Agent in the shadows, p.15
Agent in the Shadows, page 15
The final leg of the journey had been from Strasbourg, which was in fact where Siegfried Schroth officially became Erhard Schröder. Siegfried had arrived in Strasbourg the previous day after being smuggled into France over the Alps.
He was met at Part-Dieu by Luise Brunner, as one would expect an old family friend to do. She’d been given leave to meet him by a delighted Herr Möller, still basking in Klaus Barbie’s gratitude at his having found someone so well qualified. And a Party member too!
The recruitment had gone very smoothly. If Walter Möller was totally honest he’d admit it had been rather rushed through, but then needs must and he had taken the precaution of involving Barbie’s aide-de-camp, Otto Winter, and he saw no problem. The man would only be a clerk, after all.
And he was a Party member.
Luise Brunner and Erhard Schröder greeted each other formally at Part-Dieu and barely spoke as the Gestapo car took them to Avenue de Saxe, where Agnes Kléber had arranged for him to have one of the vacant apartments.
They were able to talk properly later that afternoon, walking through the 7th arrondissement towards the river and then along the banks of the Rhône on Quai Claud Bernard. Sophia was amazed at how Siegfried appeared to have become Erhard Schröder in almost every respect: from the way he spoke with a north German accent, to his slightly hesitant and even mumbling speech, the way he walked – as if weary and perhaps with a bad knee – to his whole demeanour. He was asking her about the nature of the work he’d be expected to undertake.
‘I don’t think it is especially complicated, Siegfried.’
‘Erhard!’
‘I’m sorry. I think it is more a matter of being organised and diligent. Most of the work in that department is to do with gathering records of payments made by the Gestapo and entering them into ledgers, reconciling them and then passing them through to Walter Möller to be signed off. Nearly all of the entries are in a code and most of them seem to be payments to people.’
‘What does the code look like?’
‘A letter followed by a series of numbers. There doesn’t seem to be any pattern. The codes could be for an individual or for each payment, I’m not sure. You’ll be working more closely with the codes, if you get my meaning. As far as I can tell Herr Möller has a ledger he keeps in his safe which lists names against the codes. When he gets it out he usually closes his office door: I spotted it on his desk once when the door was opened briefly.’
‘Is he a Nazi?’
‘Who?’
‘This Möller.’
‘I’m not sure: he may well be a Party member but he doesn’t seem interested in that kind of thing, Erhard. He’s an accountant and very overworked. If you can help him then who knows, he may begin to trust you more. He doesn’t seem like the kind of man who’d ever trust a woman anyway.’
‘And you’ll be working with me?’
‘I think I’m being moved again. The Gestapo has five different sections, Erhard, and between them there are more than twenty different subsections. Obviously, that’s more organised in Berlin, but even here they try and divide the work according to these sections. Agnes Kléber has arranged for me to be moved to Section 4A, which deals with the Resistance. Hopefully I’ll pick up useful intelligence there. But where you are, that’s critical. The Resistance has to know who its hidden enemies are, those it cannot see.’
They walked along to Pont de Midi and watched the river for a while as it flowed quickly through the city as if in a hurry to get away from it. They turned into Avenue Berthelot to work back that way, enabling Erhard to see where he’d be working.
They were stopped by a police patrol just as they turned into the Avenue, the French gendarmes saluting them and apologising once they saw their papers identifying them as Germans.
‘This is what it’s like being a member of the master race, eh?’
Sophia shrugged. ‘It does feel like that. Being German here means that we are seen as being superior and privileged.’
‘Not by the French though.’
‘We are by some of them, but not many.’
‘And the rest of them?’
‘They hate us, absolutely despise us. You can see it in their eyes and in every sinew of their bodies. You can even see it in the way they hold themselves. If you’re in a shop or a café and they realise you’re German – and believe me, Erhard, they know – then there’s something about the way they react. They take half a step away from you as if you’re infected with some terrible disease. And at the same time, I’m not sure how to put it, but their bodies seem to tense up, as if they are about to attack you.
‘I’ve seen old ladies look at me as if they’d happily knife me and then the mothers who move their children away from me. Every time this happens, I want to weep, but I know we deserve it. And more than that, Erhard, it’s the reason we cannot fail in our mission.’
Chapter 16
Berne
November 1943
From Noel Moore’s workplace at the British Embassy to where he lived on Marzilistrasse was a comfortable twenty-minute walk: up Thunstrasse, crossing the Aare on Dalmazibrücke and then the short walk in Marzili, just south of the Altstadt and although not exactly quaint, a pleasant enough area to live.
Most of the embassy staff lived on the other side of the river, some closer to Thunstrasse, others in one of the pleasant suburbs to the south-east of the city with their dramatic views of the Bernese Alps on a good day.
It suited Noel Moore to live away from other people: he liked to have a separation between where he lived and where he worked. The apartment on Marzilistrasse could be described as quite isolated, even slightly bleak. It was at the end of a block, with scrubland to one side and at the rear a factory from which there was a near-constant hum of machinery. The stretch of the Aare that ran parallel to Marzilistrasse was particularly windy, meaning that Noel Moore’s apartment had the noise of the factory from behind and the wind from its front.
