The Invisible Woman

by Erika Robuck

  This is a lowly man, Virginia thinks. A physically un-ideal Nazi in every way. One who might bleach his hair to appear more Aryan, one without rank or power who wants to prove himself. There is no Nazi more dangerous.

  “What kind of man allows his wife to carry the heavy suitcases?” the MP asks in slow, strange French.

  “One with a sprained knee,” Aramis says. “I’m ashamed to say.”

  “You should be,” the MP replies. “Maybe I could lighten the load.”

  Virginia makes a slight adjustment in posture, tipping her balance as if the clothing suitcase is the heavier of the two. The MP grabs it from her, opens the latches, and empties it on the floor. He kicks through the clothing with his boot, unearthing a brassiere.

  “Here, bitch,” he says to Aramis. “Wear this. Show them what kind of man you are.”

  Aramis whimpers when the undergarment is draped over him, and keeps his eyes to the ground.

  “Clean it up, Hexe,” he says to Virginia.

  Hag. The last word spit in German—one of the languages in which she’s fluent—gives her morbid pleasure. He believes she’s an old woman. She places the other suitcase on the ground and crouches to reload the clothing into the first. The MP makes a move to open the wireless suitcase. If he does, they’re finished. With all the components, there’s no way to disguise what’s inside. She tenses, eyeing the gun in his holster. She’ll take it and kill him and as many Nazis as possible before she goes down. The moment he touches the clasp, his commander shouts to him in German.

  “Why are you wasting time, Dummkopf?”

  A commotion at the station door draws her eyes to where the commander speaks with three men in blue jackets and blue berets. The Milice.

  She works slowly, willing herself not to rush or to draw attention. When she finishes, she stands and edges Aramis in the opposite direction of the Milice, careful not to meet their eyes but alert to their conversation. She’s able to pick out only bits and pieces.

  Farmer. Stolen petrol. Resistance.

  Once they’re out on the road, Aramis stops and places his hand over his heart, where he still wears the brassiere. He collapses on a bench.

  “I don’t know if I can go on,” he says.

  “What happened to ‘a little levity goes a long way’?”

  “It’s too much. I didn’t know it would be like this. My heart hurts. My knee aches.”

  “A lot worse will hurt if they catch you.”

  She pulls the bra off him, shoves it in her clothing suitcase, and offers her arm. He doesn’t take it.

  The Milice come out of the station with the Nazi MPs. One of them lets his eyes linger on Virginia and Aramis before joining the group. Her relief is profound when they head in the opposite direction.

  Again. Keep going.

  She takes a deep breath.

  “You will not lie down for them,” she says.

  She reaches for his arm and pulls him to standing.

  * * *

  —

  The farmhouse of their destination is several kilometers from the station at Crozant, and when they arrive at the crude stone dwelling, Aramis is in agony. Virginia is relieved to see the small farmer, leaning on an ax and wiping his face, matching the description of one Eugène Lopinat. He looks to be in his early fifties and in need of a good meal. An old woman stares out the window at them through thick spectacles. A quick scan of the surrounding property disappoints Virginia; there’s no barn in sight. Where is she supposed to transmit? She nearly thinks they stopped at the wrong place until the farmer gives the correct reply to her scripted question.

  “How long since you’ve had a farmhand?” she asks.

  “It has been a long time,” the man says.

  He gestures with his head for them to follow him. The smell of chicken droppings and cow dung hangs in the air, and craggy, bare trees lead to a dilapidated toolshed. Several scrawny hens scatter off the path, one taking flight to rest atop the ancient well. A fire smolders in a pit.

  “Do you have a place I can sit?” Aramis says. “I sprained my knee.”

  The man looks at Aramis and back at Virginia in disgust, clearly disappointed by the agents he was sent. She can’t blame him. But soon he’ll see; she will prove herself. Once in the back door of the house, Aramis settles heavily into a wooden chair.

  “Do you have anything for the pain?” Aramis asks.

