The Secret Agent

by Elisabeth Hobbes

  Though she was intent on the dancing, the moment he played the long, drawn out notes in a minor key, Sylvie was thrown back across the years to her teens. Traditional music. The sort that made you want to bob and kick, sway from side to side. Intoxicating and exotically foreign.

  A name sprang to Sylvie’s lips, but she managed not to release it aloud. Jakov. A young Jew who had performed songs from his native Russia on the fiddle in one of the theatres Sylvie’s mother had performed at. The first man who Sylvie had ever persuaded to kiss her. She hadn’t minded about his faith, but Angelique had later informed Sylvie that Jakov was a homosexual, crushing Sylvie’s first infatuation. Still, the kiss had lit a fire in Sylvie’s breasts and loins, and she did not regret it.

  What has happened to Jakov? Doomed on two accounts by Hitler’s new regime. Was he in a work camp somewhere, or had he been lucky enough to escape from France at the first sign of invasion? The joy flooded out of Sylvie, and she stopped abruptly, letting her hands hang limply by her side. Felix carried on playing for a few seconds longer until he realised Sylvie was not about to continue dancing.

  His eyes flashed to hers. He wrinkled his brow in what might have been concern. Sylvie gave him a curt nod, one performer to another, not caring what he thought.

  ‘Have you seen enough?’ She addressed the question to Monsieur Julien, putting her hands on her hips with one foot slightly out as if posing for a photograph. ‘Do you think I will pass as a performer?’

  Monsieur Julien blinked and ran a finger under his collar. Sylvie hid her triumphant smile. Oh yes, she had definitely done enough to prove that she could be seductive when she wanted to be.

  ‘You can stay,’ he said. His expression darkened, and he pointed his finger at her, jabbing it to emphasise his words. ‘But I’ll have none of that sort of dancing or accompaniment, do you understand? My establishment will not be tainted by any association or suggestion of partiality to Jewish culture. You dance what the customers want, and Felix, you play the songs they like’

  ‘I understand,’ Sylvie replied. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Felix had stood and was strapping his accordion closed once again, pulling the leather straps tight around it. He had his back to Monsieur Julien.

  ‘Felix? Tell me that won’t happen again. You’re lucky Mademoiselle Duchene had the sense to stop dancing. If anyone outside heard that!’ He broke off and threw out his arms wide in exasperation.

  ‘Understood. Of course,’ Felix said, his voice dead. He picked up the accordion in his arms, as if it was a beloved child, and disappeared behind the curtain without making eye contact with anyone. Sylvie watched him go. Monsieur Julien followed him through the curtain.

  Felix’s manner and words continued to trouble her as she sat on the edge of the stage and put her shoes back on. He had sounded angry at the very public reprimand. She didn’t doubt that being told she had shown more sense than he had would not endear her to him. As much as she disliked it, Monsieur Julien had talked sense. To be Jewish was dangerous and to even show an interest in anything Jewish was risky. She glanced again to the curtain. Had Felix accidentally revealed something about himself he had not intended to, or had he been trying to trick Sylvie into revealing something about herself? She wasn’t sure, but she had a sense now that there was more to the musician than she had suspected.

  Chapter Seven

  SEO Basic Training, Scottish Highlands

  1943

  ‘You will be working undercover. New names. New histories. Do you understand what that truly means?’

  Sylvie nodded, seeing that the other women seated in the room were doing likewise. There were a few murmurs. Sergeant Kintour waited for them to die down and for silence to settle over the room once more. His piercing blue eyes ranged over the women, and Sylvie felt like a schoolgirl again. She had to resist the urge to pull her skirt down to cover her knees. The lectures were an essential part of training. The syllabus had been devised to prepare recruits as fully as possible for their work which, until they arrived at what were termed ‘finishing schools’, they had not been completely aware of.

