The Invisible Woman

by Erika Robuck

  “No, you won’t,” says Virginia. “Not unless you have a death wish.”

  “We have to do something,” Sophie cries.

  Virginia holds up her hand, silencing the girl, trying to hear the Morse code. She listens, taking it all in, shaking her head with resignation.

  “What?” says Sophie.

  Virginia finishes her transmission and packs away the equipment.

  “What did they say?” Sophie cries.

  When Virginia is finished, she looks at Sophie.

  “We need to separate and relocate. Immediately.”

  * * *

  —

  Once Virginia is able to calm Mimi and Sophie, she asks Sophie if she has another safe house at her disposal. She does, and tells Virginia the address, which Virginia carefully files in her mind. Mimi will take her son to Lavi for a few days, at least, and will then return to the house when it’s safe. In the meantime, Mimi will start warning all of her contacts that the network is compromised.

  Virginia’s conversation with Louis comes to her mind.

  “How long were we trained to remain silent under interrogation?” Louis had asked.

  “Forty-eight hours.”

  “That’s right. Enough time to let your people get away.”

  Once Sophie leaves, Mimi gives Virginia the information for her new safe house.

  “The place you’ll go is in Sury-près-Léré,” says Mimi. “Cross the Loire River and follow it ten kilometers north. You will see signs for the village. The farm is on the outskirts, on the western side, second one out with the blue door. The woman who lives there, Estelle—she refuses a code name—is a widow of the 1940 fighting. She’s a school friend of mine, and a resistor. If the red flowerpot is in the front window, it’s safe for you to knock.”

  “If not?”

  “About a kilometer from the house, there’s a barn with a loft. You must wait there until she fetches you. But tread carefully. The barn is never empty. Many use it on their escape. If you must go to it, knock four times and announce yourself by saying, ‘Where did I leave my milking stool?’”

  “Thank you.”

  “Diane,” says Mimi, taking Virginia’s hands. “Estelle is your link to Chambon.”

  A feeling of warmth and anticipation spreads over Virginia. She brings it in check.

  “I’m not leaving for the mountains yet,” Virginia says. “This is only to set up separate lodgings. There are more drops to take for your Maquis, and I have experience with prison breaks from my first mission, not to mention Louis’s own experience. We’ll try everything we can to get Louis out.”

  “If he doesn’t get himself out first.”

  The women reach for each other, grasping hands and putting their foreheads together before they separate.

  Chapter 16

  Hours later Virginia arrives at the farm, her wireless suitcase feeling as if it holds a boulder. She limps from her knee stump’s raw, rubbed skin. When will a good callous start forming?

  The tall stone house looks like it was once a grand place but has fallen into disrepair. The facade is covered in the dormant vines of climbing roses and has a large, blue, arched door. The red flowerpot is in the window. The sight of it and the tulips pushing forth from the dirt lifts her spirits, but only a little. She’s sick with terror for Louis and her people.

  Goats surround her, greeting her with their calls. She pats their heads and picks a handful of grass to feed them. When she looks up, a woman with steely eyes and salt-and-pepper hair pulled into a loose bun stands at the door with her arms crossed. She’s a little older than Virginia’s true age but looks sturdy. Formidable.

  “How long since you’ve had a farmhand?” says Virginia.

  “It has been a long time,” says Estelle.

  The woman’s posture relaxes. Virginia picks up her suitcases and walks into the house. Once she’s in the foyer, she hears an old man shouting from an upstairs room. Estelle looks at the ceiling and sighs.

  “My father. He thinks you’re a German spy.”

  “Why?”

  “He thinks that about all foreigners.”

  “Then I better find a way to sweeten him up.”

  “Impossible,” Estelle says. “Steer clear of him. He never turned over his rifle from the Great War. It’s always loaded.”

  Virginia listens to him continue to curse about her arrival.

  “Is my room near his?” she asks.

  “No. You’ll be in the garret. I’ll keep him well away from you. Come.”

  The stair ahead is wide at the bottom and narrows as it rises to a landing where it splits, leading to different sides of the house. Virginia is glad to take the staircase that leads to the right, away from the yelling man. On the second floor, dark wood beams and molding contrast with pale, faded wallpaper. Though the hall is shadowed, Virginia is able to make out the lush design of foliage teeming with birds.

  “Can you remember a world so frivolous one could buy such wallpaper for an upstairs hallway?” says Estelle, a note of bitterness in her voice.

  “Barely,” says Virginia. “But this helps.”

  “Then I guess it’s a good thing.”

  Estelle walks to a small door at the end of the hallway and unlocks it. Virginia follows the woman up the narrow staircase to the garret. There’s a double bed and a desk near a window, a faded carpet on the floor, and a corner with a tiny table and chairs. The table is laid out for tea, and there’s no dust in the cups. There are no cobwebs or dust anywhere, and the window looks as if it has been recently wiped clean. The air smells of other people, as if someone just walked out of the room.

  “I hope no one was displaced for me,” Virginia says.

  “It was time for them to move on.”

