For Freedom: The Story of a French Spy

by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

  For once Dr. Leclerc answered. He gave me a long level look and said, “Yes, Suzanne. He knows your name, and he has your photo.”

  A shiver ran up my spine. “What do you mean, he has my photo?”

  Dr. Leclerc smiled grimly. “A copy of your identification photo. It wasn’t hard to get. It’s better to have records, Suzanne, in case a situation arises in which someone can come to your defense.”

  “You mean if I’m caught?”

  “Just so.”

  “Has anyone—” A look from Dr. Leclerc made me stop before I finished my question. I supposed it was better that I not ask it. If the great General de Gaulle, the hope of France, knew of me, then I couldn’t even pretend it was a game I was playing. It was real. Deadly real.

  And one evening a few weeks past, Pierre had come home from his job and said, “The Germans took old Ventreaux to Saint-Lô. They said he was a spy.”

  I was alarmed. “Who is old Ventreaux?”

  “Just an old man,” said Pierre. “He shined shoes at the hotel. He was bent over. He couldn’t do much work.” Pierre saw my face and added gently, “Don’t worry, sister. I’m sure it isn’t true. How could an old man like that be a spy?”

  Papa set a saucer of milk on the floor for Miki and whistled. The cat came running. “Monsieur Edouard Ventreaux?” Papa asked.

  Pierre shrugged. “I don’t know his first name.”

  “Because Monsieur Edouard Ventreaux is retired from the navy. He’s a very intelligent man.”

  I thought of an old man I had given messages to twice. Number four. Once he did seem hunchbacked. The other time he walked more upright. Both times he wore a navy cap.

  Pierre shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t know, Papa,” he said. “Monsieur Ventreaux from the hotel is gone. Should I ask where he went?”

  Papa shook his head. “No. You should not.”

  “Did Monsieur Ventreaux have a number?” I asked Dr. Leclerc the next time I saw him.

  He didn’t look up. He studied something on his desk. A long silent moment passed. “Be careful, Suzanne,” he said.

  So now I pulled Madame Marcelle behind the haystack and tried not to think of the message in my hair.

  “Mon Dieu,” she muttered.

  I peeked around the stack. A young boy walked past the soldiers. He stared at the jeep. One of the Germans spoke sharply to him. Another stopped the boy and held out his hand. The boy pulled his papers out of his jacket pocket and handed them over. The soldier checked them and waved the boy on. I sank back against the hay, my heart hammering.

  “We’d best stay out of sight,” Madame Marcelle murmured. After a few more minutes she looked carefully around the edge of the haystack. “Still there. And now they are lighting cigarettes, the fiends.”

  We waited. My heart gradually slowed to normal speed. I held my head carefully. When I had pinned my hair up that morning, the braids coiled round and round my head, it had seemed fine to slip the folded message into the pouf of hair in front, as I usually did. Now it seemed especially stupid. If the Germans decided to search me, of course they would take down my hair. I would. It was an obvious place! What an idiot I was.

  My heart began to race again. Now I was thirsty. We didn’t have food or water with us. We had expected to be home before now.

  I closed my eyes and tried to breathe slowly. Birds chirped in the trees. The tall grass prickled my legs. The haystack looked slippery, gray with age. Madame Marcelle checked again. “Still there,” she said. “Only two of them now. They must be waiting for someone to come for the jeep.”

  I knew they would never leave the jeep. I didn’t blame them. If I saw a German jeep unattended in a ditch, at the very least I would grab a handful of wires out of its engine as I went past, or slit the tires if I had a knife.

  Hours passed as we stood and then sat behind the stack. We grew thirstier, and hungry and cold. The sky darkened into night. When I got up to look at the Germans, my legs were stiff. I had goose bumps on my arms. “Still there,” I told Madame Marcelle. I shivered.

  My teacher looked wretched. “I believe we must climb into the hay,” she said. “It looks as if we are here for the night. I don’t wish to freeze to death.”

