To Kingdom Come (33 page)

She pointed out the single mattress on the floor in the corner where he would sleep. It was only a few feet from the double bed she shared with Maurice. After falling asleep that night, Jimmy was awakened to the first of their many ardent sexual encounters. Each time he thought they were finished, the couple would somehow find renewed energy, and their bleating cries would rise to the next crescendo. He didn’t get much sleep.

A few days later, Maurice escorted him to the studio of a local photographer, who took his picture for the false identity papers that were being prepared for him. On the way back to the café, they passed a massive building with high walls around it.

In mangled English, Maurice explained to him that it was once the Drancy prison, and that it now housed several thousand Parisian Jews who were being sent to Germany. Jimmy couldn’t understand why the Jews needed to be kept in prison, or why they were being sent to Germany.

He was sitting in the café one afternoon when two young men accompanied by an attractive blonde sat down at his table. His nervousness receded when one of the men began talking to him in Americanized English with a distinct Southern twang. He said his name was Floyd Terry, and that he was a B-17 waist gunner from Dallas, Texas. The other man was an RAF bomber pilot who had been shot down on a night mission to Milan, Italy.

They were staying in the nearby suburb of Bobigny with the blond woman, who introduced herself as Theodorine Quenot. Maurice’s café was a clearinghouse for escaping airmen, and she had come to replenish her food coupons. Like George and Maurice, “Madame Q” despised the Germans and was doing everything she could to drive them from French soil.

After Jimmy’s long nights of enduring the amatory pleasures of Maurice and his mistress, Jimmy begged her to let him stay with the other escapees. She agreed and he moved in the next day. The three Americans were joined soon after by Andrew Lindsay, a red-haired American B-26 pilot from Monmouth, Maine.

The stolen food coupons allowed the Americans to eat well. In the evenings, they played hearts at the kitchen table while listening to the nightly BBC news broadcasts on her small radio.

The days passed by slowly.

In mid-October, Madame Q woke the airmen to tell them that they would be leaving Paris for the next stage of their journey to freedom. By then, Jimmy had new identity papers that identified him as Jean Riber, a pork butcher from Reims.

After packing their few belongings, the airmen were picked up in a canvas-covered truck. Inside, there were six more Americans, including John Heald, Jimmy’s original bombardier, who had been shot down while flying with another crew on a mission to Paris in August.

That was when Jimmy realized how many French patriots must be involved in helping him and the others. Their courage in the face of possible execution by the Gestapo was astonishing to him.

At the Paris train station, the ten Allied fliers were divided into pairs and handed off to five members of the resistance who were to serve as their guides. Jimmy saw that his ticket was marked Quimper. He had no idea where it was, but once the train left the station, he knew they were traveling west. When he disembarked at their first destination with his escort, the platform was filled with German soldiers in bright green uniforms. He was so much bigger than the Germans that he worried he would stand out like a sore thumb.

Remembering the White Russian’s tutoring of how to walk like a Frenchman, he made short mincing steps toward the exit and passed safely out of the station. The escort picked him up on the street and led him across the town to a large three-story house surrounded by a high brick wall.

Its owners were Jacques and Madeleine Mourlet. By day, Jacques was a wine merchant. At night he assumed the role of the Scarlet Pimpernel. Instead of helping French aristocrats escape the guillotine, his specialty was spiriting Allied airmen as well as Frenchmen seeking to join the Free French army out of occupied France.

Madeleine, who spoke fluent English, was stunningly beautiful, and Jimmy, along with his nine fellow guests, was immediately smitten. On the night of their arrival, she served them all a delicious dinner accompanied by ample quantities of wine.

Looking around the table at one point, Madeleine focused her eyes on Jimmy.

“You look the least like a Frenchman,” she declared with a charming smile. “You are strictly American.” He took it as a compliment.

The next afternoon, another man arrived at the villa. He was wearing a long brown leather trench coat and matching wide-brimmed leather hat. To Jimmy, he looked like the archetypal spy.

