Agent of Fortune Read online

  Copyright: © Kurt Magenta

  Published in June 2020 by KDP

  The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  This publication may not be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without the permission of the author.

  While parts of this book were inspired by real events, the story and characters are entirely fictional.

  ISBN: 9798644251940 (paperback)

  Imprint: Independently published

  Interior design: Ebookpbook

  Cover design: Go On Write

  For Gustave

  ‘For the foreigner, there are no other means than espionage.’

  Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal

  Contents

  Chapter 1 Exode

  Chapter 2 Young Blood

  Chapter 3 Point of Departure

  Chapter 4 Rough Crossing

  Chapter 5 The Refugee

  Chapter 6 Act of Engagement

  Chapter 7 The Gargoyle Club

  Chapter 8 The Patriotic School

  Chapter 9 The Visitor

  Chapter 10 Gentlemen of the Night

  Chapter 11 Secrets in the Attic

  Chapter 12 The Argyll

  Chapter 13 Limehouse Jazz

  Chapter 14 Bad Penny

  Chapter 15 Fire Watch

  Chapter 16 Cadet

  Chapter 17 Madrigal

  Chapter 18 Twilight Publishing

  Chapter 19 Passage des Patriarches

  Chapter 20 The Second Floor

  Chapter 21 Not Our Trade

  Chapter 22 Broken Circuit

  Chapter 23 The Mechanic

  Chapter 24 Cold Harbour

  Chapter 25 ‘He who sees Ushant…’

  Chapter 26 Back-doubles

  Chapter 27 Turncoat

  Chapter 28 Another Option

  Chapter 29 One Last Stroll

  Chapter 30 ‘This is London…’

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Exode

  His escape from Paris began in the cellar. Every apartment in the building had its own storage space, so there were five rough plank doors on either side of a grey strip of beaten earth, lit by a single hanging bulb. A dank odour, the gurgle of water in pipes. Not for the first time, he wondered what cobwebbed secrets his neighbours were keeping down here.

  His own family’s door lay directly opposite the stairwell. The gap-toothed iron key looked like it belonged to a medieval jailer, but it turned smoothly in the lock and the door swung open at his push. He stepped inside, his heart racing. Apart from the bulb in the passage, the only light came from a small grille high up in the wall, just above pavement level in the outside world. Urgent morning footsteps cracked past.

  He thumbed on his torch and panned its beam into the murk. He was holding his breath, although it was hardly possible that the thing could have gone missing. The silver halo traversed packing crates, shrouded pictures, a furled rug tied with string. Then the sheen of black paint. His bicycle, abandoned over a year ago, when he had decided it had no place in his adult life.

  Apologies, mon ami. Welcome back.

  With some difficulty, he hauled the bike from the cellar and pushed it into the courtyard, where he set about cleaning and oiling it. He was busy pumping up its tyres when Madame Masson, the concierge, bustled out of her loge. She eyed him shrewdly – after all, she saw him leave for work on foot every morning.

  ‘Won’t catch me on one of them things,’ she informed him. ‘Rather the Boche came and got me.’

  Then she began to sweep aggressively, as if her broom alone was enough to keep the enemy at bay. Which, he thought, with a rush of affection, might actually be the case.

  He bumped the bike back down the narrow curving stone steps and secured it with a chain and padlock.

  For the first time in weeks, Lucien Cortel felt prepared.

  The news was censored, of course, but Lucien of all people knew the rumours were true. ‘It’s all over in the north. They’ll be on our doorstep in days,’ said a man on a café terrace.

  ‘Government’s already pulling out,’ agreed the man’s neighbour, gesturing with a pipe stem in the direction of rue de Varenne. ‘Loading trucks full of the most important papers. Burning the rest.’

  At night there were crashes and booms that sounded nothing like thunder. In the morning the air tasted of ashes.

