Shalimar the Clown (24 page)

Forgery had become the section’s most important task. As the Resistance became more unified and organized, and the numbers of men and women involved increased, false papers were the essentials without which nothing serious was possible. Combat Étudiant gradually built closer alliances with the intelligence networks of the Auvergne, George Charaudeau’s Alibi network, Colonel Rivet’s Kléber organization, and Christian Pineau’s Phalanx; also with other action commandos, the Ardents whose symbol was the flame of Joan of Arc, the Mithridate and the ORA. This work took Cauchi away from Clermont-Ferrand for long periods and a surly, haughty fellow named George Mathieu deputized for him, actually becoming the acting head of Mithridate. Mathieu was a large man, all bones and teeth. His blue eyes were somewhat bulging and his blond hair was slicked down with macassar oil. He insisted on wearing a beret as a gesture of defiance, and was respected on account of his icy, military manner. His girlfriend Christiane worked in the Vichy offices, as the secretary of a certain Captain Burcez. This seemed like a valuable “inside” connection. At any rate, for a plurality of reasons, nobody questioned Mathieu’s right to lead.

At that time many packages needed to be carried back and forth as the commando attacks grew in frequency and force, and as the German hunt for the Resistance intensified. Max Ophuls decided to stop asking himself what those packages might contain. The couriers needed documents to ensure their safe passage and it was his business to provide them. Then, after the Jews of Paris were rounded up, perhaps one thousand Jewish children escaped the death-trains to Auschwitz; false papers had urgently to be supplied if they were to be brought south to safety. Max Ophuls, whose work was praised by his immediate superior Feuerstein as well as the more exalted, though increasingly remote figures of Cauchi and Ingrand as the best they had seen, created many of these new identities, which he dispatched to their new owners via secret drop points from which they were collected by anonymous go-betweens. But perhaps the greatest contribution Max Ophuls made to the Resistance was sexual; although in order to pull off the feat he had to create yet another phony self and inhabit it fully and, alas, somewhat painfully. He was the man who seduced the Panther, Ursula Brandt.

In November 1942 the Germans invaded the Zone Sud and at once the stakes rose. Until then students at the Strasbourg university-in-exile could play at resistance, but with the Germans established in Clermont-Ferrand it became a far more dangerous game. In all, one hundred and thirty-nine students and faculty members would die as a result of their involvement in Resistance activities. That November, SS captain Hugo Geissler set up a Gestapo “antenna” in Clermont-Ferrand. Its director was Paul Blumenkampf, who pretended to be a hearty, good-natured fellow. His immensely influential assistant made no such pretense. She was known as the Panther because she wore a coat of panther fur which she never removed, even on the hottest days of the year. Her particular expertise was infiltration, demolition from within; and her prize witness, her quisling, her inside man was none other than George Mathieu. Many Resistance groups—the Mithridate, the ORA—were smashed and their leaders seized thanks to Mathieu’s treason. In a series of raids on these organizations, several university students were arrested, and Reichsführer-SS Himmler was finally able to authorize the attack on the university, against which Danjon’s influence with Vichy, and Foreign Minister Ribbentrop’s reluctance to overrule the puppets he had installed, had protected it for so long.

The assault on the university, which became known as the Great Raid, took place on November 25, 1943. The literature professor Paul Collomp, a good friend of Max Ophuls’s, was shot dead trying to bar the attackers from the secretariat where the teachers’ addresses were kept. A theology professor, Robert Eppel, whom Max had also befriended, was shot in the stomach in his own home. The traitor George Mathieu identified many students holding false identity papers. There were over 1,200 arrests. Max Ophuls escaped because of an instinct for self-preservation that had led him to deal with Mathieu on a strict need-to-know basis. Consequently the names Sebastian Brant and Max Ophuls could not be connected by the traitor to the Resistance operative and master forger Niccolò, and Max was safe for the moment. As a precaution, however, he moved out of Zeller’s cottage, moved in with a pretty young law student named Angélique Strauss, one of the lovestruck young women of whom there would never be a shortage in his life, forged himself yet another new identity (“Jacques Wimpfeling,” after yet another medieval humanist) and took a leave of absence from university duties.

