by Ariel Lawhon
The crates are on the ground in seconds. They are swarmed by Fournier’s men, who’ve been given strict instructions to only open the boxes but not remove anything. I have to inventory the weapons first. Then we must clean and degrease everything before they can be distributed. I learn, on this first night, what a laborious process that is. The weapons are packed in Cosmoline, a sticky, greasy goo that is impervious to heat, cold, and moisture. However, the weapons won’t work properly until the wretched substance has been removed from stock to stem.
Our eyes are heavy, and our fingers numb, when Hubert hears the trucks. A quick conference with Fournier confirms that he is not expecting anyone else to meet us here. We are surrounded by weapons, but half of them are still packed in grease and a not a single one is loaded. It’s like dying of thirst in the middle of the ocean. Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.
I reach for my service revolver, only to remember that I took it out of my holster an hour ago and set it atop my pack because it was hard to squat beside the crate with it strapped to my thigh. Stupid woman. My pack is, of course, sitting there, wide-open, on the other side of the bonfire.
“Hubert?” I say, looking to my pack and then to him.
“I only brought the one.”
I dive for my pack as five trucks crest the plateau, blinding us with their headlights. All around me I can sense Fournier’s men slip into the shadows and disappear. Most of them aren’t armed—that’s why we’re here, after all—and those who are have little in the way of ammunition. They wait. And they watch.
One by one the engines cut off, but the headlights remain on. My pack is only three feet away, and my revolver sits in plain sight. But reaching for it now could get both Hubert and me killed.
The creak of a car door. A thump as it slams shut. Then an enormous man steps into the broad yellow beam of the headlights. His face is hidden in darkness, but I can see that he is wearing tall brown boots. A brown shirt. And a German military cap. He holds a pistol in one hand, and a whip hangs from his belt.
Nancy Grace Augusta Wake
LE TRAIN BLEU, NORTHBOUND TOWARD PARIS
1936
I wake to gentle rocking and cool air on my face. Stephanie sits beside the open window, blowing smoke from her Gitane into the fresh air of the French countryside. The blue velvet curtains are pushed against the wall behind her head, and little strands of hair cling to the fabric like gilded cobwebs. Picon sits on her lap licking pastry flakes from her dressing gown. When he sees that I’m awake he hops down, skips across the plush carpet, and leaps into my berth. Picon wags his tail ferociously and pulls himself into a tiny ball beneath my chin.
Stephanie and I didn’t speak last night when we left Le Bar de la Marine. Or when we returned to our hotel. Assuming that I was drunk on lust, she left me to my thoughts. And when I left the hotel fifteen minutes later, she no doubt thought I was off to rendezvous with Henri. Needless to say, she was stunned when I returned a short time later with two train tickets and a determined expression.
“Pack your things,” I said. “We’re going back to Paris—”
“Tonight?”
“Right now.”
“You cannot be serious. We’re booked on the first train tomorrow. Don’t you want to sleep?”
“The Blue Train leaves the station in less than an hour and I’ll be on it with or without you.”
She ceased arguing at this. I knew that the only way I could convince Stephanie to leave Marseille twelve hours early was to book a private compartment on the Calais-Mediterranée Express, Paris’s infamous and elegant express night train—Le Train Bleu, as it is called for its lavish blue sleeping cars. The price of admission was enough to make me flinch, but it got me hard and fast away from Henri Fiocca. Money well spent, as far as I’m concerned. The man makes me…nervous. He’s too handsome. Too confident. Too persistent. So, we boarded the train just after midnight and went to sleep in our separate berths, surrounded by cobalt velvet and gold trim.
Stephanie glares at me now, but I know she can’t be too angry. She’s always wanted to ride the Blue Train and has taken full advantage of the experience by having breakfast brought to our car. A tray littered with hot coffee, croissants, ripe berries, fresh cream, polished silver, and pressed linen napkins sits on a stand in the middle of the floor.
Now that Picon is no longer there to clean them up, she brushes a crumb from her lap and says, “Please tell me you did not give Henri Fiocca your phone number.”
I stretch out until the tips of my toes and the palms of my hands are pressed against the walls at each end of my berth. I hold my breath and let my sore muscles burn with the strain.
“Of course not.”
“Good, at least you’ve learned something from me.”
“I’m not such a poor student as that, you know.”
Stephanie takes a long drag and turns her chin toward the window. The smoke slips away in a thin, silver stream as she stares at me from between slitted eyelids. “Did you not find him attractive?”
“He is a ridiculously virile male specimen. I look away.”
She makes one of those nondescript noises that French women are famous for and picks a piece of tobacco from her tongue with perfectly filed nails. “Not rich enough?”
“I don’t care about his money.”
“Liar.”
“Oh, stop,” I say. “If you don’t know me better than that, our friendship isn’t worth much.”
“His money isn’t important to you at all?”
I consider this and tell her the absolute truth. “The fact that Henri Fiocca has money is more pleasantly unimportant than if he had none.”
“It’s not just that he has money, Nancy, he’s—how do the Brits say it?—bloody loaded.”