  When it became clear that nothing and no-one would prevent the Germans from entering the city, people needed transport – any kind of transport. Railway stations became packed and chaotic. Families of half a dozen or more squeezed into tiny motorcars that sputtered under ziggurats of hastily-packed luggage. Trucks crammed with people and belongings lurched on overburdened axels.

  And every bicycle that did not have somebody’s rear end on it was sold or stolen.

  At just after seven in the morning on June 10 1940, Lucien Cortel dragged his bicycle from the cellar for the last time. He strapped a small brown suitcase to the rack behind its saddle and wheeled it out onto the cobbled street. He was half expecting it to get wrenched out from under him, but the sunlit boulevards were empty. The ornate limestone façades were as proud and impassive as ever. The sun felt warm on his face and the air carried a faint tang of charcoal. There was not a car in sight, although he spotted a lone dark green bus doggedly pursuing its route. The Seine, a lighter green, lolled under the Pont Saint Michel.

  Lucien was twenty years old and leaving his first job behind him. He was tall and deceptively slender, with his mother’s watchful grey eyes and an unruly version of his father’s black hair. For now he was unafraid, but a nervous excitement drove him forward. Somewhere deep inside him, he knew, there was a small bright flame of anger.

  He had packed sandwiches and water – hopefully enough for three days. Like most people, he was heading south, where there was a vague notion of safety. Unlike most people, however, he had a plan.

  Austerlitz station already looked like a refugee camp. Shafts of milky sunlight fell through the great glass canopy onto hordes of waiting passengers. Some pressed urgently towards the platforms, while others sat on their luggage, waiting with little hope for the crowds to thin. There was a prickly odour of coal dust and overheated humanity.

  Buying a ticket was not an option, he realised. If he wanted to get as far as possible from the city today, he would have to elbow his way onto a train and bribe somebody later. Summoning a ruthless streak he barely knew he possessed, he began to push like a fisherman’s needle into the dense knot of the crowd.

  As the broiling day wore on, the sense of desperation mounted. Scuffles broke out. Children howled. People fainted. Policemen and railway officials tried to bring water, but could not reach those who needed it. A red-faced man had become separated from his wife and children in the crush; he looked close to tears as he called their names.

  Lucien pressed forward, gaining a few metres every hour.

  Finally, within touching distance, stood the last train. There was a terrible moment when it began to move forward without him, spewing steam through giant wheels. Panic rising, he ploughed after it. A brawny man, stripped to his vest, leaned through an open carriage door, arms outstretched.

  ‘Reach for me! Leave that.’

  The bike. ‘No! I need it!’

  The train lurched, stopped.

  ‘Putain. Pass it up then.’

  Lucien lofted the bike and the man grabbed it as if it were
a tin toy. Unencumbered, Lucien scrambled up after it. The train pushed on. The man slapped him mightily on the back and he choked and laughed and cried, all at the same time.

  An hour later he stood in the rocking corridor squeezed against his bicycle – which was wedged upright at the far door, its front wheel near the ceiling. As dusk fell, it became clear that no light would be provided in the carriages, for fear of attracting enemy planes.

  The engine panted and clanked into the night, towing a caravan of anxiety, tobacco smoke and sweat. Several times it juddered to a halt, wheels shrilling on the rails, steam hissing. All conversation ceased as ears strained for the low hum of aircraft engines, the crump of falling bombs.

  At Tours he left the awful train, knowing he would make a nimbler and smaller target on his bicycle.

  On the afternoon of June 14 he was still in open countryside. But he was not alone. He pedalled past a straggling convoy of motor vehicles, carts and pedestrians. Heat shimmered from labouring engines. Cars and trucks that had run out of petrol blocked the route, causing delays and minor accidents. Many people had decided to continue on foot, their faces ruddy and grim.

  Beside the road, abandoned possessions had turned the fields into a surrealist landscape: a mattress leaking stuffing, a burst suitcase spilling entrails of clothing.

  By now he felt wrung-out and rancid. He had slept in fields – and once in an abandoned roadside café, with other unwashed bodies that took up every available cranny. His leg muscles blazed and his eyes stung with fatigue.

