Epitaph for a Spy Page 19

  “You mean that I am not really under arrest.”

  “If you were under arrest, Vadassy, you would not, as I have already pointed out to you, be sitting here talking to me. You see, my good friend, we had to force his hand. But we had to do it carefully. The agent who arrested you was told to make it clear why you were being arrested. If Duclos had not asked, the agent would have announced that the charge was espionage. Now put yourself in this man’s place. You know that the photographs you have taken have fallen by chance into another person’s hands. What do you do? You try to get them back. Having failed, and suspecting that this person is playing some sort of game, you decide to wait. Then this person is arrested by the police on a charge of espionage. What do you think? What runs through your mind? Firstly, that the police have discovered that the photographs have been taken, secondly, that this person may, in defending himself, lead the police to you. It is time, therefore, for you to go. What is more, you have no time to lose. You understand?”

  “Yes, I understand. But supposing he does not leave? What then?”

  “The question does not arise. He has left.”

  “What?”

  He glanced at the clock on the wall. “Twenty-five past ten. He left the Reserve ten minutes ago in a car he hired from the garage in the village. He was heading for Toulon. We will give him a few more minutes. We have a car following. A report should reach us soon now.” He lit his third cigarette and flicked the match across the room. “Meanwhile I have some instructions for you.”

  “Indeed!”

  “Yes. For obvious reasons it is not desirable that any charge of espionage should be made just yet. The newspapers must not get too inquisitive. I propose to make the arrests on a charge of theft-the theft of a Zeiss Contax camera, value four thousand five hundred francs. Do you see?”

  “You mean that you want me to identify the camera?”

  “Exactly.” He stared hard at me. “You can do that, can’t you?

  I hesitated. There was nothing else for it. He would have to know the truth.

  “Well?” he said impatiently.

  “I could have identified it.” I felt myself getting red. “There is only one difficulty. The camera now in my room at the Reserve is my own camera. The cameras were re-exchanged.”

  To my astonishment, he nodded calmly. “When did it happen?”

  I told him. Again that faint smile puckered the corners of his mouth.

  “I thought as much.”

  “You what?”

  “My dear Monsieur Vadassy, I am not a fool and you are painfully transparent. Your careful avoidance of the subject of the cameras on the telephone this morning was very obvious.”

  “I didn’t think-”

  “Of course you didn’t. However, as you have already found, the two cameras are very much alike. It would be an understandable mistake on your part to identify the camera we hope to find at Toulon as your own property, wouldn’t it?”

  I agreed hastily.

  “And, of course, if the mistake is discovered later, you will be suitably apologetic?”

  “Of course.”

  “Very well, that is settled. He got to his feet. “And,” he added genially, “I see no reason why, if all goes well, you should not be able to leave for Paris tomorrow in time for your exigent Monsieur Mathis on Monday.”

  For a moment I did not realize what he was saying; then, as the meaning began to filter into my brain, I heard myself babbling incoherent thanks. It was as if I were waking from a nightmare. There was that same almost overpowering sensation of mingled relief and fear: relief that it was, after all, only a nightmare, fear that it might, after all, be real and that the awakening was the dream. Fragments of the nightmare still lingered. I was afraid, afraid to trust myself to think. This was merely another trick of Beghin’s, a trap, a means of gaining my confidence. My thanks died on my lips. He was watching me curiously.

  “If you are telling me the truth,” I said sharply, “if you do mean what you say, why don’t you let me go now? Why can’t I go until tomorrow? If you have no charge against me, you cannot keep me here. You have no right to do so.”

  He sighed wearily. “None at all. But I have already told you that your assistance is required for identification purposes.”

  “But supposing I refuse?”

  He shrugged. “I cannot compel you. We should have to manage without you. There are, of course,” he added thoughtfully, “other considerations. You mentioned, I believe, that you had applied for French citizenship. Your attitude in this matter might make all the difference between the success or failure of your application. The French citizen is required to aid the police if requested to do so. A man with so little appreciation of the responsibilities of citizenship as to refuse that aid…”

  “I see. More blackmail!”

  One of his chubby hands rested on my shoulder. “My dear good Vadassy, I have never come across anyone so given to quibbling over words.” The hand left my shoulder, went to his inside pocket and came out with an envelope in it. “Look! You have spent three days at the Reserve at our request and upon our business. We wish to be fair. Here is five hundred francs.” He thrust the envelope into my hand. “That will more than cover the extra expense. Now then, we ask you to spend an hour of your remaining time here in helping us to arrest the men responsible for all your troubles. Is that unreasonable?”

  I looked him in the eyes.

  “You avoided the question just now. I ask it again. Who is the spy?”

  He caressed his loose jowl thoughtfully and glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. “I am afraid,” he said slowly, “that I have purposely refrained from telling you. I am afraid, too, that I have no intention of telling you now.”

  “I see. Very clever. I shall have to come with you and see for myself. And then I suppose I shall be expected to make this false identification of the camera. Is that it?”

  But before he could reply there was a sharp knock at the door and an agent came in, nodded meaningly at Beghin, and went out again.