  The farmer shakes his head in the negative, but the old woman from the window joins them and produces a flask from the folds of her skirt. Aramis takes it with gratitude.

  “Forgive my son’s bad manners,” she says. “No wonder Eugène can’t find a wife.”

  The man waves her off and abandons them to return to the yard to chop wood. The old woman turns to Virginia.

  “We were told only the woman would stay.”

  “Yes,” says Virginia. “He returns to the station after he rests.”

  “The boches took our plow, our horse, and our cart, so you’ll have to walk back.”

  Boche. It’s the French’s slur for the Germans, from the word caboche. Thick-skulled, dim-witted, block-headed thug.

  Aramis groans.

  “Rest fast,” the old woman says, patting him briskly on the shoulder. “The wolves are circling. The Resistance here managed to slash the tires and steal petrol from a convoy. The Kommandant disciplined his lazy soldiers, but now they want French blood. You didn’t pick a good day to arrive.”

  Leaving Aramis with the suitcases, Virginia follows Madame Lopinat out the back of the house. There’s a cane by the door she uses to poke along in front of her as they go.

  “My eyes are no good,” Madame Lopinat says. “Eugène needs help. In addition to what you do, can you be of assistance around the farm? Cooking, taking the cows to pasture, that sort of thing.”

  “Yes,” Virginia says.

  Taking cows to pasture is the perfect cover for a secret agent in need of fields for airplane supply drops. While she’s here in Crozant, she needs to coordinate at least one drop before moving on. A month ago, the closest Maquis group, one hundred kilometers south, was hunted and executed, and morale in the region is low. The area is thick with Nazi activity, and the small number of peasants in the region brave enough to resist are afraid. They need to know they aren’t forgotten.

  Virginia looks at the feisty old woman and feels a surge of admiration for her. How many has she lost to the war? Yet she’s still standing as tall as she’s able, doing what she can to fight evil, even if it’s only allowing a boarder to stay for a short time. This woman has surely lost so much more than Virginia has. She inspires Virginia to keep going.

  Virginia opens a rusty gate for Madame and takes her arm to help her up the hill. Once they reach the top, Madame is breathless, so they pause to take in the fields. In spite of the brown grass and the barren trees and the broken fences and the chill still in the air, Virginia feels her chest open. Far down the lane, past where the cows wander, she sees an old barn. Relief fills her.

  “Curious,” Madame says. “For a woman of your age, you aren’t winded.”

  Some remarks need no reply. Instead, Virginia points to the barn.

  “Is that where I’ll stay?” she asks.

  The woman peers at her for a moment before answering.

  “No,” she says. “Over the hill is a lane leading to a cottage with a loft. My husband built it when we were first married. If he were alive, he’d be proud to have you here.”

  * * *

  —

  Once Aramis leaves, with promises to find a trusted courier as a go-between for them, Virginia heads to the cottage. It’s tiny, has stale air, no running water, no electricity, and no indoor toilet. It smells of mice droppings and mildew, and the stove looks too small to properly heat it. Five years ago, she would have been horrified by it, but for someo
ne who has slept in barns and ambulances, with strangers in a frozen cabin in the wasteland of the Pyrenees, and on the roach-infested floor of a Spanish prison, it’s heaven.

  In spite of her exhaustion, she hauls the heavy wireless up the ladder, hiding the suitcase deep under the cot in the loft. As much as she wants to wire headquarters to let them know she’s arrived at her first stop, tonight is not the time to do so, not with agitated Nazis on the hunt for the Resistance. After filling a pitcher with water from the pump, using it to wash herself and her stump sock, and removing her prosthetic, Virginia collapses into the bed on the ground floor, hoping to fall asleep without a downer. Though her body is worn-out, her mind won’t stop racing back to the past.

  As war in Europe loomed, Virginia had been desperate to do something. She’d been officially rejected by the US Foreign Service because of her leg, and the British army because she was American, but found the French ambulance service welcomed her with open arms, sending her straight to the front.