  But apparently they could see well enough, because even before he heard the distant drone, he caught a silver flash in a rear windshield. Pausing on the bicycle, one foot on the asphalt, he looked back and up. A plane – high for the moment but dropping fast. No, surely it wouldn’t…? Yes, it would. In sudden mass agreement everyone threw themselves flat and hugged their skulls.

  And then it was over them, pounding the convoy with bullets and screeching away, forming a distant dot even before they could assess the damage. Lucien was on the ground under his bicycle, the back wheel ticking lazily. He could hear shouts and screams, the slap of running footsteps and the tinkling of shattered glass, a spatter of liquid.

  He kicked the bike off his body and dragged himself up, coughing dust. In the sky, the black speck was already growing larger He cast a glance at the fields, then at the nearest vehicle. Instinct told him to cower under a stalled truck. Logic told him otherwise: petrol in the tank – danger of explosion.

  He hurled himself off the road and onto the shallow bank sloping to the field, pressing his body into the dry grass. His arms were around his head, his eyes squeezed shut. The hum turned into a shattering roar as the guns opened up, hammering bullets into metal and canvas. And flesh?

  Lucien closed his mind as well as his eyes, locking himself in an armoured room.

  A single stray thought pierced his defences: the old man was right all along.

  Chapter 2

  Young Blood

  His father had died four years earlier. A banal heart attack: almost ignominious after everything the man had been through during the Great War. Of course, Jean-Louis Cortel had been fifteen years older than Lucien’s beautiful English mother.

  Lucien had pieced the story together by then. Elizabeth Norris was working as a secretary to a London publisher when her employer, who also happened to be her lover, brought her to Paris. She met Jean-Louis Cortel one evening at Maxim’s. He was a journalist and a warrior, upright and gallant, with a dapper moustache and a sheen of silver at his temples. After the Grande Guerre he had returned to his previous incarnation as a reporter. ‘Future wars will be fought in the full glare of the news media,’ he told her.

  The following morning, she received a dozen white roses wrapped in crêpe beneath a silk Hermès scarf. Her English lover demanded an explanation. Not receiving a satisfactory response, he left for London. Elizabeth and Jean-Louis went dancing that night and every night for the rest of the week. She returned to England briefly, to settle matters with her parents. The couple were married at the church of Notre Dame de Lorette on April 22 1919. Lucien was born the following year.

  Lucien’s childhood was filled with stories of his father’s dashing exploits. In May 1933, Jean-Louis Cortel travelled undercover with a photographer to Germany to report on the rise of the Nazi party and its leader, Adolf Hitler. By that time, Cortel was working for a new, forward-looking magazine called Vu. The weekly publication was aggressively modern, with an eye-catching design that favoured big photographs, bold headlines and terse, dramatic articles.

  The resulting piece left no room for ambiguity: it vividly captured the stiff-armed salutes, the muzzled press, the bugged telephones, the arrests of Communists and Jews and the mass executions in forest glades. It was the first to carry photographs of the ‘concentration camp’ at Dachau, where the imprisoned opponents of National Socialism were invited to reconsider their views while following a strict regime of ‘work and exercise in the fresh air’. This activity took place behind a 400-volt electric fence overlooked by armed guards. Groups of prisoners were frequently encouraged to sprint across the compound. They were gunned down: ‘shot while trying to escape’.

  ‘The Nazis are terribly young, terribly earnest,’ Lucien’s father told him. ‘They see themselves as the descendants of the Teutonic Knights, out to slay dragons, conquer kingdoms and so forth. But their steeds are aeroplanes. They’re great believers in aerial warfare, the Nazis. And Hitler is madder than all of them put together. Believe me: if France gets into another war with Germany, we’re finished.’

  Having passed away in the winter of 1936, Cortel was spared having to witness the accuracy of his prediction.

  Inevitably, Lucien grew up dreaming of a life of journalism and adventure. Much to his mother’s relief, the first ambition took precedence, and she raised few objections when he cut short his studies at the age of seventeen to take up a job as a copyboy at Le Courrier.

