by M. L. Huie
If Mrs. Sherbourne felt ashamed of the hand, she didn’t show it. She carefully placed it on her knee for Livy to get a good look.
“I was fortunate, actually,” she said. “They didn’t capture me until near the end, so my stay at the camp was short-lived. They had quite a few of us from the Firm, you know. I was the oldest, so they looked to me for—what would you call it?—strength, perhaps. We knew we didn’t have long. This was ’45, mind you, so we knew the Nazis wanted to tidy things up before the Russians or the Americans arrived. And Ravensbrück wasn’t a prison anyway.”
“I held their hands before they took them away,” Mrs. Sherbourne said, her normally melodious voice sounding quiet and mechanical. “Gemma went first and then Cecily, and the others. I always thought I’d be next, but for some reason they left me alive. Maybe they just liked to watch me when one of our girls was taken away. It hurt. Badly. Even more than losing these,” she said, nodding at her broken hand.
“Still, I was fortunate, wasn’t I? I’m sitting here now, having a nice little chat with another one who survived,” she said, pronouncing the last word as if it could have been a curse.
“There aren’t many theaters that will have me like this,” Mrs. Sherbourne said, pulling her glove back on. “Perhaps there are some in your neck of the woods, but I haven’t quite stooped to that level just yet.”
Livy didn’t know what to say. She moved back to the edge of her bed, her gaze shifting to Mrs. Sherbourne’s battered hand. Livy could imagine just how it happened. The hammer to the fingers. The questions. No answers. Again the hammer. The unending pain. Over and over.
“You were at Fresnes, weren’t you?” Mrs. Sherbourne said.
The name of the prison—the place where Livy’s heart had been shattered—sent a tremor through her body. Mrs. Sherbourne’s eyes held hers, and there was a kind of sadness in them that Livy had never seen before. Livy’d misjudged this woman but good. She knew now they were part of a select group who carried deep scars from a past they were duty-bound to keep hidden. They were comrades.
Quietly, Livy cleared her throat and told Mrs. Sherbourne everything.
Chapter Five
Fresnes, 1944
Livy and Peter were picked up on the road to Paris.
Peter’s heroics at Vercors had made him one of the Gestapo’s most-wanted men in France. Some of the maquisards they’d fought alongside told them they’d heard German soldiers asking about the agent known as Bulldog. If they knew Peter’s code name, Livy knew the journey would be even more of a risk. She’d told Peter as much, but as usual, he seemed determined to test his apparent invincibility.
After their night together in the café, Peter took Livy to a nearby farmhouse where Luc had hidden a gray Citroën. The car had never been used in a mission, but Livy knew that didn’t matter. Luc, who had remained in Paris, changed a flat tire for them and checked the engine. The Frenchman worked quickly even though the heat of the day caused him to sweat through his linen shirt.
As he worked, Livy and Peter argued. She thought the trip north was reckless. The Gestapo would have multiple checkpoints. She suggested they stay in hiding in Paris until the Allied Forces arrived. Peter just smiled and told her not to worry.
She’d always trusted Peter. After their night together, truth be told, she loved him in a way she didn’t quite understand. Livy looked up to him like an older brother and admired his bravery and calm, but the war had brought them together and made her rely on him in a way that was more like real love. They hadn’t spoken about last night. Once they woke up, they’d gotten to work.
Now she just felt stupid. Love? After one night on a pile of old towels and rags? How many married men and women had sought solace in a moment of physical intimacy while the bombs fell and the machine guns rattled outside?
The frustrating thing about Peter was how impregnable he seemed. He’d smile that crooked grin, and somehow Livy felt that all would be well. He took her hands and reminded her of all the sentries they’d bluffed their way past. This would be no different.
“I’ve got you with me,” he said. “The Gestapo may be looking for me, but you’re the one they need to worry about.”
