The Lost Girls of Paris

by Pam Jenoff

  Mark pulled two boxes off the shelf and set them on the ground. As he knelt to open one of them, Grace found her eyes drawn to the spot where his collar had pulled back to reveal a pale bit of skin, his brown hair curling against his neck. Stop, she scolded silently. Whatever madness had happened between them in New York, that was all in the past. He was Tom’s friend, doing her a favor by helping her to gain access to the files. That was all.

  Grace knelt before the other box on the ground, swiping at a handful of dust and coughing. She opened it. There were files, each bearing a surname on the label. She opened the top file. It contained a black-and-white photo like the ones Eleanor had been carrying, only this one was of a man. The file detailed locations and missions in Occupied Europe, presumably which the agent had undertaken for SOE. “The F is for French section,” Mark called. “It looks like these are all people who were deployed to France during the war.”

  She flipped to the next file, then another. “But mine are all men.”

  “Mine, too.”

  That made sense, Grace reflected. The kind of work Mark had described SOE doing would have been done by men. And except for the F notation on the boxes and photos, there did not seem to be any connection to Eleanor. Grace wondered for a second if the trip to Washington had been all for nothing. She would get a train back to New York tonight and return to work in the morning.

  “Here!” Mark called, interrupting her thoughts. As she stood and walked over to where he stood by the shelf, he pulled a thick stack of files from one of the boxes. “Regina Angell,” he read aloud from the top of the file. Then he flipped to another. “Tracy Edmonds. Stephanie Turnow.” She took one of the files from Mark and opened it. Inside was a photo like the ones Eleanor had carried. The name beneath the image was written in the same neat handwriting that Grace recognized from Eleanor’s photos. Some of the SOE agents had been women after all.

  But none of the names on the files were the same as the ones on the photos, Grace realized as she thumbed quickly through the box. Her shoulders slumped with disappointment. “The names don’t match. These aren’t the right ones.”

  “I wonder how many girls worked for SOE.”

  “There are about thirty here,” Grace replied, thumbing through the files. “Plus another dozen if the ones in Eleanor’s photos actually worked for SOE as well.” She was surprised there had been so many female agents. She lifted one of the files. Sally Rider, the label read. Inside it was a personnel file or dossier of some sort, a page of background with a photo, then notes about training. The detail was impressive, line after line about the various schools the girl had been through, how she had performed at various tests and drills, all in that same handwritten script.

  Grace scanned the file. Born in Herefordshire, it said. It contained a last known contact, not in England, but America. Impulsively, Grace pulled out a pencil and a scrap of paper and scribbled down the phone number in the file. Then there was a list of places: Paris, Lille. The women had been deployed for SOE to undertake various missions in Occupied Europe. The last entry was for Chartres in 1944. Nothing after that.

  Grace closed the file and began thumbing through the others. Each had the same basic information, hometown, contact information. It was the list of whereabouts that was most interesting: Amiens, Beauvais. The missions had taken them to all corners of France.

  There was something else she noticed, too: lots of lines blacked out. “Someone redacted the hell out of them,” Mark observed over her shoulder.

  “Maybe the files on the girls in the photos are in another box?”

  But Mark shook his head. “There are seven boxes on F Section in all. The files in the others are all on men.” He reached around Grace to thumb through the box she had been searching. “What’s this?” He pulled out a thin manila folder that had been wedged between two of the personnel files. “This is odd,” he remarked, paging through it.

  “What is it?”

  “Wireless transmissions. Some interoffice documents and telegrams, too. But it doesn’t look like it belongs in this box with the personnel files. Someone must have packed it there by mistake.” Grace reached for the file, wondering if it would shed some more light on the girls in the photos. She noticed that several of the documents had been issued on the same letterhead: “From the Desk of the Recruitment and Logistics Officer, E. Trigg.”

  Eleanor wasn’t just a secretary. She was running things.

  There was a clattering at the door to the archive. Grace turned to see Raquel in the doorway. “Raquel,” Mark said. “We weren’t expecting you back so soon.” They could not have been in the archive for more than fifteen minutes.

  “I saw Brian walking across the parking lot,” Raquel stammered. The archivist must have come back from lunch early. “Come quickly.” She led them out a back doorway and up a different flight of stairs. A few minutes later, she let them out onto a loading dock. “I’ll phone you a cab. I never should have let you in here. I could lose my job.”

  “Thank you,” Mark began, putting his hat on once more. “Tell Tony...” But Raquel had closed the door and was already gone.

  “I’m sorry that wasn’t more helpful,” Mark said a few minutes later when they were seated in the cab. “A whole trip to DC for a few minutes in the archives. We could have used hours in there.”

  “Agreed. But at least we have this.” She reached in her coat and pulled out the narrow file containing the wireless transmissions.

  He stared, stunned by her audacity. “You took it.”

  “Borrowed, let us say. I didn’t mean to. I was just startled when Raquel came back early, and I did it before I could think.” Just like with the photos in the station. Hadn’t she created enough of a mess by taking something that wasn’t hers already? “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have.” It was his friend who had given her access to the files and she hoped he wouldn’t be mad.