  “That,” said Beghin, “means that our man has passed through Sanary. It’s time we went.” He walked to the door and looked back. “Are you coming, Vadassy?”

  I slipped the envelope into my pocket and stood up.

  “Of course,” I said, and followed him out of the room.

  18

  At ten forty-five that night a big Renault saloon swung out of the short side road leading from the Commissariat and sped east along the main coast road.

  In the car besides Beghin and myself were two plain-clothes men. One was driving. The other I had recognized as he had sat down beside me in the back. It was my friend of the limonade gazeuse. He refused steadfastly to remember me.

  The clouds had gone. The moon, high in the sky, shed a light that made the beams of the headlamps seem pale. As we left the outskirts of St. Gatien, the hum of the engine rose in pitch and the tires slithered on the wet road as we rounded the “S” bends beyond the Reserve headland. I leaned back on the cushions, trying to resolve the chaos of my thoughts.

  Here was I, Josef Vadassy, a man who, not two hours before, had been resigned to the loss of his work, his liberty, and his hopes, calmly sitting in the back seat of a French police car on its way to catch a spy!

  Calmly? No, that was not quite true. I was anything but calm. I wanted to sing. And yet I was not quite sure what I wanted to sing about. Was it the knowledge that tomorrow, in almost exactly twenty-four hours’ time, I should be sitting in a train nearing Paris? Or was it that soon, tonight, I was to learn the answer to a question, that my problem was to be solved for me, without a pencil and paper? I worried over these alternatives.

  I think that all this was part of my body’s reaction to the tension of the last three days. All the evidence points to that conclusion. My stomach rumbled incessantly. I was very thirsty. I kept lighting cigarettes and then pitching them out of the window before I had smoked them. Also, and this was most significant, I h
ad that curious feeling of having forgotten something, of having left something behind in St. Gatien, something that I should need. All nonsense, of course. I had left nothing in St. Gatien that could have been the slightest use to me that night in Toulon.

  The car hummed on through moonlit avenues of trees. Then we left the trees behind and the country became more open. There were plantations of olives, their leaves a silvery gray in the light of the headlamps. We flashed through villages. Then we came into a small town. A man in the square shouted angrily at us as we shot past him. “Soon,” I thought, “we shall be at Toulon.” I had a sudden desire to talk to someone. I turned to the man beside me.

  “What was that place?”

  He removed his pipe from his mouth. “La Cadiere.”

  “Do you know who it is that we are going to arrest?”

  “No.” He put his pipe back in his mouth and stared straight ahead.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “about the lemonade.”

  He grunted. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I gave it up. The Renault swung to the right and accelerated along a straight road. I stared at Beghin’s head and shoulders outlined against the glare of the headlights. I saw him light a cigarette. Then he half turned his head.

  “It’s no use trying to pump Henri,” he said. “He is discretion itself.”

  “Yes, I see that.”

  He threw the match out of the window. “You spent four days at the Reserve, Vadassy. Haven’t you any idea of the man we’re going to arrest?”

  “None.”

  He chuckled wheezily. “Not even a guess?”

  “Not even a guess.”

  Henri stirred. “You’d make a bad detective.”

  “I sincerely hope so,” I retorted coldly.

  He grunted. Beghin chuckled again. “Be careful, Henri. Monsieur has a forked tongue in his head and he is still angry with the police.” He turned to the driver. “Stop at the poste at Ollioules.”

  A few minutes later we entered the town in question and pulled up outside a small building in the square. A uniformed agent was waiting at the door. He walked over, saluted, and leaned through the window of the car.

  “Monsieur Beghin?”

  “Yes.”

  “They are waiting for you at the junction of the main road and the road from Sablettes, Monsieur. The car from the garage at St. Gatien returned five minutes ago.”

  “Good!”

  We drove on again. Five minutes later I saw the rear light of a stationary car on the road in front of us. The Renault slowed and came to a standstill behind it. Beghin got out.

  A tall thin man was standing by the side of the car in front. He walked towards Beghin and they shook hands. For a moment or two they stood talking, then the tall man walked back to his car and Beghin returned to the Renault.

  “That is Inspector Fournier of the dock police,” said Beghin to me as he climbed in. “We are going to his territory.” He slammed the door and turned to the driver. “Follow the Inspector’s car.”

  We moved off again. Soon now the lines of trees through which we had been driving since Ollioules thinned and we passed a factory or two. Finally we swung on to a brightly lighted road with tram tracks down the center and cafes on the pavements. Then we turned to the right and I saw the name “Boulevard de Strasbourg” on the corner building. We were in Toulon.

  The cafes were full. Groups of French sailors strolled along the pavements. There were many girls. A handsome young colored woman with a picture hat and a tight black dress walked serenely across the road in front of us, causing our driver to brake hard and swear. An old man was wandering along in the gutter playing a mandolin. I saw a dark, fat man stop a sailor, say something to him, and receive a shove that sent him cannoning into a woman with a tray of sweets. Farther down we passed a naval patrol going in and out of the cafes warning the sailors that it was time to get down to the tenders waiting to return to the warships. Then we came to a less frequented part of the Boulevard and the car in front slowed down and turned to the right. A moment or two later we were threading our way cautiously through a network of dark, narrow streets of houses and steel-shuttered shops. Then the houses became less frequent and there were whole streets lined only with the high blank walls of warehouses. It was in such a street that we eventually stopped.