  The hay was dank. As we dug into the side of the stack, the powdery smell of mold rose around us. We dug a hole just big enough for our bodies and thrust our legs deep into the stack. The hay scratched me. Blades of it pierced my sweater. I shoved my skirt down and pulled my purse in beside me, then helped Madame Marcelle reach hers. We packed hay around us. We plugged the front of the hole near our heads loosely so that we could still breathe. All the time I tried to be careful not to dislodge the pins in my hair. I would never hide a message in my hair again.

  At least we were warmer now, and lying down. “Good night, madame,” I whispered.

  “Good night, Suzanne,” she whispered back. “Imagine, at my age, sleeping in a haystack.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish you didn’t have to.” If not for my carelessness, she would have been home safe in her apartment, sleeping in her bed.

  “Never mind,” she said. “We will call it an adventure. They say adventures keep you young.”

  “I am young enough already,” I said.

  Madame Marcelle leaned against me. “We are fine,” she said. “We are safe.”

  I didn’t feel safe, sleeping in a moldy old haystack. But the Germans had not caught me yet. I said my prayers inside my head, closed my eyes, and wished for sleep.

  In the morning when we climbed stiffly out into the cold air, the Germans and their jeep were gone. Madame Marcelle brushed the hay from her skirt and gripped her handbag firmly. “Where does this message—”

  “Shhh,” I said.

  “Mmm. Where do you go this morning, my child?”

  I thought hard. I should have been at the café near the theater by five o’clock the previous afternoon. “This morning I go home,” I said. “Perhaps this afternoon I should have a special lesson at the theater around five-thirty.”

  “That would be an excellent idea,” said Madame Marcelle. “You need much practice before next week’s opening, and we haven’t had time to adequately rehearse your movements onstage. Pray tell your parents I am sorry to make you go so late, but it’s the only time the stage is available. I won’t keep you long and will have you home before dark.”

  “Merci, madame,” I said.

  We went to Madame Marcelle’s flat, and I sponged the dirt from my arms and legs. She picked the hay from my clothing, and I brushed it out of my hair. I put the message on the table. Madame Marcelle ignored it. She gave me a piece of bread and some tea.

  “Be sure to practice this afternoon, slow and simple, many scales,” she said as I was leaving. I had pinned the message back in my hair. “The Lord above knows what sleeping in a haystack has done to your vocal cords.”

  At home Maman and Papa were having breakfast. Maman had been only slightly concerned by my absence. “The buses weren’t running right,” I said. “We got back so late that I stayed with Madame Marcelle.”

  Papa kissed the top of my head as he went out. I flinched, afraid the dratted message would crackle. “You should take a bath,” he said. “Hein? Her sofa must be damp—you smell so musty.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I had to find a safer place to hide the messages. Sitting in the warm bath, I had an inspiration. I stretched out my wet arm and picked up one of my shoes. Maman had managed to buy them for me only six months before, and they were fine stylish shoes, with high, thick Cuban heels. They weren’t as well made as shoes before the war, but I was very proud of them.

  Now I tugged at the smooth piece of leather covering the insole. It peeled up, revealing the bottom of the shoe and the wooden base of the heel. The heel was solid, as I had hoped it would be. There would be a way.

  After I had bathed and dressed I went out to the back garden, to the shed where my father kept some tools. I found a hand drill and took i
t to my room.

  “What are you doing, Suzanne?” Maman called from the kitchen as I went up the stairs.

  “Nothing, Maman,” I said. I went into my room and closed the door. It took me some time to figure out how to work the drill, but finally, with the shoe clamped upright between my knees, I managed to carve a hole through the top of the heel. I blew the sawdust away and examined it. When I pulled the leather insole down, it hid the hole completely. I took the message out of my bathrobe pocket, tucked it into the hole, covered the hole with the insole, and buckled the shoe onto my foot. I stood up and walked around. The shoe felt just the same. It was a good hiding place. Anyone who noticed that the insole was loose would not think anything of it. So many things were hard to get now. Everyone wore ragged shoes.