  Virginia places her suitcases on the floor and crosses the room. Just outside the window, there’s an ancient oak with new leaves whose branch tips skirt but don’t obstruct the view of the surrounding area and the road leading to the house. She’s high up, so transmission should be strong. It’s a great relief to be here.

  “Mimi says you need a traveling companion and a link to Chambon,” says Estelle. “I’m glad to be both of those things, but I’m busy with my own work. I’ll need a day’s notice if you want me to accompany you anywhere, and so I can have my young cousin come to take care of Father. She’ll stay out of your way.”

  “I appreciate your help more than I can say. As I’m sure you hear, my French reveals my accent.”

  “Yes, you shouldn’t take the railways alone.”

  Virginia tries not to bristle.

  “If I get approval, I want to go to Paris tomorrow,” Virginia says.

  “All right. The bus makes daily trips to the train station in Briare, where we can catch a connector to Paris. If we have to stay overnight, I have an apartment at my disposal.”

  “Thank you.”

  Estelle waves her off, as if providing shelter and escort in Nazi-infested France is nothing.

  “I know you need to come and go at will,” says Estelle. “You may use either of the two bicycles in the shed at any time, but guard them with your life. They’re all we have to get around. And here is a master key to the house. But please, only use it on the front door and in your door—no others. It’s an old house with many rooms, and we sometimes have . . . ghosts.”

  * * *

  —

  In her transmission that night, Virginia tells HQ Sophie’s safe house and her own new safe house, and that it’s an easy bicycle ride from here to Cosne and her Maquis. They agree on a field for a drop and a date, just after the full moon. Then, she sends them a request.

  —Permission to go to Paris. Intel on Louis’s prison break. Cherche-Midi.

  Since Virginia learned of Louis’s arrest, the nightmares have been coming with more frequency, the memories of he
r time in the Spanish prison fearing for her men and women circling again and again in her mind. She might not be able to do anything for them now, but Louis is a train ride away. She needs to do what she can, even if that’s only letting him know he isn’t forgotten.

  —Declined.

  Damn.

  She knew the request was a long shot, but it doesn’t make the answer any less frustrating. She can’t bear to think of Louis in that place. Prisons like Cherche-Midi can break men, even men who seem unbreakable. Virginia is confident Louis can endure starvation; they have all mastered hunger in one way or another—but it’s the solitary confinement that can make a social, loving man like Louis lose his way. Even when she was arrested and taken to the Spanish prison, she had a cellmate who kept her going. She asks again.

  —One day. Tomorrow. With escort.

  In the pause, while she waits for a response, a dark thing deep inside Virginia stirs. Thoughts begin to rise. Motives that are outside of a rescue mission. Virginia suffocates them, keeping oxygen from flaming that fire to life.

  —Declined.

  Virginia breathes deeply, trying to quell her rising desperation. Each minute in that prison is an hour. Each hour, a day. Each day, a week.

  —Three agents imprisoned. Entire networks compromised. Experienced in prison breaks.

  She was a part of several in Lyon, with Louis’s help. There’s a good chance she’ll be able to get the men out, especially with all the bribe money to which she has access. There’s silence for a long time—so long she wonders if her transmission has been interrupted. As she’s about to try again, the dots and dashes come through.

  —Permission granted, per Wild Bill.

  Virginia grins. Thank you, General Donovan.

  Oh, how Vera must rage. Virginia feels guilty for her triumph. There’s nothing more frustrating than being overridden by one with higher rank, especially a man. Especially—to Vera—an American man.

  —I won’t disappoint you. Travel May 1. Briare to Paris line.

  —We’ll get word to RAF.

  The Royal Air Force. If they know the lines agents travel, they won’t bomb them.

  Not for the first time since arriving, Virginia experiences a rush of gratitude for her links to HQ. It would have taken days to get this information to them through another pianist, and she might not have had success.

  —Good. Prison contact?

  —Alley outside café across street. Use rat.

  The rat. SOE training included trapping, killing, and gutting rats as foul little letterboxes. They’re safe communication devices because no one would pick up a dead rat. One does have to watch for cats, though. Dousing the rat in pepper water usually keeps cats away. At least this rat has already been killed and prepared.

  After she packs up the wireless and stores it in the wall behind several boards she’s loosened, she removes her prosthetic and climbs into bed. She reaches down to massage her aching knee stump. The wind picks up and taps an oak branch against the glass.

  She breaks into a cold sweat, suddenly remembering the tree outside the window in the Turkish hospital where she had burned with infection. She soon falls into an uneasy sleep, and the nightmare drops her right there, into the hospital bed.

  * * *

  —

  The shotgun pellets had shattered her foot. Thick mud seeped into her cuts. Gangrene had set in before the moon rose. The doctor had stared at her over his flimsy cotton mask and asked, “Your life or your leg?”

  She hadn’t answered at first. It was nearly impossible to attend to anything—especially a decision of that magnitude—when the white-hot agony of her pain so wholly consumed her. It was a terrible, humbling thing to behold, to live. To burn with torture from foot to fevered head. This fire would not take long to make ash of her.

