Fatal Ferret

THE CAT WITH TWO FACES--Gordon Young--Coward-McCann ($3.50).

The German dive bombers roared off into the sky, and the stocky young woman--one of countless uprooted victims of the Nazi armies advancing into France--scrambled out of the ditch. Said calm Mathilde Carre to a companion: "There's almost a sensual pleasure in real danger, don't you think? Your whole body seems suddenly to come alive."

Mathilde Carre had green eyes, "somewhat fanglike" teeth and so much self-confidence that at school she had been nicknamed Little Princess. A sometime nurse in Paris, Mathilde made her way to Toulouse in occupied France, where she became the mistress of Major Czarniawski, a Polish intelligence officer. He enlisted Mathilde's help in forming an Allied intelligence network. Her way of curling up in a leather chair and nervously scratching its arms with her fingernails brought her the nickname under which she became famous: The Cat. Years later, though, a British security guard remarked: "I can't think why they called her The Cat. She always looked more like a ferret to me."

"Sentimental Beast." At the end of 1940, The Cat and her Polish "Toto" slipped over the border of Vichy France into German-occupied Paris. Within a few months their espionage network, named "Inter-Allied," included some 200 agents who kept up steady radio and courier communication with London, fed British intelligence information about German troop concentrations, barracks, antiaircraft defenses, etc. British agents came to cherish the familiar coded words on the wireless: "To Room 55a, War Office, London: The Cat reports. . ."

One November morning in 1941, a Mazi counter-intelligence agent, Sergeant Hugo Bleicher, followed up a tip and burst into Toto's Paris hideout. By night-all The Cat was in a prison cell.

Said The Cat later: "Of course I realised that it was out of the question 'or me to stay in a place like that. Why. the water-closet smelled quite abominably." Next morning she became a German agent; that very night she became Bleicher's mistress. "[He was a] most disgusting sentimental beast," she remarked .ater.

"National Indignity." The Cat kept her appointments with Allied agents; at the close of a conversation, Bleicher would usually appear and arrest the victim. She watched her friends being carried away to prison, torture and death without emotion--though it is on record that she once said "Pardon" to a woman friend whom she had just betrayed. The Cat continued her broadcasts to London and because of phony messages sent in her name, the British failed to trap the warships Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen; and it was she who informed the Nazis of the approaching British Commando raid on St. Nazaire. Out of a total British raiding force of 353. no less than 212 were killed or missing.

By 1942, with the help of a shrewd Allied agent, The Cat jumped again. Still Bleicher's mistress by night, she became a British agent by day. She managed to get to London, taking with her "a complete German radio code," and the British set to work sending false information back to Bleicher. But she hated London. "I don't feel that I am really liked or trusted," she complained. She was dead right. When her usefulness was ended, the British clapped her into jail, and at war's end handed her back to the French police in return for a signed receipt.

She came up for trial in Paris in 1949, and for several days she sat in the dock with a "fixed expression of self-satisfied insolence" while witness after witness testified about the men and women she had betrayed. She chewed gum during the prosecutor's summing up, burst into a huff only when the judge revealed that Bleicher had confided that he slept with her only out of a sense of "duty." She was sentenced to "national indignity" and the guillotine, but because of her undeniable services to the Allies, the death sentence was set aside on appeal. In 1954 The Cat was released from prison; only her parents know where she is now.

"What will be the world's eventual verdict of her?" asks Author Gordon Young, a Paris correspondent of the Daily Mail. By the time the reader is halfway through Author Young's dramatic, well-told tale, the verdict has already imposed itself. Mathilde Carr was one of those half-human pathological types, living between reason and madness, against whom, as often as not, a world of law has no real weapons.

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