  But he smiled. “That was nervy. I’m impressed. Can I see?” He moved closer across the seat. She handed the file to him. He skipped the first few sheets, which he had seen when they were in the archives. “Eleanor’s name is all over these papers,” he remarked. “It seems like she was in charge, or pretty close to it.”

  “Not at all the clerk that the consul had described her to be,” Grace replied. She wondered what else Sir Meacham might have been wrong—or lied—about. “But I still wonder about the girls in the photos. If there were no files on them, could they still have been agents, too?”

  Mark pulled out two papers that were stapled together, scanning them. “This is a full list of all of the female agents, or at least it seems to be.”

  “Are the girls in the photos on there?”

  He nodded and pointed to one of the familiar names, Eileen Nearne, then another, Josie Watkins. They had surnames now, had become whole people. “So they were on the list, but there were no personnel files for them,” she mused. “I wonder what that means.” There was a little notation next to about a dozen of the names—the same ones that were on the photos: NN.

  “What does that stand for?”

  Mark flipped over to the second page where there was a small legend. “‘Nacht und Nebel,’” he read. “Night and Fog.”

  “But what does it mean?”

  “It was a German program, designed to make people quite literally disappear.” He closed the file. Then he turned to Grace, his expression somber. “I’m sorry, Gracie,” he said gently, putting his arm around her shoulder. “But it means that all of the girls in the photos are dead.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Eleanor

  London, 1944

  The first thing that should have tipped Eleanor off was the lack of mistakes.

  She was alone in her office at Norgeby House, flipping through the roller deck of cards again and again like some movie she had seen a thousand times. Each three-by-five index card contained detai
ls for one of the girls, her background, strengths and liabilities, last known whereabouts. She didn’t need to read them; she knew them all by heart. Her complete recall was not something she tried to do. Rather, once she saw a detail about an agent or a bit of news from France, it was seared indelibly on her brain.

  Eleanor rubbed her eyes, then looked up around the office. It was a generous term for the windowless former broom closet. It was the only spot available, the clerk had claimed when she had turned up at the administrative office at headquarters with the note from the Director requisitioning a place for her unit. Though Eleanor doubted this was true, she had no way to prove it and she took the space in the cellar, which was scarcely big enough to hold a desk. The air was so heavy with the smell of cleanser, it somedays threatened to overpower her. But the location was good, close to the radio room where transmissions were sent and received. The endless clacking of the teletype in the background was a now-familiar lullaby, one she was destined to hear even in her dreams.

  Or would be, if she ever slept. Eleanor had practically lived in the office at Norgeby House in the months since she had started sending girls into the field, only going home briefly every few days to change clothes and reassure her mother that she was fine. Belle Tottenberg, who had changed her surname to Trigg upon arrival from Pinsk nearly twenty-five years earlier in order to fit in with the English circles she aspired to join, had never approved of what she referred to as her daughter’s “boring little office job.” If Eleanor had to work, she’d often said, it might as well be at Harrods or Selfridges. Eleanor had considered more than once telling her about the girls she recruited and the way they reminded her of Tatiana. But even if she could share such matters, Eleanor knew the meaning would be lost on her mother, who had buried her grief in a whirlwind of teas and plays, putting behind her the dark years that Eleanor herself could never seem to outrun.

  Eleanor remained at Norgeby House nearly around the clock by choice, catching short naps at her desk in between the times when transmissions were scheduled and they were expecting messages from the field. She didn’t have to stay; the wireless transmissions, which almost always came at night, would have been sorted and decoded and delivered to her in the morning. But she liked to study the messages as they came in to recognize the patterns in the text and ways the girls transmitted. By receiving the messages in real time, it felt almost like the girls were speaking to her directly.

  Eleanor stood up from her desk and started toward the radio room. In the hallway, two uniformed men were talking in low voices. They averted their eyes as she passed. The male officers who had voiced such skepticism about her heading up the women’s sector had not warmed to her. There was a hesitation when she entered the room for the morning briefing now, an almost whisper. As long as they didn’t interfere with her doing her job and looking out for her girls, Eleanor didn’t care.

  Eleanor walked into the radio room. The air was thick with the smell of cigarette smoke and burned coffee. A half-dozen or so operators, all women younger than herself, clacked out messages or hunched over papers, decoding electric signals from the field, which were received at the transmission station at Grendon Underwood, then sent to Norgeby House by teleprinter. Fairy godmothers, the women at London headquarters were called by agents in the field. Each assigned to a specific agent or three or five, they waited loyally for the broadcast like a dog waiting for its master to come home.

  Eleanor studied the blackboard that covered the front wall of the room, scanning the names chalked on it for her girls. The radio transmissions were scheduled for twice weekly at regular intervals, exchanges where London could send information about drops of personnel or equipment and receive correspondence from the field. They might come more often, if there was an urgent matter, or less if it was not safe for an operator to transmit. Ruth, whom they’d poached from the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, was on the schedule, as was Hannah, who had lost a child in the Blitz.

