Ormerod's Landing (59 page)

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what he can tell them. The military vehicles always take the same route from the
Feldgendarmerie
post. It is a security
route. The car will turn into the Boulevard Bessieres and then
immediately turn into a small street, the Rue de Jonquiere. That
is where we must get him.'

'I say we leave the Englishman out of this,' said Le Blanc. 'He will be in the way.'

I say we take him, we need him,' said Marie Thérèse looking
at him steadily.

'We must take him said Raymond. 'We need everybody. There is not time to contact the others. There are just the four of us.'

Marie Thérèse turned towards the door to the corridor. I will get him,' she said.

Ormerod was sitting in the room with the rabbits, reading an eighteen-month-old English newspaper which he had unearthed
in the apartment. He studied the cricket scores closely and
smiled at Marie Thérèse as she entered. 'Len Hutton's batting well this season,' he said. She hushed him. She could hear
Raymond's conversation in the passage outside the room.

'Smales,' she said. 'There is something.'

He got up from the bed and touched her on the shoulder. She gave him a brief smile. 'Come,' she said. 'Raymond will tell you. Le Blanc is also here.'

'Ah good,' said Ormerod. 'I missed him.' He followed her into the room. He ignored Le Blanc.

Raymond said: 'They are going to move Smales. To the Hotel Lutetia.'

The significance of the name missed Ormerod. 'Is that a nice
hotel?' he said, guessing it was not.

'A very bad hotel,' said Raymond. 'It is a Gestapo office. Once he is there he will talk very quickly.'

Ormerod thought about it. 'If he has not done so already,' he said.

'It does not seem so. Not yet. They think he is just a British deserter; he had some Walther ammunition on him and twenty
thousand francs.'

'Wonder where he hid the rest?' said Ormerod, thinking like a policeman.

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'That does not matter so much. What does matter is that he
does not get to the Gestapo. We have one matter in our favour.
The Germans will probably be careless, casual. In the first place, as I say, they do not know how valuable Smales is, and in the second they have never yet had any trouble in Paris.
This will be the first time. But we
must
make sure he does not talk. After that we would not last five minutes. He has not told them anything yet. He will want to tell his story to the biggest
ears. But he will not take long.'

Ormerod nodded at him. 'So we've got to get him before he gets there.' He looked squarely at Le Blanc. 'And that means you'll kill him.'

Raymond looked as if he were pondering some academic
problem. He glanced up at Ormerod. 'You, monsieur, this time
you cannot be a non-combatant. This time you must use your
gun. We must either rescue Smales or assassinate him. He must
not get to the Hotel Lutetia.'

At four minutes to seven the car from the Hotel Lutetia drew
up outside the main door of the
Feldgendarmerie
office in the
Rue de la Porte de Clichy. It was dusk and the streets of Paris were almost vacant. The empty trees rattled in the chill air.

Raymond himself saw the arrival of the car from a telephone
kiosk almost opposite the military police post. He walked
quickly to the Rue de Jonquiere and joined Le Blanc drinking
cognac in a cafe on the left-hand side.

The Rue de Jonquiere runs roughly south-east from the
Boulevard Bessieres to the Avenue de St Ouen. It is an area
devoted to specialized schools, bookshops, colleges, hospital
laboratories, student cafés, hostels and hotels. It was dim and neglected, the lights of the few cafes still open reflecting
morosely onto the pavement. There was only a partial blackout
in Paris but few people looked for lights or entertainment out of doors in the evening. They went home early and stayed there.

Ormerod and Marie Thérèse stood by a news-stand on the
opposite side of the street from the cafe where Raymond and
Le Blanc were waiting. Marie Thérèse looked through a mag
azine, then another. Her eyes looked black in her pale face.

228

Ormerod picked up the
New York Times
and began to read. Marie Thérèse reached over and took it from him, giving him a French newspaper. He grimaced and then understood. She pushed some francs across to the proprietor. He was listening to the radio and did not notice.