  ‘The work you carry out will be dangerous at times. Most of the time. But it will also be lonely, and that is something which is harder to anticipate or deal with. You will not be able to share your true identity with anyone, and that can leave you feeling isolated. Even the other members of your networks will not know your true names or past. You will be a part of the jigsaw, but you will not even know who the other pieces are. It is possible you could be sharing a dinner table with another member of SOE from a different unit and you will never know. The woman sitting beside you on the bus could be carrying transistor radio crystals in her bag from a safe house to a wireless operator. The man pushing the barrow of vegetables to market might have fuses and explosives hidden beneath them that he plans to detonate on the railway lines that night.’

  She caught the eye of Lucy, a dark-haired woman in her early thirties, who sat to her left. They grinned at each other. It was a comical image to imagine a barrow full of carrots and bombs, but there was nothing funny about it in reality.

  ‘Lucy. Sylvia. Are you listening?’

  ‘Yes, sorry, sir,’ Lucy answered rapidly.

  Sylvie winced. Sergeant Kintour had switched from French to English, and Lucy had been so quick to assure him she was paying attention that she had answered in English. Sergeant Kintour said nothing. He didn’t have to. Lucy covered her face with her hands, turning scarlet with shame. A slip like that overseas would mean detection and capture.

  ‘Betrayal could come from anywhere,’ Sergeant Kintour snapped. ‘Deliberate or accidental. The less you all know about other missions being carried out, the less you will be able to reveal and the fewer associates you will incriminate.’

  He lowered his voice and walked around the room, his stick tapping softly on the stone floor.

  ‘If you are captured, lives will be in your hands and you might never know whose. Similarly, your life will be in the hands of unknown others.’

  All eyes were on him.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be safer to have as little contact as possible with anyone?’ asked Lucy.

  Sergeant Kintour shook his head. ‘No, for two reasons. First, it would raise more suspicion to ignore your colleagues. Not to say hello to the old woman in the queue at the bakery, to shy away from any social or public event. You must go about your daily lives with the confidence that comes from knowing you have nothing to hide and every right to be where you are.’ He permitted himself another smile. ‘Even though that will be far from the truth.’

  ‘And the second reason?’ Sylvie asked.

  ‘Because people need company, and it is not normal to be without it. I spoke of loneliness. You cannot become hermits. For your own sanity, you will need to reach out to other people and live in whichever society you are placed in. Learn your new identities until you are perfect. The more you become that person, the more confidence you will have.’

  Sylvie sat back in her chair, thinking of the evenings she had spent sitting alone, turning down offers from workmates in case Dennis might pay her an unexpected visit. Before that, all the days at school where she moved among the other girls silently and with aloofness that they returned. She had always declared she was happy to be solitary, but perhaps she was wrong.

  For the rest of the afternoon, they practised their cover stories until they were word-perfect. They took turns to try to catch each other out. Lucy, visibly shaken by her blunder at speaking in English, slipped up again when asked by another trainee if her shoes had come from Harrods and proudly said they had.

  That evening, Sylvie sat with Lucy by the small fire in the drawing room as they drank weak tea. Lucy’s thirty years were showing on her face, and she looked anxious.

  ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’ Her mouth trembled and she seemed to be fighting back tears. ‘I’m making too many mistakes.’

  ‘Of course you can,’ Sylvie reassured her. ‘You
’re the best wireless operator of all of us. My messages have twice the number of mistakes that yours do. And don’t forget, you were the only one of us who could hit the head target from fifty feet away.’

  ‘But none of that will be any use if I blunder on my first day in France. What if I’m not strong enough to hold up? I thought it would be easy to pass as French, but it’s been so long since I lived there.’ Lucy sat back and teased at a thread on her skirt. ‘I have to do this. I have to. For Claude’s memory.’

  Sylvie poured out more tea. Lucy’s husband had been a minor French aristocrat, but when the situation on the continent became unsettled and the threat of war loomed closer, he had sent Lucy back to live in England. He had been killed in the first year of the war. If Lucy thought that being out of France for five years would make it challenging, what did that mean for Sylvie’s longer absence?

