The British officers in the Patriotic Building would later claim they didn’t rely on torture but used numerous “techniques” to get people to talk: forcing them to stand for hours and recount in mind-numbing detail how they had arrived or to sit in a painfully hardbacked chair and do the same; or filling up refugees with English tea and forbidding them to leave, seeing if their stories changed as their bladders cried for relief; or questioning applicants from sunup to sundown, or from sundown to sunup; or tag-teaming a refugee and playing good cop, bad cop. Robert remembered emerging from marathon sessions and talking to the “twenty or so fugitives there, in a situation similar to mine, who had come from various European countries.” The people he saw were some of the thirty thousand or so who ultimately filtered through the Patriotic Building during the war: men and women who in other lands were politicians or military personnel or just flat-out adventurers, washing ashore in England, sleeping in barracks, and awaiting their next interrogation slumped over on small benches, remnants of the building’s former life as a school for orphans.
La Rochefoucauld was there for eight days. In the end, an interrogating officer who spoke French knew of Robert’s family and its lineage, and soon he and the officer were chatting about the La Rochefoucaulds like old friends. Because the British espionage services brimmed with upper-class Englishmen, the spies identified with a Frenchman from the “right” sort of family, and it soon became evident that this nobleman was not a German agent. Robert was free to go.
A man waited for him as he left the grounds. He had a boy’s way of smiling, turning up his lips without revealing his teeth, an attempt to give his slender build a tough veneer. His name was Eric Piquet-Wicks, and he helped oversee a branch of the new secret service that Ambassador Hoare had mentioned to La Rochefoucauld. His features had an almost ethereal fineness to them, but his personality was much hardier, all seafaring wanderlust. He was aging gracefully, the thin creases around his eyes and cheeks granting him the gravitas his smile did not. He wore a suit well.
Piquet-Wicks and La Rochefoucauld walked around the neighborhood, Robert taking in the spring air, free of the paranoid thoughts of the last months, while Piquet-Wicks discussed his own life and how Robert might be able to help him.
Piquet-Wicks’s mother was French. The name that many Brits pronounced Pick-it Wicks was in fact Pi-kay Wicks, after his mother, Alice Mercier-Piquet, of the port city of Calais. He was born in Colchester and split his formative education between England and France, earning his college degree, in Spanish, at a university in Barcelona and making him trilingual when he graduated in the middle of the 1930s. He found work, of all places, in the Philippines, on the island of Cebù, where he became the French consular agent. From there he moved to the Paris office of a multinational firm called Borax, which extracted mineral deposits from sites around the world. In Paris, Piquet-Wicks was the managing director of Borax Français, but he longed to be a spy.
After Britain declared war on Germany, Piquet-Wicks received a commission with the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, an infantry regiment. He was stationed in Northern Ireland and woefully bored. He seems to have approached MI5, Britain’s security service, which oversaw domestic threats, to inquire about how he could best serve the agency, because it had a report on him. The agency described him as an “adventurer” who had once used his military permit at the Alexandra Hotel in Hyde Park as the means to gain whiskey; he’d told the barman it wouldn’t be long before he worked for MI5. The report also said that before the war Piquet-Wicks had had pro-Nazi leanings, but that wasn’t the reason the agency stayed away from hiring him. “We considered him unsuitable for employment on Intelligence duties, in view of his indiscreet behavior,” the report stated.
MI6, the famed spy agency, then began asking about Piquet-Wicks in July 1940, the idea being that he was an intelligent if unstable man whose dexterity with languages—he also knew some Portuguese and Italian—might still benefit Britain. But again a concern over indiscretion surfaced, and MI6 kept its distance, with one agent even saying Piquet-Wicks didn’t have “enough guts to be an adventurer.”
He may have stayed in Northern Ireland, living in a former brewery where “it was difficult to feel embarked in a war of … consequence,” he later wrote, were it not for a new security service that was in need of qualified agents.
Piquet-Wicks’s new life began one day in April 1941 at 3 a.m., pulling night duty in Belfast as a punishment for marching too far ahead of his company in drills. The phone rang. He didn’t think to answer it, but the ringing wouldn’t stop and so he picked up.
“Have you a Second Lieutenant Piquet-Wicks?” a man said. Piquet-Wicks thought this had to be someone in the mess pulling his leg.
“I am the poor bastard,” he said.
The shocked splutterings on the other end made Piquet-Wicks realize this was someone official. Startled, he hung up.
The phone rang again.
“Inniskilling,” Piquet-Wicks said, trying another tactic.
“Have you a Second Lieutenant Piquet-Wicks with the battalion?” the same voice said, but angrier.
“Yes, sir.”
“Where is he? A few minutes ago I had someone on this line. I thought—”
Piquet-Wicks broke in, saying this was the night duty officer speaking. “The officer you are calling is undoubtedly asleep,” he said. “Shall I wake him for you, sir?”
“Of course not, at this hour,” said the caller, who was a colonel from the Northern Ireland district. “Take note that he should report to the War Office … at 1500 hours on Friday the fourth.”
The War Office was in London, and the fourth was the next day.
In the morning, Piquet-Wicks went to his superior, to see what to make of the message. “I’m afraid you won’t be able to continue your disciplinary training as night duty officer,” the superior said, his eyes twinkling. “However, good luck and good-bye.”
If Piquet-Wicks were to make it to London, he would have to catch the next boat, which departed before he could properly gather all his things, or comprehend why he needed to rush to the capital.
When he arrived at the given room inside the War Office, he met with a general, who said the British were establishing a new department—unlike MI5 and MI6, and unlike anything seen before. “I was to be seconded to a secret organization,” Piquet-Wicks later wrote, “to become involved in events whose existence I had never suspected.”
On his walk now with La Rochefoucauld, almost two years later, Piquet-Wicks implied he would like Robert to work under him, as an agent in his branch of this secret organization, which he had built up almost single-handedly. More details and the particulars of missions would be disclosed if and when La Rochefoucauld made it through training.
“Here is my address,” Piquet-Wicks said.
He was “surprisingly close to each prospective agent,” he later admitted, and La Rochefoucauld sensed the humanity behind the spy’s implacable eyes. Like virtually every French agent whose life was