At five minutes past seven the Gestapo car left the
Feld-
gendarmerie
office with Smales sitting white-faced between two
leather-coated officers in the back. The car turned into the main Boulevard Bessieres and then took the predicted right turn into
the Rue de Jonquiere.

Over the horizon of his newspaper Ormerod watched it turn in the dimness at the top of the street. There was no doubt about it being the right car; there were no others. Raymond
signalled briefly with his newspaper from the cafe\ The drizzle
was dripping from the canopy over the newspaper stand and
onto Ormerod's head. He lifted the newspaper quietly in answer
to the signal. He winked at Marie-Thérèse. It was time. Sud
denly she turned and swore at him so that everyone in the vicinity would hear and ran into the street. She collapsed on the cobbles at the centre and in a moment Ormerod was running after her. He reached the middle of the road and bent by her side. He was conscious of the Gestapo car coming nearer and then he felt the lights on him. He hoped the Germans would not spoil it by failing to stop. It came to a halt ten yards away and the driver shouted in German to get out of the
way. Ormerod looked up and made helpless signs. A few people
had gathered on the pavement to watch. The driver, cursing, left the car and stalked up to Ormerod and the prostrate girl.

'Get her out of the way,' he ordered in German. 'Come on, move her.' Then he tried some stumbling French. The two sentences brought him to within three feet of the couple. Ormerod eased himself up as if to speak to the man. The
movement revealed Marie Thérèse lying in the road with an
exposed pistol. She fired two shots, the first one of which effectively killed the driver. His face took on the usual look of a man who has met sudden death - indignation, as though he had been cheated. He sat down in the road and then rolled forward like a large doll, onto his face.

At the same instant as the Frenchwoman fired the first shot,

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Raymond and Le Blanc, shadows in raincoats and trilby hats, walked briskly into the road towards the German car. Jean Le Blanc casually, like a man lifting his wrist to look at his watch, shot one of the Gestapo officers as he tried to get out of one door and the ashen-faced Raymond shot the other. The second officer stumbled across the road and collapsed against the newspaper stand, bringing down the tarpaulin canopy. He was not quite dead. He drew his pistol and fired several aimless shots as if he were trying to hit anybody in Paris as a final act of hate. Then he fell backwards and died under the unbelieving eyes of the newspaper vendor. Ormerod ran towards the rear door of the car and pulled Smales, slack-mouthed, from the vehicle. Le Blanc, who always did his killing calmly, took a pace forward and shot Smales twice through the ribs. He doubled up, conveniently falling over Ormerod's shoulder. Ormerod, staggering under the weight and with the blood of Smales all over his hands, bellowed at Le Blanc, 'You lousy cunt! You bastard French frog ...' It was inadequate and there was no time for it anyway. Le Blanc turned and ran across the road. Almost as an afterthought he turned and fired a final shot which went by Ormerod's nose and banged into the German car.

Cursing foully, Ormerod picked up Smales across his shoulder. He was not sure why he was doing it. Some instinct, he thought later. There was no sign of Marie Thérèse or Raymond. The Gestapo car began to burn with an unhurried, almost domestic, flame. Ormerod, carrying Smales, staggered across the street towards the newspaper kiosk. He went past the Gestapo man lying beneath a shroud of newspapers and magazines. The dim, wet street had miraculously emptied of Parisians. People who had put their heads out of doors and windows to see what was going on hurriedly withdrew them.

Ormerod ran heavily, Smales a dead weight on his shoulder. He found himself in a courtyard between a cafe and a shop. He could feel Smales' blood warm on his own neck. He could not have run far like that. He knew he would have to be quick. He just wanted to hear from Smales.

Panting, he half fell down into a basement. Smales opened his eyes. He propped his head and shoulders against the wall.

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'What you want, copper?' he said, with something like sarcasm.

'You've had it mate,' said Ormerod with a grim comradeship.
'You're dead and gone. Make your peace. Did you kill the girl? Lorna Smith. Did you?'