Introducing himself as Fanfan, he informed the assembled airmen of their proposed escape plan. On a designated night, they would board a fishing smack and be transported by sea to a rendezvous with a high-speed British navy launch. Fanfan was waiting for the radio signal that would specify the night of the rendezvous.

Late that evening, Jacques received a hurried telephone warning that his house was about to be raided. A German collaborator in the village had informed the police that Jacques was harboring Allied escapees.

In a frenzied rush, the ten airmen gathered up their belongings.

The cars carrying the gendarmes were arriving at the front of the villa while Jacques led the ten airmen through a rear passage in the stone wall. After leaving them in a nearby copse of woods, he went back to his house.

It was well past midnight when he returned, saying that Madeleine had finally convinced the police that the accusation was false. He was sure they were still watching his house, so he had arranged another temporary hiding place for them until the radio signal came from England.

It turned out to be the small home of an elderly Catholic priest. After welcoming them with a short prayer, he ushered the ten men upstairs to a twelve-foot-square room, gave them blankets, and urged them to rest. The floor was soon crowded with snoring fliers.

They were confined to the room for four days and were only allowed outside at night to use the privy behind the house. Each day, the angelic Madeleine would arrive with baskets of bread, cheese, and fruit.

Once confined to the room, tempers began to grow short. One of the pilots began referring to the hulking Jimmy as “Li’l Abner,” because his pants’ legs barely reached the tops of his high-top GI shoes. When Jimmy asked the pilot if he would enjoy being hanged by his feet out the window, the officer quickly apologized.

On their fifth day in the small room, Fanfan arrived with bad news. The English launch was not coming. There would be no rendezvous. It was necessary for them all to return to Paris.

Arriving back at the Paris train station, Fanfan paired off the ten airmen again and sent them off with a new set of escorts. Jimmy and another pilot went with a man in his thirties named Gilbert Virmoux to an apartment building in the heart of Paris.

Two other Allied airmen were in Gilbert’s apartment when they got there. They had been English machine gunners on a Lancaster bomber. Gilbert’s apartment was on the sixth floor and consisted of one large room. The toilet was on the second floor and was shared by all the occupants of the narrow building.

One morning, Jimmy met a Jewish woman who was being hidden in an apartment on one of the lower floors. She spoke excellent English, and told him how fortunate she had been in escaping the roundup of Jews in her neighborhood. She told him that the Germans were arresting every Jew in France, stripping them of their possessions and property, and sending them to camps in Germany.

Her account of the German cruelty filled him with a desire to return to the war.

At the end of November, Gilbert Virmoux told Jimmy he was taking him and the others to be “toughened up” with a week of hard exercise at a place in the country. The following day, they traveled by rail to a small village in the countryside, and then walked several miles to an imposing French château.

Another group of Americans was already there. For the next ten days, he and the others sawed firewood and hiked forest trails, slowly regaining the fitness they had lost while in hiding. One of the fliers told Jimmy that they would be going out of France over the Pyrenees.

It was mid-December and the weather had grown sharply colder when Gilbert confirmed that he would be escorting them all to a town in southern France, from which they would hike across the mountains into Spain.

Boarding another train, they traveled south toward Carcassonne, a medieval fortress town near the Spanish border. Near the city of Toulouse, it began to snow. By the time they reached Carcassonne, it was nearly a foot deep.

How could they get across the mountains? Jimmy wondered. He didn’t even have an overcoat, much less hiking boots. The question was almost rendered moot when he stepped down to the platform and headed toward the station exit.

Jimmy suddenly stopped short. Fifty feet away, a German officer was checking the papers of every traveler. Standing alongside him were three soldiers with unslung machine guns.

Slowly turning away, he saw Gilbert walking toward a small building that had a large “WC” painted on the door. When Gilbert disappeared inside, Jimmy followed him. Soon, six Americans were hiding in the reeking toilet urinals.