The day after the attack André Danjon wrote a powerful letter of protest to the French prime minister Laval, a tirade in which more or less every sentence was a lie. He lied about the number of Jews at the university, and about the students’ and faculty’s involvement with the Resistance. In those years of eclipse his determination was like earthshine; it provided the only available light. As a result of his well-feigned outrage the university was allowed to remain open. Danjon then telephoned Max personally at Strauss’s apartment. “It’s the last act,” he said. “The curtain has already begun to fall. You need to think about leaving France.” During his sojourn in the cottage at Gergovie, Max Ophuls had passed his time discussing military history with Gaston Zeller and writing papers on international relations, which he himself feared were excessively utopian, and in which he speculated about the construction of a more stable world order in the aftermath of the defeat of Nazism, improbable as that sounded at the time. These papers, in which he foresaw the need for entities similar to those that would afterwards come into being as the Council of Europe, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, had been greatly admired by Danjon, who revealed that he had managed to have them smuggled to the Free French headquarters in London, where they had impressed de Gaulle. “You can do more for your country at the Général’s side than you are doing here,” Danjon said. “Get ready and we will prepare the run. I’m afraid you can’t fly this time. Twice would be pushing your luck.”

“Before I go,” Max replied, “there’s something I have to do.”

The second legendary exploit of Max Ophuls during his Resistance years became known as “Biting the Panther.” When people spoke of it their voices fell into the hushed tones reserved for the achievement of the ridiculously, beautifully impossible. Agent Niccolò, by now a senior figure in the unified resistance known as MUR—which had been created by the merging of Combat with the two other large armies of the Resistance, Franc-Tireur and Libération—simply disappeared from view. It was as if he, and Sebastian Brant, and Jacques Wimpfeling, and Maximilian Ophuls had all ceased to exist. In their place arrived a German officer, Sturmbahnführer Pabst, transferred from Strasbourg to assist Ursula Brandt’s team in its investigations, with papers of authorization personally signed by Heinrich Himmler, whose antipathy to the university-in-exile was of long standing. It was a testament to the impostor’s skill that the phony Pabst aroused no suspicion: a tribute to the implacable force of his will, which simply did not permit anyone to entertain the thought that he might not be what he said. He spoke immaculate German, was notable for his utter devotion to the Reich, his papers were perfectly in order, and there could be no questioning the authenticity and force of the Reichsführer-SS’s autograph. He was also, as the Panther noticed when he complimented her on the powerful, feline quality that made her nickname so appropriate, a man of immense personal charm and physical appeal. Ursula Brandt was a short, stocky woman to whom the term
pantherlike
could not truthfully be said to apply, but she received the compliment without demur. Within the week she and the Sturmbahnführer were lovers.

Brandt in bed revealed that she was pantherlike in one respect at least: she was fond of using her teeth and claws. Her lover stoically professed to enjoy this, and encouraged her not to restrain herself, but rather to give free rein to all her sexual proclivities, no matter how extreme. After their lovemaking the bedsheets would often be bloodstained, and Brandt would be afflicted by a strangled, stiff-backed contrition that made her unusually malleable. Thus in return for the shared secret of his nocturnal scars the nonexistent Sturmbahnführer gained almost unlimited access to the secrets of her office by day. During the month of their liaison the false Pabst was able to transmit a torrent of priceless intelligence information to the MUR. Then, when the agreed warning sign from the
maquis—
a small chalk circle with a dot in the center, meaning “they’re beginning to suspect you—get lost”—appeared one morning on the door of his lodgings, he quietly disappeared again.

This was the only known instance in the whole of World War II of a successful “reverse sting” on a Gestapo infiltration operation, and once the deception became known Ursula Brandt’s position became untenable, and she, like her imaginary lover, disappeared from view. Reichsführer-SS Himmler was an unforgiving man.

In his memoir, Maximilian Ophuls reflected on the events of the Great Raid and his own revenge on one of its architects in a somber passage. “Every moment of joy in the Resistance, every triumph, was marred by our knowledge of other tragedies. We were fortunate to be successful in the Panther operation, but as I look back on those days I think not of victory but of fallen comrades. I think, for example, of Jean-Paul Cauchi, our founder, our leader, who was arrested in Paris just two months before the D-Day landings and sent to Buchenwald. On April 18, 1945, at the very moment at which American troops were closing in on Buchenwald, he was vindictively killed by the camp’s soulless German personnel. And I think with a little more satisfaction of the trial of George Mathieu, who was arrested in September 1944, claimed that he had turned traitor because Ursula Brandt had threatened to kill his pregnant girlfriend if he didn’t, was found guilty, and was executed by firing squad on December 12. I have been an opponent of the death penalty all my life, but in the case of Mathieu I must confess that my heart rules my head.”