Her imitation of a British accent is more Liverpool than Knightsbridge, but I applaud the effort with a bit of clapping as I try to hide my smile. But after a minute I sit up and point a finger at her. “And that is why I left. I refuse to be like that blonde he was with last night, falling out of my dress and desperate for his attention…for his money.” I shrug, finally getting around to what I really mean. “He thinks I’m a sure thing.”
I can’t tell whether she’s impressed or frustrated by my resistance. “What happened on the dance floor? It looked as though the two of you hit it off in spectacular fashion. I’ve never seen you dance so well.”
“He’s a tall, handsome Frenchman who knows the tango. What do you think happened?”
“Ah.” She looks at me with pity. “You fell in love. I did warn you about that.”
“No,” I object. “You challenged me. But I know better than to expect anything but play from a playboy. I will not become a notch on his bedpost.”
She grins slyly. “So you will run instead? Have I not convinced you that he’s a worthwhile conquest?”
“It is Fiocca’s job to convince me, not yours.”
PARIS
Rue Sainte-Anne, 2nd Arrondissement
“I can’t believe it worked.” Frank Gilmore slides the New York Evening Journal back across my kitchen table. “Milo submitted your article.” He taps the date. “This was published two days after we met with him.”
“It didn’t work at all, actually,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
I tap the space where a byline should be. It’s blank.
“Where’s your name?” Frank demands.
“Where indeed.”
Poor Frank. He has never considered the possibility of not getting credit for a job well done. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s not that complicated, really,” I say. “I’m a woman.”
“So?”
“So Hearst does not publish the names of its female journalists. Particularly its freelancers. ‘That’s just how it is,’ I was told
at the beginning, when they hired me.”
“But that’s—”
“Bullshit. Yes. I know. Milo likely didn’t even file my name with the article.”
“He’s an arsemonger,” Frank spits. “This is your victory. You should be able to take it.”
I should have negotiated this byline. I should have demanded it. But the truth is I didn’t even think Milo would concede and file it at all. Besides, this is the first time in the three years that I’ve been writing for Hearst that I have seen one of my articles in print. Of course, this would be the one on the front page, above the fold. I submit them, and I know they’re published because I get paid, but they are always printed in the United States in cities with strange-sounding names like Houston and San Francisco and Detroit. Until a courier delivered this paper an hour ago, it has always felt like a job I have in theory, but not in reality. Milo wired the editor of the New York Evening Journal and asked him to send a copy as proof that he’d done my bidding. I am told the editor sent this copy with a friend who was traveling to Paris from Lakehurst, New Jersey, by way of Frankfurt and the Hindenburg. “Quicker than the mail,” Milo said in his accompanying note.
“Without your name it doesn’t count!” Frank argues, growing more incensed by the moment. “You are being erased from history even as you’re writing it!”
“I had an option early on, of choosing a male pen name,” I tell him.
“Why didn’t you?”
“I decided that if I couldn’t get credit for my work, as myself, I wasn’t willing to give it to a man who doesn’t even exist. Besides, I needed the paycheck desperately. And when I signed on it was either take their terms or go back to Australia.”
Frank opens his mouth and I know where he’s going, so I stick my finger right in his face. “Don’t you dare say, ‘But what about George Eliot?’ Don’t you dare! Mary Ann Evans made her choice and so did I.”
All the while Stephanie has been listening to our conversation without comment. She’s positioned herself at the seat closest to the window, so she can blow her cigarette smoke out onto rue Sainte-Anne instead of my tiny four-hundred-square-foot flat. I smoke when the mood strikes me—usually when I’m angry—but Stephanie smokes a lot. Perhaps too much. She’d be furious with me if she knew how I’m starting to worry. But she’s not looking at me right now, or wondering what I’m thinking. She taps her ash into one of the empty pots in the wrought-iron flower box fixed beneath the window. I planted geraniums in them last summer but they’ve long since shriveled with neglect. I meant to replace them this year with something a little more low maintenance, like ivy, but never got around to it. Stephanie doesn’t seem to notice, however, but rather pours another finger of brandy into each of our glasses. We’ve been drinking for an hour and I’ve got that pleasant, tingly feeling in my head, like I could dance or nap. One or the other. A coin toss, really. Present company prevents me from doing either, however.
“Nancy doesn’t actually enjoy journalism,” Stephanie says. “And can you blame her?”
“I guess not.” Frank looks at me as though I’ve just been accused of not enjoying chocolate. Or sex. “But the whole thing is a damned pity. You’re so good at it.”
I hate being pitied. So I change the subject. “I don’t dislike journalism. It’s the travel I love. What other job lets you jaunt off, anywhere in the world, on someone else’s dime? If I have to write an article now and again in exchange—even if I don’t get credit—so be it.”
Frank looks as though he might argue with my logic but thinks better of it. I suspect that—even though he’s far fonder of his camera than I am of my typewriter—his motives are similar. We’ve both been to a dozen countries and counting. Besides, it’s not my skill as a wordsmith that makes me an excellent journalist, it’s my curiosity.
“How did you get into this, then?” he asks.