  ‘How easy do you think it will really be to begin as a new person?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘Easier than you think,’ Sylvie replied. She shifted her legs beneath her and settled to face Lucy on the overstuffed sofa. ‘When my father brought me to live in England, I was too French for the school I went to – I had to learn to act more English.’ She squeezed Lucy’s hand and gave a merry laugh she didn’t quite feel. ‘If I can pretend to like hockey and swimming in cold pools, then you can pass for a native French woman.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Lucy said, squeezing Sylvie’s hand in return. ‘Sergeant Kintour is right. It does no good to hide away and not talk.’

  Nantes, France

  1944

  ‘I thought Antoine would fall of his chair when you started doing those jumps,’ Céline exclaimed, rushing over to the stage as soon as Monsieur Julien left. ‘You must come and sit with us for a drink.’

  Be sociable. Sylvie reminded herself of Sergeant Kintour’s words. Don’t reject the opportunities to talk with people. Sylvie stepped off the stage and looked around the club at the remaining people who had been her first audience. Three dancers, Céline and the barkeeper.

  The training officer’s other warning jumped into her mind. The problem with working undercover was that Sylvie had no idea who else was working undercover. As such, she did not dare to say anything that might reveal her true purpose or identity.

  She knew from what Uncle Max had told her in England that Monsieur Julien was a supporter of the work SOE were doing and the Resistance, otherwise he would not have agreed to her joining his staff, but she had no idea what else he might know. She had no way of guessing whether any of the others were sympathisers, members of the Resistance, other agents, collaborators or spies for the Gestapo.

  This was the prime reason for the secrecy, of course, but she reflected it would have been helpful to be able to ask out right who she could contact.

  She slipped onto a chair at the table and smiled around at the new faces.

  ‘You were superb. Wasn’t she, girls?’ Céline said. She sounded enthusiastic, but her smile ended before it reached her eyes. She was not completely happy. Was it because of how Sylvie had danced directly for Felix? The flirting had been harmless, but if Céline had a claim on him, she might be possessive.

  Céline introduced the dancers: Adele, who Sylvie remembered had taken the party of Germans away the previous evening, Emily and Estelle. Two blondes and one brunette. Sylvie decided her own chestnut-brown hair would balance the act out well.

  ‘Is that how you dance in Angoulême?’ asked Adele. ‘Was it in a nightclub or a circus?’

  ‘Don’t be rude,’ said Emily, the brunette, nudging Adele in the arm.

  Adele got up and walked away, scraping her chair on the floor. ‘It’s your turn to cook tonight, Céline,’ she tossed over her shoulder. ‘Hurry up, I’m hungry.’

  ‘We all eat together,’ Céline explained. ‘It’s never much, but Antoine’s brother is a butcher and gives us the bones and scraps he has left over. Antoine likes to call it his “family dinner”.’

  Antoine. Sylvie hid her amusement at the way Céline tossed about Monsieur Julien’s first name. Clearly the privilege was something that mattered to her.

  ‘Of course, none of us are his family,’ Emily explained. ‘Though he’d happily marry any of us.’

  ‘Marry! I don’t think so.’ The voluptuous woman with honey blonde hair, who Céline had introduced as Estelle, laughed. ‘Watch where you let him put his hands when you’re in the dressing room. Who do you think got Marie-Elaine in the family way?’

  ‘That’s not true,’ Céline said. ‘At least it’s only half possible. She’d been walking out with a Stabsgefreiter. She must have done something in return for the chocolate he kept saving for her.’

  Everyone laughed – Sylvie included, though she didn’t know the woman. Her mouth watered a little. If she was going to have to seduce a German officer, then one who worked as a corporal wouldn’t be a bad choice in times of rationing and food shortages.

  ‘Well, if Marie-Elaine is planning to have a German baby, she had better not come begging to me for help minding it,’ Estelle said primly. ‘No self-respecting French woman would lower herself to do such a thing.’