  A week after we finished The Barber of Seville the director of the opera company called a meeting to discuss our next performance, which was to be Rigoletto. I took a seat in the front of the theater, hugging my elbows from excitement. I loved Rigoletto.

  The director cleared his throat and waited until he had everyone’s attention. “First, the bad news,” he said. “With the spring rains it becomes ever more obvious that we can no longer wait to repair the roof.” This was true—some of the seats in the theater had buckets on them, and now and again, even when it wasn’t raining, we could hear a ping! from a drop coming through the ceiling. “Therefore,” the director continued, “we will be unable to sing in Cherbourg this spring.”

  Some of the company around me groaned, but I held very still. Not sing! What would I do if I couldn’t sing? How would I sleep at all without the lullaby strains of the opera I was learning running through my head?

  “The good news,” the director said, “is that we have been able to secure another house for two performances.” He smiled. “We will perform Rigoletto at the Palais Garnier in Paris.”

  Paris! I clutched my chest. Paris, where the famed national company put on some of the best opera in the world. I would be singing in Paris!

  I won the lead of Gilda for Rigoletto. I practiced as I had never practiced before. “This part is so difficult for a girl your age,” Madame Marcelle fretted. “You must take care, Suzanne. Go easy on yourself. If you miss a note, it’s not the end of the world. It will be worse if you strain your voice.”

  “Madame,” I said, “I am singing in Paris. I can’t miss a note.”

  “It is not the national opera company you are singing with. It is the same Cherbourg company as always.” My teacher smiled at me. I knew she understood. I might be singing with the Cherbourg company, but most of the audience would be from Paris. Surely the national director would come. Perhaps I could impress him. Perhaps, after the war, he would send for me. I would sing all across Europe after the war. Rigoletto would be my first Parisian performance, but I vowed it would not be my last.

  Meanwhile, I suddenly had more messages to deliver than ever. From one or two messages each week I now had one each day, sometimes more, every single day without respite. I hid them in my hollow shoe; I cut slits in the shoulder pads of my dresses and slid them inside. Still, there remained that point of transfer, when I held the paper in my hand. That was the most dangerous time. I grew to dread it. Day after day the doctor sent me out. I ran out of excuses to visit his office, so I stopped making excuses. I disappeared from home and came back hours later.

  “More practice?” Maman would ask.

  “Oh, yes!” I always said.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Wonderful!”

  My number was twenty-two. All along I had never met a person whose number was higher than mine, so I had assumed there were still only twenty-two of us in Cherbourg. Now I began to feel that there were fewer of us remaining. From the start I had made a point of not looking too carefully at any of the other spies. I collected vague impressions of hats, wigs, voices, but I was careful not to pay much attention. I didn’t want to be able to identify anyone.

  But after I had heard that Monsieur Ventreaux was missing, I had never been sent to meet number four again. For a long time I had met number sixteen, a woman, every month; I no longer did. I had not met Seven in ages, nor Thirteen, nor Twenty. Were they still alive?

  Out of fear I began to disguise myself a little. Sometimes I wore my own too-small coat, sometimes Maman’s large red one. Sometimes I wore a wide black hat or tied a scarf over my hair. Once I put my hair in pig-tails.

  I didn’t sleep at night. I lay awake and imagined German voices, harsh and loud, the steps of German soldiers thundering up the stairs. I imagined being dragged from my bed, Maman screaming. . . . When I did sleep, I woke drenched in sweat, shaking from the force of my nightmares. It was a miracle I could sing. My old prayer, Make me strong, no longer seemed to have any power. Only singing kept me steady. Singing kept me strong.

  “I can’t keep manufacturing excuses for you,” Madame Marcelle told me crossly. “You do too much. You put yourself at risk each day.”

  I turned my back to her and looked out the window of her apartment. A German soldier patrolled the street below. “I can’t stop,” I said. “Something must be happening, madame, to create so much work for me to do. Something good. The in—”

  She put up her hand. I stopped, cutting off the word invasion . I was grateful there was anyone at all in this world I could confide in. I didn’t want to burden Madame Marcelle too much.