He meant it, she knew. They had successfully navigated countless German checkpoints with their papers and their nearly flawless French. And when that didn’t seem to be enough, Livy resorted to a little flirting with the young Gestapo guards. Their eyes lit up like firecrackers when they saw a French girl, and if one of them happened to be pretty enough and spoke a bit of German, well then, she could get just about anything she wanted.
But the gnawing feeling in Livy’s stomach worsened as they bounced along the road to Paris in the battered gray Citroën. The Germans knew their days were numbered and they wanted to take their pound of flesh while they still could.
They drove in silence, Peter at the wheel. The wind from the open window whipped his thick dark hair as he kept his eyes on the road ahead.
Peter didn’t so much as flinch when he saw the big black car up ahead and the field gray uniforms that suddenly snapped to attention when they caught sight of the car rumbling down the back road. Then a hand came up, indicating stop.
Livy wanted him to run them down, just keep driving right through the bastards. But he didn’t. Peter slowed down as he approached the roadblock and said, “Don’t worry.”
* * *
Their papers identified them as Marcel and Annette Desjardins, brother and sister. The registration of the vehicle was current, but still they were stopped and held by the road for nearly four hours before the order came to move them north. Once they reached Fresnes, their papers and all their belongings were taken and burned in an incinerator. Livy knew that meant they would be treated as spies. Someone had betrayed them.
Back in the SOE training camp, instructors had told Livy and the other recruits about Hitler’s “Commando Order,” which sought to get around those pesky Geneva Convention laws about treatment of prisoners. The order could not have been clearer. Allied commandos, saboteurs, and spies found behind enemy lines did not have to be treated as prisoners of war but could be shot on sight. If they didn’t shoot you on sight, they’d take you back and torture you until they decided to shoot you. The Gestapo could also choose to turn prisoners over to the SD, the intelligence wing of the SS, for interrogation.
At Fresnes, the Germans put them in different cells almost immediately. They’d talked about this at training as well: what to do if you were captured, how to endure torture, what you could and could not tell them. The first day Livy sat in her cell and the words of her instructors ran through her mind like a ticker tape. She focused on what to do, what to say, and forced her mind not to go down the path of what if or what next.
She expected the worst.
What she got instead was the velvet-glove treatment.
They sent a woman to bring her lunch the very first day. She looked to be around Livy’s age, with a kind smile. She didn’t wear a uniform, just a simple dress with her hair pulled back. Three times a day she brought Livy her meals on plates with real silverware laid out nicely on a tray, not just shoved in under the door and left on the cold concrete floor.
That went on for three days. Then the meals became erratic. She’d get breakfast, but no lunch. The portions became smaller. Finally, they stopped coming altogether.
The first day without food she saw no one. She didn’t even hear anyone out in the hallway. It felt as if she’d been forgotten. For a few hours, she wondered if perhaps the prison had been liberated and somehow she had been left behind.
The next morning, before dawn, the door to her cell opened and a large SD officer in full uniform brought her an apple. He looked like a grown-up Hansel from the fairy tale, Livy thought. All bulky and shoved into a Nazi uniform. He sat down in the cell’s only chair and introduced himself as Hauptsturmführer Faber. He smiled and told her they would be getting to know each other quite well over the next few days, and that he hoped they
would become close friends “despite their differences.” Livy devoured the apple in a few bites. Faber, who Livy guessed weighed near sixteen stone, delicately ate strudel from a china plate and sipped tea while they spoke. For a big man, his manners seemed impeccable.
Hauptsturmführer Faber’s attempts to throw Livy off her training failed. She said nothing. When asked for her name, she always said Annette Desjardins. She then asked about her brother Marcel. When Faber probed her cover story, she gave him small details. As she had learned at SOE camp, the best legend was one that had elements of truth from the agent’s own life.
“Where are your parents?” he asked.
“Gone.”
“How do you mean—gone?”
“My mother died in an air raid. My father got sick. Cancer.”