  The newspaper’s offices were on rue Montmartre, close to the bustling boulevards and thronged cafés at the heart of the city. At first he was essentially an errand boy. When the reporters had finished typing their stories and ripped the last sheet of paper from the maws of their typewriters, he would take the manuscript to the news editor, where it was scrutinised before continuing its long journey into print. He sorted the mail, delivered messages, sent telegrams and was dispatched to buy cigarettes or tobacco.

  It might have been considered demeaning work for the son of a famous journalist, but Lucien was pleased to be making his own way in the world – and he sensed that his father would have been proud of him too. He felt a natural kinship with the reporters of Le Courrier; he liked their swift profane banter, their staccato two-fingered typing, their loosened ties and air of urgency. He didn’t even mind when they addressed him as ‘petit’, the French equivalent of ‘son’ or ‘kid’.

  ‘Allez, petit – run out and get me a packet of Gitanes, will you?’

  One of the gruffest reporters, Claude Grosselin, became his unofficial mentor. Grosselin was a pot-bellied, slope-shouldered man in his late fifties, whose furry white eyebrows squirmed above blue eyes that contained glints of cynical humour. The luxuriant eyebrows contrasted with thin strands of white hair that he pasted carefully back from a high forehead.

  He would give Lucien small articles to write after hours – obituaries of minor officials, controversy over the sanitation of the vast food market at Les Halles, fillers about attempts to improve the roads – taking precious time to correct them and make suggestions. ‘The goal is clarity,’ he would say. ‘Don’t make the reader work too hard: give them as much information as you can, right from the start. But be concise.’

  Lucien often wondered why the man had taken him under his wing, but he was too grateful and too intimidated to ask. Then, one evening, Grosselin’s pencil halted on the page he was correctin
g. He looked up and told Lucien, ‘You know, I met your father many times. He was a fine writer and an honourable man.’

  Then he bent his head back to the article, closing the subject.

  After eighteen long months, with his father’s reputation hovering over him and Grosselin as his sponsor, Lucien was promoted from the far-flung desk occupied by the copyboys to the rackety, smoke-filled newsroom. ‘This is a young newspaper,’ the paper’s white-moustached editor, Jules Chatagnier, told him over a handshake. ‘And it needs young blood. We expect great things of you.’

  Lucien’s experience grew at roughly the same pace as his disillusionment. As the youngest member of the newsroom, he was nudged towards the entertainment section of the paper. He found himself reviewing musical concerts and theatre performances. Almost despite himself, he developed an enthusiasm for jazz and became addicted to the cinema. Some of his stories even made the front page, such as the strike by cinema owners over a tax increase that would force them to raise ticket prices. But at the same time, as the storm of war closed in, he began to wonder if his elders were doing their job properly.

  One drizzly evening in December 1939 – two months after Germany had invaded Poland – he stood with Grosselin at the zinc bar of their favourite café. ‘I listen to the radio at night,’ he said. ‘The BBC. And what the English are saying – it isn’t what we’re printing.’

  Grosselin shrugged in his oversized raincoat. ‘What would you have us do? Write that the people lack the stomach for another war? That the Nazis are about to overrun Europe? When the papers on the Right do that we accuse them of colluding with the enemy.’

  ‘But this relentless optimism, you don’t think it’s out of place? It makes it sound as if we should be popping champagne corks instead of fighting for our lives. We’re supposed to report the facts.’

  ‘Where did you get that idea? Certainly not from your father or me. No, petit, newspapers curate the facts. Which is not quite the same thing.’

  They called it the drôle de guerre: the phoney war. Both England and France had declared war on Germany, but hostilities stubbornly refused to break out. The journalists at Le Courrier speculated in print that the Nazis had already lost by allowing allied troops to mass at the Maginot Line – the chain of concrete fortifications, machine-gun turrets and tank traps that snaked along the northern border of France.