  But just outside her window, winter had winked at Virginia in the glint of moonlight on an ice-encased tree limb. The branch was knobby and dormant and cold. Deliciously cold. She tried to swallow, wishing to suck the ice off the wood to relieve the fire in her. The limb tapped the glass.

  I will reawaken, the tree seemed to say.

  She was able to manage a word.

  “Leg.”

  All became black, and waking on the other side of the amputation brought no relief.

  She soon learned that phantom pain—the hurt of a lost limb—was as real as the actual pain on the stump. It traveled next to it, a second horse dragging an unwilling rider with no carriage over a rocky road. She came to understand that she was no longer whole. Her strong, shapely, lovely leg—one that had been stroked and kissed and relied upon without ever being properly thought of or thanked—was in a trash can. An actual part of her body thrown out with the rubbish.

  “You’re lucky,” the doctor had said, while Virginia stared at the pills on the tray the nurse brought to her. “We were able to save the knee. Your exact measurements have been taken for a prosthetic.”

  She imagined the doctor using a measuring tape on her severed leg before tossing it in the wastebasket. Would he think her mad if she asked him to fish it out and cut a bone from it for her? Or maybe something smaller, like a toe. A talisman to carry. A rabbit’s foot.

  She couldn’t help but laugh.

  The doctor and nurse had given each other troubled looks.

  That’s right, she thought. I’m losing it. I’m lost. And I will not continue this way.

  It was obvious to Virginia: She couldn’t live without her leg. She would not live with pity. Oh, the pity! Her friends tried to hide their shock at her gaunt face, her vacant stare. Tried to hide how they wished to flee the sterile room where she lay, missing a piece of herself.

  The nurse watched Virginia wash down the pills with water but didn’t notice one remained tucked in Virginia’s clammy, curled pinkie, the sweat allowing it to stick to her skin. She didn’t notice Virginia slide her hand under the blankets and tuck the pill under her hip, adding it to a little pile. As the nurse crossed the room to shut the window, Virginia told her to leave it open.

  “You’ll catch your death.”

  “Promise?”

  The nurse stared at her a moment. On her way out of the room, she turned off the light.

  Virginia had glared through the darkness at the tree outside her window. Each day she watched the sun melt the ice, while the evening froze the drips into little icicles, and the night fully encased it. All while the limb tapped her window, mocking her with its indecipherable Morse code.

  “Traitor,” she said.

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  If she could stand, she could break the branch and throw it in the snow far below. But she would never stand again.

  The night air smelled of spices and winter, as it did the night she’d stood on her balcony, cursing Emil, drinking gin. What she wouldn’t give to go back in time. If only she’d had just one more drink, the hangover would have been too much. She would have backed out of the hunting outing. She wouldn’t have made the careless mistake that had cost her so dearly.

  Dizzy with pain, she’d reached for the pills, collected them, and lifted her hand. Ten tiny white poisons glowed in the moonlight. Each on its own could do no harm; together they would end her. She closed her eyes and brought her hand to her mouth.

  “Dindy.”

  Her eyes snapped open. Startled, she dropped the pills on her blanket.

  The room smelled of her father’s pipe smoke. He was somehow there, glowing blue in the moonlight. But no! Impossible. He was dead.

  She squeezed her eyes closed and open again, wondering if she was hallucinating. Though his mouth didn’t move, his voice was in her ear.

  Don’t, Dindy. It’s not who you are.

  “But I can’t live like this,” she whispered.

  You’d break your mother’s heart.

  “I’m broken.”
/>   Then put yourself back together.

  “No.”

  Keep fighting.

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  Keep fighting.

  * * *

  —

  Her eyes jerk open, and the branch outside the window keeps tapping.

  She checks the time. Four in the morning. The next day. May 1. No sense trying to sleep any longer.

  Hauling herself out of bed and strapping on her prosthetic, she reflects that she’s come a long way from that hospital bed, but still has much further to go.

  As she readies herself, she goes over the plan once more, her mind racing with stations and streets, names and faces, dates and times. The date is May 1. She keeps coming back to it. Why does it feel so important? She wonders if it’s prophecy, if May 1 will bring the D-Day announcement.

  She gives her disguise a final check before leaving the garret. When she reaches the landing of the split staircase and sees the first hint of dawn on the horizon, she suddenly realizes why May 1 is significant.

  The date marks six weeks since she landed in France.

  Chapter 17

  The women ride the dawn bus to the train station in silence. They don’t need to speak; they’ve gone over the mission in detail.

  Arrive. Rendezvous. Hide. Rendezvous. Depart.

  If they’re able to make contact, and Louis and his team are alive, they need to find the location of the three cells, the time the prisoners are taken to the courtyard for exercises, and how much bribe money it will cost to smuggle each out.

  Sunup to sundown. Just another day in the field.

  Six weeks, she tries not to think.

  Estelle handles purchasing tickets and enduring communication at the checkpoints. It’s a relief when the women finally find seats, and they settle as far from the front of the train as possible. Though safe from RAF bombings, rogue Maquis groups are a worry. If they’ve wired the tracks to explode, the farther from the locomotive the women sit, the better.