Urging them to remain quiet, Gilbert left them to meet the mountaineer who was to accompany them across the Pyrenees. He returned in an hour to say that the Germans had left, but that their mountain guide had been frightened off. It would be necessary to go to another village to find a replacement.

Snow was still falling hard as they boarded another train after dark and traveled through a valley to the village of Quillan. Soaring up behind it were the majestic snow-covered peaks of the Pyrenees. Spain and freedom lay on the other side.

In the frigid darkness, the men trudged through snow to a house on the outskirts of the village. When Gilbert knocked on the door, the shutters of an upstairs window creaked open. It was too dark for Jimmy to see the man’s face, but after a brief exchange of words, he slammed the shutters closed.

A downcast Gilbert told the Americans there was no way to make it through the mountain pass, and they would have to go back to Paris. Thoroughly demoralized, Jimmy boarded the unheated train back to Carcassonne.

It was after midnight when they arrived at the station, and there was no place to go except the waiting room, where a wood-burning stove would at least keep them warm. Unfortunately, the waiting room was crowded with German soldiers who had also been stranded there for the night. Most of them were already gathered around the stove in the center of the room.

The cold, exhausted Jimmy no longer cared if he looked sufficiently French or walked like a Frenchman. Desperate to get warm, he crowded straight into the mix of soldiers until he could feel the welcoming warmth of the stove.

Gilbert was nearly out of money, but he was able to purchase tickets for them on a third-class coach leaving the following morning. After another twenty-hour journey, the train arrived in Paris after curfew, and Jimmy had to wait in the car the rest of the night before walking across Paris to Gilbert’s apartment.

As he plodded through the deserted streets, Jimmy lost his faith that he would ever make it back to England. It was only a matter of time before he was picked up by the Germans and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp. It would be better to have the odyssey over and done with.

Twelve hours of sleep in the quiet of Gilbert’s sixth-floor apartment helped to restore his flagging spirits. He felt ashamed of himself. Gilbert had done everything he could to help them escape, risking his life on their behalf for almost six weeks. He vowed not to lose hope again.

On Christmas Eve, Gilbert came home to give Jimmy the news that another escape attempt was being organized, and a man would soon be coming to escort him to the train station.

As a parting gift, he gave Jimmy a hand-painted Christmas card. The cover depicted St. Nicholas with a lantern in one hand. In the other, he was holding a gift-wrapped package. As he read the message inside, Jimmy realized that Gilbert was the true Santa Claus. The lantern represented hope, the gift-wrapped package his freedom.

Before Jimmy left for the next stage of his journey, the two men embraced. As he had done with his other benefactors, Jimmy promised to come back and visit him when the war was over.

The platform of the Paris train station was crowded with travelers on their way home to celebrate Christmas. When Jimmy’s guide gave him his train ticket, he saw that the destination was Quimper, and he knew that the next escape attempt would again be by boat.

Three hours later, the train arrived in Le Mans, where it was necessary to change trains for Quimper. On the platform, he was given a slip of paper authorizing him to wait in the station during curfew hours for the next train. Finding space on a wooden bench, he fell asleep.

He awoke to someone kicking the soles of his shoes. He groggily looked up into the face of a French gendarme. The man was demanding something, and Jimmy had no idea what it was. With rising irritation, the policeman harshly repeated the same words.

Trying to appear calm, Jimmy pulled out his identity card and handed it up to him. Without looking at it, the policeman tossed it back and angrily repeated the same question. Jimmy suddenly remembered the slip of paper he had been given on the platform. He handed it to the policeman, who glanced at the pass and handed it back, then moved on to the next person.

The next train pulled into Quimper after midnight. He was about to get off when his guide, who was sitting in another row of the car, motioned to him to remain in his seat. A few minutes later, the train was diverted onto another track, where it continued west across the Brittany peninsula.

Early the next morning, the train stopped at a small seaside village. When the guide left the train, Jimmy followed him. In the basement of a house near the quay, he joined a group of more than thirty escapees. They were to leave France that very night. Christmas night. Without question, freedom would be the finest Christmas present he had ever received.