  The invasion was what we prayed for: the invasion of France by the Allies. We knew that American soldiers were in England now. Our German-controlled news agencies would never say so, but the British broadcast the truth, and enough French people still had hidden radios that word got out. To conquer Hitler, the Allies would have to attack German-occupied Europe. Where else to do it, I thought, but France? The beaches of Normandy, the beaches near Cherbourg, were the closest mainland Europe came to England. The English Channel was treacherous, the tides were tricky, and the German army was so strong that on one hand an invasion didn’t seem possible. On the other hand, it came to seem inevitable. I carried more messages every day. There had to be a purpose behind them.

  I didn’t question Dr. Leclerc. His face had grown haggard; he seemed as worn and thin as an old piece of paper. I couldn’t bear to trouble him. One day when I went to his office, he was holding his small son on his lap. He cradled him with great tenderness. He looked up at me and smiled. “My dear?” he said politely in a questioning tone, as though he hadn’t sent for me himself.

  “I’m going to Paris on Thursday,” I said. “I’ll be back late Sunday night.”

  Dr. Leclerc smiled again—a little sadly, I thought. “I’ve heard,” he said. “I wish I could go to hear you sing.”

  “All my family will be there,” I said. “Madame Marcelle as well. Papa has got train tickets for us all.” This was one of the great advantages of Papa’s job—when we needed to, we could travel, even in wartime.

  “I know a lovely restaurant in Paris, not far from the opera house,” he said. “My wife and I dined there on our honeymoon. Perhaps you might enjoy it.” He shifted his son more firmly onto his lap and reached into the desk drawer for some paper. He wrote down the name of the restaurant, folded the paper, and slid it into an envelope. His boy watched everything quietly.

  “Here you are, then,” he said. “Good luck, Suzanne. Good luck in Paris. But hurry home. We’ll miss you.”

  I took the envelope and left. I knew it would contain a message and my directions, as well as the note about the restaurant. The sooner I got the message into my shoe the better. In the doorway I paused and looked back. Dr. Leclerc still sat in his desk chair, staring at nothing. His boy laid his head against his father’s chest, and Dr. Leclerc reached up and stroked the child’s hair. I could hardly bear to watch them, and yet I stood for a minute or more before I walked away.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Paris, oh, Paris was wonderful. The streets of the city seemed so white and clean, the buildings so beautiful. Were it not for the swast
ikas and the Nazi soldiers everywhere, and the lack of decent food, and the general absence of gaiety, you wouldn’t know you were in a war. When I said so, Papa spat into the street. “Which only proves you can no longer remember how it was before the war,” he said.

  “Oh, Papa,” Maman scolded. “She has a right to be excited.”

  Pierre tucked his hand into mine. “She’s our little opera star. Our artist.”

  “Our tiny singer,” Etienne said, “with such a huge voice.”

  “Such a loud mouth,” said Pierre.

  “Such a big head.”

  They were teasing, but they were proud of me, I knew. Everyone was proud of me. Gilda was a challenging part for an experienced singer, which, as Madame Marcelle took pains to remind me, I was not. Yet I could do it. In rehearsals I hit every note, and my voice was still strong at the end.

  Both my uncles came to the first performance. The house was packed, with far larger crowds than we ever had in Cherbourg. As I waited in the wings for the bars of my entrance, my heart beat as fast as it ever had when I was working as a spy. This was it, my big chance. This was Paris. I danced onto the stage proudly, my head held high. I was someone to be noticed. I sang as well as I ever had before.

  But Madame Marcelle proved right in her worrying. There is a section in Rigoletto where Gilda’s part goes very, very high, nearly to the limits of the human voice. All along I had had to stretch just a little to find the uppermost note. As I reached for it during the second of our two performances, I felt something in my throat give—a little, just a little. It wasn’t exactly painful, and I could continue to sing. I was glad the high part was over. I didn’t think I could hit that note again.

  I finished. I made my bow in triumph before a standing ovation. The manager of the theater piled roses into my arms.

  The next morning I couldn’t speak. My throat felt wounded. Any noise I made came out as a croak.