  She falls asleep thinking of those early days of the war in 1940, before France fell to the Germans, and drops into a familiar nightmare.

  * * *

  —

  On her last ambulance trip, fifty yards from the convent hospital, Virginia and her partner run out of gas. The wounded soldier has to be carried the rest of the way. Blood from the blisters on Virginia’s knee stump soaks her sock. She can smell it through the soldier’s gore and her own stink. Blood falls from the man’s blasted leg like water from an open faucet. It bleeds the way her foot bled from her own accident. She carries him the way her friends carried her.

  Once they get him to the hospital, she helps a nun hold the soldier down while the doctor saws. The screams go through her. There’s no anesthesia.

  When it’s over, she limps to sit on a stone wall outside the hospital, and soon the nun joins her, wrapping her in a coat. It smells of tobacco and sweat. Another aroma reaches her: lily of the valley, threaded through her bootlaces. Little beauties in the horror. Virginia pulls out a stalk and brings the flowers to her nose.

  “Mary’s tears,” the nun says.

  She lights a stub of a cigarette, a tiny torch in the night. She must have found it in the soldier’s jacket. She holds the cigarette out to Virginia, but she declines.

  “Another name for the flower,” the nun says. “Legend has it that when the Virgin wept at her crucified son’s feet, these bloomed. No wonder our fields are thick with them.”

  “This is hell,” says Virginia.

  “Hell?” says the nun, a dark laugh escaping her. “You are not old enough to remember the Great War. My dear, we are only at the gate.”

  Chapter 3

  Virginia snaps awake in the early hours of the morning and doesn’t try to go back to sleep. When her eyes adjust to the darkness, she crawls out of bed, attaches her prosthetic, dresses, and climbs up the ladder to the loft. There’s a cot where she can sit, and a small bedside table, just wide enough to accommodate all the components of her transmitter.

  She pulls the suitcase out from under the cot, opens it, and runs her hands over the Type 3 Mark II radio transceiver. This strange device, known as a B2 in the field, will be her lifeline between France and England. On her first mission, Virginia wasn’t trained as a wireless operator—a “pianist,” as they’re known—which made her dependent on others and lacking the degree of control she needed. When her pianists in Lyon were arrested, even though they hadn’t given her name under torture, incriminating papers showed Virginia’s code name heading the circuit. And it was a double agent—who’d ingratiated himself, pretended to be one of their own—who’d gone to the Nazi MP, Haas, to help zero the target in on Virginia.

  She clenches her teeth at the thought of the vile man who infiltrated her network, rendered her useless, and effectively wrote death sentences for the brave men and women at her side. Without Vera’s eyes on her, Virginia finally admits to herself that the desire to hunt him down is the other—perhaps less noble—reason for her return. She was betrayed by someone she allowed in her circle, and who he was—what he is—makes his sin greater than any other kind of betrayal. Still, she won’t allow it to take her off task.

  Not yet.

  Knowing the Nazis are thick on the ground here, certainly searching for any signal, Virginia will need to make this transmission as short as possible. Fortunately, the loft has a window with a tree within reach. She unrolls the antenna, threads it through the highest branches possible, and attaches it to the device. She pulls the curtains closed tightly, using a clothespin to hold them shut around the wire, and lights a candle. She plugs in the battery, attaches the Morse code transmitter, and pulls on the headphones. Taking a deep breath, she notes the time on the wall clock she can see from the loft, turns on the radio, and adjusts the dial to find the right frequency. Once she has it, she taps the poem she chose for her call sign and security check. Then she turns the knob to “receive” to await the reply.

  As the minutes tick by, she begins to doubt herself. What if she set up the wireless incorrectly? What if her Morse code message was jumbled? What if the Nazis have caught her signal and are approaching the cottage right now? If there are any homing vehicles in the area, they can zero in on her transmission site within twenty minutes.

  Virginia’s hands are like ice and her head is tight with a coming headache, but a sudden sound reaches her. A flurry of dots and dashes squeaks through the headphones like little fairy voices. A single word comes through with an exclamation. Her code name, the one she’d chosen to spite the Nazis, who’d christened her Artemis, among other, less flattering names.