Smales closed his eyes as if he still refused to discuss the matter. There was blood running from his mouth and nose,
bright against the pallor of his face. Ormerod shook him and
Smales opened his eyes weakly. It was almost like asking a favour of him. 'Come on Smales, did you?'

'You know I fucking did,' grunted Smales. Ormerod, as if it
might help him talk, wiped some of the blood from the man's mouth. 'You wouldn't have come all this way if you didn't
know,' said Smales. He looked as though he might be grinning or it might have been the contortion of his features. He moved
his lips for the last time. Sardonically he said: 'What you want - a bloody statement... ?'

He died then, a quick and simple transformation. Ormerod grimaced and put him gently back against the wall. Now he could hear the increased commotion of police whistles and vehicles in the street beyond the low buildings. He stood up, wiped the blood from his hands with a piece of stray news
paper, and walked briskly to the basement. The inexperienced
Germans were a long way from throwing a cordon around the area and he walked almost casually to the Metro station in the
Place Clichy and got aboard the first train that arrived.

The final pages of George Ormerod's narrative of the events of
the autumn of 1940 read as follows:

'After the business in the Rue Jonquiere, I hid in various parts of Paris for about a week. Even though the Germans
were searching for our group it was surprisingly easy to hide.
Those were now the very first days of the resistance and they
did not know where to look. There were no informers and no
splits inside the underground movement. It was like that at the beginning.

'At first I went back to the apartment at Denfert-Rochereau.
Only Raymond was there. He did not look any different after
the shootings. He still looked like a slow professor. The fol
lowing day I was taken to another house in the south of Paris

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at Gentilly. It was another professor's house, although I did
not see much of him and his family. Marie Thérèse came there
three days running and we spent quite a bit of time together.
She told me that two of the French children at Moulin-en-Ceil
had been blinded by the bridge explosion. There was nothing I could say about that. We talked a lot about ourselves also,
for the first time since we were together in the forest, before we
were taken to Villedieu to hide under the bells.

'It's a long time ago now and I don't remember much of
what we said, but she was much softer to me then, much more of a woman than when I first met her and we landed in France.
I suppose she had learned some things too. We were very happy together for those few days in Gentilly. Naturally she talked quite a lot about the resistance movement and how it would grow throughout France. Already there were groups forming in the Alps and other mountain places who in the fol
lowing years were operating like proper armies in places where
the Germans could not reach them. They had begun blowing up supply cables and trains and causing sabotage in factories. A lot of what they did was very crude and amateur, but who could expect anything else? After D-Day in 1944 they really came into their own and what they did behind the Germans' backs helped the invasion troops to get a foothold in Normandy. They ought to be remembered for that.

'Before the war was done the Germans arrested and deported thousands of Frenchmen and tortured and executed many others. Nearly five thousand were killed in Paris alone. But they won in the end.

'During the days I spent with Marie Thérèse in Gentilly the weather became wintry, with rain and winds blowing along the streets. Very soon we would be going our separate ways, me back to England to my wife and my normal life and she to
the dangers of her work in France. We spent a long time in my
room in the house and we also talked about what we would do after the war. I could not for the life of me think of anything
more original than still being a policeman in London. She had
lots of plans for her children and the school where she used to teach. It was only daydreaming, I suppose, because she had really given up her children forever. I think the reason she

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moved away from her village, and apparently from France altogether in the end, was that people could not forgive her for the
violence,
even though it had all been done in a good cause.
People just don't like violence.
It must have been very sad for her to realize that.

'As for-myself, I escaped from France in a very funny way. The resistance already had more than one escape network to the Unoccupied Zone in the south and then into Spain or Switzerland. Various odd methods were used to smuggle
people out under the noses of the Germans. Raymond came to the house and told me I was to be moved out of the city area to
Auxerre, just to the south. Marie Thérèse came to see me in the afternoon and that was the last time we met until after the
war was finished. I was sad about this, although I did not show
it, because I have to admit to myself that I had to all intents and purposes fallen in love with her. That evening I went to Auxerre.