The questioning went on for two days, and then Faber became impatient. The first day he ordered the quiet German woman to take off Livy’s clothes while he stood in the doorway and watched. She sat naked in the cold cell for a full day without food.
The next day the woman brought back her jumper and knickers. Two Gestapo guards accompanied her and they watched, leering, as Livy dressed. Then they held her in a chair while the German woman, who had brought her food the first few days, slapped her face until her mouth bled down the front of her clothes.
This continued for another two days. At mealtimes the woman would come in with her two Gestapo thugs, and she would beat Livy until she bled.
On the morning of the eleventh day, Faber returned with his tea set and strudel, and offered a fresh apple to Livy. She ripped it from his hand and ate quickly. The German smiled.
“You see, we don’t want to treat you so badly. Young girl like yourself. Do you know your face is bruised now, hmm? So maybe you just talk to me, answer a few very simple questions, and I will tell my girl to bring you breakfast. She can bring you eggs and bacon and jam right now. And all your clothes. I know you must be cold. I’m shivering in here, and I have this uniform and belly to keep me warm. You are so small. So very small. So, let me help you. We’ll even start with something simple. Who is Bulldog?”
Livy felt the last bite of apple stick in her throat, but she didn’t respond. She followed the ticker in her head, and shrugged.
Faber smiled. “You see, we know your code names, and we know that Bulldog is here. We are certain. But I don’t think it is you. No. Bulldog is a man. So, tell me, did they name this man after Churchill? Hmm. How important he must be, then. No, it’s not a woman, we know that. A woman would not be so important to the British, I think.”
Each time Livy shrugged and answered, “Je ne sais pas.”
Faber continued, probing here, trying to find a flaw in her story there, but Livy just shrugged and answered the same.
Finally the big man grew weary and left. Livy knew the German woman and her two thugs would be back soon. That’s the way it would work. The punishment might even be worse this time after her reticence, but that didn’t matter.
All that mattered was that somehow, Faber had learned Peter’s code name and knew Bulldog was now at Fresnes.
Livy realized they’d not only been betrayed, but by someone very close enough to them.
The pattern of Faber—the soft touch—and then the woman and her thugs—the fist—continued for the next two days. But Livy never broke. But now, the prison seemed even bleaker. She had always believed Peter would find a way out of Fresnes for them. Perhaps the Allied force would liberate the prison before anything happened to them.
But as Faber persisted in questioning her about Bulldog, it became increasingly real to Livy that she and Peter might die here. As that thought took root in her mind during the endless hours of sitting, she clung tighter to the feelings she had for Peter. She loved him. No other word came close to expressing what she felt, what kept her going. Sitting in her bare concrete cell, her face swollen from the beatings, she thought about him night and day. He supplanted the ticker of the instructor’s commands she’d tried to keep in her head.
She remembered the day she’d practically crashed into France, falling out of the plane like some idiot girl, and there he was, laughing at her.
The more her face reddened, the louder Peter had laughed. She’d hated him then. Now the memory of that day, and all the subsequent days, kept her alive. The feel of the wind in her hair, a smudge she remembered on Peter’s chin (jam from a sandwich he’d had in the truck while they waited for her at the drop site), and the tone of his voice when he mocked her accent all replaced Faber’s questions and the German woman’s goddamn fists.
Then the visits stopped. For the next two days Livy sat in her cell alone. At noon on both days, a guard—one she hadn’t seen before—came with something that looked like boiled cabbage on a plate, placed it on the floor inside the cell, and left without a word.
Livy worked through all the possibilities. They’d given her the silent treatment before. This didn’t make sense. This wasn’t the logical progression if they still held hope of getting information out of her. No, this change meant something.
The thought hit her the first night and she panicked, but she told herself to hang on and reassess tomorrow. When morning came and the next day brought the exact same routine, she began to accept it. They must know now Peter was Bulldog.
