Serge Frankel was a Communist – student of Marx, devotee of Lenin and servant of Stalin. Born in Berlin, he’d been hunted from end to end of Hitler’s Third Reich, and had not seen his wife and children since the day he waved goodbye to them at Cologne railway station, wearing a new moustache and carrying papers that described him as an undertaker from Stettin.
During the Civil War in Spain, Frankel had been a political commissar with the International Brigade. During the tank assault on the Prado, Frankel had destroyed an Italian tank single-handed, using a wine bottle hastily filled with petrol.
‘Tea?’ said Frankel. I remembered him making tea then as he made it now: pouring boiling water from a dented electric kettle into an antique teapot with a chipped lid. Even this room was enigmatic. Was he a pauper, hoarding the cash value of the skeleton clock and the tiny Corot etching, or a Croesus, indifferent to his plastic teaspoons and museum postcards of Rouault?
‘And what can I do for you, young man?’ He rubbed his hands together, exactly as he had done the day I first visited him. Then, my briefing could hardly have been more simple: find Communists and give them money, they had told me. But most of life’s impossible tasks – from alchemy to squaring the circle – are similarly concise. At that time the British had virtually no networks in Western Europe. A kidnapping on the German–Dutch border in November 1939 had put both the European chief of SIS and his deputy into the hands of the Abwehr. A suitcase full of contact addresses captured in The Hague in May 1940, and the fall of France, had given the coup de grâce to the remainder. Champion and I were ‘blind’, as jargon has it, and halt and lame, too, if the truth be told. We had no contacts except Serge Frankel, who’d done the office a couple of favours in 1938 and 1939 and had never been contacted since.
‘Communists.’ I remembered the way that Frankel had said it, ‘Communists’, as though he’d not heard the word before. I had been posing as an American reporter, for America was still a neutral country. He looked again at the papers I had laid out on his writing table. There was a forged US passport sent hurriedly from the office in Berne, an accreditation to the New York Herald Tribune and a membership card of The American Rally for a Free Press, which the British Embassy in Washington recommended as the reddest of American organizations. Frankel had jabbed his finger on that card and pushed it to the end of the row, like a man playing patience. ‘Now that the Germans have an Abwehr office here, Communists are lying low, my friend.’ He had poured tea for us.
‘But Hitler and Stalin have signed the peace pact. In Lyon the Communists are even publishing a news-sheet.’
Frankel looked up at me, trying to see if I was being provocative. He said, ‘Some of them are even wearing the hammer and sickle again. Some are drinking with the German soldiers and calling them fellow workers, like the Party tells them to do. Some have resigned from the Party in disgust. Some have already faced firing squads. Some are reserving their opinion, waiting to see if the war is really finished. But which are which? Which are which?’ He sipped his tea and then said, ‘Will the English go on fighting?’
‘I know nothing about the English, I’m an American,’ I insisted. ‘My office wants a story about the French Communists and how they are reacting to the Germans.’
Frankel moved the US passport to the end of the row. It was as if he was tacitly dismissing my credentials, and my explanations, one by one. ‘The people you want to see are the ones still undecided.’
He looked up to see my reaction.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘The ones who have not signed a friendship treaty with the Boche, eh?’
I nodded.
‘We’ll meet again on Monday. What about the café in the arcade, at the Place Massena. Three in the afternoon.’
‘Thank you, Mr Frankel. Perhaps there’s something I can do for you in return. My office have let me have some real coffee …’
‘Let’s see what happens,’ said Frankel. But he took the tiny packet of coffee. Already it was becoming scarce.
I picked up the documents and put them into my pocket. Frankel watched me very closely. Making a mistake about me could send him to a concentration camp. We both knew that. If he had any doubts he’d do nothing at all. I buttoned up my coat and bowed him goodbye. He didn’t speak again until I reached the door. ‘If I am wearing a scarf or have my coat buttoned at the collar, do not approach me.’
‘Thank you, Mr Frankel,’ I said. ‘I’ll watch out for that.’
He smiled. ‘It seems like only yesterday,’ he said. He poured the tea. ‘You were too young to be a correspondent for an American newspaper, but I knew you were not working for the Germans.’
‘How did you know that?’
He passed the cup of tea to me, murmuring apologies about having neither milk nor lemon. He said, ‘They would have sent someone more suitable. The Germans had many men who’d lived in America long enough. They could have chosen someone in his thirties or forties with an authentic accent.’
‘But you went ahead,’ I reminded him.
‘I talked to Marius. We guessed you’d be bringing money. The first contact would have to bring money. We could do nothing without cash.’
‘You could have asked for it, or stolen it.’
‘All that came later – the bank hold-ups, the extortion, the loans. When you arrived we were very poor. We were offering only a franc for a rifle and we could only afford to buy the perfect Lebel pattern ones even then.’
‘Rifles the soldiers had thrown away?’ It was always the same conversation that we had, but I didn’t mind.
‘The ditches were full of them. It was that that started young Marius off – the bataillon Guernica was his choice of name – I thought it would have been better to have chosen a victory to celebrate, but young Marius liked the unequivocally anti-German connotation that the Guernica bombing gave us.’
‘But on the Monday you said no,’ I reminded him.
‘On the Monday I told you not to have high hopes,’ he corrected me. He ran his long bony fingers back into his fine white wispy hair.
‘I knew no one else, Serge.’
‘I felt sorry for you when you walked off towards the bus station, but young Marius wanted to look at you and make up his own mind. And that way it was safer for me, too. He decided to stop you in the street if you looked genuine.’
‘At the Casino tabac he stopped me. I wanted English cigarettes.’
‘Was that good security?’
‘I had the American passport. There was no point in trying to pretend I was French.’
‘And Marius said he might get some?’
‘He waited outside the tabac. We talked. He said he’d hide me in the church. And when Champion returned, he hid us both. It was a terrible risk to take for total strangers.’
‘Marius was like that,’ said Frankel.
‘Without you and Marius we might never have got started,’ I said.
‘Hardly,’ said Frankel. ‘You would have found others.’ But he smiled and was flattered to think of himself as the beginning of the whole network. ‘Sometimes I believe that Marius would have become important, had he lived.’
I nodded. They’d made a formidable partnership – the Jewish Communist and the anti-Fascist priest – and yet I remembered Frankel hearing the news of Marius’s death without showing a flicker of emotion. But Frankel had been younger then, and keen to show us what his time in Moscow had really taught him.
‘We made a lot of concessions to each other – me and Marius,’ Frankel said. ‘If he’d