  ‘You were happy enough to share the chocolate!’ Céline snapped. She and Estelle began to argue; listening to them, Sylvie realised that there was more to this than she was seeing. Remembering Céline’s willingness to accept drinks from strangers, she wondered if Céline’s reputation was as marred as the absent Marie-Elaine’s.

  ‘Anyhow, no one has seen Marie-Elaine for weeks,’ Emily said to Sylvie. ‘I do hope she’s safe wherever she is.’

  ‘Don’t you know where she is?’ Sylvie asked. ‘Wasn’t she your friend?’

  Emily squeezed her hands together. She wore expensive-looking rings, Sylvie noticed.

  ‘Not really anyone’s friend. She kept to herself.’

  ‘From the women at least,’ Estelle threw in. ‘She liked the men. She didn’t come into work one afternoon, and after that no one saw her.’

  Céline shrugged. ‘She told me she was going back to her family who would look after her when the baby came.’

  Sylvie hoped the girl was all right and had, indeed, simply gone home. People disappeared. They were taken and never seen again. Marie-Elaine’s family might think she was in Nantes while the dancers assumed she was with them. She could be somewhere else entirely.

  ‘I need to pay a visit to the ladies’ room. Where do I go?’ she whispered to Emily, who was watching the back and forth between Estelle and Céline with interest.

  ‘Through the curtain and under the stairs,’ Emily replied, not taking her eyes off the other women.

  Sylvie found the toilet; a cramped cupboard beneath the stairs where she had to step over a mop and bucket and duck her head to stand in front of the sink. After relieving herself, she didn’t go straight out to the club again. She had seen the backstage area briefly when she had dropped her suitcase there and wanted to explore further. There were two rooms. A quick look in the one to the right confirmed it as the girls’ dressing room, which looked onto the alley that Sylvie had walked down. The other must have been Monsieur Julien’s office, as Sylvie could hear him whistling through the half-closed door.

  A hand landed heavily on her shoulder and she jumped in alarm, giving a small squeak.

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  It was Felix. Sylvie had not heard him come downstairs. He was dressed in a black overcoat with a grey fedora pushed back on his head. He folded his arms and studied her, his eyes narrowing in suspicion.

  ‘I was just wondering where I would get changed later,’ Sylvie said.

  Felix cocked his head in the direction of the first room. ‘In there. No one goes into Monsieur Julien’s office unless asked.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Sylvie smiled, but something about him was forbidding. ‘I’m sure it won’t take me long to find my way around.’

  Felix leaned back against the wall of the narrow passage. His right leg was pushed out so his knee was out at a
n angle and blocking Sylvie’s way. Sylvie wrinkled her brow in confusion. He seemed disinclined to talk, but did not look as if he was planning to go anywhere. Perhaps he still suspected her of snooping.

  ‘You played very well,’ she said. ‘It was hard to keep up.’

  ‘I was interested to see how much endurance you had,’ Felix said. He pursed his lips. ‘What made you stop in the end?’

  Sylvie shrugged. She had no intention of sharing her personal memories of Jakov or explaining the reason. ‘I thought Monsieur Julien had seen enough to decide.’

  She leaned her back against the wall opposite and extended her legs a little into the passageway, crossing her ankles. She was careful not to touch his legs, but there wasn’t much distance between them. She folded her arms and stared him out.

  ‘It was an interesting choice of tune, your final one. What made you pick it?’ she probed.

  The musician’s lips curled into a sardonic smile. He reached into the pocket of his trousers and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. Instead of lighting it, he held it between the finger and thumb of his left hand and pointed it at Sylvie.

  ‘Are you hoping to lead me into an incriminating admission? Subversive talk or behaviour? Are you a German spy? Will I soon find myself installed in a cell for questioning?’

  Sylvie’s mouth fell open. Did he really suspect her of spying for the Abwehr? He saw her astonishment and laughed.

  ‘I’m teasing you, mademoiselle.’