Game of Spies: The Secret Agent, the Traitor and the Nazi, Bordeaux 1942-1944. Paddy Ashdown

in her underclothes.)

      The three secret agents took the train to Tours, the two women sitting together in one carriage and Landes separately in another. At Tours, Lise de Baissac caught a train south to the Charente, where she had contacts to meet. Rudellat had her own flat in the town, but decided that, as a single woman with an inquisitive landlord, it would attract too much attention if Landes stayed the night with her, so she directed him to a small hotel near the station. The two agreed to meet the following morning in the station buffet and catch the early train to Bordeaux, travelling as a married couple. In case the rendezvous failed, Rudellat gave her ‘husband’ the address of the Café des Chartrons, before they parted.

      Checking in to the hotel that evening, Landes made a mess of writing his new name on one of the five forms he was required to complete in order to register. He amended it as best he could, hoping the manager wouldn’t notice.

      The following day, 3 November, there was no sign of Yvonne Rudellat at Tours station. Landes had no option but to continue the journey to Bordeaux by himself. Now he was totally on his own. They had told him in training to invent a cover story for every journey, so as always to have a convincing explanation for what he was doing. Over time, this would become one of his cardinal rules for survival and one he would always impress on others who he trained. Now, however, with no previous experience in wartime France, he had to do the best he could with what little London had given him. He was returning to his job in Organisation Todt after a visit to Tours, where he had been seeing friends. But who were the friends? What were their names? What was their address? What was his address in Bordeaux? He had neither a past nor a future to draw on. If he survived, he would accumulate enough back history to create both. Looking out of the window as the train ground laboriously south through Poitiers, Angoulême and the Charente vineyards, where the leaves flamed with the gold and red of autumn, Landes felt alone, out of place and very vulnerable.

      Finally, late in the morning, the train rattled over the iron girder bridge spanning the muddy waters of the Garonne and pulled into the glass and cast-iron cavern of Bordeaux’s Gare Saint-Jean, full of steam and noise and bustle. Safely through the German checkpoint at the end of the platform, he went to register at a local hotel which Yvonne Rudellat had recommended, and then set off for the Café des Chartrons.

      In general, cities are the most congenial places to conduct the business of secrets. The advantages of anonymity, a facility for easy contact and the ability to vanish into the crowd make spying, like any impropriety, easier in an urban setting than anywhere else. In due course, Roger Landes would become a master of his trade in this environment. For the moment, though, it was enough to feel safer amongst the crowds in Bordeaux than he did being drawn around the Loire valley behind a horse with homing instincts.

      That first day among the faceless throng filling the streets and squares of a foreign city must nevertheless have been a nerve-jangling one, even for someone trained to the task and used to living in France.

      After the huddled coats of London in November, it would have been strange to see people sitting outside street cafés, soaking up the last warmth of summer. Stranger still to have to root his feet to the ground to stop them taking flight when the turn of a corner brought him face to face with a crowd of German soldiers coming in the opposite direction. He cut down onto the waterfront and, turning left, followed the crescent-shaped sweep of the quay north, towards the Pont de Pierre with its seventeen graceful arches, one for each letter in Napoléon Bonaparte’s name. He was passing through elegant Bordeaux now, with its magnificent eighteenth-century frontages, balconied apartments and spacious tree-lined parks. Turning briefly left into one of these, he found himself in the Place des Quinconces. Here, strolling idly through yellow drifts of fallen leaves from the park’s plane trees, he saw a little bistro, the Café des Colonnes, and noted it as a possible future meeting place. Back on the waterfront once more, he walked north, up the Quai des Chartrons, crowded with small merchant vessels and German warships and busy with the clatter of cranes, small goods trains and lorries. Here were quayside bars and chandleries and the imposing shop windows of great wine merchants. On the opposite side of the road a line of new warehouses marched along the quay, stretching north into the haze. It was there, in the Bacalan quarter – as he remembered from the map he had studied back in London – that he would find number 101: the Café des Chartrons, the rendezvous he had fixed with Yvonne Rudellat the previous day.

      It was midi, the sacred French lunch hour, when he arrived at the café. The restaurant was crowded, smoky and full of the noise of shouted meal orders and the clatter of plates. Landes ordered himself a drink and settled into a corner to wait for the place to empty enough for him to call the patron over. Using Claude de Baissac’s alias in France, he began: ‘I have a letter for David,’

      ‘David? I don’t know any David.’

      ‘You are Monsieur Bertrand?’

      ‘Of course I am. But there is no David here. I don’t know what you are talking about.’

      Landes asked him if he could leave a letter for his friend. Bertrand, not wishing to give any indication to this stranger that he knew de Baissac, shrugged and answered that of course he could. But since he didn’t know anyone called David, there was no guarantee it would be delivered. On a slip of paper Landes wrote:

      My dear David,

      I am briefly passing through Bordeaux and would love to see you. If you can make it I will be in the Café des Colonnes in Place des Quinconces from 11 in the morning and dining at around 7 in the evening in the Café Gambetta. I do hope we can meet,

      Stanislas

      Handing the note to Bertrand, Landes returned to his hotel near the station.

      That evening, Landes entered the Café Gambetta at seven o’clock sharp and was reassured to see Yvonne Rudellat already installed at a corner table with a thick-set, dark-haired stranger, who she introduced as ‘Monsieur Jean Duboué’. She had had an accident while cycling to Tours railway station the previous day, she explained. She was only bruised, but her clothes had been badly torn. She didn’t want to attract attention on the train, so she had gone back to her flat, changed and caught a later connection. She had looked for Landes at the Café des Chartrons. Marcel Bertrand told her that a stranger had left a message. And so, here she was.

      ‘David is out of town waiting for your parachute drop,’ Rudellat continued. ‘If you missed each other, I was to tell you to go every morning to the Bar de Petit Louis, order a glass of wine and wait for him to arrive.’

      The three of them went back to the Café des Chartrons, where Landes unpacked his radio and, relieved to find that it had not been damaged in Rudellat’s bicycle accident, tried to get through to Baker Street. He could hear London well enough. But they couldn’t hear him. He would have to find somewhere else to make his transmissions.

      On that same day, 3 November 1942, while Landes was trying to radio London, Admiral Raoul Gaston Marie Grandclément, Grand Croix de la Légion d’Honneur, pillar of the French navy, head of the Grandclément family and pitiless mirror to his son’s failures, died at his home in Paris, with André Grandclément at his bedside.

      In Bordeaux, two days later, Claude de Baissac finally met Roger Landes. They discussed where the newly arrived radio operator should live and decided that he should move in with de Baissac that evening until somewhere more permanent could be found. That afternoon, trying to kill time, Landes went to the cinema and nearly gave himself away again by lighting a cigarette. The cinema manager rushed over and warned him in an urgent whisper that, under the Germans, smoking in cinemas was strictly forbidden.

      Although Friedrich Dohse in Bouscat knew nothing of the new arrivals in his city, he knew something was going on. Luftwaffe reports sent to his office highlighted a substantial increase in clandestine night flights into the Bordeaux region. They were probably, he was told, parachuting in arms and agents. Dohse ordered daily updates and persuaded local Wehrmacht commanders to provide roving raiding parties to intercept the new threat.

      Up to now, Bordeaux had been, for Friedrich Dohse, quiet, pleasant and comfortable. All this was about to change.