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By Root 2444 0

once we were almost at the corner of the rue Cassette, and only three short blocks from the house, when a uniform accosted us. The streets were quite empty. It was dreadfully cold and hard to see that a man was standing under the blued streetlamp. Were we in for arrest? Not that time. He thrust into my hand a paper with the address of one of the hotels reserved for German troops. He was lost and visibly frightened, but evidently thought that a lady might be less dangerous than a man. I could make out only the words bitte and wo ist, but responded, da, for the hotel was just around the corner. He must have been an old-fashioned German taken among the last conscriptions, for he murmured feelingly the worn-out formula, ‘I kiss your hands, highborn dame.’ This was the sole occasion when, moved by the Christmas spirit, I gave aid or comfort to one of our foes.

Clara’s closest friends and some of her family were giving more than directions to a lost soldier on Christmas Eve.

Charles Bedaux wrote a letter to his New York office on Monday, 27 December. Marked for the attention of US Bedaux Company chief Albert Ramond, lawyer Judge George Link, Jr, and his secretary, Mrs Isabella Cameron Waite, the letter was their first indication that Bedaux was in the United States. Bedaux wrote that he was a prisoner in Miami’s Immigration Detention Center, and he needed help. He asked for sleeping pills. He preferred the Medinal tablets that he took in France, but Luminal–though ‘somewhat injurious’–would do. Without the pills, he could not sleep. His other, perhaps more urgent, request was for a lawyer.

PART SIX

1944

THIRTY-EIGHT

The Trial of Citizen Bedaux

ISABELLA CAMERON WAITE HURRIED to Miami on New Year’s Day in answer to Charles Bedaux’s urgent appeal. The loyal Mrs Waite had come at her own expense, because the Treasury had blocked all of her employer’s American accounts. An FBI informant had described her as an ‘extremely straightforward person, pro-British and pro-American … she is an ardent church attendant and would not stand for any nonsense’. Bedaux had hired Isabella Waite as his secretary after her first husband, a drunk who failed to support their two children, left her. It is not clear how intimate Isabella and Charles were. When he left the United States in 1937, he assigned her his power of attorney and trusted her to set her own salary. She married John A. Waite, a salesman and First World War veteran, two years later.

She arrived in Miami the day after his Immigration and Naturalization Service hearing adjourned without a verdict. The stated purpose of the four-day inquiry had been to determine whether Charles Bedaux was still an American citizen. Bedaux’s US passport had expired on 27 February 1942 and it had not been renewed. But Bedaux, despite having told his brother Gaston in April 1939 that he was thinking of restoring his French citizenship, had never renounced his American nationality. Nor had he been convicted of a crime for which it could be revoked. Mrs Waite, seeing Bedaux for the first time since his flight from the Windsor American tour scandal in 1937, noticed how much he had aged. His year behind bars, the separation from his wife and what seemed to him the blatant injustice of his arrest had robbed him of the old bravado. And his insomnia left him exhausted. Bedaux confided to her his worries, most of which were for Fern. The first thing Mrs Waite did for him was to deliver a comfortable chair, an ice box and a stove to his chauffeur’s flat above the garage in the grounds of the Immigration Detention Center.

Mrs Waite wrote a letter that evening to Albert Ramond, the man who had taken control of the Bedaux Company in 1937: ‘I will be here until citizenship difficulties are straightened out … I have the medicine. You and Link get the lawyer please … He is eating his heart out with worry about Fern. She is held hostage in France. Most important is that he knows you are standing by–so a short line to him will perhaps heal some of the wounds the Gestapo, etc., etc., etc., have