  —Diane!

  She grins and exhales.

  —Did you make it to Stop 1? HQ types.

  —Yes. Aramis also in place.

  —Good. When find good DZ, wire for date/time.

  DZ. Drop zone. Fields for receiving airplane-parachute drops. With rolling farmland as far as the eye can see, she won’t have a problem finding one. Finding people to help her receive the drops, however, will be another story.

  —Copied.

  —Any requests?

  —English tea.

  —Crossword puzzles?

  Virginia smiles. She can almost see Vera dictating over the shoulder of some young woman at HQ, dribbling cigarette ash all over the poor girl.

  —Yes.

  —GB. BC.

  Good-bye. Bonne chance.

  Excellent. Five minutes.

  While Virginia packs up her wireless and stores it back under the cot, a fond memory comes to her mind, stirred by the mention of crossword puzzles. She can almost see the latticed London café windows filtering the January light, dust motes playing in the rare sunshine, that day in 1941 when Vera Atkins began recruiting her for the SOE.

  Virginia recalls spotting Vera by her trademark perfectly arranged, glossy black hair, sitting in a corner booth, smoking, moving her gaze between the newspaper in front of her and the café. Her eyes lit up when she saw Virginia.

  “If we were in France, you’d no longer be allowed to smoke,” Virginia said, sliding in the booth.

  “And why is that?” Vera asked.

  “Rations. They seem to think only men need tobacco.”

  “Perhaps they’re right. Women can endure anything.”

  Vera had held out a pink container of Passing Clouds cigarettes to Virginia.

  “No, thanks,” said Virginia. “I can’t be dependent upon anything if I ever want to get back to France.”

  “How do you plan to do that?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  Vera stared at Virginia a moment before stubbing out her cigarette in the near-overflowing ashtray. She turned her attention to her handbag, where she searched a bit before finding a folding knife. It was rough and well used, military issue. Vera opened it and ran the blade along the pencil tip, slicing aw
ay wood and making a sharp point, curled shavings littering the tablecloth. A waiter joined them.

  “The usual?” he said to Vera.

  “Thank you.”

  “And you, miss?”

  Virginia peeled her stare from the knife, glanced over the menu, and ordered the watercress soup.

  “Feel free to order the roast and potatoes,” said Vera. “I’m treating, and I have extra ration coupons.”

  “I can’t remember the last time I had meat. Roast and potatoes, it is.”

  When the waiter left, Virginia leaned in. “How did you come by those?”

  Vera gave a coy smile, folded up her knife, dropped it back in her purse, and began the newspaper crossword puzzle.

  “I understand you volunteered for the French ambulance service at the beginning of the war, before coming to London after the fall of France,” Vera said. “Why did you volunteer?”

  Virginia found it odd that Vera worked on a crossword while at lunch with her, asking personal questions, but sensed there was nothing the woman did without intent.

  “In spite of my immaculate record at embassies across the world,” Virginia said, “the US rejected me for Foreign Service. France was happy to use me.”

  “Were you rejected because of your leg?”

  Virginia was taken aback that Vera knew. Virginia didn’t speak about her prosthetic with anyone, especially because it seemed to be such a roadblock to employment.

  “Cuthbert?” Virginia said.

  Vera lifted her eyes to Virginia’s. “You call your prosthetic leg Cuthbert?”

  “Yes. It’s a joke. Saint Cuthbert is the patron of birds. Since I was hunting them when I shot off my foot, the name seemed fitting. And, to answer your question, yes, that’s ultimately why I was rejected.”

  Vera turned her attention back to the puzzle.

  “When you were stationed at Metz in the ambulance service,” Vera said, “did Cuthbert get in the way?”

  Virginia never mentioned where she was stationed. Vera clearly already knew the answers to some of the questions she was asking. Still, Virginia decided to play along. She had nothing to lose.