  Marie’s name was up on the blackboard, too, signaling that a transmission was expected this evening. It had been a week since Marie had dropped blind into that field north of Paris. There had been an initial communication from another W/T in a neighboring circuit, saying that Marie landed. Marie had missed her first scheduled broadcast three days earlier. A few hours’ delay in a transmission was not uncommon. The Germans might have isolated her signal and blocked it. But three days might mean something more.

  Eleanor felt her panic rise, then pressed it down neatly again into faint concern. Early on, she had learned not to get attached to the girls. Eleanor knew each of them personally, their background and history, their strengths and weaknesses. She remembered the first time she deployed one of the girls, a young Scottish girl called Angie who was to be dropped into Alsace-Lorraine. In that moment everything they had planned and prepared for was actually being set in motion, all of her plans and work come to fruition. The reality hit Eleanor then: the girl would no longer be under her control. Eleanor grew nervous, almost panicked and ready to call it all off. Something washed over her, a protectiveness. A maternal instinct, she might have called it, if she had any idea what that felt like. It had taken everything she had to go through with sending the girl.

  The exercise of deploying the girls hadn’t gotten any easier with time. She felt a sense of ownership, was vested in their well-being. She also knew the statistics, though, the very great odds that some would not survive. The practical reality was that some of them might not be coming back. Sentimentality would only cloud her judgment.

  “Ma’am?” said one of the girls, an earnest, ginger-haired operator called Jane. Eleanor looked up from the pouch. “There’s a transmission. From Marie.” Eleanor leaped to her feet and sprinted to Jane’s station. There was Marie’s code name, Angel, at the bottom of the page. Eleanor had never liked it for the way that it bespoke death. She had meant to change it, but things had gotten busy and there hadn’t been time.

  “You have the worked-out key?” Jane nodded, then handed Eleanor the slip of paper containing the cipher that Marie would have used to code the message in the field.

  As she began to decode the message, Eleanor wondered if it might be garbled, as the girls’ transmissions so often were, owing to weather interfering with the radio signals or circumstances forcing the W/Ts to rush. But the message was neat and clean. “In the Cardinal’s nest. Eggs safe.” Eleanor ran her fingers over the page, hearing Marie’s voice in the text typed across the page. “The Cardinal” was a reference to Vesper, and “eggs” meant her radio had arrived intact.

  The text was unremarkable and smooth, indistinct. It might have been written by anyone. Marie’s heaviness on the first letter, the hallmark of her fist print, was lighter than usual.

  Eleanor scanned the message for Marie’s security checks, the mistakes she had been trained to include to verify her identity. She knew Marie’s bluff check was to substitute a p for the thirty-fifth letter, but the message wasn’t long enough for that. Nor did it contain a c where she should have substituted for a k, her true check. Eleanor cursed the code instructor who, in trying to create unique checks that would not be easily detected, had gotten too sophisticated and failed to give Marie checks that would have been usable in every transmission.

  Eleanor studied the paper once more. Something felt off. She turned to Jane. “What do you think?”

  Jane read the message through horn-rimmed glasses once, then again. “I’m not certain,” she said slowly. But Eleanor could tell from Jane’s face that she was worried, too.

  “Is it her?” Eleanor pressed. She pictured Marie that night at Tangmere. Marie had seemed nervous, as if having doubts, Eleanor could see. But they all had doubts right before going. Good God, how could they not?

  “I think so,” Jane said, her voice more hopeful than definite. “The message is so brief. Maybe she was just rushed.”

  “Maybe,” Eleanor repeated without conviction. Other
than the fist print being a bit light, there was nothing else to support her uneasiness. But she felt it nevertheless.

  “What do you want to do?” Jane asked, returning to her own desk. They had at best a few minutes to transmit back to Marie. Eleanor needed Jane to send a message to Marie about the arms drop that was scheduled for the following Tuesday so that the Vesper circuit could organize a reception committee, locals who would receive the munitions and store them for the partisans. But if Marie had been somehow compromised, the information would fall into the wrong hands.

  I need to send her a personal message, Eleanor thought. Something that only Marie would know. She hesitated. Airtime was scarce and precious and it was risky to keep an operator transmitting any longer than absolutely necessary. But she needed to confirm with Marie that it was really her—and nothing was amiss. “Tell her I’m holding the butterfly.” It was a veiled reference to Marie’s locket necklace, the one that she had confiscated the night Marie left. Though she wasn’t quite sure, she sensed the necklace had meant a great deal to Marie. Something to do with her daughter, perhaps. Surely the message would prompt a personal response.

  Eleanor held her breath as Jane coded and sent the message. Two minutes passed, then three. She imagined Marie receiving it, willed the girl to say something to reassure them it was her. The message came: “Thank you for the information.” No recognition of the personal reference, nothing to confirm that it was really Marie. Eleanor’s heart sank.

  But the fist print was familiar now, heavy on the first word now like Marie’s. “It looks like her this time, doesn’t it?” Jane said, seeking reassurance.

  “Yes,” she replied. Marie had been told time and again in training not to talk about herself or her background, or to broadcast personal information. Perhaps in replying generically to Eleanor’s message, she was just following orders.

  “So what should we do?” Jane looked up at Eleanor uncertainly, asking whether to transmit the information about the next arms drop.