But it suited Noel Moore fine: when he found the apartment on his third week in Berne, he knew it was ideal. The building had three apartments, his being on the top floor, and it had its own entrance, reached via an external staircase, which led to a small porch.
By the time he climbed the external staircase just after six o’clock on a bitterly cold Wednesday evening in the third week of November, Noel Moore was exhausted. It had been a difficult day. It had begun at seven that morning when he had to debrief an escaped RAF navigator who’d arrived at the embassy the previous day. That had taken up most of the morning, and then Basil Remington-Barber said he wanted to see him in his office.
Urgently.
It turned out not to be urgent but instead something he’d become increasingly used to over recent months: a shoulder for Basil to cry on.
Had he, Remington-Barber asked, discussed him when he was back in London in August?
‘Discussed you with who, Basil?’
‘You know, Noel, with the powers that be. Head office.’
‘Well of course your name came up as in “how is Basil” and that kind of thing but nothing more than that really. It would have been most odd had they not asked after you, don’t you think? That would have been reason to be concerned, I’d have thought.’
‘And when they asked you how I am, how did you respond?’
‘I cannot remember exactly, Basil, to be frank. I imagine I said something along the lines of how busy you are and indeed how we all are and how Switzerland is now centre stage and we’re not really adequately staffed. Nothing that you and I haven’t discussed many times. You look bothered, Basil?’
‘Of course I’m bloody bothered, Noel! What do you think? Barney Allen pitching up in Switzerland and acting like he owns the place and taking over my best two agents and he doesn’t even have the grace to be where I can see him in Berne, instead he’s building his own little empire in Geneva and next thing I know I’ll be told I’m past it and once this damned war’s over I’ll end up somewhere dreadful in the Home Counties without the knighthood I’d been given to understand I’d get and… Christ…’
His voice tailed off and he stared out of the window and Noel Moore noticed that somehow Basil had not just aged in recent months but had certainly started drinking more. He’d never been exactly abstemious, but he could hold his drink, there was no question of that. But now he invariably turned up at work looking hungover and seemed to start drinking well before lunchtime. Noel noticed the familiar redness to his complexion.
‘I mean… Barney Allen… decent chap and a good family, the right school, well-connected of course… I understand all that, Noel – but you could hardly accuse him of having any experience of espionage, could you? He’s never operated in hostile territory, has he? Never been on a clandestine mission, never had his life in danger – has he? He won’t know what it’s like to stand in the ruins of a building in the damp and cold for hours on end in the hope that an agent may turn up, unsure that if they do, they won’t turn on you. He won’t know what it’s like to have a gun pulled on you or to go on the run and know your chances of making it are—’
‘He did—’
‘Please don’t tell me he fought in the Great War, Noel. Everyone fought in the Great War: even my brother-in-law fought in it, for heaven’s sake! Barney probably spent most of it copying maps three miles behind the front line in a comfortable manor house with a decent cellar.’
‘While I see your point, Basil, I think it is fair to point out that Barney was operating covertly in Berlin when I first met him in 1936 and—’
‘Exactly Noel – 1936. We weren’t at war with Germany then, were we?’
‘Nonetheless, Basil, he did recruit Sophia and Jack, so the fact that he’s running them now would seem to be reasonable enough.’
Noel Moore wondered if he’d perhaps gone too far. There was no question that Basil’s nose had been put out of joint by the arrival of Barney Allen and it was also true that when he’d been back in London in the summer he’d been asked about Basil and he had said that the workload was all a bit too much and what with his age, Basil was rather struggling. And he could see how Basil was concerned with Barney running an operation from Geneva that was so secret even he didn’t know about it.
And it was certainly an operation Noel would like to know about too.
He managed to placate Basil, but it took long enough. He told him how London was in awe of the work he did, not just the quantity of it but also the quality, and although he wasn’t privy to anything, he was sure the reward at the end of the war when Basil finally was able to retire would be something that Basil felt was appropriate.
But it had taken long enough to get to this point. It was now well into the afternoon and Noel had a report to write up on the RAF navigator and then he had to look at the paperwork on a woman who claimed she’d escaped from Munich and wished to work for the British and who he was due to interview tomorrow.
By half past five he was so tired he decided to head home and not for the first time would bend the rules – well, break them, if the truth be told – and take home the report on this German woman. He’d have a bath, then some supper and read the file then before having an early night.
He climbed the external staircase carefully: it could be quite precarious in the icy wind. He was a bit annoyed that the porch door was open: it needed fixing and sometimes it was enough effort to get the bloody thing to close. He really must have a word with the landlord about it. He’d mention the mould in the bathroom while he was at it. And the light in the hall cupboard.
It was only when he’d removed his shoes and put on his slippers and was standing in the small hallway that he realised something wasn’t quite right. He paused and stood very still but couldn’t hear a sound, at least not at first. He looked round and noticed that the door to his bedroom was open and he usually closed it and then he noticed some marks on the wooden floor, which he was sure hadn’t been there in the morning, and as his hearing tuned in to the silence of the apartment, he thought he heard a faint sound from within the lounge, which sounded like someone breathing.