  “We get out here,” said Beghin.

  It was a warm night, but as I stood on the damp cobbles I shivered. It may have been excitement, but I think that it was fear. There was something eerie about those blank walls.

  Beghin touched me on the arm.

  “Come on, Vadassy, a little walk now.”

  Ahead of us the Inspector and three other men were standing waiting.

  “It’s very quiet,” I said.

  He grunted. “What do you expect at this time of night among a lot of warehouses? Stay in the rear with Henri and don’t make a noise.”

  He joined the Inspector and the three men fell in behind him. Henri and I brought up the rear. The drivers remained at their posts.

  At the end of the walls we turned into a street that twisted out of sight a few meters farther down. On the right-hand side was the end wall of the warehouse alongside which the cars were drawn up. On the left was a row of old houses. They were three stories high and mostly in darkness. Here and there, however, slits of light gleamed through closed shutters. The moon cast indeterminate pools of shadow along the cracked stucco walls. Somewhere, in one of the upper rooms, a radio was croaking out a tango.

  “What happens now?” I asked.

  “We just pay a call,” whispered Henri. “It’ll be quite polite. Keep your mouth shut now or I’ll get into trouble. We’re getting close.”

  The street had narrowed still more. As we rounded the bend I felt the cobbles begin to slope downwards. Dimly, I could see that there were once more high blank walls on both sides of us, walls reinforced with tall concrete buttresses. Suddenly, in the shadow one of the buttresses, I saw something move.

  My heart leaped. I gripped Henri’s arm.

  “There’s somebody there!”

  “Keep quiet,” he muttered. “It’s one of our men. We’ve got the place surrounded.”

  We walked on a few meters. The ground became level again. Then I saw a gap in the wall on the right. It looked like the entrance to one of the warehouses, a way for trucks. The men ahead melted into the shadows. As I followed, I felt the cobbles give way to cinders. I paused uncertainly.

  “Get into the side,” hissed Henri, “to your left.”

  I obeyed cautiously and my outstretched hand encountered a wall. There were no longer any movements in front. I looked up. The walls rose like the sides of a deep canyon to a wedge of starry sky. Suddenly the beam of a torch cut

  through the darkness ahead and I saw that the others were standing before a wooden door in the side of the left-hand wall. I moved forward. The torch lit up the surface of the door. On it were painted the words: AGENCE MARITIME, F. P. METRAUX.

  Beghin grasped the handle of the door and turned gently. The door swung inwards. Henri prodded me in the back and I moved forward after the others.

  Inside the door was a short passage terminating in a steep flight of bare wooden stairs. A naked electric light on the landing above cast a cold glare on the flaking plaster wall. The Agence Metraux did not appear to be very prosperous.

  The stairs creaked as Beghin began slowly to walk up them. As I followed, I noticed that Henri, just behind me, had taken a large revolver from his pocket. The call was evidently not going to be quite as “polite” as Henri had prophesied. My heart thumped in my chest. Somewhere in this drab, smelly, sinister building there was a man I knew. Not half an hour ago he had walked up these stairs, the stairs beneath my feet now. Soon, in a moment or two perhaps, I should meet him again. That was the part that was so frightening. He could do no harm to me and yet I was frightened. I wished suddenly that I had a mask to conceal my face. Stupid, yes. And then I beg
an to wonder which it would be. I saw their faces as they had stood watching me when I had been “arrested”-scared, shocked. Yet one of them, one of them…

  Henri prodded me in the back and motioned to me to keep up with the man in front of me.

  On the first landing Beghin stopped in front of a heavy wooden door and tried the handle. It opened easily and the light revealed an empty room, the floor of which was strewn with slabs of plaster fallen from the ceiling. He paused to wipe off the sweat glistening on his forehead and neck, and led the way on up the stairs.

  He had nearly reached the top of the second flight when he stopped again, and motioned us to wait. Then he and the Inspector stepped on to the landing out of sight.

  In the silence I could hear the watch ticking on the wrist of the man in front of me. Then, as the silence intensified, my ears caught a faint murmur of voices. I held my breath. A moment later the Inspector’s head and shoulders appeared over the banister rail above, and he signaled us on.

  The landing was a duplicate of the one below. There was, however, no light. Very quietly the men ranged themselves in front of the door. I found myself pressed against the wall beside it. The voices were louder now and, although the actual words were too indistinct to identify, I could hear that the owner of one of the voices-a man-was speaking Italian.

  I saw Beghin’s hand go towards the handle, hesitate, then grasp it firmly and turn.

  The door was locked; but the slight rattle of the handle had been heard inside. The voices stopped suddenly. Beghin swore under his breath, and rapped loudly on the door panels. There was dead silence from the room. Beghin waited a moment, then turned round quickly to Henri. Henri held out his revolver butt foremost. Beghin nodded and took it. Turning to the door again, he thumbed back the hammer of the gun, and put the muzzle diagonally against the keyhole. Then he squeezed the trigger.