And he also wrote, “Entering the Resistance was, for me, a kind of flying. . . . One took leave of one’s name, one’s past, one’s future, one lifted oneself away from one’s life and existed only in the continuum of the work, borne aloft by necessity and fatalism. Yes, a sort of soaring feeling possessed me at times, tempered by the perpetual knowledge that one could crash or be shot down at any moment, without warning, and die in the dirt like a dog.”

It was only after his safe arrival in London that Max Ophuls understood how privileged he had been to be given access to the so-called Pat Line, the escape system based in Marseille, created by Captain Ian Garrow and controlled, after Garrow’s betrayal and capture, by the pseudonymous “Commander Pat O’Leary,” a Belgian doctor whose real name was Albert-Marie Guérisse. This line, operated by the DF Section of the British Special Operations Executive, was primarily set up and maintained for the rescue of British airmen and intelligence personnel marooned behind enemy lines, and in spite of the constant dangers of treachery and capture it had a spectacular record, smuggling over six hundred fighters back to safety. However, in the light of the growing tensions between Général de Gaulle and both Churchill and Roosevelt, it was most unusual for the services of the Line to be made available to a nonmilitary individual just because de Gaulle wanted him to join the Forces Françaises Libres at their Carlton Gardens headquarters. The reason for so exceptional an arrangement was the recent arrival at the FFL HQ of the wife of the général’s new aide-de-camp, Mme. François Charles-Roux, née Fanny Zarifi, whose namesake and aunt Fanny Vlasto Rodocanachi and her husband Dr. George Rodocanachi had allowed their Marseille apartment to be used as the Pat Line’s headquarters and local safe house. Max Ophuls, traveling down bumpy minor roads in the back of a produce truck under a mountain of beets, knew nothing of such arcana. He was wondering whether the rat-run would fail because the bumping and banging and the weight of the beet sacks broke his goddamn back. The one thing that never crossed his mind was that he was about to meet the extraordinary woman who would become his only wife.

Her name was the Grey Rat. Her real name was Margaret “Peggy” Rhodes but when she was introduced to Max in George and Fanny Rodocanachi’s sitting room by her fellow Englishwoman Elisabeth Haden-Guest, it was her celebrated nickname that was used—a name the Germans had given her on account of her elusiveness. “Niccolò the master forger,” Haden-Guest said playfully, “meet the rat the ratcatchers can’t catch.” Max Ophuls was astonished by the air of relaxation and enjoyment, even of hilarity, that prevailed in the Rodocanachis’ embattled apartment, and quickly saw that the orchestrator of the evening’s good time was the Grey Rat herself. That the Rat was beautiful was obvious enough, even though she did her best to hide it. Her shock of fair hair looked like it hadn’t been washed for a month and stuck out behind her head like a bottle brush. She wore a loose-fitting man’s checked shirt which hadn’t seen an iron in days and which she buttoned all the way up to the neck. The cuffs, too, were buttoned. Below the shirt were baggy corduroy pants and canvas shoes. She looked like a vagrant, Max thought, a buttoned-up hobo who had somehow strayed into the secret passages of the war. And yet her eyes were immense dark lakes and her body, furtively perceptible under all that camouflage, was long and lean. Above all she possessed so much exuberant energy that the room seemed too small to hold her.

“You are lucky you are going with her,” Fanny Rodocanachi told Max. “When the fighting starts she’s like five men.” The Grey Rat roared with laughter. “God, Fanny darling, you really know how to recommend a girl to a fellow,” she guffawed. “What do you say, Niccolò? Are you ready to crawl through the Spanish border thornbushes all alone with a girl who has killed a man with her bare hands?”

She was twenty-four years old, almost ten years younger than Max, and had already been married once, to a Marseillais businessman named Maurice Liota, who was tortured and killed by the Gestapo a year after their wedding for refusing to reveal her whereabouts, and whom she described to Max Ophuls before, during and after their own marriage as “the love of my life.” She had escaped capture on skis, and by driving a car so fast and skillfully that the airplane chasing her couldn’t stop her. Once she jumped from a moving train. Once in Toulouse she was detained in prison but she impersonated an innocent Provençal housewife so convincingly that after four days the Germans set her free and never knew that they had actually had the Grey Rat in their hands. “I hate war,” she said to Max at that first meeting in the Marseille safe apartment, “but here it is, eh? So I’m not bally well planning to wave my hanky at the departing men and then stay home and knit them balaclavas.”