Which was, of course, ridiculous.
So ridiculous that he decided he really was exhausted and needed to pull himself together if he wasn’t to end up becoming paranoid like Basil. And with that he strode into the lounge and turned on the light and blinked in utter shock.
Sitting on the sofa, facing the door, wearing his coat and trilby but otherwise looking quite at home was the man he’d first met as Nicholas ten years previously and who he now knew as Jeffrey Morgan.
‘Good evening, Harold. Perhaps you’d care to put the kettle on?’
* * *
He didn’t even bother to ask Jeffrey Morgan – though he still thought of him as Nicholas – how he’d found him. He knew he’d just shrug and smile in that knowingly superior way of his and not for the first time he’d feel like a fool for asking a question that would be batted away in a contemptuous manner. Instead, he waited until he’d recovered something of his composure, which took a while, and then sat down at the table, facing Nicholas on the sofa.
His visitor asked him how he was, and he didn’t reply, determined this time not to come across as compliant and obedient.
‘You always looked so shocked to see me.’
‘Last time it was because I thought you were dead.’
‘True: but last time was just four months ago, and I did say I’d be in touch, did I not?’
The last time they’d met had been in August, back in London, at the Hope public house. Nicholas had told him that he’d be asked to start working for them ‘sooner or later’ and he’d asked then how he’d know when and Nicholas had told him not to worry about that.
And here, in the small apartment on Marzilistrasse in Berne, it appeared that the ‘sooner or later’ that had haunted him for ten years, that had hung over him like an executioner’s axe, that had caused him sleepless nights and never-ending stomach problems and a constant state of anxiety… that ‘sooner or later’ was now.
The time he had so dreaded had come.
‘How did you—’
‘How did I find you? Easy enough, I do know where you work after all.’
‘I was going to ask how you got here – to Switzerland. I thought you were a wanted man?’
Nicholas shrugged in that dismissive manner of his, the one he used when he had no intention of answering a question and was surprised Noel Moore had the temerity to ask it.
‘It wasn’t easy, I’ll leave it at that. But being here is very… refreshing. Hearing German spoken so ubiquitously is a true pleasure. But…’ He clapped his hands then rubbed them together before removing his hat and coat. ‘We have work to do, eh? Heaven knows, we’ve waited long enough! And I must say, well done, you… your metamorphosis from Harold Noel Dickson to Noel Moore has been a joy to behold. How long is it now?’
‘As you know, I changed my name at the end of November 1933, before starting my new job at the Foreign Office in January 1934. I’m amazed no one suspected—’
‘I told you – I arranged for the letter from the solicitor handling your change of name on our behalf to the Foreign Office to be removed from the files. For a brief time in 1935 we had someone with access to Registry and she was able to fillet a few files for us. Without that letter and a form subsequently completed about your change of name, no one would be any the wiser that Noel Moore had in fact been Harold Noel Dickson. That was important, of course, when you moved to Berlin to work in the Passport Control Office and became involved in espionage work.’
Nicholas leaned back in the sofa and suggested it was time for Harold to put the kettle on. When he returned with a tray of tea he’d removed his jacket too, ready now to start work.
‘Of course, it was never the intention that we would wait quite so long before we turned you into an active agent. But then the war did throw up a number of insurmountable obstacles and, of course, my own difficulties and the need to disappear and then you being in Switzerland… but –’ he clapped his hands so loudly that Noel Moore jumped ‘– here we are!’
Noel Moore coughed nervously and started to sip his tea until he realised his hand was shaking too much. ‘Can I just point out that my role at the embassy is not what you… what I’m trying to say is that you may have a somewhat exaggerated view of what I do. I’m little more than a clerk, really.’
Nicholas looked at him long and hard, during which time his demeanour darkened and even though he didn’t say a word, Noel Moore felt frightened.
‘That is not my understanding.’
‘It’s not that I don’t want to help but—’
‘You give every impression of not wanting to help.’
‘What I am trying to say is not that I don’t want to help but that I fear I may not be in a position to help… much.’
‘So, this has all been a waste of time, then?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The past ten years… our meetings during that time, the considerable help we gave you, the promises you made… our expectations… the subterfuge we arranged and you so happily colluded with… what I believed was an agreement that we had – that has all been a waste of time, has it?’
Noel Moore shrugged. He’d been staring at the floor but when he looked up, he noticed Nicholas was putting on his jacket and standing up.
‘Maybe you’re right, Harold Noel Dickson. Maybe you are little more than a clerk, though that would be contrary to what we understand. In that case, you’ve clearly misled us. Maybe it’s best if I cut my losses and disappear once more.’
He was putting on his overcoat now and adjusting his scarf. Noel Moore wondered if he was about to be let off the hook.
‘I hope there’s no hard feelings.’
Nicholas stopped and turned towards him, stepping so close that their faces were no more than six inches apart. His eyes were veiny and red and his face pinched and aged but there was an undoubted venom when he spoke.