She ignored the pain of the bruises on her face and the hunger. Livy knew what would happen to Peter and to her as well. God, had he confessed? Had he been pushed so far that he talked? No, Peter wouldn’t tell them a thing. He’d take his cyanide pill before breaking.
No, please God, don’t let that have happened. Don’t take him. I have to see him once more, she thought. Livy wanted to be near Peter right now more than anything in the world. To tell him what he’d meant to her, not just that night, but all along.
The anguish of those thoughts left her gasping. She pushed them away and tried to think what would happen next. She thought through what they would do to her. Now she would be expendable. They’d shoot her and throw her in an unmarked grave.
Surprisingly, these thoughts didn’t upset her. They served as a distraction from the truly terrifying image of what they might do to Peter. Or what they might already have done. So she watched her death in her mind, wondering how the bullet might feel and how quickly it would be over. Would it be like a curtain falling? A film reel breaking in the middle of a picture? What they did with her afterward wouldn’t matter. The pain and the fear would end, just the way it had for her mother.
* * *
They came for her on the third day. The German woman gave her the skirt they’d taken from her and a pair of black lace-up shoes that seemed to be at least two sizes too big. The two thugs escorted Livy down a corridor of cells and then a steep circular stairwell. Livy slipped once. The woman shouted at her to stand up. “Walk or I will shoot you now, English bitch!”
At the bottom, one of the thugs opened a heavy metal door, and sunlight streamed into the dark staircase. Livy almost fell again. The sunlight stung her eyes, causing her to bend over at the waist.
“Blindfold her, you idiot,” the German woman yelled, and one of the thugs pulled her up while the other tied a kerchief tight around her eyes. Then she felt a push in the small of her back and heard the crunch of stones under her shoes. Up ahead she heard other voices speaking German and commands being given. The sounds of boots crunching on gravel, and also—was it?—the sound of birds twittering. They sounded so ridiculously normal she wanted to laugh.
Her shoes stubbed into something hard. Brick or concrete. A voice commanded her to pick up her feet. Livy had little time to register much else as one of the thugs shoved her against a wall and roughly maneuvered her shoulders so that she faced out into what must have been a courtyard. She felt a shoulder against her left arm and smelled what had to be other prisoners. The odor was at once overpowering and noxious and at the same time one of the most comforting things Livy had ever sensed. She brightened in the company of her fellow prisoners.
Then she heard another door open and a shuffle of gravel as soldiers came to attention with the new arrival. No, wait, two people had walked into the courtyard.
“This is all of them.” She recognized Faber’s unaccented, polished High German.
She felt the tension of those beside her. No one moved and they didn’t speak, but the heat of their anxiety was palpable. They could be shot at any moment and never see it coming.
The person who had come out with Faber moved around the courtyard and stopped several feet to Livy’s left. She heard a sigh, and then a man’s voice said in French, “Now, now. Say nothing.”
He moved down the row of prisoners and stopped directly in front of her. Livy felt a scream rising inside as the man stood before her. What the hell was the bastard doing? Do something! Anything!
Then she felt fingers, soft manicured fingers, at her temples as the man slid down the blindfold.
She blinked several times before his face came into focus, and even then she didn’t trust her eyes.
Luc stood before her. The mechanic who’d been part of their circuit. The man who’d entertained the five of them with his bawdy jokes. But this didn’t look like the Luc she knew. Now he wore a tailored double-breasted suit with a blue silk tie and white shirt made of soft cotton. A brown fedora was tilted to one side of his head so that the brim almost covered his right eye.
“Bonjour, Annette.” It sounded like Luc’s voice, but this made no sense. She stood in a courtyard in a bricked-off area that must have once been a small garden but was now just dirt.
“Get away from her!”
Livy looked to her left. Everyone around her remained blindfolded except a tall man with thick dark hair at the end of the row. Despite being handcuffed, Peter Scobee looked on the verge of choking the life out of the man who stood before Livy.