fresh napkin to the young lass with champagne dripping down her chest. A tall, haughty waiter, in traditional evening dress, was pouring her a new glass. The laughter had quieted. The Duchess was now smiling graciously. No green monster there, Fleming said to himself as he watched all this unfold in the nearest mirror.

“Quite right,” Fleming said, finally, smiling, filling in the long silence, having kept Rickie waiting long enough, “to refrain from answering rhetorical questions.”

“We are
sympatique
, you and I, no?”

Back to normal
, Fleming said to himself, as Rickie, noticeably relieved, nodded and smiled.
The scarred bartender
’
s country is about to be overrun by the Hun. And his son is missing in action. And he probably wants that weekly thousand franc note I give him to continue. Such complex creatures, we humans.

“Another?” Rickie asked, nodding toward Fleming’s glass.

“
Mais oui
.”

As Rickie mixed Fleming’s gin and tonic, the maître d’, also in evening clothes but with a cutaway jacket and black tie to denote his very high level of importance, led a well-fed, balding, middle-aged man, a stunning brunette in a red satin dress on his arm, into the room and toward the celebrity-laden round table at the far wall.

“What have we here?” Fleming asked Rickie, who lifted his head for a second to follow the couple.

“They’re new to me,” Rickie replied.

The maître d’ held the brunette’s chair, while her paunchy escort waited at his for her to be seated. Both had their backs to Fleming, but he could see their faces clearly in the gilded mirror on the wall behind them. The woman was taller than the man by six inches at least, and thirty years younger. She stood erect, her eyes very focused, as she was introduced to the former King of England and his American wife, refusing to acknowledge, except for a slight nod of the head, that she was in the presence of anyone better than her.
Proud
, Fleming thought, and then on impulse he asked Rickie to send over a bottle of the 1928 Krug he had asked Maxim’s to store for him for very special occasions. He watched a few minutes later as the sommelier, also in evening dress, but with a red vest, popped the cork and poured out the champagne with just the right mix of Gallic flair and arrogance. All at the table, including the Duke and Duchess, looked his way and raised their glasses to him before they drank.

“I’ll be back momentarily,” he said to Rickie, after acknowledging them with his own raised glass.

Fleming locked the men’s room door behind him and turned off the lights. In the dark, he slipped a film canister the size of a fat centime from the deep recesses of his wallet, unscrewed the top of one of his simple round gold cufflinks, inserted the canister and replaced the top. He flipped the lights on, peed, flushed, and washed and dried his hands.

Back at the bar, he watched Maxim’s come to life. Half empty only an hour ago, the restaurant was now filled to capacity. At the corner table, the national bank president had arrived and was sharing intimate conversation with his Vivien Leigh look-alike. Except for this, and one or two other tucked-away tables with similar
Mai-Decembre
patrons, the restaurant was a bustling and merry place. The sommelier and the wait staff moved with all deliberate speed distributing food and drink, and more drink, around the large room. Crystal tinkled, women in beautiful gowns and shimmering hair-dos tittered and smiled behind gloved hands, men in white tie guffawed. The chandeliers and gold fixtures sparkled, the brass lamps on every table glowed, and mirrors on virtually every wall reflected it all, including those in the room using these same mirrors to assess the goings on at other tables.

The perfect place for a spy, of which, Fleming was sure, there were at least one or two besides himself casting trained eyes on Paris’ crème de la crème enthusiastically ignoring the barbarians at their gates. Not a bad strategy, he thought, maybe they know something I don’t. I give the Germans five days to get here. Perhaps they give them ten.