“I was living in London at the time,” I say, lifting my glass from the table and swirling the amber-colored brandy until a tiny whirl forms at the bottom of the glass. I watch, mesmerized, until the liquid settles. Stephanie brought a bottle of Rémy Martin from Count Gonzales’s private collection to celebrate the occasion, and it has been on the window ledge just long enough to taste like black cherries set in the sun to ripen. I roll it around my tongue before finishing the thought. Warm and sweet and rich. Aged vanilla with cloves but woodsy as well, with a hint of cedar and orange peel. It’s like bourbon, only better, somehow, as though bourbon got dressed up and went out for drinks.
“I absolutely loved it, of course,” I say. “…Until winter arrived. The boat I’d taken from New York docked early that fall and I spent those first days watching the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, buying frivolous trinkets up and down Piccadilly, lying about beneath the trees in Hyde Park, and marking the time according to the chimes of Big Ben. London sounds romantic—and it is, mostly, until it turns gray and soggy in late November. I’d left sunny Australia and gone through New York that summer, so I wasn’t prepared for London winters. But I was quickly running out of money and I knew that I had to get a job or go home. Home was not an option—I wanted to keep traveling—so I checked out of my hotel and acquired a room at a charmingly disreputable boardinghouse on Cromwell Road and enrolled at Queen’s College for Journalism. They had a course I was able to finish in a few months—mostly typing and shorthand—and the second I had my diploma I started answering advertisements for freelance journalists in the newspapers. The first call I received was from an editor at the London bureau of the Hearst Newspaper Group and, thanks to my newly acquired diploma, they wanted to see me.”
Frank has that look on his face, like he can’t decide whether to shake his head, laugh, or call my bluff.
“The editor liked the marks I’d gotten in typing and shorthand,” I continue, “but he was more interested in Egypt than anything else.”
“Egypt?” Stephanie asks. “What did that have to do with anything?”
“He wanted to know if I’d ever been and how much I knew about the country in general. The Middle East was a growing area of interest for Hearst and they were looking for a writer who could enlighten their readers in the areas of Egyptian arts, literature, and science.”
Frank nods with sympathy—the poor bloke just gets nicer the more he drinks. “So, you were buggered?”
“Not in the least. I told that man, without so much as a blink, that not only had I been to Cairo four times, but that I could read and write in Egyptian. Fluently.”
Stephanie laughs so hard I fear she might choke on her brandy, and Frank looks at me agog.
“You did not,” he says.
“I most certainly did.”
“Didn’t he ask for proof?”
“Of course. And I gave it to him.” Both of them are perched on the edge of their seats, and I think that even though I don’t particularly enjoy the process of writing, I do love the art of storytelling. “He asked for a demonstration and when I agreed, he handed me a pen and notepad, pulled a book from his shelf, flipped it open, and began reading a random passage.”
“And what did you do?” Stephanie asks.
“I started to write, in delicate squiggles, swirls, and curls across the page, backward, from right to left. He was awestruck as I continued my hieroglyphics for a full page. And when he finished, I read the passage back to him verbatim.”
This is where I lose Frank. “Bullshit,” he says.
“Excuse me?”
He throws up his hands. “Bullshit. I’m not a complete knob, you know. Modern Egyptian writing is in Arabic, not hieroglyphics.”
“So?”
“So there’s no way you could have fooled him.”
“Can you read Arabic, Frank? Or hieroglyphics?”
His eyes narrow and he hesitates. “No.”
“Well, neither could he. So when I read the notes I�
�d written in Pitman shorthand back to him, without error, he was convinced.” I wait until they’ve both finished laughing before I add, “Had that particular test been graded, I no doubt would have gotten excellent marks for resourcefulness.”
“But terrible marks for honesty,” Frank adds.
Stephanie waves off the observation. “Honestly, Nancy, you’re so good at this kind of thing, you should have been a criminal.”
“If I hadn’t gotten the job, I would have seriously considered it. But as it turned out, he offered one on the spot, with a single stipulation.”
“Which was?” Frank asks.
“That I move to Paris. The Hearst European Bureau was understaffed.”
“Brilliant!” he shouts, raising his glass in salute.
“It is worth noting that I met our dear Stephanie only a week after my arrival. I was having a drink at Luigi’s, admiring my new city from the terrace, when a row started at the other end of the bar. The crowd parted just in time for me to see Stephanie throw a pitcher of water at her husband’s head while cursing simultaneously in French and Yugoslavian.”
“The Count deserved it,” she says without apology.
“He left, Stephanie stayed, and I thought it would be interesting to befriend a woman who could so easily clear a room.”
There is a great deal more to that particular story, of course, but Stephanie has long since sworn me to silence. I am considering whether to accept the next round of offered brandy when the phone rings. I feel more than a little light-headed, so I decline a refill and bring my empty glass with me as I cross the room and lift the receiver from the box on my wall.
“This is Nancy.” My voice isn’t slurred, but I can hear my thrumming Aussie accent more than usual.
“Bonjour, Noncee.”
Well. This is interesting. Henri Fiocca has finally called. I’m not the kind of girl to wait by the phone. But it has been a week. I was beginning to wonder if he’d lost interest.